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CHAPTER 1
BOOK 1
On an Art of Bumpology
1858
It was the hottest time of the year, a month after Christmas at latitude thirty-five degrees south. All down the New South Wales coast columns of smoke rose from fires burning inland. The unchecked flames shot their smoke in the air forming anvil-heads of cinders. At night the fires burned low to the ground in a lurking, underhand fashion, bothered by sea-mists. Next day they flared tree-high again, greedy, fed by hot winds from the parched inland. The fires had the sniff of rage about them. The sea was the only barrier to their eating a man's face off. Sparks flew out over surf as tongues of flame advanced onto headlands. Ash fell in the water and darkened the white beaches.
At Tathra, in the far south of the colony, Mr Syms Covington embarked for the port of Sydney, as was his custom every six-month, on the schooner Skate from Twofold Bay. The voyage of two days was done in a haze of burning. Covington had a good stomach for the sea but was unable to sleep. He experienced cold sweats and a discomfort that pierced a sword to his belly. He stood on the deck of the Skate watching worms of fire in the hinterland and knowing there was something wrong with him that a swig of gripe water and a good hard belch would never fix. He crouched in a chair, pulling his knees tight against him, and then stood clinging to the rails. He lay down on the deck and was no better. The captain prodded him with the toe of his shoe. His condition made him afraid. They sailed north, pitching and rolling. His battered, broken-nosed face turned square to the wind had the look of an old prizefighter's coming up to a bout.
Entering the Heads of Port Jackson just after dawn, the captain found Covington utterly stricken. His eyes were open, watchful, but he uttered not a word. With sails slack and the schooner steady on the tide the sufferer was offloaded forthwith and rowed to a Dr MacCracken's cottage in an arm of the harbour at Watson's Bay.
As MacCracken first saw Covington he was the colour of a ripe plum, barrel-chested, massive in thigh and limb, and silent as the grave in his agony. Covington was then forty-two years of age. His impressive head rested on a folded coat. One fist was clenched, and when MacCracken prised it open he found a small cone-shaped shell with four valves at the top. It was a common barnacle and he threw it away.
'Get him to the house. And hurry.'
Men carried Covington on planks to MacCracken's library and he prepared his knives. 'Get sheets,' he yelled, 'and spread them around the floor.' The last consideration in MacCracken's thoughts was the saving of a life, for he believed the man as good as dead with advanced peritonitis, but not last in his actions, you can be sure, which were swift and useful.
Covington parted his eyes a slit. Nothing else in him moved except his eyeballs, which followed MacCracken around the room. He observed that his saviour was a young man, lean-necked, tall, vital as a whip. He held his lancets and scalpels to the light, and drew them across his thumbnail to test their sharpness.
MacCracken kept himself calm. He had no great love of surgery, indeed had only recently begun in that business and doubted his wisdom already. Yet his hands were steady and more to the point he knew that if such advertisements for his skill as this Covington had ample pockets, then so much the better. For MacCracken fancied soon to select himself a slice of that wide-open land of Australia where he could put a man to manage livestock, and so guarantee himself regular percentages without having to dirty his feet in dust. It was how fortunes were made here if you were wise enough, and better than gold. And so was Covington his godsend? You may be sure he was.
A pall of bushfire smoke rolled along the coast and suffused the harbour foreshores, entering the room where the patient lay and stinging the surgeon's eyes. Without delay MacCracken administered chloroform and put Covington to the knife, delivering him of a foul, instantly bursting appendix. A mere half minute divided the patient from life and death.
Covington blinked awake and found himself among the living. But which lot of people and where?
'Don,' he croaked, and reached out a crippled hand.
Where that 'Don' came from MacCracken had no idea, though it declared a bond of vehement familiarity between them that was to last.
Say there was nothing between them at first except mistaken identity (who was this 'Don' at all?), and then that a quality thickened in the air between them — like a lens they could use to know each other better — one man adamant in his being, that man being Covington; and the other, the younger, MacCracken, with his limp brown hair and bony nose, ready for wisdom without having a clue that he was.
The first time Covington spoke, MacCracken learned he was deaf as a mountain. His cheeks needed a good hard pinching. 'Wake up, old dodger!' But yelling did no good unless made hard against his ears.
'I had a shell!' Covington shouted in the half-light.
'I threw it away,' said MacCracken.
'Where is my shell?'
'Gone! Vanished!'
'Mind the reef!' Covington shouted.
'Mr Covington,' MacCracken held him by the shoulders, 'you are on dry land.'
'I had a shell!' (etcetera).
MacCracken flung wide the curtains. It was barely surprising that in his delirium Covington believed himself aboard a vessel, considering the fine chronometer MacCracken had on his wall and the proximity of sea-water breezes wafting through the window. There were books on tables and spilling from shelves, many with a nautical flavour, and in a corner alcove was a fine globe of the world of the sort favoured by ships' captains. MacCracken rented the house from the widow of one.
