That Deadman Dance

by Scott, Kim

  They were twins, but Christopher was still finding his feet, still getting his balance after that long sea voyage from home. Christine could barely remember leaving; her earliest memories floated on ocean, and she felt as though she had surfed to shore. But Christopher was a buttoned-up, hands-by-his-side sort of child who would now and then stand to attention with his fringe straight across his brow like a helmet, his mouth a thin line. Christine had tended him when he was seasick, emptied his bucket of vomit, wiped his brow. Not that she was a servant to him, or obsequious. No, she was the leader, but she cared for him. Was it at sea then that their relationship had set, or had it always been that she was always the one who decided a direction and reached back to grab her brother, made sure he came, too, so they could later share the talk of it? Like they shared the one room in their new home, its walls of twigs and clay.

  She remembered, not so long ago perhaps since she herself was so young, when their home here at Kepalup had a door of animal skin. One day a native swept it aside and stood proud and tall with an axe and boomerang stuffed into his hair belt. Dangling at the front was a piece of fur and his thingy. He peered into the room, and spoke, but all she understood was, Cross Cross. Children and mother retreated into the tiny enclosed space, but Bobby walked at the man talking blackfella lingo. Outside, Papa had his rifle in hand, raised.

  Bobby laughed, brushed past the man and stood between him and Papa, his back against the barrel of Papa’s gun. Bobby stood between and against them both offering their names to one another and, switching from one language to another, was so animated, so cheerful and delighted in their company that he soon had everyone smiling.

  The naked man went away with Papa’s hat pulled tight onto his head. And he never came back no more.

  Anymore, Christine heard her mother say. Didn’t come anymore. Didn’t return ever again.

  Yes, Missus Chaine tutored Bobby, too, of course. Strange, but at first Bobby was shy, since he didn’t know how he should be with her: look into her face, keep his back turned or what? Whose relation was she?

  She thought Bobby shy. Sweetly took his jaw in her hand one time. Look at me, she said. Look at me when I talk.

  He smiled. Saw how giving his smile meant a lot to her and that, therefore, so might not giving his smile. But it was the same for him, because he wanted to please her, too. She liked him to look at her, but sometimes watched him closely with Christine. Even though he was a boy himself he was formal with Christine, like he was a grown man and she was forbidden him. So he thought, not yet understanding the force that can drive a man and woman together. He was still a child.

  And pleasing Missus Chaine helped him learn the words; the reading and writing of her sound and what those marks might mean. And even painting; he liked the feel of those things, the paper more than the slate. And then, slowly, he came to need the feel of all those small and intricate movements required to build up a picture, a story, a permanence. Came to need the ritual of it, the absorption in the doing of things, and then—stepping back—oh look what had been brought forth. It was like you froze things, froze the fluid shift and shaping, held it. Like cold time. Nyitiny. Like a seed in cold time, and when the sun came out the waters rose.

  Roze.

  Roze a wail.

  *

  The notes went from the piano, through the window, and joined the trembling light which lay over the harbour. Awestruck, Bobby watched Mrs Chaine’s hands closely as she played and then, when she left, sat with his hands splayed above the keyboard, humming, touching, softly moving his lips. Soon he was playing simple pieces by ear, matching sound to the keyboard pattern.

  Mama, called Christine, as was her way, and she rushed to fetch her mother, the two of them delighted at Bobby’s achievement.

  Grace Chaine was also a watercolourist of—as she herself said—some small accomplishment. She took real pleasure in it. Mother and children and their little friend painted pictures from books first, then from nature. They made washes of grey-blue skies, clouds billowed on the paper, clouds that had bellies heavy with rain. And when Bobby made a solid stem, a dark cloud joining ground to sky, and explained it in his own mother tongue, they worked out that the English words for it would be a leg of rain.

  That afternoon three children strode the earth, giants of all creation. On slate boards they played at spelling. But Bobby’s name! His real name. Who could spell that?

