Swords and Crowns and Rings (39 page)

‘No idea,' said Roley Keever.

‘Probably spontaneous,' said his brother, rolling a cigarette.

For a long time before Jackie came fully to his senses he was aware of Jerry MacNunn sitting beside his bed, at first a dream-figure and then for a moment or two a real man, with his hair spiking around every which-way, and his glasses pushed up to rest on his eyebrows. Jackie wanted to say something, but he was too drugged. So he just put his hand into Jerry's and left it there, as he used to do as a child during exciting movie serials, or when he awakened with a bad dream.

He felt comforted and secure, and went to sleep.

But when, a day or more later, he became fully conscious, he found that his hands were still immobilised in mummy-wrappings: he could not have touched anything or anybody.

‘How'd you get here, Dad?'

‘Come when I read it in the paper about the fire.'

‘Mum?'

‘She's apples, jogging along; not better but fair enough. Mrs Early moved in to look after her.'

The Nun wondered if he should say anything about Maida and the youngster, decided to wait until Jackie did. He remarked, ‘Your hands will be good-oh, the quack said. Full use of them and all that. He's taking the heavy bandages off in a few days and you can leave hospital and just go back for dressings.'

Jackie nodded. There was a long silence. The Nun, fidgety with affection and anxiety, did not know what to say. After a while he muttered, ‘Funny place this, all boarding-houses and all empty. Jack, maybe you could come home for a while, eh?'

‘Could do that,' Jackie said. He tried to grin, but his face felt as stiff as a board. Perhaps it, too, had been burned.

‘Dad,' he said at last, ‘is the funeral over?'

The Nun nodded, not looking at him. ‘Quite a while ago. You been in here nine days now. They been holding the inquest over.'

‘Inquest?' asked Jackie in horror.

‘At Ghinni Junction. I thought I'd get off the train there with you, see you through that business before I go home to your mum. I better not stay away too long.'

‘Oh, God,' faltered Jackie. ‘I can't, Dad. How am I...? I can't.'

‘Gotta be done, boy. Some things gotta be faced up to, and anything to do with the law is one of 'em. It'll be straight sailing, all over in an hour or two.'

The young man nodded. The Nun, filled with compassion, looked for some place about Jackie that he could squeeze sympathetically, but he was defeated by the cast-iron hospital blankets, the bandages. He scruffed Jack's hair briefly, winked.

‘On my way now, old son. Back this evening. You go to sleep now.'

Jackie pulled his apathy about himself, sank into it, and was asleep before the doctor came along to give him his injection.

The Nun, sitting by himself on a broken seat on the sea front, smoked placidly, looking out on the long grey sheets of ebb-tide, smooth and vacant as linoleum, with cloud shadows skating across them. Now and then he gave a little grunt, as though someone had unexpectedly struck him.

His head was full of worries. Duchess Bay was humming with rumours. Keever's stockman Gordie had told this one and that that Lufa Morgan had come right out and said he was in love with young Hanna's wife. There'd been more doing there than anyone realised, and if that poor old lady had thrown the lamp at Jack Hanna it might have been in self-defence, or maybe protecting her daughter. Lufa had said he heard her use the word murder. The story grew and grew like a genie from a bottle, Lufa's emotional outburst when Mrs Hanna's body was found was picked over and garbled and deplored. And, come to that, who knew whether the old lady had chucked the lamp at Hanna? There was only Hanna's word for it. Not even Lufa Morgan had seen it happen. Maybe Hanna bowled the lamp at his wife, having found out about Lufa and her carrying on.

‘Ghost, they're like blowflies around a dungheap,' thought Jerry. ‘Poor old Jack. As though it ain't bad enough for him.'

He plotted laboriously how to get his stepson onto the motor coach to Ghinni Junction without his hearing the gossip. He managed to get him seated, but a small knot of people pressed around the window outside. Jackie turned his face away, thinking they were staring at him because he was a dwarf. It was only when someone said loudly, ‘Hope they stretch you! Hope you swing!' that he realised this interest in him was something altogether new.

‘Aw, it's nothing,' said the Nun easily, as the vehicle ground away. ‘You know people. Ideas in their heads. Mad as meat-axes. Forget it.'

