A Woman of the Inner Sea

by Thomas Keneally

  —Well, when are you coming out into the open again? she asked over a mug of tea.

  —Let the dust settle first, said Gus.

  —I like the look of this Kate here, said the sister-in-law with a little edge. Why don’t you marry her and make an honest man of yourself?

  The implication was, She’s using you, Gus. Kate couldn’t have denied it.

  Throughout this sparring and veiled complaints, Kate went on thinking of the white vestments, seeing herself make contact with them. Touching the mollified children in the fleshwhite brilliance of that fabric.

  —Are the coppers watching my place? asked Gus.

  —Come on, Gus, said his sister-in-law. Don’t fancy yourself. It’s not the Great bloody Train Robbery.

  She took a deep draught of tea. Kate looked at her and judged that she was discontented in a jovial, back-of-Bourke way. Hard work and cash hunger had made her face craggy.

  Kate washed the cups while Gus drove the sister-in-law away in the truck they had turned up in. Hoary with dust, its engine had a clean growl as if Gus kept it honest. Gus would be back with the thing soon. It would be their truck.

  —Come for a walk, Kate? he asked.

  A clear evening under an immense sky. A few streaks of white vapor on the horizon. He walked toward the only hill you could see from the farmhouse. This was a knob of stone, a rare bump left over in the flatness by some old play of forces.

  —This is very hard rock, Gus told her, pushing against the surface, out of whose crevices trees grew in postures of great determination.

  Gus pointed to a long dent at the base of this stone plug. It reminded her of something from her adolescent travels: the sort of indentation the carriage wheels of the Romans had made in the cobbled streets of Pompeii. It looked equally historic. She was tired and her head, still full of holy white fabric, did not at first take in what she was looking at. But the rut ran all along the stone plinth of Gus’s only mountain.

  Gus said, See there’s a water hole amongst the rocks here on the far side.

  There was a sort of academic reproof in his voice.

  —Only in good seasons, of course. That’s when kangaroos come here to drink. Imagine, Kate, how long it took to make this dent in the rock? How many kangaroos it took, traveling in file, to make this rut? I reckon it took thousands of years to make this little road. That’s millions of generations …

  He loved the idea of it.

  She looked around and Chifley was considering her. He had followed in a random sort of way. He didn’t seem as impressed with the indentation in the stone as Gus was.

  —See, said Gus, it means buggerall to him. I bring him to places like this and it doesn’t trigger anything. I’m the one who gets excited. You know, thinking how many kangaroos it took. The does following the bucks. The young men kangaroos with their eyes on the does, sly-like. Not ready to make a move yet.

  A laugh broke out of him. He was a little abashed at its lack of control.

  —He did go chasing after does once, but he was too young and an old gray beat him up. He did it a second time. And he was still a little too young. He could do it now and be a success. But he doesn’t. He’s sticking round as if he wants to look after me in my bloody old age.

  The not-so-Reverend Frank had, on first coming from Ireland, served out here in this sparse diocese around the Darling River. I remark on that because of its bearing on white vestments.

  On the Soldier Settler verandah, where Gus sat reconstructing an old rifle the Soldier Settler had left behind as useless, Kate remembered sitting up to dinner tables in her childhood, staying there long enough to make the adults forget she was there, or slipping down off the chair and camping amongst the legs of guests and parents, in their adult musk, part animality, part dry-cleaning fluid. And then Uncle Frank would begin tales of his youth in the diocese of Wilcannia-Forbes.

  Those were his celibate days. The seminary and the Ten Commandments still cast a shadow over him, and he was pure and fresh-faced. Yet quick to punt at country race meetings, on the dirt racecourses (rainfall wasn’t adequate for turf) where the Abo jockeys and their crooked trainers had the races all arranged but where God too had a hand, as Uncle Frank believed, in the placings, and an influence amidst the clouds of dust.

