Swords and Crowns and Rings (38 page)

But the fire raging through the casuarinas and the river grass drove him back. He splashed up and down in the shallows, calling Mrs Linz, and the fire ate up his voice in its immensity of sound. He had to return to Jackie.

Half the night they searched, first on foot, stumbling in the crimson glare, calling, coo-eeing, and then in the cream boat, moving at a snail's pace along the channel, scanning the banks.

‘They gotta be here somewhere,' said Lufa. ‘That old lady now, she is a country woman. She wouldn't do anything silly. Maybe she's walked downstream in the shallows, maybe upstream, carrying the baby, but one thing you can be sure of is they're all right.'

‘Why can't we hear the baby then?' asked Jackie. ‘He'd be frightened. Hungry by now, too, he didn't get his ten o'clock...'

He went to sleep in the middle of a sentence, his blackened hands sticking out before him like boxing-gloves. Lufa gave up the pretence of searching. He anchored the cream boat in the channel, and lay down on the deck. Every inch of his body hurt in one way or another, and the dumb hurt within was more than he could bear. He grizzled a little, wiping away the tears with his hand and smearing soot and ash into grotesque marblings.

‘It ain't fair,' he muttered.

The river leapt with reflected radiance. A fallen tree lay on the nearby mud-bank like a marine monster, its roots still breathing smoke. A strange sight, far away, drew Lufa's dull gaze. It was a powerline, severed by heat, a whipping, thrashing blue snake, inscribing swift S's upon the smoke.

‘She was that beautiful,' he thought.

Before dawn Lufa saw upon the distant ranges the intermittent glint of lightning; when the light came he discerned a rainstorm standing on the hills. A shower moved faintheartedly over the smoking trees, then splattered across the cream boat's deck. It was too late to do any good, but he welcomed its soft chill upon his stiff, scorched skin. With dread he heard Jackie stir and mumble, and turned to face him.

‘We didn't find them, did we?'

‘No,' said Lufa; ‘but you gotta believe me, mate, that's a tough old chook, your mum-in-law. What do you bet she paddled down to Keever's and spent the night in bed, her and the bub?'

‘Yes, I have to believe that,' said Jackie. He heaved himself up on his hands and knees, flinching.

‘I'll pump up the primus and get us a cuppa tea,' said Lufa. Jackie nodded.

‘Thanks, Lufe.'

Lufa ambled aft. He sighed deeply as he went, long shuddering sighs that seemed to come up from his boots. Jackie buried his face on his knees.

Lufa had to hold the cup to Jackie's lips, trying not to spill the hot liquid on the young man's blistered chest. He had hardly finished drinking before they heard a hail, and a rowing-boat moved slowly into sight. It carried four men and one woman, Mrs Keever.

Jackie ran to the rail. ‘Have you seen Mrs Linz and Carlie?' he shouted. The people in the boat shook their heads, glanced at each other uneasily.

‘All right then,' said Lufa. ‘So they went upstream. Don't worry, I keep telling you, son.'

Mrs Keever, as drawn and smutty as the menfolk, wordlessly received the news of Maida's death. She had brought carron oil and torn-up sheets for bandages, and silently she offered to bandage Jackie's hands. But he pulled them away, saying, ‘I want to look for Carlie. Now.'

After a short discussion, Jackie and the Webster boys went upstream in one boat, to search the banks for any sign of the missing Mrs Linz and her burden, while Gordie, the Keever stockman, stayed on land to search the ravaged bush in the vicinity of the jetty. Jackie realised that his neighbours wanted to remove Maida's body from the devastated cottage before he got back.

Lufa nodded at him, saying, ‘You go, Jack. Better that way. No sense in making things worse.'

After the boat had disappeared round the bend, Lufa turned to Pop Keever who had volunteered to help turn over the debris of the cottage. Mrs Keever stood firm, having refused to go away from the site.

‘No, she'd want another woman to be here,' was all she said.

She had been up all night. The fire had come up to the back of the hen-house and then cut away again. Her neighbours, the Websters, had fared better; the small fires ignited by drifting sparks on their island had been easily extinguished. There had been no other deaths in the locality except of stock in outlying paddocks. Most of Mrs Keever's layers had been killed by the heat, but that was to be expected in such a narrow shave.

Mrs Keever wondered how her two boys were managing. They had left the homestead before the boat did, in an effort to bring the old Mack lorry around by road to Morgan's. But the road would be blocked with fallen trees; it would be a long business.

