The Burial (13 page)

Have anything live in there, sir. The winter always claims some.

And whose work is it to find them, or bury them?

Well, sir
, said the postmaster,
unless they're receiving mail it's not my work to do. Perhaps it's yours, Sergeant.

Barlow paced in front of the postmaster's desk while he finished the drawing.

When it was done, Barlow presented it to Jack Brown, who had been watering the horses.
It's a work of art
, said Barlow,
only I have no notion where to begin.

Jack Brown smoothed it out across the horse's saddle.
Not bad
, he said.
The man is particular. For a start you can tell north by that ridge of the mountains. Over there are marked the plots given away to the ex-soldiers. But you see the river is over here. If you want to visit them all you'll need to ride more or less in a circle. So, Sergeant, it won't matter what direction you set off in first.

Jack Brown mounted his horse.

Where are you going, Jack Brown?

I've done what I can, Sergeant. I reported the crime, I took you to it, I delivered you here. Now the fact of it is that my boss has gone and he's left me unpaid and idleness does not suit me. I need to find another employer.

Barlow began to panic. He needed Jack Brown. He knew he could not negotiate the valley without him and he knew there would be nothing more derided or endangered than a cop alone. Or, he guessed, a black man. So at least they had that in common.

How black are you, Jack Brown?
asked Barlow.

Jack Brown turned on his horse to face him.
Are you asking me what caste I am, Sergeant?

What I mean to say, Jack Brown, and I hope this doesn't cause a man offence, is are you black enough to be my tracker?

Jack Brown laughed.
What are you offering, Sergeant?

Room and a wage.

What's the wage?

What does a man expect? Six or seven quid a week?

I'll ride to the first hut with you, Sergeant. And I'll consider it.

They had not reached the first hut when Jack Brown said,
Sergeant, for seven quid a week I won't get you lost. For nine, I'll track anything with feet.

WITH THE GREAT War came the Great Suspicion. It rolled into Mingling Bros Circus of the World like a dense fog that clung to its stalls. Suddenly, there were no more crowds jostling to get in and those that did turn up came less to admire the performers and more to determine if the performers were not the enemy themselves.

The word was out—Miss Spangellotti and Mirkus were German. Patriotism in cities and country towns meant there was no place that would welcome them.

Regardless, the troupe moved from town to town in the hope there was somewhere that had not caught on to the spirit of the time. They tried novel things to bring audiences in, changing into their costumes by the side of the road and marching into towns with an elephant in the lead to create a grand procession. But most often by the time they reached the town their costumes were dusty and as they marched down the main street people eyeballed them from behind shopfronts or curtained windows. Some sent their children out to throw rocks.

It didn't take long before the performers, including my mother, were missing their cues. No amount of putting on a brave face or coloured sequins could make up for their hearts no longer being in it.

The night a man in the audience threw a dead possum at Mirkus it happened to be the most well-timed stunt of the evening. The dead possum hit Mirkus's shoulder and slid down his velvet jacket, landing at his feet.

Mingling Bros was over. Mirkus and Miss Spangellotti called in the troupe: the Indian Cyclists, Josephine/Joseph, Maximus and Minimus, the Russian Dancers, the Spanish Acrobats and Señor Donata. And, of course, my mother.

That's it, my friends
, said Mirkus.
Let's lickety-split. Let's blow the whistle. Take your costumes and your horses. And for goodness'sake, take care of yourselves. The people are going mad and I fear this is just the beginning.

Everyone in the circus had a partner except Jessie, and it was evident again in their departing. Maximus and Minimus. The cyclists. Josephine/Joseph and Señor Donata. Jessie realised that she was the only one who would ride off alone. She thought of Bandy Arrow, her pet, her sparrow, who had disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared. No one in the circus ever spoke of him and she wondered if, in her loneliness, she had not conjured him then as she would like to conjure him now, an imagined and perfect friend.

After the demise of Mingling Bros, Jessie turned her hand to all kinds of things, and mostly they were other people's things and other people's horses. There was an industry in it, selling horses to the army for the war. Broken-in horses were in hot demand and my mother knew where to find them.

She was swift and efficient and, thanks to her circus days, she could pull off many disguises. She appeared in Parramatta Court half a dozen times with different aliases—Jessie Hunt, Jessie Bell, Jessie Payne—but the evidence was usually already gone, being shipped across the seas.

Until it wasn't.

She was twenty-one years old when she was finally convicted.

By then she was a seasoned and well-regarded horse thief and when the crime was too effortless she would raise the stakes for her own amusement. It was when she swiped two chickens after stealing a horse that she was captured.

When she snatched the chickens from their coop, they were sleeping. With one hand she held both chickens upside down by their feet, and with the other she twisted their necks to kill them. But things did not go so well in the dark: one of the chickens began to flap its wings and she dropped it and it made a fearful racket. Unfortunately for Jessie, the owner of the chickens and the horse was listening out—lately his chickens had been preyed on by a fox. When he heard the sound of their distress he tiptoed out into the night with his rifle tucked under his chin. He was surprised to see not a fox but my mother coming out of the pen. He waited until she tried to mount the horse again, this time with two chickens under her arms, and then he stepped out of the dark and pressed the gun against her back and said,
Lady, you're a goner.

The man directed her, at gunpoint, to the police station. There was no one around in the middle of the night so he sat there with the gun at her back until morning. And then he stood over her, satisfied, as policemen pushed her fingers into a bed of ink and took her fingerprints. By the time the two policemen got her into a holding cell she had smeared them both with blue ink. She kicked and punched them and spat out insults.

We've got a wild one here
, they said.

Before my mother faced the judge she did her best to make herself look neat. But even with her hair pinned up in braids, when she stood before the judge she could feel his judging eyes upon her and knew that he saw her every imperfection, inside and out.

