He sat at the end of Buster’s bed while she tossed and turned.
Thoughts came unbidden, mulling round in his mind. If she dies, I’ll be free. It’s a way out. His mind seized easily on the temptations of freedom – the freedom he used to know. Able to say yes or no like that. None of this dithering about. Off the mark in a tick; a hundred roads to choose from and a hundred towns to put the finger on. Jobs to take on or turn down at the drop of a hat.
What would be said if she died? Nothing. But how would he feel? All right. He could turn round and say to himself: I did what I could. Still, why should a man say anything. Was it just an effort to bluff conscience, satisfy integrity? All that nursing, all this bush doctoring – was it done just to appease something in him; all the time he was doing it did he half hope that his efforts would be unsuccessful? He couldn’t be sure whether he did or didn’t.
In the morning, in a trickle of dawn, he came out of his stupid doze and he saw the face on the pillow, frail, peaked, white as a wood grub, smeared with a faint pearlescent sheen of sweat. He felt the pulse in the thin wrist. Like the leg of a chook, he thought. Against the puny chest he heard the clear unreeded bump of life. He looked at the ashes of the fire. There wasn’t a chip unburned. Everything had been consumed.
When after a while he saw Buster’s eyes open his face was expressionless.
‘You feel okay now?’
All he got was a faint smile and a nod. The lips were burned with fever, dry, cracked, covered with a film of brown skin. The teeth gleamed, prominent like a rabbit’s.
‘I’m thirsty.’
He turned away. ‘I’ll get you a drink.’
He went outside. The dew hung in loops on the fence wire. The grass sparkled. What was the matter with him? He didn’t have to light that fire. Swaddle that brat in a cocoon of clothes. He could have stayed in the other room, in the biting acid of the cold. No doubt about her, though, the way she had pulled through. He felt irritated by the unvolitional feeling of admiration oozing through his confused thoughts.
When he went back she sat up and guzzled the water.
‘Where’s Gooby gone?’
He went round to the other room and got Gooby. He saw her eyes sparkle as he gave it to her. She hugged it and tucked it in beside her with a great show of finicky adoration.
‘I’m hungry.’
‘You only think you are.’
‘No.’
‘I’ll see what I can get for you,’ he said.
He buttered her a hunk of bread, and when he returned with it, Buster was sitting up. Now that she was better and looked like getting well he could afford to be aloof and resentful. He sat on the bed, thoughtfully rolling a smoke while she opened her mouth wide to accommodate the size of the bread. She translated her sudden access of well-being into exuberant loquacity. Macauley let her babble on as though he didn’t hear.
‘I was awful sick, wasn’t I?’
Could have let it happen.
‘I’m not sick now. Gooby’s not sick either.’
You didn’t know I thought about it.
‘Is the fire all out?’
Only me to think about you, and me thinking about you like that.
‘You made me better, didn’t you, dad?’
Could have been dead now; you wouldn’t have known.
‘Why don’t you talk? Dad!’
God, I don’t know what’s the matter with a man.
‘Dad, talk to me. Haven’t you got any tongue or something?’
He looked round. ‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘And don’t give me any lip. You mag too much.’
‘Where’s our other room gone?’ she asked.
Of a sudden she found that she couldn’t finish the rest of the bread. She gave it to him and lay back weak and exhausted. Macauley told her to rest. He went over to the cookhouse. Polka was there, looking every inch a swagman. He was hunched up to the coals, drawing on a thin cigarette.
‘How’s the kid?’
‘Okay. I think she’ll be right now,’ Macauley said.
‘Aw, yeah, the fire. You was lucky.’ He nodded, then shuddered. ‘Strike me dead, I curl up inside a woolpack, overcoat on, all the nap I got, and yet duggar me if I can sleep.’ He looked up, dropping his misery for a bright smile. ‘And the titter’s all right, you say.’
Macauley nodded. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, with a note of pleasure in his voice, ‘she’s the toughest little bastard I’ve ever struck. If she was a celluloid dog she’d run through hell and make it.’
‘Not like him,’ Polka sighed.
‘Who?’
