Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  The scrapbook has a lot about Nancy winning ribbons at the various shows but Nancy has carefully scratched out her name whenever it’s mentioned. In her neat handwriting she’s written ‘Michael Maloney’ above her scratched-out name. There’s also the clippings on Bozo’s boxing career, the Olympics and the Key to the City Parade down King Street to the Town Hall (ha-ha, Yankalillee a city!). There’s all the stuff in the Gazette about Sarah’s pregnancy, and the university brouhaha takes up nearly half the scrapbook. There’s even a little bit about me. Mostly the bottoms-wiping certificate episode and the latest, ‘The Diary of Anna Dombrowski’ stuff by Saggy Tits, Yankalillee’s smut-rustler and fearless reporter.

  When you see it all together like that, it’s amazing how much trouble us Maloneys have caused in our time. Nancy’s even cut out and pasted in the bits about Tommy being sentenced for this or that misdemeanour or petty theft over the years.

  She’s also got all the pots, pans and dishes in a big cardboard box, another large suitcase is full of her yellow-daisy dresses, then there’s the TV set and a heap of blankets and cushions. Later, Nancy explains her choices, ‘Gotta have a dress to wear that fits (daisy dresses), gotta eat (pots, pans and dishes), gotta make a living (sewing machine), gotta have a bit of relaxation (Bozo’s still-to-be-fixed TV), gotta sleep somewhere (blankets etc), but most of all, gotta have our memories (scrapbook and photo album).’

  Bozo’s taken his old radio, his boxing gloves and his Olympic medal. There is nothing little Colleen and me have that’s precious so they don’t bother, except for little Colleen’s doll which Tommy gave her with the money from his Christmas heist six years ago and it’s beginning to look a little worse for wear. Bozo’s also taken the old .22 rifle Mrs Barrington-Stone’s husband gave me, plus a packet of ammo (defence?).

  They’ve taken me home to dress my burns and because there’s not much left in me to celebrate the end of the fire, I don’t see Tommy to tell him about the Red Steer.

  Of course, I know nothing about John Crowe going back into the forest after Whacka Morrissey and the Ford Blitz, so I haven’t put two and two together either. I don’t even know John Crowe’s missing. All I want to do is to get out of my wet clothes and go to bed. It’s still raining cats and dogs anyway so there’s no danger of the fire reigniting. In the morning I’ll get little Ann Park’s bicycle out of the bottom of the lake, polish it up a treat and put in new brake pads. What I know for sure is that I’m going to sleep for about a thousand hours. I doubt there’ll be a garbage run tomorrow anyway and if there is, the town can get stuffed, this Maloney isn’t participating.

  Fortunately Nancy didn’t take all the blankets and pillows from the house when they evacuated, because the ones in the back of the Diamond T are soaked through from the rain. I’ve already had one wet-blanket episode for the day.

  I haven’t eaten all day and my throat is so sore and raw from breathing in hot smoke and stuff in the air that I can’t bear the thought of swallowing. Besides, I can barely talk. Nancy’s smeared a tube of Savlon all over my arms, legs and face, with me ouching at her every touch. My ears sort of naturally stick out a bit and they feel like someone’s ironed them with a flat iron. I’m so tired Bozo has to help me undress and pull off my boots and socks. The soles of my feet are one big blister, which I haven’t even noticed as separate from all the other sorenesses. It’s been a long day since we did the garbage run before dawn and the coming of the great Yankalillee fire.

  First daylight’s coming through the window when I feel someone shaking me. I don’t want to open my eyes because the pain has already hit me. The skin on my arms and legs seems to be stretched tight and it hurts like hell, my face feels like it’s been clawed by a cat.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ I yell out. My eyes are burning inside their sockets and feel swollen and when I open them they sting bad. It’s Tommy standing beside my bunk.

  ‘Wake up, Mole,’ he demands. There’s enough light in the room for me to see that he looks like shit, but I don’t smell any alcohol on his breath. It takes only a moment longer to see that he’s sober.

  ‘Wha’, whazza matter?’ My voice is hoarse.

  ‘The eucalyptus forest, before you get to Boundary Road, you see anything coming in?’ I can’t think, I’m hurting and still half-asleep. He grabs me by the arm and I scream.

  ‘John Crowe, the Ford Blitz in the forest?’ Tommy asks again.

