A Woman of the Inner Sea (23 page)

His beer quickly drunk, Jelly disappeared looking for Jack.

Guthega and Noel, his shearing champion son, arrived. Guthega ordered beers by holding up two fingers which looked as though they had not been washed since before the flood. But he had gravity. He wasn’t snide tonight.

—Noel and I put all the furniture up in the rafters and got the missus off in a helicopter. I don’t know, I don’t know …

He shook his head.

It was a legend that in some country game—Myambagh versus Narromine, perhaps—when Guthega had been playing hooker, and the referee had taken a long time to set the scrum, Guthega had got out his smokes from his back pocket and lit a cigarette. A cigarette in the scrum! They’d suspended him for life for that, and laid on him the duty to be forever a smartarse, whatever the ruin to his marriage and his liver. They had by their knee-jerk decision
committed Guthega’s forlorn son to tend him every night as well, even at the loss of championship sleep. Jesus, a man who had had a life suspension for smoking in the scrum owed a debt to society which could not be paid without sacrifice and the adoption of a given role!

Tonight though, the emergency had released him from his normal duties.

—Where’s Jelly? asked Guthega, his eyes near-closed. Kate said she thought he was upstairs. Talking to Jack. She could in fact see it all with an interior but precise eye. She beheld Jelly’s movements. The annex where the rescuers and the rescued would sleep. Where the swamped aviators would doss down too. Jack and Jelly were there, and Jelly inspected the explosive and, finding it in repose, moved it to another place, the far, unpeopled end of the verandah for a start. Every movement of this nature being an advance toward the actual use of the stuff.

With her internal vision, she saw him lumber downstairs then with it and put it in her room. She saw him then press his way down the stairs against the ascending homeless, going out then to locate Gus Schulberger the fugitive at his truck.

Guthega and his son drank quickly and also disappeared. The waterlogged night didn’t offer them a truce either. They wanted to attend Jelly.

At one stage she excused herself from the bar, and walked along under the iron-roofed back verandah. She heard a shot; the dense air muffled it. She looked into the stableyard where the chained dogs—disconsolate on leashes—were beginning to compose themselves for the night, and she saw Jack and Gus and a friend of Jelly’s, a Senior Constable Burns, without doubt the one who had consulted Jelly over her picture. Senior Constable Burns was armed with a rifle. A dead sheep lay near his feet. The men were pointing to steers who had come to the yard for its high ground but were now backing toward the gate, frightened by the shot Burns had just fired. She heard the men talking, pointing to this steer and that in the near-dark. Jelly could be heard clearly.

—Up that for the rent. Let’s find a steer that belongs to that bastard McHugh.

McHugh, the Shire President, the anti-dynamiter. The Myambagh fable again: that the system of levees had been devised in
large part to protect McHugh’s pastures and divert tides of water onto the town. Not so much likely to be true, but widely taken as fact.

She saw Jelly and Gus approach the steers in the familiar, leisurely way which country people have with cattle. She herself could not have approached them in this way. For the brute force was on the side of the brutes, and it might occur to them for the first time in their history as you got close.

Nearing the cattle, both Jelly and Gus held their hands palm outward and wide. They moved amongst the beasts looking for McHugh’s brand, and when Jelly found it he yelled and slapped the animal’s hindquarters, and he and Gus drove it to Constable Burns. In one movement Constable Burns raised the rifle and shot the steer. Its legs flew from beneath it.

Kate wondered what Gus’s beasts made of this stableyard commotion?

Guthega and his son had appeared now. They helped run a chain from Jack’s truck, through a hook in the stable wall which had been used in pre-abattoir days to hang slaughtered livestock, and—very fast—they had the steer hanging, and Jack with one flick of his bandaged hand opened the artery in its throat.

The constant spouse Jack said, Leave it there as long as we can. Connie hates bloody steaks.

It was raining hard again now. One more inch for the drowned town. Gus was the one Jack passed the butchering knives to. Guthega said not a word; offered no advice.

Returned to the bar, Kate imagined Gus butchering with long, clean cuts.

An hour later she was drinking tea quickly in the kitchen when the meat was brought in, and Jack made the normal excuses to Connie.

—Look, we’ve got to feed these people some time before two o’clock in the morning, love.

