Swords and Crowns and Rings (40 page)

‘Where's Hof, Ellie? He'll be looking for you.'

He had not really seen Ellie close during the fracas in the coroner's court. Strange things had happened to his face. It was still a boy's undeveloped face, grown older, finely lined, like creased silk. His teeth were pocked with decay. Colourless stubble on the cheeks and chin gave his face a dirty, aged look.

‘You killed my mother and my sister, you dirty little freak.'

‘It was an accident.' Jackie spoke firmly. ‘A bushfire. You heard the evidence.'

Ellie's hand came up. It had a stone in it. He threw himself on Jackie, wildly striking. The stone struck Jackie on the side of the head and came away bloody. Jackie grabbed the boy by a handful of shirt and pushed him backwards. He fell in the dust, screeching, ‘I'll get you. I'll get you with a bullet in the guts.'

Jackie took the stone and threw it away. ‘Never you do that again, Ellie. Come on now, you're pissed as a ferret. I'll take you back to Hof. Where are you staying?'

Weeping, cursing, Ellie permitted Jackie to support him back in the direction he pointed. The crowd followed at a safe distance. Before long they met Hof, searching anxiously.

‘Just get us inside,' said Jackie to his brother-in-law, ‘away from these bloody rubberneckers.'

In Hof's room, Ellie passed out, snoring, face tear-stained. Hof brought a wet cloth from the basin to Jackie.

‘Just a bit of skin off,' Jackie said, dabbing. ‘Nothing.'

Hof looked at him sombrely. Jackie could see the thoughts passing through his mind. He felt, out of his withdrawn, distant state, a faint emotion that he recognised as compassion for Hof.

‘Don't worry, Hof,' he said. ‘I knew all about Maida and why you were all so anxious to get her married off to me.'

‘I was never for it,' muttered Hof. ‘Never. I wish none of it had happened and that's God's truth.'

‘Well,' said Jackie, ‘if it makes you feel any better, we were happy. I had five years as happy as any man deserves to be. And Maida and I, we loved each other, right to the end.'

He had begun as a liar, to comfort Hof, but before he finished he knew that he was telling the truth. Some time in the future he would be strong enough to think of Maida and what she had done, but his conclusion would be the same as it was now. They had loved each other and been good to each other, and it was because of Maida that he had grown to be a complete man.

Pain pierced him. He knew he would have to get away at once.

‘It's not likely that we'll meet again, Hof, so I'll wish you good luck.'

He shook hands with the big man, left the boarding-house quickly.

He hung around town for a few days, until the doctor said the bandages could be taken off his hands, and then joined a team of western drovers as offsider to the camp cook.

5

Jackie Hanna 1931

In the beginning of 1931 a three-months-old letter from Jerry MacNunn caught up with Jackie Hanna. He went to the muster camp boss and said, ‘My mother's died. I ought to get home to the old man.'

The leather man pushed up his hat, wiped the ivory white top of his forehead, said, ‘Crook news, Lofty. Always hits you, don't it, no matter what? Well now, we can get you in to meet the store wagon at the Crossing, and you can bludge a lift to the Chipp Creek siding. That any good to you?'

‘Thanks. Who'll take over the cooking?'

‘Dad Wright. Getting past drafting. I was going to pay him off, anyway, at the end of the month, so this will give him a break. The company's putting off men everywhere. Only a matter of time before I get the axe meself.'

Jackie returned to the camp ovens where his bread was cooking. The ovens squatted on a bed of hot coals. The air above the embers heaped on their lids was smeared with heat. He pulled a box up to the trestle table under the dry, rattling trees, stood on it, and swiftly, absently, mixed a brownie for the men's midday meal. Rubbing the currants in a little flour so that they would not sink, he remembered watching his mother do this, and looked at his hands to see if they were the same as hers. But there was no resemblance. During the years on the Dovey River his hands had become broad and thick, looking too large for the short arms, appearing clumsy, but quick and agile in use. These strong hands resembled no one's except another dwarf's. They were scarred with burns and there was a slightly disabling tightening of the sinews in the left hand.