‘But what can they mean?' insisted Jackie wildly. ‘You've got to tell me, Dad.'

Reluctantly, the Nun told him. Jackie shrank against his seat, sickened.

‘It wasn't like that at all. And Lufa—I can't believe he said Maida and he were carrying on. The best mate any man ever had, and the decentest. If you could have seen him during the fire... You don't believe that about Lufa and Maida, do you, Dad?'

‘Never in a million years,' said the Nun. ‘And all you got to do at the inquest is to tell your story straight like you told me.'

‘But why didn't Lufa come to see me in hospital?' pondered Jackie.

‘Jack,' said the Nun decisively, ‘you gotta put all that crap out of your head. You know what happened. Not all the gossip and dirt-chucking in the world is going to change that. Now you just face up to this, like you've faced up to everything else in your life. Time goes on, and you'll feel better about everything sooner or later. No, you don't believe it, but it's true. Your mum and me, we're counting on you not to drop your bundle, and we ain't going to let you off that.'

‘How'm I going to face talking about her to strangers?' said Jackie.

‘Not all strangers,' said the Nun. ‘I'll be there.'

There was a large crowd around the Ghinni Junction courthouse where the inquest was to be held, greedy faces bending down above Jackie, people jumping up and down to see over the shoulders of others. The Nun stalked through them, dragging his stepson behind him, occasionally halting to direct an icy glare at some heckler. Women clucked, said officiously, ‘Oh, it's a disgrace to let him get away with it...something ought to be done...that poor young woman, that little baby...'

Once the crowd parted a little, and Jackie saw the tall, severe form of Hof, greyer than he remembered, accompanied by the shabby, drooping Ellie, pressing close to his big brother, darting terrified sidelong glances at the menacing crowd.

Jackie gazed at him with as little emotional reaction as if he had been a cardboard figure. It was impossible to believe that this crumpled, frightened creature had been responsible for so many disasters. Poor Ellie, thought Jackie involuntarily, that his first excursion into the world outside High Valley should be this.

Just inside the courthouse door, Lufa Morgan approached him.

‘You better, Jack?'

‘Pretty near. How've you been, Lufa?'

Lufa shrugged. Jack introduced the Nun, who shook his hand and said, ‘I want to thank you for all you done in the fire.'

‘Wasn't nothing,' said Lufa. He looked defeated, enfeebled in some way. ‘Jack, you heard the talk?'

‘Yes, but I know what to think, Lufa,' said Jackie.

Lufa nodded, fetched up one of his quavering sighs. He gave Jackie a small parcel. Jackie looked at it in astonishment.

‘It's hers. Her petticoat. You know when she left it at the waterhole that first day. I got it next time I went to Duchess Bay, and I kept it. Nicked it. Told Maida and you it had blown away. Wasn't the right thing to do, but I done it. She was that nice to me, Maida.'

Amazed, Jackie scanned Lufa's face, but all he saw there was uncomplicated misery.

‘She thought the world of you, too, Lufa,' he said.

Whenever Jackie faltered in his evidence he looked at the Nun, sitting in the front row in the public gallery. In effect he told his story of the fire to that familiar figure, its unrelenting eyes fixed upon his, daring him to falter or break down. In reply to questioning he said only that Mrs Linz had wanted to make her home with them, that his wife had objected, and there had been an argument. He was very angry at Mrs Linz's attitude towards his wife, and the old woman had lost her head and thrown the lamp at him.

At this point Ellie leapt up at the back of the court, jumped on his chair and yelled hysterically. ‘That's not true! He killed my mother, a poor old woman who had just lost her husband! He always had a terrible temper. He attacked my brother Kurt and tried to choke him. He murdered my poor mother...my sister... and you're going to let him get away with it.'

Hof clamped a huge hand over his brother's mouth. The coroner, rapping furiously, ordered Ellie to be removed and, weeping and babbling hysterically, the young man was half-carried from the court. At the door Hof turned and said, ‘He is upset. What he says is of no importance.'

‘Indeed, sir,' said the coroner, outraged. ‘This court can conduct its own business without your advice.'

Hof bowed his head and departed, amid an uproar of excited comment and speculation, which could not be silenced until after the third threat to clear the court.

