by Paul Howarth
Meals he cooked outside the bunkhouse, in a firepit someone else had dug. Drifters, wandering swaggies, you got them out here sometimes. At night he’d sit in the warmth of the flames, smoking against the wall, looking at the shadow of the house in the moonlight and trying to remember happier times. The old days of his childhood, when a dozen stockmen had lived and worked here, every day a rabble of activity and, for him and Tommy, excitement and fun. Falling asleep in the bed they shared they would hear the laughter and swearing and singing under the stars, and all Billy ever wanted was to be a part of it, a man just like them.
He still sang their songs sometimes, sitting out here on his own.
With the wages he’d been putting aside over the years, Billy rode out to the saleyards at Lawton and bought himself half a small mob. The other half he’d be loaning from Broken Ridge: their cattle would graze his pastures, when they were sold he’d take a cut, and if he managed to get a calf out of any of them, that calf would be Billy’s to keep. He’d agreed the deal with Joe, the headman, and had got the feeling he could have named almost any terms.
But he wouldn’t accept loaned labor, not without paying a wage, and since he couldn’t afford to do so had no choice but to drove the Lawton cattle back to Glendale by himself, seventy miles over rugged flatland that took him the best part of a week. Two dozen head of cows and heifers, plus a scrawny-looking bull calf. He’d not had his pick of the market, had been outbid on all but the dregs. And these were Lawton dregs, remember—most breeders only sold there when they couldn’t sell anywhere else.
Under a beating sun Billy had walked the dusty pathways between the stinking pens, studying the cattle in their stalls. None was much to look at. Sunken rib cages, sagging bellies, a pained and mournful bellow. Still, some were better than others: Billy shouldered between the buyers crowding the wooden rails and tried to imagine, with the unsullied pastures he had waiting back home, what these broken beasts might become. He watched their movement, their gait, studied their coats for signs of mange; checked for eyes damp with discharge, jaws that couldn’t properly chew, and those whose problems shitting were smeared on their hind legs.
All this he’d record in a little notebook, his pencil tucked behind his ear.
Some of the men he knew personally, others knew him or had heard of him, or had known his father when he was alive. Often he was stopped and his hand was shaken and he was obliged to shoot the breeze in that taciturn way all cattlemen have. Mostly they were amiable, glad to hear he was starting up again; a few commented that his father would have been proud. They asked how the young widow was faring at Broken Ridge, whether that soft city arsehole—her father—was running the place into the ground. Billy told them Katherine was managing the station, that she was doing just fine, and they laughed until they realized it wasn’t a joke. The things they said about her—he could have hit any number of them, none was fit to speak her name. But enemies were made for life out here, and enemies were the last thing Billy needed, so he shook their sweaty hands and allowed the conversation to go on: some wondered whether his brother was back yet, whether he was part of the new run, and all Billy said was that he wasn’t expecting Tommy anytime soon. They’d clutch his shoulder or slap his back, then, put in mind of what had happened to them, of why Billy was on his own, would lean in and offer their sympathies, before telling him how glad they were those Kurrong bastards wouldn’t be bothering him again.
“Good on ya, Billy,” they whispered. “Good on ya, mate. Well done.”
At which Billy, clench jawed and silent, would turn and move along.
On the crest of a rise Billy sat his horse and looked over the western pastures, watching his mongrel herd: the bedraggled stock from Lawton and the pedigrees from Broken Ridge, mingling warily, in a way cattle usually were not, as if neither fully recognized their counterparts as being of the same kind.
“Ah, they’ll fatten up in a week or two. Can’t but help it with all that feed.”
He’d caught himself doing this recently, talking with nobody around. Not even a dog to listen to him, and Buck wasn’t the listening kind. Tommy should have been here, mounted on that big gray gelding he was so fond of, sitting at Billy’s side. It was all they’d ever talked about when they were boys, what they’d do when this place was theirs. Or at least they had done, before Tommy started getting ideas about himself, about a life away from Glendale.
