by Scott, Kim
Some of Dr Cross’s people stepped further back. They were standing close together, their arms reaching inward to one another, wives and children clutching at their men.
Wunyeran strode around, leapt in the air, shouted. His face was terrible to see, and he ripped his wadjela shirt from his body and tore it with his teeth. He hurled the tattered thing to the ground and stomped on it.
One of the men, Wooral it was, threw a spear. It only just missed Dr Cross and went right through the wall of the barracks. The soldiers lifted their guns, but Cross called out, No no, don’t fire. There were more men with spears than men with guns. Dr Cross kept speaking to Wunyeran, and did not let the soldiers fire. He got one of his soldiers to carry the boy out and then took the limp boy in his arms. Tears on his cheeks, and tears on Wunyeran’s cheeks, too.
It was Wabalanginy, Bobby Wabalanginy. Dead. But Bobby Wabalanginy remembered all this, he will talk about it when he is older. Other people will listen, and they will tell it, too. He was only a small boy then, and he was dead in Dr Cross’s arms. Cross gave the poor little body into the arms of his friend Wunyeran.
And then the body, Bobby Wabalanginy, sat up while the two men’s arms were crossed and still upon him. He sat up in their four arms and then, only a little boy, he climbed up onto the shoulders of Dr Cross, and Wunyeran moved beside his good friend and the boy Bobby Wabalanginy stood with one foot on each of the men’s shoulders holding the hair of their heads. Dr Cross’s hat fell to the ground.
Those two men, with the tiny boy on their shoulders, walked away from the barracks with the soldiers and wives, their children and the prisoners, too, on one side, and the Noongar men on the other. People had stretched out in a line each side to see the boy and the two men, and spears and the rifles pointed up to the sky as Cross and Wunyeran carried the boy who came to be known as Bobby on their shoulders, carried him between them. He stood high in the sky for everyone to marvel at, and he stood on their shoulders.
Not everyone remembered this story like Bobby Wabalanginy did, but he knew no fear, see, and knew it was him, floating from the soldier’s bed in the barracks and floating forever safe above the long guns and percussion locks and caps and even his beloved family’s fighting spears. And he would tell you that he rose even higher into the sky that day, little boy that he was, and saw future graves: Dr Cross and Wunyeran curled together, and two others curled tight, too, a man and a woman: one from here, and one from the ocean horizon. It took him some time, but started then: Bobby looked into future graves, and into some people’s hearts and minds, went into the hollows within them, into the very sounds they made. All his friends and their goodness kept him alive. And he never learned fear, because he was not just one self. He was bigger than that, he was all of them.
And no little boy died in the soldiers’ barracks, not ever. No, they brought him alive. No little boy died when the soldiers and sailors and Noongar lived together, not ever. No no. Never never never.
*
All my friends, old Bobby Wabalanginy would say to the tourists, in between throwing his flaming boomerangs and holding his palm out for their coins. You, my friends, you keep me alive.
All his friends and family kept that boy Bobby Wabalanginy alive, just by loving him, wanting him, and wanting him to stay where he was. Stay in this place.
*
Menak began visiting the settlement again, Wunyeran, too. Cross made no mention of their previous hijinks, for so the vegetable-stealing incident had become. Indeed, Menak was very popular; those soldiers with wives invited him to dine with them one after the other. Cross wondered at the man’s social stamina.
Content after a shared meal, Wunyeran and Cross sat within the glow of fire and candle, heads close and nodding to one another, gesticulating with wrists and fingers, speaking slowly and softly. There was darkness all around; a darkness Wunyeran seemed to fear and Cross did not know. Anyone looking in from that darkness would have seen them as if held in a sac of yellow light. Cross was drinking brandy: not a drink Wunyeran had learned to appreciate, though tonight a few sips eased his discomfort. He had recovered but was still heavily congested.
We are two men of such different backgrounds, thought Cross and, attempting to fuse them, we are preparing for the birth of a new world.
Without a woman? He would turn in his sleep, restless.
