The Dickens Boy

by Tom Keneally

  And with that he went back to his troopers, some of whom had been resting on the ground by their horses, and commanded them up. In fairly short order they rode off, leaving me full of things to say but convinced of the uselessness of my utterances.

  Back at Wonkoo, numbed and despairing, I sent Whitelock with a message for Fred Bonney telling him Belshire’s Queensland troopers had massacred most of Barrakoon’s party, including children and Father Charisse, and I thought he should come as quickly as possible to record the graves, and even the remains yet to be found, with his photographic device.

  I then gathered my men and shovels. For Cultay had permitted the burying of the dead before Fred Bonney arrived with his camera. It took us the better part of a dreadful night and much of the next day to bury the slaughtered, and I sometimes felt an impulse to drop my shovel and lie like the dead amidst the grass. I maintained just enough intent to scratch the earth and dig, occasionally leaving it to men like Keogh to achieve a depth of earth appropriate to a grave.

  After we’d finished, Cultay smoked the earth to re-sanctify it, and we camped overnight. Riding back to Wonkoo the next morning I grew feverish. I was bed-ridden the following day. Meanwhile, Cultay rode out to seek Barrakoon, and found him far off to the west. When he got back to Wonkoo he told us Barrakoon was wounded in the hand and very poorly in spirits.

  Thankfully, Fred did come, raising me a little from my fever and flatness. One of the men accompanied him to the site of the massacre, where he took a photographic tour of the graves, opening three of them to make plates of the remains. He told me he intended to publish them to provide visibility to the slaughtered. At least, I felt, a recourse might be on its way.

  By Christmas, no one had seen a trace of Barrakoon or his group, and they didn’t appear at either Wonkoo or Momba.

  The news of the massacre of Father Charisse and Barrakoon’s Paakantji group was printed widely in the end. Fred sent his photographs to the coroner in Queensland and some were published. The Queensland Commissioner of Police acknowledged the Bonneys’ letters and mine with the promise of a full government inquiry. Both Fred Bonney and I made statutory declarations through Malleson and they were sent off. My recall of the events was impaired by what I can only call a shock to the memory, into which imagination overflowed, and I felt my understanding threaten to slip, like an imprecise implement, as I wrote my account. And if I could not deliver such a tale, who would?

  Belshire, the commissioner told us by further letter, had offered his sworn version, but for some reason we were not sent it.

  It was soon clear though that if there was to be justice against Belshire, it would come very slowly. Yet on the other hand it took only a month before gossip began to undermine Charisse’s martyrdom, calling him at best reckless, at worst fascinated by a Paakantji woman.

  We would get used to waiting for a result for Belshire. And if the mounted police now became a little more circumspect, it would be little consolation to Barrakoon and his party.

  When Fred went back to Momba, taking the live infant with him to pass on to the women of the Paakantji camp there, I was still oppressed as if by the taste of death – my father’s and those of Barrakoon’s people. I now harboured the thought that I had been fatuous trying to grow up into manhood in a measured way. Death made even application seem silly, a minor vanity. I was not consoled to think that Paakantji souls were in God’s realm, and not consoled that my father’s might be. All energy left my soul, all diligence my body.

  A message was sent to Momba, and this time it was Edward Bonney, who turned up three days later. He sat by my bed and asked me how I felt and what my ailment was. I tried to tell him. I felt flooded by death, by its persistence everywhere, by its capacity to swallow the known, striving world whole. It had swallowed Father Charisse and his ambition whole.

  ‘It has so many servants,’ I told him. ‘And the commissioner of police in Brisbane – he doesn’t want to know what his servants have done.’

  ‘You know, Plorn, I was never the sage my brother was,’ he said after a pause.

