Four Fires (10 page)

CHAPTER THREE

In Yankalillee the locals used to refer to my grandfather William D'Arcy Maloney as 'Mr Baloney'. This was not because he talked nonsense or was a fool, though admittedly, in the Maloney tradition, he was undistinguished in most things. Baloney was simply a conjunction of his name, Bill, combined with his surname, which, in the parlance of Australians, inevitably became Baloney.

The 'Mister' was added for four reasons. The traditional gesture of respect for an old-timer, the second reason was because he fought in the Boer War, Australia's first real away-from-home war, the third because of his reputation as the best fighter of fires in the Snowy Mountains district and the last, but by no means least, because he drank like a fish but could hold his grog and be relied on to be good company in the pub. All of this served to give him a respectability independent of his reprobate son.

Mr Baloney lived on a run-down small farm at Wooragee, a dot on the map which served as postbox number for the locals, many of whom had come to farming via the Soldier Settlement Scheme.

During the gold rushes, Wooragee had been a Cobb & Co. stop when it had boasted a stone store, a tin pub and half a dozen wattle and daub shacks. In the twenties a primary school was built to dish out a fundamental education to the farm children thereabouts. It boasted a solitary teacher, responsible for all six classes. Today only the school FOUR FIRES 69

remains, the rest has long since gone, eroded by the wind or plundered for building material. The school served as the postal address and

- letters were marked R.M.B. Wooragee, VIC. The teacher sorted out the mail into family names and had the kids bring it home or drop it in for their neighbours.

Mr Baloney was seventy-four when I was seven years old, the year he passed away. At the age of twenty-five and already married with two sons, he'd fought in the Boer War with the Colonial Detachment and received a bullet in the knee from a Boer Mauser at Potchefstroom in the Western Transvaal and ever after walked with a slight limp.

Page 60

The second son, James, died at Gallipoli in 1915 and Francis, the oldest, at Pozires in France in 1918. Their mother Caroline was one of the twelve thousand Australians who died in the great flu epidemic in 1919 thought to have been brought back from Europe by the troops returning in 1918. My grandpa would say he'd lost two sons and a wife in the Great War and that, after five generations in Australia, the Maloneys still hadn't escaped the scoaarge of the bloody English.

Tommy was born in 1920, the youngest of his three sons and the only child to Mr Baloney's second marriage to Charlotte McKinley, a spinster who was over forty herself. She was said to possess a small inheritance, which proved to be correct. For once a Maloney had lucked in. But, as usual, there was a price to pay. His wife would spend the remainder of her years bemoaning her marriage to him and telling anyone who would listen that it was her money that kept them alive during the Great Depression. She'd add that, while other men searched desperately for ways to put food on the table for their suffering families, her husband's entire Boer War veteran's pension was poured down his useless Maloney throat and, what's more, if she hadn't kept a good grip on her dowry that's where it would have gone as well.

'Nursing me sorrows for marrying you, me dear,' my grandpa would say if he happened to be present at one of these perpetual whinges.

As a seven-year-old I was often enough farmed out to my

grandparents. Tommy was probably on the hill at the time and Nancy, who was expecting Colleen, was too busy making ends meet to take care of me. Sarah would have had her hands full with Mike and Bozo and was too young to assume the responsibility for me while still going to school each day.

My grandma was always referred to in our family in the over formal English manner as 'Grandmother Charlotte'. This was because, although Australian-born, she came from 'decent British stock', a distinction she felt compelled to make if, in a conversation, she was connected in any way with a Maloney.

She was an English Catholic, which seemed to mean that she was at the less bitter end of the bitter divide, English Catholics being mysteriously superior to all other Catholics, in particular those originally from Ireland.

Unlike us, who were collapsed Catholics, Grandmother Charlotte was devout. She'd walk the three miles into town and back twice a week, Thursday nights to do the Stations of the Cross, then waking up at dawn, winter and summer, to get to Sunday Mass at seven o'clock.

She could easily have slept in because there was a Mass at half-past
Page 61

nine. She'd snort with derision at this suggestion, the first Mass of the day was what an English Catholic attended, the later one was for the bone-idle Irish.

