Oscar and Lucinda Read online

  “Mr Smith, I am tired.”

  “Do not be tired, my Reverend Jolly-man,” said Percy Smith. “Lean on me. I am a practical man. I have the base plate already constructed on the water. It is a simple matter.”

  “But what will happen at the other end?”

  “Why, dear Mr Hopkins, listen to this. I asked myself the same question. It is easy enough, I thought, to get this glass church built on Water, but what will happen at the other end? And the answer is this. I have twelve wooden joists laid across the two barges. You must have seen them. But you did not, of course. You were Macbeth in a dream. I have been busy. I have twelve joists across, you see. When we are at Boat Harbour I will have twenty-four men lift the church by these joists and they can carry it. You should congratulate me.”

  “Twenty-four would not be enough. They must carry half a ton each.”

  “Then forty-eight or ninety-six. It doesn’t matter. These towns are always full of men wanting to prove their strength. We will have them carry it up the main street like a float in a procession.”

  “Mr Smith, why are you like this?”

  “You would not like the answer, Mr Hopkins.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “I am like this because we killed an evil man,” said Percy Smith. “It has done me a power of good. I cannot tell you.”

  “And do you feel no shame?”

  “Oh, yes, of course. And guilt, but I will tell you, in truth, that I have felt more sorrow to have slain a beast. That is something you never become accustomed to. You take care to make your knife sharp and to make the killing quick, but the moment always comes when you look that poor beast in the eye, and you can ask other farmers the same question and if they are honest they will tell you the truth—it is a dreadful thing. But this man was cruel. I am glad we killed him. I could not have borne to be a jellyfish one more day.”

  “And what of the Commandment we have broken?”

  “I am sure the Almighty does not have a mind like a railway clerk.”

  “By which you mean?”

  “He is not a puffed-up little toad in the government offices. He knows you are not a bad man.”

  Oscar reached his hand into his pocket and found his laudanum was in its proper place.

  “You should wash,” said Percy Smith. “I have some soap.”

  “Yes,” said Oscar. He did not believe any of the things Percy Smith said about God.

  104

  Mary Magdalene

  Kumbaingiri Billy was not in that tavern or any other tavern, ever. But the woman on the other side of the torn curtain was his father’s sister and she had been abducted by cedar cutters about a year before that time and was as reduced and miserable as any human being might ever be. Kumbaingiri Billy’s father’s sister was about twenty years old. She said the tavern was very quiet when Oscar made his speech. She said he had a face that was torn and peeling like the trunks of the paper-barks which grow in swampy land around the Bellinger. She saw great unhappiness there, said Kumbaingiri Billy, but that unhappiness, he reckoned, was most likely her own.

  This young woman was a witness to the murder. It was she who showed Percy Smith the cesspit which was to be Mr Jeffris’s final resting place. It was she who took him down along the river to the decaying homestead of H. M. McCracken and stood outside, scratching her long thin legs, while Percy Smith haggled with McCracken about a fair rent for his leaky lighters.

  She saw Oscar awake. She heard all the arguments about murder. She was squatting in the bush some five yards from them. She was very taken with Oscar. She thought him a good man. When he finished his damper she came out of the bush and told him there were two men she could get to help them with their building.

  She saw the glass church built upon those lighters.

