Mr Darwin's Shooter (7 page)

Thus MacCracken became Covington's beneficiary before he ever knew him at all. Covington's generosity fell upon the lanky Bostonian like spangles of light on the brow of a child. Covington's word was his bond in all his dealings, with everything down to the most niggling percentage point committed to memory. Not once did MacCracken question this generosity's foundations by asking himself what motive Covington might have beyond gratitude. As well question the loyalty of a dog when it came licking his hand, transferring its affections. The idea that Covington was looking for more meaning than a soul could bear and that MacCracken was the agent of that meaning would have struck him dumb.

‘Forget the gold rushes and the delights of land-taking,' MacCracken confided to his friend Evans, the bookseller, as he placed an order for anything brand spanking new in natural history, ‘if such friends as Mr Covington stumble into your days and bring you good fortune.'

After New Year Covington was back once more. They had their anniversary of meeting to celebrate with their eyes stinging in the month of smoke and cinders. Covington's visits became even more frequent, as curious to MacCracken as they were profitable. MacCracken brushed up his beetles and moths to compete with him, but had no chance of besting him—yet gained pleasure from the
contest all the same. ‘We have a good laugh and rub along,' he told his friends. Covington was an acute observer in entomology, just as in commerce and trade. MacCracken came away from their comparisons of beetles and wasps with a firm assessment of Covington's brainpower. When it came to birds he was incomparable, not just noting variations in plumage and beak-shape, but expounding anatomy as well. He knew the skull and breast-bones of skeletons by sight. MacCracken felt that whatever Covington turned himself to he was able to master, but at the same time felt a limitation, in that Covington was unwilling or unable to speculate from the foundation of the natural world into other realms of thinking.

‘What is man?' was the old repeated question. ‘What is life?' ‘Where are these creatures from?' were others.

MacCracken wondered at the top of his voice, ‘And what is their relation to the Great Flood of the Bible?'

‘To the
what
?' The idea seemed to put Covington in a rage of stony deafness and ill-humour. ‘What have pepper-pots to do with anything?'

‘Did the Flood reach to all corners of the earth?' continued MacCracken. ‘And if it did, look at the way these bugs float on water and climb to the tops of trees, and squat under rocks flat enough to stop their breathing but still emerge pretty fit, old Covington.'

‘The sun is hot,' said Covington.

One day MacCracken showed Covington a seed bug, a leaf beetle, and a native bee—holding them cupped wriggling and buzzing in his pink palm—three random specimens that Covington stared at thunderstruck.

‘What made you choose these—' he spluttered— ‘
Darwinii
?'

He reached out and dashed them from MacCracken's hand. MacCracken collected the same insects up, put them in an envelope and resolved at his next opportunity to have an expert tell him what in the world was offensive about
them. Their discoverer's name? They had a pungent smell all together. He thought it was that. Deafness sharpens the remaining senses and drives an old walrus mad.

 

There came a day when Covington knocked on MacCracken's door ready to say something, and—so it chanced —MacCracken had something more important on his mind and was embroiled in literary composition, and told his housemaid to have Covington call at a different hour, or even better, the next day, if it so pleased him and goodbye.

Covington turned instantly away. From that day the tone of the friendship changed. MacCracken began to feel its greater pull despite himself. Something more was expected of him and he knew not what. It made him grind his teeth in frustration.

On his next return, in April, Covington's mood of offence preceded him all the way up from Tathra to Sydney, and he declined to announce his arrival at all. When MacCracken went swimming at the end of his day's work he found Covington sitting in a rock-shelter smoking his pipe.

The next day, at the hour when they usually met, MacCracken found Covington engaged with the blacks of Watson's Bay, studying their fishing nets, employing their sign language (as they needs-must with a Covington), poking into their smoky fires with a stick to see what was sizzling there: oyster, mussel, pippi, scallop or abalone. In the dusk his great laugh told MacCracken his whereabouts. ‘Do I care that you've found me?' that laugh implied. ‘Rain on you, Dr MacCracken—I'll sleep under the stars.'

MacCracken peered into Covington's past as best he could. There were diffuse shapes down there like shadows in the tide. De Sousa, a shipping agent who was a rival to Smith and Elder, who handled Covington's cargoes, told
MacCracken that Covington had a patron who gave him his start in Australia by sending him there in the first place.

‘A Spaniard, was it?' MacCracken asked. ‘By the name of Sia Di?'

‘That's no Spanish name I ever heard,' replied De Sousa.

‘Nor I,' MacCracken reflected. ‘But that is what he calls the man of his life. After which he gives a rueful grunt. There is a feeling of pride around the name, but Covington would rather spit than boast, so all I get is the annoyance.'

