The Thorn Birds (17 page)

“I was the dairy hand, and sometimes I used to see Fee in the distance, walking with a little boy about eighteen months old. The next thing, old James Armstrong came to see me. His daughter, he said, had disgraced the family; she wasn’t married and she had a child. It had been hushed up, of course, but when they tried to get her away her grandmother made such a fuss they had no choice but to keep her on the place, in spite of the awkwardness. Now the grandmother was dying, there was nothing to stop them getting rid of Fee and her child. I was a single man, James said; if I’d marry her and guarantee to take her out of the South Island, they’d pay our traveling expenses and an additional five hundred pounds.

“Well, Father, it was a fortune to me, and I was tired of the single life. But I was always so shy I was never any good with the girls. It seemed like a good idea to me, and I honestly didn’t mind the child. The grandmother got wind of it and sent for me, even though she was very ill. She was a tartar in her day, I’ll bet, but a real lady. She told me a bit about Fee, but she didn’t say who the father was, and I didn’t like to ask. Anyway, she made me promise to be good to Fee — she knew they’d have Fee off the place the minute she was dead, so she had suggested to James that they find Fee a husband. I felt sorry for the poor old thing; she was terribly fond of Fee.

“Would you believe, Father, that the first time I was ever close enough to Fee to say hello to her was the day I married her?”

“Oh, I’d believe it,” the priest said under his breath. He looked at the liquid in his glass, then drained it and reached for the bottle, filling both glasses. “So you married a lady far above you, Paddy.”

“Yes. I was frightened to death of her at first. She was so beautiful in those days, Father, and so…out of it, if you know what I mean. As if she wasn’t even there, as if it was all happening to someone else.”

“She’s still beautiful, Paddy,” said Father Ralph gently. “I can see in Meggie what she must have been like before she began to age.”

“It hasn’t been an easy life for her, Father, but I don’t know what else I could have done. At least with me she was safe, and not abused. It took me two years to get up the courage to be—well, a real husband to her. I had to teach her to cook, to sweep a floor, wash and iron clothes. She didn’t know how.

“And never once in all the years we’ve been married, Father, has she ever complained, or laughed, or cried. It’s only in the most private part of our life together that she ever displays any feeling, and even then she never speaks. I hope she will, yet I don’t want her to, because I always have the idea if she did, it would be
has
name she’d say. Oh, I don’t mean she doesn’t like me, or our children. But I love her so much, and it just seems to me she hasn’t got that sort of feeling left in her. Except for Frank. I’ve always known she loved Frank more than the rest of us put together. She must have loved his father. But I don’t know a thing about the man, who he was, why she couldn’t marry him.”

Father Ralph looked down at his hands, blinking. “Oh, Paddy, what hell it is to be alive! Thank God I haven’t the courage to try more than the fringe of it.”

Paddy got up, rather unsteadily. “Well, I’ve done it now, Father, haven’t I? I’ve sent Frank away, and Fee will never forgive me.”

“You can’t tell her, Paddy. No, you mustn’t tell her, ever. Just tell her Frank ran away with the boxers and leave it at that. She knows how restless Frank’s been; she’ll believe you.”

“I couldn’t do that, Father!” Paddy was aghast.

“You’ve got to, Paddy. Hasn’t she known enough pain and misery? Don’t heap more on her head.” And to himself he thought: Who knows? Maybe she’ll learn to give the love she has for Frank to you at last, to you and the little thing upstairs.

“You really think that, Father?”

“I do. What happened tonight must go no further.”

“But what about Meggie? She heard it all.”

“Don’t worry about Meggie, I’ll take care of her. I don’t think she understood more of what went on than that you and Frank quarreled. I’ll make her see that with Frank gone, to tell her mother of the quarrel would only be an additional grief. Besides, I have a feeling Meggie doesn’t tell her mother much to begin with.” He got up. “Go to bed, Paddy. You’ve got to seem normal and dance attendance on Mary tomorrow, remember?”

Meggie was not asleep; she was lying with eyes wide in the dim light of the little lamp beside her bed. The priest sat down beside her and noticed her hair still in its braids. Carefully he untied the navy ribbons and pulled gently until the hair lay in a rippling, molten sheet across the pillow.

“Frank has gone away, Meggie,” he said.

