Forgotten Places

by Johanna Craven

  “You said you was going to steal from the settlements.”

  “Aye. Well.” He tied the pack around the axe and gun and slung them over one shoulder. “You need dry clothes, don’t you.” He wrapped an arm around her waist. “Hear that? That’s a boo hoo bird. Only lives where the people do.”

  “A boo hoo bird? No it ain’t.”

  “Aye, it is. Listen. Boo hoo.”

  “You’re making that up,” said Grace. But he saw a smile on the edge of her lips.

  “You’re not bringing that gun in here.” The woman marched out the front door and took Grace’s arm. “Give her to me. You want to come in, you get rid of that first.”

  Grace looked sideways at Dalton. He let his arm fall from around her waist and trudged out across the plains.

  He used the boiler to dig a hole beneath a tree and threw in the gun and axe. Tore a strip of fabric from his fraying shirt and knotted it around a branch as a marker.

  He let himself back into the house. Voices came muffled from one of the rooms. He followed the sound. The woman stepped from the bedroom and closed the door.

  “Grace,” said Dalton.

  “That her name? I got her out of those wet clothes and into bed.”

  “Is she going to die?” Dalton asked in Irish.

  “Wouldn’t think so. But I’m not God, am I.”

  He tried to step past her into the bedroom, but she blocked his way.

  “Leave her. She needs to rest.” She marched into the next room and brought out a shirt and pair of brown corduroy trousers. “Here. They belong to my Jack.” She nodded to her bedroom. “Get yourself out of those wet things. I don’t fancy disposing of you if you freeze to death in my kitchen.”

  Dalton changed, then carried his wet clothes out to the living area. The clean shirt hung loose on his shoulders, the trousers cinched at the waist with a length of rope. The woman pulled a mug from its hanger above the hearth and filled it with broth from the pot. She handed it to him.

  “I got some of this into her. You best have some too.”

  Dalton nodded his thanks.

  Nothing felt real. Not the heady smell of wood smoke, or the hot, salty broth sliding down his throat. Not the noisy breathing of the stranger in front of him. All an illusion, surely.

  He sat inches from the blaze. He’d forgotten such heat existed. Illusion or not, he craved the warmth against his skin.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  Dalton tugged his shirt towards his neck to cover his scarred shoulders. “Don’t think you ought to know that.”

  She snorted. “Look at you, all precious with your secrets. A bolter then. I’d have done the same if I could have managed it.” She threw another log on the fire. “I’m Annie. She your wife?”

  Dalton shook his head.

  “Didn’t think so.” She hooked a finger around the rim of his mug and pulled it towards her to check its congealing contents. “The soup is rubbish, aye?” She pulled the whisky bottle from the sideboard and filled two cannikins. Handed one to Dalton. “This is far better.”

  He smiled faintly and brought the cup to his lips. The smell was overpowering. The whisky slid hot down his throat, warming his belly. Hell, he’d missed this above all things. He took another long drink and felt his thoughts knock together. Out of practice, he thought wryly.

  Annie watched him curiously. “Where you from then?”

  Dalton said nothing.

  She sighed. “Look. I’m not asking questions I don’t want to hear the answer to. Don’t want to know what in hell the two of you were doing in the mountains. Just saw you looking at my belt earlier. I’m wondering where home is.”

  “Kilkenny,” he said finally.

  “My da was from Kilkenny. Went to visit when I was a girl. Were a beautiful old church with a tower that reached to the sky.”

  Dalton smiled crookedly.

  “You remember it, aye? Windows made of glass a thousand colours. Feels like another lifetime, those windows. Might as well be too, with all the chance we got of seeing it again.” She smiled faintly. “It’s nought but a fairy land now, is Ireland. Somewhere we’re best off forgetting.”

  Dalton nodded. He wished Grace could see home in the same way. A distant memory. Unobtainable.

  Annie reached onto the sideboard for the belt. She tossed it to Dalton. “Take it. I’ve another.”

