Four Fires (71 page)

Which is a pretty strange thing for him to say, him being the law and all, and with John Crowe no angel and giving him a fair amount of aggro in the past. Maybe he meant Whacka Morrissey? If I don't sound choked up about John Crowe, it's because so much has happened and I haven't grasped it all yet. He was a good bloke and always kind to me and I liked him a helluva lot. Him and Tommy were like brothers and they may not have been
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angels but they never hurt anyone and he was the only person who could make Tommy laugh.

I'm going to miss him an awful lot.

In the wash-up from the fire, there's four houses burnt down as well as the picnic rotunda in the Historic Park, St Stephen's and the priest's house. Father Crosby is without a place to sleep and the Catholics of Yankalillee are without a place to worship.

'Ha!' Nancy says, 'Just goes to show, don't it? Protestant church didn't burn down, did it? God was sending out a message to Father Crosby to mend his ways, nothing's more certain!'The proof she offers is that the baptism font is the only thing left standing. It was full of rainwater the next morning. 'Clear as the nose on your face/ Nancy points out, 'First the baptism of fire to cleanse his wicked ways and then a new beginning, the font filled with God's tears!'

No use pointing out to her that the Church of England was in our street and the Presbyterians are practically in the middle of town and the Congregational Church up the hill a bit, all of them are well away from the gorge. Also that the font was made of sandstone. Nancy doesn't put much store in sheer logic. 'Tell me anything in this world that's been brought about with logic alone?' She always challenges when we've got her cornered. 'Bollocks to logic! If logic had anything to do with it, none of you would be here!'

As it turned out, the Virgin Mary didn't get consumed in the flames of an Australian hell. What's more, Father Crosby ends up getting a bottoms-wiping certificate from the shire president, Philip Templeton, and, as well, a commendation to Rome from the Bishop.

Nancy says you couldn't have expected better from Philip Bloody Templeton and the shire council, but the commendation to Rome just goes to show how corrupt the Holy Church has become in the twentieth century! Also, what a miserable opportunist the Bishop is, licking the boots of His Holiness the Pope.

It wasn't any use pointing out to her that the shire council were all Protestants and so Father Crosby would have had to be pretty worthy in their eyes to get any sort of praise from them.

Nancy's never forgiven the Bishop for chastising her about the radios Tommy wanted for the bushfire brigade in 1946. How they had to collect the same amount for the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart in New Guinea so that the Yankalillee Catholics could be seen to have their priorities right. When we remind her that it was her said she doubted Father Crosby even consulted the Bishop, she says, 'Yeah, well, same difference, it was him, the Bishop, who also opposed Sarah going to university. He's tarred with the same brush as Father Crosby!'

This is what happened to bring Father Crosby his new-found fame. Remember when we were being briefed by John Crowe at the fire station and there were these two new volunteers and Tommy said he'd take the Collins Street cocky, Michael Mooney, because he knew nobody else would. Then Alan Phillips shouts out that old Merv O'Hare has carked it, so he'll take young Lindsay Jarvis in his team?

Well, old Merv is due to be buried and naturally enough with a name like O'Hare he's one of ours and so there's a grave dug for him in the churchyard. Normally he'd be buried in the Catholic section of the cemetery, but because the family has promised Father Crosby a nice little cheque for the stained-glass window he's been on about for years, he's being buried next to the half a dozen tombstones of prominent past Yankalillee Catholics who have, no doubt for the same reasons, been given the privilege of a churchyard burial.

The fire gets in the way of the burial and when it threatens the town, Father Crosby is told to pack a suitcase and someone will come and pick him up. Well, the someone arrives and Father Crosby puts his suitcase in the boot of their car and then says he'll be using his bicycle to get out himself. But he doesn't. He stays and rescues the two silver candlesticks and the three-foot-high gilt crucifix that stands behind the altar and the silver incense burner then dumps them all into Old Merv O'Hare's empty grave.