“I know, Father.”

“Do you know why, darling?”

“He had a fight with Daddy.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to go with Frank. He needs me.”

“You can’t, my Meggie.”

“Yes, I can. I was going to find him tonight, but my legs wouldn’t hold me up, and I don’t like the dark. But in the morning I’ll look for him.”

“No, Meggie, you mustn’t. You see, Frank’s got his own life to lead, and it’s time he went away. I know you don’t want him to go away, but he’s been wanting to go for a long time. You mustn’t be selfish; you’ve got to let him live his own life.” The monotony of repetition, he thought, keep on drumming it in. “When we grow up it’s natural and right for us to want a life away from the home we grew up in, and Frank is a grown man. He ought to have his own home now, his own wife and family. Do you see that, Meggie? The fight between your daddy and Frank was only a sign of Frank’s wanting to go. It didn’t happen because they don’t like each other. It happened because that’s the way a lot of young men leave home, it’s a sort of excuse. The fight was just an excuse for Frank to do what he’s been wanting to do for a long time, an excuse for Frank to leave. Do you understand that, my Meggie?”

Her eyes shifted to his face and rested there. They were so exhausted, so full of pain, so
old
. “I know,” she said. “I know. Frank wanted to go away when I was a little girl, and he didn’t go. Daddy brought him back and made him stay with us.”

“But this time Daddy isn’t going to bring him back, because Daddy can’t make him stay now. Frank has gone for good, Meggie. He isn’t coming back.”

“Won’t I ever see him again?”

“I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “I’d like to say of course you will, but no one can predict the future, Meggie, even priests.” He drew a breath. “You mustn’t tell Mum there was a fight, Meggie, do you hear me? It would upset her very much, and she isn’t well.”

“Because there’s going to be another baby?”

“What do you know about that?”

“Mum likes growing babies; she’s done it a lot. And she grows such nice babies, Father, even when she isn’t well. I’m going to grow one like Hal myself, then I won’t miss Frank so much, will I?”

“Parthenogenesis,” he said. “Good luck, Meggie. Only what if you don’t manage to grow one?”

“I’ve still got Hal,” she said sleepily, nestling down. Then she said, “Father, will you go away, too? Will you?”

“One day, Meggie. But not soon, I think, so don’t worry. I have a feeling I’m going to be stuck in Gilly for a long, long time,” answered the priest, his eyes bitter.

There was no help for it, Meggie had to come home. Fee could not manage without her, and the moment he was left alone at the convent in Gilly, Stuart went on a hunger strike, so he too came back to Drogheda.

It was August, and bitterly cold. Just a year since they had arrived in Australia; but this was a colder winter than last. The rain was absent and the air was so crisp it hurt the lungs. Up on the tops of the Great Divide three hundred miles to the east, snow lay thicker than in many years, but no rain had fallen west of Burren Junction since the monsoonal drenching of the previous summer. People in Gilly were speaking of another drought: it was overdue, it must come, perhaps this would be it.

When Meggie saw her mother, she felt as if an awful weight settled upon her being; maybe a leaving-behind of childhood, a presentiment of what it was to be a woman. Outwardly there was no change, aside from the big belly; but inwardly Fee had slowed down like a tired old clock, running time down and down until it was forever stilled. The briskness Meggie had never known absent from her mother had gone. She picked her feet up and put them down again as if she was no longer sure of the right way to do it, a sort of spiritual fumbling got into her gait; and there was no joy in her for the coming baby, not even the rigidly controlled content she had shown over Hal.

That little red-haired fellow was toddling all over the house, constantly into everything, but Fee made no attempt to discipline him, or even supervise his activities. She plodded in her self-perpetuating circle of stove, worktable and sink as if nothing else existed. So Meggie had no choice; she simply filled the vacuum in the child’s life and became his mother. It wasn’t any sacrifice, for she loved him dearly and found him a helpless, willing target for all the love she was beginning to want to lavish on some human creature. He cried for her, he spoke her name before all others, he lifted his arms to her to be picked up; it was so satisfying it filled her with joy. In spite of the drudgery, the knitting and mending and sewing, the washing, the ironing, the hens, all the other jobs she had to do, Meggie found her life very pleasant.

