Carpentaria (4 page)

Now, centuries later the poor things had turned up with nothing fancy, not one of them weighed down with the spoils of war to live in the Pricklebush, yet carrying a heavy weight all the same. Angel Day’s heart was big and ignorant in those days, but she believed she filled the shoes of Normal’s grandfather, who had been the keeper of this land. No one entered these parts without first speaking their business to the keeper, and to her mind, she was it. She welcomed those who walked heavy with the inheritance of antiquity stashed in their bones. Pride swelled up inside her when she saw those with a landscape chiselled deep into their faces and the legacy of ancestral creation loaded into their senses. She guarded those whose fractured spirits cried of rape, murder and the pillage of their traditional lands. Over time, they all became fringe dwellers living next to the rich white man’s municipality, all squatting next to Angel Day’s lake, on her so-called land, where she reigned like a queen over her dominion. And the domiciated? Well! They ignored her.

It is hard to determine how sides were forged, but when the fighting began, the blood of family ties flew out of the veins of people, and ran on the ground just like normal blood, when face and limbs are cut like ribbons with broken glass, or when the body has been gouged with a piece of iron, or struck on the head over and over with a lump of wood. Angel Day did not fight because she was still hugging onto her statue and encouraging the human explosion to take hold. It was like sinking an anchor. ‘What about the traditional owner?’ She was still screaming out her esteemed rights. Maybe she did not register the carnage. The woman who looked like the white cliffs of Dover, whom the fighting had carried some distance away, picked up the voice of Angel Day screaming, and looked over at her with a perplexed look, then walked out of the fight, straight back over to where she had originally challenged Angel, and wrestled the statue away from her.

The children, their bodies twisting in and out of the maze of adults at war, were wondering what was going to happen next. They rushed in like frantic butterflies to be next to kinfolk bleeding, or to others falling on the ground and not moving again. Young Will Phantom was running with his brothers and sisters to protect his mother from the big woman whose eyes were protruding, as she wrestled with the statue splashed with blood. The woman acted like she was possessed by a demon, whose body continued to use all of its strength on one thought alone: to secure the statue into a position to slam Angel Day off the face of the earth.

Young Will Phantom thought quickly. He ran home as fast as his ten-year-old legs would carry him, rushed into the kitchen and grabbed the cigarette lighter left lying on the kitchen table, then ran back to the dump. Any stack of papers he could find, he lit. He lit the dry grass around the edge of the dump so there was fire spreading over the claypans in every direction. Black clouds billowed straight through the dump. The smell of burning grass and debris was suffocating, and everywhere people were coughing. Very soon, people could be seen moving through the dense smoke, helping others through the burnt grass and back along the path with smouldering smoke on either side. Nobody spoke as they limped by as fast as they could, passing others, helping to cart injured relations home. Then, when the alarm was rung in town, they scattered.

Seeing the black smoke rising from the dump, everyone started to hear about the big fight going on. They all wished they could have killed Angel Day, walking with her statue and surrounded by her kids, following her home. The fire brigade, already moving slower than a month of Sundays, became bogged on the muddy road to the dump just two minutes out of town.

The Pricklebush around the Phantoms’ place was silent when the policeman arrived to investigate, followed by half of the Uptown Town Council on foot, after they came through the waterlogged road. They claimed it was their business to find out what caused the fire. It was a wasted trip at the taxpayer’s expense, because nobody living around the swamp had seen a thing.
Maybe, the fire was just
some old log smouldering over the weekend and caught alight
. It was a strange thing to say. All the same, the young cop Truthful said he could not help noticing a lot of injured people everywhere he went. He got to asking: ‘What happened to you then?’ While his entourage waited in anticipation for a different answer. ‘Just an accident, sir, no problem.’

‘No?’

‘No, there is no problem here.’

‘What happened then?’ he asked, just to show the Council men he was on top of the job.

‘Ah! I fall over.’

‘How did you fall then?’

‘I fall over.’

‘Where?’

‘Fall over?’

