The Coves

by Whish-Wilson, David;

  The town clerk was a thin Mormon of indeterminate age in a grubby black suit with ink-stained fingers and jaundiced eyes. There was always clamour in the clerk’s offices, as newcomers and dusty miners sought his attention to register claims, and draw up deeds, and lodge complaints against claim-jumpers. Sam caught the clerk’s eye and the man left his besieged counter and met Sam on the rear steps of the government building, next to the red-brick commissariat that resembled a fort. Sam passed him the felt sack of dust, and received in turn a ledger-page listing the names of new merchants who’d registered town-site leases, and where they were staying. This intelligence would be passed on to Keane and his men, who would invite the merchants to accept the Cove’s protection, but if refused, would initiate their various ploys of parting the merchant with his savings. There was no bank in the town, and so equally valuable as the currency of gold dust or coin was the currency of information that led to the locating of the hoards and caches and personal stores of the wealthy, and every morning at Keane’s table there were informants who were paid to deliver this knowledge to the Coves.

  Sam returned to the plaza where the wind riffled the canvas tents and snapped at the pennants strung on guy ropes between the establishments. The dog followed at his heels as he called out hellos to the men that greeted him as he walked toward Sydneytown, the name of the girl Ai on his lips, saying it to himself again and again in the manner she had taught him. Her name was beautiful as she was, and put together, her name and her face was like a crack of light in his day, and even the cold wind on his face was a refreshment and a friend.

  14

  As usual around midday, Joseph Borden could be found beside his rainwater barrel on the baker’s porch. Sam waved and made his passage toward the Australian, down the muddy track that was called Pacific Street, edging around the sinks and puddles and keeping to the planks and duckboards. Borden held up the ladle, which was his common greeting. He wore his regular leather trousers, and a canvas shirt under a leather vest and oilskin slicker, and a wide-brimmed hat in the Oregonian fashion which he never removed. His moustaches were long and grey, and belied his young man’s eyes and clean white teeth that showed in his smile at the dog’s recognition of their friendship, sidling up to Borden and offering its flank for a scratch. Borden lifted off the wooden lid from the barrel and dipped his ladle into the freshwater and passed it to Sam, who drank deeply then offered it to the dog, who did the same.

  Borden was a man who Sam stopped to talk with regularly, but on this day there was a reason for his taking the porch. Sam had assumed that it was a matter of time before Sarah Proctor’s friends heard something about a red-haired Scotswoman transported from the Swan River colony, and who’d taken on molly-work in New South Wales. But he was wrong, and Sam didn’t know what to do next, except that Borden was someone who knew his way around the territory of California, even though he was a Vandiemanlander who had settled in Melbourne, and was the first to leave that shore when the news of the gold rush was published. Like most men, Borden lived in a canvas tent pitched outside the row of streets that followed the semi-circular shape of the bay. There were thousands of these tents, lit from within by whale-oil lamps and candles, and at night the hillside resembled a constellation of golden stars set against the darkness.

  Other men lived in the hulks of the abandoned fleet out in the bay, and risked death at the hands of the area’s notorious currents when swimming to and from the shore, or fashioned rafts out of the cannibalised wrecks and made a living transporting salvage. Joseph Borden was one such man. Although he lived on land, during the day he ferried men from ship to shore, and broke apart the abandoned ships, and sold the finest wood and brass fittings to builders so that the town’s nautical origins were made daily apparent in the scavenged circular windows and the skirts, architraves and barge-boards of the new edifices built further up the hill.

  In between work and sleep, like most Australians, Borden sat around and conversed with whoever passed by, from his position on a stool beside a salvaged wine barrel now fashioned into a rainwater vessel. He collected the rainwater with the permission of the baker whose long sloped roof was natural for the purpose. Freshwater was hard to come by, despite all the rain, and more expensive by weight than either beer or rum, and Borden sat with a ladle and sold his water or traded for food.

