Tourmaline Read Online Free Page A

I hope you break down and fry in your syphilitic bloody truck.’
    But the truck was already moving, the driver heard nothing. Slowly he slid away, towards the red road and the ranges, remote, mysterious. And Byrne, meanwhile, clutching his guitar in the middle of the road, was weeping with rage and pity. This was the eccentricity of Byrne, that drink brought him to tears.
    And the diviner lay now in the open sun, looking very terrible. It was too much, too much to bear. We wanted to cover him, even bury him, anything rather than to go on looking at the monstrous joke of his face.
    ‘Jack. Horse,’ Kestrel said. ‘Lend a hand to carry him into Tom’s.’ But he himself retired to the shade of his own doorway, and stood there bleakly watching.
    So three men lifted the diviner, and carried him across the wide street into Tom Spring’s house of silence; where Tom, looking up, vaguely, from some book he was reading, said: ‘Ah. Has the truck come, already?’
    *
    I should explain that relations between Kestrel and Mary Spring were on the strained side; and the cause was not her piety or his lack of it, but Deborah. For Deborah had lived in the Springs’ house since her sixth year, when her mother (who had been given the name of Agnes Day, as a compliment to Jesus) broke a bottle of rum, half a dozen eggs and her neck by falling down an abandoned shaft near the native camp. She was drunk, of course, and Mary blamed the calamity on the young Kestrel, who took no notice. There were some who suggested that Deborah was the daughter of Mary’s late uncle; but as there were few men in Tourmaline who might not have fathered a child on Agnes Day, no judgement was ever taken. Whatever the reason, Mary fostered Deborah, and loved her, and brought her up to be as promising a girl as had been seen in Tourmaline since Mary herself was young. And one day, six months before this event, Deborah had walked across the road to the hotel, and stayed there.
    Her ‘marriage’ (I must use the terms of Tourmaline) remained as mysterious as her paternity. But still Mary hoped, and plotted to win the girl away from Kestrel, whose imposing double bed had had more and darker occupants than Deborah (indeed, Agnes Day was one of them), though never for so long. What husband Mary had in mind for her daughter we did not discover; Jack Speed, perhaps, or even middle-aged Rocky—who could say? It was enough for Kestrel that she detested him. That was why he watched so dourly as Deborah followed the cortege through Tom Spring’s door.
    When Tom saw the body, he gave a sudden quick: ‘Ah,’ and came around the counter to us. He was a long time studying the face of our burden, and we waited meanwhile in silence; in expectation, too, I think, as if Tom might be able to decipher this extraordinary augury, which for all of us remained so inscrutable. But he said nothing in the end, only moved aside for Mary to open the door into the living quarters of the store, through which we bore him to a small room of white-washed iron, with a narrow iron bed, a cane chair, and a table supporting a basin and ewer which glared with roses.
    We laid our charge on a sea-grass mat while Deborah fetched sheets and made the bed. Then, very gently, we stripped him of boots and socks, and slit up the sleeves and back of his shirt to avoid touching his forearms with the cloth. Over his left breast there was a hollow scar, and another on his back, opposite. We lifted him on to the bed and supported his head with pillows, and then Mary came with cloths and a bowl of reddish Tourmaline water, and damped the cloths and draped them on his forehead. I bear witness that in all things she behaved according to the directions of
Everything A Lady Should Know
, the property of Tom’s grandmother.
    But Rock said that was not enough, and taking the bowl from Mary he swabbed the man’s body, and pulled the sheet over him and soaked that too. And then he said we must pull the bed out from