Dust Off the Bones

by Paul Howarth

  At the back door Tommy paused and looked the room over, rain hammering the roof overhead. It was finished now, all this. The life he had found here, built here, was gone. He bowed his head, closed his eyes, then yanked open the door and stepped out. He pulled on his damp work boots and crept through the downpour, along the rear wall of the house, watching the yard in case of another intruder out back.

  From the corner of the house he looked across a hundred-yard clearing to the stables, lantern light spilling through the open double doors. He didn’t remember lighting one. The place shone like a parade. But the clearing was murky in the pelting rain, a no-man’s-land between the house and the barn, and it felt like a muzzle-loader he was firing, given the gaps between rounds. Quick with it, though. An expert shot. Still, most likely that meant only one round, two at most, if he fired the very second Tommy ran. Shit, shit, shit. He had no choice. He needed a horse, needed to warn Arthur—if the shooter was mounted Tommy would never outrun him on foot. Then there was Emily, waiting in her apartment, sitting on her bed, her hands clasped in her lap. If he didn’t get down there first there’d be a knock at the door and she would answer, her face crumpling in terror when she saw it was not him.

  Tommy snatched a final breath, and ran.

  A flash of movement breaking cover. “And here the boss reckons you’re the clever one.” Percy tracked the runner left to right in his scope, but the rain blurred his vision and it was dark between the buildings. Aim for the torso, in that case. A bigger target to hit. He adjusted the rifle a fraction, and fired.

  Mad eyes bulging, teeth bared, boots slapping the waterlogged earth, Tommy fled for his life across the yard. Ahead the barn doors yawned in the dusk, seemingly coming no closer, if anything inching farther away. Leaden arms flailing, no strength left in his legs, but close enough now to see inside the stables, the shapes of the hanging saddles, the benches, the stalls, and lying in the aisle there were bundles of . . . lying in the aisle there were . . . lying in the aisle . . .

  Missed him. Fucker slowed right at the last. Percy saw the shot kick harmlessly in the mud, cursed and quickly reloaded, raised the rifle again.

  At the sound of the booming rifle report Tommy flung himself forward and rolled into the barn, landing hard on the straw-strewn ground. He lifted his head and looked at those bundles that had stalled him as he ran, and in the shadows from a distance had resembled heaped blankets or covered hay bales that he knew should not have been there, and that now, up close, were clearly nothing of the sort.

  “Good luck getting them saddles on,” Percy crowed, snatching up his rifle, carrying it by its forestock, skipping nimbly toward the house down the hill.

  The horses had had their throats slit, Tess’s belly sawed open like a bean can. Tommy gripped his head and wrenched the skin taut, his eyes distended and red, death breaking over him in a wave. It was hopeless, he was doomed here, meaning so were Arthur and Rosie and Emily—no, not them. He staggered to the table, collected the shotgun, the box of shells. There was no way out but through him. No running away from this. Stepping over the animals and the pools of their mess, he made his way along the aisle to the barn’s back door, sliding in two shells as he went. He forced the door open, stiff from under-use, then crept along the side of the building to the front corner facing the gully and fired a shot blindly into the rain.

  Percy’s feet went from under him at the sound of the shotgun blast. He slid in the wet scrub and scrambled behind a tree, squatting with his rifle clutched vertically between his legs. Waiting. He stuck his head around the tree then ducked back in at the sound of another blast, louder, coming closer. Silly boy.

  Tommy fired the second cartridge as he sprinted across the track, buying time to find cover in the trees. He freewheeled down into the gully, slipping through the ferns and long grass and only just keeping his feet. He knew every path in this gully, every bush, every warren, every tree. Moving smoothly between them, reloading as he ran, all the way down to the creek, where he paused in a crouch, watching the foliage on the opposite bank. There was a crossing he had built a little way along, might make a good ambush point. He crept low, following the creek, until he reached it. A horse, soaked to the bone, its saddlebags laden, was tethered miserably to the nearside bridge post. It hadn’t heard him coming. The rain was too loud. Tommy paused, like there might be an alternative, when he already knew there was not. Hidden behind a trunk, he raised the gun and shot the horse clean through its neck.

