The Coves

by Whish-Wilson, David;

  Sam continued across the plaza square and entered the saloon and introduced himself to the proprietor, a florid man with a bowler hat and powder-grey sideburns. He wore an apron like a butcher. On the shelf behind him were spirits of a kind Sam had never witnessed, in greens and blues and magenta, as well as the familiar amber of rum and whisky. The floorboards looked scrubbed to the point of being abraded, and the place smelled of carbolic soap. The publican took in Sam’s appearance and the track of mud his boots had left and gritted his teeth. He tried to smile but the mangled expression dropped when Sam opened his mouth.

  ‘Quiet,’ the publican hissed. ‘In here, you’re an American. My clientele, you understand…’

  But Sam didn’t understand the American, and looked around at the men in dark suits and top hats and the occasional woman in a tentlike dress and bonnet, each of whom were regarding him askance. None of the women looked like his mother, and in the harsh light they each resembled unblinking birds of prey. Thanks to every hard surface in the saloon, the publican’s silencing of him was magnified and audible to all. Sam turned to the rows of pretty-coloured spirits and watched the barman goad a giant silver tureen with cranks of a handle until out of the tap spurted a clear but fizzing liquid that filled the glass in seconds. This was passed to Sam as the publican leaned close.

  ‘You can’t come in here dressed like that. And Australians are unwelcome anyhow. Keane knows this and I grant that it’s a test of myself and perhaps of your ability to follow orders. But these gentlemen who are mostly the town burghers are liable to string you up if you offend their sensibility anyways, especially in front of their womenfolk, primped for society as they are. Your position is outside the front door in the alley. Any potential customers for Sydney-town I’ll direct your way. Tell Keane that I don’t need to be observed, especially the day after a hanging. Take this drink and when you’re finished, place it on a fencepost. Don’t come in here unless you’re properly suited.’

  The whole sermon delivered in soft tones that reminded Sam of the Welsh speech, but there was no mistaking the seriousness of the American’s counsel. To make sure, to Sam’s back he addressed words to the effect that a drink of soda for the parched throat of an urchin was a kindness that he hoped wouldn’t offend the present company, who Sam could see were still deadly in their examination of him.

  He took his place on the corner-post, where a horse-rail ended and the alley smelt of piss, and listened to the gambling shacks across the way, where cheers punctuated by groans and the sound of fighting and laughing ebbed and flowed on the wind. The posts and boards of the saloon were all of unseasoned timber, and smelt of pine-sap and already rusting nail-iron. The saloon was owned by Keane, with the American his proxy, and Sam’s employment was to keep a watch on the plaza for faces marked by an enthusiasm for the mollies and gaming tables and cheap whisky to be had in the waterfront streets.

  It was cold in the shadows without a coat. Sam wrapped his arms about his chest and longed for the company of his dog, who was with the elderly musician in Keane’s groghouse. Across the plaza, illuminated by the candles and fires of hawkers and loungers, Sam made out the repetitive creaking of a signboard or hoarding in the chilly wind. It was only when some men stood beneath the signboard and held aloft fiery torches that Sam understood that the heavy shapes were the corpses of lynched men, devoid of hats and boots, three of them on creaking ropes beneath a storehouse gantry. The men and their torches moved along the duckboards across the plaza and the hanged men continued to twist in the wind. Sam could no longer see the hanged men, but he wasn’t grateful. It seemed worse knowing that they were there, silent in the darkness, and he was relieved when a party of horsemen rode at speed into the square, making a circuit of the plaza before they came to rest at the saloon. Newly wreathed in the clots of steam emerging from their snorting horses, and around the kerchiefs knotted over their mouths, the men were so coated with chalk-dust that they had the appearance of leather-clad skeletons. Their watery eyes stared from black wells at their leader, who dismounted and strode to the windows and peered inside at the gathered gentry and spat on the boards.

