A Kindness Cup

by Thea Astley

  Just before the ground began to level out, there came a shower of spears and stones, a poor volley that would have had Mr Boyd in tears for the poverty of its protest. The men ducked, lay on the baking earth, and reloaded.

  ‘Fire!’ Freddie Buckmaster ordered his troops, and the useless shot whined up over the crest while the rattle of the rifles died away as they still lay there a minute before scrambling on.

  When they came over the lip, the ground stretched flat for several hundred yards to end in a random-slung boulder heap guarding the cliff edge on the western face. And nowhere was there any movement.

  The men edged in towards one another, their eyes scanning the summit.

  ‘They’re in those rocks,’ Fred Buckmaster stated. He was categoric. ‘As sure as God made little apples. All we’ve got to do is flush them out.’

  They advanced slowly, still keeping to their line formation.

  There were stupendous views out towards the sea behind them and in across the flats to far ranges. They ignored all these splendid airy spaces.

  ‘Now!’ Fred Buckmaster cried. And they broke into a run, whooping as they went towards a cleft in the boulders.

  The world, the stupendous views, narrowed to a horror of shots and shouts and screams as they burst in upon the score of blacks herded into the inner circle of rocks. One spear caught Roy Armitage in the shoulder, but the others flew wide as the natives, awed by the bullet, became only a huddle of terrified flesh. They cringed against rocky shields. One old man made a break for the side of the rock circle, but Benjy Wilson brought him down with a bullet neatly placed in the centre of his spine. He lay moaning and twitching.

  It was truly time to make arrests, but Buckmaster had lost control of his men who went forward and in, shooting steadily and reloading and shooting until the ground was littered with grunting men and there was blood-splash bright upon the rocks. Only five men confronted them now. The four or five women crouched wailing against the far barricade.

  ‘Leave the gins!’ Sweetman roared in a moment of sanity. ‘Leave them!’

  There was a sudden silence and the five blacks still standing turned slow circles as they inspected the line of whites girdling the rocks. Words, at this point, failed. Freddie Buckmaster kept thinking, ‘Oh, my God! What now, what do I do now?’ He really didn’t know, having discovered blood and death. There was one gin he noticed, knew well by sight, having seen her on the outskirts of his town. She was holding a baby closely against her breast and now and again it wailed.

  ‘Make an arrest,’ Barney Sweetman advised urgently. ‘For God’s sake make an arrest!’ He wanted things formalised. Already he interpreted the scene in terms of motions to be discussed and put, perhaps even as agenda.

  Fred Buckmaster took a step forward. It was prizegiving day and the gauche fellow had never achieved such distinction before. His rifle was as limp as he. Some formal words seemed to be dripping from his mouth. The blacks moved back before him till they made a pitiful knot against his advance. He could see this pitifulness and the wretchedness of their defence so that some gland in him was disturbed to the point of his wanting to cry with shame.

  And at that moment the gin whose face so moved him sprang with a tiny cry upon one of the rocks. Balanced there she looked in quick terror all about her and then, with no sound at all, hurled herself, still clutching the child, straight over the western scarp.

  It was such a final gesture no one moved for a few seconds, numbed by the force of it. And then the white men rushed forward to peer down two hundred feet where they could see some shapeless lump lying still on the lower slope.

  Only the crows kept going over with their lost cries. And the men, purged now and gazing emptily at the boulders and the dead, knew that no arrests would be made as the blacks, their faces drilled into nothing, stood motionless in this shock of tragedy.

  Mr Boyd, rounding the base from the north and fighting clear of the straggly trees, saw a body hurtle from the cliff-top to the lower slope before the scarp. At first he thought it was some strange bird diving on prey, and he cantered his horse along easily to the spot where he discovered it was the prey itself he was looking at.

  ‘My God,’ he breathed.

  He dismounted and walked closer to bend over the crushed figure with its limbs stuck out at four grotesque angles. The skull had burst open and the rocks about were spattered with blood-flecked grey. And then, heaving at this, he saw the small body rolled to one side, howling at the end of a lifeless hand. His mind informed him it couldn’t be as he bent over the unharmed child. Yet it was so. A miracle of salvation.

