A Woman of the Inner Sea

by Thomas Keneally

  Jack and Connie both expressed wonder.

  —Jesus, that must have been hard.

  —The gaps between the railway sleepers …

  The gaps between the railway sleepers would have shown the furious water moving beneath.

  The girl said, Yes. But she made little of it in her country way.

  —I had to take it slowly, you know.

  The news that there was this way in and out exhilarated Kate. The idea itself was all the escape Kate wanted for the moment.

  Meanwhile she had gone on dragging the bags, two-handed, to the embankment. While she was engaged this way, her back to the levee, it gave way. She turned around and saw the little triangle through which the water flowed, filtered by its fall, almost clean. Calf deep, she and other women and men splashed around replugging it. She could hear behind her the enthusiasm of the news cameramen over this. The handsome men and women speaking to camera could be heard making up fables for people in other towns and cities about Myambagh’s stubborn courage. Australians, she knew, would love the fact that despite all this tirelessness there had been a failure. That would stoke them up to demand the best for Myambagh. A new wave of Monks and Escapees.

  She knew that the camera would very much like to focus on Jack Murchison’s brave bandaged hand. Better that than her hooded shape.

  The water topped the levee again, and then broke it in another place. Kate and Connie carried sandbags, Jack heaved them one-handed, using his thigh to direct them against the stream which gushed in amongst the unmilitarily placed bags. But nothing concealed the damage. Soon they were waist deep in cold, bad water, water full of the gray discontent of three thousand swamped farms, water fouled by dead sheep and by the fuel from Burnside’s sweptaway car. Mundanely, it entered in a gush amongst the sandbags, and now people stood back watching its flow and acknowledging to each other there was no stopping it.

  Some began to wade home, knowing there would be an evacuation, that they should raise a few last things above the expected water line and grab a few last items to take away. A small demented man who tried to block the torrent with his knees was swept away and up against a fence a football field away. Strong men like Jack wallowed up to him and picked him up and advised him against any more recklessness.

  Jack then and Connie and Kate waded to the truck before the rising water stifled its engine, and drove away. Squinting into the rearview mirror at the image of the wake his vehicle, boatlike, was making, Jack reflected on the nature of what had swept into the town.

  —There’s meningitis and all sorts of filth in this floodwater. People die of viruses no bugger can name. I tell you what. It’ll be time pretty soon that Jelly was heard from.

  —Long as you don’t get that hand infected, said Connie.

  Jack’s truck emerged from water beyond the railway line and rolled up the slight but saving hill on which the Railway stood dry. There were already a number of camera crew outside the public bar, dressed in their paramilitary manner, sure they were at the front. None of them had cameras running but stood instead amongst silver boxes of gear, amongst tripods folded into black cylindrical containers. Just the same, Kate took no risks with them when Jack pulled up, and passed quickly amongst them, still hooded, pausing only when she had got inside. She did not take to the stairs however. For she was sure that Jack would have something pungent to say to them, and she needed to hear it. They were the limit to which Jack’s manic charity would not reach.

  While a television producer negotiated with Jack, she listened from behind the cover of the door, in the corner between the saloon and the dining room.

  —My people need dry accommodation, like everyone else.

  Jack didn’t agree. He spoke in a terribly neutral voice. She found this listening delicious, the certainty of Jack’s prejudice against the media, his heroic neutrality.

  —I’ve only got room for orphans and bloody rescue workers. I’ll have hundreds to feed within an hour or two. You jokers better get out by helicopter. That’s what I reckon.

  —Australia has always been very generous to Myambagh. Only because they see it on their television screens. That last flood …

  —Look. I wouldn’t be so keen to take credit if I were you. You blokes are a double-edged sword. Now I’m going to have police and rescuers and all the town’s dogs and half the town’s fucking cattle, all within yelling distance of here. I’ll have to feed them and bed them down. They deserve to have their nights free.

  —Free? What do you mean by free?

  —Free of cameras, said Jack. You bloody know that’s what I mean.

  —Well, I’ll have to tell people on camera you refused us accommodation. What do you say about that?

