That Deadman Dance

by Scott, Kim

  With two ships at anchor in the inner harbour and two public houses keeping many sailors’ lips wet, it was a long way from the genteel welcome to the country that a good man’s wife and family might have expected.

  The grey shingle and whitewashed cottages are a picture and so subtle in the soft afternoon light, the Governor and his wife said. And to overlook the harbour like this … They shivered, pulled their cloaks closer about them. The harbour waters held daylight, or so it seemed because look how it glows blue even though the sun has gone and the sky is darkening.

  Voices came from close by, loud in the still, chill air; voices singing, drunken and raucous.

  We are not many, Mrs Chaine told them, wanting to speak so those voices would not be heard. All her husband could say was these sealers and whalers and sailors are mostly our guests.

  You must dine with us, said the Chaines.

  I see we will need to adjust ourselves to our new circumstances, the Governor’s wife afterwards said to her spouse.

  The Chaines took Governor Spender and his good wife Ellen to the little bush hut Cross had built at Kepalup which did not even have the wattle-and-daub walls and she-oak shingles of his building in town. They made the journey in Chaine’s new whaleboat (of local timber, he could not help but proudly say, and built by one of my men) and the Governor and his wife pulled in their chins and shrank as they passed the fish-traps and the thin figures with their spears and went to where the river water was so dark. And where, just upstream from where Bobby met the boat and secured it to the bank, a small weir made fine sinews in the river, and a thin trail of foam and bubbles, like someone’s hacking cough had left spit and phlegm in the water. But the river on the rocks sounded like someone laughing softly. Chuckling. As rivers and people do. The same.

  The Governor politely spoke of the trees, the grassy bank, this quaint path … The path maintained, he heard whispered, by many bare feet before us.

  Chaine clumped his feet on the ground. And now our own boots, he added. But we are not enough, and will put down stone and with hatchets make a future for already they grow few …

  Bobby was watching.

  The coughing has taken very many away.

  The Governor looked at this boy, past him. His pale eyes took in the little hut and Bobby, twisting, trying to look with those same eyes, saw the sheep held in a pen of rough posts and limbs and twigs, the leaves still drying. A fence which scratched and rustled in the breeze. The yellowing, scraggly vegetable garden.

  Skelly was at work and, trudging heavily, seemed like a bullock. With arms outspread and moving as if signalling with flags, Chaine indicated the timber frame Skelly had erected, the trees that had been felled, the wall down at the riverbank—there—that held water from a natural spring deep enough for stock to drink their fill. His eyes sparkled, and it seemed he wanted to break into laughter but Bobby, following people’s gaze, saw Mrs Chaine turn away from her husband and glance sideways at the Governor and his wife. She is sad, thought Bobby, as her eyes, again sliding away, caught his gaze for a moment.

  Their guests looked away from Skelly and Chaine and their achievement, and at the trees standing all around them. Talked of King George Town.

  We walked to the top of the hill above the village, they said, and saw we were surrounded, one side by ocean, and the other by grey-green bush rolling as far as the eye can see. You might drown in forest, sink and never be seen.

  Such delicate wildflowers we have seen there, they said, taking comfort in detail that, isolated, might be pressed between the pages of books.

  Chaine thought the whaleboat would sail them back, and they left late afternoon. The sky was low and grey, and the water of Shellfeast Harbour was grey, too, with some yellow hue of sunlight trapped in the shallows. The wind dropped, and Bobby saw there was rain in the ladies’ hair and bright drops on the wool of their clothes. This fine rain—mitjal, meaning tears—jewellery drops reflecting the moonlight when the clouds lifted. They rowed and rowed and thought they could see the dark mass of shore across the water. But the wind came up and blew at them, and the ladies were seasick, even though this was quite sheltered water, and it seemed they would never reach that shore, let alone arrive back at the sand and briefly cobbled streets of King George Town.