Covington narrowed his eyes and looked at his saviour with a cunning suspicion. MacCracken looked back at him lazily, now. He was an American on his way around the world from Boston, having come to rest in Australia after trying the gold rushes and exhausting his sense of adventure.
Covington began to struggle again. 'Don?' he barked in his delirium. MacCracken wrestled him down.
'The name is MacCracken. You are under my care.'
'Don Sia Di?' Covington said, or so the name sounded to MacCracken's ears.
'David D. MacCracken is the name. Just as I said.'
Covington wearied with repetition of his 'Don', coming out of the influence of chloroform, that thin colourless liquid with an ethereal odour and a sweetish taste with which the new-made surgeon had stilled Covington's struggles — and sometimes, for the interest of it, had enhanced his own senses and coloured his dreams by taking a sniff.
Finally MacCracken shouted against Covington's ear and his meaning won through. 'I am your doctor! You are ill! Be satisfied!'— and Covington sank back in his pillows,making a dry chomping sound and rubbing his battered nose with the back of his hand, giving MacCracken the benefit of a gentle smile, which the younger man witnessed then for the first time, and it warmed his liking.
'You're an American,' said Covington.
'You thought I was someone else?' mimed MacCracken.
'Aye.'
'A Spaniard?' snorted MacCracken, snapping his fingers, clicking his heels, doing a fair tarantella in charade.
In time MacCracken would learn that the man Covington called him in his delirium was also nondescriptly brown-haired, also big-nosed, also obliging of manner, also absolutely unremarkable-seeming and doubting his first-chosen trade, and aged but thirty years the last time Covington saw him. No Spaniard, either, but a well-born Englishman, and around six feet tall and so inclined to stoop a little in his relation to others. His name was Charles Darwin but MacCracken was far from knowing that, and would have thought it unlikely even if told, Darwin being famous for his Beagle's Voyage, which MacCracken had read at the age of twelve, holding it somewhat responsible for nurturing a whim, that bore fruition, for science and travel.
'I am sorry to give you this trouble,' Covington said, coming round in a cold sweat.
'Not at all,' responded his saviour.
Under wiry eyebrows and a clifflike forehead Covington's eyes followed MacCracken everywhere as he cleaned his instruments. Covington was a powerful presence in the dim light, the planes of his cheekbones and jaw offering a fine portrait. MacCracken was interested in his head. Lumpy, he would say. But interesting.
'Your hatmaker,' he supposed, 'finds his fortune in you, Mr Covington?'
That head's resemblance to a loaf of bread, where yeast pushed the crust in various stern directions, had often been remarked upon with Covington. His ears hung a little pen-dulously in his age. MacCracken, with a flippancy to his nature, muttered whatever he liked while in Covington's company, never expecting a reply unless he bothered with shouting. Covington's hair was thinning and black and, 'I daresay dyed, old fellow?' said MacCracken, testing the emptiness of the air.
'Blustery weather,' Covington replied.
Covington's facial purpling came from old scars. MacCracken used his magnifying glass. He deduced they were powder burns but Covington said nothing. Facial scarring was not the only mark on him. There were welts on his shoulders, embedded like sea-slugs, purple and slack. He guessed that Covington had once been severely flogged, and from turns of phrase Covington used ('deaf as a mainmast' and 'sparm fish' for whale), divined in Covington's distant past a ship, though whether a merchant ship, a convict ship, or a man-of-war he could not tell.
'What ship? What navy? What crimes? What cruelties?'
Covington gave no answer.
It was the nineteenth of February by MacCracken's diary, and Covington had been with him twenty days. 'I am weak,' Covington rolled his eyes around. 'Will you care for me, MacCracken?'
'I am doing so already, crippled old dog,' the young doctor murmured, conveying kindness by giving Covington's arm a squeeze. It was not MacCracken's intention to run a hospital for his cases, but with Covington he heard himself prattling: 'Of course, yes, rely on me, sir, I shall make arrangements, etcetera,' — all condensed into one shouted word in his charge's left ear (the better one): 'Yes!'
With an instrument sent from Boston by an old professor who still had hopes for him, MacCracken tackled Covington's ears. Gobbets of wax blocked his view. After careful syringing he saw that both drums were scarred beyond recovery. It was as if firecrackers had popped inside them. Covington's submission to his care was touching.
'I went to an aurist about this,' Covington tapped the side of his head, 'and he said for a thousand pound he would cut me open and clip my ear-bones, and maybe I would hear better. Would I?'
'Keep your thousand, grandfather.'
Mr Covington dozed. MacCracken felt a protectiveness towards the old coot as for a gruff, well-meaning peasant with a crock of gold. A man who could spare a thousand like that would know of some prime investments. Trying another sort of examination MacCracken ran his fingers across Covington's scalp. It was like playing on a bag of stones, and using instinct aided by phrenology (at which MacCracken prided himself, believing the craft to lie somewhere in the direction of a firm prediction), he sneaked a mental picture of Covington to verify his first impressions.
