A Woman of the Inner Sea

by Thomas Keneally

  A genuine but minor surprise, a blue helicopter, glittering, its navigation lights already switched on. Tentative, taking pains to be sure she would brake, it edged groundward in front of her. When she did slow it came to rest on the common pasturage along the side of the road, the strip where battling farmers grazed their sheep free of cost in drought time. It looked as sweet as a cerulean egg, this helicopter, O’TOOLE on its side, in serious white picked out with black.

  The door of the thing swung open and Uncle Frank, tearing himself from its wind, wearing a black aviation jacket, delivered himself out of it. Hobbling to the middle of the road, he blocked her way to town.

  It was O’Toole the undertaker, Uncle Frank’s friend, with hands white as the sacraments of Christ from committing to rest the souls of the faithful departed. He and Uncle Frank had known each other even before their arrival in Australia, that well-known missionary country. For they came from the same place in County Limerick.

  She was somehow unsurprised to see Uncle Frank there in the road, in his paramilitary jacket. If Burnside’s intelligence could reach the back-of-Bourke, all the more so the not-so-Reverend Frank’s.

  As she remembered him doing in her childhood he gestured vastly with his large soft hand.

  —Come here now, the hand said.

  An instructional gesture too. He needed to impart something to her, a little way away from the full blast noise of the rotors. Some mystery of faith.

  She went up to him. Perhaps thinking it was still tender, he gently touched her shoulder and surveyed her. She saw his mouth make the sound of her name. Kate. Kate.

  No question he wanted her to join him in O’Toole’s sky-blue contraption. In mime she tried to tell him the story of the business she was on. God knows if he understood. He shook his head, and then kissed her impetuously and wetly on the ear and roared into it.

  —Bourke, Kate. No kidnaps, my darling! All aboveboard.

  She had never in her waking life needed so much a means of flying over the earth. But she wasn’t sure this one was it. Just the same, it oddly pleased her to obey Uncle Frank. She eased her truck into a ditch and took the keys, leaving the windows open to the dusk. She climbed up into the cabin of the helicopter by means of the little stirrup step. There in the pilot seat was triple-chinned O’Toole in a flying jacket covered in far more militant patches than Uncle Frank sported. Skyhawk O’Toole. She wondered but blessed whatever vanity it was which led him to own a helicopter.

  In fact O’Toole used it for rare ash scatterings over the sea, now that Catholics were permitted to cremate themselves. This had enabled him to get the whole thing off tax. It was another example of the way, because eight hundred years of rule had misused them, the O’Tooles and O’Briens practiced their anarchism.

  In the days when Uncle Frank was in something less than climactic trouble with His Eminence Cardinal Fogarty, Archbishop of Sydney, he had done grief counseling for O’Toole and might even be doing it now, even under release on bail.

  O’Toole’s sky-blue hearse came down on a football field by the Darling River, right on the white-limed halfway mark; like a referee from on high. Already Uncle Frank knew by yells and urgent gestures that there were matters to be attended to before they went into the question of Uncle Frank himself, or of how she had remade herself in the bush, changing herself to an extent in Jack Murchison’s frying kitchen and at Frank Pellegrino’s hearty location canteen.

  At last O’Toole cut the engines. His rotors went on churning still, though he had switched off the power to them. All the racketing of the machine dropped to a mere whir.

  Surprised by silence, Kate herself fell quiet.

  O’Toole turned and said, Hello Kate.

  He looked at her under his brows, in a way which he had developed from thirty years of facing the bereaved in the first full-blown frenzy of their grief.

  —Mother of God, she heard Uncle Frank cry. Did you say to me—back there—Burnside?

  Despite all the explosive force of their arrival, they failed to find a telephone and had to walk into town looking for police and ambulance. O’Toole dawdled behind, leaving Kate and Uncle Frank to their reunion. Needing of course to get back before Gus was well enough to murder Chifley, Kate walked too fast. Since Uncle Frank had never been a man for exercise and had recently spent some sedentary time in cells, he did well to stay on the pace. Long-legged though fat-hipped, he kept by her side, uttering sentences one and a half words at a time.

