That Deadman Dance

by Scott, Kim

  Smoke lifted into the sky the other side of the harbour. Someone hunting? Kaya, Wooral, a voice confirmed. Between the smoke of that hunt and Bobby’s companions, the unfurled masts of two ships at anchor pointed to the sky. So very bare, like trees after a fire. Thin and straight like giant spears.

  Bobby moved away and was alone. Wabalanginy, Menak had recently said to him, means all of us playing together. But you often go alone. And we cannot always be playing.

  Bobby turned his back on the harbour, and as he did the wind ruffled the water’s surface and gave him the gentlest push up the slope toward the morning sun. It pleased him to read the wind so well. The loose sand shifted under his feet. Soft sand often meant graves, but there was only the one grave here. He paused. In later years, long after Bobby Wabalanginy and the span of this story, we might call this a significant site, a sacred place, and that’s just how it was for young Bobby, standing there thinking of Wunyeran and Cross.

  Dr Cross had arranged his friend’s burial, allowed Menak to instruct the soldiers how to prepare the grave. Dr Cross had cried and years later, as he lay dying, had asked to be buried with Wunyeran in the same grave. Bobby Wabalanginy imagined their bodies rolling toward another as the flesh fell away, bones touching, spirits fusing in the earth.

  He worried for them because of all the digging for buildings and rubbish that went on in King George Town. He thought of those two boys Geordie Chaine shot, their skeletons lying somewhere toward where the sun rises.

  But the shooting was a memory Chaine had bidden him put away and never mention to the people of King George Town.

  Floods would carry away the bones of Wunyeran and Cross. All along this coast of ours, bones were plucked from riverbanks and tumbled together to the sea. All those bones of ocean.

  Bobby continued walking against the flow a flood might take, onto the granite hilltop and along its ridge. Saw The Farm, its buildings and fences. And oh how the storybook tree he and the Governor planted had grown. Although still tiny at this distance, it was tall beside the hut of The Farm.

  He went across the edge of the old yam field (fenced) and up among the granite boulders and their bubbling spring. Beside a small fire, Menak was attaching a shard of glass to his spear. As grumpy as ever, the old man sat in the smoke, rolled the spear across one thigh of his crossed legs, hardly acknowledged the presence of Bobby Wabalanginy. He did not look up as Bobby said goodbye.

  Boodawan djinang.

  Coming up to The Farm Bobby smelled smoke, saw Manit being unusually attentive to a barely alight fire beside one shed near the house. She must be waiting for flour or sugar for herself and Menak.

  He moved toward her. She was still distant, beyond anything but his loudest shout, when he saw the Governor’s son rushing from the house. Hugh? Looked like he was shouting, angry. Why? Hugh slapped Manit, and she bent away from him. Bobby was running now, and Hugh was kicking dirt over the fire.

  The grass around them was very dry, though Manit had cleared it in a wide enough circle around the fire. They must have been carting straw also, Bobby guessed, because pieces of it littered the ground.

  Satisfied he had extinguished the fire, Hugh turned to Manit. Bobby, his arms around the old woman, saw the surprise register on Hugh’s face, the more so when Bobby slapped him, once, twice. These were ceremonial slaps, not blows, and Hugh’s head barely flicked from side to side, but he was shocked, into rigidity apparently. Very deliberately, Bobby went to the fire and took a longer piece of kindling from among the dirt and ash and blew upon it until it began to glow. He made eye contact with Hugh. Bobby moved a few steps away from the fire. Hugh’s eyes flickered back to where Manit, crouched beside the fire, was obstinately coaxing it to life again.

  It was only the three of them, an awkward sort of triangle, with Bobby at the greatest distance. He lowered his firestick and ignited a piece of straw at his feet. Hugh looked to the nearby paddock and its growing crop, the thin flames spreading, and turned and ran to the farmhouse.

  The yard between Bobby and Manit was alight with thigh-high flame when Hugh reappeared from the farmhouse with two soldiers and Killam. Only Killam had a rifle, but even with a good arm he was never a decent marksman, let alone at this distance, and Bobby felt safe. The men ran to the shed, and out again with shovel and wet bags and bucket of water ready to douse the flames. Already the flames were diminishing as Bobby and Manit, because of the dying wind and the still-green crop, knew they would.

