Dust Off the Bones

by Paul Howarth

  “There is, actually. Your lucky day. Here you are, young man.”

  It was Arthur’s handwriting on the envelope. Tommy tore open the flap. The postmaster noticed and said, “A sweetheart, I’m assuming?” then, laughing, “They all say that,” when Tommy replied it was just a letter from a friend.

  Tommy—

  Hope you got the last note. I’m a bit more settled these days. I’ve put the address up top there, so you can write back if you want. I don’t know how long they’ll keep me on for but I’m not in a hurry to leave. Work’s been hard to come by—it’s mostly sheep down here, and you know what I think of them. Hope you’re getting along with the cattle and Flash Jack’s treating you all right. Don’t take shit from anyone. Be good to hear your news. Take care now.

  Arthur

  Tommy wrote back immediately. It tumbled out of him in a rush. The cattle droves he had been on, the places he had seen: Boulia, Bedourie, over the Territory border and out toward Alice Springs. Jack was treating him well, he told him, and despite the usual gripes and grumbles, he and the other men got along fine. He was sorry for how things had ended between them, for how he’d behaved back then, unburdening himself after months of carrying that guilt around. He missed him, and was grateful, more than he could quite bring himself to say.

  Apart from the cameleers still making supply runs to the stations, Marree largely emptied during summertime, as the droving season wound up and the men returned to their families or looked for work nearer the coast. When Jack asked his plans Tommy admitted he’d never thought about it, and didn’t have anywhere else to be. He might just stay in Marree, he said, shrugging; Jack told him he’d go out of his mind. “Why don’t you come with me to Adelaide,” he offered, then when Tommy asked what was in Adelaide he’d laughed and said, “You’ll see.”

  They boarded the train in Marree and within a few days were on the south coast, the same journey undertaken by all that cattle they had droved, albeit with a happier end. Sitting in the carriage watching the country slip by, Tommy wearing a clean shirt and trousers, the best of all he owned. He didn’t have any town clothes. Certainly none as smart as Jack: clean-shaven, his hair freshly trimmed, he wore a brown three-piece that made him look like a pimp. There was a woman down in Adelaide, he told Tommy; then later, a little shyly, admitted that one woman was actually three. He hadn’t meant for it to work out that way, but you know how these things are, and it wasn’t like he was married or had children or anything—not that he knew of anyway, assuming his luck had held.

  Dee ran a guesthouse north of the city, which was how the two of them first met. She had short black hair and high cheekbones and greeted Jack by flinging her arms around his neck and kissing him hard on the lips, Tommy standing there awkwardly, unsure where to look. When they parted and Jack introduced him, she flashed an appraising glance and said, smirking, “Well, just wait till the girls get a look at you.” He became a pet project for her: Dee gave him a room for a peppercorn rent, and while Jack was seeing to business (as he put it) she showed Tommy the town. Cleaned him up, got him a haircut, had him fitted for a suit and other new clothes. They walked arm in arm along the pavements, Dee laughing her big laugh, her head tipped back to show her apple-white neck and the damp pink of her tongue. Tommy worried about the two of them. He was feeling things, for sure. But then he’d never had a female friend before, didn’t know how these things worked. The whole city knocked him sideways: the crowds of people, the towering buildings, the traffic in the roads; even worse in the nighttime, swaying drunkenly beneath the gaslights.

  In a bootleg dancehall in the back room of a pub, Dee introduced Tommy to a group of her friends, who teased him for his accent and asked for stories from the mythical north. Tommy had nothing to tell them. His stories weren’t for these people, for dancehalls. He paired off with a blond girl called Sally. They spent the night together a couple of times, Tommy lying in her bed afraid to fall asleep in case he scared her with the horrors of his dreams. He didn’t get them every night, but they were unpredictable to say the least, and without work to tire him out his mind roamed. He drank to keep it quiet. To knock himself out cold. He fell for Sally heavily, as a young man of his age would, and as their time in Adelaide grew shorter he began to worry about leaving her, which had Jack roaring when he heard.

