Only Killers and Thieves

by Paul Howarth

  “Is he really not coming back?”

  “No, he’s not. Joseph’s gone away.”

  “I never liked him anyway,” Billy said. “We’re better off rid.”

  Mother stiffened suddenly. “We should report them, tell Magistrate MacIntyre what they’re doing out here. If he sent word to Brisbane, they might make Noone stop.”

  “Make him stop?” Father said. “Who d’you reckon sent him out this way in the first place? Who buys their weapons, their tucker, pays their wage? Christ, Liza, where d’you think he sends his reports when he’s done?”

  She sat there chastened.

  Tommy said, “Aren’t they meant to be on our side too?”

  “Supposed to be. Meaning we’d be the dogs that turned on our own.”

  “They hanged them others after Myall Creek,” Mother said defensively.

  “Which was forty bloody years ago, and this is Queensland now, don’t forget—Billy Fraser shot six blacks on the steps of Juandah bloody courthouse and they let him walk away.”

  Mother crossed herself at the mention of the Fraser family and the events at Hornet Bank. “That was different. As you well know. But we can’t just sit here . . .”

  “I already said I’d talk to John.”

  “When will you?”

  “After the sales. Same as always.”

  “For all the good it ever does.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning nothing. Talk to him. Again. See how much things change.”

  Father was still glaring at her as the slow clap of hooves came into the yard, Arthur mumbling to his horses, encouraging them on. The family sat listening: Mother stiff-backed and formal, might have been in church; Father with his brows furrowed; the children’s eyes darting between each other and the door. No one said anything. Waiting as he passed by the house. Arthur chatting amiably, the dog muzzles jangling, two sets of hooves plodding by. The noise receded and the room took a grateful breath. Mother smoothed her apron on her lap. Father pushed himself to his feet, crossed toward the door, and Mary asked him, “Daddy, will Joseph be alright out there on his own?”

  “I don’t know. It was his choice to go.”

  She frowned and looked ready to ask another question, but Father went out through the door. As his boots thudded down the steps he shouted, “Arthur! Hold up!” then his footsteps crunched away across the gravel in the yard.

  “If he wasn’t so soft on them in the first place,” Billy said, sliding back his chair and standing, “Joseph would never have dared leave.”

  “You don’t know anything about it, Billy,” Mother told him. “You should learn to watch your mouth.”

  Billy shrugged, went to the bedroom, flapped open the curtain, and walked inside; they heard the bed joins creak. Mother came and stood between Tommy and Mary and draped an arm around each, drew them into her sides. Her hips were sharp through her housedress, the bony ladder of her ribs, but Tommy took comfort from her warmth all the same. He felt her hand move softly to his head and her fingers comb his hair. He needed a bath, she told him. They all did, after today. She noticed the rope burns on his hands, turned them over, inspected both palms, then ordered him to stay put while she went into the scullery to fetch her healing balm.

  6

  The bunkhouse door was ajar but there was no answer from inside. Tommy knocked again, called Arthur’s name, still no reply. He transferred Mother’s food parcel into his other hand and heaved open the door, stirring a flurry of dust into the air, and slid himself in through the gap. He stood at the threshold, waiting. It took a while for his eyes to adjust. Blinding sunshine outside, murky twilight within. The bunkhouse was long and empty, as big as any barn; a single window threw a column of sunlight across to the other wall. Dust motes hovered like flies. The air was thick and close, fusty, and strewn about the floor were the remnants of the last man to leave: Reg Guthrie’s litter and the abandoned iron frame of his bed. It was turned on an angle and had drifted from the wall, like a boat come loose on the tide. Even alone, Arthur had kept to his end, behind the curtain two-thirds of the way down. Force of habit maybe. Father was unusual in allowing his black stockmen to sleep indoors: most were made to live apart, in camps. But the white workers had never liked them being there, so the curtain had gone up, and each color kept to its own end of the barn. Now only Arthur was left, and still the curtain was drawn.

  Tommy walked through the building, scuffing the dusty floor, remembering the bunkhouse when it had been full. A dozen men once slept here, sometimes more, in the iron-frame cot beds that Father had since sold, or in swags rolled directly on the ground. Some preferred to be outside, beside the campfire they lit on the edge of the yard. Father would join them sometimes, sitting up late, drinking, laughing, and singing songs, and Tommy and Billy would lie awake, listening, trying to follow what they said, then fall asleep to the lullaby of some old bushman’s lament. But that was many years ago. One by one the men had left or been let go, and Father did his drinking on his own these days. He didn’t sing songs anymore.

