Oscar and Lucinda

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Oscar and Lucinda

'Oh, nonsense.' •'••

'And where are all the crates? And how will we. .?'

' 'Say not the struggle nought availeth, ' ' said Percy Smith. ' 'Our struggles and our hopes are vain.' How does it go? You have seen the crates.'

'Smith/' said Oscar, 'I beg you, I am in no state for silly puzzles.'

'Then listen to me, and do not stew. I have rented these two lighters on the wharf. They are not, individually, big enough to carry the church, so I have done the mathematics. Now your church is fifty feet long and twenty-five feet wide.'

'Twenty-two feet and six inches.'

'Good. And all these bits and pieces weigh twelve tons, as you have told me often enough. And to support twelve tons on the water we will need barges to displace two hundred and forty cubic feet. And these chaps here, these ones will do this. We can take the church upriver on the tide. I have arranged for help in the construction. Two men can pole and row to keep the barge in the centre-stream. I figure we can be there in two days.'

'And then we must construct the church.'

'Not then,' said Percy Smith. He stood up. He began to stride around the fire. 'Not then, now, here. On the barge. You see, I have worked it out. We will enter Boat Harbour in glory. Can you imagine it? Can you see the look on their godless faces? A crystal vision. My oh my. Can you see it, Mr Hopkins? What a visitation it would be to see God's temple come to them upon the water.'

'Mr Smith, I am tired.'

'Do not be tired, my Reverend Jolly-man,' said Percy Smith. 'Lean on me. I am a practical man. I have the base plate already constructed on the water. It is a simple matter.'

'But what will happen at the other end?'

'Why, dear Mr Hopkins, listen to this. I asked myself the same question. It is easy enough, I thought, to get this glass church built on water, but what will happen at the other end? And the answer is this. I have twelve wooden joists laid across the two barges. You must have seen them. But you did not, of course. You were Macbeth in a dream. I have been busy. I have twelve joists across, you see. When we are at Boat Harbour I will have twenty-four men lift the church by these joists and they can carry it. You should congratulate me.'

'Twenty-four would not be enough. They must carry half a ton each.'

'Then forty-eight or ninety-six. It doesn't matter. These towns are always full of men wanting to prove their strength. We will have them carry it up the main street like a float in a procession.'

Mary Magdalene

'Mr Smith, why are you like this?',

'You would not like the answer, Mr Hopkins.' v

'Tell me anyway.'

'I am like this because we killed an evil man,' said Percy Smith. 'It has done me a power of good. I cannot tell you.'

'And do you feel no shame?'

'Oh, yes, of course. And guilt, but I will tell you, in truth, that I have felt more sorrow to have slain a beast. That is something you never become accustomed to. You take care to make your knife sharp and to make the killing quick, but the moment always comes when you look that poor beast in the eye, and you can ask other farmers the same question and if they are honest they will tell you the truth-it is a dreadful thing. But this man was cruel. I am glad we killed him. I could not have borne to be a jellyfish one more day.'

'And what of the Commandment we have broken?'

'I am sure the Almighty does not have a mind like a railway clerk.'

'By which you mean?'

'He is not a puffed-up little toad in the government offices. He knows you are not a bad man.' Oscar reached his hand into his pocket and found his laudanum was in its proper place.

'You should wash,' said Percy Smith. 'I have some soap.'

'Yes,' said Oscar. He did not believe any of the things Percy Smith said about God. 104

Mary Magdalene

Kumbaingiri Billy was not in that tavern or any other tavern, ever. But the woman on the other side of the Tom curtain was his father's sister and she had been abducted by cedar cutters about a year before that time and was as reduced and miserable as any human being might

Oscar and Lucinda

ever be. Kumbaingiri Billy's father's sister was about twenty years old. She said the tavern was very quiet when Oscar made his speech. She said he had a face that was Tom and peeling like the trunks of the paperbarks which grow in swampy land around the Bellinger. She saw great unhappiness there, said Kumbaingiri Billy, but that unhappiness, he reckoned, was most likely her own.

This young woman was a witness to the murder. It was she who showed Percy Smith the cesspit which was to be Mr Jeffris's final resting place. It was she who took him down along the river to the decaying homestead of H. M. McCracken and stood outside, scratching her long thin legs, while Percy Smith haggled with McCracken about a fair rent for his leaky lighters. She saw Oscar awake. She heard all the arguments about murder. She was squatting in the bush some five yards from them. She was very taken with Oscar. She thought him a good man. When he finished his damper she came out of the bush and told him there were two men she could get to help them with their building.

She saw the glass church built upon those lighters.

Kumbaingiri Billy knew the story. He said: 'He moved fast, that man with the red face and the red hair. My aunty named him 'Bushfire' for the way he leapt from place to place on that barge, burning red, dancing in his own firelight. They got the columns up the first daythey were twistycurly things like rope, like the corkscrew on a can opener. These columns were black and greasy. The grease was black too. It made the white chaps into blackfellows. They braced these columns off with saplings. They could not use nails, of course. They tied the saplings on with rope. Then they got the trusses assembled on the wharf. There was no fancy stuff in the trusses. There was plenty of fancy stuff, but that came later-all this fancy iron like the houses down in Lawson Street-all this went around the bottom of the walls. There was other stuff along the top, a real cocky's crest it was, but the trusses were dead plain. They assembled them on the wharf and then they waited for the tide to go down. They waited. They had a smoke. Round about lunch time the tide went down. The top of the walls came level with the wharf and then this Mr Hopkins yelled out: 'Right you are.' They slid the trusses out and fixed them on. Mr Hopkins would not go out on the roof, but, by golly he was not shy to give those fellows orders. He called to them, you do this, you do that, you be careful, better not drop that thing and break it. They started two days before Palm Sunday. They worked on the sabbath too. That was the day they began to cover the iron with glass. They were working for a bet, or

Miriam

so I he'ard later, and this is why they broke the sabbath. They started at the bottom and moved from left to right, tap-tap. They must have used some metal clips, I reckon, to keep the glass in. This was when my aunty saw glass. My word, she was tickled by it. She had only seen glass in booze bottles until that day. She saw glass could be good. She had not thought this before. When she saw this glass church built she became a Christian. This was the day Jesus first came to the Bellinger. She saw Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Paul, and Jonah-all that mob she never knew before. She saw your great-grandfather was a brave man. She saw he had a halo like one of those saints. She saw that when it was night he shivered — not from cold, but from a sort of holy happiness. He told her: 'You will live in paradise.' He christened her Mary, for Magdalene. It was a damn silly name for a Kumbaingiri and if you want my opinion, Bob, it was ignorant to talk to us Kooris in that way.'

105 Miriam

Miriam Chadwick was not in mourning and had, once again, thrown away her widow's weeds although Mrs Trevis, her smudge-lipped employer, had thought, out loud, that this was tempting fate.

'Who have 7 to mourn for any more?' said Miriam Chadwick who was, when this conversation took place,