A Woman of the Inner Sea

by Thomas Keneally

  Guthega kept saying he wished Jelly had something called a shrike instead of the old-fashioned plunger box.

  —It’s got these two buttons on it and two lights, said Guthega, and the charge can’t go down the line until you punch both buttons and both lights come on.

  Jelly advised him not to be fussy. The plunger box had been good enough last bloody time.

  They untethered the aluminum boat and pushed it thigh deep. Jelly loaded in the Esky and a heavily packed tarpaulin box which must have contained the rumored plunger box. It was required by all the men that Kate get in next. She found that the dinghy felt fragile in the tide. The others stepped on board gingerly, one at a time. Not even Jelly’s weight gave the thing a feeling of substance.

  Gus, who had a reputation even with these men as a mechanic, got the outboard motor going and they set off up the Eglington Highway and then left at the submerged rail crossing. After a while Gus asked Guthega’s son Noel to take the tiller, and he came forward delicately in the ill-balanced little boat and sat beside Kate. The current was at least with them now, all the earth’s water pushing west against the high abutment of the Cobar railway line. Its drift seemed of course to reinforce Jelly’s argument, the old one, the one he had made high and dry in Murchison’s Railway Hotel on Kate’s first night of two-pour schooners.

  Even afloat Guthega went on deploring the lack of a shrike, the latest in detonating technology. He seemed to believe that it had somehow been Jelly’s duty to produce one.

  —How much jelly have you got for a start? he asked in an aggrieved voice.

  —Seven kilos.

  —Shit, seven kilos, eh? That’s what … fifty-six sticks of the stuff.

  And he couldn’t disapprove of that, though he took it as the minimum quantity owed to the chief supporters of a dynamiting fable.

  Now and then Gus shone a torch onto near-submerged street names to verify where he was. The extra darkness of the railway embankment was bearing down on them. So they kissed the abutment. Guthega leapt ashore holding the painter, and Jelly came next. From the dinghy Gus handed the Esky to him and the tarpaulin bag which contained the blast box.

  —Stay here holding the painter, Guthega told his son when everyone was out. D’you reckon you can do that?

  —Yeah.

  Guthega insisted.

  —Reckon you can do it?

  —Yes.

  Noel felt he was fit to take a fuller part than this.

  —So you won’t get the willies and let the fucking thing drift off?

  —Fair go, murmured Noel.

  He believed he was being punished for his championship status which this menial task of hanging on to a rope and with the low accusation of fear of darkness.

  —Guthega, murmured Jelly, unloading the Esky. Give the boy a go.

  —Got to be watched. He’s a bloody neurotic.

  For Christ’s sake, Guthega. It’s just bloody you! You make me bloody neurotic too.

  In the end they left Guthega’s unhappy son behind to hold the boat in place against the currents. He served too in the dark as a first-class landmark.

  It was a comfort to be treading along the uneven railbed. The air was dark and still and the rain had stopped. You could hear the sucking weight of water dwelling somberly in all Myambagh’s rooms.

  —Where can I drop the plunger box? asked Gus, and Jelly said, There! and Gus dropped it. Then he and Kate and Guthega continued on with Jelly, who would not let anyone else carry the Esky.

  Jelly took his mark at the meeting hall of the Myambagh Rifle Club. It had wisely painted its title on its iron roof, since it was now flooded over the eaves. Gus took rope from the same tarpaulin bag as the blast box and tied it around Jelly’s waist. Pliers and electrical tape and coils of fuse had been lifted from the bag as well, and lay between the rails.

  —Hold the torch, Gus commanded Kate, and she played light onto the preparations of Jelly and the others. Guthega at last now had a chance to handle the Esky. He opened it skeptically and took out the detonators, wrapped in their silver foil. The rope dangling from his middle, Jelly himself reached in and took up one of the explosive sticks from the Esky and one of those splints called pigstickers. He drove the pigsticker into the explosive. This initiating act caused Gus and Guthega to begin taping together eight or nine sticks at a time in bundles, and arraying them beside the Esky in the open. For Kate, all this was a compelling education. She didn’t miss a movement.

