Rush Oh!

by Shirley Barrett

  ‘As I said to the Reverend, in no uncertain terms,’ muttered Bastable, making sure that I might hear it, ‘if you cannot find the gumption to kill a whale, then summon the men that can.’

  Not surprisingly, perhaps, given that he had passed much of the day being tormented in this fashion, John Beck seemed somewhat withdrawn; he asked briefly if I was feeling better, then retired a small distance away to eat his meal. It was only later when he saw me struggling with the pots that he jumped up to help me carry them. We walked together in silence up to the house, for I felt somehow mortified by everything that had happened and sure that he must think me worthless.

  ‘Mary,’ he said finally, when we had reached the kitchen door, ‘I feel as certain as I can be that your shot did not injure the Killers.’

  ‘Really?’ I said, turning to him. I felt as if a thin shaft of sunlight was revealing itself from behind a bank of dark clouds.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am fairly confident that you missed them by a wide margin.’

  ‘Oh, I hope so!’ I exclaimed, and it hurt my ribs so badly to do so that I cried out in pain. That hurt also, making me gasp, which also hurt.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. He had been watching my gasping and wincing with some concern.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Although my ribs are quite sore.’

  He nodded. And then he hesitated a moment before he next spoke.

  ‘Mary, I just wanted to say this also. I thought what you did tremendously brave.’

  ‘Tremendously brave?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which bit?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Which bit was tremendously brave? I mean, of what I did?’ You see, I had to be sure of his meaning, for I knew his words would stay with me for my lifetime, and I could not afford to suffer any confusion about it.

  ‘Well, all of it, really. But especially the action . . .' (here he looked around to ensure he would not be overheard) ‘. . . regarding the Killers.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  Such tender memories as I have! So much more fortunate than poor Maeve or Maud, with only her jam sponge ‘as light as air’. For although his eyes were still blackened and his cheek bruised, his face as he gazed at me, so troubled and earnest, had never looked more gravely beautiful. And things no longer seemed so terrible nor did it hurt so much to breathe.

  An Unexpected Revelation

  In fact, the Killers did not reappear till almost a week later, and true to form, they made sure to stage their reappearance in the most spectacular of circumstances.

  But I am getting ahead of myself. The most pressing problem for us at that time, apart from the non-appearance of the Killer whales, and the non-appearance of whales in general, was in fact our desperate shortage of provisions. We were now at the stage when my father’s terse instructions to ‘eke ’em out’ were to little avail; our provisions could withstand no further eking. Anxious not to miss a day on lookout (and presumably anxious not to have the difficult conversation with Mr Howard, the storekeeper, that I would inevitably have to endure), my father arranged for Mr Caleb Cook to come over in his sulky and convey Louisa and myself into Eden. It is an indication of how distracted my father must have been at the time that he permitted Mr Cook, of all people, to be our driver and escort: for as observant readers will be aware, it was Mr Cook who had put up the prize money and then selected Louisa as the Best-dressed and Most Prepossessing Young Lady of the Eden Show. I may not have mentioned previously that Louisa had been rather insufferably pleased with herself when awarded this prize, but significantly less so upon meeting her admirer.

  Mr Cook had a sheep farm in Burragate, and was very keen to find a wife; it seems that the prize he offered in the Eden Show may have been an opening gambit towards this end. I should explain that Burragate is tremendously isolated and accessible only by the most arduous journey over many precipitous ridges, and if the axle did not snap or the brake fail or the horses take fright at a snake and bolt down a hill, then you considered yourself to have had a reasonable trip to Burragate. It was funny to imagine Louisa spending her days up there married to a sheep farmer and occasionally we teased her on the subject, but only if we wished to have our heads bitten off, for Louisa did not regard the topic as humorous. While happy to accept the prize money and bask in the glory of being Eden’s ‘Most Prepossessing’, she nipped in the bud any further attentions, and Mr Cook had returned to his sheep farm still a bachelor.

  He was an extremely tall man of about twenty-eight years with a ruddy face, prominent ears and a diffident manner; his mother had passed away several years ago, and it seems the loneliness was beginning to affect him. He wanted a companion, and who could blame him, for there is not much companionship to be had from three hundred and twenty-one sheep. That is the exact number; I know, because he mentioned it several times during the long trip into Eden.

  ‘Last year I had twenty-eight cows and fifty-three sheep; this year, I got no cows and three hundred and twenty-one sheep,’ he volunteered, apropos of nothing, but just because the numbers seemed to appeal to him.

  ‘What happened to the cows?’ asked Louisa. ‘Did they run away?’

  There was once an article in the newspaper entitled ‘Women Who Should Never Marry’, which seemed to have been written by someone of intimate acquaintance with Louisa, for I felt at the time that it described her to a tee:

  ‘Sweeping as the assertion may appear at first sight, there are women who should never marry, and whom young men would do well to avoid. Someone has said that a girl who comes under this category is one:

  Who is so utterly selfish that she could not consider or love another more than herself.

  Who prides herself on her domestic incompetence, and boasts of her inability to cook a dinner or scrub a floor.

