![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() He had swung his kitbag onto the hot dust of the siding and abruptly burst into tears. He had seen a grown man cry only once before, a scene of astonishment when his brother Tom returned from the Great War in France and got off the train. He was nine, had come inside to have his mother look at a blood blister on his thumb, and had little else to compare it to. Its slowing rhythm reminded him of a rabbit’s hind legs thumping the ground as it is strangled by a snare, the only sound he had ever heard that was similar. Only his crying was fixed in Dorrigo Evans’ memory. Jackie Maguire was an old man, maybe forty, perhaps older, and he was trying to brush the tears away from his pockmarked face with the back of his hand. Jackie Maguire was sitting in the Evanses’ small dark kitchen, crying. Shadows came later in the form of a forearm rising up, its black outline leaping in the greasy light of a kerosene lantern. Over and over.īless you, his mother says as she holds him and lets him go. Like entering the sea and returning to the beach. ![]() Blinding light and him toddling back and forth, in and out of its transcendent welcome, into the arms of women. Why at the beginning of things is there always light? Dorrigo Evans’ earliest memories were of sun flooding a church hall in which he sat with his mother and grandmother. ![]()
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