  —Kate, he reassured her, I know you didn’t … understand … how thoroughly you … were persecuting us. Your parents got the word … from that nice publican in Myambagh, but before they did there … was eight hours or so of … anguish you couldn’t imagine. I tell you so you’ll … know that if you yourself … don’t believe in … your own existence … there’re people who do. No, no, Burnside isn’t the issue you think he is. If you killed that gobshite, we’ll all stand up for you. Mother of God, half Sydney will give you a testimonial dinner!

  He told her too how he’d found her: through her theft of the white vestments. Missa de Angelis.

  Earlier in the monstrous year, he had written to every parish in his old diocese, enclosing a picture.

  —The boys still like me, Kate …

  That young feller in Bourke had got the letter two months back and put it on his refrigerator with a magnet. It stayed there as things will, and he had gone from his kitchen to his altar that Sunday morning, and then to his sacristy, and there was the face from his refrigerator door, willing to do him harm and steal his vestments.

  Still they found no phone box they could call from and the first sign of agencies of state was the chain fence of the police station. Within it a nineteenth-century sandstone building, the majesty of Britannia on a deep-set Aboriginal river, on a rainbow serpent named Darling. Victoria’s stone lion and unicorn still stood on the cornice of the police station.

  Uncle Frank paused.

  —I should tell you. I’ve had my experiences lately with these lads.

  —I know.

  She felt impatient and wanted to be inside now.

  —I heard it on the radio.

  —Kate, I want to tell you seriously to your face that I never bribed a single soul.

  For Uncle Frank’s chief pride was in getting favors done out of love.

  —Of course, she said urgently, shaking her head. Both because she did believe him and because she wanted to speed matters up, though to exactly what end for her she was not sure.

  With a sort of divinely annoying expansiveness, Uncle Frank presented his bail documents to the police, straight up and as if he cherished the things.

  —I’m playing straight with you boys …

  He had been looking for his niece for some time, he told the senior constable on duty. A big man, up to Burnside’s weight, but more flaccid. Kate recounted her truth to him flatly, without any desire to engage her narrative skills, to extenuate or embroider. Burnside had been injured. It was on the Schulberger property. No, not at the main house. No. Not at his late brother’s. She would lead them in then, since they didn’t know it. Who hurt him? He hurt himself. He fell.

  Arriving at the police station behind them, O’Toole explained that he would offer his helicopter, except that darkness was coming and he was not good at map coordinates.

  After a lot of police drawling into radios and loud instructions, they were all at once on the road to Schulberger’s, traveling in a police car followed by an ambulance. Uncle Frank had his arm lightly around her shoulder, and she both welcomed that and didn’t. For again it showed how much was unaltered. It was a vanity, all this dream of transmutation. She was still the small Kate Gaffney, who had inherent in her the risk of becoming Mrs. Kozinski junior. Corpuscles of blame in the bloodstream hadn’t been altered into dull mute bush corpuscles.

  If she took the blame for Burnside’s condition, she could get bail and then skip further west with Gus and Chifley. But she must be rigorous and travel a g
reat deal if she really wanted to change. There was a furnace at the Centre that would alter her. She wasn’t the only one to harbor that suspicion. Though not a suspicion, a conviction. She believed it. She had sensed it just beyond the horizon of the bounding dreams.

  So she had to try to do that. Make her way, breathing lightly, to the great renewing fire.

  Meanwhile Uncle Frank’s arm, laid there carefully just in case the scar tissue still smarted, was pleasant enough in itself. It did not make a claim, as other arms in her family would have.

  They saw a truck coming the other way. It was flashing its lights and even pulling into their path. By the last light you could see that its main color was red dust. Gus’s sister-in-law’s truck. Gus’s dismal eyes became visible by the police headlights. The police car and ambulance both halted and people got out, the ambulance driver, and Uncle Frank, Kate, senior constable and sergeant. Gus himself was waiting for them now on the red and black dirt road. The spike of his hair at the back jabbed the air dejectedly, like the plume of a defeated brave. He led them with movements of the hand to the back of his sister-in-law’s truck. On its tray lay a groaning human form wrapped in a tarpaulin, and naked to the air the still, shaggy-furred body of Chifley.

