A Woman of the Inner Sea

by Thomas Keneally

  —Bloody long way to go to Mass, Kate, he said.

  He was very wary with his affection now the frenzy had ended. Again, being proud, loath to offend or presume.

  —But it’s okay by me, he added then.

  —And if I meet Burnside, I might sign. Just for peace. But I wouldn’t let him follow me back here. This place wouldn’t be found or anything …

  —Your business, Kate.

  Twenty-one

  AMONGST THE DWINDLED NUMBERS of devout in Bourke, she attended the Mass. The church in Wilcannia where Mick Cassidy had cast aspersions on the then and forever late Tim Brady was, as Gus had persuaded her, too far to go, so Bourke must serve.

  The cast of the rite:

  The Catholic doctor and his placid wife and handsome and mannerly country children.

  The Catholic lawyer who looked Lebanese, and his young freckled-Irish spouse.

  The elderly women, and the runty little men called Kelly or Mahony who had worked on cattle or sheep stations and retired in town, wearing everywhere, perhaps even to the bathroom, the sweat-glutted Akubras they had worn in their days of labor.

  And although the congregation was smaller than the Irish monsignors who had built this church would have ever foreseen, it was in some ways as if nothing had changed since Uncle Frank had been a cleric of this diocese. The young priest could have been a bygone not-so-Reverend Frank. Though Frank and the others had come to Australia because there were too many devout for even the native Australians to supply the sacerdodal need, this lad was here because no one cared anymore, because Madonna had acted and Jack Nicholson had slickly taken the souls of the young. The crass but complex world would in the end distract even the country doctor’s wholesome children.

  The priest was wearing green vestments, for that was the season of the year.

  She sat through the Mass and numbly through the sermon. The young priest had been to some elocution teacher who had taught him to hone the final consonants of words. She listened to the shape of his words and imagined where he came from. The standard green lane in mid-Eire? A pub in Meath? Or judging by the burr, a pub in Derry.

  Numbly she took communion from one of the town’s remaining nuns. Not a galleon of a nun, full habited in the manner of the year when Tim Brady had perished in this diocese. A nun in a calf-length dress. A modern woman.

  At the end the priest with the sharp-honed words blessed them in English. Divesting himself of his green chasuble at the altar, he made for the front of the church to intercept his departing parishioners and peck some of the women on the cheek. Such Protestant folksiness wouldn’t have characterized the wrath-of-God, I-might-shake-your-hand-but-God-will-still-damn-you Irishmen of Uncle Frank’s youth.

  Only a few aged faithful, dissenting from the folksy handshaking and kissing in progress outside, stayed behind to make their private devotions. Kate stayed with them. She could hear the young priest being genial around the doors of family vehicles, sticking a head in to rib one of the children on intelligence from the parents. He seemed so remote that the world—at least the world as it existed in Bourke—was tearing him further and further out into the secular streets. His green vestment lay barely remembered on a chair.

  Kate left by a side door. She passed the graves of monsignors called Cullen and Fitzgerald and entered the sacristy from the outer door. The smell of Uncle Frank and all the others was there. The highly scrubbed and beeswax scent of the catechism. The smell of Uncle Frank’s soft hands on race day. Long before he thought of applying them to Mrs. Kearney’s whippet body.

  There were long, brown varnished drawers with brass brackets to hold a label. Albs. Tunicles. Surplices and Stoles. Chasubles. Two drawers of chasubles.

  She pulled out the lower of the two. Red and black assailed her eyes. Blood and desolation and burnt offerings; martyrdom and loss. She kicked this drawer shut with her shoe. She was affronted by even the chance idea that the black of the Mass of the adult dead applied to her case.

  A new drawer. With the green and yellow, there were two sets of white—a modern silken chasuble, made for the weather, and a heavy brocaded and braided one built without reference to Bourke’s mean summer temperatures. She pulled this one out. She inspected it, felt its texture, and then folded it to herself, against her breasts. The young priest appeared in the sacristy doorway coming from the church, carrying his green chasuble of today’s Mass, but not as intimately as she carried the white.

  He was surprised, but he said pleasantly, Is there anything I can do for you, madam?

