Coal Creek

by Miller, Alex

  Two things happened at once then. When the shotgun blasted, Irie come out of the house down behind the galley with Deeds hanging on to her. Irie was screaming, Mummm! over and over. Her mother was still on her knees with the twelve-gauge in her hands and maybe Irie thought her mother had been shot. Daniel was already out of the jeep. I seen him fumbling with the buckle on the holster of that Webley and I remembered the picture I had of George Wilson when I was a boy, that old man struggling to get out his gun while the bad man shot him to his knees. But that is not what happened. Daniel got the gun in his hand and began to shoot at Ben. Bang-bang-bang, three shots in a row, I still hear them, not steadying himself or aiming the gun but just holding it out in front of him and firing it off, his face screwed up and yelling something back at Ben. Maybe cursing. I cannot say for sure. When Irie screamed, Esme turned towards her and screamed back at her to get inside. Daniel was firing his Webley revolver at Ben and Ben lifted the pea rifle and let go his one shot. I could see Daniel was panicked and did not coolly take aim and he missed Ben altogether, which was not hard for him to do. As Daniel pulled off his third shot Miriam jumped out from behind Ben in the doorway and Daniel’s third shot took her in the chest and knocked her over backwards. At almost the same instant Ben’s single shot hit Daniel in the side of his skull and Daniel went down.

  So long as I live I will never forget the sight of young Miriam going over backwards and kind of bouncing when she hit the hard pack of that anthill floor in Ben’s place. It still makes me sick in the guts to remember the way that kid went down. Like she was made of rubber. When I turned back to Daniel I seen Ben’s one shot had caught him in the side of his head. He was on his face, blood coming out of his head. I looked back at Ben and he had dropped the pea rifle and was kneeling at Miriam. I do not know if it was being shot in the side with them pellets that was making him kneel or if he was trying to revive the child. Esme let go her second barrel at him but it misfired as it generally would do. George never used the right barrel.

  That is what I remember clearly. Others did not remember it the way I did. But I know what I saw. I remember other things too, but not so clearly as them first few seconds of it. But I do remember Esme being in the doorway of Ben’s place holding Miriam’s head in her hands and kind of rocking up and down and screaming to her child, and Irie being up there with her and crying out and pawing at her mother. And I remember thinking what a child she was. When I looked around I seen Daniel was moving and had shifted his head on one side. His eyes was open and I was glad he was not dead. His lips was moving and I guess he was saying something, or trying to. That slouch hat of his was knocked clean off and was lying out in the yard on its own, drifting backwards and forwards on its stiff brim in the morning breeze. I remember that. Ben always said when he seen Mrs Collins go down the first time he was intending to head across and help her to her feet. He said her shooting him was not expected. But she claimed he menaced her with his rifle and that is why she shot him, in fear of her life, she said she was. Which was a term the police used. And it may be true, for she was a woman in a state of fear and panic and extreme exhaustion already when we pulled up at Ben’s place and was not in no mood for acting reasonably and sitting around talking about nothing. Especially her kids. But the way I remember it she fired off that old shotgun of George’s before Ben reached for the .22 behind the door.

  I do not say Esme was lying about her reason for shooting at Ben and maybe she thought she was telling the truth. But I do know if she had not fired that old gun of George’s the rest of it would not have happened the way it did. It might have happened some other way. But not that way. That much is for sure. Everyone who heard the story at the trial seen a picture of a mother that morning on her knees before the cruel menace of the animal who had kidnapped her children. She claimed she pulled that trigger in desperation and self-defence. I do not know how many times she said that. There was a lot of other things that was said later on about what happened that morning out at Coal Creek that was not true, but by then that day and the name Coal Creek had become a kind of dark legend among the people on the coast in which the widow and her dead husband was the heroes and the real truth was long buried with little Miriam and her dad.

  . . .