  Uncle Frank later reported that he heard a mechanical noise from Kate, something like the shifting of a gear.

  Her breath departed. With nothing to elevate her, she gave up to the magnetic drag of the things which had befallen her. Her vision closed off like the closing of a shutter. Coolly dying on a godless star, she knew that her uninformed legs were writhing in the red dust, giving a show of resistance. The limbs of one who does not want to ascend from the bottom of the sea.

  First Gus shot the returning Chifley to deliver him from notoriety on the evening news. Next, convinced of the futility of rescuing Menzies, he tried to shoot the bird too. But Menzies, named for a survivor and narrower in the head and throat than Chifley, evaded the bullet through one minor repositioning of his neck. He fled of course, at the same pace which had competed with the heroine’s truck in Frank Pellegrino’s film. And so at last Gus gave up.

  He wrapped Burnside in the tarpaulin and gave him water, which caused him to go into a fit. Then he set ablaze the Soldier Settler farm with its coral snake in a jar, its ancient furniture, its 1920s copies of the Sydney Morning Herald.

  It is hard to say why he did this. It consumed the remnants of the Kozinski papers of course, or sent them flying charred out over the flat earth. It served as a beacon to draw his sister-in-law in, and as a sign of surrender. It served sentimentally as a pyre for Chifley.

  So the naïvely treacherous sister-in-law saw the blaze, the black column of smoke so different in hue from the smoke of bushfires. She drove over in a panic. What she feared was that Burnside had set the fire.

  When she got there she forced Gus to give her explanations through his smashed nose. That was how daunting her innocence was. She thought she was still entitled to every piece of information her brother-in-law could give her!

  On the road between Bourke and Schulberger’s Gus knelt by Kate—so her uncle would later tell her—and he kissed her on the cheekbone, and in front of the hardened police of what could be called his home town, wept and said he’d never do anything to harm her. Uncle Frank had an eye for this sort of thing, but did not consider him a soul imperiled however. Kate was the soul imperiled, so convinced of it that she had begun swallowing her tongue. Uncle Frank did not understand the signs. The senior constable was trained that way though, and dragged her clenched jaws apart. He brought forward that same tongue which Chifley had cursed with language.

  The police remarked that Burnside’s blood was visible on Chifley’s hind paws, the long opposed toe with the savage claw.

  Though Gus was required further by them, Kate was not. Around sad Gus however there hung very little atmosphere of condemnation. He was simply asked about Jelly, and then about the beasts, and finally, the morning after he shot Chifley, released on his own recognizance.

  Kate was not in Bourke to see this however, since Uncle Frank took her home—as Uncle Frank himself chose to call it—quickly in O’Toole’s helicopter. The killing media would pass her coming the other way in their light aircraft and in helicopters of their own. For what a story! Heiress divorcée of Kozinski, mother of dead children, thought once to have drowned in a flood of Myambagh, succored by Frank Pellegrino, involved in kangaroo injury to the notorious Burnside. Time for the kangaroo court of their own bludgeon headlines and frightful cameras! Imagine her destiny if they had found her in Bourke, with nothing to protect her except her conviction that she could no longer breathe!

  —I wanted to warn Burnside, she would have pleaded with them. But he kicked me in the stomach, and I didn’t have the …

  —Sorry, Mrs. Kozinski. We’re out of film … the batteries are flat … the light’s wrong … a plane’s going over … Could we just do that bit again?

  For the flight home, she was stupefied with legal drugs, full of medicaments normally prescribed for epileptics, though probably she wasn’t one. Something heavy had to be used to distract her from her belief there was no air.

  Gus was left to do all that press stuff, and he did it in grief, having lost his beast and his companion. But he was a dutiful interviewee. His directness won him support during the next week, while Kate lay drugged in a leafy, plain private sanatorium near wooded Kuringai Chase, beyond the normal range of scrutiny of Sydney’s frenetic press.