“Yeah, well, at least I’m still here trying. I ain’t running away.”
Billy pulled the horse around and rode him south for home, two hours across a barren scrubland no amount of rain could cure, the soil dry and brittle, choked by dust and stones. His thoughts wandering out ahead of him, to another evening alone by the fire, another meal of stale salt beef, unless . . . there was time to go hunting before sundown, he figured, rustle up some fresh meat, maybe fill the bathtub and leave it warming, it was ages since he last washed. He could bathe while the meat was roasting, scrub his clothes after, then eat and smoke and watch the sunset, drink a little rum, raise a toast to the new cattle, to his family’s run reborn.
Four loose horses were waiting for him, when he rode into the yard.
All were saddled and loaded with supplies: snuffling the weed-strewn gravel, drinking from the trough. Billy reined up and dismounted, drew and cocked his revolver, walked slowly into the yard. His gaze flitted between the buildings. His boots crunched the stones. The house door was open, as were some of the sheds, and the horses were unfamiliar: they weren’t from Broken Ridge.
The men slid from behind walls and out of doorways and were converging on Billy before he even noticed they were there: two blacks, their carbines leveled at him, marching deliberately across the yard; and one white, smiling slyly, sauntering with an enormous rifle pinned behind his neck.
Billy lowered the hammer on the revolver, let it hang loose at his side.
On they came, these three men, Billy alternating between them and only now registering the pale trousers and blue tunics the two blacks wore. The white boy was dressed in tan moleskins and an ill-fitting khaki shirt, and though he was chewing tobacco looked no older than sixteen. He resembled a workhouse urchin—pug nose, narrow eyes, filthy hair, a cleft in his chin and acne pocked on his cheeks—but from their getup Billy already had a good idea who these strangers were.
The white boy was a Native Police officer. His troopers were in uniform.
And now that he’d realized, now he saw the troopers more clearly as they closed across the yard, he wondered if they weren’t familiar, if he didn’t know them from before, from when he and Tommy had gone after their family’s killers and they had . . . and they had . . .
“Fellas!” Billy called, waving. “Good to see you! How you been?”
They were unimpressed by his bluster. Nothing in their faces at all. One on each side, fixing Billy with their carbines, while the boy rolled lazily toward him, scarecrowed by his rifle still. Desperately Billy tried to remember the troopers’ names. One was older, bald-headed, a face sunken to its bones; the other bigger, younger, stronger, his left eye knotted with scars. Priest, or Bishop maybe, something to do with God?
He looked at the boy anxiously. “What you doing here? What’s this about?”
As if by way of an answer a slow boot tread sounded on the house verandah, and all heads including Billy’s turned: he remembered with a shiver that there had been a fourth horse. In the shadow of the porch a very tall man uncoiled himself through the open doorway and stepped up to the rail. He wore a peacock feather waistcoat with a gold watch chain and had a dark longcoat draped over one arm. With the other hand he drank from Father’s favorite mug: his initials stenciled on the bottom, the only one he would ever use. Billy watched the mug rise and fall and rise again, and as it did he saw the tall man smile.
“Hello, Billy,” Noone said. “Now isn’t this a pleasant surprise.”
Chapter 4
Tommy McBride
Arthur peeled the revolver from Burns�
��s loose grip, then rifled through his pockets and began stripping off his boots and clothes, panting, “Grab the horses, Tommy. And that black’un too.”
Tommy glanced at Burns’s black stallion. Beyond, the fleeing stablehand was now a speck across the fields. “I never meant to kill him.”
“He ain’t dead yet, but we still have to run. We’ve a couple hours’ start at most.”
“But . . .”
On his knees, Arthur spun. “But what? What? You want to hold his hand and wait till he comes round? Either way we’re fucked, mate, so get your head out your arse and help me here. Five bloody years I’ve been carrying you, dealing with all your horseshit; don’t you dare play possum now. Wake up, Tommy. Get that horse.”