  Kumbaingiri Billy knew the story. He said: “He moved fast, that man with the red face and the red hair. My aunty named him ‘Bushfire’ for the way he leapt from place to place on that barge, burning red, dancing in his own firelight. They got the columns up the first day—they were twisty-curly things like rope, like the corkscrew on a can opener. These columns were black and greasy. The grease was black too. It made the white chaps into blackfellows. They braced these columns off with saplings. They could not use nails, of course. They tied the saplings on with rope. Then they got the trusses assembled on the wharf. There was no fancy stuff in the trusses. There was plenty of fancy stuff, but that came later—all this fancy iron like the houses down in Lawson Street—all this went around the bottom of the walls. There was other stuff along the top, a real cocky’s crest it was, but the trusses were dead plain. They assembled them on the wharf and then they waited for the tide to go down. They waited. They had a smoke. Round about lunchtime the tide went down. The top of the walls came level with the wharf and then this Mr Hopkins yelled out: ‘Right you are.’ They slid the trusses out and fixed them on. Mr Hopkins would not go out on the roof, but, by golly he was not shy to give those fellows orders. He called to them, you do this, you do that, you be careful, better not drop that thing and break it. They started two days before Palm Sunday. They worked on the sabbath too. That was the day they began to cover the iron with glass. They were working for a bet, or so I heard later, and this is why they broke the sabbath. They started at the bottom and moved from left to right, tap-tap. They must have used some metal clips, I reckon, to keep the glass in. This was when my aunty saw glass. My word, she was tickled by it. She had only seen glass in booze bottles until that day. She saw glass could be good. She had not thought this before. When she saw this glass church built she became a Christian. This was the day Jesus first came to the Bellinger. She saw Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Paul, and Jonah—all that mob she never knew before. She saw your great-grandfather was a brave man. She saw he had a halo like one of those saints. She saw that when it was night he shivered—not from cold, but from a sort of holy happiness. He told her: ‘You will live in paradise.’ He christened her Mary, for Magdalene. It was a damn silly name for a Kumbaingiri and if you want my opinion, Bob, it was ignorant to talk to us Kooris in that way.”

  105

  Miriam

  Miriam Chadwick was not in mourning and had, once again, thrown away her widow’s weeds although Mrs Trevis, her smudge-lipped employer, had thought, out loud, that this was tempting fate.

  “Who have I to mourn for any more?” said Miriam Chadwick who was, when this conversation took place, holding Mrs Trevis’s newborn babe, a bad-tempered little chap, always “sucky” and given to banging his little head against the governess’s shoulder.

  “You might mourn for me, or Mr Trevis,” suggested Mrs Trevis.

  “Oh, there is no likelihood of that,” said Miriam Chadwick tossing her hair back off her shoulders—beautiful hair, coal-black hair, raven hair, but who was there to see its dark blue lights out here at Marx Hill? “No likelihood at all,” said Miriam, bouncing the babe resentfully, and leaving her comment ambiguous as long as she dare, “with both you and Mr Trevis in such fine health.”

  “Here,” said Mrs Trevis, reaching out for the babe while she gently cuffed her little boy who was reaching for a saucepan on the kitchen table. “Here, I’ll take bubba. You try your hand at t’other.”

  “T’other” was the butter churn which wooden wheel of torture Mrs Trevis now abandoned to her governess.

  “If you have nabbed young Reverend Hasset,” Mrs Trevis began, an observation that had nothing to do with mourning or widow’s weeds, but was intended to bring her uppity governess (she thought herself too good to set the fires or scrub the milk pails) to a proper understanding of her place in this society.

  “I did not attempt, as you put it, to ‘nab’ the poor man, although there is no doubting he was properly ‘nabbed’ without him knowing what had happened.”

  “Jealousy killed the cat,” said Mrs Trevis, dipping her finger in the butter jar and then slipping it into her infant’s sucky mouth.

  Miriam Chadwick looked on with her hands
ome nose wrinkled.

  “Curiosity.”

  “Beg yours?”

  “It was curiosity that killed the cat.”

  “Curiosity in the beginning,” said Mrs Trevis, “but jealousy in the end. It is bad luck to throw away your widow’s weeds.”

  This conversation was in Miriam Chadwick’s mind on the hot Thursday afternoon when, with the Trevises all gone into Boat Harbour to buy provisions for the Easter feast, she was savouring her solitude, sitting on the wooden step, looking down at the curve of the Bellinger River. She was running through her list of unsatisfactory or irritating or boorish suitors when she saw a church made from glass towed into her field of vision by two men in wide straw hats.

  Her first thought was disappointment that Mrs Trevis was not here to witness this thing with her, that she must exclaim to nothing but the empty air. “Oh, my,” she said, feeling that some subtle victory had been somehow denied her, “just look at what you have missed. Just look. Just look at it.”