They sang to one another. Wunyeran initiated it, Cross accepting. It was a way to communicate, to say more of oneself than was possible with their limited shared vocabulary. Cross sang pieces from childhood, anthems and ballads, Auld Lang Syne and bawdy sea shanties. Nevertheless, his repertoire was soon exhausted, but Wunyeran was enthusiastic to hear them again and again and soon sang along.
Late one afternoon, Cross, Wunyeran, Menak, Killam and some of the other soldiers were together in a hut. Wooral came through the doorway, but hesitated at the edge of the room.
Wunyeran looked up and sang, Oh where have you been all the day, Billy boy Billy boy?
There was a moment’s stunned silence, then the soldiers’ nervous laughter.
Sometimes the hut grew too warm and too close, as if there was not air enough to breathe despite the way, in different weather, rain collected in puddles on the earth floor and chilly air found them however much the fire blazed. On one such stuffy evening, the two men went out under the night sky—not far, because Wunyeran liked to keep fires or light close at hand—and Cross tried to follow Wunyeran’s words of what was in the glittering sky: the origins of different stars, the stories of dark spaces between, the way the sky and its slowly shifting constellations signalled that rain was due, whales would be appearing, emus nesting inland … He told sky stories of how things became the truths they are.
The two men sat either side of the hut’s doorway, the candles inside flickering, and the dark shapes massed around them—huts, a heap of wood, tents, shrubs, trees—contrasted with the sky, which lowered a net of stars to enmesh and welcome them.
You people in England, they die?
The question came after a silence between them and Cross had hardly replied that yes, they did, when Wunyeran, the timbre of his voice eloquent with melancholy, continued that his own people were dying in great numbers. He coughed and wheezed, mimicking common symptoms. Mimicking, but he knew the symptoms too well. He scratched himself.
And what then? Cross tried to ask. What of a heaven and hell? Angels? A God?
Doctor-Sunday-book-paper?
Wunyeran had politely sat through several church services and now, broken English interspersed with his own language and again with song, he expressed something of his elder brothers the kangaroos, and that trees or whales or fish might also be family. Or so Cross understood. The sun was their mother … Cross’s face showed he did not understand.
Doctor-Sunday-book-service, Wunyeran said, smiling at the clumsiness of his own language. It was a new language of sorts they were developing. Wunyeran people dwongkabet.
Ah, Cross understood. Wunyeran’s people were deaf to the church; they did not understand.
Now Wunyeran talk, Dr dwongkabet.
Cross nodded, nodded again, and was suddenly speaking passionately, as if he was a young man again and wanting Wunyeran to know his heart, the weave of his inner galaxy, his Christian beliefs. Wunyeran understood something of how individuals died and went to a place in the sky, but when Dr Cross tried to speak of heaven, and chains-of-being, and of a place of constant suffering within the earth where a big spirit-man sent bad people … Wunyeran laid his hand gently on Cross’s shoulder.
You in the wrong port now, Doctor.
Tongue and paper
As he waded in the warm shallows at the south side of the harbour, each of Wunyeran’s shins momentarily became like the bow of a boat pushing a tiny wave before it, or the point of a spearhead. As his weight shifted onto the foot, the water eddied, and suddenly there was no wave, no bow, no spearhead. He stopped, wriggled his toes and sank deeper into the sand. Calves, ankles an
d feet were slightly to one side of where they should be. Below and above the sea’s skin did not quite match. As if there were two people, not quite the same, one visible only below water, one visible above. These legs, so dark and thin, might be spears, oars, gun barrels, even.
Wunyeran weighed the spear in his hand. He was wading in seawater, and yet there was land all around except the one small gap way over there toward where the sun rises and the boats slide through onto the white sandy beaches like lost whales. And those boats come and go, come and go with their oars and gun barrels and oh the things they bring.
