"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, holding Mrs Trevis's newborn babe, a bad-tempered little chap, always "sucky" and given to banging his little head against the governess's shoulder.

"You might mourn for me, or Mr Trevis," suggested Mrs Trevis.

"Oh, there is no likelihood of that," said Miriam Chadwick tossing her hair back off her shoulders-beautiful hair, coal-black hair, raven hair, but who was there to see its dark blue lights out here at Marx Hill? "No likelihood at all," said Miriam, bouncing the babe resentfully, and leaving her comment ambiguous as long as she dare, "with both you and Mr Trevis in such fine health."

413

Oscar and Lucinda

"Here/' said Mrs Trevis, reaching out for the babe while she gently cuffed her little boy who was reaching for a saucepan on the kitchen table. "Here, 111 take bubba. You try your hand at t'other."

"T'other" was the butter churn which wooden wheel of torture Mrs Trevis now abandoned to her governess.

"If you have nabbed young Reverend Hasset," Mrs Trevis began, an observation that had nothing to do with mourning or widow's weeds, but was intended to bring her uppity governess (she thought herself too good to set the fires or scrub the milk pails) to a proper understanding of her place in this society.

"I did not attempt, as you put it, to 'nab' the poor man, although there is no doubting he was properly 'nabbed' without him knowing what had happened."

"Jealousy killed the cat/' said Mrs Trevis, dipping her finger in the butter jar and then slipping it into her infant's sucky mouth.

Miriam Chadwick looked on with her handsome nose wrinkled.

"Curiosity."

"Beg yours?"

"It was curiosity that killed the cat."

"Curiosity in the beginning," said Mrs Trevis, "but jealousy in the end. It is bad luck to throw away your widow's weeds."

This conversation was in Miriam Chadwick's mind on the hot Thursday afternoon when, with the Trevises all gone into Boat Harbour to buy provisions for the Easter feast, she was savouring her solitude, sitting on the wooden step, looking down at the curve of the Bellinger River. She was running through her list of unsatisfactory or irritating or boorish suitors when she saw a church made from glass towed into her field of vision by two men in wide straw hats. Her first thought was disappointment that Mrs Trevis was not here to witness this thing with her, that she must exclaim to nothing but the empty air. "Oh, my," she said, feeling that some subtle victory had been somehow denied her, "just look at what you have missed. Just look. Just look at it."

It came up the river, its walls like ice emanating light, as fine and elegant as civilization itself.

"Who?" demanded Miriam Chadwick. "Who? Just answer me that." Who in this valley of muddy boots could be responsible for such a thing? For it was not simply that the little steep-roofed church was made from glass, but that it had all the lovely proportions and gracenotes of a fancy constructed for a prince, say, in Bavaria.