Swords and Crowns and Rings (5 page)

‘I
beg
your pardon!' said Mr Moy cuttingly.

‘Granted,' said innocent Jackie, and he had the temerity to seize a piece of the sincere dark trouser-leg in his filthy fist and beseech: ‘Don't give Cushie a belting. She didn't know we weren't allowed to go.'

But of course Cushie was whacked by her mother all the way up the stairs into her room, where she was brusquely undressed with many a severe comment on the state of her clothes, and dumped into bed. Cowed, the child was silent as the mother turned at the door.

Mrs Moy herself was drained and cold with fatigue. The long worrying day, the journeys with the train-sick, cranky Olwyn, the frightening warnings of the doctor, had exhausted her. Half her anger with Cushie was because the child had added one more burden to the day. She hated chastising her daughter. It seemed to her that was the duty of a nanny, not a mother. And Cushie's extravagant reaction to blows that scarcely ever reached her legs shocked her.

‘You silly little thing!' she said. ‘You're not really hurt. Stop making such a fuss! Daddy will think you're a coward.'

Cushie could not tell her that the blows meant nothing, but the disapproval everything. Woebegone, she kept her eyes shut.

‘Now, don't sulk,' said Mrs Moy. ‘I'm going downstairs to get you some supper.'

As she closed the door she had an impulse to go back into the room, take the child in her arms, rock her till she was calm, tell her she wasn't a bad, wicked girl any more, but loved and precious, her own chick, her dotie kitten. Where had these inexplicable words come from? These kitchen endearments that no lady would use? Mrs Moy, with a nostalgic dart of pain, remembered that her mother had said them to her, after she had pushed one of her sisters down the stairs and been severely punished.

When she brought up a tray of supper for the penitent, she found Cushie asleep.

Jackie, on the other hand, splashing and sliding around in a hip-bath before the kitchen stove, snorting the soap out of his nose and drawing faces with lather on the front of his mother's apron, spent an exciting hour telling her at breakneck pace about the fish, the Chinaman, the eagle on high in the sky, and the awful manner of its imprisonment and mutilation. Mrs Hanna accepted the eagle's fate in a prosaic countrywoman's way.

‘What do you expect?' she said, dabbing his cuts and grazes with a solution of Condy's crystals. ‘I bet the rotten thing had been robbing the traps and ruining the rabbits' skins. Them wedge-tails are only pests. They even eat the new lambs, I've heard.'

But Jackie was looking with amazement at the dark brown patches staining his skin. ‘If I painted my nose with that stuff would I have a black nose?'

Before she could answer, he had grabbed the cottonwool and painted his nose.

‘Serves you right,' said his mother.

She gave him his supper and put him to bed, and in a moment he was asleep, dreamless, flushed, his blackened nose burrowed into the blanket. It was then that she felt worn out, overcome by the anxieties of the day, remembering that it was the anniversary of her husband's death, and she was alone. A fearful apathy and weariness of life almost submerged her. She looked about the untidy kitchen, the dirty dishes, the puddled floor.

This was the evening the last clock stopped.

On Monday morning Mrs Moy swept into the shop to express her alarm and displeasure at the children's adventure. But Mrs Hanna, still caught up in a joy both calm and inexplicable, refused to be nettled and agreed that Jackie had been both foolish and naughty to take Cushie off on his quest.

‘It's them fairytales,' she explained. ‘But he knows better now. I hope you'll still let the little one come and play, for they're as good as gold together and never a squabble out of them.'

Mrs Moy flushed faintly. ‘There was a question of bad language,' she said. ‘My husband was horrified...a child of six!'

‘There's no telling where the children pick it up, is there?' lied Mrs Hanna rapidly.

‘We wouldn't like Dorothy to learn any common expressions,' said Mrs Moy. ‘You understand?'

‘I do, I do!' said Mrs Hanna. ‘I'll not let young Jackie get away with it, I promise you. Oh, he'll get a tongue-lashing, if not worse, now that you've brought it back to me mind.'

Jackie got up tired and cantankerous, obscurely displeased about the failure of his quest, violently hating his deep-dyed nose, and knowing that he'd never dare take it down the road to play with the boys.

