Benang

by Kim Scott

  ‘Sorry. Can’t help you here. Anyway, too young.’

  Will said nothing. Was struck dumb. He remembered this clerk, one of the older boys at school. His desk was a few boards slung across trestles. The flimsy hall sounded with shifting feet.

  ‘It’s no good coming here,’ the old school chum smiled at him from behind the desk, from behind his pen, from behind his sheets of paper. ‘You’ll have to see the Aborigines Department.’

  But. But. Will was a man as good as any. His father had named him the first white man born.

  Ern offered him his old job on the shit-cart, explaining that—because things were bad for him, too—he could not offer wages, only food and keep. Will could live among the tanks down the back there.

  Harriette, seeing Will’s ambition, reminded him of his Uncle Sandy Two Mason, who had gone to the war. He had made a place for himself here, but policeman Hall had squeezed him and made it impossible to return because of all the trouble. It wasn’t just silly men’s stuff; Sergeant Hall had wanted to make himself Uncle Sandy’s protector, which was intolerable for Sandy Two.

  Uncle Will liked to talk of his uncle, Sandy Two Mason. Uncle Will was a reader, and he could place Uncle Sandy in the stories he had read, in even the local histories he later devoured; all those roles for daring pioneers, for explorers of new territory, for men who were innovative and adaptable, brave and proud.

  He told us how his mother, Harriette, spoke of her brother, Sandy. She was proud of him. Uncle Sandy had his own block of land, she said. He has travelled everywhere. He can do anything, just like a white man. He is going to marry a white woman. This last troubled her, at once some sort of balancing of her family history. But would such a wife help keep our children alive? Or perhaps she thought, at last, revenge.

  If so she may have been a long way behind a great many others, a little late to arrive at this way of thinking.

  ‘Listen,’ said Uncle Will. At the time he was charged up and full of steam.

  Listen ... The train rattled, sounding like an ailing thing. Framed, fleetingly: brick, rusting iron, smoking chimneys. The sound changed; they flew across the river. Uncle Sandy Two’s feet hit the ground before the train stopped, and he charged at the city, thinking to take it with his boldness. He had the address on a piece of paper, had consulted a map beforehand but even so he reached the river almost before he knew it, and realised he had come too far. Relax. He had not come so far. Follow the river, turn back toward the railway. A hill. A big church. He walked down the side of a house.

  Remarkably, there was a queue at the back verandah. Calmed by the walk, and feeling safe among his fellows, he took his place in line. His fellows? Yes, they were people out of place. As he, were he not so careful and so proud, would also feel. The others looked around; up, down, not at one another. He saw a hat held by its brim, sheltering a groin; saw that some pulled at collars, turtle-moving their necks. A woman contorted herself; she looked over her shoulder, and then raised a foot to inspect her heel.

  He walked away, and watched from a distance that precluded conversation.

  Sandy joined the queue when it had dwindled, its members having entered the doorway and slumped back out of it one by one.

  Just as Sandy reached the door a face appeared diagonally from behind it, and Sandy quickly checked his fist from rapping.

  ‘Lunch,’ the face smiled. Door closed. Lock clicked.

  Sandy’s fist remained clenched, inches from the door. He let it drop.

  He sat on the verandah and lit another cigarette.

  ‘My mother. I believe my family is at Mogumber, and I want to get them out. They can come live with me.’

  The man opposite had a pen in his hand. There were rows and rows of small drawers behind him, and files which insisted that you tilt your head to read the tiny vertical labels, balanced as they were on redundant full stops.

  ‘I am Chief Protector Neville, as you would be aware,’ the man smiled. ‘And your name is?’

  Sandy Two saw that his answer meant something to this Mr Neville, whose mouth remained open as he began to form the sentence: ‘Ah ... Ah. You are a returned soldier, are you not? Wooloomooloo Road? ’

  The Chief Protector’s pen hovered above the page, describing little circles in the air. A hawk watching, waiting to fall, to grasp, to take away.

  Chief Protector Neville’s focus shifted. He went to a filing cabinet. Sandy looked around the room. A portrait of the king. The man’s attention was upon him again, and he held a bulky file in his hands.

