by Tom Keneally
Appertaining to
Wilkins Micawber
Magistrate . . .’
At this point of the novel, I was in tears. David had by now remarried the charming character named Agnes.
‘The guvnor wrote this,’ I told myself and was breathless with amazement and awe. How could such a majestic mind as that give birth to a plain boy like me?
One night when I rode up to the Wonkoo homestead after herding a flock along Purnanga Creek towards Whitelock’s hut, I found Father Charisse on the veranda. He had let his beard grow long, and wore a kangaroo cloak around his shoulders, under which was his now thoroughly tattered cassock.
‘Father,’ I said enthusiastically, with an eye out for Barrakoon’s people nearby.
‘Please, Mr Dickens,’ he told me as if he understood my mind. ‘My people are a day’s walk off. I am here by special dispensation of the remarkable Barrakoon.’
I asked him to come in and told him he must join me for a meal. He drank some sherry, which seemed to help him converse, and said of his new endeavours, ‘It is a strenuous life, Mr Dickens, when the desert nomads decide to move quickly.’
I said I was sure it was, and having had the informed Fred Bonney to guide me, I had never thought otherwise.
‘It is what makes it worthwhile for me to attempt,’ he added. ‘I have little doubt I am where God wants me to be, bearing witness as I am intended to. If God is the God of deserts, then I am in the desert, with desert travellers.’
I felt an urge to tell him to come back to his own people, but that was just bonhomie on my part. I was not equipped to argue the intentions of the Deity, and it seemed natural to argue that Father Charisse had misread the signs. Yet there was an authority both in his decision and to the way he looked at a person.
‘Father,’ I said, settling for a humbler aim, ‘why don’t you stay the night and have a good sleep? Cultay can take you out in the morning on horseback.’
‘That is very kind of you, Mr Dickens. I know your intentions are good.’
They were not as good as all that, though I did think that if he enjoyed a full night on a mattress, God’s intentions might be clarified for him, to make them more normal, more predictable, and town-dwelling. For there was something shocking about his dedication.
‘But,’ he said, ‘I do not have a night to squander away from my people.’
‘Do they accept you as theirs?’ I asked. ‘A kinsman?’
‘Yes. They think I am an idiot and help me at all stages of life. Their care for me is most touching and is far from the supposed emotions of barbarism. I doubt if any other society would have accepted me so quickly. Scottish Presbyterians, for example, would have thought me a child of the whore of Babylon. The native people have no such prejudices to overcome.’
So he could not be argued with, and had not come to be argued with. His purpose emerged over a dinner of mutton and potato and split peas, all of which he devoured with honest appetite as if it were his nightly fare.
‘I wanted to confide to you,’ he said as the meal went on, ‘something you can pass on to Mr Bonney. I suffer from a certain unease about events when we were further north of here, I suspect in the colony of Queensland. Four of the younger men went off in a party on their own, and when they returned were talking to Barrakoon. I cannot gauge it, and no one will answer me truly. I do wonder whether they encountered white men, and whether there was a confrontation and bloodshed. We travelled south after that as briskly as we could, so my concerns were in small part confirmed. If they did engage in an incident of blood or plunder, or both, I do not want all the people paying for it. I would be grateful if Mr Bonney could use his influence in this matter.’
I assured him I would send a message to Mr Bonney within days; that I had a letter addressed to any police commander who came to Wonkoo to say that Fred Bonney’s eyes were upon him and that anyone from Queensland lacked jurisdiction in New South Wales. And if any such commander brought a party of troopers, he would be sure to call at Wonkoo for information and Mr Bonney’s letter would be handed to him.
Father Charisse was reassured, and after a brandy seemed set to drowse off in his chair, but then he thanked me and told me he would pray for me, as if I were in peril with the supreme tempter, as distinct from Mrs Wivenhoe. After dinner, he told me he would get on his way and take some sleep later. The kangaroo-skin cloak would be very welcome, he said, for though it was spring the nights could still turn icy.
