Mr Darwin's Shooter (5 page)

It was the nineteenth of February by MacCracken's diary, and Covington had been with him twenty days.

‘I am weak,' Covington rolled his eyes around. ‘Will you care for me, MacCracken?'

‘I am doing so already, crippled old dog,' the young doctor murmured, conveying kindness by giving Covington's arm a squeeze. It was not MacCracken's intention to run a hospital for his cases, but with Covington he heard himself prattling: ‘Of course, yes, rely on me, sir, I shall make arrangements, etcetera,'—all condensed into one shouted word in his charge's left ear (the better one): ‘
Yes!
'

With an instrument sent from Boston by an old professor who still had hopes for him, MacCracken tackled Covington's ears. Gobbets of wax blocked his view. After careful syringing he saw that both drums were scarred beyond recovery. It was as if firecrackers had popped inside them. Covington's submission to his care was touching.

‘I went to an aurist about this,' Covington tapped the side of his head, ‘and he said for a thousand pound he would cut me open and clip my ear-bones, and maybe I would hear better. Would I?'

‘Keep your thousand, grandfather.'

Mr Covington dozed. MacCracken felt a protectiveness towards the old coot as for a gruff, well-meaning peasant with a crock of gold. A man who could spare a thousand
like that would know of some prime investments. Trying another sort of examination MacCracken ran his fingers across Covington's scalp. It was like playing on a bag of stones, and using instinct aided by phrenology (at which MacCracken prided himself, believing the craft to lie somewhere in the direction of a firm prediction), he sneaked a mental picture of Covington to verify his first impressions.

The message MacCracken read through his fingers came to him in a few moments: a doglike fondness was no surprise; the potency of an old sire; powers of concentration and challenge; a streak of resentment; the capacity to deal damage; a certain helpfulness; secretiveness.

This last was no surprise.

Covington came awake as MacCracken felt what he had once heard called the ‘band of hopefulness'. It was ridged across Covington's dome, a veritable rainbow of potential joy, and not seeming to belong with the doleful stranger at all.

‘What are you doing? Are you “reading” me, MacCracken? I won't have it!'—and he thrust his examiner's arm aside. ‘You won't
use
me?'

‘Dear Mr Covington!'

‘Bumpology. I
spit
on that art!'

‘Mr Covington!' (louder in his ear).

‘Yoi?'

‘I—am—your—physician.'

‘You—are—my—meddler.'

Though Covington gave a quick smile to cover his outburst, and MacCracken smiled with him, they both were astonished by the vehemence of the exchange.

‘Pardon me,' Covington said. ‘I had a bad time with that business once. When I was
jugged
and
bottled
.'

‘You are pardoned, sir. When was that?'

With the shimmering half-understanding the deaf have, that is also like a charm, Mr Covington scuttled back inside himself and secured MacCracken's fascination with that
‘bad time' and that ‘business' by keeping his jaw firmly clamped. It must have had a good outcome, surely, thought MacCracken, because the rainbow ridge of hope said so. Either that or Covington's fate had not yet run its course.

Covington lay on a bed in MacCracken's library and gazed at MacCracken's books, read their spines and threw his host a sprat of information to chew. ‘I've come home, it seems,' he said. ‘
Home
,' giving the word a scornful edge. He named a few titles—Murray's
English Grammar
, Mackintosh's
History of England
, Byron's
HMS Blonde
, and Darwin's
Voyage Round the World of HMS Beagle
— saying he ‘owned those too', which MacCracken thought, at the time, a pretty ripe boast for such an old carthorse.

‘It is like a ship's cabin in here. I like it very much.'

Through several days MacCracken watched Covington closely for signs of relapse, and one evening, having moved him to a bare side room for his convalescence, witnessed another responsive quirk in the man. Covington reached from his bunk and touched the walls with his hands. Splaying his fingers he pressed his palms flat in all their sweatiness. MacCracken thought he merely craved the coolness of stone, but learned (in time) it was otherwise with Covington. For deaf as he was, Covington held his body taut as a tuning fork, and listened, and heard—for the world sang to him through the sounding box of ‘Villa Rosa'.

