That Deadman Dance (21 page)

Within and under the sea

Once-was-a-convict William Skelly limped still, and did so for the rest of his life. It became a way of perversely cherishing the memory of his spearing, more than something caused by stiffness or pain in the limb.

And so he limped as he paced the dimensions of a shed Chaine wanted made around the forge at the whaling grounds, planning how he might get himself even more into Chaine’s employ, make himself nigh on indispensable, and get ahold of the tools and equipment for all that would need doing, not so much here or at Kepalup but at King George Town. There’d be—there already was—a need for boats, for carts and wheels, for a jetty, a church, for huts and shearing sheds … And where was the man and skill to provide all that? Skelly tapped himself on the chest. Him. He was the only man.

Except now Chaine was all for whale fishing, and left less time for building things up or laying good foundations. Said he wanted a return for his investments and he wanted it now. Only got so many years, he said. Last whale-fishing season he’d partnered a couple of American whalers, splitting the work and the profits, and done well by trading this and that: fresh food mainly. He reckoned on setting himself up nicely at the bay for future seasons. Had told anyone who’d listen that he’d make it more than a fishery, make it a port to rival King George Town and no ship need ever again go into King George Town, especially with the fees and charges they stuck with despite the advice of merchants like himself. That damn fool Governor, Chaine swore repeatedly with no need for provocation.

So now Skelly was dragged to Close-by-island Bay yet again, out of whale season and all, because Chaine wanted him to erect another of those easy-to-build houses of his, along with less permanent buildings for the men, and a hut to store the barrels, and a shelter for meals. Chaine said he’d employ a cook next season. There’d be a garden, and already they’d cleared around the soak. But it wasn’t just Chaine and Skelly: it was like a caravan, a flock of gypsies, there were so many of them, and a wagon and all. It amused Skelly to see Jak Tar treating old Manit like she was really something; Tar was even learning her language and making a big show of it. It must’ve been the old girl who’d given him that young woman; why else was she tagging along? Skelly wouldn’t mind that young thing himself and who knows, just as likely he would, there were plenty of them to be had in between then and now.

Killam was with them as well, but so quiet and withdrawn like he was all the time these days that you hardly noticed him. So altogether there was Chaine, Tar and his woman, Killam, Manit, Skelly and of course the boy, Bobby. Only Mrs Chaine stayed behind in King George Town, because even her children made the trip. As things turned out she’d never forgive herself for that.

Manit, Bobby and Binyan had wandered off somewhere near the soak. Skelly, Tar, Killam and Chaine had their heads together over one of the whaleboats, and the two Chaine children were playing in the tiny stream which ran from the dunes, across the sand and into the waves. Only a few flowed deep, it flowed surprisingly fast and as it reached the sea seemed to lift itself clear of the damp sand, cords of water woven together, and cast some spell upon the ocean. No waves broke, and sand was stirred up in the water. Someone should have noticed that, especially when the Chaine children began playing in the shallows there.

Not even all heads turned immediately when the two children’s voices began crying out together. By the time Chaine looked Jak Tar was already many steps away, and Bobby was running across the smooth damp sand, water splashing at his feet. Chaine saw his daughter, waist-deep or more, leaning toward the shore and behind her Christopher’s bobbing head and arm. Even heard his choking cries. Chaine set off fast as he could, and cursed his oh so clumsy body.

Bobby had the girl by the hand, and Jak Tar—taller than both—was splashing toward them. Christine slipped and Bobby went over with her; they struggled, the force of the current sweeping them off their feet, then Tar had Bobby’s hand, and Bobby had Christine’s but neither was on their feet. Tar held on to Bobby’s thin arm as the waves rose against him, unbreaking, and he tried not to stop them lifting his own feet from the ground. Chaine was next into the water, and he in turn grabbed hold of Tar and pulled him close to shore. He glimpsed Christopher, already a long way out, head bobbing, an arm lifted. There were four of them in a line for a moment, and Chaine pulled himself past Tar and Bobby, grabbed Christine and headed back to shore. The girl was already on the sand, vomiting, as Tar and Bobby left the water, looking over their shoulders. Chaine ran to the whaleboat, which Killam and Skelly and some of the others were dragging across the sand. They had not expected to be dragging boats to the water quite so soon. Chaine was screaming, Tar, Bobby, get here, too!

A head bobbing in the waves, gone. No, there again. Was that his voice on the wind, faint? Or birds?

Manit and Binyan were with the girl and Bobby.

Eyes scanned the water. Where was Christopher? Must be somewhere in this bay, must be somewhere floating … still.

