The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough Page B

pounded his fist on the table savagely; he had been so looking forward to going with his father as an apprentice shearer, and Archibald’s was to have been his first pen. ‘Why should he do a dirty thing like this to us, Daddy? We were due to start there tomorrow.’
    ‘He doesn’t say why, Bob. I suppose some scab contractor undercut me.’
    ‘Oh, Paddy!’ Fee sighed.
    Baby Hal began to cry from the big bassinet by the stove, but before Fee could move Meggie was up; Frank had come back inside the door and was standing, tea in hand, watching his father narrowly.
    ‘Well, I suppose I’ll have to go and see Archibald,’ Paddy said at last. ‘It’s too late now to look for another shed to replace his, but I do think he owes me a better explanation than this. We’ll just have to hope we can find work milking until Willoughby’s shed starts in July.’
    Meggie pulled a square of white towel from the huge pile sitting by the stove warming and spread it carefully on the worktable, then lifted the crying child out of the wicker crib. The Cleary hair glittered sparsely on his little skull as Meggie changed his diaper swiftly, and as efficiently as her mother could have done.
    ‘Little Mother Meggie,’ Frank said, to tease her.
    ‘I’m not!’ she answered indignantly. ‘I’m just helping Mum.’
    ‘I know,’ he said gently. ‘You’re a good girl, wee Meggie.’ He tugged at the white taffeta bow on the back of her head until it hung lopsided.
    Up came the big grey eyes to his face adoringly; over the nodding head of the baby she might have been his own age, or older. There was a pain in his chest, that this should have fallen upon her at an age when the only baby she ought to be caring for was Agnes, now relegated forgotten to the bedroom. If it wasn’t for her and their mother, he would have been gone long since. He looked at his father sourly, the cause of the new life creating such chaos in the house. Served him right, getting done out of his shed.
    Somehow the other boys and even Meggie had never intruded on his thoughts the way Hal did; but when Fee’s waistline began to swell this time, he was old enough himself to be married and a father. Everyone except little Meggie had been uncomfortable about it, his mother especially. The furtive glances of the boys made her shrink like a rabbit; she could not meet Frank’s eyes or quench the shame in her own. Nor should any women go through that, Frank said to himself for the thousandth time, remembering the horrifying moans and cries which had come from her bedroom the night Hal was born; of age now he hadn’t been packed off elsewhere like the others. Served Daddy right, losing his shed. A decent man would have left her alone.
    His mother’s head in the new electric light was spun gold, the pure profile as she looked down the long table at Paddy unspeakably beautiful. How had someone as lovely and refined as she married an itinerant shearer from the bogs of Galway? Wasting herself and her Spode china, her damask table napery and her Persian rugs in the parlor that no one ever saw, because she didn’t fit in with the wives of Paddy’s peers. She made them too conscious of their vulgar loud voices, their bewilderment when faced with more than one fork.
    Sometimes on a Sunday she would go into the lonely parlor, sit down at the spinet under the window and play, though her touch had long gone from want of time to practice and she could no longer manage any but the simplest pieces. He would sit beneath the window among the lilacs and the lilies, and close his eyes to listen. There was a sort of vision he had then, of his mother clad in a long bustled gown of palest pink shadow lace sitting at the spinet in a huge ivory room, great branches of candles all around her. It would make him long to weep, but he never wept any more; not since that night in the barn after the police had brought him home.
    Meggie had put Hal back in the bassinet, and gone to stand beside