  ‘Boys, there’s more stimulation to be had in humpin my boot than among the horse-faced pew-loungers in there. We might entertain ourselves at their expense but the menfolk are already drawing their weapons…’

  Sam stepped from the shadows with his hands in the air. The ghostly man drew his revolver and it was the only part of him not white. ‘Whaddyer want?’

  The accent a sinuous growl. Sam didn’t doctor his own. ‘There’s gamblin places over the plaza there but this ain’t the quarter for pleasures of the kind you’re searchin’. Follow me down the hill.’

  The man looked suspicious. ‘To Sydney-town? I’ve been warned, as have we all. For the reputation of your kind is little better than the gypsy whores whose whispers in a sleeping man’s ear are said to cripple his virility, should he ever stray.’

  Sam saw his mistake plainly, but no remedy suggested itself. The men were soldiers, dusting themselves off, and behind the powder masks were faces as mean as any Sam had seen on earth. He put his hands on his hips, pretending a mischief that he didn’t feel.

  ‘It ain’t your manhood or even your souls we’re after, boys, it’s yer money.’

  The men thought this a great joke, and indicated for Sam to lead the way. One of them walked his horse beside Sam with an arm around his shoulders, and occasionally patted his head. It was excitement that Sam read as the native emotion among the group, and he envied them their easy solidarity, although they stank worse than their horses. One block away from Sydneytown he began to see familiar faces and looked for some of Keane’s company to warn them.

  The air was colder by the ocean, and the smell of fish, rotting seaweed and sewage was strong. The merchant shops were mostly boarded-up at this hour, and their porches given over to street-groggers and, from their accents, Australians with nowhere else to go. He heard a revolver cock behind him and the men’s laughter tailed off.

  From the alleys and porches, dark eyes watched them descend toward the docks. Sam could feel the hunger in those eyes. Men in slouch hats leaned on horse-rails and smoked pipes in the glow of campfires set against the muddy borders of the street crossings. This was called Pacific Street, but like all of the street signs in that precinct, the poles had been cut down and turfed into the muddy holes that were said to be fathomless, and where donkeys had drowned in liquid mud and some drunks too, according to Keane. The Australians had dragged abandoned crates, packing cases and heavy timbers from the port and thrown them in the mud pits, but the sinkholes just drank them up and thirsted for more.

  Sam indicated for the riders to follow his footsteps around the edges of the worst drains. In single file they continued toward the shoreline, while the loiterers stared from the darkness and willed them to fall.

  The Americans didn’t seem so ferocious now, their nerves strained with watching the alleys and shadows. Sam imagined them veterans of Indian wars, well used to the hellish semaphore of silence that forewarned every enemy attack. But now the sounds of the Australian groghouses could be heard, and the men spat and began to smile, and whoever had cocked his revolver uncocked it and the man beside Sam slapped his back. It was a fiddle playing a shanty to a singalong of many voices, in competition with a piano and squeezebox from further along the shoreline, and now there were gunshots and laughter and singing, and somebody was playing the spoons, and elsewhere a choir of ukuleles ran down a medley of national anthems at a comical pace.

  They rounded the corner, and Sam let the men take in the length of the shoreline street, with its welter of sounds and hundreds of people in the packed roadway between the establishments. The men seemed undecided, or someway hesitant, so Sam took the bridle of the nearest man’s pony and indicated they should follow. He weaved through the tottering drunks and loiterers, and other men gathered in silent communion, whose eyes stared into every face and toward every pocket so that the
y might eat. Sam looked behind, and the Americans had formed a wary line, and their eyes too looked into every face. Sam paraded the Americans past Keane’s groghouse, and the tattooed youth called Barr who’d questioned him earlier about eating his dog tilted his head toward the stables at the termination of the street. Sam leaned toward the nearest American and told him their destination. The American nodded but his eyes were warlike. This was no place to secure a horse or pony when their packsaddles and leather wallets were laden, and where men of all ages were gathered waiting for an opportunity to thieve, and not even hiding that fact, but professing their notoriety with desperate eyes. From the smoke of the groghouse emerged the dog, which by some miracle of nature had picked Sam’s scent among the stench of the carousing number. The dog looked into the crowd and saw Sam and took two steps forward, but turned tail and went back up the steps. Like Sam, the dog had survived by reading the faces of men. He went down the steps again, but again retreated to Barr, the tattooed youth, who nudged him away with his heel. The dog followed Sam instead with his eyes, remaining on the porch above the capering drunks that parted to let the Americans through with smirks that suggested all manner of entrapments.

