Little Exiles

by Robert Dinsdale

  ‘I wonder,’ says George — and, here, Pete knows, is the real reason he has come to Black Chaparral — ‘when was the last time you heard anything of Jon?’

  ‘Sooner than you, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  It was not meant to be a challenge. George hurries after him. Quickly, he is out of breath. ‘I’ve only seen him once since …’

  That George has seen him at all is both a comfort and a barb to Pete. He stops so that he can kick his boots off — Maya always screams blue murder when he tramples dirt where the baby might crawl — and waits for George to finish.

  ‘When?’

  ‘It was January 1958.’

  The words pile into Pete with the power of a road train. ‘1958?’

  George can only nod; the year must have some significance for Pete.

  ‘Jon left me,’ says Pete. ‘Just woke up one morning, and he was gone …’

  ‘I was back at the Mission …’ George strings each word out, uncertain whether Pete wants to hear the story. ‘I’d been in New South Wales, at the farm school there, but … I’d been back three months when Jon Heather turned up.’

  ‘Just turned up,’ Pete repeats. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you’re really doing here, George Stone?’

  So, like a bigger boy who has entrusted himself with looking over a pathetic bedwetter five years his junior, George spins the story:

  In the middle month of summer, in the year of 1958, the man who calls himself George Slade wanders to the shadow wood to look over the little ones out on village muster — and there he sees a vagrant, sleeping in a swag under the shelf of red where boys sometimes stake out rabbits.

  At first, George is afraid. His instinct is to turn tail and tell Judah Reed, but Judah has lectured him on the need for spiritual strength — so, instead, he strides across the field, through the wheat the boys have sown. He is about to admonish this trespasser when the wild man turns.

  Jon Heather looks at him from beneath a mop of brown hair. The conversation is strained between them. Neither asks how the other one is. George cannot bring himself to ask Jon what he has been doing in the time they have been apart, for the answer might be too horrible to bear: I’ve been out there, being a man, working with Peter.

  At last, Jon breaks cover. ‘I need to ask you something, George. Call it a favour. For an old friend.’

  George grapples at the chance, like a drowning man so desperate for air that he drags his brother down.

  ‘It’s the wild boy,’ says Jon Heather. ‘I need you to help me with the wild boy.’

  It is a question Jon asked George once before. Then, George failed. Now, he cannot. He will do anything to win back the light in Jon Heather’s eyes. ‘What is it, Jon?’

  ‘I need you to find out …’ breathes Jon, ‘… if Luca is still alive.’

  Jon Heather’s eyes shine. He was never a boy for crying in dormitories, but now you might think him one of those terrible bedwetters with whom George was cast down.

  Because Jon Heather has never stopped thinking about the night he bore Luca back into the Mission and begged Judah Reed for his help. He can remember in intimate detail the things of which they spoke, how Luca had dreamed of leading another Children’s Crusade: back to the promised lands, England and Malta and all the other places where lost boys belonged. Jon Heather, now, is a grown man, who rides fences and musters cattle — but all that he will ever do pales against the thoughts of that little boy.

  ‘Judah Reed must know.’ He stops; he is haggard as an old man, and only seventeen years old. ‘And I have to know as well.’

  George makes arrangements to meet Jon Heather again in three nights’ time. Jon has a camp, somewhere sunrise of the compound, and he promises he will return.

  Through those days, George sees Jon more than once. He drops out of the shadow wood to watch the boys at work and play. He brings some little ones hunks of chocolate from his own pack. Jon Heather — spending the money he has been so fastidious in saving so that little boys might have a taste of chocolate.

  On the third night, George sneaks out to meet Jon. He is late in arriving — not because of any difficulty in getting away, but because he cannot bring himself to come. The wild boy Luca, George must relate, was sent to the farm school in New South Wales. Six months later, he was found cold in his dormitory.

  Jon Heather cries, loud and long. Luca might have lasted another six months in another farm school — but in his heart Jon knows that he died on the night he was delivered back to Judah Reed.

  ‘I thought,’ says George, ‘that that would be the last I saw of Jon Heather. But he was there the next night, and the night after that. Pete, he could hardly tear himself away. The little ones started talking about him: the wild man in the woods. I caught them playing stones with him …’ He stops. ‘It’s a game Jon made up. For me.’