She was not a religious woman. There was no comfort for her anywhere as she watched the men working in the unclean tangle of the cottage. It was still smoking, smelling hideously from the dawn shower. After a while Pop Keever dragged out a sheet of corrugated iron, and he and the stockman lifted something onto it.

Mrs Keever felt her inside begin to shake. She thought, ‘I have to keep a good face. No help to go to pieces. I have to keep a good face for everyone's sake.'

She turned away, but all too soon her dread and fascinated horror made her take a quick glance as the men carried the iron past her to the river's edge. She saw a black mummified thing, shaped somewhat like a shoe, split along one side to disclose a scramble of discoloured bones. At the same moment Lufa Morgan, standing amidst the wreckage of the cottage, began to blubber.

‘It ain't fair,' he howled. ‘I didn't really believe she was dead until now. I tried and tried to get her out, didn't I, Pop? Eh, you believe me, don't you, boy?'

They sat him down, got some brandy into him.

‘It's all been too much; everyone's got a breaking point. You just cry if you want to.' Mrs Keever pressed his filthy, snot-smeared face against her bosom as if he had been a child. ‘There, there, it was terrible for you, but you did your best, we all know that, you and Jack. Poor little thing, it was just a frightful accident.'

‘I loved her, you know that?' howled Lufa. ‘I know I ain't much, I'm just a nothin', can't even read or write, but she was always so kind to me, mending me clothes, cooking me scones and things, never forgot me birthday...I would have done anything for that girl.'

‘Gordie, lend us your hanky, will you?'

Mrs Keever wiped Lufa's face, made him blow his nose. She put his big bristled head back against her elderly breast and held it there.

‘You did what you could, Lufa, and none of us here thinks any the worse of you for breaking down, do we, boys?'

There was a prompt murmur of denial. Lufa shook his head violently, his face still hidden. ‘Feel ashamed,' he muttered. ‘Big sook. Just the shock, that's all. Didn't believe it last night. Didn't sink in. Gawd, poor Jack. It started here, you know, the fire.'

Mrs Keever motioned for her husband to pour out a mugful of heavily sweetened tea from the thermos. As he drank, Lufa talked on. It seemed a comfort to him to be able to tell the others something they didn't know. His bleared eyes and grotesque mask became almost animated.

‘Jackie said the old lady threw the lamp at him, and everything went up in a flash.'

‘Ghost, what'd she want to do that for?' muttered Gordie.

‘They had words,' said Lufa. ‘Jack said so. And I heard meself the old lady sing out, “He'll murder the lot of us.” That was just before I heard the lamp explode.'

His hearers glanced at one another. Lufa pushed away the tea petulantly. His lip began to shake, and he rose and went down river a little and leant against a tree with his arm over his eyes. Mrs Keever said, ‘Better keep our mouths shut about this. Don't know the real story, after all. And poor Lufa is half out of his mind, anyway.'

The stockman agreed readily, but Pop Keever said, troubled, ‘There'll be an inquest though, Mother. Lufa's bound to be called.'

‘Well, we'll meet that when we come to it,' said Mrs Keever. ‘Is Maida's body well out of the way so that poor Jack won't see it?'

They nodded, and went downstream to continue the search for Mrs Linz and the child. Lufa blew his nose and followed them, lurching with exhaustion. Left alone, Mrs Keever walked over to the debris of the cottage, musing sadly on the warped iron bedstead, on a silvery metal clot she recognised as a frying-pan. Near the stove a few brown teeth lay. Mrs Keever's heart bumped with fright, then she recognised them as the remains of a denture.

She thought of that quiet girl, her secrets. She remembered the dead child delivered at Duchess Bay hospital. Jack had thought it premature, and she, Mrs Keever, had never told anyone, not even her husband Pop, that it had been full-term.

An ash-smeared bird flew down and listlessly picked at something amidst the debris; it was an apple, half cooked, its shape miraculously preserved amidst the holocaust. It cheered Mrs Keever. She thought, ‘It's possible Mrs Linz and the baby are all right. Stranger things have happened.'

She heard the Mack lorry labouring in from the road, and went to meet her sons and tell them the news. They were big grave men, graver as they looked about them. Hesitantly she repeated to them what Lufa had said. Roley, the elder, commented, ‘Better let it go no farther. It's done now, anyway, whatever the cause.'

