Sarah Thornhill (27 page)

He untied the skiff, stood with his foot on the stern waiting.

Hard thing to hear, he said. Call me a liar if you like. If it helps. Welcome to do that.

Came over to where I was still sitting, got an arm under me, got me on my feet.

In you get, he said. Got a long row ahead of you.

I tried to hang onto him, but he peeled me away, got me in the boat, pushed it into the deep water. The current caught the bow, swung it round, pulled the boat downstream. Dick lifted a hand, turned away, walked up towards the house.

The boat slid round a bend and it was all gone, Dick, jetty, house, lagoon. Bush, water, the birds with red beaks in among the reeds, everything so ordinary I wanted to pretend none of that other place was there. No Dick, no jetty, no house, no lagoon. A dragonfly hovered and darted away. A black bird swooped from one side of the river to the other. A breeze ruffled the reeds, roughened the water, was gone.

Everything as it had always been. Only the person looking at it was struck dead.

The sun was still shining, but shining darkness. Every leaf and reed and twig carried a load of strangeness. The hand on my knee was someone else's, sallow in the sunlight like a corpse. My eyes dry with staring.

Tears would of been a luxury.

The boat slewed around, nudged into a wall of reeds. A bit of dry leaf fell on my skirt and clung. Things went on obeying the rules they always had, things falling, hearts beating.

I squeezed my eyes shut and everything went to blood. It was a sickness that had hold of me from inside. It lived in my chest, my belly, in the softness behind the bone of my head. I hunched down over myself like a poisoned rat. It helped to be a rat. They took the green powder and went in circles, looping, falling, getting up, falling again. Dragged their bodies in somewhere dark.

There was no darkness here, only Dolly Thornhill bent over the thing inside her.

Such pretty pretty stories. I'd swallowed them down and smiled. My Pa, that good man, so generous to the blacks, oh, how proud of him I was. And Jack, a grand story, wasn't it sad, lost to me because he was proud and Dolly Thornhill so much higher up than him.

Those stories were turned inside out like a bag. All those years the inside was there, only I'd never thought to look.

I hadn't done it, no. Hadn't lifted the gun. But Dick was right. I'd eaten the good food off the cedar table with the double damask cloth. Slept in the soft beds. Sat in the parlour, never known a day's hunger or cold, never asked where any of it come from.

Jack was a hollowness inside me, scooped out like a hanging carcass, an empty place where life had been.

Noises came out of me, a groaning of things coming apart. I'd lived in a cosy place made out of secrets and lies. Now I was in another country, and its climate had no mercy.

I
HAD NOTHING
to say to Pa. No words. But I wanted him to see me. Let him die knowing that I knew the thing he'd spent his life hiding.

I went in the back door. Had a glimpse of Ma in the parlour, asleep in the armchair. Head back, mouth open, ugly as a toad. I looked at her neck where the blood ran strong in the big vein there. Knew there was a killer in me too.

At the foot of the stairs I heard Mary in the kitchen, a rumble of men's voices, someone talking about
mud up to their
hocks.
Someone else laughed. A hand opened the stove door and threw in wood, the kettle clanged, the baby let out a cry and was hushed.

I'd never again be in the world where people smiled and talked, not knowing. This thing would always be with me now, stuck to me as fast as my shadow.

I crept up the stairs into Pa's room. He was asleep. I watched the bedclothes rise and fall on his chest. His face flickered, tugs of feeling.

My Pa. Always been part of myself, like my big toe. My Pa, part of the world that was always there. He was a stranger now.

The dawn with the guns and the people asleep. That hand on the coverlet, spots of black where the sun had got him, red scars, the knuckles bumpy and swollen. That was the hand that had raised the gun and pointed it at a person.

Asleep, Dick said. Dawn, all asleep. No time to run or fight. Guns and swords. And one feller with a whip.

Oh, I hoped Pa wasn't the one with the whip.

He'd kept those things with him in the eye of his memory. They'd been with us, but not seen, every time he carried me as a child, every time we met round the table and he served out the good food. With us when he sat on the verandah staring at the bush through his telescope. They were written on every line of his face if you knew how to read it.

They were with us now, in this room behind that skull. He'd made another kind of skull to keep those memories, not made of bone but silence.

He woke up. Strained upwards, a painful twist of his lips, the cords in his neck standing out. Looked at me and behind me. Looking for Dick.

His head dropped back on the pillow, his hand moved on the coverlet as if brushing something away.

You saw him, he said, but unclear. Saw Dick.

His hand fumbled towards me, but I drew back. Something rose up in my throat, like a creature in there blocking the air.

I met his eye and let him see. It was a savage kind of triumph. Here I am, your daughter who knows what kind of father she's got. What legacy he's left her. What you did, that can never be put right. Have a good look, Pa. Die uncomforted.

He was breathing as if he'd run up a flight of stairs. I thought, he'll die, here and now. I hoped so.

But his chest went on heaving. He said something, very slurred.
Bad days,
I thought it was, but I wasn't sure.

Bad days, he said. By God I wish it all different.

His tongue licked round his pale lips. He seemed to want to speak again, but closed his eyes. His breath drew hard in and out, a kind of snore. He gave a quick gasp and a jerk and woke up.

You happy, he said. You happy, Dolly, with Daunt? Are you?

Kept his eyes on me like the grip of a hand, but weakening with the effort to make the words.

By God I wish it different, he said. Wish it all different. Have it to do again. And do it different.

Waiting for me to say something. I couldn't and I wouldn't. Any word would be like forgiving him.

He stared, trying to get inside me with his eyes. Then he was asleep again, long heavy breaths.