  ‘I know it,’ says Pete. ‘I seen Jon Heather teach it to some blacks.’

  ‘Then, one night, he just calls me into the shadow wood. He looked so lonely, Pete. He asked me …’

  George’s voice wavers. When Pete looks up, he understands that this is the point of the story. It was never about that wild boy at all.

  ‘He asked me if he might stay. If there was work he could do with the boys. Not be one of the Children’s Crusade, but … like old Mr McAllister used to be, or one of the teachers who’d come in and show woodworking or shearing …’

  Pete rears up. ‘You’re lying, George. I could always tell when you were lying. Your chins used to wobble.’

  He is about to turn, but something stays him. ‘So I went and asked Judah Reed. He could hardly remember Jon. Bit of a troublemaker, he said — but I convinced him he’d changed, that he’d grown up, wanted to help. Jon was always good with little ones. Better than me. The only way I got good at anything was by copying Jon Heather. In the end, I think he … hated me for it.’ He pauses. ‘But when I went back to tell Jon, he wasn’t there. I searched and searched for his camp, had boys out with me … but I never saw him again.’

  Pete picks up his boots and hits them, methodically, against the wall. This isn’t any Jon Heather he knew. The Jon Heather who fought so hard to walk away from Megan, who turned his back on Black Chaparral, who denied himself even food and drink, could never have thought about giving in like that.

  Pete slides into the kitchen. Maya is there, rocking the baby back and forth. She is, Pete knows, determined to linger and find out who this interloper is — but before she can ask, the baby sets up a squall and she disappears.

  ‘Why are you telling me this, George? We all got our different lives now. You included, by the looks of you. Why do you want to rake up that past …’

  ‘Perhaps it’s because I went back home,’ he begins, ‘but home wasn’t there. Perhaps it’s because I know I was wrong — the Children’s Crusade was lying to me all along, Peter, just to turn me into what they wanted. Or perhaps it’s just that …’ Each word is an effort; he wishes Pete could know just how much. ‘… I still remember when we were three little boys.’

  Against his will, Pete sits, kicking out a chair so that George can do the same.

  ‘Jon’s in trouble, Peter. I want to help him. You want to help him too. Seems like we could work together on that.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Pete, pushing a tin of coffee across the table. ‘That seems like a thing we could do.’

  George reaches into the cardboard suitcase and produces papers, copies of copies of typewritten forms.

  ‘Jon Heather,’ he says, ‘has been in prison, largely in Fremantle, for the last four years. As far as I can tell, he is the only person in the history of that prison to have requested solitary confinement. He’s been on his own, in a cell, for one thousand and three hundred nights, Pete — and, in five nights’ time, they’re setting him free.’

  Pete’s face is buried in the forms: an arrest report; minutes from a trial, reliving in intimate detail every blow that Jon threw that scorching summer morning.

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nbsp; He looks at George: fat, ugly George, whose piss he used to wring out of the sheets, whose hair he used to ruffle as he read him comics.

  ‘I haven’t heard from him in all that time,’ he says. ‘Not since the day he and Megan ran out. He was so angry at me that day. So let down. I suppose I thought he’d got himself home.’ The papers strain beneath his fingers. ‘When I didn’t hear from him, I thought that was it. That he’d forgotten it all, like he always wanted.’

  ‘I think we should be there.’

  Among the papers, there is a newspaper dated the 2nd of September in the year of 1961. In the picture, Jon is being led out of court with shackles around his wrists. He is concentrating on the ground, on putting one foot in front of the other; that, Pete remembers, is how you cross the world.

  ‘I think we should too,’ Pete whispers. Then he looks up. Into the kitchen doorway comes Cormac Tate and, behind him, still holding hands, the two aboriginal girls, plucked from the bush somewhere to wind up on Peter’s farm. ‘But, Georgie boy,’ he says, ‘I don’t think he’s going to like what he finds.’

  On the morning of his release, Jon Heather sleeps in late. It is one of the pleasures of solitary confinement that you are not torn out of bed each morning and thrown into a mess hall with the rest. Today, however, he will have to have conversations. There is, he will admit, a little piece of him that would rather stay inside, so that he does not have to join the pantomime.

