Benang

by Kim Scott

  At Dubitj Creek Station, and not long after that last spree, he’d been going to shoot Patrick Coolman. Daniel had stopped him.

  He could have shot them both.

  Of course, he could understand what Patrick had done; he knew plenty who’d done the same thing. But, for it to happen to both his daughters? Harriette’s was the usual brutality, and he’d not been there. But he’d introduced Patrick and Dinah.

  Sandy One went over it all again, in his mind.

  It was the southern coast, a long way between two capital cities. It was the edge of the desert, but there was grass for stock, and some water. There were a number of little bays which made good harbours, sheltered as they were from the south-westerly wind and swell; from Wirlup Haven, you headed east and it was Kylie Bay, Dubitj Creek and then Point Zion. With the right eyes it was easy to find water, and grass for stock. From Point Zion you went north-west to Badjura, and then Norseton, and waterholes led you across to the goldfields, or back down to Kylie Bay.

  There were pastoral leases in the name of ex-convicts, of men who’d worked on stations further west, of men who’d jumped ship, of their cousins, their nephews. They were all hoping to get in on the action.

  There was a new workforce being built. The children, paler with each generation, gathered at the woodheap. A new skin.

  The women, many of them the men’s own daughters, were in great demand.

  Gold attracted more and more men. Someone nailed a sign to one of the flimsy walls surrounding a big tub of grog, and thus began a tavern.

  With so much activity at the goldfields, and with no railway yet built from the capital city on the west coast, there was more than enough work carting goods from the south coast up to the fields. Someone like Sandy One Mason, for instance, knew the coast from years of seafaring, from working on the telegraph line, from carting for the stations and homesteads; and from some deeper knowledge, some more intimate acquaintance. People said it was his missus.

  Teamsters waited for the boats close to Point Zion. The telegraph line touched Dubitj Creek, kept going. Very soon it was neglected, and disappeared, but here it passed between the teamsters’ camp on the coast and a range of hills. Granite peaks rose to the sky and helped keep the westerly winds from the bay. In the mornings, those rocky slopes, long polished by blowing sand, glowed with the colours of sunrise, and at their base old dunes rolled away toward the white beaches and the sea. Midway, there was a grassy plain and a soak for the animals.

  Close to the ocean the crest of each white dune was as crisply edged as folded paper. The white sand was soft and deeply scored where the teamsters had cleared a way to the beach, and rocks and timber had been placed there to stop the carts from bogging. Either side of the trail lay rubbish; a horseshoe, a bottle, an old boot, piece of rope, sheet of iron a strap a broken box. It seemed, among these slow and reforming mounds, that there floated the remains of some strange wreck. People had disappeared beneath the surface, the earth had closed over their passage, and only this flotsam remained.

  There were campfires in the soft gulleys. White and ruddy men, dark men and women.

  ‘They’re my daughters,’ Sandy told two tall twins who arrived in rain and stood at the end of tracks you could follow eastwards back across a red-earthed continent. Twin ruts which remained in the mud, and where vegetation never again grew, and which were later sealed with bitumen and crushed stone.

  Sandy One welcomed them to his campfire. He advised them.

  ‘My daughters,’ he said. ‘They are educated, they can read and write.’

  The twins spoke of their horses, sired by a stallion brought across the sea. Like ourselves, they thought, looking at one another and fingering their moustaches. The three men stroked the horses, looked at their teeth, lifted the tails, stood back and admired them. Well-bred, and strong. Intelligent.

  The twins helped Sandy mend his wagon. The men held the metal in a fire until it glowed red, then hammered and reshaped it. The next day when they attached it to the wagon they thought it was like new.

  One of the twins tousled the young Sandy Two’s hair. He had watched them the whole time. ‘Good on a horse, is he?’

  ‘My daughters,’ said Sandy One. ‘I registered their births. I will marry their mother. She’s everything you want a woman to be...’

  Mother and daughters were with the other women at another fire further back among the low and twisted trees.

  ‘A good partner, knows this country, keeps out of the way. Food everywhere. A best partner.’