*

Mrs Chaine sat by her daughter’s bed, stroking the girl’s hair, her unlined skin like porcelain. Her husband was away again, unreachable since the accident even when he stood beside her. So often silent. They had rooms where the roof was only sheets of bark, and she listened to the wind moaning in the trees, the branches tossing wearily to and fro. Through the open window sunlight danced brightly on the harbour and shone on the hills enclosing it, as if to spite the daughter who lay muttering and tossing her head from side to side. Even here in town Mrs Chaine could hear the malicious croaking of frogs, the shrill voices of cicadas and crickets, the harsh shrieks and mutterings, sometimes, of birds. She pinched her skin, hard. It could not be real that she was here, like this, alive, when her son …

Geordie had brought their daughter back to King George Town by boat. It must have taken forever, his clammy daughter awkward in his aching arms, and to arrive to a shrieking wife … But who else could be blamed?

Skelly and Killam came back more slowly with the wagon. Manit and Bobby began with them, but slipped away. The men were in no great hurry, and wandered when they could, either hobbling the horses or leaving them to slowly continue on their own. There were only so many ways the horses could follow.

It was a hot, dusty journey. The men complained to one another, cursing imprecisely. A throbbing heat, and the constant pulse of what must be cicadas and bees, and dangling leaves turning slowly on their axis even as the breeze shook them so that they clashed like cymbals. A man’s own breath heaving like an animal’s. Where were the women, the black bitches? That fucking stupid boy. Their bodies found gaps in the bushes, their heavy feet followed those of another and another and another … Here, in a steep valley among smooth rocks, a deep blue pool, irregularly shaped, as if the rock had been torn apart. They had water, it was not thirst that compelled them. Strangely, no one even tasted the water. Killam lowered a long tree limb into the pool but couldn’t tell how deep it was. Then Skelly was undressing; he plunged in, and came back to the surface gasping, a hand held out, pleading, and when they pulled him onto the rocks he was already blue with cold. Shivering and dressed again he looked into the pool with the others and they saw a dark form pass across it. The two men stepped back. It was salt water, yes, but can ocean be beneath earth this far inland? Each thought of the boy. Drowned, gone underground? Some spirit of water, of ocean, even here? The dome of sky might have fallen, crushed them to the earth with no space between.

Sometimes a whale’s path

Bobby was alone—a rare thing among his people, really— and he stood beneath the old trees on the line of rocks that crossed the river just down from Chaine’s homestead, his bare feet disturbed a thin sheet of water as it went over the edge, turning silver as it fell. The water was dark because of the shade of peppermint trees, their leaves falling now and then, drifting until they reached the line of rocks his bare feet straddled. Some caught for a moment there, and the river brimmed, and brimmed again so that the leaves must move, and fall, inevitably, to the water a handspan below. They floated in little circles then, those leaves, agitated for a bit, and there were small bubbles and squiggles of foam. Like someone spitting.

Cold here, but not so cold as Chaine’s house. They built it with stone walls, and the sun never hardly got in there no more. And their boy, he, too, was no more, at least not a live boy. They should’ve moved away when he passed on. Mrs Chaine, her skin all grey and she like an everlasting flower, dry, tiny and just as likely to blow away in a wind, even by the wind say made by someone’s laughter. And so Bobby didn’t laugh; you couldn’t laugh when you were with her now. Not that she was really noticing much of the world about her.

Bobby went back to the lessons with Mrs Chaine and Christine. Christine? Same thing, she was not like she was, at least not when she and her mother were together. The boy was there, it was just that you couldn’t see him. But he was there alright, and he was sick and he was unhappy and everyone was still ashamed. He never wanted to be here and he never wanted to be dead.

Yes, they returned to their lessons, but it was very careful letters, and say if you wanted to write the letter ‘d’, well, then in the slow time it took writing it—took Bobby, anyway, but not Christine—there was all the time to think those words like dead, like decay and death and then don’t, desist … It slowed Bobby right down. And don’t even think about the letter ‘c’. He didn’t know how the sister could even write her own name.

It was cold and quiet in that house, and behind the sound of his own footsteps going through some of those rooms there was the sound of another footstep, someone following close. Sunshine hardly ever touched them inside those walls. Voices moaned and complained all around the house right in the middle of the day when the wind was up.

Back to lessons, and they read the Bible. Oh yes, that book was always within reach. Bobby remembered Jonah, and the disciples and their supper, and Samson with all his blind strength. Lazarus was one he never heard before: the man who died walking out of a cold, stone cave. After that Bobby had to stop himself hesitating each time he had to open a door to the Chaine house. Who might walk out to greet him saying, I come back now?

Mrs Chaine’s chin dropped sometimes and she seemed to bend a little more, as if she was trying to look inside herself, and went very quiet, and when she did try to speak her voice was weak. Then she would wave a hand, and go out of the room just like someone they could not see was pulling her. She went away and left them to their own lessons.

Mrs Chaine appeared as Bobby was about to leave with Geordie Chaine for a second season’s whale hunting, and gave him an oil-skinned paper journal.

