Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  We don’t forget however that it was Tommy’s kindness that done it for us in the first place. But here’s the joke, the letter is signed ‘Michael Mooney, Chairman’. The following weekend when Bozo and me drive out to thank him, he looks serious before he says, ‘No, no, lads, it’s me who has to thank you. It’s easy to forget other people’s circumstances when you’re sitting in the chairman’s chair. For once in my life, I saw things from the client’s side. I’m ashamed we treated you like that.’ I reckon he can stay on in our team. In time he’ll make a pretty good firefighter.

  After he’s been home a month, Tommy comes to me after school on the Friday afternoon. ‘Bring your sleeping bag and the rifle, we’re going bush, Mole.’ ‘But you’ve just got back!’ I protest.

  ‘This is different.’

  I don’t want to upset him and I’ve been meaning to tell him, so I say carefully, ‘Dad, it’s my matriculation year and I’m vice-prefect of the school, I can’t go bush except maybe a few days in the school holidays.’ ‘But it’s the weekend, no school.’

  ‘I’ve got to study, I’ve got an essay and a Maths test coming up.’

  He looks at me. ‘You’ll not go because of an essay and sums?’ I can see he can’t believe his ears.

  ‘’Fraid so,’ I say, biting my lip.

  He’s silent for a long time then he says hesitatingly, ‘I thought it’s time you saw the Alpine Ash, Eucalyptus delegatensis.’

  This time it’s me who can’t believe his ears. ‘Yeah? The Maloney tree?’ Tommy nods.

  ‘I’ll go get my sleeping bag,’ I say.

  ‘Better take some flour for damper, and tea, we’ll live off the land the three days we’re away.’

  I hesitate. ‘I can’t, Dad. I’ve got to be back at school Monday!’ Then I think a moment. All they can do is take my vice-prefect’s badge away, I haven’t waited five years for that. ‘Ah, bugger it! I’ll fetch the flour and tea.’At the door I turn back to him, ‘If she asks, don’t tell Mum we’ll be away three days.’ It’s a silly thing to say, Tommy wouldn’t tell her anyway and I’ll tell Bozo so Nancy doesn’t get worried when we don’t return on Sunday night.

  I can’t believe it, I’ve waited ever since I turned twelve and I think he’s mentioned that big old tree maybe three times and that’s only because I’ve brought it up. Every time I’ve done so, Tommy’s said, ‘Not yet, Mole, there’ll come a time when it’s right to go.’

  I can’t understand what he means. Once I protested, ‘It’s only a big old tree! How come there has to be a time that’s right?’

  ‘If that’s all you think it is, then the time isn’t right yet,’ he replied.

  I often wonder if that’s where Tommy goes when he goes walkabout? The Alpine Ash isn’t the biggest hardwood tree in the world, because that’s the Mountain Ash, Eucalyptus regnans, which can grow to near three hundred feet with a trunk ten feet across and it can live up to eight hundred years. But the Alpine Ash, the eucalyptus Tommy’s going to show me, can live four hundred years and grow to two hundred and eighty feet with a trunk nearly as large as the Mountain Ash. I can’t believe it, the time is right at last!

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Tommy surprises me when he says we’re off to Mount Buffalo, which is sort of the beginning of the high country before you get to the Snowy Mountains. I’m surprised, because we’ve been in the area often enough and he’s never mentioned the big Alpine Ash. Where we’re going is only about an hour’s drive from Yankalillee, though we’ll be going on foot more or less as the crow flies. I’m a bit disappointed because I’d always imagined the big old tree would be growing further up on the Snowy range. I should have known better, Alpine Ash can’t grow all that high up, but when a picture, a thing you want to believe, is stuck in your head, you don’t ask it to make sense.

  ‘We’ll see where the fires went, eh? Should be a fair bit of regeneration,’ Tommy says, then adds, ‘We’ll go the German bloke’s way.’

