A Woman of the Inner Sea (22 page)

As a team, one at each end, Kate and Connie carried sandbags to the levee. Kate noticed far away, along the ramparts of the highway, a string of aged and young and pregnant tottering with bowed heads toward helicopters from which men and women with cameras dismounted. Dropping a bag in unison with Connie, Kate pulled the hood of her jacket low over her brow. It was obvious though why cameras should be sent to behold this phenomenon, from the air first of all and then from the ground. To show Myambagh’s pocket of color in the midst of the gray-water nullity. To show the wonderful unity of spirit of country people.

Soon the cameras were at the levee, perhaps three hundred yards along from Kate, at what they must have considered the water’s chief point of attack. Kate, head down, lifted the sandbags with Connie as a light rain fell.

Someone cried out and everyone stood still and looked up. Connie and Kate looked up, holding a sandbag between them by its four corners. Amongst the tops of eucalypts a mile away, a new wave could be seen. It was slow and lazy. To a Palm Beach surfer like the former Kate Kozinski it would have been beneath contempt, a wave for a slack, still day. It traveled fast however. It came sucking up to the lip of the parapet and broke for a moment over it, splashing everyone’s already glistening gumboots.

Some people began to reinforce the levee with driven-in angle
iron spikes and rolls of fencing wire from the stock and station agents. They were all for a second the Australian Corps, those five brilliant divisions, rebuffing Ludendorff’s assault in the Easter of 1918. They were connected in heroism to the putteed Digger whose memorial stood above the flood in Lachlan Street.

Kate had time to see that Jack worked with as much brotherly energy as any other man, though he uttered no particular opinions on the army method of laying sandbags, and at one stage he held his hand up bloodied and he laughed. He had taken a routine wound from the wire and the steel, and if nothing worse happened to him then he was no less fortunate than the others. And even if the town were not saved, they were working lovingly together in a dizziness of exhaustion, in a communal frenzy of love.

An ambulance had pulled up and Connie led Jack to it to have his wound dressed. A nurse who was a farmer’s wife washed the damage and poured a stinging brown disinfectant on it and surrounded it with bandages. Her hood still pulled down to her nose Kate heard Connie and Jack asking the nurse how she had got into Myambagh, since she lived on a farm out to the west of the town, in the universe of water. She heard the woman say, I came in over the railway bridge.

Jack and Connie both expressed wonder.

—Jesus, that must have been hard.

—The gaps between the railway sleepers …

The gaps between the railway sleepers would have shown the furious water moving beneath.

The girl said, Yes. But she made little of it in her country way.

—I had to take it slowly, you know.

The news that there was this way in and out exhilarated Kate. The idea itself was all the escape Kate wanted for the moment.

Meanwhile she had gone on dragging the bags, two-handed, to the embankment. While she was engaged this way, her back to the levee, it gave way. She turned around and saw the little triangle through which the water flowed, filtered by its fall, almost clean. Calf deep, she and other women and men splashed around replugging it. She could hear behind her the enthusiasm of the news cameramen over this. The handsome men and women speaking to camera could be heard making up fables for people in other towns and cities about Myambagh’s stubborn courage. Australians, she
knew, would love the fact that despite all this tirelessness there had been a failure. That would stoke them up to demand the best for Myambagh. A new wave of Monks and Escapees.

She knew that the camera would very much like to focus on Jack Murchison’s brave bandaged hand. Better that than her hooded shape.

The water topped the levee again, and then broke it in another place. Kate and Connie carried sandbags, Jack heaved them one-handed, using his thigh to direct them against the stream which gushed in amongst the unmilitarily placed bags. But nothing concealed the damage. Soon they were waist deep in cold, bad water, water full of the gray discontent of three thousand swamped farms, water fouled by dead sheep and by the fuel from Burnside’s sweptaway car. Mundanely, it entered in a gush amongst the sandbags, and now people stood back watching its flow and acknowledging to each other there was no stopping it.