So when his mother treacherously attacked him about his use of a bad word to Mr Moy, he retorted as vigorously.

‘But it
was
a bloody hill, it was a
bloody
steep hill.'

‘You're not to say
bloody
!'

‘You say it, you bloody well know you do!'

‘If I don't half-kill you for that, you young devil!' said Mrs Hanna, ‘You just wait till I get to you!'

But, being sensible, Jackie was away around the brown-sugar barrel and the kerosene drums and half-way towards the door before his mother could count four. Bad luck for Jackie that the door opened then to let in the Nun, come with the Sisters' weekly grocery order. He grabbed Jackie by the coat collar and held him, the little boy flailing and spitting, and doing his best to get the Nun around the hips and squeeze the tripes out of him.

‘You need help, missus,' observed the Nun.

Jackie let rip with an oath, and the Nun gave him a cuff across the ear that felt like a blow from a handful of candles. The boy fled with a blaspheming howl, and the man turned to Mrs Hanna, rosy and flustered, half inclined to blubber with embarrassment and vexation.

‘That boy needs a father's hand, missus,' said the Nun.

‘Take it up with the Lord, then,' retorted Mrs Hanna spiritedly.

‘No need,' stated the Nun. ‘I've thought it over this last twelve months and I'm here to make you an offer of marriage.'

‘Are you indeed?' snapped Mrs Hanna. ‘You with the reputation you have, half your life downing the stuff up at the Princess May and the other half codding them poor Sisters into paying you good money for the bit of wood you chop that wouldn't cook more than a sausage.'

‘True,' admitted the Nun mildly. ‘I got it sewed up, all right. But I'll give it all up for you, and take care of you and the boy as best I know how.'

Mrs Hanna scarcely knew which way to look, so she bristled and faltered: ‘You! I hardly remember your name!'

‘It's Jerry MacNunn,' said the Nun, ‘as well you know.'

He turned away and began shifting the bags of poultry-feed, which the carrier had carelessly dumped inside the shop door, swinging them easily to their little platform beside the heavy brass scale. Mrs Hanna, half thrilled, half outraged, stared privily at him, his pleasant, rubbery brown face, not old, but already crumpled. What was inside him—a husband? She imagined him with his shirt and trousers off, and got a fright.

He gave her a sideways glance. ‘I'm serious,' he said. ‘Never more so. And if you take me, I'll play a man's part to your satisfaction.'

Mrs Hanna dared not think what he meant.

Hot and red, she stammered, ‘Go away. I'm bothered. I can't think.'

The upshot of it was that within six months Jerry MacNunn and Peggy Hanna were married, and in no time at all the sound of a father's voice and the occasional touch of a father's boot to his stern had straightened out young Jackie.

He and the Nun were as thick as thieves. The Nun got him on to weight-lifting, and taught him how to wrestle. He said that with Jackie's lack of stature there'd be no point in teaching him how to knuckle, for every blow he landed would be a low one.

‘Nevertheless,' he cautioned, ‘there's times when a foul blow may save your life, so I'll inform you how to land such a one and how to dodge it.'

The Nun was a treasurehouse of information to Jackie. From him he learnt how to whistle, tickle trout, play the mouth-organ and the spoons, cook in a camp oven, plant a garden, and shoot rabbits. As for Peggy Hanna, who was then thirty-eight and some eight years older than her husband, she took on the appearance of a woman ten years younger, for she'd never before had the company of a real man. The restraints fell away, her natural exhilaration burst out like a fountain, and she began to see the late Mr Hanna more or less only as a packet of worries, prejudices, and spinsterish little ways and manners all wrapped up in a pair of tradesmen's trousers. Her life with him seemed but a dream, not a bad dream, but one with no significance. She couldn't believe her luck.

The Nun was so good-tempered that being with him was like sitting in the late afternoon sun. He didn't speak much, and when he did all his words were well worn with use. These comfortable, familiar vocal progressions were like an old tune to Mrs MacNunn; she could have listened for hours. Yet her husband's placidity was not indolence; he got things done. He had the clock collection sent to a Sydney firm and auctioned, and with the capital he straightened out the grocery shop and in no time had it running as prosperously as it had done in the days of Walter Hanna's father.