Jackie's face had changed. A burn had left him with a permanent bare spot in one eyebrow; there was a pitted scar across one cheekbone. He looked much older than he was.

‘Mum's gone,' he thought. ‘Hard to take it in.'

It had been so long since he had seen her, and even then she had not looked much like the mother of his youth. He found it almost impossible to comprehend that both the middle-aged lusty woman and the swollen old gasping one had vanished somewhere together.

He padded around the dusty track between fire, tuckerbox, and the drum of bore water which was his only supply, his own constellation of flies whirling with him wherever he went, his hand constantly brushing automatically before his face to keep them out of his eyes in the immemorial gesture of the outback.

The plains were scalped by summer; the lapis sky bore down upon it unappeasably. Like a quernstone the heat lay over the supine countryside, grinding the earth to granules, the granules to flocculent dust that the wind took away in willy-willies, glassy shapes spindling and bowing in the sky.

One would have thought no living thing could move here without being sucked dry. Yet on the horizon Jackie could see the dust-cloud that marked an approaching mob of stock. They would be here before two hours were gone. When he distinguished the barking of dogs and bellowing of cattle, it would be time to take the bread from the oven.

This was the third stock camp he had been with since he left Ghinni Junction nearly eighteen months before. Each time he had waited for a job that would take him deeper into the west, away from the coast and the tidal rivers. He could scarcely remember his first four months as offsider to a half-demented bushman whose life swung between dumb, morose periods of sobriety during which he was a ‘poisoner'—a dirty, unbelievably bad cook whose fare reduced the men to endless gastric malfunction—and bouts of drunkenness when he talked non-stop in manic gaiety and cooked like a chef. Jackie supposed that the old man had been a professional cook on shearing circuits, tossed out on his ear for unmanageable drunkenness.

But that knowledge, if indeed Jackie had ever had it, had gone, blotted out along with the man's face and name. His agony of bereavement, delayed shock from his own experience and injuries, had cast around Jackie a wall of non-communication. He supposed he must have spoken to the men sometimes. He could remember a fight—someone hitting him over the head to break his grip on a hard stringy throat, a voice saying: ‘It's your own fault, Jim. I warned you. The little bugger's mad as a gelded bull. Just keep out of his way like I told you, can't yer?'

He supposed the man had chiacked him about his size; he couldn't recall. Queer!

Grief, remorse, self-pity—he had experienced them all. Then one night he realised that what had been distilled from all these painful sorrows was purest rage.

It was rage at life, fate, whatever it was that had distorted him in the womb and made all his life dependent upon that fact, no matter what hopeful lies his parents had told him.

For weeks the rage trembled within him, and then it, too, came to terms with its causes.

‘All right,' he thought. ‘What else have you got in store for me? What else can you take away or do me for? Nothing.'

And he didn't know who or what he was thinking at: life, or time, or the stars stabbing down at a land as indifferent to those things as it was to human existence. It struck him then that all he had or ever would have was himself, and a moment to be himself in; and the knowledge was complete and exhausting.

‘I'm me,' he said. ‘And no one can take that away unless I let them.'

And as dog-weary as if he had won a fight, or come to the end of a long road, he rolled in his blankets near the banked fire, and fell asleep.

During this time he occasionally met someone who'd read a newspaper, or had heard the rumours that had flown round Ghinni Junction at the time of the inquest. One of these men had come from as far away as South Australia, so Jackie had no doubt that the story had been spread all over the country. Three or four wanted to talk to him about it, for crude curiosity's sake. The sympathetic ones said nothing, but their eyes waited for him to speak.

Others used the tragedy of the bushfire to have a go at him, and in the early days he seemed always in fights. Once or twice he was thrashed; another time he was cautioned by a country sergeant.

‘What do you want me to do then?' asked Jackie, snuffling blood. ‘Stand there like a pint of milk and let them say I burnt my wife and kid to death?'

The sergeant was elderly. ‘It'll die down, son. And in the meantime just try to turn these remarks aside. You can't fight the world.'

‘Can't I?' said Jack. ‘Watch me.'