  They looked across the lightly scorched earth at the men with their bags and implements. What makes Hugh the Governor’s son walk with soldiers at his side?

  *

  There were no whales.

  Not at Close-by-island Bay.

  Not at King George Town.

  And, as Bobby now realised, King George Town was a growing village, spreading upward from the shore of the harbour. Might not need whales, the way its people were. He paused at the Sailor’s Rest. No longer was this the only drinking-building. Along with huts of wattle and daub, there were stables and water tanks and buildings of stone. There would be a church, so he’d been told. Further still up the hill he came to the grave of Wunyeran and Dr Cross: one grave for a black man and a white man. The difference in their skin colour had seemed just one among so many other things—but maybe it was the most important, after all. No one said Noongar no more; it was all blackfellas and whitefellas. The grave was surrounded by holes for rubbish. A man with a shovel was poking right into their shared grave.

  Wunyeran’s body, buried in not quite a foetal position, must have begun to dissolve into the earth along with ochre and leaves and ash. The gravedigger’s spade, working its way around Cross’s coffin, broke and chipped Wunyeran’s bones, exposed and disordered the skeleton. It was not like the passion of flood, or a persistent wind lifting the soil to expose bones at the core of country. It was deliberate and careless all at once.

  Of course there was a very bad smell. Bobby told the man to stop and, when he did not, he shoved him. Slapped him. The man left immediately. Bobby sat beside the grave, arms at his sides with forearms lifted and palms raised just as if he were a set of scales, weighing the balance. The gravedigger returned with men of authority, and Bobby rolled crumbs of earth between the thumb and forefinger of one hand, and with the other stroked and smoothed the soil beside the grave as if it were the pelt of an animal. They came at him angry and with loud voices. Hauled him to his feet. Gave him a shove.

  Bobby was alone, and vulnerable.

  None of Wunyeran’s people were present when Cross’s decaying, coffined body was reburied in the new town cemetery, not far from the great granite boulders near where Bobby had once rescued Skelly. Skelly’s bowed head was one of those around the patch of earth where Dr Cross’s coffin was laid and which was marked by not just a cross, but a railing and a headstone engraved:

  DR JOSEPH CROSS

  1781–1833

  SURGEON PIONEER AND LAND OWNER

  1826–1833

  KING GEORGE TOWN WESTERN AUSTRALIA

  It seemed Geordie Chaine and Governor Spender had for once agreed: this was more appropriate to Cross’s important role in the history of King George Town.

  The original, still raw grave was hastily filled. A town dog scurried away with something in its jaws; a cat, hunching its back and showing its teeth, would not be moved. Small bones were left to grey in the sun, be trodden in horseshit and piss and vomit as the town grew and bright moons waxed and waned.

  Bobby roamed the ridges the other side of the harbour, where limestone broke through the thin, sandy soil like enormous old skeletons, and the ocean moaned and spat in the hollows and tunnels in the earth beneath his feet. The moon was old bone in a blue sky, dissolving as the sun rose higher. Clouds gathered in the southwest, drifted to meet a plummeting sun and spread across the dome of sky so that by dark-time there were no stars or even a moon, only a soft and drizzling rain. Mitjal: a rain like tears.

  Deeper in the night the
wind lifted and rain began to drum the earth. It fell and fell and fell; it gathered in the hearts of grass trees, in forks of branches and cups of leaves, in clefts and cavities of rock and small indentations in the earth. Fell, overflowed, and began to move together again.

  Bobby entered a rock shelter flickering with firelight. The little dog leapt to its feet barking so wildly Bobby thought it might burst, until Menak growled it into silence. Bobby had travelled alone and so at first Menak and Manit looked around for his companions, before realising there was no one. Menak’s two younger wives and an assortment of children, mostly asleep, were beside another small fire.

  Manit raged for a while. Call yourself men? She spoke to Bobby, but included Menak somehow. Winyarn, she said, Noonook baal kitjel don. You coward and weakling: spear them! But after a while her abuse slowed and she relented. The white man’s guns, for one thing, and all these strangers and the other Noongars they will turn against us. Fighting will not help us; we would need guns like them, and they are now more than us.

