The Mary Smokes Boys (2 page)

There were three people beneath the roof before and
three people now, but the house seemed utterly empty to Grey. One wall was darkened by the smoke of a lamp that the first Irene North burned beneath a print of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa. Grey saw the stained wall and he burst into tears.

His father filled a glass baby’s bottle from the stove, but Irene did not suckle as the milk was too warm.

 

GREY WENT TO sleep in his room lit blue by the moonlight that flowed through the window beside his bed. Before he lay down he looked out the window at the boys both he and his mother called the wild boys. They were walking across the haying grass to Mary Smokes Creek from Eccleston’s. When the wild boys disappeared he slept. But late in the night he woke with terrible dreams and realised that his mother was dead, and he went to his father’s room.

Bill North was exhausted and did not wake when Grey climbed in and lay down beside his sister. He put his finger in her tiny hand that gripped it. For the first time in his life his hand seemed large, someway closer to the hand of a man. He whispered in her ear that he hated her. Then he cried. Then he kissed her cheek. He fell asleep with her hand in his, tears running down his face onto the pillow.

GREY’S SCOTTISH PRESBYTERIAN GRANDMOTHER DRESSED him in corduroy pants and a black felt jacket. His grandmother stared at him with unyielding cold blue eyes.

“And this is the best coat you own?”

“Yes, Grandma.”

Bill North pretended he did not hear. He busied himself whittling a pencil with no intention to write.

“You poor boy. You must remember your mother did her best with what little she had.’ Then to the man, ‘You never can trust a priest, can you? When will Cooney be here? It’s Saturday, so I suppose he’s hung-over.”

“I’ ve got no more love for papists than any of the rest of’em,” said Bill North. He squeezed his temples and ran his hand over his weathered face that had lately begun to smooth with the retained fluid of a drunk. “I’m only doing as she would have wanted.”

The old woman affected a sigh and telephoned the district Women’s Committee about catering for the wake.

Grey looked into his father’s eyes that were dull and defeated.

 

GREY STOOD IN the drafty timber church, uncomfortable in his clothes. Tears made his face red and hot despite the cold that whistled in through gaps in the wallboards. Through the service he wept until he could not breathe. He heard snatches of Father
Cooney’s arid and assuasive sermon on the resurrection of the dead, and he did not feel God was in the room. Outside the church, people made apologies for death. If there is a God, Grey thought, then He is something wilder and fiercer than this.

 

THE CEMETERY WAS at the southeast edge of town below Solitary Hill. The wind blew rusty eucalypt leaves to bank against the fallen wrought iron fence. Beyond the cemetery was rolling yellow grassland where felled and windthrown timber was scattered amidst spare, ringbarked trees. Buffel and feathertop grass grew out of cracks in the gravestones. In the northeastern distance the hills darkened under a sweeping cloud, and mist pooled high in the mountains.

Grey stood before everyone, isolated as an object of pity, in a rare, cold spitting of winter rain. His jacket looked even shabbier after it was wet. Black dye ran from the sleeves into his palms. His over-long hair was pasted to his forehead. He wished very much to be away from the crowd. Men he vaguely knew came to shake his hand. Chalk-faced women he did not know at all kissed his cheeks. The women stroked his wet head and looked very sorry. His grandmother wore a wrathful expression with no certain object. At finding themselves accidentally near her the other mourners shuffled away to a safer distance. Bill North looked stunned and held his head and his hands.

 

A FEW OF the chalk-faced women began singing “Abide with Me,” but like a too-delicate candle, the song faltered and was extinguished by the wind. The singers left along with everyone else for the wake at the town hall.

Grey crept away. He did not want the others at his mother’s grave and was glad when he saw they were leaving without him. He sat alone in the grass outside the yard. He was nauseated by the thought of the wake, that empty formality he had witnessed when his grandfather died.

