A Woman of the Inner Sea (35 page)

With a lawyer’s certainty that things came to litigation in the end, especially if the Kozinskis were involved, Murray commuted from his cabana to hers. He showered for example in his own. He went back there early in the morning to try to impose on his sheets what looked like the indentation of a single, virtuous man.

He was very muscular, she had noticed even in her stupor. More so than Paul Kozinski.

Murray blamed himself, but all the experts said that in the tropics it took only half an unwary day to induce third degree burns. She had strung together many unwary days. Pretending to block the sun out with a raised hand and reading nothing at all, she sat by the lagoon with a book. Once she went out with him in the stern of an aluminum boat and waited near naked while he dived briefly. When he surfaced she had become ill from heat stroke and was shivering. The liquor had probably dried up the nutrients in her skin in any case. One Sydney doctor would ultimately and sagely tell her so.

Fijian boatmen carried her to her cabana on a stretcher. She lay shivering in a blaze of heat. At first she felt too ill to appreciate anything except the grateful pain, as the flesh of her shoulders howled and blistered and then shrank, becoming black, sloughing. Later it would seem so trite, such an unworthy gesture to her children. But for the moment she was pitiably satisfied.

She could read the silliness of what she had done however in the bemused faces of Indian doctors as she wafted in and out of a conscious state in hospital in Suva.

Murray stayed on with her, though the time of his holiday was over. When she was well enough to travel, they dressed her shoulders, and Murray took her home. He knew what pills to give her if she had trouble. He knew that she was not to drink liquor on the plane.

In Australian terms it was a short flight and she was full of
tranquilizer and opiates for it. The Gaffneys had an ambulance waiting for her at Sydney Airport.

They never thought as much of Murray after that. For Uncle Frank had become too busy with Mrs. Kearney and her affairs to stand up for Murray’s cause again.

R
USHING TO TOWN with news of Burnside’s injury, wanting to be fast to save Chifley from Gus’s mercy, she careered all over the red dirt road, dragging the russet bottom of Gus’s ocean behind her in a cloud. Rattling over bullbars, opening and closing gates, restless and competent. So many saltbush miles to the frontage road, to the final gate. She felt that she had been so long cloistered from the normal offices of civil life that she wondered in what language she would speak to the police or the ambulance people. She would open her mouth and Aramaic might come out.

A band of cloud in the west had flattened the declining sun to a molten ingot. The world was full of still light. Light which waited upon an event. Something abominable was growling across the slant of the light. The sky descended to suck her up. She drove fast to evade it. Top gear. Seventy-five miles an hour and in something like terror. Rattling over culverts. The shadow of the sky passed over the windscreen and darkened her hands on the steering wheel.

A genuine but minor surprise, a blue helicopter, glittering, its navigation lights already switched on. Tentative, taking pains to be sure she would brake, it edged groundward in front of her. When she did slow it came to rest on the common pasturage along the side of the road, the strip where battling farmers grazed their sheep free of cost in drought time. It looked as sweet as a cerulean egg, this helicopter,
O’TOOLE
on its side, in serious white picked out with black.

The door of the thing swung open and Uncle Frank, tearing himself from its wind, wearing a black aviation jacket, delivered himself out of it. Hobbling to the middle of the road, he blocked her way to town.

It was O’Toole the undertaker, Uncle Frank’s friend, with hands white as the sacraments of Christ from committing to rest the souls of the faithful departed. He and Uncle Frank had known each other even before their arrival in Australia, that well-known missionary country. For they came from the same place in County Limerick.

She was somehow unsurprised to see Uncle Frank there in the road, in his paramilitary jacket. If Burnside’s intelligence could reach the back-of-Bourke, all the more so the not-so-Reverend Frank’s.

As she remembered him doing in her childhood he gestured vastly with his large soft hand.

—Come here now, the hand said.

An instructional gesture too. He needed to impart something to her, a little way away from the full blast noise of the rotors. Some mystery of faith.

She went up to him. Perhaps thinking it was still tender, he gently touched her shoulder and surveyed her. She saw his mouth make the sound of her name. Kate. Kate.

