THE FREDERICK
When they asked him to join the crew (‘Say a word to anyone an’ you’re fuckin’ dead’) John Myer didn’t hesitate. There was nothing he wouldn’t have risked to get away—by this time not even his life, which was only a burden. As the other men pressed him and threatened him, offered the place among them though with coiled reluctance (those stinking, chained, angry men), John Myer had felt the shuddering of the earth beneath his feet, the vibration of it right through his body. He’d arrived at some point that he recognised, that had been waiting for his attention all this time. It was not for him to wonder how or why. All that John Myer knew, intuitively, was there would never be another chance.
Now one of ten desperate men.
Nobody was killed (a few heads were busted) and it was as though the cell keys had been left in the locks. Help yourselves, boys, off you go. And to boot, a nearly finished brig, only a handful of guards (fishing!) and the penal settlement already abandoned except for the convict shipwrights and labourers.
Six weeks later, in the boundless Southern Ocean, they sighted land without a day to spare, their lives in the balance and fading. ‘Huzzah!’ They cracked the Frederick’s hull and sank her, took the longboat into shore. Fixed their stories of shipwrecked sailors and hoped for the best. But never going back, each man swore it in his heart; oh no, never.
‘Mutton and rum!’ Benjamin Russen said. ‘And women to drown in!’
‘you’ll behave,’ James Porter said, eyes on the beach ahead of them. ‘We’re not in the clear yet.’
John Myer knew it was true. He pulled at the oar, dragged the choppy sea and heaved with gritted teeth. Fatigue heavy through his flesh. Not clear yet, but close.
He was forty-six years old.
SOMETIMES IT HELPS TO OPEN ALL THE WINDOWS
Samanta was concerned about her mistress. For weeks now the señora rarely left the house. They no longer went together to the flower market or to the bakery for cherry pastries, no longer took walks down to the water in the evening, no longer visited the offices where her businesses were run and the managers and accountants and clerks there greeted her with great respect and manners, pulling out and offering their chairs, even to Samanta. The señora was still a beautiful woman and often courted and always invited to the most fashionable soirées and salons in Valdivia. But she would not attend or be courted any longer. Her fine silk dresses hung sadly in the robe. Samanta believed the señora’s malaise had ruined one of the lemon trees in the courtyard. She feared for the health of their well water.
Thankfully (Samanta had been praying to the Virgin) the señora did finally take a walk one day and was gone for most of it. The sun and air would do her great good, Samanta thought. She opened all the windows in the house and all the cupboard doors, and beat the rugs and swept and mopped the floors. She aired the blankets and pillows and she wiped every shelf clean of dust and she chose the brightest tablecloths and cushions for the house. And as she did, Samanta softly repeated the Indian chants her mother had taught her when she was a child, the ones she could only ever whisper in case her father heard them sung, for which crime mother and daughter would both be beaten. The chants were ancient, in the language of her mother’s people from the mountains (which Samanta could not otherwise speak or understand), and they dispelled bad spirits and called on the good. She’d always felt the truth of them and was certain the Virgin understood, too. It was never a simple thing, to air a dark home.
Her mother would say, ‘An open heart has no secret compartments.’
Samanta lit smudge sticks and chanted the prayers and brushed the smoke over every wall, drawing loops and sweeping arcs, concentrating on the corners that never received sunlight (where the bad spirits cowered). She went to all three floors and through every room, out onto the balconies too, and even up into the attic with its terrible spiders’ webs. She could feel her good work giving breath back to the sad house.
When the señora returned, Samanta heard the front door slam, the iron knocker sounding twice. Then along the hall the floorboards creaked with pain and the small vases and glass bowls on the shelves and side tables rattled and shook with the señora’s firm striding. A small picture frame slid flat. Samanta came out from the kitchen to see, but her mistress was already on the stairs.
‘Señora?’ she said.
‘you can go home, Samanta.’
‘Are you not feeling well?’
Elisabeth paused on the landing, looked down at the girl but said nothing. She looked right through her and Samanta felt herself shiver.
