One

by Patrick Holland

  Paddy smiled.

  ‘Then at the end of the night she asked who she’d been dancing with. And I told her.’

  Jim smiled.

  ‘She fainted. Right there in my arms,’ said Paddy. He shook his head. ‘But the look on her face before she did!’

  ‘Aye. I reckon she thought she’d be arrested by her husband as an accomplice.’

  Paddy smiled.

  Jim scanned the saloon. The room was filled with pale yellow light and music from a player piano. At the tables were men of the racing track and officers in uniform and landed gentry in moleskins. Sat along the bar were scalpers and ringers in flannel and cabbage-tree hats.

  ‘Queensland towns, hey?’ Jim nodded towards a pair of ringers. ‘Look at the clothes some of these poor bastards are wearing. Like a bunch of mountain inbreds who just ransacked a mail coach.’

  Paddy flicked the filthy lapels of Jim’s serge coat.

  ‘They look like they’ve been ridin with us for a month.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘I bought you a new one.’

  ‘I’ll get it off you tomorrow.’

  Jim whistled for the bartender.

  ‘Whisky for all these along the bar. And a box of cigars.’

  The bar saluted him.

  Then he turned to the tables and shouted.

  ‘And a round of bare-knuckle for any of these prissy scent-wearing wine-drinking English officers with balls enough to take me on.’

  The officers regarded him, wondering if there was anything in the threat. Then went back to their talk.

  The men at the bar were poured their whisky. They raised their glasses to Jim.

  Paddy winced and spoke under his breath.

  ‘Why would you do that, brother?’

  ‘Insult those cunts?’

  ‘That too. But I mean shouting the fucking bar – announce we’ve got money like that? Anyhow, this is Queensland. All of these that look like possum skinners probably own stations big as European countries. With oil wells.’

  Jim looked along the bar and laughed.

  ‘Aye, that’s true.’

  ‘Remember old Cecil Cleland at Yuleba? Cut his hair himself. All his life. Till he got to forty and then didn’t trouble with it anymore. Not a tooth in his head and one pair of pants in his cupboard, and he could’ve bought the harem off an Arab prince. You can’t tell by how they look.’

  ‘Aye, that’s true. And look at you and me. Given a proper bath and barber we could walk into the governor’s smoking room in Sydney and none’d bat an eyelid. And we’re busted-arse in a western saloon.’

  ‘We’ve got all the money we need now, Jim. The trick is to hold on to it. Think of me and our brothers, Jim. Think of the old man.’

  Jim shook his head and was silent. Then he spoke.

  ‘Why do you think I’ve done all this? Put my life in jeopardy time and time again?’

  ‘I wonder if you even know. Do you ever ask yourself that question? Truly? I know why you say you do it. I know why you started. The same reason I had when I was young.’ Paddy sighed. ‘If only you truly loved someone.’

  Tears came instantly to Jim’s eyes. He cried easily, as he had since boyhood.

  He grabbed his brother’s collar.

  ‘You think I don’t love you, you bastard? You think I don’t love the old man?’

  Paddy looked nervously about the bar. He took his brother’s hand and pushed it down. The drinkers returned to their drinks.

  ‘No, you do love us,’ whispered Paddy. ‘I said that wrong. I meant, if only someone you loved depended on you.’

  ‘Who have you got dependin on you?’

  ‘You. Though you don’t know it.’

  ‘And you could have done this job without me?’

  ‘Aye. And done it better probably. You’re the best bloody horseman I know. Maybe the best on the face of this earth. The best at reading the signs of the bush. The best man with a rifle, if not a revolver. And these strengths are your weakness, because you think they make you immortal.’

  Jim took a drink.

  ‘Maybe once I thought that. That seems long ago now.’

  ‘You think–’

  ‘Shut up, Paddy. If I want a fucking sermon I’ll go to church.’

  ‘Alright, brother.’

  ‘So we drink?’

  ‘We drink.’

  They pulled up stools and Paddy called for a bottle.

  ‘But this isn’t a bad town to rest for a while,’ Jim said. ‘It’s got hotels and rum shanties. Even a cinematograph.’