  ‘You can’t say that,’ I protested, but purely out of the politeness that was still left in me.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘to be a sage you need to believe men can be redeemed. Because of my proclivity, which I bear like a cross, I felt the crowd was always around me, ready to flay me. I don’t speak to you lightly, Plorn. You are in agony. I have always been. I mean, I am a clergyman’s son. I have never tried to be a sage because I know how fallen we are, and on what a ledge we live. My little brother . . . Well, it all came naturally to him. No strange appetites. He wonders why men are so given to deadly acts. To me the question is, why aren’t we evil all the time? I think . . . forgive me, I’m not sure, dear boy . . . but I think you have seen so far out here that men tend to evil, even if they can be suddenly overtaken by acts of grace. Like my brother, you prefer to believe the reverse: men tend to good and are suddenly overtaken by acts of viciousness. You are always surprised by evil. You are in fact bed-ridden by it. On top of your dear pater’s death.’

  ‘Is it worth rising up and walking about in a world where viciousness is everywhere?’ I asked him.

  ‘I don’t know. I just wake and find myself living as yet and undertake the duty of life. And that’s it. There’s one thing my brother and I agree on. Even in this wilderness, Plorn, life is honey. Is it not honey for you?’

  I could not stop myself weeping now. ‘It is not honey, it is gall,’ I replied. ‘My father is dead, and he never knew me.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, as if he was approaching an understanding of me. ‘So it is your father more than the Paakantji.’

  ‘No. It is my father and the Paakantji,’ I protested. ‘They are the same thing.’

  ‘I see,’ said Edward. ‘I do understand, old fellow.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Bonney.’

  And again, I felt a revival of grateful life in me. Perhaps, I thought, more than if his brother had come with deft consolation.

  Since the massacre I frequently sought out Cultay to see how he was faring. ‘How are you, Cultay?’ I would stupidly ask.

  ‘I’m grouse, Mr Dickens,’ he would reply, ‘grouse’ being the colonial word for excellent.

  I couldn’t tell whether he was despairing, or had placed the murder of his kinsmen into a part of his soul where it could be viewed without bringing down the whole structure of his mind.

  42

  Before he left to return to Momba, Edward Bonney said, ‘Christmas is coming, and it needs to be celebrated by the living on behalf of the dead. So Fred and I have decided to make this Christmas memorable, to make it a gala. As well as you and Alfred, Fred has invited the Desaillys, and your friend Ernie Hayward from Toorale. What do you say, Plorn? Will you enjoy such celebrations?’

  I decided I must go along at least to the extent of seeming well to honour their gesture amidst the darkness.

  In the approach to Christmas, I fortified myself with my scattered achievements, reminded myself I had been entrusted by good men with the management of my own outstation. I was also now a man who had read a novel and could discourse on the qualities of characters. I demanded of myself that I feel almost equipped for meeting other people in society. Belshire was serious, and my sense of social inferiority to Hayward was nothing by comparison and need not be taken too earnestly. So I insisted to myself that I would not find anything threatening, as I had before, in the easy sociability of Ernie Hayward.

  I rode south to Momba beside Cultay over a hot day and half a night. Back in my old room at Momba homestead, I forced myself to rise for breakfast and was delighted to find a very jovial Alfred had arrived from Corona, and was wearing a festive, chequered suit, and the kind of dazzling tie the guvnor would have approved of. For my sake he was in the highest good spirits, as if the guvnor had not died on us.

  It seemed a mercy beyond utterance that the Desaillys were here too, and their presence brought about a shift in my spirits. They proved
that the normal was in many places splendid. Mrs Desailly was very vocal and Mr Desailly was smoking beside her, smiling at her high robust conversation with a mixture of pride and irony. I was comforted to reflect that I had lasted long enough in Mrs Desailly’s country for her to treat me as a familiar. It struck me, too, that the Bonney brothers had warned the company to avoid talking about the Belshire incident.

