I took a cigarette and lit it. I shook my head.
Arthur thought. “I should call the police,” he decided.
“It wasn’t Bad Billy,” I said. “I saw a woman.”
“A woman?”
“I think it was a woman. She was only there for a second.”
“Should I go out and investigate?”
I shook my head.
“I should go and investigate,” he said.
“No. Let’s go back to sleep. I’m probably just strung out, imagining things.”
Arthur accepted this and soon he was sound asleep. He was wrapped around me, hugging me close, and it was hard to extricate myself without waking him up. I crept down the hallway, waving off Kevin, who was now up and determined to follow me. I put on Arthur’s coat and lit a cigarette, then, with my boots loose and clammy on my feet, went out into the night. It was bitterly cold, but with no wind. I walked as quickly as I could to the tip of the point, worried the whole time that I’d run into some patrolling officer, but there was no one. Even where the land dropped off to the tidal bay, all was quiet, not even a fox. I turned around to go to the house, when I caught a whiff of smoke. Then it was gone. I turned to the woods and said, with minimal bravery, “Hello?”
No answer.
Then, “Mother?” Because although I found this highly unlikely, I did not know where she was, and I knew that if she had escaped, she would come to find me. There was no answer. I took a step into the woods. Everything was still except for a few high branches tapping on each other and the light skittering of leaves. I was about to make my way back to the house when I noticed the print, a footprint, small, a woman’s, with the unmistakable human quality of a cigarette butt pressed into its center.
As I wandered back to the house, I found myself thinking of my brief tenure at boarding school. When I was fifteen, my father packed me off to his old school, very impressive and pedigreed, conveniently coed, in the northern suburbs of Boston. I suppose my father was feeling put upon by my mother’s fits. My being institutionalized coincided with her being institutionalized for the first time, although my father didn’t term it as such. He said there was a new treatment for her illness—fresh air, constant care—and I imagined her bundled up in the freezing cold on the long veranda of a sanitarium, her sickness one of the lungs rather than of the soul.
My roommate, Astrid, was a pretty, pleasantly remote girl who was in some funk over her parents’ divorce. She spent most of her time in bed and found me acceptable since her last roommate had been a kleptomaniac and a compulsive liar. I was reading The Dead for my Joyce class and when the rock hit my window, thought that I’d hallucinated it. Michael Furey and his shower of pebbles, perhaps. With the second rock, which nearly cracked the glass, I thought it must be one of Astrid’s suitors—wealthy boys with floppy hair who were invariably good shots through years spent at lacrosse, squash, and baseball. Astrid didn’t seem inclined to move, although she did give me one of her appealing, monumentally bored looks. Her blond hair was matted to her skull and she pulled it a little so that it covered her eyes. I got up from my bed and went over to look. Standing on the ground outside my window was my mother. There was a cab waiting on the drive behind her, headlights slashing through the dark, its low rumble barely audible because it was a windy night. Windy and cold. I opened the window and smiled.
“Katherine,” she said. She was wearing a suit, but her feet were bare.
“Come up the fire escape,” I answered.
“I don’t have any money to pay the cab.”
Astrid sat up in bed, more animated than I’d seen her in days.
“It’s my mother. She’s escaped from the asylum and needs money to pay the taxi.”
“Take it out of my purse,” said Astrid. “I should have a couple of hundred in there.”
My mother spent the night curled up in bed next to me. She had a terrible cold that turned into pneumonia. I knew she was really sick, or I would have tried to hide her a bit longer. My father came to get her and found me with my bags packed. He seemed resigned to taking us both home, although he did find the strength to argue with me for the entire hour and a half it took to reach our house.
A week later, I tried to call Astrid, to thank her, but there was no answer in our room. Finally, I called the house counselor, Mrs. Grady. I wanted to pay Astrid back. I owed her seventy five dollars. But Mrs. Grady couldn’t tell me where she was. She started crying and finally said that Astrid had hanged herself the week before. Did I know why?
