by Paul Howarth
“So already you’re slowing us down, with your monkey man here and these two orphans you’re now intent on dragging around.”
“I’ve told you not to call me that,” Locke said. “Bloody mean it n’all.”
Noone cocked his head and studied him. “You’ve injured your hand, Raymond. What happened? A little overzealous with yourself last night?”
“Fuck off. Got snakebit.” He spat tobacco juice on the ground.
“How careless of you. Hope it wasn’t poisonous. Hate to lose you so soon.”
“Well, I’ve bloody warned you. So there it is.”
“So there it is,” Noone repeated. “Consider me suitably warned.”
Noone was smiling at him. The troopers hadn’t moved. Locke nodding and nodding at the others as if convincing them of something, convincing himself.
“Alright,” Sullivan said. “We’ve a bloody long ride ahead, don’t the pair of you start. I suppose you’ve already got the track on them, Inspector?”
“I told you: the only tracks I found at the house were yours.”
Sullivan looked about anxiously. “So, what are we going to do, then?”
Noone beat the dead tobacco from the bowl of his pipe, stowed the pipe in his longcoat, and reached for a wide-brimmed slouch hat balanced behind him on his pack. He squared the hat on his head and began turning his horse around.
“We already know where the Kurrong are,” he said. “The best thing about natives is they stick to their own lands. We ride west beyond the ranges and we’ll come up with them soon enough. One way or another, John, we’ll find your man.”
The troopers parted to let him pass, then circled into a column and followed on behind. Sullivan glanced at Locke, at the brothers, the slightest hesitation in his eyes. Almost immediately it was gone. He clicked his horse forward, the others did the same, and one by one each of them joined the back of the line.
16
They were a whole day crossing Sullivan’s station; Noone and the troopers fell back in the line and allowed the squatter to take the lead. A thin column of horses snaking through undulating yellow scrubland, through pasture, through brigalow, through sparse stands of gum trees and the shadows they threw. There was no other shade. Their backs burned all morning, then their faces all afternoon, and their pace was slow and measured in the unrelenting sun.
Tommy rode in the middle of the group, Billy in front of him, the first of the troopers directly behind, the young one with the bat-like face and grin that never seemed to fade. Tommy tried to keep a gap between them, rode tight to Billy’s heels, but the trooper was always there, the sound of his hoof fall, the other noises he made. Spitting or laughing or chattering, to whom it wasn’t clear. Tommy risked a glance backward, pretended he was studying the terrain. The trooper was watching him. Wide-eyed under that low slabbed brow, smiling and nodding and keen. Beyond him the others were in reverse order: Noone at the very back, the old man in front of him, as easy and nonchalant as if taking a Sunday ride.
Tommy turned forward, stared at Billy’s back, tried imagining the troopers were not there. He thought of Mary, back in her bedroom, Mrs. Sullivan on the chair, Shanklin might even have been there by now. He knew what he was doing. Better than some bloody vet. With his medicines and his doctoring, he’d see she was back on her feet to meet them by the time they came home.
Tommy shook his head. The reasoning didn’t hold. Weeks had taken the ball out, patched the wound, made her comfortable, and still she wouldn’t wake. What more could Shanklin do? How could he fix her if she was already bled out? Tommy looked about nervously. As if searching for an answer, a sign; the bush gave only silence in reply. He wasn’t the only one twitchy: Billy rode like he was expecting a sudden war. Reins pulled short, back rigid, hand resting on the revolver Sullivan had loaned, ready for an ambush or the chance to set one himself. Not worrying about Mary, anyway—Billy was already seeking their sister’s revenge.
