Swords and Crowns and Rings (42 page)

He climbed back through his window, began to take off his clothes. The grief for Maida and Carlie, as it often did, took him by surprise, freezing up his throat, darkening his eyes with its sheer physical onslaught. He knew it was all mixed up with the death of his mother.

He heard the Nun moving up the stairs, dragging his leg a little. The older man looked in the open door to say good night.

‘How long you going to stay, do you think, Jack?' he asked, before he saw the young man's face.

‘For good, if that's all right,' said Jackie.

The Nun sighed. ‘It's all right, boy. It's grand.'

He shook his head. ‘You don't really know, do you,' he said, ‘until it happens? You can't really guess how awful it is.'

Jackie nodded.

‘Christ, we're a pair of poor broken-up bastards, aren't we?' said the Nun, and he turned away to his own room.

Jerry was more cheerful the next day.

‘With you here it'll make all the difference. I guess I was getting to be one of them lonely old roosters, losing interest in everything. We'll go to the football, sink one or two at the old Princess now and then, eh?'

He saw the expression on Jackie's face and added hastily, ‘Oh, you needn't think I'll lean on you like. I've got a bit put away, and your mother's insurance, though the doctor got most of it, which was to be expected, and there's the shop.'

Jackie told him baldly of the occurrence at the pub the day before. The Nun flushed.

‘Them beer-sodden hooers! And Tidey, always on the side of the cash register, that one! Scared to serve you in case they took their boozing elsewhere.'

He fumed on. Jackie said, ‘I suppose the rumours were bad here in Kingsland? I mean, just after it happened.'

The Nun nodded uncomfortably. ‘Flying around, they were, after the inquest. That bloody little nancy of a boy of my poor sister Eva is still going around Ghinni Junction talking about it, so I've heard. Him and one of the brothers is working down there now. Country people—you know how they like a commotion to yarn about.'

‘Mum never felt there was anything in. it?'

‘Never entered her head. I put a flea in a few ear-holes, I can tell you. Thought it was all dead and forgotten. But just fancy them mugs at the pub still at it after more than a year! A man can't win.'

Jackie smiled. ‘Well, my shoulders are broad. They'll soon get used to the sight of me round the place again.' He walked over to the window.

‘Moys' still a boarding-house? No mistake, it looks a wreck.'

Jerry surveyed it. ‘Not a lick of paint since the Moys left it. Ah, poor old Mrs Driscoll can't make a go of it. Who can afford to live in a boarding-house these days? She had five single men only eighteen months ago, good wages coming in, glad to pay for their laundry done and a nice hot supper of an evening. And what happens? All five put off within six weeks. God knows where they are now?'

‘On the roads,' said Jackie.

Jerry looked at him anxiously, ‘Can you fathom it, Jack, why we got this slump?'

Jackie tried to explain, but Jerry wasn't listening. He was just talking, asking questions, to keep his mind off loneliness and sorrow. So Jackie stopped explaining economic theory, and said gently, ‘I've got a snapshot of Carlie, my little boy. Would you like to see it, Dad?'

Jerry took the snapshot, already browning a little, and looked for a long time at the baby, sitting up laughing in his cot on the veranda.

‘What colour eyes, Jack?'

‘Blue, but they might have gone brown like Mum's. Maida always thought they might.'

Jerry handed back the picture. ‘Funny, ain't it? The world full of rotten parasites living on their neighbours' blood, politicians sitting pretty while a thousand men fight like devils for one job, murderers, wife-beaters, and yet they live on and on while a beaut little bloke like that has to go. Bloody unfair, that's what it is.'

The two of them stood there, not knowing what to say to each other. Then the Nun limped into the shop and rattled tins around. Jackie washed the dishes, standing on the three-legged stool his mother had bought him many years before. He tidied up, shaved, tried to pull himself together.

Later on he said, ‘I thought I might go up to the cemetery to see the grave.'

The Nun confessed he had not gone for several weeks.

‘It's a bloody woeful place,' he said. ‘Gives me the willies. And your mum's no more there than you are.' He drew on his cigarette. ‘Ah, what's the use of codding meself? A man's a cur. I can't bring meself to go there; that's the strength of it.'