I didn’t really, but then the impulse to live was to me just as surprising as the one to stop it all. What was the pride in survival? How did we find the strength to mount each obstacle when we all knew in no uncertain way that it was not the last? I wanted to tell Mrs. Grady that the weak make way for the strong, but I felt that Astrid’s was a useless death.
That night, in bed with Arthur snoring beside me, I kept seeing Astrid’s pale face, the blue eyes and thin pink lips. I couldn’t get my mind to relax and found myself wondering if death wasn’t anything more than a side effect of time. Astrid was very much alive ten years ago. What made the present any more valuable than any other time? Why was Astrid more dead than I was, when I was bound to be dead at some future date? Wasn’t the present just an arbitrary lens for viewing existence? Finally, realizing that lying there was giving me a headache and that there was no chance of falling back to sleep, I got out of bed. If I’d stayed there I might have started thinking about God, about the existence of good and evil, how my view of time left no room for the afterlife (or the present life, for that matter) and that such thoughts were silly indulgences and I’d be better off doing some laundry or taking the dog for a much-needed walk.
Usually simple tasks had a soothing effect on me, but I was finding it harder and harder to execute them in my normal, focused way. There was an anxiety gnawing at my heart—mother lost, me here. There was no place left to breathe. There were no longer wildernesses, only zoos. There was no longer an easy freedom, only guarded institutions.
The next morning when Arthur and Travis got up, they were greeted by the unusual sight of me cooking breakfast. The house was freezing cold and I realized we’d run out of oil. I’d called the oil company and they said they’d send someone over, but it was almost eleven and I was still waiting for the delivery.
“It’s cold,” said Travis.
“Fucking freezing,” said Arthur.
“Have some coffee,” I suggested. “Maybe you can put your feet in it.”
I poured the coffee into mugs and handed them around. “Thinking of Texas?” I said to Travis.
“No,” he said. “You know where I’d like to be right now?”
“Where?”
“Australia.”
“Why?” asked Arthur.
“Because it’s summer. My dad went there once.”
“Vacation?” I asked. Vacations seemed a bit bourgeois for Travis.
“My father sells crop-dusting equipment. He went out there January two years ago. He said it was hot as hell.” Travis sipped his coffee. “He said he hit a kangaroo out on the highway. He said people went hunting after the kangaroos. I sure would like to do that.”
“I could never hunt kangaroo,” I said.
“Why not?” asked Travis.
“They’re too cute,” I said. “But I’ve always wanted to go to Australia.”
“Why?” asked Arthur.
“Because of the bushrangers,” I said. “A country of convicts and criminals appeals to me.”
“Bushrangers?” said Travis.
“Outlaws. You know, Ned Kelly, John Donahue, Michael Burke,” I said. “I took a course in Australian history when I was in college. Their heroes are bushrangers. How can you not love that?”
Australia in my mind had become an idealized America, what America might have been if we as Americans were more self-reliant, more free. In Australia (or so it seemed to me) one’s capacity to succeed was equal to one’
s ability to exist outside of society, rather than in America, where one’s self-sufficient qualities were put to the test building yet another society. My bushranger heroes were largely Irish and Scottish, victims of the English. Their transport to Australia was a diaspora of Celtic pickpockets, forgers, and cattle rustlers.
“Who’s your favorite?” asked Travis.
“My favorite what?”
Travis looked at me, amused that I’d already lost track of the conversation. “Your favorite bushranger.”
“Oh,” I said, “that.” I pondered for a moment. “My favorite bushranger would be Alexander Pearce.”
“What did he do?” asked Arthur.
“He stole six pairs of shoes.” I sipped my coffee. “It was his first crime. He got seven years’ transportation, but he never saw his home again.”
“Where was home?” asked Travis.
“County Monaghan, Ireland.”
“God, you have a good memory,” said Arthur.
“For certain things,” I said.
* * *
I pictured Pearce on the deck of the Castle Forbes, slicing through the low waves and dense, wet air. Hell’s Gate suddenly appeared, rising out of the water—a mountain peak whose roots reached far below the churning surface of the sea. Pearce saw the basalt flutes of Tasmania rising out of the ocean, the sharp edges of rock cutting the sky. He knew he had sailed not only to the edge of the world, but to the edge of human knowledge itself. And what monsters inhabited this hell? What rules governed this island with its woolly-headed natives and ambitious, bitter overseers, beaten down by heat and famine, hostile Indians and savage convicts, seeing always the golden skies of Mother England over the edge of horizon, the sunny warmth of her smile.
