Aunt Sass Read online

  an anders Tuerle geht uff.

  Whenever I think of him I am carried down into the wells of childhood. The deepest memories of men, as of birds, are contained within the nest; and down there, at the bottom of the well, lies the figure of Johnny Delaney–a little grain of truth for me–sending up his endless message to the surface of the water. I often wonder how that melodious Irish name came to be borne across the seas to our sprawling plantation in the tropics of Australia. For it is there that we must look for him, not in his native land. I cannot remember the cane-fields without remembering Johnny. And at this moment he is so close, I could almost touch his hand. Or his black, Irish head, perhaps. Or his little thin bow-legs.

  I suppose you would have said that he was primarily a jockey. That, at any rate, was the form of address he preferred. But he was also groom, stable-boy and carpenter; even, when labour was short, a cane cutter, and sometimes a feeder at the mill. It seems to me now that there was nothing Johnny could not do, no part of our family life in which he was not the dominating figure. Before any of the children came he was already part of the plantation–like the house itself, and the black-fellows, and the groves of mango trees. Indeed, when we were very young, we thought we had three parents–not only our father and mother but Johnny Delaney as well. As soon as a child began to stagger, he snatched it away from sheltering arms as though, like the warlocks in fairy tales, he had come to claim his own. The moment it was strong enough to wave a rattle he taught it to handle reins, and in no time he had it climbing palm trees to strengthen its riding muscles. Long before it could properly talk it was shown the difference between poisonous snakes and the ones that have no sting; the proper method of avoiding tarantulas; how to make grown-up life a torture with whistles from bamboo sticks; and to hide from Kate Clancy, our gorgon nurse, in the stems of the sugar-cane. And there, in that last phrase, lies the clue to Johnny Delaney. He was, before anything else, an antisocial being. He was a man made entirely of blackness and shadow, the quickest-tempered, arrogantest, bitter-heartedest creature that ever stepped out of the County Clare. But the whole family loved him with a deep and changeless passion. Don’t ask me why. Just let me tell you Johnny’s story, and I think you will not wonder.

  He had two gifts–if gift is a proper word to use in connection with so determined a have-not as Johnny. He could swear. He could swear in a way that would blister the skin of a camel. Not like a trooper, profanely. Johnny Delaney was an artist and that would have been beneath him. No. His swearing was like a bitter poem, a long, black, vitriolic epic, invented by himself. Dark words and phrases flowed from his lips in cascades and fountains of rage. And once at it, he could hold an audience shocked and stunned for half an hour together.

  ‘And take that into yer gizzards!’ he would conclude venomously, as his hearers stumbled away. The smallest thing was enough to set him going and once you had heard the first phrase it was impossible not to listen to the end, the invention was so superb. The mere sight of a priest enraged him; and he deliberately pressed his hat a little further on his head when he met Mr Preston, the vicar. The gesture was sufficiently obvious; no one could mistake his meaning. ‘Ah, what do they know of life at all, them ignorant white angels? Sittin’ an’ sthrummin’ their harps of gold with never a shadow upon them!’ If he had known that Father Connolly and Mr Preston would both officiate at his grave–for they, too, recognised his essence–I don’t believe he’d have died. He’d have gone on living till Judgement Day, simply out of spite.

  His other gift was second sight. Oh, not Cassandra’s splendid vision nor her high sense of tragedy. Johnny Delaney’s premonitions were essentially domestic. I remember watching my father once, shading his eyes with his big grass hat, as he scanned the horizon anxiously. For my mother was out by herself in the dog-cart, driving a newly broken mare. Johnny, about as high as his elbow, stood by with his lips pursed sourly. ‘Sure, the Misthress is safe as a nail in a post,’ he was saying with bitter conviction. ‘Isn’t it, now, a wastheful thing, a woman to be sitting as live as a bee and a good horse dead in the ditch?’ His forewarning was exactly true. They found the dog-cart overturned, the mare with both her hind legs broken and my mother sitting by the side of the road with the dying head in her lap.

  When Johnny heard that a third baby was expected he gave a loud and prolonged groan. ‘Another girl!’ he said lugubriously. ‘Two years till we get a bhoy!’ And no one was at all surprised when he proved to be quite right.