As Arthur undressed him, Burns’s head flopped to one side and Tommy saw the crimson mess matted in his hair. He’d hit a rock part-buried in the dirt, the only one out here, a million-to-one chance. All he’d done was push him. Nothing more than that. It didn’t matter. Death followed Tommy regardless. Shadowed him, night and day. As if years ago it had laid a hand on his shoulder and had been stalking him ever since.
He drifted in the direction of the stallion, collected him, and led him to where the others were tied in the shade. Arthur ran over, carrying a loose bundle of clothing that he stuffed into the empty saddlebags; he was already wearing Burns’s boots. He fetched the long-handled shovel and a few other fencing tools and slid them under the stallion’s saddle straps, then mounted up and ordered Tommy to do the same. They rode out, over a couple of miles of open grassland until they reached the rutted gravel coach track that traced the course of the Balonne River to St. George, where, on the outskirts of the little settlement, they halted by a roadside cemetery and considered the distant outline of the river crossing on the far side of town.
“We’ll have to find another way across. We can’t risk going through there.”
Tommy wasn’t listening. Studying the nearby headstones, the names and dates and descriptions: beloved father, mother, daughter, son. He wasn’t any of those things, he realized. If it was him who’d died back there today, what would his inscription say? Murderer? Liar? Coward? Did he even warrant a proper grave?
One headstone near the fence read: robert thompson, he enjoyed a simple life, and that phrase tolled in Tommy like a bell. A simple life—it sounded wonderful. To live and work and die in peace, to be remembered, to be mourned.
They doubled back and crossed the river out of sight of the town, then struck west through open country before joining the track again. They could follow it all the way to a place called Innamincka, Arthur explained after an hour of silent riding, of thinking his plan through, a lonely trading outpost he’d heard of, weeks away, up on the Cooper Creek, provided the track went that far. Nobody would come looking for them out there. More likely assume they’d crossed the border into New South Wales. Then from Innamincka they could trace the Cooper until it met the Birdsville Track, that fabled central stock route running north-south through the guts, now with wells and bores and camping grounds, apparently, serving the great rivers of cattle that tumbled out of Queensland onto trains waiting to whisk them directly to the south coast ports.
“We’ll just follow the cattle. It’ll be like old times.”
Arthur smiled uneasily. He almost sounded convinced.
* * *
It would be four days’ hard riding before they reached the next main town, following the ribbon of the western coach trail through sun-drenched grassland, the sky deep blue above them, thin cloud scudding like surf. Fifteen-hour days in the saddle, or as much as the horses could take, resting through the heat of the daytime, riding dusk till dawn at night. They saw nobody following. No posse on their tail. Only the occasional silhouette of some weary traveler trudging eastward, or in a spew of dust and gravel the mail coach rattling by.
They spoke very little in those early days, other than the basic business of keeping themselves alive. Arthur had Cal Burns’s money clip, but there was nowhere to buy supplies, and out here both food and water were scarce. If they saw any form of settlement, the few lonely farms and hamlets dotted along the trail, they would creep from the shadows at nighttime and use whatever river, bore, or waterhole sustained the people living there, fill their flasks and water the horses, then slip away unseen.
On the second night they called time on their riding just before dawn, found a place to make camp, lit a fire. Warming themselves in silence, when suddenly Arthur said, “Look, I just can’t let this lie.”
“Let what lie?”
“What happened back there, how you—”
“I already told you, I never meant to kill him. He had a gun to my head!”
“Ah, you don’t even know he’s dead, Tommy.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, that’s not what I’m saying: how you disappeared inside yourself, like you always do. Burns wasn’t going to shoot you and you know it. My bet, he reminded you of something that happened from before, and that’s what set you off.”
Tommy didn’t answer, buried his gaze in the flames.
“It’s been five years, Tommy. It’s time you moved on.”
“Moved on? Are you serious?”