For a while they followed the line of the ridge, then angled away south through a thick band of scrub, keeping clear of grazing sheep and new cow-and-calf pairs. The ridge fading into the distance until all that remained was the jagged imprint of its spine against the sky, tapering down low in the west. The old people believed the ridge was a crocodile, or made by a crocodile, or something like that. Arthur had told Tommy the story, but he couldn’t recall it now. He could see the resemblance: the downslopes contoured like limbs, head, and jaw; the swell of a belly where they met the land; the spine and the tail and outcrops like scales on the sides. So what was to say Arthur had been wrong? Why couldn’t a crocodile have made the ridge? Tommy doubted Arthur even believed those stories himself anymore, pictured him sitting against the bunkhouse wall weighing his beliefs in his hands, each as insubstantial as air. He’d looked utterly lost that day. A man without faith or a place in the world. Was that why he’d left them, to find wherever else he thought he belonged? Where else was there? Way out in this nothingness, his family and people dead . . . the others were still saying Arthur was involved, that he’d joined up with Joseph, been part of what was done. Tommy didn’t believe it. In just a few weeks Arthur would be coming back, oblivious to everything. Stay gone, Arthur, he thought to himself. Stay gone.
Strange how the land plays its tricks on the mind: Tommy was used to heat haze and mirage, but now beyond the dots of cattle grazing the faraway plains he thought he saw waterbirds swooping to the ground. Long-legged things, egrets maybe, looked to be feeding but surely not. He tipped back his hat and watched them. The ground up there shimmering, different to heat haze, glistening in the glare of the sun. If Tommy didn’t know better he’d have said it was a floodplain, but how could there be a floodplain when it had rained only three days in the year?
He moved his horse forward. Billy flinched when he drew alongside.
“You seen that?” Tommy said, pointing. “That look like a floodplain to you?”
Billy followed his finger, eyes narrowed, straining to make it out.
“Might be. What of it?”
“It’s not hardly rained, Billy.”
He shrugged. “So maybe it’s a lake.”
“Exactly. And how’s he got a lake in the middle of a bloody drought?”
“You don’t get a lake. Either there is one or there’s not.”
“It should be all dried up, though. Must be full for us to see it from here.”
Billy looked at him irritably. Tommy went to argue again but there was a whistle from behind, two-toned, an up-and-down cooee. Both of them turned. Noone was now directly behind them, alongside the young trooper; he nodded toward the water, tutted, and shook his head. The boys jerked back around, and Noone went on whistling a jaunty little tune.
“Can’t you just leave it?” Billy whispered. “Quit your questions all the time?”
“You don’t think it’s off he’s got a lake?”
“No, I don’t. And neither should you. How many more warnings d’you need?”
Tommy eased back into line. He kept his head down. Noone was now humming and sometimes singing and his voice was deep and full. They rode on. A long sweep through dry bush until they reached a struggling creek, by the look of it the same creek that flowed south onto McBride land. The group watered here, let the horses drink, and Tommy found himself squatting at the waterside a little way along from the young trooper who had been following him all day.
Tommy tried to not look at him. Filled his flask, watched the water trickling by, dappled in shade. Billy was with Sullivan and the others at the top of the bank, acting like one of the men. Tommy could hear them talking: “Not until the ranges,” Noone said. Tommy raised his flask dripping from the creek, stoppered the neck, and caught a glimpse of the young trooper filling one of the bladder bags. It was made of stitched kangaroo hide and bulged with trapped air as the trooper forced it down. His waddy dangled at his side. His arms were long and thin. He had both sleeves rolled, and with each surge underwater it looked more and more like h
e was drowning something there. An animal, a small child—hadn’t Mrs. Sullivan told him they liked eating their young?
Tommy fumbled his water bottle and dropped it in the creek. He plunged down after it, paddling into the water on his hands and knees, just reaching the flask before it was lost. He backed out of the water. He’d soaked his trousers and shirtsleeves. As he rose he saw the trooper coming for him, his mad eyes bulging, the drowned hide dripping in one hand and the other outstretched.
Tommy lurched clear and scrambled up the bank to join the other whites, wet and panting and scared. They frowned at him. Looks of confusion, distaste. Then Sullivan said, “Poor lad looks like he’s pissed himself,” and all of them, including Billy, laughed. Tommy walked to where Beau waited in the shade of the trees, stowed his flask in the saddle pack. While he was fastening the buckle the trooper emerged from the creek bed. He saw Tommy staring, and waved.