  On another occasion, when an urgent telegram arrived, he remarked gleefully–and correctly–to my mother–‘It’ll be that ould divil, yer father’s brother, dhropped dead at the Counthry Show. Well, our lives’ll all be brighther without him, if he hasn’t embezzled yer trust funds.’

  Contrariwise–and Johnny Delaney was always contrary–he never attempted to use his gift to foretell the result of a race. Racing was to him, as to my father, a sacred occupation. He was quick, however, to pocket a bribe when asked to name a winner. Then–sardonically watching the hopeful smile spread over the questioner’s face–he would whisper in the eager ear, ‘The besth horse, surely!’ All things considered, it is quite surprising that Johnny was never knifed.

  Nor would he consult his inward crystal to forward his own affairs. No man living can have cared less about the future. All he ever said in regard to it was, ‘I’ll die the day me work is done and not a minyut before.’ The grown-ups took this for just another piece of arrogance. But we, steeped in myth and fairy tale, understood it differently. It was perfectly obvious to us that Johnny was immortal and, furthermore, that he knew it. That this should be so did not surprise us. Of course he would live till the end of time, for when–with horses and sugar-cane–is anyone’s work ever finished? Only when the last horse is dead and sugar ceases to grow. Not until we grew older did we realise that Johnny had another work besides his daily chores.

  Johnny’s person, you would have said, was a perfect match for his tongue. An ugly, long-toothed face he had, criss-crossed like the map of Mars. From a narrow head his ears stuck out like two enormous handles. His spirit glared through his dark eyes, a fierce, tormented prisoner. And his mouth had a wry and bitter twist that was seldom smoothed out by a smile. From behind, however, and at a distance–particularly when he was dressed in his racing colours–he looked like an elegant little boy. That, indeed, is how many a stranger saw him. He only needed to turn his head to correct the delightful illusion.

  None of us, not even our father, who had known him intimately for many years, knew Johnny Delaney’s secret–what pain, what passion or despair, had worked upon his spirit. A modern psychologist or a conventional mind might have looked to his hump for the cause. But they would have been wrong. Johnny’s hump was his treasure. ‘It’s me house, it’s me parlour!’ he would tell us arrogantly, glancing with pity at our flat, skinny shoulders. ‘I’m a snail with me palace on me back, and it’s there I rethire when I wish to take me ease.’ Whenever he shut the door of his room we imagined Johnny–like a snail–drawing his black head into the hump and taking his ease within it. A lordly relaxation.

  Johnny’s was the only hut in the compound whose inside we did not know. Matt Heffernan’s–the overseer–was untidy, dirty and smelly. Pictures of well-fed naked ladies smiled softly from the walls. The room of Ah Wong, the Chinese cook, had nothing in it at all. Except for the mat on which he slept it was clean and empty as the husk of a nut. Only Johnny barred us out, berating us malevolently if we put a toe on his threshold. His hut, like his hump, was his palace. None but the master could take their ease within.

  ‘But what do you do in there, Johnny?’ we would ask him inquisitively.

  ‘Me life’s work,’ he would reply sharply, and shut his mouth like a trap.

  Outside his hut, however, he had no sense of personal property. He behaved towards the world with a grandiose, contemptuous air–as though he had originally created it and had now no further use for his handiwork. Money meant nothing to h
im. Sometimes he would ‘blow’ a pay-cheque on a drinking bout in MacKinley, where the friendly jailer locked him up until he was sober again. But apart from these rare occasions he gave his earnings away casually, as though they were bits of paper. Nevertheless–contemptuous though he was of his own riches–he watched our open-handed father with the eye of an anxious eagle.

  ‘Go on, then, give it to him!’ he would jeer, as the hand reached quickly into the pocket in response to a hard-luck story. ‘The Misthress, dear soul, can take in washin’ and yez can put the childer to scarin’ rooks from Misther Preston’s cane.’ Only when Johnny’s back was turned could my father nip into the Kingdom of Heaven by warming a palm with silver.

  But if Johnny was generous with his riches, he was a prince, a sheikh, a Grand Caliph when it came to giving advice. Nobody was free from it; everyone suffered equally. He told Kate Clancy to buy rouge from the chemist instead of ‘robbin’ the Masther’s purse’ by using the cochineal. ‘Yer face is a disasther now. Would yez want it to be a ruin?’ Matt Heffernan, always in trouble with the local belles, was driven to the edge of madness by Johnny’s advice on the subject. ‘Ah, leave them! Be a hermit, Matt. Don’t insult the mighty realm of nature by mating with schraps of tinsel!’

