The Conversations At Curlew Creek

by David Malouf

  This was impressive, but Langhurst found he could not so easily turn his back on a question that seemed to him to be vital, and which, when he considered his own case, guaranteed in him the thing that set him apart but at the same time linked him up to all the rest; the part of him, uncomfortable as it might be on occasion, that was alert and attentive, observing itself and worrying away at its own unlikely motives and desires; and was the agency through which he could, as he put it, think things out, turn them over as he was doing now.

  Garrety thought him soft, he knew that, with the milk still on his lip. This was because he had always slept in a bed – though a shared one – and had some schooling. But his parents were poor dairy farmers. He hadn’t lived a soft life. He had got up every morning before five, with the ground often white with frost, to linger and warm his feet a moment where one of the cows had been lying, then drive the herd in to be milked, and had been doing this since he was old enough to carry a stick and chuck rocks at the stubborn, bad-tempered cows who would not come at his call. He had calluses to show for the work he did, places where the skin on his hands had broken and festered, leaving scabs. That wasn’t the difference between them.

  ‘I was just thinkin’,’ he said now, breaking into the silence.

  Garrety cocked one eye at him from under the hat.

  ‘I was just wonderin’ – what he must be thinkin’.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Him. The paddy. I was just wonderin’ – you know – what a feller’d have on his mind.’

  ‘What are you worryin’ about that for?’ Garrety resettled the hat. ‘Tain’t you, is it?’

  ‘No. It ain’t me. A man can wonder, can’t ’e?’

  ‘You can. It don’t worry me.’

  He lay with his hat over his face, his long legs thrust out, enjoying the heat and the restful hour. That was that.

  Langhurst frowned and did not settle. This was unsatisfactory. Garrety was a hopeless fellow when it came to conversation. What he had really wanted to go back to was another matter, though it was not unrelated to the present one.

  No one when they were recruited had mentioned it. Danger, yes – that was a positive thing – adventure. Though in fact there had been less of both than they had been led to expect, and a lot more of just lying about as they had been doing for the last week, with all the petty quarrels and irritations that wore through any gilded belief they might have had in the heroic.

  Then two weeks ago something outrageous had occurred. Something had happened. To Jed Snelling. And in a way that was not just unexpected but utterly uncalled for. Crazy, useless! One minute he was there, part of their nagging quarrels and complaints against one another, and the next he wasn’t. Yet everything up to the very moment had been so ordinary. Breakfast as usual, last evening’s leftover stew. Socks laid out to dry on a convenient bush. Jed Snelling complaining as usual that he was constipated. The blacks’ camp when they came upon it filthy enough but in no way remarkable, the argument, when it started, like a dozen others they had had along the way, with the same lot of difficult old men or surly young ones. But suddenly the shouting had got serious, things were out of hand, and Jed Snelling had with no warning become something unimaginable, a man with a spear in his neck who was on his knees on the rough ground, gurgling – praying maybe, or shouting for his wife or his mother, only you couldn’t tell because the words were indistinguishable from the blood that was gushing out of him in an arc like a fountain, all sparkling in the sunlight but turning dark where it was sucked into the droughty earth.

  That is what he wanted to talk about.

  People were running in all directions, women and children mostly, scattering through the trees.

  It was Garrety who took charge. He ran to Jed Snelling, and with his knee in the middle of his back, and one arm around his neck, began to pull out the spear. It was of light wood, sharpened but with no haft, and came out easily enough, with a sucking sound, and Langhurst, who was looking right into Jed Snelling’s eyes, had seen his soul come out with it.

  That’s what he wanted to talk about.

  Jed Snelling had slumped in Garrety’s arms, gone empty, his head lolling sideways, his face suddenly as pale as potatoes. He was no longer there. Clean gone, just like that! He wasn’t nineteen years old any more, he was no age at all. He wasn’t a married man. He didn’t have thumbs he could bend right back into his palm – a sign of generosity, they say – or a laugh that at the last minute caught in his throat, where the spear had just been, as if he had swallowed a wishbone.