  Gus and Guthega and Jelly went on making their packages of gelignite, wrapping them together with many loops of black tape, asking where in the bloody hell the pliers were. When this was finished, Gus opened the foil package which held the detonators. He took out one detonator and gave it to Jelly, who strapped it to the wooden shaft of the pigsticker already embedded in the initiating stick of gelignite. This was an act of great weight and authority too.

  —Don’t be anxious, boys and girls, he breathed. The detonator’s not even wired up yet.

  But we are getting toward it, Kate wanted to say. We’re getting there at an awful pace.

  —Wire, he commanded.

  Gus picked up a coil of fuse wire from beside the tarpaulin bag. Kate shone torchlight onto Jelly’s grimy yet slug-white hands as he played one of the strands of the wire around the end of the pigsticker—it was just as it had been explained to Kate before—and crimped it onto the detonator with pliers, and then the other strand likewise. Doing it, Jelly seemed so admirably light-fingered.

  He completed everything then by binding the premier stick, the one with the pigsticker and detonator, onto one of the bundles.

  So this was what there was now on the ground—half a dozen or so fasces of gelignite sticks bound together, and in the top stick of one bundle the pigsticker, and on top of that the detonator and the attached wires.

  In the spirit of the expert status these grave acts endowed all four people with, Jelly gave Kate the fuse wire to hold and asked her to play it out a little. Gus and Guthega held the rope to which Jelly was tied, and Jelly backed down the embankment, carrying in his arms all the bundles of gelignite. When he got to water level by the submerged chainwire fence of the Myambagh Rifle Club he entered the water without flinching. She played the torch on him.

  Guthega said, There’s a blocked-off culvert down there. That’s where …

  Everyone associated with the fable except Kate seemed to know about this culvert. It had Jelly’s name on it.

  Jelly was up to his chest now in the water. He stored his bundles on a shelf of earth in the embankment, and he bent down into the water with one of them and strained to deposit it somewhere out of sight below the water. He did the same with each bundle, lifting it off the shelf of mud into the raised high crook of his left elbow, and from there into his right hand, and depositing it.

  Kate shook her head, but it was not the involuntary flinch. It was for the wonderful seriousness of these people, and the rite of dynamite.

  Before she would have expected him, Jelly was hauled out of the water again, back up on the embankment, turning slowly from side to side, trying to shake the water off his wet-weather gear. Gus and Guthega somehow knew to drive a system of pigstickers into the railbed here, and around it they separated out and hooked the two strands of fuse wire which rose up the embankment from the explosive below the water and which then hung from the apparently single coil in Kate’s hands.

  Without saying anything, Jelly took the coil of electric fuse from Kate’s hands.

  Everyone walked backward up the railway line, Kate shining the light as Jelly laid down the two wire strands, parallel and never touching, across the sleepers of the Cobar line. Jelly’s culminating bang depended on this separation. That was the science of the thing.

  Trolling out his parallel fuse wires and accompanied by Guthega, Gus, and Kate, he reached the point where he had left the plunger box. He connected the two wires of fuse to their terminals very adroitly. These seemed to Kate to be lonely connections he was m
aking, even though he had company. As if alone, he picked up the box and backed some way further again down the line, very slowly, careful not to trip up his heels in irregularities in the railbed. Once or twice he made little indicating gestures of the hand that the others should keep behind him yet out of his way. Yet for a man who would have such renown in Myambagh tomorrow, a man who would have rounded the circle of his own appointed fable, he did not seem excited.

  This is how it goes:

  They all duck down the side of the wet embankment, the western side of the railway, the side away from town, their faces, if they should raise them, aimed over the rail line toward the sunken municipality.

  Guthega yells down the line to his son to lie down, to go down the embankment a bit, to hold tight to the painter.

  Wriggling in the dark, in the pre-shock of what is instantly expected, Guthega asks, Jesus, what’s that? Kate herself feels a flurry against her thighs. There is something feral and full of appetite about this flurry, and she can’t stop herself kneeling upright.

  —Rats, she says. And she and the others beat about themselves, Jelly himself hits out. But his tone is reassuring.

