The Thorn Birds (60 page)

“It doesn’t much matter,” said Patsy from the stretcher on which he was to be flown to Sydney. “I was never too keen on marrying, anyway. Now, you look after yourself, Jims, do you hear? I hate leaving you.”

“I’ll look after myself, Patsy. Christ!” Jims grinned, holding hard onto his brother’s hand. “Fancy having to spend the rest of the war without my best mate. I’ll write and tell you what it’s like. Say hello to Mrs. Smith and Meggie and Mum and the brothers for me, eh? Half your luck, going home to Drogheda.”

Fee and Mrs. Smith flew down to Sydney to meet the American plane which brought Patsy from Townsville; Fee remained only a few days, but Mrs. Smith stayed on in a Randwick hotel close to the Prince of Wales military hospital. Patsy remained there for three months. His part in the war was over. Many tears had Mrs. Smith shed; but there was much to be thankful for, too. In one way he would never be able to lead a full life, but he could do everything else: ride, walk, run. Mating didn’t seem to be in the Cleary line, anyway. When he was discharged from hospital Meggie drove down from Gilly in the Rolls, and the two women tucked him up on the back seat amid blankets and magazines, praying for one more boon: that Jims would come home, too.

Not until the Emperor Hirohito’s delegate signed Japan’s official surrender did Gillanbone believe the war was finally over. The news came on Sunday, September 2, 1945, which was exactly six years after the start. Six agonizing years. So many places empty, never to be filled again: Dominic O’Rourke’s son Rory, Horry Hopeton’s son John, Eden Carmichael’s son Cormac. Ross MacQueen’s youngest son, Angus, would never walk again, Anthony King’s son David would walk but never see where he was going, Paddy Cleary’s son Patsy would never have children. And there were those whose wounds weren’t visible, but whose scars went just as deep; who had gone off gaily, eager and laughing, but came home quietly, said little, and laughed only rarely. Who could have dreamed when it began that it would go on so long, or take such a toll?

Gillanbone was not a particularly superstitious community, but even the most cynical resident shivered that Sunday, September 2nd. For on the same day that the war ended, so did the longest drought in the history of Australia. For nearly ten years no useful rain had fallen, but that day the clouds filled the sky thousands of feet deep, blackly, cracked themselves open and poured twelve inches of rain on the thirsty earth. An inch of rain may not mean the breaking of a drought, it might not be followed by anything more, but twelve inches of rain means
grass
.

Meggie, Fee, Bob, Jack, Hughie and Patsy stood on the veranda watching it through the darkness, sniffing the unbearably sweet perfume of rain on parched and crumbling soil. Horses, sheep, cattle and pigs spraddled their legs against the shifting of the melting ground and let the water pour over their twitching bodies; most of them had been born since rain like this had last passed across their world. In the cemetery the rain washed the dust away, whitened everything, washed the dust off the outstretched wings of the bland Botticelli angel. The creek produced a tidal wave, its roaring flood mingling with the drumming of the soaking rain. Rain, rain! Rain. Like a benediction from some vast inscrutable hand, long withheld, finally given. The blessed, wonderful rain. For rain meant grass, and grass was life.

A pale-green fuzz appeared, poked its little blades skyward, ramified, burgeoned, grew a darker green as it lengthened, then faded and waxed fat, became the silver-beige, knee-high grass of Drogheda. The Home Paddock looked like a field of wheat, rippling with every mischievous puff of wind, and the homestead gardens exploded into color, great buds unfurling, the ghost gums suddenly white and lime-green again after nine years of griming dust. For though Michael Carson’s insane proliferation of water tanks still held enough to keep the homestead gardens alive, dust had long settled on every leaf and petal, dimmed and drabbed. And an old legend had been proven fact: Drogheda did indeed have sufficient water to survive ten years of drought, but only for the homestead.

Bob, Jack, Hughie and Patsy went back to the paddocks, began seeing how best to restock; Fee opened a brand-new bottle of black ink and savagely screwed the lid down on her bottle of red ink; Meggie saw an end coming to her life in the saddle, for it would not be long before Jims was home and men turned up looking for jobs.

After nine years there were very few sheep or cattle left, only the prize breeders which were always penned and hand-fed in any time, the nucleus of champion stock, rams and bulls. Bob went east to the top of the Western slopes to buy ewes of good blood line from properties not so hard hit by the drought. Jims came home. Eight stockmen were added to the Drogheda payroll. Meggie hung up her saddle.

