Coal Creek

by Miller, Alex

  Esme took Daniel off a little way and was whispering something to him, the pair of them looking across at me with suspicion. Daniel come over to me and stood in front of me and he suddenly drew back his arm and cracked me one across the side of my head with his fist. I went over backwards and sat down hard on my backside. He crouched down in front of me and hauled that Webley out of its holster and stuck it in my face. Now you will tell me this plan of yours with Ben Tobin to get his revenge on me or I will finish you right here.

  The sun was coming at a low angle through the brigalow and lighting the side of his face. I noticed for the first time his eyes was a kind of blue colour, but a bit on the watery side. I did not think his threat was convincing. I seen the weakness of it in his watery blue eyes and I despised him. He might be forced to it by his own weakness and his wife’s craziness. That thought did worry me a little. My injured wrist was throbbing and my mouth was filled with saliva from the whack he give me. I turned my head aside and spat into the sand and I swallowed some saliva and spat again. This man would never have hit me that way if I had not been manacled. He pushed the point of the Webley’s barrel against the side of my nose and turned my head towards him. I looked at him and I said, You hit me one more time, Mr Collins, and I will have nothing more to say to you or to Mrs Collins. You are a weak man and a bully. I have no confidence in you. I do not know what you mean by my plan. I do not have no plan. If Ben Tobin was going to get his revenge on you he would have done it in his own time without needing me to back him up. I looked aside and spat again. My spit was red where my cheek had cut on the inside against my teeth. I said, Ben Tobin never needed no one to back him up, not me nor anyone.

  Daniel stood up. We shall see, he said. I seen he was forming up a plan of his own now. That is the way such people think. There is nothing straight in their own minds, so they think there is nothing straight in the minds of other people. He looked at Esme where she was sitting on the scuffed-up sand with her head in her hands. I said to myself, There is a lost man and he will come undone. Nothing is surer. He said to his wife, who was looking like some poor old relative of Rosie’s after a night on the wine, We must get back to the station, Ez. Do you think you are up to it? He went over and crouched beside her and put his arm around her shoulders and spoke to her. She was not crying. I could see that much. I could not say what she was thinking and I do not care to speculate on it. My face was aching where he hit me. I did not care much about their feelings just then.

  I looked over at them, studying the way they was, and I knew there was nothing more certain than them two was not going to find their way back to the Mount Hay police house through the scrubs without me to guide them there. They would be going around in circles till they was too done up to go no further, then they would sit down just like them old piker bullocks when they was winded from being chased, and they would never get up again but would lay there and give in to their despair. That is how it is. I sat on the ground looking at them thinking a lot of thoughts that come into my head just then. One thought I had was, So what if I refuse to get up? What if I let them go off and lose themselves in the scrubs and they are never heard of again? As I thought of them two perishing in the scrubs I seen a picture of the wild pigs and the dogs dragging their bones about and scattering them like they do with the carcasses of cattle and old roos. I would not need to do nothing criminal to them but just tell them, I am not walking back with my hands manacled and my face beat up. It is not me who drove your daughter away but you yourselves who done it to her. I would tell him, I owe you nothing. You cuffed me and you beat me, all for nothing but your own panic and suspicion, and now you are on your own, Daniel Collins. Let us see how you go without Bobby Blue looking after you out here. I reckoned I could be at Ben’s place by morning and he would get the cuffs off me. Then me and Irie could head out to the spring of the old fig tree. Ben would lend us a couple of horses and stores. I tried thinking how I might get Mother and my saddle but I could not see no way of doing it that made sense. Ben would go in and get Mother for me one night and bring her out to the fig tree. The four of us would have a fine time camped there together for a few days until me and Irie worked something out for our future. I could see no further than that. But I knew I had committed no crime and had nothing to be ashamed of. All I had to fear was being misunderstood by these people from the coast. The authorities was on their side and would come hunting for me and Irie, for sure, but that would be better than this and when they caught up with us one day we would have nothing to confess to them but our own happiness at being with each other. We was both at home in the scrubs. She was right about that and was a natural for this country. I had been a fool not to take her to the spring of the fig tree when she come up with her plan and we had a chance to make a clean getaway then. I should have trusted to her judgment. I felt good thinking about Irie. I would make it up with her and prove I was reliable for her. I regretted my failure to respect her plan. Regret for my foolishness is what it was. I like to be honest with myself and not lie about such things. My mother will never have nothing to be ashamed of from me. I know that.

  Daniel lifted Esme onto her feet and they come over to me and he got behind me and put his hands under my arms and hauled me up. Get going! I leaned back at him. I am not going nowhere, I said. If you want to go back to the police house you had better be making a start or it will be dark before you get there. I am staying here, I said. I looked him steady in the eye. I have had enough of walking around in the scrubs without no hands being beaten on by you because you do not trust your daughter. I am done with it.