  It came up the river, its walls like ice emanating light, as fine and elegant as civilization itself.

  “Who?” demanded Miriam Chadwick. “Who? Just answer me that.” Who in this valley of muddy boots could be responsible for such a thing? For it was not simply that the little steep-roofed church was made from glass, but that it had all the lovely proportions and grace-notes of a fancy constructed for a prince, say, in Bavaria.

  All along its roof ridge there was a decorative edging, a frill—she could not make it out exactly but it would seem, there, to be like a line of fleurs-de-lis. The glass sheets of its walls were not square and dull like window panes, but tall and thin, with a triangulation at the top, and a lovely cast-iron frieze made of medallions (crests?), which repeated in a frieze along the bottom of the walls. This cast-iron frieze must be nearly three feet high—ornate like the rood screen in a cathedral.

  She did not see or appreciate Mr Flood’s speciality—the cast-iron barley-sugar scrolls of which he had been so proud—and indeed it would not be more than a minute before she forgot the miraculous building entirely—it soon assumed no more importance than a pretty wrapping paper for, as the lighters slewed in the river, the glass regained its transparency, and she saw the black-suited figure sitting on a chair inside the church.

  At this moment her sense of wonder was completely swamped by more practical concerns, for if this lovely building was a church—and was that not a cross at the termination of the cresting?—then the black-suited man inside was almost certainly a clergyman.

  She had an aqua moiré-silk riding habit, which was thought “unsuitable” in Boat Harbour. She put it on. She had a little hat with a veil. She fastened it with a long pin. There was no time for bathing. She went out into the home paddock and caught the bad-tempered little Shetland which had been left at home, smacked it hard across the nose when it tried to bite her. The beast pulled its head back and its eye, though wild, was less wild than usual. “So,” thought Miriam Chadwick, “you are a bully like the rest of them.” The pony pulled. Miriam hit it again, refllecting bitterly on the brutalizing effects of life at Fernmount.

  The pony would not go slow. It went at speed, cantering, almost galloping down the rutted shale-loose hill towards the river. She lost her pretty little whip at the gate but the pony was hard-mouthed and would not pull up. She came on to the cattle path beside the Bellinger. She came beside the rowing men and the glass church on the barge.

  “Oh, dear God,” she prayed, “do not let me appear as such a fool.” She cried with fright as the pony stumbled on a crumbling piece of riverbank, regained its footing, and continued, leaving the church behind, in the direction of the landing wharf at Boat Harbour.

  She thought it obvious to everyone what she was up to and was, in consequence, ashamed.

  At Boat Harbour she had to hide an hour or two and not be seen by her employers or their children, who were, it seemed, at every draper’s shop and corner. She sat in the prayer room above the cobbler’s shop and having begun by pretending to pray, ended by doing it in earnest.

  106

  The Aisle of a Cathedral

  The Bellinger was not like it is now, with wide electric-green fields pushing down on to the river. The banks were like green cliffs of camouflage pierced with giant knitting needles and spun and tangled all about with ferns and creepers. It was a landscape already bleeding from the stabbing and hacking of the cedar cutters, but the wounds were all internal, in the belly of the bush, and although Oscar saw how Percy Smith and his two helpers must jump and poke with their punting poles to keep them clear of floating cedar logs, he did not guess the history of these logs. He saw only the shrieking walls of jungle which threw up wide-winged birds as the church approached.

  Laudanum or no, he was not at ease. He called for Percy Smith to lock the door. He placed his hard wooden chair in the very middle of the church. He prayed out loud and his voice had a hard vibrant quality inside the glass. He said: “Oh Lord, I am alive in the midst of Thy dreadful river. All Thy glory surrounds me, but I am afraid.”

  Outside the walls, he could hear the man named “rumgo” giggling. This had no more importance to him than the cries of savage birds.

