Mr Darwin's Shooter

by Roger McDonald

  There was no shortage of love in Covington towards his other children. The Australian Covingtons were a fine brood. They did the Queen’s Empire credit, and even the youngest of them was now launched into the world without a second thought or a look back over her shoulder. They all loved their Pa in full return, and they knew him for a Pa of the very best—strong, boisterous, reliable, firm but kindly, always industrious, and sure to leave them generously bequeathed if he should drop off the perch. Yet perhaps a bit strange—more than so!—and therefore never to be quite understood. For they knew just as much of him as he wanted them to know. They knew about Darwin— Covington had named his second boy Charles Erasmus, after all. (Why? Because of damned superstition, that is why. Why else name a Congregationalist after a probable atheist?) There was no lack of pride in Covington’s associations with quality, the Darwins, the FitzRoys, the Kings, even. But relating to deeper questions, as they touched on his children’s knowledge of him, nothing more would come out of him than had already been given. They were good ridge timber, his progeny, and he was a stout trunk. They must never know about his querulous, leaf-withering side. They would find it stranger than a fencepost sprouting a head, or a cow talking English. The sons would take him for a milksop. But Theodora. But MacCracken. They prompted thoughts of a different quality altogether. They seemed to be his life and he hardly knew why, except the matter was pressing, and they had encompassing minds.

  Was it to light a candle in his memory that he wanted this so? Was it to chisel his name on a granite slab placed vertically in the earth, and know its full meaning? Was it to tend his memorial days on a rise of land overlooking river flats where corn-tassels whispered, and white herons rose from an estuary and winged their way south along a line of misty surf? Was it to sit on the rough ground and tell him their news, whispering it to the grass? The strange wisdom of the future, which might turn on its head all that Covington found in his day? What grandchildren would come of them? What great-grandchildren? What strangers bearing his blood? Smaller and smaller proportions of his blood until infinitesimal but never quite gone—unless people were lost from the earth: someone to live the history of his blood in continuation of when it was first roused.

  When the proposition was put to him, MacCracken believed he had never made such a swift and final decision in his life. Yes. He would go with the Covingtons to the country. This very morning on the coal-fired steam-packet that waited to chug them to Sydney Cove in the space of an hour. Then by pony trap and packhorse as Mrs Covington sketched over breakfast, spooning him an egg and deferring to him like the dickens—miles over ridges and across tablelands and deep into the southern ranges until they arrived perched on the threshold of heaven, as he heard tell, overlooking both west and east. A good number of the cattle there were book possessions of MacCracken’s already. It was where the land was, that Covington had spoken to him about some time before— when MacCracken had mentioned acreages and sheep as being worth more than gold, and Covington had nodded sagely, owning that he knew a man with four thousand acres and a fine house in a district with good soil and fair rainfall, who might be amenable to taking a new owner aboard. Was that man Covington himself? It mattered intensely to MacCracken if it was. For he had the infatuation that he would get Theodora thrown in. And so what if it meant abandoning every element of friendship, loyalty, and attachment—if it ripped to shreds MacCracken’s reputation with his Afghans. This morning they felt like a faint dissembling set of feathers washed down the river of time, and MacCracken himself was a newer, stronger fellow. Reading Darwin was like getting a new pair of spectacles that sharpened MacCracken’s view.

  But where was the book? It was gone, and MacCracken had a faint hallucination of splashing the floor, missing his chamber-pot in the dark—dare saying that had been enough for Covington to interpret as an opinion, and take it away.

  MacCracken’s maid was called and given instructions. She was to hurry to ‘Villa Rosa’ and pack boots, cotton socks, weskits, regatta shirts, moleskin trousers, belts, cabbage tree hats and collar studs. Also his telescope, pistol, notebooks, tinder-box, pocket compass, negrohead tobacco, inks, pens, buffalo-hide medical bag and an assortment of dissecting knives for whatever might transpire. And his small shelf of poetry books, while she was at it, in consideration of romance, and his Galapagos sea-urchin spines on a saucer on the window ledge—the whole contents of that saucer, if she would, with its knick-knacks and treasures to interest a clever eye.

