Mr Darwin's Shooter (6 page)

Another six months passed and Covington returned from his home in the south. It was October and changeable weather to the point of madness, hot as the equator in the morning, misty and chill with low rushing cloud in the afternoon. MacCracken looked up one day and there Covington was on the horizon, unmoving, watchful. He sat on a hired pony. Much had transpired between them during their separation. They had corresponded on money matters and through the facility of Covington's Sydney agent MacCracken already owned cuts in a number of Covington's cargoes: whale oil, timber, hides. They were beginning to show him a handy profit. So there was no more welcome visitor on MacCracken's rocky patch than the man he saw.

‘Mr Covington!' MacCracken waved his hat.

Overlarge on horseback, Covington was a stone pillar awaiting a lightning bolt. His movements were a story of shoulder bones, rib bones, ankle bones and skull all broken in his youth, mended, and thereafter very sore. Those ‘boans' ground against each other and were stiff, lending Covington his monumental manner when he attempted turning his neck.

MacCracken strode up the white track. ‘Old fellow, how good to see you!'

‘That woman who helped me,' Covington looked down from his hired nag, ‘what was her name?'

Covington's gaze had all the power of a lament. MacCracken helped him down. They descended the landscape of rocky headland and sheltered bay.

That day MacCracken wrote in his diary:

Two years later MacCracken went back to the date and circled the entry in red. It was because of a letter Covington carried in his satchel but was no more likely to take out and show around than he was to strip his clothes and walk naked. It was a letter from Charles Darwin and it read:

Two years. That would be the length of time Covington nurtured his pain before MacCracken understood the story he carried in his bones, and how it ate away at him. Two years before Covington showed MacCracken the letter. By then MacCracken would, in a kind of by-product of shame, know what his own role was to be in the tale of Covington's life, and how to go about correcting his ignorance and bringing his friend through to his end.

Covington stayed a week subjecting himself to the pounding of Nurse. MacCracken had leisure to examine him for his present state of health, which was excellent save for his rheumatism and deafness. Like a farrier re-shoeing an old horse he gave Covington's ears another syringing. Covington declared himself well satisfied, though he heard no better.

‘What made you deaf?' MacCracken shouted a question he had asked before.

As before he got a deflected reply.

‘Why is a worm blind?' responded Covington, then answered his own question: ‘Because it lives in the dark, that is why.'

MacCracken rolled his eyes. They were back to their first way of dealing with each other, with Covington excluding MacCracken somewhat, yet demanding his attention—and always on the edge of a withheld confession.

‘MacCracken, can I trust you?'

‘As your physician and your friend? As your business partner?
Aye
on all counts!'

‘How wise are you?'

‘Wise enough.'

‘What did you say?'

‘I said
wise
,' MacCracken nodded and shouted, ‘
enough
.'

‘You tied a string to a tortoise and made it pull a rock.'

‘Thank you,' croaked MacCracken into his chin. ‘So you hold my own writings against me. Thank you kindly. What a good proof of readership. Alone of all the faithful you kept the faith.'

‘Since we met I've been wondering about something.'

‘We never met, we collided, old barge.'

‘Is a man only ever to be as he seems? That is my point,' said Covington.

‘And a good one, ancient Diogenes,' remarked MacCracken. If
he
was only ever to be as he seemed, then he would be a flimsy sort of a fellow.

They smoked their pipes and watched the shallow tide. When it retreated it printed white sand with mottled hearts of Port Jackson fig leaves.

‘Must a servant be always—just a servant?'

‘Jesus was a servant,' said MacCracken righteously.

‘Who?'

‘
Jesus
.'

‘Nay, he was a master,' said Covington.

‘Come up to the house,' said MacCracken, clapping a hand on the shoulder of his brooding friend. ‘I have a fine old brandy from the Cape.' Covington stared at him uncomprehendingly until MacCracken made the ‘snorter' sign with his elbow, and then he leapt up and trotted at his side to ‘Villa Rosa'.

‘What do you think the brain is?' Covington said, when they were settled with their snifters. ‘Does it have several organs packed into it, like lumps of clothing in a seabag?'

‘That is a pretty idea,' nodded MacCracken. He was interested in the brain. He had dissected it into portions but found the process useless, philosophically speaking, leaving him always at the point he wished to start with—the mystery of being.

Covington sneered into his swirl of spirits. ‘We must all have great heads or these qualities are small, trailing back on roots to be all fitted in like
turnips
or
yams
.'

‘Another?' MacCracken held out the bottle.

Covington declined, saying the brandy was ‘oily to his taste'. The comment irritated MacCracken extremely. It undercut his hospitality. Some friendships were better conducted through the mails, he swore to himself. In Covington's letters from ‘Forest Oak' there was never any innuendo, while face to face he was full of it. As Covington placed his glass on a shelf and readied himself to leave, grunting and cracking his joints, his eyes were caught by an arrangement of shells MacCracken had placed in a window recess. Among them was a saucer of sea urchin spines. They
were slim, shaded in brown, about half an inch long and dotted with small marks like goose bumps. Covington held them to the light like a diamond connoisseur, making judgemental clicks of the tongue, saying he ‘owned these too,' having found them on the same island where MacCracken teased the tortoise and smothered the bird. His noise of disapproval was typical. He seemed captivated by the souvenirs, and somewhat lost, and yet there was this disdain also.

