The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith

by Thomas Keneally

  West again over the Divide, they found an empty house to steal from. Was it a Friday or perhaps a funeral? Though he might be a man who had killed women, Jimmie secretly fretted that it might be a funeral. It was not a rich man’s hut, not the hut of an established man, but commodities were exactly laid out in it, all in order, the cups in the dresser, the wood in its box, the wick in the hurricane lamp white and precisely trimmed. A battler’s house, not the house of the sort of man they had made war with. Jimmie didn’t wish on its owner a funeral and a looting in the one day.

  There were no newspapers for Jimmie to read what a plague he was.

  As for Mort, he was restored and given new vigor by touching household things, tea canisters, sugar scoops, jam tins; even if it was only with the relative innocence of a thief that he touched them. He left the place tidy, at least, and there was no blood on the walls.

  Dowie Stead thought of his comrades as a fast striking force, like the new striking forces that were being formed in South Africa to hunt the slithery Boer. By arriving at Healy’s only the day after the Blacksmiths had been there they had proved their quality and had their sense of being the vengeance strengthened. Not that they were presented with the direct evidence of Jimmie Blacksmith’s work. The coroner, wise enough to know that babies are powerful stimulants one way or another, and that this one would merely stimulate hysteria, sent a telegram that only first-degree relatives were to see the remains. So Dowie Stead had learned nothing at Healy’s, nor from his conference with the lady-companion.

  But while squadrons of Mounted Rifles, sent to Dubbo instead of Cape Town, encumbered the west, and parties of volunteers solemnly followed the Blacksmiths’ cold spoor, they had been only a day behind the devil himself. That proved their competence, they told each other.

  Dowie Stead was no fool, however, and secretly feared what might not be accomplished; that there might be no consummation to the chase. No blood to dip his fiver in.

  “I wonder,” he said, “if Blacksmith knows about the telegraph. Gilgandra can telegraph direct to Sydney and so can Merriwa. But there’s no telegraph direct between the places where he’s most likely to move.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it,” said Dud Edmonds.

  “He’s not as clever as all that,” said Toban.

  In their night encampments some of them spoke as if the manhunt were a novitiate for the war in South Africa. They were unlike the clerk who gave Jimmie the leaflet on fencing in 1897. Their inheritance – combined – was not in thousands of acres but in hundreds of thousands. Except for Toban, they were Britannically minded.

  “What makes me doubtful about South Africa, there are too many fellers dying of disease.”

  “Righto. Yer got t’ risk the disease t’ git at the Boer. Righto. They print the list of those who die of disease. But they don’t say how many of them’ve killed a Boer or a bunch of bloody Boers.”

  Toban said: “There aren’t even a few British soldiers ’ve killed one, let alone a bunch.” It gave him satisfaction.

  “Yer can’t get away from it. Yer look at the lists in the Herald. Private Briggs, enteric fever, Private Brown, of wounds, Corporal Jones, enteric fever, Private Smith, enteric fever, Captain Ponce McGillicuddy, enteric fever. The lists are bloody endless. Enteric fever is what they’re fighting. The British Empire versus gut-ache. They ought t’ put out in front of recruiting places a sign that says Recruits ought to be told that if they join Her Majesty’s Forces they might have to bloody well fight Boers.”

  Toban, son of the son of an Irish evictee, spoke as expected.

  “It’s Britain’s war, not ours. Every Australian gets shot or goes under t’ fever is a crying waste. We’re going to federate. We’re going t’ be a bloody power in the world. And our world’s our world, not Britain’s. If it was, why did our fathers and grandfathers come here?”

  “Singin’ too-ral, li-ooral, li-addity,” said someone, from an old song about the convicts.

  “I can tell yer Father Reynolds, who’s of Irish descent all right, but no fanatic, yer all know that, he’s just come back from Rome and he tells me Britain’s stocks in Europe are so bloody low they wouldn’t even buy a pound of butter.”

  Everyone whistled and groaned to let Toban know that he had been admitted to their number because of his sillabubs and horsemanship and power with liquor, in spite of the colour of his opinion, which was generally anti-monarchist and Papist.

