The Thorn Birds

by Colleen McCullough

  Paddy’s starched shirt and celluloid collar chafed, the blue suit was too hot, and the exotic Sydney sea-food they had served with champagne at luncheon had not agreed with his mutton-inured digestion. And he had felt a fool, thought he looked a fool. Best though it was, his suit smacked of cheap tailoring and bucolic unfashionableness. They were not his kind of people, the bluff tweedy graziers, the lofty matrons, the toothy, horsy young women, the cream of what the Bulletin called “the squattocracy.” For they were doing their best to forget the days in the last century when they had squatted on the land and taken vast tracts of it for their own, had it tacitly acknowledged as their own with federation and the arrival of home rule. They had become the most envied group of people on the continent, ran their own political part, sent their children to exclusive Sydney schools, hobnobbed with the visiting Prince of Wales. He, plain Paddy Cleary, was a workingman. He had absolutely nothing in common with these colonial aristocrats, who reminded him of his wife’s family too much for comfort.

  So when he came into the presbytery lounge to find Frank, Meggie and Father Ralph relaxed around the fire and looking as if they had spent a wonderful, carefree day, it irritated him. He had missed Fee’s genteel support unbearably and he still disliked his sister as much as he had back in his early childhood in Ireland. Then he noticed the sticking plaster over Frank’s eye, the swollen face; it was a heaven-sent excuse.

  “And how do you think you’re going to face your mother looking like that?” he yelled. “Not a day out of my sight and you’re back at it again, picking fights with anyone who looks at you sideways!”

  Startled, Father Ralph jumped to his feet with a soothing noise half-uttered; but Frank was quicker.

  “I earned myself money with this!” he said very softly, pointing to the plaster. “Twenty pounds for a few minutes’ work, better wages than Auntie Mary pays you and me combined in a month! I knocked out three good boxers and lasted the distance with a lightweight champion in Jimmy Sharman’s tent this afternoon. And I earned myself twenty pounds. It may not fit in with your ideas of what I ought to do, but this afternoon I earned the respect of every man present!”

  “A few tired, punch-drunk old has-beens at a country show, and you’re full of it? Grow up, Frank! I know you can’t grow any more in body, but you might make an effort for your mother’s sake to grow in mind!”

  The whiteness of Frank’s face! Like bleached bones. It was the most terrible insult a man could offer him, and this was his father; he couldn’t strike back. His breathing started coming from the bottom of his chest with the effort of keeping his hands by his sides. “No has-beens, Daddy. You know who Jimmy Sharman is as well as I do. And Jimmy Sharman himself said I had a terrific future as a boxer; he wants to take me into his troupe and train me. And he wants to pay me! I may not grow any bigger, but I’m big enough to lick any man ever born—and that goes for you, too, you stinking old he-goat!”

  The inference behind the epithet was not lost on Paddy; he went as white as his son. “Don’t you dare call me that!”

  “What else are you? You’re disgusting, you’re worse than a ram in rut! Couldn’t you leave her alone, couldn’t you keep your hands off her?”

  “No, no, no!” Meggie screamed. Father Ralph’s hands bit into her shoulders like claws and held her painfully against him. The tears poured down her face, she twisted to free herself frantically and vainly. “No, Daddy, no! Oh, Frank, please! Please, please!” she shrilled.

  But the only one who heard her was Father Ralph. Frank and Paddy faced each other, the dislike and the fear, each for the other, admitted at last. The dam of mutual love for Fee was breached and the bitter rivalry for Fee acknowledged.

  “I am her husband. It is by God’s grace we are blessed with our children,” said Paddy more calmly, fighting for control.

  “You’re no better than a shitty old dog after any bitch you can stick your thing into!”

  “And you’re no better than the shitty old dog who fathered you, whoever he was! Thank God I never had a hand in it!” shouted Paddy, and stopped. “Oh, dear Jesus!” His rage quit him like a howling wind, he sagged and shriveled and his hands plucked at his mouth as if to tear out the tongue which had uttered the unutterable. “I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it! I didn’t mean it!”

