"You're very well liked in Gilly, Father."
"For which no doubt I may thank my face and my figure," said the priest bitterly, unable to make it sound as light as he had intended. "Is that what you think? I can't agree, Father. We like you because you're a good pastor."
"Well, I seem to be thoroughly embroiled in your troubles, at any rate," said Father Ralph uncomfortably. "You'd best get it off your chest, man." Paddy stared into the fire, which he had built up to the proportions of a furnace while the priest was putting Meggie to bed, in an excess of remorse and frantic
1921-1928 RALPH to be doing something. The empty glass in his hand shook in a series of rapid jerks; Father Ralph got up for the whiskey bottle and replenished it. After a long draft Paddy sighed, wiping the forgotten tears from his face. "I don't know who Frank's father is. It happened before I met Fee. Her people are practically New Zealand's first family socially, and her father had a big wheat-and-sheep property outside Ashburton in the South Island. Money was no object, and Fee was his only daughter. As I understand it, he'd planned her life for her-a trip to the old country, a debut at court, the right husband. She had never lifted a hand in the house, of course. They had maids and butlers and horses and big carriages; they lived like lords. "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 hale 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 his 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, darting?"
"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.
Occasionally a bad man would come, on the lookout for women whose men were away; with a view to robbery, not rape. Thus Fee kept a shotgun standing loaded in a corner of the kitchen where the babies couldn't get to it, and made sure she was closer to it than her visitor until her expert eye assessed his character. After Stuart was officially allotted the house as his domain, Fee passed the shotgun to him gladly.
Not all the visitors were swaggies, though they were in the majority; there was the Watkins man in his old model-T, for instance. He carried everything from horse liniment to fragrant soap unlike the rock-hard stuff Fee made in the laundry copper from fat and caustic; he had lavender water and eau de cologne, powders and creams for sun-dried faces. There were certain things one never dreamed of buying from anyone but the Watkins man; like his ointment, better by far than any drugstore or prescription salve, capable of healing anything from a rent in the side of a work dog to an ulcer on a human shin. The women would crowd around in every kitchen he visited, waiting eagerly for him to pop open his big suitcase of wares. And there were other salesmen, less regular patrollers of the back-blocks than the Watkins man but equally welcome, hawking everything from tailor-made cigarettes and fancy pipes to whole bolts of material, sometimes even luridly seductive underwear and lavishly beribboned stays. They were so starved, these women of the Outback, limited to maybe one or two trips a year into the nearest town, far from the brilliant shops of Sydney, far from fashions and feminine furbelows.
Life seemed mostly flies and dust. There had not been any rain in a long time, even a sprinkle to settle the dust and drown the flies; for the less rain, the more flies, the more dust.
Every ceiling was festooned with long, lazily spinning helixes of sticky flypaper, black with bodies within a day of being tacked up. Nothing could be left uncovered for a moment without becoming either an orgy or a graveyard for the flies, and tiny speckles of fly dirt dewed the furniture, the walls, the Gillanbone General Store calendar.
And oh, the dust! There was no getting away from it, that fine-grained brown powder which seeped into even tightly lidded containers, dulled freshly washed hair, made the skin gritty, lay in the folds of clothes and curtains, smeared a film across polished tables which resettled the moment it was whisked away. The floors were thick with it, from carelessly wiped boots and the hot dry wind drifting it through the open doors and windows; Fee was forced to roll up her Persian carpets in the parlor and have Stuart nail down linoleum she bought sight unseen from the store in Gilly. The kitchen, which took most of the traffic from outside, was floored in teak planks bleached to the color of old bones by endless scrubbing with a wire brush and lye soap. Fee and Meggie would strew it with sawdust Stuart carefully collected from the woodheap, sprinkle the sawdust with precious particles of water and sweep the damp, pungent-fragrant mess away out of doors, down off the veranda onto the vegetable garden, there to decompose itself to humus.