  “Oh Paddy dear, and did yer hear,” they sang at him.

  At the end of the hubbub, someone said, “The Boers’ve got a lot of sympathy, it’s true what Toban says. I mean, all they wanted to do was to have their land and keep the black man in his place. Isn’t that our policy, here tonight? The Boers wanted to keep the black man in his true naked state. If we hadn’t flattered and put clothes on our blacks … I mean t’ say, our blacks are far more backward than any South African black ever was, and if we hadn’t tried to turn ours into Europeans, then –” he coughed, as if worried at reminding Dowie of his grief or duty of grief “ – then you know what.”

  Dowie spoke, with all the authority of his bereaved state, just now suggested. But without rhetoric. They kept Toban for that.

  “British authority has been challenged by the Boers. There’s been deliberate provocation. An insult to the Queen.”

  “Pardon me, Dowie. I respect yer right to speak, but I beg to point out the flaws in yer statement.” It was Toban again, the great flaw-pointer. “I mean, t’ talk about an insult t’ the Queen! If an Eskimo in the Ar’tic wrote bugger the Queen! on the wall of his igloo, would yer go all the way up there t’ shoot him for it? It’s nonsense. The Boers are a people like us. They’re tough and there wouldn’t be any South Africa without them. Just the same as there wouldn’t be any Australia if it wasn’t for the downtrod of Britain’s filthy cities and the victims of tyrannous British eviction.”

  Again they cheered ironically at Toban’s Irish catechisms. “Where from, Toban? Where were people evicted from? What country did that happen in? It’s those bloody Catholics again, evicting the poor bloody Protestants!”

  “Don’t you worry! Our grandparents all had the arse out of their trousers. Out here we live like kings in Australia. Who did that for us – the Queen? My grandfather farmed an acre and a half in Kerry. Now my father runs sheep on twenty thousand acres. And we can afford t’ ride out like this, like knights, and hunt …”

  He began to look solemn, as the other young man had some seconds earlier.

  “… with all respect, Dowie, hunt the killers of girls who nothing can make up for.”

  Someone said, “Well put!” and the words sank beyond trace into the shadows beneath his jaw.

  Dowie Stead let his mouth set in mute lines that could easily be interpreted as grief. Secretly he mastered a compulsion to tell them all to shut up their sombre prognostications. For they nearly all knew what it was to slaver after dark women. Even Toban. And he couldn’t blame that on evictions.

  In Muswellbrook, Mr Neville told his wife that if he could he would go off after the Blacksmiths unarmed.

  “Poor Jimmie!” he was always discovering himself saying.

  And always Mrs Neville said, “What do you mean, poor Jimmie?” In a tone that suggested that she might not have married him if she had known of this tendency towards sympathy for killers.

  Mrs Neville wept for the obvious things which were all reproduced in one special edition of the Mail. The photograph of the Newby family, taken at Christmas time, 1898.

  “What a fine solid couple they made,” said Mrs Neville of the Newbys. The two murdered girls were marked with a white cross.

  “So young, so young,” said Mrs Neville.

  “But you must remember,” said Mr Neville, “that they would have grown considerably since 1898.”

  “Of course, of course.”

  There was Miss Graf’s firm face, strenuous shoulders and bust.

  Mr Neville was no fool. He knew what sickness Jimmi
e was suffering. Having a true talent for religion, he understood the obsessive spiral, and understood that he himself might have been sent racketing around it if ever he had touched a black woman. The only anodyne, the sole apology for one abomination, becomes a second, and so on.

  The Mail had printed too a photograph of Mrs Blacksmith, waif-wife in crumpled dress and straggly, bunned hair, squinting at the phosphorus flash. Mr Neville remembered with nausea that he had recommended this sort of marriage to Jimmie, this stupid, cunning and insipid girl. Did Mrs Neville remember that? He hoped to God she did.

  Appropriately deaths and burials were numerous in his congregation during the first fortnight of the Blacksmith spree. The Rev. Mr Neville had got beyond the words of the funeral rite and found that total extinction after death and survival in God’s sight were both equally hard to disbelieve in.