Some began to wade home, knowing there would be an evacuation, that they should raise a few last things above the expected water line and grab a few last items to take away. A small demented man who tried to block the torrent with his knees was swept away and up against a fence a football field away. Strong men like Jack wallowed up to him and picked him up and advised him against any more recklessness.

Jack then and Connie and Kate waded to the truck before the rising water stifled its engine, and drove away. Squinting into the rearview mirror at the image of the wake his vehicle, boatlike, was making, Jack reflected on the nature of what had swept into the town.

—There’s meningitis and all sorts of filth in this floodwater. People die of viruses no bugger can name. I tell you what. It’ll be time pretty soon that Jelly was heard from.

—Long as you don’t get that hand infected, said Connie.

Jack’s truck emerged from water beyond the railway line and rolled up the slight but saving hill on which the Railway stood dry. There were already a number of camera crew outside the public bar, dressed in their paramilitary manner, sure they were at the front. None of them had cameras running but stood instead amongst silver boxes of gear, amongst tripods folded into black cylindrical containers. Just the same, Kate took no risks with them when Jack pulled up, and passed quickly amongst them, still
hooded, pausing only when she had got inside. She did not take to the stairs however. For she was sure that Jack would have something pungent to say to them, and she needed to hear it. They were the limit to which Jack’s manic charity would not reach.

While a television producer negotiated with Jack, she listened from behind the cover of the door, in the corner between the saloon and the dining room.

—My people need dry accommodation, like everyone else.

Jack didn’t agree. He spoke in a terribly neutral voice. She found this listening delicious, the certainty of Jack’s prejudice against the media, his heroic neutrality.

—I’ve only got room for orphans and bloody rescue workers. I’ll have hundreds to feed within an hour or two. You jokers better get out by helicopter. That’s what I reckon.

—Australia has always been very generous to Myambagh. Only because they see it on their television screens. That last flood …

—Look. I wouldn’t be so keen to take credit if I were you. You blokes are a double-edged sword. Now I’m going to have police and rescuers and all the town’s dogs and half the town’s fucking cattle, all within yelling distance of here. I’ll have to feed them and bed them down. They deserve to have their nights free.

—Free? What do you mean by
free?

—Free of cameras, said Jack. You bloody know that’s what I mean.

—Well, I’ll have to tell people on camera you refused us accommodation. What do you say about that?

—I say go to buggery!

It was clear. Jack wanted his high, dry hotel to be available only for dynamiters, wanted it safe for kidnappers of the animal ingredients of
tableaux vivants
.

Jack and Connie appeared together in the lobby where Kate had been eavesdropping. She was too tired to flee. The licensees. They stood together a second at the bottom of the stairs of their high hotel, united for once in the disgust for the merchants of half-truth. On the threshold of his ark, Jack winked at Kate.

She knew she wouldn’t be resting yet.

Later, godlike aerial shots would show Murchison’s Railway Hotel thus, beached amongst Myambagh’s drowned civic buildings and households, the houses swamped at least to their windowsills
but often to their eaves. This aerial footage would likewise show the rows of dogs in the Railway’s stableyard, all rearing on their hind legs in expectation of meat.

Despite his threats to treat Jack badly, the producer let his crew film the cattle and sheep teeming up to Jack’s yard howling and bleating for fodder and receiving it from the hands of volunteers.

By the time these camera images would reach the rest of the country, the crucial question first uttered by Connie, of whether Jack would go
mad
, had been answered. As soon as he started the generator and turned the lights on in the bar, he had resumed his argument with Connie. Soon the men who had been defeated on the levees would be here. They would deserve beer. It defied decency to keep on hitting the cash register buttons on such a night.

—Jesus, love, Jack kept protesting, as if Connie were winning the argument.

In a low voice he told Kate to forget to punch the middy buttons and the schooner buttons and the buttons for nips of spirit.

—And if we’re not going to do that, he argued with himself, it’ll seem pretty bloody small-minded to punch the button for peanuts.

So instructed, Kate could feel the hotel fill up with the nearpanic of Connie. Knowing you needed resources against a continuing history of loss, she couldn’t get it through to Jack. He really thought everything could be expended on this one crisis.

