A Woman of the Inner Sea

  —What are we going to tell people? Guthega asks, taking up his son’s earlier theme.

  —What are we going to tell people? cries Noel.

  Gus murmurs yet can be heard over the noises of water on the move and of the engine.

  —You and the boy weren’t even there, that’s the first thing.

  —Everyone knows we were.

  Gus said, No, people like Jack know you and your son were. But the whole world doesn’t have the sort of information Jack Murchison had.

  —But they’ll grill you and Kate, for Christ’s sake.

  —No, listen, said Gus. No one knew Kate was with Jelly. And me … well, why don’t you say I was with him?

  —Jesus Christ, said Guthega with a kind of reverence. But he was shivering.

  —Say I was, will you? asks Gus. Go on. Say it.

  —I’ll say it, offered Kate.

  —Good. You’ll say it? Guthega? Noel?

  He exacted quick promises as he steered the boat.

  —Now stick to it, he said. Just have a bit of gumption and stick to it. And you’ll all be clear.

  —Oh Jesus, said the bereft, weeping Guthega.

  But in their void of shock and in their shame, he and his son fearfully agreed with everything Gus said.

  Shy of the Federal Hotel, the prow of the aluminum boat touched earth. Kate could see that Jelly had managed to empty out the water from the Federal, and from God knew what other institutions and hearths!

  Noel the shearing champion got out and began to drag the boat with them all in it over the mud to the Federal’s railings. He had not spoken much and he was madly eager. Gus rose while this was happening, picked up the bag, stepped out into the mud, and strolled beside the towed boat with Guthega and Kate in it.

  —You and the boy weren’t there, he repeated with even greater dogmatism, and Kate wasn’t. I might’ve been but I’m missing. That’s it, isn’t it, Guthega? Covers everything. Fixes all the headache wafers.

  Noel intended to continue hauling the boat along Commonwealth Street. He didn’t want people saying he hadn’t done everything possible. Whatever his faults with small animals, he had energy for objects of substance.

  —Okay, Noel, called Gus. Enough’s enough, son.

  Guthega started weeping.

  —You’re going to have to clear out, aren’t you? Pee-Oh-Queue. Aren’t you?

  —Well, I will, yes.

  Guthega didn’t want to be left to fend.

  —Going to bugger off …

  —Over the railway bridge, said Kate. She remembered the nurse.

  —Yes, said Gus. The railway bridge’s the go.

  Guthega was still seated in the stationary boat in the mud, and he shuddered and asked, What about Jelly? What about poor bloody Jelly?

  —I’ll take him, said Gus.

  —Jesus! And what about your livestock?

  —I’ll take them. You just keep things clear in that head there, Guthega. It doesn’t matter what those who know us know.

  Gus was already smoothing down his black hair; making ready.

  Eighteen

  SOMETIME LATE in this heavy night Gus, wiry and sober, carrying his tarpaulin bag, leads Chifley and stiff-kneed Menzies up the road, enticing the animals forward with pellets of stockfeed amidst houses draining of water.

  No one has thought clearly about Jelly’s awful accident except Gus. And he has made proper arrangements.

  He has helped the crazed woman to her room and soothed her to sleep.

  He has paid Noel forty dollars to deliver the furniture truck back to his accommodating friend in Wilcannia in the near future, once the receding ferment of mind leaves Noel clearheaded enough to make the journey.

  He has woken Jack and tragic-eyed Connie and told them, and Jack too has ordered Guthega and Noel what to say, and they are all compacted together in the secret.

  —But why did he take Kate? Jack keeps thinking. In his perturbation, he has to resist waking her now to ask.

  Jack placates Connie.

  —It doesn’t have any bearing on your pub license, he has to keep telling her with something close to contempt.

  Gus talks and talks and they become calm.

  Then, very late, he and the beasts drive out of the old stables at the back of Murchison’s Railway Hotel without anyone noticing, though there have been people, Burnside included amongst them, walking up and down the pub’s verandahs, in the hard yellow of the light from Jack’s emergency generator, asking if anyone had heard that bloody great bang about an hour ago, and speculating on the flood.