‘Hinchey, that mate of mine. And it wasn’t like he didn’t have any savvy or that, you know. He had plenty. That’s what I can’t understand.’
Macauley put a hand on Polka’s shoulder. ‘Listen,’ he said softly, ‘stop fretting about your mate. He’s feeling it more than you.’
Polka jumped up, expostulating. ‘Frettin’ about him! I’m not frettin’ about the silly bee. I’m just sayin’, like. I’m — ’
His eyes met Macauley’s perspicacious gaze, and his words faltered, and he turned his head.
‘Dammit,’ he said angrily. ‘Look at that duddy blackfeller’s fire. I could kick its guts in.’
‘Why don’t you put some wood on it?’
‘Wood!’ squeaked Polka. ‘Don’t you think I would if we had any? We’re skinned out. Unless we go knock on the kitchen table.’
‘Take it easy,’ Macauley said with a bit of a grin. ‘It’s not that bad. Come on, we’ll rake some up.’
Macauley wanted to get away as soon as he could. It would take him all day to walk to Collarenebri, and he didn’t want to be coming into the town in the dark. Yet he wanted to give Buster a chance to get a little strength into her body. She would have to be nursed along steadily, and he knew what he was going to do about that. What he had in mind was Walgett and Bella Sweeney. He could bank on a ride through from Collarenebri to Walgett, and there he could park Buster with Bella until he found a job, and maybe Bella wouldn’t mind even keeping the kid with her.
He managed to get Buster to eat some meat. Then he dressed her warmly. She wobbled weakly outside in the sun and sat on Macauley’s swag. Macauley saw that the two rooms were left as clean as when he went into them, and that nothing was left behind, and then he was ready for the track.
Polka waddled up to him, looking glum. ‘Sorry to see you go,’ he said.
Macauley shook his hand.
‘I’ve took a real shine to you, Mac,’ Polka went on. ‘You’d be a good mate to knock round with.’
‘You’d kill me with kindness.’
Polka grinned. ‘Not me? I can be a hard bee when I like. Trouble is, I don’t very often like. How are you off for lettuce?’
‘I’ll be right.’
‘What I mean is I can dook you a caser if it’s any good.’
Macauley patted him on the shoulder in a gesture of thanks and refusal. ‘You’ll be here when the boys come. If a bloke called Lucky Regan is among them tell him I said what big eyes he’s got. Stepper Mackenzie, Bluey Green, Mick and Ted Bennett. Tell ’em I was asking after them and they can still pull up a log to my fire any time they like.’
‘I’ll do that, mate.’
Macauley lifted the swag onto one shoulder and hoisted Buster into his arms on the other. He was surprised at her lightness and realised how much weight she must have shed.
‘Look after yourselves,’ Polka called. ‘Send me a message stick some time.’
‘What address?’ Macauley turned for a moment.
‘Aw, just care of the wide open spaces, Australia,’ Polka waved.
Macauley had a little matter to tidy up at the station first. It didn’t take long. When the dark girl came out from the kitchen in answer to his knock he thrust a pound note into her hand. She looked at him bashfully, half frightened.
‘Take it,’ Macauley said. ‘It’s yours. I owe you nothing now. We’re quits.’
He s
aid no more. He was gone with her looking after him, he knew, and he felt better. He felt better because he no longer felt beholden; he had put the concupiscent happening with her in its proper place and given it its proper name. She had nothing on him now and he had nothing on himself. He had cleaned up a debt.
He had walked a mile before he lowered his two swags and had a spell. He smoked a cigarette while the sweat dried on his face.
‘Do you like carrying me, dad?’
‘Sure,’ Macauley said satirically, ‘I love it. Come on.’
He hadn’t got a half mile before a utility truck came along behind him and stopped alongside. Macauley recognised it as Wigley’s; the one he had driven home from his sheep-judging visit to Dubbo.
A ruddy-faced man with a cap and buck teeth called to him, ‘Come on, hop in.’
Macauley threw his swag in the back and got in beside the driver. He took Buster off his knee and sat her in the middle. When the truck was under way Macaulay looked the station hand up and down discreetly, noticed his workaday clothes and the muddy boots.
‘You’re not going to Colly?’ he said.