For the judge there was nothing to consider. My mother had been caught in the act. He tallied up her sentence: twelve months for the horse, three months for each chicken and six months for the assault of the police officers, which he assured the court was lenient.

He said,
In giving this sentence, it is my hope that this young woman might grow virtue, like a virtuous child in her womb, and the law will claim its paternity
.

HER PHYSICAL ENERGY was almost spent but her mind was a flurry of memory and her memories were ceaseless. She sat down on a rock and squeezed her throbbing head as, one after another, the memories rose up. And as if there were pincers in her head, she would try to snatch a memory as it rose, to determine if that was the fate-altering moment when things could have been different.

For one whole day she swayed back and forth on her haunches, tapping her forehead with her knuckles as if she might extract something useful from herself. But by the end of the day she knew only two irredeemable facts: she had deceived Jack Brown and she had killed Fitz. She did not know who she was to do either.

Houdini grazed around her and it occurred to her that she might be undernourished. She did not move from the rock but waited with her gun and eventually she saw a roo and shot it. As she did she recalled the fleeting moment when she could have shot Fitz and it would have appeared a perfect accident.

She had been with him for almost a year. By then she had lost count of the times he had hit her and she had already begun fantasising about her escape to the mountains. On this day he was demonstrating to her how to muster and brand his cattle. He said he was going to promote her, send her out on a ride. She had no skills with cattle, or none that she had cultivated. She had a natural talent for horses but cattle she found to be too stupid to care for. They reminded her of Fitz—she did not know what dumb things moved them.

For the sake of peace she took Fitz's lead and they rounded up half a dozen cattle that he had brought in. They were moving them from a lower paddock and into the holding yard when a bull broke from the herd. It charged out in some kind of fit and while Jessie jumped the fence Fitz held his ground and swung a rope over the bull—but it was to no avail as the bull was fast and deliberate in charging at him and pinning him against a fence post. Fitz yelled at Jessie to get his gun from the stable and as she started to run she realised she did not care if the bull killed Fitz or not. She found the gun propped against the wall; knowing better than to run with a loaded gun she walked back to the yard. She could see Fitz crawling in the dirt and she aimed at him but the bull tossed him up and then up again and then the bull's horns seemed to twist right into him and she thought that they had impaled him. She fired a shot into the air to scare off the bull and the bull charged for the gate. Fitz took his chance and rolled under the fence and it was too late to shoot him so she shot the bull instead, twice in the head, and watched it fall back, its full weight upon itself, and die right there in front of them.

Fitz was a mess. Jessie washed and dressed his wounds. Just from feeling she could tell he had two broken ribs and his knee was shattered. He insisted she stay and mind the farm and he left her with the same gun she had grabbed from the stable. With great difficulty, he mounted his horse, one leg completely straight. She handed him a full bottle of whiskey and then she did not see him for two days.

She should have escaped. She packed the one bag she had brought from prison, a green canvas thing that lived under her bed, and she filled it again with the soaps shaped as angels and birds that by now had gathered dust on the windowsill. She looked around her bedroom and around the house and there was nothing else in it that she valued. The only useful things now were a knife and a gun and her shirt and her trousers. She saddled Houdini and rode down into the forest, which was the only way out of there. When she cleared the forest, she would head to the mountains. She thought she would be safe there. But she was not even halfway along the track when she thought she heard a galloping horse and she feared its rider was Fitz so she turned Houdini around, as sharply and swiftly as she had set off, then put Houdini back in the stable and herself in the brown armchair that she despised. By the time she realised it was not Fitz she had heard in the forest she had lost her nerve.

When he did return he was blind drunk, like a bull himself, and full of talk of his bull wrestle and, worse, full of plans. He announced to her that he would bring in another rider and she and the rider would be his drovers, his lackeys, heist to heist, as more or less his droving days were over.

He said,
I'll get a blackfella this time
.

And Jessie asked,
Is that because of his droving?

But she did not even register his answer. She knew that to Fitz a convict woman and an Aboriginal man were as good as slaves.

Later, when she first saw Jack Brown in the forest, she could have told him there and then to flee. But she knew that without Jack Brown it would be the ceaseless nightmare of her and Fitz and if she did not kill him first, it was unlikely she would survive him.

She did not know how much time had passed. She had skinned the roo completely. She wished that she could skin herself, that she could pare herself right back to bone and pull apart those bones and reconstruct herself again.

She lit a fire and cooked some of the meat but as the fire licked up she saw the carnage she had created and her appetite was gone. She was disgusted with herself and with the waste of it. There was blood all over her.

She smothered the fire with dirt and spread out the fur of the roo on the ground and then she lay down on it and wept. She was inconsolable.

Jack Brown was nowhere within reach and now he would never be. Their pact to wait was not for the reason she told him, that they must choose the right moment to escape. She had asked him to wait because she was trying to muster the courage to tell him that the child inside of her was not his, it was Fitz's. In almost six months she had not found the courage to tell him. At first she thought it could have worked, their escape to the mountains, man, woman, child, seeking freedom. But could he have ever loved a child of Fitz's? Or could she? By imagining Jack Brown was my father was the only way my mother did not find me a repellent thing. As I grew inside her, she did her best to blot out my nasty biology. But the truth remained. And the truth was awful.

I could not hold that against her, her fiction. Because in it there was a seed of truth. Jack Brown could have been my father and, like my mother, I would have preferred that he was.

My poor mother curled against the fur of the roo. She pulled it around her and then she said,
Hold me.

And her own words surprised her. But the words kept coming.

Hold me.

Hold me.

Hold me.

And in their utterance, she did not have another thought.