That Deadman Dance

by Scott, Kim

  Used to be there was no archway, no path, and the hut was tarpaulin and kangaroo skins, so there was no need for knocking; you just pushed the door aside and walked in, and see the wadjela missus looking startled, excited. It made you feel strong, and sorry for her, too. He heard the stories.

  Boss got the soldiers, that place. Rifles and horses.

  It’s different, things change. Bobby stands on whalebone (oh yes, he who will stand on a whale’s back, and have a gun of his own and food given him by the bosses) and pauses, fist raised ready to knock, to marvel once again at how the tiny holes in this door rescued from the sea have merged with the bevels and curves made by a man like Skelly, somewhere.

  The door opens, and Bobby almost punches Boss Chaine on the nose.

  Seen it, Bobby. Chaine shoulders him aside in his rough and familiar way. Boss Chaine, all beard and glittering eyes and bulky like a bullock.

  Chaine knows what he wants. Profits, not prophets. Knows what he wants done because he writes it down first. Some of it, leastways. Him and his lists. They will build a stand for the try-pot; they will make a garden, then tend and weed it. They spread pitch on the boats the Yankees left them. They shepherd sheep, make fences to keep sheep in and kangaroos out. But those yongar leap clear over the fence. Chaine gives Bobby a rifle, and Bobby comes back with a kangaroo and puts it in the fire. He singes the skin first, then buries it in the ashes.

  Now—though the precise boundary of now remains unclear—trees bloom, and a few late salmon can still be seen in the waves. The crests flutter, torn by the wind to look like Missus Chaine’s lace, and you see the fish silhouetted clear and separate from one another. The wave breaks and Bobby thinks to run along the beach, forever and forever beside the breaking waves, the rolling miles and miles of spit and bubbles maybe all the way back to King George Town.

  Of course you couldn’t keep going fast all that distance because of the rocky headlands in between and the soft sandy beach, unless of course you can maybe travel like a fish, and not even Bobby with so much family out there in the sea can do that.

  From the lookout Bobby sees fish in a solid mass, indistinguishable from one another under the skin of sea. He sees how a shark can’t join them, can’t merge because soon as he moves into the school, they break apart. Another thing altogether, shark.

  Bobby knows there’s life under the sea still, like there was at the cold, frozen time. Nyitiny, he thinks: cold time. Nyitang: cold with. Wadjela: white man, away very? The spirit of all those from the cold time still there under the sea’s skin, and their shapes change because the light is different, the sounds are different. Dolphins wave to him as they journey by, show themselves racing the waves, leaping and twisting in the air. Air suddenly all around you as you hurtle from the back of a wave, the fear and thrill of that, and then the crash, bubbles, the world pulling itself close again and hearts beating and the calls of brothers and sisters moving through water thicker than air. Outside and inside, ocean and blood; almost the same salty fluid.

  Bobby crested a dune with his uncles and cousins, and there were fish spread out across the beach; the water left them, suddenly shrank away, pulled back. Uncles said don’t eat them fish. Mullet. Merrderang. Nearly the same word as the word for penis, his people said so, anyways. Dick. Never realised that before. A lot of dicks lying on the ground. Like Chaine’s dick that he wave around sometime, but never with his wife close by.

  And big-dick Chaine (a bubble of laughter bursts from Bobby in his solitude), big-dick Chaine wants whales. And if he wants whales then Bobby knows this is the place where they come close to shore, close enough for him and the other men to leap into a boat, row quickly to them with spears.

  Madness.

  Bobby was excited just thinking about it!

  All the life and spirit under the sea’s skin and out past the horizon, and Bobby gunna bring it back, give it air, haul it onto the sandy shore.

  Every time Bobby walked through the whale jaws he still thought of Jonah, from the Bible story, and that old people’s song. Grab the whale’s heart, squeeze it, use its eyes and power to take you where you wanna be. He sings to himself, that song with one man on a rock next to deep ocean, and a whale scraping its barnacles on the rock. True. He on a rock and right next to him in the water, bigger than the rock he’s standing on, is a whale, breathing and groaning. He steps onto its back and into the spout; he slides down into the cave which must be inside each and every whale. And in that echoing cavern of flesh he sings and hurts its heart, he dances around, driving it to that place further along the coast he heard in story and song. Never been there, never seen it. The whale comes up to breathe and the man looks out through its eye and sees only the ocean, and birds in the sky. No sign of land. But he trusts the song his father gave him, and he makes the whale dive again, and again, and makes the whale take him deep and far. Until the whale takes him onto the beach, and the women on the beach love him and bring all their people there, and they all feast and altogether party.

