The Great Plains

by Nicole Alexander

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘We have ourselves a bit of an enterprise going. You being a smart lad, well you’d know a man can’t live on bread alone.’ Evan leant forward. ‘I ain’t spelling it out for you, kid, but if you happen to see or hear anything that’s a bit different, don’t you take no heed of it. Old Evan will have things under control. In return I’ll look after you. Who knows, there may well be a bit of extra coin in it for that piece of dirt you’re dreaming about. Agreed?’

  ‘I ain’t doing nothing illegal.’

  ‘A bit of honest dishonesty never hurt no-one.’

  Will frowned. ‘Look, I’m no crook.’

  Evan gave a cackle. ‘You’ll be fine, boy, I won’t lead you astray. There’s women that’ll do that to a man quick smart.’

  They walked back into the light rimming the campfire. The men stopped talking as Evan took up his place in the circle. He gestured to Will and as he sat the men each gave a welcoming nod. They were a motley assortment of big and little, old and not-so-old, cranky and quiet.

  ‘Have a swig, kid.’ The hairy-nosed stockman, Sprout, threw him the bottle. ‘Don’t look so surprised.’

  Will pulled the cork and wiped the mouth of it with a shirtsleeve, aware that six pairs of eyes were focused on his movements. The yellow flames of the fire highlighted creased skin and matted beards as he took a good gulp. The liquid burnt all the way down. The fire spat and crackled. Will passed the bottle to Evan and the old man took a swig before the rum travelled the circle. The two black men, Chalk and his son, Jim, refused the bottle, electing to drink their tea and smoke instead. They stuck to themselves, those two, and Will knew little about them, except what he’d seen. They were masterful horsemen. Tasked with choosing their campsite each night, there was always water and good feed for the horses and a windbreak of trees to protect them from the southerly that could blow up across the plains.

  ‘No frost tonight, lads,’ Evan told them. Overhead the stars were blurred by fuzzy dark clouds. ‘It’ll be a good day for travelling tomorrow. The ewes will be flighty and ready to move, which means we’ll be right on time.’

  Nicholson lifted a tin plate from the edge of the fire with a piece of rag. The food was passed around to Will.

  ‘On time for what?’ Will placed the hot dish on the ground. There were three good-sized chops as well as roasted potatoes speckled with the remains of the wet newspaper they’d been cooked in and a chunk of damper. A mug of hot, sweet tea was placed in the dirt by his feet.

  Sprout looked meaningfully at Evan.

  ‘To get the sheep to their paddock, of course,’ the older man replied.

  There was something in Evan’s tone that didn’t ring true, but Will didn’t question it. He needed the job and his parents were relying on him to bring home his earnings. Picking up one of the chops by the bone, he bit into the flesh. The fat glazed his lips as he tore at the meat. It was good and hot and hardly burnt, even the tea was fresh, not half-stewed and weak.

  ‘How’re the legs, son?’ Nicholson was pouring tea from the billy into a pannikin.

  ‘Pretty good now.’ He picked at the strips of baked-on paper with dirt-ringed fingernails and bit into a potato.

  ‘Nothing like a feed and a bit of grog to cure what ails us,’ Bob replied.

  ‘Amen,’ Evan belched.

  It was colder than cold when Will woke. He rubbed at numb skin, the air biting at the insides of his nostrils. About to turn sideways in his swag, he sat up as the sound of horses and men carried through the trees. Timber and leaf-litter crunched and snapped. The fire was low. A figure appeared opposite. He dumped branches on the dwindling embers and added some dry brush before squatting to blow on the gathering flames. It was Jim.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Will’s throat was parched and croaky.

  ‘We’ll be waiting here for a couple of hours while they finish the job.’ The young Aboriginal poked at the fire with a skinny branch uncovering hot coals. Their provisions sat in small canvas sacks on the ground. From them he took a couple of handfuls of flour, added a pinch of salt and mixed the dry ingredients on a tin plate with water. Once the small loaf was formed he sat the damper in the coals.

