The Coves

by Whish-Wilson, David;

  Sam unclenched his fists and turned to the weak sunlight and drove the dream from his eyes with a focus on the horizon of hills and the wood smoke haze over the townsite. The needs of his body were always a balm against the dream, and he peered into the court looking for the privy. He could smell the slops in his room from outside and didn’t want to anger the owner of the lodgings.

  After the longhair gunman took Sarah Proctor to the rear of a brothel, he had delivered Sam to the unlit and empty lodging-house at the end of the street. The gunman didn’t speak, and Sam’s ears were still deafened with the discharge of the Colt. The tall killer climbed the internal steps of freshly hewn boards and led Sam onto the rear balcony. He pointed to a bunk in a dark empty room and then was gone.

  That departure, and Sam’s collapse into an exhausted sleep, might have been this morning or it might have been days ago. The only gauge of time passed was the queasy hunger in Sam’s belly. He was used to days without food, and the nausea he now felt was the intermediate period between a bladed intestinal gnawing and the outright staggers. If he returned to his cot and slept through the discomfort, he couldn’t be sure of getting to his feet again.

  There were no workers in the building, although the street along the shore was bustling with horse and wagon and clots of drunken men. In case he discovered his mother this day, Sam wanted to make himself presentable, and so he combed his hair with his fingers and picked the sleep from his eyes and wiped his face on his sleeve. He didn’t want to appear before her an urchin and a likely burden. Sam patted his arms and legs looking for wounds but it was only his bare feet that were tender. His ribs ached from the sleeping and his skin was filthy despite the dunking in the harbour. He walked to the end of the balcony and looked across a plank fence to see a man fell a steer with an axe. The steer fell silently into red mud and the man set about taking off its head with slopping blows. In an open stable, closed off with hessian sheets, hung the carcasses of sheep and pigs. Joints of bone and assorted hooves boiled in a glue-pot, the grey scum roiling off the surface into the hissing fire. Sam thought to trade the man some labour for meat, and once again drew his fingers through his hair and hoisted his trousers. His stomach convulsed at the thought of food, but his parched mouth and cracked lips needed water. He could drink from the puddles in the court below and wash in the same. But first he needed to make his bed. Ignoring the slops, he straightened the kapok-stuffed mattress and three woollen blankets. He didn’t know how long it would take to find his mother, or if he would return to the room, or what awaited downstairs, only that his immediate survival depended upon the encouragement of strangers. The only man who’d shown him recent kindness was a killer who felt nothing when he killed, and only because Sam might be useful.

  Downstairs was the smell of fresh sawdust and cigar-smoke. Sam followed the dog’s footprints in the sawdust as it tracked to the door. The guard outside the door was asleep at his post, face hidden beneath a green felt slouch hat. Sam watched his slumbers and thought about waking him, but the oriental kris at the man’s belt and six-foot musket with bayonet attached laid across his chest dissuaded him from the idea. The wind was cold and briny, and there were dozens of people further along by the groghouses. He thought it best to retrace his path to the tavern from last night. The tall man who’d murdered Dempsey had not been summoned there, but hid behind a rug curtain, the probable owner of the place. It didn’t seem an idle boast when he spoke of his influence. His dress and manner were leaderlike. He had the knowledge that Sam required.

  The groghouse called The Stuck Pig was near empty of patrons and what humanity was there looked like they’d slept where they passed out. Sam recognised the longhair Starr from his tattooed hands. His face was bloodied and he looked dead, or dead drunk. No steam on his breath like the steam that Sam exhaled as he made his way to the plank-bar. The ancient in the tattered redcoat was emptying spittoons into a wooden tub. He nodded at Sam and indicated for him to follow.

  They went through the drape-wall and upstairs into a room illuminated by a paneless four-square window where four men were seated around a sawhorse table. The room was an armoury, with hardwood stands holding muskets and Hawken rifles and shotguns along one wall. The men didn’t look at Sam, busy with their bomb-making. On the table was a pile of carpentry nails and halved copper piping and lead shot. A jar of coal-oil that smelt sulphurous. Cotton wicks soaking in kerosene. A ceramic bowl piled with gunpowder and a wooden spoon perched in it. Empty tin cans with the lids peeled back in rough serration.