‘What?’

Everywhere Truthful asked the question, he received a grand demonstration of hand movements. ‘Hmmm! Oh! My. I am feeling no good! No good at all today! If you had any sense you’d run us up to the hospital like a good boy.’ Truthful had the woman with what was left of the white dress with him. Angel came straight up to her with outstretched arms, and hugged her, but it was full of hate.

The Council men and women too, following Truthful into every household in the camp, looking on in mock silence, gave knowing looks to one another of a familiar: Nudge-nudge! Wink-wink!
If you please! What’s
he been up too, jumping over the back fence at night already
? Look at the familiarity if you please. What was the world coming to, when the police force had no power over these people? Acutely embarrassed by his lack of progress, and overhearing the whispering behind his back, Truthful terminated the sideshow with a demonstration of Brisbane Valley cop briskness by saying he was arresting the first likely suspects to catch his eye. The bemused Council people crowding around, uninvited, huddling to avoid bodily contact with anything inside the Pricklebush home in case they picked up something quite dreadful, and having had an eyeful of poverty chipped at Truthful:
Let’s take em and take em, get em off our backs, bloody mongrels are a prime nuisance to everyone anyhow. Send these two little buggers off to a reform school or something. That will show them who’s boss of this town.

It is true that silence has a cloak because it covered all of those little tin humpies all day after the official people went back to minding their own businesses. Normal Phantom sat at his kitchen table glaring at Angel whenever she came into the room. Neither spoke. He knew what had happened. And she was not repentant, not one bit. There was no end of her fussing over her statue, cleaning it, looking at it, examining the cracks and chips, helping herself to the full range of Normal’s fish paints, making a pride of place for it in her bedroom. The day slipped into an even quieter night with no lanterns lit. The Pricklebush wore the total darkness of cloud cover.

Once the dawn broke, Normal Phantom stepped out of his house to go down to the boat. It was then he felt the eerie quietness, a stillness he found difficult to place, where even the birds did not sing. And no sign of his bird.

He was expecting retaliation, and he looked around up in the branches of the trees to find his bird. As he surveyed the surroundings, something struck him as being out of place, a surreal quietness: silence had replaced the noise of children’s crying, families arguing. The Phantom family was on its own. The other families had moved during the night. In complete and utter silence, they had picked up everything they owned, and moved to the other side of town. That was when the war of the dump caused the division, and people realigned themselves, Eastsider or Westsider, and that was that. The Phantoms lost whatever near and dear or distant relatives they had, except some old people who refused to move. No one else wanted to put up with another minute more of what they called Mrs Angel Day.

The war of the dump burst apart the little world of the Phantoms and their related families. Everyone in the Pricklebush from elder to child, Eastsider to Westsider, injured and uninjured started bringing up their faded memories of the ancient wars, to be renewed with vigour and the hard evidence of all facts. Everyone now knew of someone in their families who had been assigned to make the long pilgrimage over their vast lands which occupied dozens of cattle stations, where they travelled in clapped-out vehicles, near and far within their tribal territories, to seek out their very old senior Law people. The old people were always elusive too, never being where they should be, when their relatives turned up.

‘Well! Where’s old White Whiskers?’

‘He must have gone that-a-way.’

The challenge was to be always on the move, following the old ones travelling their country to at least a thousand sites they knew by memory. It was a test of how good they knew the country before they were able to find old White Whiskers waiting for them. Every family had to know the story of the past. Know, to go about their separate ways, by reclaiming land from fighting long ago.