No question he wanted her to join him in O’Toole’s sky-blue contraption. In mime she tried to tell him the story of the business she was on. God knows if he understood. He shook his head, and then kissed her impetuously and wetly on the ear and roared into it.

—Bourke, Kate. No kidnaps, my darling! All aboveboard.

She had never in her waking life needed so much a means of flying over the earth. But she wasn’t sure this one was it. Just the same, it oddly pleased her to obey Uncle Frank. She eased her truck into a ditch and took the keys, leaving the windows open to the dusk. She climbed up into the cabin of the helicopter by means of the little stirrup step. There in the pilot seat was triple-chinned O’Toole in a flying jacket covered in far more militant patches than Uncle Frank sported. Skyhawk O’Toole. She wondered but blessed whatever vanity it was which led him to own a helicopter.

In fact O’Toole used it for rare ash scatterings over the sea, now that Catholics were permitted to cremate themselves. This had enabled him to get the whole thing off tax. It was another example of the way, because eight hundred years of rule had misused them, the O’Tooles and O’Briens practiced their anarchism.

In the days when Uncle Frank was in something less than climactic
trouble with His Eminence Cardinal Fogarty, Archbishop of Sydney, he had done grief counseling for O’Toole and might even be doing it now, even under release on bail.

O’Toole’s sky-blue hearse came down on a football field by the Darling River, right on the white-limed halfway mark; like a referee from on high. Already Uncle Frank knew by yells and urgent gestures that there were matters to be attended to before they went into the question of Uncle Frank himself, or of how she had remade herself in the bush, changing herself to an extent in Jack Murchison’s frying kitchen and at Frank Pellegrino’s hearty location canteen.

At last O’Toole cut the engines. His rotors went on churning still, though he had switched off the power to them. All the racketing of the machine dropped to a mere whir.

Surprised by silence, Kate herself fell quiet.

O’Toole turned and said, Hello Kate.

He looked at her under his brows, in a way which he had developed from thirty years of facing the bereaved in the first full-blown frenzy of their grief.

—Mother of God, she heard Uncle Frank cry. Did you say to me—back there—Burnside?

Despite all the explosive force of their arrival, they failed to find a telephone and had to walk into town looking for police and ambulance. O’Toole dawdled behind, leaving Kate and Uncle Frank to their reunion. Needing of course to get back before Gus was well enough to murder Chifley, Kate walked too fast. Since Uncle Frank had never been a man for exercise and had recently spent some sedentary time in cells, he did well to stay on the pace. Long-legged though fat-hipped, he kept by her side, uttering sentences one and a half words at a time.

—Kate, he reassured her, I know you didn’t … understand … how thoroughly you … were persecuting us. Your parents got the word … from that nice publican in Myambagh, but before they did there … was eight hours or so of … anguish you couldn’t imagine. I tell you so you’ll … know that if you yourself … don’t believe in … your own existence … there’re people who do. No, no, Burnside isn’t the issue you think
he is. If you killed that gobshite, we’ll all stand up for you. Mother of God, half Sydney will give you a testimonial dinner!

He told her too how he’d found her: through her theft of the white vestments.
Missa de Angelis
.

Earlier in the monstrous year, he had written to every parish in his old diocese, enclosing a picture.

—The boys still like me, Kate …

That young feller in Bourke had got the letter two months back and put it on his refrigerator with a magnet. It stayed there as things will, and he had gone from his kitchen to his altar that Sunday morning, and then to his sacristy, and there was the face from his refrigerator door, willing to do him harm and steal his vestments.

Still they found no phone box they could call from and the first sign of agencies of state was the chain fence of the police station. Within it a nineteenth-century sandstone building, the majesty of Britannia on a deep-set Aboriginal river, on a rainbow serpent named Darling. Victoria’s stone lion and unicorn still stood on the cornice of the police station.

Uncle Frank paused.

—I should tell you. I’ve had my experiences lately with these lads.

—I know.

She felt impatient and wanted to be inside now.

—I heard it on the radio.

—Kate, I want to tell you seriously to your face that I never bribed a single soul.

