“No language in here!”
“Beg pardon, boss.”
“I mean, that’s a word the glorious English created. Sometimes they do what the word suggests. Mainly to choir boys. Anyhow, it’s not to be stolen by sepoys, gyppoes or boongs. You understand, Jacko?”
“I’m recording every word, Carmichael,” the Englishman murmured at the rear of the office.
“I mean, Jacko, what would yer say of a New Zealand Maori or a Canadian redskin who walked into town and told them he wanted to fuckingwell know about fencing?”
Jimmie Blacksmith knew the joke that was afoot, felt a flush of collegiate friendship towards the rebel youth.
“I’d say he was a fuckin’ foulmouth, boss.”
The clerk hooted with joy. Jimmie let the corners of his mouth twitch ever so slightly, and his dark eyes were alight.
“Get out!” the acting office-chief was screaming. “Get out of here, you black layabout!”
Even as Jimmie began to leave, Carmichael had produced an appropriate leaflet, as if from nowhere.
“Here yer are, Jacko, here’s all about fence posts. There’re a lot of hardwoods round here don’t need much treating or any at all, just put ’em in as they are. Anyhow, read this. Yer do read, don’t yer?”
“Yair, I read, boss.”
Carmichael watched him go with what seemed genuine regret.
Jimmie Blacksmith ran downstairs laughing, to the street where commercial purpose moved whites up and down the pavements with frowns of dignified intent on them. Adjusting his face to match this high mood, he stepped out to walk amongst them.
It is hard to dig post holes. You must spear the soil with an iron, seven-foot digger, again and again, weakening the nape-muscles of bull earth. When you strike sub-surface shale the iron haft jolts blisters on your palm, and soon concusses them wide and open. The new skin that then grows will be tougher, if your hands are already harsh, as Jimmie’s were.
He slept in Healy’s hayshed, presuming permission, coming after dark, leaving before dawn. Two meals a day were his ration. Damper and butter at breakfast, bacon and etceteras at sunset. At noon he had a drink of tea.
After a week he had post-and-railed a hundred yards. Such fast work didn’t quite accord with Healy’s mental budgeting.
Boundary-riding on a big splay-footed grey, Healy stopped to measure at random the distance between two of Jimmie’s fence posts.
“That isn’t so bad at all,” he murmured, but as if Jimmie were undermining him.
3
On Saturday night he went to a party up the river at a blacks’ camp called Verona. He drank little – alien ambitions had made him a drinker of moderation.
He lay down with a scrawny gin called Florence but found that the preliminaries of copulation sent her into a whooping spasm.
But it was, for other reasons, a bad night and a bad place full of miserable omen. White voices could be heard as burlap door-flaps were flung open. Shrieking welcomes were sung to the white phallus, powerful demolisher of tribes. Florence barked and barked and dredged blood from beneath her lips.
He turned home in the small hours, not wanting to see Verona’s Sunday sunrise.
Early the next dawn, as he neared Healy’s gate and saw the pastures frosted solid, silver and blue, he was pleased to have exchanged them for the sourness of Sunday morning in Verona. In a corner of his front paddock, Healy, suited, but his russet-grey head bare, was talking to a neighbour dressed similarly for church.
On the homestead track Mrs Healy waited in the dray for her kingly husband to be finished. They were off to Mass in Merriwa or perhaps some closer Irish church in a clearing.
“Papists are not to be stoned but pitied,” Mrs Neville had said once.
Yet Mrs Healy wore better clothes than Mrs Neville: a coat of blue velour, wide-sleeved but tight at the hips. After skinny Florence, Jimmie Blacksmith felt the appeal of those full hips; stood frankly eyeing the woman in a dewy corner of the road.
“Papists confess their sins to a priest,” Mrs Neville had said, “as if there were a mediator other than Christ, as if some Irish priest could mediate between God and us.”
Jimmie wished impossibly that Mrs Healy might stray with him when he became a recognizable man, an owner of things. And whoever wanted to mediate was welcome.