On the other hand, the townsfolk of Desperance could not make heads or tails out of why they were being sandwiched between Aboriginal people, not only living on either side of them now, but setting up two camps without even saying to anybody what they were doing. All of those families that moved over to the Eastside to get away from the Phantoms, had walked noisily through town in the middle of the night. Everyone had been in a state of high agitation, with loud arguments taking place about the decision to move,
Should’ve, shouldn’t’ve
, all to the rhythm of cyclone fences being scraped with heavy fighting sticks by some of the youths. People were complaining to each other about the weight of their ragtag belongings, while children zigzagged all over the street with their laughter and cries being heard everywhere. What did it matter to try to hush all the little children since that many dogs in tow, stirred up by the scraping sticks, joined in the racket by running up and down the fences of white people’s homes barking their heads off or leaping up and throwing themselves against the tin walls while trying to get over the fences, and equally with the town dogs inside doing the same, trying to get out? None of this racket worried their owners. Nor did the straggle-taggle give one iota to the peace and quiet of the town. Whatever! Nevermind! as if the town with all of its laws and by-laws for inhabitation did not exist. It was as if they could not care less whether the townsfolk, woken up with all the noise, switched on every single light in their houses in the middle of the night, and stood silently in the front yards, gobsmacked, comprehending they were in the middle of a riot.

Word quickly came back to Norm about what they were saying down at the Council. The town was up that quick smart, nice and early in the morning, looking out around their front yards again, as if searching for order, trying to locate some sense of normality, and the main street was normal, as though nothing had ever happened in the night. Everyone of the white skin jumped into their showers and scrubbed themselves hard for this was what high and mighty powerful people did when they felt unclean, before running out the door, where they went straight over to the Council to talk about the uproar.

Everyone was up in arms even before the meeting got started. This was the normal way they talked straight. No, no coloured person was ever going to forget about this incident of lawless carrying-on like they owned the place. A whiff on the gossip grapevine said who was to blame. ‘It was bloody Normal Phantom. Wouldn’t you believe it. So what then? The man is incapable of handling his wife. What then? Teach him that’s what. Well! We will teach him what’s what.’ That year, Normal Phantom had no chance of winning citizen of the year, nor forever perhaps.

The bell was tolling, ringing non-stop for half an hour, but Normal Phantom never responded to the sound of bells. When no one in the prickly bush camps saw the Phantoms getting involved in Uptown business, they also ignored the bells. The Phantoms only went into town when the bells rang for the sea. Normal said that was the only important reason for ringing the bell, because what happened to the sea affected every single one of them. ‘We are the flesh and blood of the sea and we are what the sea brings the land.’ This was not a sea matter, so no adult person from the Pricklebush went running to see what they wanted.

Yes, there was plenty of worry. Worry straight for Uptown. The Council had a string of evening meetings so everyone could come along and have their voice heard. It was like living in a democracy. Paranoia was the word that best described what took place inside of the squashed Council chambers. Everyone had a story to tell about some Aboriginals who they saw sitting under a tree thinking about lighting fires. Some Aboriginals were seen pushing up into Uptown itself – abandoned car bodies to live in. You could see Aboriginals living in them behind the fences at the end of their backyards even. Aboriginals were thinking about setting up another camp. The net was not working. What was happening to the net? Wasn’t the net supposed to be there for the purposes of protecting the town against encroachment from people who were not like themselves?

‘Ya mean coons?’ Sanguine-voiced, the local mayor was speaking. A big, beefy, six-two, no-fuss man, who liked to call chalk chalk, or night night. That was his motto. He overshadowed the town with his power.

‘Excuse me, Mr Bruiser, Mayor, you don’t have to talk like that. We are just saying that they are an eyesore, so what are you going to do about it?’

Stan Bruiser was a straight speaker and was such a popular mayor for Uptown of Desperance, that for ten straight years, he had been voted its citizen of the year.
It was rigged
, some said of the voting box in the Council office. But be what it may, tampering with a ballot box was no great sin when conspiratory theorists worked with no proof. Bruiser, now fifty-six, was a prosperous cattle man, with Elvis combed-back hair and sideburns, dyed the colour of a Santa Gertrudis. He was a hawker by trade until his change of luck due to a foray into the Australian stock market, after he picked up a hint late one night on the radio in the mining-boom seventies. Next day, he piled his last quids in the stock exchange on a tin-pot mining company that struck it rich in Western Australia. So very quick, he was rich.