Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  Then the little bloke turns around, ‘Surpriseski!’ he shouts. ‘Now I am English, Morrie Suckfizzle, Australian gentlemans!’

  We all gasp. Morrie’s shaved off his moustache. He’s prancing around us with delight, then he rushes over to Sarah and, grabbing her hands in both his own, he proceeds to shake them vigorously. ‘Sarah Maloney, I am Morrie Suckfizzle, please ta meet choo, zis is Sophie, my wife, gidday, mate.’ He introduces himself in perfect Australian, only his pronunciation is a bit crook. Then he repeats the exact same words to each of us, except of course for our individual names. You can see he’s pleased as punch with his new self-appropriated, two-action-words surname, but it’s hard to look at him without his big curledat-the-corners-up-to-his-ears moustache. It’s like seeing this chicken that’s been around all year suddenly plucked and on a roasting dish ready to go into the oven for your Christmas dinner.

  We’d known the professor and Sophie for some time when Sarah became pregnant and they both knew of her wanting to be a doctor, of course, which more than delighted Morrie Suckfizzle. The two of them would have long discussions about medicine and what it meant to be a good doctor. By this time both he and Sophie spoke very good English with a slight Polish accent. I reckon if I had to learn Polish I’d never get that good so quick.

  So, when Sarah got pregnant we didn’t know quite what to do and we decided to say nothing for a while, not even to Morrie and Sophie Suckfizzle. Nancy said it was Maloney business and whatever happened we’d handle it ourselves. As it turned out, this was a big mistake.

  It wasn’t that hard to keep our secret from them as we weren’t seeing a lot of Morrie and Sophie just then. I mean they were terrific friends, the best we’d ever had. In fact, they were the only grown-ups who ever came to the house for a proper visit and not just to pick up a christening robe or a baby’s layette. It was just that both of them now had their day jobs and, as well, at night Sophie worked as a cleaner at The Pines for the Forestry Commission and Morrie as a travelling door-to-door salesman for Rawleigh’s products, so they never had any time for visiting except for one Sunday every month when we’d go with them to the Bonegilla Migrant Camp.

  Morrie bought this little clapped-out Austin 7 from the mechanic at the Golden Fleece petrol station for twenty quid and, with Bozo’s help, they’d got it going pretty well. Bozo built a roof rack to carry Morrie’s boxes of householdcleaning products. He’d do the town and nearby places like Silver Creek, Wooragee, Chiltern and Stanley on weekday evenings, and places like Yackandandah, Allans Flat, Bright and Myrtleford and the farms and properties surrounding them on the weekends.

  I don’t think Morrie was a very good salesman at first, but after a while he became terrific. It happened like this.

  One weekend Morrie visits an outlying farm where the farmer is busy dehorning several Herefords he’s just bought. Sitting there on the race, he’s covered in blood from the horns he’s been cutting, and the posts of the cattle race are the same. Somehow the farmer’s slipped and gone head-first into the race, and the uncut horn of the Hereford has hooked into his groin, ripping it open and slicing through the femoral artery and generally making a huge wound. The blood is pumping out of the artery and the poor bugger is bleeding to death right in front of the family’s eyes. His wife can’t drive and it’s going to take an hour or more for the ambulance to come from Wangaratta because it’s the weekend and it’s at the footy match.

  Just then, old Morrie comes up the dirt road in the little Austin 7, bumping and jumping at every rut and suddenly it’s all happening. He hops in and gets to work, gives this bloke a couple of stiff shots of brandy, ties the artery and eventually stems the blood flow. Then he cleans the massive wound and, using a sharp kitchen knife which he first sterilises in boiling water, he cuts away the lacerated bits of flesh, I think it’s called tissue. He uses the farmer’s Mercurochrome to stop short-term infection, then he sends the wife out to get several hairs from the tail of the kid’s pony and, after he’s sterilised them, he uses a darning needle and the horsehair to sew up the big gaping wound.

  The ambulance arrives three hours later but the farmer doesn’t want to go to hospital because he reckons he’s all right. Morrie says he must, to get antibiotics and have the wound properly dressed and sutured and he probably needs a blood transfusion.

  At the hospital the doctors can’t believe it, not because it’s a botched job, just the opposite. Morrie’s done everything perfectly and they’ve never seen horsehair stitches before. The doctors say afterwards that they were perfect and very neat and that the whole job had obviously been done by a very skilled surgeon.

