Swords and Crowns and Rings, page 32
At first light, people awakened, dirty-eyed and stiff, yawning, grinning—a kind of simple comradeship amongst them. There was small talk about the slump, unemployment, how many miles to the next halt for refreshments.
When he left the train to wait for the passenger train which would take him to Kingsland, he saw three hoboes being dragged from under a tarpaulin. One looked drunk or unconscious.
‘Bloody cockroaches!’ said the porter, secure in his uniform.
The passenger train was crowded. Jackie rode on the platform, leaning against the washroom door, watching half-dazed the trees whipping away beside the line, and in the distance other trees changed by mirage into fuming islands, trunkless, afloat in heat.
Shortly after seven the next morning the seamed green hills of his native town rose before him. Stiff as an old man, he left the train, washed his face in the familiar waiting-room, shaved in cold water.
He thought he would have a drink at the early-opener before going home.
He walked into the Princess May, and in the time it took him to move from the door to the bar the talk stopped and the silence gathered about him. He knew the two kinds of silence, the silence that is, and the silence that’s made; one is dumb and the other has meaning.
He knew which one this was.
‘Well,’ he thought, ‘the story’s been here before me.’
He lowered a shoulder and let the swag drop, slapped the dust out of his trousers, meantime glancing casually around the saloon. Strangers mostly, some looking familiar as though they were older copies of boys he had gone to school with. But all silent. A museum of dummies.
‘Middy,’ he said.
The barman didn’t move. Jackie looked at him coolly.
A year ago he might have felt outraged, bewildered. But that was a year ago. He stared at the barman.
‘Did you hear me, mate?’
The barman swivelled an eye at his boss in the little office off the lounge. The publican came behind the bar, stood in front of Jackie, his hands flattened on the counter, his smooth woman’s arms showing to the folds of the rolled-up silk sleeves. His name was James Tidey.
Someone yelled from behind Jackie, ‘You ain’t wanted here, Hanna.’
‘Get your swag,’ said James Tidey, ‘and get going.’
Jackie glanced around at the men. Some looked away, some grinned, others stared him out with a virtuous challenge.
‘That’s how it is?’ said Jackie.
‘That’s how it is,’ said the publican.
Jackie picked up his swag. ‘Shove it then,’ he said, and turned for the door.
As he went he heard a voice say self-righteously: ‘Good on yer, Tidey. A man has to draw the line somewhere. I mean, his own wife and kid...’
He walked down the main street. Kingsland didn’t look different, except for the garage where the Chinese General Store used to be on the corner. But the town had a scaly, run-down look, not paintless, but with everything years overdue for repainting. Jackie halted here and there, looking for familiar names on signboards, trying not to look at the people who peered out of windows, drew each other’s attention, hurried past. His heart pained him. He was no longer a boy but a man; yet he was wounded that this, his own town, should believe such evil of him.
His step quickened as he saw the Nun come out of Hanna’s and sprinkle the sunny pavement with a bottle of water, preparatory to sweeping it. Jackie withdrew a little to one side to watch him. The Nun’s face had changed; temples and jaws were prominent; the skin of his throat was loose.
‘How are things, Dad?’ he asked softly.
The Nun jumped. Joy lit him.
‘Ghost!’ he said. ‘You little son of a gun!’
They embraced each other out in the street, punched each other wordlessly, then drew apart with foolish smiles. The Nun blew his nose, wiped his eyes.
‘Better cut this out. People’ll think we’re a couple of poons.’
He walked Jackie through the shop, which seemed dusty, desolate in some way. It was only when Jackie was in the familiar kitchen behind that he realised the shelves had been half empty, tinned food arranged in a single line to cover the hollowness, apples and potatoes laid out on paper instead of being heaped in baskets and sacks.
‘And you been travelling all that time! Days! Bet you’re empty as a boot. I’ll have a feed ready for you in two shakes.’
‘But the shop?’
The Nun shrugged wryly. ‘Ain’t going to be a rush. Never mind that. Sit down, me old Jack. How’s things been for you?’
‘About as bad as they’ve been for you, I guess.’
