Mosquito Creek

by Robert Engwerda

  At first he got to know his four digging partners mainly by watching and listening to them. There was McMurphy in his one suit of clothes: his too-short, once white and now soiled moleskins, a filthy brown and yellow jacket he insisted on wearing over a torn blue woollen jersey in all weather – ‘What keeps the cold out must keep the hot out!’ – boots open at the toes and no socks. His arms and legs stuck out in jutting, bony elbows and knees. His face was blue and gaunt, cold-looking. He never drank in all the time Alec was with him but his weeping red eyes and shaking hands suggested a long history of doing so. The second partner was a New South Welshman, Kelvin Bagley, a knockabout cove who never worried about anything, and was never interested in anything unless someone else suggested it was worth thinking about. And that would be what occupied him then, rubbing his chin in the contemplation of it, until another idea or notion from someone else took his mind away again in some other direction. The third digger he only knew as Brown. ‘No more brains than a dog,’ McMurphy would say, sometimes in the digger’s presence, ‘but can he work! My fucken’ oath he can!’ And the last of their party was Oriente, a very recent arrival to the diggings, and there was something about him that Alec could never quite place. It was his aloofness in part, a secretiveness so bad he would never own up to what he had for breakfast for fear of giving something away. His face hid behind a thick brown and ginger beard, his pale eyes too alert. While others were quick to toss away the English and Irish sounds of their voices for something more home-grown, Oriente kept his family’s Sussex tongue. Something burned hard inside him. But on a few occasions, almost against his will, steam would escape and he would talk.

  That already seemed a while ago now. This new claim on the other side of the river had given Alec and Merriman some returns. But then the floods had come to wash their change of fortune away.

  ‘This is my last chance,’ Alec said to the prone figure on the stretcher. ‘I promised the wife I’d be back after this and no more rambling. We need this water away so we can get on with it.’

  Alec drew a small round mirror from beneath the stretcher – he’d retrieved it from his tent as the water was still rising – and examined his reflection. Looking back at him was a haggard face. Dirt creased around his eyes. His straight brown hair needed cutting and he wondered where his scissors were or if they’d been lost too. His watery blue eyes from the Danish on his mother’s side stared blankly back at him.

  He felt apart from Emily, and not just because of the fact of distance. Before he’d left Melbourne she was barely speaking to him. She said she had already heard years of excuses as to why they couldn’t keep their heads above water, and had endured weeks and months of absences while he chased work hauling goods from the city to the country and then back again. ‘You do what you have to,’ she said, when he spoke of his goldmining proposition. ‘I don’t care.’

  What he didn’t know, when he turned himself inside out, was whether he cared or not either.

  When he was leaving she flung a final barb at him. ‘Why do you have to make such a mess of everything?’

  Merriman cut across his thoughts. ‘And where’s all this water come from? Like something out of the Bible.’

  ‘Emily will be wondering.’

  ‘No one knows yet.’

  ‘They have to know. Or someone. No one just disappears off the face of the earth.’

  Merriman cast black eyes over him from his stretcher. ‘Out here they do.’

  ‘I wonder if my old mates will think where I am.’

  Alec stepped outside the tent to see if there was any sign of the sky clearing.

  When he’d taken his new claim Merriman was the only one he could find willing to leave the main diggings and take a chance on this side of the river. Most miners who left were looking to the goldmining companies in Bendigo and Ballarat, for steady wages and the possibility of a family. Halls and hotels were springing up in those towns, along with schools and hospitals. Proper doctors established rooms and wide streets ferried busy traffic before two-storey buildings with names like ‘Providence House’ and ‘Martin and Sons’. Still, some refused to join companies on principle or because they had worked for themselves so long they could see no other way of doing things.

  Merriman wouldn’t have been Alec’s first choice as a partner. Alternately sulky or petulant, the Englishman might say nothing for hours before launching unexpectedly into a tirade against officialdom, the foulness of the weather, or the working habits of those at the Mosquito Creek diggings.

  But he offered more when the inclination took him. Most often it was when he was feeling confident he would have enough shillings to last more than a few days. Once when shovelling sand from the bottom of their claim, on the second day they worked together, he spoke nonchalantly of his family in England. They were Londoners, he said, from the docks area. His father had some sort of work providing supplies to navy ships.

  ‘Like the commissioner,’ Alec had said. ‘They say his people are navy people.’

  ‘But not like my family, I bet,’ Merriman rejoined. Poor as wharf rats, his lot were. Seven brothers and sisters and his mother sick. It was his bad luck to be the oldest in the family and having to spend too much time looking after the rest. ‘And my mother sick all the time,’ he repeated, as if she had done it to spite him. In the end he had left for Australia and said nothing to the others about where he was going in case his father tried stopping him. He laughed when he said he could picture his father looking here, there and everywhere, poking his stupid nose into every nook and cranny to see where he had gone, ‘like searching for noises come from behind the wainscoting’.

  Merriman had also taught himself numbers and could tally up any kind of complex calculation. ‘I can cipher too,’ he’d say haughtily, as if that were the finish to whatever argument he’d been engaged in.

