The Mary Smokes Boys (6 page)

In summer Grey would come treading up the back stairs after swimming at the creek with the boys, and when Irene heard his steps she would go and stand in the corridor. Then he smiled at his un-pretty dark-haired sister, and she sighed and held his hands with the unreasonable relief that made him laugh–as though there were any danger out there in the country he knew so well. And if she had some secret to tell him she would wait until any hour, even until sleep overcame her and he found her with her head on her arms on the dining table. If she woke she would tell him whatever childish thing it was that had seemed so important, and he would laugh and send her to bed.

 

WHEN THEIR GRANDMOTHER died both children mourned her, though Grey took the loss harder. The old woman’s dilapidated house in town was sold for pittance, and without her pension check they were very poor. Grey’s part-time work at the cabinet-maker’s and the occasional check mailed by their father kept them on the borderline of poverty. But shortly Grey lost his job. The work had dried up and Jake Naprasnic moved to Toowoomba to live in a nursing home near his only daughter.

When Irene was hungry and without money she would thieve a tin of beef stew or soup from one of the two general shops, and Grey would scold her until tears came to her eyes, but then scold her no more. She took to selling her mother’s things to the antique shop for a fraction of their value until Grey caught her. Her clothes were scandalous, dirty and torn. She cut her own hair, like a boy’s but for a long tress that fell over her forehead or over her ear onto her shoulder. She was pitied by Mary Smokes women. At times they resolved to report the family to whatever government authorities handled such cases, but Grey was growing into a man, some said, and then Bill North would return to the house sober after weeks away from hard liquor.

The first few days of any return from the west, Bill North
spent dry and racked with guilt; then he even attempted to love his children, who regarded him as an occasional boarder. But these spells, both of concern and sobriety, passed quickly, and the man decided it was better for all of them when he was away. After any longer than a fortnight at home Bill North would take to drinking himself into oblivion. One night Grey came home and saw his father lying against the living room wall and the floorboards wet with urine.

Bill North’s bitch had pupped twice in two years to wild dogs and the three pups of the last litter now nipped the heels of any visitor, even Sister Nivard, the Poor Clare who had started looking in on them. She came the night Grey found his father on the floor. In his sister’s bedroom Grey saw Sister Nivard lifting Irene’s nightdress and examining her painfully thin body for marks of abuse, and he knew he must do better.

In time Irene welcomed the aging Sister’s visits. The girl habitually hid her father’s whisky bottles in order to be safe from prying townswomen, but she did not hide them from the Sister, and the Sister was the only visitor the girl would not leave to the half-wild dogs.

Sister Nivard came to the house twice a week to bring bread and canned fish and soap, and perhaps bake the children a simple cake. She told Irene stories of missionary work in India and of the nature of angels according to St. Aquinas, to which the girl listened in rapture. Bill North asked the nun why God watched a girl who was devoted to him die in pain, and left him to live on meaninglessly. He did not expect an answer. Sister Nivard only sighed and her fading blue eyes, set in a face that had never known adornment, stared out the window across the grassland.

Their father believed in nothing, so Catholicism, with all its ritual, hagiography, Latin prayers and icons, had about it the whiff of rebellion. Despite the Sister’s insistence on moderation, Irene would fast on bread and lemon juice every Friday and fast totally on Good Friday and Holy Saturday, taking nothing but a
little water, so by Saturday’s end she was apt to faint. She prayed the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary before her mother’s icons, lit by candles she bought with money stolen from her father’s wallet, and her frail body would excite Grey’s pity.

Irene’s religion was a thousands-of-years-old Eastern book she could barely read; fierce-eyed, long-bearded or serenely feminine, miracle-working saints; but also the slow, silent words she claimed were spoken by the stars; the spirits in the trees; the little waterfall called Wooroolin, deep in the woods, which she declared was sacred. She said at Wooroolin the scent of the water moved against the wind, and there were hours when the falling water made no sound.