  Under the table, Kate became recipient to Uncle Frank’s mysterious tales of his first bush diocese.

  So Father Tim Brady, parish priest of Wilcannia some time after the birth of Christ and before the birth of rock’n’roll! While the bush was still innocent and full of Gus-like battlers. Brady dies, twelve thousand miles from his brother’s farm in Offaly, Republic of Eire. Priests come from all over the enormous diocese to watch Tim lowered into the Australian earth. The bishop, Kieran McDonagh, drives all the way from Forbes with his curate-secretary. By the time the priests all get there, the nuns have had to close the casket, but they tell Tim Brady’s arriving brethren that Father Brady had looked tranquil and had died well.

  So there’s the coffin in the big church of Wilcannia. In the nineteenth century when wool was worth so much in Liverpool and Huddersfield, when paddlesteamers took Wilcannia’s fleece away down the Lachlan and the Darling to the sea, it had seemed that there would be nothing but growth and growth on this distant river. But by the time Tim Brady’s corpse sat surrounded by his brother priests, the Sisters of Mercy, and his parishioners, Wilcannia’s church was already too big for a shrinking town.

  Frank O’Brien and his friend Michael Cassidy file with all the others past Tim Brady’s closed coffin, and Mike Cassidy whispers, You know, Frank, I wouldn’t be so sure Tim’s in there. I think he might have run away to New Zealand with a woman. He was never one for the washing, Tim, and I’ve never known him to smell so good.

  Tim is taken out to the graveyard and put beneath the alkaline-streaked alien sod—if he’d died earlier they could have fitted him into the churchyard, but it was full up by now with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish clerics. After the interment, the bishop and all the priests come back for the mother of wakes at Tim’s enormous and empty presbytery. They do not get together frequently, so that even death must provide a social pretext. And would you believe it, it starts raining? The drought ends. The flood comes. The Sisters of Mercy maintain that this is due to Tim Brady’s intercession before the throne of God, though if he had such power with the Deity he had kept it something of a secret from his bishop and his fellow priests.

  In country where the yearly rainfall is eight inches, they get that by breakfast the next morning. The town is utterly cut off. The sanitary truck cannot get through to take the full can (which Uncle Frank describes in his telling at table as heavy with the wastes of mourners) away.

  By the second morning His Lordship Kieran, Bishop of Wilcannia–Forbes and of Neapolis Trojanos in partibus infidelium (the bishop’s phantom diocese in infidel Turkey) appears at the table and thunders at his clergy.

  —You boys are going to have to do something about that shit can. A man’s balls are dragging in it.

  It gave an electric excitement to the young Kate Gaffney to be told that a bishop spake thus. That was the special scatological merit of Uncle Frank’s tale for her. She would sit rocking beneath the table, while hilarity jerked the knees of all those around her.

  The memory of the white vestments of the Missa de Angelis was sustained in Uncle Frank’s old diocese by the grown and bereaved Kate, hidden in a forgotten farmhouse on marginal land. In partibus infidelium.

  The beds were made now in the room off the kitchen, the old stove creaked and ticked with heat, a family of possums having been driven from the chimney where they must have nested for thirty or forty years.

  Outside, Chifley and Menzies prowl without intent a cold, electrically radiant blue night. While in that small room off the kitchen, the two iron-frame beds are jammed close together, which suits the fellow travelers’ need for warmth. Fully clothed in the darkness, they find they have huddled close, each to the inner rim o
f his bed.

  The air outside seems to chime with cold, and in these cold-to-the-core conditions Kate is to receive the final revelation concerning Chifley and the dreams of flight and air. In the dark, holding on to her frankly in a way which they have both agreed to consider good manners, Gus begins to talk about an old blackfeller who’d worked for his father. At first it seems a casual story. Folklore. An effort to charm.

  But from the earliest words, at the speaking of one word in particular—language—Kate understands straight away that it will be a grievous tale, more than Gus knows.