He had a knack, that was it, not only with life but with living. He and Peggy MacNunn had a tremendous amount of love to make, and they made it in all kinds of ways, not only in each other's arms, but with sly glances and smiles and friendly slaps and pushes, yells and sulks and Saturday afternoons at the football, and good hot Sunday dinners. All the air around them was mellow with this simple enjoyment of themselves and each other, and in this golden climate young Jackie bloomed.

The doctor, already stiffening up with arthritis, able to move his crumpled body from place to place only with difficulty, examined Jackie every six months for signs of the orthopaedic and optical deterioration that his books told him sometimes went with dwarfism. But the boy was radiantly healthy, like a tree or a young bear. The grotesqueness of his shape, becoming more noticeable as he grew, did nothing to mar this image of joyful vitality.

‘You've done a great job, Peggy,' said the doctor, ‘and you, too, Nun.'

The War had begun, and young men disappeared from Kings-land in small flurries of beer, tears, and band music. News of battles flickered like harmless lightning over the town. Jackie, growing up, in and out of mischief, had a pantomime idea of ‘The Front', a remote country coloured like jelly babies, populated erratically by camels, Arabs sitting around the wells of Beersheba, Huns in spiked helmets, and our brave boys. The only one of these with whom he had been at all familiar was Cushie Moy's youthful uncle who died of wounds at Gallipoli.

The uncle had, in fact, been a dingy, barking adolescent who stumbled through life as a junior bank clerk under the critical eye of his elder brother, Cushie Moy's father. Their temperaments were in constant opposition, their leisure times filled with uneasy silence or venomous bickering.

Mrs Moy, who had brought her indifference towards the young man to a high level of unkindness, was able to squeeze out a tear every time she spoke of his gallant death, and Mr Moy thought this most becoming of her. But the passionate Cushie, thus brought for the first time into contact with death in her family circle, and rendered stone-cold by terror, endured the mourning atmosphere for a week, and then broke—with a spectacular fit of bawling and vomiting during the memorial service. For this she was slapped and put to bed. She was seven and never forgot her Uncle Graham's demise.

She had hardly recovered from this event before the town hall bells tolled for young Baillie Nicolson, football star and champion runner, Kingsland's hero and only son of John Nicolson, the town bagpiper and the Nun's closest friend. When the news came it was a Saturday so wet and blowy that even the football had been cancelled. Mrs MacNunn had plunged off against the gale towards the school, where the parish ladies held a sewing circle every third Saturday. She had gone before the news of Baillie Nicolson's death was posted up outside the post office so she was not there to support her husband.

It hit him as though Baillie had been his own brother, not for Baillie's own sake, but for the piper's. Old melancholies he had forgotten since he came to Kingsland, childhood wounds and bereavements and horrors, rose up from some place in his soul and nearly swamped him. He lay flat on his bed staring at the ceiling.

The thick cobwebby light of winter afternoon buried him. There was nothing, he thought, but himself alive in the grave of the world. The dead despondency that had so often characterised his mood before his marriage came to him again as he thought of his friend Nicolson.

Some, like his own father, had kids and they punched and kicked them. But those kids were still alive. Nicolson had cherished his only son like a bloody great diamond and now that diamond was lost. Nicolson was a man in solitary now, that hard hawk of a man.

‘I got to go and say something to the old piper,' he thought, ‘and I don't know what to say.'

Jackie watched the fire die down into a grey ruff of ash, streaked with gasping ruby. He had overheard the man who came briefly to the backdoor, and he knew that Baillie Nicolson was killed. He waited for a long time for his stepfather to come out of the bedroom, while the house became colder and darker.

Jackie listened to the lift of the wind, the sudden seething as it found trees to scruff. He tried to distract himself with it as it tried the windows and proved a rattle, whistled through the keyhole as with pursed lips, shouldered the house and the shop, knocking the creaks out of the timber, hoying down the chimney and dusting the hob with ashes, skiffing under the house and across the floor so that one end of the mat reared up at it like a cobra and dropped again.

He was sad and lonely, feeling less than eight years old.

The Nun, sunk in lethargy, heard a new sound above the reeding of the wind, a scrabble at the door. A little sun of light leapt up against the hollow greyness of the hall.