‘Yeah. Musta been a knock, coming on your other trouble, I mean.’
Jackie nodded. He suddenly felt depleted, exhausted. He sat down in his mother’s chair.
‘Couldn’t believe it when I got your letter. I thought she was built to go for ever. I wish I could have been here when it happened, to help out.’
‘That’s all right.’
The Nun slapped fried eggs and bacon on a hot plate, began to make toast on a long fork thrust up against the fire bars. He laughed. ‘Remember how your mum always burned the toast, every bloody time? I bought her one of them electric toasters before she really got crook, but she was scared to use it, thought it might blow up. She went on charring the toast and swearing about it. Gawd, Jack, she was a woman in a million, she was.’
His voice shook. With dread Jackie averted his eyes from the Nun’s crumpling face. He knew that if his stepfather broke down he himself would be good for nothing. Fortunately at that moment heavy boots sounded in the shop, and a voice shouted:
‘Hey, Nun, where you keeping yourself? Got that chook food bagged for me?’
The Nun blew his nose shamefacedly, wiped his eyes. ‘It gets me now and then. Sorry, Jack. You bog in now.’
He limped into the shop, and gratefully Jack began to eat.
That night he climbed along the bough and into the treehouse. The door had swollen with rain; he had to shove it to get in, and it squalled off its hinges. The treehouse itself had become very small. The floor was a foot deep in leaves, there were damp patches on the ceiling and the walls, and birds had nested in the roof, leaving behind them on the rafters archipelagoes of white dung.
He stood there as though in a dream, feeling unreal, seeing Cushie and himself lying there on a blanket, Cushie giving a cry of pain and saying, ‘Don’t mind. It doesn’t matter if you love me, Jackie.’
But he had never had Cushie in the treehouse. It was just that as a boy he had so many times dreamed of having her there. What she had said had been said in her own bed, in Moys’ house, that long-ago late spring.
Sharp as a knife were memories of other times with Cushie, the sweetness and the confidence of them, no thought of pain and bereavement. Ah, more than that, no knowledge of them!
What had happened to Cushie in the years between? He had gone so long without thinking of her, so that his love for Maida should grow unimpeded. Did she ever think of him, his golden-haired princess? The games they had played: silly as owls they’d been, as though life were a fairytale and everything came out all right in the end by Divine Law. He tried to imagine Cushie there, in the treehouse, grown-up. She’d be tall, like her mother probably. But he was still the same size. Perhaps she’d despise him, be horrified at what they’d been to each other for all those years.
He climbed back through his window, began to take off his clothes. The grief for Maida and Carlie, as it often did, took him by surprise, freezing up his throat, darkening his eyes with its sheer physical onslaught. He knew it was all mixed up with the death of his mother.
He heard the Nun moving up the stairs, dragging his leg a little. The older man looked in the open door to say good night.
‘How long you going to stay, do you think, Jack?’ he asked, before he saw the young man’s face.
‘For good, if that’s all right,’ said Jackie.
The Nun sighed. ‘It’s all right, boy. It’s grand.’
He shook his head. ‘You don’t really know, do you,’ he said, ‘until it happens? You can’t really guess how awful it is.’
Jackie nodded.
‘Christ, we’re a pair of poor broken-up bastards, aren’t we?’ said the Nun, and he turned away to his own room.
Jerry was more cheerful the next day.
‘With you here it’ll make all the difference. I guess I was getting to be one of them lonely old roosters, losing interest in everything. We’ll go to the football, sink one or two at the old Princess now and then, eh?’
He saw the expression on Jackie’s face and added hastily, ‘Oh, you needn’t think I’ll lean on you like. I’ve got a bit put away, and your mother’s insurance, though the doctor got most of it, which was to be expected, and there’s the shop.’
Jackie told him baldly of the occurrence at the pub the day before. The Nun flushed.
‘Them beer-sodden hooers! And Tidey, always on the side of the cash register, that one! Scared to serve you in case they took their boozing elsewhere.’
He fumed on. Jackie said, ‘I suppose the rumours were bad here in Kingsland? I mean, just after it happened.’