‘I can fix some tea, Señora,’ she said. ‘Special herbs I have from the mountains, they will help if you are unwell …’
‘Please, Samanta.’ Elisabeth held up her hand. ‘Obey me.’
‘yes, Señora.’
Samanta stayed, of course, but was too scared to ascend the stairs and listen at the bedroom door in case the señora heard her coming. She waited in the kitchen. She made the herbal tea and prayed to the Virgin. Samanta knew she couldn’t stay all night, but was torn and in two minds. The señora would be very displeased if she discovered her there in the kitchen, but she felt that she should wait, in case she was needed, in case the señora called for her.
Samanta waited but heard nothing. What could the señora be doing? Samanta waited for as long as she could, but when the dark came, the silence seemed to thicken in her ears. She was afraid. Eventually, like a thief, Samanta crept out of the house and hurried home.
The next morning when she returned, the señora gave her money and sent her away to spend time with her family in Los Lagos.
NEW LIFE
He’d taken back his true name and found work unloading ships. He rented a small room in a faded blue hotel, full of scarred, tail-less cats over in the poorer part of town, where the lanes smelled of stale urine and the nights were loud with singing and fighting. He’d bought a book from a street stall and read from it every evening (it was Goethe, in Spanish, he had to read slowly). There was a cantina not far away, where every day Johannes Meyer ate grilled fish and drank sweet white wine the colour of straw.
He took his time with everything, settled into a calm that savoured every moment. He walked unhurriedly, ate slowly, worked hard, slept deeply, read and let his imagination roam. One of the cats adopted him. The hours were long and kind and lingered like welcome guests.
He believed them, these hours, or wanted to, but in truth he remained suspicious of the contentment they seemed to bestow. It lessened over time, this suspicion, but never truly faded. He wondered if it ever would (it wouldn’t). His contentment had a cautious air.
He looked over his shoulder from time to time. He approached corners with vague trepidation.
Johannes Meyer was working at the dock one day and he saw her first.
He slid the sack down from his shoulder and brushed the dust from his arm. She was walking towards him with an umbrella against the sun. There was a man with her, short and fat and overdressed, a watch chain bright between his vest pockets, wiping his forehead with a white handkerchief and pointing out into the harbour, showing her the ships. They came closer, walking down the storehouse side of the dock, where the sun blazed hottest against the stone facades. Then they paused for a moment as the man lit the woman’s cigarette. When she lifted her head, she was looking directly at Johannes.
They stood like that only metres apart, eyes on each other, each remembering and yet thinking that it couldn’t be.
DAYS CAN GO EITHER WAY
She’d sent Samanta away and had been thinking of it for days, recalling the boy at the docks (he wasn’t a boy anymore!). Deeply regretting that she hadn’t approached and spoken to him. Elisabeth Montoya felt an unaccountable sense of loss.
Her true impulse had been to go over and greet him (embrace him!) but she didn’t move, just looked, in a kind of shock. Because he wasn’t an old friend, he wasn’t anybody at all, just a face from a long time ago, and it was this thought that ha
d percolated among a rush of others and held her there, motionless. And then somebody had yelled, further down the dock, and she’d watched him turn to the voice and then bend down to pick up the sack at his feet. She’d watched him shoulder it, bounce it into position, and then turn to look at her again. And then Señor Bonas (who hadn’t stopped talking the whole time) had taken her by the arm and they’d moved on. He was showing her the new dock warehouse that had been purchased.
She wasn’t listening to him. She only felt the man’s eyes following her. With every step away, she’d thought to stop and turn around, but she didn’t.
Elisabeth Montoya walked away with Señor Bonas. With every excruciating step, she hoped to hear him call out, call out after her.
Please, she’d thought. Hoped. Please call out to me.
A LETTER FROM CHILE
(From Consul General Walpole, Santiago de Chile, to Lieutenant Governor George Arthur, Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land)
May 25th, 1834
Sir: I have the Honour to transmit to you the Translation of a Paragraph contained in the Araucano, a Paper published here under the Authority of this Government & which was Communicated to me by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.