  Kate walked toward him. Yes, she said. These white vestments …

  —The heavy set, he said, still pleasant and willing to humor. Probably eighty years old, that one.

  She hit him in the stomach with all her force twice and then ran away, clasping the thing to her. The churchyard rang with the Jansenist disapproval of dead monsignors. The street was empty though except for peppermint trees. All the faithful had vanished.

  She did not wish to have to explain to Gus what the vestment for the Missa de Angelis was doing in his truck. It sat beside her on the front seat and she felt it one-handed and was satisfied. Ultimately, she was pleased to encounter an irrigation canal, well before the turnoff to Gus’s place. She laid the white chasuble down into the water, and it floated away like an august living thing.

  —That’s it, she said reassuringly, standing on the edge of the canal, on the limitless bottom of a once inland sea. It was well known from the classroom: two hundred million years too late the English gentleman Charles Sturt came with certainty to find a sea that had so long stopped lapping, and had found instead the harshest light off white objects and been blinded instead of bathed.

  She inspected her hands with which she had taken the wind out of the Lord’s anointed. She did not know why she’d done it to that poor, jovial man.

  Back in the truck, she drove home on spidery trails amongst the stringybarks to the Soldier Settler ruin, and went inside to sit by the stove and listen to Gus’s quiet inquiries.

  Gus turned on the radio news in the still afternoon as they sat content, she with her morning’s work done, he with his veneration of her and the old rifle to work on.

  The radio said:

  —Well-known racing identity, the Reverend Francis O’Brien, was arrested in the early hours of this morning at a hotel in Ermington, Sydney.

  Letting an unwise yelp loose, Kate saw that Gus had noticed nothing. She composed herself. She knew the name of the hotel after all. The Partridge and Grapes. A massive barn of an Aussie hotel to carry such a cozy name. Mrs. Kearney’s hotel.

  —Also arrested was an associate of Father O’Brien’s, Mrs. Fiona Kearney. Father O’Brien and Mrs. Kearney are charged with taxation fraud, illegal gaming, and with violations of the Federal Telecommunications Act. Mrs. Kearney and Father O’Brien between them have interests in at least ten Sydney hotels, of which Mrs. Kearney is nominee. Mrs. Kearney is the widow of well-known East Sydney alderman, Mick Kearney, who at the time of his death was a witness before the inquiry into illegal gaming. The Reverend Francis O’Brien was suspended from duty by His Eminence, Cardinal Fogarty, Archbishop of Sydney, in November 1988, at a time when the Reverend O’Brien’s connections with starting-price bookmaking were revealed before the Independent Commission into Corruption.

  Morosely gratified Fogarty, who had managed to move in on Uncle Frank before the police did. Though there was no sense to it, she felt something like a fury at the righteousness of His Eminence Fogarty.

  Gus heard all this newsreading static too but knew nothing of what it meant. Chifley, beneath the stringybark, heard it and gazed at the verandah.

  —There, she believed he placidly said. The gift of sodding language. Keep the bastard.

  —Thanks a lot, said Kate.

  At least the radio was too prim to say what Kate knew in her blood: that Uncle Frank was dragged half-naked from the same bed as half-naked Mrs. Kearney. Neither of them beauties, Frank in his tousl
ed plumpness, she angular and her face blurred. As she had heard someone, probably a friend of the Kozinskis, say, If he was going to break his vows, you’d think he’d get better value than Fiona Kearney.

  What is required of me now? she wondered. Whatever it was, there wasn’t any chance she would provide it. The not-so-Reverend Frank was not dependent on her favors.

  The bottle the shocked young fireman had pressed into her hands.

  —Reached inside the door, but this was all I could get before everything went. Sorry. Sorry.

  Even in prison, Uncle Frank would be Uncle Frank, a god who would know where the bottle was. In a cupboard at Mrs. Kearney’s at Ermington at the worst. In a cupboard at his house in Abbotsford. It wouldn’t be right to ask him now, burdened as he was.

  Just the same, she wondered should she write to him? He would have the best of counsel. His ten hotels would pay for it. His tax-evaded earnings. If not that, his loyal brother-in-law James Gaffney, or his tame mortician O’Toole.