It was not long after this that Meggie got a letter from Luke, the second since she had left him.

“Not long now, I reckon,” he said. “A few more years in the sugar should see me through. The old back’s a bit sore these days, but I can still cut with the best of them, eight or nine tons a day. Arne and I have twelve other gangs cutting for us, all good blokes. Money’s getting very loose, Europe wants sugar as fast as we can produce it. I’m making over five thousand quid a year, saving almost all of it. Won’t be long now, Meg, before I’m out around Kynuna. Maybe when I get things together you might want to come back to me. Did I give you the kid you wanted? Funny, how women get their hearts set on kids. I reckon that’s what really broke us up, eh? Let me know how you’re getting on, and how Drogheda weathered the drought. Yours, Luke.”

Fee came out onto the veranda, where Meggie sat with the letter in her hand, staring absently out across the brilliant green of the homestead lawns.

“How’s Luke?”

“The same as ever, Mum. Not a bit changed. Still on about a little while longer in the damned sugar, the place he’s going to have one day out around Kynuna.”

“Do you think he’ll ever actually do it?”

“I suppose so, one day.”

“Would you go to join him, Meggie?”

“Not in a million years.”

Fee sat down in a cane chair beside her daughter, pulling it round so she could see Meggie properly. In the distance men were shouting, hammers pounded; at long last the verandas and the upper-story windows of the homestead were being enclosed by fine wire mesh to screen out the flies. For years Fee had held out, obdurate. No matter how many flies there were, the lines of the house would never be spoiled by ugly netting. But the longer the drought dragged on the worse the flies became, until two weeks before it ended Fee had given in and hired a contractor to enclose every building on the station, not only the homestead itself but all the staff houses and barracks as well.

But electrify she would not, though since 1915 there had been a “donk,” as the shearers called it, to supply power to the shearing shed. Drogheda without the gentle diffusion of lamps? It wasn’t to be thought of. However, there was one of the new gas stoves which burned off cylindered gas on order, and a dozen of the new kerosene refrigerators; Australian industry wasn’t yet on a peacetime footing, but eventually the new appliances would come.

“Meggie, why don’t you divorce Luke, marry again?” Fee asked suddenly. “Enoch Davies would have you in a second; he’s never looked at anyone else.”

Meggie’s lovely eyes surveyed her mother in wonder. “Good Lord, Mum, I do believe you’re actually talking to me as one woman to another!”

Fee didn’t smile; Fee still rarely smiled. “Well, if you aren’t a woman by now, you’ll never be one. I’d say you qualified. I must be getting old; I feel garrulous.”

Meggie laughed, delighted at her mother’s overture, and anxious not to destroy this new mood. “It’s the rain, Mum. It must be. Oh, isn’t it wonderful to see grass on Drogheda again, and green lawns around the homestead?”

“Yes, it is. But you’re side-stepping my question. Why not divorce Luke, marry again?”

“It’s against the laws of the Church.”

“Piffle!” exclaimed Fee, but gently. “Half of you is me, and I’m not a Catholic. Don’t give me that, Meggie. If you really wanted to marry, you’d divorce Luke.”

“Yes, I suppose I would. But I don’t want to marry again. I’m quite happy with my children and Drogheda.”

A chuckle very like her own echoed from the interior of the bottle-brush shrubbery nearby, its drooping scarlet cylinders hiding the author of the chuckle.

“Listen! There he is, that’s Dane! Do you know at his age he can sit a horse as well as I can?” She leaned forward. “Dane! What are you up to? Come out of there this instant!”

He crawled out from under the closest bottle brush, his hands full of black earth, suspicious black smears all around his mouth.

“Mum! Did you know soil tastes good? It really does, Mum, honestly!”

He came to stand in front of her; at seven he was tall, slender, gracefully strong, and had a face of delicate porcelain beauty.

Justine appeared, came to stand beside him. She too was tall, but skinny rather than slender, and atrociously freckled. It was hard to see what her features were like beneath the brown spots, but those unnerving eyes were as pale as they had been in infancy, and the sandy brows and lashes were too fair to emerge from the freckles. Paddy’s fiercely red tresses rioted in a mass of curls around her rather pixyish face. No one could have called her a pretty child, but no one ever forgot her, not merely on account of the eyes but also because she had remarkable strength of character. Astringent, forth-right and uncompromisingly intelligent, Justine at eight cared as little what anyone thought of her as she had when a baby. Only one person was very close to her: Dane. She still adored him, and still regarded him as her own property.