  He was scornful of the majority of diggers. ‘Refuse,’ he once called them. And more angrily, ‘Scum!’ When he began working himself up like that he would jump to his feet like a maniacal preacher. ‘I’m not going to be one of those river rats!’ He would almost scream so that Alec would step back a pace or two, startled, before Merriman would be overcome by wheezing, air whistling between his teeth as he sucked hard for breath.

  ‘Why did you learn to cipher?’ Alec once asked, after one such tirade.

  Merriman’s black eyes widened. ‘That’s none of your business and will never be any of your business!’

  They slept a while because there was nothing else to do, till the Englishman woke Alec by speaking. ‘At least our gold is safe and sound. They can’t take that away. Everything is gone here and that’s for sure but the gold is here and good to stay.’ He leant on an elbow and turned to face Alec across the tent. ‘We’ll have to get it out of the bank when the water’s down. Then we’ll split the money in two and be on our ways. This digging’s finished and I might go back to Ballarat or Bendigo, or maybe New South Wales. Or maybe back to the other side of the river.’

  Alec fidgeted. ‘I’m sure it’ll be all right. If that’s what you want to do.’

  Merriman was suddenly panicked. ‘Those slips of paper the government assayer gave you about our gold … Did you remember to get those from your tent?’

  Alec felt the truth closing in. ‘I should tell you …’ he began slowly.

  ‘Tell me what?’

  Alec slung his feet to the ground, sitting up. ‘I didn’t bank the gold.’

  ‘You didn’t what?’

  ‘It’s all right. It’s safe.’

  ‘You said it was in the bank.’

  ‘Well it isn’t.’

  He watched the agitation grow in Merriman’s eyes, until the Englishman’s lip curled. ‘Well, where is it?’

  ‘I buried it.’

  ‘You buried it?’

  ‘I buried it in the ground.’

  ‘Where else would it be buried, idiot! Whereabouts?’

  Alec looked down. ‘In a good spot by the base of a t
ree, near my tent.’

  ‘That’s now under water!’ Merriman exclaimed. ‘Right under the bloody river, oh lord!’

  ‘I know where it is. And it’s in a tin so it’s safe. We were too busy after we found that first gold so I thought what would it matter?’

  ‘And you think water won’t get into a tin? And you think this flood won’t gouge a bloody great furrow right through the countryside here, cart everything a hundred miles downstream?’

  ‘It’s about a foot down.’

  ‘Oh Jesus, son of Mary!’ Merriman cried, his hand pressed over his eyes.

  ‘It’ll be all right.’

  But his partner lay on his bed wailing. ‘Why do I always ...’

  He tore hard at his shirt, but after a minute fell into silence.

  ‘Jack?’

  I’m not worried, Alec thought. I know where it is. To him the gold was the least of their problems. He could picture the tin, safe where it was buried. His share was hardly enough to satisfy Emily that the venture had been worth his while. She would likely react the same as if he returned with nothing but a bad back. Tucked in as well was a sealed note the digger Oriente had pressed upon him a while ago, when the man was all worked up. Instructions to retrieve important papers from a bank in Wangaratta, he had said, ‘should anything happen to me’. Alec humoured him. As things had eventuated, perhaps he should have given him a like note in exchange, Alec thought. But how would he have known then that circumstances were going to turn for him as they had?

  No one knew how long they might have to wait for the floodwaters to subside, or for rescue to come. Out beyond the island was a kind of nothingness: a drab grey and olive, and spindly, sickly-looking trees pressing against each other, bending with the force of the flood, a bitter wind scything through everything, a sinking iron sky drizzling veils of misting rain over the river as the forest and flood spread forever.

  There were a handful of them stuck here on this island, but out there was nothing.

  11

  The commissioner drew back the dark drape covering the only window in the rear room he thought of as his storeroom. It even had the same rank, musty smell of the stores room aboard the Whitby, causing him to wonder what this room had been used for previously. In the poor light he looked first at the trunks he had already unpacked, which had held his clothes and the other possessions now ornamenting his quarters. Opening and leaning forward to peer into them he was satisfied that he hadn’t overlooked anything in them. In another corner of the room were those cases he hadn’t opened, except for the one that was half empty, the one he had made a misjudgement in unlocking at Bendigo.

  He would leave that one for the minute.

  Taking a key from his pocket he slipped it into the first unopened trunk. He could barely recall what they held now; it seemed an eternity ago that he had carefully arranged his belongings in them. Since then they had followed him around silently, in the cramped quarters on the Whitby, at the administration housing at Bendigo and now here.

  It was superstition that had prevented him emptying the trunks much earlier. To open them, he thought, to open them and arrange their contents in his wardrobe, over his chairs, to accommodate these materials and objects to his new surroundings and them to these, would mean his permanence in this country had been established when everything in him railed against it being so. He wanted to be home. He wanted to be back in the company of his brother, his mother, his grandfather, even his father. Anything in England had to be better than the close, claustrophobic feeling he carried with him here.