  He picked it up and cradled it while it wailed thinly. It was naked save for a silver piece strung round its neck. The noon sun struck off the metal in small brilliant flashes and Boyd read Dorahy’s name and puzzled. Puzzled for minutes, it seemed, when he became aware of figures at the top of the cliff looking down also and heard the rattle of hooves coming up behind him.

  The three horsemen reined in. Dorahy’s face was set in its usual sour and gentle lines, but there was an underlying tension of excitement. Jenner and his boy had an angry kind of bafflement about them.

  They dismounted and joined him. Without words. The heat of the sun was full of speech. The baby wailed again as Dorahy came closer to examine the dead woman, the sadness of it, and then to look upwards where the posse was outlined against searing cobalt.

  Young Jenner, whose voice was choking, said something the others could not quite hear, but Dorahy spoke loudly for the boy and for all of them, his eyes fixed on the familiar and now disfigured body of the young woman.

  ‘Lucretia,’ he said. ‘Lucretia lying naked.’

  BARNEY SWEETMAN is still the host of lush broad acres. He had owned most of the mill that crushed not only his cane crops but those of neighbouring farms. He had believed earnestly in Separation. He had implemented the policy of cheap black labour and in his minor hey-day had a barracks with thirty kanaka boys, the wide-veranda-ed plantation house where he squired it around in white moleskins and blue oxford shirts. He had held many gracious drunken evenings on behalf of the Separation League for other planters in the district. Dorahy still recalls the night he had been invited for some crushing-season shenanigans, and on going to farewell his hosts had found the husband sprawled in the garden and the wife collapsed in the breeze-way. Tempted to recite a suitable fragment of Horace over their recumbent forms, he had been accosted by Snoggers Boyd who was still some drinks this side of sanity.

  Dorahy has a sense of déjà vu. It is happening again as he edges towards the front door.

  Snoggers says, ‘Not leaving are you? Don’t leave. Spoil everything.’

  ‘I have to be sober to face tomorrow,’ Dorahy answers. At that other time he had added grimly, ‘I’m answerable to their sons.’

  Boyd had thought about this with some amusement patched at the corners of his mouth.

  ‘But the parents aren’t. To their sons, I mean. It’s a strange world when outsiders have to set a better face on things.’ Now he says, ‘If you’re leaving I can give you a lift.’

  ‘Well, perhaps,’ Dorahy says. ‘I wanted a chance to talk with you.’

  ‘Good,’ Boyd says. ‘I came with Buckmaster, but he seems to have passed out with jollity. Someone will get him home.’

  They look back in at the turmoil of upright but drink-flogged bodies. Buckmaster is snoring deeply from an easy chair.

  ‘Yes,’ Boyd says sardonically. ‘Ah, yes.’

  They go back down the long hall and out onto the steps. The garden is sickly with frangipani and the overriding sweetness of cane. ‘In this small cloister,’ Dorahy wonders, ‘what vows are shattered daily?’ And he asks abruptly, ‘Can you take me to Lunt?’

  The crudity of the request startles Boyd.

  ‘Well, now!’ he says. There is a waiting pause. ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow. At least as soon as possible. I have only the week.’

  ‘Why?’

 
; ‘I think he should be here. For the official welcome.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It pleases my sense of irony, I suppose. You think so, too.’

  ‘Do I? I don’t know that I do. He’d probably refuse. It’s twenty years, you know. Twenty.’

  They walk across to the side of the garden where Boyd’s buggy is hitched to the fence. Despite the darkness, Boyd pauses before he puts one foot on the step and stares at the other man.

  ‘Why won’t you let go?’ he asks.

  ‘I can’t,’ Dorahy says. ‘It’s simply that I can’t.’

  The ride back to the hotel is silent. But there is all the hushing surge of sea along the front. The streets, the disposition of them, haven’t really changed; and consequently in the formless dark Dorahy feels tears prickling and taking shape behind his lids, so that when he gets out in front of the hotel with its sea-facing verandas and the long star-wash of the sky, he feels the merging of time then and time now.

  ‘You don’t really care for Lunt,’ Boyd accuses him over the handshake. ‘You’re not a seeker after justice. You’re just a trouble-maker.’ But he smiles.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Dorahy concedes. He feels unexpectedly humble. He is surprised into a silent admission of hatred greater than charity.

