On Saturday night he went to a party up the river at a blacks’ camp called Verona. He drank little – alien ambitions had made him a drinker of moderation.
He lay down with a scrawny gin called Florence but found that the preliminaries of copulation sent her into a whooping spasm.
But it was, for other reasons, a bad night and a bad place full of miserable omen. White voices could be heard as burlap door-flaps were flung open. Shrieking welcomes were sung to the white phallus, powerful demolisher of tribes. Florence barked and barked and dredged blood from beneath her lips.
He turned home in the small hours, not wanting to see Verona’s Sunday sunrise.
Early the next dawn, as he neared Healy’s gate and saw the pastures frosted solid, silver and blue, he was pleased to have exchanged them for the sourness of Sunday morning in Verona. In a corner of his front paddock, Healy, suited, but his russet-grey head bare, was talking to a neighbour dressed similarly for church.
On the homestead track Mrs Healy waited in the dray for her kingly husband to be finished. They were off to Mass in Merriwa or perhaps some closer Irish church in a clearing.
“Papists are not to be stoned but pitied,” Mrs Neville had said once.
Yet Mrs Healy wore better clothes than Mrs Neville: a coat of blue velour, wide-sleeved but tight at the hips. After skinny Florence, Jimmie Blacksmith felt the appeal of those full hips; stood frankly eyeing the woman in a dewy corner of the road.
“Papists confess their sins to a priest,” Mrs Neville had said, “as if there were a mediator other than Christ, as if some Irish priest could mediate between God and us.”
Jimmie wished impossibly that Mrs Healy might stray with him when he became a recognizable man, an owner of things. And whoever wanted to mediate was welcome.
The Healys meanwhile had an uphill ride to Mass; downhill all the way home. What was it like to travel with Healy? Whenever Jimmie saw Mrs Healy she sat round-shouldered and had an aura of being delicate. Her lips, which were really quite fat, accumulated in the middle in a square pout of acquiescence. Her eyes were distant. She may have been very stupid or very modest. It didn’t matter; arrogant at dawn after lank Florence, Jimmie deliberately chose her, though he knew the choice was an act of fantasy.
What he had done, without understanding it, was to elect her to the stature of ideal landowner’s-wife. It was not simply a matter of her being full and ripe: he could not have been so potently stirred by aspects so directly sexual. But combine these with her impassive air, her peculiar way of sitting still in the dray and breathing out into the morning a vapour of worship and submission for her husband – and you had something that appealed to all Jimmie’s lusts. In a second she had become a symbol, a state of blessedness, far more than a woman. It could almost be said that he did not choose her as a woman at all, rather as an archetype.
In the corner of his glistening property, Healy laughed to his neighbour and went to join his wife.
Jimmie Blacksmith did a hundred and fifty yards that week, and Healy, in shock, handed over five shillings advance.
Jimmie went to another party at Verona but liked it less. His half-caste girl, called Gay, though not as sick as Florence, had a bad cough. A lunatic gaiety shook the girl and infested the town; and when Jimmie left after midnight, horses and even a dray were tethered two or three at a time to a tree at the edge of the camp. All the white lust from the town of Merriwa.
He was home in time to see Mrs Healy come out of doors in her Mass coat.
To Jimmie, who did not know Irishmen, it was a surprise that Healy should take the finished fence as an insult and insist on short-changing him.
“But it oughter be twelve shillin’ more, boss,” Jimmie protested when the account was settled.
“I’m not denyin’ it. Two quid’s all yore gettin’. There’s twelve of dem posts three inches out. One of dem by more ’an four inches.”
“Not by my tape, boss.”
Healy’s face became blank: a big-featured, militant pallor Jimmie would see overtake the faces of other Celtic penny-pinchers.
At the apex of a silence deliberately built, white cockatoos descended on Healy’s tree-tops in a tribe and began chattering. Jimmie felt grateful to them.
“My tape that counts,” Healy said equably at last. But Jimmie knew that if he were contradicted, there would be sudden havoc. He put his money into his pocket.
“Well, posts is solid, boss, rails cut good. Kin yer give me a ref’rence?”
“Bejesus, ye’re a fussy bloody black. What d’yer need rif’rences for? A job in a bank?”
“So I kin show it t’other people wantin’ fences done.”
Healy’s laugh could not have been understood unless you knew that at its heart stood a primitive algebra. It had cost Healy’s father a great outlay of rigor to keep two acres of stony earth in Sligo. To retain therefore a thousand acres of beneficent slopes in the new world would take a massive exercise in harshness.
“I haven’t got me writin’ glasses,” said Healy. “And I want to see yer off by ten in the mornin’.”
Cunning, humble, Jimmie persisted.
“Kin I git a ride into Merriwa with yer, Mr Healy? I got a lot of things t’ carry.”
“I’m not goin’ to Merriwa tomorrer.”
“I bin thinkin’ yer might, it bein’ Friday.”
“I don’t need yer to think for me. I’ll ask yer when I want yer to do me thinkin’.”
“Yair. Well …”
But Jimmie was at last stung by the mystery: that a wondrous landowner should need to degrade him.
“Yair. No ref’rence ’cause yer can’t bloody write.”
The pallor returned to Healy; the strange horn-mad pallor and stillness of the mouth. Of course it was the truth. Jimmie had seen Healy call his wife to read the invoices for goods delivered from Muswellbrook or Merriwa. Jimmie had seen him force his splayed fingers to make an arduous signature. The nuns who had taught Mrs Healy writing and humility had never seen Healy.
Healy hit Jimmie. The impact was demeaning: Jimmie’s thin legs flew from beneath him and there he was, instantly on his shoulder blades.
It did not hurt so very much.
The next forenoon Jimmie was travelling west with his gear when the Healys, their dissimilar eyes averted, passed him on the road. He found himself swearing to possess her to depths that were probably not in her.
It was strange how she had become inherent to his programme.