Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  I recall very little about her, except that she appeared to permanently regret having married William D’Arcy Maloney. I remember that she invariably spoke to my grandpa in a raised and irritated voice, while her manner towards me was brusque and lacked the indulgent tones usually associated with grandmothers. Nancy told us it was because she was from English stock.

  My grandpa dropped dead of a heart attack in the Shamrock on the day of the cattle sales when the joint was packed with some of the local farmers and the blokes from down the saleyards and the abattoir, and any other serious drinkers who could dredge up an Irish surname somewhere in their family’s past. To the eternal admiration of this roistering send-off committee, he carked it with half a pot of beer, in the very act of raising it to his lips.

  After all the years of long-suffering martyrdom and putting up with my grandpa, his death seemed like a good opportunity for Grandmother Charlotte to sell the property at Wooragee and check into a retirement home. Not one like the Owens & Murray Old Age Home, which was seen as God’s waiting room, but something for decent folk. She’d spent almost half her life with a man she actively disliked and had spawned a son by him whom she loathed with a great intensity. Now her turn to put up her feet, free of a male encumbrance, had arrived at last. She would constantly refer to a place called Sunnyside on the Mornington Peninsula, a retirement home often advertised in The Stock and Land. ‘It is as far as I can possibly get from the taint of a Maloney,’ she’d say. In her mind it had become a Shangri-la, her haven of peace and the stairway to heaven itself.

  However, as commonly happened in the bush in those days, when the will was read, the property went to the oldest-surviving son, who was Tommy of course. While the will allowed for her to live in the house until she died, Grandmother Charlotte was penniless, left pushing shit uphill with a broken stick. Maloney payback.

  William D’Arcy Maloney, who had stolen her inheritance in the first place, had robbed her of the few days she had left in her troubled and unsatisfactory life. The retirement she had anticipated, lazy days spent lounging in a deck chair with the tide lapping at her feet and a soft breeze blowing in from the ocean, was over before it had begun.

  After that, Grandmother Charlotte quickly faded away and lost the will to live. Less than three months later she followed her husband to the grave. When the end was nigh, she summoned Father Crosby so she could say her final confession and have him administer the last rites. Two days later, with her English-Catholic conscience clear before God and a final unconfessed curse on her lips for the two Maloneys who had denied her the comforts of old age, she skipped purgatory and went straight to heaven.

  Alas, death has no conscience and even less shame and she was buried without fuss in the same burial plot as her errant husband. ‘So them two can still go at it hammer and tongs,’ Nancy chortled.

  Following so closely on her deceased husband’s heels caused people everywhere to say that, despite everything, they must have been devoted to each other and that Grandmother Charlotte must surely have died of a broken heart.

  ‘Broken heart, my arse!’ Nancy snorted. ‘After your grandpa died, the old witch had nobody to nag. More like she died swallowing her own venom!’ Then, thinking perhaps that speaking of the dead in this manner might bring us bad luck, she added reluctantly, ‘I’ll say this for the old tartar, she made a bloody good Christmas pudding.’

  It takes two to tango, I guess. In retrospect I now realise how hard it must have been for the old girl. Indeed, how difficult it was for any woman at the time. If anything went wrong it was the woman’s fault and, as Nancy did at Grandmother Charlotte’s funeral, even women often took the man’s side. Women seemed to do it automatically, turning on their own kind. They still do. God knows, Mr Baloney, by anyone’s reckoning, was a drunk and a layabout and my grandmother put up with him for thirty years. Like most of her generation, she deserved a lot better in life.

  But at that time I didn’t understand this cruel imbalance of the sexes, particularly in the bush. When Grandmother Charlotte died and Tommy came into his inheritance, it seemed to us, like for once, a bit of good fortune had come into our lives.

  Though he loved the bush itself, Tommy had no desire to be a farmer. Mr Baloney, more interested in the pub than the paddock, had neglected the property something terrible. His land was covered in a seasonal calendar of noxious weeds: red sorrel, St John’s wort, thistle, castor-oil plant and, to top off these floral catastrophes, the most prevalent of all, the dreaded Paterson’s curse that could turn a paddock purple and useless quick as look at you.