I saw him to the gate of the home pasture, but then he insisted I turn back to Wonkoo homestead. He continued forth, a penitential figure despite the dinner he’d had. He was a man who had abandoned all shelter for Christ’s sake, and I could not avoid revering him. He was, in his way, a saint. The fact that he expected to achieve nothing measurable gave him more authority, since pious people were often strident about the results they would have. And even the guvnor had expected results from Urania Cottage, and achieved them. Charisse’s achievement was the humble one, and witnessed by no one but me: of going back to sleep on the same earth as Barrakoon.
Some four days later, two dozen Queensland troopers arrived in caps and blue coats and riding boots. The white commander of the troop, a very lean man of perhaps forty, introduced himself to me as Sub-Inspector Belshire. He told me his native troopers were camped a little way from the homestead, making free of a well and the water from the Purnanga Creek. They sounded like a normal squad of young darks, hooting, teasing, musical when they spoke their native language. I presented Belshire with Bonney’s letter and then felt bound to offer him the hospitality of Wonkoo, such as it was, though he assured me that to him it was a palace. It was his choosing, though, he admitted, to lead the rough life he did. He had gone home to Lincoln two years before but found it would never suit him again to live in Britain. ‘Queensland has well and truly cured me of that,’ he confided, although his confidences sometimes had the quality of policeman’s edicts.
The sun set under long thin skeins of cloud, and I had got a good fire going on the hearth. He read the missive of Bonney’s by lamplight, finished it without comment and returned it to its envelope. Dinner was cooking in Bellows’ kitchen outside at the time, and I was hoping our drink would be sociable and conclusive. I had a certain prejudice against Belshire to begin with, given that Fred Bonney considered men of his ilk licensed killers of the darks.
It was an evening when a high wind began moving, and spirals of red dust were kicked up, but by now I knew that atmospheric drama in the upper air did not necessarily foretell the arrival of a rain front. I served Belshire his rum and we sat at the table, face to face, avoiding the two easy chairs the room provided. I had poured a companionable rum for myself, but a small measure which I diluted with water from a jug. The inspector had taken off his belt and loosened the buttons of his jacket before he sat. He took a sip of his spirit, but not a hungry mouthful.
‘Did you know that we caught Dr Pearson?’ he asked me. ‘Weren’t he and his chaps the ones who held you up here?’
‘That’s right,’ I agreed, almost casually, as if Dr Pearson and his associates had not brought me the fatal news.
‘It was at Eulo. He took the entire town hostage and then boasted that he had a particular wild mare – a grey – amongst his horses, and that he would show how he could ride her in the main street. Well, she threw him so bad that his skull was damaged and his gang could not move him, yet had to move on themselves. And that was how the Queensland police got the doctor.’
I would have laughed that du Barry had caused Pearson’s demise except that the main issue of Belshire’s patrol was no laughing matter. I uttered a sincere hope that Pearson was not too badly injured.
‘Well, now he will stand trial. He will not hang, but he will be long detained,’ he replied with considerable satisfaction, then said, ‘I’ve read your boss’s letter. I have every intention of according with his wishes if that is at all possible.’
‘He is very insistent, Inspector, that
you have no standing here,’ I said firmly.
‘On the other hand, Mr Dickens, I am interested in crimes committed within my jurisdiction. There may be people on Momba who are suspected of the murder of two Welsh prospectors west of Toompine in Queensland. Besides, I see no other sworn enforcers of British law here, certainly not the New South Wales police. And the enforcement of law as it is recognised by our society, not some other fanciful one, is my vocation, my church and my mandate.’
‘Within the colony of Queensland, however,’ I replied.
He took another sip of the rum.
‘These niceties can’t be maintained in country like this, Mr Dickens,’ he replied. ‘The matter of jurisdiction is a civilised concept meant to regulate the behaviour of servants of the law in places where they are thick on the ground. They are not thick on the ground here, or in southwest Queensland. Here the first principle of civilisation, that the traveller should sleep safely, has not yet been established in the minds of the savages.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘there is no need for the response to murder to be murder. I should remind you that if you are seeking to punish in this region crimes of the group led by Barrakoon, there is a priest with him, Father Charisse, from Belgium. He would inevitably be a witness to any actions you took, and thus you would be under the same scrutiny as if you were acting in a city street.’
