Ghost River

by Tony Birch

  Ren knew his river as good as anyone and better than most. As well as drawing birds and other animals, his exercise books were increasingly filled with maps of the river, including sketches of the swimming holes, the hollows where rabbits burrowed into the ground, the fox holes hidden beneath the barbs of blackberry, and the drainways spewing out rubbish from the streets above. Ren’s thoughts of the river were so constant he sometimes woke in the night, recalled an image of his most recent visit, opened one of his books and began drawing.

  On one of Sonny’s early visits to the river with Ren they came across the river men. It was a Sunday, and they had spent much of the morning in the grassed laneway behind their yards, doing what teenage boys do when they’re bored, resting against Ren’s back fence and talking about nothing in particular. Sonny was teaching Ren how to roll cigarettes. He was a slow learner. The wind blowing from the north suddenly gusted. Ren could smell the water calling them.

  ‘Come on, Sonny. Let’s go.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Follow me.’

  They ran beside the wall separating them from the mill and negotiated the maze of thorn bushes before sliding down the steep track to the riverbank.

  ‘The falls or the bridge?’ Ren asked.

  ‘The bridge. I’ve got an idea,’ Sonny said. ‘Them pigeons that make a home under the bridge, I’m gonna catch a couple and start my own flock. I could race them. There’s prize money in that. And you can make even more betting on your bird. Or against it.’

  ‘You don’t have any place to keep birds.’

  ‘I could build a coop outside my bedroom window, over the kitchen roof.’

  Ren didn’t doubt Sonny had the skill to build a coop, there was nothing he couldn’t do with his hands. Just the same, he didn’t like the idea at all.

  ‘I don’t know about that.’ He frowned. ‘Keeping a bird in a cage. I reckon it’s cruel.’

  ‘It’s a coop, not a cage. If I can find enough wood and wire I’ll make it as big as a house. Anyway, you train pigeons and you don’t need to keep them locked up. They fly away and come back home to you. No harm to the bird in that.’

  ‘S’pose so.’

  ‘Is so.’

  As they approached the iron bridge Ren heard hollering up ahead. He whispered to Sonny to keep low and stay quiet. They moved off the track and lay in the long grass, Sonny’s knee digging into a length of metal pipe. He pulled it out of a tangle of weeds, put one end to his shoulder and pointed it at Ren.

  ‘You’re fucken dead.’

  Sonny stuck his head up above the line of grass and saw a group of men underneath the bridge stomping around a campfire. They looked like a long-lost tribe. The men passed a flagon of wine between them while they sang and kicked up dust.

  ‘We have trouble,’ Sonny said. ‘We’re gonna have to take them, Ren.’

  ‘You’ll be doing it on your own.’

  ‘Please yourself, coward.’

  Sonny stood up, lifted the pipe to his shoulder, moved forward through the grass and took aim at the men. One of them saw him coming, nodded to the others, took a couple of steps forward himself and raised his hands in surrender.

  ‘Don’t be shooting at me, youngster. Are ya from the authorities?’ he asked Sonny, humouring the boy.

  ‘We’re outlaws,’ Sonny answered.

  ‘Thank Jesus Christ for that one.’ The man smiled, relaxing his hands at his sides. ‘So are we. How about you be polite and come over here and introduce yourselves?’

  After some coaxing the boys walked closer to the camp. The man offered them a seat, which they refused. The other men took no notice of the boys and went on shuffling around the fire, humming a tune and continuing to pass the bottle.

  ‘This is my camp,’ the man said. ‘So you can end the poor manners and stop pointing that weapon at me,’ he ordered Sonny. ‘If not, I’m as likely to take it and shove it up your arse.’

  He made the comment with a smile on his face, but it was enough of a threat for Sonny to throw the length of pipe to the ground. The man clapped his hands together.

  ‘Good boy. That’s what I like to see. They call me Tex and I’m boss down here.’ He pointed at Sonny. ‘What name do ya go by?’

  Sonny wasn’t accustomed to providing his name to a complete stranger but he offered up Sonny Brewer without thinking about it.