A gift from Christine and myself, she said, placing it between his hands, and her hands around his. Keep up your lessons, Mrs Chaine told him. But she could not be so friendly as she once was. Christine smiled, looked to the ground.

Later, on lookout, the thought of Christine made Bobby sad and happy at the same time. He ran ink over the pages of that journal; made lines, prints, laid traces of what was happening. It was like he was moving, following, making tracks of time so that later—further along—they’d tell him, if not where he was, then what he’d been doing. Even if he stepped onto a rowboat and left no sign and ended up somewhere altogether different, where not only the prints on the sand, but the sand itself, the wind and plants and air, the birds rivers insects were strange, and no pattern or rhythm, no sound he knew to move and be a part of … Well, even then he could backtrack maybe … He could, he could. Bobby knew he could do that.

So this moon—May, some say—the air chills quickly soon as the sun sits on the land, ready to go away. Bobby looked at that setting sun sitting, and felt the wind blowing from his left-hand side, not the writing hand side, like it did, even late in the day, this time of the year, after the salmon been, before the whales came. A chill land breeze early tempted you, then it was a warm breeze, the land breathing out and its breath blowing across the sea.

Going where?

The breeze rippled the sea’s surface, but even so it was gentle enough and quite smooth, even when there were lines of swell pulsing beneath it. The sea might be blue, might be dark grey and looking thick like blood with dark cloud making one single coat of fur across the sky. A few salmon slid in the shallows, and herring closer still. Across the sand the mullet made circles with their tails, their bellies on the sand floor of the estuary, wishing the sand away, waves breaking not so far but a world apart. Foam on the sand like clean mouth-spit. Rain like human tears, and the smell of earth and moist leaves in the warm air. Frogs call out from where they’re buried, sensing rain, saying move inland move inland move away from the sea.

But Chaine stays. And Bobby stops right with him.

Fun. Chaine says, Let’s race. It’s one boat against the other and Bobby with Jak Tar in the boat this year, on the rudder—steerer—and Jak Tar is boss of men and boat and harpoon, too.

The boys run—Bang! says Chaine or Jak Tar—and they’re off! Grab the whaleboat, drag it to the sea. You might be behind, but you can still catch up, rowing out past the rocky point and back. Pull your weight against the oars, lean forward lean back (you and your brothers’ legs arms backs drive the boat) and the hull slices the sea’s skin, spurts froth and foam.

A new rhythm.

Some of the boys go with Killam and Skelly. They break up the ground with steel shovels, open the earth, shit and dig it in. Put seeds in the damp ground.

Skelly takes the sheep walking, with that woman that come along this time. They walk the sheep around the poison bushes, keep them near to water.

Slow and easy.

Chaine gives everybody rum. A tot, boys. A tot. He sings in the evening and there’s always food. All the boys, same as brothers. Bobby and Jak Tar special brothers now, ever since Jak got Binyan.

The whale jaw was planted in the ground to make an archway, and Bobby went through it to get to Chaine’s hut. He came up the slope, walking with the wind but knowing that the winds when the whales started dying here would keep the stink of their death and the try-pot away. He would go under the arch of whale jaw and it would seem so grey, the sky would be grey, the ocean, too, and most often it was raining and blood everywhere. But today he looked up and saw the curve of bone—bright, white—arching against the vault of sky, and the bright whale teeth, and the sun behind so biting and stabbing at his eyes it brought tears.

A path of bone began at the arch. It was all rectangles and circles; whale vertebrae, cut in half, with flat surfaces uppermost and sand packed solid in between. Bobby stamped his feet as he walked to see if the path would shift. It didn’t. He looked back over his shoulder—the white sandy beach, the slope of granite to one side with the whale hauled up on it, and the headland rising above that—and remembered blood flowing down the granite, and the sharks, their fins and tails above the surface, cutting and slicing to and fro. The try-pot, and the dry blubber fed to the fire, and the black smoke rolling away in shredded clumps.

Already the Yankee whaler had anchored inside the island, furled its sails, and men were rowing to shore across the many shifting surfaces of grey, green, turquoise sea, preparing themselves to walk again on solid ground.

Bobby raised his hand to knock.

Used to be there was no archway, no path, and the hut was tarpaulin and kangaroo skins, so there was no need for knocking; you just pushed the door aside and walked in, and see the
wadjela
missus looking startled, excited. It made you feel strong, and sorry for her, too. He heard the stories.

Boss got the soldiers, that place. Rifles and horses.

It’s different, things change. Bobby stands on whalebone (oh yes, he who will stand on a whale’s back, and have a gun of his own and food given him by the bosses) and pauses, fist raised ready to knock, to marvel once again at how the tiny holes in this door rescued from the sea have merged with the bevels and curves made by a man like Skelly, somewhere.