By this Paper you will perceive that Ten Individuals whose names are specified in a List also enclosed, presented themselves on the 9th of March last at Valdivia in this Republic stating themselves to have been shipwrecked on the coast of Chile—that the truth of this Account appearing to be liable to doubt, a further Examination into the Circumstances was entered into, the result of which was a declaration of their having absconded from a Port in Van Diemen’s Land, thereby withdrawing themselves from the Performance of the Sentence to which they had been sentenced with the Addition of the Committal of an Act which it would seem can only be characterized by the Term of Piracy.
The Circumstances as stated by them appear so contradictory in many Parts and indeed the Confession of the serious Crimes which they profess to have Committed renders their History so improbable that it is scarce possible to attach credit to it.
LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR ARTHUR’S MINUTE UPON RECEIVING THE LETTER
October 31st, 1834
Prepare an answer setting forth all the particulars of the case, with the offences for wh. these Convicts were transported, & adding, of course, that their last act was one of piracy & express my anxious desire that they may be sent back to this Colony & add that as soon as a Vessel of War arrives I shall request the Officer in command of Her to proceed to Valparaiso. Let me see your letter as soon as it is prepared—one copy may be sent to Sydney, another to Rio by the earliest oppty.
HIGH IN THE GREAT WESTERN TIERS, THREE RIDERS
They stood their horses inside a stand of snow gums. They could see the timber hut just ahead, sheltered in the lee of a small rise that curved out across the plain to the northwest. No smoke in the chimney pipe. The wind had picked up and it was starting to rain, and there were fat snowflakes whipping around in it, too. The trees were sleet wet from the night before, and the trunks gleamed blue-grey and gold, pink where the bark had peeled away.
It was 6 March 1915.
Gabriel Tait shifted in the saddle. It had been a hard slog through densely wooded valleys and up steep mountain banks, and the horse didn’t like him. The feeling was mutual. At one point the crazy animal had bolted along a ridge for no reason anybody could give him, a sheer drop to certain death only inches from its sparking shoes. He’d climbed off when it finally stopped, cursing the beast.
‘you ain’t much of a rider,’ Wilson O’Farrell had said.
‘He’s all right,’ his brother Joseph said. He smiled at Gabriel Tait. ‘Don’t worry, mate. Nearly there.’
He’d had a mind to turn back for Deloraine, be done with it, but they’d come past the halfway by then. The O’Farrell brothers had charged five pounds to bring him up and the paper would want something for the expense.
They sat their horses and waited inside the snow gums, collars up, hats low, watching the hut. Nothing else around for miles. Wind, rain, snow.
THE STORY
‘Nobody’s a hundred and twenty-six years old,’ Gabriel Tait said.
He was twenty-one and there were two or three close friends and his parents in Invermay, and a younger sister as well. And there was a fiancée and there was that he worked for the Launceston Examiner. The two or three close friends had already joined up and the fiancée had been telling everybody how Gabriel was joining up, too.
Gabriel Tait’s subeditor said, ‘Well, that’s what they say, one twenty-six. It isn’t totally impossible, right?’
‘yes it is.’
‘Anyway, look, it doesn’t matter, I mean, he could be a hundred an’ nine or something, you know? People always exaggerate.’ Lance Landstrom could tell the boy was reluctant, but he thought there was some talent there needed pushing. ‘Like I said, it doesn’t matter. He’s bloody old, full stop. Just make something of it.’
‘Like what?’
‘Jesus, come on, Tait. People love this kind of thing,’ Landstrom said. ‘Or you’d rather stick to shipping news and death notices?’ He went back to the typescript on his desk.
On the way home, Gabriel Tait had a few beers in different pubs, asked around. His fiancée was expecting him at seven-thirty, dinner with the future in-laws and some of their family friends, maybe an old aunt up from Hobart. His fiancée had fought hard to bring her parents around to the engagement and the dinner was important. Tait glanced at his watch. Bought a few more rounds.
Nobody had heard of the one hundred-and-twenty-six-year-old man who lived somewhere up in the Great Western Tiers.
‘Who? John Myer?’ they said. ‘Nah.’
