Ned Kelly and the City of Bees

by Thomas Keneally

  We climbed on Apis’s back. Now nearly every bee had left Maurie but he still stood whimpering, his bucket in his hand.

  “He tried to catch the bees,” said Nancy Clancy. “But the bees caught him.”

  “You can go now, Maurie,” I called. As Apis and Nancy Clancy and I rose to rejoin the swarm Maurie dropped his bucket. It fell on the ground with a thud and a clank. He began running.

  I found out long after that Maurie ran straight to school and told Miss Such that he had been covered all over with bees, and while he stood there frightened, tiny voices had told him to be still. And that he knew while he stood there so terrified, coated all over with bees, what it was like to suffer and not be able to move or answer back. So now, he told Miss Such, he was never going to be cruel to smaller children again.

  Of course, in real life people don’t often change completely. But although Maurie still picked on smaller children and dumb animals, he was never again so out-and-out savage as he had been in the past. So that he did learn a little something from his meeting with Selma’s bees.

  14

  The Hive at Major Steel’s

  “They’re back,” Apis said, waking me. I’d slept all night on her, leaning against Miss Nancy Clancy, and although it had been a strange way to spend the night, I had slept well.

  “Who?” I asked her, holding on with one hand and stretching with the other. “Who’s back?”

  “The scouts. The scouts are all back.”

  Looking down, we could see them dancing on the great ball of bees of which we ourselves were part.

  “Some dance one way,” I noticed. “Some dance another.”

  Apis said, “One of the scouts wants us to go inland. Another wants us to go across the river. Another wants us to go up the river and another still down. They’ve all found good places for a hive, or so they say. It depends on who wins the argument.”

  One of the scouts, the one who always waggled her tail in a-down-river direction, danced up towards us. We could hear, in the way she pounded her feet, how much she wanted us to go her way. She must have found the right kind of hole for a hive and she was dancing her small heart out trying to convince all of us.

  “She’s waggling her tail faster than the others,” said Miss Nancy Clancy. “I know that means something.”

  Apis nodded. “That means the place she found is closer than the holes the others found. I hope we go with her. I don’t want to have to fly too far away from Mrs Maguire’s radio.”

  In the middle of the cluster we could hear Romeo squeaking at the Queen. “The one who says down-river seems to have found a nice place,” he told her.

  The little dancer kept on dancing out her argument until I thought she’d fall over, tired out. But at last the other scouts began to dance like her. They had decided—like the rest of us—that she must have found the best place of all for a hive, and they too wanted to follow her.

  She could tell now that everyone was on her side, and so she flew into the air, and the whole thick swarm followed her. We hadn’t flown far, dodging amongst the trees, when I saw ahead of us an old house I’d visited once before. Once, a hundred years ago, it had been a fine two-story house of stone and plaster. It had been built by a man called Major Steel. Now no one lived there. That was for many reasons. Sometimes floods came into the ground floor, and even if anyone wanted to buy it, there were very few people in our valley who could have afforded to furnish it and do it up. Of course, all the children of the town called it a haunted house, because Major Steel had been so unhappy in it that he’d hanged himself. The story was that his wife had run away back to England and taken his son and daughter with her, and so poor Major Steel had been all alone in his stone house in the bush and had been too lonely to live on. People told stories of seeing Major Steel’s ghost on dark nights; fishermen coming home from the river said they’d seen him, and so did some of the big boys from the high school who had gone out one night to hunt rabbits. Well, you can’t always believe fishermen or big boys. Just the same, as I neared the stone house that morning on Apis’s back, I held my breath and wondered about poor Major Steel.

  High up on one of the walls of the house was a small hole where the scout had landed and was dancing joyously. Then she stood still and pushed bees through the hole as if she was saying, “[You] have a look at the place and you’ll see it’s exactly right.”

  Apis and Nancy and I at last got inside the hole in the wall.

  “Oh,” said Apis, “this is good. Oh this is grand!”

  All the other bees were buzzing madly, as pleased as Apis was. I could see even the workers who still had Nancy Clancy’s furniture on their backs were jumping with excitement.

