The Commandant

by Jessica Anderson

  He had taken his share of the roasted wallaby, but while eating it had suddenly remembered the coffin in his quarters, and the realisation that the commandant had indeed been provident to have it made of lead had made him remember the state of the wallaby while the men had carried it, and he had sickened, and given the meat to Lazarus, who had eaten it with huge chews, standing with a hand on a hip and looking at the sky as if he had never seen stars before. The memory of this ranging way Lazarus had of looking about him, his head turning stiffly but somehow luxuriously, and the sinews of his neck and chin like an inverted claw, made Henry, lying sleepless in the dark, think piteously, ‘I am fat and sick and am going to die.’

  But having reached this low pitch, he could only turn back. He laughed at himself, sat up, took the flask from his pocket, and shook it. In his new cheerfulness he thought he may have been mistaken in his estimate of its contents. He shook it twice, listening as carefully as he had ever done to a heartbeat. He had not been mistaken. He took only a sip.

  He knelt and spread his blanket on the ground, then lay down on his back, expecting peace. And indeed he was all but asleep when he heard himself whispering, ‘Damn you!’

  He opened his eyes wide and stared, shocked and solemn, into the dark. A sip of drink was worse than none. On the verge of sleep, an image of neat black shoes had flashed on his eyelids, and off-guard, he had cursed. Curled on his side in his bed in his boyhood room, he had opened his eyes and seen two shining narrow black shoes. One was set on the rug, the other swung comfortably aloft. ‘Damn you!’ he had whispered at those shoes, and his father had uncrossed his legs and leaned forward.

  ‘What did you say, my son?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Henry hoarsely, beginning to remember the previous night.

  ‘Do you remember last night?’

  ‘No,’ said Henry.

  ‘My son, the hold that man Clark has upon you is no natural one.’

  Henry sat up in bed. ‘It’s a lie!’

  ‘My poor boy, if you had heard yourself weeping last night because he has abandoned you!’

  ‘What you say is a lie. We have had women. We took them together. Jemima at the hospital. And others.’

  His father, showing no surprise, fell swiftly on to his knees and lifted his hands.

  ‘Save me, O God, for the waters are come into my soul. I sink into deep mire, where there is no standing. I come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me.’

  It seemed to Henry—schooled from childhood in the psalms, and familiar with the rest of this one—that his father was praying for himself. He pulled the covers over his head and bawled into the sheet that fell back and half stopped his mouth. For weeks he had been dogging Nobby Clark’s footsteps. ‘I don’t believe what they say about you, Nobby.’ And for a while Nobby had been as grateful, earnest, and tearful, as he had been at first. ‘Buck, Nobby won’t forget that. Nobby knows his pals.’ But then he had changed, had begun to scratch behind an ear and say in a gabble, ‘Yes, lad, I know, I know.’

  ‘Nobby, what have I done?’

  ‘Nothing, lad. But I’m leading you into bad ways.’

  ‘Never! Ain’t we roistering boys?’

  ‘Yes, but look, better go home, lad. Go on.’

  So then there was more dogging and pleading, and soon Nobby, when he saw him coming, took to darting into doorways or down lanes. But Henry was not to be shaken off; he argued that Nobby could not have seen him, and that the darting was for some other purpose. But on the night before he lay bawling into the sheet, and his father knelt by his bed intoning the sixty-ninth psalm, he and Nobby, rounding the same corner, had come face to face.

  ‘Nobby!’

  Nobby had turned and run, with Henry after him, calling to him and laughing, for this was surely another of Nobby’s jokes. He thought as a counter-joke he would cry, ‘Stop, thief!’ But it occurred to him in time that this would be excessively indelicate. So he only panted with laughter, and called to Nobby to stop, and was about to catch up with him, and end the game, when Nobby darted into a short lane, saw a cart lumbering across the other end, and stopped, at bay.