  All the same, when the warden comes to collect him, he is sitting patiently, ready to go. In the end, there is no shaking of hands. He is given a ticket for a train that will take him to Perth, and the details of a halfway house at which a room has been assigned him. Then, doors are drawn back, and he walks out into the low sun.

  He is kicking his heels along a street lined with market stalls, listening to the sound of sea birds, when his eye is drawn to a wagon parked up on the side of the road. He stops. Though he only rode in it for a few weeks of his life, he knows that wagon well.

  A red-haired man steps out of the ute and nods his head. Jon wanders towards him. Yes, it is certainly Peter Slade — older, perhaps, with a fuzzy beard that does not suit him, but still Peter Slade.

  ‘Jump in, Jon Heather,’ he says. ‘I haven’t got all day!’ The familiar tone sets pulses running along Jon’s every sinew. ‘We’ll get you a good feed, shall we? Looks like you’ve been wasting away.’

  If he wants to protest, Jon Heather cannot. Something rushes inside him, like a geyser. There is, he knows, only one other thing that could make him erupt like this.

  A yellow snout appears, dozily, from the flatbed. It stands, shakes itself out of sleep, and stares.

  Somebody might have presented him with a huge mammoth bone, and told him to start chewing. Though he has a pronounced limp, Dog turns in berserk circles, barking once each circuit. His rear half squats, as if he is about to take a delighted shit, and he falls, flat-footed, from the ute, waddling over to Jon and leaving a thick trail of urine behind him.

  ‘You got old, boy,’ whispers Jon, bending down to slap the hairless tummy.

  With Dog trailing after them, Pete and Jon take off up the street.

  It is three days before they make the long drive. Before then, there is Perth: the halfway house where Jon will prove he is a reformed Australian citizen; and an officer he must check in with. When the third day comes, they set off early, riding the inland highway that might take them to Geraldton and the Mission, and then following the signposts for Moora. From here, it is empty, endless road. They take it in turns to sit behind the wheel and, though there is much silence, they talk, too, about the days when they worked these wheat fields together: Pete and Jon and Cormac Tate, three adventurers on their quest.

  Dusk is nigh when they leave the road and follow dirt trails east. This is uncharted country for Jon Heather, so Pete takes the wheel and Jon sits, kneading Dog’s head in his lap. The old brute smells worse than ever; Pete takes grim delight in telling Jon the prognosis of their travelling veterinarian: all of his glands are rotting.

  They reach Black Chaparral before darkness is absolute. Under the stars, Jon sees fields of wheat, horses in their stables. At the top of the trail there is a farmhouse. Lights blaze inside.

  In the yard, they sit in the ute, neither making the move to get out.

  ‘You know, Jon Heather, I never for the life of me thought I’d see you here.’

  Pete’s head rests against the wheel. He lifts it a fraction and smiles.

  ‘I never planned on it,’ Jon says.

  ‘I thought you was home. That night Megan went after you and didn’t come back, I thought that was it …’ He bunches his fists around the steering column. ‘I was happy for you, Jon Heather. Figured you’d seen sense at last, taken that girl with you.’

  It is Jon’s turn to bunch his fists. ‘I almost did,’ he whispers. ‘She had a plan.’ A smile erupts. ‘That girl always had some sort of a plan. She wanted to …’ At first Jon does not want to say it. ‘… sell her mother’s things, buy us a berth we could share. But we had to pass through Broome.’

  The rest can remain unsaid; Pete is not sure he wants to know about the night his old friend was hounded through spinifex and scrub.

  ‘You ever hear from that girl, Jon Heather?’

  Jon nods, but there is something ghostly about the way he moves. ‘She even came to Fremantle once. She wrote me a letter, said she wanted to see me. She tried to bring me my books. But, Peter, I couldn’t see her. She came three days and still I couldn’t do it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  His voice fraying around the edges, Jon whispers, ‘She changed what I wanted, Peter. All of my rules, all of my strictures, they were useless, up against someone like her. She was making it so I didn’t want my mother and my sisters anymore.’