The message MacCracken read through his fingers came to him in a few moments: a doglike fondness was no surprise; the potency of an old sire; powers of concentration and challenge; a streak of resentment; the capacity to deal damage; a certain helpfulness; secretiveness.
This last was no surprise.
Covington came awake as MacCracken felt what he had once heard called the 'band of hopefulness'. It was ridged across Covington's dome, a veritable rainbow of potential joy, and not seeming to belong with the doleful stranger at all.
'What are you doing? Are you "reading" me, MacCracken? I won't have it!'— and he thrust his examiner's arm aside. 'You won't use me?'
'Dear Mr Covington!'
'Bumpology. I spit on that art!'
'Mr Covington!' (louder in his ear).
'Yoi?'
'I — am — your — physician.'
'You — are — my — meddler.'
Though Covington gave a quick smile to cover his outburst, and MacCracken smiled with him, they both were astonished by the vehemence of the exchange.
'Pardon me,' Covington said. 'I had a bad time with that business once. When I was fugged and bottled.'
'You are pardoned, sir. When was that?'
With the shimmering half-understanding the deaf have, that is also like a charm, Mr Covington scuttled back inside himself and secured MacCracken's fascination with that 'bad time' and that 'business' by keeping his jaw firmly clamped. It must have had a good outcome, surely, thought MacCracken, because the rainbow ridge of hope said so. Either that or Covington's fate had not yet run its course.
Covington lay on a bed in MacCracken's library and gazed at MacCracken's books, read their spines and threw his host a sprat of information to chew. 'I've come home, it seems,' he said. 'Home,' giving the word a scornful edge. He named a few titles — Murray's English Grammar, Mackintosh's History of England, Byron's HMS Blonde, and Darwin's Voyage Round the World of HMS Beagle — saying he 'owned those too', which MacCracken thought, at the time, a pretty ripe boast for such an old carthorse.
'It is like a ship's cabin in here. I like it very much.'
Through several days MacCracken watched Covington closely for signs of relapse, and one evening, having moved him to a bare side room for his convalescence, witnessed another responsive quirk in the man. Covington reached from his bunk and touched the walls with his hands. Splaying his fingers he pressed his palms flat in all their sweatiness. MacCracken thought he merely craved the coolness of stone, but learned (in time) it was otherwise with Covington. For deaf as he was, Covington held his body taut as a tuning fork, and listened, and heard — for the world sang to him through the sounding box of 'Villa Rosa'.
Much later MacCracken was to learn all that the walls meant:
Touching them brought back to Covington his adventures, beginning with his earliest on leaving home at the age of twelve. It was the suck and slam of the ocean, the great stringed instrument of wind Covington detected, combing through eucalyptus branches overhanging the slate roof and sifting him down his only music in small vibrations, the hard thrum of cicadas and the decisive slap of small waves on hard-packed sand. The creak of a ship's timbers, the rush of waters along the leeward railing and mashing across half the deck like a neverending turnpike. Then the dip of paddles in a quiet estuary (on his several returns) that said, 'England at last!' The wetlands, the flatlands, the stink of mud and rutted roads. The hiss of footsteps across dewy-damp grass. Empty houses. Graveyards of names. A doorhinge creaking as he entered an old chapel, and then with his eyes lifted discovering that a window that was formerly there, high in a wall, was gone, and some greatness in his heart leaping the obstacles of the world was gone as well.
When Covington saw MacCracken watching, he sneaked his hand under the covers, embarrassed at showing his feeling.
MacCracken had this heavy-limbed Ulysses in his household care for another week, and then — for Covington remained feverish with a persistent infection where the cut had gone septic — arranged a cottage, 'Coral Sands', where he could attend him daily. Covington stayed there through all March and half April, well able to pay a good price. He retained Nurse Parkington, MacCracken's sometime assistant and a woman of ample spirit and powerful arms, to dress his wounds and, when he was much improved, to pummel his stiff joints while he sprawled walrus-like on a table.
One day Covington asked if he might call on MacCracken, convivially, he said, and, without much ceremony, the doctor found him at his door. Covington's hair was combed straight forward like Napoleon's, with a curl over one eye, and he reeked of pomade. His prickly devotion came at MacCracken from under a cliff of forehead, and he beamed his great smile, bellowing 'MacCracken!' so that his listener might know from his admiration that something was wondrous about him. In retrospect it did MacCracken good to feel the heat coming from the slab of Covington standing in his doorway. But in the present it itched him around the collar. It might be called love, that tide or spark of feeling the other gave off. When in later years MacCracken got through to a settled plan of life — and returned to Massachusetts to square his accounts with running away, and became, in time, a puzzled student and then a practitioner in matters of the mind — it was often this picture of Covington holding the door-jambs that recurred to him. It was an emblem he took into himself, indeed, as a measure of character. Never give up, it said. Neither your victories nor your losses. Stay eager for your pain until it serves you well. Nourish life to the end.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Mr Darwin's Shooter"
by .
Copyright © 1998 Roger McDonald.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
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