Much later MacCracken was to learn all that the walls meant:

Touching them brought back to Covington his adventures, beginning with his earliest on leaving home at the age of twelve. It was the suck and slam of the ocean, the great stringed instrument of wind Covington detected, combing through eucalyptus branches overhanging the slate roof and sifting him down his only music in small vibrations, the hard thrum of cicadas and the decisive slap of small waves on hard-packed sand. The creak of a ship's timbers, the
rush of waters along the leeward railing and mashing across half the deck like a neverending turnpike. Then the dip of paddles in a quiet estuary (on his several returns) that said, ‘England at last!' The wetlands, the flatlands, the stink of mud and rutted roads. The hiss of footsteps across dewy-damp grass. Empty houses. Graveyards of names. A door-hinge creaking as he entered an old chapel, and then with his eyes lifted discovering that a window that was formerly there, high in a wall, was gone, and some greatness in his heart leaping the obstacles of the world was gone as well.

When Covington saw MacCracken watching, he sneaked his hand under the covers, embarrassed at showing his feeling.

MacCracken had this heavy-limbed Ulysses in his household care for another week, and then—for Covington remained feverish with a persistent infection where the cut had gone septic—arranged a cottage, ‘Coral Sands', where he could attend him daily. Covington stayed there through all March and half April, well able to pay a good price. He retained Nurse Parkington, MacCracken's sometime assistant and a woman of ample spirit and powerful arms, to dress his wounds and, when he was much improved, to pummel his stiff joints while he sprawled walrus-like on a table.

One day Covington asked if he might call on MacCracken, convivially, he said, and, without much ceremony, the doctor found him at his door. Covington's hair was combed straight forward like Napoleon's, with a curl over one eye, and he reeked of pomade. His prickly devotion came at MacCracken from under a cliff of forehead, and he beamed his great smile, bellowing ‘MacCracken!' so that his listener might know from his admiration that something was wondrous about him. In retrospect it did MacCracken good to feel the heat coming from the slab of Covington standing in his doorway. But in the present it itched him around the collar. It might be called love, that tide or spark of feeling the other gave off. When in later years MacCracken got through to a settled plan of life—and returned to Massachusetts to square his accounts with running away, and became, in time, a puzzled student and then a practitioner in matters of the mind—it was often this picture of Covington holding the door-jambs that recurred to him. It was an emblem he took into himself, indeed, as a measure of character. Never give up, it said. Neither your victories nor your losses. Stay eager for your pain until it serves you well. Nourish life to the end.

‘You have made me good,' Covington boomed, producing a bottle from under his arm and holding it up in the air: ‘Rum tiddley-um-tum!'

MacCracken had asked for this, and over a glass of spirits Covington confirmed himself as a case to be admired. He began quizzing MacCracken on money matters. MacCracken had saved his life, and Covington's best answer to that was to begin money-making for him. When MacCracken mentioned acreages and sheep as being worth more than ‘accursed gold', Covington nodded sagely, owning that he ‘knew a man' with four thousand acres and a fine house in a district with good soil and fair rainfall, and who might be amenable to taking a new owner aboard. Thus MacCracken saw his way clear to much leisurely scribbling and a changed background to life. In his present, callow state of mind the ambitions MacCracken entertained were literary—he was a would-be essayist. For that he wanted a good thousand a year. Too much—but when was enough ever enough for a pleasure-seeker? As he farewelled Covington that night he put an arm around him and gave him a warm embrace. They stood eye to eye in their tallness. Their beaming faces said ‘good fellow' to the world while their minds raced, calculating their needs and adjusting their tactics to each other.

‘I like you, MacCracken, but do you think that matters?'

‘Indeed I do,' the younger man replied, confused by Covington's question and unsure if he liked him quite as much in return.

‘What's that you say?'

MacCracken cupped his hands to the side of Covington's head and repeated himself at the top of his voice. ‘
Indeed-ah-do
.'

‘“Indeed yah do”,' Covington chuckled, mimicking the other's expression, and stomping off into the night. ‘Well said.'

