The Secret River (33 page)

Loveday read on in a fluty voice:
On occasion of any native coming
armed, or in a hostile manner without arms, or in unarmed parties exceeding
six in number, to any farm belonging to British subjects, such natives are first
to be desired in a civil manner to depart from the said farm
.

Loveday was enjoying himself, mellowed by liquor and a hut full of people listening to him, but Smasher could not let him have the floor.
Civil manner on the end of my gun
, he interrupted, his eyes glittering small and dangerous in his flushed face. But Loveday was in full flood now and would not be stopped. He held up a hand and raised his voice:
And if they persist in remaining thereon, they
are then to be driven away by force of arms by the settlers themselves
. He stopped and looked around at his audience.
Put plain, you may shoot
the buggers any time you get the chance
, he said, and in one draught drained the pannikin by his elbow.

Give it here
, Mrs Herring called out.
Give it along here to me
, and Thornhill saw she did not believe that Loveday had read the thing right. Loveday passed her the paper and she signalled Sal to help her. The two of them bent close over the words, spelling them out to each other in whispers, their fingers running along the lines of print. Thornhill saw them reach the end of the piece and look at
each other. Mrs Herring had laid aside her pipe for once and her mouth was dour.

Sagitty, flushed with liquor, called out,
Devil take that one-
at-
a-time
shit. Give ’em a dose of the green powder
. But now Smasher was on his feet, his voice filling the hut.
Think I need any bit of paper from the
damned Governor?
He pulled something out of his britches pocket and laid it on the table beside the lamp, something like a couple of leaves tied together with a strip of leather.
What’s mine is mine and I
ain’t never waited for no by-
your-
leave
.

Sal, near him at the table, reached out to touch one. From across the room, Thornhill saw her eager face in the lamplight and knew that whatever the things were, they would not be anything as innocent as leaves, but could not get across the room in time. He saw her face contort and her hand flick the thing away as if it had bitten her, heard her cry out in disgust.
Get them out!
she cried.
Out! Smasher! Before them kids see!

They were a pair of human ears, dark brown, hacked off rough. Where the blood had dried it had crusted almost purple, like any other meat left out too long.

Smasher laughed and picked them up from the floor.
All right,
missus
, he said,
no need to get yourself fussed
. The children were craning to see, but Sal got over to them and tried to block their view.

Smasher watched Thornhill, taunting him.
Got a bob for
the head off a feller in Sydney
, he said.
To measure and that
. He picked up the pair of ears and shook them together.
Got to boil it up real
good first. Get it nice and clean
.

They all contemplated the boiling-up of a human head. Thornhill forced his face to be a stone. The thing about Smasher was, it was hard to know when he was boasting and when he was in earnest. In either case, Thornhill wanted him gone.

He could see Sal’s face in three-quarter, her mouth rigid. He had kept so much from her. Now, in one moment, all that was undone.

Sagitty released a long expressive belch. It seemed to activate Loveday who called out,
Pickling
. The word was unclear and he said it again, very loud:
Pickling
. He looked around at everyone watching him and went on.
Better than boiling, Smasher, my good man
, he said.
For the scientific
—he missed the word, tried again—
for the
scientific gentlemen
. His hand resting on a cushion of air to steady himself, he turned his whole body to Smasher as if he did not trust his head alone to swivel.
Pickling retains a greater degree of data
, he said with elaborate clarity, and abruptly arrived at the next stage in the stations of his drunkenness, a stupor from which he would not be roused.

Smasher reclaimed everyone’s attention by showing how he hung the ears from his belt with the leather strip.
For good luck
. There were times when Thornhill could almost find it in his heart to feel sorry for Smasher, his greed for the admiration of other men was so naked.

~

Smasher was still fiddling around with the ears on his belt when Blackwood burst across the room at him. At any time Tom Blackwood would have been more than a match for Smasher. He grabbed him around the neck and forced his head down onto the table, squeezing words out from a tight-clenched jaw.
You damn little
maggot!
Still holding him around the neck, he jerked him upright and ran him backwards into the cornerpost so the whole hut trembled. Smasher jolted with the shock of it and scrabbled with his feet, but Blackwood’s arm kept him up off the ground as he said,
You had this coming a real long time Smasher
, and punched him, the weight of his whole body against Smasher’s face.

