A Kindness Cup

by Thea Astley

  ‘This matter, gentlemen, is one that must hit deeply at the consciences of all of us.’ There were appreciating grunts. ‘A little girl—a baby, rather—removed from her mother’s care’—he allowed a moist eye to rest for a moment on Benjy Wilson’s face—‘abandoned a week later in a state of filth and sick from lack of food. We are not interested in the whys of doing it. We are interested only in the fact that it was done. Fortunately she is all right now but that is not the main point, Mr Chairman. Not the main point at all. Are we to stand by while those things we cherish’ (he thought briefly of son Fred and dismissed the thought) ‘are taken from us? And there is the matter of cattle, too. Part of our livelihood. The food for our children’s mouths.’

  ‘Don’t overdo it,’ said Snoggers, who hadn’t learnt his lesson.

  Swinging on him, Buckmaster cried, ‘By God you have a strange way of looking at things! We’re here to determine fundamental attitudes.’

  Stubbornly Snoggers said, ‘I believe the blacks. They found Benjy Wilson’s little girl about five miles from her home. They had no idea who it was. They did their best, damn it, to help and only left her out near Jenner’s place when they found she wouldn’t eat. Poor bastards,’ he said. ‘Give them credit. They tried.’

  Buckmaster was a bulging purple.

  ‘We only have their word for that.’

  ‘And the Jenners’.’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Mr Sweetman interrupted, ‘it is the casualness of the whole affair. The irresponsibility. Are we to risk the continuance of this sort of thing? By our very softness allow it to get out of hand? This is’—he paused—‘the thin edge of a very long wedge.’

  Snoggers’s fat face swelled also. ‘They were being kind in their own way to that child,’ he repeated. ‘Kind. Are you going to take them to task for that?’

  ‘There’s the matter of six cows, some poultry and a horse,’ Buckmaster shouted. ‘My God! The horse alone demands reprisal!’

  Snoggers said, ‘Count me out.’

  Buckmaster was still towering. This headless trunk of stone, the well-read Snoggers parodied to himself, stands in the desert. Jaysus!

  ‘I move,’ Buckmaster continued, ignoring Snoggers as some kind of poltroon, ‘that we do not wait for a warrant from the south. It will take too long. I move that by next Monday at the latest we have prepared a punitive force, without sanction if you like—I repeat, without sanction —that will go straight to the scene of the trouble, sort out these blacks once and for all, taking whatever measures it thinks fit. Who’s with me?’

  Snoggers was almost trampled to death in the rush.

  That’s Lunt, dog-lonely after some brief supper of potatoes and beef boiled to rupture point over his vindictive stove. He’s a front-step sitter and a reader of old papers that come by chance wrapped round his stores. He would be lonely but for his dog, the rusty strainings of his mills, and the hungry stirrings of his stringy cattle in the home paddock which translate him into a state of acquiescence. His lust for charity is eased by the gentle attentions he gives his animals, feeling guilt over his own supper when they low in hunger. He hand feeds them when he can afford it, waiting for the mills to tap their sources as he had waited for his girl. But that was another place, another time, and yet he seems to bring ill-luck with him, for nothing thrives. All country has its black spots and he appears doomed to settle innocently on them.

  But he reads aloud to his dog and the great black shapes of the mill-monsters against the early evening. Vegetable prices in Brisbane are up. The recent drought has been responsible for over-priced greens in the Moreton Bay area. A terrible crime at Gatton. Women teachers seek equal salary rights. Man suicides from northern fishing-vessel, Gladstone, Thursday, a man whose identity is still unknown.

  Like me, Lunt said, looking up from the month-old paper. He announced this to the dog and the nearest mill which waved mechanically back in acknowledgment. My identity is still unknown.

  He threw a stick for the dog who looked at it for a minute, wagged his gratitude, and remained by Lunt’s feet watching it in case it moved again. Lunt clicked his fingers for him and lit his pipe, and that was how the sporting town councillors found him, grave with twilight amid the loneliness of sail-creak and grass-stir. The sky was one huge bruise of wider and darker air. Sitting there still, one arm dangling, Lunt watched them through the home gate, their horses high-stepping through tussock. Then Mr Sweetman, who was leading, trotted smartly through the clearing and came up to sling his reins loosely over a veranda post. Buckmaster trotted after him and, totally at ease, the two of them made themselves at home on the veranda steps while Lunt expressed surprise or pleasure. The doubt was in him.

