Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  I fetch water from the creek and put the billy on. I’m dead proud of Tommy carving those names in the tree. Normally I’d think it was wrong, but not this time. This time it’s right. It’s a Maloney thing that’s had to be done. I wonder to myself if it will be a part of him getting better. If things will be different when we get back home, now he’s got all the shit off his liver. All that stuff he’s been living with, the terrible guilt he’s felt and told no one.

  I wait another hour, it must be near eleven o’clock and Tommy ain’t back. That don’t make sense, he’d have wanted to get going by now, he’d never leave it this late.

  Something’s happened. He’s fallen or something, knocked himself out. Maybe tried to climb up a tree with his crook shoulder, he can do it too, I’ve seen him lots of times. It’s not a long gorge we’re in and I start to look. But I soon see that the undergrowth hasn’t been disturbed, twigs ain’t broken, the daisy musk bushes and blanket leaf haven’t been pushed aside. Then I go towards the way we came in. I soon see Tommy’s gone out this way, I even pick up his tracks one place. I follow until I’m out of the gorge and I can see where he’s started to climb back up the mountain.

  So I go back to the camp site and put out the fire and I’m ready to leave and go over to get Tommy’s knapsack. I can’t understand why he’s left it behind. It doesn’t make sense. Him taking the rifle and leaving without me don’t make sense either.

  Then, sticking out of the top of the knapsack, I see this piece of paper. It’s from one of those small spiral notepads people keep in their shirt pockets, I can see the paper even before I open it, the torn, ragged holes on one edge. I open the note and in pencil Tommy’s written:

  Dear Mole,

  I have gone under the wire, mate.

  Look after the Maloney tree.

  I am sorry what I done to you all.

  I love you kids and Nancy.

  Tommy Maloney (Cpl.)

  2/19th Btn, 8th Div. AIF

  I think my heart is going to stop. Then that it’s going to jump out of my chest. I think, I ain’t heard a shot, even a .22 you’d hear it all over the mountain. I’ve seen his foot steps out, I can catch him. Tommy’s had no sleep, he doesn’t climb fast with his bad shoulder, steady but not fast. It’s a four, five-hour climb to the top and through the waterfall and the tunnel out onto the spur. I know what he’s done, he wants to get clear of the tree, keep the Maloney secret. I convince myself I can catch him.

  Now I’ve got a plan, I’m a bit more calm. ‘I haven’t heard a shot, I haven’t heard a shot, I haven’t heard a shot,’ I keep repeating in my head. Tommy’s still on the mountain, still not dead. I put on my knapsack and start moving out. Then I begin to think more calmly, ‘under the wire’ that’s the term the POWs used for escape. Maybe he’s just going away, leaving us to get on with our lives. He thinks he’s created enough misery, it’s time he got out of the way and let us grow up respectable.

  I feel tremendous relief as I convince myself that’s what it is. I’ll find him, catch up, tell him we don’t want him to go. Tell him he’s as much a part of our family as anyone, it doesn’t matter no more what he is, now we know why, the others will understand, even Mike.

  I reckon I get up the mountain to the waterfall in about three and a half hours. If Tommy started an hour before me, even an hour and a half, then I can’t be that far behind him. The spray from the fall splashes over me and then I wade through the pool and get down onto my hands and knees and enter the narrow tunnel. Soon it’s pitch black and I can’t hurry. I have to feel my way every few inches. I smash my knuckles and I think I’ve broke one finger and cut me head open again.

  In the dark you can’t tell time, I must have been in the tunnel half an hour. With Tommy and the torch it took an hour. I ain’t going any faster than we did before. Maybe not even as fast. There’s the sound of the water running over rock in my ears and there’s my own breathing, nothing else. Then a shot. It’s faint, like it’s far away, but maybe it isn’t, sound travels outwards. Maybe not even a shot, a rock tumbling down the mountain.