  I seen a look of doubt come into those pale blue eyes of his and I thought, I have got him. Get these cuffs off me, I said, and I will think about maybe taking you back. But I am not doing it cuffed. Esme stepped up and said, Don’t free him, Dan. He’ll make a bolt for it and leave us here. Daniel looked at me. You can stay here if you want to, he said. I will strip you naked and tie you to that tree right behind you so you stay here till we come back and pick you up. He smiled. That is if we can find you again in this godforsaken place. I said, I do not see nothing for you to tie me with. He said straight up, like he had already thought it out and was pleased with himself, Your clothes will rip up and do nicely. I said, You will get lost on your own. He said, Maybe we will. And that will be just too bad for you tied up here waiting for us. You might remember, he said, getting cocky with it now, I found my way back to the police house in Mount Hay from that trash hole of your mate’s place out at Coal Creek. And that was at night. A dark night too. Now you have brought us here and you are the one wearing those handcuffs, not me. If I know anything, you will be showing us the way back. So you see, I am not such a sorry creature as you imagine me to be. It is you doing my bidding, not the other way around.

  I said, That old horse Finisher found your way home for you. You was as bushed as a baby rabbit. I seen your tracks wavering all over the place out there by the red wall. But you are not on a horse today, Mr Collins. And you will die in these scrubs just the same as I will if you leave me here tied to this tree. He said, Well let us see which of us is right, shall we, you or me? He stepped up to me and loosed the buckle of my belt and smiled into my face like he knew he had won. I said, All right. I will take you back. He stepped away. Let’s go then. I said, Do up my belt. He did it up. I said, I have committed no crime. You have no right to hold me in these cuffs. Daniel stepped back and said, How about conspiracy to kidnap my children? Is that crime enough for you? He was sneering at me when he said this and I did not like to hear it and I got a scare from it. I said, Your daughter will tell you there is no such thing as a conspiracy. To leave you was her idea and she done it on her own. He said nothing to this but pushed me forward roughly and told me to get going.

  As I went along, making my way up the stony incline, I thought about what he had said. It had come as a shock to me and I began to see the way them two was intending to take this whole thing. They had the authorities with them and
could make anything they liked to make of it. I tried to believe it would all be cleared up and understood when we caught up with Irie at Ben’s place, but I could no longer trust to that view of how it was to go. I could not wait to get there now and to hear her backing me up and telling these two the truth of this whole thing.

  . . .

  Later on I turned around when I could no longer hear them and I seen Daniel and Esme was fallen a long way behind me. He called to me to hold up and wait for them. When they come on I seen Esme was having some kind of asthma attack and finding it hard to get her breath. I waited and watched them. From being friendly at the beginning, them two now seemed to me to be the most dangerous people I had ever got myself tangled up with. When it began to get dark I thought of giving them the slip and doubling back and making my way out to Coal Creek. But the truth is I lacked the spirit for that. I could have lost them two easily in the dark, or even in the daylight, handcuffed or not, but I knew I would have spent the rest of my life haunted by their helpless struggle to survive out there. They was the kind of people needed a torch to see where they was going and I was their torch. I knew I could not abandon them. But I wished I could.

  I stood and waited for them again. In some stupid way they seemed to me like children. I had never seen two people more in the wrong place than them two. I hoped they would be going back down the coast once they got their girls back. But I did not like to think too closely on this, as I was afraid me and Irie would be split up whichever way this thing went and would never see each other again. I was not so stupid I did not see she was the best thing ever come into my life or ever likely to come into it.

  My right wrist had swelled up onto the cuffs and was giving me some gee-up. I thought maybe the skin had split. I had a deep ache for a cigarette and for something in my belly. I had gone without food for a day before this but I had never gone without a smoke. As I went along through the dimlit scrub, that long day dying around us, I dreamed of finding myself alone with Daniel Collins and the two of us fighting it out. And in my dream I beat him till he lay on the ground bloodied and pleading to me to forgive him all the wrongs he done to me. This little dream of getting my vengeance of him kept my spirits up.

  But it is given only to the prophets to see the future before its time and is not given to us to know what is to become of us. And that may be just as well, for we can dream in the present and see no harm in it but get our comfort from our dreams, and if we could see the future we would have no dreams but only the wreck of our days to think on.

  ELEVEN

  The quarter moon had been down already more than an hour by the time I come up to the horse paddock and the night sky was just giving way to the first sign of the dawn, a chill greyness over the world, a low mist rising on the open ground. We had been doing a lot of stopping to rest for Esme in the night and there was times I thought she was not going to make it no further. They was off behind me some way and I squirmed under the bottom wire without their help. Tip had been barking steadily ever since she first heard us approaching through the scrub. But she did not come to meet us. Bark-bark-bark, she went, kind of flat and with nothing of a welcome in it. There was something sad in the sound of Tip’s bark and I did not like to hear it. I wondered that she did not come down to greet us. When I come through the horse paddock the horses was keeping still and quiet. I could see them bunched up in the bottom corner of the paddock staring in my direction with their big startled eyes. Esme must have got hung up on the wire coming through some way behind me; I heard her cry out, a wretched kind of cry in the dismal morning, like a mare struggling in trouble to give birth, no human word in it but something animal and exhausted. I waited by the shed till they come up to me.