  Foxes happily crawled through gaping holes in an ancient chookhouse and stole his chickens. Rabbits chewed away at what clumps of grazing grass survived. If anything remained worth eating, you could bet your boots there’d be a locust plague to turn the paddocks to dust in a few days. Even the old apple tree in the backyard seemed always to drop its fruit before ever it ripened. Tommy, casting sentiment aside, decided to sell up and we Maloneys eagerly contemplated the meaning of being stinking rich with a thousand pounds in the bank.

  We should’ve known better. It turned out the property was hocked up to the eyeballs to the State Savings Bank of Victoria. In the end we only had enough, after paying off the debt to the bank, to do a major overhaul on the Diamond T and equip it with a brand new set of Dunlop tyres.

  With a bit of money to be used at his own discretion, Tommy took on a mantle of self-importance we’d not seen in him before. In a fit of sentimentality he paid for an expensive marble tombstone for Mr Baloney that featured two pure-white marble angels on top of a polished granite slab. Nancy said it was pure extortion and they’d seen him coming. In vain she pointed out to him that the money could have been better spent elsewhere and that one angel would have been sufficient to remind everyone that Mr Baloney was no bloody angel.

  Nancy was driven to despair by his arrogance, ‘I know it’s your money, Tommy, but I’d like the kids to have a proper education. Sarah says she wants to go to the university, be a doctor, won’t you let me put some of it away?’

  ‘A doctor, my arse, she’s a girl!’

  ‘What about Mike then? You’ve spent more on Mr Baloney’s headstone than what an education for one of them would cost.’ She couldn’t shout at him like she normally would, because it was his money. ‘Be nice if one of them was the first Maloney to go to a university.’

  ‘So? What are you saying? There’s never been a Maloney that’s finished high school, isn’t that enough for you? There’s never been a Maloney had a decent headstone neither. That’s another bloody first. At least we’ll get a bit of respect in the cemetery from now on. How much respect yer reckon a bloody sheila quack would get in Yankalillee?’

  In all this extravagance of Catholic-burial ritual, where the dead drunken male is instantly sanctified, Grandmother Charlotte very nearly got the bum’s rush. Even though she was buried in the selfsame plot as Mr Baloney, her presence there remained incognito, silent as the grave, and that’s how Tommy intended leaving it.

  ‘She can kiss my bum, she ain’t getting nothing,’ he said.

  ‘She’d have a fair bit of trouble doing that, now she’s dead!’ Nancy said, ‘But what you’re doing is burying her in an unmarked grave. That’s not fair, she’s not a murderer! If Father Crosby finds out, you’ll be in trouble, mate.’

  ‘That old poofter! If he’s the best the Pope can do, His Holiness should have saved himself the trouble. Wouldn’t surprise me if he was fondling one of the altar boys. Irish priests! Jesus Christ, why should I take any notice o’ one of them.’

  Nancy ignored this outburst, sticking to the subject. ‘Tommy, she was your mother after all, you came from her womb.’ While she may have disliked Grandmother Charlotte, as far as Nancy was concerned, and despite the fact that she herself had jumped into it a little prematurely, motherhood was a sacred duty and credit should be given where credit was due.
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  ‘My mother! Jesus, I’d a been a damn sight better off being born an orphan,’ Tommy shouted. ‘I should a been took away the moment they cut the birth cord.’

  ‘She prayed constantly for your safety during the war, Tommy,’ Nancy reminded him. ‘I know that’s true, she spent hours on her knees in front of the altar at St Stephen’s. “If the power of prayer can do it, then Tommy’s coming back to make you a respectable woman,” Father Crosby would tell me often enough.’ Nancy paused, ‘And you bloody did come back, though, I admit, a bit worse for wear. So give her a bit of credit, will ya!’

  Tommy wasn’t having any of it. ‘Yeah, and look where all her praying got me, dysentery, beri-beri, three years and five months under the fuckin’ Nips!’

  ‘That wasn’t her fault!’ Nancy protested.

  ‘Oh yeah? Don’t be so sure. I wouldn’t have put it past the old cow to write to General Tojo in Tokyo, give him my identity-tag number and tell him, if ever he comes across me, to kick the shit outta yours truly!’