  In that story the man returns home, his children with him and their two mothers, pregnant again the both of them.

  Daadi man, him. Everybody love him.

  Jonah woulda been alright if he was a Noongar man.

  Come back home rich and your people gunna love you.

  *

  Bobby seen them by their smoke first, and went closer to greet them. Wooral and Menak and Manit and some other old ones who he not seen oh since before his uncle died and he went to live with Dr Cross and now Kongk Chaine. They were in a grove of paperbarks, near the edge of the dance ground, and not far from where the creek rested near the beach, waiting for the rain and the storms to join them all up again.

  They hugged him, one old woman nearly crying to see him. She was so old and grey, so wrinkled and tiny and Bobby was so much taller now that she rested her head against his chest, tapping her palm against his cheek. Wooral and Menak stood close, patting his shoulders and touching him. Manit came and stood beside her old sister. He was tall as her, too.

  Oh! Manit had him by the nose! Had her fingers inside his nose, pinching the flesh between his nostrils and Menak and Wooral held him by the shoulders, and they wouldn’t let him go, none of them. Granny Manit’s fingernails hurt. She held him like that old bull was held. And something very sharp was being stuck into the skin inside his nose.

  They let him go and he jumped away. Looked at them, and fingered the piece of bone in his nose. Understood there were other people he must also be with on his way to becoming a man.

  Jak Tar told Chaine that Bobby wouldn’t be back, not this season leastways. But he reckoned they’d find some other fellas could help with the whaling.

  But not my boy Bobby, too? Chaine first thought of Christopher, then: Oh, you mean he’s gone with the Yankees? Not with that captain!

  No, Jak Tar said, with his own people.

  Chaine felt somehow betrayed.

  Part IV

  1841–1844

  Bobby came home on high

  Bobby came home on the shoulders of brothers and uncles and cousins and, coming home high, held in the sky, he saw things with new eyes. They carried him because he was important, because he was boss and too solid, and (if truth be told) because he couldn’t yet quite find his feet. Eyes, feet; he was different.

  He travelled from river to river and what seemed from island to island until there were trees he’d never seen and family whose names he’d never heard. In these years he learned hard things, and had his strength and nerve tested.

  He ran until he was breathless and his limbs turned to stone, and then ran easily again downhill with limbs flailing, never falling. He lay in icy creeks, stayed with no food or company until he heard voices all around him. Frogs called that rain would spill from the sky like a ruptured bladder. Magpies sang to him and the goanna said, Time to dig yourself out again. When birds moved away he went, too, following them. An eagle in the sky was only a circling speck, and then there it was, just t
he other side of a steep gully. Bobby looked across the narrow space between him and the eagle, and the eagle looked back at him, held his eye.

  Returning home with new friends and family, he was massaged with oils, and his fine, strong and supple self was decorated with feathers, with twigs and tiny nuts, with fur and skin, and he was lifted into the air and supported by those resolved to show him his importance. Bobby trusted, he was supported and held up high. They carried him to await the welcome home of Menak and Manit and laid him on soft animal skin with women either side, and everybody just so happy to see him back again. People filed past in a long line just to see him, speak to him, tell him oh how wonderful to have him back again until Bobby Wabalanginy thrummed with pride and pleasure just being him.

  After days at the centre of this strong circle, he heard an English voice, one he carried in his head but so long since he’d heard its sound saying Bobby. Bobby.

  He thought them all: Christine Chaine. William Skelly. Soldier Killam and them two boys … Kept his thoughts moving: Mr Boss Kongk Chaine. Missus Chaine. Menak and Manit then, but not them because they did not have the sound of the voice he heard, and he realised he was thinking in letters, too, doing the names of people and here MENAK and MANIT did not fit either, and soon as he tried the letters the memories would not come, and the letters broke or moved apart like a boat hit by the whale’s tail, when all its planks just fell apart, floated separate and the best you could do was tie an oar crossways … Jak Tar came into his mind then. JAK TAR, the picture of the letters written like that came along with the memory, his bare feet and stiff pigtail and the grin wrinkling his face up.