  He fell quickly into one of his jesting fencing positions, making a sword of his outstretched cane. But Henry stopped dead as soon as he saw his face. He was trying to grin but was defeated by fury. His mouth was a mere contortion about his long decayed teeth, his face was purple and blotched, the whites of his eyes aflame with veins. From under his hat fell one strand of lank black hair. Why had Henry never noticed till then that his hair was dyed? He lunged with his stick at Henry’s waistcoat. ‘Back!’ He lunged again. ‘Back! Puppy! Milksop! Gull! Back!’ He was no longer pretending that this was a joke. At the end of these invocations he squared his mouth and snarled like a dog. He hated Henry enough to kill him.

  Henry turned and walked back through the lane, conscious as he went of Nobby’s footsteps racing and clattering in the other direction. ‘All they said about him is true,’ a quiet voice, his own, was informing him. He walked through the town in a daze. ‘I have always known it was true,’ said the quiet voice, incredulous yet somehow drugged. ‘So why would I not let myself know it in words? Why?’

  In one of the streets west of the wharves he knocked at the door of a squat little cottage. All he can remember now of the woman who opened it is her name—Honoria—and her celebrated breasts. He had one out before she could shut the door, and had fastened his lips and teeth to it, and they fell together to the earthen floor of the room, she laughing and gasping, and the other men and women in the room roaring and stamping and crying encouragement. A few hours later someone had dumped him on his father’s doorstep, drunk, stinking, his clothes torn, his pockets empty.

  ‘I made sackcloth also my garment, and I became a proverb to them.’

  ‘Baw-baw—’ sobbed Henry.

  ‘They that sit in the gates speak against me; and I was the song of the drunkards.’

  ‘Baw-baw—’ But it was true. ‘And I bet his pa does it just as good,’ Honoria had cried to that roomful of people.

  ‘Reproach hath broken my heart, and I am full of heaviness.’

  But now, under the covers, there was only a crafty silence. Henry had suddenly decided that the only way to redemption was in death; he would leap from the bed, run to the window, and throw himself out.

  The recollection of his great leap from the bed brings Henry to his feet under the stars in the dark bush. Collison wakes.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Only me,’ said Henry, in a hoarse and humble voice.

  ‘Sir, what are you doing?’

  ‘I must piss.’

  As Henry walked away from the group his feet cracked twigs, a sound that carried and multiplied so that he might have been one of a number of men walking, far apart but abreast, across that tract of bush. It was a marvel how his delicate little father had reached the window before him. There he stands, as if for ever, barring the way, his arms outstretched and a steadfast and noble look upon his face.

  ‘Let me be,’ shouts Henry. ‘I wish to die!’

  ‘You will live,’ says his father, as if in judgement.

  ‘I will throw you out first.’

  ‘You will not.’

  And of course he is right; Henry cannot touch him with violence; the ancient embargo is too strong. ‘You will stay in the world,’ announces his father, ‘to be saved.’

  Henry pulls the flask from his pocket. He puts a hand on a hip as he drinks, and rolls his eyes at the stars.

  ‘Make haste, O God, to deliver me. Make haste to help me, O God.’

  His silent intonation of the words are of ironic intention, yet there is a residue of sweetness in them too, a melancholy sweetness, like homesickness, that brings no comfort. The comfort seeping into him comes from the flask, which is now quite empty.<
br />
  ‘But,’ argues Henry, ‘it will be only a day’s deprivation. We are bound to find him early in the morning. Collison and the others will bring him in while I ride ahead. If the nag goes well I will be at the Limestone by dark. All depends on finding him early.’

  They did in fact find him very early. When they left the camp, in the grey light before sunrise, Henry expected to be led north-north-west, in which direction Collison said the clearing lay. Lazarus took them almost east, but Collison suggested that the convict was making the first curve of an arc that would bring them out near the clearing and would at the same time avoid an unreliable ford.

  By sunrise they were walking again through a blond landscape threaded by the darker clefts of creeks from which the cockatoos again rose screeching. Between creeks the country flattened and opened, and while crossing one of these spaces they saw rising above the bank of the next creek several heads. As they rose a splotched oblong of red appeared among their grey. Lazarus, in the lead, stopped dead, and Henry put the spurs to his horse; but Collison shouted, ‘Hardacre!’ and Lazarus went on again, his shoulders slumping for a moment in what looked like relief, and Henry reined the horse back to his former pace.

