The television offers her blurrier images of her son that she has fought to make out before, as she has the Sandy Blight, an eye disease contracted in the scrub, and it is hard to focus on things. And it’s especially hard to focus on this: a foggy ghastly image of her friendly little boy, rejigged into a mad killer with menacing eyes. She gave him his real eyes a long time back and she cannot now believe her old ears. On the telly program, they go on and on about how violent Ronald is.
‘Oh,’ she whispers to herself, all alone. ‘Switch it off!’
She is old and crook and her old body hurts a lot. She is doddery and so, so vague. As she stares at the blue screen, she tries to not cry too hard. ‘Crying exhausts me,’ she has often declared to any other Ryan within earshot.
She goes to the strange and unrecognisable bedroom in order to close her throbbing eyes after the shock of not seeing the premier. She is weak and mixed up and lies gently on the unknown raft of a bed, with no idea where she is anymore. All she knows is she just saw him on the telly and he looked alright then, but when exactly was then, anyway?
She pulls the cool bedsheets up round her thin throat and falls asleep in a trice and dreams of the old days, long before trouble came to her door, when her kids grew up in the bush and tore around and flew kites. When in the heat of burning summer, they swam and dived in icy muddy creeks, and knew every bubble and current off by heart.
She is dying but she doesn’t know it.
Ronald is dying and he finally does. In the cell that never diminishes its light, he finally relinquishes his inalienable right to think about the future with hope. He gives into death and understands that it cannot be put off. He realises that joy and misery are the same thing, and life and death are the same thing, and he also is aware that Christ Almighty isn’t a joke or a mystery but a dead certainty.
Christ is for me. He is on my side. He alone understands that I never fired the carbine that shot George back when we hopped over the wall.
Christ can’t come into a man’s heart without an invite and this is my invite; the way I’m feeling here is Christ.
He is trying hard to get through to me He sure is.
I will not let Him down one more time and I will obey him and answer his simple questions in a straightforward manner and as a matter of fact I have always gone for Him and loved Him ever since the blurry beginnings of Sunday School days where I first saw Him and loved what I beheld which was Love Without Reserve.
Ryan’s daughter Gloria sits down at her roughened old home in the company of her two sisters and employs pretty pen and ink upon nice, pleasant writing paper. She composes a letter, three pages long, that she hopes will convince the premier and his cabinet to change their minds. She sure takes her good time with it, especially the tone, if you like. The letter’s heart and spirit have come through meditation and long heartache, and she is not a person who writes a thing that quick and lively.
She watches her own wrist cling stubbornly to the old wooden pen holder and makes sure that the ink never blots. The result is the most elegant letter possible and the other sisters are rapt. They eagerly read it aloud around the cluttered tea table and then Gloria asks them if it’s okay and they are so overwhelmed, they answer her with kisses and kisses.
They read it to their sick old mum and she weeps the instant she hears it, and says ‘that letter is like a miracle’.
The letter is read back to close friends of the family and declared just perfect and just right and it is sent with a letter and an envelope to Parliament House and never gets to the premier because it is instantly in the dirt tin, all crumpled and splotched up.
Chapter 15
TEN YEARS AGO, the Moreland City Council erected a small marker outside Pentridge’s vast bluestone walls stating the fact that ‘Ronald Ryan died here’.
But now they have removed that marker and now nothing lies there at all. There is nothing there to speak of him and to recall what was done. He was dumped well before his poor bones hit the deck, and put straight into a pit full of lime. He knew full well that that was where he was going to wind up. As he said to officer Ken Leonard when Ken offered him a final hot breakfast: ‘Look, you have the bacon and the eggs I think, dear Ken. It would be wasted on me, I think. Let’s face it, I’m heading for the lime pit.’
Meanwhile, two and half days earlier, Governor Grindlay is talking hardline to his mostly faithful officers, who have been pretty much simmering ever since their brother George was slain eighteen months ago.
‘There will be no rough stuff on this strict regimental day of Ronald getting justice here in the D Division, where we have arranged for his departure physically on this good condition gallows.
‘He is going to go through that trap as clean as a whistle and I will be watching him go through it as I have never watched a man in my life and I know every single freckle on him. There will be no mucking about with him and no wounding or kicking him. He will be going through that trap like a clean criminal who has paid the ultimate price for his crime and he will be placed in the lime pit out of respect for his body and he will have by then have given back what we deserve from him for what he did here.
‘He is a sinner who has very recently and very luckily discovered Christ again just before atonement.
‘I knew Ronald very well indeed at the Bendigo Training Prison and I often remember with affection just how nice and very kind he could be. It’s pretty hard to understand and reconcile that with what he has done to one of our officers, and I just hope he finds peace after his long incarceration and separation from his wife and family too.’
The governor and wife endure the unendurable because they are case-hardened practising Catholic Christians, a fusion of the great power of Good. They pray upon their knees side by side in the manse as if they can read one another’s thoughts, which of course they can. They wish that Ronald hadn’t done all those bad things, but they accept that he did, and believe that by meeting Jesus, he can be redeemed. They shudder at the fate that awaits the boy who so brightened them up, but feel sure that the Lord shall get him to Heaven.