* * *
At sundown they scattered their tracks and made camp in a clutch of weeping myall trees, the low branches giving shelter from the cold and shielding their fire from view. A small fire at first: the troopers built it up and stacked wood into a pile; they cleared the ground around it, saw to the horses, then retired to make their own camp outside the cover of the trees. They did not light a fire. Faint sounds of them moving out there, scrabbling around, whispering, and sometimes a burst of hushed laughter, the whites listening in silence as Sullivan parceled out dry stores in the makings of a meal. Sausage and biscuits. A quart of rum. Quietly they ate their food. Dusk drawing in around them, darkness coming quick, and as Tommy nibbled his biscuit he watched the others in the firelight. Billy alongside him, Sullivan, then Locke sitting cross-legged with a revolver in his lap, gnawing on the sausage like it was boned. On the far side of the fire, Noone sat alone, reclining against the trunk of the myall tree. He had his bowie knife out, picking at the sausage with the tip, dissecting it, piece by little piece. The gristle he would flick into the fire, and when he found a morsel that interested him, he would skewer it on the point of the knife tip and place it delicately between his teeth, before sucking it sharply into his mouth.
“They ever fucking shut up?” Locke grumbled, tearing off another bite.
Noone watched him through the flames. “They being?”
“Your niggers. Couldn’t you muzzle them or something, let us eat in peace?”
“Funny, I was just having that same thought about you.”
Locke spat into the fire. Tommy saw Sullivan smirk. Noone held Locke’s stare, then smiled and went back to his meal and there was silence between them again. Embers crackled in the darkness. A sweet smell of violet from the trees. The branches were draped like curtains around the little camp and the shadows of the men played upon the leaves.
“I knew a bloke once,” Sullivan said. He paused to take a swig of rum, then leaned and passed the bottle to Locke. “Heard about him anyway, this fella down near Bathurst, somewhere round there, kept his blackboys chained to a stake in the yard. Might have even muzzled them, I’m not sure, but the point is he wouldn’t leave them loose after dark. Didn’t trust ’em. Chained ’em to a fucking pole. Long chains, mind you, let ’em wander a bit. Fed ’em from a trough, gave ’em a bucket to shit in, they slept right there on the ground. Course, people didn’t like it, church and city types, but you wonder if he didn’t have the right idea.” He looked meaningfully at Tommy and Billy. “Fella works for you for years, next thing you know, he’s killed your whole family just about.”
“Wouldn’t trust ’em any farther than I can spit,” Locke mumbled.
“That’s because you don’t understand them,” Noone said. “You don’t have the capacity for it. Hence, you’re afraid of them. It’s only natural, I expect.”
“I ain’t fucking afraid.”
Noone picked thoughtfully at his sausage meat. “Men fear that which is alien, that which they cannot control. Hence most are afraid of certain animals, predators, those they cannot tame. In this country that would be snakes, dingos to an extent, but mostly the wild native. It is remarkable really, to see how afraid you all are. They have become like the Devil in the minds of white men.”
“And what?” Sullivan asked him. “You think they’re alright?”
“I think they are unnecessary. Mankind has moved on. I don’t suppose any of you have read Darwin, but he makes the case very well. As a race the negro has fallen so far behind the rate of human evolution that for the most part they are unsuited to the civilized world. We have seen it everywhere, the Americas, Africa, the Indies, tribes who left to their own devices have advanced little further than the apes. Your native Australian is no different. Darwin saw it for himself, visited these very shores. They are a doomed species, gentlemen. Those who won’t adapt or be trained will be gone by the century’s end.”
Sullivan was nodding admiringly. Locke scoffed and said, “You can’t train a black, not really. Deep down they’ll always be wild.”
“No?” Noone said. He sucked another morsel of sausage meat from the tip of his knife, rolled it around his mouth with his tongue. “Then consider our present situation. Here we are, in the middle of the bush, soon to be asleep, four armed natives not fifty yards away. And not just any natives: these are Murray blacks, have you heard of them? The finest fighters and trackers this bitch of a country ever birthed. We are entirely at their mercy, and yet I doubt you would be any safer lying at home in your beds.”