“Yeah, well, you need to hear it. We had a good thing going there, best work in years. Now look at us. This is hardly the first time, neither.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Oh, you reckon? Listen, there’s plenty buggers out there had it just as rough as you and don’t carry it with them their whole bloody lives.”
Tommy shook his head. “I still see him, dream about him: Noone.”
Arthur spat a thin string of saliva hissing into the flames. “Mate, I dreamed about that mission station for years after. I told you what happened to the family, remember?”
The two of them talking outside the bunkhouse, Tommy fourteen years old, glimpsing a world he could never have imagined, realizing that Arthur had a life of his own.
“’Course I do.”
“Yeah, well, you were too young for the whole story back then. That place . . . there was blood and bodies everywhere, no telling who was who, and I’m picking through it all trying to figure if any of ’em’s mine, the missus and the littl’uns, I never did find ’em in the end. So maybe they got took, maybe they’re still alive, this was thirty ago and I still don’t know. After, my head was gone, just like yours is now. Only difference is, I didn’t have nobody else.”
Tommy didn’t know what to say to that. The fire threw out a spark.
“So don’t try telling me I don’t know what it’s like. But fuck it, eh, what can you do? Can’t change what happened, that’s for damn sure. Either forget about it or bury it or whatever else works, but quit your bloody sulking before you get us both killed.”
Meekly, Tommy nodded. Staring lost into the flames.
* * *
They reached Cunnamulla late on the fourth day and camped a good distance from town, watching the lanterns burning, listening to the singing and piano music from the hotel bar, imagining the revelry and the beds awaiting the drinkers when they were done. Before dawn they looped around to the western fringe of town and once the place had come to life rode in from that direction, pretending they were traveling east, a lie they repeated to the waitress in the roadhouse, not that she seemed to care. They each had two breakfasts, courtesy of Cal Burns’s money clip, and afterward headed for the livery stables along the road. A shopkeeper sweeping his doorway paused to watch them pass; Tommy touched his hat brim and, after a moment’s hesitation, the man nodded in return.
Outside the stables Arthur unstrapped his battered old saddle and dumped it in Tommy’s arms. “Remember what we talked about now.”
“I remember.”
“Just, don’t tell ’em too much, all right?”
“I remember, I said.”
herman’s tack & livery comprised a large barn with a small tack shop annexed on one side. The shop door was already open. Hesitan
tly, Tommy stepped inside. An empty bare-wood counter, bits and bridles on the walls, plus a photograph of the local gun club: two dozen grim-faced riflemen scowling in a row.
Tommy dropped the saddle on the counter, called out hello, peered through the archway into the main barn, a smell of straw, shit, and tan in the air. He noticed a handbell on the counter, rang it, a voice called, “Hang on, hang on,” and a moment later a bald, round-bellied man, presumably Herman, came waddling through the archway, sliding up the shoulder straps on his coveralls and fastening a button at the waist. He spread his thickly haired arms on the counter and said, “Help you?” as if Tommy had just that second walked in.
“I’m after a pack saddle, three nose bags, and a sack of grain.”
“All right.”
Tommy nodded at the saddle. “For this, I mean. To trade.”
Herman frowned at the ragged offering then stared at Tommy a long time, taking in the unwashed clothing, the restless gaze. He flipped the saddle over, the buckles and stirrups jangling, and winced like he’d swallowed bad milk.
“Had it long, have you?”
“A while.”
“I’ll say. Well, she’s not pretty, but I might can fix her up. I’d take this plus five pound from you—how does that sound?”
Tommy didn’t haggle, terrible deal though it was. He pulled out the money clip and peeled off the notes and Herman’s thick eyebrows rose. “So what are you,” Herman asked, pocketing the notes in his coveralls, “just passing through?”
“Heading east, after work.”
“What kind of work?”
“Sheep, cattle, anything like that.”
Herman coughed and spat, like the idea offended him. “What you wanting a pack saddle for, if you’re planning on stopping to work?”