by Rohan Wilson
Best you put that away, she said.
Sorry missus, I really am. I never meant—
There’s been enough of that this past night.
Yes, she said, yes. She looked up at the nursing woman, her dark eyes wreathed in white. What happened last night? she said.
Bloody drunken fools tearing up the town, the woman said. Angry about that levy they don’t want to pay.
They did a job of it, Caislin said.
My word. And a job of each other.
She reset the hammer and lowered the gun and wedged it behind her back. At the tent where the wounded lay on cots many of the men had begun to cluster, to speak in conference, now and then one of them pointing at the hooded girl. Caislin did not like the look of it.
If you see an Irishman, she said, a chap carryin a walkin stick, a chap with a strange way about him. If you see such a man, would you tell him I’m lookin for him?
I will.
Thank you.
She started off towards the gate. Crossing the lawn she was met with a chorus of whistling and bitter howls from the men and she picked up her pace, ducking under an elm and scaring up galahs and other birds, whose noise momentarily drowned them out. At the gate she stopped and looked back. No one had followed. She was damp and the cowl stuck to her cheeks. She laid her forehead on the gate as she let her breath come back.
• • •
She moved on, towards the greasy river over the way. The cowl seemed to grow ever more suffocating. Her breath churned inside it. She passed the gasworks factory where the chimney stack cast a precise black stain upon the earth and she crossed the road and came to riverbanks dressed with grass and stands of reed. Ahead the river in its furrow carried a dead cat floating by. She sat in the grass rubbing her thighs and gazing along at the wooden bridge span. There were people moving on it, and police, darkly shaped against the shell-blue sky.
Where are you, Pa? she said to the river.
She buried her face in the crook of her arm.
After a while she slipped O’Malley’s bulldog pistol out of her belt. It was British made and took a .44 calibre shell in the revolving barrel and it was loaded with all the rounds she had. She held it in her palms. She thumbed the cylinder around until the charge was aligned against the hammer. The finish on the trigger guard was worn where it had once sat in a holster, rendered back to bare metal. She reset the cylinder. Then she levelled the bore against her temple.
The river sloughed past bronze with a glaze of sun. On the bridge a horse cried out. She closed her eyes. A dull unending ache pulsed in the cave-dark of her innards. She pulled off the hood, tossed it on the bank, and let the breeze play upon her neck. Each crank of the mechanism as it turned ticked through her skull. The hammer clacked back and locked. She maintained the gun above her ear and soon the weight of it set her arm trembling. She would fall on the grass, her limbs made slack. Sink like a long sigh into nothing. A last breath then a long dreamless sleep. But at her innermost, lodged like a rifle ball in her heart, was a hardness. It would not crush nor would it dislodge. Her finger found the trigger. Settled there. For a long time she sat in the full sun watching that silty stretch of water. Wanting an end of pain.
But there were Ashley and Brannah alone and waiting.
At length she let the gun fall.
A pair of rats bellied from a hole in the reeds leaving an outward flare of wake where they broke. She watched them swim downstream in the mud-brown river. After a time she stood and adjusted her pants, reseating the pistol at her back, and reached for the hood and yanked it on. Stepping out of the weeds she found the road, a sad and dusty gutter, and looked either way along it. She began to walk.
JACK KETCH
WHEN JANE HALL REACHED ST JOHN Street she was breathing hard. She stopped and leaned on her knees. She needed to find the hangman and she thought she knew where he might be but crossing through town was proving difficult. Away towards the church of St John along a hundred yards of double-height stores and hotels a strange spectacle played out. Territorial police from other districts had begun to sweep through on horseback and they cantered up and circled and drew their great long batons. Hall sheltered in a yard and kneeled where she could see them pass. They rode big horses, the colour of sand; they seemed to dissolve inside the dust they made. Their mounts skipped sideways like cattle dogs, heading off men who broke. The constables atop held grimly to the reins and yelled. Soon they had assembled before them a group of cowering men and women. At length the crowd was turned and the territorials pushed them along the black iron pickets by Prince’s Square and the crying and the calling began to fade.
