by Rohan Wilson
Two constables appeared then at the top of the stairs. They saw the girl hovering in the hall’s dim void, hugging her package, head down, and they drew their sticks. She stopped. Two men she’d seen. One called Beatty. The other Webster. They nodded and touched their caps.
Beggin your pardon, marm, Beatty said.
She dared not look.
You better get along now, he said. There is a lout in here has fired off a gun.
I heard it, she said. In there.
Right. We’ll have him out. Stand aside, marm.
She gave a faint curtsey and began to pass by.
Oh dear, he said. Your face. What’s happened?
No, please sir. Don’t look. Please. It’s terrible.
She turned her head aside, but Beatty only leaned to get a better view. Well, he said. Yes. That must be painful.
Webster was staring at her. His mouth was wide open. She looked down at the floor and looked anywhere but at him. Her heart was so loud she thought they would hear it. Beatty was tapping his billystick in his palm. He gazed a long while at her. Her fingers shook. She closed her fists and stared at the floor. Beatty cleared his throat.
Excuse us, marm, he said. Best you move back.
She gave a dim smile, which was all the pain would allow, and made for the landing.
The municipals approached the door and Beatty bent and gave a rap on the wood, holding his ear by the panels. This is Beatty of the Launceston police house, he said. If you is in there come out peaceably.
Silence. He nodded at Webster and then he pushed back the door, standing aside from it. As the scene within was exhibited Beatty put his hand to his mouth and drew a sharp breath. He took a faltering step backward. What the devil, he said.
Caislin had started quickly down the stairs. She could hear the constables entering the room and she did not look back. She held tight to the package that the coins would make no sound. At the foot of the bannister a group of Chinese boys stood talking amongst themselves. With them a Chinese porter kit up in a formal tailed coat and white gloves as well. When they saw the girl coming they shifted around and watched her. She gave them a sidelong glance. Going fast, hugging the package. The boys were wearing their faded hats inside and they removed them politely as she descended out into the room. She began towards the street.
Beatty called down from the landing. You have a mess up here. Bugger of a mess. Someone has done for your lout.
The Chinaman was studying her and studying the bundle under her arm and she could see the mechanism of his mind beginning to piece the elements presented there, see it registering with him. He started walking. At the pair of shattered doors she stopped and looked back. The Chinaman was wearing a snarl as he pushed through the boys towards her. She stepped out onto the street.
Stop! he called. Stop!
She bolted, holding her skirts up and revealing the road-worn boots beneath. She ran to the alley cutting beside the hotel and turned down it. Jane Hall was waiting there among the shadows. She came forward with her hand out.
Move yourself.
A tall paling gate opened into a shared lot and Hall kicked it and shoved Caislin through. They ran, the pair of them, around piles of unlaid bricks and footings dug for some unfinished place, the dirt turning under their feet, and Hall hiking her leg out wide in her odd hobble and they reached another fence over which Hall dove headfirst, hardly slowing. Caislin stopped. She hitched up her voluminous skirts and chucked her leg up. A cool wind blew about her uncovered nether parts. She dropped the package, jumped after it and she could hear in the distance the small cries of the hotel Chinaman as he sought them in the alley. Hall limped for the next fence and Caislin grubbed up the package and followed.
A braced gate led onto Cameron Street and there was a clothiers here and a druggist and some folk were at the business of boarding up their stores before the curfew when the gate walloped open. Emerging onto the footpath a shaved-headed girl lame in one leg and another with a face half torched beneath her bonnet. Rattled and guilty and awkward for it, the pair of them cut among the wary citizens and the mounted police venturing by. They made out for the river sliding by at street’s end, the water rippling with sun, hand in hand, hearts a-thud.