  Major Steel had been a rich man in the early days of our town and his house had been built with two walls, an outside one of stone and an inside one of bricks. As you can see from the drawing, the hole the scout had found led through into the space between the walls and above us was a beam of wood from which the honeycomb could be hung. Even I could tell it was a wonderful place for a hive. I noticed as well that across from the main opening was a small hole in the brick wall. From it, we would be able to see into the inside of the house.

  I pointed to this place, laughed and said to Miss Nancy Clancy, “We can sit there and look out for the ghost.”

  “Ghost?”

  “Major Steel’s ghost. He used to live here.”

  “Oh, oh,” she said and frowned. “My father knew a Major Steel.”

  I shivered when she said this. It was so hard to remember that Nancy Clancy was a hundred and twenty years old.

  Guards had already taken up their position at the door. They stood in a straight line, facing outwards towards the world from which wasps and Maurie Abeys and other dangers might come. Selma stood on the doorway’s inside edge and seemed to shake herself. Straight-away, workers flew up to the wooden beam above our heads and hung from it in a long, straight line. Apis joined them, after first unloading Nancy Clancy and me on to the floor.

  Nancy and I watched the bees working high above us, watched them clinging to the roof and to each other. Taking little plates of wax from their stomachs, cutting them into shape with their mouths, sticking them to the roof, molding them into rows of beautiful six-sided cells, honeycomb and cells for pollen and for egg laying, and one of them an apartment for Nancy Clancy and me.

  Selma’s group—Romeo, the bees whose job it was to keep her cool or warm or happy—came and waited near Nancy Clancy and me while the work went ahead far above us. “Oh they’re good workers,” we heard Selma keep saying. “They’re good girls.”

  By mid-day the good girls had built a great comb with thousands of cells, and already some of them were flying out to get nectar and pollen to pack into the hive.

  “Tomorrow, I suppose,” Selma told us dreamily. “I’ll start laying. Not Queen eggs, no sir. I don’t want any more uppity young queens. But workers, that’s what we need. A lot more workers.”

  Nancy Clancy and I spent that day telling stories, some of them true. She told me, for instance, about the convicts who used to come from England by ship to Port Macquarie, wearing chains on their legs all the way. She told me about princesses she’d met, though I didn’t quite believe her. I told about trouble I’d got into at school, and most of that wasn’t true either. I made myself sound like Maurie Abey, whereas I was really easily scared by teachers.

  We played charades and I Spy.

  “I spy with my little eye something beginning with S.R.”

  “S.R.?”

  “Yes. S.R.”

  I looked around. I couldn’t see anything in the new hive that began with S.R.

  “Sandy Rock?” I guessed.

  “No. Give up?”

  “All right.”

  “Stupid Romeo!” shouted Nancy Clancy in triumph.

  “That’s not a proper I Spy.”

  “Yes it is. It’s a perfectly proper I Spy. It’s as perfectly proper as N.K.D.”

&nbs
p; “N.K.D.?”

  “Ned Kelly the Dunce,” she said.

  I would pretend to be angry. But I enjoyed the games and the arguments.

  15

  Duffers

  When Apis went off alone on a pollen or nectar trip she would often leave us in the hole that opened into the inside of the house. From this point we could see the living room of the house, and its dusty old fireplace. Sometimes we would try to imagine what it must have been like when there were books and toys, armchairs and pictures and children in that old room. But mainly we played our games.

  We were sitting there late one afternoon, playing one of our usual guessing games, when the front door of the house opened and two men came in. I know that it always happens in stories like this that children are hiding in a haunted house when in come two villains. It happens in Tom Sawyer, for example.

  But these two men weren’t villains. In fact one was Mr Horne, father of my friends, Jack and Kate Horne, the ones who had been with me that day I’d got sick and gone to the hospital. The other man was Maurie Abey’s father, Clarence Abey by name. They both sat down on the living room floor and began rolling cigarettes. It was only when they’d finished this little job that they began talking.

