Swords and Crowns and Rings (34 page)

He had no clock but a sun-mark scratched on a windowsill, a diagonal line pointing inwards from the edge. When the shadow of a certain redgum fell on the mark, he knew it was noon.

‘But it only works in winter, and buggerall on a rainy day,' confessed Lufa. But he did not need a clock. He awakened automatically when the lighthouse was turned off at clear daylight.

That first night, after he had slept for some hours, Jackie awoke to find the cottage filled with gliding brightness. He rose and went outside. Darkness, darkness, absorbent as black blotting-paper, without a star or water-glimmer. Then suddenly the Nelly Morgan flailed its beam across the bush, the sea, the long reefs, brushing the clouds, the Dovey, the swarthy scrub, with swift light. It was a great wheel, spoked with light, turning for ever in the universal blackness, and its majestic regularity buoyed up Jackie's heart.

He thought, ‘All right; so my life has changed. It's not what I planned. But here I am with a job, and a house to live in, a wife and even a baby growing. You wouldn't believe it.'

It seemed so comical to him that all these things had happened so quickly and unexpectedly that he chuckled, threw up his arms, and did a few steps of a jig, so that the next sweep of the Nelly Morgan caught him capering. He leapt inside, still chuckling, hoping that by some mischance Lufa had not been awake to glimpse his new partner grotesquely hopping in the dark.

‘Where have you been, Jackie?' murmured Maida. ‘Is it time to get up?'

‘Not yet. Go to sleep again.'

It was four o'clock, so he thought he would not sleep again. He lay there stroking Maida's hair, making plans, waiting for the dawn.

In a little while the window of Lufa's shack drew itself faintly on the dark, so Jackie rose, lit the lamp, and blew up the banked fire in the rusty stove. Half asleep, Maida cooked his breakfast, and by the time he had eaten a vinous flush suffused both sky and river, and Lufa's small eyes were beaming around the door.

‘Well, Maida,' he said, ‘think you're going to settle down?'

‘I'm settled down already,' said Maida. She smiled. ‘This is the right place for Jackie and me.'

In later years when Jackie Hanna looked back on his life on the Dovey, he felt that it had all been a dream. He forgot the grinding endless labour on the cream boat, and recalled an existence that seemed to have been an idyllic, perpetual picnic. Jackie shot rabbits, caught fish, sluggish big things that tasted of dirt. Until Maida became too cumbrous they often went eeling on the leaky, oozing islands, or into the bush where bogs stretched long fingers into the valleys. The scrubland was full of tea-coloured creeks, lakelets, swamps that dried up in summer.

The work, as Lufa had warned him, was extremely heavy, and during the first month on the cream boat Jackie ended each day in a stupor of weariness, too tired even to eat. But gradually his musculature began to develop, and his extraordinary natural strength to show itself. He thickened and put on weight, so that Lufa said, ‘You'll end up as broad as you're long, Jack. I tell you, it's a moral.'

He and Lufa soon became known as the man and a half all along the river and the delta farms.

The river-flat people accepted Jackie as naturally as they would have accepted a man with a wooden leg, or a twenty-five-year-old cursed with premature baldness. His dwarfism made him different in appearance, and that was all. He couldn't help it, it couldn't be fixed, and it did not interfere with his capable handling of his job or his personal life. To most of them Jackie's minute stature seemed lovable.

‘Sort of dinky, ain't he?' they said. ‘Like a banty rooster. You can't help but smile.'

The fact that he was a dwarf passed completely from Jackie's mind. He was Jack Hanna of Morgan's Clearing, Lufa's mate.

The thirty-foot cream boat was one of a rapidly dwindling fleet of shallow-draught flat-decked vessels which from the seventies had moved up and down the Dovey carrying the dairy farmers' milk-cans to the co-operative factory farther up the river near the railhead. Lufa's boat chugged up tributaries and navigable anabranches, and in and out the delta islands, daily covering about fifty miles of difficult water maze.

‘I can smell a mud-bank,' said Lufa, ‘and I know the channels like the wrinkles on me dial. Dark mornings, winter like, or heavy mist rising, you gotta listen to the boat, sorta feeling her way along, dead slow. You'll catch on, Jack. You're real quick. I suppose that's what schooling does for a man.'

On Lufa's run the pick-up averaged seventy to eighty milk-cans, and he calculated that with the loading and the unloading he and Jackie lifted eight to ten tons a day.