‘I'll just take the weeding fork and the clippers,' said Jackie with pity, ‘and see that all's right.'

The Nun nodded. He trailed into the shop, opened the door wider, let the damp wind blow into the mouldy staleness. The shelves were half bare, but what did it matter? No one had money to buy food any more, let alone grass seeds and hardware.

‘It's worse than it was after the Boer War,' he thought, taking the broom and beginning to sweep. But it was worn down to a stub, with a long silly tuft of whiskers on one side. The broom was banjaxed like everything else.

‘I don't know whether to laugh or cry, and that's a fact,' he thought.

The graveyard was on a hillside, all the graves looking uphill, as though the departed had turned their backs on Kingsland. Perhaps there'd once been the idea of building a church on the crest, but there'd been no money.

The place communicated its silence, as a desert does, or endless grasslands. Jackie found himself listening for the swish of his feet in the untended grass, the roll of a pebble. Where were the birds, the insects? Only the melancholy drip of water from the sodden trees disturbed the air.

Here and there the worn and dimpled grave-stones had fallen into the grass. Some had sunk up to their shoulders in bowers of briar, or leant forward as though in a reverie, the tail fennel and Queen Anne's Lace reaching up to meet them. On the cracked and tilted slab before a tall cross a pool of rainwater had formed, and two little birds, sky-coloured, were bathing there. This pleased Jackie, and after the two little creatures had flown straight up and away he was further pleased to see that the grave was that of his grandmother, the old woman Hough, who had died before his birth, and whom his mother had nursed for years. Her husband was there too, Native of King's County, Ireland, Plumber of this town, Much respected, Deeply regretted, Died of sunstroke, 4 January 1881.

He knew his mother would be near by, and at last he found the grave, still new-looking after three months, with a counterpane of gravel and a glass bowler hat covering artificial flowers. Jackie crouched beside it, began to clip the matted grass, trying not to look at the inscription. He felt destitute of either grief or comprehension. It was as useless trying to think of his mother, quenched, changed, under that stone as it had been to realise that the body of Maida had turned into a charred log. But he looked at last, and read: ‘Margaret Euphemia MacNunn, beloved wife of Gerard MacNunn and loved mother of John Luke Hanna. 1875–1930. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. R.I.P.'

Where had she gone, with her hearty laughter, her indestructible courage, her gusto for ordinariness which had turned life into richness? It was not like her to leave those she loved bereft. Dying was out of character for Peggy MacNunn.

And yet Jerry had said, ‘Don't be sorry, me old Jack. You didn't see her at her worst. She hated being not able to breathe properly. Everything. Don't be sorry.'

If she were able to speak to him she would. If he could be quiet enough he would hear. And kneeling there he tried to quieten his whole being and listen.

‘Oh, my dear boy, don't grieve. There'll be others to love you,' said a voice. Jackie, with flopping heart, leapt to his feet, to see a young woman in a black hat and carrying a bunch of flowers, staring at him aghast. She stammered, ‘Forgive me, I thought you were a child, kneeling there. I didn't mean to startle you.'

Jackie made a gesture towards the tombstone. ‘In a way, you were right. I'm her son.'

He wished she would stay, speak to him. But he had frightened her with his oddity, his lack of stature, She disappeared amongst the dripping trees, half running. Jackie turned towards the gate, and once, when he saw her at the end of a long aisle of tombstones, he waited until she had passed, so that she would not be further disturbed.

On the way home, passing the rows of cottages that stood where there had been paddocks, a market garden where once Sallycamp Creek had spread out to form a bog where the children of Kingsland speared mud eels with bits of fence-wire, he saw the same old willows growing along the big creek. And he remembered that he and Cushie Moy had, as one of their secrets, often buried bottles containing newspaper headlines, marbles, treasured fragments of this and that. In some magical way they had become hostages to the future, bribes to time. They had stopped burying bottles when they were eight or nine, but Jackie could remember where most of them were—under the shop in the dry cementy earth, beside the back fence-post, and here, near the highest willow.

Now that he had the weeding fork, he thought he would dig it up, if it was still there.