  “Well,” said Mr Horne, his voice booming in the big empty room, “I know it happens a lot. Duffing. Half the people wouldn’t ever eat meat if they didn’t duff a few cattle.”

  “That’s right,” said Clarence Abey, “that’s the bare truth.”

  “Duffing? What’s duffing?” Nancy Clancy asked me.

  “Stealing. Stealing cattle,” I told her.

  Mr Horne went on. “But I never thought I’d want to steal a prize bull like that, a big expensive bull.”

  “Well, it’s going to be easy,” Clarence Abey told him. “We get him out of Morrison’s paddock about three o’clock tomorrow morning. Then my mate Trevor comes along with his truck and we load the bull on to the back and take him over the mountains, to one of those good western towns, and we sell him. And won’t he just sell, Jimmy. He’s such a beauty. Those western farmers—the wealthy ones anyway—will be lining up to buy him.”

  Mr Horne made a doubtful noise with his teeth.

  “Aren’t you sick of never having any money though?” Clarence Abey asked him. “Aren’t you sick of seeing your missus in the same sad old dresses?”

  “I’m sick,” said Mr Horne, “of sending my daughter to school in a dress made out of old flour bags.”

  Clarence Abey nodded. “Then help me duff this bull. Come on. They tell me you can really handle bulls, talk to them, soothe them down. Help me duff the bull, eh?”

  After a long think, Mr Horne nodded. “What’s the bull’s name?”

  “Oh, he’s got some fancy stud name but Morrison just calls him Fred.”

  “All right, all right.”

  “Have you got an alarm clock?”

  “I don’t sleep much,” said Mr Horne. It sounded very flat the way he said it, as if he got no fun out of life at all. “I’ll be awake at three o’clock in the morning.”

  And so they agreed to meet and duff the bull. Clarence Abey went, but Jimmy Horne sat on, finishing his thin cigarette. I should have felt sorry for Mr Morrison, the farmer who might soon lose his prize bull, but I felt sorry for Mr Horne instead and even for Clarence Abey. They’d looked as lost and unhappy as children and I never knew then that adults could be like that.

  At last Mr Horne got up, stretched and left.

  “I suppose,” Miss Nancy Clancy said after a long silence, “you’re going to rush to Miss Such’s place and write a letter to Mr Morrison on the kindwriter?”

  “The typewriter,” I corrected her.

  “Well, are you? Are you going to write a letter to Mr Morrison saying,

  Dear Sir, your bull is going to be stolen,

  I overheard it semi-colon,

  Yours sincerely, a friend?”

  In the cowboys films and in Rick the Frontier Scout, men who stole cattle were always mean and cruel, gun-toters who would shoot you down if you had anything they wanted. But Abey and Horne were two frightened men, two men I knew, two men with wives and children and butchers’ bills to pay.

  “Well, well?” Nancy Clancy was asking.

  “I can’t send any messages,” I told her. “Anyhow it isn’t my business. Cattle duffing—it happens all the time in this valley. Every day nearly. The police don’t even think it’s any sort of crime, they’re so used to it.”

  “Is that so?” she asked doubtfully.

  “Yes. It is.”

  “A lot of those convicts,” she told me, “the men who came to Port Macquarie in chains so long ago, a lot of them had been cattle stealers.”

  “Well, well,” I said, “things are different these days.”

  And I wouldn’t say anything more.

  16

  Arrest

  That evening we slept on Miss Nancy Clancy’s bed in one of the clean new cells and, before the sun rose the next morning, were woken up by a loud animal noise. It sounded just like the moaning of a bull. We were soon to find out, it was the moaning of a bull. Some of the bees were already working, in fact they’d gone on working all night, but they did not seem to hear or be upset by the bull noise.

  Nancy Clancy and I climbed out of our cell and took up our positions at the hole where, the day before, we had looked down on Mr Abey and Mr Horne. Now we saw them again. Mr Horne came in first, holding a lantern in one hand and dragging Fred the prize bull by a rope with the other. Behind Fred Mr Abey pushed, calling, “In there, Fred, in there.” When they had Fred inside the old house, they tethered him to the ironwork around the old fireplace and then both sat down on the floor.