No one ever mentioned Frank, but every six weeks Fee would lift her head when she heard the mail call, and for a while be animated. Then Mrs. Smith would bring in their share of whatever had come, and when it contained no letter from Frank the small burst of painful interest would die.

There were two new lives in the house. Fee was delivered of twins, two more tiny red-haired Cleary boys, christened James and Patrick. The dearest little fellows, with their father’s sunny disposition and his sweetness of nature, they became common property immediately they were born, for beyond giving them milk Fee took no interest in them. Soon their names were shortened to Jims and Patsy; they were prime favorites with the women up at the big house, the two spinster maids and the widowed childless housekeeper, who were starved for the deliciousness of babies. It was made magically easy for Fee to forget them—they had three very eager mothers—and as time went on it became the accepted thing that they should spend most of their waking hours up at the big house. Meggie just didn’t have time to take them under her wing as well as managing Hal, who was extremely possessive. Not for him the awkward, unpracticed blandishments of Mrs. Smith, Minnie and Cat. Meggie was the loving nucleus of Hal’s world; he wanted no one but Meggie, he would have no one but Meggie.

Bluey Williams traded in his lovely draft horses and his massive dray for a truck and the mail came every four weeks instead of every six, but there was never a word from Frank. And gradually his memory slipped a little, as memories do, even those with so much love attached to them; as if there is an unconscious healing process within the mind which mends up in spite of our desperate determination never to forget. To Meggie, an aching fading of the way Frank had looked, a blurring of the beloved lineaments to some fuzzy, saintlike image no more related to the real Frank than a holy-picture Christ to what must have been the Man. And to Fee, from out of those silent depths in which she had stilled the evolution of her soul, a substitution.

It came about so unobtrusively that no one noticed. For Fee kept herself folded up with quietness, and a total undemonstrativeness; the substitution was an inner thing no one had time to see, except the new object of her love, who made no outward sign. It was a hidden, unspoken thing between them, something to buffer their loneliness.

Perhaps it was inevitable, for of all her children Stuart was the only one like her. At fourteen he was as big a mystery to his father and brothers as Frank had been, but unlike Frank he engendered no hostility, no irritation. He did as he was told without complaint, worked as hard as anyone and created absolutely no ripples in the pool of Cleary life. Though his hair was red he was the darkest of all the boys, more mahogany and his eyes were as clear as pale water in the shade, as if they reached all the way back in time to the very beginning, and saw everything as it really was. He was also the only one of Paddy’s sons who promised adult handsomeness, though privately Meggie thought her Hal would outshine him when it came his turn to grow up. No one ever knew what Stuart was thinking; like Fee, he spoke little and never aired an opinion. And he had a curious knack of being utterly still, as still within himself as he was in body, and to Meggie, closest to him in age, it seemed he could go somewhere no one else could ever follow. Father Ralph expressed it another way.

“That lad isn’t human!” he had exclaimed the day he dumped a hunger-striking Stuart back at Drogheda after he was left at the convent minus Meggie. “Did he say he wanted to go home? Did he say he missed Meggie? No! He just stopped eating and patiently waited for the reason why to sink into our thick skulls. Not once did he open his mouth to complain, and when I marched up to him and yelled did he want to go home, he simply smiled at me and nodded!”

But as time went on it was tacitly assumed that Stuart would not go out into the paddocks to work with Paddy and the other boys, even though in age he might have. Stu would remain on guard at the house, chop the wood, take care of the vegetable garden, do the milking—the huge number of duties the women had no time for with three babies in the house. It was prudent to have a man about the place, albeit a half-grown one; it gave proof of other men close by. For there were visitors—the clump of strange boots up the plank steps to the back veranda, a strange voice saying:

“Hullo, Missus, got a bit of tucker for a man?”

The Outback had swarms of them, swagmen humping their blueys from station to station, down from Queensland and up from Victoria, men who had lost their luck or were chary of holding a regular job, preferring to tramp on foot thousands of miles in search of only they knew what. Mostly they were decent fellows, who appeared, ate a huge meal, packed a bit of donated tea and sugar and flour in the folds of their blueys, then disappeared down the track headed for Barcoola or Narrengang, battered old billycans bouncing, skinny dogs belly down behind them. Australian itinerants rarely rode; they walked.