‘Hell, no.’ The driver jerked his head round as though he were surprised about something. ‘I don’t have to. Wigley told me to pick you up and take you there.’
Macauley sat back with a faint, gratified smile.
He was walking down the street in the last of the sunshine when he saw Luke Sweeney ahead of him. He recognised the humped back, the hands in the pockets lifting the flaps of the coat, the slight limp in one leg that still carried shrapnel from Armentieres, the bent head as though the man was stiff-necked when all he was doing was being pensive.
Macauley hastened his walk and called from three yards behind, ‘Hey, you old bag of bones, what are you looking for now?’
Luke Sweeney turned as though expecting to see a small cheeky boy with a man’s voice. The instant he saw his mistake the fight went out of his eyes, and surprise jumped into them. He shook Macauley’s hand with delight and all the vigour he could muster.
‘Blow me down, wonders’ll never cease. Me and the Cow was only talking about you the other night. We thought you musta been pushing up daisies, it’s been so long since you were here.’
Luke Sweeney was an introduction to Bella Sweeney long before you saw her. He used to say, ‘She’s one of them women, you know.’ And if you didn’t know, Macauley reckoned, you did when you saw her.
Her figure was a continent. Her great chest curved like the Bight. Her buttocks were the hump of southern Victoria. Her legs were Ayers Rock, twice. She engulfed him, fed from his pathetic frailty, so that the dissipated juices and living fluids left him a desiccated being to mark their going, atrophied the struggling flesh on his bones and built hollows in his face and filled him with shadows. He was a frame of bones scraggy and gaunt as dead timber; a wildling pressed between the gluttony of her passion and the dangers of her tremendous vitality. Yet he thought the world of her; glorified in the deluge of her love; relished her with pride, pleasure, and mischief.
‘When’d you get here?’
‘Just a while ago,’ Macauley said. ‘We struck a lift with a cocky from Colly, right through. Soft seats, too. How’s Bella?’
‘Who, the Cow? Bigger than ever, and still loves me like mad. You know, she’d drink rat poison if I kicked the bucket. I wouldn’t want that. But I tell you, boy, I’m finding it a helluva job to go on staying alive.’ Luke Sweeney’s eyes twinkled waggishly. ‘I’m gonna get overlaid any day now.’ He laughed with good humour. ‘Another thing. I’m having nightmares. I think I’m sleeping on the side of a mountain. I think I’m a bear. I climb the mountain. Then I get the shivers. I start screaming. I find I’m not alone. There’s a great big bare behind.’
He burst into uproarious laughter, slapping one hand with the other. ‘Ah,’ he broke off, ‘a man’s got to have his little joke. Say, where’d you get that?’ He pointed at Buster.
As they walked along, Macauley told him the story of what had happened and why he was there.
‘I didn’t want to be any bother, Luke, and I wouldn’t ask your help if I didn’t need it.’
‘Ah, rubbish, what are friends for?’
‘I’ve come to the stage,’ Macauley said, ‘where I’ve even got to touch you for a quid.’
Luke Sweeney raised his eyebrows. ‘Well, that just about breaks my bloody heart,’ he quavered in a miserly voice. Then he laughed and slapped Macauley on the shoulder. ‘You’re such a proud, independent cow I wonder how you got the words out even.’
Macauley half wondered himself. He couldn’t imagine himself saying them. But he wanted to be sure that Sweeney didn’t misunderstand him. ‘On my own I wouldn’t be in this fix. And I’m not asking for charity, don’t think that. Just a little help on appro. I’ll settle with you when I come good.’
‘No bloody fear you won’t. I don’t forget the time you stuck to me out at the Ridge when I was just scratching.’
‘You owe me nothing,’ Macauley said.
‘I owe you everything, what are you talking about? Only for you, me and her would have chucked it in long before. We wouldn’t have stayed there in that god-forsaken hole gouging our guts out for sweet damn-all. It was you who talked us into staying, and you who put me on to that duffer and told me to give it a go. Remember?’
‘I remember.’