But nothing kept the dust at bay for long, and after a while the creek dried up to a string of waterholes, so that there was no water to be pumped up from it to kitchen or bathroom. Stuart took the tank truck out to the borehead and brought it back full, emptied it into one of the spare rain tanks, and the women had to get used to a different kind of horrible water on dishes and clothes and bodies, worse than muddy creek water. The rank, sulphur-smelling minerally stuff had to be wiped off dishes scrupulously, and made the hair dull and coarse, like straw. What little rain water they had was used strictly for drinking and cooking.
Father Ralph watched Meggie tenderly. She was brushing Patsy's curly red head, Jims standing obediently but a little rockily waiting for his turn, both pairs of bright blue eyes turned up to her adoringly. Just like a tiny mother, she was. It had to be a thing born in them, he mused, that peculiar obsession women had for infants, else at her age she would have regarded it as a duty rather than pure pleasure, and been off to do something more alluring as fast as she could. Instead she was deliberately prolonging the process, crimping Patsy's hair between her fingers to shape waves out of its unruliness. For a while the priest was charmed with her activity, then he whacked the side of his dusty boot with his crop and stared moodily off the veranda toward the big house, hidden by its ghost gums and vines, the profusion of station buildings and pepper trees which lay between its isolation and this hub of station life, the head stockman's residence. What plot was she weaving, that old spider up there at the center of her vast web? "Father, you're not watching!" Meggie accused him. "I'm sorry, Meggie. I was thinking." He turned back to her as she finished with Jims; the three of them stood watching him expectantly until he bent and scooped the twins up, one on either hip. "Let's go and see your Auntie Mary, shall we?"
Meggie followed him up the track carrying his crop and leading the chestnut mare; he toted the infants with easy familiarity and seemed not to mind, though it was almost a mile from the creek to the big house. At the cookhouse he relinquished the twins to an ecstatic Mrs. Smith and passed on up the walkway to the main house with Meggie by his side. Mary Carson was sitting in her wing chair. She hardly ever moved from it these days; there was not the necessity any more with Paddy so capable of overseeing things. As Father Ralph came in holding Meggie's hand, her malevolent gaze beat the child's down; Father Ralph felt the increase in Meggie's pulse rate and squeezed her wrist sympathetically. The little girl dropped her aunt a clumsy curtsy, murmuring an inaudible greeting. "Go to the kitchen, girl, have your tea with Mrs. Smith," said Mary Carson curtly.
"Why don't you like her?" Father Ralph asked as he sank into the chair he had come to think of as his own.
"Because you do," she answered.
"Oh, come now!" For once she made him feel at a loss. "She's just a waif, Mary."
"That's not what you see in her, and you know it."
The fine blue eyes rested on her sardonically; he was more at ease. "Do you think I tamper with children? I am, after all, a priest!" "You're a man first, Ralph de Bricassart! Being a priest makes you feel safe, that's all."
Startled, he laughed. Somehow he couldn't fence with her today; it was as if she had found the chink in his armor, crept inside with her spider's poison. And he was changing, growing older perhaps, becoming reconciled to obscurity in Gillanbone. The fires were dying; or was it that he burned now for other things?
"I am not a man," he said. "I am a priest.... It's the heat, maybe, the dust and the flies.... But I am not a man, Mary. I'm a priest." "Oh, Ralph, how you've changed!" she mocked. "Can this be Cardinal de Bricassart I hear?"
"It isn't possible," he said, a passing unhappiness in his eyes. "I don't think I want it anymore."
She began to laugh, rocking back and forth in her
chair, watching him. "Don't you, Ralph? Don't you? Well, I'll let you stew a little while longer, but your day of reckoning is coming, never doubt it. Not yet, not for two or three years, perhaps, but it will come. I'll be like the Devil, and offer you- Enough said! But never doubt I'll make you writhe. You're the most fascinating man I've ever met. You throw your beauty in our teeth, contemptuous of our foolishness. But I'll pin you to the wall on your own weakness, I'll make you sell yourself like any painted whore. Do you doubt it?"
He leaned back, smiling. "I don't doubt you'll try. But I don't think you know me as well as you think you do."
"Do I not? Time will tell, Ralph, and only time. I'm old; I have nothing but time left to me."