  Who displays no love for children, and who would rather fondle a pug dog than a baby.

  Who is cross and miserable unless she is the centre of attention or is engaged flirting with the best-looking man in the company.

  Who does not hesitate to pronounce old and ailing people “bores”, or to show impatience with the recital of their aches and pains . . .’

  I mention this article, because I was reminded of it whilst sitting in the sulky with Louisa and Mr Cook, and I found myself contemplating copying it out in its entirety and sending it to him anonymously. What on earth he was doing driving all the way from Burragate to pick us up and then convey us all the way into Eden, I do not know. I imagine he had hoped that the long trip would give Louisa ample time to warm to him, but if her frosty demeanour was an indication, this was not eventuating.

  ‘Who is looking after your sheep?’ I asked politely, for I felt a compulsion to make up for Louisa’s coolness.

  But he looked at me in scornful amazement. ‘They’re not like cows, you know – you don’t have to milk ’em,’ he said, and when Louisa gave a snort of laughter, he began to guffaw at his own joke, and from then on kept alluding to the fact that I apparently thought sheep needed milking.

  After that, I decided I did not much care for him. Let Louisa do her worst, I thought, and sat in silence. (I suppose I will not spoil the ending if I say that Louisa did not marry him, and as far as I know, he remained a bachelor.)

  The trip into Eden was uneventful, except for when we came to a dead echidna on the road. Mr Cook’s ponies took great exception to it, and would not go past it for anything. Instead, they decided they might simply back up all the way home again, and this they commenced to do, with the unhappy effect of unscrewing the sulky wheels in the process, causing us to have to hastily dismount before the entire contraption fell apart. Fortunately, Mr Cook seemed to have come prepared for an event of this nature, for he produced a large wrench and screwed the wheels back on again. After removing the offending corpse from within a hundred yards of the vicinity of Mr Cook’s ponies, we w
ere eventually able to continue.

  ‘Let us try to not draw attention to ourselves,’ Louisa whispered to me as we finally approached the post office. ‘I would rather not be noticed with Mr Cook.’

  No sooner had the words fallen from her lips when, as if to defy her, Mr Cook’s ponies began to buck and plunge, and then at once took off at a terrifying speed across Imlay Street, along Mitchell Street and then down the hill towards Aslings Beach. I remember little of the incident clearly except clinging on for dear life and thinking the sulky would surely break apart as we hurtled down the hill. People in the street were screaming and running in all directions. Mr Cook lost his hold of the reins amidst the initial bucking, but I will say this for him: he managed to clamber forward over the dash board and take hold of them again whilst our sulky was careening down the hill. He had almost succeeded in reining the ponies in just as we reached the cemetery, whereupon the ponies slewed sharply to the right, capsizing the sulky and tipping us into the sand on Aslings Beach, directly in front of the cemetery in which rested the remains of our great-grandfather, Alexander Davidson.

  At once, a crowd of people came running down the hill in the hope of our having incurred death or serious injuries; many excitedly declared it the worst runaway they had ever witnessed. But in fact, despite a few bruises from being bounced about in the sulky, we were relatively unscathed; shaken up and covered in sand, certainly, but mostly just very annoyed with Mr Cook. To our mind, he did not seem sufficiently apologetic. In fact, he offered by way of explanation that his ponies were used to the peace and quiet of Burragate, and did not much care for town; they particularly did not care for town horses, and it seems a town horse may have slighted them in some way outside the post office.

  ‘Slighted them in what way?’ asked Louisa.

  ‘Well, I daresay he looked at them funny,’ said Mr Cook.

  Mrs Pike, proprietress of the Great Southern Hotel, insisted we come back to her establishment and lie down in a darkened room for an hour or so to recover from the shock. We accepted her offer gratefully, leaving Mr Cook to tend to the injured feelings of his ponies. We were very glad of one thing, and that is that we now had a perfectly acceptable reason not to travel back with him; Mrs Pike kindly offered to make arrangements for us to travel home later in the day by means of Mr Jessop’s motor launch. She brought us up corned beef sandwiches with mustard pickles and a bottle of lemon barley water, and when we thanked her profusely, she said that she’d do anything she could for George Davidson’s girls, she thought so well of the man, and so did everyone in the whole of Eden and surrounding areas; in fact, she went on about our father to such an extent, we began to wonder if she harboured feelings for him. When she had left us, with assurances that we must consider the room ours for as long as we needed it, we washed up with a soap that smelled of roses and drank our lemon barley water and ate our sandwiches; then we lay down on the big bed with the pink satin eiderdown and giggled about Mr Cook and his sensitive ponies and his three hundred and twenty-one sheep. And that is when Louisa confided in me that she loved Darcy.

