Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  Then there’s the fact that Mrs Barrington-Stone makes no bones about her affection for Sarah. Having her on our side almost makes us respectable. She finished her full stint on the Country Women’s Association even though what she calls ‘a reactionary element’ tried hard to get her kicked out. But it turned out that most of the members were behind her and admired her for going in to bat for Sarah and winning against enormous odds. They’re beginning to feel there’s a change in the air for the country women’s cause and that Mrs Barrington-Stone has shown the way for the older women and Sarah is the example for their daughters to follow. That is, of course, if you cut out ‘the falling pregnant to the high-school footy captain’ part. What Mrs Barrington-Stone has shown the outside world is that the CWA aren’t a bunch of old chooks baking cakes and making jam for fetes, but one of the most progressive women’s organisations in Australia. They have a long history of fighting for just causes, justice and the rights of women everywhere and it was them who started the Land Army during the war so they’re no shrinking violets.

  Templeton, by the way, is a typical Maloney with flaming red hair. The only thing Murray Templeton gave her is his skin so she doesn’t have freckles. Nancy says she hopes it, her skin that is, doesn’t turn out as thick as her father’s, but otherwise not having freckles is a blessing. Except for that, she’s a Maloney from her carrot top to her toenails and looks like ten-year-old little Colleen’s younger sister.

  There’s a lot to tell you and then, on the other hand, there isn’t, which is why I’ve skipped about five years. Television’s come, but you know about that. Of course, it didn’t come up to Yankalillee properly until earlier this year.

  We didn’t think we’d be able to afford a television set for a couple of years, if even then. Then in the very first week of transmission from GMV6, the new TV station at Shepparton, a miracle happened.

  We got real lucky, some rich bloke in Turnbull Street comes home pissed one night and demands his tea. It seems his wife and three daughters are crowded around the brand-new set watching Bob Dyer’s ‘Pick a Box’. He’s told his tucker’s in the oven, to get it himself. This makes him a bit shitty in the first place but he then finds that his wife must have turned the oven up too high by mistake and his tea is ruined, burned to a crisp or dried out or something. He’s had a skinful and comes back into the lounge and goes off his rocker. He kicks the screen in and does what looks like irreparable damage and the set ends up in the garbage.

  Goes to show it isn’t just the poor and the Catholics who do irresponsible things like that. Nancy says that those rich blokes can’t beat up their wives like us Catholics so he took it out on the television instead, which is our Maloney good fortune. I reckon she’s wrong, just because you’re rich doesn’t mean you can’t be a mongrel.

  Anyway, there it was when we come around the next morning to collect the rubbish, a television set with a big hole in the screen. Bozo’s onto it in a flash. He’s since studied up on TV sets and reckons once we’ve got a new picture tube he has to order from A.W.A. in Sydney, we’re going to have TV. Fair dinkum, a television set of our own and an expensive twenty-three-inch one to boot. If anybody else had said it, I’d be doubtful, it looked a heap of shit when we recovered it from the garbage. Bozo wouldn’t say it will come good unless he was pretty sure he could repair it. The only immediate problem is that we can’t yet afford the new picture tube, but when we can, it’s going to be a lot cheaper than a new set. In the meantime we’ve got a piece of smoked glass fitted to hide the damage inside and keep the dust off and it looks pretty good in the front room sitting up on a small table we also scavenged some time from someone’s rubbish.

  With Mike gone to Melbourne that left only Bozo and me and occasionally Tommy to do the garbage. The old Diamond T was just about clapped out and towards the end couldn’t get out of second gear even with Bozo’s best efforts. The gearbox was history and there was a whine in the diff loud enough to wake the dead, no way we can afford a reconditioned one either. We didn’t save anything with Sarah and Mike gone neither. Bozo and me ate like a horse, still do, and Nancy makes us all look like pikers. Only Tommy and little Colleen peck at their food and so, what with the cost of living constantly going up, things were tough. Bozo’s having to pay his train fares to Melbourne every weekend meant he couldn’t help out that much when we got into a pinch. The truth is the first three years after Sarah and Mike left were the worst ever.