  He parks the truck by the Federal. He persuades the beasts into the boat which Noel had dragged high in the mud there. Menzies has stepped in stiff-kneed. He has lifted Chifley’s mighty tail in a way which has caused Chifley to yield up suspicion and jump into the aluminum tub.

  Gus then reverses Noel’s work, pushing and dragging the boat into the water. In the shallows the bird folds the stalks of its legs and settles to the floor. Chifley stays upright, broadly balanced on his tail. A kangaroo afloat, a sight which, if there were drunks to witness it, would cause them to swear off liquor.

  Far away to the left, the water police and the rescuers have lit the gap in the line and run their engines in reverse to prevent themselves being sucked through with the water into the uncontained western plains.

  He was in the water to his knees, ready to board himself, when he saw a shadow of Kate in the shallows four or five paces away. She seemed to be watching him, sharp-eyed from the little he could make out of her. She seemed to be carrying an airline bag. What of the exhausted woman he’d recently put to sleep? Where was she?

  —How could I stay asleep? she asked him. What do you think the first thing I dreamed of was?

  She shone a torch at him as a means of emphasis. She saw him close one eye. So clearly he wanted to be alone on the road with his charges. She switched the torch off.

  —No. Listen, Jack’ll think I took you off.

  But she had the answer.

  After packing her bag, she’d entered the Murchisons’ bedroom to leave a little note, and heard their night breath. Connie slept with skeptical little intakes of breath, but Jack’s was deep, slow, imperial. He had transcended the need for bar staff.

  —He’ll do well without me. He’s got volunteers … They all want to be around him. He won’t need anyone in particular for a long time now.

  —Jesus, it’ll confuse everyone. They’ll think something’s happened to you.

  —Well … Did you see a man called Burnside? At the Palais last night?

  —I’m not going to be responsible …

  She began to weep on the edge of the flood, but there was something not supine but imperative in her tears.

  —Please, she told him. Now Jelly’s gone.

  He was in a sense the inheritor.

  In the end Gus lacks the power to rebuff her, and so asks her to get into the dinghy with the beasts.

  The leaving of Myambagh is so unexpectedly easy.

  Gus could reasonably expect that the fall in the water level has left a gravelly beach exposed below the embankment, just where it meets the line going west to Bourke. A beach of gravel and shingle. Gus grounded the aluminum boat here, and Kate trod ashore with her airline bag, accompanied straight away without hesitation by Chifley the incarnate marsupial joy of her dreams, the shadow of her shadow. How she welcomed this far shore. If she had tried to utter her gratitude for not being left, she would have been defeated. There was no idiom available to her for a task like that.

  In a different world, Gus might have looked comic carrying Menzies ashore, hefting the abdomen high so that the long legs would clear the gunwales of the boat and the shaly patch of beach. Such trust the bird showed: deposited on the little beach, he stood waiting.

  Gus reached back into the dinghy to fetch the tarpaulin bag.

  —Come on then, Kate.

  Scrabbling up the embankment, she was watching the kangaroo, alre
ady briskly away and up there on the railway line above her, the line which traveled away from Jelly’s hole. The main line to Bourke. Out to Bourke, people said, to signify great distance, great dry distance, great dry interior distance. Not dry tonight though. To Bourke and back, people said to the same effect.

  Gus’s rescued beasts moved as companionably as dogs in the company of Gus and Kate, sometimes going ahead along the embankment, sometimes lagging. Essential company for the night of Jelly’s obliteration. She was their dependent. She prayed nothing more would be taken before morning.

  A little comradely walk, and Kate could hear but not see the surge of water below her, and feel the steel presence of the bridge’s superstructure. The vacancy between the sleepers was opaque in this light. Chifley’s paws overhung the gaps. Sometimes there was a slippage of one of his hind legs. But the great tail spanned four or five spaces, and Chifley would adjust himself like a man pulling his foot out of a bog. The lack of vertigo displayed by Chifley, high-stepping Menzies and Gus as a group imbued her with the means to make progress too.