"And what do you think I have?" he asked. "Time, Mary, nothing but time. Time, and dust, and flies."
The clouds heaped themselves in the sky, and Paddy began to hope for rain. "Dry storms," said Mary Carson. "We won't get rain out of this. We won't get any rain for a long time."
If the Clearys thought they had seen the worst that Australia could offer in the way of climatic harshness, it was because they hadn't yet experienced the dry storms of drought-dogged plains. Bereft of soothing dampness, the dryness of the earth and the air rubbed each other raw and crackling, an irritating friction which built up and up and up until it could end only in a gargantuan dissipation of accumulated energy. The sky dropped and darkened so much Fee had to light the lamps indoors; out in the stockyards the horses shivered and jumped at the slightest noise; the hens sought their perches and sank their heads into apprehensive breasts; the dogs fought and snarled; the tame pigs which rooted among the rubbish of, the station dump burrowed their snouts into the dust and peered out of it with bright, skittish eyes. Brooding forces pent in the heavens struck fear into the bones of all living things, as the vast deep clouds swallowed the sun whole and prepared to spew solar fire over the earth.
Thunder came marching from far away with increasing tread, tiny flickers on the horizon cast soaring billows into sharp relief, crests of startling whiteness foamed and curled over midnight-blue depths. Then, with a roaring wind that sucked up the dust and flung it stinging in eyes and ears and mouths, came the cataclysm. No longer did they try to imagine the biblical wrath of God; they lived through it. No man could have kept himself from jumping when the thunder cracked-it exploded with the noise and fury of a disintegrating world-but after a while the assembled household grew so inured to it they crept out onto the veranda and stared across the creek at the far paddocks. Great forks of lightning stood ribbed in veins of fire all around the sky, dozens of bolts each and every moment; naphtha flashes in chains streaked across the clouds, in and out the billows in a fantastic hide- and-seek. Blasted trees alone in the grass reeked and smoked, and they understood at last why these lonely paddock sentinels were dead. An eerie, unearthly glow seeped into the air, air which was no longer invisible but on fire from within, fluorescing pink and lilac and sulphur yellow, and smelling of some hauntingly sweet, elusive perfume quite beyond recognition. The trees shimmered, the red Cleary hair was haloed in tongues of fire, the hairs of their arms stood out stiffly. And all afternoon it went on, only slowly fading into the east to release them from its awesome spell at sunset, and they were excited, on edge, unappeased. Not a drop of rain had fallen. But it was like dying and coming back to life again, to have survived the atmospheric tantrum unscathed; it was all they could talk about for a week.
"We'll get a lot more," said Mary Carson, bored. They did get a lot more. The second dry winter came in colder than they had thought it could get without snow; frost settled inches thick on the ground at night, and the dogs huddled shivering in their kennels, keeping warm by gorging on kangaroo meat and mounds of fat from the homestead's slaughtered cattle. At least the weather meant beef and pork to eat instead of the eternal mutton. In the house they built great roaring fires, and the men were forced to come home when they could, for at night in the paddocks they froze. But the shearers when they arrived were in a mood for rejoicing; they could get through faster and sweat less. At each man's stand in the great shed was a circle of flooring much lighter in color than the rest, the spot where fifty years of shearers had stood dripping their bleaching sweat into the wood of the board.
There was still grass from the flood long ago, but it was thinning ominously. Day after day the skies were overcast and the light dull, but it never rained. The wind howled sadly across the paddocks, spinning drifting brown sheets of dust before it like rain, tormenting the mind with images of water. So much like rain it looked, that raggedly blowing dust. The children developed chilblains on their fingers, tried not to smile with cracked lips, had to peel their socks away from bleeding heels and shins. It was quite impossible to keep warm in the face of that bitter high wind, especially when the houses had been designed to catch every stray puff of air, not keep it out. Going to bed in icy bedrooms, getting up in icy bedrooms, waiting patiently for Mum to spare a little hot water from the great kettle on the hob so that washing was not a teeth-chattering, painful ordeal.
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