Our Sunshine: Popular Penguins (4 page)

Let me state the bloody obvious. A charge of attempting to murder a policeman has them after you then and forever.

If I
had
been there I wouldn’t have shot him in the hand!

So Dan and me saddled up and took off to Bullock Creek. Joe Byrne was doing nothing so he came too. A bit later Steve Hart joined us. They couldn’t catch us so they gave our mother three years’ hard labour. Judge Barry did the sentencing, roaring from the bench that if he caught me he’d give me fifteen years. Judge
Sir
Redmond Barry, sorry, being knighted twice already by the Queen for his firm dealings with us ignorant bushmen. The lower orders and dangerous classes. In other words, the Irish.

We weren’t a gang then, we were just the shrewdest of the ordinary, wily with those special things the Irish know. The never knowing when we’d had enough, the never leaving well enough alone.

H
er breasts were nightly visions bending over me. Yes, I thought them up all round and brown and became something, someone, else again. I was still young is my excuse, but no excuse, got something from it anyway, from these ghostly sights and feels of her. Helped me through the days and nights and daily fights, her dark hair dripping on my face. Me nuzzling with bruised lips and cheeks.

This is difficult to even think of, in case I’m overheard. Wouldn’t trust anyone not to read my mind.
Dad in heaven, ginger eyebrows glaring down!
Didn’t even say this in confession, in the days I went.

Well, it shocked me once to hear this sucking sound, woke me with a fright, dry-mouthed, but it was only me.

Beechworth Gaol, 1869; just turned fifteen, this was.

I
can hear it, that one question fizzing unvoiced in every timid mind: Did you,
ahem
, or did you not – as was announced, and pardon me for asking, never believed it myself, of course, of a man like you, such strangeness,
umm
, excuse me, but there being only one of them remaining on the sergeant’s head – CUT OFF KENNEDY’S EAR?

Well, police, papers, Protestants say so, pray for, scheme of, this propaganda. The sadist stole his heirloom watch, tied him to a tree, tortured the man, sliced off his ear in some drunken Celtic rite. Revenge, maybe, on a Catholic turning Rechabite. The madman heard his wounded plea – The wife! The kids! – but shot him anyway.

That part’s true. Of course I can’t stand slow bleeding deaths, blowflies, bull ants, stinging, nibbling things. I’ve put many a horse in better health out of its misery. Certainly I pushed the gun against his heart – sorry Sergeant, sorry, wish it wasn’t you in this melodrama, many, many I’d prefer, and so forth – and pulled the trigger, pulled a cloak over him with care, left him honourably, the shot still roaring in both his ears.

The myth arose of us boys sharing blood guilt at Stringybark Creek, of promising to die as one if necessary. They said the four of us shot him in a pact to split the blame. Wrong. Compared me to a chieftain from the mists of Irish history who forced his men to ritualistically blood themselves by firing into corpses. Jesus, you’d think the police’d know about shotgun wounds, multiple entry. The swandrops blast was mine alone. I shot him – and the other two as well. Me. In too deep from the beginning. Deep and rooted as any tree an Englishman could name.

Something gnawed off his ear, is what I’m saying. Wombat, dingo, crow, fox – take your pick.

What do you think I am? A bloody monster?

B
UT
–
AND
something else. I kept his watch. Genuine Swiss movement, pretty fob chain, no sense it lying there in the weather. It wasn’t just the watch alone: we took their guns and rations, horses, everything of use. Souveniring from the enemy happens in every war. Thought of sending it to his family but by then the papers had me down as ghoulish – the Ear Cutter, the Corpse Robber, shameful, not my usual style and so forth – so I thought, no point now, I’m damned anyway, a gold watch is a gold watch. Ran two minutes slow a day, as it happened. A bit later I gave it to a barmaid with a lovely Kerry blush who didn’t mind my eyebrows.

‘When you smile like that your mouth’s not hard at all,’ she said.

I said nice things back. Who wouldn’t?

G
LAD TO
be rid of it, but the watch still niggles at me. A blot on my copybook, I know it. Dream of it, of giving it back, at least once a week. Dream of other round things too. Coins, cakes, necklets, plates, the rims of cups. Even globes of the world. But when I peer closer at these circles, there’s always a chunk missing from them. I have this gold coin in my hand, a treasure. I’m thrilled. Then I see an eighth, a quarter’s gone. And over my shoulder, Fitzpatrick’s smirking.

