A Woman of the Inner Sea by Thomas Keneally

Author:Thomas Keneally [Keneally, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80062-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-25T13:00:00+00:00

Seventeen

IT WAS FROM THE DREAMS before dawn, crisper than manna, that Jack Murchison woke her. Even on inundation days, gentle apology was his way with women.

He said, They need us at the levee, love.

She washed her ruined hands and drank some water. Downstairs she found a raincoated, gumbooted and aggrieved Connie waiting in the front seat of Jack’s truck. They exchanged hellos. Connie’s seemed specially crafted for this dim, undeclared sunrise.

Kate wondered if Gus and the beasts still slept from their adventures, or if Gus was already up, feeding them their protein pellets, giving them extra to make up for the barbarity of the owner of the tableau vivant.

They crowded into the front seat of Jack’s truck, their wet-weather clothing creaking and crinkling. As they drove off, Connie began to talk as if Kate’s arrival in the front seat had been a mere pause in a quarrel which had broken out hours before in utter dark.

—I know we’re going to be a target yet again. Just because we’re on the highest ground. Jack has to make a big man of himself. And they impose on that. They impose on your good nature.

Jack’s lips squeaked by way of appeal and reconciliation. Again, his duty to prevent Connie from taking to her carotid with sharp objects governed the noises he made with his mouth.

—No, love, look. You know we can put in a claim for anything we give people in a state of emergency. Food, drink, shelter, everything.

—Yes. But you go crazy, and you build up a bill you know the state won’t pay for. So you halve your claim, and they whittle that down by a third, and we end up with seventeen cents in the dollar.

Connie did not want Jack to put undue emphasis on this flood amidst all the other floods, fires, famines and human slaughters.

They parked behind the cemetery, and as the three of them walked to the levee at the eastern end of Myambagh, Jack seemed to make an earnest effort to adjust his demeanor to Connie’s view of this one flood amongst many.

Trucks brought new sandbags from the depot where they had been filled, and people stacked them into the wall. Everyone was tired and talking berserkly, and a man who was clearly an army veteran of some kind came down the line saying, If you want them to hold, you’ve got to stack them army-wise, one lengthways, the next crossways. But people could not hold that much artifice in their head. They piled the sandbags up any way they could. Beyond the levee walls topped with bags lay the universal grayness of sky and flood, a sheet of breast-high undimpled foul water, on which little waves moved now and then across the drowned pasture! Myambagh was utterly beset.

As a team, one at each end, Kate and Connie carried sandbags to the levee. Kate noticed far away, along the ramparts of the highway, a string of aged and young and pregnant tottering with bowed heads toward helicopters from which men and women with cameras dismounted.

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