I recall very little about her, except that she appeared to permanently regret having married William D'Arcy Maloney. I remember that she invariably spoke to my grandpa in a raised and irritated voice, while her manner towards me was brusque and lacked the indulgent tones usually associated with grandmothers. Nancy told us it was because she was from English stock.

My grandpa dropped dead of a heart attack in the Shamrock on the day of the cattle sales when the joint was packed with some of the local farmers and the blokes from down the saleyards and the abattoir, and any other serious drinkers who could dredge up an Irish surname somewhere in their family's past. To the eternal admiration of this roistering send-off committee, he carked it with half a pot of beer, in the very act of raising it to his lips.

After all the years of long-suffering martyrdom and putting up with my grandpa, his death seemed like a good opportunity for Grandmother Charlotte to sell the property at Wooragee and check into a retirement home. Not one like the Owens & Murray Old Age FOUR FIRES

Home, which was seen as God's waiting room, but something for decent folk. She'd spent almost half her life with a man she actively disliked and had spawned a son by him whom she loathed with a great intensity. Now her turn to put up her feet, free of a male encumbrance, had arrived at last. She would constantly refer to a place called Sunnyside on the Mornington Peninsula, a retirement home often advertised in The Stock and Land. 'It is as far as I can possibly get from the taint of a Maloney,' she'd say. In her mind it had become a Shangri la, her haven of peace and the stairway to heaven itself.

However, as commonly happened in the bush in those days, when the will was read, the property went to the oldest-surviving son; who was Tommy of course. While the will allowed for her to live in the house until she died, Grandmother Charlotte was penniless, left pushing shit uphill with a broken stick. Maloney payback.

William D'Arcy Maloney, who had stolen her inheritance in the first place, had robbed her of the few days she had left in her troubled and unsatisfactory life. The retirement she had anticipated, lazy days spent lounging in a deck chair with the tide lapping at her feet and a soft breeze blowing in from the ocean, was over before it had begun.

After that, Grandmother Charlotte quickly faded away and lost the will to live. Less than three months later she followed her husband
Page 62

to the grave. When the end was nigh, she summoned Father Crosby so she could say her final confession and have him administer the last rites. Two days later, with her English-Catholic conscience clear before God and a final unconfessed curse on her lips for the two Maloneys who had denied her the comforts of old age, she skipped purgatory and went straight to heaven.

Alas, death has no conscience and even less shame and she was buried without fuss in the same burial plot as her errant husband. 'So them two can still go at it hammer and tongs,' Nancy chortled.

Following so closely on her deceased husband's heels caused people everywhere to say that, despite everything, they must have been devoted to each other and that Grandmother Charlotte must surely have died of a broken heart.

'Broken heart, my arse!' Nancy snorted. 'After your grandpa died, the old witch had nobody to nag. More like she died swallowing her own venom!' Then, thinking perhaps that speaking of the dead in this manner might bring us bad luck, she added reluctantly, I'll say this for the old tartar, she made a bloody good Christmas pudding.'

It takes two to tango, I guess. In retrospect I now realise how hard it must have been for the old girl. Indeed, how difficult it was for any woman at the time. If anything went wrong it was the woman's fault and, as Nancy did at Grandmother Charlotte's funeral, even women often took the man's side. Women seemed to do it automatically, turning on their own kind. They still do. God knows, Mr Baloney, by anyone's reckoning, was a drunk and a layabout and my grandmother put up with him for thirty years. Like most of her generation, she deserved a lot better in life.

But at that time I didn't understand this cruel imbalance of the sexes, particularly in the bush. When Grandmother Charlotte died and Tommy came into his inheritance, it seemed to us, like for once, a bit of good fortune had come into our lives.

Though he loved the bush itself, Tommy had no desire to be a farmer. Mr Baloney, more interested in the pub than the paddock, had neglected the property something terrible. His land was covered in a seasonal calendar of noxious weeds: red sorrel, St John's wort, thistle, castor-oil plant and, to top off these floral catastrophes, the most prevalent of all, the dreaded Paterson's curse that could turn a paddock purple and useless quick as look at you.

Foxes happily crawled through gaping holes in an ancient chookhouse and stole his chickens.