  “All right,” said Mr Horne, puffing, “where’s your mate Trevor with the truck? Where is he, eh?”

  “I don’t know. It’s no use asking me. Maybe he broke down.”

  “Maybe he got a bit of sense during the night,” said Mr Horne, “and decided to stay in bed.”

  “He … he wouldn’t do that to us.” Mr Abey coughed. It was a bad, sick cough. “He’ll come soon.”

  “That’s no use,” Mr Horne said. “We can’t take Fred out into the open now. The sun’s coming up.”

  In fact the first morning light was now coming in through the windows of the old house. Mr Abey sighed. “Oh,” he said softly, “we’re going to be stuck here all day with a bloody bull.”

  “Even if we tried to take Fred back,” Mr Horne muttered, “old Morrison would see us. He gets up earlier than the sparrows.”

  “Hey, he’s probably noticed already that Fred’s gone. He’s probably already rung the police.”

  “Oh hell!”

  The two men hung their heads and shook them because of the trouble they were in. Fred bellowed loudly enough to be heard all over the valley.

  “Shut up, Fred!” said Mr Abey.

  Behind Nancy Clancy and me, the work of the bee hive had begun. Selma had already moved over the wax wall to begin laying eggs in the cells meant for egg laying. Apis was away on a morning flight. The bees were trying to make a lasting city for themselves here, in their hole in the wall, and they had no time for the human problems of Mr Horne and Mr Abey.

  An hour passed, and Nancy Clancy and I watched the two men all the time. They talked about whether one of them ought to go and get some food from home while the other minded Fred. But then they decided not to. I imagined Kate and Jack Horne waking and asking where their father was. “Oh, he went off early,” their mother would say. “He had some work or other to do.” Then Kate would go and climb into her flour sack dress.

  We did not leave that position all morning. We watched Fred moan and bellow and now and then drop some manure on the floor. We were still there, watching, at noonday. And Jimmy Horne and Clarence Abey were both dozing, their heads between their knees, when the police opened the front door of the house and walked in in their large black boots. I saw that the men in the police uniforms were Sergeant
Kennedy and Constable Scanlon, and they were already in the room before the two cattle thieves were properly awake. Mr Morrison followed the police in.

  “Fred,” he said, pointing at the moaning bull. “That’s old Fred.”

  Sergeant Kennedy told Mr Horne and Mr Abey to stand up. Jimmy Horne obeyed and leaned his head back until he was looking straight at our hole. There were tears on his cheeks.

  “You won’t believe me, Sergeant Kennedy,” he said, “but we were just waiting for dark before we put the bull back.”

  “No, I don’t believe you, Jimmy,” the police sergeant said softly. “Well, maybe I do, but it doesn’t make any difference.”

  There was silence while the sergeant wrote everyone’s name and address down for when the case would come to court. “How much did you say your bull is worth, Mr Morrison?” he asked at last.

  Mr Morrison named some great sum of money that made both Nancy Clancy and me blink and stare at each other.

  “Well, it’s a very serious crime then,” the sergeant muttered.

  “Of course it’s serious,” Mr Morrison barked, caressing Fred’s ears.

  “For God’s sake, Morrison,” Jimmy Horne shouted. “It isn’t as if we sold him or anything.”

  “You would’ve. In time.”

  “I’ve got a wife and two kids. If the judge puts me in Grafton jail …”

  Morrison said, not very interested, “You should have thought about Grafton jail before you stole Fred.”

  “Both the men have families, Mr Morrison,” Sergeant Kennedy said.

  “All cattle duffers have families. That’s why you police let them get away so easily. If I let them off, they’d be in the pub boasting about it, and every cattle thief in the valley would know he could get away with stealing Fred. No, charge them, Sergeant Kennedy.”

  So Kennedy put handcuffs on Clarence Abey and Jimmy Horne. Mr Horne stared at his wrists and shook the cuffs a little as if they might just melt away the way terrible situations melt away in dreams.