  At the same time I’d somehow reached a judgement on sundry matters I’d never entertained until now. Belshire and his men’s massacre of Barrakoon’s people seemed to have induced more scepticism in me about many things. Had Father, for example, undertaken Urania Cottage in part from vanity, to impose on the lives of the girls the neatness he insisted we practise at Tavistock Hall and Gad’s Hill? And even if this was so, it wasn’t a crime, and I was prepared to argue that point with Alfred should the matter arise. But then I saw Alfred would probably be in agreement on it. Had Alfred simply wanted me to get over the childish illusion that our father, despite all, was impeccable? Belshire was a different man from the guvnor, though. Belshire was a man who had sought permission for savagery, a godlike and satanic warrant, and had got it from the Crown emblazoned on his helmet or from the hell of his own heart. I was sure that other policemen did not invoke the law as regularly as Belshire, and that was because they did not have that need to fortify themselves, sustain themselves from the wellsprings of authority as often as Belshire, to justify his going forth to cover territory with the blood and curses of the Aboriginal people.

  With this newly settled moral confidence about the guvnor, I found myself talking afresh to the pretty-featured Connie Desailly on Christmas Eve. I noticed her face had become refined since the previous Christmas and seemed less florid and more womanly. I relished the fact that I could talk to her without too much artifice and teasing, which this Christmas I was not in such a mood for.

  ‘So, you have plans for a partnership with Ernie Hayward?’ she asked.

  ‘I have agreed with Ernie to take up one of the stations between Wilcannia and Fort Bourke,’ I told her, proud that news of our enterprise had got around. ‘We’ll be veritable grandees.’

  ‘I never doubted it,’ she said, ‘though Mr Hayward is a loss to the music hall.’

  ‘But there is debt,’ I said by way of exaggerated humour, ‘and we’ll suffer it like all the other great men of the Western Division.’

  Blanche did not intrude in any of this, for her suitor Mr Brougham had arrived and all her attentions were for him.

  Connie spoke as if her happiness was dependent upon her beginning in shorthand and pastoral book-keeping at an Adelaide school, and the idea of such independence of skills suited my mood exactly that Christmas. Yet I wanted her company, and all at once I wanted more, and found as I talked to her that I was not a half-spirit haunting the conservatory at Gad’s or even that western creek of the murders. I was alive, and somehow the fragments of my body and soul had coalesced to be alive for her. I felt for her something of the sweet yearning of which the guvnor wrote in David Copperfield. Again I wondered why Maurice McArden had taken such an extreme exception to the guvnor’s depiction of infatuation, for it seemed to me to have more in common spirit with David Copperfield than with William Blake’s poems. This exchange of plans with Connie was part of a serious project, the project of a life, where Mrs Wivenhoe had been the project of one great, all-revealing night.

  Hayward had to be inveigled to sing with Connie that night and agreed to do it if Mr Brougham, who had a good voice, would accompany him and Connie to sing the carol. Thus we were graced with ‘Torches, Torches, Run with Torches’, which had a strange effect on me, with its invocation of running all the way to Bethlehem, another town in another place and of heightened meaning . . . vast places, dry too, on a small earth in a great darkness – or so it came to me as I heard it in my half-mad, half-healed condition. And Hayward and Connie were sublime and carried Mr Brougham, who was not quite so.

  At the end of the evening, I took a last drink, looking out at the immense night with Alfred on the veranda. ‘Well, Plorn, old fellow, this year has orphaned us, as regards the guvnor anyhow,’ he said. ‘But we can never be fatherless again.’

  I felt a brief sense here in this desert calmness of that gentle approving soul, Mama, and wondered how she had stayed silent all this time, while Alfred and I and others were vocal with our opinions.

  On Christmas morning Frederic Bonney read some of the Christmas liturgy from the Book of Common Prayer. It was never much used in the Dickens house; it lay, largely forgotten, like a firehose in case of conflagration. The reading from the third epistle of John, like the carol the night before, rang in me this morning and I feared I might be turning religious, of which the guvnor would not have approved. ‘He that doeth good is of God: but he that doeth evil hath not seen God. Demetrius hath good report of all men, and of the truth itself: yea, and we also bear record; and ye know that our record is true.’ Was Belshire in some humid Brisbane church? I wondered. Did he hear this too? Did it strike home?

  The record of the fatal deeds of Belshire! In that matter there was an epistle of Bonney, and an epistle of Dickens, humble documents, but with our truths and Belshire in their sights.

