The Thorn Birds (3 page)

Finally Fee beckoned Meggie to sit on a high stool, and did up her hair in its nightly rags before packing her off to bed with Stu and Hughie; Jack and Bob begged to be excused and went outside to feed the dogs; Frank took Meggie’s doll to the worktable and began to glue its hair on again. Stretching, Padraic closed his book and put his pipe into the huge iridescent paua shell which served him as an ashtray.

“Well, Mother, I’m off to bed.”

“Good night, Paddy.”

Fee cleared the dishes off the dining table and got a big galvanized iron tub down from its hook on the wall. She put it at the opposite end of the worktable from Frank, and lifting the massive cast-iron kettle off the stove, filled it with hot water. Cold water from an old kerosene tin served to cool the steaming bath; swishing soap confined in a wire basket through it, she began to wash and rinse the dishes, stacking them against a cup.

Frank worked on the doll without raising his head, but as the pile of plates grew he got up silently to fetch a towel and began to dry them. Moving between the worktable and the dresser, he worked with the ease of long familiarity. It was a furtive, fearful game he and his mother played, for the most stringent rule in Paddy’s domain concerned the proper delegation of duties. The house was woman’s work, and that was that. No male member of the family was to put his hand to a female task. But each night after Paddy went to bed Frank helped his mother, Fee aiding and abetting him by delaying her dishwashing until they heard the thump of Paddy’s slippers hitting the floor. Once Paddy’s slippers were off he never came back to the kitchen.

Fee looked at Frank gently. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Frank. But you shouldn’t. You’ll be so tired in the morning.”

“It’s all right, Mum. Drying a few dishes won’t kill me. Little enough to make life easier for you.”

“It’s my job, Frank. I don’t mind.”

“I just wish we’d get rich one of these days, so you could have a maid.”

“That is wishful thinking!” She wiped her soapy red hands on the dishcloth and then pressed them into her sides, sighing. Her eyes as they rested on her son were vaguely worried, sensing his bitter discontent, more than the normal railing of a workingman against his lot. “Frank, don’t get grand ideas. They only lead to trouble. We’re working-class people, which means we don’t get rich or have maids. Be content with what you are and what you have. When you say things like this you’re insulting Daddy, and he doesn’t deserve it. You know that. He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t gamble, and he works awfully hard for us. Not a penny he earns goes into his own pocket. It all comes to us.”

The muscular shoulders hunched impatiently, the dark face became harsh and grim. “But why should wanting more out of life than drudgery be so bad? I don’t see what’s wrong with wishing you had a maid.”

“It’s wrong because it can’t be! You know there’s no money to keep you at school, and if you can’t stay at school how are you ever going to be anything better than a manual worker? Your accent, your clothes and your hands show that you labor for a living. But it’s no disgrace to have calluses on your hands. As Daddy says, when a man’s hands are callused you know he’s honest.”

Frank shrugged and said no more. The dishes were all put away; Fee got out her sewing basket and sat down in Paddy’s chair by the fire, while Frank went back to the doll.

“Poor little Meggie!” he said suddenly.

“Why?”

“Today, when those wretched chaps were pulling her dolly about, she just stood there crying as if her whole world had fallen to bits.” He looked down at the doll, which was wearing its hair again. “Agnes! Where on earth did she get a name like that?”

“She must have heard me talking about Agnes Fortescue-Smythe, I suppose.”

“When I gave her the doll back she looked into its head and nearly died of fright. Something scared her about its eyes; I don’t know what.”

“Meggie’s always seeing things that aren’t there.”

“It’s a pity there isn’t enough money to keep the little children at school. They’re so clever.”

“Oh, Frank! If wishes were horses beggars might ride,” his mother said wearily. She passed her hand across her eyes, trembling a little, and stuck her darning needle deep into a ball of grey wool. “I can’t do any more. I’m too tried to see straight.”

“Go to bed, Mum. I’ll blow out the lamps.”

“As soon as I’ve stoked the fire.”

“I’ll do that.” He got up from the table and put the dainty china doll carefully down behind a cake tin on the dresser, where it would be out of harm’s way. He was not worried that the boys might attempt further rapine; they were more frightened of his vengeance than of their father’s, for Frank had a vicious streak. When he was with his mother or his sister it never appeared, but the boys had all suffered from it.

