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Authors: Thomas Keneally
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delighted in people saying, “Shrewd old bastard!” He had farmers put up land as guarantee against his supplying them credit on jam and flour. The way to wealth and property in the new land. Hard to imagine the mean and continuous effort of the brain needed for enterprises like that. To Tim it was like an effort of extreme mathematics. Why make it? So customary was all this in the bush, though, that farmers had come to Tim and offered to sign letters of agreement for credit. Pride wouldn’t let him enforce them.
As the big convent in Kemp Street loomed up, he said to the girl as another inducement, “I will come and take you on a visit to Crescent Head with Mrs. Shea and the children. Have to get up early in the morning to get to Crescent Head!”
The memory of Crescent Head’s ozone and surf hissed in the summer street. A favoured place.
But it was a silly gesture against the numb, grave fact. She was nobody’s child.
Tim knocked on the large, glass-panelled door at the front of the convent. Very strange, the smell of convents. Brass polish, bees’ wax, a lingering scent of extinguished candles.
The youngest nun answered the door. Only eighteen months off the boat. All that black serge these women wore. Welcome in frozen Ireland. How did it feel here? What did they sleep in, these poor women, in this heat? How did they make their peace with the thick night in New South Wales?
A pleasant-looking young woman, some farmer’s lost child from Offaly or Kerry. A native elegance in her despite the pigshit in her family farmyard. Her noble-faced mother—Tim could just imagine her—carrying her bitter secrets in her face, the secrets of her womb, the secrets of short funds and high rent. Dragged down bythe gravity of things. And the child thinks, I can get above this! The sacrifice of earthly love a small thing, since the rewards of earthly love were so quickly diminished and brought to bugger-all.
And here she was answering a door in the Macleay. In a place which had once been a rumour but was now too solid, and its sun so high.
She seemed happy though. At least she harboured that young intention to have the joy of the Lord shine forth from her face.
She said, “It’s Mr. Shea isn’t it?”
The consecrated woman showed them through into the front parlour. Here stood a big dresser and a bees-waxed table and upright chairs. On the wall the lean, amiable-looking Pope Leo XIII, and the visage of Bishop Eugene Skelton, Bishop of Lismore, New South Wales. On a pedestal in the corner a plaster Saint Vincent de Paul. On a pedestal by the window the Virgin Mary in blue and white crushed the serpent with her foot.
Tim and Lucy did not sit at the table. It had very much the air of being reserved for higher events. They sat instead on a settee of severe lines, covered with maroon cloth.
The young nun went to fetch her superior.
“These are just women, you know,” Tim told Lucy. “Women like Mrs. Sutter. Women like my wife. They dress in that way. Tradition. But they have instincts of care, like all other women.”
For he seemed to remember Albert Rochester was a Primitive Methodist, and all these nunnish robes and furnitures would have been accursed in his eyes. His wizened daughter, though, took them as they came.
Mother Imelda could be heard thumping up the corridor and now burst into the room. A big woman, her beads clicking against her unimaginable thighs.
“Well, Mr. Shea!” she cried out, closing the door for herself. She’d once told him that her father had owned a warehouse in Waterford, but he had wondered in that case what she was doing here in her Order’s remotest province. Surely, unless he’d gone broke, her father could have swung her a grander appointment than commanding Christ’s outpost amongst the bush-flash children of cow-cockies in the Macleay. Of course, maybe adventurecalled, as it had with him—if adventure was the dream of separateness, of not seeking out the common landfalls of
As the big convent in Kemp Street loomed up, he said to the girl as another inducement, “I will come and take you on a visit to Crescent Head with Mrs. Shea and the children. Have to get up early in the morning to get to Crescent Head!”
The memory of Crescent Head’s ozone and surf hissed in the summer street. A favoured place.
But it was a silly gesture against the numb, grave fact. She was nobody’s child.
Tim knocked on the large, glass-panelled door at the front of the convent. Very strange, the smell of convents. Brass polish, bees’ wax, a lingering scent of extinguished candles.
The youngest nun answered the door. Only eighteen months off the boat. All that black serge these women wore. Welcome in frozen Ireland. How did it feel here? What did they sleep in, these poor women, in this heat? How did they make their peace with the thick night in New South Wales?
A pleasant-looking young woman, some farmer’s lost child from Offaly or Kerry. A native elegance in her despite the pigshit in her family farmyard. Her noble-faced mother—Tim could just imagine her—carrying her bitter secrets in her face, the secrets of her womb, the secrets of short funds and high rent. Dragged down bythe gravity of things. And the child thinks, I can get above this! The sacrifice of earthly love a small thing, since the rewards of earthly love were so quickly diminished and brought to bugger-all.
And here she was answering a door in the Macleay. In a place which had once been a rumour but was now too solid, and its sun so high.
She seemed happy though. At least she harboured that young intention to have the joy of the Lord shine forth from her face.
She said, “It’s Mr. Shea isn’t it?”
The consecrated woman showed them through into the front parlour. Here stood a big dresser and a bees-waxed table and upright chairs. On the wall the lean, amiable-looking Pope Leo XIII, and the visage of Bishop Eugene Skelton, Bishop of Lismore, New South Wales. On a pedestal in the corner a plaster Saint Vincent de Paul. On a pedestal by the window the Virgin Mary in blue and white crushed the serpent with her foot.
Tim and Lucy did not sit at the table. It had very much the air of being reserved for higher events. They sat instead on a settee of severe lines, covered with maroon cloth.
The young nun went to fetch her superior.
“These are just women, you know,” Tim told Lucy. “Women like Mrs. Sutter. Women like my wife. They dress in that way. Tradition. But they have instincts of care, like all other women.”
For he seemed to remember Albert Rochester was a Primitive Methodist, and all these nunnish robes and furnitures would have been accursed in his eyes. His wizened daughter, though, took them as they came.
Mother Imelda could be heard thumping up the corridor and now burst into the room. A big woman, her beads clicking against her unimaginable thighs.
“Well, Mr. Shea!” she cried out, closing the door for herself. She’d once told him that her father had owned a warehouse in Waterford, but he had wondered in that case what she was doing here in her Order’s remotest province. Surely, unless he’d gone broke, her father could have swung her a grander appointment than commanding Christ’s outpost amongst the bush-flash children of cow-cockies in the Macleay. Of course, maybe adventurecalled, as it had with him—if adventure was the dream of separateness, of not seeking out the common landfalls of
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