She moved on through the central part of town. At Johnson’s grocery the doors were kicked in and Johnson himself was squatting in the footpath. Looters carried off his barrels, his sacks and tins. He looked up at Hall and he seemed bewildered by these events. Blood from a broad red wound in his brow ran and dripped off his jaw. He sat in the dust. He lay over. In the year before he died, her father had bought her to Johnson’s for a pair of boots with money in his pocket from the railways, and Johnson had slipped the boot over her wasted foot and laced it with a tender sort of embarrassment while her father stacked some coins onto the counter. They’d walked out and left her old shoes behind. Such a day, such an hour, as would never come again, walking the streets to the squeak of new leather, holding her lost father’s hand.
But the town in which she’d lived her sixteen years of life now seemed outlandish. Mad scenes played everywhere. There was the druggist that was a charred hollow smoking in the sun. Hordes and hordes of people roaming unchallenged. Men with clubs, dogs, ropes. Women drinking in the roadside or laid out cold. The whole scene adorned by wreaths of black smoke and broken glass in the dust alight with sun. For a moment she could not place herself. She limped through an intersection and stopped and she stood for a time, unsure. When she looked back Johnson was lying as before, staring, and his eyes stood whitely from the red mask of his blood. She moved on.
From laneway to shadow she went along Brisbane Street where the fighting had been the worst. An unnatural quiet ruled here. The road mottled with the black pits of fires. She picked her way and when she reached the park at the end of the road she realised she’d been gritting her teeth the whole length of it. Her jaw felt locked shut. She entered the park near the fountain and the glass conservatory. The Rechabites had raised their gaudy tent that they might dole out soup to the drunk or wounded and recruit the worst of them and she crossed the crisp brown lawn to where she knew she would find John Bunyip propped inside probably holding a mug upon which he’d be blowing like a baby. She hobbled up and they all looked around, all the wounded and bandaged, and the attendant women. Sure as shit Bunyip was in the tent too. He sat tenderly up on his elbows when he saw her. He waved her inside.
Did you see him? she said. She was breathing fast.
Oh, he said and sat back. Here I was thinking you was worried.
I been talkin to Oran Brown, she said. He’s tellin every bugger.
Notice a hangman gettin about and you’re likely to talk.
Bunyip had above his ear a gash where he had met with a sportive trooper early that morning. Brown had told her all this as well, told her how upon being struck Bunyip had folded to his knees and wailed. The lion was not half so fierce as he was painted.
So? Where did he go?
That lass there in green, Bunyip said and he gave a secret move of the eyes. Hall glanced around. There was a young woman bending over another fellow, putting a stitch through a cut in his arm.
What about her?
Tits on her like brandy jugs. I am working meself up to a fit. See if I can’t get her leanin over me that way too.
Listen, you mouthy bugger. Where’s this hangman if he’s here?
You don’t mind it when Finlay talks about tits.
She crouched beside him. I aint muckin about. Just tell us where he went.
Bunyip locked his long bare arms a
bout his knees. He was set upon by that Georgetown Rodney when he presented here, he said. Took off out the river way.
The river? she said.
A penny says he is one of Rabbit’s boys.
The nursing woman came past and Bunyip brightened up and smiled and held up his soup to her. When she had disappeared into the sunlight he put his mug aside and frowned.
Gawd what I would give, he said.
Behave yourself, Hall said and she started out of the tent.
What do you want him for anyways? Bunyip called after her. You’re not still chasin them ten quids, are you?
She stopped and looked back. She came towards him and whispered. If some mongrel murdered me, she said, would you want to know?
What?
Murdered me. If I was murdered, would you want to know?
Course I would.
You aint just sayin that?
Bunyip patted her on the arm. Rabbit knows a few lively types, he said. Types as will run a blade where it’s needed. Between us we’d see you revenged.
She blinked a few times. You mean it?
