Leonora turned away in disgust.
“There’s something about being out in nature, man against beast.” Alex spoke and sniffed at the air, puffed out his chest. “Seeing the bewilderment, the fear, in the animal’s eye before,” and he mimicked holding a rifle, focusing on the target, then pulling the trigger, “Bang!” He watched her carefully, each flinch of her jaw bringing a great enjoyment to his face.
Leonora turned back to the roses. Alex put one boot on the step below her. He reached into her basket and took a rose, smelled it deeply.
“Where is the black fellow that went with you?” she asked flatly.
Alex looked at the rose in puzzlement, spun it between his fingers. “Black fellow?” He squinted his eyes for the memory. “Black fellow?”
Russell shuffled his feet and laughed, pulled the empty horse closer.
“Oh yes! Allambee. That was his name, wasn’t it?”
The roustabout snickered again and shrugged his shoulders.
“Allambee, yes. I remember now. Said his name meant ‘quiet resting place.’ Odd meaning, isn’t it?” Alex asked to the sky. “Anyway, we were out a few miles from here when he just got up and left. Said something about going on a walkabout.” He inspected the folds of the rose. “Strange people, those natives. One minute a guide, the next minute walking into the sunset.”
Despite the warmth of the afternoon, icy fingers tickled down her neck. “He didn’t take his horse,” she said.
Alex looked at her as if she were a child. “It’s called a walkabout, not a ride-about, my dear.” Then he smiled, dropped the rose and crushed it under his heel like a smoldering butt. He turned to Russell. “How many shots did you fire off this morning?”
“Hard t’say,” Russell cackled. “Couple at the roo. Few others out t’the bush.”
“Should be more careful, Russell,” Alex said in mock reprimand. “Never know what could be in the path of a stray bullet. Those Aborigines blend in right with the shadows, especially the children.” He gave a slow wink to his wife.
“Clean up the horses, Russell. Wipe up the blood!” Alex ordered. “Abo won’t be needing his for a while.” The men laughed.
Leonora’s stomach fell sickly and her head heated as if it readied for fever.
“Whot yeh want me t’do wiv the roo?” Russell asked.
“Leave it for the dingoes or the buzzards. I don’t care.”
With effort, Russell dragged the kangaroo to a cart, leaving tiny dots of rust-colored blood against the dirt.
Leonora held her stomach, turned to the house, but Alex grabbed her elbow. His fingers slid down her forearm and squeezed her hand. He stared at her wedding ring, rubbed the surface of it with his thumb, held the diamond up to the light, his expression distant and odd. “My mother’s ring,” he said softly. “My stepfather tried to sell it after she died, but I stole it. Did you know that?” Leonora didn’t move, stilled as the pressure on her fingers increased.
“She would never have left me if it weren’t for that man. Wouldn’t have sent me away, drowned herself in drink.” His eyes shot up to hers, his face taut with warning. “Don’t ever leave me, Leonora.”
He dropped her hand, the ring tugging at her finger like a boulder. Alex pushed his shoulders back, smoothed out the hair above his ears. “I take it yesterday’s conversation has been forgotten?”
She nodded clumsily, just wanted to be away from him, make the icy fingers stop scratching her back. “You were right; I didn’t know what I was saying.”
“That a girl.” He smiled widely and patted her cheek. “Let’s hope we never hear that awful word again. Otherwise”—Alex spun on his heel and slung his rifle across his shoulder—“I’ll have no choice but to plan another hunting trip.”
The shearers arrived with the last of the morning dew. They came carried upon a caravan of haggard-looking utes, three men crammed in the front seat, the rest lounging on the flatbed squatting or hanging legs over the sides, their boots hidden in the pillows of dirt. They came sunburned and strong, the veins raised above the defined muscles of their forearms, their tough voices rich with laughter and the creases around their eyes deep with comradery.
Meredith and Clare neglected their morning duties to scope out the lot, pointed at the faces most handsome, the bodies best sculpted, and scoffed at the ones who weren’t so endowed. Leonora joined them at the window and the women hushed their giggles.
“So, these are the shearers,” Leonora assessed.