  The twins thought of how it was with the women. They were lonely, those twins, scared even in their togetherness. The daughters were quite fair, really.

  ‘She’s been good to me,’ said Sandy, whose words were thick and sticky, whose tongue was black from rum and tobacco. ‘If it wasn’t for her...’

  Those red-haired twins, Daniel and Patrick Coolman, went to the goldfields and were back within a matter of weeks. Pragmatic opportunists, they could see a better plan than the dust and foolishness of that place.

  They had good skills. Each of them could do a blacksmith’s work, could build wheels, fix carts. They had their own wagons and horses, and Sandy One—continually journeying from Dubitj Creek to Point Zion, Badjura, Norseton, Kylie Bay, sometimes westward along the coast then back to Dubitj Creek again—was there to help them out. The men had not much else to do but tend their animals and help load and unload. Fanny and her children navigated. Her children.

  ‘Um, those girls of yours, Sandy.’

  Sandy One was vigilant, adaptable, flexible; but for all that it is as well that we have more than him and his memory to rely on. He was a little man, and with his olive complexion and fair, almost blond, hair he looked quite exotic, reminding travellers of some people in the south of Europe. The sun left its mark on him as he aged so that you could date him, almost, by the lines where his hair had gradually receded.

  Sandy One was a man with a long past, an insecure present, and a particularly uncertain future. Consider, for instance, myself as his future, and you will appreciate the uncertainty of it.

  He thought he knew the pattern of things, of new relationships being forged in the land. And so, when Dinah came limping and snuffling back after being caught at a spree, Sandy was about to go for his gun. Then the very Reverend Harton visited.

  It was an afternoon, the granite peaks hardening against the sky, when Fanny looked up from the campfire and grabbed Sandy One’s arm as he was about to go for the gun.

  Was it a man? Cresting the hill, rushing down the slope at great speed. Crazy wings flapped about him—but yes, it was a man—and he moved between two thin wheels, his feet just above the ground and making small circles.

  Then he was among them, was there, and Fanny was embarrassed for her laughter. He spoke first, might have said something like, ‘You lucky sinners. Here I am, vestments and all.’

  Then he spoke about his bicycle, and how far he had come.

  He moved among the men, wanting to talk—very softly—of sin. Most listened to him, but there was more respect for his technology, and for the fact that he’d taken the trouble to reach them, than there was for his talk of prayer and God. Men moved away, but one—Patrick Coolman—returning to the campsite, joined the little group around the good reverend. Sandy One went quickly to his side, shoulder to shoulder, and immediately felt very small.

  ‘It was the camel pads,’ said the reverend, ‘and God’s wind at my back.’

  The men listened, their various brows creased. The talk was of sin, and what is sacred. Of a life after this one. Of love.

  You could hear the sea just beyond the dunes. You could smell it. You could smell the grasses, too. The thin blond-headed man, the tall red twins. Fanny willed that they feel the light feet running all about them, and the nervous hearts’ beating.

  After he had talked with Sandy and the twins the reverend said, ‘Come and see me, then, when you are at the town, and I will marry you.’ Sandy thought
this might be the way to do things, the way of surviving.

  Sandy One had tried to arrange that they all get married together, the white man’s way. Sandy Mason and Fanny, Daniel Coolman and Harriette Mason, Patrick Coolman and Dinah Mason. Father, mother, daughters and sons-in-law, all on the one day.

  They went as a group, the new sons following the wheel ruts. Sandy at least was proud. So many children had been lost, but now their daughters should be safe.

  Fanny was thinking of lost children too, of lost family.

  After the wedding ... Well, there was no party. No reception. No guests, no bits of torn paper fluttering over them. Rather, there was an absence of paper, because the red-twin-Pat and daughter Dinah had got waylaid somewhere somehow. Pat had met some friends, gone on a bender. He missed a wedding and its certificate. ‘But let us celebrate,’ Sandy said.