  Still, he remembered now that most of these remaining cases contained nothing but clothes and the unrelenting rain and dank made the prospect of a few changes in garments welcome. Unfortunately, when he opened the first case he found damp and lack of air had insinuated themselves beneath the crumpled sheets of packing paper at the top. Creased white shirts bloomed wildflowers of gunpowdery mould. Trousers felt damp to the touch and the trunk had suffered an infestation of silverfish; as he held garment after garment to the window he saw pinpricks of light through them.

  He made the beginnings of a heap he would later dump outside his hut.

  There were some items to be saved from the next case. For whatever reason these clothes of heavier material, such as linen and tweed, seemed preserved from the ravages of insect infestation and mould and he carefully removed them to a separate pile.

  Another trunk contained books, which when held by their spines released their pages like rotten fruit plopping to the ground. Damp had ruined every single one. Safe though were other treasures he was delighted to rediscover, keepsakes he and his brother Terence had fossicked for in those long-gone years when they were children.

  There were fragments of black rock hard as flint. They had come upon them by accident, the first a loose stone Terence had flung at him from the roadside. Picking it up, ready to hurl it back at his brother, he had noticed a creature squashed flat into the rock, impressed into it, the stone smooth and neat as a brooch. On the way home it was passed from hand to hand, fought over. It was a beetle, or part of one, some kind of insect resembling nothing they’d ever seen. And every free moment after that found them with pick and hammer excavating first the cutting beside the road and then white seams of earth where they bucked through green fields beyond. There had been other finds: fish-like creatures and the elegant curve of stone bones – ribs, they surmised – in one place.

  Carrying the stones to his bedroom he arranged them neatly on the dresser by his bed. He returned, finally, to the case he had first opened in Bendigo. He had unlocked it in the beginning, despite his reservations, to reassure himself the relic was still there. It was the only thing he had ever stolen from his father, taken in an ill-conceived moment from its hiding place at home and smuggled among his luggage the day before he’d sailed. It was a prized family possession first fashioned for his grandfather, a tiny decorative box made from the very casket that had borne Lord Nelson’s body home from Trafalgar. In the box was a piece of Nelson’s bloodstained uniform cut from him after he’d died in the surgeon’s cabin aboard the Victory. When his grandfather had fallen ill his father had taken possession of the relic and in turn promised it to Terence. In that tiny piece of cloth, his father claimed, beat the very heart of England. On rare occasions his father would have his sons kneel down before it, a switch of yew in his hand.

  ‘If I were a preacher, by God I would make some sense of this world!’ he would cry, drawing the yew across his eldest son’s bare legs till they were red with welts.

  Stanfield’s mistake had been opening the case in company. The box disappeared one night, as did the thief, known well to him and who had now resurfaced at this goldfield to make new threats, to claim compensation for the return of the item.

  He timidly drew the letter from his trouser pocket, barely able to unfold the creases of paper, barely able to set his eyes upon the handwriting so different from his own.

  Imagine my surprise, my astonishment at discovering you here at Mosquito Creek! In all these months since leaving Bendigo I have had more than enough time to mull over your mistreatment of me, your abandonment of me as if I were a mere scrapping cabin boy. Do not for a minute think that I have forgotten however! Do not think for a second that I am a man to let sleeping dogs lie. You think yourself a perfect man with family and land, that others like me are of no consequence. But let me tell you that I am a man of flesh and blood and spirit. Injustice, that is what rankles deep inside me. That I was not good enough. That you thought that when the Whitby berthed you would walk away in one direction and I in another. But that surprised you, did it not? That despite you pushing me away by chance I arrived in Bendigo through the fact of working in Alfred Row’s troupe, to find you at your commission and you paying me no more courtesy than a stranger. I am a man of flesh and blood and spirit Charles and I mean to prove it.

  I have seen you walking this goldfield though you have not seen me. I have seen the red colour of
your uniform and the shine of your buttons. I have seen the white horse you ride, its black companion stabled just for you. I have seen the smoke rising from the chimney where you live.

  I see you and I watch you while you do not see me. But I have Nelson in my hand and you will pay me dearly for it, if not in kind because there is no kindness in your soul but in two hundred pounds. Two hundred pounds! If I mean nothing to you then perhaps two hundred pounds will.

  The artefact was never of great consequence to me except for your need of it. I’d be rid of it and make money easier than digging for it. We might then hope to part permanently and nothing might ever be said.

  I imagine you might like Alfred Row to conduct his Battle of Trafalgar for the miners. That would be apt don’t you think? I will use the conclusion of that performance as the time at which you will deliver me the two hundred pounds I demand. There will be no negotiation around this point and no way anyway of you contacting me. Once I have the money and am safely away I will send a message alerting you to the place where the item is hidden. Whatever else you may think, you know I am a person of integrity and a bargain is a bargain.

  Phillip

  The commissioner scoured the trunk again in the vain hope the relic would somehow miraculously appear among the folds of scarves, or be wedged inside a silver tankard, or be buried in between the many copies of the Bible, now ruined, his mother had insisted he take with him. But however many times he searched, the box remained obstinately stolen. And with it came a feeling he could not shake: that his father would somehow appear before him – no matter how many thousands of miles away he was – and take him to task, beat him, for his own theft of the treasure, his failing of the family. There would be no doubts as to its whereabouts. The coincidence of its disappearance and his departure required little contemplation.