There was nothing unusual about obscure patrons in that colony. If you lacked one you invented one. A letter of introduction was all that was needed to change things around for a hopeful. There was no better place on the planet for correcting reversals of fortune and ill-birth, and none worse for sucking the spirit from an overreaching hopeful, either. Origins were made to be muddied as a matter of course. The next man you met could well be a lord, though he dressed in tatters and affected a colonial style.

So far Covington had told MacCracken nothing about his early life except that he spoke of a stepmother, a Mrs Hewtson of Mill Lane in Bedford. ‘She had a loving affection for me, I believe.'

When MacCracken wanted more he got that lick of the lips, that beginning of words, that ducking away from straightforwardness:

‘I am a man of no importance. Ain't that plain?'

The sarcasm was extreme.

MacCracken pictured Covington coming to his door the time of the offending rejoinder. He sensed the chance he missed. He could see the rectangular shadow looming, the hand raised to the knocker, the door opening, Covington's mouth opening, Covington's thunder beginning to rumble, and the words spoken by MacCracken's housemaid sounding—‘Go away, come back later, come tomorrow, Doctor MacCracken is
thinkin
”—and then the
jaw closing again, and the shadow creeping back, curled smaller than a beaten cur's and gone into silence again, to be held, to be held in hurt.

They carried on their negotiations in the open air, Covington with his hands hanging between his legs and a cowhide portfolio open on the ground. His knuckles grazed their receipts. Those disdainful lips were always half-smiling, even in a temper. That strong nose, with its powerful, flared nostrils, was a rudder to all Covington's mercantile instincts.

Percentage cargoes of cattle, red cedar, mutton fat and whale oil were the currency of the friendship in that time, before Darwin's
The Origin of Species
lifted a veil on MacCracken's understanding. They discussed the breeding of sheep and dogs, of which Covington knew plenty. He brought MacCracken a terrier pup named Spearmint, to replace brainless Carl who jumped from a cliff while chasing a kangaroo. He showed MacCracken how various defects in an earlier litter were improved in the terrier by a few simple expedients involving, said Covington, ‘the wringing of small necks'. MacCracken gave Covington, as a gift, a shell collection he had made while crossing the Pacific. It made Covington smile.

To MacCracken's utmost surprise a day arrived when Covington bought ‘Coral Sands' at the end of the row and came there to live. At this MacCracken discovered a Covington-like emotion knifing into him. Offence. He steamed and rolled his eyes. Covington?! If he ate raw potatoes and washed them down with earth MacCracken was ready to believe it. They were barely a village, a picturesque outpost of the great harbour. Yet they had their tone. ‘To be attracted thither was to make a declaration of an artistic hue.' MacCracken's was a dalliance haughty in origin. Having scorned the Europe of his fellow-Bostonians he had found something superior. Call it his own Amalfi-like cove among the tumbled cliffs of an ancient land.

And was that Covington's motive, too—recuperation of ill-spent youth and convalescence of spirit? MacCracken thought not! He believed Covington a nobler creature— something like a horse. His move, MacCracken thought, had nothing to do with his own delicious ambience of face and manner. By his diary it was the twenty-fifth of March 1860. MacCracken itched around the house and ranted into his breakfast (fried schnapper, fresh rolls and newly roasted coffee). Did he want Covington as an acolyte? Was Covington in love with a doctor as with an all-knowing God? What about Mrs Covington and the children
MacCracken had never met? Were they to fend for themselves in the black starry nights of Pambula, where tribesmen built fires in hollow trees, and danced their corroborees clicking spears as Covington had told him, within sight of the substantial residence (with attic windows) named ‘Forest Oak'? It was where Covington wanted to be buried, on a nearby headland, but, ‘Not too soon, MacCracken, if you don't mind.' What about the corn flats and the seven hundred head of horned cattle being driven down from a high plateau to those grey box-log wharves that Mr Covington had built himself? Half MacCracken's cattle they were! His risk, too! And what about the high plateau itself, where the Covingtons had a farm they all loved, and where the Covington children, older boys and younger girls, lived a natural life of horse-galloping and calf-chasing, and despised the idea of ‘town' and their father's ‘retreat'? Mrs Covington apparently felt the same and hated to leave her brooding hens, her milking cow and her pet cockatoo.

All Covington's mysteries had a special interest for MacCracken. But he wanted them unravelled in their rightful place, in those ‘up country' locations, as Covington said (where up meant down). MacCracken had contracted Covington's corn to a miller. He had paid for half Covington's cattle in promissory notes. He had expected Covington, though he never said a word of it, to supervise their business on the spot. He had his picture of Covington at his cattle yards, dressing him in imagination in an oilskin coat, wielding a fly swat and puffing a corncob pipe. This was before MacCracken ever saw him wearing an Argentine poncho and smoking thin cigars, thus confounding his every last supposition about him—that he was devoid of romance absolutely.