Rabbits chewed away at what

clumps of grazing grass survived. If anything remained worth eating, you could bet your boots there'd be a locust plague to turn the paddocks
Page 63

to dust in a few days. Even the old apple tree in the backyard seemed always to drop its fruit before ever it ripened. Tommy, casting sentiment aside, decided to sell up and we Maloneys eagerly contemplated the meaning of being stinking rich with a thousand pounds in the bank.

We should've known better. It turned out the property was hocked up to the eyeballs to the State Savings Bank of Victoria. In the end we only had enough, after paying off the debt to the bank, to do a major overhaul on the Diamond T and equip it with a brand new set of Dunlop tyres.

With a bit of money to be used at his own discretion, Tommy took on a mantle of self-importance we'd not seen in him before, In a fit of sentimentality he paid for an expensive marble tombstone for Mr Baloney that featured two pure-white marble angels on top of a polished granite slab. Nancy said it was pure extortion and they'd seen him coming. In vain she pointed out to him that the money could have been better spent elsewhere and that one angel would have been sufficient to remind everyone that Mr Baloney was no bloody angel.

Nancy was driven to despair by his arrogance, 'I know it's your money, Tommy, but I'd like the kids to have a proper education. Sarah says she wants to go to the university, be a doctor, won't you let me put some of it away?'

'A doctor, my arse, she's a girl!'

'What about Mike then? You've spent more on Mr Baloney's

headstone than what an education for one of them would cost.' She couldn't shout at him like she normally would, because it was his money. 'Be nice if one of them was the first Maloney to go to a university.'

'So? What are you saying? There's never been a Maloney that's finished high school, isn't that enough for you? There's never been a Maloney had a decent headstone neither. That's another bloody first.

At least we'll get a bit of respect in the cemetery from now on. How much respect you reckon a bloody sheila quack would get in Yankalillee?'

In all this extravagance of Catholic-burial ritual, where the dead drunken male is instantly sanctified, Grandmother Charlotte very nearly got the bum's rush. Even though she was buried in the selfsame plot as Mr Baloney, her presence there remained incognito, silent as the grave, and that's how Tommy intended leaving it.

'She can kiss my bum, she ain't getting nothing,' he said.

'She'd have a fair bit of trouble doing that, now she's dead!' Nancy
Page 64

said, 'But what you're doing is burying her in an unmarked grave. That's not fair, she's not a murderer! If Father Crosby finds out, you'll be in trouble, mate.'

'That old poofter! If he's the best the Pope can do, His Holiness should have saved himself the trouble. Wouldn't surprise me if he was fondling one of the altar boys. Irish priests! Jesus Christ, why should I take any notice o' one of them.'

Nancy ignored this outburst, sticking to the subject. 'Tommy, she was your mother after all, you came from her womb.' While she

have disliked Grandmother Charlotte, as far as Nancy was concerned,; and despite the fact that she herself had jumped into it a little prematurely, motherhood was a sacred duty and credit should be given where credit was due.

'My mother! Jesus, I'd a been a damn sight better off being born orphan,' Tommy shouted. 'I should a been took away the moment cut the birth cord.'

'She prayed constantly for your safety during the war,

Nancy reminded him. 'I -know that's true, she spent hours on her knees in front of the altar at St Stephen's. "If the power of prayer can do it,.

then Tommy's coming back to make you a respectable woman," Father Crosby would tell me often enough.' Nancy paused, 'And you bloody did come back, though, I admit, a bit worse for wear. So give her a bit of credit, will ya!'

Tommy wasn't having any of it. 'Yeah, and look where all her praying got me, dysentery, beri-beri, three years and five months under the fuckin' Nips!'

'That wasn't her fault!' Nancy protested.

'Oh yeah? Don't be so sure. I wouldn't have put it past the old cow to write to General Tojo in Tokyo, give him my identity-tag number and tell him, if ever he comes across me, to kick the shit outta yours truly!'

And so it went, back and forth, for nearly two weeks the two of them arguing. Eventually Nancy prevailed and Tommy allowed the stonemason to chisel Grandmother Charlotte's name into the granite slab, though right at the bottom as an afterthought, and he absolutely refused to have it picked out in gold paint like Mr Baloney's.