Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds

by Gregory Day

  Satisfied, Leo Morris loosened his grip on Ron’s shoulder and turned to Trumpeter Carson behind the bar. Trumpeter Carson was a tall, well-kept countryman who’d been a fixture at the hotel for a decade and who also played the violin. By the time the counter lunches had come on at midday – brains and bacon, T-bone steak, beer battered garfish, rabbit goulash – Leo had persuaded Trumpeter to go and get the fiddle from his room at the back of the hotel, and to play the hungry patrons all a tune.

  Amidst the aroma of hops and gravy, between pouring beers and fixing drinks, Trumpeter Carson managed to play, ‘A Daisy a Day’, ‘Oft In the Stilly Night’ and, on request, ‘Mad Jack’s Cockatoo’, a song from the Barcoo river region which Leo had notated and taught to Trumpeter not long after the lodger had first arrived in Mangowak. It had become a favourite since then, a rhythmic bush tune with a surreal and comical tale of drinking to tell. As Trumpeter Carson played, his normally neat hair falling over his forehead, his fiddle held across his chest in folk style rather than wedged up under his chin, Leo sang in his classically ornamented voice, delighting in the story and the scansion.

  When big Martin Elliot returned from the banking in Minapre halfway through the song, he cut in with a purposefully raucous strine and the two personalities began sparring between their respective renditions of the song. In the course of the long verses they settled into a duet, one line from Leo in his grandiloquent warble and then its antidote from Martin Elliot, rasping like a cockatoo. By the end of the ballad, the whole bar, Ron included, was in cahoots. Even the shark behind the aquarium glass seemed trans-fixed by the song, not to mention Guts the black Labrador, who had got up on his feet for the first time since breakfast, drawn from the warmth of the open fire by the raucous hilarity all around him.

  To Min in bed at night by kerosene light in those months after her husband’s death, the ocean seemed to punch and hound the Two Pointer rocks ceaselessly at the bottom of the cliff, no matter the weather. You could not have surprised her with how wild life could get, given that she had lived all her married days in that spot, but now she tossed and turned in what sounded like a relentless world, trying to fill her mind with chores rather than recriminations, but failing miserably.

  She kept two books beside her bed: The Gift of Poetry, and her father’s Bible. In the shock of losing Len so suddenly, big Len who had wooed her with his marmorean physique, his innocent good looks and a smile that would emerge like water out of ironstone, Min took to her two books with a searching intensity that had as much to do with her own sense of guilt as it did with the gaping emptiness of death. She would have liked to sit and talk to Rhyll Traherne but didn’t want to bother her. Sid had lost two fingers to a tomahawk only the week before and Rhyll had her work cut out nursing him. And so it was The Book of Job Min turned to, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, Francis Thompson, Blake, and the Anonymous ballads.

  The household chores would help her during the day, the mere use of her fingers and wrists getting her through, in fact her kitchen had become a kind of penitential chapel full of the smell of cherries and citrus juice and dough, but at night in her bedroom, with an empty space beside her, conjuring up such practical solace was miserably ineffective. She knew it was hopeless but tried anyway, running her mind over the stores in the larder, what could be drummed up from a tin bucket brimming with nectarines and a pair of wild ducks hanging plucked on the old bus hook that Len had fixed on the wall in there. But nine times out of ten her mind would stall, and then splutter back to collide with her conscience and she would grope for the two books beside the hessian lamp, to figure what could bring down a hale man like that and allow her no redemption. And then of course, in the bottled light of the kitchen during the following day, as she kneaded or carved or scrubbed or stoked, or cut a pattern or darned her son’s clothes, she would reflect on the lines she had read in the ceaseless hiss of the night, with the littoral black and starlight outside.