  But then it was Collison who halted. ‘Mr Cowper!’ Henry looked back and saw him pointing to a spot at some distance to Henry’s right. Again it was red that drew their attention, but this time a mere speck. Henry put the horse to a canter, and now that Hardacre was near, Collison left the prisoners and ran after.

  When Collison arrived at the spot Henry was still mounted, looking impassively down on a torn scrap of red coat, and nearby a piece of waistcoat, rust-coloured and stiff as bark with dried blood. While Collison was picking these up, the breeze fluttered a piece of torn paper above the grass. Collison retrieved it, glanced at it, and as he handed it to Henry he looked into his eyes and nodded. There was no mistaking that impetuous yet tentative handwriting. ‘After seven hours trav—’ read Henry.

  ‘And yet there is no good you beating around here,’ said Private Hardacre, when they joined him. ‘We combed the area yesterday.’ But Lazarus insisted to Henry and Collison that it was hereabouts he had been told he lay. ‘Then go on,’ said Henry. ‘Lead! Lead!’

  Lazarus made off at a run, heading directly north now, and Henry trotted the horse by his side. Collison fell behind, and all the others, with Hardacre, lagged further behind still. For about two miles Lazarus led them over the rough area Collison had spoken of: a terrain of little creeks, some almost dry, and some, occluded by seeping earth, mere waterholes, but all lying deep in gullies, and the open spaces between them smaller and less frequent than before. They had emerged from one gully, and had begun to cross an open space towards another, when Henry saw that Lazarus had thrown back his head and was sniffing the air, and in the next moment he was himself assailed by the stench. Henry had led the horse through the last gully, but now he mounted and trotted forward, with Lazarus running by his side.

  The pall of flies almost hid the grey mare as she lay in the little water in the bed of the creek, though the mound of her belly, hairless, pink, and shining with slime, showed here and there among them. Lazarus hardly glanced at her. Tense and immobile, he stood looking across the creek. Henry followed his glance, saw nothing unusual, rose in the stirrups to gain the advantage of height, but still saw only the low scrub, of medium density, covering the other side. The men behind them, informed perhaps by Lazarus’s stance, had begun to shout and run up.

  Lazarus signalled for Henry to follow, then turned and ran for a few minutes alongside the creek until he came to a turn in the bank that obtruded so far into the gully, and so nearly reached the other side, that it all but made a causeway. While Lazarus and Henry were crossing, the others, singly or in twos and threes, reached the dead mare, but none lingered for more than a few seconds before turning and running, forced into single file now, Collison in advance and Hardacre after, alongside the gully towards the causeway.

  But they had fallen far behind. They were still running on that side of the gully while Henry, led by Lazarus, was riding through the low scrub on the other.

  They found him lying at a right angle to the line of the creek, about ten yards from where the mare lay. At first Henry saw only a rough hump of sticks, such as might collect against the bulwark of a fallen tree, but then, protruding from one end of this hump, he saw two purplish black objects, and by their compact placing and duality discerned that they were a man’s heels. Lazarus went forward, and standing wide of the hump, reached over and took the sticks, one by one, and quickly tossed them to one side.

  He had been buried face downward in a shallow grave. The native dogs had dug about his feet, and exposed the heels, and when Lazarus got a green branch, and brushed it to and fro to remove the layer of earth covering the body, they saw that he was naked, and that his flesh had turned the dark colours of decomposition, and that the back of his head had been beaten away by many blows.

  They did not notice Collison coming up until they heard his step and his hard breathing. He was carrying a pair of shoes, and when he saw the body he set these down, with abstracted care, near his own feet.

  Henry spoke low. ‘Where did you find them?’

  Without looking away from the body, Collison pointed to the bushes a few yards in his rear. Lazarus spoke as quietly as Henry. ‘I wiz wrong. In me mind I seen ’im runnin’ barefoot.’