Smasher’s head snapped sideways but his eyes were still open, fixed on Blackwood, and he was trying to speak. Blackwood sent his fist into his face again. Everyone in the room heard the crunch. Blackwood let go and stepped away from him. Smasher stood
swaying, his hands up to his face, blood pouring from his nose and mouth, crying out wordlessly like a baby.

Now Sagitty and Twist were on Blackwood, and Thornhill too, taking hold of his arms, feeling the muscle hard under his shirt. Blackwood shrugged them off and in a few strides was out of the hut. They all listened to his heavy footfalls going back down the path.

When he had gone, Smasher whispered through the blood in his mouth,
Give us a tot, will you, after a man been damn near killed
. Sagitty slopped out a pannikin and Smasher drank it down like water. His lip was split in several places and he had lost his few remaining front teeth. His voice came hoarse and reedy and at every word Thornhill could see the blood on his lips stick together and pull apart again.
That bugger’ll be sorry he done that
, he said. With the back of a shaking hand he wiped at his mouth and took another drink.
They all going to be real sorry
.

~

When everyone had gone the Thornhills lay down to sleep, but it did not come. At last Sal spoke, as he knew she would.
We maybe
better go, Will
, she said quietly.

He whispered back,
Go where, where have we got to go?
He heard her snort in disbelief.
Home, Will, where else would we go. Sell up and go
.

It ain’t five years yet, only half a year!
That was his first response, but even as he spoke he knew this was not a matter of keeping to the letter of a promise.
We ain’t got enough, Sal
, he went on quickly.
Nowhere near!
She propped herself up against the wall to see his face.
How much then, Will?
she said.
How much is enough?

But he would not put a number on it.
I ain’t going back to a
lighterman’s life
, he said. He felt indignation rise up in him, pressed it back, made himself speak with no more passion than if they were discussing the weather.
Remember Butler’s Buildings
, he said, and he could feel her remembering: the heaps of musty rags
where they had slept and the fleas that rose from them in clouds, the bugs that nipped all night. Butler’s Buildings was a place she could still smell.

Yes, Will
, she said, and he saw she was ahead of him, had known what he would say.
What about this then, we go to Wilberforce or
one of them other towns where the blacks don’t come. Business can go along
just as good from there
.

He was silenced by surprise, that she had thought the thing out so carefully. Like any good haggler she had been cunning enough to start with the highest price, so as to make a show of coming down to what she had meant to pay all along. She turned to him, her face indistinct in the near-dark.
Get the Pickle Herring going again
like we had back in Sydney. Be making money hand over fist
.

It startled him: she had been thinking over their choices, and seemed to have arrived at something of a certainty.
Look Sal
, he started. He heard his blustering tone and quietened himself. He was talking about the most unimportant thing in the world.
If they was going to do anything, they’d of done it by now
. He touched her ear, where the firelight caught its softness.
We said five years,
remember. We got the worst part behind us
. She stretched a leg out against his and said nothing, so he went on.
They got their place,
we got ours
, he said.
We don’t give them no grief. Plus they know we got
the gun
.

She lay back down under the blanket and after a moment he heard a long sigh from her.
I don’t want that Smasher showing his face
here no more
, she said.
That man’s going to bring down trouble on the whole
lot of us
. He heard a darkness in her voice. It was the sound of someone who was prepared to yield, but against the grain of what she believed.

He felt a misgiving that he had convinced her. Another sort of woman would have cried, shouted, forced him in the end to go to Wilberforce. He loved her for not being that woman, but he knew she was right: trouble was coming.

He could not turn his back on this place. How could he bear to go on passing in the boat and see some other man there? It would feel like giving up a child.

He listened for Sal to fall asleep, but she did not, only lay on her side facing him. But not touching him, thinking her own thoughts.