The hangman catches the train from Perth and has a look at the paper on the long way across. He is most large – six foot something – with a big, broad back, preposterously thick arms and big, bandy legs underneath. He is a member of the Public Service Sector Union and for the hanging will be paid time and a half, with extra loadings such as holiday pay.
He doesn’t like or dislike the work, but is insouciant either way and rather enjoys going interstate for a gig like this. He loafs over the Nullarbor and chats a bit to fellow passengers but doesn’t let any of them know the exact nature of his employment as it might put them off. He enjoys a large buffet-car breakfast of bacon, eggs and fried tomatoes and sips several large black coffees before retiring to his cabin. It is an enormous lie-down bed/armchair arrangement into which his great bulk just dissolves.
His suitcases contain several personal nooses. He is a bit of an expert in the craft or art.
They also contain some rather splendid textbooks, published in England, that illustrate the weights and measures required to work the drop. He flicks through these awful books with a detached academic interest before his great paw switches out the carriage reading lamp and he begins to snore powerfully.
He takes pride in his work and sees himself as a professional, a man of expertise who dispatches clients without fuss. It is just a job of work, that is all it is, and it’s human too since the felon, whomever he or she might be, would probably never see the error of their ways otherwise, and go ahead with more criminal activity. He has read the paper he purchased in Perth and is undoing his rectangular leather case, the smaller and more compact of the three he fetches along with him, and he studies the literature of current trends in hangings the whole world over and he is rather impressed.
In the United States of America, its most efficient means of disposal remains the good old rope. It is quick, it is clean, and it seldom breaks under t
he strain, even though the executioner has heard of a recent case where a guy’s head came right off. That was fairly embarrassing for the officials watching and not much fun for the doomed.
He reads of the staggering amount of hangings currently going on in the US (as opposed to gassings and, that old stand-by, the electric chair and the new-fangled idea of the needle, which renders them pretty dead in next to no time). Then he flicks through some illustrated pages on the lynchings in the US in the 1930s and ’40s when the Ku Klux Klan did their thing. There are terrible but necessary photographs of Negro adults as well as children being hung up for all to admire – white bigots are especially admiring, of course, and he’s met a few of those in the course of his work.
He looks at his latest client, who is Ronald Ryan of no fixed address, then settles down into a blissful sleep. Despite those brawny biceps, he looks so relatively normal that none of the other travellers would have the foggiest clue about what he does for a crust. And nor should they as what he does is perfectly moral and legal.
At Spencer Street Railway Station, he stretches, which is something he is good at in his line of work. Yawning vigorously, he gathers his cases, hands in his ticket and makes through the barrier, then wonders which tram to catch.
He asks around until some friendly sod tells him he has to hop onto the Sydney Road tram up on Elizabeth Street. It is a fair walk up Collins, which is easily Melbourne’s most beautiful street, and so the hangman takes his time and sort of admires the old shops and all the quaint edifices and lanes that look like something out of Charles Dickens. It is such a perfect translation of Victorian England; in fact, it is said that Melbourne is the second London.
The hangman gets aboard the relatively empty Sydney Road tram, as it rattles incredibly noisily towards rough-as-bags Coburg, a suburb of salamis and hens and vigorous vendors all vying for customers’ limited attention span. He observes the lovely and ugly shops and the lovely and ugly people, the priests bored stiff, the farmers bored stiff, and the vast hordes of schoolkids truanting.
Coburg is in a heatwave and everyone is off to the old baths for a dip and a much-needed cool down. He can hear Italians and Greeks crying out and running around and see Turks in unroadworthy kombi vans come very close to running them all over. Cabbages and cauliflowers are everywhere and the sticky, sickly electric tram is unbearably hot. It is a portable humidicrib of awfulness.
He alights upon the intersection of Sydney Road and Bell Street, which slightly bewilders the hangman. Bell Street seems to be a most important road – at the very least, a freeway or a highway – but its ordinary boring name seems somehow desultory.
He understands from his official letter, with ‘Pentridge Prison’ embossed on the top, that the governor has invited him for lunch with his wife, and hopes he is well and had a nice journey and all the other usual stuff. He walks a bit stiffly up the rest of Sydney Road into the Champ Street reception area and, just like that, he feels instantly at home.
He is shaken hands with pretty eagerly by the officers, who of course revere him and wonder whether they can ask for his autograph. That would be a keepsake, would it not? A thing to take out at the guard’s home for that moment when the conversation flags.
He is introduced to various officers of high rank and is walked politely to the old manse next to the condemned cell, which is at the top of the gaol overlooking Mrs Grindlay’s fresh washing.
He is shaken hands with in the friendliest fashion by the governor, who today is looking pretty tired, pretty exhausted actually, because he didn’t get very much sleep the night before. It was all the praying that kept him up. In fact, Ian and Audrey did nothing all night except put palms together and pray for their condemned friend.
It turns out that the hangman has actually turned up a couple of days early.
‘You’re not putting us out you know,’ says the governor kindly as the three walk into the manse.