“Just arrived.”
“Whew, they’re a lot of them.”
“Near thirty I’m guessin’. Gonna need more flour.” Meredith ticked off the list in her head. “Sugar. Baking powder. Cheese.” She rolled up her sleeves as if she were ready to knead bread. “Men work only as hard as their bellies are full.”
The men flowed off the trucks. Leonora’s mouth opened slightly as James and Tom walked up to meet the men. There were hearty shakes, arms that pointed to the different directions of the land, rubbing of chins, bent backs of laughter, slaps upon shoulders, cigarettes rolled and shared, hats adjusted and hands shoved into trousers.
The women were silent and stilled with the shift and quantity of men in tight trousers. They were rough men and tough men with swaggers and long, tan arms and sharp eyes. The three women exchanged shy glances, then covered giggles with their hands.
Leonora’s eyes clung to James’s figure and a great heat swarmed her cheeks. She cleared her throat. “Suppose they should be fed straightaway.”
“Yeah, good idear.” Meredith cleared her throat in equal response. “They’re lookin’ ’ungry already. Gonna be thirsty for somepin cold.”
Clare giggled and covered her mouth. “Me mouth is waterin’, too.”
Meredith elbowed her, tried to hide her grin. She clapped her hands. “Orright, off we go.”
Leonora hung to the window while the girls pranced to the kitchen, their voices high with excitement and loud enough to filter out with clarity.
“Gawd, did yeh see the lot of ’em?” Meredith huffed.
“Got m’eye on the tall one wiv the blue tie round his neck,” clicked Clare.
“Naw! Yeh don’t want that one!” scoffed Meredith knowingly. “Dandy bloke. Seen ’em b’fore. All prim an’ proper. Kind who prides himself on restraint. Knew a bloke like that once. Used to slather his hand wiv lanolin so it’s soft when he’s touchin’ himself.”
“Och!” Clare erupted in giggles. “Been wiv a shearer or two an’ no man’s got hands like ’em. Got muscles in their fingernails, I tell yeh! Hands like steel.” Clare paused and seemed to reconsider. “Course, the milkers a fair match wiv their hands.”
“Problem wiv the dairymen is they ain’t sure they’re pleasin’ yeh until they got milk squirtin’ outta yer tits!”
Leonora covered her mouth and laughed.
“Ain’t that the truth!” cackled Clare. “Swear I was wiv one milker who wouldn’t let go till he heard me mooin’!” Pots rattled against snorts and snickers. “Still like the one wiv the blue tie.”
“Stop droolin’ into that dough an’ start bakin’ it. We got boys t’feed!”
James led the shearers by horse. The men followed in the trucks set in low gear. The quarters were new and clean and the men whistled with the new bunks. “How many head yeh say yeh got again?” asked the head shearer. The man was the oldest of the lot, but his skin shone with health and his face held the deep lines of years rich with humor.
“Twenty thousand,” James replied.
“Good. Take us ’bout a month at most. Men’ll like it ’ere, shame yeh ain’t got more to shear.” The man pushed his hat to the back of his head. “Came direct from the Gillabong Station. Won’t work that piece o’ shit place again. Quarters infested wiv fleas. Me an’ the boys slept under the stars every night.”
“Everything’s new. Tools, stalls.” James pointed to the shed behind the quarters. “If you find a flea in this place, one of your men brought it in.” He s
lapped the man’s shoulder.
The shearer beamed and rubbed his hands, already itching to get started. “And how’s the help round here?” the man asked with a sly wink.
James knew what the man was thinking. “Only got a cook and a maid at the big house. I’ll let you be the judge of them.”
The smell of shorn fleece rode upon the hot breeze, permeated the air until even human skin smelled like wool. The shearers kept out of sight except for the trucks swaying with piled bales that left every morning at sunrise. Little puffs of wool escaped from the wire mesh and floated off into the sky like feathers from a plucked chicken.
Meredith and Clare slunk in late every morning, carried in eggs or brooms to pretend they had been hard at work. But their footprints were still clear in the dirt from their early-morning walk from the shearer quarters, their cheeks still flush with the secrets of their night.