  —I say go to buggery!

  It was clear. Jack wanted his high, dry hotel to be available only for dynamiters, wanted it safe for kidnappers of the animal ingredients of tableaux vivants.

  Jack and Connie appeared together in the lobby where Kate had been eavesdropping. She was too tired to flee. The licensees. They stood together a second at the bottom of the stairs of their high hotel, united for once in the disgust for the merchants of half-truth. On the threshold of his ark, Jack winked at Kate.

  She knew she wouldn’t be resting yet.

  Later, godlike aerial shots would show Murchison’s Railway Hotel thus, beached amongst Myambagh’s drowned civic buildings and households, the houses swamped at least to their windowsills but often to their eaves. This aerial footage would likewise show the rows of dogs in the Railway’s stableyard, all rearing on their hind legs in expectation of meat.

  Despite his threats to treat Jack badly, the producer let his crew film the cattle and sheep teeming up to Jack’s yard howling and bleating for fodder and receiving it from the hands of volunteers.

  By the time these camera images would reach the rest of the country, the crucial question first uttered by Connie, of whether Jack would go mad, had been answered. As soon as he started the generator and turned the lights on in the bar, he had resumed his argument with Connie. Soon the men who had been defeated on the levees would be here. They would deserve beer. It defied decency to keep on hitting the cash register buttons on such a night.

  —Jesus, love, Jack kept protesting, as if Connie were winning the argument.

  In a low voice he told Kate to forget to punch the middy buttons and the schooner buttons and the buttons for nips of spirit.

  —And if we’re not going to do that, he argued with himself, it’ll seem pretty bloody small-minded to punch the button for peanuts.

  So instructed, Kate could feel the hotel fill up with the nearpanic of Connie. Knowing you needed resources against a continuing history of loss, she couldn’t get it through to Jack. He really thought everything could be expended on this one crisis.

  —I am not feeding them all the steak out of my freezer, she cried.

  —Love, love, the stableyard’s bloody crawling with livestock.

  —Then I want it hung. I don’t want meat that hasn’t been properly hung bleeding all over my kitchen!

  —It’ll get hung. Maybe not as good tonight as on following nights. But be a bit patient, Connie love.

  European society in Myambagh was barely a hundred and fifty years old and looked for its myths, and Kate could tell that on top of the kindness, Jack had mythic ambitions. Generosity was his art form, and he wanted men to speak of the renowned openhandedness of Jack Murchison. During the Wrangle flood. Married to the Greek girl, you know. Connie. He wanted to be invoked in these terms.

  This was how he disposed things in the Railway:

  In the bar Kate poured her two-pull beers as the police and the evacuators came in, giving up Myambagh for the night, permitting the floodwater to enter all the town’s cupboards, to inspect every drawer. Sometimes Kate punched the cash register buttons by mistake, but she received and put away no money, and the ping! and slide of the cash register drawer was only an occasional pleasant, sharp noise in the waterlogged air.
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br />   The stories the men told were of taking people along the flooded streets by life raft, persuading them to leave this and that behind: a wedding picture, a bucket, a packet of laundry detergent, a suitcase with a fifty-year-old wedding dress in it. Up past the Civic Centre and the Ambulance Station, right at the high school. Keeping the laws of the road in a rubber boat. Left at the railway crossing, bypassing the Railway on its hill and delivering townspeople to the helicopters on the highway.

  Others told of emptying dead refrigerators before food putrefied, and of pacifying family dogs, the naïve protectors of the home, who could smell the coming water, the carrion adrift in it. Calling There boy and Good boy and getting a muzzle on the buggers and bringing them by boat to the high ground in Jack’s stableyard for tethering.

  None of the drinkers were aware, any more than the camera crews had been, that Menzies and Chifley occupied their dry shed and were now surrounded by the barking of dogs, and that they frowned at and tested the noise, at least in Chifley’s case, by continuing shifts of the angles of the ears. Even the drinkers on whose sleeves were sewn the badges of the State of New South Wales, a lion and kangaroo in this case holding up an escutcheon, and Orta Recens Quam Pura Nites—Recently Arisen How Brightly You Shine; even those would not have been interested in who Gus Schulberger was and whether he harbored beasts. For their terms of reference were all to do with the flood. Stolen marsupials were ultra vires.