  Finally they reached solid, gleaming sand, but were still inside the mouth of Shellfeast Harbour. Seeing as how the ladies recovered once their feet were ashore, Chaine thought they might walk and he instructed his men to take the boat as best they could to King George Town Harbour. He expected he would see them in the morning, and they would have a late night themselves because there were still a few miles yet to walk. The Governor’s old war wound meant he could not walk even that distance, and he went with the men in the boat.

  Perhaps it was the difficulty of their journey from Kepalup, or they may have strayed from a straight path, but the ladies stumbled, and it was understood that they must rest. Geordie Chaine spread his long coat for them, and they lay together, the Governor’s wife saying, Please do not leave us, Mr Chaine, you have been too kind, sir, but really I must lay myself down …

  Perhaps she also thought Chaine was like a rock. You could break against him, cling. A thing of strength, that nothing could shake.

  Bobby had slipped away, but the cold made the women prefer to be on their feet again walking, and they found themselves moving closer and closer together, and held one another for support, and stumbled again and again, bushes sprinkling them with silver drops like confetti. Not until dawn, just before sunrise with the sky lightening and space growing all around, did they walk down into the valley of the settlement, and the harbour was a great shallow bowl glimmering before them.

  The wind had again dropped. The boat had arrived before them, after all, and here was the Governor, fully clothed, asleep in a chair in their hut.

  Still numb and sleep-thickened later that same day, Chaine showed them a mound of earth and a cross newly erected on one slope of the valley that led away from the harbour. A Dr Cross cross. Solid, freshly whitewashed timber. A timber rail around that. Letters that had been neatly chiselled and darkened:

  DR CROSS.

  A FOUNDING FATHER.

  PASSED AWAY 1837.

  The man you succeed, Mr Chaine said. The Governor’s wife may have given a little shudder. Chaine did not say it was a shared grave. That the man had asked to be buried with a native, Wunyeran. They saw how the Governor had looked at Noongars, and stood away. How could they explain?

  Bobby, hardly noticed and with them again, realised Wunyeran’s name was not on the cross. Why?

  *

  Governor Spender moved out to The Farm and away from the community of King George Town. With so many people in his family it was almost like he made another little town altogether separate from King George Town out there where Soldier Killam used to live nearly all the time on his own. Most of the people at the port walked out to The Farm for a special occasion of flag raising and firing guns and planting trees. A tree will be planted, the Governor said in his speech and pointed. Although it was only small, you could see the storybook shape of it already. Norfolk Pine, the Governor named it. It was only a small crowd really, Governor Spender and his people, Mr Chaine and his, an old soldier, a cobbler, a few merchants and sailors and landowners, ex-soldier Killam and ex-convict Skelly, some wives and mothers and children … A group of Noongar people, too. Governor Spender was accustomed to public speaking and, taking his time, he looked around the small crowd and saw Bobby. The Governor beckoned him, and for once in his life Bobby was slow to understand and so did not respond. The Governor put down his shovel (he did not use it like the other men) and walked toward Bobby. Some people wondered what he was going to do. Was he angry? He brought Bobby back with him and together—both pairs of hands lifting, each taking a turn on the shovel—they planted the tree.

  A memorable day, Governor Spender said. I am the King’s representative and … He gestured at Bobby Wabalanginy and eve
rybody started clapping. Bobby gave a bow, and the applause increased. Bobby smiled as big as he could, looking at the Governor’s son and his two black servants (is that what they were, those two?). He felt very proud.

  When Bobby was a very old man he would tell tourists to go look at that towering tree. And shake his head.

  I was only a little boy, he said.

  *

  Geordie Chaine took charge of the bar of the public house he’d hired Mr Killam to manage. He even shouted a round of drinks when Mr Killam returned to celebrate their new business arrangement.

  It was a low-ceilinged and dark place, cramped enough to suit the habits of the seagoing folk who were its main customers. It did not yet have the great whale jawbone within which Chaine in later years would stand and command his clientele, but there was a fireplace at one side of the room, and at the other a bar and wall of stone. A grid of wrought iron attached to the wall could be folded over the bar to make the grog safe from the hands of the many who would walk through any wattle-and-daub housing presumptuous enough to think it alone could stop them.