  Another blast, but this time Percy was ready—he got a read on the position and set off after it, sidestepping down the hillside toward the creek. From a high vantage he followed its course until he caught a glimpse of the bridge. He halted. Shouldered the Hawken, used the scope. His horse lay on its side, its neck blown out, no sign of who had done it, no movement on the bank. Percy lowered the rifle. Fucker was really starting to piss him off now.

  Tommy retreated from the crossing, backtracking into the trees, then with the shotgun raised waded into the creek to his waist. The water took his breath away. Shivering, he dragged himself into the root hollow of a fallen gray gum, reloaded with trembling fingers, steeled himself, and went on.

  There. There he was, the cunt. Skulking up the hillside, shotgun in his hands, looked fucking petrified bless him, startled as a baby deer. Percy took up a shooting position. Adjusting his feet, shifting his weight. Rain bounced off the long barrel of the Hawken as he closed one eye and dipped the other to the scope. His finger slid to the trigger. Watching Tommy through the trees. There were too many of them. Trunk upon trunk, breaking his aim, and the Hawken wasn’t good at close range. He lifted his head and very carefully laid the rifle on the ground, then reached for his belt and popped the clip on his knife sheath and drew out the long bowie blade, serrated on one side, curved on the other, still bloodstained from the barn. Noone’s initials were engraved on the hilt. It was the finest gift Percy had ever received. Not once taking his eyes from Tommy, he felt around for a rock and threw it, and when Tommy jerked his shotgun to where it had landed, Percy crawled forward on his hands and knees.

  Gripping tight to the shotgun, pushing through the foliage, no sound now but the hissing rain. But he had heard it, a thud then faint rustling, like a footstep, a slip. He was out here, Tommy knew, he was close. Inching along the hillside, one reluctant step after the next; his heart pounded wildly, his whole body thrummed. In the presence of Death now, either his own or whoever had come. A familiar feeling. He’d met Him many times before. Walking toward the house with Billy, their parents lying dead inside; riding into the crater with Noone. Hell had its own sound, smell, taste, metallic and rancid, rising up in Tommy like he was already rotten inside; a concussive thud in his veins. His vision had contracted to a pinprick, homing in on that rustling he’d heard. He parted the ferns timidly. Like peeling a blanket from a sleeping child. But there was nothing. There was nobody. He looked about, lost, then realized: all there’d ever been was that one single sound.

  Too late.

  Tommy spun but Percy was on him, slashing at his throat with the knife. It caught him on the shoulder, a cut so deep and clean the blood was spilling in a torrent even before Tommy registered the pain. Howling, Percy swung again, a mad flurry, the knife so close to Tommy’s face he could feel the rush in the air. Twice he fired the shotgun. The second caught Percy in the gut. He sprawled backward into the brush, his feet peddling, pawing desperately at his stomach with both hands. Tommy reloaded. He could hardly use his left arm. Blood soaked his shirtsleeve and hung like webbing from his hand. Once he had the cartridges in, he snapped the breechface closed and stood over the dying man, the shotgun raised to his face. He didn’t recognize the ugly bastard, could have been anyone, but Tommy already knew why he had come.

  “You’re Noone’s man, aren’t you? Tell me—is this him?”

  A stillness came over Percy. He looked up from his wound. When he smiled, his yellow teeth were swimming in tobacco-stained blood. He went to speak but
coughed, and a thick gout spilled onto his chin.

  “He’ll kill you all,” Percy said, laughing. “He’ll fucking kill you all.”

  Tommy glanced across the gully, anguish in his eyes. “Arthur,” he whispered, turning, before almost as an afterthought blowing a hole in Percy’s chest.

  Chapter 38

  Tommy McBride

  Across the fields he staggered: stumbling, falling, rising again. A ghostly presence in the twilight, clutching his wounded arm. Ahead, Arthur’s house glowed warm against the darkness of the surrounding trees. Blurred lantern lights dancing, swimming in the rain, but there was no movement in the windows, no silhouettes in the rooms, the house as bereft as Glendale all those years ago, and now it was happening to him again. They were dead in there, Tommy knew. Noone’s man had got to them first. He fell to his knees and cried out, lifted his face to the rain. Everything he’d ever loved, everyone—all had been taken from him, all were gone.

  “Arthur!”