O
ne blue and silver morning a week after the attack on Webb, the
Hope
glided past Darkey Creek. It was an absence that Thornhill noticed. For once there was no smoke rising out of the gully where Captain McCallum’s men had been routed. Only birds, rising, circling, dropping down below the trees.

He might have sailed by, but an impulse made him push the tiller over. The tide was rising and floated the boat up the creek easily. The wind died to nothing as the mangroves closed around him, brushing the gunwales on either side. The boat slipped along the water to where the bank opened out on to level ground.

As he stepped out to wade ashore, Thornhill felt the silence deepen. He wanted to get back into the boat and push it down the creek, away from this dense silence. He called out
Oy!
to hear a human sound, and the silence flowed back over the noise. Even the mosquitoes seemed to have abandoned the place. It was a relief to step onto the land. The quicker he could see what there was to see, the quicker he could be gone again. The blacks had a few humpies around the coals of a dead campfire. They had burned around them, the way they did, so the ground was clear. A couple of empty flourbags lay about, bright against the dirt,
and a bark dish where a damper had been mixed, the scraps dry and yellow.

He waited, but nothing moved. Above him the birds flapped and shifted in the branches. He stooped to look into the nearest humpy. He saw nothing at first, just shadows. Then he saw that the shadows were a man and a woman, and they were dead. A mass of shiny flies crawled and buzzed around them. The man lay on his back, arched even in death, his mouth ajar, his chin crusted where he had vomited. His eyes were open but dull with death. The woman had one hand flung out grasping at the air. He could see the lines on her yellow palm. The smell of shit was overpowering.

He backed away into the light. Beyond the humpy were more bodies: another man, and a woman with a dead child still in the crook of her dead arm. Even the child had the pale stickiness around the mouth where the flies seethed.

There was an unnatural clarity to everything, each twig on the ground more real than itself, the way the sunlight made a sharp copy of it out of shadow.

When he heard a sound he thought it was himself, groaning. When it came again he told himself it was a bird, or a branch rubbing on another. But when it came a third time it was unmistakable: another human, alive, here with him in the clearing. His feet took him towards the sound against his will, feet in a nightmare.

It was a boy, still spindly in the arms and thin in the chest, a lad no more than Dick’s age, on the ground, his knees drawn up to his belly. From his mouth hung tendrils of the vomit that was all around his head and the lower part of his body was shiny where it had emptied itself.

The boy arched his body in a spasm and groaned again. His head jerked, trying to vomit. Flies were crawling on his face and his chest where the vomit was slick.

Thornhill could not think what to do, only felt the humid sun boring into his back and shoulders. He looked away from the boy, at the comfortless forest all around. Above the gully, way up, there was the sky, that eternal hard blue, and two ducks crossing it, wing to wing.

He made himself speak, to break the evil spell:
Ain’t nothing I
can do for you, lad
. He wanted to turn his back, leave all this, let someone else come across it later.

But somehow he could not. He would give the boy some water. He could at least offer that gesture. Then he could leave.

The familiar details of the
Hope
were a comfort. The place in the bow where he kept the keg. The tap on the side that came off unless it was turned the right way. The sound of the water hitting the bottom of the pannikin. This was the world he knew.

By the time he walked back up to the humpies he had convinced himself there would be nothing there. No one frozen with a fatal gripe in their guts. No lad coiled over himself, dying by inches.

But the bodies were there and the boy still lay blinking at him. He had turned on his back, his knees pulled up. As Thornhill approached, his face twisted and he turned his head from side to side. Seeing the dipper of water, he licked his lips, whispered, reached towards it.

Thornhill knelt beside him. Was surprised at the softness of that black hair. Under it he felt the shape of his skull, the same as his own.

Gingerly he put the pannikin to the boy’s lips and he drank, but even as he was drinking his body jerked, the water vomited straight back up along with strings of greenish slime.

For God’s sake
, Thornhill shouted in fright. He had not intended it, but heard it as a kind of prayer.