‘And what do I do?’ Sweeney said. ‘I come up with a stone worth five hundred quid. I come up with the Black Beauty, and from then on I never look back. Tin-bum, they call me. I get on to opal all over the place wherever I sink a shaft and put up a windlass.’ He chuckled. Then his eyes narrowed shrewdly. ‘You know, I often suspect you put that stone there for me to find.’
‘Don’t kid yourself. Me dum five hundred smackers when all I’m doing is making wages myself!’
‘It was too pat; it was too easy even though I know the luck of the game, the way it can be under your nose all the time and you can’t see it.’
‘You’re talking through your hat,’ Macauley said. ‘You’ve had too much of the sun.’
‘I’ll believe it if I like,’ Sweeney told him. ‘Anyway, it was the makings of us. It got us a lot of things we never had before. It set us up on easy street. It got us this boarding house and a lot of other things.’
‘You worked for it,’ Macauley said.
The boarding house was an extensive old timber building two storeys high and with a verandah running round the top storey. It had been a hotel in the days when horses had a big say in the affairs of men, and the fact that it stood on a corner was not the major evidence. There was a big backyard with the stables still standing. There was nothing shabby about any of it. It was painted buff and green with maroon pipings.
Macauley and Sweeney went through the gate in the fence and walked across the yard rutted and cobbled with hard black mud. They stopped on the flagstones of the back verandah, and Sweeney put his face to the gauze door of the kitchen.
‘Hey, Bel,’ he called, ‘come and see what I found.’
The door opened and the doorway was plugged with a gargantuan female. This was the woman Sweeney called the Cow. She had a casky bosom, as if stuffed, an uddery bulge against the garish print dress covered with yellow and vermilion flowers. An amber scarf was tied round her head and tucked in, giving her a poly look. Her face was a massive blob of radiant flesh, with the features a long way in from the perimeter as though they had been superimposed, forming a face within a face. There was a vague, elusive doll-like prettiness about it.
She gaped at Macauley, blinked and burst into a sunshower of tears. She threw her two arms like the weekend joints round him, Buster and all, and the touch of her face on Macauley’s tough skin was like the touch of a powder puff: What had he been doing, the big lump, and where had he been and how was he feeling, and who was the piccaninny? – she flung the questions with shrieks of joy, slapping, pummelling and pushing him with the hilarity of an elephant at its mother’s home
coming. Then she stood off, her blue eyes sparkling with laughter and happiness, and as if she hadn’t made her rapture clear she hurled a pudgy arm round Sweeney’s head, pulled him off balance and squashed his face against hers so that one eye was twisted skew-whiff and the lips pouted like a cod’s.
‘And what do you think of my Lukey?’ she shouted lovingly, giving him a resounding kiss on the nose. ‘Isn’t he looking well?’
He struggled like a cat with its head in a fish tin, and she only released him so that she could give her overwhelming attention to Buster, who was standing beside Macauley and looking up as though at some strange horror in the sky. Sweeney twitched his face into shape and picked up his cap, breathing heavily from his exhausting ordeal.
Bella Sweeney astonished Buster with her terrible affection. She lavished her with darlings and sweethearts and poor little dears. She gripped her under the armpits and hauled the unwilling child into the air, kissing and hugging her. Buster grunted, and held herself away, arching, not knowing whether to be distressed or paralytic and so settling for both. Bella carried her inside protesting, but when Buster was satisfied no harm was going to come to her she sat still in a caution of wonder and timidity.
In the private lounge room Sweeney explained the situation, and Macauley was grateful. He didn’t relish the idea of going over the same ground again.
‘Of course,’ Bella boomed, ‘you can stay here as long as you like. And we’ll soon get this little cherub strong and healthy again, won’t we, love? You poor little baby, you must have been sick.’
She fondled Buster to her and Buster sniffed virtuously.
‘Hey, you be careful of that kid, Bel,’ Sweeney warned her. ‘She’ll break. She’s not like me you know – rubber bones and no nerves.’
Bella gave a hoot of delighted laughter. ‘Isn’t he a funny old bugger, my Lukey?’ she chortled. Caught in the direct rays of her wifely adulation he put his hands up protectively, and said, ‘Now, Bel, now, you’ve had enough of me for one day.’
The Shiralee Page 14