  Tommy’s attempts at being on the wagon have been reasonably good by his standards, but his health hasn’t held up. What with the war, prison and his lifetime of drinking, he’s crook more days than he’s better. He’s not been up to lifting a hundred and fifty garbage cans from three in the morning until seven-thirty, so Bozo and me had to do the lot ourselves. It was hard going, just the two of us behind the truck. Bozo didn’t even have the weekends to sleep in. He’d go down to Melbourne Saturday morning on the 9.13 from Wangaratta to train with Kevin Flanagan at the Russell Street gym. Or he’d have a fight on Saturday night. Sunday mornings he’d catch the train again and come back in the arvo on the 3.15 and get home on the bus from Wangaratta by nine o’clock if he was lucky, then have to be up at 3 a.m. again. If it wasn’t for the fact that he could usually grab three hours’ sleep on the train, he’d have been exhausted all week.

  Tommy also had two more stints inside for petty theft, the first for stealing a fifty-pound bag of dog biscuits for Bozo’s Bitzers. Silly bugger, got himself tanked at the Wangaratta Agricultural Show and became carried away on the spur of the moment when he saw this bag of biscuits in front of one of the exhibition stalls at the sheep-dog trials. He upped the bag and humped it towards the entrance fast as he could go. But it was open one end and he left a dogbiscuit trail to be followed and when Tommy ran out of puff he’s citizen-arrested by this sheila in pants who frogmarched Tommy to the cops. She turned out to be the ‘Good Dog’ dog food representative from Melbourne so we couldn’t even appeal to her compassion as a local. The real truth was that she might have come around but Tommy, being drunk, told her exactly what he thought of women with moustaches who wear men’s khaki pants, and that put an end to any goodwill that might have been going around.

  Bloody Oliver Twist, the stipendiary magistrate of illfame, gave Tommy six months.

  The second time was equally ridiculous and is Tommy Maloney at his all-time stupidest. I think Tommy can’t be a real crim at heart, just someone who gets these sudden rushes of blood to the head, because nobody can be that dumb. Not even Bobby Devlin, Bozo’s old boxing coach, who’s served his sentence and gone to live in Queensland. Big Jack says it’s a place in the sun for shady people. What’s more, I know Tommy isn’t stupid because I go out with him in the bush and he’s bloody clever the things he knows. It’s what the war’s done, sometimes he’s really fucked in the head and I reckon that’s when he commits these really dumb crimes. The second crime that gets him six months from Oliver Twist defies explanation, even for Tommy. What’s more, he isn’t even pissed when he commits it.

  Father Crosby calls around, must have been early November 1958, if I remember correctly, and he’s all smiles for a change. It seems there’s a convocation of priests to be held by Cardinal Stewart in Bendigo and he’s been invited. He’s come to see Nancy about a new surplice, he wants all the trimmings and, of course, he wants it for free. ‘A donation to the Blessed Virgin, my dear.’

  Nancy will work off some of her past sins, shorten her time in purgatory, is the other subtle suggestion from Yankalillee’s own Friar Tuck. Anyway, Nancy buys the deal, I mean what else can she do, even her, a collapsed Catholic, doesn’t want the priest from Yankalillee to look like a dag surplice-wise. Besides, with Mike gone, we can’t really afford to drop our standards because all these years people think it’s Nancy’s work that’s winning ribbons. Mind you, Nancy’s no slouch herself when she really wants to try.

  Well, Father Crosby as usual leaves his Mal
vern Star resting against the front fence. Tommy comes home with the problem that he owes the SP bookie ten quid he’s lost that afternoon betting on the St Leger, one of the big local greyhound races. He sees this beaut bike and in his addled mind thinks, ‘That’d be worth a fiver at least.’

  Well, to cut a long story short, he rides it all the way to Wangaratta, and tries to sell it to Joe Turkey. Only problem is that it’s got Property of the Catholic Church stamped on the frame in three places. Joe, of course, doesn’t know that Tommy is Bozo’s old man, and while bicycle theft isn’t exactly front-page news, stealing from the Church is not on. Joe Turkey, who’s a good Catholic, dobs Tommy in to the Wangaratta police.