  The man whose pony Sam led took back the reins, and drew his revolver, and looked down the line to where the others did the same. Even so, they followed Sam to the livery barn where he rapped on the high plank door. His mind was now on some kind of commission, so that he might build a store of coin. The barn door creaked, and a hulking gnome with a blacksmith’s leather jerkin and iron tongs ushered them into the darkened hall. The barn floor was covered in wet hay, and in one corner was a makeshift fire service with barrels of water on a dray-cart with iron wheels. Beside stood a draughthorse, looking at them over a canvas nosebag. The men patted their rides and whispered to them, but didn’t remove saddles or suggest as much to the farrier beyond tossing him a silver coin. They followed Sam back out to the streets, and in silence followed him up the steps of The Stuck Pig, where the dog began a strange dance that Sam ignored upon noticing that the Americans had forgotten him already. But the tattooed youth, with sleeves rolled up over his biceps, and wearing a pistol in a holster over his chest, stopped the American party and pointed to Sam. The nearest American grunted, and seeing that his way was barred, pulled out a leather purse on a string from inside his trousers and unleashed the neck and passed Sam a silver dollar. The dog was leaping on Sam’s haunch, and he turned and clamped it in an embrace while the beast licked his hands and shivered.

  8

  Sam and Clement the old musician reclined with their boots toward the round-bellied stove. The seams of the stove glowed red. The dog slept beneath Sam’s chair, having spent the day in Clement’s company. The warmth of the stove and the resin-smoke that drifted from Clement’s pipe made Sam both sleepy and awake. Clement had ordered Sam to drink a medicinal glass of rum, mixed with milk and honey, and he’d drunk it down.

  After leaving the American soldiers, Sam had returned to the brothel area, against Sarah Proctor’s advice, and he was still haunted by the experience. At that late hour the noise and drunkenness at the brothels was even worse than on the shoreline street. Hundreds of men were lined up outside each of the molly-houses, and down the duckboard paths. Sam thought of Sarah, and possibly his mother, receiving the men one after another, throughout the long night, and the picture of it made him feel ill. There was an angry air among the waiting men who were from all points of the globe. They dressed and spoke different, but each had the same look, and that was frustration at having to wait to fulfil their needs.

  Sam made a promise that he wouldn’t mention to Sarah that he’d visited the street during the night. Still feeling bad, he instead returned to the familiar environs of the tavern, to sit with Clement while he smoked his resin. But even in the tavern, with his dog beside him, Sam felt distant from the crowded and noisy tableau of drinking and gambling, with the rumbling and shouts and repetitive whorls of the fiddler on stage. From their raised position by the stove, they could see the entire floor. There was a line out the door that led to twin tables with a dealer playing on one table faro and on the other table monte. Sam didn’t know the games, and it seemed the gamblers didn’t either, because the purpose seemed to be to slam down your wager in the form of gold coin or bag of dust, and stand back and wait for the turn of a card, and if you won then to bet again until you’d lost everything. Clement explained that there were faro and monte games to be had on most streets, and in American saloons near the plaza square, but the Southlanders made sure to spread rumours that their dealers were the luckiest in the territory. Because gold digging was an occupation defined by luck, Clement said, most miners were crazed with superstitions designed to bring them good fortune. Dutchmen and sailors were considered especially lucky companions, and a Dutch sailor the luckiest of all, but your ordinary man needed to take his luck where he could find it. To make the Southland dealers appear lucky, they’d planted men in the lines out the door, and the dealers made sure to reward their big stakes with big rewards.