A quarter to eight now, at a workers’ pub in Mowbray, doors locked. Every second man in uniform. The barman said, ‘Sure, I’ve heard of him. The old Kraut who lives up on the Tiers.’
‘Really?’
‘yeah. My poppy knew him. Used to stay over sometimes when he was out trapping. All the old guys did.’
Tait leaned a little over the bar. ‘Is he still alive?’
The barman laughed. ‘yeah, and he’s about a hundred and fifty years old mate, last I heard.’
‘Two ’undred!’ said a drunk next to them, laughing into his beer.
At the Langridge’s, Evie opened the door. ‘you’re late!’ ‘Sorry,’ Tait said. ‘It’s work. I’m on a story.’
FIREWOOD
The clouds rolled in and the snowflakes thickened. Gabriel Tait had never seen such volumes of whiteness in his life, falling silently from the sky, tiny feathers of snow, covering everything. It was beautiful.
He looked over at the O’Farrell brothers and they were watching the snow, too.
‘When was the last time you ever saw him up here?’ Gabriel Tait said.
The older brother, Wilson, squinted up into the sky and patted his horse on the neck. He was tall and rangy, with bluestone eyes in a dark, sooty face. He ignored the question and nudged his horse on.
‘Oh, been a while,’ said Joseph O’Farrell, who was nothing like his brother. He was shorter, had a cottage pie body, and a natural, easy warmth. He clicked his tongue, gave on the reins and followed. ‘years,’ he said over his shoulder to Tait.
They rode over to the hut. Rough planks of lichen-patched wood, a shingle roof, animal skins nailed over a window space to the right of the door, the bottom corner loose and flapping. They skirted around to the right. In the rear there was a small, low awning attached to the hut, walled off on two sides with more timber planks.
They put the horses in and the brothers slipped off the bridles and unsaddled them, then Joseph hooked on their nosebags for a chew. They picked up a rail (a narrow tree trunk, axe-trimmed) and slotted it into a couple of brackets either side of the opening. The wind had eased off but the snow kept falling.
‘Better be some firewood,’ Wilson O’Farrell said.
‘We’ll have a look,’ Joseph said.
Joseph tapped Tait on the shoulder. ‘Come on, give us a hand.’
There was a woodpile a little way from the hut.
‘It’s all wet,’ Tait said, feeling colder just looking at it.
‘Choice cuts underneath.’
They picked up an armful of wood each, made their way back to the hut.
‘He hasn’t been here for a long time,’ Tait said.
‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Joseph O’Farrell said. ‘But that doesn’t mean he’s not around.’
Tait looked at him, confused. He couldn’t read the tone. The brothers had spoken to him like that the whole way, smiling underneath every word, nothing ever certain about what they were saying.
Joseph O’Farrell saw the annoyed look on Tait’s face and stopped. ‘you wanted to see where he lived, right? Well, this is it.’ He opened a gloved palm to the falling snow. ‘And looks like we’re staying the bloody night now, too.’
They took the firewood into the hut.
LOVE IS SACRIFICE
At school, everybody thought Evangeline Langridge had airs and graces.
‘Just because her father owns a newspaper,’ they said. ‘Who cares?’
She was seventeen, serious like her father, broad like her mother, and though her features didn’t add up to any remarkable beauty, taken separately there was nothing to fault: large brown eyes, soft pink cheeks, tawny hair that fell long down her back when it wasn’t plaited and pinned up. It was glimpsing her hair one day (through a door left ajar in the hallway, her back to him, hair loose and wavy and cascading all the way to her waist), which had thrilled Gabriel Tait the first time. He hadn’t been long at the paper, had come to deliver something to the boss. Soon they went to dinner every Thursday and soon after that they went riding together on Saturdays.
Matters progressed (though her hair remained pinned) until Evie asked Tait to propose to her. He’d frowned, surprised, and then she’d laughed; but Evie meant it, and eventually Tait did as she wished, though the moments leading to his asking and those that came after were a blur to him now. He’d done it, and Tait supposed he was happy about it, but wasn’t exactly sure why. He could hardly tell people it was because of her hair. And then (due to Evie’s tenacity) there’d been the announcement and it didn’t really matter anymore.
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