She claimed she could see paths lit for her in the deepest corners of the woods. It was true she seemed to have a map and compass always in her mind, even in country she had not seen. She never became lost or frightened, no matter how far she walked, no matter how late. She knew how to follow the creeks and she knew by the shape of the country where they would lie, like one who had spent years there. She knew the stairways of granite and exposed tree roots in the mountains; the lie of lost and forgotten cemeteries; the wild mulberry bushes and wild orange trees where she harvested fruit in its season.

She would play truant from school and sit all day watching the clouds, else sit on Mary Smokes Creek from morning until dusk, calling birds to her hand. Some evenings there would be a phone call to the house to say she had been seen on a stretch of a man’s country, and Grey would drive to collect her. Then he would find her wending her inscrutable way through waves of hay and barley in the dusk, just like the lost simpleton people took her for. And in the night she and Grey would sit together on the splintering back stairs and watch the stars and listen to the wind jangling their half-fallen back fence and soughing in the eucalypts and she-oaks on Mary Smokes.

At school she stood in Grey’s shadow amidst the other sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys, only reluctantly parting
with him to join children her own age when the bell rang for class. She waited faithfully each afternoon for him by the school gate. She would miss the bus rather than leave without him–causing them to have to walk home together.

A jesting rumour persisted that Irene was not Bill North’s daughter, but rather the daughter of the middle-aged Vietnamese cook at Mary Smokes’ Chinese restaurant. It was encouraged by the colour of Irene’s hair and the friendship she had struck up with Minh Quy’s daughter, Amy. The two loners had paired up and, once Grey had left school, they often played on the lawn beside the restaurant after class. Old Minh would give Irene dinner and sometimes there was enough for Grey.

Irene’s hair was black and her face ghostly pale. Her body remained excruciatingly thin even into her mid-teens. Grey guessed this last condition was due to the sicknesses she had suffered. Yet the curious thing about her appearance was not that she must ever bear the marks of infant frailty, but that at the same age her mother’s hair had been white-blonde and her skin olive in the ideal Australian fashion. Grandma Finnain said Irene showed Black Irish blood, a strain of old Celtic via Iberia, but when the girl misbehaved she recalled her Scottish grandfather dealing with a family of reviled Polish Jews from Minden, who for want of companions interbred with Chinamen. They were called Noschkes, and the old woman guessed North was an Anglicisation of that name … More than one lost language, more than one people and history flashed briefly in Irene: in her sharp Celtic tongue, and the deep and whispering Hebrew eyes that always seemed to be looking far away, from the border of this world into some other. In Grey, so far as he could see, these were mute, vanished.

 

THEIR FATHER DID not return to stay permanently at Mary Smokes for seven years, after his horse fell on his leg on the Dumaresq River. He had been working for cash and could claim no pension. He was forced to take up work at the Helidon railway
again, with half the duties he had before and only a dozen hours’ work a week.

By this time Irene had made of Grey a father, brother and closest ally, and welcomed her father home as one would a distant and barely-recognisable uncle. Bill North did not recognize his daughter either–she had lost her infant manners, dictates of her once sickly body. Now, by turns, she was the most vivacious and most solemn of young girls.

Feeling he had lost something never properly valued in time of possession, Bill North tried on occasion to reclaim the small part of his daughter’s affections that had been his, but the attempts were in vain.

For feminine companionship and domestic service he married a divorcée, the daughter of an old man he once worked for called Teal. The woman worked as a waitress at Minh Quy’s restaurant. One night when collecting Irene, Grey brought his father along to put some food in his system to counter the drink. Bill North’s wife-to-be was smoking a cigarette and leaning against the back wall of the restaurant, staring into the small-town night.

Bill North and Angela Teal married in a registry office on the outskirts of the city. On the third night of their North Coast honeymoon the woman was shocked to discover they had run out of money. She drove in tears to her sister’s house in the city and did not return for days …

 

NOW GREY FELT pity for the poor lame man who sat in the living room in the dying afternoon light, staring out the window while the wife he did not love and who did not love him spent yet another weekend at her sister’s, the man asking his daughter, who indifferently refused, to come sit by him and talk.