  As gently and breathily told by Gus:

  —The old feller said how the gift to talk had been out there, on the plain, a separate animal, looking for an owner or a friend or something. All the others were scared of it, because they thought it was a dangerous beast, a troublemaker, a real meat eater.

  —So there was a sort of committee made to decide who was going to get stuck with language. And someone said, some animal, some totem creature, Give it to the humans. They’re vain and they’re stupid, and they’ll like it.

  —The animal chosen by all the others, said Gus, to persuade the humans to take on the talking business was the kangaroo.

  This story on the edge of drowsiness and the possibility of drowsy caresses wakes Kate up fully. It is that she knows now in an instant what Chifley’s placid intensity meant. It was a kind of persuasion. It was the urging of language upon her. It meant she cannot merely bellow in distress. Through Chifley’s bestial cunning, she is faced now with the duty of defining her misfortune in words. She is stuck with language and with the awful business, the fussiness of definition. The cruelty of this stings and distracts her. At once she begins weeping.

  —What’s the problem, Kate?

  He is panicked and presses her shoulder to find out.

  What she most bitterly hates is to find herself stuck with language now, in the rump of her life, when it is a futile implement. She understands now the transaction behind the Chifley dreams, and so the viciousness of dumping talk upon her. Though she knows she will still exult in him, she has an awful, rankling, bitter sense that he owes her more still, and better.

  —What is it, what is it?

  The way he pushes against her shoulders, which he has never seen bared, about whose scarring he is ignorant, will lead by degrees and ultimately to gentler touches still.

  She is pacified. It’s no use arguing the matter. The panic at owning tongues subsides. Gus’s arm goes all the way across her for warmth’s sake. He desires her too, but that is no excuse in his book for intruding upon her. He is an antiquity of vanished values, poor Gus, and artless in a way unknown elsewhere.

  Not properly asleep, she beholds the remote ghost of her own desire in the room, substantial enough, together with Gus’s more robust animal presence. She wishes she could be absorbed in that wordless urgency. But it stands off a little way from her yet. It is just as well. The thing has to happen by degrees, by random caresses. Gus would not be able otherwise to accept the shame.

  They needed to heat their bathwater on the fuel stove. Ruminating on Chifley’s language trick, Kate did it, taking a long time over it, and then ultimately bathing herself. She saw how her hips had expanded—they were now what people called ample. But she wanted more dimpling of fat around the inside of her thighs. She hadn’t yet achieved the amplitude of Connie Murchison’s cook Shirley. She washed her genitals and felt the unfamiliar blood in them. Like a postcard from a distant place, she thought. Because of that she came out dressed only in her worse-for-wear bra and a blouse on her shoulders, and a slip which had once been cream and had turned yellow from washing with rough soap. Gus said with fear, Aren’t you going to put something warmer on?

  When they put out the storm lantern, he held her as usual but tentatively, from behind. To let him know that all was permitted, she reached behind her, one-handed, and stroked as best she could—not flesh but the hard fabric of old army pants. Soon she felt and was pleased by his solidity. She helped him raise the yellowed slip and he entered her with that gratefulness which is the better part of the male spirit.

  She now had more time for recollection than she’d been permitted in Myambagh, or had permitted herself.

  The memory arose of how at one time Bernie Astor’s office had been employed a little oddly to conduct American astronauts on a tour of Australia. The Australian tracking station at Tidbinbilla had been their only link as they crossed the earth’s southwestern corner; the city of Perth had kept all its lights on till the small hours to provide a navigational fix! The astronauts had been sent by NASA to thank a friendly nation.

  One was a Christian of fundamentalist tendencies, and the other was a wild technocrat reasonably assured that Australia’s pleasant women would be anxious to reach out to the flesh he had carried to the moon and back. At first Kate was repelled by him, but when he discovered that Kate was not one of those who wanted the astral experience which was his to offer, he took it with an unexpected style and settled down to become a mere companion.