  He ran his fingers across its rough stitching. “Thank you.” His chest tightened with an unexpected rush of emotion. He stood abruptly. “I need to see Grace.” His legs felt weak with whisky.

  “She’s sleeping.”

  “I’ll not wake her.”

  The belt in his fist, he let himself into the bedroom. Grace lay on a narrow mattress beneath a mountain of grey blankets. A fat curl lay across her cheek. He pressed his fingers to the side of her face. Her skin was warming; not that deathly cold it had been in the mountains. Her breath tickled his thumb. Life. The relief that washed through him was so intense, it brought a murmur from his throat.

  He sat on the edge of the bed. Grace shifted in her sleep. She reached an arm out of the blanket and felt for him, as she had done those cold nights in the mountains. Her eyes fluttered open. She clutched a fistful of his shirt and weakly tugged him forward.

  “I dreamt I was watching the sun set over the Tower.” She smiled sleepily. “If you stand on the hill at just the right time, the walls turn gold. I’ll show you one day.” She closed her eyes against the sunlight. “What you going to show me, then?”

  “Grace,” said Dalton. “Can I lie beside you?”

  She mumbled sleepily and shuffled across the mattress. He slid beneath the blankets and laid his head against hers, her curls tickling his nose.

  Once, before Van Diemen’s Land, he imagined he’d live the life of a normal man. Wife, children. Lying here with his body pressed against Grace’s, he saw a flicker of what could have been. It was as though he’d managed to catch hold of a thread of the life that had passed him by. The life stolen from him by his own bad choices. There was no normalcy for a man like him. No wife or children. No one holding him in the dark. This was the best he could hope for. A few stolen moments of intimacy with a woman too delirious to fight, while he waited for the world to hunt him down. He wrapped his arm around Grace’s chest. Warmth. She would live. He closed his heavy eyes. Today those stolen moments were enough.

  When he opened his eyes again, it was dark. Grace lay on her side, breathing deeply. What had woken him? A creak of the floor. Voices. Dalton peered through the darkness, hot and disoriented.

  The night is for the dead, his ma used to say. Off to bed with you and leave the house for the spirits.

  His hand tensed around Grace’s shoulder until reality returned to him. Tonight he slept among the living.

  XVI

  Grace woke to a room filled with pale grey light. Alexander lay beside her, his breaths long and slow.

  She’d come close to dying, she knew. Would be frozen on top of the mountains if it weren’t for him. How to reconcile that with the man who had aimed the rifle at she and Violet? The man who had killed two marines with a single bullet.

  In sleep, there was a vulnerability to him, a childishness. Lying with the blankets pulled to his neck, he looked an ordinary man. Had he left a family behind? Grace knew nothing of his life before this place. Had he loved, been loved? Had children of his own? Who had he been before Van Diemen’s Land had turned him wild? Strange it had taken a night in civilisation for her to consider such things.

  She climbed out of bed. She felt drained and heavy, but more alert than she had in days. Clean flannel petticoats and a blue woollen dress were draped over the end of the bed. Grace had vague recollections of the woman in the mop cap bringing them to her. She searched her blurred memories for the woman’s name. Annie?

  She washed, buttoned herself into the clean dress and walked slowly into the kitchen. She stopped abruptly. A tall man stood at the table, pouring a mug of tea. H
is skin was the colour of caramel, his face with the wide, flat features of the blacks. Grace stepped backwards, her spine pressing hard against the wall.

  He looked up and smiled wryly. “A black man with a tea cup in his hand. Whatever is the world coming to?”

  “I’m sorry,” Grace spluttered. “I didn’t mean no offense. I … Where’s Annie?”

  He nodded to the garden. Poured a second mug of tea and placed it on the table. “Here. You’re still down on your strength, I imagine.”

  She nodded her thanks and picked up the cup, eying him curiously.

  Annie shouldered open the door and tossed a handful of carrots on the table. She kicked off her muddy boots and wiped her hands on her apron. “I see you met my Jack,” she said, pouring herself a mug of tea. “How are you feeling?”

  “Better,” said Grace. “Much better. Thank you. For everything.”