  My great-grandfather drifted up the Bellinger River like a blind man up the central aisle of Notre Dame. He saw nothing. The country was thick with sacred stories more ancient than the ones he carried in his sweat-slippery leather Bible. He did not even imagine their presence. Some of these stories were as small as the transparent anthropods that lived in the puddles beneath the river casuarinas. These stories were like fleas, thrip, so tiny that they might inhabit a place (inside the ears of the seeds of grass) he would later walk across without even seeing. In this landscape every rock had a name, and most names had spirits, ghosts, meanings.

  He had given his hat to Kumbaingiri Billy’s father’s sister. It was the Wednesday before Good Friday, and although it was now cool in Sydney, it was hot at this latitude. Under the canopy of glass it was very hot indeed. Only on the dog-leg bend at Fernmount was the riverbank able to provide any shade.

  Kumbaingiri Billy saw the glass church. He was a young boy, initiated only the year before. He was with the men, hunting, at the place which is now named Marx Hill. He saw the glass church in the distance—a prism, a cube, a steeple of light sliding into the green shadows of Fernmount. There were men with blue shirts and wide-brimmed hats. They held long poles. They stood around the perimeter. In the middle was a man. Even in the shadow, so Kumbaingiri Billy told my father, fire danced around this man’s head.

  Oscar could not see the blacks watching him. He was not frightened of the blacks. He was frightened of other things. The wooden platform beneath his feet was built on H. M. McCracken’s two lighters, which remained, in spite of all the nails and planks and lashing that joined them together, two independent entities. Thus when one lighter bobbed it would not be in step with its companion and the result of this was that the foundation of the fragile bird—cage church would shift and twist. Glass, for all its great strength under compression, cannot easily tolerate this sort of twisting.

  Three panes of glass had cracked. These panes were in the roof. They crazed and hung like ice—knives. Their jigsaw edges refracted the colours of the rainbow across my great-grandfather’s clasped hands. He was gaunt and ugly, with a bright Adam’s apple and a bright red hooked nose. He looked like the most fearsome Calvinist. There were white unburnt rings around his eyes. His green irises were set in yellow whites and these were laced with fine red rivers.

  Percy Smith drove his pole into the mud. Vectors of force fought with each other for a resolution. The platform beneath Oscar’s feet twisted. Another pane splintered and, this time, fell at the foot of the barley-sugar columns in the little chancel. “Oh, Lord,” he prayed, as sweat ran down his brow and into his eyes, “I thank Thee for granting me this day.”

  For answer, three more panes crazed. And while, according to all the laws of science, they should have falle
n—there was no wire reinforcing in the glass, nothing but its own splintered edges to hold it there—it stayed in place. It was a blemish on the sky, like something curdled—milky-white, like crinkled cellophane.

  The man inside the church waved his hands, gestures which appeared, from the perspective of Marx Hill, to be mysterious, even magical, but which, inside the crystal furnace of the church, had the simple function of repelling the large and frightening insects which had become imprisoned there.

  There were bush-flies inside the church. They did not understand what glass was. There were also three blue-bellied dragon-flies. For one hundred thousand years their progenitors had inhabited that valley without once encountering glass. Suddenly the air was hard where it should be soft. Likewise the tawny hard-shelled water beetle and the hang-legged wasp. They flew against the glass in panic. They had the wrong intelligence to grasp the nature of glass. They bashed against “nothing” as if they were created only to demonstrate to Oscar Hopkins the limitations of his own understanding, his ignorance of God, and that the walls of hell itself might be made of something like this, unimaginable, contradictory, impossible.

  While the three men worked around him with their long sapling punting poles, Oscar put his hands over his ears or waved them in the air. The fractured glass cast a burning spectrum across his forehead. He said: “Oh, God, I praise Thee. I praise Thy dreadful river. I am not afraid,” But his hand sat on the hard lump in his pocket where the sticky laudanum bottle sat.

  He thought: It will soon be over.

  But the church burnt his already burnt skin and he watched the exquisite jewel-blue dragon-flies crash against the glass. He felt a stab of panic, that he had made his bet on second-rate information. It was not God who had persuaded him, but that “other voice.”