  Eyes closed, body keening, voice echoing over the fields.

  “Arthur!”

  A figure stepped from behind the house, rifle raised, barely visible in the gloom: Arthur, peering through the downpour as Tommy pitched forward and lay motionless in the mud. Arthur tossed down his rifle, and ran.

  * * *

  They stood in a line at the graveside, Emily rubbing Tommy’s back, Arthur and Rosie holding hands. Bright morning sunshine, birds chirruping, the field peaceful, the grass still glistening with rain. The shovel had gone in easily, the earth soft and damp; clean edges, clean walls, a mound of black soil alongside. Arthur had done most of the digging; Rosie and Emily helped. Tommy couldn’t manage the shovel—his wound had been cleaned and stitched with catgut sutures and his arm hung limp in a sling. Nobody was talking. Not a word as they lowered Billy in. One on each wrist and ankle, his head tipped back, his white throat exposed, until he reached the bottom and lay there, waiting for the soil to fall. Tommy didn’t offer a eulogy. He couldn’t find anything good to say, Billy a stranger in all but name, save the boy he had been in childhood and the half hour they’d shared yesterday. Later, it would hit him. In the train carriage rattling north. A realization that with Billy’s passing his whole family was gone, Tommy the last of them, and that after all these years spent blaming him, hating him, wondering about him, he still loved his brother just the same. He’d watch the moonlit fields through the carriage window, his reflection in the shuddering glass, and now and then catch a glimpse of Billy’s face in his own. Haunting him. He’d spent the best part of twenty years in mourning. Now he was starting all over again.

  Afterward, they went back to the house and sat around the kitchen table, waiting for Tommy to begin. He’d slept all through the night but this morning insisted he was well enough to put Billy in the ground; he’d explain things after, he’d said. So now he was going to tell them everything, the whole tortured bloody truth, and they weren’t going to like what they heard. But he might as well be honest. He had so little left to lose. He loved them, all of them, and they were all in danger as a result of him. It seemed the very least they deserved.

  “What are you talking about, Bobby?” Emily asked, reaching for his hand.

  He shook his head sadly, found her eyes. “Well, I guess that’s the start of the story. My name isn’t really Bobby. It’s Tommy—Tommy McBride.”

  They were silent while he told them. Tears stained Emily’s cheeks. She rubbed his hand continually with her thumb and the rubbing never faltered, not once. But when he reached the part about the crater, he sensed the shift in Rosie, heard the gasp, saw the pinch in her eyes as she turned them away, and he knew she’d never be able to look at him with the same open affection again. Beside her, Arthur sullenly rubbed the table with his finger, as if he was also implicated, for of course he already knew.

  Tommy left immediately after. Couldn’t bear to stick around. He excused himself from the table and went into the bedroom, threw a few clothes and some money in a bag, and slipped out the front door without another word. He had Billy’s travel tickets, and the lawyer’s address: he would go to Brisbane and see him, he’d decided, finish what Billy had begun, take his place on the witness stand, there seemed no other way. He’ll kill you all, the shooter had threatened, and he would, Tommy knew, one day Noone would come, unless he brought the cycle to an end. Let the truth out, tell the world, let that bastard drown in his own sins. Likewise Tommy. He’d take the consequences however they fell. After so long hiding, denying, burying his past way down, there was some comfort in the idea, some relief. For now he had a reason beyond his own guilt. Protecting them, all of them, then hoping, once it was over, if he survived, that they would be willing to take him back.

  In town he asked the coachman to wait while he ducked into the startled notary’s office, demanding he draw up a will: his house and his money he left to Emily; Arthur got the cattle and grazing land. He scribbled his signature and paid the man, then climbed into the coach outside. By that evening he had taken the district line to Melbourne, then, using Billy’s ticket, traveling under his name, boarded the night train bound for Sydney, with connections through to Brisbane and the dark heart of central Queensland beyond.

  After twenty-one years running, Tommy was going home.

  Chapter 39

  Magistrate MacIntyre

  The houses sat on a quiet sandy lane, a handful of well-spaced properties built high on the bluff, overlooking grass-tufted dunes and a long golden beach and the shimmering two-tone waters of the South Coral Sea. Gentle surf rolled off the breakers, foam tide lines sank into the smooth wet sand. Gulls circled and strutted in the shallows; a lone fishing boat farther out, bobbing on the bay.