  The moment the words were out Father Ralph let go of Meggie and grabbed Frank. He had Frank’s right, arm twisted behind him, his own left arm around Frank’s neck, throttling him. And he was strong, the grip paralyzing; Frank fought to be free of him, then suddenly his resistance flagged and he shook his head in submission. Meggie had fallen to the floor and knelt there, weeping, her eyes going from her brother to her father in helpless, beseeching agony. She didn’t understand what had happened, but she knew it meant she couldn’t keep them both.

  “You meant it,” Frank croaked. “I must always have known it! I must always have known it.” He tried to turn his head to Father Ralph. “Let me go, Father. I won’t touch him, so help me God I won’t.”

  “So help you God? God rot your souls, both of you! If you’ve ruined the child I’ll kill you!” the priest roared, the only one angry now. “Do you realize I had to keep her here to listen to this, for fear if I took her away you’d kill each other while I was gone? I ought to have let you do it, you miserable, self-centered cretins!”

  “It’s all right, I’m going,” Frank said in a strange, empty voice. “I’m going to join Jimmy Sharman’s troupe, and I won’t be back.”

  “You’ve got to come back!” Paddy whispered. “What can I tell your mother? You mean more to her than the rest of us put together. She’ll never forgive me!”

  “Tell her I went to join Jimmy Sharman because I want to be someone. It’s the truth.”

  “What I said—it wasn’t true, Frank.”

  Frank’s alien black eyes flashed scornfully, the eyes the priest had wondered at the first time he saw them; what were grey-eyed Fee and blue-eyed Paddy doing with a black-eyed son? Father Ralph knew his Mendelian laws, and didn’t think even Fee’s greyness made it possible.

  Frank picked up his hat and coat. “Oh, it was true! I must always have known it. The memories of Mum playing her spinet in a room you could never have owned! The feeling you hadn’t always been there, that you came after me. That she was mine first.” He laughed soundlessly. “And to think all these years I’ve blamed you for dragging her down, when it was me. It was me!”

  “It was no one, Frank, no one!” the priest cried, trying to pull him back. “It’s a part of God’s great unfathomable plan; think of it like that!”

  Frank shook off the detaining hand and walked to the door with his light, deadly, tiptoed gait. He was born to be a boxer, thought Father Ralph in some detached corner of his brain, that cardinal’s brain.

  “God’s great unfathomable plan!” mocked the young man’s voice from the door. “You’re no better than a parrot when you act the priest, Father de Bricassart! I say God help you, because you’re the only one of us here who has no idea what he really is!”

  Paddy was sitting in a chair, ashen, his shocked eyes on Meggie as she huddled on her knees by the fire, weeping and rocking herself back and forth. He got up to go to her, but Father Ralph pushed him roughly away.

  “Leave her alone. You’ve done enough! There’s whiskey in the sideboard; take some. I’m going to put the child to bed, but I’ll be back to talk to you, so don’t go. Do you hear me, man?”

  “I’ll be here, Father. Put her to bed.”

  Upstairs in the charming apple-green bedroom the priest unbuttoned the little girl’s dress and chemise, made her sit on the edge of the bed so he could pull off her shoes and stockings. Her nightdress lay on the pillow where Annie had left it; he tugged it over her head and decently down before he removed her drawers. And all the while he talked to her about nothing, silly stories of buttons refusing to come undone, and shoes stubbornly staying tied, and ribbons that would not come off. It was impossible to tell if
she heard him; with their unspoken tales of infant tragedies, of troubles and pains beyond her years, the eyes stared drearily past his shoulder.

  “Now lie down, my darling girl, and try to go to sleep. I’ll be back in a little while to see you, so don’t worry, do you hear? We’ll talk about it then.”

  “Is she all right?” asked Paddy as he came back into the lounge.

  Father Ralph reached for the whiskey bottle standing on the sideboard, and poured a tumbler half full.

  “I don’t honestly know. God in heaven, Paddy, I wish I knew which is an Irishman’s greater curse, the drink or the temper. What possessed you to say that? No, don’t even bother answering! The temper. It’s true, of course. I knew he wasn’t yours the moment I first saw him.”