  There’s nothing I can do. So I just keep going, but my heart is pumping, beating in my chest so hard I can’t hardly breathe. Then I see a small dot of light and soon it grows larger and at last I squeeze into the little chamber at the entrance to the tunnel and I knock straight into Tommy. He falls face-down and all I can see is the back of his head which looks normal. I have to push at him to get past. ‘Tommy! Tommy, you all right?’ I’m crouched beside him, the little stream is damming up, blocked by his shoulder, then it starts to run over his shoulder. I roll him over. He’s put the barrel to his crook eye and pulled the trigger. He’s done it first thing he’s out and safely away from the Maloney tree.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Nancy is just not the same since Tommy’s death. Not quite her old self. That’s the funny thing, you’d have thought with all the trouble he caused in her life, in ours as well, that she’d be better off with him gone. But now it seems she really loved him, little Tommy was loved by great big Nancy, which is something we’d never have guessed. But on the other hand she never turned him away. Bell Street was always his home, come what may. We always thought it was because she’d cheated on him during the war that she felt maybe guilty. That wasn’t it at all, Tommy was her first love and stayed that way.

  The other funny thing was that she even seemed to miss being looked down on by those who would see Tommy drunk in the streets or with the other alkies down by Lake Sambell or working in a prison work party. ‘With you lot all grown up except for little Colleen and Tommy gone there’s nothing to hang on to,’ she said shortly after the funeral. She must have temporarily forgotten about Father Crosby because he was still there large as life.

  The news of Tommy’s suicide brought him riding down to Bell Street pedalling his Malvern Star fast as his fat gut could carry him. And what a stoush that turned out to be.

  Him shaking his head, getting even redder in the face. ‘Nancy Maloney, your husband has committed a mortal sin taking his own life, the Church cannot condone his behaviour!’

  ‘What’s all that mean? The Church has never condoned his behaviour, so what’s new?’

  ‘Ah, being a drunk and a thief, that’s one thing, that’s quite all right, he’s from Irish stock, the Lord has long made allowances for that. But taking your God-given life with your own hand, now that’s quite another matter, that is.’

  ‘Oh? So what about Father Maximilian Kolbe? They’re thinking of making him a saint.’

  Father Crosby looks bewildered, it’s obvious he hasn’t heard of this particular priest but he isn’t going to admit it. ‘That’s entirely different, for sure now,’ he splutters.

  Morrie told us about Father Maximilian Kolbe, who should be a saint. How he was put into a concentration camp by the Germans and then gave his own life to save a man who had a number of children. I think to myself that it’s not quite the same thing, the priest gave his life to save someone else, same as Jesus did. I’ve got to say this for Nancy, she can twist a fact around as good as anyone. Besides she’d have invented a saint if she had to, she’ll do almost anything to get the better of the Priest of the Flames, who is beginning to think of himself as practically a saint for rescuing the Blessed Virgin and the Christ on the Cross with the dented belly.

  Since Father Crosby’s got his stained-glass windows and the Italians have built him a new brick church, there’s no stopping him. Nancy’s still mad as hell that he didn’t come to her for his fire vestments, she can’t believe the appliquéd rubbish he’s wearing, a big orange squiggle running up his back, twisting around a cross and other bits licking at the base of the cross. ‘If that’s fire, then my bumhole is a rosebud!’ she says.

  Big Jack Donovan reported that Father Crosby has been seen sneaking over to Wodonga and taking driving lessons from Cec and Lyn Clark who run the Hume Driving School. �
��Typical!’ Nancy snorts when she hears this. ‘You’ll see, next thing he’ll be wanting the community to supply him with a car!’

  ‘Why’s it different?’ Nancy now asks. She points her finger at his chest. ‘You explain it to me, Father. He did the same as that Polish priest to save a family! The Pope should make him a saint and Tommy does the same and all of a sudden he’s committed a mortal sin!’

  ‘All of a sudden!’ I think Father Crosby is going to have a heart attack right on the spot. ‘The Church doesn’t do things all of a sudden! And that’s blasphemy, comparing the one to the other!’ Father Crosby has caught on to the explanation that Maximilian Kolbe gave up his life for another man’s family. ‘That’s not the same as committing suicide,’ he says triumphantly.

  ‘I beg your pardon, the suicide note Tommy wrote, he said he was sorry what he did to the family!’

  ‘His family! That’s not the same as someone else’s family!’

  ‘Ha! That’s where you’re wrong, Father! It was for someone else’s family! What about Bozo, Mike and Mole? They ain’t his family. He did it for someone else’s family the same as the Polish priest did.’