“They’re wary of your rifle,” Locke said. “That’s all it is.”
“You have a rifle, Raymond, but I doubt they’re very wary of you.”
Locke glowered into the flames. Sullivan said, “Well, if they do what they’re here for, I don’t have a problem with ’em. Wild enough when their blood’s up. That’ll do for me.”
“Precisely,” Noone said. “It is not about taming them, but about making them obey. Your half-civilized native, a Mission black, let’s say, he’s no good for anything. Can’t hunt, track, or fight; no obedience in him, might as well be culled.”
“Arthur was on a Mission and he can do all that.”
Tommy shriveled in the silence. He’d spoken without thinking. All of them watched him; he buried his gaze in his lap.
“Arthur being . . . ?” Noone asked.
“The other one,” Sullivan said. “Their old boy. I let Ned have him when he left. We reckon he was a part of it. Did I not say about him?”
“Must have slipped your mind, John. You left that part out.”
“Arthur never did it,” Tommy said. “I already told you that.”
“Either he was there or he wasn’t,” Noone said. “Did you see him or not?”
“No,” Tommy said.
They all looked at Billy. He was cradling the rum. He took a slug, winced, then handed the bottle to Tommy. Warily, Tommy drank.
“I ain’t sure,” Billy said. “But he took off beforehand, a few weeks back, must have known what Joseph had planned.”
“Horseshit,” Tommy said. “He only took off because Daddy was drinking and there was no work to be done. Told me so himself.”
“Was he Kurrong?” Noone asked.
“I reckon so,” Billy said, but Tommy was shaking his head.
“He wasn’t nothing. His lot died out years ago. Arthur was the last one left.”
“There’s always an exception,” Noone said. Tommy crawled around to hand him the rum; he nodded, took a swig, passed it back. “My boys over there are similar—not all blacks are suited to this kind of work. Many sign up, then desert. A weakness of the system, unfortunately. You don’t always know the bad ones until you’ve got them out here, and by then it’s too late.”
Locke mumbled, “Just so long as they know their fucking place.”
“Or what? What will you do if they don’t?”
Locke only stared at him. Noone continued, “You know, Raymond, above all else I consider myself a scientist, a chronicler of humankind. Over the years I have met many men like you and
have come to the conclusion that beneath your bluster you are fundamentally all the same. You are cowards. That is what you are. Keen for any fight you think you can win, scared of those you cannot. I would wager you beat your animals. Horses, dogs, pets. And your women, probably—”
“I’ve fucking had enough of this.”
“He’s only pulling your pizzle,” Sullivan said. “Calm down.”
“I mean it,” Locke growled. He pointed across the fire at Noone. “You’ll get what’s coming one day, you keep going as you are. I ain’t scared of you.”
“How truly prophetic. Do you know that word, monkey man?”
“Fuck off with you.”
“Alright, that’s enough. Both of you pack it in.”
“You know,” Noone said, ignoring Sullivan, “by Darwin’s logic you are bottom of our particular evolutionary pile, a throwback even amongst whites. In fact, there must be some overlap between the very lowest of our caste and the most evolved blacks. I should make a study of you, before your kind becomes extinct.”
Locke raised his revolver and pointed it at Noone. Noone did not even flinch. He leaned against the tree and picked at his meal as if Locke and his weapon were not there. When his eyes flicked up to look through the flames, the stare was steady and cold. Already Sullivan was crawling to Locke’s side, telling him to stop, grabbing his pistol arm and pressing the rum bottle into his hands instead. Locke shook his head and relented. He swigged a long mouthful of rum, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then flapped out his bedroll and lay down, his back to the group, his head cradled in the crook of his arm.
“Night-night, Raymond,” Noone whispered. “Sweet dreams.”
Sullivan spluttered a laugh, tried to muffle it in his hand. Locke gave no sign of having heard. Tommy smiled nervously but kept his head down, unsure what was expected of him, whose side he was supposed to be on. This kind of banter was new to him. Father had not been a bantering man. Now here were two strangers teetering on the edge of violence as casually as if they were shaking hands.