  Mrs Covington made toast in front of the flames. It was how MacCracken liked it, dripping with butter and with a burr of charcoaled crumbs across the surface. She cut him a slice of pink ham and doled out mulligatawny chutney. But there was too much chewing involved. So she warmed stew in a pot of leftovers. This was better. It was the last dirty pot and when she scrubbed it and dried it and placed it in position over the fireplace she would have no chores left and be ready to leave ‘Coral Sands’ and lock the door.

  While his stew warmed MacCracken took his cane and limped to the door of the cottage and sniffed the fresh air. Theodora had been in the house when he woke—he’d heard a melodious, good-humoured, accented voice, and had struggled from bed only to miss her. He shaded his eye against the sun. Was that her at the wharf, an intense impression of autumnal reddish-brown? Undoubtedly, and seeking to avoid him, too.

  Covington appeared from the wharf pushing a four-wheeled baggage trolley.

  ‘There you are, confound you for a creeping crippled man. Are you better?’

  MacCracken demonstrated his agility, turning around and leaning inwards on his stick, making a full circle on the flagstones and looking (thought Covington with a certain satisfaction) like an animal caught in a trap without any realisation in the world that it was a trap indeed, and the bait was set, or rather would be if Theodora gave the nod.

  MacCracken’s jaw moved. He spoke or tried to speak. Covington came over and took his elbow, peered close and read his lips. Yes, there was movement along those bruises.

  I wish to slurry on the water.

  ‘What’s that you say? A drink? You shall have better than water,’ Covington boasted, putting his head through the doorway to direct his wife. ‘Good God, man, you’ll have breakfast. You shall have a soft-boiled egg and white bread, and whatever else you wish. Best China tea or Java coffee, and a mutton chop if your jaws can manage it, which I doubt they are able.’

  So MacCracken kept what he’d really said to himself: I love your daughter. I wish to marry your daughter.

  Then Covington was gone with a wave of his hat, and a loud shout: ‘Be on the ten o’clock!’

  MacCracken sucked shreds of meat between his newly chipped teeth. Physically matters were under control again. Ankle wobbly but holding, jaw manipulatory, and he was able to speak after a corner-of-the-mouth fashion.

  ‘A little tea for you, doctor?’

  ‘A great deal of tea, if you please.’ It was needed to flush the opiates through. His vision was a little too bright. His mind was a carnival.

  ‘An’ how did you sleep?’ Mrs Covington asked.

  ‘Very well,’ he nodded. Though his sinuses ached.

  ‘Theodora saw you and said you tossed and turned. She stayed with Nurse Parkington last night.’

  It was her bed I took. What a state of closeness he was in. No wonder his dreams had been wide-ranging and full of rapacity. Animals had figured prominently. Carnivorous animals well-armed, the shoulder pad of the boar, the hooked jaw of the male salmon. He woke in the thought that the shield might be as important for victory as the sword or spear—and obscurely gratified that the hearty Nurse Parkington was no special friend to Miss Georgina Ferris, and wouldn’t take her side in a fit.

  Of course if the Covingtons about-turned and announced that Theodora wouldn’t be coming as hoped, then MacCracken might have to think twice. The thought of her staying in Sydney and being taken up, and wearing blue velvet at Government House balls and being subject to other men’s lusts
enraged MacCracken insensibly. He was full of zest this morning and cursed his injuries. He wanted to be wherever she was. He wanted to get another look at her, and Covington’s deaf misunderstandings weren’t far wrong—it was a thirst he had.

  He thought if he could just glimpse her and work on that, he would be able to take in a little more, and so later look at her again, adjusting to the idea that he could work up to a conversation with her, and not feel incapable of speech twice over—once from the stiffness of his inferior maxillary, sore as perdition right up into the ramus, and the other from a most uncharacteristic fear that he wouldn’t be able to charm her with his usual light tone, through shyness, bashfulness and lovestruck idiocy. His dreams of the night mocked him with their fancies. He would save his emotions and give her something—a trinket—that might serve to get them started. It did with all her sex as a rule.