  Bobby had brought his brooding silence into the camp with him. The raw grave, the hollow in the damp earth that had held Wunyeran, his bones. They all felt Bobby’s diminished spirit. He could not smile. He did not dance, he did not speak.

  Menak wanted to know nothing of the white men, anyway. Sadly, he could see their fires from here. On calmer days you could even hear their voices from way over there across the water. He was absorbed, was singing about rain. It was easier to sing with him, softly, than try to speak of this, of all that was happening in their lives and the terrible change of it. That they were spiralling downward, like leaves from a tree, yes, a tree that had already fallen. Cut down.

  Manit—over her rage—struck the fire so that sparks rose and tongues of flame grew and multiplied, greedy in the dying light.

  Menak sang, Manit too, and Bobby, barely moving his lips, traced his finger across the wall of granite beside him, drew something of the trajectory of the tune and the words. Rain ran down granite slopes either side of the valley floor. Water streamed from she-oak slate roofs into earthenware pots, and over the brim, over the brim flowed …

  The open gutter one side of the path sloping down to the harbour spilled over, and the path itself became a growing stream. Rain fell in great bodies, slamming the earth, then recovered, collected its many selves and flowed, chuckling, past flimsy houses and pubs of clay and twigs, swirled around the footings of the stone church awaiting construction, rushed beneath the footbridge built across what was usually a tiny stream at the bottom of the slope. Not a tiny stream today, but. The footbridge—no longer spanning the stream but isolated at its very centre—tilted, leaned, rolled over on its side and was swept away.

  What had been a path was now a torrent carrying twigs, branches and household rubbish. It pushed pieces of building rubble and stones and similar things, rolled them over and swept them to the sea. No trouble at all then, taking bones to the ocean. Always been this way. Bones from riverbanks washed down toward the sea, and only a kindred spirit and tongue can find them, maybe bring them alive again, even if in some other shape.

  The wind scuffed the ocean into whitecaps, and waves raced across the harbour to fling themselves at the torrent rushing to meet them. Fresh and salty water jostled, swirled …

  Did all those bones reach the sea and join a path of whalebones across the ocean floor? Or years later become part of the foundations of the town hall and its clock with ticking faces looking north, south, east and west and, right at the very steeple top, that very great weight: a nation’s fluttering flag?

  But forget it. That’s long after this little chapter of a single plot and very few characters, this simple story of a Bobby and his few friends.

  Had we but

  Governor Spender was disturbed, and said as much. Disturbed and very concerned. The arrogant defiance his son, Hugh, had reported in the incident with the old woman and that boy, you, Mr Chaine, claim to have raised. We might all, along with our property and what we stand for, be put in danger.

  Chaine raised his hand against the accusation. Inserted his other hand between the buttons at his chest. I gave him a little education, that is all. He might still be an asset.

  Hugh, the third at this gathering, reminded them that some three hundred sheep had been stolen from Chaine’s coastal property. Driven away and slaughtered. How many natives must there have been to have devoured them?

  The three men looked into the fire. Raised their heads, met one another’s gaze.

  When I first arrived at this place, said Chaine, we were on friendly terms with the natives, although they were largely disrespectful of our habits and considered their right to enter our huts to be the equal of our own. And they were very numerous. I was the first settler to make a stand against them in this regard. Not Dr Cross.

  They all nodded thoughtfully, the rhythm of Hugh’s nodding head more enthusiastic than that of the two older men.

  It may have been that in the past, the Governor said, we did not dare take steps to secure the offenders. Dr Cross’s reports to the Cygnet River colony say that the natives could muster two to three hundred while he had but nine military. That is not the case now.

  Their numbers are not so large, said Chaine.

  We have police and military and able-bodied men.

  They might have said it all at once, or been led by young Hugh, with Chaine and the Governor merely giving their voices in support: steps must be taken.

  The setting sun a stone

  Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool … Bobby was walking alone, as was his way, and walking beside one of the creeks feeding into the river of Kepalup. Already the waters were slowing, the level dropping. The coarse, soft sand between the shrinking pools was crisscrossed with the prints of many beings, and Bobby moved quickly along it, sheltered from sun and wind by the trees on either side. He came down the rocky slope of water holes, and stayed to clear some of them of reeds, and lay a carpet of leaves not far from the eagle’s nest. The old bird studied his efforts.