Which had led to many a tussle of wills between her and her mother. It had been a rude shock to Justine when Meggie hung up her saddle and got back to being a mother. For one thing, Justine didn’t seem to need a mother, since she was convinced she was right about everything. Nor was she the sort of little girl who required a confidante, or warm approval. As far as she was concerned, Meggie was mostly someone who interfered with her pleasure in Dane. She got on a lot better with her grandmother, who was just the sort of person Justine heartily approved of; she kept her distance and assumed one had a little sense.

“I
told
him not to eat dirt,” Justine said.

“Well, it won’t kill him, Justine, but it isn’t good for him, either.” Meggie turned to her son. “Dane, why?”

He considered the question gravely. “It was there, so I ate it. If it was bad for me, wouldn’t it taste bad, too? It tastes good.”

“Not necessarily,” Justine interrupted loftily. “I give up on you, Dane, I really do. Some of the best-tasting things are the most poisonous.”

“Name one!” he challenged.

“Treacle!” she said triumphantly.

Dane had been very ill after finding a tin of treacle in Mrs. Smith’s pantry and eating the lot. He admitted the thrust, but countered. “I’m still here, so it can’t be all that poisonous.”

“That’s only because you vomited. If you hadn’t vomited, you’d be dead.”

This was inarguable. He and his sister were much of a height, so he tucked his arm companionably through hers and they sauntered away across the lawn toward their cubbyhouse, which their uncles had erected as instructed amid the down-drooping branches of a pepper tree. Danger from bees had led to much adult opposition to this site, but the children were proven right. The bees dwelled with them amicably. For, said the children, pepper trees were the nicest of all trees, very private. They had such a dry, fragrant smell, and the grapelike clusters of tiny pink globules they bore crumbled into crisp, pungent pink flakes when crushed in the hand.

“They’re so different from each other, Dane and Justine, yet they get along so well together,” said Meggie. “It never ceases to amaze me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them quarrel, though how Dane avoids quarreling with some one as determined and stubborn as Justine, I don’t understand.”

But Fee had something else on her mind. “Lord, he’s the living image of his father,” she said, watching Dane duck under the lowest fronds of the pepper tree and disappear from sight.

Meggie felt herself go cold, a reflex response which years of hearing people say this had not scotched. It was just her own guilt, of course. People always meant Luke. Why not? There were basic similarities between Luke O’Neill and Ralph de Bricassart. But try as she would, she could never be quite natural when Dane’s likeness to his father was commented upon.

She drew a carefully casual breath. “Do you think so, Mum?” she asked, nonchalantly swinging her foot. “I can never see it myself. Dane is nothing like Luke in nature or attitude to life.”

Fee laughed. It came out as a snort, but it was a genuine laugh. Grown pallid with age and encroaching cataracts, her eyes rested on Meggie’s startled face, grim and ironic. “Do you take me for a fool, Meggie? I don’t mean Luke O’Neill. I mean Dane is the living image of Ralph de Bricassart.”

Lead. Her foot was made of lead. It dropped to the Spanish tiles, her leaden body sagged, the lead heart within her breast struggled against its vast weight to beat. Beat, damn you, beat! You’ve got to go on beating for my son!

“Why, Mum!” Her voice was leaden, too. “Why, Mum, what an extraordinary thing to say!
Father Ralph de Bricassart
?”

“How many people of that name do you know? Luke O’Neil never bred that boy; he’s Ralph de Bricassart’s son. I knew it the minute I took him out of you at his birth.”

“Then—why haven’t you said something? Why wait until he’s seven years old to make such an insane and unfounded accusation?”

Fee stretched her legs out, crossed them daintily at the ankles. “I’m getting old at last, Meggie. And things don’t hurt as much anymore. What a blessing old age can be! It’s so good to see Drogheda coming back, I feel better within myself because of it. For the first time in years I feel like talking.”

“Well, I must say when you decide to talk you really know how to pick your subject! Mum, you have absolutely no right to say such a thing. It isn’t true!” said Meggie desperately, not sure if her mother was bent on torture or commiseration.