  ‘You poor muddled bastard,’ Boyd says. ‘All right. I’ll run you up there. My reasons are different. But I’ll run you up. No persuasion though.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘No trying to talk the old boy into coming if he doesn’t want it. I’m very fond—or I used to be—of the old Charlie Lunt.’

  Dorahy leans against the buggy side a moment. He finds it hard to believe it has been so easy.

  ‘Lunt’s the only reason I came back,’ he says. And he is speaking the truth though it is a different truth for Boyd. ‘The only reason.’

  Boyd raises one hand before he takes the reins and shakes them. It is blessing and absolution in one.

  ON THE veranda, post-breakfast, of the Sea Rip Hotel, Gracie Tilburn, still with magnificent voice, is holding forth. She has gathered her band of acolytes from fried eggs and bacon and a couple of anaemic cereals only. The veranda, open to morning sun with its striped deck-chairs and rachitic tables, is booming with reminiscence and gossip. Gracie had married twice and on neither occasion did her voice achieve the rich black quality she had been told came with sexual fulfilment. Still, it is rich enough. Her husbands’ importance had petered away in direct ratio to her encores. Manless, she realises how much she had needed each of them.

  Her busy brown eyes take in the group: Benjy Wilson, widower; old Miss Charlton who had run Sunday-school classes she had tried to avoid—she is very old now and nods agreement to everything; Ted Ellis and his wife, ex-groceries; Roy Armitage and Jack Romney, both wifeless but still grubbing for money on a shared mixed dairy farm down south. She smiles and it is radiant. The others could believe her to be about to burst into song—which no one will prevent, at least on the evening when the official speeches and welcomes have been made.

  There are other groups scattered in chairs along the veranda, but they are younger or much older and have different references. Nostalgia has not united them all except in the accidents of greeting—the casual wave, the nod, the cursory handshake.

  ‘I’m cramming this in between engagements,’ Gracie is confessing, ‘in Melbourne and Sydney. Simply squeezing it in. I very nearly couldn’t come.’

  They are all grateful. Some even say so. It wouldn’t have been the same.

  ‘But where is everybody?’ she is asking the sea and the palms along the front. ‘Where’s Tim Jenner? Where’s Freddie Buckmaster?’

  Her rhetoric does not really need an answer, but she gets it from Ted Ellis.

  ‘They’ll be in later,’ Ellis says. He thinks slowly, speaks slowly. ‘I’ve been back before. Seen them. The Jenners still have the same holding, only the boy does most of the work now. Not a boy. Middle-aged man. And Freddie Buckmaster is down from the Palmer.’

  Gracie Tilburn is all ears. ‘They were dear boys,’ she says graciously. ‘Dear, dear boys. I wonder will I know them?’ To a chorus of assent, she sips her tea.

  Dorahy is espied slipping by to have a walk along the front so that Gracie, who uses her tongue with the ease of a tapir, uncoils a sentence in his direction that sucks him back. Her face hasn’t really begun to crumble yet and Dorahy, pulling up another chair, is wedged in between pure art and Old Testament.

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful, Mr Dorahy,’ old Miss Charlton croaks, ‘to be back?’

  Dorahy would want to harp on his obsession, but their morning faces are too bland.

  ‘As if we’d never been away,’ Benjy Wilson says. ‘The town’s hardly altered except for the size. Shops in the same old places. Same people.’ He has another go at lighting his pipe.

  ‘How’s the family now?’ Dorahy asks him, playing conventional visitors.

  ‘Well, the kids are all grown up. Don’t need me any more. They’ve moved out and away.’

  ‘What about that youngest girl of yours? The one who was lost that time. What’s she doing?’

  Benjy suspects no reference to the darkness of the past. ‘She’s made me a grand-dad three times over. In Brissy now, happily married and all.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Dorahy says musingly. He thinks of Kowaha. ‘That’s good. I don’t suppose … oh, nothing!’ He cannot proceed with what chokes him.

  ‘Suppose what?’ Wilson is a big lumbering man, still primitive and slowly suspicious despite grandfatherdom. Or because of it.