  —Just some rats. Swam ashore. That’s all.

  Fat with terror, the rats have passed on down the line. They don’t want a mere embankment. They are looking for Mount Ararat.

  —Don’t want any more of those little bastards, says Guthega. There is a shudder in his voice. He turns and calls to his son in the dark.

  —You okay, Noel?

  —Is it going to go off? cries Noel.

  —We hope bloody so.

  Jelly is all ready again and has the plunger box level with his face on the top of the embankment. His conscientious hands are so wet, he shakes the fat, hoary fingers with the terminal wires to see that they are securely screwed in and crimped onto the terminals.

  But he doesn’t depress the plunger; he struggles upright and cocks an ear. The wind has died. The flood comes sucking up against the Cobar line. But there is another sound too. It could only be picked up by that portion of the ear which is connected to the fright hairs on the back of the neck. It is the mob of rats straining against the god of waters and departing sourly down the line toward Cobar, their scouts sniffing for high ground to either flank and not getting any answer.

  —Hope they didn’t bugger up the wires, says Jelly.

  Then, through a little contemplation, he becomes sure they haven’t.

  Prepare yourselves! yelled Jelly, sliding back into place and raising his hand to the plunger handle.

  —You can switch the light out for now, Kate. On three.

  He counted to three.

  Kate couldn’t believe that she was here at such a gravid moment. If only she were certifiably alive to taste the hour. He put the plunger down, and the wait for the great eruption went on to a point that even Kate raised her head to ask a question.

  —Jesus, said Jelly. The bloody rats.

  Guthega said, You needed a fucking shrike, old son.

  Jelly pulled the handle of the plunger up again.

  —I’ll have to go and separate the wires. Some bugger trod on them.

  —Fucking things’re temperamental, Guthega told him, raging. Guthega was worried, though Kate and Jelly weren’t. He had picked up the musk of imperfection.

  —I’ll go and attend to it.

  —Wasn’t one of us, Jelly, said Gus quietly. Must have been the rats.

  Jelly rose.

  —R’you going to disconnect the wires on the box? Gus asked him.

  That sort of talk made Jelly strangely impatient. He shook his head heavily. The weight of it all had at last reached him.

  —Yes, disconnect, Kate urged him.

  —Look, if the thing won’t go off with the plunger bloody down, it won’t go off with the bloody plunger up!

  So Jelly wouldn’t do it. He took the torch from Kate and set off up the line, kneeling heavily in spots to finger the strands of wire. Moving back toward the center of his great task.

  And so it continues:

  As Jelly approaches the place where the wires debouch around pigstickers and under the steel rail and down to the underwater bomb, Guthega’s son Noel comes running and whimpering up the railway line toward Kate and Gus and his father, dragging the dinghy with him.

  The tide of rats which passed down the railway line earlier were simply the vanguard of all Myambagh’s flooded-out rats. The genuine host of rats now pursues Guthega’s son, not nipping at his ankles, having their own phantoms to deal with, but raising in him the fear for which his father has earlier persecuted him.

  So many rats. A road of fur. A seething animal river. A railway embankment coated in moving rodent intent. It starts in Kate not only a fear for herself, but a concern for how Jelly will be confused when the phenomenon reaches him.

  Noel the wide-comb champion is tripped up in his terror by rats or a sleeper and falls forward. What strikes the plunger handle? Forehead, inside of the elbow? Optional. As he comes down, Kate is sure that his fall is really serious business. The plunger is depressed. There is an astounding detonation as the known earth tears itself apart. Air is taken from her. Her skull and her chest and her invalid womb, a kind of echo chamber, take the terrible buffet from the noise.

  Feeling the shock intimately and not as the mere shadow of experience she has had up to now from Chifley and from Jelly, she knows straight away that Jelly is saved now, easily and quickly, from the burden of his name and from the gravity of his parts.

  The men are however too awed by the detonation, by the jangling of their heads, to begin mourning Jelly yet. But Kate has begun and she finds herself rocking on her haunches and uttering a sound she remembers from an earlier holocaust: Oooooooooo! All around her rats are falling from the sky. Some of them, she can tell, run off as they land. They want to come to terms with themselves far away from here.

