54 / COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH
well known. Of late he had branched out of the ranks of youths in his search for challenges, and the local men still talked about the day he had beaten Jim Collins to a pulp, though Jim Collins was twenty-two years old, stood six feet four in his socks and could lift horses. With his left arm broken and his ribs cracked, Frank had fought on until Jim Collins was a slobbering mass of bloodied flesh at his feet, and he had to be forcibly restrained from kicking the senseless face in. As soon as the arm healed and the ribs came out of strapping, Frank went into town and lifted a horse, just to show that Jim wasn't the only one who could, and that it didn't depend on a man's size. As the sire of this phenomenon, Paddy knew Frank's reputation very well and understood Frank's battle to gain respect, though it did not prevent his becoming angry when fighting interfered with the work in the forge. Being a small man himself, Paddy had had his share of fights to prove his courage, but in his part of Ireland he was not diminutive and by the time he arrived in New Zealand, where men were taller, he was a man grown. Thus his size was never the obsession with him it was with Frank. Now he watched the boy carefully, trying to understand him and failing; this one had always been the farthest from his heart, no matter how he struggled against discriminating among his children. He knew it grieved Fee, that she worried over the unspoken antag- onism between them, but even his love for Fee could not overcome his exasperation with Frank. Frank's short, finely made hands were spread across the open paper defensively, his eyes riveted on Paddy's face in a curious mixture of pleading and a pride that was too stiff-necked to plead. How alien the face was! No Cleary or Armstrong in it, except per- haps a little look of Fee around the eyes, if Fee's eyes had been dark and could have snapped and flashed the way THE THORN BIRDS / 55
Frank's did on slightest provocation. One thing the lad did not lack, and that was courage. The subject ended abruptly with Paddy's remark about Frank's size; the family ate stewed rabbit in unusual silence, even Hughie and Jack treading carefully through a sticky, self-conscious conver- sation punctuated by much shrill giggling. Meggie refused to eat, fixing her gaze on Frank as if he were going to disappear from sight any moment. Frank picked at his food for a decent interval, and as soon as he could excused himself from the table. A minute later they heard the axe clunking dully from the woodheap; Frank was attacking the hardwood logs Paddy had brought home to store for the slow-burning fires of winter. When everyone thought she was in bed, Meggie squeezed out of her bedroom window and sneaked down to the woodheap. It was a tremendously important area in the continuing life of the house; about a thousand square feet of ground padded and deadened by a thick layer of chips and bark, great high stacks of logs on one side waiting to be reduced in size, and on the other side mosaic-like walls of neatly prepared wood just the right size for the stove firebox. In the middle of the open space three tree stumps still rooted in the ground were used as blocks to chop dif- ferent heights of wood. Frank was not on a block; he was working on a massive euca- lyptus log and undercutting it to get it small enough to place on the lowest, widest stump. Its two-foot-diameter bulk lay on the earth, each end immobilized by an iron spike, and Frank was standing on top of it, cutting it in two between his spread feet. The axe was moving so fast it whistled, and the handle made its own separate swishing sound as it slid up and down within his slippery palms. Up it flashed above his head, down it came in a dull silver blur, carving a wedge-shaped chunk out of the iron-hard wood as easily as if it had been a pine or a deciduous tree. Sundered pieces