  There was gold dust visible on the boards beneath the dealers’ tables, and Clement told Sam that every morning the old man in the tricorne hat was paid by sweeping up the boards and panning out the dust and that, despite his appearance, the Ancient was one of the richest men on the street.

  There were other tables playing poker, and other games Sam didn’t know where the participants were sallow and steely-eyed and looked like they lived in their chairs. The tattooed youth Barr stood shadow-framed beneath the lintel that led into the alley, eyes keen and cosh-ready. At the first sign of trouble he waded into the throng and struck out with the leaden purse, and didn’t stop until the victims were unconscious, dragging them out by their ankles and tipping them into the street. Nobody seemed outraged, and Barr never once drew his pistol. There was no sign of Keane or Mannix who, according to Clement, still anticipated trouble from The Hounds, and were off making preparations.

  Sam’s eye returned to it—the patch of floorboard where Dempsey’s blood had run out his neck, now laid over with sawdust that was stamped in wine-coloured boot-prints. It was barely two days since Keane had ended the Irishman’s tyranny, but under the influence of the rum it felt like an old dream.

  If Sam expected Clement to be knowledgeable about the women of Sydney-town then he was disappointed, although the old man was sympathetic when he learned where Sam had been.

  ‘Samuel, if your mother is on that street then I hope you find her soon. They say that a miner ages a decade every year on the diggings, but I count many mollies among my friends and it’s no different for them. Time is speeded up in this new colony, on account of the hard work and the money, and the spree that every miner depends upon to look forward to while he’s labouring in the dirt. I don’t know of any such woman as you’ve described, but I’ll ask around on your account. If she’s here then we’ll find her soon, but my counsel is not to get your hopes up, even if you find her. Hers is a hard life, and she’ll be hardened on account of it. Although the money is better than any other kind of job a woman can do here, just like a miner needs his spree, so too a molly needs her comfort, and for most that comfort is found in the laudanum bottle. I was intending to teach you how to pickpocket in the safety of this tavern, but that can wait. Try to put what you have seen tonight out of your mind.’

  Sam nodded and listened to the balm of the old man’s talk. Clement wasn’t a lag like most of the Australians, but a sailor who’d jumped ship in China, and lived there on the Pearl River with a Celestial wife and harvested tea and grew a taste for the opium resin. He claimed that he didn’t drink, because his stomach was painful, and the resin assuaged his many old wounds. He had a kindly face although weathered beyond repair, and his eyes were sharp with an intelligence that voided only when he rubbed his ruined leg, and shifted its weight by hand.

  There was a patient ritual associated with the smoking that seemed pious in that raucous company. Clement tenderly rolled a
ball of the black stuff in his fingertips, and heated the ball on the end of a sawman’s nail, then laid it in the pipe and smoked it dry. The pipestem was brass, and the hot smoke smelled like manured dirt, which Clement exhaled in long clouds that kept their shape under the ceiling. Sam’s head spun, and he closed his eyes and opened them again, and fingered the gold nugget that Clement had given him as his first touch of the yeller. It wasn’t his to keep but only to meditate upon. He liked its weight and colour even though the nugget was misshapen like a severed ear. Sam stared at the nugget cradled in his palm, and its glow was brighter than a flame, and its weight made him want to secrete it in his boot.

  Clement laughed. ‘Gold is the storybook of our kind and always a reflection of its owner, truer ’n any mirror.’

  Sam made little sense of Clement’s statement, but understood that the old man’s discourse was a product of the resin affecting his mind, because his own drunken thoughts were tending toward the unusual.

  ‘That is alluvial gold and these here,’ Clement whispered, ‘are alluvial people. You an’ me included. Pushed this way an’ that in the darkness despite all gravity, tumbling down shimmerin rivers and imagin ourselves motive with an individual’s will. When the alluvial’s gone, a whole other kind of man will arrive. Rock miners. Industrials. Men of so-called substance. You will know them by their methods and their manner and their machines. As for these men here,’ casting a withered hand, ‘they come here looking for the yeller but in actual fact they’re lookin for something more precious, even though they are most of them stupid as donkeys and don’t know it yet.’