  ‘Might be you should be making a trip north?’

  Jon is silent.

  ‘Jon, you know, I got married.’

  ‘I figured it,’ says Jon.

  Pete arches an eyebrow. ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Yeah, I can see it all over you. You got soft.’

  ‘I got a baby boy too.’

  This time, there is a lurching in Jon’s gut, like uncooked chicken announcing itself. ‘What’s he like?’ he asks, a touch too eagerly.

  ‘Oh, you know. He pretty much shits and sicks.’

  The ute headlights die and, out back, Dog tumbles from the flatbed.

  ‘Jon,’ Pete says, his voice a hoarse whisper, ‘it’s bastard good to see you.’

  He kicks open the door and plods towards the farmhouse door. Some distance behind, with Dog at his heel, Jon follows.

  Through the door, Jon sees Cormac Tate standing in a broad kitchen. His face is etched with deeper lines than the last time they met, but at least his face is not purpling, and at least he is not stopping himself from lashing out. Jon has gone only three steps through the door when the old man barrels forward, smothers him in his arms. Rigid, Jon does not move. He feels the warmth of Cormac’s tears against his shoulder.

  ‘I’m glad you’re back, son. Son, I’m sorry. For what I said. For what I …’

  Jon is about to speak out, when someone gets there first. At their feet, Dog lifts his head and lets fly with barks so shrill that Cormac has to pull away and order the stupid mutt to sit.

  ‘I wish you’d been here, Jon. All this while.’ The old man rocks back against a kitchen cabinet and quakes.

  From another door, two black faces appear. When they see the old man crying, the youngest — a girl with doleful eyes and hair of the deepest black — goes to him, tries to slip her tiny fingers in his giant hand.

  Pete leads the way to a room next door. There, Jon sees a woman with short-cropped hair, holding a baby against her breast. Pete says hello to her first, dangling a finger about which the baby wraps its whole hand. Then, he steps aside. In the doorway, Jon Heather stalls. He has grown used to silence in the last years, and now he has nothing to say.

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bsp; In front of him is a thing he has not seen since he was a real, live boy: Georgie boy, fat baby George, is here, with Peter Slade, to welcome him home.

  There will be little sleep tonight. There will be talking. Before long, Maya takes the baby away — and, soon after, Cormac Tate himself trudges off. Then, only Pete, George and Jon Heather are left. Now, the talking comes less easily, so that, at last, George has to bring polished stones out of his suitcase and range them around, just so that they have something to do. Pete is useless at stones; George and Jon Heather devour him.

  There are stories to be filled in: Pete is married to Cormac Tate’s daughter; George might soon become headmaster at the farm school of the Children’s Crusade. Jon himself has no story to tell; he never has done. He suspects they both know it, for neither ask him about prison, nor even about the night he was captured.

  George tosses a twentieth stone in the air, slowly bringing his hand around, angling it so perfectly that the stone lands in the gap between his fore and index fingers. It is the first time that Jon has smiled so freely: George has beaten him, fair and square.

  ‘Jon,’ he says, ‘there’s something we’ve got to show you.’

  It is not Jon’s place to resist any longer, so he follows George and Pete up the stairs of the farmhouse. At the end of the landing there is a little box room, made up with a bedroll and blanket. Curled up, there lies a boy, ten or eleven years old. He sleeps soundly, but there is a Mission smock hanging on the back of a chair beside him.

  Jon snaps a look at George. This, Pete thinks, is the real Jon Heather. He hasn’t quite died yet.

  ‘His name’s Charlie,’ George whispers.

  ‘From the Mission?’

  ‘Nearly five years. But I’m sending him back.’

  They drift back downstairs, out onto the veranda. The night is warm, and bats chitter in the gutters.

  George tells Jon everything: the first night at the port in Liverpool; tramping back to the Chapeltown Home and seeing the place being gutted. Then, how he sat with the policeman and listened to his own life’s story filled in. My mother, he tells Jon Heather, never really died. I’ve written to her, and she has even written back. Once upon a time, she made a terrible decision: she gave me to the Children’s Crusade. It was they who told me she had died, so that I might forget — all about England, all about my old life.