Course I mean it.
The matter is, she said and lowered her voice, the matter is one of Ketch’s mates was done in.
Christ. Jesus.
I saw it.
Janey, he said. No.
What?
Don’t go stickin your nose in.
Ketch will want to know.
Bunyip grabbed her wrist and pulled her close. It aint smart to stick your nose in, he said. You’ll bloody lose it.
She huffed and looked about the tent and for a time was quiet. The sun had the canvas brightly aglow. Through the tent flaps the framed view of the town, the black-fleece smoke above. She looked at him. This fellow, she said. This Toosey. I been followin him. All night. All day. He did for Ketch’s mate. You know, the tall one with the stick. The Irish.
I see, he said and dropped her wrist. I see. You’ve grown a conscience.
Bugger that, I’m talkin about what’s likely.
Likely how?
Pay attention, she said. I told you how it was. This Toosey has money. A lot of it. Ketch’s money. I show Ketch how to find him and I’ll get a cut. Enough to see us clear. Enough to pay out Rabbit.
Janey, the hangman will kill him.
That won’t happen. I won’t let it.
Janey. No.
For ten quids I will risk it.
Bunyip dropped his head and looked away. They sat in silence. The canvas heaved and creaked.
You think Rabbit will just forget, she said. You think he’ll let us off.
What can he do to you?
Burn Ma’s place. Have her beaten. Have her shot. Have me in a brothel. Break me good leg. Break me—
All right, I hear you, I hear you.
You don’t know Rabbit like I do.
There’s easier ways to get ten quids, he said. That’s what I think.
Not if I do this properly.
Bunyip grew agitated. Doin it properly means this Toosey gets shot through the heart.
That won’t happen. I won’t let it.
Jesus, he said. You are pigheaded. I fear you aint long for this world.
I’ll come find you later. Don’t tell no one about this. Not a soul.
I hear, he said. Get along and find your hangman, you bloody fool.
• • •
She moved in her odd gait down the narrow river esplanade. Happening the other way was a loaded stage coach, men on the running boards, men perched atop like vultures, cutting so close she could smell the horses. She stood by in the grass as it rolled through. The driver had a whip that was fully twelve feet of leather and the concussion when he cracked it caused her to flinch. The carriage rocked, the rear wheels kicked stones. But standing aside, breathing the dust it left, she had time to think. Bunyip was right. She would bring harm to Toosey and that was the fact of it. Her heart turned and skipped like a pebble but her mind remained hard-set. She’d seen him knife the Irishman. Ketch would want him for that. If it led her to money, then all the better. Yet when she stepped off the grass and walked into the wake of the coach her heart was tolling louder and louder. For there was the matter of Toosey’s boy pressing on her mind. The way he followed his father always a pace behind, as if he was in awe, was the same way she had followed her own. She walked, and her blood beat a march, and the road seemed narrower than ever.
At the bridge municipal police stood a loose guard on the rail platform on the Invermay side of the river. It seemed they held some concern for the continued operation of the western line, for they had cordoned off the loco and were stationed along the Invermay road at intervals. A mixed troop of municipals and mounted territory riders, teams of them, holding their positions at the terminal, to a man befouled from the violence and missing bits of uniform, bandaged or sutured, their unshaven faces dark in the sunshine. They looked at her limping along and she looked calmly away. No good asking them. She went on. Near the brewery a line of men were conveying crates off a flat-bedded cart while the horse stood meekly in its tack. They had a fire burning beneath a huge copper brewpot that filled a corner of the yard. It was being tended by a chap with a long packing rod allowing him some room from the heat. He was blacked up and sweating. She came by the gate and called.
Here!
The brewer looked up from his work.
You aint seen a chap come by, have you? Has a sack on his head?
The brewer stuck one hand behind the bib of his leather apron and with the other kept tending the coals. Did you say sack?
A sack. A hood.
I seen him, said the brewer. We all seen him.
You see which way he went?
