The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith

by Thomas Keneally

  “I know who you two are,” he told them. “God, you’ve travelled fast.”

  Jimmie could not allow people like him to establish their intent. He raised his Enfield and sighted it on the schoolmaster’s heart. For two seconds he clenched his eyes shut and then fired. The bullet went well wide of the teacher. Those two blind seconds had cheated or saved Jimmie.

  “Jesus!” the teacher muttered and sat down on his chopping block.

  The thin girl who had been sighted earlier came onto the veranda and began to scream.

  “It’s all right, darling,” the teacher called. “We spotted a rabbit. You go inside. I’ll be in in a moment.”

  The girl’s large eyes were not reassured. She remained where she was and raked her hair from her forehead so that she should not fail to see any further pot-shooting.

  “C’mon, Jimmie,” Mort said. He was afraid for the witnessing lady.

  “No.”

  “C’mon!”

  There was silence, set against the small-talk of forest, of falling twigs and chattering birds. The schoolteacher began to speak but gave up and drew his hand down the length of his spiky hair from the back to the forehead. A gesture of conciliation.

  Then he said, “If you two gentlemen are in any doubt as to whether to kill us, just let me tell you my wife’s sick and I don’t have much insurance.” He struck his fist three times on the knee of his trousers. “And we’re both bloody innocent.”

  “Yer got any flour, bacon?” Mort asked.

  “Oh yair, enough of that.” He shrugged and looked up at them, his lips quivering beyond control. “You don’t have to think you must kill me. You let an old man live up in Barrington Tops.”

  “Soon as we turned our backs, yer’d be off to the p’lice,” Jimmie said. “It was a schoolie did for Ned Kelly.”

  “You’re welcome to take my horse. I’m twenty-two miles from a police station. A walk like that would take me two days. Look, I know I can reason with you, because you aren’t mad, either of you.”

  After a second of looking up from beneath his eyebrows, and looking always more and more blameless without trying, after an instant of licking his long sad lips, he laughed sharply and in considerable fright, and stood up.

  The Blacksmiths could see that he understood – perhaps from the classroom – the ways control shifted from one to another and that he suspected it might somehow pass to him; that, at least, his family would not be hewn or shot.

  “Let me show you something you’d enjoy. It’s in the Bulletin.”

  Mort followed, dangling his arms, and Jimmie came too, though much more creakily, his rifle at the port. There was one of those near-comic crushes – somehow implying the parlous state of Jimmie’s command – at the doorway, where the schoolmaster halted for the sake of frankness.

  “By the way, you aren’t going to believe me if I say I’ve got no arms in the house. In fact, I’ve got a bonzer Martini Henry carbine. My father-in-law gave it to me. I’ve been intending to clean it – I haven’t touched it for a year. It was a wedding present. Everyone said it was a funny wedding present. Someone said it was to keep the cow-cockies away from my wife. I haven’t got any ammunition for it.”

  They went on then, into the kitchen. The teacher chattered on, the wife watched out of her vast witnessing eyes.

  Meanwhile Jimmie felt desperate. He was letting consequences pile up against him by letting them live. Yet he had no passion for this woman’s blood.

  He screamed for the teacher to shut up and hit him on the jaw. The woman shrieked at the blow. Her husband began to weep silently in a detached way, in a way that did not diminish him.

  “A schoolie did for Ned Kelly,” Jimmie diagnosed. “I don’t want no schoolie to do fer me.”

  “Yer got any liquor?” Mort asked dismally, as if the terms they were negotiating had shrunk to that. “There won’t be anythin’ more bad happen t’ yer, missus,” he muttered at the woman while the teacher went fumbling for rum in the kitchen cupboard. The teacher passed a flask to Mort without interest and held out his arm to receive his wife.

  “It’s all right,” the teacher said, whether instructing Jimmie or comforting his wife no one could tell. “If they were going to kill us, I’d tell you so that you could pray. My wife is religious.”

  “We’re Methodist,” Mort stupidly said. “We not goin’ t’ kill yer, missus.”

  The headmaster blinked. Gobbets of tear were spiked on his lashes. He began to look around him.

  “Where’s that copy of the Bulletin, dear?” He found it slung across a dumb-waiter. “Here, look at this.”

