Benang

by Kim Scott

Fanny and the old man knew one another. Perhaps he called to her.

  Fanny saw all the ropes in the stables where the women had been tied, and one of the men—either a Done, a Mustle, or Moore—working at a grindstone with his back to her. She studied his vulnerability, and retreated. She stepped over more ropes on the verandah, and into the gloomy house. The air was stale, and she pulled the child closer to her breast as she crossed the cold stone floor. An even darker room, and the smell of gunpowder. Another, a bedroom, but nothing like keys nearby.

  Back to the kitchen. Above the fire, a shelf.

  The keys were heavy, and jangled their malice. The child grabbed them, and Fanny—holding the child’s hand in her own to keep the keys silent—slipped back into daylight. The house was like a deep cave which faces away from the sun.

  Fanny unchained the old man, and he embraced Fanny and the child as one. Then, indicating that she must return the keys to the house, he moved toward the stables.

  Fanny heard the scream as she placed the keys back on the shelf. It was a scream which froze everything, and it seemed a very long wait before that moment moved onto the next and she was able to rush outside and see an agitated Sandy One at the wagon.

  Their eyes met across the space between them, and they turned together to see the old man Fanny had released hurrying away from the shed. The old man glanced across at Fanny, and then at Sandy standing with the horses. Although he held the axe in only one hand, he did not wave but simply veered away and disappeared into the scrub by the creek.

  Sandy waved Fanny across to him, and she hid herself and the child among the wagon’s load. Sandy continued to fuss at the horses and Fanny listened. The voice of one of the Mustle brothers called out to Sandy, who pulled up the horses. ‘Nah,’ said Sandy One Mason. ‘Didn’t see anything. Nah, haven’t heard nothing.’

  Fanny heard other men arrive, rush away again.

  The wagon creaked and shifted. Not far from the homestead Fanny—cautiously peering from the load, peeking over bales—saw a small group of men women children, running and falling before station men on horseback.

  And suddenly the child, Harriette, had somehow fallen from the wagon, and was stumbling toward the distant violence, calling something in her shrill voice. Sandy One leapt to the ground, and ran after her. He threw her up to Fanny, who once again concealed herself and the child amongst the load on the wagon.

  My family left and did not return for many years. It was such a sorry place. Fanny and Sandy One huddled within small campfires, and talked of how the firelight changed the look of them, how it made them appear aged and sacred. Fragile and forever.

  And so it was that we—my uncles, my grandfather and I—turned back toward Gebalup the next day and deviated from a humming and stale journey along bitumen roads which, Uncle Will informed me, my father had helped build.

  Uncle Jack took us through a neglected farm gate somewhere between the townsites of Wirlup Haven and Gebalup.

  ‘They got a permit,’ I said. ‘From the police. To kill.’ I had seen a reference to police permission for a revenge killing among my grandfather’s papers. ‘Eighteen, they were allowed to kill eighteen.’

  Uncle Jack snorted. ‘More than that, they killed just about everyone around here. Most Nyoongars still won’t come here, just wind up the windows and drive right through Gebalup.’

  Perhaps it is most exciting to gallop and shoot and blast holes in people as they turn and fumble with whatever slight weapon they might carry; to keep the horses stomping and rearing, to turn around and around, to reload and shoot; to think these which the dogs seize and fling about are not humans, these are not men women children.

  But it is afterwards that the words come. Oh, they are not really human. Not like us. We are superior (and here is our proof).

  Forget it.

  But there has been such a lot of suffering. Again and again.

  The bodies were dragged away from the creek to prevent contamination and damage to stock. A fire. Maybe heap the bones together.

  We stopped the car and walked to an old mine shaft, the construction above it seemingly frozen in the act of falling. Little gullies showed the ground in cross-section. ‘I had the bones hidden away in there,’ said Uncle Jack, ‘for a time.’ Large ones, small ones. Skull, hand, the tiny what-names bones of a foot. Jack Chatalong did not know the names. Fanny would have, in her own tongue.

