Mr Darwin's Shooter Read online

  ‘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 door-hinge 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.

  ‘You have made me good,’ Covington boomed, producing a bottle from under his arm and holding it up in the air: ‘Rum tiddley-um-tum!’

  MacCracken had asked for this, and over a glass of spirits Covington confirmed himself as a case to be admired. He began quizzing MacCracken on money matters. MacCracken had saved his life, and Covington’s best answer to that was to begin money-making for him. When MacCracken mentioned acreages and sheep as being worth more than ‘accursed gold’, Covington nodded sagely, owning that he ‘knew a man’ with four thousand acres and a fine house in a district with good soil and fair rainfall, and who might be amenable to taking a new owner aboard. Thus MacCracken saw his way clear to much leisurely scribbling and a changed background to life. In his present, callow state of mind the ambitions MacCracken entertained were literary—he was a would-be essayist. For that he wanted a good thousand a year. Too much—but when was enough ever enough for a pleasure-seeker? As he farewelled Covington that night he put an arm around him and gave him a warm embrace. They stood eye to eye in their tallness. Their beaming faces said ‘good fellow’ to the world while their minds raced, calculating their needs and adjusting their tactics to each other.

  ‘I like you, MacCracken, but do you think that matters?’

  ‘Indeed I do,’ the younger man replied, confused by Covington’s question and unsure if he liked him quite as much in return.

  ‘What’s that you say?’

  MacCracken cupped his hands to the side of Covington’s head and repeated himself at the top of his voice. ‘Indeed-ah-do.’

  ‘“Indeed yah do”,’ Covington chuckled, mimicking the other’s expression, and stomping off into the night. ‘Well said.’

  MacCracken stood in the dark feeling bothered. Talk of getting rich was all very well, but there was a humour in Covington that niggled him; a way of acting possessively— which is to say without respect—as if this little patch of heaven where MacCracken lived was quite Covington’s own, under a prior claim. There was a studiedness about the man, giving MacCracken the feeling that while Covington was honest in his gratitude, he most of all wanted to emphasise that he was no man’s lackey. If anything, that MacCracken was the inferior in their two roles. The sum of MacCracken’s feeling, too, was that Covington had set him up like a row of skittles. MacCracken could not get rid of a feeling that Covington had not fallen into his sheltering cove by accident. Something about his being there was contrived. Yet how could a man do that, almost dying on your doorstep in the attempt? It was not possible to manufacture peritonitis, and time a grave illness to within a minute or two of death. It made no sense in any understanding of the world at all.

  MacCracken stifled his irritation soon enough, however. He was niggled but not so high principled as to take the matter further. Covington’s getting about in good health was a case of satisfaction to him as he needed his advertisements hale. For questions were asked in Sydney about whether young MacCracken was qualified at all, to which MacCracken indignantly flourished certificates issued under Massachusetts law, inviting inspection: ‘At your leisure, if you please,’ and threatening lawsuits on the matter. He travelled each Tuesday to the government hospital to assist Mr Vincent Crews, a man little short of a drunken blunderer, but with vice-regal connections, whose rare successes, MacCracken indignantly countered, were MacCracken’s own.

  A short time later Covington made a fine recovery, then went about his business in Sydney Town spouting MacCracken’s good name, and collecting views of the doctor in return—thence embarking for Twofold Bay on the next sailing of the Skate.

  ‘Coral Sands’ and ‘Villa Rosa’ lay among the cottages of watermen, sea captains, pilots and fishermen. Watson’s Bay was prettily situated on the peninsula called South Head, with sandy beaches and calm sheltered waters on one side of shelving, dramatically broken land. The Pacific Ocean, invisible but close, shuddered against sandstone cliffs a narrow quarter-mile behind the settlement’s back. The staging was theatrical in the written opinion of MacCracken, who got down to his essays in his leisure hours. On the ocean side it was a good setting for Lear; on the sheltered side you could have your Midsummer Night’s Dream if you wished, amid cabbage-tree palms and stately, red-limbed angophoras, that were called apple-gums in New South Wales though they bore no fruit—a typical confusion in the colony, whose botany and everything else was upside-down like the seasons—until the timber was cleft, and then the resemblance to apple showed.