From up on the hills this land-encircled ocean looked like a lake, a plain of glass: a great pane of glass, a looking glass, even. And Wunyeran, up close now, motionless, waiting for the water to settle, saw part of his reflection but also, behind the reflection, that the sand was not white, but coloured like bark or ochre. Why? Because the water is dark. Why? Is the bush staining this shallow part of ocean? Or is it the smoke, colouring the light and therefore the water, too? The questions you ask, learning a new way of speech. How it drives your thinking.
He had begun to collect leaf, feather, bone and, pressing some of them between sheets of paper, to mark the days by them. Why?
Smoke, way up there: someone hunting along the ridge between him and the open Southern Ocean. More wind up there, and his brothers would be poised at the edge of tendrils and thick loops of smoke, the fire roaring and crackling in the scrub, and bodies crashing, rushing to meet their spears.
And why he not with them?
He had run across the hot burnt earth in boots, with shirt and trousers sticking to the ochre and oils and sweat of his skin. Naked now, but. Barefoot and wading in sunlight and salty water with the weight of a spear in his hand.
He gazed at the rippling water, the ribbon weed barely swaying at his feet and sometimes the sandy ripples marking the ocean bed. Lifting his eyes, he saw high above and in the smoky light the clouds spread across the dome of sky in the same pattern as the sand beneath his feet. But the clouds were edged with blood. All the things you can’t collect and press, that won’t slip between sheets of paper. Today the light was smoky, and the water, and so, too, the sandy floor of this shallow ocean with its shape of the water’s movement made solid enough to look at and study. But the sand could no more record his passing than could the water, the air or clouds.
His footprints disappeared.
And these words hold barely a trace of Wunyeran’s voice, yet so much of the others who came as strangers and were surprised more than once at what marks could be found and what could be realised from them. Just as no mark of his passing remains in the water, so there remains little trace of his tongue in the air, or these hills around him and sky, these clouds … But surely if we paused, listened long enough …
Wunyeran and his brothers, his fathers and uncles, waded here at night and, separated by darkness, the light of their firesticks shimmered and danced on the water; laughter bubbled, a fish plashed. Sounds—a tiny voice, disembodied, an invisible dog barking—skimmed across the surface from the far shore, that scatter of tents, the huts of timber and pale mud, the boats straining at their ropes. Here, Wunyeran and his family were held within the hum of fire, within the sputter and cough and tiny tongues of flame. The lapping and chuckling ocean ripples.
Today there was sunlight and high open sky and space all around Wunyeran—like being in a boat at sea but for the rhythm of his step and his breathing. The land was close behind him, its tall trees and stony ridges keeping the wind mostly high overhead, but every now and then it swoops down, whispering, ruffling the water’s surface.
They call this place harbour, this body of ocean surrounded by hills and held within earth hollowed like a grave that their boats sail into. They collect on the other shore, blown there by the wind.
Boats, clothing, dogs and guns … Even the food they eat. Interesting. Wunyeran’s lips and tongue shaped their words now, and their songs, Oh where have you been all the day …?
Heads snapped up when he sang like that. Surprise, and hurt, too, shows on their faces when we walk like them, fold our arms, cross our legs. Speak their way. When we be like a looking glass, and show their way back at them.
Across the lapping sea, at the mouth of a harbour, Wunyeran saw the fine mist, silver in sunlight, of a whale’s spout.
Something moved across the patterned sand at his feet.
Kitjel don.
His spear missed.
Death and spirit
The Noongar would come and go; for weeks on end there would be no one, and then suddenly Cross’s hut was full of Wunyeran and his brothers. This time, Cross heard Wunyeran’s coughing well before he ever saw him. He stayed a night, went away and returned a few days later, almost carried by Menak and that young boy with them again. For several days he lay beside the fireplace, shivering but hot to touch. Now and then he spoke very rapidly, or sang, but not to anyone in the room with him. And sometimes there were several there to listen, because elderly men of his own community and even some of the soldiers came to see how he was, show they cared.
Cross tended him as best he could, while Menak watched closely. Menak wanted to take Wunyeran back to his own people and, presumably, their own wise people’s attention, but he could not travel just yet.