  Likewise he found it only too easy and totally impossible to believe that his Jimmie Blacksmith was at loose killing women.

  In Sydney there was a promise of spring, but first, harsh nor’-westers. All Mr Hyberry’s customers had colds and Ted Knoller, waiting against the antiseptic wall, sniffled into his scarf with a furled copy of the Sporting Chronicle under his armpit.

  “Well, they’ve found two of them,” he called across the floor. Once more no one but a reputably deaf spinster was waiting to be served. “The wife and the old man. You’ll have to … do the job, let’s say, do the job on them two.”

  “I wasn’t aware they’d come to trial yet,” said toffee-nosed Mr Hyberry.

  Knoller found the man unbearably discreet and polite. He even had a copy of the Pure Foods Act hung on the wall.

  “No, they haven’t. But Christ, they were all in it. They’re sure to … Have yer ever hanged a woman before?”

  “No.”

  “I s’pose it’ll present its peculiar problems.”

  “Indeed it would, Mr Knoller, for the simple reason I’d never hang a woman, even if ordered to do so by the Queen herself.”

  Behind their father, the slicing boys did not even look up. As if they had been informed beforehand of this possible future falling-out between V R and their father.

  “Not even if she’s a murderer?” Knoller asked. “I mean, a killer’s a killer, it don’t make no diff’rence, man or woman.”

  “It makes all the difference, Mr Knoller. A condemned woman might be carrying another life. However squalid the origins of that life might be …”

  “Yer mean, she might be in the family way? In a jail?”

  “Jails are not all they should be, Mr Knoller.”

  Mr Knoller was amazed or pretended to be. He pulled the Sporting Chronicle from under his arm in a manner that made the butcher fear that he might fall back on it for reference material.

  “By what yer jest said,’ Knoller slyly murmured, “you’d be willing to hang a grandmother who was past bearing children. You’d hang her no matter how randy the wardens were.”

  “I would not hang a grandmother, because I would respect the life she’d already given to the world.”

  Then Knoller laughed, in a nasty, doubting way. It made him peevish that Hyberry was incorruptible.

  The hangman himself found it possible to be lenient with Knoller today. It would be easy enough for anyone to presume that an executioner, given that he was not a monster, would obtain insights into the nature of man and death by all his cool killing.

  In fact, all that happened was that Hyberry came to the jail the day before the hanging. Through the Judas window of the condemned cell he surveyed the man, never for more than five minutes. The chief warden already had certain measurements to hand to him as well. Then the gallows were inspected and Mr Hyberry set up and adjusted the rope and tried the trap.

  These days it took him up to two hours to arrange matters to the limits of his scruples. Then he went home, unless it was a country hanging, in which case he returned to his hotel. At home he took a double-whisky and went to bed early. In a hotel he might have as many as three whisky-and-sodas in the lounge, reading something such as the London Illustrated News until ten o’clock.

  The next day he was called at dawn. In a strange numbness he drank his early morning tea, shaved and omitted breakfast.

  At six-thirty a cab took him to the prison and he looked over his preparations, though not at his victim. Most of the hour between seven and eight he spent chatting in the Chief Warden’s office, where a chaplain would join them.

  There was usually a high failure rate in jail chaplains, so that Hyberry found himself frequently explaining to novice chaplains where he himself would stand in relation to priest and warden and physician and statutory witnesses.

  The condemned usually behaved well. Hyberry never knew whether it was because the doctor had given them some euphoric drug or because it was easy to die if the hour and moment of death were known. He would never have asked if sedatives were used; it was not his business.

  On the scaffold, Hyberry stood at the left-rear corner. The condemned scarcely ever looked at him when they came up onto the platform. Sometimes they were permitted to speak, though were usually dissuaded from it if they were in a God-defying mood.

  Then two warders jostled the man gently onto the centre of the trap. Immediately Hyberry came forward, arranged the noose, put a hood over the man’s head. Three seconds later he had gone to the lever and tripped it. The clack of the trap did not always drown the incisive click of the neck breaking.

  Hyberry had learned no mysteries; he was so deft at the work and so swift that witnesses often wondered why they were necessary.