Soon the smell of frying meat filled the bar, and men were pricked back to intensity by it and started boasting about their appetites. A number of men who by habit or temperament liked the work came to the kitchen and boiled potatoes and cooked onions while Shirley and Connie dealt with the great slabs of awfully fresh meat. It was utterly clear that the orgy of Jack Murchison’s
kindness had well advanced despite Connie’s warnings and would be somehow compounded in the eating of all this meat.

Kate ate at the bar, and Jelly—plate in hand and giving off an odor of dampness from his clothes—lumbered up to her.

—Listen, Kate love. I’m taking Guthega and his boy and Gus. You must be tired. But if you want …

She found the invitation a little hard to believe in. It brought fear and a brand of stupid pleasure. The Cornerman and the Plaqueman, even if not helicoptered out on the grounds of age, would never in a millennium have been asked to join Jelly in his night’s task.

Weighed with the burden and the grandeur of the idea and barely breathing, she went to find her drying gumboots and her torch.

Amongst the party traveling by Jelly’s truck: Five people somehow damply slotted into the front seat, Kate half sitting on Gus’s lap and Noel half sitting on hers and Guthega’s; a short truck journey to where they met the flood lapping across Commonwealth Street and against the front windows of the abandoned Federal Hotel.

To one of the Federal’s verandah uprights, Kate could see, an aluminum boat with an outboard motor was moored.

In the truck Guthega had grown vocal and knowledgeable again. There had been a lot of talk about fuses and pigstickers. She didn’t know what a pigsticker was. She had to pick up from the way the name was used that it was some form of wooden splint you ran into a stick of gelignite.

Gus said, Nonmetallic, see.

It seemed you could then run the wires either side of the pigsticker to the detonator. The pigsticker stopped them from touching and ending the world by accident. Jelly, Gus and Guthega must have always known these things. Noel may have missed out on learning them by becoming wide-comb champ.

Guthega kept saying he wished Jelly had something called a shrike instead of the old-fashioned plunger box.

—It’s got these two buttons on it and two lights, said Guthega, and the charge can’t go down the line until you punch both buttons and both lights come on.

Jelly advised him not to be fussy. The plunger box had been good enough last bloody time.

They untethered the aluminum boat and pushed it thigh deep. Jelly loaded in the Esky and a heavily packed tarpaulin box which must have contained the rumored plunger box. It was required by all the men that Kate get in next. She found that the dinghy felt fragile in the tide. The others stepped on board gingerly, one at a time. Not even Jelly’s weight gave the thing a feeling of substance.

Gus, who had a reputation even with these men as a mechanic, got the outboard motor going and they set off up the Eglington Highway and then left at the submerged rail crossing. After a while Gus asked Guthega’s son Noel to take the tiller, and he came forward delicately in the ill-balanced little boat and sat beside Kate. The current was at least with them now, all the earth’s water pushing west against the high abutment of the Cobar railway line. Its drift seemed of course to reinforce Jelly’s argument, the old one, the one he had made high and dry in Murchison’s Railway Hotel on Kate’s first night of two-pour schooners.

Even afloat Guthega went on deploring the lack of a shrike, the latest in detonating technology. He seemed to believe that it had somehow been Jelly’s duty to produce one.

—How much jelly have you got for a start? he asked in an aggrieved voice.

—Seven kilos.

—Shit, seven kilos, eh? That’s what … fifty-six sticks of the stuff.

And he couldn’t disapprove of that, though he took it as the minimum quantity owed to the chief supporters of a dynamiting fable.

Now and then Gus shone a torch onto near-submerged street names to verify where he was. The extra darkness of the railway embankment was bearing down on them. So they kissed the abutment. Guthega leapt ashore holding the painter, and Jelly came next. From the dinghy Gus handed the Esky to him and the tarpaulin bag which contained the blast box.

—Stay here holding the painter, Guthega told his son when everyone was out. D’you reckon you can do that?

—Yeah.

Guthega insisted.

—
Reckon
you can do it?

—
Yes
.

Noel felt he was fit to take a fuller part than this.

—So you won’t get the willies and let the fucking thing drift off?

—Fair go, murmured Noel.

He believed he was being punished for his championship status which this menial task of hanging on to a rope and with the low accusation of fear of darkness.