But the gossip did die down, and Jackie ceased to be wary each time a newcomer arrived at camp.

In the end, the old poisoner had gone on a bender that had sent him out of his mind. Trussed in the back of a wagon, dribbling and goggling, he had been taken to the railway and a train flagged down so that he could be carried to hospital. Jackie had automatically inherited his job.

It had been good for him. It kept him busy all day, for he rose in starlight and did not cease working until he had set his bread and soaked the porridge oats and parboiled a heap of potatoes for the following day's breakfast.

Those first months were something to forget, and he had almost forgotten. The challenging sparkle that had enlivened his glance had gone; he had become much soberer. The mouth-organ remained in his back pocket unplayed. At night, now and then, he turned to embrace Maida. Other times he dreamed so vividly that the firm, rubbery body of his son was dancing in his clasp that when he awakened he found his arms crooked as though to hold a little child. There was a strange feeling about his arms—in truth, perhaps left over from the healed burns—that they were always holding something. But it was nothingness.

Astonishing to think they were gone, his wife and son. Carlie, nephew of Blind Hof, great-grandson of old Martin, stature and weight and strength in his genetic keeping, Maida's Germanic hair on his head, yet with his father's vitality and inquisitiveness—of this Jackie was certain—sparkling and jumping inside that head. All that potential, for strong manhood, for imposing height—over six feet tall, the doctor had said, six feet!—all gone in a flash. While Jackie Hanna, the oddity, the little turd as Piper Nicolson had said long ago, was still running around alive and well.

And Maida—how brief had been the time of her happiness! And she had died without hope that the day would come when her husband would understand and accept her love and care for her weakling brother, would understand her desperate duplicity, her debilitating fear that she would be found out.

He remembered the night she had persuaded him to come to her room. Looking back, he could see now that it was a simple plan to have him caught in the act by the old mother. Yet Maida had not been able to carry it through: she had let him escape.

It all seemed so far away and meaningless now that she was dead. His heart ached for her. It ached for himself. What was living all about?

Now his mother was dead, too, and Jerry was alone in Kings-land, battling along, not knowing whether the news of Peggy MacNunn's death had reached her son or not.

He turned out the loaves, steaming wheels with a black blush of burn down one side where the camp oven was wearing thin. He tried the brownie with a length of fence wire, observed the latter's brightness, and turned out the primitive cake to cool.

Almost without his own knowledge or volition, he had learnt to bear his sorrows like a man. Grief was intermittent now. When it returned, as it often did, it was almost as sharp as ever. But at least now he had the consolatory knowledge that he just had to bear it for a few hours, a day perhaps, and it would recede once more.

In twos and threes the men rode in, ate quickly, drank their scalding tea, smoked a cigarette in the meagre shade of the trees, and hastened away again. They were lean as bones, several of them black. The dust lay like fine fur on their hat-brims and across the wet stains where their shirts stuck to their backs. They had brought a stray with them, a youngish man who had tried to cut across the dry country to jump the train at Chipp Creek, where the engine slowed on the long hard grade.

He was not the first hobo the men had found, some of those in the past beyond saving, or already stiffs, mummified and black as Pharaohs. One man who had been fat, Jackie recalled, was nothing but a bag of basil and bones, the ground beneath and around sodden with grease sucked by the sun from his corpse. Beside him was a gladstone bag, with a clean shirt and underwear, a fountain pen, and the man's credentials as an accountant.

‘Poor town buggers, silly as cut snakes. Think thirty miles of scrub and gibber as safe to cross as Collins Street. Don't let this one eat too much for a start, Jack, and if he wants to hang around till Thursday he can go in with you to Chipp Creek.'

The man was very sunburned, his lips blistered like sausages. Late in the afternoon he recovered, and came over to Jackie.

‘Anything I can do, mate?'

Jackie jerked his head at the bucketful of potatoes. ‘Peel 'em if you feel up to it.'

The man sat under a tree, handling the knife awkwardly, glad to find himself alive and still going.

‘Thought I was going to do a perish back there.'

Jack told the man about the lift available on the store wagon. The man's eyes lit up, but only momentarily.