  So there was nothing to tell Knoller, either obscene or revelatory … apart from his mistake with the old black man.

  But Knoller already knew about that.

  11

  Twelve days after Healy’s, the Blacksmith brothers were still in forest and had tired of it. It was tricky country. One kept coming on drops of hundreds of feet, perhaps a thousand, and had to scout about for a way down. The descents themselves seemed profitless and unreal. The Blackmiths had the tedium of ceaselessly outdistancing their pursuit.

  They needed the heady sight of hunters; to be made to flee at high speed and in the route of armies.

  Fires and long meals soothed them. Sometimes they over-slept. Mort spoke, the little he did, of visiting women.

  Jimmie believed it was wise of Mort to think of women, and to find Pilbarra camp one night after dark, where he knew a girl called Nancy. Certainly they were reckless, but had come to a point where they needed to be assured of the tangible world of search-parties and towns aghast by the dozen.

  So they heedlessly knocked on Nancy’s door in Pilbarra. It happened that Nancy’s husband was away, but he was a hospitable man anyhow, or if not hospitable, easily frightened.

  Both her children were there, a half-caste called Simon and a full-blood called Peter. Nancy took them aside. She had a flat solemn pleasant face. The Blacksmith brothers could hear what she told them.

  “These two fellers pretty bloody tough, cut yer water off or bloody throat like as not. You git off with yer into bush and catch possum a few hours. Orright? Yer go quiet and if yer go near Constable Harrogate they’ll shoot the two of yer and him as well. Off yer go.”

  Unbuttoning, Mort said, “Who’s this Constable Harrogate?”

  “All the blacks’ camps got a constable, pertect ’em against angry whitefellers. There lot of whites with rifles ridin’ up and down the countryside.”

  Nancy herself was undressing, in a random way. Her kindness to killers – it looked like kindness, anyhow, not fear, made Jimmie’s throat stick and caused him to colour and brought tears to his eyes. Her off-hand mercy.

  Without warning, Mort fell on her and wept with an alarming loudness, and was soothed into sucking at one of her nipples like a child.

  “Yer know what we done?” he asked her, half-choking, his mouth champing at her.

  “Yair, yer ripped up some people, didn’t yer? Yer ain’t goin
’ t’ rip me up though, are yer, Mort?”

  Mort howled. Nancy made hushing noises.

  Jimmie as well wanted his turn to weep on her, but could not delay the spasm of grief. He fell onto his knees shuddering. It was beyond him to hate the Newbys any more. It was far less than that he felt no victory over them. Their judgments seemed to hang over him still, of their own strength.

  So Jimmie was still the victim. The obviousness of the fact bent him to the ground abjectly, as Healy himself had been bent.

  Then, as Mort still sweated towards satisfying his mothering Nancy, Jimmie lay inert, his mouth open. He could neither move nor imagine himself ever moving again. It would take someone to come armed and demanding surrender to undo his paralysis.

  Someone came armed and demanding surrender. Mullett had at last heard of the murders and gone to the police. While drunk, Mort had mentioned Pilbarra to Mullett’s woman.

  A small force of police and citizens, headed by Farrell, had met Dowie Stead’s party, who were moving west again. In another case such a reference to one village might not have brought forth a large concentration of force. But it was the pattern of the Blacksmith chase that hundreds of men would ride hundreds of miles on a rumour.

  Therefore Farrell had been able to collect constables and volunteers as he went.

  At eleven that night, Nancy left the brothers drowsing and went to her burlap doorway: the last look of the night, to call her children home if they were waiting in the dark for a sign from her.

  What she saw was a bonfire in the centre of the camp where police and armed volunteers were guarding the menfolk who had been flushed from their shanties at the south end of the camp. This gambit looked as if it had been in progress for some time, the blaze, the herded men, all achieved in near silence.

  When the Blacksmith brothers knew they took their rifles and cartridges. Everything was so quiet; it was one of those nights when you can almost hear the frost turning to crystal on the earth.

  “Don’ leave yer food,” Nancy begged them, for they looked like men about to sprint. “Don’ leave yer bloody blankets. C’mon, Mort, don’ be a bastard. It’ll all make me look damm silly.”