  He was coaxing her along and near to carrying her. She was having trouble with her breathing and seemed to be close to collapsing. She rested against the door getting her breath and he told me to get into the back of the jeep. When I was in he manacled me to the handhold above the wheel housing. When he had me fastened he reached in and took out the .303. I watched them two struggling across to the house, her hanging off his arm wheezing like some old pump, the .303 slung over his shoulder the way a soldier would carry his gun. And I remembered he had been in the army in New Guinea before he joined the police and come up to the ranges. Seeing him like that in his stained shirt and pants with that gun he looked like a soldier would look who had been out in some battle all night and was coming back with a wounded comrade. The lights went on over at the house and I heard their voices. Tip had stopped barking and was giving out a kind of whining sound that went off into a bit of a howl every now and then.

  I snapped awake when I slid off the guard and the cuffs jerked tight. Both my wrists was swollen and bleeding and I cried out with the sudden pain of it. I seen the light was on in the office, Daniel’s shadow against the window. He was talking on the telephone, his voice was raised but I could not hear what he was saying. I had a headache and was feeling pretty low. I did not see how we could ever be normal with each other again. No matter what Irie was to tell them I knew we had gone too far into something else to ever turn it around. These two was the kind of people who was never going to apologise to a hired man like me. They was no longer treating me with the decency any man or woman should get. There was no way back on it.

  They come out and crossed over towards me. She was carrying George Wilson’s old twelve-gauge shotgun, a bunch of spare shells clinking in the front pocket of her apron as she climbed into the passenger seat at the front. From being a young and friendly woman, Esme Collins had taken on the look of an old deranged woman with nothing in her mind but a picture of her daughters in captivity to the violent and cruel man she believed Ben Tobin to be, a mixture of terror and crazy determination in her to get them girls of hers back. She was gripping on to that old gun of George’s like she thought it was the hand of her Saviour. I could have told her the right barrel of that weapon was inclined to misfire, as the spring was weakened, but she was not a woman to be spoken to with reason. Daniel was wearing his slouch hat with the strap under his chin. I noticed the flap on the holster of his Webley was fastened down. It looked like he had got himself smartened up to be the real boss of this and the authority in charge of how it was to go. I knew that even with his girls still lost to him he would be thinking of writing his report to his superiors on the coast. Making a big man of himself out here in what he seen as the wild country but anyone in Mount Hay could have told him was the quiet country. I would say they had both had a drink of something as I could smell liquor on them. He kept the .303 in the front with him between the seats. I reckoned that phone call of his would have been to the coast. Who else would he be calling on the telephone at this hour but his headquarters people? They said nothing to me but sat up front, her with that old open-hammer shotgun of George’s across her legs.

  It was nearing sunup by the time we headed out but he put on his lights anyway and they danced and flickered on the scrub ahead of us. My backside was getting battered from the bumping around. I was near to passing out a couple of times with the pain in my wrists, which was gone all up my arms and across my chest. Daniel slowed up whenever he come on dual tracks, and he yelled out to me, Which track? I told him and he took off with a violent jerk and flew along for some way till the tracks confused him again. And so it went on until I yelled to him to slow down. The sun was up now, knifing at eye level through the timber, and we was just about on the lip of the Coal Creek crossing. The creek was still running but with no more than a foot or two of water in it. Daniel put the jeep in low low and we got over and climbed out on the silt with no trouble. Despite the cool air of the morning I was sweating with pain and with my worry. Daniel drove up to about twenty yards off the front door of Ben’s place and cut the motor.

  . . .

  I have told about what happened next in detail many times at the trial and since that day. I have always been careful to tell it as it was. What I seen was not the way Esme spoke of it a
fterwards. Esme’s was a different story to mine. At the trial there was a number of different versions given of what happened that morning outside Ben Tobin’s place on Coal Creek, but I stuck to what I seen and I have never changed nothing of my story. The name Coal Creek was never the same afterwards. I know what I seen. This was it.

  The jeep was a left-hand drive and Esme was sitting right there in front of me on the seat next to Daniel. She jumped out of the jeep before it come to a stop and tripped and went to her knees. She went down hard and that old gun of George Wilson’s flew out of her hands and landed out ahead of her in the dirt. When she looked up the first thing she seen was Ben at the door of his place. She claimed to have thought he was coming for her and she was in fear of her life. She scrambled forward on her knees and grabbed for that old gun and she swung it up and let go with the left barrel without taking aim, just firing in a blind panic. The main bunch of shot sent splinters flying off the side of the door, the spread catching Ben in his side so that he spun around and snatched at the lintel to hold himself steady. He was very evidently not expecting to get shot. I seen the look of surprise on his face. He steadied himself a moment before he reached in and grabbed that single-shot .22 pea rifle of his that he kept behind the door for the snakes. He then stepped out just one step from the door with the rifle held sideways in his hands, not pointing it at no one but yelling something which I do not remember, just a wild kind of yell, like he was trying to hold the situation up till he could work out what was going on.