Potato Factory

by Bryce Courtenay

  Ikey had at first been given a pick-axe, a tool with which he was entirely unfamiliar. Besides, his confinement in chains on board ship had enfeebled him and his hands were as tender as an infant’s. Despite being instructed by the more experienced lags to piss upon each hand to harden the surfaces of his palms, on Ikey’s first day of labour his hands soon blistered. On the second day, the skin peeled away from the entire palm and even from between his fingers, and his fingernails were ripped off as a consequence of being made to labour with such a rough and heavy tool. But he was forced to labour for two more days until the handle of the pick was stained with his own blood, and particles of flesh remained upon it whenever he withdrew his hands. The pick itself was too large for even a robust man of his height, and Ikey was reduced to whimpering with each downward strike. Finally, an hour before sundown on the fourth day, he collapsed.

  Several kicks of a more than tentative nature, administered by the overseer, Harris, failed to get Ikey to his feet. It was only when he was observed to cough blood that he was placed in a wheelbarrow after the day’s work and several convicts, cursing him loudly, were made to take turns wheeling him back to Richmond Gaol.

  That night the doctor was called to examine him. He thumped Ikey on the chest, and peeled back his eyes to peer at the jellied orb, whereupon he made him drop his breeches and, weighing his balls in his hand, commanded him to cough. Finally he squeezed Ikey’s thigh and calf muscles. Standing up again he declared him fit to work.

  ‘It be nothing but the softness of the voyage. This one will soon enough harden to labour. Put him back to work I say!’ He seemed annoyed at being called out after supper for a matter so inconsequential and the superintendent felt compelled to apologise to him, explaining that Ikey was a prisoner of some renown or he would not have disturbed the good doctor.

  Ikey groaned and held the lumps of raw flesh up for the surgeon to see. ‘What about me hands?’ he pleaded.

  ‘Piss and spit soon fix them, my boy!’ the doctor said, then turned to the superintendent. ‘Tell the overseer to put this prisoner on carts - his legs be well muscled and strong enough by all accounts.’

  Though the work on the carts was harder, each team being required to pull ten loads each of a mile every day, it suited Ikey better. Years of walking about the London rookeries at night had made his legs strong, and the strength of a prisoner’s legs played the major function in pulling the brutal cart.

  To add to the humiliation of the work, Harris thought it high jinks to place beside Ikey at the crossbar a black boy named Billygonequeer, who was captured as a lookout while other members of his Stoney Creek tribe were said to be raiding sheep. Billygonequeer had been in captivity three years when Ikey joined the road gang, and his major claim to fame was that he had received the most stripes to his back of any in their company. He would work as hard as any man at pulling the cart and no prisoner could fault him for not doing his share. But every few weeks, as though he sniffed something in the air, he grew most melancholy, would take no food, and refused to work by standing rigid in a single place. This was known to all in the road gang as ‘Billy gone queer’ and so the black boy had received this strange appendage to his name.

  At night it was not customary to lock Billygonequeer in the cells. For if he should be placed in close confinement he would commence to shout all night so that no prisoner could sleep a wink. And so, summer and winter, with only a blanket to cover him for the coldest part of the year, he would be chained to a ring set into an outer wall which formed part of the courtyard of the gaol. Here he would sleep like an animal on the hard cobblestones.

  But when Billygonequeer went queer, he would stand all night and look upwards at the stars and howl exactly like the Tasmanian tiger, the thylacine, a creature doglike in appearance and extremely shy of humans. This beast, only seldom glimpsed in the outer camps and always in the depths of the forest where it would come to stand just beyond the edge of the firelight at night, was familiar to timber workers and road gangs for its dreadful howl. It was a hollow sound that came from inside, as though vibrating from deep within the chest, and was most disconcerting to the ear. Billygonequeer did not so much appear to make the sound as to be the sound. His eyes seemed to turn yellow and catch the light in the darkness, and his jaws unlocked and widened as the terrible creature cacophony came from him. They had tried to gag him once but this proved to no avail - the sound continued as though it emanated from his chest and sought no expulsion from his lips.