  Kate noticed as she poured the beer, conscious of how many firkins and kilderkins of the fluid she was pouring out, that most of the Monks and Escapees were gone. She liked the rescuers better than those who merely painted and plastered the town and lacked a mandate to save it.

  A sergeant of the Water Police—Orta Recens Quam Pura Nites—asked, So I put it to you, gentlemen? Can anything be permanently done for this bloody town?

  There was a flurry of opinion. People couldn’t wait to speak. In the midst of it, largely unnoticed though enormous in his yellow Emergency Service gear, Jelly entered from the saloon. To her he had so obviously now the aura of the-man-to-answer-the-question that she was astounded the police, the Water Police, the men from the Emergency Service, the camera people drinking off to one side, and the reflective crew of the air force transport plane which had landed at the Myambagh airport just before the levee broke, and which was now awash out there—that all these people failed to notice him! None of these men put the matter to him or even much adverted to him as anything more than a large presence, a Myambagh grotesque.

  He asked her quietly for a middy of beer. He smiled palely at her. His beard was growing up bluely on his large, soft face.

  His paleness was different from that of the others. They saw themselves back here again and again, every time it rained. Ferrying widows, pacifying dogs, cleaning out refrigerators. Whereas his duty was to demonstrate by dynamite that Myambagh did not need to be terrorized by the river, could be relieved not only of the fear of its own downpour but of the runoff from other people’s. He carried such knowledge in his soft body, and of course it separated him from others. He would have considered it an enviable life purely to have to persuade old biddies and forthright country widowers into the rafts and across to the helicopters, to oopsadaisy them into the cabins and reach up and clinch their seatbelts.

  His beer quickly drunk, Jelly disappeared looking for Jack.

  Guthega and Noel, his shearing champion son, arrived. Guthega ordered beers by holding up two fingers which looked as though they had not been washed since before the flood. But he had gravity. He wasn’t snide tonight.

  —Noel and I put all the furniture up in the rafters and got the missus off in a helicopter. I don’t know, I don’t know …

  He shook his head.

  It was a legend that in some country game—Myambagh versus Narromine, perhaps—when Guthega had been playing hooker, and the referee had taken a long time to set the scrum, Guthega had got out his smokes from his back pocket and lit a cigarette. A cigarette in the scrum! They’d suspended him for life for that, and laid on him the duty to be forever a smartarse, whatever the ruin to his marriage and his liver. They had by their knee-jerk decision committed Guthega’s forlorn son to tend him every night as well, even at the loss of championship sleep. Jesus, a man who had had a life suspension for smoking in the scrum owed a debt to society which could not be paid without sacrifice and the adoption of a given role!

  Tonight though, the emergency had released him from his normal duties.

  —Where’s Jelly? asked Guthega, his eyes near-closed. Kate said she thought he was upstairs. Talking to Jack. She could in fact see it all with an interior but precise eye. She beheld Jelly’s movements. The annex where the rescuers and the rescued would sleep. Where the swamped aviators would doss down too. Jack and Jelly were there, and Jelly inspected the explosive and, finding it in repose, moved it to another place, the far, unpeopled end of the verandah for a start. Every movement of this nature being an advance toward the actual use of the stuff.

  With her internal vision, she saw him lumber downstairs then with it and put it in her room. She saw him then press his way down the stairs against the ascending homeless, going out then to locate Gus Schulberger the fugitive at his truck.

  Guthega and his son drank quickly and also disappeared. The waterlogged night didn’t offer them a truce either. They wanted to attend Jelly.