He lived another week but said nothing more. We sat round the bed listening to him breathe. For gaps of time he was so still that one of us would lean forward to check. Sometimes he seemed so nearly dead that every breath was a surprise. The only sound was the click and rustle of Mary turning her knitting, or putting it down to nurse the baby. Her gaunt face tender, watching him. Bub stared out the window as if he was thinking about the weather. Johnny tapped his fingers on his knees, got the watch out of his waistcoat pocket and stared at its face.

Ma tried to touch me once, I flung up my arm to be rid of her. She was still Margaret Grant when it happened but Pa must of told her. She'd stored her knowing away, brought it out like a knife when it suited her, to slice me from Jack, slice Jack from me. The knife so cunning it couldn't be seen. Never would be now, because anyone holding a lamp up to it would be
wandering
in his mind
.

Cunning as a fly, that woman.

And my mother? Did she know? She must of. That's why Pa stood begging. Could you sicken of that kind of knowing, turn to bones and yellow skin? Did she die of it?

Pa knew Dick wouldn't come. But knew he'd tell me. Sending me up to fetch him was confessing, but at a remove.

Watching my brothers and my sister, I knew why he'd done it that way, said without saying. How could you find the words? How could you drop this thing into lives where people fiddled with their watches, worried about the hay, doted on their babies? How would you ever come together with them again, the shame between you like an unwanted guest that never left?

I knew why he hadn't spoken because I couldn't either. I tried to picture Mary looking up from the baby to listen, or Bub or Johnny.
I met our brother today
, I'd say.
Found out some things
. I couldn't do it. They wouldn't hear, wouldn't believe. Like I'd done with Dick, they'd say
no!

That was part of it. But more it was the shame, that I couldn't bear to hold up to the light. This was how Pa must of felt, all those years. I was drawn into the same dirty secret he'd lived with for so long.

It would be with me now till the day I died. Once you knew, there was no way to not know. There was no cure for the bite of the past. When bad was done, it was like a stone rolling. You put your foot to that stone and pushed and there was no stopping it. Every roll of the stone brought more bad. You had to live with it, and your children too. And their children, down the line. Whether they knew it or not, they lived in its shadow.

I could hardly bear to touch the open wound of the idea of Jack. Somewhere tangled up in that idea was a lie. Not the lie Ma told, that he'd gone off out of pride. The bigger lie was mine. I'd lied to myself about who he was.

I'd been so proud, telling Ma that Jack's mother being a darkie made no difference. Don't care if he's black white or brindle, I'd said. But it did make a difference. Not the colour of his skin but himself, the man he was. No one called him a black, not till Ma did, but that was the truth of him, a truth no one wanted to own.

He'd tried to show me, that day he talked about his mother. Mr Langland told him he should pass for Portugee and I'd done the same, only different words. Brushed aside his darkness, proud of myself for doing it. Couldn't see what I was telling Jack, that I'd take the white part of him but not the black.

He knew better than me. Knew the colour of your skin and the colour of your mother's skin wasn't a thing you could brush aside. It was part of who you were, even if no one wanted to talk about it.

He knew, even before he knew why.

When he left me on the road that day it seemed like the end of the world, because the man I knew as well as myself had become a stranger. I saw now what I couldn't see then. If Jack looked a stranger that day, it was because he'd always been one.

The final day, you could feel Pa restless, some spark of will fighting the sluggish body. He stirred and muttered, tossed a hand up in the air, kicked a foot under the bedclothes.

His eyes flickered open, his lips shivered. But if he wanted to speak after a lifetime of silence, it was too late.

F
ROM THE
moment I got off the horse at Glenmire, they all saw something was amiss. Sadie watched me solemnly, as if seeing a different mother. Daunt took one look at me.

Sarah dear, you're ill, he said. Straight to bed with you.

I slept, it seemed for weeks. Even when I wasn't asleep I lay under the bedclothes not able to find the will to get up. The house closed itself down round me.

Daunt looked after me every way he could. Brought me the cup of tea of a morning and the jug of hot water. The lovely sound of the water going out of the jug into the basin woke me. Then I'd remember.

The only good and simple thing in my life was Sadie. Oh, she was patient with me, knew to come halfway to meet my sadness. Curled up beside me on the bed, sucking the bit of rag she wouldn't be parted from, warm and alive. She'd lay her hand on some part of me, like a rope that might save me.

When she'd had enough of her silent mother she'd fetch her doll and tuck it in beside me under the covers and slip away. I'd hear her out in the kitchen with Maeve, her clear voice trying the tune of their song. The splash of water, she'd be helping Maeve do the potatoes, the afternoon sun slanting in the door onto the boards, the water in the bowl shining as it shifted.

Sometimes Daunt lay down beside me, but he didn't try to make me talk.

After a time I got up, but I wasn't right. There was a black knot in everything I did. It would creep up on me, a slow pain. I'd be doing the bread and the tears would start to fall into the dough, and Maeve would make me go and lie down. Or I'd find myself in front of the hearth with the poker in my hand and the fire gone out, the tears running down my face, and Daunt would come in and take the poker from me.

I'd make myself picture it: that lagoon and the people sleeping, the men coming up on the
Hope
. Pa lifting his gun and squinting along the barrel.

What happened then? Did they bury the bodies or throw them in the lagoon? Did they laugh and slap each other on the back?

No, they'd put their heads together and decided to tell nobody what had happened. Would of shaken hands all round the circle of men and promised never to tell. My own Pa there with them. Shaking hands, promising.

My thoughts were like stones. Hundred years of wearing away, they'd be still the same. The past could never be any way but the way it was.

The sun rose and set again, clouds gathered and cleared, wind blew from the east and then from the west. It would be the same when I was dead and gone. That was a comfort. I was a part of the great world. But the great world didn't need me and the darkness I carried round with me.