‘Yet that ain't nothing to what the old timers lifted,' Lufa said. ‘Now, the late Mr Harry Tremlett, who died in the rats last October leaving me the cream run, as I told you, he went back to the old steam launch days, and he lifted fifteen ton or more each day. Ghost, he was a strong man. Could carry a man of my size on each shoulder. Always showing off. Tore a chube or somethink in the end and that's why he took to the plonk.

‘Summer's hard—when I can't get the tub closer'n twenty–thirty feet to the jetties, and we got to manhandle them bloody cans over the mud and roll 'em up the plank. I seen this same river shrunk back to the channels, and cows grazing where we are now; but I ain't ever grounded the boat yet.'

His simple pride in his own craft was not new to Jackie. The Nun was the same, able to do certain things well and pleased that he could.

Lufa was a good mate to Jackie, kind and undemanding and helpful. He was like a good dog or a horse, and gradually Jackie fell into the habit of commenting on things that interested him, or had happened to him, as unselfconsciously as a lone man might do to such an animal, and Lufa listened with absorption, his nut-coloured eyes twinkling, until at last the young man was brought to himself by Lufa's slapping a hand on his thigh with a crack, and his yell of admiring laughter.

‘By Ghost, you're little but you're shrewder than an abo dog! Bet them old squarehead cousins of mine, them Linzes, was sorry to see you go.'

‘Heart-broken,' replied Jackie.

At first he was more at ease with Lufa than he was with Maida. Her submissiveness sometimes irritated him, so that he said, somewhat brusquely, ‘You don't always have to agree with me. I won't get cranky if you have opinions of your own.'

‘But I'm your wife,' she said, with such a look of wonderment that Jackie remembered with a pang that she had known only one.

So he stopped chiacking her and expecting her to explode into laughter and chase him round the room, as his mother would have done. She was different; he might long for her to aim a frolicsome clout at his head along with the kisses; but he was not Jerry MacNunn and she was not Peggy. And looking at her sometimes, her long beautiful eyes, the European planes of her face, her fair hair coiled in a little net, he was humble that she loved him so unquestioningly.

Voluntarily, then, he accepted her for what she was: the solemnity where he would wish for playfulness, her mind that had been bullied and frightened along narrow, rigid ways, her superstitions and old-world beliefs, the fears and sorrows that sometimes shook her, especially as the child grew.

‘It won't have the kind of bad life me and Ellie had, will it?' she entreated Jackie. ‘No one will ever knock it around or lock it outside in the cold or hurt it like Father hurt us?'

‘That couldn't happen, because I'm here to look after it, and you too.'

‘I wish there was someone to look after Ellie,' she said wistfully. ‘I miss Ellie.'

Sometimes she told Jackie long stories about Ellie and herself, their tiny excursions around the hills beyond the orchard, the Afghan pedlar who gave them a few sweets in a flimsy pink twist of paper, and how their mother threw them away lest they should be poisoned. They had been two against the rest of the family at High Valley, Maida always protecting the younger child, taking the blame, getting it even when she did not accept it.

Every month or so she wrote briefly to her mother, sometimes getting a postcard with two or three lines in reply.

‘I wish poor Ellie could write,' she said. ‘I miss Ellie.'

Weeks before the child was due, Maida became sickly and fretful. Sometimes Jack awakened to find her crying silently. He was exasperated, not knowing what to say or do, but contrived to be patient with her.

‘I don't know what's the matter,' she said. ‘I'm frightened, I suppose. Mama always had terrible times and she said I would too. If I died, Jackie, you wouldn't give the baby to Mama to look after, would you?'

Jack was so worried that he even mentioned the matter to Lufa.

‘What you need is a good motherly old chook to look her over,' he advised. ‘Tell you what, son. What say I bring up Pop Keever's missus from Wininnie Bend? She musta calved eight or nine times herself, knows all about it, and a real nice old biddy, too.'

Mrs Keever, from the family sixty years settled at Wininnie Bend, had all the characteristics of the river farming people. Reticent and dignified, she was a sensible countrywoman, plain and thin as a pole, who looked at Maida's gaunt face and swollen form consideringly.

‘I don't know, dear,' she said. ‘This is an iffy kind of time, especially when you're carrying your first. I think you should go into Duchess and let the doctor have a look at you.'