  And so it went, back and forth, for nearly two weeks the two of them arguing. Eventually Nancy prevailed and Tommy allowed the stonemason to chisel Grandmother Charlotte’s name into the granite slab, though right at the bottom as an afterthought, and he absolutely refused to have it picked out in gold paint like Mr Baloney’s.

  What was left of the money allowed Tommy to shout all his friends at the Shamrock and stay drunk for a month as well as lose a few quid on the horses at Flemington with a clear conscience.

  Then, I remember, we invested the last fifty quid on Tatts tickets. For the second time we speculated on how we were going to spend the fortune we stood to win. True to form, the Maloney luck held firm and we got bugger-all back. So, there you go, the water from the tap had hit the spoon in the sink as usual. Life on Bell Street continued as before.

  My grandpa’s funeral was a big affair with Tooley’s funeral wagon draped in black crepe and more flowers than the combined floats at the Golden Hills Festival. It was fol lowed by a wake at the Shamrock with several of the town’s leading Protestants present. The entire district bushfire brigade attended, some coming from as far as Yarrawonga. Of course, all the town’s Catholics were there. Anything for a free piss-up.

  At the wake they’d rigged up this tape recorder to a loudspeaker and played a bush ballad which Mr Baloney used to sing when he’d had a skinful. The recording was in his own voice. A bloke at the ABC, visiting the town from Melbourne a couple of years earlier looking for stuff for the wireless, had recorded it in the pub one night. It’s called ‘The Ballad of Billy Brink’ and goes like this:

  There once was a shearer by the name of Bill Brink,

  A devil for work and a devil for drink,

  He’d shear his two hundred a day without fear,

  And he’d drink without stopping two gallons of beer.

  Chorus from the people in the pub

  And he’d drink without stopping two gallons of beer.

  When the pub opened up he was very first in,

  Roaring for whiskey and howling for gin,

  Saying, ‘Jimmy, my boy, I’m dying of thirst,

  Whatever you’ve got here just give it me first.’

  Chorus from the people in the pub

  Whatever you’ve got here just give it me first.’

  Now Jimmy the barman who served him the rum,

  Hated the sight of old Billy the bum;

  He came up too late, he came up too soon,

  At morning, at evening, at night and at noon.

  Chorus from the people in the pub

  At morning, at evening, at night and at noon.

  Now Jimmy the barman was cleaning the bar,

  With sulphuric acid locked up in a jar.

  He poured him a measure into a small glass,

  Saying, ‘After this drink you will surely say “Pass”.’

  Chorus from the people in the pub

  Saying, ‘After this drink you will surely say “Pass”.’

  ‘Well,’ says Billy to Jimmy, ‘the stuff it tastes fine,

  She’s a new kind of liquor or whiskey or wine?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the stuff, Jimmy, I’m strong as a Turk –

  I’ll break all the records today at my work.’

  Chorus from the people in the pub

  ‘I’ll break all the records today at my work.’

  Well, all that day long there was Jim at the bar,

  Too eager to argue, too anxious to fight,

  Roaring and trembling with a terrible fear,

  For he pictured the corpse of old Bill in his sight.

  Chorus from the people in the pub

  For he pictured the corpse of old Bill in his sight.

  But early next morn there was Bill as before,

  Roaring and bawling, and howling for more,

  His eyeballs were singed and his whiskers deranged,

  He had holes in his hide like a dog with the mange.

  Chorus from the people in the pub

  He had holes in his hide like a dog with the mange.

  Said Billy to Jimmy, ‘She sure was fine stuff.

  It made me feel well but I ain’t had enough.

  It started me coughing, you know I’m no liar,

  And every damn cough set my whiskers on fire.’

  Chorus from the people in the pub

  ‘And every damn cough set my whiskers on fiiiiiiiiiiiiire!’

  ‘Was it, you know, weird hearing the old man’s voice after he was already dead?’ I asked Tommy when he told me about the song and the funeral one day when we were in the bush together.

  ‘Nah, they loved it. Brought the old bugger fresh back into the pub like he was attending his own wake.’