  ‘It’s a bit of a step up here, Charlie,’ Sweetman said. ‘You’re pretty cut off.’

  ‘That’s how I like it,’ Lunt said simply, straining at them with his tired eyes through thickening twilight.

  His visitors’ eyes were polished and active, saw night-fires a mile away by one of the water-holes, absorbed this and chewed at it while Lunt poked round his kitchen doing things with kettle and cups. These were firm on their saucers when he brought them out. His innocence was impregnable. He apologised once for not being much of a social cove and sat opposite them with his pipe going.

  ‘You’ve got some company, I see,’ Sweetman observed, his eyes still on the patch of fire. ‘Down on the outer run.’

  ‘Just a few blacks down at one of the water-holes. Poor devils. You take sugar?’

  Sweetman took sugar but his mind persisted sourly.

  ‘You had them here before?’

  ‘Sometimes. Off and on. They don’t give any trouble. Beg a bit of tucker now and then. I don’t mind. Someone to share with.’

  Mr Sweetman shared Mr Buckmaster’s eyes for a minute. Words were clogging their mouths and had to be spat out.

  Finally Buckmaster said, ‘It’s like this, Charlie. You can’t be blamed. You don’t know what’s going on the way you’re stuck out here, only coming into town for the odd day once a month, but these bastards have been behaving like animals. Beyond the law. Just like bloody animals.’

  Lunt decided not to enter a debate of such minimal invective. His eyes widened.

  ‘Racing off with that kid, Benjy Wilson’s little girl. Cropping off Ted Spiller’s cattle. It’s got to stop.’

  Sweetman kept making assenting sounds and movements that welded him, in a twinning of ideals, Lunt thought, to the other man. Lunt had slow eyes. A slow face. He looked up carefully over his tea.

  ‘What actually happened to the child?’ he asked slowly.

  Buckmaster began an incoherent raving.

  ‘Let’s get this straight,’ Lunt suggested when the maniac paused. ‘The way I heard it in town, she was lost and they found her. Was she harmed in any way?’

  This was not at all the way the conversation should be going. Buckmaster wanted unhinged loyalties.

  ‘Half-starved, that’s all!’ he roared. ‘Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘No,’ Lunt decided after a long pause. ‘It’s not enough. She wouldn’t have eaten their sort of food. Perhaps that’s why they were forced to steal.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus!’ Buckmaster cried. ‘You’d excuse Judas.’

  ‘I might,’ Lunt agreed. ‘I might. Can I top up your cup?’

  About them sudden dark. All the threatening black of the tenth station, a medieval obscurity for the town fathers who squatted like powers and principalities. Time for a Miltonic sweep of wings. Lunt watched them both with a half-smile they failed to decode and was conscious above their looming shoulders of restless light against the far sky.

  ‘Polluted man,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t follow you,’ Sweetman said, ‘but I do know this. We want your help. You know these people. We’re forming a party to round them up and move them out. If you’d join …’ His voice held an especial note of pleading. ‘But we don’t expect that. In respect to your niceties, that is. But you can help, you see, by saying
nothing. Not preparing them.’

  ‘I won’t do it,’ Lunt stated flatly. ‘These aren’t the ones. You’ve got the wrong bunch altogether.’

  He was definite with his pipe. Refilled the kettle and stood it back on the stove, feeling the security of the banal matters of living crumble. Even the kettle rocked.

  ‘We have proof,’ Buckmaster said through spittle.

  ‘What proof?’

  ‘Proof enough. I don’t have to go into it, by God! They were seen.’

  ‘I see them also,’ the stubborn Lunt said. ‘I see them every now and then. If they’d had a child with them, a white child, in the last month, I’d have known.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘By God, I don’t have to go into it either! I simply know.’

  ‘Then you refuse?’

  ‘Of course I refuse.’

  Sweetman tried placation. He said, ‘Think it over, old man. Don’t make a sudden decision on a sentimental basis. We all do that.’