  ‘Ah, yes. Your mother was Fanny Mason?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She was a full-blood?’

  ‘Yes.’ And then Sandy Two saw where this devil Neville was leading him. ‘I don’t really know. My father was a white man.’

  Our Chief Protector wished to study the man before him. He agreed with Mr Proud’s comments. Half-caste. And what eye was more informed and respected than his own? Half-caste, he repeated to himself, but unusually fair. His very fine mind recalled the relevant diagram. Firstcross, he believed. Remarkably fine features. Very well-spoken.

  A younger man entered the room. Sandy Two recognised the curious visitor of a year or two ago. The young man looked away from Sandy’s gaze.

  ‘Yes?’

  A further bundle of papers fell onto the Neville desk.

  ‘Thankyou.’

  ‘Oh. She’s passed away? I should have gone to see her, even if Hall...’

  ‘You are jumping to conclusions. And let me assure you that you need never worry about funeral arrangements. The Aborigines Department has...’

  ‘No. I don’t want the department having anything to do with this.’ But it was already done.

  ‘This is no affair of yours. The department is running the children’s affairs, and you have no business here.’ The Chief Protector looked up from his desk, from his papers and his card indexes. ‘Sandy, you have to come under my laws, you can’t get away from them.’

  ‘I’m not an Aboriginal. I defy you to call me one.’

  The Chief smiled, and his ears rose fractionally with the effort. He flicked at the raised corner of a piece of paper with his fingertip. Papers and small cards surrounded him in neat stacks.

  ‘What do you call your common-law wife?’

  ‘A white woman.’

  The undeniably white man shook his head, and tuttutted softly. ‘No. She is a half-caste.’

  Uncle Sandy Mason would not be denied. ‘Her father was a white man, her grandfather was a white man.’

  Family trees, and odd diagrams of genealogy appeared as if floating in some dark sea. And himself hanging from an upturned branch, like precarious fruit, about to fall.

  He knew the law. ‘I am not an Aboriginal but I am treated as if I am one. I want to be exempted. My family and myself not being Aboriginals should not be pauperised and kept under the act.’

  The Chief Protector held his hands in front of him with their palms up. ‘The proof is to the contrary, Sandy. And it is I, or my representatives, who decide who is or is not Aboriginal. I’m thinking of your family, Sandy. Did you ever hear the yarn about the needle and the camel?’

  Uncle Sandy wanted to look at something in the room, anything, anything but this man.

  The Chief, devil Neville, allowed himself a grin. ‘Well, on account of your police reports, you have as much hope of getting an exemption as a camel has of getting through the eye of a needle.’

  Constable Hall’s reports, deviating from all correct and in order, strictly routine patrols ... Constable Hall’s reports from all those years ago now stopped Uncle Sandy right there dead in his tracks.

  Well, not quite dead, not literally. Not yet.

  what jack and kathleen built

  After the noise of the motor, the wind tearing at the metal and canvas of the car; after the jolting, the shifting, the being thrown together and the final slewing of the car that brought them to this stop it was silent.

  Silence.
>
  Ern uttered clipped and strangled sounds. Barely audible curses.

  Kathleen looked into the distance. She might have laughed, but she knew his anger. He had wanted to get her away from Harriette, and to himself. Now this.

  The sound of insects, the earth moving. She breathed the light and the heat.

  Ernest returned from his inspection of the car.

  ‘The front wheel. I knew it. Soon as we lost the spare.’

  The wheel was no longer a circle.

  Kathleen lit a fire a short distance from the car to boil a billy, and sat in the shade while Ern removed the wheel. Even after replacing some of the spokes, he was unable to return it to its original shape.

  Kathleen watched him. Occasionally she stood and turned around in a slow circle, her eyes following the horizon. The sandy track they had been following curved in the middle distance, and then she could see only mallee scrub. But there, in the far distance, something a little taller, bobbing in the heatwaves.

  Ern’s shirtback was dark with sweat. He bumped and grazed his knuckles. Each breath, each curse, was louder than the one before.