  When morning came Billy still would not move and it was impossible to imagine that a man could stand so rigid and so long in one spot. If he should be knocked down by the overseer, as often happened, he would not cry out, but would get back to his feet and stand as before, impervious to pain.

  Harris, despite having seen Billygonequeer go queer on numerous occasions, could not bring himself to accept his condition. He was a stickler for the rules and greatly afraid of the wrath of the authorities, and on each occasion he would cause Billy to be dragged before the district magistrate. Here Billy would stand before the beak, his dark eyes glazed over as though he were in some distant place of his imagining. Nor would he respond to questions, though his comprehension of English was said to be quite sufficient to this task. Finally, the magistrate, partly angered and bemused and in all parts impatient, would declare himself compelled to obey the law. He would hand down the most severe punishment for refusing to work, a sentence of one hundred lashes with the cat o’ nine tails.

  A month after Ikey had been put to the cart beside Billy, following the eating of their midday rations, Billy had suddenly turned his head in the direction of a breeze which had that very moment blown up and commenced to sigh high in the giant gum trees. He jumped to his feet and seemed to breathe deeply, pulling the air into his nostrils so that his broad nose flattened upon his face. In great agitation he began to tear his clothes from his slim body, as though some vicious biting insect were to be found within them. As each garment was removed he flung it into the bushes. Then he gave a great sigh and, naked as the day of his birth, stood rigid with his arms to his sides, the pale palms of his hands turned outward. His only movement was the distension and retraction of his nostrils as he pulled the wind into him, as though it were some invisible musk sent from heaven.

  ‘Jaysus Christ! Billy’s gone queer,’ Seamus Calligan shouted. ‘Sniffin’ in the wind and that. I’ll be damned if he’ll not soon be standin’ still as a bloody fence pole!’

  Michael Mooney, Calligan’s partner on the front cross-bar, cautioned Ikey not to catch the attention of Harris the overseer. ‘Let him be a while, poor bugger will suffer enough soon as bloody Harris comes.’

  ‘We’ll not pull the cart with only the three of us,’ Ikey ventured.

  ‘We’ll have to. Billygonequeer will not be comin’ back these three weeks or more,’ Mooney replied.

  They left Billy standing and walked back to the cart. They were loading rock for gravel that day and the cart was almost too heavy for four men to pull. Now with only the three of them they were forced to lessen the load. Harris, seeing them pass with the load not extended beyond the rim of the cart, was soon alerted. Then he saw Ikey was alone at his cross-bar.

  ‘Where’s the nigger?’ he shouted, using an expression he had picked up on an American whaling ship.

  The three men brought the cart to a standstill. ‘Billy’s gone queer,’ a reluctant Seamus replied.

  Harris grinned. ‘Oh ‘e ‘as now ‘as ‘e, that be most considerate o’ the black bastard!’ He turned and called another convict over to harness up beside Ikey. Then, rubbing his hands gleefully, he set off for the camp where the prisoners had taken their midday rations.

  When the team returned for the evening muster they found Billy in the same spot as they’d left him. He was rigid as a well-rooted sapling, but with one eye half closed, and the blood from his nose caked upon his smooth ebony chest. His shoulders, too, were crimson caked, and it appeared as though the ba
ck of his head had been smashed with some sharp object. A great cloud of flies had settled about his shoulders and eyes, and swarmed about his wild black head. Billygonequeer did not appear to notice the presence of either the flies or the men standing around him.

  The men did not ask how his injuries occurred. Those who had worked on the road gang for some time knew Harris to be a coward and a bully, and when Billy went queer it was always an occasion for sadistic gratification on Harris’s part.

  Billy, still rigid, was wheeled back to Richmond, his thin legs, like two black poles, sticking out beyond the front lip of the wheel-barrow. No prisoner complained of the extra effort, even though each was himself exhausted from the day’s toil. Ikey knew this was most peculiar. Compassion for another was not a part of the convict nature. To feel for another was to put oneself in danger. A singular and ruthless attention to one’s own survival was paramount in all matters concerning the convict’s life. Ikey understood these rules better than anyone, for he had always lived in accordance with them. Yet no one complained at the need for Billygonequeer’s wheeled transportation back to Richmond Gaol.