  The men gather themselves and go looking for Jelly with Gus’s torch, exclaiming, Jesus! and Fuck me! They do not reproach Noel, who is going forward with them in utter silence.

  They lack the authority to make Kate stay where she is, and so she goes too. Her grief is of a curious order now, as she cries out striding behind them. It is a quantity of grief. It has no quality. It oppresses her in a different, massive, blunt way.

  They find with their boots a multitude of felled rats and pray they are not Jelly. It is brave Gus who encounters an arm and hand, and to prevent Kate seeing it clearly, puts it at once in the tarpaulin bag he carries, the one from which the plunger box came.

  Guthega is getting efficient, though he does not have the talent to look after Jelly as briskly as Gus does, and he waves his arms and tries to make Kate stay with Noel, the big boy who is still dragging the dinghy with him and has been slowed and frustrated with it to the point that he now yells.

  —What are we going to tell people?

  Oh, how Guthega shudders and looks at the bag Gus is holding. To have Jelly so reduced! There is still in Guthega, she can tell infallibly, a hope that Gus is storing the arm to present to an otherwise integral Jelly.

  Gus finds Jelly’s large head, utterly white and contemplative on the edge of a gap in the railway line. The gap Jelly has made, and through it the flood is now gushing away loudly westward, precisely as promised.

  —Bless him, yells Kate madly. Because they will tomorrow as their town drains and the Monks and Escapees return.

  Gus lifts Jelly’s pale, square head and puts it too in his tarpaulin bag.

  —Hang on, Guthega protests. He might …

  —What? asks Gus. What might he?

  Gus goes on searching without result. Guthega yells punitively to his son Noel, You still got that bloody dinghy?

  Uttering Oooooooooooo for Jelly, Kate knows she will leave Jack. The sweet triangle: Jelly, Jack, the unsated Connie, which kept Myambagh in place. Now it has been washed away. Now it is flowing noisily out through the gap in the Cobar line. Even uttering the long Os, she knows
she has to get going. With the water flowing like this, Murray and her parents, Uncle Frank, the vengeful Kozinskis will not permit her to be static. Murray too hungry and devoted, the others bamboozled with grief. Her parents believing still she lived in a world where people sent each other polite cards.

  —Please forgive me for disappearing …

  After further search, Gus led Guthega and wailing Kate back to Noel. He took the painter of the dinghy from him and told him to go down the embankment and get into the boat and steady it. Then he told Guthega to embark. Stumbling down the embankment, Guthega sat down. He looked nothing, and he was. Rootless, no longer Jelly’s smartalec. A smartalec instead deprived of his context. Noel put his hand out as if to straighten his father’s posture. Guthega brushed the boy’s hand aside.

  —Fucking neurotic, Guthega said.

  —Godsake, yelled Gus. Leave the boy alone.

  It didn’t seem to Kate, as she found her own way down the embankment, that the water had much receded. She reflected, finding a seat and looking up sobbing at Gus who still held the bloody remains in their tarpaulin bag, that she would have liked to be alive in a time when Jelly could live on in his fragments. Gus and herself lugging them from town to town and producing miracles. Saint Jelly the Detonator.

  In a plain world however, it was hard to know what Gus would do with his bagful of Jelly’s magisterium.

  In spite of her ambitions to become unfeeling, she was not in fact an unfeeling woman. It was simply that she had accommodated herself to the principle that the order of the world is loss followed by loss.

  They push off under Gus’s direction. He is the only one of the three men who has any ideas about what is to be done, for Guthega and his son are stupefied. Kate sees a boat traveling off to her right. Its floodlight skims toward the embankment. Jelly’s party does not call out or try to get the boat’s attention and it goes singleminded on its way.

  Without any other propulsion for the moment, they can all feel the current in the water; Myambagh voiding its flood through Jelly’s hole in the wall. Gus lays down his bag in the bottom of the boat and smoothly starts the engine. This seems to be a talent of his. Getting motors to chatter away in the wet. Steering, he reaches his free hand out and pats Kate’s knee. This causes her to cease her Os.