  Annie shrugged. “We help each other as we can out here. Still finding our way, aren’t we. And Lord knows Jack and me have seen our share of trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  She gave a humourless laugh. “Irishwoman and a man with black blood in him? You think the rest of the village likes having us around? No sir.” She gulped down her tea. “Dogs, the lot of them.”

  Grace waited for Annie to continue, but she just reached for a knife and began to hack the tops off the muddy carrots.

  “Well,” said Grace. “Dogs or not, I got to find work. I got to earn some money to get back to Hobart Town. You know of anyone hiring?”

  “You ought to head up to the Porters’,” said Jack. “I heard they just had three of their lags got freed.”

  Annie snorted. “Bill Porter’s the worst of the lot.” She attacked the carrots without looking up.

  “Course he is. But she needs money. And Porter’s got money.” Jack motioned to Grace. “I’ll show you which is their house. You can see it from here.”

  She followed him into the paddock at the front of the cottage. The morning was misty and grey, the sun a perfect circle behind the cloud. Jack pointed to a hill behind the village. A sprawling white house sat on the slope.

  “Up there. Bill Porter’s. He’s a bastard of a man, but he’s desperate for workers.”

  Grace nodded. “What they do to you, then?”

  Jack ran a hand through his thick black hair. “Killed our cattle, dug up the crops. Did their best to drive us out.”

  “But you stayed.”

  “Where else were we to go? This place is all we got.” He smiled to himself. “They underestimated Annie’s stubbornness. Takes more than a few dead cows to force that woman from her home.”

  Grace looked back towards the mountains. Snow glittered on the peaks. “I’m lucky you were here.”

  Jack followed her gaze. “Men went up there during the black wars. Tried to flush out the natives. There were plenty didn’t make it back.” He smiled wryly. “Bloody fools come out from the cities. Never seen a mountain in their lives. They think they can take on this land and come out on top.”

  Grace wrapped her arms around herself, hearing her own foolishness in Jack’s words. She shivered. “Alexander, he sees things out there. Ghosts, like. At first I thought it was just his imagination. But there’s something about this place, ain’t there. It’s like the land… remembers.” She laughed humourlessly. “You must think me a complete fool.”

  Jack dug his hands into his pockets. “My ma, she always said the land is alive. It has a spirit. A soul. Perhaps that’s what you felt.” He began to walk back towards the cottage. Annie was back in the vegetable garden with a shovel in her hand. “Perhaps if the rest of these colonists could feel it they might respect the place a little more.” He touched Grace’s shoulder. “You’re no fool. I promise you.”

  She smiled faintly. Suddenly Jack’s arm was ripped away.

  “Get your hands off her,” Alexander hissed. Jack whirled around and shoved him hard against his chest. Annie threw down her shovel and charged out of the garden.

  “Alexander!” cried Grace. “What in hell?”

  He paced in a circle, his hands behind his head. “Get your things,” he told her.

  Annie hurled out a torrent of bitter Irish. Alexander glared at her.

  Grace’s eyes darted between them. “What did you say to him?”

  Annie planted her hands on her hips and snorted. “Said he’s a mad bastard. Ought to have let him freeze.”

  *

  Grace shoved Dalton into the bedroom. “What the bloody hell’s the matter with you?” she cried. “He weren’t doing nothing but helping me! And why’ve you got that filthy shirt on again? You stink like a dead goat.” She watched with cold eyes as he pulled off the old shirt and slipped the fresh one over his head. “What’s this about then?” she demanded. “You want me all to yourself? Christ Almighty.”

  Dalton marched into the kitchen to fetch his damp clothes. She chased him through the house.

  “You can’t go about behaving like this! You’re in the real world now! And these people have been nothing but good to us!”

  Dalton shoved his dirty trousers into the pack and charged back into the bedroom. The walls of the house seemed to have closed in on him in the night. He’d never meant to stay this long.

  “Get your things,” he said again.

  Grace shook her head. “I ain’t going back into the forest.”

  “Of course you are.”