  He sat now and scratched the dog’s ears in the way that the dog favoured, so that its nose was beside his own, eyes closed and leaning into him. Borden’s eyes were however on Sam, and there was caution in his voice.

  ‘Sacramento is no place for a boy. The anti-Australian feeling is strong in that river-port, where the streets are straight and the minds narrowed by open Nativist resentment. The lynching of Southlanders is common, and so there are few Australian mollies at work, and I should know. Better for you to remain in this embayment where you’re safe among your countrymen, and where the opportunities for a clever boy are greater.’

  The advice wasn’t welcome, but Sam respected Borden’s knowledge of the colony and also the forthrightness of his opinions. At first he’d thought Borden a pest, whistling to him as he passed and offering him water, but lately Sam looked forward to chatting with the short man who knew the interior and many of its people.

  Borden kept away from Sydney-town for reasons he wouldn’t explain, but knew Keane and Clement and asked after them. He’d sluiced for gold alongside the two Coves up on the mountain rivers and creeks, until the snow melt had inundated the best shores and most gold-seekers had turned instead to dry-digging in the hills nearby, which Borden wouldn’t consider on account of it being like ‘searching for a drop of freshwater in the biblical ocean’. And yet even though Borden had turned his back on the interior, he still retained that look about him that reminded Sam of the faces straight off the boats—enthusiastic and excited and optimistic.

  This was, according to Borden, because the gold-bearing land he’d pored over in the Californian hills reminded him of similar land he’d traversed back in Victoria, and not far from Melbourne either. His plan was to return upon the first possible ship, to begin his explorations unmolested by thousands of rival miners, and all the foolishness of the gold mania around them. Borden had learned the hard way that the reality of gold-seeking was different to the promise, and he offered that advice freely to all who paused for a ladle of water in those alternately dusty and muddy streets. There were many thousands who’d died up there, he said, waving a hand at the clouds to the east, broke and broken and never a priest to say a word over their graves. One man in ten, he reckoned, passed out of the world in that fashion, and still they kept coming. That would end, Borden assured Sam, when the measure of disappointment outweighed the dewy-eyed optimism that governed the new arrivals.

  In the meantime, it was his missionary responsibility to help that disappointment prosper by declaring the truth to any who’d listen. Sam looked at the faces of the men Borden preached to as they stood in the street, but universally they shook their heads and thought him a fool, a blatherer made bitter by failure or even worse—a man who’d manufactured his own bad fortune by speaking ill. As every man knew, bad luck was contagious, and those who suffered it were best avoided.

  Borden didn’t care about the ill feeling of those he considered ignorant, and that made Sam trust him.

  ‘Is there anywhere else I can look? What about the town of Los Angeles, which I saw on Thomas Keane’s map?’

  Borden shrugged. ‘In truth, I haven’t been that far south, but I hear that it’s a small fishing village. Nothing there for a … your mother. But there is one other possibility in this town that is unlikely, and tragic if it’s true. If I was searching for a white woman strayed from her kind, I’d suggest looking in the shanties among the sand dunes to the north of Goat Hill, where many Chileans identifiable by their domed hats seek asylum, and blacks and Indians and all breeds in-between. There are white women out there, some plying their trade in the service of niggers, I’ve been told, but I’ve
never seen this myself. They are the mad ones, they say, cast from our society but too valuable to be imprisoned in any bedlam lockup. I hope to God that your mother isn’t in that company, for it sounds like a living hell, more so than any regular molly-house. If you go, take your dog and arm yourself, for there is no law that applies to you where there are no whites to observe it.’

  Sam was silent while he let the information sink in. The possibility that his mother might be mad, or enslaved. He considered asking Borden to accompany him to the shantytown, because of the dangers spoken of, or Clement or even Sarah Proctor, but decided against it. In his mind he always imagined coming upon his mother alone. She would know him, and they would be together.

  With that, as he did every time they parted, Borden passed Sam the ladle and he drank deeply from it, and it tasted sweet and metallic, and he passed it back to Borden who placed it under the dog’s nose, and laughed as it gulped and went crosseyed, and licked its lips and padded in a circle around the ladle until the great spoon was licked clean.