A watch! It smacks of the common bushranger, the city pickpocket. The sort of petty job old Harry Power did. When I rob, I rob bloody towns!

Ransacked his pockets! Jesus, forgive me playing into their hands. I disgust me sometimes, getting in the way of my own aims.

‘Dan, listen for the train. Water that brandy, for God’s sake! Sharpen up!’

T
HE SIGHT
of a corpse fosters the heebie-jeebies in any man who believes in the Last Judgement. And in anyone who doesn’t.

So they say.

Should tell Curnow that creeks and me together didn’t always signify death. That when I was aged eleven back home at Avenel I was the Hero of Hughes Creek.

Coming home from school, that studious fat boy Richard Shelton slipped off the tree that bridged the deep reach of the creek. Already tightly dressed and sausagey, then sucking sudden muddy water and disappearing with his goody-goody satchel of books around his neck. Jumped in after him, in the darkest part – the reddy-brown part when you open your eyes – the water rushing cold, snags plucking at me, imagining yabbies nipping tasty dead Richard in some clay-hole. Found him with my feet, pulled his bag off him and dragged him to the bank, squeezed him till he coughed up mud and cried for mum.

The Sheltons kept the general store and butcher’s shop opposite the Royal Mail Hotel. Mr Shelton shook my hand, said a thank-you speech, gave me a green and gold sash for saving his son.

I wore it seriously, my hero’s sash of green and gold. See, I can say. Proof I’ve saved a life as well.

F
IRST THE
simultaneous shot and cry – a sort of choking croak and unbelieving scream – then the falling down, the moaning for the wife and kids as breath leaves with a hiss and whistle, the arcs of blood into the air (the spurting bleeding going on for quite a time), then the sudden, buzzing silence and congealing, the stiffening (blowflies well established, plus a curious ant or two), the drying out (crows flop over to investigate), the stretching, the discolouring (joined by ants in larger numbers), the swelling, the smelling, the oozing (maggots now pop out), the exploding (bush rats and other small nibbling animals appear), the vaporising (beetles join the crowd, a blue-tongue lizard comes by), the melting (worms). All covered in this pale blue and sea-green mould of the finest, densest waving filaments.

Then him sitting up suddenly and roaring, ‘Which one of you parasites took my ear?’

This is Kennedy in one of his nightmares.

Y
ou’ll have to speak up, Mr Curnow, I can’t hear you over the lion. Can we talk about my motives? Perhaps an overreaction on my part? Oh, we’re on a single track here, aren’t we? You don’t know the half of it. That’s the trouble when your story’s seen through other eyes.

When did things first enter a different dimension? Well, now, that’s the thing.

Doesn’t it roar! Nightmare stuff, Mr Curnow.

What do schoolteachers dream of instead of lions?

R
EMEMBERING MYSELF
as a boy is hard enough. A little child with toys, on foot, a toddling baby, impossible.

Back home at Avenel, did I, a grubby bundle, ever ride on my father’s shoulders, ever catch a ball, put on his hat for laughs, his big boots? I can’t say.

Hold his hand? Ever touch his prickly cheek? I can barely think this – kiss him? Who knows?

I’m a bearded man on a horse. Seems as if I always was, always will be.

What I best recall is riding alone with the sun behind me from Eleven Mile Creek to Greta, and seeing my shadow cantering ahead against the roadside weeds and willows. Leaving me stretched far behind, galloping to chase it, it seemed like a centaur from the picture books.

Do I tell a lie?

Remember that red evening of my running to greet him at the door, my joyful gripping of his legs that smelled of horse. Remember the slanting sunrays in the doorway, the golden specks of dust, the ruckus of the kookaburras’ dusk chorus. He’d had a drink and was ready for games with his first son. So I barrelled into him and – here’s a trick! – stuck my head between his knees and began to crawl on through this daddy tunnel. And he laughed and squeezed the trap together tight and kept on squeezing. Squeezed too hard and long to be a joke. Pressured my head and ears with this serious wrestling hold until I heard and saw the last red gongs of sunset beating and cried his name.