  ‘Nothing,’ Dorahy says. ‘I was just remembering.’

  A hundred feet away reef waters lick at the sand strip. The heat comes fiercely to life as the sun moves in square blocks along the hotel terrace, painting in yellow spaces the colonnades of wrought-iron stanchion. They are all seated in sun now. Nothing can be hidden.

  Gracie Tilburn for one cannot hide. She presses Dorahy with questions. Has he heard from Tim Jenner in all these years?

  A card or two. A longish letter one Christmas, so long ago now he forgets the substance.

  He says, ‘Not really’, and the sun clouts the side of his head for the lie.

  Gracie is thinking at half her age level, smoothing the silk over fatter thighs, recalling lazy-daisied hats and the grass of a lost creek. Grief keeps pecking at her for the vanished past when even her voice had seemed purer. Sentimental, she senses tears washing behind her eyes and quickly sips more tea.

  But Argus-eyed Dorahy has observed. He puts a hand over hers as she reaches out for the sugar.

  He says, ‘It’s the same for all of us you know. Just the same.’

  And then he remembers the swollen face of young Jenner entering the world of men, and the sun loses some of its sting. Dubiety about his role of avenging prophet nibbles, but there is not sufficient bite for him to alter his determination.

  Ted Ellis, with unforced bonhomie, says, ‘Soon be time for that first drink of the day’, and gets Romney and Armitage on side in a flash, rum being thicker than blood.

  ‘Why don’t I have that gift?’ Dorahy asks himself. He has planned a solitary mooch along the front to bathe in a world of water and light. He is not and never will be a man among men, while Romney is saying meanwhile that it can never be too early and Armitage heads for the bar to fetch and carry.

  He decides to drink with them, get on side. Buckmaster, he knows, would have no trouble achieving a nexus. ‘I must try to be,’ he decides, rejecting the idea even as he does so, ‘more like Buckmaster.’ But it is too late for his crabby morality, and when the rum comes he can only sip in silence.

  Affronted, Miss Charlton recalls something she has to do in her room; Ted Ellis’s wife does the same; but Gracie Tilburn, who is used to being a woman among men, stays put and orders a teeny piece of brandy.

  ‘Not enough to ruin the voice,’ she explains, and her explanation is so coy Dorahy flinches.

  He asks the
others in a kind of cold rage, then, about Charlie Lunt. The other men make weak feints at vagueness and memory until Dorahy catches Romney grinning at Armitage, a rictus of prior and secret knowledge.

  ‘He’s doing all right,’ Romney says. ‘Very all right.’

  Romney is an ursine fellow, still tough at fifty, and nobody’s subaltern. When Gracie asks what he means by ‘very’ he gives another grin to his stooge and says it isn’t for ladies.

  ‘Are you a lady?’ he asks insolently.

  Gracie takes it well. Time has given her a wonderful callus. She says she hopes she is, but the insult has stopped her momentarily, for she takes refuge in brandy while her eyes beg Dorahy’s like a dog.

  ‘Will Mr Lunt be coming?’ she asks them, ladylike.

  ‘Now that,’ Romney says with a laugh, ‘I seriously doubt.’

  Dorahy loathes the manner of the man. ‘I intend doing something about that. He should be here. An integral part of the place.’

  ‘And what are you going to do?’ Armitage challenges. He is a blond, devious man. ‘He wasn’t invited.’

  A conspiracy, Dorahy thinks. He says, ‘As my guest. He can come as my guest.’

  ‘But he’s close enough to have come back before this if he’d wanted to. He hasn’t set foot in the town since the day he left.’

  ‘And when was that?’

  ‘Close on eighteen years now. Just after you’d gone.’

  Only Lunt remembers the force of the wind that day, wind driving apocalyptically across his dusty paddocks for grass scourings. The sulky had groaned under his few belongings, for he had sold out at a pittance, hardly enough to buy the mixed business he took over. He said good-bye to no one except the Jenners and whipped his horse up for the trip north.

  ‘Poor old devil!’ Dorahy complains. ‘He was forced out. He had no option.’

  ‘Fair go!’ Romney says, quietly warning. ‘You can leave us out of it.’