  Billy spent the night in the courtyard standing without the slightest movement, though once every few minutes he emitted the long, lonely howl of the forest dog creature.

  Ikey found it impossible to sleep that night. He cursed himself quietly for his insomnia, and wondered how he could possibly feel disquiet and sorrow for the plight of a black savage. Ikey remembered only once before experiencing such a stirring of compassion, when he had impulsively given Abraham Reuban money and his Waterloo medal to give to Mary. Now he felt it again for his black partner, and felt ashamed that he should do so. Morning found him hollow-eyed and still despairing of Billy’s plight. He tried all day to convince himself that such was not the case, but the feeling of deep, instinctive sorrow would not go away.

  Ikey sensed that Billy was mourning, though how this could have been brought about by a sudden shift of the wind on a day which seemed to Ikey like any other, was a mystery. But he was a Jew and he knew instinctively about loneliness and terror, and the evil golem that comes at times to molest and disturb the soul. The mischievous ghost of the past who comes to make a Jew feel guilty when, seemingly, with a shift of the winds of terror, those who would destroy him arrive, even when he has done nothing to deserve this fate. There is this eternal conundrum for every Jew who is not guilty but nevertheless feels guilty. Guilty of what? Guilty how? But guilty nonetheless.

  For centuries the elders and the rabbis have questioned how it is that the victim should think himself to be guilty. How can a man feel guilty when it is his own blood, and the blood of his wife and children which has been spilled? Only the Jew knows how this can be done. But even a Jew does not know why he must be made to bear the shame of his own persecution.

  Ikey could see in Billygonequeer the same mysterious forces, the same looming tragedy, the fear that a sudden change in the wind might bring with it a great destruction of his people. But he knew also that Billy’s people had nowhere to go, no opportunity for a diaspora. No borders to steal across at night, no river to wade with forlorn bundles on their heads or mountain to scale with safety promised on the leeward side, no corrupt officials to bribe to gain a temporary haven. Billy’s people had been placed at the ends of the earth. Now, with the coming of the white man, they would be pushed over its edge to oblivion, where only the ghosts of the eleven lost tribes of Israel dwell in the howling, mournful, swirling mists of eternity.

  When Billy had gone queer and thrown off his clothes, Ikey had seen his back. The lines of scar tissue joined in a contorted lunar landscape of ridges and troughs, so that no single piece of clear black skin remained. Billy had been beaten so often that his back looked like a shiny, carelessly plaited garment of hide pitted with a dozen small craters of yellow pus.

  They left Billygonequeer behind that day at Richmond Gaol in order that he might be taken before the district magistrate. A police magistrate alone could order only three dozen lashes and this, Harris felt, was insufficient to curb the black man’s constant rebellion. When the men returned that night they found Billy in the courtyard still standing rigid, his yellow palms turned outward, chained to the ring set into the prison wall. Harris informed them jauntily that they would not muster as usual at dawn, but would be allowed to rest until nine of the clock, and thereafter would be required to march to the nearby courthouse where the triangle stood and where they would witness Billygonequeer’s sentence of flogging - one hundred strokes of the cat. The men cheered, for a late rising was like a holiday.

  ‘Be there a man among you who will volunteer to be the flagellator?’ Harris asked.

  ‘Where be Rufus Manning?’ someone called.

  ‘Gorn to Hobart to do a floggin’. There be twelve men called to the triangle there and only two to flog the livin’ daylights out o’ them,’ Harris explained, then added, ‘It’s double rations for him what volunteers to flagellate the nigger!’

  There was a murmur among the prisoners though none stepped forward. Harris watched them, his eyes seeming to fix on each man before travelling on. Billygonequeer stood rigidly behind him in chains. The overseer saw the reluctance in each pair of eyes. ‘Double rations and the ‘arf day orf!’ he now added.

  The men shuffled and murmured among themselves. It was a prize each of them was much tempted to possess, and had it been any other man who was to be flogged, few would have hesitated. No man among them could remember when last he had felt his stomach contented. But they all felt differently about Billygonequeer, differently and afraid. Two flagellators who had whipped him in the past had died shortly afterwards, and were rumoured to have howled as they died, making the same dog-like noise as Billygonequeer. Afterwards the surgeon could find no cause of death, though there had been a look of great terror on their faces and both had torn at their guts until they drew deep furrows of blood. They did not for a moment believe that Manning had gone to Hobart. He had taken cover. Life on a road gang was not much to contemplate, but to die howling like a dog with some great terror ripping the life out of you from within, and all for the sake of half a day’s rest and a good tightener, was a more fearful prospect.