  Tommy felt along the folds of the curtain, searching for the divide, the material thick and plush as velvet in his hands. He found the parting and opened up a gap and peered through, into the quarters that Arthur and Joseph shared. Had shared. Here was another window, and the back door was open, light flooding into the room. Arthur’s possessions were spread along one wall: his bed, a cabinet, a table and chair, a luggage trunk patterned in gold and silver leaf. Much of the furniture looked salvaged, repaired, and there were odd little trinkets on the shelves. Horseshoes, cigar boxes, ornaments gummed together with wax. On the floor by the bed a Bible lay open at the Gospel of John. The blankets were knotted, recently slept in, but Arthur wasn’t there.

  Tommy went to the open door, passing the few meager belongings Joseph had left behind: a blanket, a ball of dirty clothes, a necklace of braided leaves. Tommy shied from the sunlight. It was past midday, the sun high overhead; he shielded his eyes as he stepped outside and followed the wall to the back corner of the building. There was a dunny thirty yards away, in among the scrub, the door closed.

  “Arthur?” Tommy called. “You in there? Ma sent over some food!”

  “You don’t have to bloody shout.”

  He was sitting in the shade against the back wall of the bunkhouse, shirtless, wearing only a pair of ragged shorts, his long, thin legs crossed beneath him, slumped in such a way that his beard covered most of his chest and his stomach was creased in deep folds. He squinted up at Tommy through straggles of gray hair, a faint smile in the corners of his eyes. He looked like a man at the grog but Tommy doubted it. He’d rarely ever seen Arthur drink.

  “Howya, Tommy,” the old man said. He patted the ground beside him. “Come and get yourself a seat.”

  “Ma sent some food,” Tommy repeated. He held out the parcel, wrapped in a red-and-white-checked towel. Arthur took it from him, shuffled upright, and Tommy noticed on his bare chest and shoulders a series of scars similar to those Joseph had worn, so old and faded he must have missed them before, long-ago etchings worn smooth by the years.

  Tommy slid down the wall and sat beside him in the dirt. Arthur carefully peeled back the folds of the parcel in his lap. Inside was buttered bread, meat, some cheese. He raised it to his nose, sniffed and sighed.

  “Tell her thanks, won’t you. You hungry?”

  He offered the parcel. Tommy hesitated, took a strip of salted beef; Arthur began on the bread, still warm from the oven, the butter melted into the crumb.

  “What you doing out here anyway?” Tommy asked.

  “What d’you reckon: enjoying the view!” Arthur waved at the dunny and the barren scrub beyond, then broke into a rattling laugh. He backhanded Tommy on the leg and took another bite of the bread. “Too bloody hot inside, no air, gets that I can’t hardly breathe.”

  “So you’re just sitting here?”

  “He doesn’t want me working. Said to take a spell.”

 
; “He tell you we’ll be mustering with you? Me and Billy, for real this time?”

  “Well, he doesn’t have much choice now, does he? We’d have a job with just two men.” Arthur’s smile sagged, then he brightened and said, “Who’s gonna make my tucker, though? Who’ll boil up the tea?”

  “Still me, I reckon. I was hoping Joseph but . . .”

  Tommy trailed off. Arthur waved a hand, dismissing it. Sat there chewing his bread. Tommy asked him, “You think he’ll ever come back?”

  “Nope.”

  “You don’t seem too worried?”

  “Brave for a youngfella, going off like that, no horse, all them police about, but he wasn’t nothing to me. Moody little bugger, actually. Glad we wasn’t kin.”

  “What about the scars, though? Joseph had the same ones.”

  Frowning, Arthur followed Tommy’s gaze to his chest. “These? We’ve all got ’em, Tommy. Different ones for different mobs. Kurrong have their own ways, but I’m not Kurrong.”

  “Where are you . . . I mean, who are your people, then?”

  He smiled at Tommy warmly. “Ah, my lot went bung a long time ago.”

  “How?”

  “I never told you?”