  Just the two certificates which, almost a century later, I studied so carefully, again and again, before letting them fall to where so many other leaves lay. I sank into all that paper, and it rustled like snake skins, like cicada shells, like the feathers and parchment wings of long dead things. I thought of all those the papers named, and of how little the ink could tell.

  The two couples and the boy camped just out of the town of Kylie Bay, made a fire blaze, drank rum. Sandy played the piano accordion, and the lone red twin (Daniel), his nervousness drowned in grog, danced with his woman and his mother-in-law. They laughed about who was who, who married who—for they were all thinking of when Patrick and Dinah would do the same. Sandy Two staggered about, his blood roaring with drunkenness, and the many shadows, the many shadows flickering and shifting in the firelight danced with him until he fell asleep.

  Sandy Two once staggered, and I now hover, but the ageing Daniel Coolman could only shuffle as he went from room to room. In fact, he mostly just lay on his back, staring at his puffy hands where they rested on the great mound his chest and stomach had become. He could feel the air move on his teeth, where the lip had been cut away.

  With considerable difficulty he took out his pocket watch. He never touched a drop of grog until midday.

  Chatalong began working when the war was still on, and with so many men away there was a demand for labour. Chatalong worked at many things; he was useful, fit, strong. It meant Will could be with Daniel. Chatalong could charm anyone, with all that talk and nonsense.

  He cut and carted wood for the smelters.

  He was good with horses.

  Eventually, he settled at the smelter. He worked on the top floor, keeping the furnace stoked. It was not so bad, on the top floor, except for the sulphur fumes.

  He often helped men who had collapsed. The breeze was always so very sweet after the sulphur fumes and the heat.

  The sulphur made him cough, and slowed his talking.

  In the evenings Chatalong sipped some oil. It soothed his throat, and was what men and horses drank after collapsing from the fumes.

  It was usually Jack who carried Sandy One to where Fanny and a number of children sat by a small fire hidden among the chaos of timber, corrugated iron and horse stables. The police office was next-door, but they were out of its sight.

  Sometimes, before he got too big, even the bloated Daniel joined them. The children were hidden away. Daniel took tiny sips of his grog and held a pipe in his teeth; a grip which was framed by a hirsute lower lip and the startling absence of an upper one. The flickering flames made evil shadows of that hole in his whiskers, and of the long and yellowing teeth. Chatalong coughed and sipped oil, and Sandy One gazed up at the night sky, clicking and moaning his songs while the women mostly talked among themselves. Fanny said something, and her daughter laughed.

  I used to read to Grandad, purely for the malicious satisfaction it gave me. I wanted him to see that I was a failure, one way or another. That I was resentful and bitter. I wanted to undermine what he had done to the extent that he could never know where or when it might all collapse and send us plummeting down to ... to ... Well, certainly not to a place of heat and sulphurous fumes. I have already touched upon such a place with Chatalong in this chapter, and that was tolerable enough.

  One at a time, bit by bit, I wrote out Grandad’s so carefully collected and meticulously filed documents. One at a time I held each before his eyes, put a match to it, and let it fall when the flame reached my fingers.

  Perhaps I could have found something more valuable in them had I kept them. When I later recited to Uncle Jack and Uncle Will I know we sometimes regretted the loss of some of them, but all that was before I began to reproduce much more than words.

  Increasingly—reading and reciting my work—I wanted to impress each of my audience; I so wanted to somehow bring Uncle Jack, Uncle Will and myself together. And if Ern could follow, so be it. But I seemed unable to satisfy our diverging needs.

  Uncle Jack would say, ‘You gotta get back. Work your way through this shit. Find that spirit which is in you. The land is still here. Trust.’

  Sandy One had a space in the narrow passageway just inside the front door of Daniel’s house. There were no visitors. They propped him in a corner there, and stepped about him as they passed. Until they could decide. To begin with, Fanny slept beside him, right there, and bundled their blankets away each morning.

  Sandy One remained in that gloomy space. The window faced south. He watched clouds move across it. Sometimes the branch of a tree, a bird might pass. Flies buzzing. The flyscreen moved in the breeze, changing the way it held the light in the squares within it.