When home from the mine, Alex spent his day at the shearing shed watching the men work. He’d often take his dinner with them and stay late in the evening sharing drinks and helping the men gamble away a day’s wages. He’d return to the house well after midnight and climb into the bed smelling of sheep and alcohol and stale smoke. With his weight upon the mattress, Leonora curled to the edge of the bed. He hadn’t touched her in months, but the fear was still there that he would. She kept a basket of yarn next to the bed and on top lay the long knitting needles. She would never let him touch her in that way again, never let him take her as a husband takes a wife. She would gladly pay the whores herself to keep him occupied.
Leonora rarely saw James, but he was never beyond her thoughts. He stayed out in the paddocks with the horses or the cattle, left before dawn and returned after dusk. The few times she had seen him at the homestead, they hadn’t spoken, but their eyes had held tight until Alex inevitably appeared, breaking their gaze, darkening James’s eyes and hardening his face. But James was still here. And that was enough.
In a few weeks, Alex was taking her to Coolgardie for the mine’s annual party at the Imperial Hotel. The new dress he ordered from Milan came this morning via post. She would meet the wives of the head managers. She and Alex would stay in the Imperial’s only suite. Leonora looked at the knitting basket. She would pack the needles.
This was her life. But as long as James was near—as long as she caused him no harm and she kept the Aborigines safe—this life was enough.
CHAPTER 54
Alexander Harrington leaned against the back wall, his arms folded at his chest. Three men sat at the table, their bodies tilted toward their boss, their eyes alert to his expression. They did not offer Ghan a chair.
“So, fever’s contained?” asked Alex under dark, cocky brows.
“Yep.” Dr. Middleton pulled at his waistband and flared his nostrils like there was a bad stink in the room. “Burned half the camp. Everything else got scrubbed down with disinfectant. Supervised it myself.” The doctor winked at no one in particular.
“What about the sewer?”
The puff went out of the doctor’s chest. “Getting to it. Men don’t want to touch it.” He clicked his teeth and drew out a sigh. “Complain about the fever and then complain about cleaning up the shit that caused it in the first place. Go figure.”
Alex turned his black eyes on Ghan. “Men tell me you’re doing some listening for us. What’s the mood?”
“Sour.” Ghan set his gaze on one bastard at a time. “How the ’ell yeh think the mood is?”
The men at the table stiffened, shot furtive glances to Alex, but he only chuckled. The men released their bound shoulders. “You’re pretty pissed off, aren’t you, Mr. Petroni?”
Whistler’s blue, hard face flashed and Ghan fought against the rage brewing inside his limbs. “Yeah, I’m pissed,” he said coldly. “Babies dyin’. Mothers too sick t’hold ’em. Men worried ’bout gettin’ fired if they don’t show up for their shift. Yeah, I’m pissed!” he growled at the doctor. “Doc don’t show up till fever workin’ its way out. Men complainin’ ’bout cleanin’ up the sewer, yeh say? Damn right they’re complainin’! The mine put that pipe in. Mine’s the one that let it crack an’ fester. Now yeh askin’ the camp men t’clean it up—askin’ men who lost their babies ’cause the mine’s too bloody cheap to fix the gawddamn pipe.” His lip curled and he blinked back the hate that stung his eyes. “So, yeah, I’m pissed.”
Alex unfolded his arms and tucked his hands in his pockets, stared at his shoes. The other men clenched lips and twisted them and waited. “Martin,” Alex addressed the man at the center. “Send the engineers to the camp and get that pipe fixed. Then clean it up. All of it. No camp men, either. Find some swaggies or black men or Chinamen. I don’t care. But you get that mess cleaned up even if you got to use your own hands to do it.”
Martin nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“All right, that’s settled.” Alex turned back to Ghan and asked pointedly, “Now tell me, Mr. Petroni, are the men going to strike?”
And there it was. The question. Ghan knew the answer. A strike was coming sure as the sun was going to rise in the bush. Then the scabs would be brought in and the fighting would start. And once the fighting started, it would grow and spread like the fever.