  Tex took a step closer and studied Sonny’s face. The man was delighted by what he found. ‘That eye you have there, I believe it may be a true wonder. Come take a look at this,’ he barked at the others. ‘We have someone special visiting this morning. How’d you earn such an eyeball as that, son?’

  Sonny rubbed the knuckle of his thumb over his eye, unhappy with the attention it was getting.

  ‘I was born with it.’

  Tex gently patted him on the shoulder. ‘Good for you. It’s a true beauty. I have never seen an eye like it. And it’s a sign, we can be certain of that.’

  ‘What sort of sign?’ Sonny asked.

  ‘Can’t say right yet,’ Tex answered, seemingly holding something back.

  Neither Sonny nor Ren was sure what he was talking about, but they would soon get used to Tex speaking in riddles.

  ‘And you would be?’ He turned to Ren.

  ‘Ren,’ he answered, through a mouthful of dust and woodsmoke.

  Tex skipped back and then forward, reminding Ren of a circus clown he’d seen perform at the town hall one Christmas.

  ‘Wren! The name of a bird. I like that one. You are a free spirit, boy.’

  ‘I’m not a bird. It’s short for my last name. Renwick.’

  ‘Don’t talk yourself down, boy. The wren is a bird I know from another time. And you’re that one. Don’t go forgetting it. One day ya will need to fly.’

  Tex stepped forward and rested an open hand on Ren’s forehead. ‘There is no doubt you are a bird. I can feel you have heart and spirit in you, boy. Don’t matter that you know nothing of it now. You will sometime in the future.’ Tex lifted his hand from Ren’s head and straightaway the boy felt different than he had before the old man had touched him, lighter somehow, as if his body might leave the ground.

  Tex dusted off his ragged clothes. He had a rich dark face and what looked to Ren like a film of milk across his eyes. He stood a little straighter and cleared his throat. ‘Let me introduce you to my companions.’ He circled the fire. The men walked in one direction, Tex in the other, and one by one he announced them as if they were about to step up for a boxing title bout.

  ‘First off here we have Big Tiny Watkins, hailing from the heat and sweat of the north, where as a young man he made his mark in the snowdropping trade.’

  Big Tiny, who was as wide as he was tall, bowed his head gracefully and went on pacing the fire.

  ‘Falling in behind Tiny we have the mighty, mighty Tallboy Parrish, our camp cook, who was at one time the undisputed champion tea-leaf across the state of Victoria.’

  Tallboy waved and smiled at the boys. He wore a friendly face that Ren took an immediate liking to.

  ‘And that skinny fella trailing him,’ Tex said, moving on, ‘is my own second-in-command, the silent but deadly Mr Cold Can Jonson.’

  Cold Can, who looked more like a child than a man, and had to weigh something less than a starved jockey, avoided the unwanted attention of the newcomers by turning away.

  ‘And this here is the Doc,’ Tex said, completing the introductions in a flat voice, pointing to a silver-haired man wearing a full three-piece suit and no shoes or socks. ‘There’s nothing more to say about this one.’

  Ren couldn’t take his eyes off the man’s filthy, scabbed and bloodied feet.

  ‘They’re some weird names,’ Sonny said.

  ‘They are,’ Tex answered. ‘There was a time when we went by everyday names, until we ditched them and too
k up with new autographs from no public record. Most of all the police and vagrancy record.’

  Sitting around the fire that afternoon Tex told the boys the story of how the men had recently shifted camp after being forced out of their home some distance upriver. Their old campsite had been destroyed by workers from the Water Board laying a run-off channel to deal with flooding. The men had been marched out of their camp, with nothing but the possessions they carried in their arms.

  ‘The camp was burned down on us,’ Tex told them. ‘They said they done it to kill off the bugs and germs. But we got no germs. If you don’t include the Doc.’ He chuckled. He explained that the site for the new camp had been carefully chosen, as it would be shaded from the sun on warm days and protect them from the wet weather when it rained. The men had built themselves a humpy between the web of iron supporting the bridge, out of whatever bits and pieces they could scrounge, scraps of timber, an old tarp that had blown off a truck crossing the bridge above, and sheets of iron roofing found in the scrub. The structure was held together with wire and old rope and a handful of rusty nails. Although the humpy swayed like a boat at sea whenever a strong wind came through the valley, it held together well enough to provide what comfort they needed.

