Only Killers and Thieves

by Paul Howarth

  Tommy drew alongside Noone. Sullivan yelled another catcall. Noone didn’t look at Tommy but kept his eyes on the horizon as he spoke: “The rich have plenty money but very little class. Have you noticed that, young man?”

  He nodded hesitantly. Behind him in the saddle he felt Kala squirm.

  “You want to talk about this morning? About your father, maybe?”

  “Kala,” Tommy croaked. He cleared his throat. “The girl.”

  “I see. Well?”

  “What’ll happen to her? The same as the other one in them rocks?”

  “You miss nothing, do you, boy? Did your brother notice, I wonder? Did John?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tell me something, do you smell that? The air is different today, no?”

  “I thought lightning. Or gunpowder, I’m not sure.”

  “Very good. Look over there.” He pointed north. Far beyond the curve of the horizon the sky was gray and full. “That’s a bushfire, traveling north and east, and quickly, a mile a minute, I would say. You have a sense for these things, Tommy. It’s a skill. You should use it to your own gain. Also, there is rain coming. Can you feel the change in the air? To a black it is intuitive, as obvious as night and day. It must become like that to you.”

  “For what?”

  “For you to make something of yourself out here. You would become a fine officer one day, I’m sure enough of that.”

  Tommy scoffed a short laugh, but a redness crept into his cheeks and neck.

  “Come now, Tommy. You are without prospects, without the makings of a life. On your little farm you’d be lucky to last a year, and though you could probably scratch a living as a station hand somewhere—”

  “Billy says Mr. Sullivan’ll set us on.”

  “John has his own reasons for making you his boy. But do you want to end up like your father? I’m curious—why aren’t you asking about him?”

  Tommy shrugged.

  “Alright, then,” Noone said, sighing. “What about this girl?”

  “I already said—what’ll happen to her when you’re done?”

  Noone swayed his head slightly, like scales tilting side to side.

  “Sell her, I’d imagine. They fetch a fair price at her age.”

  “Sell her as what?”

  “Housegirl, most likely, she’s young enough to be taught. There’s always the cane fields but they prefer island negroes up there. Cannibals, I’ve heard it said.”

  “Couldn’t we just . . . let her go?”

  Noone tutted disapprovingly. Clicked his tongue behind his teeth.

  “Only once we’re done, I mean. Once the timing’s right.”

  “Were you not listening to me this morning? She’s a breeder, Tommy. The future of her race is right there between her legs. We must appropriate her, domesticate her, sever the bloodline. Remember Darwin: a species adapts or it dies. We must not allow them to adapt. If we take their land, their women, kill their men, sooner or later they will simply expire. It is science. A most fascinating field.”

  He said nothing more. His gaze rested on Tommy, then shifted to the horizon again. The land gently inclining now, rising to the north. Tommy rode at his side. So many things in his mind and he could say not one. But then to imagine Kala as a housegirl somewhere—pinafored and bonneted, with food and shelter and a bed—didn’t seem so bad at all. Better than her lying discarded in a ditch, after a half dozen men had done with her whatever they pleased.

  “Was there something else, Tommy? Your father maybe?”

  “Alright—what of him?”

  “You weren’t surprised by what I said? By the kind of man he was?”

  “What’s to say I believe you?”

  “Well, do you? Did he tell you about his past?”

  “You didn’t even know him. The two of you never met.”

  “True. Even so, it must be of concern, what you came from—don’t you worry you’re cast in the same mold?”

  Tommy sniffed and shrugged at him. “Might be that I am.”

  “I believe you may be right. Tell me, what would he have made of all this? Our mission here, our plan?”

  “He was against it. Against Sullivan. Against you.”

  “Really? And if someone had killed you and Billy, and knowing now what you do about your father’s temperament, you don’t think he’d have done the same?”

  Tommy didn’t answer. He couldn’t think what to say. Behind him, Kala was twisting her body away from Noone and knocking out Beau’s stride. Tommy eased him back, allowed Noone to move on. The inspector watched him over his shoulder until he had slid past the troopers and was out of his eyeline. Locke and Sullivan stared wantonly at Kala as Tommy went by. Then came Billy, asking, “What was all that? You wanting your turn?” and the same roving stares as the men. Smirking while he did it. Ogling her top to toe to tail.