  “It’s every woman you ever speak to, Bobby! No different to that whore!”

  At Jack’s instigation he opened a bank account, risky in the middle of a depression, but not as risky as carrying a rumpled stack of banknotes around. He needed some convincing. Handing over all his money like that. His father had never had one, didn’t trust the banks, and it seemed way above his station in truth. But a bank account felt like something a man should have, a man of means anyway, or at least a man with aspirations beyond simply getting by. Jack had shown him such things were achievable: he led two lives, Tommy realized. One up north with the cattle and the country, another down here like some gent. That had been Tommy when he was younger: all he’d wanted was to grow up like his father, while at the same time feeling there should be more. He’d been more curious than his brother. Better at reading and numbers too. Once, he’d suggested they start at the school in Bewley, and Billy had looked at him like he’d lost his mind. Now it seemed vaguely possible that there was a life for him out there, a different life, away from all the guilt and the pain. He was unsure exactly the shape it might take, but a bank account seemed a good start, and when he came down the steps in his new suit that day, with the papers in his pocket and a lightness in his heels, he felt like he’d just sneaked a peek into his future, without knowing yet what that future held.

  Still, it was a relief to leave the city. All those buildings, those crowds. He’d not realized he could miss a place like Marree but as the train rattled north and the land opened out it felt like he was going home. He went directly to the post office. He’d written Arthur from Adelaide, told him all about the city, and Sally, and everything else. It had occurred to him while he was down there that he might have tried to track Arthur down: he had the name of the station he was working on, and though it was probably still hundreds of miles away they were closer than they had been in a long time. He didn’t. It felt like they were following different paths now. But when he opened the letter he found waiting for him in Marree, he allowed himself to hope those paths might cross one day, that he would see his old friend again.

  Tommy—

  Adelaide? Are you bloody kidding me? You’ll stand out like a bald cockerel down there! I’ll bet that young Sally helped you settle in some—it’s good to hear you’re enjoying yourself anyhow. Things are all right on the station here, even with the bloody sheep, but it won’t be for long, I doubt. They’ve let most of the whitefellas go, now there’s only the bosses and us blacks. On account of we’re cheaper, see. Saving them a proper wage. But the place is for closing, I reckon, so I’ll likely be on the road again. Maybe don’t write for a while in case I’m not here—they’re not the sort that would send on my mail. I’m pleased you’re getting by though, Tommy. And don’t worry about before. Nothing’s ended between us. You ain’t rid of me yet!

  Arthur

  It became the rhythm he and Jack lived by: the stock routes in the droving season, then the train down south to the coast. Tommy did some traveling. Saw the ocean for the first time in his life and it made him so queasy he had to sit down on the sand and close his eyes. It terrified him. The endless uncertainty of it all, the way the thing breathed; it felt like the earth moved under his boots. He would take up drinking almost as soon as the train landed—there was nothing else for him to do. Sally had married a blacksmith from Mile End, and for a while Tommy nursed a broken heart, until a seamstress called Jacqueline helped stitch the wound. He was nothing like himself down here. He’d left Tommy McBride in Marree. In bars and at the racetrack he was drawn into conversation with groups of other men: people seemed to find Bobby interesting, he even managed to make them laugh. If eve
r they asked for his story, or about the fingers missing from his hand, he would make up some bullshit tale. He got in fights sometimes. He was tall, and strong with it, the kind with whom certain men like to have a go. He held his own, mostly. Being hit didn’t bother him. There was power in his swing. He felt a surge of abandon in fighting, and it surprised him, how easily violence came. More than once Jack had to drag him off a man, and Tommy would stagger away, panting, while whichever poor bastard had provoked him lay bleeding on the ground.