  Each time Fanny stepped in the door she forgot, say, the ache in her knees from all day kneeling, or the wrinkled peeling skin of fingers too long in water. She felt the light move away, the cold floor under her feet, and heard the jangle of keys just as she had once, a very long time ago.

  Sandy One, his hair now completely silver, may as well have been chained there, and his hazel eyes seemed to beg her not to remember.

  Well, of course we spoke of many things. Me and Ern, in the time before Uncle Jack and Uncle Will came back to save me. And then, around the campfire, all of us men. But, they were very old, and I was feeble in my own way. All of us past it, and nostalgic, and they with a terrible sympathy for my plight.

  ‘You’re so young. And you had just did it the once with both those girls?’ Uncle Jack laughed, ‘You just kept at it, again and again, all day long, unna?’

  Given my predicament—shall we say my medical condition (you remember, the car accident?)—it is hardly surprising that they were sympathetic, sad, curious.

  Oh yes, I had told them. ‘I’ve had women. Well, they were girls, and I but a boy. We all went up in a bang, as they say.’ But no matter how much I tried to savour my memories I tasted only bitterness; what has been taken away. I admit to hours spent fondling myself. Hours of futility. Perhaps, astute as you are, you see this narcissism in my prose. Naturally, I would prefer the flaccidity, the limpness, to remain undetectable.

  We would end up discussing Fanny and Sandy One. They must have had something special going, unna? Really. All that time alone, following the team, him watching her, and she absorbed as if—I say—as if reading. His awareness was growing, he was becoming intimate with their land, with her. She laughed, showed him the plant with a great many stiff, thorny stems. ‘Devil’s, devil’s...’ She tapped his crotch.

  It must have been something other than a sort of moral obligation or a sense of guilt that kept him with her all that time. Perhaps it was her relative youth. The firm flesh, the soft and delicious skin. The generosity of her, her softness and scent. The children and he, they revolved around her.

  They were a long time together. She must have been not much more than a child when they met, given the date of the last birth.

  Those last years, so gloomy and cramped. Sandy One, as I have described him, was not much more than a head balanced upon a wasted body. A clicking and stiff-tipped tongue.

  Well. Perhaps there you have it. Her tending him. Wiping,
washing, drying. Gently, not rushing. It was a rare time, to be safe and alone together, those last years.

  Her gentle hands. Teasing a reaction out of him. He as light as if he was hollow-boned like a bird.

  She was bathing him by the fire. Alone, somehow.

  The firelight made his skin glow. He was flushed, pink and white, and his eyes glittered as she had not seen them do for, oh, so long. She considered his wasted body, his groin. How long? Well, long enough eh? Even now.

  She straddled him. On her knees, making her way up and down his so scrawny body. She was using her memory and imagination. A knee? No, his leg gave way. An elbow? He was talking to her, his tongue clicking, crackling now like fire. She slid his body along the ground to position him, and his tongue was there. So quick, so stiff at the very tip. And her hand, reaching back, her voice helping him.

  It was easy to slide him into her after that. She moved for him, and felt the little convulsions, the spurting.

  A last time. You would think such a little ecstacy would not be enough to start a life, let alone finish one. Perhaps it was what Sandy One had been saving himself for, waiting in the half-light all that time.

  Of course Fanny had to dress him before the others returned. She searched until she found his sea clothes, from when she had first met him. They were musty, and crinkled all the more because of how he had shrunk. She put aside his beanie, set aside the pipe and boots, decided against seating him on Daniel’s chair by the fireplace in the house. She could smell the salt water on him, and even though it was midday, she made the fire blaze.

  Daniel, wheezing from the wagon, squeezed through the door, stopped. His wheezing continued after a short pause. Harriette peered over his shoulder.

  Sandy One stared at them from where he was propped by the fire. He was naked, except for a hairbelt and a kangaroo skin draped over his shoulders, and he stared at Daniel as if defying him. His old resolve seemed back.