 

THE NIGHT SKY was high and cloudless. Grey walked across the windblown stretch of grass and spare deadwood that he had walked since boyhood. Eccleston’s two barely-ridden horses, the
smoky-blue gelding and old Appaloosa mare, walked along the roadside fenceline. Grey climbed the low hills and walked into the trees and stepped down the tallowwood roots to the bend in Mary Smokes Creek.

He sat down with the boys on the strip of sand and gravel. It was warm and there was light enough without a fire tonight. They sat in a vivid dark.

Matt Thiebaud told Eccleston about some country in the north that he could get them onto to shoot, where a couple of young blokes might make a living, at least for awhile before coming home. He said he was sick of working at the abattoir at Kilcoy and of fencing at Tiger Scrub with the boy called Jack Harry, who he said was as thick as the posts he strained wires to. He spoke through the rolled cigarette that he kept always intact in his mouth and squinted his pretty blue eyes. Grey was not listening. He squatted on the bank and watched the water purl around rocks and shake the stars. The water ran deep and fast around the bend, and faster over the gravel bar where Raughrie Norman stood.

Norman, who the boys called “Flagon,” fell fully-clothed from the bar into a deep pool. Eccleston hung his clothes in a tree up the bank and stepped in at the bend and Thiebaud went after him. Grey leant against the husk of a tree. He watched the boys with their heads beneath the last granite step of a waterfall. He hung his clothes on the husk and stepped in. The water had come from somewhere other than their warm night, from the high country of shattered rocks in the southwest, and he shivered at its touch.

The night ran on and the water ran faster and spilled over the rocks and timber and splashed the boys’ faces. The creek had broken its banks in a storm a week ago and scoured the country and the water tonight spilled into the newly cut rills.

Eccleston, Norman and Thiebaud crawled and swam to a downstream rock pool. A full moon scaled the eastern sky and illuminated the boys. Grey was alone. He swam upstream
and sank into the pool beneath the cradling spotted gum root and rested his arms and let the water crash over him. He laughed to himself at this inconsequential, late-night-creek-swimming small-town life. At such times all thoughts of leaving or anything else belonging to that still-distant place called the future left him alone. The world still moved slowly at Mary Smokes Creek. At the creek you took in the infinite and nameless changes in the hours, and moving at the same speed as the earth there was not that whiplash of time and the death feeling that came with hours lost unwittingly in degrees of waking sleep. At Mary Smokes Creek there was time for everything, and no desire to do anything at all. For a year now Grey had taken what work there was in the country, a little horse work and shifts at Bizzell’s service station at the edge of town. And that was all he and his sister needed.

Thiebaud burst from the water. Grey had been quiet for too long and the boys covered him with arm-fulls of creek. He slid into the deepest hole. He knew that he and these boys owned the night as ever. They were the
dramatis personæ
of nothing and nowhere, and only so intangible as they were could they lay claim to so intangible a thing. And so they did.

The wind dried them on the walk home. By the time they got to Eccleston’s back fence all the joking had stopped. They had given in to tiredness and in tiredness to silence. Grey left the other three on their way to Eccleston’s house.

He climbed through the rusted barbwire and his father’s red bitch ran to his heel. She licked the creek off his shins and licked his canvas boots. The back door was unlocked and the windows were all open. He crept through the kitchen, careful not to wake his sister.

She sat awake before the Black Madonna and icon lamp. The tips of her fingers touched the glass.

She smiled. She did not care that he was late, only that finally he had come.

 

THEY WERE BOTH happy. It was deep summer and the long days barely passed; they were spent in a state of staid, balmy dreaming that was not real. There was nothing else to do tonight, nor all tomorrow. Grey’s next shift at Bizzell’s was three days away. His cold muscles were tired and gently aching from pushing against the current at the creek.

He showered and fell asleep beside his sister on their lounge chair, a cool wind from the mountains playing with the ragged veils of curtains in the living room.