  The Christmas feast began in the late afternoon and continued for hours. It was thoroughly delightful, and I went on feeling a tentative happiness in the company. I was aware certainly that I heard every plain and wise and humorous utterance, that they fell on us simultaneously, and that Connie Desailly and I exchanged gazes as if we saw common meaning. This was heady, I thought. This was the height of life. A week ago I had been disabled by recurring images of gunshot wounds, of the dead, bloody-chested priest on his back, of the child whose head was a daub of blood and bone and cerebral substance. I knew I would always be burdened by this image, but it would not burden me to the point of disappearance. It was Belshire, I saw now, who had the duty of disappearance.

  I drank wine. Edward Bonney told a joke! It was not hilarious in itself, but for his efforts to narrate and his own amusement in it. It concerned a teacher in their father’s grammar school who suffered from appallingly bad breath and would lean over boys, and when they averted their heads cried, ‘What is the matter with you, boy? You refuse to look at me!’ And one hapless boy, blinking at the stench from the teacher’s mouth, was reduced to saying, ‘It is the cologne water you wear, sir.’ To which the teacher with the withering breath said, ‘I don’t wear a cologne, you fool!’

  Then, suddenly, it was late at night and I was tipsy from wine and from confirmatory glances from Connie. She and Hayward sang a few more songs – ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, I remember. It showed, said Edward Bonney, that we did not need Dr Pearson and his gang to make us musical.

  I felt I should see Alfred to bed again, and helped him to his room. Yes, he had drunk very fully, but for some reason he was full of laughter, even after I managed to get him flat on the mattress and remove his shoes. It seemed the fore-knowledge of his expected success in Hamilton made him jovial. I sat in his room a while, breathing easily until he succumbed to sleep. I relished too the normal humanity of the night after the difficulty of past and lonelier nights.

  I saw his copy of the collected poetry of his godfather, Lord Alfred, which was always by his side. Indeed, it was one of two pieces of Tennyson that travelled everywhere with my brother, the other being an engraved ring the poet had given Father long ago, I think at Alfred’s christening, and Father had given Alfred.

  It had been one of those daunting realities of who Alfred was, that his godfather was a beacon and a god. But given that I was a literary gent now, I picked it up, intending just to dip in briefly, as I had been told one could with poetry. Besides, I knew that Alfred Tennyson had written the great ‘In Memoriam’ for his friend Henry Hallam and had always been impressed that Tennyson could have such a passion for a friend. Also, ‘In Memoriam’ seemed a good tag for the year we’d had and for the horrors I’d witnessed. And on top of that
, Connie had read from it before we left Wilcannia for the memorial service in Sydney.

  It was obvious that Alfred had been consulting the same poem, for the page fell open and I read:

  I envy not the beast that takes

  His license in the field of time,

  Unfettered by the sense of crime,

  To whom a conscience never wakes.

  Oh, my God! I thought again, as I mused about the reading from the Christmas ceremony. Belshire!

  And then nearby, the great consolatory verse:

  I hold it true, whate’er befall;

  I feel it, when I sorrow most;

  ’Tis better to have loved and lost

  Than never to have loved at all.

  As I went to put the book back, a letter fell from the midst of the pages. Looking down, I saw it was in the guvnor’s handwriting.

  I picked it up. The letter was loose and I opened it quite idly. It had the letterhead of the Athenaeum Club, that cream block of male clubbiness that stood on Pall Mall. I had only ever seen it from the outside – as a fortress where eminent men went to mutter significant things and dine. The letter was addressed to Mr Alfred Tennyson Dickens, and had been written on Friday, 20 May 1870. This was – what? – some nineteen days before the guvnor’s decease.

  ‘My dear Alfred,’ it began.

  I have just time to tell you under my own hand that I invited Mr Bear to a dinner of such guests as he would naturally like to see, and that we took to him very much, and got along with him capitally.

  I knew no Mr Bear, but he must have been a colonial visiting London.