The strike was coming. The hate and the fighting were coming. And here they were, these clean-shaven bastards with warm beds and full bellies asking the question—looking for a heads-up. If they knew about the rumblings, they’d pluck out the men like roo ticks stuck in the skin and scorch them with a tip of a match. They’d round up the Italians, sever them, send half of them packing back to the motherland with barely their shirts and send the other half back to the shaft shivering with gratitude they still got a job and a filthy tent to sleep in. Then they’d rough up a couple of the Aussies, make them a little bloody, beat the rage out of them before they cut their pay. A few weeks later, new Italians come in without a clue and it starts all over again.
Ghan let the steam leave him slowly for effect, the boiler still pumping inside. “Naw. Men ain’t talkin’ strike.”
“Really?” Mr. Harrington cocked his head, incredulous.
“They’re pissed. I’m pissed. We’re all damn pissed.” Ghan slumped his shoulders. “But fever left ’em weak. Mind an’ spirit. Men ain’t got no will t’fight. Just want t’feed their kids. Even the Aussies seem t’got the wind knocked out of ’em.”
The men watched him carefully. “I was sick,” Ghan continued. “Never been so bloody sick in m’life. But then I woke up, felt the typhoid leavin’ me. Couldn’t believe I was still livin’.” Now Ghan watched the men. “An’ yeh know whot my first thought was when the fever left? Know the first thing that popped in my mind?” The men waited.
“I wanna work. Gotta get up an’ go t’work.” Ghan shook his head. “Ain’t gonna be a strike. Somepin broke wiv that fever. Men just wanna work.”
The ugly news traveled quickly through town overnight. Good news pools and ripples, takes its sweet time as it passes from one smile to another. But not the black news. Black news rolls like a tsunami, ripping at ears and sucking anger into its bowels in a greedy swell. And the wave grows and growls and doesn’t stop until it has flattened everything in its wake.
By morning, the angry news spread across the miners’ camp, reeked between the tents with a gaseous infusion and seeped into the canvas, under the flaps and through the holes of the rusty metal. And the ugly news grew and twisted, the facts pulled apart and added to until the news no longer was a mix of words but had become a life.
The news reached Ghan as news does in a camp, riding upon the lips of a man passing by and added to by shadowy whispers under tent poles.
Fights spilled as freely as whiskey in mining towns. But the news of this fight, Ghan knew, had layers and terrible depths that made an ordinary brawl morph into a war. Two miners, an Italian and an Aussie, threw punches and broke bottles on each other at the Lamb’s Eye Pub. Who started it depended on the ethnicity of the man telling the story. But somewhere
along the line of the fight, that Aussie got cut straight into his eye to his brain and died. The police came, and before they had the blood sopped up that Italian lay shot in the face along the street. That was the birth. But the details were lost now, unimportant. A new beast had usurped the birth.
Ghan tied the stringy bark tight around the peg leg and wrapped it in loops across his stub. The air was heavy, thick with the hate that had hardly just bloomed with dawn. Saliva wet his mouth and it didn’t taste quite right. Outside, men drank black and bitter coffee and their eyes reflected the black bitterness.
Here it is, Ghan spoke in his head, and frowned. The blindness had set in. Men on all sides were growing blind as men do. And these men walked through the rows, knocked shoulders against other men and snarled as dogs and sniffed as dogs do. Forget the strike; this was bigger. They’d call it a strike, use the word that would support and praise their anger and disguise the riot. But this war would have nothing to do with cut pay or scab labor or immigrants or typhoid. This war was because the taste of blood had replaced the craving for sugar on the tongue.
Ghan passed the Italian tents and shacks. Dark eyes watched his movements; speaking lips grew quiet. Green, white and red–striped flags were pulled in and folded ceremoniously. Women set their jaws and shuttled between the blind men. They brushed the ground with brooms, their eyes absent, and they left little crevices in the dirt from sweeping the same spot over and over again. For the women saw what the blind men could not and their faces paled. They saw the change, saw how the anger would turn a husband, a provider, to a growling animal and they, the women, would be left picking up the pieces. And these women felt the anger, too, but theirs was directed at the blind, stupid, stupid men.
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