  It was a caricature of two plump aborigines camped in a forest setting, feeding police bloodhounds with legs of mutton. One of the two aborigines was telling a satiated police-dog, “Go back to yer boss an’ tell ’im yer ain’t seen nothing!” Both natives were smiling, and the one not bribing the bloodhounds was reading a newspaper which bannered the news: Blacksmith Brothers still at large after two months.

  “What’s it say?” said Mort, after Jimmie had read the thing a second sombre time.

  Jimmie explained as drily as he could manage. He was unwilling to confess being touched. But once the bones of the joke were stated, Mort propped himself up with Mrs Healy’s lady-companion’s rifle and bent over with laughter, and then Jimmie himself conceded, and the headmaster smiled.

  It was preposterously more than a joke. The pen-and-ink man had restored the Blacksmiths to the comic realm, an area which, they thought instinctively, everyone had closed to them. It gave them leave from the corroding business of being incubi; absolved them from the bogy role. At once Jimmie saw the remote potentiality of becoming a figure of myth in this first breaking of the monumental visage of appal the press had so far turned towards their fumbling homicide and talent for flight.

  And the teacher knew all this.

  “There’ve been three thousand men out looking for you two, you know,” he told them.

  “Three thousand!” Mort whispered. In a sparse country, Mort was impressed by the immensity of thousands.

  As the wife told Mort where the groceries were kept, Jimmie remembered the passage in the Herald about saving Jackie Smolders’ hanging until the Blacksmiths had been taken. The idea of a hostage, of someone who could be bargained for Jackie Smolders, came to him.

  He knew how unlikely the concept was. But here they had been treated with a sort of respect, been given room to speak in their true selves. It was all so simple: they wanted to go on being seen as the two gay fugitives of the caricature. And this teacher was a man to whom they could speak of their crimes in level, wholesome, even comic terms.

  Jimmie could not have explained all this. But for taking a white with them there was one word, which the force of his understanding pushed up his throat.

  “Hostage,” he said, and everyone became silent.

  “I couldn’t keep up with you two. I’d hold you up. I’ve got respiratory trouble.”

  Besides which, Jimmie knew, there was a great risk of the prisoner becoming master. Some of the blindness that goes with falling in love forced Jimmie’s decision. Mort’s eyes also shone. He wanted company.

  “We wouldn’t hurt him, missus,” he said in actual apology. “Three thousan’ sure t’ catch us in the end. Then he kin come home.”

  “Git yerself some blankets and ground sheet!” Jimmie told the man.

  Instead, the schoolteacher was caressing and soothing his wife and began to argue against the nonsense of taking him. But, being no fool, he began to see that they were answering one of the imperatives of their history and were fixed.

  Soon his wife was fussing about, packing his things as if he were going for a train journey. It was all very insane. “Take the double blankets,” she said. “Keep warm but not too warm. It’s a dangerous time of year. And wear your rough-work boots. What about Wellingtons?”

  “It’s too hard trekking in Wellingtons. Have you seen my Palgrave?”

  “How
many pairs of socks? And don’t forget to keep the flannel round your chest.”

  She was meanwhile seeping tears all the time.

  They left well before dusk, so that she could start for a neighbour’s place before dark. She stayed on the veranda, spilling tears and chewing her bottom lip.

  It was like a dream, this fantastic insistence on a hostage, and had no more logic than a dream. They found that the schoolteacher’s name was McCreadie. Now they intended to show McCreadie the daily virtue of their fear and strenuous survival. He had short breath, however.

  “I warned you,” he said.

  It rained and the schoolteacher’s asthma became louder in the slowly dripping, still forest. Towards one o’clock in the morning they halted.

  McCreadie sat against a trunk, assuring Mort he was not as ill as he sounded.

  “The secret,” he grunted, “is to get rid of the entire load of air before breathing in again. Most asthmatics take short, quick breaths, but that only makes things worse. A person must never panic, or think that each time he breathes out is the last.”

  “Panic?” Mort asked.

  “Do your bundle,” McCreadie explained.

  Mort understood that that was how McCreadie had won, by giving things time, by passing around the latest edition of the Bulletin.

  Spreading a groundsheet, Jimmie saw Mort gathering kindling wood.