  There were few servants, and very little labour available. Mr Chaine had found a man with carpentry skills, best of all one who could work in stone and even metal. Skelly was capable at a blacksmith’s forge, and could also make a boat.

  Now, from inside the house, Geordie Chaine saw movement at the edge of his vision. Three children, Christine, Christopher and black Bobby leaping in the flaws of his window glass, bent and sliding down toward the river over the other side of a patch of open, grassy ground. Damp ground, good soil, and with small holes dug all over it even in the time Cross had been here. It had caught fire in that time, too, just this patch. The children ran, Bobby out front, skipping backwards and facing Christine as she ran up to him. It pained Geordie Chaine to see his boy, pale-haired Christopher, trailing the other two. What playmates were there for his son? What young man might he become in this new land? As for the girl … But they were children yet. His daughter turned to hurry her brother and Bobby scanned their surrounds while he waited. Those blank windows at the house.

  The children ran through soft grass, followed a natural pathway, a path any visitor used after crossing the river. They ran past the fence being built around the garden, its upright posts of Strawberry Jam Tree; the saplings just the right size for a fence post, needing only the weedy branches trimmed. It burned to a fine ash, too. Further down the slope a bubbling spring fed a pool, made a creek, flowed into the river. Chaine planned to build a wall around that spring, make a well.

  I come back from the islands out there, Bobby told his friends, pointing. I come back and speared him in the leg! I rode a boat with a gun in my hand. I stood on the old men’s shoulders and waved down at the soldiers!

  Bobby told them stories, sometimes nearly the same ones Papa told them. Nearly, but different.

  Skelly bringing them sheep back, said Bobby, and he got old Nelly on a lead, (he mimed holding the lead, the weary horse) and all of a sudden all these Noongars standing all round him. Spears mirrel, you know, ready to spear him. He proper scared then, like he gunna mess himself and I, said Bobby, never too modest, I go up and say, This is my friend Mr Skelly and Dr Cross he’s my friend, too. Then Bobby grabbed Skelly’s gun and said, This rifle my friend, too, and held the gun and his hand up like a governor or soldier or Geordie Chaine so they knew he was a strong man.

  Christine laughed at him. Oh yes, so you say.

  And Bobby said, Yes, I say. You know, I jumped over the top of all their spears and over the moon, too, still holding Mr Skelly’s hand, and when I landed I put Skelly on my shoulders and took off. Running like an emu.

  Bobby held his arm, hand up, making it look like an emu’s head and turning around, just a little bit frightened and watchful, looking back as he ran.

  And Skelly sitting on my shoulders backwards so he could watch their spears flying after us, and tell me run this way, that, to dodge them. Skelly on my shoulders backwards, said Bobby, giggling, his feet knocking on my back, his thingy in my face …

  Christopher laughed out loud, Christine opened her mouth, Oh yuck … but Bobby was gone, running down to the river and they ran after him. Bobby pulled rushes from a grass tree beside the spring, and the twins helped him make a carpet of tiny crisscrossed spears. Together they walked barefoot across to reach the edge of the pool.

  The trees were women leaning to the water to wash their hair, and when the children stood under their limbs they were among loved ones. Christine looked up to a magpie, just above her, a grey fuzz of downy feathers on its chest. A parent bird, glossy black and white, landed beside it. They were close, just
beyond her reach, and their gaze held hers. The birds warbled and Christine tried to answer with the sound they made, but they looked at her quizzically. From close behind came the voice of another magpie. She turned and there was Bobby, at her shoulder, magpie-talking, liquid sound bubbling from him. The birds turned their heads, each keeping one eye on them. And stepped along the branch a little closer.

  Bobby sang one short phrase. Christine tried to repeat it, but her mouth was stone and wood, her tongue cloth. Close together, face to face like this, music continued to spill from Bobby’s lips and tongue and bright teeth and then from feathers and sharp beaks, too, as the magpies joined in, their songs merging, swelling, buoying them all.