  ‘What’s he doing there?’ I ask stupidly. Well, perhaps not so stupidly, no firefighter would have stopped in the forest with the fire approaching like it was.

  Tommy doesn’t answer. ‘Did ya, Mole? Tell me!’ There’s panic in his voice.

  ‘I didn’t get that close, I took the back way, the forest was burning.’ Then I connect and make sense of what he’s saying. ‘Oh shit!’ ‘What, what?’

  ‘I seen a Red Steer, an explosion, it was like an atom bomb!’ Tommy doesn’t seem to understand. ‘Big ball of fire, jumped maybe a mile, trees were thrown up above the canopy.’

  ‘Come!’ Tommy says. ‘Get yer gear on.’

  ‘Don’t think I can, I’m burned bad!’

  ‘Fuck you, Mole! Now get your gear on, yer hear me!’ Tommy can say things like that to us when he’s drunk, we don’t take no notice, but it’s not the way he’ll speak when he’s sober. Bozo’s suddenly awake and leaning on his elbow, ‘He’s not going, he’s crook. Leave Mole alone, I’ll go.’ He doesn’t call him ‘Dad’ or anything, just gets out of his bunk and stands in front of Tommy in the nuddy.

  Tommy suddenly crumples to the floor and covers his face with his hands. He’s sobbing. Then he gets to his knees and brings his hands together like he’s begging and starts jabbering to Bozo in some strange language. He grabs a hold of Bozo’s ankles and starts to kiss his feet, sobbing and jabbering away, shaking all over, looking up pop-eyed, frightened, then down again, kissing Bozo’s feet, pleading.

  ‘Shit!’ Bozo says, looking down at me, ‘What’s he saying?’ He’s trying to kick out of Tommy’s grasp but Tommy’s holding on for dear life, his hands, surprisingly strong, like manacles around Bozo’s ankles.

  Suddenly Tommy jumps to his feet and he runs like hell. We hear him crashing through the house. Next thing there’s the sound of an engine starting and a car pulling away. Bozo runs to the window to see a dark-green ute taking off, skidding, spraying mud in the puddled street.

  ‘Jesus!’ Bozo says, turning from the window, ‘What happened there?’

  ‘It’s John Crowe, he’s dead, the Red Steer got him.’ I explain it to Bozo, what I’ve seen, ‘Can’t be certain, of course, but what else? He hasn’t come back.’ Bozo seems stunned, ‘John Crowe?’

  ‘It’s only a guess, but if he was in the forest, anywhere near, there’s no way he’d be coming out.’

  ‘Christ, I hope you’re wrong, mate,’Bozo says. ‘Can’t be, he’d be too smart to get caught in the forest with the fire approaching, surely?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that, he’d have thought he was well ahead of the fire, still a mile away.’

  He nods, thinking, then says, ‘He had our ute, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah, I reckon that would be gone.’ Bozo doesn’t dwell on it, just shakes his head. ‘Let’s hope you’re wrong about both,’ he says again. Then being him he gets down to practical matters, ‘We’ll wait until seven o’clock and go see Big Jack at his house. Reckon you can get up? Walk?’

  Big Jack’s wife, Terri, brings her hands up to her mouth when she sees me. ‘Oh, my goodness!’ she exclaims. I haven’t looked in the mirror so I don’t know what she sees, but if it looks like it feels it can’t be too pretty. She goes to the first-aid box she keeps in the back room and gets some ointment and pretty soon I’m ouching all over again. Then she cooks us breakfast, scrambled eggs, my throat feels a little better and I wait until the eggs are not too hot, can’t come at the toast and tea though. I tell Big Jack
the story of the Red Steer.

  ‘The Red Steer, you saw it?’ It’s the police officer in him asking. He nods, ‘Hmm, heard about them, never seen one myself, don’t know anyone who has.’ You can hear the doubt in his voice. I begin to wonder if I saw it myself, you know with everything that’s gone on before.

  ‘Mole wouldn’t make it up,’ Bozo says, also picking up on the doubt in Big Jack’s voice.

  ‘No, of course not. Tommy was asking everywhere last night. Not like him to refuse a drink. We all thought John Crowe would show up eventually, if not last night, first thing this morning. Never know, still may, hey? Mind you, not too many of the fighters were in a fit state to go looking for him in the rain and even less so after it stopped.’ He smiles slightly. ‘About midnight I could have arrested the whole male population of Yankalillee for drunk and disorderly conduct.’