  She had loved him magnetically at first but, in the end, how could you love such a mute as that. His inability to caress was one thing but his constant requirement that she read his mind was too much. It was as if she was a mere fixture to him. He would turn over in bed and open her like a cabinet door, and with the same perfunctory air. To say that at first this came as a shock to Min would be to greatly underestimate her distress. Normally vivacious, she too became speechless in response. She was scared to resist him and unable to attempt to teach him a better way. And anyhow, she doubted, what did she know? She had no experience with men really, only of boys, and city boys were different. Added to that, she was fast becoming some kind of working creature to him around the house and land, and beasts couldn’t reason, could they?

  The effect on her was like a lack of rain on the gardenia bush she’d planted when they’d built the house. She began to wilt and lose her colour, she began to curl in at the edges. Of course, whether or not Len noticed she never knew. But why else did he think she’d been through those miscarriages after Ron had been born without incident in the first flush of their love? After the fifth miscarriage she steeled, suddenly, and then picked herself up to restore her own humanity. If he wanted to love her he could jolly well learn how!

  And this is what her guilt was flowing from: that last instinctive effort to survive. It was a woman’s knot and she strove to untie it. She had known what Len needed and she had refused, for nearly fifteen years. Side by side, under the same blue Warrnambool blankets. From her distance she almost admired the dignity with which he received her rejections. He didn’t whimper or force. And she was sure he wouldn’t go anywhere else to be satisfied. In the end he was a moral man, from an austere Scots family, with an unbridging carefulness, proudly set in his ways. That had been part of the attraction in the first place. She could feel the power, the calibre of it. But she was a Melbourne girl, with a gentle, romantic father. She needed the tenderness to be there, not just the wide-legged gait and the firm white shirt. Not just the country directness, the lexicon of tipping hats, winks, grunts and nods. But she only found that out too late. Well, not too late, she would admonish herself further as she lay there, for there was always Ron.

  The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

  It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

  It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

  Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

  Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

  And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

  And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

  Is bare now, nor can feet feel, being shod.

  She could hear her father’s voice in the upstairs kitchen in Spensley Street, Sunshine the cockatoo finicking in the cage behind him as he said these lines to his girls. They were swept up in his passion for the words, the love and sympathy with which he gave them to himself, and thus to them. But now the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins sank dark sounding stones deep into her soul. How could she be caught in the trap of not nourishing her husband? How could she not have found a way? He needed to be led like a dumb child into the world of communication. It would not have been an insurmountable task. She could have shown his fingers the outlines of her own. Taught him how to whisper. But she never had, and the grandeur of God, its flaming out, its searing force, had turned inward on her and was now burning her up.

  What a house it was in those weeks after Len McCoy’s death! Perched there on the cliff with the swells rolling in, the mother and her son, each in their own fretting. Ron was, in fact, the last person Min would talk to, her boy could be no confessor, particularly not of a darkness which seemed to her at that time unutterably shameful.

  As Ron remembered it, Father Leo Morris arrived at the McCoys’ on the Friday following their talk in the pub, armed with three bottles of Foster’s Lager. Ron was home and said a quick g’day before heading straight across the block to the open shed. Min and Leo sat down in the kitchen and took the
top off the first bottle.

  Leo Morris did not quest to find the heart of Min’s distress; he already knew it. It was not so many years ago that Len McCoy and he had had a little talk amongst the she-oaks behind Leo’s home. So now, having left it six weeks, and having had a chat with Ron, all he did was drink with her. In his mind he wanted to paint a shine back on lovely Min McCoy’s brown eyes. He’d known what Len was like – unsophisticated was the word he’d use. Not rough as guts like some around the bush, for Len had a certain stateliness in his silence and you’d never hear him swear or anything like that, no, he was just unable to adapt and bend to circumstance. He’d married a city girl, a flower, Leo perceived, but not a wildflower. This one wouldn’t just bear the inclemencies and grow. As strong as she was she needed nurturing. But Len was from the scrub where wildflowers find a way through parched and twisted, rooty soil full of skipjack and frost. And he couldn’t adapt. Leo Morris knew it was a crazy analogy but for Len McCoy, marrying Min was like finding himself a little slice of Paris. In which he felt like a hick, tense and unloved. And the more unloved he felt, the more silent he became.