  At a distance, the bubbling music spilling over him, Christopher crouched by the riverbank. Fins and tails of mullet broke the surface, trees shifted and whispered reassurance among themselves, and the river flowed over stone weirs with barely a sound. The fish here, Christopher saw, could move neither upstream nor down.

  The three children spent most of that afternoon throwing crudely made spears into the water. Twice there was a small spear moving sideways, upright on the surface, twice it toppled from fish flesh before they could grasp it. Small groups of mullet, frightened, eventually leapt from the water, over the stone, out of the pool. Each time it happened the group of mullet in the next pool was a little larger. Yet this pool was smaller than the first, and so the fish even easier to spear. Bobby grinned when Christine tried her spear there.

  Trees bent over them, bowed each side of the sandy pathway Bobby led them along, then straightened again and rose higher as the humans passed. At another bend in the river there was a tiny tributary and Bobby, crouching, plunged an arm below the surface and came up with a handful of red clay. A few steps away he did it again, but this time it was white clay in his hand.

  Christopher was tiring, was too mature for ochre dabbed onto his skin. The bubbling spring held him, how it fell from granite onto sword and sedge, along a cleft running down to the pool. His father, he knew, thought to fatten sheep and cattle beside it.

  They made letters of ochre, three-dimensional at first, then smeared large on bark and rock. Finally, they used their fingers to make letters in the sand. Bobby showed them footprints; did they know the animals that made each mark?

  Alitja, look, he said, showing them some scratches not far above the base of a tree. Possum writing, laughed Bobby. He’s not here no more, he gone along the ground to ’nother tree. Too far for him jumping. See here? he said. Gone up again. There were marks in the trunk, too, rough axe cuts and—Bobby showed them how—you put your toes there. He ran up the trunk, toes finding the steps a stone axe had made.

  Christopher shook his head, looked into the water for mullet.

  Bobby and Christine kept on. Possum home, Christopher heard Bobby say, but he not coming out today. He saw the long white curve of Christine’s leg, that she’d tucked her skirt into her pantaloon and that she and Bobby were in a high fork of the tree, limbs and leaves like a safety net below them.

  Christine thought Bobby was funny.

  Wabalanginy, he said, the name bubbling on his lips. Bobby. He balanced a honky-nut on his head, and she laughed with him all the more.

  She said he should have a real policeman’s hat. Like Daddy said Peel’s men wore on the sleety cobbles of a London she couldn’t remember. She skinned her knee, and when Bobby bent to the wound felt a thrill she’d never known.

  Very close to the possum, but held high in strong limbs and dappled leaf light they heard whispering all around them.

  With the possum cooking in hot ashes and earth, and his sister and Bobby down at the river, Christopher read by the fire. Oh yes, books came, sometimes published only two or three years before they arrived, and sent by much-loved family at home.

  Home?

  Christopher couldn’t remember that home, the mother country. Or not in any way removed from what he read. Where was his knife? Christine had taken that, too. That was from home. It folded neatly away, the blade inside the wooden handle. He was like that knife, Christopher told himself: an innocent exterior, the sharp steel blade hidden out of sight. A knight humble, but valiant.

  Suddenly the valiant knight almost squeaked in surprise, and fear made his heart gallop. One of the blacks—dark beard and hair greased tight on his scalp, ropey scars all across his chest like armour—stood beside the fire.

  Hello, Christopher stammered, and then—remembering Bobby—Kaya.

  The man’s face split into a grin, was made familiar by the smile. He lay his spear by the fire, unhitched some other implements from his hair belt and—since Christopher made no move otherwise—crouched beside the fire and began talking. Occasionally he paused and studied Christopher. Awaited some reply.

  Christopher nodded, grinned and smiled foolishly. No knight, but a jester. Then voices, and in a moment Bobby and Christine burst from the foliage like birds.

  The man said something to Bobby. Bobby laughed in reply, not quite looking at him, and gave him Christopher’s knife. And then the man was gone. Three children remained.

