AT 29
Authors: D. P. Macbeth
When Saturn Returns
A NOVEL BY D. P. MACBETH
Copyright © 2014 by D. P. Macbeth
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without prior written permission from the author.
Published by eBookpartnership.com
ISBN 978-0-9911172-0-8
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, enterprises, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Caligraphics. Guitar man image from Wikimedia Commons. In silhouette - Nederlands: Ben Howard tijdens een optredun in paradiso, Amsterdam. Image Credit ©Abigail Hoekstra.
The author acknowledges Evan D. Macbeth, Linda Mount, Charles R. Scoggins, Jr. and Hank Van Handle for their suggestions.
For my wife
Prologue - 1982 â The Whitehurst Legacy
Prologue
-
1982 â The Whitehurst Legacy
Lloyd Gannon Clarke cursed under his breath as he waited for his suitcase to tumble onto the carousel. He was wheezing after the long hike through the Tullamarine airport terminal. Traveling was so distasteful that he no longer cared to make these trips from Sydney. He had a measure of clout with his editor, but for some reason his protests met with threats from higher up. He had no choice, but to make this tedious excursion to Melbourne.
The suitcase appeared at the top of the chute and slid down to join dozens of others wending in his direction. When it came within reach he grabbed it with one sweaty hand grunting, twisting and tugging until he was able to wrench it onto the floor where, thankfully, he could roll it to the taxi stand. That would be another chore, shoehorning his massive body into the backseat of a dingy cab. Twenty-five years earlier, when he was just starting out, none of this would have bothered him. Then he weighed a mere two hundred and seventy pounds, still too heavy for his six-foot frame, but not so unwieldy that he couldn't fit comfortably into a seat on an airplane or in a taxicab. Today, however, he was well over four hundred pounds. The newspaper balked at purchasing two airline seats each time he went on assignment, but his column had a following. His editor relented.
Balcony, front row, that's where the critics sat. And, dead center, with unoccupied seats on either side, is where Lloyd Gannon Clarke placed himself as he had done every opening night throughout his career. No one would take the seats right and left. The man was too big, his persona too threatening for anyone to come close. By all measures, he was revoltingly obese. He looked down to study the early arrivers from his perch high above, leaning forward with his heavy arms resting on the railing. Tuxedos and gowns were the order of the evening. He smoothed the lapels of his own tux, made to exacting measurements to cover his girth, conservative and tasteful. After a while he sat back, taking no notice of the creaking seat that strained to withstand his weight. He opened the program and quickly paged to the details.
BLOSSOM PRESENTS:
THE WHITEHURST LEGACY
Produced by James Buckman
Directed by Timothy Seligman
Musical Director, Reina Das-Whitehurst
Written for the Stage by Alice Limoges
Music by Nathan Whitehurst
Arranged by James Buckman
From the Story by Melba Whitehurst
Clarke ran his hand through his thick black hair, the only attractive feature his body possessed. Soon this ordeal would be over. The taste of a gourmet dinner remained fresh in his mouth. Once the performance was over, well, not really, since he customarily left no later than the middle of the second act, he would have a late supper then a cigar and cognac. His column would be typed in his hotel room. Depending upon the hour, he'd either fax it to his editor or simply dictate it over the telephone to the copy boy on the night desk. Either way he'd make deadline. He always did.
He scanned the list of actors. He knew only two of the names, minor players he'd seen in second-rate musicals, decent singing voices, but not much else to recommend. Seligman was competent as directors go, but he would never be big. The Das woman was the only person he respected. How stupid of her to leave the Sydney Symphony Orchestra for this pedestrian business. She's the best violinist in all of Australia. Oh yes, Whitehurst, the rock ân' roll singer. That's why she abandoned her calling. To marry him and see her fortunes crumble away, such a waste.
The American connection irritated him. He reached over to the adjoining seat and picked up his copy of the theater notes. He thumbed the pages, stopping at the one with a picture of Alice Limoges, the Pulitzer Prize winner. He read her bio again. She wasn't a bad writer, he thought, certainly capable of magazine features. How in the devil did she get the commission to write this show? He'd already decided it would bomb. The American scriptwriter would take the biggest hit in his column. She should stick to magazine fluff.
Blossom Presents? Lloyd Gannon Clarke did his homework on that crowd, too; a recording company from America, trying to expand its footprint by venturing into stage productions. Those bloody Americans will do anything for money. After Alice Limoges, Blossom would get the most criticism. Go back to rock ân' roll.