At her father’s funeral Grey’s mother had told him of the
vigil over the dead in the early Irish Church, on terrible islands of rock where anchorites went to be alone in the presence of God. Now, despite his few years and no history or remembrance of anything but a story told him by his mother, he dreamed of that ritual, though he could give it no certain shape, merely commingle symbols of solemnity: candles; heaving dark song; hooded faces; a howling wind that somehow did not put out the candles. But this afternoon there would be a polite and nervous hour of tea and cake before the townspeople hurried to their houses, where death would leave them be. This rather than an all-night watch with eyes in the shadows: men watching for … He did not know.

I will stay awake, Grey said to himself.

He watched his grandmother and three women in conference. They looked about the cemetery for him. They looked across the plain. A Mary Smokes school teacher cast her eyes in his direction. The woman would think he had run off for attention. She would offer him some tranquil consolation. He did not want to be consoled. He stood up against the grey sky and thought of running to the west, where the emptiness seemed interminable and offered infinite escape. But the concerned, pitying look on the woman’s red face arrested him.

IN THE NIGHT HE LEANT AGAINST THE HILLS HOIST IN the houseyard. He watched wet oats and feathertop glinting in the broken light. He looked across Eccleston’s to the paint-stripped white house on stilts. The valley wind tore at the rusted corrugated-iron roof. A dappled mare stood at the gate. The wild boys were there now.

The undulating Eccleston grassland was intermittent light and dark and the wild boys trod across it.

Grey went to the edge of his yard and put his hands on the barbed wire that trellised wild jasmine. The Eccleston boy carried a kerosene lamp and the others followed, hooded in their duffel coats.

He wondered should he go to them.

He let them disappear over a shoulder of the earth into the places they knew.

If he went to them his grandmother might wake. She slept lighter than his sister. She might wake if Irene cried, or wake with her bronchial cough and walk past his room to the bathroom and see him gone. She might have done so already. If he was to be scolded anyway then he should have gone.

The wind rent a gap in the cloud and let moonlight fall on the path of the boys on the last crest before Mary Smokes Creek. The clouds closed and the land was dark and the wild boys were gone. I should have gone to them, he thought. A light came on over his shoulder in the kitchen. He crept back inside unnoticed.

GREY WOKE EARLY THE NEXT DAY AND HIS GRANDMOTHER was sitting in a wicker chair by the stove. She slept no more than four hours in any night. Only her eyes shifted when she addressed her son-in-law. She told him to go into town to buy food, so she might go about the task of feeding his children.

Bill North said she could come and cook if she was determined to, but she was not to stay in the house. The old woman took no notice. And Grey watched his father turn his eyes to the floor. It was the same betrayal of guilt he had read in his father’s eyes at the funeral and days before at the hospital. The atmosphere in the house was taut with a final accusation that was never made …

 

GREY’S MOTHER AND father had lived apart beneath a common roof. Michael Finnain had insisted on the marriage after his daughter fell pregnant, despite the mother’s protests. “Even our girl must own her actions,” he said pitifully. “The child will be born and the two married, though it breaks my heart to lose her.’ In marriage, Irene had found faith consoling; she recalled her soft-spoken father’s admissions of the inevitability of sin and the need to accept original guilt. It made her load easier to bear, to think she was not paying for some extraordinary mistake that was hers alone. She prayed for forgiveness and forbearance before her icon cards of St. Magdalene and St. Pelagia …

At fifteen she had kissed a boy she came to detest. She
wanted to eradicate the stain. Bill North saw her standing on the road in front of school in the rain with her books over her head. He drove her home in his truck. She felt important and romantic, and the next Friday afternoon Grey was conceived in the cabin of Bill North’s truck at the edge of Lake Wivenhoe. Clouds floated along the water that evening while the young man lay beside her asleep with a half bottle of whisky still in his hand. A small timber row boat was pulled off its anchor and drifting near Cormorant Bay. Irene Finnain leant on the windowsill and watched the boat and cried.

Her father had taught her to speak Irish. She would have amazed her old aunts in that distant country she would never see. She played Bach’s preludes and fugues and sang the canticles of Hildegard von Bingen. An Ursuline nun who trained in music at the Brisbane Conservatorium had taught her. Sister Marie Hauswald said no one in Mary Smokes knew how well the girl’s voice carried the great prayers. When she married she rode with her piano and books in the back of Bill North’s truck to her new house beyond the southern edge of town and every young hope she had in the world beyond vanished into the country’s great emptiness.