  A smile for Kaya

  Jak Tar heard cicadas and wind in the leathery leaves and even the grass. The unequal crunch of his companion’s footsteps. He had not expected to miss the ocean, or to miss the very sound of water, and found himself walking down to the river once or twice a day to listen to it falling and laughing among the rocks at one end of the pool. The water there was dark, deep, and reeds grew around its edge save where the boats set people and stores ashore. The pool was surrounded by trees that leaned as if seeking their own reflections, or perhaps guarding and protecting its secrets.

  Jak Tar was not accustomed to being inland, nor was he accustomed to being isolated. In a ship it was hammocks side by side and the sounds and smells of companions all around. Here it was just him, bush, and a taciturn William Skelly, who limped around the clearing, busy from dawn to dusk, and kept a gun loaded and close to hand.

  Well, it’s not our home, is it? Skelly said, when Jak Tar enquired, and elaborated no further.

  Skelly was taciturn, but effective enough at communicating what was required of Jak Tar. Jak was to assist him in every way. At this stage, as agreed with Chaine, Jak was fed, sheltered and kept out of the way of the authorities. Skelly himself also liked to stay away from soldiers and officials, he said, but did not elaborate.

  Jak Tar thought of when he sat up in the sand and seaweed and looked into the face of that black boy staring right back at him. Bobby, as he now knew him. Not only his body, but also his mind must’ve been numb that day. He let himself be led to a group of huts. A white Jack Russell ran at him, barking, and a man and two women stirred inside the hut it guarded. They were naked, they were black. Jak Tar turned his head, and the boy took him to a small hut, barely large enough to crawl into. He fell prone on an animal skin, and someone massaged him until at last he was thawing, becoming warm. He must’ve slept for hours, and when he awoke he was alone in the hut with a fire smouldering not far from its opening. He crawled outside and unfolded unsteadily to his feet. A group of natives around another fire watched him stumble away out of sight. What to do now? he wondered, pissing. The little dog trotted up to his feet sniffing, and looked up into his face. He reached to pat it, and the dog spun around and trotted back in the direction it had come. Not thinking, he followed it back to the group by the fire; conversation softly continued. About him? There was food on a piece of soft bark. The senior man said something, and turned his face away.

  I take you to your people? Bobby said.

  No, not the port, not the village.

  Mr Geordie Chaine, then.

  The boy had gone, Jak Tar had retreated to the same hut and sleep, and when he awoke again was alone. The fire had gone out. He listened to waves sighing on the beach, and when it was light walked to the highest nearby point. He was on a sandy isthmus, the landlocked harbour to his left, the open water of a great bay with its headlands and
islands to his right. There was no sign of his ship. He could see the few buildings of the settlement across the other side of the harbour.

  Waiting by the simple huts, he studied the way they were woven together and wondered how long they might last, untouched. Other than the ashes and huts there was little sign anyone had been here, but it was a naturally protected place. Peaceful. He found a spring seeping out of the white beach sand at the base of a granite boulder nearby. He made sure to keep out of sight of the settlement, remain alert. But he was hungry. Anxious. What to do? He kept an eye on the settlement, and watched a boat leave from the other side of the harbour, heading for the channel. It detoured late and came to rest on a beach on the inner side of the isthmus, as close as it could to the campsite from where Jak Tar watched. Bobby leapt from the bow.

  *

  I don’t know nothing about where you’ve come from, insisted the stocky Geordie Chaine. You’ve come to me looking for work, saying you’ll work for your keep. I’ve agreed.

  It was the same fine whaleboat brought him here—Jak handling it although the boy seemed capable, despite his young age—and its sail had driven them out of the harbour, north across the bay into yet another harbour and, eventually, a river. Trees closed over the narrowing water until it was almost a tunnel, and eventually they stopped at a sort of natural lock where a sheet of granite on the bank formed a fine, dry landing. They tied the boat and walked up an open, grassy slope to a couple of rough bush buildings, a surprisingly neatly manufactured timber home, a small sheep pen, and a rudimentary vegetable garden. A man was hammering at an anvil under a roof of bark and rushes. William Skelly.