  The shade had grown to embrace the two of them before Ern sat back, and placed his wrists on his knees. Even in relenting, his mouth remained tight. He couldn’t fix the wheel, and without it they might never be able to roll away across the flat land which surrounded them.

  ‘I can’t unbuckle it enough to tighten the spokes,’ he said, half to think it through, half to complain of the injustice. He might perish, shrivel, be forgotten.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I could sit on it. Like this.’

  She did so, and her weight held the rim so that it formed something more like a circle.

  Kathleen saw the relief in Ern’s face. She bounced up and down on the wheel.

  ‘Stop.’

  She waited, patiently, until it was all but done, and then began to bounce again, lightly. Bouncing, she looked over her shoulder at him, at the patch of pink scalp at his crown, the grazed knuckles. The concentration.

  He was aware of her buttocks bouncing on the wheel, her back, the twist of her neck and her throat. He thought of that policeman, and squinted up at laughter which fell upon him as if from the dazzling sun, the vast pure sky.

  Kathleen stood. Ern held the wheel. He ran his fingers around it, felt the weight of its circle. He clung to the technology of hub, of spokes and the arch of a rim from which the weight of a car could be seen to hang. Civilisation.

  He replaced the wheel.

  ‘Yeah, well,’ he said. ‘What about you show us what you’re made of, be a good darky and find us a camp and some water.’

  But she was already in the cab, and pointing ahead.

  The sun was low, and it was as if the earth had tinted the sky. A pink light bathed them as they approached a crowd of trees.

  These trees stood tall, and their reaching trunks and limbs were a creamy white, were mottled; in places their limbs were the pink of the sky.

  Ern saw limbs of flesh almost like his own; a little warmer in colour, and so lithe, so long, so slender. The trees’ flesh swelled as the sap moved in them. There were folds, and clefts where limb and trunk met.

  ‘I came here with my mother, once,’ Kathleen said. ‘I think, she brought us here.’

  ‘Your mother!’ Ern snorted.

  ‘Harriette. I mean Aunty Harriette.’

  Ern was thirsty.

  Again they sat in a relative quiet. The engine creaked as it cooled in the shade of these surprising trees. There was a lot of good water underground.

  ‘This is a good camp,’ he said.

  Kathleen smiled, still looking at the trees, not at Ern.

  ‘Now,’ Ern grinned. ‘What about that fresh water?’

  ‘I think...’ Kathleen walked in among the trees.

  ‘How do you know this stuff anyway?’

  ‘I don’t know. From when I was a little girl, and Harriette always ... You need a big knife, or a little axe.’

  She was circling a tree.

  Ern, head down and stepping toward her with the small axe in his hand, looked up and saw a native embracing Kathleen. Ern saw two natives, embracing. It was a man, a black man. And his own wife.

  Kathleen freed an arm and beckoned Ern to her.

  ‘This is my brother,’ she said. ‘Jack, this is Ern. You remember. He is my husband.’ Again there was a little silence as they all adjusted themselves.

  Jack dug around the tree to expose a root. They cut one off, and Jack held it above Ern’s mouth. Ern knew it was the coolest, the clearest, the purest water he had ever tasted. But he couldn’t savour it. It seemed somehow tainted.

  ‘I had to get away from there,’ said Jack. ‘Find somewhere where no one knows me, maybe then I’ll be all right.’

  Like a sister, he had said, like a sister to me. Not a sister, not really.

  Ern thought they had been very slow to take their arms from one another. But Kathleen had returned to him and taken his hand.

  She knows me. He had looked over her shoulder and seen, even as his glance slyly swept on, Jack grinning. At him. At them.

  She wants me. Me.

  Jack could not help shaking his head and grinning, and was still doing it even in the light of a campfire late that night. He had only just got here, he said, after being sent to a wheat farm. But ... You couldn’t go into town. They set one day aside for Aboriginal people to do their shopping, and told him that was his day off. Not that he had money, most of it was banked for him, somewhere. He never saw it.

  And had they heard what that Mogumber place was really like? Anyone can be put there, just about (unless, maybe, you got yourself married to a white man). Criminals, black trackers with whips. They chase you down. It’s a prison there, it’s like a dog kennel.