  I was manacled to that jeep and I was not able to move and I seen it all, or mostly all of it. I could not be looking two ways at once and do not recall seeing Daniel get out of the jeep. But he was out and not far behind Esme and his first shot come close behind hers. It was all over in a few seconds and takes a lot longer to tell than it did to happen. All our lives was changed forever in them few confused seconds of panic and none of it should have ever happened. Ben was all set to bring them two kids back to their mother and father that morning. I believe that to be true. If Ben had had the chance to do it his way, it would have been an opportunity for him and the Collins to reach some kind of trust and even a friendship. Them people might have learned something about themselves and the people of the ranges. Laying in my bunk at Stuart, the racket that was always going on in that place keeping me from sleep in them early days, I often imagined a scene of Ben driving up to the police house in his old International truck, Tip jumping at the wheels and them two girls sitting up alongside him having the adventure of their lives and waving out the side window. In these night imaginings Esme come out of the police house wearing her apron and was overjoyed to see her girls safe with Ben. She invited him into the kitchen to have breakfast with the family. I smiled to myself to see them all laughing and telling their stories together, like it was some great adventure they all shared. The way I daydreamed it many times, the story of our lives had a happy ending. But that was not the way it was in real life and there are yet some things I must tell about here before this whole story of it is done with.

  TWELVE

  Me and Ben was separated away from each other in Stuart. When the story come out in the newspapers we was shown as evil villains without no conscience or concern for our fellow creatures. The papers give it out that Ben Tobin and his well-known associate, Robert Blewitt, alias Bobby Blue, had been terrorising the law-abiding residents of Mount Hay township for years, where they was known for their cruelty. On arriving in the town the newly appointed constable, Daniel Collins, a decorated veteran of the Australian campaign in New Guinea, where he served with distinction as corporal, decided to bring to account the likes of Tobin and his associates. Constable Collins went out on his own to Tobin’s hideout at Coal Creek in the wild scrubs and arrested him and brought him to justice for abusing a young Aboriginal girl. When Tobin swore to get his vengeance on Constable Collins after he come out of prison, so the story in the newspapers said, him and his accomplice, Robert Blewitt, made the plan of getting the trust of the Collins family so they could arrange the kidnap and molesting of the two innocent young Collins girls as payback on Constable Collins.

  No mention was made that it was the same Constable Collins who accidentally shot dead his own child out at Coal Creek on account of Mrs Collins firing off a shotgun at Ben Tobin without no reason in the first place. At the centre of the story the papers told about Coal Creek was the grieving mother of the dead little girl and the widow of Constable Daniel Collins, the war hero. Esme’s suffering and grief and her courage was the big story for them. Much was made of her heroism in wounding the villain Ben Tobin before he shot her husband dead. There was a photograph of Mrs Esme Collins dressed in black with a veil over her face holding the hand of her surviving child, Irie, at the funeral in Townsville of her murdered husband and their youngest child, Miriam. This photograph of a mother’s grief caused a great stir and there was howls from ordinary people looking to avenge her. Esme was shown to be a woman of great courage and a deep and generous care for the welfare of the community of Mount Hay.

  A couple of days after we was admitted into remand a crowd was gathered outside the gates of the gaol. They was chanting and waving placards and calling for the death sentence for Ben and me. I think if the
police had let us go free, that crowd would have hanged us anyway. We was said to be the most heartless criminals ever known in the district. Once the people had that story from the newspapers there was no going back to the truth of it for me and Ben. One newspaper even called it the Coal Creek Massacre. Which was plain stupid and wrong. The newspapers lied and twisted the truth around to make people get excited. Which is what people did. They was all townspeople with a natural fear of the bush and was always looking for some sensational event to come out of the wild country up there in the ranges. It did not make no difference to them that for the whole time George Wilson was the constable at Mount Hay they had never heard of no trouble out there. Most people had never heard of Mount Hay before this, including the newspapers, so what could they know of it? Something like the idea of the Coal Creek Massacre did not surprise them but only made them more sure they had been right all along to believe that country was lawless and filled with brutal types of men. If I had been asked I would have said it was partly the Collinses’ own original expectation of adventure and sensational events in the ranges that caused the whole thing to get out of hand and go the way it did. They had no need to go putting me in handcuffs and beating on me that day. I would have taken them out there and found their girls without no trouble if they had not panicked but had given me a chance. And I never heard of no one taking a shotgun to a neighbour in Mount Hay before Esme did it.