  At one stage she excused herself from the bar, and walked along under the iron-roofed back verandah. She heard a shot; the dense air muffled it. She looked into the stableyard where the chained dogs—disconsolate on leashes—were beginning to compose themselves for the night, and she saw Jack and Gus and a friend of Jelly’s, a Senior Constable Burns, without doubt the one who had consulted Jelly over her picture. Senior Constable Burns was armed with a rifle. A dead sheep lay near his feet. The men were pointing to steers who had come to the yard for its high ground but were now backing toward the gate, frightened by the shot Burns had just fired. She heard the men talking, pointing to this steer and that in the near-dark. Jelly could be heard clearly.

  —Up that for the rent. Let’s find a steer that belongs to that bastard McHugh.

  McHugh, the Shire President, the anti-dynamiter. The Myambagh fable again: that the system of levees had been devised in large part to protect McHugh’s pastures and divert tides of water onto the town. Not so much likely to be true, but widely taken as fact.

  She saw Jelly and Gus approach the steers in the familiar, leisurely way which country people have with cattle. She herself could not have approached them in this way. For the brute force was on the side of the brutes, and it might occur to them for the first time in their history as you got close.

  Nearing the cattle, both Jelly and Gus held their hands palm outward and wide. They moved amongst the beasts looking for McHugh’s brand, and when Jelly found it he yelled and slapped the animal’s hindquarters, and he and Gus drove it to Constable Burns. In one movement Constable Burns raised the rifle and shot the steer. Its legs flew from beneath it.

  Kate wondered what Gus’s beasts made of this stableyard commotion?

  Guthega and his son had appeared now. They helped run a chain from Jack’s truck, through a hook in the stable wall which had been used in pre-abattoir days to hang slaughtered livestock, and—very fast—they had the steer hanging, and Jack with one flick of his bandaged hand opened the artery in its throat.

  The constant spouse Jack said, Leave it there as long as we can. Connie hates bloody steaks.

  It was raining hard again now. One more inch for the drowned town. Gus was the one Jack passed the butchering knives to. Guthega said not a word; offered no advice.

  Returned to the bar, Kate imagined Gus butchering with long, clean cuts.

  An hour later she was drinking tea quickly in the kitchen when the meat was brought in, and Jack made the normal excuses to Connie.

  —Look, we’ve got to feed these people some time before two o’clock in the morning, love.


  Soon the smell of frying meat filled the bar, and men were pricked back to intensity by it and started boasting about their appetites. A number of men who by habit or temperament liked the work came to the kitchen and boiled potatoes and cooked onions while Shirley and Connie dealt with the great slabs of awfully fresh meat. It was utterly clear that the orgy of Jack Murchison’s kindness had well advanced despite Connie’s warnings and would be somehow compounded in the eating of all this meat.

  Kate ate at the bar, and Jelly—plate in hand and giving off an odor of dampness from his clothes—lumbered up to her.

  —Listen, Kate love. I’m taking Guthega and his boy and Gus. You must be tired. But if you want …

  She found the invitation a little hard to believe in. It brought fear and a brand of stupid pleasure. The Cornerman and the Plaqueman, even if not helicoptered out on the grounds of age, would never in a millennium have been asked to join Jelly in his night’s task.

  Weighed with the burden and the grandeur of the idea and barely breathing, she went to find her drying gumboots and her torch.

  Amongst the party traveling by Jelly’s truck: Five people somehow damply slotted into the front seat, Kate half sitting on Gus’s lap and Noel half sitting on hers and Guthega’s; a short truck journey to where they met the flood lapping across Commonwealth Street and against the front windows of the abandoned Federal Hotel.

  To one of the Federal’s verandah uprights, Kate could see, an aluminum boat with an outboard motor was moored.

  In the truck Guthega had grown vocal and knowledgeable again. There had been a lot of talk about fuses and pigstickers. She didn’t know what a pigsticker was. She had to pick up from the way the name was used that it was some form of wooden splint you ran into a stick of gelignite.

  Gus said, Nonmetallic, see.

  It seemed you could then run the wires either side of the pigsticker to the detonator. The pigsticker stopped them from touching and ending the world by accident. Jelly, Gus and Guthega must have always known these things. Noel may have missed out on learning them by becoming wide-comb champ.