  And Mr Geordie Chaine now also had a farm managed by Mr William Skelly (who swelled with pride when addressed as such by Geordie Chaine, and then despised himself). The farm, Kepalup, was out of town just beyond the edge of Shellfeast Harbour, on a river leading inland to the mountains, a branch of which apparently ran to yet another sheltered bay to the east.

  *

  Early morning, and Bobby lay half-asleep. An easy day, a lazy day. He imagined the sun beginning to show above the horizon, emerging from the sea between the islands, where the whale paths ran. He’d come from the ocean that same way, and been borne by the wind like a bird. Now he was earth and stone. He could not see the sun, but the pale sky was opening, light expanding from right there between the islands. His world opened around him, each day grew a little more.

  His feet could not take him as far as his eyes might lead … Oh, far enough, but. His piss steamed in the thin morning sunlight. Dew caught the sun. The dark tree trunks, and all around him on leaves and twigs and grasses the water droplets sparkling, so that he was like a spider at the centre of his web.

  The blazing orange magic of Christmas tree, they called it. He stayed clear; a branch fell, a feathered-thing flew heavily from the tree, wings straining in the air as it called Nyu! Nyu! and turned a very human face to Bobby. Its long legs dangled and swung in the air as it flapped away.

  The thin gnarled trunks and crimson blooms of … bottlebrush. For a moment the word returned him to a ship’s door, to a bowl of soapy water and glass bottles. Bobby missed climbing the mast and, like an eagle, looking to the horizon, seeing all, being unseen.

  He wandered to where the view was of limbs of land laying in the ocean, and the islands peeping up saying, me too, me too. All spread like gifts before him at the centre of this sparkling morning.

  He heard footsteps, something rolling toward him. Was stopped dead in his tracks. Felt like he’d been slapped in the face.

  There was a long whiskered face, its tall ears turning and a quizzical expression directed at him. A mule; and the man astride it wore a long coat, bright as a flower, but fading. He had a tall three-cornered hat, shining medals against his chest, and a sword bumping against his side as he went by, unaware of Bobby.

  Bobby stepped back, thin branches fell across his shoulders like comforting arms, and prickly fingers tried to shield his eyes.

  Despite the hat, coat, medals and sword, the Governor’s hair and skin seemed like nothing, almost as if they were made of the sunlight dappling his clothes, and about to be drawn back through the thin and fragmentary canopy to the sky.

  Behind him, two more mules pulled a cart in which two women—mother and daughter?—balanced precariously on chairs. A sharp, sweet scent and stale body odour followed the party. Bobby turned to watch them rattle down the slope. Two young men—dark like himself—sat on the back of the cart, feet dangling. They stared at him, but offered no greeting. So solid, so solemn. Who?

  Standing between them, bracing himself with a hand on each of their shoulders, was a boy not much older than Bobby himself; a red-haired boy who poked out his tongue. Frowned.

  After they were lost from his sight, Bobby listened to the group proceeding down the slope until they were lost from his hearing, too. Later he saw them emerge on the beach below.

  A boat left a ship that was anchored in the harbour. Bobby had not seen this one arrive. The boat rowed to the sand, and its men lifted the women from the cart and mule and carried them through the shallows. They bore the Governor on their shoulders. As they reached the ship a thin, cracking thunder reached Bobby’s ears. Wisps of smoke trailed from among the masts.

  Shooting at the Governor?

  Oh, they must be shooting into the sky just to say hello.

  A Yankee challenge

  Mr Killam was learning what it was to have someone move in on what you thought was your very own home. He thought it was the last straw. The very last. He was back under canvas, and the Governor was planning the rooms he’d add to the main building; a building Cross had constructed especially for the Cygnet River’s Governor’s summer home, and which Killam had later claimed as his own. And now the new Governor’s family was right there, watching the garden ripen. No surplus to hide away now.

