The Thorn Birds

  Dane and Justine came through the windows.

  “Nanna, may we ride down to the borehead?”

  “You know the rules. No riding unless your mother gives her permission personally. I’m sorry, but they’re your mother’s orders. Where are your manners? Come and be introduced to our visitor.”

  “I’ve already met them.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’d have thought you’d be away at boarding school,” he said to Dane, smiling.

  “Not in December, Your Eminence. We’re off for two months—the summer holidays.”

  Too many years away; he had forgotten that southern hemisphere children would enjoy their long vacation during December and January.

  “Are you going to be staying here long, Your Eminence?” Dane queried, still fascinated.

  “His Eminence will be with us for as long as he can manage, Dane,” said his grandmother, “but I think he’s going to find it a little wearing to be addressed as Your Eminence all the time. What shall it be? Uncle Ralph?”

  “Uncle!” exclaimed Justine. “You know ‘uncle’ is against the family rules, Nanna! Our uncles are just Bob, Jack, Hughie, Jims and Patsy. So that means he’s Ralph.”

  “Don’t be so rude, Justine! What on earth’s the matter with your manners?” demanded Fee.

  “No, Fee, it’s all right. I’d prefer that everyone call me plain Ralph, really,” the Cardinal said quickly. Why did she dislike him so, the odd mite?

  “I couldn’t!” gasped Dane. “I couldn’t call you just Ralph!”

  Cardinal Ralph crossed the room, took the bare shoulders between his hands and smiled down, his blue eyes very kind, and vivid in the room’s shadows. “Of course you can, Dane. It isn’t a sin.”

  “Come on, Dane, let’s get back to the cubbyhouse,” Justine ordered.

  Cardinal Ralph and his son turned toward Fee, looked at her together.

  “Heaven help us!” said Fee. “Go on, Dane, go outside and play, will you?” She clapped her hands. “Buzz!”

  The boy ran for his life, and Fee edged toward her books. Cardinal Ralph took pity on her and announced that he would go to the cookhouse. How little the place had changed! Still lamplit, obviously. Still redolent of beeswax and great vases of roses.

  He stayed talking to Mrs. Smith and the maids for a long time. They had grown much older in the years since he had left, but somehow age suited them more than it did Fee. Happy. That’s what they were. Genuinely almost perfectly happy. Poor Fee, who wasn’t happy. It made him hungry to see Meggie, see if she was happy.

  But when he left the cookhouse Meggie wasn’t back, so to fill in time he strolled through the grounds toward the creek. How peaceful the cemetery was; there were six bronze plaques on the mausoleum wall, just as there had been last time. He must see that he himself was buried here; he must remember to instruct them, when he returned to Rome. Near the mausoleum he noticed two new graves, old Tom, the garden rouseabout, and the wife of one of the stockmen, who had been on the payroll since 1946. Must be some sort of record. Mrs. Smith thought he was still with them because his wife lay here. The Chinese cook’s ancestral umbrella was quite faded from all the years of fierce sun, had dwindled from its original imperial red through the various shades he remembered to its present whitish-pink, almost ashes of roses. Meggie, Meggie. You went back to him after me, you bore him a son.

  It was very hot; a little wind came, stirred the weeping willows along the creek, made the bells on the Chinese cook’s umbrella chime their mournful tinny tune: Hee Sing, Hee Sing, Hee Sing. Tankstand Charlie he was a good bloke. That had faded, too, was practically indecipherable. Well, it was fitting. Graveyards ought to sink back into the bosom of Mother Earth, lose their human cargo under a wash of time, until it all was gone and only the air remembered, sighing. He didn’t want to be buried in a Vatican crypt, among men like himself. Here, among people who had really lived.

  Turning, his eyes caught the glaucous glance of the marble angel. He raised his hand, saluted it, looked across the grass toward the big house. And she was coming, Meggie. Slim, golden, in a pair of breeches and a white man’s shirt exactly like his own, a man’s grey felt hat on the back of her head, tan boots on her feet. Like a boy, like her son, who should have been his son. He was a man, but when he too lay here there would be nothing left living to mark the fact.