The boy did not move. The water did not seem to have done him any good, and he had still not closed his eyes. He made a weak
movement to draw his knees up to his chest and stared at Thornhill. His eyes were glassy. Thornhill thought perhaps he was dead, but then he groaned again and a thread of mucus slid down his chin. Thornhill felt as if everything in his own body had stopped. If he moved or took a breath he would feel the poison burning away at his own guts.

There seemed nothing to be done except walk back to the boat. He pushed it away from the bank and poled back down the creek between the cushions of mangroves. When he came out into the open river, it felt as if a lid had been lifted. He could not get enough of the river air, stood in the bow taking lungfuls of it, clean and cool. He did not look back, to see the place where the birds circled over Darkey Creek.

He knew that he would not tell anyone what he had seen. Some of them would know already: Sagitty for one. He was the man who had talked of the green powder.

He knew he would never share with Sal the picture of this boy. That was another thing he was going to lock away in the closed room in his memory, where he could pretend it did not exist.

~

Next morning Dick came running up to the hut, his feet flicking up the dust as he ran, to tell his father that the blacks were in the corn.
Not just in it
, he panted.
Picking it! Filling their dilly-bags with it
and taking it away!

Even before the boy had said his piece, Thornhill realised he had been waiting for this, that the calm he had been living in was a blank sheet ready to have this moment written across it. His rage swelled, sweet and simple. It was a clean feeling, like a length of the sea massing into a wave.

He got the gun down off its pegs. Noted that his hands were trembling as he went through the business of wadding the charge
into the barrel and priming the pan. He walked down the track with the gun along his arm. The sun was already hot.

He could see the blacks among the corn. They made no effort to hide or run. They glanced at him and then away again. They were everywhere, hands reaching out for his fat cobs and wrenching them off the stalks. He could see Long Jack and Black Dick near him. On the edge of the field the women were calling in their raucous way to each other. Their long breasts shook with each wrench of the cobs.

As he came close they fell silent. They went on ripping the cobs off the stalks, lifting their arms high, deliberately, showily. They knew the owner of the corn was there, and they were going to ignore him.

He grabbed one of the women by the hair.
Get off you bugger,
get away
, he shouted. She was strong, but he was stronger, and was not going to let go. Another woman was on him now, clawing at his arm. He smelled her, spicy and pungent, as she dragged and scratched at him. He saw her lift the stick she had in her hand and felt it come down square on the top of his head, heard himself grunt with the shock of it, felt the gun drop out of his hand. For a moment everything went grey.

Get out of it, you thieving black whores!
he shouted. The pain in his head made things clear and he took his chance to boot the first one as she turned. Her body arched with the force of it and she would have fallen but he was still holding her up by the hair.

Now an old woman, with terrible shrill cries, was on him, and a girl had him round the throat from behind. But he had not for nothing grown up in the streets of Bermondsey. He elbowed her savagely and felt himself connect with something soft that could have been her bud-breast. She gasped and the hands round his neck fell away. He managed a good kick at the old woman’s knee, so she retreated too, hopping on one leg, and now he grabbed the arm of the first one. He held her while giving the second one a
wild back-hander, but she flew at him again so he made a fist and got her right in the face. Her hands went up and blood of a glossy redness was everywhere, pouring between her fingers.

It is like mine, he surprised himself thinking. Just the same colour as my own.

Dan was running down now with his club in his hand and Ned was close behind him with a gun, crashing through the corn.

He might have broken the woman’s arm. When he let her go it hung limp by her side. He picked up the gun and saw her flinch away from it.

Long Jack and Black Dick were coming at him, and he turned the gun towards them. He had never pointed the gun at a human before. There was something of an intimacy to it. The gun was between them, but it joined them, too, along the line the shot would travel.

No take our tucker
, he shouted. Behind the gun, his voice sounded very sure of itself. He stamped on the earth to make his point and a cob rolled away from under his boot.
This belong Mr
Thornhill, youse bugger off
, he said and took a threatening step towards them.