  So Bozo and me get into the police car with Big Jack Donovan and drive to Boundary Road and turn into the dirt road running alongside the eucalyptus forest. Everywhere we look it’s just blackened stumps and trees on the one side and blackened earth on the other with the ash stained dark by the rain.

  I think to myself, this time there won’t be any regeneration, this eucalyptus forest ain’t coming back to life, no way! The road turns into the forest and everywhere we’re surrounded by trees that look like spent match sticks. About three miles in, we spot the ute where the road turns again suddenly. ‘There’s his ute!’ we both yell out, thinking it’s John Crowe’s Holden, but almost at the same moment we realise it’s not, it’s the right colour, green, but it’s an International.

  ‘It’s Tommy’s,’Bozo says, ‘the one he used this morning.’

  ‘Tommy got a ute?’ Big Jack asks, surprised.

  ‘Nah, must have borrowed one,’ I say quickly. Bozo glances at me, we both know that Big Jack reckons the same as we do, that Tommy’s pinched the ute, desperate to find his mate.

  ‘We’ll get it back to its rightful owner soon enough,’ Big Jack says quietly. ‘Probably some bloke too drunk to drive,

  Tommy’s done him a favour.’

  We pull up to examine the International but there’s nothing in it except some firefighting gear in the back. Big Jack writes down the registration number. After that, we carry on in the police car, take the bend and then into a little dip when Big Jack suddenly slams the brakes on. ‘Holy Shit!’ he exclaims. For a hundred yards or more in a rough circle there is nothing, not even a stump, nothing. After a few moments Big Jack Donovan turns to me, ‘I’d never have believed it unless I’d seen it with my own eyes, Mole! Sorry if I sounded doubtful earlier on, son.’

  I’ve already described what we saw when we got to the spot where the Red Steer landed, but there’s no Tommy to be seen. We see his footsteps in the wet ash and then out again and heading away down the road in the opposite direction to the ute. The road leads out of the forest and towards the hills. It’s the best thing could happen, Tommy going walkabout. But what his footsteps do say to all of us is that he knows John Crowe is dead.

  Bozo found the bits of the Ford tanker and then the part of the chassis from John Crowe’s company ute we still owed a lot of money on. Later Bozo will tell me he had insurance built into the hire-purchase price and I’m glad he’s taken the spoon out of the sink as usual. If we had to pay for it without having its use to make the payments, I suppose it would send us broke. Big Jack takes the twisted length of welded stainless-steel chain and puts it in the boot of the police car. He turns and looks at the devastation all around us. For a long time he says nothing, then he sighs. ‘The worst part is knocking on the door and telling the wife,’ he says, then he shakes his head, ‘It’s always the good ones that go!’

  Which is a pretty strange thing for him to say, him being the law and all, and with John Crowe no angel and giving him a fair amount of aggro in the past. Maybe he meant Whacka Morrissey? If I don’t sound choked up about John Crowe, it’s because so much has happened and I haven’t grasped it all yet. He was a good bloke and always kind to me and I liked him a helluva lot. Him and Tommy were like brothers and they may not have been angels but they never hurt anyone and he was the only person who could make Tommy laugh. I’m going to miss him an awful lot.

  In the wash-up from the fire, there’s four houses burnt down as well as the picnic rotunda in the Historic Park, St Stephen’s and the priest’s house. Father Crosby is without a place to sleep and the Catholics of Yankalillee are without a place to worship.

  ‘Ha!’ Nancy says, ‘Just goes to show, don’t it? Protestant church didn’t burn down, did it? God was sending out a message to Father Crosby to mend his ways, nothing’s more certain!’ The proof she offers is that the baptism font is the only thing left standing. It was full of rainwater the next morning. ‘Clear as the nose on your face,’ Nancy points out, ‘First the baptism of fire to cleanse his wicked ways and then a new beginning, the font filled with God’s tears!’

  No use pointing out to her that the Church of England was in our street and the Presbyterians are practically in the middle of town and the Congregational Church up the hill a bit, all of them are well away from the gorge. Also that the font was made of sandstone. Nancy doesn’t put much store in sheer logic. ‘Tell me anything in this world that’s been brought about with logic alone?’ She always challenges when we’ve got her cornered. ‘Bollocks to logic! If logic had anything to do with it, none of you would be here!’