  So that one night, drinking late, she had been able to raise with him the friendly, hackneyed question. Had he learned anything of God in space?

  She asked him because by now she expected from him a novel answer. He had already disproved the accusation that spacemen were humanoid. He had told her, for instance, that he hated the jungle training and suffered a childhood phobia of insects. When dumped with the others north of the Panama Canal in rotting rain forest where they were expected to live off the land, he had become ill when served iguana, and had huddled on a muddy slope watching the mulch of leaves beyond the door of his pup tent for fear that they might disclose a spider or a scorpion.

  His frankness about his refusal as a certified superman to countenance lizard meat had gone together with his brotherly acceptance of Kate’s rebuff, to generate a kind of friendship. So, both their brains tinted with whiskey, she could raise with him the question of space and the ultimate principle.

  The astronaut grew somber and said he—like the fundamentalist who had already gone soberly to bed—believed in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.

  She looked for a twitching of his joker’s lips but there was none. So he believed in the Incarnation. How strange he’d say it just like that! Raging at his own reflection in a mirror behind the bar. Real Hound of Heaven stuff; wrestling with divinities. And playing out his startling argument.

  —God was made flesh in Judaea, said the astronaut. God made Jewish in fact. Imagine. I believe it. I wish I didn’t. It has what you could call important implications for my lifestyle and my future … I realized in my spaceship—really had it come home to me—that we, the earth, the race … we’re a suburb. A little corner. A cul-de-sac.

  —It is therefore in my opinion obscene to be stuck with the idea that the only intelligent life in the universe is here, here in this dead-end street. What I believe is … Christ has been throughout the universe, to many, many constellations. Otherwise there’s no sense. Okay, that’s number one.

  —Number two. Number two: our idea of aesthetics and of what is noble in the body of a man or a woman is based on gravity. Gravity makes us. Gravity made Marilyn Monroe. Gravity made Jesus Christ. If we lived on a planet where the gravity was 1.5, Christ would be four and a half feet tall and have an enormous flat brow to stand the extra pressure. Marilyn Monroe would be four foot two and her ankles would be seven inches through, and we would still think that was damn marvelous. Because gravity would’ve given us our idea of beauty as well.

  —But imagine (continued the astronaut to the now enthralled Kate Gaffney). Imagine a planet where the gravity was three, Christ and Venus would be hunched over, they would drag their forepaws along the earth. And again we, made by that same gravity, would think they were beautiful, worth dying for, worth our souls. And then a planet with gravity eight! Christ and Venus would be serpents or multipedes, and he still would have died to wash us in his blood and we would still have wanted
her.

  She remembered the nature of the awe she and the astronaut had shared then. Reverence for the serpentine Messiah. The vision of the serpentine Venus. It took much headshaking to rid the imagination of these images.

  The Kate who made love to Gus knew she was Kate from a planet of gravity two. Her skull had been pressed flat by the weight of events. She had turned herself by will into a Venus from an alternate planet. She had let the gravity of Murchison’s Railway Hotel thicken her. Yet Gus clearly came from a similar planet, because entering her and caressing her from behind, his mouth near her ear, he writhed and jerked with cries of praise.

  As Chifley had had one or two great and foredoomed glandular adventures, Kate imagined—but she may have been wrong—that this was a rare excursion for Gus’s body. In tune with this belief Kate herself felt certain waters breaking and flowing inside her. She approved of it all distantly, a Maharani approving of the coming of the monsoons.

  Flung with abandon across the frost outside, Chifley waited, owing her something for the pain of being shackled to language, even for the milliliters of painful breath, the ounces of broken words Gus uttered against her ear.

  But though Chifley had the lungs and sinews, he couldn’t provide everything. Toward the edge of sleep, she said, Would you let me go to Mass?

  —What do you mean, let?

  —I want to take the truck if you’ll let me. I want to go to Mass in Bourke or Wilcannia.