  Buckmaster, repressing, felt his face would split open.

  ‘You’re one of us,’ he was going on stupidly. ‘You have to see things like the rest of us.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Lunt answered his kettle’s summons. ‘I don’t think so at all. I only have to see things the way I see them.’

  ‘Then you will warn them?’

  ‘I’ll do whatever I think proper.’

  ‘You’ll regret this,’ Buckmaster threatened.

  ‘No. You don’t understand,’ Lunt said. ‘You never regret obeying conscience.’

  ‘Christ!’ Buckmaster said. ‘You’re mad. Mad mad mad.’

  In the heart of the next morning, under its early carnation sky, Lunt and his dog went round to the horse-yard. The mills were creaking, straining their guts to drag trickles of love from the red powdered earth. The land lay flat all round with its dusty scrubby shade trees making black dawn patches.

  Lunt bent down and took a pinch of dust between his thumb and finger, sucked it and swallowed.

  ‘Ah, you bitch country,’ he said. ‘I love you.’

  The dog trotted beside the horse across the mile stretch to the dried-out river where the camp lay. Lunt sang as he rocked in his saddle, out of tune and kindly towards sky: ‘This man comin’, this man goin’, earth stay flat and here. This man comin’, that man goin’, woman stay warm and here.’

  He laughed in his middle years at his craziness, and was still smiling when he rode into the camp and smelled the first of their fires. The dog shot away from him to bark at the blacks’ dogs, circling them, then coming in for a snap and tussle. Three black men stood silent by the edge of the big water-hole watching him down the slope, watching his horse pick over the rock outcrop. The black faces shone as they saw him but it was only the sun striking up and over the coast range.

  ‘Morning,’ Lunt said, and then greeted them in the few words he knew of their native dialect. They grinned at him and he rubbed his hands along his thighs, slid from the saddle and asked, ‘You fellers got tea?’

  They nodded. Over their shoulders he could see two of the women squatting in front of the fire. A baby howled at their side. The morning was full of awakenings.

  He dipped into their billy with his saddle mug, squatting also with the women who smiled and turned away. The men had not yet spoken, but he knew them both—old Bunyah and Kowaha’s tribal husband, a splendid tall fellow called Koha.

  He knew these things took time, so he sipped a little. The baby yowled again and was picked up to drag on a breast. Crooning sounds came over the fuzz of its skull. My God, he thought with reverence, they’ve grown from the earth. Straight from it.

  Finally Lunt asked, ‘You have any trouble down here last night?’ The tea left a bitter taste in his mouth. Or perhaps it was the dust still. His tongue felt troubled.

  Bunyah came to squat beside him. He was fighting for the words. ‘Two feller. Horses. Dogs. Tell us move bloody quick time.’

  ‘We say,’ Koha added, ‘Mister Lunt leave us stay. He know us feller longtime. Bin stay fish and things.’

  Lunt smiled. ‘They have a story,’ he said. ‘Think you took Benjy Wilson’s little girl. Did you?’

  ‘Gawd, no, boss!’ Koha laughed. ‘Whaffor? One piccaninny here already.’

  ‘They mean business,’ Lunt said. ‘They’re crazy men. They’ll come again, with guns maybe, shoot you down, women and kids. What will you do, eh? What the hell will you do?’

  Koha made a little dust-picture with his big toe.

  ‘Can’t move yet,’ he said. ‘Old man sick and still plenty fish this hole.’

  ‘But your women, your kids?’ Lunt said. He felt hopeless.

  ‘You help, boss?’ Koha asked. He had his gods and was innocent about them.

  All their faces were dark with waiting. Three other men had come up along the creek-bed. They had two more gins and a couple of half-grown children with them.

  The carnation, meanwhile, had run out of the sky and the sun was up.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What, boss?’

  ‘Yes. I said, yes. I’m warning you now, aren’t I?’

  He felt desperate under the malice of the rising sun. One man, one rifle. They’d be back in the evening with guns and dogs. It would be a massacre.

  ‘I think,’ he said slowly, ‘you ought to move back for a bit. Little way. Back towards the hills. There’s more cover. By tonight, anyway. You can come back here when the chase is off.’