  It was still pitch dark, usually the men drank hot tea before starting and devoured a wedge of damper to ward off an aching belly until they stopped for a couple of hours when the sun was high. But the men were gone. Will yawned and reached for his waterbag. Jim wiped his hands on his trousers and then proceeded to clean his fingernails with his teeth.

  ‘How come they don’t need us?’

  The young Aboriginal sat the billy in the depths of the embers and leaned back on his haunches, looking at Will looking at him. ‘Cause they don’t.’

  Will felt the boy sizing him up. Eventually Jim turned his attention to the water. When it began to boil, he added a handful of tea-leaves from a pouch by his side. The water boiled for a minute or two and the boy put the billy to one side.

  ‘Didn’t you ask?’

  Jim poured tea and then sat the billy midway between the two of them. ‘Why would I ask? I do what I’m told and get paid for it.’

  ‘Don’t you want to know what’s happening?’ His hair felt stiff with the cold. Will patted the arms of the heavy coat he wore, coaxing warmth through his body, and scrambled in the dirt for his pannikin. It smelt of greasy mutton but he scraped the dirt out of it with his finger and, pouring it full of tea, took a grateful sip.

  ‘I listen and learn.’ Jim peered over the rim of the battered mug. ‘You should do the same.’

  Will figured the boy was probably right. ‘Have you been working here long?’

  Jim slurped his tea and topped it up from the billy. ‘Long enough. You don’t know much, do you?’

  ‘I know enough.’

  ‘Sure you do. You white boys always know more than everybody else, but when you try to make sense of the words they’re like empty air. You know, white boy, that the time will come when the white men will stop fighting my people and fight each other instead. I wonder how you will fare then?’

  Just his luck, Will thought, to be left with a blackfella with an axe to grind. ‘So that’s why you and your father don’t speak to us, eh? I guess you lot think we’re all the same.’ False dawn showed itself in a lightening of the sky. ‘My father never fought any darkies. The only people he fought were in the war.’

  Jim cradled the mug of tea. In the half-light his skin was very dark. In reality it was a shade lighter than his father’s and his features were softer. Will guessed his mother was a half-caste but dared not ask.

  Jim speared the damper with a stick and turned it over in the coals. ‘Is it just you and your father then?’

  ‘And my mother.’

  Jim looked at him with interest as if he were seeing Will for the first time. ‘Do you know a woman called Abelena?’

  ‘Abelena? No, why?’

  Will took another sip of the tea. He was beginning to think that Jim had a few kangaroos loose in the top paddock. ‘Evan told me he’s in charge, not the overseer, Mr Kirkland. Is that right?’

  ‘The old man says one thing but Mr Kirkland knows what’s going on,’ Jim told him. ‘Anyway, pretty soon things are going to change. The owner is coming out from America.’

  Will recalled gossipy Mrs Doolan in the store. ‘I heard he’s bringing a cousin.’

  ‘He’s going to sail straight across the sea and then ride out here to our country to see what his family stole all those years ago.’

  ‘Stole? As far as I know, Condamine Station was bought from an English squatter.’

  Jim threw the dregs of his tea on the flames. The liquid sizzled. ‘It’s not theirs to buy and sell.’

  Will reckoned it was a bit late for that. Tendrils of daylight reached through the trees to the east. Birds began to twitter.

  ‘They say Mr Kirkland was a lawman in America. They say he hung people up by a rope until they were dead.’

  ‘Who told you that?�
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  ‘They say he’s been with these people who own this place for a very long time.’ The older boy rolled a smoke and lit it. ‘There was another man who was a manager, a man called Hocking. This Hocking came all the way from America too and he told Mr Crawley the story many years ago.’

  ‘What’s the story?’ Will asked.

  ‘That the blackfella ain’t alone, that there are others who have been driven from their home, people like us who were hunted and killed for their land, the land of their people. I heard that there are red people in America, dark people too, and that the whites chained them up and bought and sold them as slaves.’ Jim rolled his lips. ‘That’s what I heard.’ He stabbed at the damper, turned it in the coals.