  There would have been femur, pelvis, tibia, spine, vertebra even, and many funny bones. Is there pleasure to be found anywhere in this pain?

  They had all been collected, and placed together among the granite rocks, high where the water would not reach and the sun might bleach them pure. What could be done? Bones white like the skin of the young ones will be, the children flowing from these, the survivors growing paler and paler and maybe dying.

  Well, Fanny had collected the bones, and sung here. Uncle Jack sang once again, when he took us there, and Uncle Will muttered some prayer or other.

  registering romance

  I asked it of my two uncles, even looked to my grandfather as I did so. ‘How come Sandy One and Fanny registered their children? Why did they marry, that way? There must have been some others did that.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Uncle Jack nodded. ‘Some. But that meant another sort of death, for our ancestors, because some of us tried to forget about them altogether.’ He looked long at Uncle Will.

  ‘But not me,’ I said. ‘Anyway, why did Sandy and Fanny do all this? Did it mean protection?’

  ‘Yes.’ Clearly Uncle Will thought so. ‘Sandy even sent the kids to a mission, for a bit.’

  Why? For my sake? For your sake. For our sake.

  For someone’s sake...

  And when I eventually came to write it up, I was still not sure why I was doing so. Was it for my children? For me? For all of us? I had thought I was an end, and had wanted a beginning, but that is to think of it in the wrong way. It is a continuation. It is survival.

  Fanny and Sandy One.

  Some would call it a romance.

  Simple names: Sandy, Fanny.

  They followed the telegraph line. It was newly completed. Sandy had come this way on the boats, just before and after he took up with that last mad, whaling venture. He had tossed long posts into the ocean, and left them to float to shore and into the hands of men constructing their own line of communication across the country.

  Many of those straight and upright posts were raw and red, the life smell still clinging to them. Looking from beneath, Fanny and Sandy saw how the wire divided the sky, how clouds crossed it, not faltering. Birds rested, then flapped randomly away. Lines such as these carry messages; and they listened to this one sing in the wind.

  Sandy wanted to follow it all the way to Frederickstown to register the child’s birth. If he registered his child, then it would be murder when they took, used, killed like they did. Because there would be the certificate. It’d be written down, there’d be words saying who there was. Then it couldn’t be just for fun, just to feel the power, just to try to make up for being like nearly dead that people were killed. Some people wanted everything for themselves, and if you got in their way...

  The boss had smirked at him. Would have said something like, ‘What chance, eh? Look at its father, a black mother. Where’s it going to live? What sort of education? Send it away, send it away to give it a chance.’

  It was a long way to travel. Sandy had only journeyed this far by sea, but had heard the talk of shepherds, prospectors, teamsters. Horses ate the poison, and died along with scores of the sheep. You walked—behind boss horse sheep—across grazed and broken ground, through different kinds of shit. There was never enough water.

  The diaries and journals tell me that there was nothing but plains of sand and sharp rolling stones. Impenetrable mallee. Salt lakes, and brackish streams. You ate tinned dog, listened for the croaking of the green canaries, slept at the Star Hotel.

  Now, him and Fanny, the child in the wheelbarrow. There
were flowers spread across the undulating plains. Pinks, creams, yellow white and blue; delicate little things, looking so fragile, but so hardy, it seemed. The sun did not mark them, nor the wind tear.

  The mallee was in flower, brazenly red. In the mornings the wind pushed at their backs, and in the afternoons they felt a breeze on their faces. Or was it that they moved with an effortless speed, gliding along like the soft white clouds?

  There were kangaroos all about, keeping an eye out ears up. The animals looked at them and scratched their chests, thinking. Then bounded away with such exuberance.

  Fanny and Sandy moved across grassy plains. Sandy thought of all the books he’d read, yet understood that it was people and fire had made this parkland. You could look across, and yeah it was green and soft and undulating; it was what was called hill and dale, with running creeks and tall trees here and there. They were Yate trees, their high crowns glistening in the afternoon sun. And their yellow sap; that yellow sap it tasted like sugar.