Lufa, his hair sticking up, so bewildered that he looked half-daft, hung down his head and mumbled his evidence. He heard the report of the lamp, saw the smoke, grabbed a couple of buckets and ran. Jack Hanna was already trying to extinguish the fire. Mrs Linz was in the doorway looking a bit knocked. Mrs Hanna brought a doormat down to help fight the fire. He knew nothing about any argument, except what Jack Hanna mentioned when they were working on the fire.

He had never had a difference with Jack Hanna. He was his mate. There had never been any improper relations between him and the deceased Maida Hanna. She had been good to him, darned his socks, asked him to come to Christmas dinner every year. He respected her. He didn't know what he'd said when they dug out her body, he was upset and might have said anything. It was no good asking him and asking him what he said because he couldn't remember, he was that upset about poor Jack Hanna losing everything.

The verdict on all three deceased persons was death by mis-adventure. It seemed to kill Maida and Carlie once and for all, and Jackie, still numb, went out of the courthouse and stood blinking, half-dazed, in the sunshine. A few people still stood around. There were stares, whispers, stiff ostentatious shrinkings away. The Nun said, ‘Come on, boy', and took Jack to the modest boarding-house where he had booked a double room.

‘You want to talk or blubber, or punch me in the nose, you do it, son,' said the Nun. ‘You got to get it out of you. Let it rip.'

But Jackie remained silent. There was nothing to talk about. The huge fact of his bereavement engulfed all else; it needed no comment. He thought that some day he would consider all that Maida had told him before the fire; at the moment it seemed irrelevant. So he went obediently to the hospital to have his hands dressed, ate his meals when Jerry bade him. At the end of four days he said to his stepfather, ‘You'd better be getting on home to Mum, I guess.'

The Nun, uneasily remembering the giggling and nudging amongst the hospital staff, the women turning around and staring censoriously at Jackie in the street, said, ‘Why don't you come too, me old Jack? After all, it's your home. And Mum and me'll be that glad to have you.'

‘No,' said Jack. ‘It'd be a step backward. I've had years on my own, with plenty of responsibilities, and I have to make my own way.'

The Nun nodded. ‘Yeah. You're doing the right thing, son. But I'm a bit leery of you meeting too much rough stuff for you to handle. I mean, like you've had these past weeks.'

Jackie smiled. ‘Well, Dad, there's no point in my changing my name. I'll just have to take it. But it'll all die down after a while.'

‘Sure it will,' said Jerry heartily. After a moment he asked, ‘You think you might go back on the cream boat? Real solid bloke that Morgan. Stick to a man, he would.'

‘No,' said Jackie. ‘I want to get away from the river. Find something else.'

‘Times is getting hard; you might have a struggle,' said Jerry, anxious. Then he aimed a punch at Jack's middle. ‘But you'll make out. Course you will, boy.

‘Send us a line now and then, won't you?' he said at the train window. ‘And I'll explain everything to your mum, never fear. I'm real good at getting her feathers smoothed down.'

Jackie walked slowly back to the boarding-house from the station. The town drowsed; the pepper-trees drooped; windows shot fire. There were numerous boarded-up empty shops, and an air of bedraggled apathy hung over all. The frightening events of the vast, incomprehensible world outside Australia cast long shadows, spectral glooms that the small Ghinni Junction businessmen could neither understand nor defend themselves against.

Jackie thought, ‘Maybe I won't get a job. What then?'

But he did not care. He could not care.

He thought, ‘If nothing turns up, I'll go on the track.'

He felt as though the world had stopped and he would never get it going again. This was not his place. His place was in the cottage by the Dovey, with Maida cooking tea and Carlie jumping up and down in his cot like a blue-eyed monkey. At the thought of Carlie hopelessness came down over him. He sat there and suffered dumbly like a beast.

The next morning he was dressing himself, a task of frustrating difficulty, so that he could go down the street to be shaved, when he heard shouting outside. He fumbled the last buttons into their buttonholes, crossed to the window. Ellie was swaying on the kerb, half drunk, bareheaded in the blazing sun.

Jackie went downstairs quickly. He said to the porter, ‘I'll get rid of him, take him back to his brother.'

As he left the veranda a dozen people had already gathered to watch. He walked up to Ellie.