  Will didn’t know much about America except that Wes Kirkland came from there and he spoke funny. ‘What happened to Hocking?’

  Jim rolled the damper from the hot coals and tapped it to see if it was cooked. He brushed the dirt and soot from the outside and, breaking it in two, threw half to Will. He sat it on his swag to cool.

  ‘If people do wrong, eventually bad things happen to them or their kin. That’s what Hocking told Mr Crawley. He knows the story. The Wades made their money out of newspaper stories and black slaves who picked cotton until they couldn’t pick it no more and they sold bad silver shares to Hocking’s father and he went bust and died.’

  ‘Did awful things happen to the Wades?’

  ‘One bad thing happened that led to many bad things,’ Jim explained, ‘but Hocking never told anyone what it was. He said it was Wade family business, a sad business. My father says that the American who is on his way here is running away to start a new life but a person can never escape their troubles, for Mother Earth has a long memory.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Sometimes my father sees a shadow when he thinks of those people.’

  ‘What do you mean, a shadow?’ Will scoffed.

  ‘Are you laughing at our ways? At the ways of the old people?’

  ‘N-no. What do you think the shadow is?’ Will persevered.

  The black boy threw the half-eaten bread into the fire. It shrivelled and blackened. ‘I only know that when the Emu in the Sky dips below the horizon, that’s when the trouble will come.’

  Part Nine

  Do not stand at my grave and weep,

  I am not there; I do not sleep.

  I am a thousand winds that blow,

  I am the diamond glints on snow.

  From ‘Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep’ (1932) by Mary Elizabeth Frye

  Chapter 39

  August, 1935 – between Melbourne and Sydney

  Abelena gripped the side of the bunk as the train shuddered and slowed. It felt as if the locomotive had hit something and she struggled upright, twisting in the narrow bunk so that she faced the window. Outside, dawn was breaking across an unknown land. There were trees and shrubby bushes, strange animals known as kangaroos and an expanse of country that was beyond imagination. It spread out from the railway tracks, hard and flat, and extended to a hill-strewn horizon where the sun rose, highlighting the frost that layered the ground. Abelena pressed a palm to the freezing glass pane as the train rolled forward. As they gathered speed, a cow limped into the scrub. The mother left behind a calf who staggered and fell by the railroad tracks.

  This land was all upside down and inside out. Here, Fall was spring, day was night and unknown stars weaved overhead in a darkness so thick it unnerved her. Her cousin Tobias had shown her their destination on a map and even now Abelena imagined that they had come to a country that sat at the bottom of the world, which, at any moment, might slip and fall from its place. Climbing down from the bunk, she tugged the curtains wider until light filled the narrow first-class sleeper with its polished timber panelling, folding table and leather chair. Through the window the land rushed past in a blur of browns and washed-out green. They were travelling from the city of Melbourne to another great city, Sydney. Tobias was to spend a number of weeks meeting with investors and bankers and wool buyers there before they set off on the last leg of their journey to the Wade land, at the bottom of the world.

  Since Jerome’s capture in Broken Arrow, Abelena’s world had shrunk to what could be seen through a pane of glass. A week ago her view of the world had been through a round window, a porthole on a boat that had carried her across the sea. In the weeks before that she’d been locked in her mother’s old upstairs bedroom in the Wade house in Oklahoma City. It was from one of the windows in this room that her older cousin Tobias pointed to the great river, where a stable boy had been lynched thanks to Serena’s wilful ways. She didn’t believe him of course, but he made a fine story of it and was quick to point out Serena’s part. From another window Abelena studied the white-haired Edmund Wade. Leaning stiffly on a cane, he visited her great-grandmother, who lay buried in the garden below. She too had stayed in the same room a prisoner to the disease that eventually claimed her.