  So Leo and Min chatted over the beer. Chatted about Sid’s accident out near the Poorool road, about Rhyll, who was a natural and efficient nurse, they both agreed. They chatted about Fred Ayling coming to Len’s funeral – the first time he’d been to mass in eighteen years. Chatted about the proposed visit to Melbourne of Yehudi Menuhin and his sister Hephzibah and how superb it would be to attend the concert. Chatted about all manner of things, in a casual tone, and the beer going down easily indeed.

  By midafternoon Min had taken the top off a fourth bottle, this time a Geelong Bitter which she had a few of in the ice-box, and they could just hear the strains of the pump organ which Ron was playing over in the open shed.

  ‘Ah, it’s a grand old world, Min,’ Leo said, ‘and the people we have in it. If only your husband had had your son’s love of natural music. You know, Min, Len was the most unmusical person I think I’ve ever met. Of course that’s no sin. It’s just a lack, I suppose. I couldn’t grub the trees that he did in his time. He’d say that was my lack. And it is. But no, Min, it has to be said, Ron got his music from you.’

  ‘Well, thankfully from you too, Leo. It was you who noticed. You gave him the organ, after all. For his shyness, do you remember? When he was barely a man.’

  ‘Yes, but his curiosity for the thing could not be ignored. He virtually willed it.’

  ‘Actually, Leo, I think Ron’s ear comes from my father. I’ve never played, not even a drum.’

  ‘Ah, your father, yes, the music may come from your father, but of course it has come via your interpolation to Ron.’

  The priest took another sip, the gentle, transient light of the kitchen flashing occasionally on his crosses and in his spectacles, the navigational light from the Meteorological Station just in view through the window above the sink near the Rayburn. ‘I’ve been to symposiums about this kind of thing, Min. Ah, the mystery of the origins of music! The wellspring! The source! From which beyond does the melody come? I’ve written dissertations on it myself. But do you know what I have concluded, Min?’

  ‘Pray tell, Leo.’

  ‘My conclusion, Min McCoy, and it’s as simple as bread, is that music is a natural medicine, no different from eucalyptus oil, a balm for the monotonous march of time. Now, I wouldn’t breathe a word of it at the university, let alone at the cathedral, but I’ll bet you a bottle of Bodega at Martin Elliot’s hotel that you yourself would be far better off to sing and hum your way clear of your present difficulties, rather than to pray or consult the catechism. Now what do you think, Min McCoy, am I right or not?’

  ‘Perhaps, Leo, perhaps,’ Min replied, smiling fondly.

  After another hour they’d managed to open a further bottle from the ice-box whilst Ron had left off playing the organ to soak the yabbies he’d caught that morning in a change of fresh water. They talked and they talked, nibbling first at a dish of peanuts Min had put out and then at cheese and biscuits. Now she spoke some more to Leo about her father’s love of music rather than about her dead husband. And the priest’s pale blue eyes and cheery spirit kept drawing the pleasant recollections out of her, like a fisherman freeing his line of a snag. She told him how her father used to call himself a ‘born canary’ and together they sang a little of ‘My Canary’s Got Circles Under His Eyes’. By 5 pm Ron came in with wood for the oven and the conversation turned to poetry.

  ‘The poets encapsulate the music in mere speech, don’t they, Min,’ Leo was saying as Ron went out again to throw the new puppies some liver. ‘There’s a harp in the spirit of the words. Take Blake – did your father like Blake? Full of the spirit’s hope. Oh, and Hopkins. We’re proud of Hopkins in the church, Min. For speaking of the dark and quenching it with light.’

  Once he got going on poetry, Leo Morris was unstoppable, but it was precisely that kind of energy that was the tonic for Min. The priest was something akin to her father but more flamboyant, more an artist than a man of the cloth. ‘What are those lines again, Min?’ he said. ‘From “God’s Grandeur”? Do you remember?’