  Siesta: an unlikely event in Gus’s life. It is midafternoon on the day after Kate stole the vestments of the Missa de Angelis, and still she cannot think of anything Uncle Frank needs from her. Somewhere Jim Gaffney is discussing bail and lawyers with him, while Gus has yielded to drowsiness and is languorously entwined with Kate.

  —Man’s getting bloody lazy, leading this life.

  Half-asleep, they could hear the engine of a truck and both got up on their elbows to get a view through the window. Soon two distinct motors could be heard.

  The first vehicle to appear by the farmyard gate of the vanished Soldier Settler was Gus’s sister-in-law’s red ute, tinged a sallower red by its permanent dust.

  Gus’s sister-in-law dismounted and opened the farmgate. By then Gus and Kate had reached the window. They were mystified: having opened the gate she backed away from it, did a complete U-turn and parked with the tail of the truck toward the farmhouse, leaving the track clear to the black sedan which had followed her to enter the yard.

  Kate dwelt on the ecclesiastical black duco beyond the window.

  —Uncle Frank? she asked. Uncle Frank?

  She was still caught in the tail of something like a dream. Gus took no notice. He put his boots on without socks, in the manner of people of the old bush, the battling bush of the vanished Soldier Settler who wore socks only in the trenches of Flanders and for his wedding.

  —It’s someone, Gus told her.

  Barefooted still, she reached for her gumboots. She would have liked to have washed. This had nothing to do with the normal etiquette of visits however. Of what a visitor could expect in a farm wife, if that’s what Kate was. It had more to do with her delight in the image of a thread of cold water from the water tank by the front door. The white fabric had sharpened her delight in the seeing of such things.

  She could hear the visitor’s car pull up by the steps. One look of alliance, and she and Gus went out to greet it. When they got to the verandah, Burnside was already out of the car, inspecting some knee-high native plant which had encroached on the shade of the verandah steps. He was no longer in the charity weeds they’d given him at the Palais in Myambagh after his rescue, but in his accustomed clothing—razorsharp slacks and a windcheater. He looked up as Kate emerged.

  —Well, don’t you think you two ought to call the police and tell them you’re safe? They’d like to talk about what happened to the big fellow …

  The big fellow. The biggest. Jelly.

  Standing by her truck beyond the gate, Gus’s sister-in-law was waving something. It was an envelope. Burnside was the master of the envelopes.

  —Fifteen thousand in cash, Gus. And a check for fifty thousand. All so that Mr. Burnside could have a talk to your friend. Legal documents. Fair enough in my book.

  Gus’s face reddened. Perhaps even from that distance she could get that whiff of his shame, for she got uncertain and threw the envelope into her truck.

  —Leave you to it for the time being.

  She entered the truck herself, then she drove away homeward, dragging with her a light red squall of dust.

  There was a makeshift table and two chairs on the verandah. Gus had set them there so that he and Kate had somewhere to sit and drink tea in the afternoons. Slowly in this landscape aching of slowness, Burnside set his eyes on this rough furniture.

  —Can I come up? he asked as if he was very tired.

  —No you bloody can’t, said Gus.

  Burnside went back to his car, opened a door, then his briefcase which sat on a seat, and took a brown envelope from it. It was of course the twin to the one full of the papers Kate had signed in the Railway Hotel. She felt an intimate anger. With a shudder, she felt it slither from her. She believed she could perceive it glittering handsome as Satan on the verandah boards.

  She said, Now I’m not signing. I’m not signing now.

  He did not realize that he was up against a living thing, where in Myambagh he had had to fight only inertia.

  —If you’d signed them last time when I said, I wouldn’t be still after you.

  —Get out of here. I’m not signing.

  —So you only signed in Myambagh, said Burnside almost plaintively, with a thug’s genuinely hypnotic sense of grievance, because you knew the floods would get me. What a bitch of a thing. I can’t stand people who think like you do!

  —Listen, you used to make me sick when you were on the Vistula, Mr. Burnside. Fuck off. I’m going inside.

  —Well, you weren’t in such good taste yourself. You were all sewn up like a fucking Lebanese virgin. But we’re not here for insults. Mr. Kozinski senior is willing to pay you an extra $300,000 over the two million for your signature.

  She heard Gus whistle or at least express breath despite himself.