  There had been arguments between father and son during her stay in Oklahoma City. Their raised voices became the background noise to her grieving as Abelena lay sobbing on the floor or crouched in a corner. Edmund and Tobias bellowed and pleaded with each other, cajoled and reasoned while she pressed her forehead against the window and wondered what would become of her. At night she fell asleep to dream of baby Tess and the red-haired twins, who were now in a state home. Sleep came intermittently and in the twilight hours Abelena would gaze at the stars while recalling what her great-grandmother Philomena had passed on to her mother: the only promise the white man ever kept was the promise to take away the lands of the Indian. This promise they kept.

  Sheriff Cadell never did keep his promise to let her visit Jerome, and Tobias also refused any contact with him. Her brother was in gaol awaiting execution for his crimes and Tobias Wade acted as if he’d saved her. But she was warm in the Oklahoma City house. There was water and sweet-smelling soap and clean, fancy clothes and so much food that she took to storing some of her meals in a drawer in case her circumstances changed. For the first time in her life Abelena knew what it meant not to struggle, not to starve, not to want for the most basic of things, but she was also truly alone. A great void settled within and around her. Where she could once recall the beloved faces of her extended family, gradually even their memory was lost, swallowed by despair.

  Abelena couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment that she began thinking about Uncle George, but the old man came to her in daydreams. She would sit for long hours, studying the frill of trees bordering the river, remembering the scents of the land taken from her. At these times snatches of her uncle’s voice would enter her head and she would recall the foods that the land gifted, foods not given or taken by another’s leave. Indian potato and prairie turnip, corn bread and mesquite ground meal. There was an abundance of food delivered to her room, yet Abelena craved the simple tastes that the land yielded.

  She was beginning to understand how fortunate they’d been to have Uncle George with them, following Serena’s passing. His teachings kept them alive and gave Jerome the strength to kill the men who threatened them. She hoped this resilience would accompany him when the white law of Oklahoma ended his days. Grief had weakened her but now, in this strange country, the need to survive became potent. Abelena refused to become a victim of either her heritage or her sex and so, very reluctantly, she gathered the threads of her uncle’s beliefs and traditions. She too wanted to understand the medicine of the Apaches, their history, the way of the warrior. Jerome could fight and kill, run like the wind and exist for days on little food and water. These were vital elements that she too would need in order to survive and the more she thought about Uncle George, the more she remembered his teachings.

  Abelena trained her mind to stillness and imagined running through The Great Plains as Jerome had done. She envisaged fighting like a man, stabbing and killing those who had wished her and her family wrong. The more she concentrated, the more the old ways re
turned. It was as if the Indian part of her had been waiting to be found. Gradually the tears that threatened to dry out her body came less frequently and the anger, which had curled itself around her innards in the railway station at Broken Arrow, began to simmer, making her strong.

  The morning Tobias came to her room in the great Oklahoma City house, the day before their long journey began, she’d been kneeling by the window. The brief thought of ending her life, of breaking the glass with a chair and jumping to the ground below tempted her. She thought of joining Tess and Uncle George, of the three of them waiting with smiles and overflowing hearts when Jerome arrived. But Uncle George didn’t believe in a hereafter and Abelena didn’t have any religion, nor did she believe it possible that they would ever be together again.

  She sat, mutely listening to Tobias talk of Australia, of how he wanted to help her start a new life, of how her Apache heritage meant nothing to him as long as she was happy. That surely after so much hardship and tragedy, the family – what was left of his and hers – deserved another chance, a reconciliation of sorts. Tobias’s offer of reunion was framed in terms of forgiveness. It was as if her female line were to blame for what had befallen the Wades and yet he was willing to overlook the past to help her. Abelena couldn’t help but think of her uncle. Had he been present, George would chuckle and say here was another peace treaty neither side could keep.

  ‘My father and I are in disagreement over your future, which you’re probably aware of,’ Tobias informed her one afternoon. ‘We can’t reach an accord over what’s to become of you.’

  ‘And what about what I want?’ Abelena clenched her fists.

  Tobias blinked. ‘I’m surprised, considering that he gave your great-grandmother a home in her final days.’

  ‘And where was his kindness when my mother came calling for help?’

  ‘Where was Serena’s gratefulness for what had already been given?’ Tobias countered.