Illywhacker

I remember the Case of Mrs Chamberlain who was condemned for murder, almost certainly, because she did not show adequate grief for her lost child. She did not howl and pull out her hair in tufts. She was therefore universally derided as an unnatural mother and a monster.

I can only pray that my jury, unlike hers, possess imagination equal to their task, because I will not shriek and groan before you.

Instead, let me tell you: It is alleged I hit my son and caused him lasting damage to the ear.

There was a funeral with no coffin.

At the funeral there was a small upset we need not dwell on. As a result of this upset my friend Nathan Schick drove me to Sunbury where he placed me in the care of doctors. Perhaps he imagined grief was medical.

56

The train had not run across Izzie's legs neatly, but torn crudely, splintering bone, crushing flesh; it took the right leg above the knee and the left across the thigh; then, like some Corsican bandit who wishes to leave a sign, cut the top of an index finger with a neat razor slice.

He had not been jumping the rattler, although that lie appeared in the Albury News. He had been fleeing from John Oliver O'Dowd who ambushed the boxcar Izzie was riding in (it had pulled into a siding in order to give the newSpirit of Progress right of way).

Izzie was out and running when the Spirit came hurtling up from the south, its brakes locked, sparks showering from its wheels while the driver, white-faced and bug-eyed, whimpered quietly as he sliced across the fallen man whose pointed toes had tripped on a spike.

The driver's name was Jack Fish, a shy and pessimistic man who had always thought himself a coward. But it was Jack Fish Who ran back two hundred yards beside his hissing train, Jack Fish who pushed the bully boys aside, applied tourniquets in the midst of screams and hot, pulsing bright red arterial blood.

Something quite wonderful happened to Jack Fish that night, and it was no less wonderful for occurring in the midst of so much agony. He could not explain it to anyone but as he carried that bleeding mess, running, tripping, his eyes filled with sweat, he felt what religious people call God, and the experience of holding that ragged mess of flesh, that man, in his arms, all that blood, that beating heart, that screaming journey down the last twenty miles to Albury, the sheer terror of it, would give him a comfort about life he had no right to expect. It was not the business of being a hero, being given a medal, or having his picture taken. All of this made him uncomfortable and embarrassed. Nor was it the recollection of his dramatic entrance at Albury where theSpirit of Progress had stopped half-way along the crowded platform and the driver had leapt down with the mutilated body of a mercifully unconscious Izzie Kaletsky. About all this, Jack Fish felt what someone else might feel about waking up in church naked.

This experience did not transform Jack Fish's personality, did not make him soft, gracious, or even very understanding. For this same man was able to write to Izzie in Albury Base Hospital: "I am pleased to have been of assistance to you, even though I hear you are a commie."

This letter was about the only thing that made Izzie laugh during that extended stay in Albury Base where his missing legs not only continued to send him signals that the morphine could not block, but the part that was left became infected and had to be dressed and redressed, painfully.

He fought his despair in Albury. It was more difficult when he came home to Sydney where the house had been emptied of tenants on his behalf. He was installed in the room where Leah had once learned to dance, where his mother and father now planned to look after him. The tenants' greasy walls had been repainted in a blinding "cheerful" yellow. A print of sunflowers hung over the old fireplace which was now fitted with a large electric radiator. Blue curtains with puckered hems hung across the dirty windows. They tried to give the room a new history with curios, framed photographs, but they had never decorated a room in all their travelling lives and it showed in the final effect which was jumbled, discordant, slightly desperate. It was then that it was hard to be brave. He was ashamed that his old parents should be forced to confront the ugly lumpy reality of his slowly healing stumps. He had been their future. Was it arrogant of him to feel that he contained the best of them, that he was a truer embodiment of their virtues than the brother who had disappeared into the steaming cauldron of the revolution? Perhaps, but the brother, anyway, was not discussed, and this painful place which could not be touched intensified his feelings of despair.