  Nancy swears she’ll never forgive Father Crosby, who, when the case came up, refused to withdraw charges.

  ‘I cannot in all conscience go against the law of the land, Nancy Maloney. The Scriptures teach us, “Render thereto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.”’

  ‘So, Tommy took a little ride on your bicycle, you got it back, didn’t yer? No harm done!’ Nancy yells.

  ‘Nancy Maloney, I am the Church in Yankalillee! God’s servant and representative in this benighted parish. We’ve got a prison up the hill, as you are well aware through bitter personal experience! Every Thursday I hear confession and distribute Holy Communion in the prison chapel. The lads inside are always contrite, but I’ve never heard a single one of them confess to the crime they’ve been convicted and sentenced for. They’re all innocent, the lot of them. What comes through the confession grille is a general admission of guilt and the wish to be forgiven in the eyes of the Lord, if you know what I mean? Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. But the sins they’ve committed are always due to special circumstances. If it wasn’t for a drunken father and a mother with TB and too many hungry mouths to feed and not enough money, they’d all, every one of them, have grown up pure as the driven snow to become doctors and lawyers and upstanding citizens. It’s the cruel hand that society has dealt them that put them inside. Nothing to do with them or their bad characters.’

  ‘I reckon they’re half-right about that, Father, but what’s that got to do with Tommy borrowing your bicycle for a few hours?’

  ‘Theft! He stole it. Borrowing requires permission, stealing doesn’t.’

  ‘So he’d had a drop to drink, so he forgot to ask. These things happen, the Church got its property back and there’s no harm done.’

  ‘All the harm in the world, Nancy Maloney. Moral harm! Stealing from the Church is the same as stealing from God Himself. God has His hand stretched out in His infinite compassion and your husband, Tommy Maloney, has gone and bit it!’

  I suddenly see the hand of God stretched out to Tommy and him taking a great chomp at His fingers and people looking up and saying, ‘Look, it’s raining blood!’

  ‘Bloody hell! Here we go again!’ Nancy’s eyes shoot up to the ceiling and she lets out a monumental sigh. ‘Father, he was pissed, stonkered, he didn’t know it was your bicycle, he didn’t know he was stealing from the Church, he was just being a perfectly common thief as usual!’

  ‘Now that’s just it, Nancy Maloney! That’s my point. How would it be if the lads doing time up the hill, common thieves and scoundrels themselves, heard that Tommy Maloney, a known recidivist, was let off by their own priest who hears their confession? Good Catholic boys hearing that about one of their own! How do you think they’d feel, eh? Them innocent in their own minds and incarcerated and him, guilty as sin before God and man, free as a bird. No, no, not at all, I can’t do it! What Tommy Maloney’s done is like stealing from the Blessed Virgin Herself, we’ll not be forgiving that with a wave of the hand and fifty Hail Marys!’

  ‘What about the Lord Jesus Christ forgiving the thief on the cross when he was crucified?’ Nancy now quotes the words of our Lord. ‘ “Amen I say to thee, this day thou shalt be with me in paradise”, isn’t that what Jesus said, Father?’

  Sometimes Nancy can leave you flabbergasted about what she comes out with. I reckon, if she’d had half a chance, she might have got somewhere in life. No wonder she’s determined we’ve got to have an education.

  ‘Extreme circumstances call for extreme unction,’ Father Crosby says. ‘Tommy isn’t on Golgotha, now is he?

  He hasn’t been nailed to the cross with four dirty big nails, now has he?’

  ‘Three, Father, one through each hand and just the one for his feet which were crossed, the fourth one is the one you’ve used to nail Tommy!’

  ‘Nancy Maloney, I’ve warned you before about blasphemy! The Bishop simply wouldn’t approve a recommendation of clemency. A bicycle is valuable property and it’s on his diocesan audit. As God’s representatives on earth His Holiness the Pope, the Cardinal himself, the Bishop and myself are the Holy Roman Church and we must see him punished and only then can he confess and be forgiven for sins committed.’