  It was said that on occasions Thomas Keane slipped out of town in a disguise that concealed his long hair beneath a Mexican hat, or a sailor’s woollen skullcap, depending upon who told Sam the story. Keane was wanted throughout the territory for his bushranging exploits, although Clement explained that Keane’s absence was actually because he’d taken a lover—a newly arrived French Madam who’d set up an establishment in French-town, one that Keane described as furnished in velvet and dark woods and that brought a touch of class to the settlement. Keane was lately absent several days in a row, and Mannix was gone raiding into the hinterland with Barr and several others. Clement didn’t mind when Sam asked for time to explore the northern beaches behind Goat Hill, where Borden had described the Chilenos as camped.

  The dog sprinted past Sam as it realised they were leaving Sydney-town, heading round the base of Goat Hill and into the scrub. It had rained for two solid days and nights, and it was good to leave the muddy tracks and clamber round some rocks toward the sand dunes. The dog skittered over the boulders above the waterline, looking back to make sure of Sam’s following. New smells and new ground. Sam clucked his permission and the dog climbed the rocks, and disappeared into the coastal heath, while Sam clambered over seaweed drifts and hitched his knapsack and leapt to the sand.

  It was a relief to get out of the weather, and he trudged the first swale where the wind whipped at the peak of the dunes and a thin tracing of sand migrated down and caught in the roots of the grasses and bushes whose leaves were pliant as he plucked them and worked them in his fingers. The leaves smelt of salt, and in the sheltered swale Sam might have been back on the Swan River but for the detritus of squatters in the scrub around—shreds of clothing and empty cans of beans and meat and bottles of medicine and rum.

  There were the older scoop-footprints at the base of the dune, but with the wind blowing a curtain of sand it was hard to believe that hundreds passed daily along this track. Soon the discarded goods consisted of live provisions, scavenged from the unwanted crates and pallets on the dock: cans of navy beans and brined beef and sacks of flour and cornmeal too heavy to carry the final distance to the camps.

  There was shortly a thin smoke on the wind, and he recognised the fuel as the familiar saltbush scrub from the fires at home. The dog struggled in the deep sand to the top of a dune and disappeared over the summit and there began the sound of barking but not from the dog. A gunshot broke the muffled silence and the dog sprinted back over the dune and tumbled and leapt until it rejoined Sam, whereupon it hid with its ears back and tail pointed down.

  Sam continued along the floor of the swale until the ground hardened and the pale aggregate sustained a bed of salt grass, while two small dogs the size of harbour rats patrolled the ridgeline and yapped down at him and the dog. He could see the smoke now, and around a final drift of sand he emerged into a small valley where the crusted mudstone supported a village made of salvaged packing woods and tea-chests, and canvas flies strung between the low trees.

  There were hundreds of these makeshift dwellings, and an equal number of men and women, but the governing atmosphere of the place was silence, and a kind of secretiveness, except for the barking of the two hounds that now sped toward them and gathered in a furious barricade of teeth and snarls and shivering. The dogs were the ugliest Sam had ever seen, and thought themselves the stature of wolves by their actions, but were miniature enough to fit in his jacket pocket. The dog looked to Sam and took his lead by ignoring the two things, and trotted beside him as they entered the camp. There was no sign of the musketeer who’d fired at the dog, but one by one the inhabitants of the camp ceased their labours and recreations and turned to watch him come.

  Clement had told Sam that a majority of these sand-dune dwellers were Chilenos, or Peruvians or Mexicans, routed by The Hounds from the townsite proper, and that the dunes were a refuge because no white man would live there due to the lack of fresh water and the sand that flowed in antlike migration around their cots and entered their mouths and eyes and ears.