  “There’s not much misses you, is there?”

  “I suppose not. However, it doesn’t take much more than very ordinary powers of observation to see when the various members of my parish are troubled, or in pain. And having seen, it is my duty to do what I can to help.”

  “You’re very well liked in Gilly, Father.”

  “For which no doubt I may thank my face and my figure,” said the priest bitterly, unable to make it sound as light as he had intended.

  “Is that what you think? I can’t agree, Father. We like you because you’re a good pastor.”

  “Well, I seem to be thoroughly embroiled in your troubles, at any rate,” said Father Ralph uncomfortably. “You’d best get it off your chest, man.”

  Paddy stared into the fire, which he had built up to the proportions of a furnace while the priest was putting Meggie to bed, in an excess of remorse and frantic to be doing something. The empty glass in his hand shook in a series of rapid jerks; Father Ralph got up for the whiskey bottle and replenished it. After a long draft Paddy sighed, wiping the forgotten tears from his face.

  “I don’t know who Frank’s father is. It happened before I met Fee. Her people are practically New Zealand’s first family socially, and her father had a big wheat-and-sheep property outside Ashburton in the South Island. Money was no object, and Fee was his only daughter. As I understand it, he’d planned her life for her—a trip to the old country, a debut at court, the right husband. She had never lifted a hand in the house, of course. They had maids and butlers and horses and big carriages; they lived like lords.

  “I was the dairy hand, and sometimes I used to see Fee in the distance, walking with a little boy about eighteen months old. The next thing, old James Armstrong came to see me. His daughter, he said, had disgraced the family; she wasn’t married and she had a child. It had been hushed up, of course, but when they tried to get her away her grandmother made such a fuss they had no choice but to keep her on the place, in spite of the awkwardness. Now the grandmother was dying, there was nothing to stop them getting rid of Fee and her child. I was a single man, James said; if I’d marry her and guarantee to take her out of the South Island, they’d pay our traveling expenses and an additional five hundred pounds.

  “Well, Father, it was a fortune to me, and I was tired of the single life. But I was always so shy I was never any good with the girls. It seemed like a good idea to me, and I honestly didn’t mind the child. The grandmother got wind of it and sent for me, even though she was very ill. She was a tartar in her day, I’ll bet, but a real lady. She told me a bit about Fee, but she didn’t say who the father was, and I didn’t like to ask. Anyway, she made me promise to be good to Fee —she knew they’d have Fee off the place the minute she was dead, so she had suggested to James that they find Fee a husband. I felt sorry for the poor old thing; she was terribly fond of Fee.

  “Would you believe, Father, that the first time I was ever close enough to Fee to say hello to her was the day I married her?”

  “Oh, I’d believe it,” the priest said under his breath. He looked at the liquid in his glass, then drained it and reached for the bottle, filling both glasses. “So you married a lady far above you, Paddy.”

  “Yes. I was frightened to death of her at first. She was so beautiful in those days, Father, and so…out of it, if you know what I mean. As if she wasn’t even there, as if it was all happening to someone else.”

  “She’s still beautiful, Paddy,” said Father Ralph gently. “I can see in Meggie what she must have been like before she began to age.”

  “It hasn’t been an easy life for her, Father, but I don’t know what else I could have done. At least with me she was safe, and not abused. It took me two years to get up the courage to be—well, a real husband to her. I had to teach her to cook, to sweep a floor, wash and iron clothes. She didn’t know how.

  “And never once in all the years we’ve been married, Father, has she ever complained, or laughed, or cried. It’s only in the most private part of our life together that she ever displays any feeling, and even then she never speaks. I hope she will, yet I don’t want her to, because I always have the idea if she did, it would be has name she’d say. Oh, I don’t mean she doesn’t like me, or our children. But I love her so much, and it just seems to me she hasn’t got that sort of feeling left in her. Except for Frank. I’ve always known she loved Frank more than the rest of us put together. She must have loved his father. But I don’t know a thing about the man, who he was, why she couldn’t marry him.”