Maida protested; but Mrs Keever paid no attention.

‘No, dear, I have to be firm. It's my duty as an older person and your nearest neighbour. If your mother was here she'd say the same as me. Don't you be silly now. You don't want to lose your baby prematurely. That's right, dear, you have a little weep while Jackie and me make the arrangements. Now then, Jack, first thing tomorrow, my boy Roley will bring the Mack truck around by the bush road, and him and me will take Maida into Duchess. We'll take it slow, and I'll be there to keep an eye on her. No need to worry at all. We'll stay overnight at my sister Enid's, and if the doctor says she's all right we'll bring her back next day. No trouble, dear. You just leave it to us and get on with your job, easy-minded.'

Maida went off, tearful and timid, and yet half excited at seeing Duchess Bay again.

The next day Roley Keever returned to say that the child had been born shortly after they had got Maida to the hospital. It had been a stillborn boy.

Though he had not felt very deeply about the coming child, Jackie was dismayed and distressed, more for Maida than the baby.

‘I suppose he came too early to live, poor little beggar.'

Mrs Keever was soberly compassionate. ‘Things sometimes happen this way.'

When Jackie arrived, Maida was depressed and querulous, hating the hospital.

‘Take me home,' she begged. ‘I want to be home just with you. I'll get better quickly there.'

‘Did you see him, the baby?' Jackie asked Mrs Keever privily. ‘I just wondered, if he was—like me. You know. Small.'

Mrs Keever said, ‘No, I didn't see him. Don't think of it any more and try to keep your wife's mind off it, too. Nobody could help the baby coming before time, it's just fate.'

When Maida returned to the river she looked round the cottage with an intense and hungry glance.

‘I wanted to be here,' she said, and suddenly: ‘When I tell Mama that the baby was born dead, you know what she'll say? That it's a punishment to me for being wicked.'

She wept all night. In the morning she seemed calm, completely herself.

‘I must look a sight.' She covered her swollen face with her hands. ‘Don't look at me.'

‘I always want to look at you,' Jackie said. ‘I love you. You're my girl, aren't you?'

‘Yes,' she said. She pressed his head against her still-sore breasts, rocked him gently, saying, ‘You can be my baby now, Jackie.'

The years slid by, less marked by event than the river. They were the years of the big boom, of cities expanding and country towns turning their backs on the old traditional standbys of sheep and cattle raising, goldmining and grain-growing, and venturing into light industry. The railways veined the countryside, shipping increased. Crazy men like Kingsford Smith and Charlie Ulm talked about regular airmails, freight planes linking Australia with Home, carrying lightly chilled lamb, choice tropical fruits, wines for the luxury market. Lufa and Jackie agreed that these dreamers needed their heads read.

The farmers along the Dovey leased more land, burned and cleared bush, increased their herds, and the dairy factory raised more capital and built a new jetty and iceworks. Lufa could have bought another cream boat and put a couple of men on it, but he said he couldn't bother his head with it.

‘Ghost!' he said, ‘what would I do with more money?'

But Maida and Jackie saved a little. Maida had never owned any money in her life, and she never looked at their savings bankbook without glee. ‘All that! Ours!'

‘We could go for a little holiday if you like,' Jackie suggested.

‘Oh, no,' she said, dismayed. ‘I like it here! It's a holiday here all the time. You don't want to go away and leave it, do you, Jackie?'

Within a year Jackie could scarcely remember the Kingsland hillsides of faded green velvet which had filled his infant eyes with familiar security and his infant head with dreams of dwarfs and gold. Like Lufa, he began to speak of the river as an entity, and when the big blows came, the gulls snow-storming in to the bogs, the whooping wind full of salt that made frost-flakes on the window, he said, ‘She'll be eating her banks tonight', feeling helpless and anxious as though this great brainless thing of water and sand were an animal bent on its own destruction.

During these blows, when Jackie and his wife learnt the value of the tarpaulin that anchored their roof till the whole structure seemed to crouch and cling to the ground like a limpet, the nights were full of awesome tumult, the bush booming forth its mighty mantra,
OM OM OM
, and the Dovey driven back upon itself by wind and tide, tacking from shore to shore with an antiphonal roar and rattle. On such nights the two young people made love with inexhaustible vigour, driven by the prodigal energy that filled the river, the sky, the whole dark world about them, until they felt one with each other and that dark world and all that it signified.