Fee watched him, her heart aching; there was something wild and desperate about Frank, an aura of trouble. If only he and Paddy got on better together! But they could never see eye to eye, and argued constantly. Maybe he was too concerned for her, maybe he was a bit of a mother’s boy. Her fault, if it was true. Yet it spoke of his loving heart, his goodness. He only wanted to make her life a little easier. And again she found herself yearning for the day when Meggie became old enough to take the burden of it from Frank’s shoulders.

She picked up a small lamp from the table, then put it down again and walked across to where Frank was squatted before the stove, packing wood into the big firebox and fiddling with the damper. His white arm was roped with prominent veins, his finely made hands too stained ever to come clean. Her own hand went out timidly, and very lightly smoothed the straight black hair out of his eyes; it was as close as she could bring herself to a caress.

“Good night, Frank, and thank you.”

The shadows wheeled and darted before the advancing light as Fee moved silently through the door leading into the front part of the house.

Frank and Bob shared the first bedroom; she pushed its door open noiselessly and held the lamp high, its light flooding the double bed in the corner. Bob was lying on his back with his mouth sagging open, quivering and twitching like a dog; she crossed to the bed and rolled him over onto his right side before he could pass into a full-fledged nightmare, then stayed looking down at him for a moment. How like Paddy he was!

Jack and Hughie were almost braided together in the next room. What dreadful scamps they were! Never out of mischief, but no malice in them. She tried vainly to separate them and restore some sort of order to their bedclothes, but the two curly red heads refused to be parted. Softly sighing, she gave up. How they managed to be refreshed after the kind of night they passed was beyond her, but they seemed to thrive on it.

The room where Meggie and Stuart slept was a dingy and cheerless place for two small children; painted a stuffy brown and floored in brown linoleum, no pictures on the walls. Just like the other bedrooms.

Stuart had turned himself upside down and was quite invisible except for his little nightshirted bottom sticking out of the covers where his head ought to have been; Fee found his head touching his knees, and as usual marveled that he had not suffocated. She slid her hand gingerly across the sheet and stiffened. Wet again! Well, it would have to wait until the morning, when no doubt the pillow would be wet, too. He always did that, reversed himself and then wet once more. Well, one bed-wetter among five boys wasn’t bad.

Meggie was curled into a little heap, with her thumb in her mouth and her rag-decorated hair all around her. The only girl. Fee cast her no more than a passing glance before leaving; there was no mystery to Meggie, she was female. Fee knew what her lot would be, and did not envy her or pity her. The boys were different; they were miracles, males alchemized out of her female body. It was hard not having help around the house, but it was worth it. Among his peers, Paddy’s sons were the greatest character reference he possessed. Let a man breed sons and he was a real man.

She closed the door to her own bedroom softly, and put the lamp down on a bureau. Her nimble fingers flew down the dozens of tiny buttons between the high collar and the hips of her dress, then peeled it away from her arms. She slipped the camisole off her arms also, and holding it very carefully against her chest, she wriggled into a long flannel nightgown. Only then, decently covered, did she divest herself of camisole, drawers and loosely laced stays. Down came the tightly knotted golden hair, all its pins put into a paua shell on the bureau. But even this, beautiful as it was, thick and shining and very straight, was not permitted freedom; Fee got her elbows up over her head and her hands behind her neck, and began to braid it swiftly. She turned then toward the bed, her breathing unconsciously suspended; but Paddy was asleep, so she heaved a gusty sigh of relief. Not that it wasn’t nice when Paddy was in the mood, for he was a shy, tender, considerate lover. But until Meggie was two or three years older it would be very hard to have more babies.

When the Clearys went to church on Sundays, Meggie had to stay home with one of the older boys, longing for the day when she, too, would be old enough to go. Padraic Cleary held that small children had no place in any house save their own, and his rule held even for a house of worship. When Meggie commenced school and could be trusted to sit still, she could come to church. Not before. So every Sunday morning she stood by the gorse bush at the front gate, desolate, while the family piled into the old shandrydan and the brother delegated to mind her tried to pretend it was a great treat escaping Mass. The only Cleary who relished separation from the rest was Frank.