  Ah Wong, on the other hand, seemed to welcome his diatribes. ‘Yess, Johnee! No, Johnee! I tink-im plurry good words,’ he would say, nodding his head solemnly. The smooth Eastern face absorbed all jibes and irony. It smiled and kept its thoughts to itself. Nothing disturbed that pool of wisdom. And I think Johnny found a moment’s peace as his barbs went home to silence.

  He hectored our father’s friends and guests on their habits, professions and private lives; and never failed, after their first fury, to draw forth sheepish grins of agreement. Once a grown-up cousin, lamenting an unfortunate love-affair, took a trip to the plantation for the sole purpose of consulting Johnny. With her city muslins sweeping the dust, she sat on the edge of an upturned feed-bucket–an exquisite, eager Niobe–weeping out her woes to him while he curry-combed the horses. We heard nothing of what passed between them. Indeed, I think it probable that Johnny never uttered a word. But he let out a banshee wail of mirth over and over again–hollow and wild and inhuman. Evidently it solved something. For she came back dry-eyed from the stables walking with a light gay step and a look of peace on her face.

  But such outside advice was intermittent. To the family it came as a steady downpour. He advised our father about his investments and our mother about her hats. ‘If it only had a melon, now, the thing would be complete!’ That was his comment on a flowery concoction that my mother never wore again for fear of arousing his wrath.

  But these things were trifles. Johnny Delaney’s prime concern was to teach our parents how to bring up their children. ‘Root, shoot and fruit’ must be eaten every day. Ipecacuanha wine was the cure for all ailments. Nightlights had to burn in the nursery to keep away ‘things and witches’. A naughty child must never be spanked but ‘straighthway sent to Coventry’. It was his strong–and quite correct–conviction that for anyone not to be spoken to was the worst of all shames.

  On the other hand, there were many times when he would not let us speak. Emotional times, cowardly times, times of personal trouble. I remember standing on the shaky bridge that crossed our little creek. The planks were hot beneath my feet and the rail burned in my hand. The brown water rushed away in a thick curdle below me. Out of nowhere–for I was a thoughtless child–I was struck by the awful realisation that merely to be alive, to live, was a matter of great courage. And that all men in their secret selves were somehow innocent victims; the wounded in no worse a case than the wounder and both of them betrayed. I say awful realisation–for if it was true I would have to do something about it. My past, such as it was, was over. From now on I could never live according to like and dislike. I should have to take people as they were, accept and not judge. A desperate, frightening notion.

  I tried, abashed and stammering, to communicate these thoughts to Johnny. But he stopped me at once. ‘Ah, whisht then!’ he said angrily. ‘That’s no sort of thought for the young. Let yez get a skin like the armadillo and hathred rise in yer bhreast like yeast!’ (When hatred comes it brings great peace. A bright flower lifts its head within us. But what if the flower cannot rise? What if its head is for ever bowed by the painful rain of justice and love?) Johnny looked at me with furious eyes. But I knew, in that moment of clarity, that he wasn’t talking to me. He was warning himself against ‘all such thruck’; giving himself the stern injunction he never could truly obey. Armadillo skins are not for all. There are some that must go uncovered.

  Johnny had no favourites. If he loved one of us more than another nobody would have guessed it. And he knew our natures through and through as though they were lessons he’d learned.

  ‘This wan must be yer care,’ he said once, morosely nodding at the eldest child. ‘Yez must watch her keenly when I’m gone.’

  But our mother had her eye on her darling, the beautiful second sister. ‘But surely, Johnny,’ she protested, ‘it’s she we must watch!’ For her mind was busy with strings of suitors, all eager to snatch her jewel.

  Johnny eyed her viciously. ‘She’s safe. She has her nose in herself. But this wan’s black with loving!’

  Black with loving. Curious phrase. Our parents shook uncomprehending heads and left it hanging in the air, another of Johnny’s mysteries. Had they argued they would have said conventionally that love is always bright. Johnny knew better. He saw the child in her coils of passion and knew she was lost from the start. The lover is always dark and naked. His share is shadow and the point of the sword. The blood moves slowly through his heart; it flows very thick and black. He goes with one hand shielding his eyes and the other imploringly flung outwards. The loved can sit in the lap of time and play with their toys and sleep. The lover has to watch and pray. He is involved with the nature of things, simply by being a lover. He has to grind his own grain; no other bread will feed him. It is he, going forward against the thorn, who needs to be treasured and cared for; the loved are always safe.