After that, Father Crosby spends an hour trying to get the carved wooden statue of the Virgin Mary down from the wall at the back of the altar. He's dragged a mattress from the priest's
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house next door and put

it on the floor directly below the Virgin and somehow he's unscrewed the Mother of God from the wall and she's fallen, face-first, onto the mattress but only her nose and crown have broken off. Then Father Crosby somehow dragged the three-hundred-pound, six-foot-high carving out of the church, across the lawn to the grave, and dropped it in there with the other church treasures.

By this time, the fire is into the gorge, soon to be coming out the other side as a roaring furnace, with St Stephen's directly in its path.-With the flames in sight and him near exhausted, Father Crosby grabs a shovel and pours dirt over the grave covering the church artefacts to protect them from the approaching fire. The flames are now practically licking at the clapboard walls of St Stephen's.

Maybe it was stupid, but you've got to admit it was pretty brave. Folk said he only just got away in time and that the hem of his soutane was burning when he arrived at the lake on his Malvern Star. Which is bullshit. If it had been alight, he'd have let it go for a while and then doused it and he'd never have taken it off again. Anyway, Nancy says his order doesn't always need to wear a soutane and it's pure affectation on his part. 'There'll be no stopping him now. Can you imagine?

Father Crosby, Priest of the Flames!'she says, disgusted with the whole thing.

Anyway, now he's a hero of the church and they'll probably make him a saint when he's dead.

Him saving The Blessed Virgin from the flames of an Australian hell! So much for Nancy's saying that few things in this world are brought about by logic alone. Of course, Nancy doesn't see this saying of hers working in Father Crosby's particular case. Far as she's concerned, what's happened shows what an irresponsible idiot our priest is, wearing a dress when he doesn't have to and putting his own life in danger for the sake of a wooden statue.

Later the Italian migrants build a new church out of stone, which the Catholic community pays for. All the Catholics help a bit with the work, but mostly the Maltese and the Italians. It takes more than a year to rebuild and it's now called 'St Stephen's Church of the Flames' and the baptismal font is placed in the very centre of the new church rather than in a corner like in the old one.

The Italians also fixed up the Holy Virgin and carved a new crown and nose. They've done a really good job. With it back on the wall high

up, you can't tell it's been damaged. They've added this wooden plinth that's got flames carved around the edges at the Virgin Mary's feet and they've painted them gold and now she's called The Virgin of the Flames'. Nancy says it makes you want to puke.

There's also two stained-glass windows, one on either side of the Virgin. One window shows eucalyptus trees on fire with Christ's ascension up into heaven, you can see the three crosses on a hill through the flaming trees. Looking at it, little kids are bound to think that Christ was an Australian who went to heaven when he was caught up in a bushfire. The other window shows the baby Jesus lying in straw in a horse trough with a donkey in the corner. There's a star up the top of the window shining down. The window isn't big enough to show Joseph and Mary and the Three Wise Men, but I guess everyone knows they're there from Sunday School.

The gilt crucifix is not so lucky. If you look at it carefully and close one eye and squint, you can see it's dented in the middle. That's where the Virgin hit Jesus in the guts when she toppled into Merv O'Hare's grave and not even the Italians have been able to restore Him perfectly.

There's a new brass plaque on the baptismal font that says:

'The Font of the Flames'

Yankalillee child, thou art

born knowing Original Sin,

condemned to the eternal

flames, the furnace of Hell.

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Thou shalt he redeemed,

hy an all-forgiving Saviour

and haptised in holy water,

these blessed Tears of God.

It just appeared there mysteriously one Sunday shortly after the new church was consecrated by the Bishop, a shiny brass plaque, properly drilled and screwed into the sandstone base which had been left blackened by the fire and is now known as 'The Font of the Flames .

I reckon Catholics are their own worst enemy because soon enough the story gets about that the rainwater that fell into the

baptismal font on the night of the fire is inexhaustible and the font never gets empty. So every new baby is now baptised in the original rainwater that everyone calls The Tears of God' from the great Yankalillee fire.

What's more, Father Crosby does nothing to contradict this. In fact, there's no holding The Priest of the Flames'back and Nancy says, far from repenting, he's a worse bloody hypocrite than before, if that's possible.