A
gainst his will he does it, recalls life at Avenel. Avenel’s really just the Sydney Road, but you can take your pick of sights. Shelton’s general store. The Avenel Arms and Royal Mail Hotel. The wine shanty, selling plonk from the Tabilk vineyards. The blacksmith’s. The courthouse behind the police barracks.

The cemetery.

Travelling north and south, the Overland Mail, the Cobb & Co. and Crawfords’ stagecoaches, bullock wagons, squatters on their bloodstock, farmers’ families driving gigs, Chinese in traps and pattering past on foot. Flickering around the edges, shy Aborigines. The lunatic cart from Beechworth madhouse grinds by; shorn and bulbous heads stare out and catch your eye; only a giggle somewhere breaks the spell. The gold coach from the diggings, its escort uniformed in dusty white and blue, sabres clattering in scabbards, striving to impress now they’re safely in a town (and with the night to spend constructively), speeds up and thunders down the road, swings into the police yard and stops dead.

And a different show: the gaol coach from the goldfields, bound for Beechworth. A small crowd watches this one, grows silent as the thieves and murderers, shackles rattling, peer out ferociously, step down and turn into doddery old men, shuffle between their keepers, and enter the lockup for the night.

And more, yes, he remembers Dan Morgan’s severed head passing slowly through the town when he was ten. People muttering at the open cart, not impressed. Pale Dad, their Red, disgusted, saying, ‘Turn away.’ Because he’s already sick with the dropsy and maybe sensing he has only months to go himself, Dad doesn’t look. But himself on tiptoes. What’s in the box, a livid blue melting into purple, doesn’t seem like a former human anyway, with the beard stripped off as well for a police tobacco pouch.

They said Melbourne University had claimed the head to study what had ever possessed it to think of crime. Phrenologists longed to feel its bushranging bumps. Morgan’s gift to science. But the wonder to him was why the police overseeing the head were laughing.

Bear with me.

And straight from this, it seems, the peacock’s screaming. Police are banging on the door, searching the house, backhanding them, kicking the dog, scattering hens, dropping jugs and dishes, smashing eggs on the floor. (The local squatter has lost a calf!
Shit, eh
.) Taking Red for possession of a calfhide with no brand. Arrested for possessing something
absent
. (Not crazy at all. He’s got a record, after all. Didn’t unlawful possession of two pigs get him transported in the first place?) He’s sick at heart his Irish past’s come back to haunt him twenty-four years later. Sick, he goes to court to get a twenty-five pound fine, in default, six months’ hard labour. (Guess who’s the magistrate? The same calf-less squatter!) Sick, Red comes out of gaol to welcome Grace, child number eight. He stays sick.

Neighbours rally with a pine coffin, dig a grave, help hoist him in. Can’t afford a headstone but he’s got a view of the courthouse and gaol traffic, the display of passing loonies. It’s given to his eldest son to fill out the death certificate: Wife Ellen 34, children Mary Jane (dec.), Ann 13, Edward 11, Margaret 9, James 7, Daniel 5, Catherine 4, Grace 1.

He dips the pen in the government ink again and corrects the register, adds a
½
to Edward. It’s official – Edward is now a serious eleven
and a half
. Maybe he always was.

Once he was planing timber for someone’s window frame and showed me how. Watching the shavings curling from this steady instrument, his calm elbow, the patient process, the smooth levelness of the result – in my concentration I nearly swooned.

Must have planed for all of ten or fifteen minutes this cool and magic day of to-and-fro. Paying me attention. The air was all enclosed and warm around the two of us. Sweet wood smell. In my daze he called me Sunshine.

B
ear with me, folks, and imagine this yellow early-summer’s day when I come out of gaol, not long fifteen.

You’ll want some fun, says Wild Wright, the horsebreaker, lending me his favourite chestnut mare. Ride her into Wangaratta, jumping fences all the way. So joyful to be out, I cut a swathe and talk to girls outside the Star Hotel.
Like my horse? Want a ride?
The publican’s daughters say yes and share their nougat. And watching them trot around the town, their thick hair-weight bouncing on their backs, their fronts – excuse me – bouncing nicely too, it seems that life ahead will be one long November Saturday of nougat and girls.

The mare is pretty, and well-known for her white blaze and docked tail. Known in the
Police Gazette,
as it turns out, for belonging to the Mansfield postmaster. But this is news to me when Constable Hall comes up behind me and tries to pull me off her.