The door opens, and Bobby almost punches Boss Chaine on the nose.

Seen it, Bobby. Chaine shoulders him aside in his rough and familiar way. Boss Chaine, all beard and glittering eyes and bulky like a bullock.

Chaine knows what he wants. Profits, not prophets. Knows what he wants done because he writes it down first. Some of it, leastways. Him and his lists. They will build a stand for the try-pot; they will make a garden, then tend and weed it. They spread pitch on the boats the Yankees left them. They shepherd sheep, make fences to keep sheep in and kangaroos out. But those
yongar
leap clear over the fence. Chaine gives Bobby a rifle, and Bobby comes back with a kangaroo and puts it in the fire. He singes the skin first, then buries it in the ashes.

Now—though the precise boundary of
now
remains unclear—trees bloom, and a few late salmon can still be seen in the waves. The crests flutter, torn by the wind to look like Missus Chaine’s lace, and you see the fish silhouetted clear and separate from one another. The wave breaks and Bobby thinks to run along the beach, forever and forever beside the breaking waves, the rolling miles and miles of spit and bubbles maybe all the way back to King George Town.

Of course you couldn’t keep going fast all that distance because of the rocky headlands in between and the soft sandy beach, unless of course you can maybe travel like a fish, and not even Bobby with so much family out there in the sea can do that.

From the lookout Bobby sees fish in a solid mass, indistinguishable from one another under the skin of sea. He sees how a shark can’t join them, can’t merge because soon as he moves into the school, they break apart. Another thing altogether, shark.

Bobby knows there’s life under the sea still, like there was at the cold, frozen time.
Nyitiny
, he thinks: cold time.
Nyitang
: cold with.
Wadjela
: white man, away very? The spirit of all those from the cold time still there under the sea’s skin, and their shapes change because the light is different, the sounds are different. Dolphins wave to him as they journey by, show themselves racing the waves, leaping and twisting in the air. Air suddenly all around you as you hurtle from the back of a wave, the fear and thrill of that, and then the crash, bubbles, the world pulling itself close again and hearts beating and the calls of brothers and sisters moving through water thicker than air. Outside and inside, ocean and blood; almost the same salty fluid.

Bobby crested a dune with his uncles and cousins, and there were fish spread out across the beach; the water left them, suddenly shrank away, pulled back. Uncles said don’t eat them fish. Mullet.
Merrderang.
Nearly the same word as the word for penis, his people said so, anyways. Dick. Never realised that before. A lot of dicks lying on the ground. Like Chaine’s dick that he wave around sometime, but never with his wife close by.

And big-dick Chaine (a bubble of laughter bursts from Bobby in his solitude), big-dick Chaine wants whales. And if he wants whales then Bobby knows this is the place where they come close to shore, close enough for him and the other men to leap into a boat, row quickly to them with spears.

Madness.

Bobby was excited just thinking about it!

All the life and spirit under the sea’s skin and out past the horizon, and Bobby gunna bring it back, give it air, haul it onto the sandy shore.

Every time Bobby walked through the whale jaws he still thought of Jonah, from the Bible story, and that old people’s song. Grab the whale’s heart, squeeze it, use its eyes and power to take you where you wanna be. He sings to himself, that song with one man on a rock next to deep ocean, and a whale scraping its barnacles on the rock. True. He on a rock and right next to him in the water, bigger than the rock he’s standing on, is a whale, breathing and groaning. He steps onto its back and into the spout; he slides down into the cave which must be inside each and every whale. And in that echoing cavern of flesh he sings and hurts its heart, he dances around, driving it to that place further along the coast he heard in story and song. Never been there, never seen it. The whale comes up to breathe and the man looks out through its eye and sees only the ocean, and birds in the sky. No sign of land. But he trusts the song his father gave him, and he makes the whale dive again, and again, and makes the whale take him deep and far. Until the whale takes him onto the beach, and the women on the beach love him and bring all their people there, and they all feast and altogether party.

In that story the man returns home, his children with him and their two mothers, pregnant again the both of them.

Daadi
man, him. Everybody love him.

Jonah woulda been alright if he was a Noongar man.

Come back home rich and your people gunna love you.

*

Bobby seen them by their smoke first, and went closer to greet them. Wooral and Menak and Manit and some other old ones who he not seen oh since before his uncle died and he went to live with Dr Cross and now Kongk Chaine. They were in a grove of paperbarks, near the edge of the dance ground, and not far from where the creek rested near the beach, waiting for the rain and the storms to join them all up again.

They hugged him, one old woman nearly crying to see him. She was so old and grey, so wrinkled and tiny and Bobby was so much taller now that she rested her head against his chest, tapping her palm against his cheek. Wooral and Menak stood close, patting his shoulders and touching him. Manit came and stood beside her old sister. He was tall as her, too.