  They give the farmer a blood transfusion and then open him up, dress his wounds again and stitch him with proper hospital stitches, but forever afterwards the farmer, whose name is Harry Trumble, would claim that it was all totally unnecessary, that Morrie Suckfizzle had done the job perfect in the first place and they should’ve left it alone.

  After this incident Morrie became a sort of local hero in the district and whenever he went out to sell his cleaning stuff, if there was a sick kid in the house or if someone else in the family was crook, people would ask him to take a look.

  They got to like Morrie a lot because he wasn’t like your normal doctor who you had to treat like a little tin god or something and who never told you anything anyway. He’d always listen very carefully first. ‘Listen to your patient, Sarah, they will tell you what’s wrong with them. To be a clever listener is to be a good physician,’ he’d often say to her. Then when he’d heard it all and asked a few questions of his own and if he thought it required treatment from a doctor, Morrie would write down what they had to say to their doctor. If it was something that could be treated by stuff you could buy at the chemist, he’d write the medicine down for them to get. But he’d always say that he wasn’t qualified to treat them in Australia and if they were worried they should go to the doctor. If he recommended they see a local doctor, they had to do as he said or he wouldn’t be able to help them again if something went wrong.

  But country folk know when things work and when they don’t and a lot of them came to swear by him. Morrie always carried his doctor’s bag with him and other things like bandages and plaster of Paris and a few basic medicines. This didn’t make the two local doctors, old Dr Hughes and young Dr Wallis, too happy even though they benefited from the patients Morrie sent them. The two doctors tried to stop Morrie helping people but as he wasn’t practising medicine for profit and never charged for his services or prescribed drugs that weren’t readily available at the chemist, there wasn’t anything they could do except have sour grapes. Morrie would often come across a broken finger or stitch a cut on a kid’s leg, or someone would break an arm and he’d set the bone and do the plaster of Paris and nobody could find fault with the job he’d done.

  So even if Morrie wasn’t a good salesman, in the end he was, because people always bought heaps of his Rawleigh’s products, just in case they might be sick the one time he called around. He could easily have opened up a surgery in town with a brass plate outside which said:

  PROF. MORRIE SUCKFIZZLE NOT QUALIFIED TO PRACTISE IN AUSTRALIA.

  Sarah said people would still have come to him anyway, because he was much better than the two town quacks, although, as Mike said, ‘The old Sarah’s just a tad biased, wouldn’t you think?’ But of course it would be against the law because he couldn’t take any money from his patients.

  Morrie Suckfizzle was probably the only migrant who broke through the migrant-prejudice barrier. But only for some people, the small farmers and the working-class people in the town. The bigwigs, nobs, graziers, and the would-bes-if-they-could-bes would simply have shooed him from their front door, because they wouldn’t have wanted people to think that they bought Rawleigh’s cleaning products in the first place. But the working-class people didn’t call Morrie a ‘wog’ or a ‘dago’, even behind his back. They had this
special name for him, ‘the bush doctor’, and welcomed him into their homes.

  Morrie also did another good thing. Once a month he’d come over on a Sunday morning and Bozo would help him to service the Austin 7. Then they’d follow us to Bonegilla with Colleen hugged all the way and squeezed in on Sophie’s lap.

  The migrants would bring their sick kids, and the adults who were crook would also turn up and he’d question, then examine them and write down in English what they had to ask the camp doctor. He’d also treat minor wounds and abscesses and tell them things to ask the camp doctor. Unlike the town doctors, the doctors who came to the camp were too busy to mind him interfering. It turned out Morrie could talk five languages, Polish, Russian, German, Hungarian and Yiddish, in addition to English, and he made things a lot easier for them, so they decided that Morrie was a good bloke to have around.

  He and Sophie were saving every penny they made so that they could move to Melbourne where Morrie could study for his medical degree at the university. He’d have been okay if he’d come from England or a Commonwealth country where they teach you to be a doctor in English, but not if you came from Poland or any other place that speaks a different language. If Morrie wanted to be a doctor in Australia, he had to sit an examination, which if he passed, he was permitted to skip the first year at medical school and do only five years instead of six to qualify.