  ‘Ha! Revenge to me; I will repay, saith the Lord! Didn’t I hear you say that when it came to Dora Templeton? What was it you were going to do? That’s right, pray. And in His infinite wisdom maybe the Lord would send a bit of fire and brimstone hailing down. Well, there’s been bugger-all happen to the bitch that’s nasty! But Tommy nicks your bike for a few hours and there’s no praying for fire and brimstone, no leaving it to the Lord to decide. Instead a charge of grievous bodily harm for biting God’s fingers and straight to gaol you go, Tommy Maloney!’ ‘Blasphemy! Blasphemy!’ Father Crosby cries. Mind you, all this is said after Father Crosby has received his fancy new surplice which Nancy does for him in less than a week. It’s delivered to the priest’s home before the Wangaratta cops come around to nab Tommy. I don’t mean they waited deliberate, nothing like that, but stealing a bloody bicycle, even from a priest, isn’t exactly urgent police business.

  What’s really suspicious, though, was that Wangaratta didn’t inform Big Jack Donovan before they made the arrest. That’s bad form. Tommy’s a local crim and Big Jack should have a say, that’s how the cops work in the country.

  Nancy says it’s not that hard to smell a rat, a nasty little Father Crosby conspiracy somewhere along the line. Big Jack came around to apologise to us, he knows how difficult things are, but there’s nothing he could do about it because Tommy was arrested and held overnight in Wangaratta and went before the stipendiary magistrate, the one and only Oliver Twist, the very next morning and got six months for petty theft.

  It’s this last term in prison that seems to really do it for Tommy. It’s not a big sentence, but I think he’s had about enough. He comes out not the same man that went in. His spirit seems broken. When we go to get him, we’ve hired a taxi special, so he doesn’t have to get into the Diamond T which is on its last legs. Tommy comes out the gate and he’s sort of crumpled and small, nothing cocky left in him. You can see his crook shoulder and his one eye and crooked jaw and caved-in cheekbone where the Jap guard smashed him with a rifle butt, something which you hardly even noticed before. I don’t know how we know, but it isn’t Tommy who walks out the gate, it’s someone who’s given up. It’s not something you can explain but just something you know inside of you. Nancy takes one look and starts to cry. These days the only time Tommy perks up a bit is when we go bush.

  The next thing to know is how Philip Templeton tried to get rid of us in the rubbish-collection business. Even though he’d been elected shire president twice in a row, he’d not been game to take a shot at us before. This was because Peter Barrington-Stone had been on the shire council representing the graziers. He wouldn’t have had the guts to take on Mrs Barrington-Stone. When someone else took Mr Barrington-Stone’s place on the council, Philip Templeton’s free to have a go at us.

  It wasn’t going to be easy because Bozo looked as though he might get selected for the Rome Olympics and Sarah was the pride and joy of Yankalillee and has nearly finished Medicine.

  But Mr Templeton is
patient and waits for his opportunity and, sure enough, given that we’re the Maloney family, it comes along dished up to him on a platter with sauce.

  One morning in February 1959, halfway through the garbage run, the axle on the Diamond T breaks. As luck would have it, we’re only two blocks from John Crowe’s house and I go round and tap on the bedroom door. His wife Trish wakes him up and he comes out and I explain what’s happened, thinking maybe he’ll get the Diamond T going with Bozo’s help, him being an expert mechanic.

  But he does more than that, he comes out in the ute and looks at the broken axle. By this time the gearbox and differential, which I mentioned earlier, are ratshit and now there’s the axle. The tyres are in their usual state except for one back one that’s still half-good.

  John Crowe crawls under the old truck and comes out a few moments later. ‘Forget it, axle’s snapped.’ He opens the bonnet and gets Nancy to start the engine. ‘Holy shit!’ he exclaims when he hears the whine of the diff and the clapping of the tappets. Then Bozo tells him how it can’t get out of second gear. ‘I can’t believe it’s still going, mate, it’s a bloody miracle.’ He turns to Bozo. ‘You keep this old lady on the road, Bozo?’

  Bozo pretends he doesn’t know whether he means Nancy or the Diamond T. ‘Which one?’ he says, laughing up at Nancy. ‘Yeah, best I can,’ he finally answers.