THE QUEEN’S WHARF
IN THE HOUR THEY WAITED BY the wharf, William watched and wished so hard for his father to appear that his legs began to tremble and his lip to quiver. Ships were docked along the pier, fat, rope-webbed sloops, screw steamers out of Port Melbourne, and they heaved with the pull of the tide on the mooring lines making them fast to the wharf and it was silent save for this creaking, save for the talk between Payne and a fellow off a whaler. The naked stands of masts tottered and William never moved. He folded his arms. He could see the town spread on the hill and he could see the people in the streets, the mounted police making little order, shadowed, the whole of it, below an apocalyptic smoke.
The man that Payne had struck conversation with was no regular man but a half-caste Tasmanian of the islands. They took up a place on a bale of wool. There were many such bales and crates and boxes on flatbed carts and no dockhands to load them, no crews to sail. The Tasmanian, whose name was Harrington, put to Payne a string of questions about the course of the riots, the nature of the fires, and the response of police. His shoulders as he spoke rose and fell inside his heavy seafaring woollens. His hands were hard as oak and painted in Indian ink with waves and curving designs. Payne knew him somehow. As a well-known bag of wind he knew everyone.
White goats, the Tasmanian said and he had a voice like the sawing of timber. They bleat and they cry, he said, but there is no action. Men. Men would burn the town.
More louts than men most of em, Payne said.
This Harrington reached to his belt and there was a long low hiss followed by the ring of metal as he pulled a boat spade and held it to the side. He must have lately sharpened it for the rim gleamed in the late sun. Take the ears, he said. Take the fingers. That is the old way.
Not no more, Payne said. Now they take furniture.
I would burn the furniture.
I don’t doubt that.
Harrington put the spade over his knee. He stared narrowly at the town.
Hard against the far end of the pier sat a mighty three-masted barquentine. This was the Derwent and she made for a very quiet sight. Square-rigged of foremast, rigged on the main, bobbing on her rope but giving forth neither steam nor coal smoke from her funnel and her deck, her gangway unattended by crew of any kind save fleets of seagulls. William looked at her and felt cold. She wasn’t about to sail. Her crew must have been drunk and rioting with the rest. His father needed to know this. He was hazarding his life in service of making her four o’clock passage. Yet they sat, Payne and the other man, without any thought of leaving.
The start of it, Payne said, was removing your kind. Shot the worst. Exiled the rest. Then what? Then there’s a country full of the clans of Europe. Living on land without law.
Let them eat each other, the Tasmanian said.
That we are. My word.
William could not listen anymore. He walked away along the edge staring at the far side of the river where, like a place split by an axe blow, it emptied from ruptured cliffs, foaming below the bridge spanning the gorge mouth. We ought to go find Pa, he said. If the boat won’t sail.
Harrington tapped spade on his thigh. He turned his dark face along the hill where the town smoked quietly. Ho, he said and pointed. Someone comes.
They all turned. At the far end of the pier walked a pair of men in level stride past the custom’s booth where officers would sit in safer times than these and they were conversing together, their hands moving and gesturing, the wind carting away their voices.
I know that fellow, William said and he walked forward. Mr Fisher, he said.
Of the two it was the smaller that looked up. He wore no hat and the bald part of his head had grown pink with the sun. He straightened his pince nez.
Oh it’s you, he said. The nameless son of a nameless father. I warned you. You won’t board without paying.
She aint sailin, William said and thrust his chin at the Derwent. Her fires aint even lit.
But George Fisher paid him no attention. He was watching the Tasmanian. That man has an axe, he said. Why does he have an axe?
It’s a boat spade.
Harrington grinned and his beard crawled. Fisher looked alarmed. He waved his finger. Listen, I don’t like threats. If this is—
I told you. It’s a spade.
Kindly put that away, he called but Harrington grinned out of his great black beard and sat as he was.
The Derwent, William said. Is she sailin or not?
Fisher looked down at him. You want to board without paying, is that what?
No. I want to know if we have passage today. Cause it don’t look that way.
Who is he?
Him? Harrington of Cape Barren.
How do, the Tasmanian said.
Do you mean a threat with that weapon, sir?
Answer the child’s question, Harrington said. Or I just might.