  ‘Like you’ll be goin in there?’

  Jim smiled.

  ‘I might.’

  ‘It’s a good town to lay low, brother. If you can manage that. Big enough to hide us.’

  Jim nodded. Paddy went on.

  ‘But this time of year, brother, when it starts getting cold, I miss the old country.’

  ‘The hills at Stanthorpe?’

  ‘Aye, and further south. I miss the snow. That’s strange, I spose. To miss the cold. But I miss the mornins with ol Ma. Collectin tinder for the fire. Drawin water for tea. The bawlin of a newborn calf, cracking crusts of ice with its hooves. The way the sun lit on the snow those mornings. So bright. Everything like a promise.’

  ‘Aye,’ Jim said, but he was not listening to his brother anymore. He was watching a Chinaman who sat in the corner with his fourteen-year-old wife. The Chinaman wore the robes of prosperity and a bamboo pipe protruded from a leather pack at his side.

  The barman saw where Jim looked and spoke.

  ‘Bloody celestials. Best to keep your children away from em, as you see! Dignified as hell, but no morals.’

  Jim shrugged.

  ‘We had a few sifting for gold in a creek up from our country when I was younger. I tell you, I’d like a draw on whatever he puts in that pipe when no one’s watchin him.’

  The barman frowned.

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that. What I do know is one of em was caught ere last year in an unspeakable act with an animal. I tell ya they’re an abomination.’

  ‘Aye. Most likely. But have you marked their women? There aren’t many of them. But the ones I’ve seen are finely made.’

  ‘So why don’t they keep to em? Their own women!’

  ‘There aren’t enough, I spose.’

  ‘I say they threaten the purity of Australian women.’

  ‘Aye. And what little there is of that quantity should be preserved.’

  Paddy laughed. The barman frowned.

  ‘Anyway,’ Jim said, ‘I’ve known Irishmen sell their daughters and sisters to em. I’ve seen it.’

  ‘You got something against the Irish, lad?’

  ‘Plenty,’ Jim said. ‘I’m Irish. And harlots are not unknown among us. Nor harloteers.’ He grinned.

  ‘Even so,’ said the barman. ‘No one likes these Chinks here. I don’t know why the damnable old gold diggers don’t ship back home.’

  Jim pointed at the bottle of Irish whisky.

  ‘Pour, sir.’

  The barman poured and Jim took the glass to his lips then pointed at the Chinaman with his empty glass.

  ‘That crow was probably a street sweeper back in Peking. Now look at him! Pretty girl beside him and all the money he’d need for two lifetimes. He’s not going anywhere. Pour again, sir.’

  The barman poured two fingers and Jim raised his palm to say more.

  Jim and Paddy stayed two more nights in the town.

  They left Elden behind at the hotel to make sure no man set up a search, then made a rendezvous point at an old abandoned church they knew on cotton-bush plains to the west.

  ‘See you come home soon,’ Paddy said to Jim.

  ‘Aye.’

  Paddy and Elden took separate trains on separate days. But Jim never made it to the rendezvous. He rode west to Ilfracombe and stayed three nights. Then rode on to Stonehenge. Then he rode west onto dry plains and towns he could not name.

  He took a
room at a hotel and took off his coat and boots and stretched out on the bed. He placed his hip holster next to his leg.

  He was asleep before he could think of hiding the revolver under the pillow, but he woke in the night from troubled dreams and could not sleep again. He stared out the window at the blue dark. A train cut the night headed west across the plain.

  He put on his boots and went downstairs.

  He walked south down the gaslit main street of town. He walked to the outskirts where black women chopped wood outside shingle huts. Yellow-eyed black men with discarded top hats and animal skins around their crotches eyed him from the roadside. These men and a handful of their women were wrapped in bedsheets and stank of the mixture of grease and clay they smeared on their bodies to stay warm. There was a tribe of them, come to the edge of town to hang around settlers’ houses looking for tobacco, whisky and sugar. Half begging, half threatening.

  He came to a rough-boarded hut that was a rum shanty and went inside. Half-castes, scalpers, bandits and low-ranking police sat at unvarnished tables with black women and half-castes on their knees.