  Not much further and the creek joined the river, and Bobby kept to the old path along the riverbank until he reached the tiny bubbling spring that fed it, and that little stone wall Skelly had built so that come summer it might be closed off for Chaine’s sheep. On one bank their footprints had cut away all the earth. Chaine’s horses would drink here, too. His hunting dogs and his workers. But what about Noongar people?

  The old trees still leaned over the riverbank. Further upstream he saw the eagle watching from its bough. A mallee hen emerged from the dense forest of jam tree the other side of the river, and returned his gaze for what seemed a long, cheeky time before it retraced its steps, disappearing into the close ranks of trees. Bobby turned up the bank and again paused as a family of emu studied him, and then—it seemed a little resentfully—strode off and vanished into the trees. So he was known here still, in this place where his people had always walked. Not so alone then.

  But what about those people up in the farmhouse he’d known pretty well all his life? Did they still want to know him?

  Neither William Skelly nor the man helping him saw Bobby until he was within a few steps. It was a very large hut they were building; the stone walls rose two or more times the height of even a tall man. Skelly’s companion tapped him rapidly on the shoulder, pointing.

  Nigger, he said.

  Skelly’s heavy body turned slowly, his head even lower in his shoulders than Bobby remembered, so that when their eyes met Skelly seemed a glowering bullock.

  Mr Skelly, Bobby said. But Mr William Skelly did not hold out his hand.

  Bobby, said Mr Skelly. The third man watched them closely.

  Are Mrs Chaine and Christine at home, Mr Skelly?

  I’m not too sure, Bobby. But they’ll not be wanting to see you nekkid like that, boy. Hairy balls on show and all.

  Skelly sent away the other man who, looking back over his shoulder a couple of times on his way to the house, seemed abo
ut to break into a run.

  I’m going to King George Town, Skelly.

  You’ll need clothes there, too, Bobby, and no spears with you. Them’s the new rules, see.

  But Bobby knew all these things, and because Bobby was a friend, Skelly went to find him some clothes.

  Bobby shook out the crumpled rags he received. How worn they were. Smelled of mould. Bobby had lived long enough with the Chaines and Dr Cross to know they would not wear clothes in this state. These were used for polishing, or patches.

  They’ll let you in town with these, Bobby.

  Skelly seemed particularly pleased with himself. His companion came jogging back, happier but still nervous by the look of him. He had a gun, primed and loaded.

  Mrs Chaine and her daughter are indisposed.

  Bobby’s people said he should be with Chaine’s daughter; look how Chaine favoured him, and hadn’t Bobby himself helped that family? But Bobby knew old Boss Chaine had his own laws. Chaine and them, they seemed to divide the world up into black and white people, and despite what they said, they put all black people together, and set to work making sure they put themselves in control, and put their own people over the top of all of us who’ve always been here. When Bobby was a child, he and Christopher and Christine … They were together, and they shared. But not now. Christine come close then run away, went back and forward ever since they could be man and woman together. Why? Because he was with the black people? Because he was black? Could only be outside and not at their dance, nor with the horses and wagons and big house?

  Bobby remembered the change in Mama Chaine after the death of her son.

  And Christine? She is also now indisposed? He remembered the girl climbing the tree, the strong tendons behind her knee and the long muscles of her thighs. They said bone from the whale’s throat was used to lift skirts away from such legs, yet still conceal them.

  Bobby took the clothes, walked diagonally across the rectangle they were building, leapt a fence (one foot touched the cap of a post), continued across a paddock where as a baby he’d gone with the women as they dug for yams, and walked down to the river crossing near what Chaine called ‘a set of natural weirs’. There was still a path on either riverbank, but the other side was loose and worn deep from hooves and iron cartwheels. Bobby thought of following the river to Shellfeast Harbour; a boat might save him a day or more. But even if he did find one, it’d be too large for him to row alone, and the chance of finding one with a sail was remote. He wasn’t too good with a sail, anyway. And he didn’t want to steal.