  Koha was struggling with white-man talk.

  ‘Move long time?’ he asked hesitantly.

  ‘No,’ Lunt said. ‘No. Move short time. Seven nights, maybe. But today. You can leave old Tiboobi with me. I’ll look after him.’

  Koha stirred more dust with his reflective toe. He looked down at the patterns he was making.

  Finally he said, ‘Gawd, boss, he no stay any time long you. He want come with us, his own people. He sicken more here.’

  ‘What’s up with him?’

  ‘He good-oh,’ Bunyah said. His age and dignity and curative powers were challenged. His old wrinkled skin shone brownly in the morning light.

  Koha spoke rapidly to him in his own tongue, consonants straggly as eucalypts.

  They’re straight from the earth, Lunt thought once more, remembering how he had sucked that mother, tasting her on his tongue that very morning. For a flashing second another world was manifest, a lost and almost forgotten place of blue chairs and white mats and river-stirred curtains. Impossible. He wrenched himself away from the memory to follow the two men to a branch and bark humpy where Tiboobi hunched his illness under leaves.

  The old man was gasping in his sleep and Lunt, bending over him, felt the roar of temperature from his body, heard the barriers within his lungs.

  ‘He’s got pneumonia,’ he said to the two black men with him. ‘You can’t shift him. He’ll die.’

  They stared blank.

  ‘My God!’ Lunt cried, raising his voice. ‘Devil disease. In here.’ He struck where he imagined his heart might be. He coughed for them. He gasped for air along with the man on the bed of leaves. ‘Two days. Three. Unless I nurse him. Bring him up to the house.’

  They still stared. But Bunyah was beginning to frown.

  ‘You heard me? You bright boy, Koha? You love this old man. You want him living long time?’

  Koha nodded.

  ‘You bring him to the house then, quick smart.’

  He backed out of the rough shelter which was made as much with love as with boughs and straightened up.

  The old man groaned once more. ‘You bring him,’ he repeated, and did not look at the other two again.

  It had taken him years to learn what the law had never learnt, that the best boomerang to use against them was the threat of silence.

  Two of the younger men carried him there on a stretcher of stringybark. Half an hour had gone by before they capitulated to the threat of Lunt’s sturdy back riding away without another word.
r />   Lunt put the old man in his own bed, looking down at the black face against the torn white pillow. A bad anthropological joke. The tribesmen shuffled and were reluctant to go.

  ‘Off now,’ Lunt commanded as gently as he could. ‘Off quick time. Look after your women.’

  Koha bent to lay his head against that of the sick man.

  ‘I’ll take care of him,’ Lunt reassured, ‘as if he were my own father.’

  Though there wasn’t much he could do, he thought, as he watched the men, pigeon-toed and splay-footed, walk back through dust in the direction of the camp.

  He sponged the old man down and rubbed in some chest embrocation he hadn’t used for years. He fed him sips of cooled boiled water with aspirin mashed in it and sat by him and waited for the fever to go down.

  At sundown the old man was worse, sitting up in the bed with his eyes turned in, the whites showing. Cries and moans of the fever-spirit were gabbled out, the congestion in his lungs thickening each sound. Lunt opened a tin of soup and heated it while the sick man babbled wildly. Having drunk it at a gulp he went back to fanning and sponging the dried skin and holding a blanket round the racked shoulders.

  There were no smoke-lines by the river that evening, no cobber glow of fire. Somehow the camp had slipped away in the early darkness and as the light turned blue and became star-scarred, he was glad that one thing at least had been secured, even as Tiboobi raved in the crisis.

  Near ten he heard the horses go past. They were walking them, but he still heard the soft slurring of dust as they went round by the far paddock, the clink of a bridle, a snort from a horse. The dog stood braced by the veranda steps, his urge to bark stilled by his master’s hand on his risen fur.

  Not long, Lunt thought. Not long before they’re back. He watched the hands on his alarm clock staggering round for ten minutes, fifteen, soothing the old man as he cried out, forcing more water between the thick lips. The frizz of Tiboobi’s skull was grey. His heavily ridged hands clawed at blanket and tribe memories of the green coast.