  “No fire,” Jimmie said, “They’ll be lookin’ fer fires.”

  “Who’ll be fuckin’ lookin’? The schoolie needs a cup.”

  “Don’t be such a bloody ole lubra. He’s here fer us. We’re not here fer bloody him.”

  “Mort wants one too.”

  “Fuckin’ ole women’s church turn-out.”

  But he drank some when it had been brewed. Then McCreadie put his glasses away in his jacket, his eyes with the blunt look of the acutely short-sighted, and began slowly rolling himself in his blankets.

  “No school tomorrow,” he wheezed, before going soundly asleep.

  The McCreadie-Blacksmith connection was initiated by Jimmie in the hope of finding a genial self-reflection in McCreadie. But people are never passive mirrors.

  Jimmie became quickly disenchanted with the teacher who seemed to be receiving confessions from Mort, or perhaps even conspiring with him. Suddenly McCreadie began to see little comedy in two men evading three thousand, and became fixed like Mort on the fact of Jimmie having axed women.

  Mr Jimmie Blacksmith felt as cheated as a man who marries a bitter woman. It was clear that the teacher would emasculate and sunder them; and that he intended it.

  Meanwhile Jimmie wanted to be blunt and vicious with McCreadie, in the manner of a Healy or a Farrell; but harshness like that did not transfer well to the teacher, who could not be appropriately frightened or angered.

  On a clear damp morning, for example, he fetched water from a mountain sink in sandstone, a fed pool with sweet little crayfish in the soft abrasions of sandstone which covered the bottom. He filled a can, and rose to see McCreadie gathering wood in the undergrowth ten yards away, his suit collar turned up and his elf-shaped ears pink as if it were mid-winter.

  He went straight to McCreadie. As often before when Jimmie had confronted the teacher, Mort materialized from the forest to watch, to see after McCreadie’s welfare.

  “When I went t’ work fer farmers, fer farmers like Newby,” Jimmie said, “they was always afraid I was goin’ t’ turn their prop’ty into a blacks’ camp. They always said a filthy blacks’ camp. It looks as if yer aren’t keepin’ yerself very clean, Mr Schoolteacher, and I don’t want my place turned into a filthy whites’ camp.”

  Then he poured the can of water over McCreadie’s head. It washed the glasses off the short-sighted eyes, turned the beard to a thin goatish tassel of hair and flooded the good cloth of his shoulders.

  But the act worked no magic for Jimmie. McCreadie’s wet pink ears and beard and all made a flat joke. Of course, Jimmie Blacksmith understood, the reasons why it was a flat joke were the same reasons that made vengeance a yawning lie.

  How Mort would once have laughed, the young Mort. The Mort he had become groaned his intolerance across the space between them.

  A quick shiver ran through McCreadie, but he did not move.

  “Yer stupid bastard, Jimmie!” Mort called, passionately, a genuine opponent.

  “I’ll tell you,” said the schoolmaster, “if I get one of my chest inflammations …”

  “Go an’ fill up the can,” said Jimmie. “That’ll help keep yer warm.”

  “Why don’t yer go an’ fill it yerself?” Mort suggested. “Yer the stupid bastard that spilt it.”

  “What d’yer think I am, the bloody schoolie’s servant? Yair, yer’d like me t’ go, so yer kin tell him how yer never cut up any women an’ yer a nice abo off a mission.”

  “Well, I never cut up any women.”

  “Jest shot one in the chest. But that don’t count, I s’pose. Christ, they ought t’ have yer fightin’ the Boers.”

  Without warning, McCreadie, a gobbet of water still on his nose-tip, let out his classroom roar.

  “Be quiet!”

  The arguing brothers were jolted more than they cared to be.

  McCreadie said severely, “If you stand there comparing evils, you won’t stop till you’ve shot each other through the heart. You ought to know that no one does a murder unless he wants to.”

  Jimmie Blacksmith morbidly hoped McCreadie meant that, for it would weaken him with Mort, who believed now that people could stumble into the act of killing.

  “Yer kin hurt people by acc’dent,” Mort said.

  “Oh yes,” the teacher conceded. “But you harmed the people you harmed because you chose to go to them ready to harm them, with the arms to do it.”