  ‘Nancy Maloney, you’ll not be getting away with specious arguments, not this time, the laws of God are sacred, we can’t be tampering about with them, twisting them around to suit your own purpose. Tommy’s committed a mortal sin and that’s that! There’s to be no more argument!’

  ‘Okay, what about Judas Iscariot then?’ Nancy says, not finished with him yet.

  Father Crosby sighs, exasperated, ‘What about Judas Iscariot?’

  ‘Well, he committed suicide.’

  ‘Ah, but Christ would have forgiven him.’

  ‘So, why can’t Christ forgive Tommy then?’

  ‘Tommy didn’t confess his sins, he didn’t receive the last rites, extreme unction. The Scriptures are quite clear on that matter!’

  ‘So what does that mean?’ Nancy asks, she’s suddenly not so bolshie, and says it with her eyes downcast and her voice gone quiet.

  ‘I’ll not be giving him a funeral, his body cannot be permitted to lie in sacred ground.’

  ‘You mean he can’t be buried in the Catholic cemetery?’ Nancy asks, aghast.

  ‘You can bury the deceased anywhere you like, but there can be no mention of his name in the Church and the grave site will not be consecrated, I’ll not be conducting the burial. I’m sorry, but God does not permit me to do so.’

  Nancy is silent for a long time, I can see she is close to tears but she’d rather die than cry in front of Father Crosby.

  Then Father Crosby says in a not unkindly voice, ‘Nancy Maloney, I’ll tell you what I can do. I shall conduct a nice little Requiem Mass.’ He looks happy with this decision, but adds, ‘Mind, there’ll be no body of the deceased present and we’ll not be mentioning his name and we’ll not be saying anything about how he came to lose his life.’ He folds his hands across his belly, pleased with himself. ‘Now that’s the very best I can do, my girl.’

  When she looks up, Nancy’s eyes are fiery, the weepies gone. ‘Let me understand you clearly, Father. You’ll have a Requiem Mass for somebody who isn’t there, who you can’t name and are unable to mention how whoever it is has come about needing to have the Requiem Mass in the first place?’

  ‘Well, yes, something like that. It’s the best effort I can make, Nancy Maloney.’

  ‘Well, you can go to buggery, Father!’ Nancy yells, ‘You and the Church, you’re a bunch of bloody hypocrites! You’re as bad as the Protestants!’

  ‘Now that’s blasphemy comparing the Holy Church to that lot of misbegotten heathens! You’ll not be saying that, Nancy Maloney, or we’ll be thinking excommunication!’

  ‘I’ll be saying a lot worse if you don’t bugger off!’ Nancy yells at him.

  I reckon for a collapsed Catholic we’ve just seen the final collapse between Nancy and the Church. Father Crosby gets back on his bicycle and, even from the back as he’s wobbling to gain traction, you can see he’s real huffy. Nancy’s finally gone too far.

  Tommy’s funeral was quite big, but, of course, he couldn’t be buried on the Catholic side of the cemetery and in the family plot Tommy bought with Mr Baloney’s inheritance. Nancy simply couldn’t bring herself to bury him on the Protestant side so she managed to get Big Jack Donovan to find a compromise with the shire council.

  The Chinese part of the cemetery still has the two old Chinese porcelain burning towers standing. There has always been a wide gap between the Catholic gravestones and the Chinese section, a good twenty yards or so. The Chinese came to the goldfields in the mid-nineteenth century and helped to build the town, but as the last family left in 1885, there wasn’t going to be any problems here. So Tommy is buried in no man’s land, between his own kind and the infidels. Nancy says, ‘I’d rather Tommy was mistaken for a Chinaman than a Protestant and at least he won’t have to put up with Mr Baloney and Grandmother Charlotte’s constant quarrelling all the dark hours through.’

  By big funeral, I don’t mean, like huge, not like John Crowe’s and Whacka Morrissey’s after the big fire, but a bigger one than we’d expected for a nobody in the town like Tommy. Nancy said it was the suicide caused that, all the stickybeaks came to take a ghoulish delight in a Maloney tragedy. ‘Don’t know what the nosyparkers expected to see, one coffin’s much the same as the next. He wasn’t the Pope put out on display!’ she said.