Early one afternoon he rolled his head to gaze at Menak and Cross. And said something, Wabalanginy, perhaps? Then his head lifted from the pillow just a little, and his eyes rolled back under their lids: one moment alive and focused on Cross and Menak, the next like glass. Was that goodbye?
Dr Cross watched as Menak, sighing deeply, placed his palm against his brother’s cheek. He arranged the body: raised the arms and crossed the hands near the neck, tilted the head forward, drew the knees up to the chest. Finally, he pulled the lower legs and feet closer against the thighs, rolled the body onto its right side and wrapped the blanket completely around it.
Menak turned to him demanding, Peer, peer.
It took Cross a moment to understand; Menak wanted to spear someone as payback for his brother’s death.
Of course, Cross could not allow that. After all, who might he wish to spear?
Menak signalled the sun’s path across the sky to show he would return the next day, benang. He wanted the body to remain just as it was, until the burial. Then he left.
Cross remained by his friend and prayed that a merciful God might admit so refined a soul through the gates of heaven, despite the many—not knowing him—who would say heathen, and insist he was but an uncultivated savage. What good was Cross’s science when it could not save his friend? What good was it to be civilised, when he could offer no more help than could this poor fellow’s own brother? Wunyeran had returned here to die, not to be healed.
Did God watch over them all?
Cross stayed by the body for hours. He prayed, he read the Bible. He sipped rum. Prayed again. Got to his feet and stood swaying. He could not stay beside this body, all that remained of he who was Wunyeran.
A little boy peered around the corner of Cross’s wattleand-daub hut, clad only in an adult’s cast-off shirt, and mouthed the very prayers he heard mumbled. He slipped away from the doorway a moment before Cross stumbled through it, and even though it was now dark, and many of his own people would’ve been wary of leaving their campfire, Bobby followed Cross’s assistant to the hut and so saw—his lips parted in horror and wonder—the man straighten the limbs and lay the corpse out flat, in the European way.
Bobby was there again in the morning, learning the curses Cross uttered as he tried to return his deceased friend to his original position. But the limbs no longer moved the way they had, and the body was not as it should be. Cross wept. Cross swore and cursed and sobbed so that his body shook and the sounds came from deep within. Watching, the boy moved his limbs like a dead man, tried that style and so began his mastery of the Deadman Dance.
He was a good man, Dr Cross. But no wonder Wunyeran’s spirit never depa
rted the proper way.
Morning. Soldiers carried Wunyeran up the slope and deep into the shadow of the hill where the rising sun had not reached. They gently laid the blanket-wrapped body upon the ground, and soldiers’ shovels, directed by Menak, cut the earth to make a sharp-edged hollow the size of the oldest Noongar graves.
Menak had them shovel the soil to the southwest corner and, when they stood back, he crouched and carefully shaped it with his hands. Bobby looked at the harbour further down the slope and the hills on the other side; looked from harbour to grave and back again. One echoed the other.
Menak got the soldiers to fetch certain bushes, and he and the Noongar men put these in the grave, and then laid Wunyeran’s body on its side upon this bed of bush, facing the sunrise. Menak pushed soil from the lower, northern side of the grave and it spilled over the body until the grave’s surface sloped gradually for the morning sun to warm it and the cold wind to pass over. It was like a good camping spot, although a small one.
Menak swept the grave with a branch and laid a broken spear upon the smooth surface. Pushed a spear thrower upright into the earth. Made a little fire. He and the other Noongars sang in the smoke, the white men stood with heads bowed, mumbling as the shadow finally receded and sunlight flowed onto the grave so that the flames disappeared and the smoke looked so thin … Everything there and not there, all at once.
They went back to the Captain’s hut, soldiers and Noongars together, and ate ship’s biscuit and a little salt meat.
That boy? Cross asked, seeing him all of a sudden though he’d been there all along. Bobby?
Yeah, Menak said, Wabalanginy mummy daddy they finish. That grave one now? He uncle him.
That was how people said the words, then. Them days.
There were small piles of clothing where the Noongar had been. They had shed their English dress; were gone.