  During her stupor, Murray visited her. So did her parents and, filling in his bail period and curing her soul, Uncle Frank. He was the one she noticed. In a brief wakeful period in which she did not speak, she was aware that he carried an airline bag, as if he had a gift for her. But he put it by the wall. He wanted her to be clearheaded to receive it.

  Gus, since he did not even try, had the basics to become what the media call a folk hero. When he refused to sell his story to any newspaper, it made them double the price.

  He served as a catalyst too. Feature articles appeared about Burnside and his repute for terror, and his long retainership to those prize Australo-Poles the Kozinskis.

  In sympathy with Gus, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals raided the Wagga entertainment park which had featured the tableau vivant and served writs on the man from whom Gus had retaken Chifley and Menzies. People queued in newspapers and on television and radio to say they didn’t think Gus’s was the sort of prosecution on which taxpayers’ money should be expended.

  His life has made him a practical, play-the-cards-you’re-dealt sort of man. His known Kate was the Kate of Murchison’s steak kitchen and front bar. His Kate was Jelly’s Kate. Not a woman of whom so many bewildering things were said: heiress (an old-fashioned term Gus had only ever encountered in books of a certain kind), Kozinski Constructions, shopping malls in California, tragedies on the Northern Beaches. Events on a yacht called Vistula.

  He causes so much distress to the half-conscious Kate Gaffney that Mrs. Kate takes him aside and tells him it would be better if.

  He is aware too of course that he has had his choice. He has chosen saving Chifley rather than take any notice of Kate’s idea of where her breath and phantom joy come from. A true lover, he accepted, waited out, served, handled gently all the beloved’s mad ideas, especially those about air and the uselessness of the human lung at certain points of history. But then, despite all that, he shot Chifley.

  Kate, cleaned by experts and stunned medically in a sanatorium bed! She knows she is dead, but is never awake long enough to actually set her compass in that direction. It is clear to any observer that her ideas about air are utterly crazed and that she will go on living.

  Kate now tends to see the same person in the room whenever she wakes. It is never her mother and father. It is never Murray, who is rarely allowed to be alone with her anyhow because of his part in her injuries. It is always Uncle Frank. It is clear that Uncle Frank waits on after others leave. He i
s looking for the moment that his airline bag can have its part.

  But he always speaks to her too. He speaks at greater length than she has consciousness for. He understands that that is effective. She will sometimes answer him without knowing it, her mouth will clot with the few words she has to play with. She doesn’t know at any stage what she has said. Somehow she knows what Uncle Frank says though.

  What most of his talk is about is still that he has never bribed anyone. Since it is his chief claim, the claim which in his mind qualifies him as comforter and guru, he is as desperate to tell her this in her sanatorium as he was amongst the pepper trees outside Queen Victoria’s remotest police station in Bourke.

  SP (Starting Price) bookmaking. It was as old as the anarchic island continent and as ancient as convictism. It was harmless too, in some lights, part of the unofficial democratic rights of the Australian working men and women. Except that there were some rough boys and even some gobshites involved. The intention upon coming to Australia to serve the diocese of Wilcannia-Forbes and then the archdiocese of Sydney had been pure and he had involved himself in it. But he loved the races. If he hadn’t had a vocation—he still thought of himself as having a vocation, a better one than His Eminence Fogarty—then he would have certainly been a trainer or at least an owner.

  And then love. He hadn’t come to Australia from loveless Limerick for love. Yet love was something he was not ashamed of claiming. The late Alderman Kearney had been in SP bookmaking since boyhood. When he died too young and left his widow, she appealed to her friend the not-so-Reverend Frank to help her to run things.

  Kate probably knew—and if not he certainly told her during her convalescence—that you needed to be able to get phones on quick if you were a controller, the central figure of an SP network. You needed a bank of a dozen phones at least in a series of given locations. Just in case the authorities, with nothing better to do with citizens’ taxes, became concerned about the number of calls being made from an individual number or string of numbers. It was something they checked on. Hard to believe. But they did. So you needed a dozen or so in each place to bear the volume of traffic, and then alternate locations in case of raids.