He come along there from the bridge and down thataways, the brewer said and pointed the glowing red end of the packing rod downriver. We all seen him, he said. How could you not?
Hall surveyed the ships at wharf and the street that ran by. Dockers worked a hand-cranked swivel crane to put wool aboard a steamboat. Bales like coffins, long and square and wrapped in canvas, descended into the dark. The men waving them down from the hold. She began to limp out towards them. The brewer watching after her called, What’s the matter with your leg?
Nothin, she said and kept limping.
The street was a strip of hard powder guttered its whole length where carts ran, pressed between the warehouse rows and the creeping river. She crossed the ruts towards the wooden dock at river’s edge. Below, banks of mud rife with weed, the oozing river. The water sluiced past slow and thick. She paused here. She was looking around and turning. Something had caught her eye. She was considering likely routes out and what lay along them and paying little attention to the white shape arranged against the brewery’s roofing-tin fence. She stared for a full minute at the figure bunched in filthy shirt and pants, bunched like a child, before she understood it. She took a few steps. Then she pursed her lips and whistled.
Ketch, she called.
The hooded figure gave a start.
Christ, she said as she came limping over, no one forgets a bloody hangman, do they.
He did not speak. He seemed to be hungry or faint in the heat for he hardly moved. Hall crossed and sat on her haunches, back against the corrugated wall. The wort boiling in the brewery was rich and bready and she inhaled a lungful.
Get up, she said as she breathed out. Let’s go.
The hooded man said nothing.
I have him. Your man Toosey.
He lifted his head and Hall saw now the eyes inside, the black of wet flagstone. I don’t know where Flynn is, he said.
Across the esplanade the unrigged ships strained on the bowlines, lifting with the tide. Hall watched them jostle. There was a realisation that sent her skin itching.
You aint been told, she said.
The hooded man looked at her.
Oh you aint been told. Oh hell.
Told what?
Hall stood and stepped away. You’re his mate, she said. I tho
ught you would’ve known. I thought you would’ve heard.
The hooded man stared.
He’s stabbed him, she said. Toosey.
The hooded man did not seem to comprehend. He stared, his head tipping slightly.
Murdered him. Your mate the Irish.
Beyond the brewery fence the ringing of bottles as crates were stacked. The hooded man gazed off down the alley. When he turned back his eyes were pinched shut. What? he said.
Hall limped out into the sun. I know where he’s goin, she said. Get up. I’ll take you. There aint much time.
But the hooded man could not answer. He had slumped forward and wrapped his arms about his head. She looked down at the fellow huddled among the mess of gorse and thistle on the fence line.
Are you sick or somethin? she said.
Then the hooded man gave a long ugly wail. He began to pull at the cowl as if it caused him pain. It spooked Hall and for a moment she merely stood watching. He was pulling and the wailing noise he made whirred inside her ribs, behind her eyes. It brought the hairs up on her arms. The sound of a man carved out, left hollow, now collapsed and caving in. She crouched beside him.
Come on there, she said. Come on. This won’t do.
The wailing eased to a spasmodic sob that shook the whole of his frame. He lay a long while, wracked at intervals by his grief and covering his head and clenching his fists. After a spell the hooded man ceased this noise and lay quietly. The whole front of his mask was wet and the skin beneath was like an undershirt of muscle. He lay and did not move. Jane Hall reached and shook him by the shoulder but the hooded man made no response. The cowl looked suffocating. A forked stick lay at her feet, which she took up and placed in her teeth. It was sour and chalky and she sucked it anyway.
She sat for a time just watching the hooded man where he lay. He was gazing at some point in the middle distance and when he breathed in the cotton made the shape of his mouth. He must have been only young for his features seemed to have a fineness to them, through the cloth, that a grown man’s would never have. Hall chewed the stick and waited. She wanted to speak but instead turned to stare along the street, at the roped masts standing above the dock, the low-tide banks of mud. The sun hammered down. Blowflies landed along her arms. She waited and watched.