  I had been in Stuart no more than a few days when I got a message through one of the guards from George Wilson letting me know Chiller was taking care of Mother and the other horses at the police house, and he had Tip over there at the pub with him. He said nothing of Deeds and I do not know if Ben had any news of her. Once we was in the gaol me and Ben did not see each other until the trial got going, and then only to nod.

  . . .

  The side of the story that never did get into the newspapers was how Ben took charge after the shooting and got us all back to the police house in Mount Hay that morning. When we arrived back at the police house in the jeep from Coal Creek, the Flying Doctor plane and their people was waiting there to meet us. There was two detectives come out from the coast with the Flying Doctor and they was waiting to arrest me and Ben, which they did without asking us no questions. Daniel had called the police headquarters when we come back in the night from seeing the girls’ and Ben’s and Deeds’ tracks at the rock shelter. That was the phone call I seen him making. He asked for help and for the Flying Doctor service to come out, as he and Esme was in great fear their girls would have been injured in some way, and there was no doctor in Mount Hay. I do not know what they thought Ben was going to do to them girls and they never did say, but only give the impression it was something evil.

  Esme and Daniel and the body of Miriam, along with Irie, was all flown down to the hospital in Townsville and me and Ben was left cuffed in the cell at the police office in Mount Hay in the care of them two detectives. The part of the story that never got told was that it was Ben drove the jeep in from Coal Creek and him who helped Esme get Daniel into the back of it. Ben was calm and Esme was in no state to see any sense or do nothing for herself. Ben’s side was giving him pain where the pellets had tore into him but he did not mind his own pain and took the responsibility of getting that family back to help as soon as he could. Ben was a cool head to have onside when you was in trouble. I knew that from experience with him. Daniel died the following morning in the Townsville hospital. When this news come through on the telephone to the detectives they come down to the cell and charged Ben and me with murder. We was already charged with conspiracy to kidnap minors and some other charges they made up and which I now forget. They said I was Ben’s accomplice and was just as guilty as he was of murdering Constable Collins. I did not like the feeling it give me to be charged with murder but I did not make no protest against it. I was with Ben no matter which way it went. I knew that.

  When the detectives had finished with us and had left us, Ben said, If you kill a policeman there is no hope for you but hanging. I still thought the truth would come out and we would be let go and maybe even thanked for being so helpful. I said, Irie will tell them all what happened and clear it up for us. Ben laughed at me for this idea. And I soon learned what an innocent fool I was to ever think like that. The facts was just as twisted around and exaggerated at the trial as they was in the newspapers. At first me and Ben laughed at the way the prosecution told the story, then we got used to hearing it and stopped listening. The lawyer the state give us was a man by the name of Alfred Katzen, which I thought was an unusual name, which is why I remember it. Alfred told us plainly we was in for it and to get our minds set for the worst outcome. He smelled of grog and was tired of life himself. He was a man my father would have scorned to speak to. I felt sorry for him and did not think he was such a bad sort, just someone whose luck had deserted him early in life. He told me he had received threats to his life if he got us off. He smiled when he said this. I don’t think there’s much hope of that happening, Bobby, he said. I told him not to worry about it as I had already seen how things was to go with us.

  . . .

  In the cell at the police office in Mount Hay the detectives had us both in cuffs and they give us a beating, which they said was for resisting arrest. Which was a lie. We knew they beat us because one of their own people had been killed and they needed to take out their revenge on us. Until we went into the gaol them two had us in their power and could do with us just as they wished to do. On the drive in to the coast they talked between themselves about shooting us and I believe they would have done it if they had thought they could get away with it. Ben knew how to laugh at them, which made them fierce with him. But I just took it and ground my teeth. Ben had learned in childhood that taking a beating is nothing so very special anyway and they could make no impression on him, which got them wild.