They ran, Jack half-carrying the limping old one, the woman with the dangling arm holding it tight against her ribs. Willie was bellowing into the quiet morning in his boy’s cracking voice,
Shoot
’em quick, Da
. Sal was beside him, Mary crying in her arms. She shaded her eyes to look at the broken stalks everywhere.
They
nicking our corn, Ma
, Willie shouted as if she could not see for herself.

The blacks had got to the edge of the forest now, and they all disappeared into it except Long Jack, who turned and looked straight at Thornhill.

Be off!
he heard himself bellowing.
Be off!
But Jack did not go. It was as if he was memorising the way Thornhill looked with the gun in his hand. Or daring him to use it.

Thornhill got the gun up to his shoulder and pointed it. At the last instant, as his finger pulled back on the trigger, he shut his eyes. The sound engulfed him, the gun threw him backwards. There was that sharp blast of bitter smoke.

When he opened his eyes there was no one over by the trees. No Jack watching him, no Jack dead on the ground. The forest gave nothing, only the shadow of one tree moving against the shadow of another. The puff of blue smoke floated away on the air. When the rumbling echoes had faded away, a silence settled.

It had been a good noise. The heat of the barrel was a comfort in his hand. But it left an emptiness, too. There was the impulse to do it again.

His head swam and his mouth was not completely under his control. His neck hurt where the girl had gripped it and there was a smarting place on his face where fingernails had dug in hard.

He leaned the gun on the ground, holding it to steady the shaking of his hands.
That’ll learn them good and proper
, he said in a reedy voice.

Put that in yer pipe and smoke it, Blackie
, Willie called into the forest, but not too loud.

Sal rounded on him.
You shut your lip, Willie
, she said, and there was something in her voice that made Willie obey.

~

They heard Dan yelling from the far side of the field. He had got hold of a boy not above twelve years old, as spindly as a grasshopper, all gangly legs and knobby knees, one eye lost in swollen flesh. Dan had the club in his hand, matt with blood. He had the boy’s wrist up behind his back so he was trying to bend forward away from the pain, and the further he bent over the higher Dan pushed the wrist up his back so the two of them were locked together like dancers. On the boy’s fleshless leg, a flap of skin hung down bright red.

Ned was eager.
Did you get one with the gun, Mr Thornhill?
His pink mouth worked away at the idea.
I never seen a dead person, you
know that?

Dick stared at the boy. He stood rigid, his arms by his sides, every muscle tensed. His face was stricken. His mouth opened, but no words came out.

Dan jerked the boy’s head around and pushed his chin up so he could shout right into it.
Mind your manners, this is Mr and Mrs
Thornhill come to see you
. His voice was rich with the pleasure of being able to shout at another person. The boy trembled and tried to keep his face down. Dan took hold of the boy’s head and turned it, so he was forced to look at Thornhill. His chest was going in and out quick as a dog’s, the ribs moving up and down under the skin. His tongue came out and licked his lip, where there was a lumpy wound.

Dan started to say,
Now that we got one
, but the boy wrenched himself to twist free and Dan jammed his arm further up his back. Dick shot out a hand to ward something off.

Tie this one up like bait, shoot the others when they come to fetch him
, Dan panted. He nodded to Thornhill for approval, but Thornhill looked at the boy, the way his feet were tensed against the dirt as if hoping to spring up like a bird and be free.
Smasher done the same
, Dan said.
Told us it worked real good
, Ned laughed his blurt of a laugh.
Learn ’em real good
, he shouted, shooting an imaginary gun, recoiling from the imaginary force of the imaginary shot, his face shiny with excitement.

But Thornhill could only see that the boy might be the brother of the one in Darkey Creek. This boy had the same narrow shoulders where the bones could be seen moving under the skin, the same black hair.

That’s enough of your lip, Ned
, he said, and saw Dan and Ned exchange a glance. Dan’s face went wooden. Thornhill bent down so he could speak right into the boy’s face. Tears gleamed on the
black cheeks.
Why don’t you just bugger off the lot of youse
. He was almost pleading. He felt Dan and Ned watching him.
Just get away
out of here
.