The Healys meanwhile had an uphill ride to Mass; downhill all the way home. What was it like to travel with Healy? Whenever Jimmie saw Mrs Healy she sat round-shouldered and had an aura of being delicate. Her lips, which were really quite fat, accumulated in the middle in a square pout of acquiescence. Her eyes were distant. She may have been very stupid or very modest. It didn’t matter; arrogant at dawn after lank Florence, Jimmie deliberately chose her, though he knew the choice was an act of fantasy.
What he had done, without understanding it, was to elect her to the stature of ideal landowner’s-wife. It was not simply a matter of her being full and ripe: he could not have been so potently stirred by aspects so directly sexual. But combine these with her impassive air, her peculiar way of sitting still in the dray and breathing out into the morning a vapour of worship and submission for her husband – and you had something that appealed to all Jimmie’s lusts. In a second she had become a symbol, a state of blessedness, far more than a woman. It could almost be said that he did not choose her as a woman at all, rather as an archetype.
In the corner of his glistening property, Healy laughed to his neighbour and went to join his wife.
Jimmie Blacksmith did a hundred and fifty yards that week, and Healy, in shock, handed over five shillings advance.
Jimmie went to another party at Verona but liked it less. His half-caste girl, called Gay, though not as sick as Florence, had a bad cough. A lunatic gaiety shook the girl and infested the town; and when Jimmie left after midnight, horses and even a dray were tethered two or three at a time to a tree at the edge of the camp. All the white lust from the town of Merriwa.
He was home in time to see Mrs Healy come out of doors in her Mass coat.
To Jimmie, who did not know Irishmen, it was a surprise that Healy should take the finished fence as an insult and insist on short-changing him.
“But it oughter be twelve shillin’ more, boss,” Jimmie protested when the account was settled.
“I’m not denyin’ it. Two quid’s all yore gettin’. There’s twelve of dem posts three inches out. One of dem by more ’an four inches.”
“Not by my tape, boss.”
Healy’s face became blank: a big-featured, militant pallor Jimmie would see overtake the faces of other Celtic penny-pinchers.
At the apex of a silence deliberately built, white cockatoos descended on Healy’s tree-tops in a tribe and began chattering. Jimmie felt grateful to them.
“My tape that counts,” Healy said equably at last. But Jimmie knew that if he were contradicted, there would be sudden havoc. He put his money into his pocket.
“Well, posts is solid, boss, rails cut good. Kin yer give me a ref’rence?”
“Bejesus, ye’re a fussy bloody black. What d’yer need rif’rences for? A job in a bank?”
“So I kin show it t’other people wantin’ fences done.”
Healy’s laugh could not have been understood unless you knew that at its heart stood a primitive algebra. It had cost Healy’s father a great outlay of rigor to keep two acres of stony earth in Sligo. To retain therefore a thousand acres of beneficent slopes in the new world would take a massive exercise in harshness.
“I haven’t got me writin’ glasses,” said Healy. “And I want to see yer off by ten in the mornin’.”
Cunning, humble, Jimmie persisted.
“Kin I git a ride into Merriwa with yer, Mr Healy? I got a lot of things t’ carry.”
“I’m not goin’ to Merriwa tomorrer.”
“I bin thinkin’ yer might, it bein’ Friday.”
“I don’t need yer to think for me. I’ll ask yer when I want yer to do me thinkin’.”
But Jimmie was at last stung by the mystery: that a wondrous landowner should need to degrade him.
“Yair. No ref’rence ’cause yer can’t bloody write.”
The pallor returned to Healy; the strange horn-mad pallor and stillness of the mouth. Of course it was the truth. Jimmie had seen Healy call his wife to read the invoices for goods delivered from Muswellbrook or Merriwa. Jimmie had seen him force his splayed fingers to make an arduous signature. The nuns who had taught Mrs Healy writing and humility had never seen Healy.
Healy hit Jimmie. The impact was demeaning: Jimmie’s thin legs flew from beneath him and there he was, instantly on his shoulder blades.
It did not hurt so very much.
The next forenoon Jimmie was travelling west with his gear when the Healys, their dissimilar eyes averted, passed him on the road. He found himself swearing to possess her to depths that were probably not in her.
It was strange how she had become inherent to his programme.