The inspector inhaled and opened his eyes wide to take account of this. ‘What work of your father’s is your favourite, Mr Dickens?’ he asked me.
‘Why, it’s David Copperfield.’
‘Bleak House for me,’ he told me. ‘“An infernal country dance of costs and fees and nonsense and corruption as was never dreamed of in the wildest visions of a witches’ Sabbath.” Such is his view of the law as practised in cities. Besides, your good father seemed to think appropriate punishment a fine thing, whereas the letter of the law is a stumbling and silly thing. See his mockery of the prison system in Copperfield. So I have to say I am a little surprised to get here and find the son of the great man presenting me with that very letter of the law. Especially when two men were killed by their campfire.’
‘I regret their deaths,’ I replied. ‘The security of the night camp is a consideration all bush people place weight on. But I have no reason to believe the miscreants are anywhere on Momba.’
The matter of the concern about the young men that Charisse had raised with me was, after all, nothing near proof.
‘Mr Bonney respects the Paakantji and is respected in turn by them. He wants nothing to blemish or destroy his connection with them. When the Cooper’s Creek blacks come down here on their way to find ochre, Mr Bonney allows them to spear whatever sheep they need. As a result, we barely lose a head. If we applied the letter of the law they would become criminals, and what benefit would there be to us in describing them as such? If you destroy the friendship between the Bonney brothers and the native people, it is certain they will not take it calmly and that it will be difficult to restore.’
The inspector swallowed a large mouthful of rum now and its sweet acridity set his lips in a rictus. ‘So,’ he said, ‘I am to be concerned for a priest and the Bonney brothers.’
‘And for me,’ I felt I owed it to the Bonneys to say. ‘For me as well.’
‘Oh dear me,’ said the inspector with a short laugh. ‘I don’t want to take on the Dickens family as well.’
The next day there was a lot of inspection of police horses, the draining of a hoof abscess, and a great deal of walking back and forth of a suspect gelding. But then the troop saddled and set off in a south-west direction, where Belshire would encounter the western and lower reaches of the creeks that flowed from the Paroo, and thus less certain water.
41
A day passed at Wonkoo, and then another, and on the third day I was attending to the stock books at the homestead when Bellows came in and said there was a noise of firing from some miles south. I went out of the homestead and stood in the yard and could hear it clearly in the still morning. The human power to deny certain possibilities set in and I actually wondered if Belshire might have developed a head of resentment and was down there slaughtering Fred Bonney’s sheep. I fetched my rifle and called Cultay and Bellows as all my other staff were collecting a flock from Purnanga. Cultay was so worried and fretful that I myself became unsettled. I saddled Coutts and gave Cultay a rifle, while Bellows wore pistols, and we rode off in the direction of the noise of firearms.
After no more than two hours’ ride, we rose up the ridge and came down on Nippers Creek, where we found the firing had stopped. We continued on to an escarpment called Round Hill, where we heard a further scatter of fire, and a single shot resonating more sharply than the previous general fury of the fusillade.
We came upon the body of a young man on the north side of Olepoloko Creek, a watercourse that ran off from the Paroo. He had a broken spear by him and had been shot through the throat, the chest and both legs. We dismounted and began to lead our horses through the tall grass, with Cultay intoning a death chant. There was another young man felled nearby, half-hidden by kangaroo grass, desecrated similarly by unnecessary wounds. A bloody club lay by him and it seemed one of his executioners had, after felling him, taken to him with his own weapon. I vomited immediately, without having time to excuse myself or move aside.
Bellows said, ‘Let me do the rest of the count, Mr Dickens. You sit there.’
But I gathered myself. I couldn’t let that happen. I was the boss. The count must be mine.