The soft-drink factory that had opened after he left Kingsland had closed last month, hit by the Depression. The company was going into liquidation, the Nun said, and a lot of people had lost what was left of their savings. But the creek was still polluted from the factory sludge. Near the willows sluggish bubbles came to the top of the water as though from half-flat ginger beer. There was a dirty smell.

He found the buried bottle without trouble, pulled out the rotting cork, and shook the contents onto the ground. A torn-off headline: ‘Terrible Losses at the Marne, Fought to Last Man, French Heroism.' The hand that had fallen off Cushie's doll. Some blue beads. His first communion medal. A blackened halfpenny.

He sat there looking at the hoard, wondering where the hopes had gone, all the frail faiths of childhood. He put all the things back into the bottle and threw it into the creek.

As he came down into the town he met a knot of schoolboys, kicking stones, yelling, pushing one another, on their way home for midday dinner. They stopped dead when they saw him, mouths fallen open in theatrical shock. Jackie had met this comedy routine before, and passed by without a look. But the tallest jumped in his way.

‘What is it?' he shouted. ‘Who sawed him off?'

Jackie waited, looking up at the boy steadily.

‘He don't as much come up to my belly-button,' marvelled the boy.

‘Get out of my way,' said Jackie. ‘Joke's over, buster.'

For a moment Jackie thought that his sharp, schoolmasterly tone had carried the day, as it so often did, but the boy recovered from his momentary surprise and jeered, ‘Make me move, go on, you freak, make me.'

The other boys came up behind Jackie, half-thrilled, half-abashed. One shrilled, ‘You really a freak, mister?'

‘No,' said Jackie peaceably, ‘I'm a dwarf. Now cut along, will you? I've got work to do.'

‘What kind of work?' asked the first boy. ‘Setting fire to more women and kids?'

Jackie fixed his tormenter with a stare that made him burst into artificial mirth.

‘You half-witted creep,' he said. ‘You don't know what you're talking about. Now, move!'

He stepped forward abruptly, and the boys scattered briefly, so that he walked between them and out along the footpath. He had no wish to force a physical confrontation; it would ruin his chances in the town if he had a scrap with school kids. He walked on, keeping his pace normal.

‘Yah, you oughta be hung, yer murderer!'

A stone hit him in the middle of the back. Others went wide. He walked on.

‘Got no guts. Won't fight! Come on back here and Shorty'll clean you up. He's just about your size!'

They followed him, pelting him with clods of earth, horse manure, pebbles, until at last they tired of the game and galloped away to their homes. Jackie, tense with fury, tried to calm himself. He entered the back gate of the MacNunn home, and removed his soiled clothes and washed himself before Jerry came in from the shop. He was cheerful.

‘Had a really good day, couple of decent orders,' he said. ‘You've brought me luck, me old Jack.'

Jackie smiled, knowing that the customers had come in to get a look at him.

At the weekend the Nun did the washing, laboriously scrubbing his shirts and white aprons on a washing-board, hanging them up every which-way on the line.

The neighbour next door put her head up above the fence. ‘He's that independent.' She smiled. ‘I'd do his things with my wash, quick as a wink, but he won't have it. How are you, Jackie? It's been too long since we seen you, dear.'

She had always been a pleasant, sensible woman, a woman who'd had her own troubles.

‘You heard about my poor Jim dying? Ah, he was never the same after the War, with his lungs, you know. That cruel gas.' She sighed. ‘And now your dear mother. We were neighbours for—how old would you be, Jack?—well, that makes it just on twenty-six years. And never a cross word did we have.'

Jerry said kindly, ‘You come in for a cup of tea this arvo, Mrs Early. Jackie and me will be real happy to see you.'

‘I will,' she said with pleasure, ‘and I'll bring some hot scones. Remember how I used to make little tiny fairy scones for you and Cushie Moy to have feasts with, Jackie?'

He didn't want Mrs Early to come in and reminisce about his childhood, but he knew she would.

There she sat, soft big country face, brindled hair chopped off as all the women's hair seemed to be chopped off nowadays, drinking her tea, placidly enjoying the scones.

‘I fancy that Mrs Moy and the girls went off to England. She had a sister a Lady or something. Never liked that woman, somehow. Even took her husband's body to Sydney to get him buried. Kingsland cemetery not good enough for her. Jesus, Mary!'