  Tex ruled the camp, and rule number one was that any man in need of a warm fire and a meal could not be turned away. While sharing the fire and food, Tex would observe a newcomer until he came to what he described as an understanding of character.

  ‘I got to read a man’s soul. Takes some time and thinking, that one.’

  ‘How’d you misread the Doc?’ Tallboy asked him, raising his eyebrows and smiling across the fire at Ren.

  ‘Was gone on the grog the night he turned up. By the next morning he’d settled in like a stray pup and I didn’t have the heart to turn him away.’

  As camp boss, Tex also demanded that any man who shared his fire and shelter came and went by three commandments: Never call a man a dog unless he is one. Never take another man’s food or bed unless he offers to share. And never touch another man’s fire.

  Tallboy, the most capable of the men when it came to repairs and maintenance, fashioned a stove from a cut-down 44 barrel he found along the bank and rolled back to the camp. It sat out the front of the humpy and the men worshipped around it of a night, seated on fruit boxes or old car tyres, cooking up a feed, passing the bottle, belting out a tune and sharing stories. Baked beans or canned sausage and vegetables were number one on the camp menu, as they were easiest to lift from the milk bar and could be heated and eaten straight from the tin. When things were on the up, the river men feasted on bacon bones, provided free of charge by sympathetic local butchers. Tallboy boiled the bones in a pot of river water and served them up with potatoes roasted in the fire.

  The men possessed a single blunt knife between them – a precious item – which they used to hack at a tin-loaf of stale bread, or split the chest of a rabbit whenever they caught one. They didn’t carry a spoon, knife or fork between them and ate with their fingers.

  ‘Licking these stumps after a feed,’ Tallboy often pronounced, ‘is the best tasting tucker you’re likely to come by.’

  Big Tiny, always in a hurry to get his food down, had a habit of eating with his face, sticking both his snout and full lips into the can and coming out with a mess of food woven into his scraggy beard.

  Cold Can, although he looked like he couldn’t lift fresh air, had a shotgun throwing arm and could hit a retreating rabbit with a rock up to a distance of fifty yards, in the old measurement. He’d pass the concussed rabbit over to Tallboy for necking, skinning and roasting over the coals. Rabbit hunting was restricted to mornings though, as once the grog took hold he wasn’t capable of hitting the side of a tree trunk, even a few feet out from the mark.

  Sonny would soon come to believe there wasn’t a creature on the planet as unlucky as one of those rabbits. ‘You know, not one of them fellas can even leak straight. I’ve seen them piss on their own feet,’ he would later say to Ren.

  ‘That’s no accident. It’s for the chilblains,’ Ren explained to him.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Chilblains. It’s why they piss on their feet. They all got them from getting round with no shoes and socks on. The only way to get rid of chilblains is piss between your toes. My stepdad, Archie, does it all the time. I seen him do it in the backyard, in his vegie patch.’

  ‘Your stepdad pisses on his own feet? He don’t even drink.’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with the drink. Home remedy he told me when I caught him one time and asked what he was doing.’

  Other than rabbits the only occasional meat brought to the fire were chickens that came off the convent farm, two bends along the river. The men would occasionally try their hand at chicken rustling. It was a tricky business and not always successful. The convent birds were slick and shifty-eyed. They also made a hell of a noise. The racket would wake the nuns, who’d come out into the night, each of them swinging a kero lamp in one hand and some sort of fearsome weapon in the other. On one raid Big Tiny backed out of the hen house with a bird tucked under one arm, only to see the lamps swinging across a field in his direction. He slipped in a bog and got stuck. When the Sisters of Charity caught up with him they laid into him with picks and shovels, rescued the bird, and sent him back to the camp covered in cuts and bruises.