Finally, he turned the page to a picture of Jim Buckman. Here was the real travesty. He recalled the sensation stirred across Australia when the singer debuted his album,
Back and Blue
. Yes, and that song,
Peg
, that received so much attention after the television broadcast. Now, the pop singer is masquerading as a theatrical producer? And, that drug addled rocker, Nigel Whitehurst. He's big among young people who have yet to be exposed to quality music, orchestral productions such as those his wife foolishly abandoned. Unlike the rest of this lot, at least he's Australian, but that's not saying much. So, tonight's performance is about his so-called legacy. He flipped back to the narrative and stared at the list of characters to be portrayed, Jonathan, Nathan and Aaron. Those were supposed to be Nigel Whitehurst's ancestors.
Lloyd Gannon Clarke knew plenty about Australia's history. He was among the few present day Australians familiar with the legend of Jonathan Whitehurst. He was skeptical. Bushrangers held a certain cachet among ordinary Australians, but Clarke knew better. The real ones were half-mad villains who were driven around the bend by the brutality of âThe System'. It taxed credulity that Jonathan Whitehurst could have escaped into the arms of the indigenous population and survived for more than thirty years. Perhaps he truly existed, but the legend painted by a London reporter simply could not be proved. Nathan Whitehurst? Here was another fiction, half black with an American wife and a thousand-page songbook. Oh, and a whaling captain? Preposterous. Aaron Whitehurst's story could be true. Of course, with the Americans involved who could discern fact from fiction? It didn't matter. After tonight The Whitehurst Legacy would die a quick death.
Lloyd Gannon Clarke should have been a brilliant historian. He was born in Sydney at the start of the Great Depression. As a youth during World War II, he distinguished himself by completing university level requirements by the age of fifteen. After the war he received the prestigious Sydney Medal for Letters and used the accompanying stipend to further his education in England. He did not adjust well. His argumentative nature alienated his professors who urged him to move on. Rebellious and
hurt, he taught himself French and enrolled at the Sorbonne. In direct contrast to his academic path in London, he switched to fine arts, disdaining the history of his native country, which had earlier been his passion. But he wrote extremely well, and it was this skill, together with a capacity for laborious research, that won him the attention of a professor who possessed the patience to look beyond Lloyd's prickly nature and offer intellectual guidance. “Go back to history,” he encouraged. “Australia has no accurate portrait of itself. You have the skills to write it.” In this way, Lloyd Gannon Clarke rounded out his education until his return, manuscript in hand, to Sydney.
He was captivated by his heritage. On his maternal side he was descended from the notorious convict bushranger, Dermott Gannon. Instead of bedtime fables, his mother and grandmother regaled him with the courageous, though tragic, story of his great grandfather. In the eyes of the English who occupied Dublin during the second decade of the nineteenth century, Dermott Gannon was an instigator. The politically minded leader did not hide his disdain for Ireland's occupiers nor did he shrink from confrontation. He led parades and organized strikes, always urging his countrymen to throw off the English yoke. Twice his demonstrations resulted in violence. When an English officer was severely injured, Dermott Gannon, his devoted wife and others, whether innocent or guilty, were rounded up and deported to hulks anchored in the Thames. Dermott received a swift sentence of fourteen years servitude in New South Wales. His wife, although uninvolved in her husband's activities, received seven. They were separated within hours of the ship's arrival in Sydney Harbor.
Convict supervision was sometimes lax on the remote farms that sprang up slowly out of the inland bush. Within a year the Irish malcontent escaped to Sydney and spirited his wife away from the mill where she slaved under nightmarish conditions. For six months they subsisted on handouts from sympathetic settlers and the occasional kangaroo until his wife's pregnancy drove them to return.
English justice was harsh. Helen Gannon was returned to the squalid conditions under which she was forced to work fourteen hours a day until she miraculously gave birth to a baby girl. Dermott received one hundred lashes and was sent back, without medical treatment, to his labors on the remote farm.
A year later, desperate to see his wife and child, he escaped again. This time he used his considerable persuasive skills to convince other convicts to join him. So great was his hatred for the British that he burned his way back to Sydney, stealing horses, guns and provisions before turning out freemen from their homes and torching their dwellings and fields.
Alarms went out and the British military dispatched soldiers to track him down. A cat and mouse chase ensued for weeks as Gannon and his band of bushrangers outsmarted the soldiers with help from sympathizers along the rough roads leading to Sydney. In the dark of a cold night he slipped into the barracks where his wife nursed their daughter between shifts. What he found enraged him beyond reason. The sick woman was barely alive, bare-breasted, with his daughter in her skeletal arms. Dermott Gannon realized he could do nothing to free her from slavery. He tore from the barracks insane with fury.