  Sam waited, but when he wasn’t acknowledged, sidled to a table covered with slate tiles. The dog looked to the men and was reluctant to enter the room, and only came when Sam tapped his hip. On the table were different bullet moulds, and pigs of lead, and iron melting pots. Lead-shot of different sizes in bowls and smaller buckshot and tamps made of wax paper and rawhide. Paper cartridges for the buckshot. Balls of a kind he’d never seen before. Not round but conical, with a skirt at the bottom. And four homemade pig-iron flechettes, sand embedded in the pitted cast. He picked one and weighed it in his hand, looked around for the weapon that would deliver such a heavy dart, but couldn’t decide its owner.

  The men hunkered down, muttering, the stack of grenades growing on the table. The door behind Sam creaked on its hinges but none of the men looked up. It was the tall killer, dressed now in white canvas trousers and knee-boots that looked military issue. A leather coat lined with tartan. He looked at Sam and nodded.

  ‘We don’t oil the hinges round here. You can guess why.’ Indicating the rack of weapons, his gaze hawkish on the men, his long hair fixed with a buckle, eyes not on Sam but on the dog cowering at his feet; a picture that appeared to sadden the man.

  ‘You ever been around guns?’

  Sam shook his head. ‘Only in books. But I have an interest, and I can learn.’

  The tall man appraising him, matching words with his reading of Sam’s face. ‘You’re lettered eh?’

  ‘Somewhat, sir. I am.’

  ‘Then you’ll be wasted in here. I was thinking your young eyes and steady hands. We’ve had accidents in this room, the result of shakes, and haste. Follow.’

  The door creaked shut and they entered a hallway with all the doors closed except for one room with a low bunk and a white table. In a bucket by the door were bloody bandages, and the room stank of gunpowder.

  ‘Infirmary,’ said the tall man. ‘Where you get your teeth pulled and musket-ball removed and knife-holes sewed up again.’

  To a big room at the end of the hall. The door creaked so loudly that it made the dog back away. Another sawhorse table but covered in maps. Roughly made bookshelf, empty. Books piled on the floor beside. A wooden trolley with bottles and glass. The tall man waved at a stool beside the table, and put up his booted feet and inclined his head into a box of sunlight, dust swimming in the eddies caused by his breath.

  ‘Show me on the globe where you think we are.’

  The globe was eggshell cool beneath Sam’s fingers. The master in the Boys Home had a globe too, but it was decades old. The Swan River colony Sam’d recently arrived from had not been on the master’s globe—just Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales and a great swathe of brown island whose northern borders looked drawn by a child. Sam now spun the globe until he found the Old Country and worked west with his fingertips, across the Atlantic until he hit Newfoundland. Followed his fingers south to New York. Across a rudimentary patchwork of nations and Indian land to the west coast. It was all Mexico, far as he could see, and no towns.

  ‘Not on here. Yet.’

  ‘Didn’t say it was. Asked you to show me where you thought we was.’

  ‘Couldn’t say, sir.’

  ‘Boy, don’t call me sir. My father was a bullocky, not a laird.’

  ‘Mister, what do I call you then?’ Sam not meeting the man’s eyes.

  ‘And don’t act like I’m a laird either. Look at me when you talk. You’re a free man now. My name is Th
omas Keane. You call me Keane.’

  ‘Yes, Mister Keane. I go by Sam Bellamy, lately of Van Diemen’s Land, but born to the Swan River colony. Transported when I was eleven.’

  ‘The point I was making with the globe.’

  ‘Yes, Mister Keane. There’s nothing on it.’

  ‘Was all Mexico but a year ago, this town called Yerba Buena. Now it’s newly American, called San Francisco, and soon to be part of the Union. But peopled by men from across that globe. That man whose head I uncoupled—he was wrong. It ain’t Spaniards here; it’s Chileans. Russians. Chinese. Brought on the Pacific Ocean. Every kind of European that has colonies in the Pacific. Some blacks. Plenty of Mexicans, or Californios, as they call themselves. And us, who the Americans call Southlanders, in big numbers.’

  ‘Come for the gold.’