Fisher turned away with a long exhaled breath, almost a hiss, and nodded at the gallant-looking gent he’d been speaking to earlier. The gent had on a white hat, which he removed and tucked very formally under his armpit. The brass buttons on his coat were full of the sun.
Captain, she’s your ship, Fisher said. Your crew to control.
The captain drummed his fingers on his hat.
I expect the loss in refunding tickets will be deducted from your wages, Fisher said.
The captain eyebrow’s reared up. They won’t wring much from that stone, he said.
But wring they will. Find your crew and save them the bother.
How would I ever find the bastards up there? It’s a shambles.
Whatever you say, Fisher said and turned down his mouth. It’s not my money at hazard.
William stood a moment looking between them, to the captain, the black, and finally his uncle. The sun formed a resplendent band upon his face behind which his eyes at first soft began to harden and he turned on his toes, seized suddenly with purpose. He walked up the pier. Passing Payne, he snapped with his fingers and tossed his head as if to call him to heel. Payne rose gingerly. He slapped Harrington on the back in the way of good friends. When Payne followed the boy in his bent-backed trot along the pier raising gulls off the decking, their wind lifting his sparse hair, Harrington slung his spade and called after them, Take the ears! The ears! And like a chain-gang of two in single file, heads bowed for the sun, William and his uncle entered again the disorderly city.
• • •
In the late afternoon they formed up before the Star of the North Hotel where men were massed at the entrance and where backed to the doors was a cart drawn by a dirt-brown mare. The mare stood entirely still like it was no horse at all but a waxwork of one. In the shade it cast squatted a team of street children and they were watching the hotel doors, waiting for something, waiting all with bulbous eyes. Payne went among the men there putting questions to them and they would lift their hats, scratch, and then shake their heads or point him towards another fellow. When he looked back at William he was solemn, the creases of eyes grown deep. He nodded once and turned away.
A broad oilcloth covered the bed of the cart, over the sideboards to the wheels, and it was not long until the constables came out of the smashed hotel doors carrying a body between them, grunting, sweating, and swung it up onto the cloth. They were men that William knew well, Beatty and the new man Webster who’d lately been at his side. They had on butcher’s aprons over their uniforms and the blood showed like black grease, as they wiped their hands on the heavy leather bibs. Several in the crowd removed their hats, several averted their eyes. The children at the wheel of the cart wore looks of haggard fright.
William Toosey began to quiver as he stood watching it all. The dead man stared at the sky. The wound in his forehead big enough to take your thumb. Over the moments there settled upon William a thought so black and destructive, so shot through with heat, that it scalded his innermost parts. The dead man looked like his father. The constables wrapped him first crosswise in the sheet and tucked under the ends and they stood away with their backs to the cart, wiping their hands, eyeing the crowd. William felt dizzy.
Brother Payne came elbowing through the pack of men up alongside the boy. He leaned and spoke into his ear. William could not hear what he said, such was the heartbeat in his ears, yet when Payne’s hand fell heavily upon his shoulder he knew. It was the weight of helplessness. Payne caught him by the arms and turned him roughly and crouched before the boy. He held William’s eyes a long time before he reached and cupped the back of his neck and pressed his own forehead gently upon the boy’s and pressed their noses together.
Above the tufts of his whiskers his uncle’s eyes were hard and dark. He bore the smell of sweat, a breath of coffee. William did not resist the embrace of this solitary man. As their noses touched it seemed he would take upon himself, this wanderer, the charge of grief that William had gathered in his days, bear it away as his own, if he could, but there was no host and there was no power to make it be. Even so, he held the boy nose to nose, brow to brow, and the forthright giving of his pity unnerved William, set his heart racing, and when Payne stood and stepped back and folded his arms William felt light.
You are young, he said as his gaze stayed long on the boy. Let your shadow fall behind you.
The crowd began to break up. William could only stare at him.
They were silent for a time. Payne fetched a gold cross from his shirt pocket, which he rubbed in his fingers. Between the folk at the cart they could see the shape of Thomas Toosey under his sheet.