  Tommy fell in at the back of the line and gave Kala one of the lemon sweets. It felt like a grubby offering but she didn’t seem to mind; she snatched the lolly from him and he heard it clattering around her teeth. Would have usually raised a smile in him, but he was thinking about Father, about what Noone had said. Since Billy first voiced the idea of coming out here, doing this, Tommy had clung to the assumption that Father would have been against it, would have been turning in his grave to see them with these men, avenging him and Mother in this way. What if he was wrong about that? Between them this morning his two sons had put down one of those supposedly responsible, and were riding out here on Joseph’s trail—what was to say that if he was watching them now, Father wouldn’t actually have been proud?

  25

  As dusk fell, the crater fire burned on the horizon like a torch buried deep in the earth. A few miles away yet, a small and faltering glow, but all knew what they had found. They stood the horses in a line, watched the distant firelight, and caught the strains of chanting and the rhythmic clapping of wood on wood, and Tommy heard Kala moan in a way he had never heard a person moan before. A dull, heartfelt keening that echoed in her chest and seemed born of another world.

  “You can muzzle her now, Tommy. There’s a good lad.”

  Tommy looked at Noone wide-eyed.

  “Either muzzle her yourself or one of this lot will.”

  “What with?”

  “I’ve got something that’ll gag her,” Locke said. Sullivan and Billy laughed.

  Tommy surveyed himself up and down. All he had was his greenhide belt. His fingers went to the knot. He glanced at Kala and she flinched.

  “Sorry, but they’re saying I have to—”

  “Here,” Billy called, digging around in his pack. He tossed something that Tommy caught and dangled one-handed by its strap. A horse’s burlap feed bag, saliva-stained and crusted in dirt and dried grain.

  “That’ll do you,” Sullivan chortled. “Get it on her snout.”

  Kala eyed the feed bag warily. Tommy said, “It’ll be better if I do it. Please.”

  Billy swung down from his horse. He grabbed Kala’s ankle and wrenched her from the saddle, caught her just before she hit the ground.

  “Hey!” Tommy shouted, dismounting. “Get off her!”

  “Quiet, the pair of you,” Noone said. “Unless you want me to muzzle you too. Tommy—give your brother the bag.”

  Billy’s arm was across Kala’s chest, his other hand outstretched. Tommy passed him the feed bag and he stuffed it into Kala’s mouth. She choked on the rough gunny cloth. Billy looped the strap over her head then tied it tight at the back. Her bound hands tugged at the loose sacking falling like a beard to her chest. She couldn’t loosen the gag. The straps dug into her skin. Billy slapped her on the behind and shoved her, and she fell against Tommy, sniveling. All he wanted was to hold her. To loosen the straps and tell her she’d be fine. But the others were watching to see what he’d do next, so he pushed her away and stared into her eyes. Trying to say all that couldn’t be said. She returned the stare coldly, breathing hard through her nose. Tomm
y swallowed and steered her back to their horse, stood there dumbly, no idea how to get her up. He hadn’t the strength to lift her, wouldn’t know where to put his hands. He looked along the line of men and Noone nodded for Jarrah to come. Jarrah dismounted and walked toward them and Noone told him, “Best keep her with you. The boy’s smitten, I fear. Some dissent in him yet.”

  Jarrah dragged Kala back to his horse. She sat small and hunched between his legs, her face in her hands, the dirty burlap dangling from her chin. They moved on. Toward the burning west, the last lickings of the sunset and the halo of the fire melding like some holy sign, then north, to higher ground and a small range of hills, bubbling hummocks of red rock silhouetted against the dusk. Noone sent the troopers ahead to make camp, while the whites turned and rode in the direction of the crater fire, and the thump of the beat getting louder as they neared.

  “What’s happening?” Tommy asked. “Aren’t we all going in?”

  “In the morning,” Noone said. “Patience. We’ll hit them first light of dawn.”