After the inquest, when the coroner finds John Crowe and Whacka Morrissey died by misadventure, there's a memorial service held in the churchyard next to the burnt-out St Stephen's. Sarah, with Templeton, Mike, Morrie and Sophie, come from Melbourne for the funeral. Almost the whole town turns out on the day, Catholics and Protestants, and they've rigged loudspeakers up on poles so everyone can hear the funeral service. The crowd is so big they spread to the Historic Park right along the gorge.

The entire shire council is in attendance, the Bishop comes from Bendigo in a big black Buick and the Cardinal sends a message of condolence to both families and so does Premier Bolte.

The deaths are even mentioned in the State Parliament. The bushfire brigades from all the surrounding districts including Wangaratta, Chiltern and Wodonga attend, almost a thousand men come dressed in their fire fighting overalls.

Both John Crowe and Whacka Morrissey were pretty ordinary blokes who, under normal circumstances, would have had a box and a few members of the family and friends, with a bunch or two of flowers at the graveside and that would be it. So it's not a bad way to go with over three thousand people attending and a heap of wreaths you couldn't pole-vault over.

However, other than his wife Trish, John Crowe's most important mourner is missing. Tommy's been gone a week. Nobody says anything but lots of people know how close Tommy and John Crowe have been since they were kids, the only time they've been separated was during the war when John Crowe was sent to Darwin in the quartermaster-general's outfit to dish out boots, shoelaces and socks for the use of, to the troops. He admitted to me once that it was a scam he'd worked out

to avoid active service. 'No point in getting your arse blown away by some harakiri Jap, is there, Mole? Wars come and go but I've only got the promise of three score and ten, don't want to put that at risk, do Some of the folk at the service come up quietly to shake Nancy's hand and wish her well.

Father Crosby is in a new surplice that has these red and orange flames appliqued on the back.

He must have reckoned his chances of getting Nancy to embroider them weren't good, because he's got a dressmaker or someone to put on the flames. Nancy says it looks vulgar and is machine-stitched and in typical bad taste, but, after all, what can you expect from a Diocesan priest.

All the same, I reckon she's pretty insulted that he didn't come to her and ask. They may be mortal enemies but that's not the surplice's fault. 'A job worth doing is a job worth doing well,'

she says as her final bitter comment.

I must say that the Priest of the Flames has prepared a nice sermon, which he concludes by
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saying, 'John Crowe and William Sean Morrissey have gone straight to Heaven as they've already done their time in the terrible fires of Hell. I commend their immortal souls to Almighty God and ask Him to embrace them in His love everlasting.' Then he stops and sort of looks into the distance:

'May the road rise up to meet you

May the wind be ever at your hack

May the sun shine warm upon your face

May the rainfall soft upon your fields

And until we meet again May God hold you in the palm of His hand.'

I tell you what, there's a few tears about, and not just the wromen.

A big wake is held at the Shamrock by the Yankalillee and Eldorado firefighters together with the family and friends of both the deceased. Trish Crowe announces that she's going back to look after her ailing mother in Shepparton. She says if Bozo's willing to shoulder the debts in the business, she'll be happy to sign John Crowe Transport over to him. Bozo thanks her and says he agrees to be responsible for

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the money owed and we won't change the name of the company. He'll always be proud to have been associated with John Crowe, who was the best business partner anyone could have had.

Since coming back from the Rome Olympics, Bozo has been pretty confident with people. He's still the same quiet person who doesn't have any tabs on himself and is a real good bloke, but now he can handle himself in any company. I reckon he could meet the Queen or the Governor-General or even maybe Bob Menzies if he had to, and still look calm. I'm proud that I'm his brother, not because of what he's done but because of who he is. It's nice to know we've made a Bozo in our family.

I forgot to say that I was pretty sore coming back from the forest where John Crowe and Whacka Morrissey died and so I didn't go out to the lake to fetch little Ann's bicycle. I doubt I could have walked the distance from home with the blisters on my feet. Next day, though, I made it and changed into my cossie behind some bulrushes. It took me ages to find the bike, even though I knew exactly where I'd landed coming down the hill. But when it and me were back on shore, I saw that all the paintwork had been damaged, blistered by the heat from the fire. The little bike was a mess. I wheeled it home because I was still too sore to ride it.