  —No. No way.

  If the fury hadn’t broken from her body and made things simple, she could have said more rhetorical stuff than that. Something like: They haven’t printed the check large enough to carry the digits to pay for getting rid of me! As it was, she was so ruggedly angry she didn’t need to.

  Burnside appealed to Gus. I don’t think she’s reasonable. Do you think she’s reasonable?

  —Not for me to judge. But a sum like that … there’s got to be some dirty work.

  —There’s dirty work, said Kate with her new passion. He’s the dirty work.

  Gus put his head on the side. Light could be seen through his feathers of black hair. He said, I don’t know who invited you onto the property. I’ll have to speak to my sister-in-law.

  Moved by his herbivorous curiosity, by habits well tolerated in his de-pouched babyhood by his friend Gus, Chifley had come in close.

  Burnside mounted the stairs opening the envelope. He took papers out as he went, and offered them to Gus.

  —You read them then. There’s a fee in them for you too. She already signed their identicals in Myambagh. What a town that is!

  Stepping forward to receive the papers, Gus was at his most defenseless. She meant to tell him about Burnside’s renown, but Burnside was quicker than utterance. He dropped the papers on the verandah. They would not blow far in this still, dry air. With both hands he took Gus behind the neck and dragged his face down onto a raised knee. She heard Gus’s already skewed nose crack like a twig.

  Omnipotent Gus who had led her out of the floods and rescued the beasts! Rescueless himself, he tumbled to the boards. Burnside’s knee then landed in her stomach, taking her breath, making her brain reach hugely for air.

  Even without air Kate was abashed by the way Burnside spoke in cliché, not because he could not do better but because tough guys loved clichés, and Burnside wanted the tough-guy niche in the building industry of New South Wales.

  —Don’t leave bruises on a lady, she heard him inform her. Work on the soft tissues. I’ve been bloody wanting to for some little time.

  Her legs gone, she sat beside Gus. She could hear herself whooping for air. There came from between her legs a hateful brown s
tain; a stench of helpless resentment.

  Burnside was collecting the Kozinskis’ papers again. Now I will die rather than, Kate was still airlessly saying.

  What took up her mind while she barked for breath was a sort of admiration of the sister-in-law’s innocence. Here was a woman who certainly believed that money fell from heaven or—the same thing—came unsullied from the hands of scoundrels. If she hadn’t believed that, she would surely still be here, keeping an eye out for the way things went on the verandah. The eye, one of many, Burnside deserved to have focused on him.

  He lifted her by the scruff, without effort, and somehow the movement gave her back her breath.

  —What a great girl you are, Mrs. Kozinski! The real Kozinskis, particularly old Mr. and Mrs., despise you. You want to have kids by this fucking bushwhacker? I can neuter him, love! Listen: Sign Paul Kozinski’s papers so he can live the full enriched life he wants to, and you can live the shitty one you want.

  Gus was trying to lever himself upright. Holding Kate still, Burnside kicked him casually in the side of the head. Had Burnside been wearing those heavy, metallic soles in Murchison’s Railway Hotel? How had she missed them?

  At the thud of the impact, Gus’s arms flew from beneath him. Kate saw Chifley, a placid witness, ten paces from the base of the stairs. Menzies paced the fringes of the bush with an avian indifference, but Chifley saw and misread it all. He had the same brand of grass-eating innocence which Gus’s sister-in-law possessed. You push the gift of tongues upon us, thought Kate beyond reason, and now Burnside beats us to death with it.

  Burnside said, I will fucking cripple your friend, and the lawyers Mr. Kozinski hires for me will tell the courts it was self-defense. They’ll even argue he was beating you. Your behavior will disqualify you as a witness. I’ve had cases like this before.

  He sat in Gus’s chair. Shuffling the papers, he grew ruminative.

  —This is an old road to me. It’s only new to you.

  He watched her raise herself from the boards and flop into a chair. She wanted her breath back to tell him that the womb didn’t matter. For the fury was gone—it had its own will. Oh the weariness of his catching her up, and all the people who would be in his wake! But she had the resources to help Gus. Nothing to help Uncle Frank with. But she had the papers and, no doubt, Burn-side’s pen, to hand.