  As it turned out, the Virgin Mary didn’t get consumed in the flames of an Australian hell. What’s more, Father Crosby ends up getting a bottoms-wiping certificate from the shire president, Philip Templeton, and, as well, a commendation to Rome from the Bishop.

  Nancy says you couldn’t have expected better from Philip Bloody Templeton and the shire council, but the commendation to Rome just goes to show how corrupt the Holy Church has become in the twentieth century! Also, what a miserable opportunist the Bishop is, licking the boots of His Holiness the Pope.

  It wasn’t any use pointing out to her that the shire council were all Protestants and so Father Crosby would have had to be pretty worthy in their eyes to get any sort of praise from them.

  Nancy’s never forgiven the Bishop for chastising her about the radios Tommy wanted for the bushfire brigade in 1946. How they had to collect the same amount for the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart in New Guinea so that the Yankalillee Catholics could be seen to have their priorities right. When we remind her that it was her said she doubted Father Crosby even consulted the Bishop, she says, ‘Yeah, well, same difference, it was him, the Bishop, who also opposed Sarah going to university. He’s tarred with the same brush as Father Crosby!’

  This is what happened to bring Father Crosby his newfound fame. Remember when we were being briefed by John Crowe at the fire station and there were these two new volunteers and Tommy said he’d take the Collins Street cocky, Michael Mooney, because he knew nobody else would. Then Alan Phillips shouts out that old Merv O’Hare has carked it, so he’ll take young Lindsay Jarvis in his team?

  Well, old Merv is due to be buried and naturally enough with a name like O’Hare he’s one of ours and so there’s a grave dug for him in the churchyard. Normally he’d be buried in the Catholic section of the cemetery, but because the family has promised Father Crosby a nice little cheque for the stained-glass window he’s been on about for years, he’s being buried next to the half a dozen tombstones of prominent past Yankalillee Catholics who have, no doubt for the same reasons, been given the privilege of a churchyard burial.

  The fire gets in the way of the burial and when it threatens the town, Father Crosby is told to pack a suitcase and someone will come and pick him up. Well, the someone arrives and Father Crosby puts his suitcase in the boot of their car and then says he’ll be using his bicycle to get out himself. But he doesn’t. He stays and rescues the two silver candlesticks and the three-foot-high gilt crucifix that stands behind the
altar and the silver incense burner then dumps them all into Old Merv O’Hare’s empty grave.

  After that, Father Crosby spends an hour trying to get the carved wooden statue of the Virgin Mary down from the wall at the back of the altar. He’s dragged a mattress from the priest’s house next door and put it on the floor directly below the Virgin and somehow he’s unscrewed the Mother of God from the wall and she’s fallen, face-first, onto the mattress but only her nose and crown have broken off. Then Father Crosby somehow dragged the three-hundred-pound, six-foot-high carving out of the church, across the lawn to the grave, and dropped it in there with the other church treasures.

  By this time, the fire is into the gorge, soon to be coming out the other side as a roaring furnace, with St Stephen’s directly in its path. With the flames in sight and him near exhausted, Father Crosby grabs a shovel and pours dirt over the grave covering the church artefacts to protect them from the approaching fire. The flames are now practically licking at the clapboard walls of St Stephen’s.

  Maybe it was stupid, but you’ve got to admit it was pretty brave. Folk said he only just got away in time and that the hem of his soutane was burning when he arrived at the lake on his Malvern Star. Which is bullshit. If it had been alight, he’d have let it go for a while and then doused it and he’d never have taken it off again. Anyway, Nancy says his order doesn’t always need to wear a soutane and it’s pure affectation on his part. ‘There’ll be no stopping him now. Can you imagine? Father Crosby, Priest of the Flames!’ she says, disgusted with the whole thing.

  Anyway, now he’s a hero of the church and they’ll probably make him a saint when he’s dead. Him saving The Blessed Virgin from the flames of an Australian hell! So much for Nancy’s saying that few things in this world are brought about by logic alone. Of course, Nancy doesn’t see this saying of hers working in Father Crosby’s particular case. Far as she’s concerned, what’s happened shows what an irresponsible idiot our priest is, wearing a dress when he doesn’t have to and putting his own life in danger for the sake of a wooden statue.