  Min placed her hand on her chin and looked skyward. Then slowly, as Leo beamed at her, she said, ‘And for all this . . . nature is never spent . . .’ Leo nodded enthusiastically, and joined in on the next line. ‘There lives the dearest freshness deep down things . . .’ they recited together. Then Leo stopped and allowed Min to continue alone, her light voice fragile with emotion but full of strong memory. ‘And though the last lights off the black west went/Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs – / Because the Holy Ghost over the bent/ World broods with warm breast and with . . .’

  At this she paused and looked over at Leo, with tears surfacing in her eyes. He nodded, prompting her to finish the poem. Min took a deep sigh, and said again, ‘Because the Holy Ghost over the bent/ World broods . . . with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.’

  At a quarter to six, Leo refused the offer to sit with them for a meal of yabby and beans. Half-soused after an afternoon of entertainment, and feeling his duty was done, he said his farewells and got into his car in the lowering light to go home to Bonafide View. Min waved him goodbye at the Belvedere sign, quite drunk herself and feeling a thousand times better about things. Through the conversation of that one man, time had changed from being a lean decline to seeming a little fuller again. As she walked back along the driveway quartz, she gave a quick prayer of thanks to God for Leo Morris and even after the alcohol wore off later in the evening, some of the contentment Leo had brought her remained.

  She climbed into bed at a quarter past nine and noticed that for the first time in weeks she could lie reasonably still. It was no longer as if hundreds of ants were crawling all over her skin. Outside the ocean seemed even, without intent. The recriminations were still in her mind of course but as she took up The Gift of Poetry her eyes fell on the page with a different emphasis.

  God’s grandeur. Leo, with his zest and wordiness and his unabashed pleasure in life, had re-opened the door on that grandeur a little way. Now she read Hopkins again, this time for his light rather than just his propensity for darkness. How had Leo put it, amongst all the things he had said that day? That’s right, she remembered. Leo Morris had said that by speaking of the darkness Gerard Manley Hopkins had quenched that darkness with light.

  TEN

  LIZ AND CARLA GO FOR A WALK

  For months before her fated koala sighting on the bush block at the bottom of the Boatbuilders Road, Liz had been persistently demanding that Carla join her one morning to walk the Bootleg Creek track out in the hills behind the town. Just the two of them, no kids, no Craig, no friends from Melbourne. ‘You’d love it,’ she told Carla over and over again. ‘It’ll do you the world of good.’

  By the time Carla could finally get around to it, the prearranged walk was to be Liz’s first venture out into the bush in over three months, ever since the ants had
got stuck in her Birkenstock and feasted on her flesh, developing in her an acute case of ecophobia.

  She knew she could avoid it no longer, that Carla would be curious if she put it off, so, after agreeing on the phone, she immediately rang the local doctor to arrange for an EpiPen. Not that she’d changed her mind as to what had bitten her, she still believed it was bull-ants not skipjacks and that the hospital had misdiagnosed her symptoms, but at the very least a seed of doubt had been sown in her mind. If she got the EpiPen she’d be that little bit more relaxed on the walk.

  The day finally set aside for the walk was a slightly muggy Thursday with cloud cover, and Liz had not known whether to take a raincoat. The Bootleg Creek track was easy but it was nine kilometres and would take them at least two and a half hours. Who knew what the weather would do? In the end, despite the persistent assurances from ABC Radio 774 that the day was only going to get finer, she decided not to risk it. She dug out her blue oilskin from the hooks in the laundry and told herself she could tie it around her waist if she didn’t need to wear it. That way, too, she could hide the EpiPen in the back pocket of her pants where Carla couldn’t see it.

  Although she was fit, Carla wasn’t much of a walker. As a single mother she just couldn’t find the time. She’d moved out of Melbourne to live a more relaxed life but she was still flat out most days, either looking after her kids or conducting her Italian classes up and down the coast. But when she did manage to escape the shackles and get out into the bush she embraced the experience wholeheartedly. She’d been looking forward to this walk with Liz ever since they’d first discussed it, and she was sure, looking up at the sky through the canopy of trees as she got out of her car, that the weather was going to clear for them. Carla had brought plenty of water.