  “Don’t think I ever asked before now.”

  Arthur considered him while he ate. There were bread crumbs in his beard. He shrugged and bit into a strip of beef and said, “Well, alright, then, since you’re all grown these days. But don’t go passing this on. Blokes don’t like hearing blackfella talk.”

  “What blokes? Daddy?”

  The food parcel slid from Arthur’s lap. He caught it before it reached the ground.

  “Nah, your daddy’s a good man. What he said out there to Joseph . . . he was angry, didn’t mean it, not all of it anyway.”

  Arthur offered the parcel again, but this time Tommy refused. Arthur put the cheese and bread together, took a bite, and stared into the scrubs as he chewed. Tommy waited. Finally Arthur swallowed and said, “It all started when I went to the Mission—”

  “You were on a Mission Station?”

  “Course I was. Where d’you reckon I learned to speak so good?”

  “What about those other stories? The snakes and the birds and all that?”

  Arthur moved his hands like he was weighing the two out. “I read that bloody Bible again this morning, first time in years. It’s horseshit. You know what I reckon, Tommy: one’s about as likely as the next, probably both a crock. This place . . . God might have made it, or some giant snake, or maybe it was just always here.”

  He sighed and leaned his head against the wall.

  “Anyway, I was young like you back then, bit older maybe, but our mob was dying, getting sick, every time we saw a whitefella they’d chase us with their guns. Then one day this new fella came with no gun, talking about God and this station they’d built, plenty food, give us work—even had a bloody school. Them old buggers, they told him to piss off, but I was just a youngfella so I went to take a look. I liked it. Turned out they were mostly Germans but all whites seemed the same to me. I fell in with the blokes that looked after the cattle and sheep, learned how to ride and all that. All we had to do was follow whitefella ways and say prayers in their little church. I didn’t mind. Told ’em I was Christian the first day I got there, never had no trouble since.”

  He paused to tear off another bite of bread and cheese, talking as he chewed.

  “After a while I got married, had a couple of littl’uns, then I heard about this other place offering blackfellas work. Real work, proper pay, none of the praying and rules. We wanted our own place, see, our own life. A cattleman he was, name of Cox—I rode down to find him, see if he’d put me on. Two weeks I was gone, then I came back for the missus and kids. Only . . . when I got there the Mission was empty, nobody about. The family, them German buggers, the cattle even, like they all just—”

  He clicked his fingers, raised his eyes to the sky.

  “There was marks on the ground showing what had gone on. No way of telling who was who. I reckoned a woman and kids might have got took, so I set out after ’em but it wasn’t no good. In the end I went back to the old mob again, found there was only a few of ’em left. It was a bad time, Tommy. I moved or I died. So I rode back to Cox and he set me on, worked a couple other runs after that. The last was for a bloke up John Sullivan’s way, north of there and east, they called it Denby Downs. Sullivan busted him. Took the run, the men, that’s how I came to be his. Then your old man brought me with him when he got this place. Every day I’m happy he did.”

  Arthur went on eating. Tommy hadn’t known he was once married, or had children, hadn’t known any of the story other than he’d once worked with Father at Broken Ridge. He hadn’t even noticed his scars. It shamed him. They had talked together many times, and Arthur knew him probably better than anyone who wasn’t blood, but Tommy knew so little in return, hadn’t even wondered, in truth. Other than a few attempts at learning his age, it had never occurred to him to ask.

  “So what are the scars for?” he asked now. “What do they mean?”

  Arthur looked at him playfully. “What do you reckon they mean?”

  “Joseph’s were different. Like notches, I thought. A tally, I don’t know.”

  “They are,” Arthur said. He pointed at his various markings, counted them up. “That’s eleven men I’ve killed just here on my front.”

  Tommy stared at him, horrified, then Arthur’s face broke into a grin. He laughed, slapped Tommy on the chest. “Stupid little bugger. They ain’t all that different to the things you lot write down. Your papers and all that—we just wear ours on our skin.”

  Tommy was smiling shyly. He glanced at him and looked away.

  Arthur said, “If you were a blackfella you’d be getting ’em soon. Means you can do things, get married, hunt, trade. Means you ain’t a boy no more, that’s all.”

  “I thought . . .”

  “I know what you thought. You whitefellas are all the same.”