  Mickey O’Hearn generously donated two eighteens for the wake and the bushfire mob had added a niner and Tommy had somehow scratched up the shekels for another nine-gallon keg. So the joint was awash with grog and, once the collective tongues were sufficiently oiled, just about every man and his dog made a speech or had a yarn to tell concerning the dearly departed, who had grown a dozen inches in stature since he’d hit the deck with a clunk.

  There was plenty to tell. Except for the Boer War and once to attend a bushfire conference in Melbourne in 1937, Mr Baloney had never left the valley and almost its whole history was encompassed in his life. Of the Boer War he’d say, ‘We should have lost. Them Boers were better than us, ride all day at a half-gallop, shoot the eye out of a potato at five hundred yards, in the end we outnumbered them twenty to one!’ Of his only visit to the big smoke: ‘Couldn’t get ’ome quick enough. Ratbags the lot of ’em, talked about bombing bushfires with water from the air!’

  Mickey O’Hearn, who’d made his particular oration fairly late in the day when the crowd sentiment was full to overflowing, mentioned how the dearly departed had sent half a pot of Victoria Bitter crashing to the floor moments before he’d been whisked up to the great pub in the sky. ‘Now, such a waste may be thought by some to bring shame to a drinking man of Mr Baloney’s reputation,’ Mickey intoned. ‘But I assure you I am not among his critics. No, sir! As an Irishman and as a publican of twenty years’ standing, I regard myself as an expert in these matters. I’ll be after tellin’ you now, ladies and gentlemen [there were no ladies present at the wake], the unconsumed ale is a very clear sign if ever I saw one.’ He paused to make sure everyone was paying attention. ‘It means, Mr Baloney will be back for the other half, don’t you bother yourself about that now!’

  This sentiment was rewarded with clapping and whistles and banging on the tables. Then, quite possibly carried away by the occasion and no doubt also from the effect caused by having imbibed too much of his own amber liquid in an effort to regain somewhat from his generosity, Mickey made this grand announcement. ‘Henceforth, a pot of beer w
ill be left on the main bar of the Shamrock every night to await the dear man’s return or until the Second Coming of our Lord, whichever occurs the sooner.

  God bless you all.’

  It was a fine gesture which brought tears to the eyes of several hardened drunks and was loudly applauded by all. Mr Baloney’s half-finished beer was instantly dubbed ‘The Beer of the Second Coming’.

  Except that, after two weeks either Jesus had come and nobody in Yankalillee had noticed (which was not entirely impossible) or Mickey O’Hearn had reneged on his promise. No pot of beer now rested on the polished-cedar bar counter where Mr Baloney had customarily perched.

  Tommy waited a week or two to make sure this wasn’t an oversight, then he confronted Mickey O’Hearn, ‘How come me old man’s beer ain’t on the bar like you promised, mate?’

  Mickey O’Hearn looked surprised. ‘Come now, Tommy Maloney, that’s funeral talk, that’s all that is, Irish blarney. I put the beer out the first two weeks, fourteen beers. To be sure now, that’s not a gesture to be taken lightly.’

  ‘Twelve, pub don’t open Sundays.’

  ‘Twelve then.’

  ‘Yeah, and you filled the glass from the slops tray, thought we wouldn’t notice, eh?’

  Michael O’Hearn, the representative of the town’s poor and downtrodden, was clearly taken aback and became somewhat agitated. Jabbing his forefinger into Tommy’s chest, he said, ‘Do you expect me to pull three hundred and sixty-five fresh beers a year minus fifty-two Sundays and let them go to waste! Jaysus, you wouldn’t be serious now, would you, Tommy Maloney? I’m not the bloody Aga Khan!’

  Tommy shook his head slowly, his eyes directed at the floor. Like most recidivists he was a convincing actor. ‘I dunno, mate, seems a real shame. Like you said at me old man’s funeral, tradition and all that. What with him lingering in purgatory, a cold beer might go down real good after a day on the hot coals.’ Tommy looked up at the Irishman, his one good eye registering a deep and profound sadness at this insult to the memory of his departed father. Mickey O’Hearn didn’t need to be reminded, though Tommy now lost no time reminding him, ‘Me old man spent almost his entire Boer War invalid’s pension every month at the Shamrock, Mickey. It’s just not right what you done, mate.’