  Later they gathered his few possessions, a penknife, letters, an engraved ring and such, and wrapped them in a big spotted handkerchief, and sent them to his wife, Janet. But Jed Snelling’s most intimate possession, Langhurst felt, though neither of them could have intended it, had been passed on to him. It was what he had seen when he had looked into Jed’s eyes and right through to where his whole life was gathered up into a single knot, which, with the most tremendous effort, while Garrety applied all his force on one side and Jed Snelling himself on the other, was wrenched right out of him in an agonizing release of which the sucking sound, Langhurst felt, was only the most distant echo.

  That is what, on more than one occasion since, he had tried to talk about.

  He had seen Jed Snelling’s soul go out of his body. Seen it. That was fact. And it wasn’t just a breath that came out on a last releasing sigh. It was a knot, a thing the size of a fist, that had to be torn out of the flesh with a violence that was terrific, an effort so all-consuming that it seemed superhuman, and which, when you tried to translate it to your own body, was unimaginable. The mere thought of it and Langhurst broke into a sweat.

  That was one thing. But there was something else as well.

  He had seen a pig killed often enough. Seen the hot little ball of flesh and muscle, its throat cut, rolling from side to side on its short, powerful legs, go thundering down the length of a paddock till the blood was drained and it toppled. But what struck him now, in Jed Snelling’s case, but also his own, was the terrible pressure it must exert all over the surface of the body to come out with such a rush. In your wrists, your throat, your belly. And the terrible energy with which, as he had seen even in so quiet a fellow as Jed Snelling, the heart, like a live thing you could hold in your hands, wet and fat and kicking, had so forcefully jerked it out.

  When he was younger he had had a tendency to boils, which came one after the other in crops and which, so his mother said, were an indication of the richness of his blood. Which may have accounted as well for his nosebleeds.

  He had grown out of the latter – or almost. Once, when they were just riding along, he had produced one that was prodigious, a real gusher – he might suddenly have been punched in the face by a passing angel. He had had to lie down on the stony ground while the others, still on horseback, looked on. ‘Jesus! They told me I was likely to see blood in this game,’ Garrety remarked humorously, ‘they did warn me of it.’ This was before the Jed Snelling business.

  Lying there, his head back, swallowing blood, he was glad they did not know of the spoon his mother would have insisted on slipping down his shirt – a domestic detail that might have proved too great a provocation to Garrety’s sense of the ridiculous.

  The boils were another matter, the plague was not past. The rubbing of the saddle, the sweatiness of his groin, were a constant worry to him. Anxious about every itch or swelling, he spent a good deal of time in private investigation of parts of his body where he knew he was vulnerable, to the point where Garrety, once or twice, had told him if he couldn’t stop playing with himself to just take it out, give it a good bashing and be done with it.

  ‘I’m not playin’ with myself,’ he had insisted hotly, but his blush – once again his blood betrayed him – suggested the opposite.

  ‘Well, stop friggin’ about then. It’s a bad example to Jonas. An’ you’re gettin’ on my nerves.’

  Garrety now shifted his backside,
and propping the heel of one boot on the toe of the other, sighted down the long line of his body. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I thought you hated the paddy. I thought you were dead set against ’im.’

  ‘No I’m not.’

  ‘You coulda fooled me. Just a few hours ago you were ready to kill the bastard.’

  ‘No,’ he said, looking in the direction of the hut, ‘I’ve got nothin’ against ’im. I was mad, that’s all. Because ’e jumped me like that. He bloody nearly broke me jaw.’

  Garrety laughed. ‘He was trying to do you a good turn.’ He looked up grinning. ‘You’d look a sight better, I reckon, if you didn’ have such a pretty jaw.’

  This was a stale joke. Langhurst made a face, then turned away and spat.

  In their early days together he had made the mistake of confessing to Garrety that he had a twin sister. He was surprised by the effect it had had on the other youth. He was so used to it himself, it had for so long been a settled condition of his existence, that it meant nothing to him. Garrety had stared as if he was some sort of phenomenon – a calf with five feet at a country fair. He had coloured up and said mildly, ‘It’s nothing. Honest. There’s nothing remarkable in it.’