  Father Ralph looked down at his hands, blinking. “Oh, Paddy, what hell it is to be alive! Thank God I haven’t the courage to try more than the fringe of it.”

  Paddy got up, rather unsteadily. “Well, I’ve done it now, Father, haven’t I? I’ve sent Frank away, and Fee will never forgive me.”

  “You can’t tell her, Paddy. No, you mustn’t tell her, ever. Just tell her Frank ran away with the boxers and leave it at that. She knows how restless Frank’s been; she’ll believe you.”

  “I couldn’t do that, Father!” Paddy was aghast.

  “You’ve got to, Paddy. Hasn’t she known enough pain and misery? Don’t heap more on her head.” And to himself he thought: Who knows? Maybe she’ll learn to give the love she has for Frank to you at last, to you and the little thing upstairs.

  “You really think that, Father?”

  “I do. What happened tonight must go no further.”

  “But what about Meggie? She heard it all.”

  “Don’t worry about Meggie, I’ll take care of her. I don’t think she understood more of what went on than that you and Frank quarreled. I’ll make her see that with Frank gone, to tell her mother of the quarrel would only be an additional grief. Besides, I have a feeling Meggie doesn’t tell her mother much to begin with.” He got up. “Go to bed, Paddy. You’ve got to seem normal and dance attendance on Mary tomorrow, remember?”

  Meggie was not asleep; she was lying with eyes wide in the dim light of the little lamp beside her bed. The priest sat down beside her and noticed her hair still in its braids. Carefully he untied the navy ribbons and pulled gently until the hair lay in a rippling, molten sheet across the pillow.

  “Frank has gone away, Meggie,” he said.

  “I know, Father.”

  “Do you know why, darling?”

  “He had a fight with Daddy.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to go with Frank. He needs me.”

  “You can’t, my Meggie.”

  “Yes, I can. I was going to find him tonight, but my legs wouldn’t hold me up, and I don’t like the dark. But in the morning I’ll look for him.”

  “No, Meggie, you mustn’t. You see, Frank’s got his own life to lead, and it’s time he went away. I know you don’t want him to go away, but he’s been wanting to go for a long time. You mustn’t be selfish; you’ve got to let him live his own life.” The monotony of repetition, he thought, keep on drumming it in. “When we grow up it’s natural and right for us to want a life away from the home we grew up in, and Frank is a grown man. He ought to have his own home now, his own wife and family. Do you see that, Meggie? The fight between your daddy and Frank was only a sign of
Frank’s wanting to go. It didn’t happen because they don’t like each other. It happened because that’s the way a lot of young men leave home, it’s a sort of excuse. The fight was just an excuse for Frank to do what he’s been wanting to do for a long time, an excuse for Frank to leave. Do you understand that, my Meggie?”

  Her eyes shifted to his face and rested there. They were so exhausted, so full of pain, so old. “I know,” she said. “I know. Frank wanted to go away when I was a little girl, and he didn’t go. Daddy brought him back and made him stay with us.”

  “But this time Daddy isn’t going to bring him back, because Daddy can’t make him stay now. Frank has gone for good, Meggie. He isn’t coming back.”

  “Won’t I ever see him again?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “I’d like to say of course you will, but no one can predict the future, Meggie, even priests.” He drew a breath. “You mustn’t tell Mum there was a fight, Meggie, do you hear me? It would upset her very much, and she isn’t well.”

  “Because there’s going to be another baby?”

  “What do you know about that?”

  “Mum likes growing babies; she’s done it a lot. And she grows such nice babies, Father, even when she isn’t well. I’m going to grow one like Hal myself, then I won’t miss Frank so much, will I?”

  “Parthenogenesis,” he said. “Good luck, Meggie. Only what if you don’t manage to grow one?”

  “I’ve still got Hal,” she said sleepily, nestling down. Then she said, “Father, will you go away, too? Will you?”

  “One day, Meggie. But not soon, I think, so don’t worry. I have a feeling I’m going to be stuck in Gilly for a long, long time,” answered the priest, his eyes bitter.