MacCracken stood in the dark feeling bothered. Talk of getting rich was all very well, but there was a humour in Covington that niggled him; a way of acting possessively— which is to say without respect—as if this little patch of
heaven where MacCracken lived was quite Covington's own, under a prior claim. There was a studiedness about the man, giving MacCracken the feeling that while Covington was honest in his gratitude, he most of all wanted to emphasise that he was no man's lackey. If anything, that MacCracken was the inferior in their two roles. The sum of MacCracken's feeling, too, was that Covington had set him up like a row of skittles. MacCracken could not get rid of a feeling that Covington had not fallen into his sheltering cove by accident. Something about his being there was contrived. Yet how could a man do that, almost dying on your doorstep in the attempt? It was not possible to manufacture peritonitis, and time a grave illness to within a minute or two of death. It made no sense in any understanding of the world at all.

MacCracken stifled his irritation soon enough, however. He was niggled but not so high principled as to take the matter further. Covington's getting about in good health was a case of satisfaction to him as he needed his advertisements hale. For questions were asked in Sydney about whether young MacCracken was qualified at all, to which MacCracken indignantly flourished certificates issued under Massachusetts law, inviting inspection: ‘At your leisure,
if
you please,' and threatening lawsuits on the matter. He travelled each Tuesday to the government hospital to assist Mr Vincent Crews, a man little short of a drunken blunderer, but with vice-regal connections, whose rare successes, MacCracken indignantly countered, were MacCracken's own.

A short time later Covington made a fine recovery, then went about his business in Sydney Town spouting MacCracken's good name, and collecting views of the doctor in return—thence embarking for Twofold Bay on the next sailing of the
Skate
.

‘Coral Sands' and ‘Villa Rosa' lay among the cottages of watermen, sea captains, pilots and fishermen. Watson's Bay was prettily situated on the peninsula called South Head, with sandy beaches and calm sheltered waters on one side of shelving, dramatically broken land. The Pacific Ocean, invisible but close, shuddered against sandstone cliffs a narrow quarter-mile behind the settlement's back. The staging was theatrical in the written opinion of MacCracken, who got down to his essays in his leisure hours. On the ocean side it was a good setting for
Lear
; on the sheltered side you could have your
Midsummer Night's Dream
if you wished, amid cabbage-tree palms and stately, red-limbed angophoras, that were called apple-gums in New South Wales though they bore no fruit—a typical confusion in the colony, whose botany and everything else was upside-down like the seasons—until the timber was cleft, and then the resemblance to apple showed.

Just a few short years ago these shimmering protected coves were one of the last great unmeddled-with portions of earth. Then with lightning-swiftness (compared with the time that had gone before), pink-cheeked high-principled naval and army officers made it their England's preserve. With utmost reasonableness they spoke their laws, setting up a gaol, a gallows, and a series of fine government
buildings made of sandstone blocks. Such was Sydney Town. Windmills turned in the humid hot haze, grinding a damp sticky flour. Charles Darwin saw them when he sailed through the Heads of Port Jackson twenty-five years previously—their listless, hopeless sails. Dealings with the black people who were there before the garrisons arrived were first conducted in a tone of amused equality, noted the essayist, with gifts exchanged and comparisons made of clothing, adornments and human anatomy. The friendly contrasts were well understood as reflecting that both sides were matched in being human, and this was soon ironically demonstrated by the women producing little bastards, by which time it seemed there was a belief on the part of the natives—with little language, and much gesturing on their part—that they had met with a superior civilisation and liked its products of rum, treacle and flour better than their own raw produce of kangaroo flesh and bush honey.

There was not much adventure in the journey bringing the young MacCracken to Australia, although he sometimes boasted there was—colouring accounts of brushes with
bandidos
and the like. He had believed the great age of adventure was already over. Boredom and a breach of promise dispute propelled him from his Boston home and he went to Buenos Ayres, acquiring a dissolute's Spanish. There he heard about Ballarat gold and made his run for Australia. Others took the journey with him seeking fortune—sick at heart rounding the Horn, then stitching up the coast of South America as far as Peru to find another vessel. Thence across the rollers of the Pacific in a stinking overloaded bark. First landfall, and a hasty one, at Chatham Island in the Galapagos chain, where twenty turtles were taken live for the ship's galley, and the knowledge of FitzRoy's
Beagle
and Charles Darwin having called there toasted in Chilean amontillado. Leaking and wallowing the whole way, they made, finally, landfall in New South Wales. Then came the march to the gold diggings of
the 1850s through stupendous heat under a brassy sky. Following that, failure on the diggings. And retreat to this haven.