  She came on, stepped over the white fence, came so close all he could see were her eyes, those grey, light-filled eyes which hadn’t lost their beauty or their hold over his heart. Her arms were around his neck, his fate again within his touch, it was as if he had never been away from her, that mouth alive under his, not a dream; so long wanted, so long. A different kind of sacrament, dark like the earth, having nothing to do with the sky.

  “Meggie, Meggie,” he said, his face in her hair, her hat on the grass, his arms around her.

  “It doesn’t seem to matter, does it? Nothing ever changes,” she said, eyes closed.

  “No, nothing changes,” he said, believing it.

  “This is Drogheda, Ralph. I warned you, on Drogheda you’re mine, not God’s.”

  “I know. I admit it. But I came.” He drew her down onto the grass. “Why, Meggie?”

  “Why what?” Her hand was stroking his hair, whiter than Fee’s now, still thick, still beautiful.

  “Why did you go back to Luke? Have his son?” he asked jealously.

  Her soul looked out from behind its lucent grey windows and veiled its thoughts from him. “He forced me to,” she said blandly. “It was only once. But I had Dane, so I’m not sorry. Dane was worth everything I went through to get him.”

  “I’m sorry, I had no right to ask. I gave you to Luke in the first place, didn’t I?”

  “That’s true, you did.”

  “He’s a wonderful boy. Does he look like Luke?”

  She smiled secretly, plucked at the grass, laid her hand inside his shirt, against his chest. “Not really. Neither of my children looks very much like Luke, or me.”

  “I love them because they’re yours.”

  “You’re as sentimental as ever. Age suits you, Ralph. I knew it would, I hoped I’d have the chance to see it. Thirty years I’ve known you! It seems like thirty days.”

  “Thirty years? As many as that?”

  “I’m forty-one, my dear, so it must be.” She got to her feet. “I was officially sent to summon you inside. Mrs. Smith is laying on a splendid tea in your honor, and later on when it’s a bit cooler there’s to be roast leg of pork, with lots of crackling.”

  He began to walk with her, slowly. “Your son laughs just like you, Meggie. His laugh was the first human noise I heard on Drogheda. I thought he was you; I went to find you and I discovered him instead.”

  “So he was the first person you saw on Drogheda.”

  “Why, yes, I suppose he was.”

  “What did you think of him, Ralph?” she asked eagerly.

  “I liked him. How could I not, when he’s your son? But I was attracted to him very strongly, far more so than to your daughter. She doesn’t like me, either.”

  “Justine might be my child, but she’s a prize bitch. I’ve learned to swear in my old age, mostly thanks to Justine. And you, a little. And Luke, a little. And the war, a little. Funny how they all mount up.”

  “You’ve changed a lot, Meggie.”

  “Have I?” The soft, full mouth curved into a smile. “I don’t think so, really. It’s just the Great Northwest, wearing me down, stripping off the layers like Salome’s seven veils. Or like an onion, which is how Justine would rather put it. No poetry, that child. I’m the same old Meggie, Ralph, only more naked.”

  “Perhaps so.”

  “Ah, but you’ve changed, Ralph.”

  “In what way, my Meggie?”

  “As if the pedestal rocks with every passing breeze, and as if the view from up there is a disappointment.”

  “It is.” He laughed soundlessly. “And to think I once had the temerity to say
you weren’t anything out of the ordinary! I take it back. You’re the one woman, Meggie. The one!”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. Did I discover even Church idols have feet of clay? Did I sell myself for a mess of pottage? Am I grasping at nothing?” His brows drew togther, as if in pain. “And that’s it, perhaps, in a nutshell. I’m a mass of clichés. It’s an old, sour, petrified world, the Vatican world.”

  “I was more real, but you could never see it.”

  “There was nothing else I could do, truly! I knew where I should have gone, but I couldn’t. With you I might have been a better man, if less august. But I just couldn’t, Meggie. Oh, I wish I could make you see that!”