  They sat in silence awhile. Arthur finished his meal and folded the towel neatly into a square. “Ah, fuck it, eh, Tommy. Least we’re sitting here together, I’m still living after all these years. Better a bloody coward than hanging in some tree.”

  “You’re not a coward.”

  “You reckon? I seen them two blackfellas yesterday, same as Joseph did. Yes, they were his old mob but they could have been mine, and I still didn’t know how to feel. He did. He bloody knew. He wasn’t coming back here. Not me, though. Good old Arthur, follow what the boss says. And here I am, Tommy. Here I am still.”

  Tommy took the towel from him. Pressed it flat between his hands.

  “Daddy’s going to talk to him. Sullivan. Make him stop what’s going on.”

  Arthur smiled knowingly, the smile between an adult and child. “Then you don’t know John Sullivan. Or your daddy even. There’s only one boss between ’em, and I’m sorry, Tommy, but it’s never been your old man.”

  Tommy climbed to his feet and hesitated, like there was something still unsaid. He wanted to defend his father but couldn’t; Arthur’s words had been loaded with truth, not meant as some kind of slight. And Tommy knew so little. He was realizing that now. Three days ago the world had been one way, now it was twisted another way around. He couldn’t get his bearings. Didn’t know for certain where anyone stood. What he’d always taken as definite now felt flaky as the soil on the ground.

  “Tell missus I said thanks.”

  He blinked and looked at Arthur. “When will we see you?”

  “When I’m needed. I ain’t going nowhere.”

  Tommy turned sharply and rounded the corner of the bunkhouse. He jogged across the yard, back to the house, found Mother sweeping dust through the doorway, onto the porch. He came up the steps and handed her the folded towel.

  “He alright up there?” she asked.

  “He said to tell you thanks.”

  “But he’s alright? What did he say to you?”<
br />
  Tommy paused before he answered. “He said to tell you thanks.”

  7

  They ate their oats in the dark predawn, shivering by the fireside and squinting against sleep and the smoke belching into the room. Mother sat with them. Feeding up her men. She drank her tea slowly and watched them all eat, no one talking, a grim sense of ceremony in the air. Last meal. Last rites. Tommy went along with it, took his cues from the others, buried his excitement deep. Already Father seemed weary, Billy casual, though Tommy knew that was an act. Mustering wasn’t boring. This wasn’t a normal day. They wouldn’t see Mother or Mary, wouldn’t sleep in their own beds, wouldn’t sit around this table again, for the best part of a week.

  After breakfast Tommy and Billy went to the stables, where Arthur was saddling and loading the horses in flickering lantern light. Gruffly they exchanged their greetings, then went silently to work, too early for idle chat. When they were done they led the horses—all five of them, including Jess—by their reins down to the house, past the dogs roaming loose in the yard. Father was waiting on the verandah. He sipped the last of his tea. Mother came out behind him, wearing her nightgown still, and Father tossed the tea dregs over the rail and handed her the mug. She kissed him as she took it, set it on the bench. The food parcels were piled there; she came down the steps and handed them out, one for each man. There wasn’t a week’s worth. Only enough to start them off. She kissed Tommy and Billy and touched Arthur on the arm, then went back up the steps onto the porch. The four of them mounted up. She bid them good luck and they all said good-bye, then in the pale light of daybreak rode out of the yard.

  “That’s you there, Tommy! Get your bloody head out your arse! After him now, after him!”

  It was nothing like he’d expected, nothing like the musters he remembered from his childhood, when he and Billy would climb high into the gum trees and watch for signs of the mob coming in. The swirling dust cloud, the bellows on the air, a trembling rumble of hooves. Then they would see them, a long train of cattle snaking through the scrub, stockmen casually patrolling its flanks, little signals between them, a raised hand, a flicked whip, and sometimes even laughter, piss-taking back and forth. As they neared, the two brothers would race to the cattle yards, open the gates and climb the railings, and balance there, breathless, hearts pounding, waiting for them to arrive. The press of their bodies coming in through the gates, the noise, the heat, the shit, the sweat, was like nothing else Tommy had known. Father directing it all, high on his horse, and when he saw them clinging to the rails he would smile and call a greeting, or even just tip his hat, and something in Tommy swelled. In those moments all he wanted in his life was to become that same man.