  Morrie and Sarah would talk about doing their degree together and laugh about it a lot. They’d say how they’d hold hands when they graduated and then they’d open a practice together, the old bull and the young heifer. That was their wonderful dream which all the Maloneys shared, the thing that was going to get us out from under that rock Nancy was always going on about. That’s the big joke now, the old bull and the young heifer, a heifer is a young cow that has never had a calf. Now Nancy didn’t want us even to tell our family’s best friends about the Maloneys’ latest tragedy. I guess she was that ashamed she couldn’t face them.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Bozo came home from boxing one night a day or so after we’d been to see the Templetons and called Mike and Sarah and me together into the washhouse out the back. Nancy was having her afternoon kip and so was Colleen, who always goes with her, the lump and the morsel, so we were safe enough.

  Bozo’s expression is real serious and he even makes Bitzers One to Five wait outside before he blurts out, ‘There’s this bloke at boxing whose sister got a bun in the oven and she went to see this old lady who lives in a bark hut at Silver Creek, she’s Indian or something like that, and she gave her some medicine and it got rid of her baby.’ ‘What sort of medicine?’ Sarah asks.

  ‘Just stuff to drink,’ Bozo says. ‘She had to make up this concoction and drink it about five times a day.’ ‘And it worked? She got rid of it?’ Mike asks.

  ‘That’s what this bloke said.’

  ‘And his sister, is she okay?’ Sarah says.

  ‘Yeah, right as rain. He said she was a bit crook for two days, that’s all.’

  Sarah gets on her stern face. ‘Bozo, what’s this boy’s sister’s name?’

  ‘I’m not allowed to say,’ Bozo pleads. ‘I promised him. We all took the boxer’s oath.’

  ‘Promised this bloke?’ Mike reaches forward and grabs Bozo by the shirt front, pulling him towards him. ‘You mean you told him about Sarah?’ ‘Christ no!’ Bozo exclaims.

  ‘Well then, what’s her name?’ Sarah demands. Bozo looks around, he’s got the trapped look Sarah can get you to have when she wants to know something. ‘Please, Sarah,’ he now begs. ‘Nobody knows his sister was up the duff and, if it gets out, the family will be in disgrace. He only told us after we’d all taken the boxer’s oath.’ ‘What’s that when it’s got booties on?’ Mike asks.

  ‘It’s when there’s a secret only we know. You know, us Police Boys boxers.’

  ‘That’s bullshit, Bozo,’ Sarah says. ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘It’s an emergency and family comes first,’ Mike reminds him.

  Bozo can take the long way or the short way, but he knows he’s going to lose. When Sarah wants to find something out nothing can stop her. She’ll ask you all these little innocent questions and you’ll answer them and then discover that she’s got you trapped, that there’s no way to go except to tell her.

  ‘Is this bloke a Catholic?’ Sarah begins.

  See what I mean? Already she’s started. No harm in answering that, is there? Well, that’s the beginning of the trap and Bozo knows sooner or later she’ll nail down the truth.

  ‘No, he’s a Proddy.’

  ‘Ah, so he goes to our school, then so must his sister.’ Bozo sighs. It’s only a matter of time so he reluctantly decides to go the short way. ‘Her name is Angela Morrison.’

  Bozo’s not too happy, he’s good at secrets and now he’s gone and broken his boxer’s oath.

  ‘Ah-ha, Angela Morrison, eh? Well, well, who’d have thought that, she never says boo to a mouse,’ Sarah exclaims.

  The next day when I get back from school, Sarah calls me into the kitchen, ‘Mole, I want you to come with me to Silver Creek.’

  ‘What about Mike and Bozo, they coming?’ I ask.

  ‘No, just you.’ She doesn’t explain why it’s me she wants to go with her. She only says she’s been to see Angela Morrison and we’re going to see this old lady at Silver Creek.

  ‘When?’ I ask.

  ‘Now,’ she says. She hands me a jam sandwich she’s made. ‘You can eat this on the way.’

  Silver Creek is only about two miles out of town so we can walk it easily enough. Sarah doesn’t say much on the way out, only that she’d been lucky enough to find Angela Morrison alone at home so she could talk to her frankly, with none of her oldies in the way.

  ‘What did she say? I mean she must have wanted to know, you know, how you knew about her?’ I ask.