  They were back up on the Birdsville Track, among the vicious sloping sand dunes south of the Warburton Creek, when one night around the campfire, the others all asleep, Jack poked the burning deadwood and said, “I promised not to ask when I met you, and I’m nothing if not a man of my word, but if ever you want to talk about it, I’m listening. If it would help to get it all off your chest.”

  Tommy frowned at him. “What you on about?”

  “Mate, I’ve known you long enough. I can see how it’s tearing you up.”

  “What is?”

  “Whatever happened back then, over in Queensland, when you were young.” Tommy dropped his eyes to the fire. A shiver against the darkness. Jack went on: “Look, you don’t have to tell me, but I’ve heard you dreaming, I sleep next to you every night.”

  “So I get nightmares—what of it?”

  “Nothing, mate. Suit yourself.”

  “Come on, let’s have it. You got something to say?”

  “All right, who’s Noone?”

  There was a long silence between them. Tommy picked up a stone and hurled it into the night. “A copper. You ever hear of him?”

  “Dunno. Don’t think so.”

  “You’d know if you had. Well, he’s what happened. Him and everything else.”

  “How d’you mean?”

  A long breath washed out of Tommy like the breaking of a dam. “Noone was Native Police, had the district where I’m from. This one day, me and my brother went swimming at a waterhole, only when we got back we found our family killed. Shot, every one of them. Hell, they even stabbed the dogs. Our sister Mary hung on a while after but she went too in the end. They brought in Noone to catch them that did it, only he never did.”

  “Fucking hell, Bobby.”

  “Yeah.” He scooped up more stones and flicked them at the ground.

  “How old were you?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Fucking hell. And is that what you keep dreaming about? What happened to them?”

  “In a way, yeah. Also him. Noone.”

  Jack was staring at him. “Why? What did he do?”

  In the firelight Tommy glanced across at this man, Jack Kerrigan, one of the best he’d ever known. It would take so little to tell him, to unburden himself—because if not Jack, then who? “He took us . . .” he began, then stopped himself. He couldn’t make himself do it, couldn’t reveal himself in that way. If Jack knew who he was really, if he knew what Tommy had done . . . he shook his head by way of an answer, but it seemed Jack had already guessed.

  “If he was Native Police I can imagine. Wait, you were there? You saw?”

  Hesitantly, Tommy nodded.

  “Fucking hell—I’ll stop saying that in a minute. Your brother too?”

  Bitterly, he snorted. “It was his idea in the first place.”

  “And this was what you were running from when I found you on the Strez?”

  “Before that. Five years. Arthur got me away from there, saved me really. I didn’t want to see it that way but it’s true.” Tommy’s face twisted in the firelight. “All those people, Jack. All those people because of me.”

  He’d not cried in many years now, but the tears began falling and wouldn’t stop. He lurched up and stumbled between the sandhills, into the empty desert beyond, fell to his knees and wept. Pain filled his body, washed out of him in gulps, and was swallowed by those immense and silent plains. He dug up the dirt and held it; dust dribbled between his fingers on the breeze. He placed his hands palms down on the earth, as if bent to the land in prayer. It had heard it all already. It knew what had been done. So much killing it had witnessed, so much blood and death and grief. Tommy straightened and sniffed and steadied himself, and finally the tears dried. The moon bright above him, the blackness peppered with stars. He wiped his face roughly on his shirtsleeve, struggled back to his feet. He could hear the mob grunting beyond the sandbar and just about see the glow of the campfire. He set off walking. When he got back to camp he found that Jack was already in his bedroll, with his head on his arm and his eyes closed, pretending to be asleep.