MacCracken cupped a hand to his mouth and shouted to be heard:

‘Chatham in the Galapagos? When were you there?
When
, old stager?'

‘When the world was young,' was all Covington would say in response. And perhaps that was everything, thought MacCracken, that he would ever need to say. (MacCracken would come to think so when he was wiser.) MacCracken was struck by the swirls of feeling that Covington shot out at him. They were full of pain.

Opening his diary that night MacCracken wrote his piece on friendship. ‘No, a man does not have to be just as he seems. He can be more, in the light of understanding.'

 

Covington called another day, and they spoke of other things. Yet always with difficulty, one shouting himself hoarse, one scribbling figures, both barking replies. It was hard work, like playing a ball without bounce. It was all restricted to pounds, shillings and pence; to bullock wagons and weeks on the road; to sloops gone aground with their cargoes ruined and unwilling insurers. Covington carried a silver ear trumpet in a kidskin bag, but never used it. It was an advanced model, made to the latest design in London. He said he could have it manufactured in Sydney if he liked, and plenty would buy it, but had an aversion to forcing on others what was useless to himself.

‘Such as your tale of woe?' MacCracken riposted.

‘What's that you say?'

‘Have you never killed a small bird with a hat?'

‘Nay, not with a hat,' said Covington sourly. ‘Not flippantly like you,
doctor
.'

‘
What—is—it—about—you?
' MacCracken demanded, in a voice that made his brandy balloons ring.

‘I am afraid to know,' replied Covington. There were tears in his eyes. MacCracken dropped his irritation, and embraced him as he farewelled him at the door. ‘I have been a collector in my life,' said Covington. ‘Birds and insects, small and large. Fossils. Mammals. Corals. You get so you forget what is man. You start to think, “Man? Why, he is just a stack of bones.”'

‘Dear Mr Covington, dear broken old heart,' said MacCracken. ‘Tell me your tale.
Trust
me.'

Covington made a sound like a bull-seal smacking rubbery lips. ‘Hmm?' Whether the plea reached him was irrelevant. Because the leaden door of deafness slammed shut. Because he tugged a lock of hair in ironical farewell. Because he trotted off into the dusk, a swirl of insects around his head, and gave those bothersome gnats all his attention.

 

Nurse Parkington urged on Covington a walking cure after giving him a good pummelling using pungent oils and the power of her mannish arms. Going about on his long, strong legs, Covington in a wide hat was like a patch of cloud-shadow on the headlands, trailing small boys who brought him bugs and rocks and other interesting finds. He could not stop himself peering, and MacCracken thought he was like someone hoping to find gold, he was so persistent in his hobby. What did he keep in his pockets? There was often a reek of raw spirits about him. He clinked and clanked like a bottle-oh. MacCracken saw him on the
sandstone escarpment plucking at beetles. He saw him crossing the heath. He saw him up on the roadway, near the lighthouse, beating shrubbery with a stick and stirring up butterflies. He saw him coming down.

Steadiness and accumulation of effort defined Covington just as lightness of mind and quick snobberies defined MacCracken. Black boys threw pebbles on Covington's back to get his attention. Those narrowed eyes, all their shine burned out, turned upon miscreants and were calm the way a coral lagoon is calm in a ring of storm.

You may wonder why MacCracken thought Covington's collecting activities unremarkable in the man, even after his outburst at the door, and confronted with Covington's confessions still didn't know what he was talking about. The answer is that he ascribed them to fashion. Beetles were the wonder of the day in the Australian colonies through every class of immigrant. Stark wonder was the mood in the forest and in the house, with every piece of bark and every cookpot lid and plate left lying around lifted to reveal a creature never sighted before by civilised man and waving its feelers. There was a special pride among the takers of the place, because the plants and animals were so strange. Everything so queer and opposite. There must have been a separate act of Creation, it was maintained, and as Darwin had said on visiting there, to bring them into being. Swans were black. A mammal, the platypus, laid eggs, although nobody had ever seen one do it except the black fellows, who were not to be believed, so much of their lives being fanciful.

So it did not astonish MacCracken as much as it might have when Covington, holding a few struggling wrigglers in his outdoorsman's palm for MacCracken's admiration, gave their names in Latin. ‘
Leptosomus
, a weevil.
Ontiscus
, a seed bug. I was first to catch these,' Covington croaked triumphantly, ‘in this very place where we are.'

MacCracken believed that Covington meant he was first
between the two of them, referring to their mutual competitiveness. The doctor went on his way chuckling over Covington's clumsy pretensions. He was ‘off' the fellow today. MacCracken had seen Covington's type at operatic concerts, men who had made their pile ‘up country' clutching their programs as if they would strangle them, and popping their eyes from the effort of enjoyment and mouthing a few words of libretti taught them by daughters and wives. As with opera so with bugs. MacCracken put Covington in a box labelled ‘Old Stager', smiled at him, shook his hand heartily, slapped him on the back, and made noises Covington would never hear.

Covington's other task on this stay was to attend to their business together. This suited MacCracken fine. After studying his ledger books Covington snarled, ‘You need boxin' around the ears, young fella,' and took the books back to ‘Coral Sands' and tidied them into columns. Then, without much ceremony, he was gone.