—I am not feeding them all the steak out of my freezer, she cried.

—Love, love, the stableyard’s bloody crawling with livestock.

—Then I want it hung. I don’t want meat that hasn’t been properly hung bleeding all over my kitchen!

—It’ll get hung. Maybe not as good tonight as on following nights. But be a bit patient, Connie love.

European society in Myambagh was barely a hundred and fifty years old and looked for its myths, and Kate could tell that on top of the kindness, Jack had mythic ambitions. Generosity was his art form, and he
wanted
men to speak of the renowned openhandedness of Jack Murchison. During the Wrangle flood. Married to the Greek girl, you know. Connie. He wanted to be invoked in these terms.

This was how he disposed things in the Railway:

In the bar Kate poured her two-pull beers as the police and the evacuators came in, giving up Myambagh for the night, permitting
the floodwater to enter all the town’s cupboards, to inspect every drawer. Sometimes Kate punched the cash register buttons by mistake, but she received and put away no money, and the
ping!
and slide of the cash register drawer was only an occasional pleasant, sharp noise in the waterlogged air.

The stories the men told were of taking people along the flooded streets by life raft, persuading them to leave this and that behind: a wedding picture, a bucket, a packet of laundry detergent, a suitcase with a fifty-year-old wedding dress in it. Up past the Civic Centre and the Ambulance Station, right at the high school. Keeping the laws of the road in a rubber boat. Left at the railway crossing, bypassing the Railway on its hill and delivering townspeople to the helicopters on the highway.

Others told of emptying dead refrigerators before food putrefied, and of pacifying family dogs, the naïve protectors of the home, who could smell the coming water, the carrion adrift in it. Calling
There boy
and
Good boy
and getting a muzzle on the buggers and bringing them by boat to the high ground in Jack’s stableyard for tethering.

None of the drinkers were aware, any more than the camera crews had been, that Menzies and Chifley occupied their dry shed and were now surrounded by the barking of dogs, and that they frowned at and tested the noise, at least in Chifley’s case, by continuing shifts of the angles of the ears. Even the drinkers on whose sleeves were sewn the badges of the State of New South Wales, a lion and kangaroo in this case holding up an escutcheon, and
Orta Recens Quam Pura Nites—Recently Arisen How Brightly You Shine
; even those would not have been interested in who Gus Schulberger was and whether he harbored beasts. For their terms of reference were all to do with the flood. Stolen marsupials were
ultra vires
.

Kate noticed as she poured the beer, conscious of how many firkins and kilderkins of the fluid she was pouring out, that most of the Monks and Escapees were gone. She liked the rescuers better than those who merely painted and plastered the town and lacked a mandate to save it.

A sergeant of the Water Police—
Orta Recens Quam Pura Nites
—asked, So I put it to you, gentlemen? Can anything be permanently done for this bloody town?

There was a flurry of opinion. People couldn’t wait to speak. In
the midst of it, largely unnoticed though enormous in his yellow Emergency Service gear, Jelly entered from the saloon. To her he had so obviously now the aura of the-man-to-answer-the-question that she was astounded the police, the Water Police, the men from the Emergency Service, the camera people drinking off to one side, and the reflective crew of the air force transport plane which had landed at the Myambagh airport just before the levee broke, and which was now awash out there—that all these people failed to notice him! None of these men put the matter to him or even much adverted to him as anything more than a large presence, a Myambagh grotesque.

He asked her quietly for a middy of beer. He smiled palely at her. His beard was growing up bluely on his large, soft face.

His paleness was different from that of the others. They saw themselves back here again and again, every time it rained. Ferrying widows, pacifying dogs, cleaning out refrigerators. Whereas his duty was to demonstrate by dynamite that Myambagh did not need to be terrorized by the river, could be relieved not only of the fear of its own downpour but of the runoff from other people’s. He carried such knowledge in his soft body, and of course it separated him from others. He would have considered it an enviable life purely to have to persuade old biddies and forthright country widowers into the rafts and across to the helicopters, to oopsadaisy them into the cabins and reach up and clinch their seatbelts.