  And then as if underwater and heading up to the surface there was light and the skin of the sea and he broke through …

  Jak Tar was sitting on the ground beside Bobby’s campfire, smiling at him, and the lines of his smile led to the pool of each eye. Jak Tar called to him. Bobby, he said. Whales.

  Jak Tar wove rope: a fine line for the harpoon, a line to go from boat to harpoon to whale. The line had to be strong, yet flexible, and being three strands each of sixteen threads it was slow work. Jak not only liked to make it himself, but he liked to stack it, too, since because of a loose loop or tangled line he’d seen men lose a limb or plunge clumsily overboard in pursuit of a sounding whale.

  Jak Tar had always taken pleasure in being methodical, but his present happiness was thanks to Binyan. Who’d have thought, a native woman at that, and at an age when he might have been a sun-dried and salty thing pressed in with his own kind. The only thing worse than sailors in a ship was whalers in a ship; maggots in a floating abattoir.

  Instead, he was beside the sea only a few months of the year. Beside the sea, not on the sea. True, they were wintry months, and not the most comfortable to be at the seaside. True again, it was no Brighton or Nantucket, but it was nonetheless a place where he helped take the mightiest harvest the sea provided and met and mingled with those who sailed her. The rest of the year was his. He was as independent as a labouring man could be, and lived what he called a life of comfort: it was easy to earn his keep, put bread upon the table (though there was not always a table!), and he had the comfort of love.

  Binyan appeared now, entering the tent Jak had made of whalebone, tree limbs and sailcloth. Its roof fairly soared, and when he rolled up the tent’s sides he had shade, a cooling breeze, and a view of the bay to rival Chaine’s. It was a home that served him well for the whaling season, and could be dismantled and stored if need be.

  And Binyan herself! Not a princess, to be sure, not with a name like Binyan and dressed in old sailcloth, cloth she was ready to throw off with hardly a thought for modesty but clever enough to know what a thrill it gave an old mariner like himself to unfurl.

  She was a young woman but worked like a man. Could lean into a shovel or hoe, had learned as much as he knew of horses (which was not much) and then had them doing whatever she wished without ever raising her voice, let alone a whip. She’d led him to more sandalwood trees than he could count, and helped cut and load and cart enough to see them through a month of idle loving; she could provide more shelter than any man with such a lover required, and it was she who found the best grazing when they were shepherding, where poison bush ran thickest, and where dingoes were least likely to trouble them.

  Her hands were cool and, especially given how hard she worked, surprisingly soft. Perhaps that was the sheep’s fleece, or the oil she rubbed into her skin.

  Laughing, she was always laughing, her body rocking with it as she leaned against a horse, or grabbed his hand with her own, as if to make him dance with her.

  They lay in one another’s arms in their high-ceilinged tent with the sides rolled down for shelter and the front opened to a view of the bay and the island below. It was mostly just the two of them at the whaling grounds this time of year, though her family might drop in at any time. It seemed he had no say in that. He preferred the place to themselves.

  Not much chance of that, since Chaine was planning a fine home here where he’d lost his boy and until now been happy with canvas and whalebone. Reluctantly, Jak admired the man’s ability to acquire and develop. This was a fine anchorage, and if Chaine’s boasting was to be believed, the extent of his trading would soon rival that of the Cygnet River Colony, let alone King George Town. It was all due to him, he’d tell you with no need for prompting—the force of his will and his energy. He could be a regular pain in the arse, Chaine. Of course he’d profited from Jak Tar, same as he had from everyone he knew. The thing was, without him, none of them would be able to make a living here except, of course, the blacks. Binyan’s people. Well, if they needed to make a living, and not just live.

  Ships called in all year round because the sleepy government-fed port of King George Town charged such exorbitant rates (theft, the sea captains called it) for its anchorage, and yet was nervous of sailors and rum and almost any flicker of life that sailed into its drowsy hollow.