  Just a few short years ago these shimmering protected coves were one of the last gre
at unmeddled-with portions of earth. Then with lightning-swiftness (compared with the time that had gone before), pink-cheeked high-principled naval and army officers made it their England’s preserve. With utmost reasonableness they spoke their laws, setting up a gaol, a gallows, and a series of fine government buildings made of sandstone blocks. Such was Sydney Town. Windmills turned in the humid hot haze, grinding a damp sticky flour. Charles Darwin saw them when he sailed through the Heads of Port Jackson twenty-five years previously—their listless, hopeless sails. Dealings with the black people who were there before the garrisons arrived were first conducted in a tone of amused equality, noted the essayist, with gifts exchanged and comparisons made of clothing, adornments and human anatomy. The friendly contrasts were well understood as reflecting that both sides were matched in being human, and this was soon ironically demonstrated by the women producing little bastards, by which time it seemed there was a belief on the part of the natives—with little language, and much gesturing on their part—that they had met with a superior civilisation and liked its products of rum, treacle and flour better than their own raw produce of kangaroo flesh and bush honey.

  There was not much adventure in the journey bringing the young MacCracken to Australia, although he sometimes boasted there was—colouring accounts of brushes with bandidos and the like. He had believed the great age of adventure was already over. Boredom and a breach of promise dispute propelled him from his Boston home and he went to Buenos Ayres, acquiring a dissolute’s Spanish. There he heard about Ballarat gold and made his run for Australia. Others took the journey with him seeking fortune—sick at heart rounding the Horn, then stitching up the coast of South America as far as Peru to find another vessel. Thence across the rollers of the Pacific in a stinking overloaded bark. First landfall, and a hasty one, at Chatham Island in the Galapagos chain, where twenty turtles were taken live for the ship’s galley, and the knowledge of FitzRoy’s Beagle and Charles Darwin having called there toasted in Chilean amontillado. Leaking and wallowing the whole way, they made, finally, landfall in New South Wales. Then came the march to the gold diggings of the 1850s through stupendous heat under a brassy sky. Following that, failure on the diggings. And retreat to this haven.

  MacCracken walked his clifftops on calm days, wading through prickly banksia trees and flat-growing hakea bushes with spidery orange flowers. He came to a lookout point and never failed to amaze himself. The eye of the Pacific stared into unfathomable space. It was a great emptiness and a mystery after the closeness of domestic life near to hand. Consider London’s Hampstead, he wrote in an essay (never having been there):

  with the roiling South Atlantic instead of the ‘Heath’, and no end to be seen on the other side, only a glaring bowl of blue studded with albatross, white-caps, and sometimes a ruddering Leviathan.

  MacCracken felt a little afraid when he stood on those clifftops. Sight of the sea made him know there were things he was yet to dare, and so the sea challenged him, and he was often worse-off for his constitutional—more dissatisfied with himself than was good. Men like Covington he reckoned had faced the sea with inferior trepidation: they simply did not allow it to move them, and were lucky in that. It gave the world sailors at least.

  So MacCracken with his snobberies got away from the cliffs and hiked back to the cove he loved so dearly. It was a world unto itself where afternoon sea-changes of weather, called southerly busters, raced overhead, leaving the cove placid while whipping the waters of the harbour farther in. MacCracken liked the feeling better than the mish-mash of weather stirring Sydney Town a few miles around the shore, where they had a summery succession of hot, cold and humid, with hot prevailing after the passing of the rest in a furnace-breath of westerly wind bringing the smoke of the ever-burning bushfires. Here was a more idyllic setting for MacCracken’s moods. Let his friends find him ‘on location’, as he said in the fashion of the day, whensoever they wished. Let the world steam over him while he hunkered down a little removed from its chops and changes, a privileged spectator on a tiled verandah, a glass of ale in his hand, and his kangaroo dog, Carl, an amiably deficient hound, lapping milk at his feet.

  All was cosy. All was right. MacCracken craved no cataclysmic dramas. He had his surgery, saw a few patients for cuts and scratches, and the rest of his time he gave to friendship, dalliance, and his literary pursuits. Nightly there came a tapping at his window-pane, and he enjoyed the close attentions of a visitor discreet as she was willing— ‘The older Miss X,’ he told his friends, ‘if you want a name at all.’