  A quarter mile from the crater they dismounted and Noone told Locke to gather the reins and mind the horses until they were back.

  “The hell for?” Locke snapped. “One of them boys can do it.”

  Noone only glared at him. Sullivan said, “We’ll be down on our bellies anyhow—how’ll you crawl with that arm?”

  Sullenly, dutifully, the overseer obeyed.

  In the last of the light they walked through the scrub, Tommy’s stomach knotting with each step. The noise grew louder. The hollow clacking of the rhythm sticks and the high-pitched strains of a male voice singing. Beneath it all lay the drone of a didgeridoo, ringing around the crater like the earth itself spoke, and Tommy felt something acrid rise into his throat. He swallowed repeatedly, but the taste would not shift.

  Twenty yards from the crater’s edge, Noone raised a hand and signaled for them to drop. The four of them went onto their hands and knees, and crawled through the warm, sharp dirt. Biting their palms, scraping their skin, Tommy at the end of the line, the crater peeling before him, a vast circular basin carved into the earth, so uniform it looked deliberate, as if scooped by some tool. First came the far bank, then the slow reveal of the camp below, a handful of humpies scattered through the sparse scrub, around a central clearing in which a great bonfire burned. Flames licked the darkness, sparks spiraled and danced through the air. A fire so big its makers must have thought it hidden by the crater walls. Or else they’d simply not figured on there being anyone to see; they’d believed themselves alone out here.

  The last of the Kurrong numbered fifty, sixty . . . at most a hundred in all. Men and women of all ages, children, infants, dogs; must have been a good few dozen dogs. Most of the group were sitting in a loose circle around the clearing, clapping time with the musicians and watching their kinfolk dance. Others ambled through camp, seeing to chores or laughing and talking and dancing themselves. Children played. It was a convivial affair. Not much ceremony to it, though the dancers were painted in stark white lines, like they each wore their bones on their skin. Skeletons jigging in the twilight, jerking to the beat of sticks and the stomping of feet and the ominous moan of the didgeridoo. Mothers fed their babies; children joined the dancing, to the laughter and catcalls of the crowd. The dancers paused, then regained their rhythm; the singers rotated and another voice took it on, straining to be heard above the din. It was a peculiar kind of chaos but seemed innocent enough, not the hellish debauchery of the rumors Tommy had heard. They looked to be greatly enjoying themselves, lost to it, immersed in their songs and their dance.

  Happy and helpless as lambs.

  26

  The rainstorm Noone predicted came at nightfall, and the men opened their mouths gratefully to the sky, scrubbed themselves clean, collected water in their flasks; the horses drank from puddles in the hollows of the rocks. But then the rain continued and the long night set in, and there was no shelter to be found in camp, if what they had could be called a camp at all: men huddling among the boulders and all but invisible in the gloom. The rain pattered on their hats and dripped from the brims, their clothes clung to their bodies like skin. There was no fire. Noone had forbidden one lit. The rum was gone and even when pooled their rations fell well short of a meal. So they sat. Miserably watching the distant glow of the native bonfire and listening to their revelry and smelling the trace of meat on the air. Sullivan promised a feast when they were back at Broken Ridge, but the station was many days and many miles away, and talk of a feast was just talk.

  Still the rain fell. The ground became boggy and thick. There was no more talking. The rain so loud only shouting could be heard, and since shouting was forbidden, no one did. There was little to be said anyway. Those who were able, slept. Others glared grimly into the darkness, alone with their thoughts. Thoughts of elsewhere, of afterward, and of the task that lay ahead. Locke massaged his wounded shoulder as if coaxing it back to life. Sullivan smoked with his hand cupped around the cigarette end, shielding it from the wet. Noone had unfurled his bedroll and draped it over himself to form a makeshift tent, and in the dry it afforded, wiped his many weapons down. Rodding each barrel; cleaning hammer, cylinder, chambers one by one. The others soon did likewise, bedrolls popping up like toadstools among the rocks. Waddies were polished and cleaned, bayonets affixed to the troopers’ rifle ends. Noone filed the long blade of his bowie knife on the edge of a boulder stone, the sound of its scraping slicing at the air.