  Jim watched a man stand up and go to the corner of the room and piss.

  A scarecrow-thin, stubble-bearded German came to him.

  ‘Vooman, sir?’

  Jim scanned the room and shook his head.

  ‘You can keep your old gins, gov.’

  ‘Drink?’

  ‘Rum.’

  He sat down. A kerosene lantern hung on a nail above him. The lantern cast light on the splintering table where rum cups had bitten rings into the wood. The light fell too on the grey death-mask face of a Russian teasing a large wire-haired half-caste woman.

  He thought, God, what a place.

  A girl came and sat down beside him. She had emerald, almond-shaped eyes. Her skin glowed in the light of the kerosene lamp. The calico dress she wore hugged her hips and hinted at the firm, small breasts beneath. He did not say a word, only stared at her. She stared back.

  ‘What is it, sir?’

  Tears came to his eyes at the sound of her voice and he tried hard not to let them fall.

  She led him by the hand into a small dark room behind the place. A sour bedsit that someone had kept tidy if not clean. She took a lantern off a hook. Struck a match and lit the wick. She washed her hands in a basin of water, then washed her face. She made to wash her crotch but he stopped her.

  ‘Don’t bother with that. I know it makes no difference.’

  She stopped and went to him without a word and put her thin arms around his neck.

  ‘You don’t say much, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So you can speak English?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But it wasn’t your first language.’

  ‘No. My mother was black. Or half black.’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘A Chinaman. I never met him.’

  ‘Where’d you learn English?’

  ‘At a mission.’

  ‘You ran away?’

  ‘Yes. They weren’t kind to me.’

  She sat down beside him.

  He had money enough to last the year. More. He had a row of nights … endless … in which he could ride the country like a dream. There was no end to the liquor he could buy. And with riding and liquor he could run from everything. And now there was this girl in a rum shanty on the dark outskirts of a town whose name he had forgotten. Her head was on his shoulder. And he hoped the dawn would never come.

  A Serbian girl walked across the doorway. She glanced into the room and her face caught the lantern light.

  The girl saw her and looked at Jim.

  ‘You see now what you might have had if you’d waited.’

  ‘I would have chosen you still.’

  ‘What manner of man are you?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Should I tell you the truth?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘I’m an outlaw.’

  ‘That’s nothing. So am I.’

  ‘I’m hunted by troopers.’

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘My name is …’ He should lie. ‘My name is Jim Kenniff.’

  ‘I’ve never heard it.’

  He laughed. She smiled.

  ‘Have you killed someone?’

  He grunted and drank the last of his rum.

  ‘I’ve broke many people’s hearts.’

  ‘You don’t sound like a bandit. Are your crimes all against girls?’

  ‘Some of them.’ He stared into her eyes. ‘Are you afraid of me?’

  ‘There are people here to protect me. All I have to do is scream. You may hit me once, but you won’t hit me twice.’

  ‘There is no one.’

  ‘There is. There are three men.’

  ‘There is no one. And I would never hit you in a thousand years. Not if you bit my hand off. Not if you pulled my gun and threatened to shoot me dead.’

  ‘What gun?’

  He sat up. He pulled aside the lapel of his vest to show the rib holster.

  The girl took the Colt by the stock and pointed it at him. Her hands shook.

  ‘It’s heavy,’ she said.

  He took the barrel in his hand and pointed it down.

  ‘If you’re going to shoot me you should mean to do it. I don’t want to get killed by accident.’

  ‘God. You wouldn’t care, would you?’

  After a time of silence and staring into the girl’s eyes he spoke.

  ‘Only about what would happen to you afterwards. You should remember my name. Jim Kenniff. If you shoot me the government will pay you money.’

  The girl stared at him. Looked at his sunburnt windburnt face and into the eyes that were green and pretty like hers. And troubled.

  ‘But you have done something wrong. I guess you’re not telling, or you’d have told me by now.’

  ‘Is that how it usually goes?’

  ‘Often.’

  ‘Aye. And I know how troopers use girls like you to hear the talk of drunk and guilty men.’

  ‘Yes. So best don’t tell me.’