  I think, too, that Johnny, when he used that phrase, was telling us unconsciously the story of himself. If ever there was a man, dark and cloudy and black with loving, it was little Johnny Delaney. It burned within him secretly in some Pluto cavern of being. That central glowing seam of coal ravaged his outward substance. He and the earth were brother and sister, seared and scored on their visible surface, because of the pits at the heart. But on earth there are men with pick and shovel to set that dark mass free. They mine it to glow on human hearthstones and redeem itself in flame. For Johnny there were no such mediators. His bitter tongue could not say the words, nor his seared face give evidence. His love was heavy and silent within him. Not even the children could make it speak.

  But what, after all, do words matter? Once they are uttered they are lost–to the hearer as well as the speaker. And the angel comes by silently and takes us all with a sigh. We knew Johnny. And it is a truism that the race of children has little need of words. He was mixed with our inmost hearts and spirits. He belonged to us far more nearly than ever our parents could. Their love was our rightful privilege. We were no more grateful to them for it than for sunshine or air. But Johnny was an extra thing, a special dispensation. He lifted our lives from their dull round into a kind of legend. All pasts, good and bad, are like a story. Whenever we try to return to them we see ourselves as fairy-tale figures, slightly larger than life. If I were to go back now to the plantation I know I would walk with the step of a prince because of Johnny Delaney. And the country round about the cane-fields would reek with his lordly myths.

  The flamingo-swamp–how well I remember!–was one of his favourite landmarks. For there it was that Boydie McGrew was buried alive by a bushranger. At night his ghost went wildly crying across the watery wasteland–‘Take me out of the bog, bhoys, take me out of the bog!’ ‘I can hear him wailing,’ Johnny would say, ‘like
the voice of me own brother!’ Down at the place where the creek forked we would seize each other’s hands–none of us ever dared to take Johnny’s–for there, full of drink and evil years, old Paddy Freeman was drowned. ‘And, faith, his body’s down there still, as tight as the dhrum in a band!’ He would stand by the gunyahs in the bush, moodily watching the black-fellows and their flocks of mongrel dogs. He’d a friend among them, Billy Pee-kow, one of the cane cutters. Johnny never failed to give him advice on how to dance a corroboree or to pitch a boomerang. But afterwards he would turn away and fall into sombre brooding. ‘A vanishing race,’ he would say with a sigh, while we waited expectantly. We would not have been in the least surprised if the smiling blacks and their shy women had dissolved before our eyes.

  But of all the fearful, exciting landmarks, the place by the pond where the snake bit Johnny was the worst–or rather, the best. ‘Snake is it?’ he would say, jeering, when asked to repeat the story. ‘A serpent it was, from the Garden of Eden, and few men last out that!’ We thrilled with pride and reflected glory. Any man could be bitten by a snake but only the tempter out of Eden would do for Johnny Delaney. ‘Not Adam and Eve’s serpent, surely, Johnny?’ ‘The same!’ he would cry with triumphant malice, and we shivered together with horrid joy at getting so near to the Bible. We might have been walking with Cain himself, through the green Australian bush.

  And always, no matter where we went, Johnny’s dark eyes would be gravely searching, in the undergrowth and scrub. Birds’ nests, lizards or what, we wondered? Suddenly he would dart from the path and seize a little fallen branch or a gnarled piece of wood. Every time he wandered into the bush he brought home two or three of these treasures. His thick, knotty fingers handled them delicately; he would smooth and roll them between his palms and test their hardness with the blade of his knife. And to every question as to why he wanted them he made the same reply. ‘It’s me life’s work,’ he would say darkly with a look that closed the subject. The curiosity this aroused was almost unbearable. The riddle of the Sphinx–had we heard of it–would have seemed a very minor thing compared with Johnny’s work. Was he building a little house, perhaps? Did he burn the wood at dead of night beneath some warlock’s brew? Or was he–surely nothing so dull!–simply a collector? But Johnny Delaney kept his secret. We did not discover the nature of his work until his work was done.