  Jak liked it here, but this woman-girl of his wanted to be up and gone. These past few weeks, ever since they’d come back to the whaling grounds, she’d suddenly up and disappear. And now she wanted to be gone again.

  He be back maybe, was all she said. Wabalanginy Bobby man now, your brother. Him a man now. Young man. Them girls lost their promised mans, ’cause too many old people—young ones, too, but—dying. He a clever man Bobby Wabalanginy baal kaditj koombar booda mabarn ngan demanger wanginy …

  Jak Tar had to slow her down right then. He might be a good listener, and even learning her lingo, but he couldn’t understand everything.

  You him brother, she said. Manit say … She was laughing in his face: delighted, excited. The detail of it made no sense—he guessed it was something to do with the way old Manit had adopted him, Jak Tar, and arranged things so he might get together with Binyan. It was hard to follow; anyone might be brother or sister, any uncle also a father, any aunty a mother. They were such loosely applied appellations.

  Appellations! As he followed Binyan, Jak Tar congratulated himself on the use of such a word. He might be living at the very bottom of the world, and among those others would happily call savages, heathens, Indians or blackfellas … (Nobody except they themselves said Noongars and there were far more names than understanding.) Jak may have learned something of their tongue—more than most bothered—yet had lost none of his way with English.

  If they were to stay together, Binyan would need to have less to do with these people, her people. For the sake of the children they would have. A surprise, really, that she was not yet pregnant. But Binyan was leaving, and he called out for her to wait. She turned, smiling, her head tilted.

  Biirdiwa, she said. Not a word he’d want to write down; how the blazes would you spell it? Though in his mind the boy he remembered became Biirdiwa Bobby, though she used the name Wabalanginy. A mouthful of sound, that one. But how long since he’d seen the boy? Or was he a man now, as Binyan seemed to be saying? As a boy he’d been
as quick with his mind as he was on his feet. What would he be as a man?

  Anxiety flickered in Jak Tar’s gut. What about his own yet-to-arrive children? What opportunity would they have, with a black mother and a runaway for a father? Jak Tar knew enough of British ways and, as much as he’d all his life loved its people and its institutions and its justice and in his childhood had run home with lard from the royal kitchens where his Aunty worked and … Well, he knew what he knew and Jak Tar would wager that whatever Bobby’s talent there’d be precious little place for a black man as the settlements grew. Though it was a wager he’d gladly lose.

  It was Jak Tar’s responsibility to make sure their boats were well maintained, well manned and well stocked. It was a responsibility he revelled in and took seriously. He’d run his hand over the boat, tracing each of its long, thin curved planks and was embarrassed to notice Bobby copying him. He wondered if he was being mocked, but it was just that Bobby was trying to see things as Jak did. That was Bobby for you: trying to get into other people’s heads.

  *

  Jak Tar trained Bobby, and oddly enough began with description, putting the boat and its equipment into words. The boat was as long as about four or five tall people laid down in a row; its width about the same as an older child (say you, Bobby, just a couple of years ago) laid across it. Twenty-six feet, by four feet ten, Jak Tar told him. The other men, experienced in whaling, noticed the precision and the care he took. Six men to a boat, Jak reiterated, as if Bobby had not seen them hunting, and then pointed at the bow. The harpooner up front, see? And the steerer at the stern, with his great long oar, and probably four men between them, rowing.

  And what was in each boat?

  Jak Tar wondered if Chaine was using Bobby to keep an eye on his own dutifulness, or wanted him to take over his own role.

  There was a tub between the centre seats—thwarts, Jak had told him, and Bobby afterwards always used that very word—and in it some four hundred feet of very flexible line, carefully woven and tarred and thick as a man’s thumb. Near the tub was an anchor, and in some boats a cross of heavy wooden planks to be lashed to the end of the rope if the whale was strong enough to have taken its entire length. A barrel contained some weight of biscuits, and another held fresh water. (We might finish up a very long way from shore, my boy.) There was a ship’s lantern, and candles, flints, steel and tinder sealed in a tin box. There were bowls for baling, one or two buckets to be thrown overboard as sea anchors as the whale hauled them along, a hatchet, a knife, and a small mast and sail. The sail might also serve as a sea anchor. And of course there were harpoons and lances with their wooden handles.