Pop Keever returned, picking his way amongst the pockets of hot cinders. In answer to his wife's call, he said, ‘Yep, we've found 'em. Honest to God, it'd draw tears from a glass eye.'

When Jackie returned they let him look for a while at the body of his child, untouched, unburned in his soot-smeared nightgown. Carlie looked as if he were alseep, the little face shut up in a dream. Jackie touched the silky hair with a finger.

‘Somehow it seems worse,' whispered one of the Keever boys to the other, ‘Jack being the way he is.'

They had found Mrs Linz lying on her face over the body of the child. Her back was severely burned, but she did not look as though she had died by fire.

‘Either she collapsed, heart attack or something, and fell on the boy and smothered him, or she failed to get to the river and tried to shelter him when the fire swept over,' said Pop Keever, trying to lead Jackie away.

They were otherwise silent, not knowing what to say.

They tried to get him on the lorry, take him away, salve his burns, comfort him, get him drunk.

He broke away blundering through the smoking woods, disturbed cinders sparkling and springing scarlet about his boots.

Some time after midday Pop Keever found him, a little red-eyed ogre crouched by a creek, which had begun to run meagrely again, fed by the splashing thunderstorms in the hills above.

‘He was that black he looked like a stump or a burned-out beef carcass,' said Pop Keever. ‘And them little half-blind eyes! His hands was dangling in the water, big as footballs, with the skin peeling off like gloves.'

Jackie did not speak. The men, fidgeting wretchedly, talked in mutters.

‘Bloody shame. Enough to send anyone off their nut.'

Pop Keever said, ‘Lift him onto the back of the lorry. Me and the boys'll get him to Duchess hospital; that's our bit.'

The others were glad to see him go, the truck lurching into the yellow nimbus of the smoke, the two Keever sons going ahead of it with axes and crowbars to move debris fallen across the road.

They drew straws for the task of wrapping the bodies as best they could and putting them on the cream boat. Mrs Keever tried to get Lufa to stand out, but he mulishly resisted.

‘Gotta see it through,' he said. Compassionately, she saw him draw a short straw.

Those who won, quickly went off to see what assistance they could give on other parts of the river. Lufa remained with his head in his hands, but the stockman and the younger Webster, feeling the pouncing heat of the invisible sun, shook him into action.

‘We gotta get moving, Lufe,' said Gordie. ‘Can't bury 'em here, with the police wanting to examine them and that. Got to put them on ice till the authorities take over. Jesus, though. That little bub! I'll never forget it.'

Lufa insisted on taking the wheel, and the others fell asleep in exhaustion as the cream boat travelled sluggishly upstream to the dairy factory. Lufa, eyes bloodshot, face wan under the soot, alternately licked his burned arms and fingers and cried noiselessly in simple, weary misery. Now and then he uttered a quavering sigh.

For a long time Jackie huddled in the blankets on the lorry deck, eyes wide open and unseeing, like a dying animal. Every time the vehicle halted, Pop Keever came back to see how he was getting on.

‘I think he's asleep with his eyes open,' he confided to his sons.

Jackie heard the laboured breathing of the fire as it died in the last patches of charcoal. The idling wind was full of ash and charred smells; now and then, like a breath, it brought the crude, hideous stink of burning fat. How could animals carry any fat on their strung bones after such a drought? Jackie wondered. At either side the devastated trees stretched in a grey and rufous sea; charred rocks, revealed by the fire, were like huge burned skulls. The road was littered with the carcasses of birds which, fleeing, had been licked out of the sky by tongues of boiling air.

His mind was inert. Nothing but the enormous pain of his hands concerned him. He concentrated on that greedily, but fell asleep, toppling over on the lorry deck like a shot duck. When they came to the edge of the burned-out area, Pop Keever and the boys were able to lift him to a stretcher without waking him.

Hundreds of fire-fighters were still at work on the edge of the smouldering, shrinking bush. Large breaks had been felled. There were cars and trucks everywhere, crowds of fatigued, blackened men.

‘About five thousand acres gone, I guess,' remarked the police sergeant. ‘Funny, all this bush was due to be cleared for pastoral development, but the Government decided against it, with the slump threatening and all. Well, they got it cleared now, the sods. Four dead.' He sighed, a stout man's asthmatic sigh. ‘Wonder how it started, eh?'