  Tommy didn’t tend to his rifle, didn’t sharpen his folding knife. He lay upright in the valley between two sheets of rock, watching the others through the curtain of rain, watching Kala most of all. She looked near-drowned. Sitting naked and uncovered beside the sheltering troopers, dark hair lying flat on her head and her skin shimmering in the dull moonlight, slick as cooking oil. She was still muzzled. The feed bag dangled from her mouth. Total resignation in her stare. Tommy spent a long time wondering what she was thinking, then realized that he could not understand. Her thoughts were not his thoughts. Her words were not his words. He felt a fool for having tried. He turned away again. It ached him to see the state she was in. And the only thing he could do about it was not watch her anymore.

  Billy was huddled against another of the rocks, smoking one of Sullivan’s cigarettes. Even had it cupped in his hand just the same. Good for warmth, Tommy supposed, though it wouldn’t have been so cold if not for the rain. Mother used to call this the wet kind of rain, like there was another kind of rain there could be. They had teased her for it but she was right: this was about the wettest there was. She was funny like that, his mother: a worrier, a thinker, she noticed the little things. Maybe that was where Tommy got it from, this second sense Noone spoke of. She liked to classify in all different ways, wouldn’t accept a thing was just a thing. Wet rain, dry rain; hard heat, soft heat; good death, bad death—might have been she was more superstitious than Tommy realized. Truthfully, he hadn’t known her, not in the way he would have liked. All he had now were memories, fractions of memories, incomplete scrapings from his past like the leavings of a fire.

  He flicked the rain from his face and wiped his eyes and turned his attention back to the men, still cleaning their weapons, rodding their guns. They were not just passing the time. The dull fascination with which each of them worked wasn’t born of idleness but intent. Those weapons were being readied for use, each man making preparations for what he knew was to come, and which only now Tommy fully understood. It had taken him this long. Days of riding across the colony, farther and farther from home—he had believed they were on one path but he realized he was wrong. Not them. These men knew what they were doing. They’d always known, because they’d done it many times before. Joseph might be out here, or he might not: it was irrelevant, this had never been about him, or Tommy’s family, or whatever else he’d assumed. It was only about the Kurrong: a mass dispersal was planned.

  Abrupt as a dead heartbeat, the distant music stopped. />
  The night drew on, hour after hour, and still the rain didn’t ease. The men slept upright, the ground too bogged to lie down, hunched in their bedrolls and no different in outline to the boulders and rocks. Tommy waited. Wedged into his crevice like a bilby in its hole, sheets of water sliding down the wall at his back. No stars visible, the moon shadowed behind the clouds. Tommy watched each of the men in turn and every now and then would see one of them flinch. A portent from their dreaming. A shiver from the cold. Who were they, these troopers? Who was Noone? If a bushman had come wandering from the west and described them around the campfire back home, Tommy doubted he would have believed they were real. Paid by the government to hunt down wild blacks, recruited from the south and keen, Rabbit had told him, so fucking keen. He felt such a child in their presence, helpless, unprepared. Father should have warned them. Should have taught them about this world. Maybe he’d planned to. “When you’re older,” he used to say. Too late for that now, Daddy. We’re as old as we’ll ever be.

  The rain drummed his hat and bounced from the rocks, and everywhere was rain, rain, rain. Was it raining at Glendale? Tommy wondered. Soaking the paddocks, the northern fields, swelling the creek until it broke its banks and flooded the surrounding plains? He remembered the night they had danced in the yard, Mother lifting her nightdress and Father falling to his knees. It seemed impossible. Less a memory than a dream. Yet barely a month ago he’d been out in those fields, mustering the cattle like one of the men. He’d been miserable that week because of how Father behaved; now he’d give anything to hear him complain. He remembered waiting with the others, watching him ride home drunk from the saleyards, Mother slapping him on the chest as he puckered for a kiss. Firing Billy’s shanghai against the bunkhouse wall, laughing with Mary about the smell from his boots and her telling him, in that voice that would never grow up, You stink. I mean really, really stink!