  Mrs Covington gathered herself into her compactness, brushed crumbs from her apron, straightened her skirts with a snap, and asked MacCracken what he thought of a man, full useless around the house and very demanding, who had once been better than a wife to another man.

  ‘Mr Covington, you mean? Ha, was that what he was?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said the loving, affronted dame. ‘Always doing the fetching and carrying. Answering every call, even cooking hot butter cakes and redding the poker last thing, to make a hot toddy. I never knew such a man. But then he told me,’ Mrs Covington wiped away a tear, ‘about his Theodora.’

  ‘Ah, Theodora,’ said MacCracken, just liking the name.

  ‘We had a small scare with Mr Covington last night,’ said Mrs Covington, getting on then and folding the napkins. ‘At least Dorrie did. I keep calling Theodora Dorrie although you know you mustn’t. Not in Mr Covington’s hearing, that is.’

  How can I call her anything when I don’t ever see her? MacCracken had the peevish sensation of being abandoned that can afflict the person at the centre of everything.

  ‘He is so very proud of her it would break your heart. I’m as wise to his manner as you are, Dr MacCracken, but Dorrie won’t be told, and when it was well after dark she found him sitting on a rock. She said he was all steamed up from his conversation with you. She was a mite annoyed at your liberties, but I told her how needful my husband was, and of my trust in your part.’

  MacCracken gravely nodded.

  ‘They were not back for hours. I kept the lamps burning, as you know I do.’

  MacCracken kept glancing through the windows, checking the door. He desperately wanted to be composed for Theodora if she came in. Perhaps she had left a memento behind. He felt pathetic about this. She might want to see him again. It was not inconceivable.

  ‘Do you have any consolation?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ asked MacCracken.

  ‘For my husband. Through what Mr Darwin has wrote. You know what hopes Mr Covington has for you, doctor, and heaven knows, I have gone up and down like a whirligig these past few years, as the time has drawn nearer to the book being done. It has been like coming towards a death in the man, I believe.’

  ‘Well,’ said MacCracken with difficulty, holding his jaw in his hand and finding the position made things easier, ‘it is a wonderful piece of work. Mind I have only skimmed through—conditions were hardly conducive last night— um, where is your daughter, Mrs Covington?’

  ‘My daughter?’

  ‘Theodora.’

  Mrs Covington coloured before replying. ‘She has gone to the town with Covington, they have gone to see a photographer and we are to join them there. They are like each other. Always dashing around. Full of expectation and wonder.’ She went to the window. ‘Now I see that our bags are down at the jetty and I want you to take my arm. Because if we take it slow we’ll have it easy together.’

  Theodora had a knowledge of her father going back to the earliest, beginning moments of his life. Soon after she arrived in Sydney they walked for hours around the shore while he spoke of it. They sat in a tea-room while he spun it out. Sometimes she drifted off, nodding, losing the connection between a running band of urchins in an English field and the love of a young vacciano for her fickle, imprudent mother. Other times she sat upright with attention, and learned what she never knew— that Carreras, who was left, in his turn, by her mother, was one of Rosas’s most assiduous Indian-killers, a disperser of bands of women and children to the most violent and sadistic ends. Yet a man with utter sentimentality over the loss of those savages, as she remembered him, a collector of their weavings and weapons and funereal stones.

  Covington in turn learned of her: the excellent education she had from English nuns in a convent of Buenos Ayres. The unhappy marriage she made, that was annulled by Papal decree (she carried the dispensation with her). She told of the long journey she made to India with her mother, who had married, by then, an English general. It was where Theodora might have married someone she knew—having aided him in the cholera wards, and learned her Nightingale procedures under his instruction. India was where she finally decided that she would come to Covington, take a chance in Australia, and answer his plea to be known.

  Covington told her of his master. Of the greatness in him, and she had, indeed, heard his name.

  ‘From where?’

  She leaned across and pinched Covington’s cheek.

  ‘From mother.’