  Tommy—

  I’m in Victoria! Never even knew where the bugger was! Turns out the only places I’m good for down here is the Missions, which I wasn’t all too happy about but the truth is I’m better suited to it than most anywhere else. There’s a bunch of us to knock about with, and there’s food and beds and work. Cattle now, thank Christ Almighty, which I’m not meant to say round here. It’s like the rest of my life never happened, saying grace and all that horseshit, like I’m back where it all began. I’ll stick it for as long as they’ll have me, or until you can get down. You still thinking of coming? Bloody long way for you now. You’d like it though, I reckon. Green as a tree frog’s arsehole—gets plenty bloody rain! No rush, mind, I’m only saying. Whenever you get done with them cows.

  Arthur

  It was their sixth season working the stock routes together when, in a pub in Urandangi, on their way north to collect another mob, Jack noticed the stranger eyeing Tommy across the room. A toothless old swaggie with straggly long hair and a beard speckled with lice, a flinty look of menace in his bloodhound eyes. Standing alone in the corner, leaning on a shelf, staring at Tommy and nursing his beer like an infant against his chest. A lively crowd in that evening. Various droving teams passing through at the same time, mingling, drinking, singing, swapping stories from the road. Tommy was playing cards at a table, the cards fanned out in his right hand, his beer glass clutched in the three fingers of his left. Laughing. Slapping the man beside him on the arm. Jack bought two beers from the barman, sidled over to the old-timer, and offered him one.

  “What’s this?” the stranger said, scowling.

  “You don’t want it, I’ll drink it myself.”

  “I never said that, here . . .” He snatched the beer, spilling some, put the glass to his lips and drank, eyes on Jack the whole time. He lowered the glass and sighed contentedly. “Do I know ye or something, friend?”

  “Might do. I’ve known a lot of people.”

  “Reckon I’d remember, generous as y’are.”

  “I just don’t like to see a fella drinking by himself, that’s all.”

  “Well, I’m much obliged to ye.” He offered his hand. “Alan Ames.”

  They shook. “Jack Kerrigan. So what brings you out here, Alan Ames?”

  Ames laughed like this was funny. “Might as well say it’s the wind.”

  “Take her as she comes, is it?”

  “Something like that, aye. Not by choice, mind.”

  “You after work then?”

  “Might be. You hiring?”

  “Not yet, but you never know with this lot. Anything can happen in a night.”

  Ames nodded. They stood drinking. Finally he said, “Here, that young blond lad playing cards over there—he’s not one of yours, is he?”

  “Never seen that bloke before tonight. Why?”

  “Ah, nothing. I reckon I might have known him someplace, that’s all.”

  “So go ask him.”

  “Not likely.”

  “All right then, I will.”

  Jack went to leave but Ames grabbed his arm. “Don’t.”

  “There history between you or something?”

  “It’s him what has the history, not me.” He ducked his head a little, lowered his voice. “Crazy little cunt once killed a man down in St. George, a good man, station overseer on a place called Barren Downs. I was working there w
hen he did it. We went out looking but never caught him. Kid was madder than a one-eyed dog.”

  Jack sipped his beer. “You sure that’s him? Bloke could be anyone.”

  Ames was shaking his head furiously. “Look at that hand there, the fingers he’s missing. Kid had the exact same thing. Blond hair, the ages match—bit more to say for himself now by the looks of it, but that’s him as I live and breathe.”

  “Plenty blokes I’ve met are missing a finger or two.”

  “You’re not listening to me. They never caught him, I said. Even put up a reward and everything, a good few hundred it was.”

  “Reward? Bit old for a bounty hunter, aren’t you?”

  “Cheeky bastard, what d’you reckon?” Ames said, laughing. “Right place, right time, more like. ’Bout bloody time my luck changed n’all.”

  Jack leaned into him. “So what you thinking?”

  “Dunno. I’ve not really worked it through yet.”

  “Well, it might be I’ve a proposition for you. Young fella like that, big with it, no disrespect but you’ll struggle on your own. Unless you’ve got a weapon?” Ames shook his head quickly and Jack showed him the two revolvers he carried on his belt. “What say we do it together, fifty-fifty, even shares?”

  Ames weighed this carefully. “Where would we take him to collect?”