  Sam looked into the faces that were stilled by suspicion, and he felt his heart beating faster, and he covered the dagger-blade in its scabbard with a conspicuous jerk of his jacket. Most of all he tried to avert his gaze from the rows of black eyes, so as to not give offence, although the swarming in his chest and the pressure of blood in his ears and the awkwardness of a white boy patrolling through their camp while pretending to be invisible was too unlikely, and he glanced at the faces that were unanimous in their condemnation.

  The two ugly dogs were called off. The only sound now was the wind at the top of the dune, and his footsteps crunching in the gravel. On griddle-plates were patties of cornmeal, and stews of various concoction, and hanging from the stunted trees were chandeliers of drying mackerel and legs of gammon pork, and around the tents were herbs and vegetables potted in tins and canvas bags.

  Despite the possessions, the camp looked like a good wind would carry it away, and Sam remembered the routing of these people by The Hounds from their previous situation, and his already tentative steps became doubly self-conscious as he searched in the shadows for a white woman with red hair like his own. But there was no such woman, and Sam realised with a spike of shame that Borden’s story of fallen white women living in slavery amongst the refugees was an abject rumour, and a further insult to these people, who were many of them healing from injuries likely inflicted by the very same rumour-mongers.

  It was the sight of the camp’s end in a cul-de-sac before a giant dune that sank his spirits further. An old woman with a brown moon face and crinkled eyes smiled at him, and for a moment he saw himself as she saw him—a skinny boy made fearful by their silent observation of his passage. He tried to repay the smile, but managed only a grimace, and so instead ducked his head in thanks for her kindness, and continued toward the mighty dune that rose above him.

  There was no exit from the camp and there was no alternative to climbing it other than returning the way he’d come, but that thought filled him with dread. No man had lifted a hand against him or spoken harshly and the dog was similarly unmolested, although the hundreds of eyes had unbalanced his ambition.

  He began to climb the sheer sand-wave, and the dog slogged ahead and turned to watch his awkward passage on his hands and knees in the boggy sand. A sparrowhawk, or harrier of some kind hovered above the dune’s crest, and seagulls could be heard cawing and scrapping. In the bowl of white sand the weak sun was trapped, and he began to sweat in his collar and woollen suit, and his boots filled with sand. He turned and looked over the camp, and not one of those inhabitants had paused in their observation of the strange boy’s passage through their morning. The dog was gone now, and Sam walked on his hands and feet the final twenty yards up the slope without stopping or looking back, feeling the ocean breeze on his reddening face, finally slumping over the crest and scrambling out of view.

  The relief he felt at escaping their solemn observanc
e was magnified by the view that awaited him. Height was the first impression, because the dune banked down to a bluff, where gnarled and ancient trees stood into the weather, so fixed and so permanent that when the wind blew in little gusts off the ocean their dark green foliage, which was pinelike with little brown nuts, trembled not at all, unlike the salt grasses which swept this way and that.

  The dog patrolled the perimeter of the bluff, and whined at the terns and gulls spaced along the wet rocks below. Sam slid down the dune and sat upon a rock covered in a bright green punk-moss that was dry and tinderlike. Catching his breath, he gulped in the sea air and emptied his pockets of sand and then his boots. From his knapsack he withdrew a bottle of Borden’s sweet rainwater, and drank it, and called to the dog to accept a splash in its mouth. He had some dried meat, which he chewed, and shared likewise with the hound, who swallowed the jerky whole and asked for more with big sad eyes.

  Sam clucked him and away he went, back to the cliff-side where he resumed his whining and pacing above the birds. The sun broke through for the first time that morning, and Sam angled his face into the sunlight, and drank it up like a flower. So comfortable was he in this position that he kept his eyes closed, and listened to the surf glissade along the reef, and the dog calling the seabirds to a feast of which they would be the meal, and the head seagull ignoring the dog by asserting its suzerainty over the number with brutal caws.

  Sam laid himself upon the rock and crossed his bare feet, and spread his arms Christlike to take in the sun-warmth. Red and green starlights crossed his eyelids, and he imagined the Chilenos behind him eating the cornmeal and dried fish, and playing on their stunted instruments, and dressed in their conical hats and colourful blankets.