MacCracken walked his clifftops on calm days, wading through prickly banksia trees and flat-growing hakea bushes with spidery orange flowers. He came to a lookout point and never failed to amaze himself. The eye of the Pacific stared into unfathomable space. It was a great emptiness and a mystery after the closeness of domestic life near to hand.
Consider London's Hampstead
, he wrote in an essay (never having been there):

MacCracken felt a little afraid when he stood on those clifftops. Sight of the sea made him know there were things he was yet to dare, and so the sea challenged him, and he was often worse-off for his constitutional—more dissatisfied with himself than was good. Men like Covington he reckoned had faced the sea with inferior trepidation: they simply did not allow it to move them, and were lucky in that. It gave the world sailors at least.

So MacCracken with his snobberies got away from the cliffs and hiked back to the cove he loved so dearly. It was a world unto itself where afternoon sea-changes of weather, called southerly busters, raced overhead, leaving the cove placid while whipping the waters of the harbour farther in. MacCracken liked the feeling better than the mish-mash of weather stirring Sydney Town a few miles around the shore, where they had a summery succession of hot, cold and humid, with hot prevailing after the passing of the rest in a furnace-breath of westerly wind bringing the smoke of the ever-burning bushfires. Here was a more idyllic setting
for MacCracken's moods. Let his friends find him ‘on location', as he said in the fashion of the day, whensoever they wished. Let the world steam over him while he hunkered down a little removed from its chops and changes, a privileged spectator on a tiled verandah, a glass of ale in his hand, and his kangaroo dog, Carl, an amiably deficient hound, lapping milk at his feet.

All was cosy. All was right. MacCracken craved no cataclysmic dramas. He had his surgery, saw a few patients for cuts and scratches, and the rest of his time he gave to friendship, dalliance, and his literary pursuits. Nightly there came a tapping at his window-pane, and he enjoyed the close attentions of a visitor discreet as she was willing— ‘The older Miss X,' he told his friends, ‘if you want a name at all.'

MacCracken's essays were his personal pride and his most abject failure. Inspired by Emerson and Thoreau, they observed nature in a genial fashion and toyed with philosophy. They made humour out of his travails. ‘
The bird was so tame I killed it with my hat
,' he wrote of his Galapagos Islands interlude. ‘
In experimental mood, I persuaded a tortoise to haul a rock
.' He did not think the essays were bad, but though he sent them away in scrupulously tied packages, nought returned to him but silence. His soul went six months across the sea and came six months back unenthused-over. If anyone asked why he refrained from publishing in the
Sydney Morning Herald
in preference to Boston and Edinburgh journals, he said, ‘You know as much of colonial taste as you do of my particular style.' But the fact was that the
Sydney Morning Herald
would not have him either.

He showed an essay to Covington, who kept it an hour, then handed it back with a grunt.

‘Mr Darwin was there before you.'

‘Well, so he was, old bookworm, and the whole world knows it through his journal of the
Beagle
. I saw the birds
that he shot, finches, hardly bigger than mosquitoes, some of them were.' MacCracken shouted into Covington's ear: ‘Bang! It was done.'

Covington twisted his mouth disdainfully.

‘
Obtained
,' he said, ‘if you want the right word. Not shot.'

‘What is that you say, miraculous old pedant?'

He spoke the words to Covington's retreating back.

‘Obtained,' Covington repeated without turning around.

‘Sir?!' pleaded MacCracken.

Covington hauled back a leg and took aim at a coconut that MacCracken had placed on a stone as a decorative detail, and sent it flying through the doctor's garden of shells with a well-placed kick.

‘Finches!' The word exploded into the night.

MacCracken sighed, then went back indoors. For a minute he heard the coconut bouncing through the rocks down to the shore as Covington pursued it to destruction.

MacCracken pulled his journal of the
Beagle
from the shelf and turned to a page headed ‘Ornithology'. He saw that Covington was correct and that ‘obtained' was the very word used.