  ‘You do it, Mr ‘Arris!’ one of the prisoners shouted. ‘G’warn, you flog ‘im, you flog Billygonequeer!’

  Harris grew suddenly pale, and while he tried to laugh off the suggestion, the corners of his mouth seemed for a moment out of control. ‘It’s not me job,’ he finally muttered.

  ‘It’s not ours neither!’ several of the men volunteered and there was a knowing snigger among the prisoners.

  Suddenly Billy’s arm rose stiff as a ramrod and pointed directly at Ikey, and from his throat came the howl. Harris turned to see the wild-eyed black pointing at Ikey’s breast. Billy howled once more, then let his arm fall slowly to his side.

  Ikey looked fearfully about him and then at the overseer and vigorously shook his head. ‘Who, me? No, no, not me!’ he said, taking a backwards step and bumping into the man behind him. ‘Mercy be! I hates violence of any sort. Please, I begs you Mr Harris!’ Ikey’s eyes had grown wide with fear. ‘No, no!’ he repeated shaking his hand in front of his face. ‘I cannot do it, I simply cannot, I should faint at the very prospect, I cannot abide the sight o’ blood.’ Ikey let out a sudden wail and fell to his knees at the overseer’s feet. ‘I begs you, no!’ he sobbed.

  The assembled prisoners were convulsed with laughter. Blood was such a common substance in their lives, they thought it hilarious that Ikey should declare his abhorrence to it. Before he had completed his prison sentence they knew he would see rivers of blood, until this substance would seem no more strange to him than the spittle on a man’s tongue, or the beads of sweat gathered on his brow.

  ‘Well now, you’ll do nicely, it will be an excellent ‘nitiation for ya, Ikey Solomon.’ Harris smiled. ‘Yer most fortunate, you are. You’ll come to blood the easy way, not from the fresh opening of yer own Jew back, but upo
n the back o’ the nigger!’

  The gang mustered and was issued with their morning skilly and then marched by the three troopers who constantly guarded them to the nearby courthouse where the triangle stood.

  The triangle, the dreaded flagellation post, was built of strong scantlings, that is to say posts or purlins of about five inches in width. They were placed so as to form a space about ten feet square at the bottom, and secured by pins into the ground in a slanted manner so that they rose to meet at a point in the centre. Horizontal bars were fastened to these posts, each about two feet apart, and it was to these that the person to be flogged was secured. He faced inwards, his back outwards, with his ankles, knees and outstretched arms tightly bound to the bars. The victim of the triangle was stripped, either to the waist or, more often, naked, this so that the blood would not damage his clothes, which were government property. Eight or ten men could be fastened to a single triangle, and several flagellators employed to beat them. These were usually ticket of leave men, expressly appointed to the position, and many took great pride in their work. Prisoners could also be selected if they were sufficiently robust to lend some weight to the task.

  Ikey did not fit the bill in the least. Puny, with narrow sloping shoulders and delicate arms, in his hands the cat o’ nine appeared to be a most incongruous instrument. Ikey carried the whip of many tails awkwardly, as though it were repulsive to him, and the knotted ends of the cutting cord drooped to the ground at his feet. Ikey’s limbs appeared to tremble of their own accord, and his knees shook violently. There was no doubt in the mind of those brought in to bear witness that Billygonequeer was in for a soft time, a mere tickle of the flesh, and this prospect immensely cheered those who watched.

  ‘You will put yer back into it, ya hear, Solomon? Step up and lay the cat square an’ ‘ard or, I swear, you’ll receive the same yerself!’ Harris shouted. He reached out, grabbed the knotted whip from Ikey’s reluctant fingers, and demonstrated how it should be used. The cords whistled through the air and landed with a single hard smack across the smooth wood of one of the triangle’s posts. Ikey’s eyes screwed up in horror, and he trembled more than ever.