  But the twin aunties were on display, brought out of the loony bin for the funeral. I’m not sure they knew what was happening but they liked the flowers a lot. Nancy said, ‘That’ll show people the Maloneys aren’t through with being themselves in this town.’ Though after the last episode, when Auntie Gwen escaped and walked down King Street in the nuddy saying her rosary, I was a bit nervous having them around. It turned out they were nice as pie and at the wake afterwards they sat out the back of the pub and drank four lemonades and ate three chops each. Both exactly the same, they even had tomato sauce spilt on the same place on the front of the floral summer dresses Nancy made for the occasion.

  Nancy’s still pretty bitter, because Catholic families have a right to keep suicides quiet and not even to tell the priest. ‘They all come to gawk because of what that slag Vera Forbes wrote in the Gazette. But that isn’t quite fair, among the mourners are a good few ex-crims and most came up to us afterwards and said Tommy was a good bloke, never ratted on anyone and kept his nose clean. John Sullivan, the prison governor, attended and he came up and said it was always a pleasure having Tommy up the hill, that he was a model prisoner. Big Jack Donovan offered his commiserations and said that, underneath, Tommy was a good bloke and meant no harm and of all the petty crims he’d met, ‘Believe me, Nancy, there’s been a few and Tommy Maloney was the most likeable of them all and never whinged or made excuses for himself.’

  Bozo, Mike, Morrie and me carried the coffin and Nick Reed, the regional fire officer, came from Wangaratta and did the talk at the graveside. It was instead of having the funeral director doing it, which none of us wanted because we didn’t even know him. Mr Reed said Tommy was the best firefighter he’d ever known and like his father before him and his father and probably his father, was a real Maloney. He was completely reliable and there was more than one fire brought to an early standstill with his skill at calling it right. A lot of the firemen present were nodding their heads when he said that and if it hadn’t been such a solemn occasion I reckon they’d have clapped.

  All the district bushfire brigades came from as far as Albury and Wangaratta and wore their Sunday suits and ties. Afterwards they formed a long line and each one shook our hands and wished us well. Other people came up and said nice things, most of them from Bell Street, and even the poorest families in the street sent a wreath or picked a bunch of flowers. So you can see it was quite a crowd. Tommy would have been flabbergasted.

  Nancy said aft
erwards, ‘Father Crosby may have sent Tommy straight to hell, but at least it was six fire brigades gave him a send-off!’

  The whole of Bell Street threw in a few bob and so did the firemen and there was a real nice wake at The Shamrock with Mickey O’Hearn donating a keg and the abattoir supplying chops and steak for a barbie out the back. A good time was had by all, except halfway through Father Crosby turns up and the whole pub goes silent as he walks in. Mickey O’Hearn pours him a beer and Father Crosby raises his glass and says, so we can all hear, ‘To the dearly departed!’ So we all have to do the same. Then he takes a long swig, about half the glass, puts the glass down on the bar and walks out of the pub. We all watch as he gets on his bike and goes down King Street.

  ‘Cheeky bugger!’ Nancy says to nobody in particular. But I don’t agree. I reckon it took a lot of courage to do that.

  Mickey O’Hearn, ever the diplomat, tries to comfort Nancy. ‘Never seen him waste a perfectly good beer like that before. Left damn near half the glass full for sure. He must have been very upset, Nancy.’

  When Sarah and Mike came up from Melbourne for the funeral with Morrie and Sophie, I told them Tommy’s story three nights in a row. There were lots of tears, Nancy and Sarah wept and even Sophie and Morrie, who’d been through so much themselves.

  Morrie said later it was like the concentration camps in Germany, only no women and children, that Tommy had it just as bad as they did and if you take the tropical ulcers and the dysentery and malaria and other tropical diseases, there were some things even worse.

  It was a nice thing to say and we appreciated it, but I don’t think you could compare it. In the concentration camps there were innocent women and children dying of starvation and that’s a different matter altogether.

  Nancy said Tommy had never told her anything about Sandakan and the death marches. Every time she’d ask him, he’d say, ‘Maybe some time, eh?’ But the some time never came.

  I also told them about the Maloney tree. Tommy didn’t ever say I couldn’t; it’s just that because I’d never seen it all those years, I’d not said anything. To tell you the absolute truth, I was never quite sure it wasn’t like the fish that appeared in the rainwater ditch that wasn’t anywhere near the river in Borneo. Tommy never cleared that one up, even at the end. I should’ve asked him, but there was so much to take in, I forgot.