  I was surprised of course, stunned even; and yet I also experienced the not disagreeable sensation that pieces of a puzzle that had never made sense to me (the puzzle being Louisa) suddenly fitted into place, and I saw her at once clearly and wholly and compassionately, for possibly the first time in her sixteen years. Of course Louisa loved Darcy! It seemed suddenly obvious – and yet not obvious at all. Certainly, they had been great playmates in childhood, for we had known Darcy since he was very small; his father, Percy, had been a whale man for my father for many years. When whaling season came around, our Aboriginal crew members would materialise (their usual home was Wallaga Lake, some distance north); the men would stay in the sleeping huts, but the women and children would often times in those days camp up the hill behind the house. We would rush up to greet them, so excited were we to have our little friends return. After a period of initial shyness, lasting all of about half a day, we would pick up where we had left off the previous year; fishing with spears we had fashioned ourselves and building humpies and ‘startling the bandicoot’; all the normal fun of childhood. Louisa was a contrary sort of child, but Darcy seemed to have a knack with her, and her oft-declared boast as a child was that her bare feet were almost as tough as his. At thirteen, Darcy began whaling, which meant we saw a good bit less of him, and if you asked me to relate any particular sign of their enduring closeness, I would say only that they were inclined to surreptitiously toss small stones and sticks at one another whenever circumstances drew them in near proximity.

  But now that I thought of it, quite recently, when she had been charged with the cooking whilst I tended to the injured John Beck, I had entered the kitchen to fetch his meal and there they were, just the two of them, for Darcy had carried up the pots. It was odd to see him standing in the kitchen, for he would never normally venture into our house, and seeing him silhouetted in the doorframe made me realise how tall he had grown. However, I was too preoccupied with John Beck at the time (what a familiar refrain this is becoming) to notice anything between them; besides which, Darcy made his excuses and promptly left.

  ‘Does he love you?’ I asked Louisa now, as we lay together on the bed.

  ‘Yes, of course he loves me,’ she said, and she suddenly looked very sorrowful. By which I mean that the corners of her mouth pushed downwards and her lower lip convulsed violently for a moment before she regained control of it. As a rule, Louisa did not like to cry, and considered it a sign of weakness.

  ‘Does anyone else know?’ I asked.

  ‘I think Harry and Robert may suspect.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘I don’t know. They seem to watch us all the time.’

  ‘Don’t let them find out,’ I said urgently, and I found I was enjoying my new role as her heart’s advisor. ‘No one must ever find out.’

  ‘Oh well, they will find out soon enough,’ said Louisa.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, and even as I spoke the words, I could feel my physical being stricken with a presentiment as to the answer.

  ‘Well, we are going to run away and get married,’ said Louisa.

  The very first thought that came to my mind, and I am ashamed to admit it, was of the Breelong murders. These had happened some years earlier, for I remember reading about it in the newspaper, and when my mother saw what I was reading she snatched the newspaper abruptly from me and hid it away. However, I found it again and, when my mother was otherwise occupied, I studied the article at length. A young blackfellow named Jimmy Governor had married a white woman (in fact they had been properly married by a Church of England minister), and he and his wife Ethel (who was by all reports a nice-looking and presentable young lady) were camping on the property of the Mawbey family, for whom Jimmy Governor was working. The Mawbey womenfolk taunted Jimmy and Ethel and called them ‘rubbish’ and said that Jimmy deserved to be shot for marrying a white woman. Ethel began tearing her hair out, and cried, ‘Lord save me from the terrible things these people are saying, I cannot stand it.’ So Jimmy went up to the house to ask the women to stop their name-calling. But the women taunted Jimmy further, and he became so enraged that he bludgeoned the women to death, and the children also, with a tomahawk. I remember the article vividly for the description of the brains coming out of one of the victims; also because it was the first time I had ever heard of an Aboriginal man and a white woman being married. (In fact, it was the only time I had ever heard of it.)

  The second thought that leapt to mind was that it was a great shame that my mother had died when we were young. It was more than a shame; I felt suddenly furious about it, for I was saddled with more responsibility than I was equipped for. Surely if my mother was still alive then she would have taken Louisa in hand, and she would not be now considering running away and marrying a blackfellow and spending the rest of her days in ignominy and
ruin. But even as this thought passed through my mind, I realised with a jolt that Louisa was not ‘considering’ this; she had already made up her mind.

  My third thought was this: I had long sought to be close to my sister, but her haughty demeanour and the various differences of our personalities had always kept us at a distance from one another. Here now, as we lay side by side on the pink eiderdown, she was confiding in me, and this she had never done before. I felt honoured and filled with love for her; I was proud of her pale beauty and her defiant spirit. It was somehow of the greatest importance to me to keep this thin new thread of sisterly feeling between us from breaking. I see clearly now that as her older sister, especially in the absence of wise counsel in the form of our mother, I should have urged her to consider more fully the inevitable and terrible consequences of this action. I should have reminded her that she was only sixteen, and that her feelings for Darcy were most probably a remnant of her childish fancies, distorted by the tempestuous emotions common to youth and the relative isolation in which we lived. At the very least, I accept that I should certainly have said something to our father. However, the unexpectedness of the revelation and the pleasure excited in being her confidante prompted in me a loss of reason, and in this moment, when I had perhaps my greatest opportunity, I chose not to attempt to dissuade her.