  She pulled him down on top of her. He stared into her eyes and did not move to kiss or touch her.

  She was confused. She sat up.

  ‘What are you looking for with me?’

  ‘I’ve never sought anything but what I’ve lost.’

  ‘Do I remind you of someone?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know how. You’re different in every way.’

  ‘Would you like me to be her? I can say something. Say something like she said.’ She brushed his hair from his forehead and smiled. ‘You poor little boy.’

  ‘Say, “Follow me, brother”.’

  ‘Follow me, brother.’ She drew hard of the cold air. ‘I know the way home.’

  He wept without knowing it.

  The girl smiled. She took off her dress then pressed her face against his hot cheek.

  In an hour he was standing outside in the dark. Looking across the spinifex and gibber plains to a rim of stick-rake fires burning the horizon. He walked back to the hotel.

  He slept three hours and left town at dawn.

  They had ridden a thousand miles and not seen the Kenniffs. At Injune Nixon put the Skillington boy in charge of King Edward and left them at a guesthouse. He wrote a promissory note to pay their bill of fare and said that if he was not back in a fortnight they were free to go.

  He rode west into grey box woodland. Then further onto yellow grass plains. In the late afternoons the sun lit the eucalypts and the smell of the trees in the light in the cooling air was of burning oil. He rode on and the earth was iron red. Then the colour of blood. He rode till the stars seemed they were inches above his head and he might reach and touch them.

  He camped on the road, drifting between towns on the plains. When he came to a town he went to the hotel and took a room.

  He woke at dusk in a hotel in a town whose name he did not kno
w. A train cut the twilight plain. The line went northwest through cattle country to Jericho on the Jordan all the way to Isa. He looked out the window. He watched the train fire along that line. Then all was dark. He wondered what fool had put holy names upon this bitter wilderness. But the Holy Land was bitter wilderness too. It only seemed otherwise when ladies painted pictures of it for church halls. Still, there were true oases in that country. And cities. But there was nothing out there. He stared out the window at that nothing until sleep came again. He wondered that it didn’t trouble him more. That dark waste. Why he would as well be here as anywhere.

  He woke and washed his face and went down the stairs.

  He sat down at the bar and took whisky. He drank one glass, then a second. Then he asked for the bottle. He stared out the far window of the saloon that looked onto the empty rail depot. At the depot three Aborigines with possum skins around their loins and one with a top hat were pestering a swagman for tobacco. The swagman said he had none. The Aborigine with the top hat said he had seen it. The swagman backhanded the black man who fell to the ground sobbing while the others took him by the arms and fell back into the shadows. Nixon turned to a perfumed English army officer who had come to the bar and viewed the scene out the window.

  ‘They say civilisation follows the rail. But that doesn’t seem to hold out here.’

  The officer nodded and smiled and went back to his table without a word.

  Nixon laughed. Polite society thought he was one of them: troopers and scalpers and highwaymen. They viewed them all the same.

  He thought, But there are we keepers of Law, and outside us a great kingdom of nothingness. The same kingdom he had glimpsed from the room upstairs before he slept. But to set the Law so far from everything, so far beyond the frontier, on these plains of desolation … That was a task! That was a sweet phrase, too – plains of desolation. He had read it somewhere, in a poem. No, it was in a letter by a Brisbane businessman complaining about the retardation of the north and west. Nixon stared out the near window onto the shallow-lit veranda of the hotel. Across the empty street. Between the gaps in the buildings. Plains of desolation.

  He thought of his trips to Moreton Bay to visit his aunt – before she left for San Francisco. He called her his aunt. She was a relation of some kind. Though not near enough to want him around for any more than a few weeks, which charity she congratulated herself for. He remembered standing by a window in her house by a piano and everyone singing by the sea. And there were electric lights along the esplanade. Everyone clapped at night when the electric lights were lit. Some nights by those electric lights you could see into the gardens of the wealthy. Women fanning themselves before brass bands at private banquets and fetes. Garden parties, where the dresses of the ladies were low at the throat. It seemed impossible that such scenes should be going on right now – though surely they were – and yet here was he on the plains of desolation.