  “No. You were right about me going back to Hobart Town. I can’t take Nora with no place to go. I’m going to Mr Porter’s at the top of the hill. He’s looking for help. I got to earn some money so I can make a decent life for the two of us. And then I’ll go back for her.”

  Dalton’s insides felt hollow. For a strange, fleeting moment, he saw his isolation for what it had been: a desperate attempt not to face his own shame. A self-imposed purgatory as he waited out the rest of his sorry life. “What will you tell them?” he mumbled.

  “I’ll tell them the truth. I’m a free settler who fled a violent master in Hobart Town. They don’t need to know nothing about New Norfolk.”

  “They’ll take you for a bolter.”

  “Me? A bolter?” She laughed, then swallowed it abruptly. “They’ve no proof.”

  “They don’t need proof! This place is corrupt as hell! There are police running around who are lags themselves! Men who’ll do anything for that ticket of leave. They’ll lock you up for being a bolter until you can prove otherwise. That’s the way things work here, Grace. Guilty until proven innocent.”

  She chewed her thumbnail. She looked different in her blue striped skirts. Young and clean. Her hair was pinned neatly at the base of her neck. He could smell soap.

  So this was Grace in the real world.

  “I got to do this for Nora. I got to take that risk. Besides, many more nights rolling in the mud, I truly will become mad. I’m going over there soon as I packed my things.”

  “You can’t. You need to rest. You’re not well enough to go looking for work.”

  She smiled out the corner of her mouth. “But I’m well enough to go back into the forest with you, is that right? I’m fine. Just a little tired. I got to do this, Alexander. You know I do.”

  She gathered her muddy clothes from the end of the bed and folded them neatly. Dalton searched for an argument that might keep her from going. But he saw the determination in her. Determined, he supposed, to move on from the loss of Violet and do something right for the other girl. Determined to shake off the title of lunatic she’d been shackled with in Hobart. He felt ill.

  Grace turned to him. “Tell me,” she said suddenly, “about your life in Ireland.”

  “What?”

  “Who is waiting for you? A wife? A child? I’m sorry, I don’t know why I never thought to ask before.”

  Dalton let out his breath and looked away.

  “There was a woman in New Norfolk what saw ghosts,” Grace said after a moment. “One night she couldn’t bear it
no more and hung herself with her bed sheets.”

  Dalton clenched his teeth. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I can see such a thing happening to you. I can see your memories driving you to your death. You’re a human being. It ain’t right for you to be so alone. No one here knows who you are. You said yourself, the world thinks Alexander Dalton is dead.”

  “Then why shatter their illusions?”

  “I worry for you,” said Grace.

  “Why?”

  She laughed a little. “What you mean, why?”

  “Why should you care?”

  “Because I can see a decent man in you.”

  “Is that what you were thinking when we were burying those soldiers?”

  “Well. It’s like you said, ain’t it.” She straightened the bedclothes. “You did that for me.”

  Dalton pulled the blanket from her hands. “I buried the gun behind Annie’s house. Marked it with a strip of my shirt so we could find it. We’ll dig it up and shoot a couple of kangaroos. Or those cows we passed. And they’ve got a garden full of carrots. We can take those too.”

  Grace glared at him. “How dare you even think it after all they’ve done for us!” She sighed. “Go if you must. I understand.” She ran a finger along one of the thick white scars that snaked over to his collarbone. He shivered. She pulled at the lacing of the shirt, closing the linen over the scars and tying it tightly at his neck. She placed her hands on his shoulders and looked into his eyes.

  “You saved my life,” she said. “Thank you.” The front door slammed and she pulled away.

  *

  Grace trudged out of the cottage and crossed the rickety bridge into town. She couldn’t bear to think what would become of Alexander. More silence, more loneliness. A life lived in the shadow of the dead.

  In spite of herself, she’d come to care for him, perhaps more deeply than he deserved. She knew he’d be forever in her thoughts as he hid, waiting out the rest of his life. She felt an ache in her chest. Isolation wasn’t what he truly wanted, she was sure. He’d not buried his human need for companionship so deeply.