  ‘That’s right, come for the gold. Up beyond the Sacramento Valley, out on the American and San Joaquin rivers, and all the little streams run off ’em…’

  Sam listened to the man whose eyes never rested, scanning across the maps on the table and occasionally glancing back at Sam to make sure he was paying attention. At first there was a weariness in Thomas Keane’s voice, suggesting that this was a speech he had made many times before, and Sam supposed that this was true because of all the new arrivals. But the longer Keane spoke the more his voice changed, and Sam recognised it as the voice that the Magistrate used when he wanted to sound fatherly, and Sam knew that the speech was for his benefit alone. He wanted to ask the man about his mother, and he expected to be asked in turn why he’d travelled over the great ocean, but then he understood that this type of man wouldn’t ask that kind of question. In any case, Thomas Keane was taking an interest in Sam, and was trying to educate him, and so he had better listen and not interrupt.

  ‘… There’s a race goin among common men to get the easy gold, before hard-rock minin becomes the preferred method, and us Australians got a good start. Ten pound steerage I paid, and near two month to get here from New South Wales; six month and one thousand dollars to get here by wagon train or across Panama from the eastern American colonies. Why there’s barely no women, and hardly no children, or boys like you, yet. But plenty of men, the kind who can pack up and leave. American deserters from the war with Mexico. Whalers and sealers tired of the Pacific trade. Settlers from the western Spanish colonies. And just lately arrived, as cabin passengers on the better steamships and clippers, from the Old Country, and the richer states back east—the plain old adventurous. Some of them have wit, and some of them’re stupid like children. That’s where you come in. You got any vices?’

  Shook his head.

  ‘Boy your age, I believe you, excepting one or two. You look at everything, and you always got questions behind your eyes. So ask them.’

  Sam thought again of his mother and began to form the question, but the look in Keane’s eyes was sharp. That particular matter was for Sam’s benefit alone, and here was the leader trying to help him, and he realised that he wanted to impress Keane, and so he asked the question that he supposed was natural of a boy his age.

  ‘Those men making mortars next door?’

  Keane smiled, nodded. ‘We’re arming ourselves, because The Hounds are up to something. They’re an American gang, deserters from the Mexican War, who want to take what we have. Our gang, we don’t know what they’re planning, but something’s coming. Anything else?’

  ‘What does it go by, your gang?’

  Keane laughed, and the sound was pleasant to Sam. ‘They call us many things. Sydney Ducks when they want to mock us, or Sydney Coves mostly, on account of that being one of the names for the quarter you find yourself in.’

  Keane next told the story of the early months. How when he first arrived there were a few hundred Americans and some US soldiers stationed at the Presidio barracks, fresh off the border war with the Mexicans. Keane had gone upriver into the mountains around Sutter’s Mill like everyone else, looking for the yeller. But his friend got a leg crushed in a rockfall, and they drug him back to San Francisco, and even after a few months absence the place had grown with the new arrivals flooding in from the Pacific Americas and Australia mainly. And how some of The Hounds, lately outnumbered in their own country, soon realised what the coming of foreigners meant for their own aspirations. In particular, the bandy-legged Southlanders with manacle-chafed wrists and ankles, stripes on their backs. Set barefoot upon the shoreline armed with cruel knives and the instinct to survive. Men who had journeyed for the gold but didn’t care how they came upon it. For whom the stories of the Californian interior, where freemen slaved to extract the yeller while being plagued by hunger and cholera, held no fear but no interest either. Who looked around at the port streets so similar to those in the Australian colonies but for the notable absence of peelers.

  A town without a constabulary. A town without masters. A town for the taking.

  And take they did. Mr Keane a freeborn man like Sam Bellamy who had also fallen into captivity. Who also had letters. Who in the caring for his wounded compatriot, with a few trusted friends, began robbing gold dust from merchants who refused their protection, and soon began bushranging into the hinterland. Who bought this their first groghouse in the midst of The Hound’s territory and who, in response to the warfare enjoined by The Hounds, by way of targeted murder, had slowly diminished their number to the point where the Americans were now a rabble, plundering the poor Mexicans that lived in wattled hovels on the fringes of town.