  MacCracken’s essays were his personal pride and his most abject failure. Inspired by Emerson and Thoreau, they observed nature in a genial fashion and toyed with philosophy. They made humour out of his travails. ‘The bird was so tame I killed it with my hat,’ he wrote of his Galapagos Islands interlude. ‘In experimental mood, I persuaded a tortoise to haul a rock.’ He did not think the essays were bad, but though he sent them away in scrupulously tied packages, nought returned to him but silence. His soul went six months across the sea and came six months back unenthused-over. If anyone asked why he refrained from publishing in the Sydney Morning Herald in preference to Boston and Edinburgh journals, he said, ‘You know as much of colonial taste as you do of my particular style.’ But the fact was that the Sydney Morning Herald would not have him either.

  He showed an essay to Covington, who kept it an hour, then handed it back with a grunt.

  ‘Mr Darwin was there before you.’

  ‘Well, so he was, old bookworm, and the whole world knows it through his journal of the Beagle. I saw the birds that he shot, finches, hardly bigger than mosquitoes, some of them were.’ MacCracken shouted into Covington’s ear: ‘Bang! It was done.’

  Covington twisted his mouth disdainfully.

  ‘Obtained,’ he said, ‘if you want the right word. Not shot.’

  ‘What is that you say, miraculous old pedant?’

  He spoke the words to Covington’s retreating back.

  ‘Obtained,’ Covington repeated without turning around.

  ‘Sir?!’ pleaded MacCracken.

  Covington hauled back a leg and took aim at a coconut that MacCracken had placed on a stone as a decorative detail, and sent it flying through the doctor’s garden of shells with a well-placed kick.

  ‘Finches!’ The word exploded into the night.

  MacCracken sighed, then went back indoors. For a minute he heard the coconut bouncing through the rocks down to the shore as Covington pursued it to destruction.

  MacCracken pulled his journal of the Beagle from the shelf and turned to a page headed ‘Ornithology’. He saw that Covington was correct and that ‘obtained’ was the very word used.

  Another six months passed and Covington returned from his home in the south. It was October and changeable weather to the point of madness, hot as the equator in the morning, misty and chill with low rushing cloud in the afternoon. MacCracken looked up one day and there Covington was on the horizon, unmoving, watchful. He sat on a hired pony. Much had transpired between them during their separation. They had corresponded on money matters and through the facility of Covington’s Sydney agent MacCracken already owned cuts in a number of Covington’s cargoes: whale oil, timber, hides. They were beginning to show him a handy profit. So there was no more welcome visitor on MacCracken’s rocky patch than the man he saw.

  ‘Mr Covington!’ MacCracken waved his hat.

  Overlarge on horseback, Covington was a stone pillar awaiting a lightning bolt. His movements were a story of shoulder bones, rib bones, ankle bones and skull all broken in his youth, mended, and thereafter very sore. Those ‘boans’ ground against each other and were stiff, lending Covington his monumental manner when he attempted turning his neck.

  MacCracken strode up the white track. ‘Old fellow, how good to see you!’

  ‘That woman who helped me,’ Covington looked down from his hired nag, ‘what was her name?’

  Covington’s gaze had all the p
ower of a lament. MacCracken helped him down. They descended the landscape of rocky headland and sheltered bay.

  That day MacCracken wrote in his diary:

  I love the old fossil, he warms my liking, it is a good feeling to know we are friends.

  Two years later MacCracken went back to the date and circled the entry in red. It was because of a letter Covington carried in his satchel but was no more likely to take out and show around than he was to strip his clothes and walk naked. It was a letter from Charles Darwin and it read:

  Dear Covington, I have for some years been preparing a work for publication which I commenced twenty years ago, and for which I sometimes find extracts in your handwriting! The work will be my biggest; it treats on the origin of varieties of our domestic animals and plants, and on the origin of species in a state of nature. I have to discuss every branch of natural history, and the work is beyond my strength and tries me sorely.

  Two years. That would be the length of time Covington nurtured his pain before MacCracken understood the story he carried in his bones, and how it ate away at him. Two years before Covington showed MacCracken the letter. By then MacCracken would, in a kind of by-product of shame, know what his own role was to be in the tale of Covington’s life, and how to go about correcting his ignorance and bringing his friend through to his end.

  Covington stayed a week subjecting himself to the pounding of Nurse. MacCracken had leisure to examine him for his present state of health, which was excellent save for his rheumatism and deafness. Like a farrier re-shoeing an old horse he gave Covington’s ears another syringing. Covington declared himself well satisfied, though he heard no better.

  ‘What made you deaf?’ MacCracken shouted a question he had asked before.

  As before he got a deflected reply.

  ‘Why is a worm blind?’ responded Covington, then answered his own question: ‘Because it lives in the dark, that is why.’