For Uncle Frank’s chief pride was in getting favors done out of love.

—Of course, she said urgently, shaking her head. Both because she did believe him and because she wanted to speed matters up, though to exactly what end for her she was not sure.

With a sort of divinely annoying expansiveness, Uncle Frank presented his bail documents to the police, straight up and as if he cherished the things.

—I’m playing straight with you boys …

He had been looking for his niece for some time, he told the senior constable on duty. A big man, up to Burnside’s weight, but more flaccid.
Kate recounted her truth to him flatly, without any desire to engage her narrative skills, to extenuate or embroider. Burnside had been injured. It was on the Schulberger property. No, not at the main house. No. Not at his late brother’s. She would lead them in then, since they didn’t know it. Who hurt him? He hurt himself. He fell.

Arriving at the police station behind them, O’Toole explained that he would offer his helicopter, except that darkness was coming and he was not good at map coordinates.

After a lot of police drawling into radios and loud instructions, they were all at once on the road to Schulberger’s, traveling in a police car followed by an ambulance. Uncle Frank had his arm lightly around her shoulder, and she both welcomed that and didn’t. For again it showed how much was unaltered. It was a vanity, all this dream of transmutation. She was still the small Kate Gaffney, who had inherent in her the risk of becoming Mrs. Kozinski junior. Corpuscles of blame in the bloodstream hadn’t been altered into dull mute bush corpuscles.

If she took the blame for Burnside’s condition, she could get bail and then skip further west with Gus and Chifley. But she must be rigorous and travel a great deal if she really wanted to change. There was a furnace at the Centre that would alter her. She wasn’t the only one to harbor that suspicion. Though not a suspicion, a conviction. She believed it. She had sensed it just beyond the horizon of the bounding dreams.

So she had to try to do that. Make her way, breathing lightly, to the great renewing fire.

Meanwhile Uncle Frank’s arm, laid there carefully just in case the scar tissue still smarted, was pleasant enough in itself. It did not make a claim, as other arms in her family would have.

They saw a truck coming the other way. It was flashing its lights and even pulling into their path. By the last light you could see that its main color was red dust. Gus’s sister-in-law’s truck. Gus’s dismal eyes became visible by the police headlights. The police car and ambulance both halted and people got out, the ambulance driver, and Uncle Frank, Kate, senior constable and sergeant. Gus himself was waiting for them now on the red and black dirt road. The spike of his hair at the back jabbed the air dejectedly, like the plume of a defeated brave. He led them with movements of the hand to the back of his sister-in-law’s truck. On its tray lay a
groaning human form wrapped in a tarpaulin, and naked to the air the still, shaggy-furred body of Chifley.

Uncle Frank later reported that he heard a mechanical noise from Kate, something like the shifting of a gear.

Her breath departed. With nothing to elevate her, she gave up to the magnetic drag of the things which had befallen her. Her vision closed off like the closing of a shutter. Coolly dying on a godless star, she knew that her uninformed legs were writhing in the red dust, giving a show of resistance. The limbs of one who does not want to ascend from the bottom of the sea.

First Gus shot the returning Chifley to deliver him from notoriety on the evening news. Next, convinced of the futility of rescuing Menzies, he tried to shoot the bird too. But Menzies, named for a survivor and narrower in the head and throat than Chifley, evaded the bullet through one minor repositioning of his neck. He fled of course, at the same pace which had competed with the heroine’s truck in Frank Pellegrino’s film. And so at last Gus gave up.

He wrapped Burnside in the tarpaulin and gave him water, which caused him to go into a fit. Then he set ablaze the Soldier Settler farm with its coral snake in a jar, its ancient furniture, its 1920s copies of the
Sydney Morning Herald
.

It is hard to say why he did this. It consumed the remnants of the Kozinski papers of course, or sent them flying charred out over the flat earth. It served as a beacon to draw his sister-in-law in, and as a sign of surrender. It served sentimentally as a pyre for Chifley.

So the naïvely treacherous sister-in-law saw the blaze, the black column of smoke so different in hue from the smoke of bushfires. She drove over in a panic. What she feared was that Burnside had set the fire.