4
Up and down the valley, Jimmie took other work, and word reached Brentwood that he was making sums of money. Lazy members of his totem would associate any task like fencing with sums of money. To Jackie Smolders, for example, it occurred that he should cross the Divide and ask for his part – a maternal uncle’s part, supreme in Mungindi lore – of Jimmie’s pay.
But Jackie mistrusted the mountains. There were fables about their formation that alarmed him.
There was one fortnight when Jimmie seemed taken over by a bad spirit, lassitude and submission he could not account for. Obsessed, he spent the time at Verona, frightened by the obsession. And Verona frightened him too. It seemed that an eye – God’s eye – had ceased to see Verona squarely. The image ran like an ulcer at the edges.
At night the candle-light was fragmented, and shattered the silhouettes of boys from town and lubras dancing out their death.
One evening a hut lit up and began to burn with a festive intensity. It belonged to a fat lady whose friends held her back from entering this purest thing in Verona, this diverse squalor refined to the clean unity of a tongue of fire.
“All me things!” she kept screaming. “All me things! All me keepsakes!”
For a second Jimmie Blacksmith would willingly have burned Verona off the map.
Sometimes too he would ask a girl, “Wot’s yer animal-spirit, eh, yer black bitch? I bin killin’ a lot of animals lately. What animal’s got yer soul, eh?”
They didn’t like that sort of chat. But he was the one in genuine alarm.
One evening he was woken. It was a Saturday and he had drunk a lot of bad sherry early in the afternoon.
“Get up, Jimmie,” one of the anonymous people of Verona asked him. “Harry Edwards gone and stuck ’im a whitey wiv a knife.”
“The whitey much hurt?”
“Hurt? ’Im fuckin’ dead, Jimmie. Git up. Yer got t’help bury ’im.”
“Yer kin bury ’im yerselves.”
The Mungindi were able to handle their aitches, the natives of Verona only some, but a rough sort of politeness made Jimmie copy them.
“We let yer have our woman. Yer help us bury this bloody whitey.”
It was a bitter night. To step from the animal-warm hut into the midnight was like walking on to a knife.
There were a dozen men in Harry Edwards’s hut, all wide-eyed at the lovely dead white boy with his well-sewn hare-lip. Blood was still surging out of his upper belly as from something living. Jimmie had seen the face somewhere, in one of the towns.
The wound bled so plentifully onto the earth floor that Sally, wife to Harry, began to pack her chairs onto the stinking bed in the corner.
Someone said that the boy could be best carried a distance in a blanket, by the four corners. Sally replied that she didn’t want to have a good blanket ruined beyond repair.
“’E was orright,” Harry explained. “’E go and lie down with Sally.”
“Don’t do much, ’e don’t,” Sally said.
“’E wake up and don’t know where ’e is. He says we tricked ’im ’ere to sleep with filthy gin, I ask ’im for a little cash. ’E go bloody mad. Yellin’. ’E start breakin’ ’em Sally things. I got to stop ’im. I git meat knife.”
“Jesus, yer made a big hole in ’im, Harry.”
“He with mates?” Jimmie Blacksmith asked. Because if the boy had come with friends, they might begin to search Verona for him.
“They hang Harry certain as all shit,” Harry said. “But I didn’t see no friends.”
They took one of the blankets from Sally’s bed to wrap the boy in. Then another just for carrying, so that Sally lost two. An old man went ahead with a storm lantern, then the eight or nine carriers and a boy dragging a eucalyptus bough. The earth was uneven but the corpse light. They could carry him one-handed, sometimes bringing their other hand to bear when the balance shifted.
“What animal’s got yer soul, eh?” Jimmie had asked black girls.
When the corpse jolted it was with a slick wet sound and everyone averted his eyes and mind from the bad omen of blood too copious for the blanket to take in.
“Here,” someone said. Dubious authority: for this place was close to the camp. Someone would have to move it on the first quiet night. Places were infected by the bad portent of blood. Even places where the New South Wales Commissioner for Aboriginal Affairs said, “Here shall be a camp”; naming it Verona in whimsical hope of justice as fine as Shakespeare’s. Even such places as that were infected. Those in the know would tend, while sleeping, to suffer from the gory omens of the dead boy.
“Here,” the voice said, anxious to be safe quickly, as all of them were.