  There was another tree. Sandy broke off a twig and smelled raspberry jam. Or his senses were deceiving him, his memory muddled.

  ‘Possums like these flowers,’ said Fanny, glancing around and high. Her finger traced scratches down a tree trunk and, where they ceased, it was a mere possum’s leap to the ground. No possums here today but. Sandy ate the flowers.

  Black cockatoos kept rising from trees, screaming and calling as they spiralled up. Their black feathers, the white-tipped ones at the tail, might have fallen down about the couple, soft and congratulatory. A celebration.

  There were more and more peppermint trees, and growing closest to the coast and near deep creeks, variations of the banksia they knew.

  Fanny ripped flowerstalks from the banksia. The flowers were golden, tiny and ticklish, and she put them into Sandy’s mouth. She penetrated him with golden-downed stalks and he sucked at the honey he tasted there.

  Fanny led him into green rushes and they pushed and parted the close and sharp-edged green, their feet feeling the water long before it created the sudden space before them. They drank, and whenever Sandy—in the long future before him—remembered this his senses became confused. He would see a surface of dark water, and recall the taste of a pool brimming with daytime stars and tiny, pale blossoms.

  In fact, the water was crowded. There were green floating creepers, insects, themselves, and the nodding dark heads—ringed with petals—of the tall rushes behind them. And then the occasional rippling of the air showing its breath.

  There were leeches, too. Fanny searched for the words. That one-who-sits-on- his-face-and-drinks-blood. It was another part of the world she was returning him to, and he had to smile for it.

  He never remembered the midges, hardly noticed them at the time, except that he thought they were the reason for moving on a little further and camping near a stream which fell onto rocks, grumbled a little, and changed its direction.

  Sandy spat it back. It was salty. But later in the night, when the face in the sky was at its most distant, Fanny took him to a crevice in the rocks to one side and below where the salt water tumbled. At the bottom of the crevice, there; water, rose from between the rocks, growing like the moon and its beaming. He tasted sweet water from her hands, heard the faint roar of water beneath the ground.

  They looked at it again and again throughout the night, and the water at the little spring rose and rose until it became a well. In the morning it had gone.

  There was a harbour at the bottom of a muddy street and a cold wind crossed from the hills at its far side, buffeted the stone buildings, ruffled itself over the cobbles, and swept irritably up the street to meet the descending man, woman, wheelbarrow and child. The wind eddied around them, as it had in the dark entrance of each cold building it passed, and lingered a little longer at the church. Perhaps because of the ceremony.

  Water was poured over a soft skull, and ink swirled within the grids ruled on thin white paper.

  Name: Harriette Mason.

  Father: Sandy Mason, Shepherd. Mother: Fanny, An Aboriginal.

  It is flamboyant handwriting, yet its bold flourishes do not quite transgress the lines. Names are disposed of. You would think this no place, and that there are no words here, from which to continue.

  Harriette. They called the girl Harriette. A good English name.

  Fanny, Sandy, the baby Harriette; they headed east, and rather than skirting around the ranges they went through a pass, which led to an old port, where the whalers and sealers used to trade their catch for rum. Sandy knew it from his childhood, shepherding with his own mother and father, and hoped to find work on a boat, and thereby transport them back to Dubitj Creek.

  But first they came through the heavy stone bluffs which were defined, dark and sharp, against the soft colours of the early sky. On some of the slopes there were tall trees, on others masses of weathered stone with extrusions of grey-green leaf and a red blooming.

  They detoured, climbing, exchanging the child’s weight, until they stood surrounded by cloud and what could only be sky. The rock named, you might say, Drizzle-carrier. Fanny stamped her feet on the small flat surface beneath them. Again, there was a spring. It brimmed, water trickling across damp rock and into the mist.