  Halfway across, Gus stepped out to the edge of the bridge-works, carrying the tarpaulin bags in his hands. He showed a steeplejack’s lack of fear.

  He calls, Kate!

  Kate sees and approves the aptness of his intention. Yes. Okay.

  For from this woman who once was a girl in Loreto Convent there comes no glib formula, no Requiescat in pace. Jelly won’t rest in peace. Jelly will be an unquiet spirit in the river. He will hold it in a kind of equipoise, tugging it down with the weight of his spirit.

  Gus lets the remnants of Jelly fall. An instant after Gus’s hand lets go, there is only a uniform abyss. Country selector, railway clerk, invalid pensioner, bar priest and dynamiter, he is plainly gone. Since the engorged river is putting out its own rhetoric, there is no noise of an entry into the water. To assert his presence, Jelly might need to wait for the level to fall and the current to slacken.

  Across the bridge and a little way from the river’s racket, the line declines into a flooded cutting, and to Kate’s surprise the beasts are happy to wade or lollop their way through this. She wonders can they see or smell the hill on the far side? Jelly has barely been dropped from Gus’s hand, but this speculation is throwing a shadow of exaltation on her in the liquid black of the cutting.

  Where the silver rails emerged from the water and took some of the minute light available to surfaces tonight, the Schulberger party located themselves between the parallels and climbed the slow rise.

  Gus was reflecting on Jelly’s history.

  —A tremendous prop forward, you know. Got a trial with a city club. But his wife wanted to stay with her mother. So Jelly was persuaded out of it. Typical of Jelly’s poor bloody life. He stayed in town for his wife’s sake, and his wife left him anyhow. And now look.

  Gus’s hard life on a Soldier Settler farm near Bourke had given him perfect wind. He did not seem to pause for breath as he reached the crest and concluded Jelly’s encomium.

  —When he was a country selector, he said, politicians used to queue up to shake his hand. Now his hand’s in the river.

  —Yes, said Kate. A few strange shuddering tears broke out of her. They felt as if they were a long distance from her, glaciers on the moon’s face.

  Making his way along the lines, Gus confessed he didn’t know what they should do. Keep on this path or cut across the paddocks to the road? Partly flooded, it was off to their right hand, but if they took it, how could they explain themselves to the police or to anyone likely to give them a lift?

  Not reaching any answer for the moment, Gus began complaining about the beasts.

  —These poor animals will follow me like dogs. They’ve lost their nationality. They think they’re related to me or something. Better for poor bloody Menzies if someone had blown his egg and etched a palm tree design on it. He might have been a bloody sight happier as an ornamental emu egg.

  She was uneasy to find him hoping the bird back into the egg.

  —Yet you rescued them from Wagga, Kate argued.

  —Of course, with Chifley, it’s hard to wish him the slow death he’d’ve had in his mother’s pouch. We ran her down by accident one dusk. And we find Chifley’s still alive in the pouch. So we felt a responsibility. But this is bloody hard now, too. Look at him.

  Chifley had waited behind a moment sitting on the rails and taking thought. Soon he would bound ahead, sit and contemplate again, earnestly domestic, eager as a cattle dog.

  —Bugger’s so pleased to be out of Wagga. And he thinks he’s a member of the bloody union.

  Kate has had a sharp though short education in floods, and she is considering their position in this light. Again, the question is slow travel by a railway track, possibly faster by road. If they could negotiate the flooded paddocks between the line and the road, she thinks, the road would be the go. On the western side of any flooded low point, there may be discovered a half-drowned car which Gus in his cleverness would know how to revive.

  So the stratagem she offers to Gus is that they should watch the pastures either side of the track. If they find a flooded region, they should cross through it on the relative height of the railway track and then, when they get to the shallows on the far side, take a right-hand course directly across the fields at that very point, along the inland edge of the dip of earth where, it could be hoped, someone’s car had choked.

  Not of course that a car is much use for conveying Chifley and Menzies, with their odd antediluvian design.

  Gus and Kate in their gumboots and with the beasts and the still palpable presence of Jelly, traversed the shallows of someone’s lucerne field. Floodwater had spoiled it.