Between them they managed to dig a hole two feet deep. In the dark they confused each other with meaningless advice.
The boy they wrapped up with all the evil auguries of his blood neat in Sally’s blanket.
“What animal’s got yer soul, eh?”
Not only did Jimmie feel that Verona, its chaos of black-white meanness, was off God’s globe, if God had a globe. But worse, that they had hurriedly buried the animal of their true totem without propitiatory rites and out of a necessity that should not have arisen.
He had no family there and no woman he loved; and so, except for one other visit a year later, that was the last time he went to Verona.
For he was a hybrid. If he had been tribal man, love would have been written into the order of his day. All his acts would have been acts of solemn and ritual preference. Love would have been in their fibre.
But having chosen to grub and build as whites do, he knew that love was a special fire that came down from God. A mere visitor. After a brief hectic season, it extended itself more soberly to your children and the boundaries of your land.
Suspended between the loving tribal life and the European rapture from on high called falling in love (at which even Mr Neville had hinted), Jimmie Blacksmith held himself firm and soundly despised as many people as he could.
But there is little enough interest in a man who loves nobody. In fact, Jimmie was surprised to find that he loved his half-brother Morton, who was innocent and loyal, who came to see Jimmie because he hated the thought of kinsmen lost amidst strangers.
In the time between Verona and Morton’s arrival, Jimmie Blacksmith had worked for a number of farmers, who had cautioned and paid him in the Healy style.
Now he had taken a contract with an old Scot called Claude Lewis.
Lewis mistrusted Morton, who had Dulcie’s flippancy. As old Lewis stumped about with a yard-stick, breathing sinusitically through a soiled moustache, Mort would double with laughter, would sit down on a tree-stump and quiver at some quaintness in the man.
“What’s worryin’ blackie, o’er thire?”
“Nothin’, Mr Lewis. He’s jist a boy.”
“Yer nae gunner turn me property into a blacks’ camp, are ye?”
“No, boss. No blacks’ camp.”
/> How these farmers feared the tribal intentions of the black man.
“Cut it out, Mort,” Jimmie would scream. “Give it a rest.”
Lewis would snort into his greyed slack moustache that had once been ginger and buoyant.
“Still canna see what he’s laughin’ at.”
When Lewis was gone, Jimmie would reproach Morton; but sometimes he too would be infected by laughter.
“The whitey he made me,” he said once, “he must have been solemn bastard. Or somethink.”
Morton had found him early on in the Lewis contract. It had been a hot day in December 1898, and Jimmie had felt unease the moment he saw a black stick wading in the ghost-vapours where the road took a crest at least a mile away.
He sensed the stick was kin of his. It proved to be thin kin, with big child-like teeth, chanting wild affection in Mungindi plainsong:
Breed of Emu-Wren, see your breed coming
Shouting the day’s joy as you
Shout the day’s welcome.
I sing my welcomes to you too
As I take you by the shoulders
And my hands clap,
Recognizing eyes, and beards
Jutted with smiling.
Though he could not stop himself smiling, Jimmie Blacksmith was wary of the song and Morton’s love. Therefore he made it clear to Mort that he allowed him to stay for reasons of commerce rather than of tribal section.
“If yer couldn’ work like yer do, I’d boot yer black arse out of here.”
It was, in fact, all nervousness with Mort, and a desire to give a kind of welcome.
Such welcomes Lewis wouldn’t accept. The Scot found fault all the time, fictional faults with his yardstick – cannier, he implied, than Jimmie’s tape. There were threats that Jimmie’s poor wages would be cut to a point at which he would not be able to buy food for Mort and himself.
Jimmie, once more, did not know Scottish history, or reasons why people called Lewis should relish so their ferocious bookkeeping.
One morning Jimmie and Mort Blacksmith simply walked away from Lewis’s.
Over the hills, in Scone, they got casual work from a squatter. Mort got a reputation as a horse-breaker. His talent arose from his ignorance and lack of fear of wild horses and his willingness to believe the best of animals. His big toes hooked into the horse’s belly, his thin boy’s body jolted madly up and down the spine. Of course, he giggled without ceasing. In the end even the horse would be bemused by that.
The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith Page 3