  From one of these houses two elderly ladies emerged, sisters, shopping baskets in their hands. They navigated the front steps and made their way arm in arm along the lane, chatting, laughing, anticipating their trip into town. It was a twenty-minute walk along the coastal path and the highlight of both their days. A couple of hours spent shopping, a refreshment break in their favorite tearoom. They might meet some friends there, exchange gossip, no doubt share the latest gripes about their respective husbands, for just like the aches and pains that afflicted them at this age, they all had their fair share.

  Across the field from the house and the lane they now walked along was a little pine wood, where, leaning against one of the tree trunks, his folded jacket at his side, his shirtsleeves neatly rolled, Noone watched the sisters through his spyglass. He followed them as far as the end of the lane, where the hedgerows shielded them from view, then retracted the spyglass and took one last bite of the apple he’d been eating before tossing it behind him into the trees. He collected his jacket and draped it over his arm, and like a gentleman out for an easy sunshine stroll, ambled across the field, humming, trampling the wildflowers underfoot.

  He climbed the fence easily, swung his leg over, hopped down. The track was quiet, the houses empty—most were used as holiday homes, he knew. He crossed to the house the two sisters had come from, mounted the stairs, and rang the handbell.

  The front door had been left open. Only the fly screen was closed. Through the mesh was a hallway, sunlight dazzling the polished wood, and a man huffing his way along it, using a cane and rocking with each step. He looked up when he reached the fly screen, saw the tall frame silhouetted there, and even through the mesh Noone could sense his panic and fear. He struggled to compose himself. Chin wobbling with the strain. “My God—Edmund?” he managed to say.

  “Hello, Spencer.”

  Noone pulled open the fly screen and the two men were face-to-face. Magistrate MacIntyre was now in his mid-sixties and his features bore every one of those long hard years. He had a beat-up look about him: wrinkled skin, sagging cheeks; dark and haunted eyes. “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked.

  Noone smiled easily. “I was planning on asking you the same thing.”

  “How’s that now?”

  “I
wouldn’t have put you at the seaside after all those years inland.”

  “Doctor’s orders. My lungs, apparently. Along with everything else.”

  “I have to say it suits you. You’re looking remarkably well.”

  MacIntyre waved away the lie for what it was, and for a moment neither man moved, Noone smiling pleasantly, his jacket over his arm, until MacIntyre could no longer stand it, stepped back and said, “Come in, why don’t you. The wife’s gone out with her sister so I can’t offer you anything to eat . . .”

  “I’ve already eaten. Wouldn’t want to put you out.”

  MacIntyre led him along the hallway, toward the back of the house, Noone glancing into the rooms as he passed. When they reached the kitchen MacIntyre mumbled, “There might be some cake if you’re interested, but that’s about all I can do. Don’t know my arse from my elbow in there.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Coffee? Tea? Something stronger?”

  “Whatever you’re having.”

  “All right. Head on out to the deck there, I’ll fix us something up.”

  “I’ll wait,” Noone said.

  MacIntyre’s eyes pinched; he affected a little shrug. He leaned his cane against the wall and hobbled to the drinks cabinet in the living room, where he poured them each a brandy. He handed one to Noone and gestured to a pair of open French doors leading onto a raised deck. They stepped outside. A grand view over the beach and sea, the misty haze of the offing far away. Noone regarded it all expressionless. Might as well have been looking at a plain brick wall. MacIntyre pulled out a chair from the table and sat down heavily, wheezing with every breath. His lungs were the least of his worries, truthfully. His heart was failing him, as were his bowels; he struggled to walk more than fifty yards, given his knees. His mind slipped sometimes also. He forgot things. He blanked out. He tried covering these lapses with anger and bluster, but for a long time Margaret had known. His wife was in rude health, comparatively. She would outlast him by many years. When she’d first suggested moving here, she’d argued it would be good for him, but now he wasn’t so sure. They lived next door to her sister, she’d made plenty of friends, while he was virtually housebound. She was setting herself up for afterward, he had realized, but then he’d have been like this anywhere, or worse, so what did it matter in the end?