  He told her that when Darwin was a boy he was locked in a long room with tall windows down either side, and ran with a stick smashing the windows, trying to get out, letting in the light. As for him, he had lately been feeling a darkness. There had been many letters from Darwin over the years. Covington showed her the bundle. ‘See what I mean to him!’

  Theodora read the letters over half an hour. There was a feeling through the tired friendliness and veiled condescension that Covington was envied—good health, no sickly or dead children, increasing property values, land, prospects for his offspring, progress in life. What if Darwin himself had emigrated? The thought was expressed. Australia might have been his choice. Now it was too late.

  Theodora had tears in her eyes as she took Covington’s hand. They sat in silence for a while.

  To Covington, the simplicity of their moments was a great blessing, and no amount of thinking about how creation was done could take that away. With thoughts of the book flapping about in his head, dark as the wings of a bat, Covington basked in a light as clear as any star of his boyhood nights.

  Covington told her about MacCracken. He laughed at that man. Theodora pulled a small face, and shook her head. ‘Impossible.’ Anyone who tried to make another shine in her eyes went about it the wrong way. The man she married would at first never seem the least dependent; yet would show her, in some fashion hardly known to himself, that he would cross the seas for her and walk on hot coals through adoration and love.

  Covington wore a collarless cotton shirt and a black coat with the sleeves polished. Dark ridgelines curled around his right cheek, the gun-nuzzling side. A magnifying glass was needed to see them—those old, deep, connected stains, peppery as a Maorilander’s tattoo— all from cradling the walnut stock of the small bore muzzle-loader that exploded in his face, lashing mustard-seed shot against him.

  He clutched the book in his lap. The spine was showing. He was a man always obedient and with his sarcasm kept in check. Yet his silence bellowed:

  ‘Be sure the volume can be seen.’ He checked the inner pages, and pulled a sour face. ‘It is the second printing!’

  The title was plain. He wanted the photographer to be sure of it. The Origin of Species. How many thousand copies were made? If it was like Darwin’s Beagle’s Voyage there would be uncountable numbers of them, and in all the world’s languages and libraries, too, and there would be no getting away from it anywhere.

  Thoughts of himself went brawling like devils in his mind. He held the book tighter and wondered what to do to be part of a new fashion of believing. Shake a tree and spill the seed everywhere? Leap on a she-tiger? Go spr
ead-eagled on the sea, trailing milt, disgorging phosphorescence between his legs?

  Such monstrous pride in him and animal spirits.

  He gave a warm laugh. How many issue must a man have to secure his place in creation? The answer was enough.

  A light blinded him, a white magnesium crunch of heat. Through the after-light came MacCracken wearing a floppy straw hat, and Theodora separately, her hair up in a radiant pile. They shall have the next one with him. Please. Stand here. You there. And ‘Come on, darlin’,’ to the wife. It was a long ride he hoped for them all. The doughty missus. The doctor a son to him. The long-lost daughter malleable to his intentions. If she comes. And if she declines he will travel with MacCracken, and seek understanding, hoping she will follow later. But pray God she sees her way, or his heart might split.

  ‘You must send one to your Don,’ said MacCracken.

  ‘He wants no photograph,’ said Covington disparagingly.

  ‘He asked for one. “With your next letter”.’

  ‘He never asks. He “wonders to trouble me”. In that wonder is a demand. In that demand is a great opposition to being told no. Get your nose out of my letter box, MacCracken.’

  ‘Give him an acknowledgement of your existence, old codger.’

  ‘I send him barnacles packed in wooden crates,’ said Covington, ‘lined with tin, and he thanks me for remembering. I send him duck-skins and owl-skins. He praises the ship’s captain who delivers them to his very front door without charge, never wondering if I have covered the freight generously, which I have indeed. I send him the foetus marsupials just the same.’

  So he went on. It was much dry carping against a pretended grain, because here was the truth: under the complaints, the photograph, with Covington’s new people, and with the book showing plain, was meant for Darwin all along. A fine expanded sense of Covington, have no doubt of it.

  ‘What is the delay?’ he shouted at the photographer, a shrivel-bearded man wearing an artist’s smock. ‘There is so little time. We have wagons to drive. Land to appraise.’