The hangman is sort of humiliated to get dates incorrectly and sort of says sorry to the Grindlays, adding that this kind of stuff-up’s never occurred before. The kindly Grindlays assure him over and over again that it doesn’t put them out and that he can easily stay in the spare room. They don’t see people much these days and indeed it can get a bit lonely on your own.
So the hangman thanks them both very much and says he likes his room and how much friendlier it is than the Victoria Hotel in Little Collins Street, where most hangmen stay when they are in Melbourne. Although, as everyone knows, it’s been a long time between hangings in Melbourne. More than twenty years, isn’t it, since Jean Lee and her accomplices were hanged?
He enjoys a long hot shower and dries his oddly bright red hair and combs it as best as he can. Wearing his nicest civilian clobber, he sits at tea with the friendly Grindlays, his pleasant honest hosts, and they eat roast beef and potatoes and silverbeet out of the prison garden and sip lemonade upon nice ice.
He congratulates Audrey on the deliciousness of the drink.
‘That’s my great privilege to serve up something nice and home-made and cooling,’ she says, and herself tucks into the nice juicy beef. She honestly didn’t realise how famished she was.
After tea, the governor takes the hangman out to the garage, with his much-heavier-than-he-thought cases dragging along the path. He opens the double garage doors with a sort of practised flourish and they enter the dark old space. Some of Ian Grindlay Junior’s long-distance bicycles are there collecting dust, alongside bits and pieces of newer bikes that look just about ready to race with.
The hangman takes off his trusty shirt, as it’s a bit hot with it on, and he rolls up his pants and his shirtsleeves. He gets up on a pretty sturdy-looking step ladder that’s in the corner and rigs up a long, thick rope, with a splendid noose at its end. It takes about two hours to perfect it but in the end he’s got what he wanted: the perfect rehearsal for a perfect hanging. He ties some sugar bags stuffed with grass together to be the body’s stand-in.
The governor runs back to the office, as there are hundreds of urgent telephone messages to return. Some are from the Office of the Premier, others are from the press. Everyone’s on his case for personal interviews and urgent talks and he has found it just on impossible to see to them.
The governor cannot sleep and is taking strong painkillers. He is determined to pull this off expertly and to see to it that no fault may be found in his propriety and expertise; he has seen lots of hangings in the navy, on board ships out to sea, as well as inside all sorts of gaols in Australia. But this one is heavier. Different. Ominous. And it seems to wait for him like a terrible smirk.
The hangman must be 65 if he’s a day, yet going by the sheer hide of him he’s like a water buffalo out there in the garage, pulling on really heavy weights and studying the information he knows about Ronald’s body, his exact weight in pounds and ounces.
All day long, he’s hard at it in the governor’s musty garage, just a two-minute stroll from the condemned cell.
Chapter 16
IT’S A DAY and a half from the execution and Dorothy is having a terrible time in her hovel. Her second husband has dropped dead on the floor. There wasn’t even a carpet to soften the blow. He just keeled over and was cactus when she got in from seeing people up the street to get a lend of jam and some sugar. He had been going crook about indigestion a fair bit lately but obviously it must have been a bit more serious than that and now he is deceased, with his tongue hanging out.
The three daughters scream fits when they see this. Surely they have more than enough to grieve about without their second dad carking it as well.
That’s life, though, and speedy arrangements are made for his internment, although there isn’t much money in the house.
Dorothy is beyond depression, beyond anxiety, beyond belief, beyond grief. She sits down after the funeral of husband two and, clearing a bit of free space from the tea table, picks up a very blunt pencil and bit of ruled exercise-book page and writes a letter to Ryan in
gaol. But all she can manage to say is ‘I hope you’re looking after yourself ’. Later that night, she attempts to say more but it’s incredibly hard to do it.
By three in the morning of a terribly sultry Melbourne summer day – a Melbourne with a bright red sky despite a cool change – she is positively gleaming on her forehead, it’s so hot and unsparing. She has managed to add a few thoughts by now, mainly to the effect that she’s sorry about sending him his divorce papers but of course it was inevitable, the way he was going, and she was grateful that he signed them and quickly posted them back.
Can you or anyone imagine the state she is in, with one and a half days only to go until it’s all over? Though it’ll never be over so far as the kids are concerned. He isn’t dead yet but the kids are already seeing him that way, as the walking deceased instead of the happy-as-a-jaybird dad that he was in the old days before all the trouble kicked in like a banshee. How they miss their great jovial father, that whimsical chap who used to shave naked in front of them and do all these really good bird whistles walking round the old fruit shop.
In the late afternoon on the second of February 1967, Governor Ian Grindlay issues the edict that Ronald is to be moved well away from the D Division area and placed into the condemned cell to see out his final hours on his own. It’s for his own good, as well as the good of the guards, some of whom should like to skin him for what he did to their brother officer George.
Ronald is led in chains up a set of steps grooved out of 1854 bluestone and his throat is dry, very dry, and in the condemned cell there isn’t much to comfort him. He should have preferred to see out his last night in the D Division but they need to stick it right up him.
Last Words Page 10