  The river took such good care of the men that Tex called it their mother. She kept them safe from those who would do them harm, be it young bucks from the streets above, out for a night of menace, or the local police steaming with grog themselves. Coppers loved the drink as much as anyone and went hard at it any opportunity they got. Their amusements came cheap, and most often involved kicking a wino around the back lanes on a Saturday night. Down on the riverbank, tucked up in their shelter, the men were able to charge on in peace.

  It soon became obvious to the boys that Tex organised all camp business. He was in charge of the fire and announced the menu each night, although he did none of the cooking himself. That was a job left to Tallboy, with Cold Can in assistance. As well as possessing the ability to sniper rabbits and cook, Cold Can drew beautiful pictures. Sometimes, as they gathered around the fire, he drew the face of one of the men with a piece of charcoal, or nothing in particular but swirls and lines mapped in the dirt. Ren would watch him closely and later try to copy the same drawings into his sketchbook.

  Tex was also an accomplished musician. He played the gum leaf and could belt a song as good as a professional singer on a record album. He liked an audience and was soon performing for his newfound young friends. When he stood up from the fire for a song he transformed into a man from another time, strutting about in his boots, wearing a moth-eaten pair of woollen pants and jacket, and a hat worn back on his head with a magpie feather poking out of the band.

  All the river men loved a tune, be it country and western or gospel. The singer would wail over a friend he’d lost to the grog, or a woman he’d busted up with and the kids he’d left in his wake after taking to the road. They had so many children between them the river men could never have recalled all their names, even when sober. Tex would sometimes choke on a lump of pain, and for a moment would be unable to go on with his song. He’d smudge the tears across his face with the sleeve of his jacket, cough and splutter, take a good swig of the flagon and clear his throat.

  Most days of the week, bar Sundays, they’d gather of an afternoon out the front of the local wine shop and chip in for a flagon, a pair if one of them had done particularly well on the twine. They were connoisseurs of a cheap brand of red that went by the dubious name of Captain’s Table. Tex was usually good for a dollar or two, picking up loose change by singing and playing the leaf outside hotels or on the railway station platform. Tallboy, who had at one time been a trump pickpocket, working the markets and racetracks, held his reflexes steady enough to shoplift goods for campfire dinners. A
nd Big Tiny wasn’t too bad at the snatch and grab, usually fruit and vegetables. He might have been as fat as a house but he was also as quick as a rat on the run over a short distance. Tex once referred to him as the refrigerator on ballet shoes.

  The only one who never weighed in was the Doc. He contributed little to the camp other than the miserable look on his face. He was called a lazy old cunt any time his back was turned and more than one of the men wanted him barred from the camp every other week. The Doc and Tallboy had come to blows many times. The same day the boys showed up at the camp, they fought over a missing flagon of wine, which Tallboy claimed the Doc had ferreted away for his personal enjoyment. While the Doc denied the theft, as soon as he got up to take a shit in the blackberry Tallboy fronted Tex demanding he be expelled.

  ‘His con … con … tree … bution is fuck all.’

  Tex listened to Tallboy carefully before answering, ‘I know it myself, Tallboy. Many times I want to be rid of him. But the Doc’s been here with us too long. It’d be like throwing a relation in the street. I can’t be doing that.’

  ‘But he’s no relation of mine.’

  Tex raised a hand in the air, which was enough to indicate the conversation was over. Tallboy dropped his head. Tex knew to banish the Doc, for all the selfishness he possessed, could bring bad luck to the camp and he’d have no part of it.

  In the weeks after Ren and Sonny first came across the river men, they spent more time around the campfire listening to stories than they did exploring the river. They’d race down to the camp after school and leave late of an afternoon wearing the campfire smoke, envious of the life of freedom and adventure the men enjoyed. Late at night, from his open bedroom window, Ren would sometimes hear the men singing down on the river, listening to the drunken choir wage a battle with the water tumbling over the falls. A breeze would sweep along the river valley, roll up the hill and carry the music and the scent of the water with it. Ren would look up at the same stretch of sky the river men were resting under and wish he was at the water’s edge with them.