  He was just trying to get away, find some peace. But he needed work, really. Keep to yourself, that’s the way, if you wanna live.

  They drove off with Jack’s bicycle roped awkwardly on top of a neatly interlocking stack of boxes, tools and luggage behind the cab.

  Ern had a job in Norseton, building, for the publican. It was verandahs, some further rooms.

  The publican’s voice and belly introduced the man an instant before the rest of him came out into the sunlight, with Ern at his back.

  The man said he had a room, for Ern and ... his missus.

  His eyes stayed on Kathleen as she came close to him; as she brushed past him, through the door, into the gloom of one of his own rooms. His gaze swung back to Jack, who still leaned against the truck. The man scratched himself, and Jack did the same, for his own amusement, but was grateful the big red man did not notice the mockery.

  ‘The woman, yeah. Long as she doesn’t cause any trouble. But not him. Haven’t got room. Yeah, I know, I’ve heard that some of these coons are all right but I haven’t met any.’

  It was convenient, Ern said, that Jack sleep on the tray of the truck.

  Ern had no dog to guard the vehicle, and he worried for his tools.

  Jack wrapped himself in a blanket and canvas, and lay with his head pressed against the locked toolchest. He listened to the voices in the pub, felt the cold night air on his face. And now the voices were close, suddenly intimate. He heard glass clinking, and slurred boasts were murmured, it seemed, into his ear.

  ‘See that builder? Taking his about with him. You reckon he really married her?’

  Jack’s hand roamed his body, found the stiffness, relaxed himself.

  Ern, conscience clear, rocked to and fro upon the not-his-sister’s body.

  Most of the building materials were on site. Ern set up a small bandsaw and cut planks from the seasoned logs the publican had stored away.

  There was a claypan near the edge of town and, not far away, an assortment of humpies and tents. Women and children came to the far edge of the claypan and, scooping the clear water from just above the mud, slowly filled old kerosene tins. Some balanced a stick across their shoulders, and hung
a bucket from each end.

  Not our people, thought Kathleen, watching from the corner of her eyes. Jack, remembering the camps, was not so sure. There were larger groupings, and what was that saying? There, but for the grace of God...

  Jack and Kathleen made a crude kiln to bake the bricks, and then spent days culling the surrounding scraggy scrub of firewood. They used picks to break up the clay and, pouring in more water, set a horse to working the earth. Kathleen walked at its bridle, around and around in a small circle, and the clay was stirred to a thin, muddy consistency which would swallow anything placed in it.

  They poured the soft earth into a mould, shaped it into bricks.

  The fire glowed day and night until the tangled pile of wood became a few straggly remainders, and there was only white ash; soft, fine, and somehow soothing. The wind lifted it, and spread it across them.

  Jack and Kathleen stacked the bricks as high as they could reach. They put handfuls of fine sand between each layer and the wind blew grit into their eyes, nostrils, ears, between their teeth; dust coated their skins, changed their voices, settled in their hair. The sun rose over the wall and, tired and dry and irritated by the dust, Kathleen and Jack turned away those who came visiting from the camp.

  Kathleen and Jack heard Ern’s motor as if from the sky, or from somewhere else altogether. They could see only bricks, a high wall before them. And when they turned away from the wall there was only the sloppy-holed earth and the blackened kiln, already crumbling.

  Jack dug trenches for the foundations in the earth behind the pub, while Ern and Kathleen began carting the bricks and soon the great stack of bricks was only a neat and diminishing ruin which they drove the truck between.

  Kathleen kept to the room they’d been given while Ern and Jack built the walls, and then she was enlisted once more.

  Jack slept on the ground inside the walls. In the evenings he heard the men leaving the pub in small groups, and heading out to the claypan on the edge of town.

  Jack slept inside a doorway so that the sun fell upon him as soon as it rose, and he let the light draw him up. He splashed the sleep away at the rainwater tank, and made tea on a little fire in the yard. The publican sent a meal out to him; bread, tea. He and the girl snatched at one another’s words before she hurried back.