  Her hand stole along his bare arm, tenderly. “Dear Ralph, I do see it. I know, I know…. Each of us has something within us which won’t be denied, even if it makes us scream aloud to die. We are what we are, that’s all. Like the old Celtic legend of the bird with the thorn in its breast, singing its heart out and dying. Because it has to, it’s driven to. We can know what we do wrong even before we do it, but self-knowledge can’t affect or change the outcome, can it? Everyone singing his own little song, convinced it’s the most wonderful song the world has ever heard. Don’t you see? We create our own thorns, and never stop to count the cost. All we can do is suffer the pain, and tell ourselves it was well worth it.”

  “That’s what I don’t understand. The pain.” He glanced down at her hand, so gently on his arm, hurting him so unbearably. “Why the pain, Meggie?”

  “Ask God, Ralph,” said Meggie. “He’s the authority on pain, isn’t He? He made us what we are, He made the whole world. Therefore He made the pain, too.”

  Bob, Jack, Hughie, Jims and Patsy were in for dinner, since it was Saturday night. Tomorrow Father Watty was due out to say Mass, but Bob called him and said no one would be there. A white lie, to preserve Cardinal Ralph’s anonymity. The five Cleary boys were more like Paddy than ever, older, slower in speech, as steadfast and enduring as the land. And how they loved Dane! Their eyes never seemed to leave him, even followed him from the room when he went to bed. It wasn’t hard to see they lived for the day when he would be old enough to join them in running Drogheda.

  Cardinal Ralph had also discovered the reason for Justine’s enmity. Dane had taken a fancy to him, hung on his words, lingered near him; she was plain jealous.

  After the children had gone upstairs, he looked at those who were left: the brothers, Meggie, Fee.

  “Fee, leave your desk for a moment,” he said. “Come and sit here with us. I want to talk to all of you.”

  She still carried herself well and hadn’t lost her figure, only slackened in the breasts, thickened very slightly in the waist; more a shaping due to old age than to an actual weight gain. Silently she seated herself in one of the big cream chairs opposite the Cardinal, with Meggie to one side, and the brothers on stone benches close by.

  “It’s about Frank,” he said.

  The name hung between them, resounding distantly.

  “What about Frank?” asked Fee composedly.

  Meggie laid her knitting down, looked at her mother, then at Cardinal Ralph. “Tell us, Ralph,” she said quickly, unable to bear her mother’s composure a moment longer.

  “Frank has served almost thirty years in jail, do you realize that?” asked the Cardinal. “I know my people kept you informed as we arranged, but I had asked them not to distress you unduly. I honestly couldn’t see what good it could do Frank or yourselves to hear the harrowing details of his loneliness and despair, because there was nothing any of us might have done. I think Frank would have been released some years ago had he not gained a reputation for violence and instability during his early years in Goulburn Gaol. Even as late as the war, when some other prisoners were released into armed service, poor Frank was refused.”

  Fee glanced up from her hands. “It’s his temper,” she said without emotion.

  The Cardinal seemed to be having some difficulty in finding the right words; while he sought for them, the family watched him in mingled dread and hope, though it wasn’t Frank’s welfare they cared about.

  “It must be puzzling you greatly why I came back to Australia after all these years,” Cardinal Ralph said finally, not looking at Meggie. “I haven’t always been mindful of your lives, and I know it. From the day I met you, I’ve thought of myself first, put myself first. And when the Holy Father rewarded my labors on behalf of the Church with a cardinal’s mantle, I asked myself if there was any service I could do the Cleary family which in some way would tell them how deeply I care.” He drew a breath, focused his gaze on Fee, not on Meggie. “I came back to Australia to see what I could do about Frank. Do you remember, Fee, that time I spoke to you after Paddy and Stu died? Twenty years ago, and I’ve never been able to forget the look in your eyes. So much energy and vitality, crushed.”

  “Yes,” said Bob abruptly, his eyes riveted on his mother. “Yes, that’s it.”

  “Frank is being paroled,” said the Cardinal. “It was the only thing I could do to show you that I do care.”

  If he had expected a sudden, dazzling blaze of light from out of Fee’s long darkness, he would have been very disappointed; at first it was no more than a small flicker, and perhaps the toll of age would never really permit it to shine at full brightness. But in the eyes of Fee’s sons he saw its true magnitude, and knew a sense of his own purpose he hadn’t felt since that time during the war when he had talked to the young German soldier with the imposing name.

  “Thank you,” said Fee.