  Mort put on a sulky face, as if he were hurt to be lumped with his brother, the axe-murderer, and disappointed by McCreadie’s poor opinion of him.

  Once more the thought of shooting McCreadie came to Jimmie, but dismayed him. The startling thing was that a bullet could not hurt McCreadie on the plane on which Jimmie hoped to hurt. Something so endowed with energy and the grace of the Lord as a bullet from Birmingham could not prevail.

  “I’ll go and get the water,” said McCreadie at last.

  He went away in the maladroit amble Jimmie Blacksmith had become accustomed to seeing. A stiff, sick-man’s walk, anyone could see.

  Yet he had such hopes for, such need of McCreadie. It was not to be thought of, letting him go.

  Not only in his butcher’s shop was Mr Hyberry considered wide open for scrutiny. As Grand Master of his Balmain lodge he must endure a Master who, far from being a night foreman of a marshalling yard, was a State Member of Parliament and an industrialist.

  This man was delighted as a child with all the lines of influence he controlled, and enjoyed flexing them in public to show people that they really existed.

  Grand Master Hyberry was always surprised by the man’s blunt line of approach.

  “Hah!” he’d say secretively, whenever he met Hyberry, “tell me, Grand Master, did you ever go to sea?”

  They might talk health, weather and the vague politics which are all a politician can afford to speak with strangers. But it always returned to, “Tell me, Grand Master, did you ever go to sea?”

  The parliamentarian had been to sea. His father had owned small clippers and once he himself had signed on for the Sydney-Valparaiso-London run.

  Mr Hyberry always said no, he regretted he had never been fortunate enough to go to sea. Then the politician would actually begin to talk of knots, of knots and seizings; unmanageable, iced-up knots off Patagonia.

  It was not as subtle even as Knoller, but the purpose was the same. They wanted to find out that he was privately a monster with a profound lust for his task.

  Hyberry refused to tell them how he had had a sober maternal uncle, a devoted man who, fallen to arthritis, merely wanted to hand on an onus of public duty to someone
who would carry it with dispassion.

  In the early hours of a November morning, however, Mr Hyberry, sleepless in his high-prowed marital bed, could not be dispassionate. The loud-mouth politician had told him – in confidence! – at lodge the evening before that the Premier had put down Hyberry’s name for an M.B.E. on a preparatory list of nominations for royal honours. The list was to mark the new year and the new federation.

  “But he can’t now, Wallace, yer understand. Not till those Blacksmiths have got caught. If they git shot, good-oh, all above board! But if yer have to hang ’em, what with the public interest in the case, it’ll look like yer gitting a reward for stringing them up. Never mind, in a year or two …”

  Mr Hyberry wanted a royal honour, humbly knew it to be his due. He thought it was unfair that whether he got one or not depended not only on the normal vagaries of politics but on who committed murder and when, on when they were captured and tried, and on the intensity with which their murders struck the public mind.

  “I mean t’ say,” the politician had said, “it’ll be hard enough choosing a time to hang ’em. Everyone’ll be in such a high frame of mind with all this federation nonsense. Hangin’ and things to do with it’ll be a little bit out of place.”

  They would probably give the M.B.E. he coveted to a senior sewage engineer. For sewage was less contingent than crime and punishment.

  13

  And now McCreadie became a habit. He would hold his breath and take the risk of beginning to speak of bloodlust and murder.

  “I can understand your being angry,” he would say in the midst of a night silence. “Oh, I can imagine it, Jimmie. I mean, settlers still talked about marauding blacks. Only ten years ago they did. But how many whites really ever got killed by aborigines? No one knows. I bet it wasn’t more than four or five thousand. If that. Then, you might ask, how many aborigines did the whites kill? The answer is a quarter of a million. Two hundred and seventy thousand have gone. I can understand your being angry.”

  Jimmie secretly loved to hear these admissions. They were the luxuries he kept McCreadie for.

  Then McCreadie and Mort would argue about their killings. Perhaps it should have been hard for Jimmie Blacksmith to listen. It was easy; because crimes like the Wallah massacre made the criminal, him, Jimmie, feel remote, a phantasm; and his terror of unreality, of hell, of demon-harbouring, could be soothed by this sort of debate.