  But Garrety was not to be put off.

  ‘You mean she looks like you?’

  ‘Sort of. Well, not exactly – she’s a female.’ This was meant to be a joke but Garrety for once was too intent to see it. ‘She’s an old married lady of nineteen.’

  The resemblance in fact was closer than he cared to admit. When he was still a skinny, pale-faced kid, his features still small and girlish, it had been a great torment to him – the only one he had ever known. But he had filled out at last, got to be a broad-shouldered, sturdy fellow – the farmwork took care of that. But some notion of his earlier self persisted and he could never be sure that some other fellow, if he got close enough, might not see it.

  But Garrety was not just surprised, he was awed.

  It did not occur to Langhurst that the other, who had no family at all, might consider this presence not just of a sister but of a twin as yet another example of the way Langhurst, without even being aware of it, was a favoured recipient of the world’s unequal gifts.

  ‘I can’t imagine it,’ he kept saying over and over.

  No, Langhurst thought, you wouldn’t – and he could see why. It was hard to get your mind around another Garrety, some female version, or even another male one, of his long-boned leatheriness and dark, almost gypsy features, whereas his own broad-faced, crack-lipped blondness was common and repeatable. He had grown up with the plain fact of this continuously before him. If being a twin made him, as Garrety thought, special, it had also brought home to him that he was not.

  He sat now with his gorged hands, red with firelight, hanging loose between his knees, and brooded. In his mind he walked back again to the place, just out of the glow of the fire, where the little false move had been made that since this morning had cost him so much silent misery.

  He had let the fellow out for a bit of exercise. He had stood at first blinking at the light, and when they walked up and down a little had seemed unsteady on his feet. Langhurst had been regarding him, now that the time was so close, with a kind of curiosity but they did not speak.

  He had asked if he could take a piss, and had stood, docile enough, with his legs apart and his head back, enjoying it, glad maybe to be doing it in the open again. When he stepped back to settle himself in the loose trousers, Langhurst, out of respect for the man’s modesty, or perhaps it was his own, had turned away. The next thing he knew he was flying sideways and had the whole weight of the man’s body on his chest, fierce breath in his ear, tough arms hurdling his waist. They were struggling in the dirt. In a moment the man’s forearm was at his throat. His head was being jerked back so hard he feared his neck would break. Jesus, he had yelled, though no sound came out. He had no breath. Jesus!

  He was stronger than he knew or the paddy was weaker. Anyway, he had got himself out of it, he did not know how. They were on their feet again. Blowing air at one another like bulls. But he had the man and knew it. For all his brutal size and strength, the week of being locked up had made him unsteady. He stood wheezing. Filled with a fury that very nearly blinded him – he was outraged that the paddy had taken advantage of him – he had gone in and brought him crashing to the ground and put his boots into the fellow’s ribs, into his cheekbone, his groin where he lay curled up in the sand like an enormous baby, using his hands to protect his head.

  ‘For Christ sake,’ Garrety had yelled as he and Kersey came running.

  The man staggered to his feet. Blood was pouring from his eye. He stood bull-like, the shoulders bunched, head lowered. But before he could do anything Garrety had stepped in as light as ever and delivered him a blow to the jaw, hard and vicious, then stood back with his fists up like a boxer, preparing to go in again if the other showed fight. But he did not. He sank to his knees and his eyes rolled back as if he were about to pass out. Then he recovered, shook his thick head, and looked up at Garrety out of his one good eye in a pitiful, uncomprehending way, as if he could not work out where he had sprung from.

  ‘Here,’ Garrety had said, stepping forward to give him a hand.

  The man, head lowered, was on all fours. He raised one hand to wave Garrety off, supporting himself, but barely, with the other. He tried to rise, slumped, and Garrety caught him under the arms.