  During the twelve-hour ride to the coast they took turns at the wheel of the jeep. I was in severe pain with my wrists and Ben was sliding into being unconscious from the beating they give him and from his shotgun wound. We was still in cuffs. They took Ben’s tobacco from him and did not give us nothing to eat. I had no tobacco on me to get taken, but I would not have been able to roll a smoke anyway with my hands behind my back. If I’d had some tobacco I would have tried. While we was driving to the coast I worried what was to happen to Mother and Tip while I was away, and I know Ben was worried what was to happen to Deeds left out there at Coal Creek on her own and pregnant with their child.

  I had had nothing to eat for a couple of days at that time and very little to drink and I was not in a good way for thinking clearly about nothing except wanting a smoke. When we got to Townsville I did not get no treatment in the remand cell for the wounds on my wrists from wearing those cuffs. My right wrist become infected and I could not sleep for the throbbing pain of it. The poison went up my arm and ulcerated. I still carry the scar of it.

  . . .

  They said our trial was a bigger event in Townsville than the annual show and rodeo. I was described as a weak man and a willing follower of Ben Tobin’s evil schemes. I was led by him, so they said, into the heinous crimes that he planned to get his revenge back on Constable Collins for being sent to prison. Ben told the plain truth of it and if they had listened to him they would have seen the whole thing was a mistake and a result of the Collinses’ panic about their daughters and the Collinses’ ignorance of the ways of settling things in the ranges. Ben said straight up, We was riding back through the scrubs from visiting Deeds’ relatives in Mount Hay when we come on the girls in the rock shelter. The smaller of the two girls, Miriam, the one her dad shot dead, was crying and wailing and the other one, the older one, was calm and steady but worried all the same by being lost. Me and Deeds took the girls up behind us on our horses and rode home to our place on Coal Creek with them and Deeds put them to bed and calmed the younger one. We did not have the telephone at our place, Ben told them, and it was our intention to take the girls
back to the police house in the morning after we had given them their breakfast. They was both still sleeping when the constable and his wife come up in the jeep and the wife started blasting at me with that old shotgun of George Wilson’s. Ben said he was sincerely sorry the .22 bullet had killed Daniel Collins but that he was being fired at by Collins at the time and did not expect a single shot from that pea rifle to kill him but only to make him duck away and give himself a half second to dive out of the firing line. It was an unlucky shot, he said, or a lucky one, depending on how you looked at it, as the constable was going to keep on firing and must have hit me sooner or later with one of them big .38 bullets. But no one in the court was paying attention to what Ben was saying and they all just thought he was making up some yarn to save his own skin. The way they would have lied themselves in his position. But Ben was not lying. He was just saying it the way it was. He knew there was no hope of saving his own skin.

  Irie did not show up to set them straight. The Collins family was described as good Christian people, the husband a war hero and gentle father, and the mother a worker for the good of the Mount Hay community, where she revived the tennis club and the women’s social association and helped to defend the Aboriginal women against the brutality of men like Ben Tobin. The Collinses was an unselfish and civilised family, an ideal kind of family they seemed when their lawyer described them, people with only the good of the community and the welfare of their girls in their hearts. Which I dare say was true. Just like the good people of Townsville themselves. It was the kindness and the trusting natures of the Collins family that Robert Blewitt (that was me) took advantage of, and which he then betrayed with the most heartless indecency, luring their daughters into the bush and leading them to where Ben Tobin could capture them and take them to his hideout in the wild scrubs for his own indecent purposes. They never said what those indecent purposes was but everyone thought they knew what they was, because that was what was in their own minds. It sickened me to my guts to hear them say it. I seen my brother Charley sitting in the court one day and when I looked at him he looked down into his lap and I seen he was ashamed to be my kin. I was glad in the end I did not see Irie in the court and she did not have to sit there listening to all that indecent talk. If I had seen her in the court I know I would have felt different about things. Her not being there made it easier for me in a way I did not expect.