His hair is so long, William said.
Long as a horse’s tail, Payne said. Never saw the like of it.
They were silent a while.
Why wear it that way? William said. He looks a fool.
Payne worried his little cross. Out of shame, he said. Out of love. Cause he loved you and your ma. He was sorry to have lost you. Very sorry.
William lowered his eyes then. He remembered his father leaving in the long ago, when his mother had thrown his bedroll into the street and thrown after it a handful of coins. He’d watched his old man bend like a clumsy infant and grub through the dust to find them. Beside him a bottle of rum. We don’t want you here, she’d said. His father had fingered up with great care the bits of copper, bits of bronze, and fumbled them into his pocket. His hat had toppled off. His hair was short. Not no more, his mother had said, not like this.
Clear back, clear back, Beatty was calling.
The cart started forward. William could not look.
Clear back, Beatty called.
THE WEST TAMAR ROAD
JANE HALL KNEW EVERY OWNERLESS TENANCY in the shire of Launceston and it was to one such hovel that she led the outlaw Caislin Flynn. They passed rows of tenements little better than shanties on the western road out of town, each the same seasoned grey and skirted around by a growth of thistle. They passed river flats where brushy reeds wilted in the mud and the boats above the tideline sat shored by poles. They did not speak to the folk going by that often bid them good afternoon. Ahead the Esk River discharged out of a gorge of sheer-sided stone. They walked, holding hands, looking up at the bare cliffs rising out of the wild river, the gum in bloom and the crowning scrub of black wattle.
An outbuilding lay on the road to the bridge and Hall ducked through the rail fence into the yard before it. She entered the ruin through a hole in the wall and Caislin followed in a daze. The floor had mouldered and the old manure of birds was cast about and there were blankets and two rough chairs stashed away beneath the sloping sheet-iron. Jane Hall showed the girl a place where she might sit, a frayed cane chair. She fetched in a bowl full with water and placed it on the ground by her feet.
Better get that mess off you.
Sh
e removed the neckerchief and bonnet Caislin wore and rolled back the sleeves of her dress and lathed water over her arms to wash away the freckled blood. Caislin sat stunned and silent, watching the road towards the town through the wall hole.
Just get the money, Hall said. Didn’t we agree? Just get it and go.
Caislin lifted her eyes. The balded skin above her ear was mottled by blisters. Some seeped pus, some had hardened.
Get the money. That was all. Then come out the back through the kitchen like I told you.
Her hands dripped into the bowl. She held them out.
Now the whole thing is dead in the nest, Hall said.
It don’t matter.
That celestial saw you, Hall said. When you’re hunted as a murderess it will soon enough matter.
She seemed to stare at the hills a moment through the unclad walls, the folds of dark towering rock and up high the stunted cliff-top scrub. She looked back at Hall.
Christ, Hall said. You never had to kill him. You never had to do that.
She took a scoop of water and splashed Caislin’s face. The girl blinked.
We are royally in the shit I can tell you.
Then you should go, Caislin said. It aint safe with me.
My word it aint. I see that.
So you should go.
No.
They will hang you too.
No one’s hangin no one, girl. Not by a long shot. The point of the matter is to get you away. Get you home. That’s how we beat this. Not a chance they will find you there. Not in the Quamby.
Water dripped off the unmarred point of her chin. For an instant she was a plain-enough looking girl, the up-turn of her nose, the white of her cheek, and then she turned to Hall with the whole of her face and it was abhorrent. Hall lay a hand on her forearm. She let it lay there calmly, through a few long breaths as she slowed her bolting mind.
Simple truth is I’m too wise for them, she said. While I’m around won’t no one will hang.
With a lazy lift of the boot Caislin kicked forward the package she’d carried from the hotel. It rolled and propped up in the floor litter and being only crudely secured her road clothes poked through the paper and with them something else. A knotted sack. She gestured at it with the toe of her boot.