  But now Hardacre came crashing along, excited, exploding into their stillness, a broken spear held aloft in one hand.

  ‘Well, there it is!’ He threw the spear to the ground. ‘Blacks. But led by Boylan or another. They make no burials on their own prompting.’

  The eight prisoners, Collison’s four and Hardacre’s four, were not coming up at a run, but were herded together, dragging their feet and finding much impediment in the small scrub. It seemed that they would have liked to turn back, but were drawn forward by the thread of their own vision, for none could unfix his stare from the long dark dusty shape protruding above the trough in the ground.

  Henry and Lazarus and the two soldiers, repelled by the smell released by the removal of the earth, had all stepped back a little, and about a yard outwards from them the eight prisoners now came to an uncertain halt. Several fat flies entered this irregular circle of men and buzzed down on to the body, and Henry gave a garbled shout and motioned Lazarus forward to beat them off with his green branch. Lazarus went forward heavily, setting his face into an expression of indifference. The flies clung, and had to be dislodged almost with blows, and even then did not go far, but flew with an angry buzzing about the circle of men. One, buzzing before the face of a prisoner, caused him to throw up an arm and back away, and the heel of his boot catching in a hollow, he fell backwards and tumbled among his companions.

  They laughed as they righted him. They called him a clumsy dog and put him on his feet and slapped his back; and then every man began to slap his neighbour’s back and to laugh with such growing relief and excitement that Collison’s command to be silent went unheard or unheeded, and at last Henry, with another wild uncompleted shout, had to ride the horse among them and brandish an arm as if to warn them of what they could expect.

  They grew silent, but still did not try to hide their smiles except by passing their hands elaborately across their mouths. Hardacre, as if he preferred not to witness these antics, looked lazily at Lazarus, who was still waving the branch to and fro above the body; but Collison had become very red in the face and glittering in the eyes, and as Henry backed the horse away from the silent but grinning group, he suddenly roared in challenge, ‘Well—and there are worse men than him!’

  The smiles faded and died. None of the prisoners spoke, but measured Collison briefly with their glances before looking away. One took off his hat and gazed into the crown. Some shuffled their feet, one cleared his throat. Then the one who held his hat—his name was Odell—gl
anced at Collison, and away again, and said almost with kindness, ‘In my reckoning, there was a worse one on Norfolk.’

  He put on his hat and looked in turn at his companions, but all were stony-faced; none would agree with him. Henry, seeing Collison growing angry again, walked his horse among them and made them press back.

  ‘Come now,’ he said pleasantly, ‘who has blankets? Take out your blankets. I have brought rope in my pack, and needles and thread. He must be made ready and brought in.’

  Sullenly, slowly, Hardacre’s four took the blankets from their packs. Hardacre came up. ‘Mr Cowper, a word.’

  They went aside. ‘Mr Cowper, could we bury him here?’

  ‘Hardacre, don’t consider it.’ Henry was the more definite because he himself had just considered it: only immediate burial would give him a chance to reach the Limestone Station by nightfall. ‘It would be indecent,’ he said, as much to himself as to Hardacre: ‘He must have a Christian burial.’

  ‘Sir, you could say the words over him.’

  But this had also occurred to Henry. ‘That may satisfy decency, Hardacre, but not official custom. And what of his widow? Poor lady! He must be buried where she wishes. No, there’s no help for it—he must be brought in.’

  ‘Very good, Mr Cowper, I will try.’

  As Hardacre approached the prisoners, Henry saw that they had dropped their blankets in a pile on the ground and were now standing well away from them, as if to announce like this their withdrawal from the business. Collison, alone and watchful on the other side of the pile of blankets, turned his head as Hardacre reached him, but not his eyes. The two soldiers conferred briefly, then both confronted the eight watching men. Lazarus, his green branch now only mechanically swishing, watched both soldiers and prisoners. He was hardly in earshot, but the great alertness of his eyes suggested to Henry that he was preparing to use them for what his ears might miss.