  The German is a man named Ferdinand von Mueller, Victoria’s first government botanist, who travelled from May Day Hills, which is more or less where Yankalillee stands today, to Mount Buffalo during the gold rush in 1853. We’ll follow Myrtle Creek through Buckland Gap to Myrtleford and then on to the little town of Ovens and from there into the national park to Porepunkah and up the slopes of Mount Buffalo. In all, it’s a distance of about thirty-two miles, which is a fair bit shorter than going along the Ovens Highway. Though, even if the highway was shorter, Tommy never takes a major road. ‘No point, is there? Don’t see nothing but trucks and cars.’Anyway, the countryside in the direction of the mountains is a bit up and down and, in good weather, it’s a full day-and-a-half trek and then maybe some.

  We’re travelling light but we’ve both decided to take our sleeping bags and groundsheets, it can still get cold at night in the mountains or it may rain. I’m carrying a bit of flour and tea and a couple of carrots in my knapsack as well as lugging the .22 and a billy to make a rabbit stew which we’ll eat both nights. I’ve also cut some cheese sandwiches and six hard-boiled eggs to keep us going on the way.

  For once I don’t forget to take mosquito repellent, as the mozzies can be real bad up the various creeks, though for some mysterious reason they never bite Tommy. I’m the big feast. Mozzies see me coming and right off they send out this high-frequency message, the zzzzzzzz you hear that’s their HF radio and can be picked up by every mozzie within miles, ‘Mole Maloney heading your way, prepare for a banquet!’

  ‘It’s because you don’t smoke,’ Tommy claims. ‘You should smoke, cigarette smoke keeps them away.’

  ‘You don’t smoke in your sleep and you don’t get bit,’ I point out.

  ‘Yeah, that’s because I sleep next to the fire, smoke there works the same.’

  It ain’t true, I also sleep next to the fire and the mongrels still get me. I reckon it’s because they can’t take the alcohol that’s built up in Tommy’s system over the years. One bite out of Tommy Maloney from a mozzie and I guarantee it drops dead of alcoholic poisoning.

  One of the things we had to do last year in English class was to write a poem and I wrote this one, which I admit is a bit cheeky because it comes right out and says that Tommy is an alcoholic. But as there isn’t anyone in the whole town that doesn’t know this already and talks about it behind our Maloney backs, I thought I’d just bring it out into the open. This is because The Parrot, our English teacher, her real name is Mrs Barrett, told us that poetry could express your innermost and secret emotions and desires, that poetry was the purest form of the truth. The baring of the human soul.

  I reckoned Tommy being a drunk is our family’s most innermost emotion and wanting him to get better is our greatest desire. That’s baring your soul, ain’t it? But you can’t write something like that and be serious at the same time, can you? You know,

  Woe is me!

  Got a drunk for a dad.

  I’m all screwed up,

  Isn’t that sad?

  So I reckoned I’d do it from a mosquito’s viewpoint. It took me ages and ages to get right and then I only got a B+ rather than an A+, which was what I was expecting, because The Parrot said that while the rhyme structure worked well and the theme I chose was worked to its proper conclusion, it was disrespectful of our elders and ‘in bad taste’. Nancy said, ‘What can you expect, she sings in the choir of the Church of England.’

  Anna Dombrowski asked me what I got for my poem and when I told her B+ because it was ‘in bad taste’, she begged to read it. I showed it to her and she laughed and said it was brilliant. She looked real serious into my eyes and said that she wished she had the courage to write something like that about Chicka Barnes, her stepdad, though she wouldn’t know how to make it funny the way I did with Tommy and myself. I should’ve known then that there was something going on in her life that wasn’t nice.

  I asked her what sh
e got and she said A+ but that her poem was a con job.

  ‘Why? How can a poem be a con and get A+?’ She shrugged, ‘Easy, I didn’t have time to write a proper poem so I wrote a bad one about the concentration camp and The Parrot was forced to give an A+.’ She grinned, ‘If she didn’t, it would have been in bad taste on her part!’

  Clever, eh? You can see why Anna’s top of the class and could’ve been top of the state if she hadn’t run away with Crocodile Brown. I miss her a lot.

  Anyway, I showed my poem to Tommy and he laughed and said I was a flamin’ genius, that I was a poet and didn’t know it, and a chip off the old block because Maloneys have always been bush poets. He took it to the pub to show all his mates and came back and said he wanted ten copies because they all wanted one to keep for themselves.