The Nun nodded uncomfortably. ‘Flying around, they were, after the inquest. That bloody little nancy of a boy of my poor sister Eva is still going around Ghinni Junction talking about it, so I’ve heard. Him and one of the brothers is working down there now. Country people—you know how they like a commotion to yarn about.’
‘Mum never felt there was anything in. it?’
‘Never entered her head. I put a flea in a few ear-holes, I can tell you. Thought it was all dead and forgotten. But just fancy them mugs at the pub still at it after more than a year! A man can’t win.’
Jackie smiled. ‘Well, my shoulders are broad. They’ll soon get used to the sight of me round the place again.’ He walked over to the window.
‘Moys’ still a boarding-house? No mistake, it looks a wreck.’
Jerry surveyed it. ‘Not a lick of paint since the Moys left it. Ah, poor old Mrs Driscoll can’t make a go of it. Who can afford to live in a boarding-house these days? She had five single men only eighteen months ago, good wages coming in, glad to pay for their laundry done and a nice hot supper of an evening. And what happens? All five put off within six weeks. God knows where they are now?’
‘On the roads,’ said Jackie.
Jerry looked at him anxiously, ‘Can you fathom it, Jack, why we got this slump?’
Jackie tried to explain, but Jerry wasn’t listening. He was just talking, asking questions, to keep his mind off loneliness and sorrow. So Jackie stopped explaining economic theory, and said gently, ‘I’ve got a snapshot of Carlie, my little boy. Would you like to see it, Dad?’
Jerry took the snapshot, already browning a little, and looked for a long time at the baby, sitting up laughing in his cot on the veranda.
‘What colour eyes, Jack?’
‘Blue, but they might have gone brown like Mum’s. Maida always thought they might.’
Jerry handed back the picture. ‘Funny, ain’t it? The world full of rotten parasites living on their neighbours’ blood, politicians sitting pretty while a thousand men fight like devils for one job, murderers, wife-beaters, and yet they live on and on while a beaut little bloke like that has to go. Bloody unfair, that’s what it is.’
The two of them stood there, not knowing what to say to each other. Then the Nun limped into the shop and rattled tins around. Jackie washed the dishes, standing on the three-legged stool his mother had bought him many years before. He tidied up, shaved, tried to pull himself together.
Later on he said, ‘I thought I might go up to the cemetery to see the grave.’
The Nun confessed he had not gone for several weeks.
‘It’s a bloody woeful place,’ he said. ‘Gives me the willies. And your mum’s no more there than you are.’ He drew on his cigarette. ‘Ah, what’s the use of codding meself? A man’s a cur. I can’t bring meself to go there; that’s the strength of it.’
‘I’ll just take the weeding fork and the clippers,’ said Jackie with pity, ‘and see that all’s right.’
The Nun nodded. He trailed into the shop, opened the door wider, let the damp wind blow into the mouldy staleness. The shelves were half bare, but what did it matter? No one had money to buy food any more, let alone grass seeds and hardware.
‘It’s worse than it was after the Boer War,’ he thought, taking the broom and beginning to sweep. But it was worn down to a stub, with a long silly tuft of whiskers on one side. The broom was banjaxed like everything else.
‘I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, and that’s a fact,’ he thought.
The graveyard was on a hillside, all the graves looking uphill, as though the departed had turned their backs on Kingsland. Perhaps there’d once been the idea of building a church on the crest, but there’d been no money.
The place communicated its silence, as a desert does, or endless grasslands. Jackie found himself listening for the swish of his feet in the untended grass, the roll of a pebble. Where were the birds, the insects? Only the melancholy drip of water from the sodden trees disturbed the air.
Here and there the worn and dimpled grave-stones had fallen into the grass. Some had sunk up to their shoulders in bowers of briar, or leant forward as though in a reverie, the tail fennel and Queen Anne’s Lace reaching up to meet them. On the cracked and tilted slab before a tall cross a pool of rainwater had formed, and two little birds, sky-coloured, were bathing there. This pleased Jackie, and after the two little creatures had flown straight up and away he was further pleased to see that the grave was that of his grandmother, the old woman Hough, who had died before his birth, and whom his mother had nursed for years. Her husband was there too, Native of King’s County, Ireland, Plumber of this town, Much respected, Deeply regretted, Died of sunstroke, 4 January 1881.