Paddy’s religion was an intrinsic part of his life. When he had married Fee it had been with grudging Catholic approval, for Fee was a member of the Church of England; though she abandoned her faith for Paddy, she refused to adopt his in its stead. Difficult to say why, except that the Armstrongs were old pioneering stock of impeccable Church of England extraction, where Paddy was a penniless immigrant from the wrong side of the Pale. There had been Armstrongs in New Zealand long before the first “official” settlers arrived, and that was a passport to colonial aristocracy. From the Armstrong point of view, Fee could only be said to have contracted a shocking
mésalliance
.

Roderick Armstrong had founded the New Zealand clan, in a very curious way.

It had begun with an event which was to have many unforeseen repercussions on eighteenth-century England: the American War of Independence. Until 1776 over a thousand British petty felons were shipped each year to Virginia and the Carolinas, sold into an indentured servitude no better than slavery. British justice of the time was grim and unflinching; murder, arson, the mysterious crime of “impersonating Egyptians” and larceny to the tune of more than a shilling were punished on the gallows. Petty crime meant transportation to the Americas for the term of the felon’s natural life.

But when in 1776 the Americas were closed, England found herself with a rapidly increasing convict population and nowhere to put it. The prisons filled to over-flowing, and the surplus was jammed into rotting hulks moored in the river estuaries. Something had to be done, so something was. With a great deal of reluctance because it meant the expenditure of a few thousand pounds, Captain Arthur Phillip was ordered to set sail for the Great South Land. The year was 1787. His fleet of eleven ships held over one thousand convicts, plus sailors, naval officers and a contingent of marines. No glorious odyssey in search of freedom, this. At the end of January 1788, eight months after setting sail from England, the fleet arrived in Botany Bay. His Mad Majesty George the Third had found a new dumping ground for his convicts, the colony of New South Wales.

In 1801, when he was just twenty years of age, Roderick Armstrong was sentenced to transportation for the term of his natural life. Later generations of Armstrongs insisted he came of Somerset gentlefolk who had lost their fortune following the American Revolution, and that his crime was nonexistent, but none of them had ever tried very hard to trace their illustrious ancestor’s background. They just basked in his reflected glory and improvised somewhat.

Whatever his origins and status in English life, the young Roderick Armstrong was a tartar. All through the unspeakable eight months’ voyage to New South Wales he proved a stubborn, difficult prisoner, further endearing himself to his ship’s officers by refusing to die. When he arrived in Sydney in 1803 his behavior worsened, so he was shipped to Norfolk Island and the prison for intractables. Nothing improved his conduct. They starved him; they immured him in a cell so small he could neither sit, stand nor lie; they flogged him to jellied pulp; they chained him to a rock in the sea and let him half-drown. And he laughed at them, a skinny collection of bones in filthy canvas, not a tooth in his mouth or an inch of his skin unscarred, lit from within by a fire of bitterness and defiance nothing seemed to quench. At the beginning of each day he willed himself not to die, and at the end of each day he laughed in triumph to find himself still alive.

In 1810 he was sent to Van Diemen’s Land, put in a chain gang and set to hew a road through the iron-hard sandstone country behind Hobart. At first opportunity he had used his pick to hack a hole in the chest of the trooper commanding the expedition; he and ten other convicts massacred five more troopers by shaving the flesh from their bones an inch at a time until they died screaming in agony. For they and their guards were beasts, elemental creatures whose emotions had atrophied to the subhuman. Roderick Armstrong could no more have gone off into his escape leaving his tormentors intact or quickly dead than he could have reconciled himself to being a convict.

With the rum and bread and jerky they took from the troopers, the eleven men fought their way through miles of freezing rain forest and came out at the whaling station of Hobart, where they stole a longboat and set off across the Tasman Sea without food, water or sails. When the longboat washed ashore on the wild west coast of New Zealand’s South Island, Roderick Armstrong and two other men were still alive. He never spoke of that incredible journey, but it was whispered that the three had survived by killing and eating their weaker companions.