  Killam never thought he’d miss the barracks and the company of soldiers and he wondered if he’d done the right thing handing in his resignation. And staying here? It was bad for business having the Governor at The Farm, and how was Killam gunna make his way? And now he had these black boys of the Governor’s. Chaine couldn’t stop grinning when he brought them to Killam and said the Governor wanted them made useful, trained to be capable working men. They’d work for keep, the Governor had said, until they prove their worth. Train them to be useful, they are simply a burden upon me at present. He thought he had enough mouths to feed in this colony and its precarious supplies, without another two.

  Jeffrey and James stood with downcast eyes, dressed in fine clothes which, although shabby, were beyond those to which any working man might aspire. They nodded their heads in reply to Killam’s greeting and listened to Chaine’s plans for them and their life with Killam.

  A solid working life. The Governor wanted them trained to be useful and to have a place in society as workers. Meantime, Chaine said, and it might take some time, we’ll have their labour.

  Well, Killam knew that they’d have to learn to hold their tongues first of all. He didn’t want them talking to the authorities, and best if they never knew the difference between what was legal and what was more in the way of a grey area. If they were clever enough they’d soon realise what could be gained from helping him, and remaining dumb. There was more and more work in this grey area. The reluctance of captains to pay the fee they were charged for entering the harbour meant they anchored outside, and that increased the possibility for tax-free trade. Some called it smuggling, but neither Killam nor his employer, Mr Chaine, used such a term. It was easier to work for Chaine than starting from nothing. And Killam admired Chaine’s ingenuity, his pluck and energy.

  *

  Soldier Killam … Well, he was no longer a soldier. Just a man trying to make his own way. Trying to advance his-self.

  Easy enough to say every man has to sit on his own arse if, like Chaine, you had money to pad the seat of your trousers, but Mr Killam couldn’t afford sitting-down time and had taken to patching his trousers lately. If he wasn’t careful, he might soon be as bare-arsed as the blacks hereabout. Not that these boys of the Governor’s were bare-arsed; a couple of dandies, were Jeffrey and Jimmy. They’d have to prove their worth, and prove they could earn the food he was obliged to give them. The Governor got here with his notion of showing how the natives could be trained to fill the role of working white men, but suddenly realised he might struggle just to feed his own people.

  Big-hearted Chaine stepped in yet again, so soon after buying a dead man’s prop
erty just to help out the poor widow. Killam wished he’d had the chance—and capital—to do the very same thing. Chaine thought Killam could help train the two black boys.

  Killam knew he needed more than his own two hands to properly advance himself in this part of the world. It was handy to have Chaine’s backing, at least until he got some capital behind him, some friends and contacts of influence but—as Chaine showed—he needed to offload labour whenever possible. These two might yet prove useful.

  They were rowing now. Having left where the curve of sand met the rocks in the very lee of the headland, the boat slid softly across the sea’s skin. The boys rowed satisfactorily, and after several brisk strokes of the oars they were beyond the rocky point and the ship’s light was once again visible. Closer still and the ship was an almost menacing presence: a squatting coagulation of darkness that the ocean lapped against, that disturbed the wind.

  The three in the boat were tense. This was a risky business. The oars dipped, the ocean accepted them. The moon lifted its large and yellow self from the dark silk sea. So calm out on the ocean, and warmer than on land. Tomorrow this ship would lie in the harbour with other Yankee whaling ships.

  It would be grand to have a tavern like Mr Chaine. Lucrative too. There’d been enough money passing over that bar the last few days to make up for any high-spirited hijinks the sailors and whalers got up to. But Killam didn’t have a tavern, though he’d once sold grog in a hut. He may once have helped ships into the harbour, and called himself harbourmaster and pilot, but when those positions were made official and put up for tender, he’d not won them. Why? Because he didn’t have his own boat, and maybe they thought he wasn’t good enough with small talk. Maybe because he didn’t have the right connections, the right way about him. Chaine wanted to be first onboard each ship and reckoned he was sharp-witted enough to take best advantage of that—to meet the captain or whoever was best able to strike a deal. Then he gave the task over to Killam, paid him a wage.