  Langhurst, like Kersey, had stood by watching. He had been set aside. It was Garrety who settled the fellow with his back against a tree and stood over him as cool as could be, with scarcely a glow of sweat on his skin. He was a bath of sweat, himself, and still swelling with an outrage he could not contain. His heart hammered, his face burned, his throat felt so thick he could not speak. When the man’s eye met his own it was with a look of contempt, but there was fear in it too, of a kind that made him burn with shame. The violence in him, it said, was without rule. When he went to help Garrety get the fellow up, he jerked away from him and would not be touched.

  ‘Yair, well,’ he said now, ‘I gave him something.’

  ‘I’ll say you did. You bloody near killed ’im.’

  Garrety said this, he knew, out of kindness, to make him feel good. But he took no pleasure in it.

  He thought sometimes that he might act better, have a firmer grip on his own nature, if he had his dog Nellie with him, whom he had brought up from a puppy and owned since he was nine years old, and talked to, and slept with, a companionable warmth against his side, and whose spirit, he believed, was somehow continuous with his own – though he had seen this only when he was riding away and felt for the first time the lack of her close and loyal presence.

  ‘Who’s Nellie?’ Garrety had asked him once.

  ‘Nellie’s my dog. Why?’

  ‘’Cos you spent half the night talkin’ to ’er. Talk, talk, talk.’

  ‘What did I say?’

  He was worried what he might have given away, but the news made him happier than he had felt for a whole month.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Garrety told him. ‘I reckoned it was private. I didn’ listen.’

  To their left there was a movement at the door of the hut. Kersey appeared. He came back mumbling and began to fuss about among their paraphernalia, getting together the makings of a light.

  ‘I knew ’e’d be like this,’ he muttered. ‘His reputation has preceded him.’

  Garrety laughed.

  ‘What’s that?’ he said. ‘What’s his – reputation?’

  ‘Mister bloody punctilious, that’s what.’

  Garrety laughed again. ‘An’ what’s that when it’s at home?’

  ‘A stickler, that’s what. You seen the head on ’im. Close cut like that, short an’ neat an’ regular. That’s punctilious.’ He tightened his voice in mimicry: ‘“I thought I asked for a light.” You did. I’m preparin’ it, aren’t I?’ But he deliberately took his time. At last he got the lamp burning, but not before a
voice came, calling impatiently from the hut. He went off. A minute later he was back.

  ‘Damn that feller,’ he hissed. ‘Damn ’im to hell. Damn the both of ’em. I’m sick a’ this business. This isn’t a man’s work.’

  The outburst made the two younger men uncomfortable. Kersey had said something like it before. Garrety fixed one eye on the far-off tip of his boot, which was scuffed and broken. Langhurst made a study of his hands. What Kersey said was true but he might have refrained from stating it. None of them liked the work of this last week or found what they were to do tomorrow acceptable.

  Dealing with the blacks was acceptable work. It was what they had signed up for, though they were not proud of what happened when Jed Snelling got killed. They had lost their heads. Two of the blacks were wounded before the party got away. One of them was an old woman who could barely crawl – that wasn’t something you could boast about. They had let her drag herself off into the scrub. The other, a big fellow of thirty or so, they had done for with the butts of their muskets. It had seemed at the time to equal things up a bit for Jed Snelling, who was stretched out on the sand with a mass of flies at his throat, and had calmed a little the rage they felt, which was also fear.

  It wasn’t a good thing but it was the sort of thing that happened. Acceptable. Only for a few days afterwards they had felt low and panicky, too ready to justify to one another an occasion that had exceeded their instructions, which were to make a show, and riding always now with one eye on the horizon and sleeping at night with a look-out, who jumped at the smallest sound, in a world where small sounds, which could not always be identified, were everywhere. Acceptable enough.

  So was the tracking down of these rebels as they were called, or bushrangers.

  They had come across them in a hollow between two enormous boulders, with giant logs all round that at one time or another had come down in a storm, which made the ground rough and difficult. It was Garrety who had sniffed them out. They sent Jonas back to make contact with another group, who were working the other side of the mountain, and waited under cover for thirty-six hours for them to come up, afraid at every moment of being spotted. But the little group – there were five of them – seemed to believe they were invulnerable, or invisible, out here at the end of nowhere.