But watch as the ship slips into the antipodean realm. Her bow rises and falls, her masts soar majestically upward and sails are flung to right and left. How easy to picture this ship as bearing all that is civilized England to this misted, far-flung island. How easy to dream that belowdecks lay bundles of silk and velvet, vellum-bound books, fragrant cheeses, heady wines, sweating hams, carved ivory combs, corset baleen, hooked woolen rugs, and pots of ink and quills with which to inscribe on sheaf after sheaf of ivory paper the progress of the New World back into the Old . . .
But the ship is bearing convicts and its boards are slick with the sweat and shit of four hundred condemned men. Some are children, barely sixteen, some are hardened criminals, some are women, all are exiles from civilization sent to this prison that needs no bars, because this is Van Dieman’s Land, Tasmania, prized for her resilient timber and not much else. Here, the interior is a mystery known only to the natives, who are tight-lipped or silly with drink, and in either state are not trustworthy. And why would they tell? Their only refuge is the white man’s fear. In those small pockets of dark, primordial soil, an aborigine can still wander in peace. In the interior’s twisting ravines and sheer cliffs, frothing rivers and barren plains, things are as they’ve always been. These places are death for the white man, who knows too much to know how to survive, whose brain is so cluttered with muskets and profits and buttons that when faced with starvation and a buck kangaroo, the white man will stand berating the animal for not offering itself up with a prized buttery sauce and glass of heated rum.
This is Alexander Pearce’s Tasmania. It is 1819. Pearce is thirty years old.
Alexander Pearce is to work off his time, four years down from the seven if he buckles under and performs well. He does not. While on assignment to various locals, he manages to steal, drink, abscond, and escape. In one six-month period in 1821, the record shows him to have received 150 lashes. He is unrepentant. His behavior does not improve. During this period he escapes into the bush and learns—from some helpful natives—how to survive in the wilderness for close to three months. Of his many transgressions it is forgery (a two-pound money order) and absconding from service that finally get him sent to Macquarie Harbor, a penal colony on the distant western coast of the island reserved for hardened criminals and the hopelessly degenerate. And if Pearce wasn’t when he first arrived, he certainly is now.
Macquarie is a singular place. Its iron bars are the miles of shark-infested beach and the hostile, mysterious natives that roam the interior. One in ten men escape and nearly all are recorded as having “perished in the woods.” The food—what there is of it—is intentionally pickled and rebelliously rotten. All the men have scurvy, lice, and sores. Few have teeth. Lashings are routine and the sight of a man with his back looking like an ox liver, his shoes overflowed with blood, is commonplace. Fresh meat is the stuff of dreams. And so the men leave, not so concerned with what lies ahead but propelled with what is at their backs, leaping into oblivion and probably not caring. Starving. Drowning. Lying down exhausted, never to rise. Picked off by the native Tasmanians, whose spear-hurling will not save them from extinction. As the convicts draw their rasping final breaths, I would say that they all feel that dying a free man is overrated.
Only one man escapes Macquarie twice, and he is Alexander Pearce.
Who knows how much planning went into this venture? I suspect the escape was spontaneous. On the morning of September 22, 1822, Pearce is working felling trees when out of the corner of his eye—near the sector of his brain where thoughts of escape lurk endlessly—he sees a boat floating in Kelly Basin. Tantalizing. Languid. Waves lapping seductively at her sides—you are never at the horizon, you are always on the horizon . . .
Pearce makes a run for it. He jumps into the boat and before he can gauge the magnitude of his actions, he has seven willing companions—seven men who have entwined their fate with his—seven men leaping like fish into the safety of the boat. With the popping of muskets and the scent of powder heavy in the air, the men quickly row, the shouts of the overseers lost in the pounding blood of the first moments of freedom. Soon the smoke signals wind into the sky. Men have escaped. Hunt them down.