  Keane talked of his exploits in plain language. None of the grandiloquence that Sam expected from a war leader, although there was a bitterness in his eyes whenever he mentioned The Hounds, until he checked himself. ‘Samuel, I’ll provide you with board and employment. You can work as a scout, to be schooled by Patrick Ryan, with an eye to the pocket heavy with gold dust and an ear for the loudmouth and braggart. You can tout at the stagecoach muster for new chums with the glint of foolishness in their eye. Was there anything else you want to know?’

  ‘I just want to thank you, Mr Keane, for taking an interest in me, and for offering me a position with your fellows.’

  Keane’s smile told Sam that the formality of his speech was amusing. The man sat back and huffed on his pipe, curiosity in his eyes, waiting for the question that Sam really wanted to ask and that he seemed to know was coming. ‘Mr Keane. I don’t know if your influence extends to knowin about mollies and their movements, but I got to ask you about…’

  There were angry boot-steps in the hall, coming closer, and Keane raised a hand until there entered a red-headed giant as pale as Sam and equally dirty.

  ‘The Hounds are at the Mexican camp. Our men are situated on the rooftops of Sydney-town and in the streets. The armoury is empty but for our favoured pieces.’

  Up some stairs and a ladder, and they were on the shingled roof, a leaden walkway between the twin gables. Five other men were crouched and smoking, dressed in a motley of corded trousers and coats of different leather. One of them passed Keane an eyeglass, who grunted and passed it to Sam. The eyeglass was heavy, but when he trained it lengthways over the blocks of two- and three-storey buildings and the squatters’ shacks to the perimeter of mud huts, Sam could see the dozen horsemen in their tattered uniforms charging through the distant encampment with whips raised and cavalry swords descending in silver arcs onto men and women and children running everyway through the tracks. Sam stopped his scan of the Mexican camp, and watched what appeared to be a man humping a well, until the man finished and without pulling up his breeches reached down and took the ankles of a skinny woman and tipped her headfirst down the well, while a child not more than three or four batted his legs, until the man took up the child and sent it after its mother.

  Sam put down the eyeglass because of the sickening in his belly. Dempsey’s reign and bloody murder appeared to have been merely a foretaste of this new world. It was a massacre that Sam was witnessing, but the men around him appeared disinterested, some of them eve
n grimly amused.

  ‘You can bet this latest campaign is due to Dudgeon’s goading,’ said the giant redhead. ‘Stirring his men for action with an easy slaughter. I’ll toss you for him.’

  ‘Done, Mannix,’ replied Keane. ‘He’s had it coming, and I’ll be glad to turn him off.”.’

  Several blocks away on a sloping grass cantonment were gathered a hundred men or more. One among them was waving his hat, speechifying from the raised platform of a dray-cart. Even from a distance, Sam recognised him as the Australian who’d raided the whaler. The man replaced his hat and jumped down into the crowd that began to march out of the square toward the Mexican camp.

  ‘That’s the Australian man who boarded our ship,’ Sam said.

  Keane made a look of distaste behind billows of tobacco. ‘He’s the travesty that goes by Mitchell Walker Esquire, and who’s no less criminal than ourselves, but lacks the honesty to proclaim this. He’s grown fat charging poor men felonious prices for ordinary goods, and cares not whether they starve as a result, and wonders why they turn to crime. Walker has lately formed a vigilante group which aims to limit our future numbers by raiding ships and turning them back, and, I hear, openly killing Australians who bear the lash and iron-stoop.’

  ‘Now might be the time,’ the redhead muttered to Keane, who turned and faced the ocean, but shook his head. ‘The wind isn’t right. But I agree. It’ll need to be soon.’

  Sam wasn’t about to ask. He felt his separation from the dog, who he could hear whining at the foot of the ladder, and then there was a hand on his sleeve. Keane, looking hard at him.

  ‘Boy, you’re shaking and it ain’t cold. You better eat.’

  On his way down the ladder the wood-frame of the building began to vibrate, and Sam held onto the ladder and stopped his descent. But it wasn’t his hunger or a trick of the mind. The saw-boards in the bare walls were trembling against a swelling cushion of sound.