  Mozzie lemonade

  All you mozzies gather around

  Mole Maloney has been found.

  He’s what all mosquitoes crave

  His blood is mozzie lemonade!

  Avoid the father, enjoy the son

  Tommy is the dangerous one!

  A million mozzies are his toll

  Tom’s blood is purest alcohol.

  You’ll have a very nasty death

  A single sip your final breath.

  Sip the Mole and stay frisky

  Nip his dad and you are history!

  A mozzie moral has been made

  Stay sober, stick to lemonade!

  Bushwalking with Tommy is never a hurried experience. It’s the process of wandering about that he likes. This is the first time I can remember where the destination was of some importance to us. This doesn’t mean, though, he’s in a hurry and we stop to examine everything of possible interest as we follow the creek down to the little town of Ovens.

  This time our major interest is the recovery after the fires, it’s only a matter of weeks but since the rain, the ground cover is already a carpet of green and the eucalyptus canopy is awash with new leaf. The leaves are not yet the army-green of their maturity but come in pale orange, white, yellow and scarlet. It’s almost as if the leaves have retained the colours of the fire as a tribute to the renewal of life that it brings to each eucalyptus tree.

  There are lots of rabbits around, they too have responded to the fire and I guess their burrows are full of kittens being suckled by the doe in the nesting chamber, which is a sort of side-alley maternity section off the main burrow. They’re blind when they’re born so can’t come out to nibble on the new grass, but in a month they’ll be weaned and the doe will get pregnant again and so the cycle begins all over. Once when Tommy explained this to us, Nancy said, ‘It’s not that different to the Maloney women, no sooner is one brat off the breast when there’s another in the oven.’

  For once in his life Tommy’s got a comeback. ‘Don’t look at me, woman!’

  I reckon Nancy had that coming to her.

  While we know rabbits are a plague and I should shoot the females, do a favour to the countryside, later I’ll salve my conscience by shooting a couple of bucks in the late afternoon, taking them off the breeding cycle. One buck probably accounts for about a thousand rabbits born in his lifetime and, anyway, in a stew the tougher meat doesn’t matter much and I reckon is tastier.

  We follow Myrtle Creek and by mid-afternoon get to the little town of Ovens, about twenty miles from Yankalillee. ‘Forget the bunny chow, what say we get a couple of steaks for tea tonight?’ Tommy says.

  It’s not like him to suggest something like this, he believes we should live off the land as much as possible. ‘I’m skint,’ I say with a shrug.

  ‘She’s right, I’m payin’, he says, ‘couple of bottles of lemonade’ll go down good as well.’

  There’s definitely something up. It’s not as though he’s mean or anything, Tommy will always pay his share and then some, it’s just that he’s always separated bush and town. The only compromise is a small packet of White Wings for damper and half a packet of Bushells tea and half a jam jar of sugar and a bit of salt. He’s even been known to go without flour, tea and sugar and then he’ll hunt out a bush called Alpine baeckea. It has a little white flower with scented leaves, which make a sort of lemonflavoured tea that is drinkable, though you wouldn’t want to make a habit of it. Tommy says it’s good for rheumatism but I’ll have to wait until I’m a grandfather to find out. So why is he offering steaks and lemonade all of a sudden, I ask myself.

  ‘We celebrating something?’

  ‘Nah, not exactly.’ He doesn’t explain further.

  I don’t want to show him how impressed I am. ‘Suits me, bloody sight better than rabbit stew,’ I mumble.

  ‘Have that termorra night, bit of rabbit will go down a treat then.’

  Well, we buy a couple of enormous T-bones and two large bottles of lemonade. It’s a special treat so I don’t mind carrying them. Anyway, with his crook shoulder Tommy can only just manage a small knapsack without the strap on the one side falling down.

  From Ovens we walk a little way down an old dirt road, maybe two miles and into the Mount Buffalo National Park. I reckon by sunset we’ve covered about twenty-three miles and, if we start early, we’ll get to the big old mountain about noon tomorrow.

  We find a campsite, an old picnic clearing on the banks of Buffalo Creek, and I build a fire, letting it burn down to the hot coals before I make a bit of damper with flour, water, and a sprinkle of sugar and salt. I let it cook on the coals until it’s black and burnt on the outside, you only eat the inside. I also do the steaks and boil the billy for tea.