She did her best to be a dutiful wife. To counter his feelings of inferiority, Bill North told her that their marriage and the child had kept him from a life he intended, though he could give no shape to that envisioned life; only that in it he was free from all duty. He spent his spare hours with boys from the railway. Most nights he saw no reason to come home early, or at all.

Grey had often sat up with his mother who waited by a cold plate of dinner. She would send him to bed before midnight. Then he would sit in the doorway of his room, listening to her praying until her husband returned.

Grey would not sleep if he heard her crying. He would remain in the corridor and if she saw him he would go to her and she would not send him to bed again. One night she wiped her eyes and turned down her icon lamp and took his hand and told
him about heaven. She made it sound like a palace in the sky with a glass floor, so you could look down and watch over the ones you loved. “Will Bill go to heaven?”–“ Yes,” she said. She said everyone would be changed in heaven, so they were fit for it. They would even change in appearance. He said he did not want her to change; he asked how he would recognize her if she changed so much. And the pretty girl of twenty-two smiled, “You’ll know me. You’ll know me by the things I say.”

“Were you praying for me again?’ Bill asked when he returned that hour and found her sitting in a chair beside the Black Madonna.

His wife turned away from him.

“Ah, you were. That’s why I’m home. Your God came and pulled me by the ear. You must be a favourite of His.’ He lit a cigarette and sat down in the dark. “I was just about to take from Molly Small the thing that you can’t give me. A slut she may be, but she sympathises. She’s a warm woman, where others are cold as fish.’ He began undressing and throwing his clothes over a chair. “He’s spiteful your God that doesn’t exist. You must be the most chaste girl that was ever knocked up at fifteen. Molly thinks so. Well, now He’s got you all to himself.’

Grey lay awake and listening.

Bill North left his food untouched in order to mock his wife’s sense of duty. He resented her for making herself a martyr on his account.

He believed a racehorse might make him the wealth that some-mysterious-how would free him. He went to sales and bought the cheapest yearlings in the hope that one would be lucky–he could give countless stories of unpredicted success that had arrived on other men. He spent the family’s money on horse feed, veterinary bills and carriage to district races. And what was left he drank. He squandered his wife’s dowry and borrowed another two-and-a-half thousand dollars from his father-in-law that was never repaid. He bought a colt with good bloodlines with Stan Eccleston, who was living with a black
woman next door. But Eccleston sold his share to August Tanner and left town for reasons no one knew and took work dropping bores in the far northwest of the state. Tanner was a horse dealer–in the phonebook he listed himself under “bloodstock agent”–but rumour said he sold whisky, black girls and guns as often as horses. Tanner and Bill North made poor partners and the horse was soon sold.

Bill North bought more than a dozen horses through Tanner, but none worked out, and finally he was convinced that Tanner had been cheating him for years, passing off horses he knew were faulty. One of the most promising had fallen dead in the paddock. Tanner blamed a snakebite that could not be found.

The only visitors to the house were Bill North’s railways friends and a few local hands and horse workers who came for cards and drink. When they came Irene would sit on the back steps with Grey and name the constellations, though the boy’s amblyopia meant he could not bring them into focus; else she would sing “Fhir a’ Bhàta” or “O virga ac diadema,” and she would not go back inside until the house was empty.

Bill North’s friends teased him jealously about his pretty wife. One night a half-caste ringer made a joke regarding her and a hand of cards and Bill North broke the man’s jaw and dragged him onto the road.

 

IRENE NORTH TRIED to teach her son the piano but he had no aptitude. He was sorry that this saddened her. “Perhaps when you’re older,” she hoped. And Grey nodded. He promised when he was older he would learn to play the piano, and even to speak Irish as she did. Occasionally she taught him a word or phrase, and her husband mocked her for teaching his son a language that was dying in its own tiny country half a world away.