  —Who’d be a farmer? Gus asked of the universe, though himself a farmer and cowcocky.

  Kate grew weary. To her it seemed an unconscionably, a maliciously more-than-average distance from the rail to the road. She had thought the two were meant to echo each other. But this was no echo. It was a long picking of the way. Coming to one after another barbed wire fence, always part awash, parallel to the railway line but presenting no parallel highway!

  At the fences Gus seemed to become overtaken by anxiety about Menzies’ thin legs. Again, as at the boat earlier in the evening, he would lift the large eccentric bird by the bowl of the abdomen and pass him across the wire to Kate. Menzies seemed extraordinarily at ease with this arrangement.

  Chifley was an eccentric case. He could have cleared the fences at a bound, even on this ground. Instead he broached them lazily, humanwise, lifting up a strand of wire with a shoulder, pulling down lower ones with his great hind feet. Inserting his head through. Delightful to see, it was the negative of bounding. It was the whimsy of a great bounding beast.

  —See the way he gets through fences? Gus asked Kate. See?

  Gus pretended to be annoyed at Chifley’s laziness.

  At last their hard progress brought them to an embankment, and on top of it a road.

  The top of the road was very dry. Gus took her apologetically by the elbow. They must return a little way now, back toward the flooded town Jelly had relieved.

  Soon they could see the vehicle waiting for them, a white van, almost luminous, its rear high, its snout stuck into a broad arm of flood. The van had red and blue lettering on its flanks which said that it belonged to a particular signwriter, O’Riordan of Bourke. Someone to the east of Myambagh, in Dubbo or Wagga perhaps, had lured the signwriter down here under swollen skies, promising him a contract, and when his engine choked in the water across the road, he’d sworn blue Jesus on the side of the road, and someone had given him a lift back to Girilambone or even perhaps Cobar, where he had to stay in a pub or motel, and knew that in the morning—even if things got no worse—he would need a tow truck and a mechanic.

  And he would sit on his bed with his head in his hands, or buy himself a middy in the bar and complain to everyone.

  —This fucking job is really going to cost me the earth now!
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  The water the signwriter’s truck was stuck in had a strong current, and it was hard to believe that it was not affected one way or another by Jelly’s great releasing of the Myambagh waters. Gus had to wade in tentatively, hauling Kate behind him by the hand. He wanted her to sit in the cabin and release the bonnet lever. She did it. The truck opened its maw. She could see in the side mirrors that Menzies pecked in the gravel on the edge of the water and along the broken tar of the road. But Chifley was leaping westward. That easy lope which delighted Kate in spite of everything; and then he sat back on his tail for a while and thought, and then loped east and sat again back on the thick, stupendous tail to regard Kate through the open window.

  —Well, she found herself telling him. Well, where are the bloody tears?

  Chifley went on staring at her indirectly, largely through reflection off the side mirror. She had found herself entertaining this fantastical idea that he had her tears held somewhere and would release them to her some time or other. Where did such a notion come from? She was engrossed by it anyhow. But Chifley did not stay long enough for it to become fixed. He loped away again to the west. All this thought seemed dependent on movement.

  She got out of the cabin to discover if she could see a little of what Gus was doing. The water came up over the top of her boots and she felt the shock of its cold. She bent down and scooped up a handful and drank it. It not only smelt of, but tasted too of mud and the rankness of dead cattle and sheep and foxes. It was water of substance.

  Gus talked to her about magnetos. He held spark plugs up toward an utterly shrouded moon, and blew at their apertures, cleaning them with the flame of a Bic lighter. He promised to open and clean the carburetor.

  —No sense in your standing there in the water, love.

  But she kept standing there, turning numb, hearing the beasts pace and shift behind her. Their habits would have brought imperfection into the Wagga man’s tableau vivant. The six medallions of the founding states of the Commonwealth of Australia could be made to stand still indefinitely, secure in their bush heraldry. But Chifley would have needed to lope aside for contemplation, and Menzies must work the earth, forwarding and backing over its surface.