We soon found two more young men, one of them with four bullet holes in him, and then another who resembled Yandi and was probably a cousin. This one had many bullet wounds in his chest, as if troopers had stood above him in a group, exhausting their ammunition. These younger men, it seemed, had gone forward to meet the attackers, so their people could cross the creek to hide. Further on, Cultay stood above two dead crones with mourning helmets of gypsum and seemed to take exact account of a frowning young woman with a dead baby beneath her body. One of the baby’s legs was all but torn off by a carbine round. In the stream itself, we found seven women and older men, all dead. These we brought forth and laid on the bank. On the south side of the creek, a number of men and women and two boys about fourteen years old with hardwood clubs by them were stretched out full of bullet holes.
We heard a baby crying from further along the creek, and made our way there, finding two elderly women, kneeling in death, each with a little lump of gypsum in their hair. Here too was Father Charisse, lying on his back pillowed by a kangaroo-skin cloak, wearing a loincloth of rags with a number of bullet holes in the front of his body. Had he been wearing his cassock, I imagined he might have been spared. Behind him, a naked child of between one and two years was sitting up and howling. Taking the priest’s kangaroo skin, I wrapped the child in it.
Twenty-four of Barrakoon’s party were dead, though according to Bellows Barrakoon himself did not seem to be amongst them. I went to Cultay who was silent now, his face mute, and asked did he want to remain there. He said he would, with Bellows.
‘Will we bury them?’ I asked. ‘Would Barrakoon still be escaping?’
‘Mr Bonney ought to make a picture here,’ he replied.
‘Yes,’ I assented. ‘Yes, he should.’
I left Bellows there to mind the bodies and the live child, and sent Cultay off to track down the shattered clan and to tell them the killers had gone, and that they would be welcome on Momba Station under the protection of Frederic Bonney. I then set out back to Wonkoo to collect my stockman and Whitelock the hutkeeper, who were due at the homestead that afternoon. After a few miles I saw dust to the north-east, and knew that Belshire’s troop was on its way back to Queensland. I spurred Coutts crazily and chased the dust column for an hour and a half. When I overtook the group of twenty or so troopers they were riding in shirtsleeves, their elegant jackets stowed. Altogether they looked bored and dispirited. I rode to the front of the column and Belshire saw me c
oming – indeed he must have been aware for some time I was following.
‘Mr Dickens,’ he called, as if we were meeting by happy accident.
I began to speak but seemed able only to produce fragments of words.
‘How?’ I asked, ‘how . . . ?’
He called on his troopers to halt then pointed to a red gum which we rode towards.
‘You murdered them,’ I accused him.
‘I put paid to all that Barrakoon magic, I’ll tell you that.’
‘You killed the priest.’
‘There was no priest.’
‘Yes, you mistook him for a dark.’
This gave him thought for a while but not for long. ‘There was no priest in the group, Dickens. No one identified himself as a priest to me or my men. So you must be mistaken.’
I told him I had seen the dead priest with my own eyes.
‘Did you notice we got a number of young men and even young women?’ he replied. ‘This will be fatal for the band. Within the year they’ll be living on the stations and driving cattle. And Barrakoon will be dead of grief, as he well deserves. We could have pursued him but are at the end of our supplies. Best now to let him wither.’
Like the boy I still was, I was tempted towards weeping in frustration, but instead I promised him, ‘Mr Bonney and I will see you destroyed.’
Belshire looked at me as if I were the deluded one and said, ‘Crimes against persons and livestock are not readily forgiven in the law of civilised countries. They are not available to be forgiven by you, for example, or by Mr Bonney. Indeed, I would have thought the punishment of those who commit them was welcome to your boss. And I reiterate, there was no priest. We do not kill priests.’
‘You are an abominable man,’ I told him.
‘If so, you will find that the Queensland government will not be interested in any complaint from you or Mr Bonney. For I have brought quietus to those who have the intention to invade Queensland in the future and impose their treachery. Our carbines have spoken the majesty of law to the eternal rocks of Momba Station. I have been instructed to bring such majesty by my superiors, and my superiors will stand by me. Now, I’m getting on for the border, and you must report to Mr Bonney. And get your stockman to bury the dead.’