He knew his mother would be near by, and at last he found the grave, still new-looking after three months, with a counterpane of gravel and a glass bowler hat covering artificial flowers. Jackie crouched beside it, began to clip the matted grass, trying not to look at the inscription. He felt destitute of either grief or comprehension. It was as useless trying to think of his mother, quenched, changed, under that stone as it had been to realise that the body of Maida had turned into a charred log. But he looked at last, and read: ‘Margaret Euphemia MacNunn, beloved wife of Gerard MacNunn and loved mother of John Luke Hanna. 1875–1930. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. R.I.P.’
Where had she gone, with her hearty laughter, her indestructible courage, her gusto for ordinariness which had turned life into richness? It was not like her to leave those she loved bereft. Dying was out of character for Peggy MacNunn.
And yet Jerry had said, ‘Don’t be sorry, me old Jack. You didn’t see her at her worst. She hated being not able to breathe properly. Everything. Don’t be sorry.’
If she were able to speak to him she would. If he could be quiet enough he would hear. And kneeling there he tried to quieten his whole being and listen.
‘Oh, my dear boy, don’t grieve. There’ll be others to love you,’ said a voice. Jackie, with flopping heart, leapt to his feet, to see a young woman in a black hat and carrying a bunch of flowers, staring at him aghast. She stammered, ‘Forgive me, I thought you were a child, kneeling there. I didn’t mean to startle you.’
Jackie made a gesture towards the tombstone. ‘In a way, you were right. I’m her son.’
He wished she would stay, speak to him. But he had frightened her with his oddity, his lack of stature, She disappeared amongst the dripping trees, half running. Jackie turned towards the gate, and once, when he saw her at the end of a long aisle of tombstones, he waited until she had passed, so that she would not be further disturbed.
On the way home, passing the rows of cottages that stood where there had been paddocks, a market garden where once Sallycamp Creek had spread out to form a bog where the children of Kingsland speared mud eels with bits of fence-wire, he saw the same old willows growing along the big creek. And he remembered that he and Cushie Moy had, as one of their secrets, often buried bottles containing newspaper headlines, marbles, treasured fragments of this and that. In some magical way they had become hostages to the future, bribes to time. They had stopped burying bottles when they were eight or nine, but Jackie could remember where most of them were—under the shop in the dry cementy earth, beside the back fence-post, and here, near the highest willow.
Now that he had the weeding fork, he thought he would dig it up, if it was still there.
The soft-drink factory that had opened after he left Kingsland had closed last month, hit by the Depression. The company was going into liquidation, the Nun said, and a lot of people had lost what was left of their savings. But the creek was still polluted from the factory sludge. Near the willows sluggish bubbles came to the top of the water as though from half-flat ginger beer. There was a dirty smell.
He found the buried bottle without trouble, pulled out the rotting cork, and shook the contents onto the ground. A torn-off headline: ‘Terrible Losses at the Marne, Fought to Last Man, French Heroism.’ The hand that had fallen off Cushie’s doll. Some blue beads. His first communion medal. A blackened halfpenny.
He sat there looking at the hoard, wondering where the hopes had gone, all the frail faiths of childhood. He put all the things back into the bottle and threw it into the creek.
As he came down into the town he met a knot of schoolboys, kicking stones, yelling, pushing one another, on their way home for midday dinner. They stopped dead when they saw him, mouths fallen open in theatrical shock. Jackie had met this comedy routine before, and passed by without a look. But the tallest jumped in his way.
‘What is it?’ he shouted. ‘Who sawed him off?’
Jackie waited, looking up at the boy steadily.
‘He don’t as much come up to my belly-button,’ marvelled the boy.
‘Get out of my way,’ said Jackie. ‘Joke’s over, buster.’
For a moment Jackie thought that his sharp, schoolmasterly tone had carried the day, as it so often did, but the boy recovered from his momentary surprise and jeered, ‘Make me move, go on, you freak, make me.’