The convicts, now at a safe distance, sink the boat and head into the heart of island, where the clock of time has wound and wound so tightly that it has stopped altogether. The trees poke into the very fabric of the sky—trees sprouted at the time of Julius Caesar. The melancholy cawing of the magpies, the flutter of fallen leaves as a snake slides into hiding, the rattle of gum nuts shaken high above by a springing possum, the buzz of the great yellow sun, these are the only sounds heard over the grunt and heave of men walking at quick pace, walking inward, backward, nowhere.
Who are these men?
Little Brown. Robert Kennelly. William Dalton. Thomas Bodenham. John Mather. Mathew Travers. Robert Greenhill. And Alexander Pearce. They have only one weapon, an ax, which is in Greenhill’s possession.
What is their plan?
To survive. To this end, they must travel first to the center, then manage eastward to Hobart. There, on the good days, they will find passage on a ship, maybe on a Dutch freighter going to the Spice Islands; they will spend their years weighed down by native women, whose soft black hair smells of nutmeg and saffron. On the bad days, they will arms themselves and retreat into the bush, where the aborigines and Irishmen (after all, aren’t they the same to the British?) pick off sheep at the fringe, occasionally stopping a carriage or man on horseback with a hearty, “Bail up.” But the food is now gone and the terrain has shifted. Jagged toothy peaks drain their energy, bottomless gorges swallow them whole. Of the voluptuous women of the Spice Islands, all that is left is the scent of nutmeg, and wouldn’t that be better coming off a plum duff?
One of the men, Little Brown, is weak with dysentery. How long will he last? How long will any of them, with no food? Robert Kennelly heaves a deep breath and looks at the land before him—wall after wall, divide after divide—and states: “I am so weak that I could eat a piece of man.” Is this a joke? This is not a time for joking. Is this a thought mistakenly uttered, better left unsaid, because as the words escape his mouth he sees the eyes of all the others swing toward him. He sees the light dying in Little Bro
wn’s eyes. He sees the keen blue eyes of Alexander Pearce calmly appraising him, those icy eyes sitting in Pearce’s pocked, creased face.
Someone will not survive the night.
Days later the authorities find Robert Kennelly and Little Brown trying to escape back to Macquarie. They are hysterical, babbling, doomed. “We fell back,” says Kenelly. “They tried to catch us, but we hid. There was no food.” “Then what is this?” asks the constable, holding forth the small sack of meat. “That is not food,” says Kennelly. “That is William Dalton.” William Dalton, believed to be a flogger, although the records do not bear this out. Eaten for his supposed cruelty, cut down with Greenhill’s ax. They sliced off Dalton’s head, eviscerated him, hung him up to bleed, and dined first on the heart and liver. In the following week Kennelly and Brown both die, unable to heal from the deprivations faced in their weeks of freedom.
The other convicts continue east to the Loddon Plains. Thomas Bodenham is the next victual. His bones are found years later, by a surveyor hoping to be the first white man to travel the region.
Four men continue onward. All are so thin that they offer little food and although each slaughter reduces the mouths by one, it is still necessary to choose a new meal every few days. Now, the men have fallen into factions: Greenhill and Travers, Pearce and Mather. The two pairs stagger on, in sight of each other, but at a distance. Pearce considers his fate. He does not want to be so far that if another meal presents itself, he cannot partake. He does not want to be so near as to present himself as a meal. He looks at Mather. Mather has more flesh to him than Pearce, and height. Pearce is only five feet four inches. Also, Pearce has had a bout of smallpox and his pitted appearance, he thinks, makes him look less appetizing. Greenhill will most likely go for Mather, because Pearce is known for his ferocity. If he was smart, Greenhill would cut down Travers, who is weak from a snakebite, even though they have some sort of friendship. What kind? Who can say? The most unholy of affections spring up around convicts and, Pearce wryly notes, cannibalism and sodomy both dwell outside the perimeters of civilization, which is exactly where they’re standing. Pearce staggers onward, his mind unable to free itself of thoughts of meat and man, and man and meat, and which is what and why not.
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