  ‘She was pretty shitty when I told her why I’d come,’ Sarah said. ‘At first she said she didn’t know what I was talking about. Then I told her I was a Catholic. “I know that,” she said.’ ‘What did you say, then?’

  ‘“Well,” I said, “if you’re afraid I’ll tell someone about you, imagine what would happen if you told someone about me.” “What do you mean?” she asks. “If you’re a Catholic, getting rid of a baby is a mortal sin, the Church will excommunicate me and my mother will never speak to me again in her whole life!”’

  ‘Is that true? I mean about Nancy?’ I say, shocked. I knew it was a mortal sin against the Church, but being collapsed Catholics I wasn’t too worried about it. Nancy said God would understand about us being born out of wedlock and I reckoned when the time came, He’d sort of throw this in as well. But Nancy not ever speaking to Sarah again, that would be unbearable.

  ‘Nah, she’ll be real shitty for a while, but in the end she’d forgive me.’

  I’m terrifically relieved to hear this, I must say. ‘What did this Angela girl say when you told her that?’

  ‘She said she was glad she wasn’t a Catholic, but knowing how bad it would be for me if she talked, she knew I’d never talk about her and if I didn’t start it she wouldn’t retaliate.’

  ‘Good one! Did she tell you who put her up the duff?’

  ‘Mole!’ Sarah gasps.

  ‘Well, did she?’

  ‘Mole, haven’t you been listening? I said I’d never talk about her, and I won’t. You better not either, you hear?’

  ‘Course I won’t!’

  ‘Swear it! C’mon, swear it on a stack of Bibles!’

  ‘I swear on a stack of Bibles I’ll never tell, cross my heart and hope to die,’ I say, adding the extra bit for good measure.

  ‘Swear it on the Virgin Mary’s heart!’ I’ve never heard that one before, but I say it anyway. ‘I swear on the Virgin Mary’s heart.’

  ‘So help me God!’

  ‘So
help me God,’ I repeat.

  Sarah seems satisfied. ‘Good boy, Mole.’ ‘You’ll have to do the same with Mike and Bozo, they also know her name.’

  ‘You’re right. Good thinking, Mole.’

  ‘Did she say how much it would cost?’ I now ask.

  ‘I asked, but she wouldn’t tell me, she said the old lady told her not to.’

  We get to Silver Creek, which is nothing but a few old houses on small-acre ridges where nobody lives and a hayshed that’s half fallen down with an old rusted tractor in it. There’s nobody about and there’s no bark hut to be seen for love nor money.

  ‘She said it was in back of the house in the gum trees a bit further on,’ Sarah says.

  So we set off into the eucalyptus, mostly ironbark, and blunder around for a while looking for a track. We’re getting nowhere fast and we’re making a helluva racket in the undergrowth when suddenly this voice calls out, ‘Looking for me, dearies?’

  Standing about fifteen feet from us is this old woman who’s a dead ringer for a witch. Her hair is white and hangs down over her face, which is dark, like very sunburned. She’s wearing an old brown dress that goes right down to her ankles and is torn and ragged at the hem and she’s sort of stooped over and leaning on a long stick. ‘Looking for me, are you?’ she repeats. She’s got a strong voice that rings out, not a cackle like you’d expect from a witch.

  Sarah says, ‘Good afternoon, Angela Morrison sent us.’ ‘Who?’

  ‘Angela . . . Angela Morrison?’

  ‘Never heard of her in my life!’ the old woman says firmly. Then she crooks her finger. ‘Come, come, we’re not having all day to waste.’ ‘Are you the Indian lady?’ Sarah asks.

  ‘Yes, yes, come now.’ She walks into the bush and Sarah and me follow her.

  After about five minutes we come to this hut in a clearing. It’s made of bark like Bozo’s boxing mate said, with a lean-to that’s for cooking. There’s a big black kettle on an iron tripod over some glowing ashes and a wisp of steam is coming out of the spout of the kettle. The yard is very neat with the ground swept all around and a little creek running past what looks like a well-tended vegie garden, green and growing. There’s also a big sunflower about six feet high growing in its centre, the flower on the stalk is bigger than a soup plate. She sees me looking. ‘For the birdies, they pick at the sunflower seeds,’ she says. ‘You like the birdies?’