—Guthega, murmured Jelly, unloading the Esky. Give the boy a go.

—Got to be watched. He’s a bloody neurotic.

For Christ’s sake, Guthega. It’s just bloody
you!
You make
me
bloody neurotic too.

In the end they left Guthega’s unhappy son behind to hold the boat in place against the currents. He served too in the dark as a first-class landmark.

It was a comfort to be treading along the uneven railbed. The air was dark and still and the rain had stopped. You could hear the sucking weight of water dwelling somberly in all Myambagh’s rooms.

—Where can I drop the plunger box? asked Gus, and Jelly said,
There!
and Gus dropped it. Then he and Kate and Guthega continued on with Jelly, who would not let anyone else carry the Esky.

Jelly took his mark at the meeting hall of the Myambagh Rifle Club. It had wisely painted its title on its iron roof, since it was now flooded over the eaves. Gus took rope from the same tarpaulin bag as the blast box and tied it around Jelly’s waist. Pliers and electrical tape and coils of fuse had been lifted from the bag as well, and lay between the rails.

—Hold the torch, Gus commanded Kate, and she played light onto the preparations of Jelly and the others. Guthega at last now had a chance to handle the Esky. He opened it skeptically and took out the detonators, wrapped in their silver foil. The rope dangling from his middle, Jelly himself reached in and took up one of the explosive sticks from the Esky and one of those splints called pigstickers. He drove the pigsticker into the explosive. This initiating act caused Gus and Guthega to begin taping together eight or nine sticks at a time in bundles, and arraying them beside the Esky in the open. For Kate, all this was a compelling education. She didn’t miss a movement.

Gus and Guthega and Jelly went on making their packages of gelignite, wrapping them together with many loops of black tape, asking where in the bloody hell the pliers were. When this was
finished, Gus opened the foil package which held the detonators. He took out one detonator and gave it to Jelly, who strapped it to the wooden shaft of the pigsticker already embedded in the initiating stick of gelignite. This was an act of great weight and authority too.

—Don’t be anxious, boys and girls, he breathed. The detonator’s not even wired up yet.

But we are getting toward it, Kate wanted to say. We’re getting there at an awful pace.

—Wire, he commanded.

Gus picked up a coil of fuse wire from beside the tarpaulin bag. Kate shone torchlight onto Jelly’s grimy yet slug-white hands as he played one of the strands of the wire around the end of the pigsticker—it was just as it had been explained to Kate before—and crimped it onto the detonator with pliers, and then the other strand likewise. Doing it, Jelly seemed so admirably light-fingered.

He completed everything then by binding the premier stick, the one with the pigsticker and detonator, onto one of the bundles.

So this was what there was now on the ground—half a dozen or so fasces of gelignite sticks bound together, and in the top stick of one bundle the pigsticker, and on top of that the detonator and the attached wires.

In the spirit of the expert status these grave acts endowed all four people with, Jelly gave Kate the fuse wire to hold and asked her to play it out a little. Gus and Guthega held the rope to which Jelly was tied, and Jelly backed down the embankment, carrying in his arms all the bundles of gelignite. When he got to water level by the submerged chainwire fence of the Myambagh Rifle Club he entered the water without flinching. She played the torch on him.

Guthega said, There’s a blocked-off culvert down there. That’s where …

Everyone associated with the fable except Kate seemed to know about this culvert. It had Jelly’s name on it.

Jelly was up to his chest now in the water. He stored his bundles on a shelf of earth in the embankment, and he bent down into the water with one of them and strained to deposit it somewhere out of sight below the water. He did the same with each bundle, lifting it off the shelf of mud into the raised high crook of his left elbow, and from there into his right hand, and depositing it.

Kate shook her head, but it was not the involuntary flinch. It
was for the wonderful seriousness of these people, and the rite of dynamite.

Before she would have expected him, Jelly was hauled out of the water again, back up on the embankment, turning slowly from side to side, trying to shake the water off his wet-weather gear. Gus and Guthega somehow knew to drive a system of pigstickers into the railbed here, and around it they separated out and hooked the two strands of fuse wire which rose up the embankment from the explosive below the water and which then hung from the apparently single coil in Kate’s hands.