  Coming down, emerging, they looked out over the tops of great and ancient trees. Fanny and Sandy called to one another, their voices echoing, again, again. Many times. The child listened, eyes wide mouth open. And so the parents felt compelled to shout pleasant things at one another, because offering, because the voices repeated so.

  As they may do still. If only I had the ears, memory...

  A tongue to speak.

  I remembered my grandfather’s words, almost as if they had emerged again in the night, in that bush, around that campfire when the other three of us felt so frail and bitter. The words which had come clear from among Grandad’s spit and bubble, from among his buzz and groan.

  ‘Sandy Mason. He spoke some Nyoongar. Even Daniel did. Not you. Not your dad. So how can you ever...’

  His words cut deep. I had inherited his language, the voices of others, his stories. That history whose descendants write:

  There was never any trouble. Never blood spilled, or a gun raised in anger.

  Uncle Jack laughed. ‘Don’t need guns when you got poisoned flour, poisoned waterholes.’

  Even Uncle Will, ‘Yeah, that’s not right.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s what they’d like to think.’

  ‘Yeah. There must’ve been death everywhere, for us, for Fanny and Sandy.’

  I surprised myself, not only with my attempt to be balanced (which is so important when you’re up in the air, and—after all—I was always fair), but also with my recollection of Grandad’s references. I said that it is sometimes admitted that the pastoralists took up firearms:

  They crept to the natives camp deep in the night, gently raised their weapons and fired an earth-shattering volley over the heads of the sleeping natives. The natives rose as one man, and as one demented man they screamed and fled through the bush with more frightful roars following them. Their bewildered pet dingoes yelped and ran in a wide circle—one of them was shot dead to show what these noisome weapons could do. Some of the terrified natives in the rear saw the incident and, screaming again, they left their weapons and ran as fast and far as their slender legs could carry them.

  After the shooting, and chuckling like naughty schoolboys, they wandered about the deserted camp and chose the best of the native weapons for their collections! The rest were put on the smouldering fires and left to burn.

  Thus all attempts at uprisings were frustrated in such a way as to leave no bitterness but just a quiet sense of mastery on the part of the white man, and a good lesson to the primitive mind.

  It was east. East. Where tomorrow may be.

  There was a tree, and they saw it from far away, standing tall and alone and casting a long shadow at them. Sandy and Fanny felt that shadow reaching for them
first thing each morning after that day, and it would only fall back as they came fully awake, and the sun rose higher, burnt stronger.

  They had camels hitched to a cart, but it rained and they would have been better off with horses. The wheels turned with a sucking sound, and the mud filled the space between the wheel spokes.

  It was rare rain; and they came to a new day with the moisture still in the air, and the sun before them. Fanny couldn’t hear the voices, not over that distance; not over the creaking of the wheels, the slap of the harness and traces, the shuffling of the beasts. The sucking sound, still, of the earth’s resentment of turning wheels.

  The crack of rifle shots.

  There was just that one tree, tall above the tufted scrub which stretched away in all directions. Hanging from it, what seemed assorted shadows. But these were too solid for shadows, and although too heavy for the desert breeze they nonetheless swayed, and shifted, and probably spun on their axis if ever you got close enough to look.

  After each new movement, the sound of a rifle shot. There were only a few shooters. My family, the shooters; they stared at one another across a space. Well, you would want to keep a distance, wouldn’t you?

  Fanny, Sandy One, their tiny children my ancestors, saw several thin columns of smoke as they approached the homestead. Signals. To hear the bosses talk it was as if they were lost in a forest of charred trees which had suddenly popped through the earth’s crust. Yeah, they were worried.

  ‘Well, she heard anything then?’ a boss asked Sandy One, tossing his head in Fanny’s direction. Fanny was untying the load. The boss said there’d been fires on and off for days.

  The station blacks had told him that the blacks were gathering to attack the station. The women he kept were sick with anxiety.

  ‘They’re going to kill us,’ he said. ‘That’s the word.’ He indicated the people gathered at the woodheap. ‘But you can’t trust them, any of them, niggers.’ Sandy held the man’s gaze.