The first night of Covington's new residence there came a banging on MacCracken's door. An imperious, troubled
Covington stood there, a fishbone stuck between his teeth that he wrenched free while bellowing:

‘MacCracken!'

‘I am here,' MacCracken stabbed his own chest (to the deaf 'un).

‘I want your gun. The ladies' shotgun you keep for scarin' possums off your roses …'

‘If you want something,' said MacCracken, opening the broom cupboard where he kept the slim weapon, ‘you must get out of the habit of disparaging me for having it.'

He slapped the gun into Covington's hands, who examined it curiously, underlining his ingratitude. ‘I picked you for a breech-loading man, MacCracken. Such a convenient, slick conception of shooting they are. I meself am wedded to the old frontstoker. What are these charges made from, fly paper? They are somewhat clingy to the touch.'

MacCracken only stared at the phenomenon before him. A gentleman without pretension when it came to securing a friendship—who made scorn his starting point. It was quite admirable, really—if you liked that brand of swank.

All this was by way of an aside, however, because Covington then said:

‘MacCracken, answer me this …'

MacCracken only half-listened, and surreptitiously consulted his clock, expecting Miss X and her nightly visitation quite soon, not wanting Covington to stir gossip before he must.

‘I won't
keep
you, MacCracken,' he sneered, ‘but where is God?'

That caught MacCracken.
God?
Covington waved the gun around and asked MacCracken questions from his experience as a surgeon. ‘In your dissections at the Boston hospital, and ever after,' he wanted to know, ‘have you seen evidence of a human soul?'

The questions rained down on MacCracken's slightly bowed head. Had he cut a man open and found any immortal part? When he was in Covington himself did he peer
around corners? (No.) Had he ever cleaned out a possum? (No, he had never cleaned out a possum.) Had he ever cleaned out a bird? (No, he had never cleaned out a bird.) If he had, would he ever have found any difference? Was he not an educated man, compared with Covington, a dunderhead? So? And so on?

‘The difference, MacCracken,
what is it
?'

Difference between what and what? (MacCracken mimed.)

‘Difference between a man and a rat, noddy-foozle!' Covington bellowed. Then grabbing MacCracken by the elbow, he dragged him into the night. They stumbled along the shelled pathway leading to Covington's gleaming, newly painted and snug-as-a-ship's-cabin cottage with its lamplit nameplate ‘Coral Sands'. Within that whitewashed palace, through a square window-pane, MacCracken saw a short, humorously squat woman in voluminous skirts standing on a seachest and flapping her arms against her sides. She had jet-black hair pinned with a half-dislodged Spanish comb.

‘Shoo!' Her eyes bugged and MacCracken saw why. There on the dining table, consuming an end of loaf, was a sleek whiskery rat. ‘Get it off!' she shrilled.

It was at this moment MacCracken realised that every word spoken to him that night by his friend, from Covington's first banging on his door until now, had been bitterly sarcastic in tone. The sarcasm was not addressed to MacCracken. It rose to the height of the universe itself. Within that dome, rampant as a flea, stood the Mrs Covington that MacCracken had thought in their country fastness. He found himself commandeered as an illustration in a domestic tableau: ‘MacCracken will show you!'—and realised he was no more real to Covington in his rage than the man's own face in a mirror.

‘Dr MacCracken,' Covington silenced the woman with a roar, ‘says there
is
no God! And so bless you and shut
yourself up, darlin'. A man is no different from a rat, and a man never frightened you, did he, eh?'

‘Blaspheme all you like and still say your prayers. Heaven prepare you, Syms Covington,' she said.

Covington waved a finger under his dame's nose, and while MacCracken stood feigning amusement, he raised the ladies' shotgun and with quick aim sent the rat slamming against the opposite wall without breaking a dish.

‘If you'd done that first,' said the wife, hopping down, ‘we'd a-had none of this nonsense.' She dusted her hands and introduced herself, giving the doctor's hand a vigorous shake. ‘Mrs Covington, and very pleased to meet you, sir. I'll put the kettle on.' That done, she skipped back to MacCracken's side while Covington stood nearby cracking his knuckles and staring into the night. ‘He gets his ideas,' she lowered her voice and turned away from Covington. ‘I do my best, but Dr MacCracken,' she drew breath, raising herself to her full height, ‘
he
has such hopes for you!'

MacCracken allowed himself to be soothed by a cup of the best China tea. Then, with a neat bow, he bade them goodnight and went to join his pleasure.