  “Will you welcome him back to Drogheda?” he asked the Cleary men.

  “This is his home, it’s where he ought to be,” Bob answered elliptically.

  Everyone nodded agreement save Fee, who seemed intent on some private vision.

  “He isn’t the same Frank,” Cardinal Ralph went on gently. “I visited him in Goulburn Gaol to tell him the news before I came here, and I had to let him know everyone on Drogheda had always been aware what had happened to him. If I tell you that he didn’t take it hard, it might give you some idea of the change in him. He was simply…grateful. And so looking forward to seeing his family again, especially you, Fee.”

  “When’s he being released?” Bob asked, clearing his throat, pleasure for his mother clearly warring with fear of what would happen when Frank returned.

  “In a week or two. He’ll come up on the night mail. I wanted him to fly, but he said he preferred the train.”

  “Patsy and I will meet him,” Jims offered eagerly, then his face fell. “Oh! We don’t know what he looks like!”

  “No,” said Fee. “I’ll meet him myself. On my own. I’m not in my dotage yet; I can still drive to Gilly.”

  “Mum’s right,” said Meggie firmly, forestalling a chorus of protests from her brothers. “Let Mum meet him on her own. She’s the one ought to see him first.”

  “Well, I have work to do,” said Fee gruffly, getting up and moving toward her desk.

  The five brothers rose as one man. “And I reckon it’s our bedtime,” said Bob, yawning elaborately. He smiled shyly at Cardinal Ralph. “It will be like old times, to have you saying Mass for us in the morning.”

  Meggie folded her knitting, put it away, got up. “I’ll say good night, too, Ralph.”

  “Good night, Meggie.” His eyes followed her as she went out of the room, then turned to Fee’s hunched back. “Good night, Fee.”

  “I beg your pardon? Did you say something?”

  “I said good night.”

  “Oh! Good night, Ralph.”

  He didn’t want to go upstairs so soon after Meggie. “I’m going for a walk before I turn in, I think. Do you know something, Fee?”

  “No.” Her voice was absent.

  “You don’t fool me for a minute.”

  She snorted with laughter, an eerie sound. “Don’t I? I wonder about that.”

  Late, and the stars. The southern stars, wheeling a
cross the heavens. He had lost his hold upon them forever, though they were still there, too distant to warm, too remote to comfort. Closer to God, Who was a wisp between them. For a long time he stood looking up, listening to the wind in the trees, smiling.

  Reluctant to be near Fee, he used the flight of stairs at the far end of the house; the lamp over her desk still burned and he could see her bent silhouette there, working. Poor Fee. How much she must dread going to bed, though perhaps when Frank came home it would be easier. Perhaps.

  At the top of the stairs silence met him thickly; a crystal lamp on a narrow hall table shed a dim pool of light for the comfort of nocturnal wanderers, flickering as the night breeze billowed the curtains inward around the window next to it. He passed it by, his feet on the heavy carpeting making no sound.

  Meggie’s door was wide open, more light welling through it; blocking the rays for a moment, he shut her door behind him and locked it. She had donned a loose wrapper and was sitting in a chair by the window looking out across the invisible Home Paddock, but her head turned to watch him walk to the bed, sit on its edge. Slowly she got up and came to him.

  “Here, I’ll help you get your boots off. That’s the reason I never wear knee ones myself. I can’t get them off without a jack, and a jack ruins good boots.”

  “Did you wear that color deliberately, Meggie?”

  “Ashes of roses?” She smiled. “It’s always been my favorite color. It doesn’t clash with my hair.”

  He put one foot on her backside while she pulled a boot off, then changed it for the bare foot.

  “Were you so sure I’d come to you, Meggie?”

  “I told you. On Drogheda you’re mine. Had you not come to me, I’d have gone to you, make no mistake.” She drew his shirt over his head, and for a moment her hand rested with luxurious sensitivity on his bare back, then she went across to the lamp and turned it out, while he draped his clothes over a chair back. He could hear her moving about, shedding her wrapper. And tomorrow morning I’ll say Mass. But that’s tomorrow morning, and the magic has long gone. There is still the night, and Meggie. I have wanted her. She, too, is a sacrament.