  By the way, there’s a knack to making billy tea a lot of people don’t know. You bring the water to the boil with the lid on, then lift the billy off the fire with a stick, remove the lid and let the water stand maybe a minute. Put the billy back on, but without the lid this time, so it can absorb a bit of the smoke from the fire. Bring it to the boil again and remove it a second time, then add a handful of tea and let it brew until you can’t see the bottom of the billy. Toss in a couple of gum leaves at the very end just before you pour it.

  A man can’t ask for much more. A bit of a rub with repellent to keep the mozzies away, a juicy steak and a piece of damper swilled down with the last of the lemonade and finished off with a mug of hot, sweet billy tea. I reckon life doesn’t get much better even if you are the King of England.

  The birds are coming in to roost, a kookaburra close by letting everyone know who’s the boss and the currawongs, as always, having the last word before all the birds come to silence and the frog and cricket choruses begin.

  Tommy’s done me a great favour teaching me to love nature and I reckon I’ve got to respect him heaps for that. No matter what happens to me in my life, I’ve always got the bush and that’s like having a friend you can rely on forever. It’s his gift to me and I’m grateful.

  It’s not long dark, we’ve eaten and we’re into our sleeping bags. The mozzies are gone with the last of the light, they’ll be back again just before dawn. The moon is still hidden behind the trees and the only light is from the fire. There’s a bit of a fresh breeze blowing off Mount Buffalo so we’ve spread our groundsheets at opposite sides of the fire and are snug as a bug in a rug. I’ve thrown a heap of wood on the embers to build it back up into a fire in an hour or so, this way it should last until around midnight.

  The last thing I remember is Tommy sitting up in his sleeping bag, his knees up against his chest, having a final fag. I watch as every time he draws, the tip of his cigarette lights the end of his broken nose. Poor little bugger, he probably wasn’t that handsome to start with, but the Japs sure as hell done a good job of smashing up his face.

  I wake suddenly. The moon is high above me and it’s bright enough to see clearly. The fire is not completely down to embers, a few small flames still lick up, which means it’s around eleven o’clock. Then I see Tommy across from me,
he’s still sitting up in his sleeping bag and he’s crying. Not bawling or anything, just quietly sobbing. I’m not sure what to do. Tommy is a pretty private bloke and it would take a fair bit to make him cry. He hasn’t cried for John Crowe yet, or if he has, it was when he went walkabout in the bush straight after the Yankalillee fire.

  There’s been a small marble memorial made to John Crowe and Whacka Morrissey, which has been placed next to the war-memorial names in the rotunda wall. Big Jack Donovan gave Tommy the stainless-steel chain that had its links welded when the Red Steer hit and it’s been incorporated into the plaque. When every fireman in the district attended the memorial ceremony and Nick Reed read out the eulogy, I could feel Tommy shaking beside me, his lips trembling, but he didn’t cry. Now he is sobbing in the moonlight and I don’t know what to do.

  I lie there for maybe an hour, playing possum until the fire burns down, almost out. At last I hear Tommy pull the zip on his sleeping bag and lie down. Next thing it’s morning and he’s shaking me, holding out a mug of tea.

  There’s been a fair bit of dew on the ground and the grass around is wet. There’s also a bit of a chill in the air before sunrise. The currawongs are carolling in the trees beside the river, so it must still be early, they’re usually up a good half-hour before the other birds and always well before sun-up. I don’t have a watch nor does Tommy, no point in the bush anyway.

  ‘Better get going, Mole,’ Tommy says. He waits until I sit up and unzip the sleeping bag, then hands me the mug of steaming tea. I take the mug and place it beside me on the ground and search in my knapsack for the four hardboiled eggs left over from yesterday and hand him two.

  After we eat I go down to the creek where there’s still a wisp of mist above the water and have a bit of a wash and clean my teeth. Then I clean up the camp site and make sure the fire is completely dead and we’re on our way just before sun-up.

  We should be able to make Mount Buffalo a little before noon, though I don’t know where the big old Alpine Ash is situated on the mountain or how high the climb to find it. Can’t be that high.