Tourmaline (7 page)

‘Ah, Deb,’ Tom said, ‘won’t you come home?’

‘I’ve made my bed,’ she said; and laughed. ‘My good old double bed with the brass knobs. I’ll lie in it.’

‘Kes is all right,’ said Byrne, forlornly.

‘D’you think he believes
you
exist?’

‘How do I know? I can’t even understand what you buggers are talking about.’

‘You think he treats you like a brother,’ she said. ‘Well, he does, too. Like a brother to Jock’—meaning Kestrel’s black mongrel. ‘Except that Jock doesn’t drink his grog.’

‘Stop it, Deb,’ Tom said, unsmiling.

‘He brought me up,’ Byrne protested (it was terrible, it was harrowing to watch him). ‘From the time I was thirteen. Tom——’

The girl put her hand up, wearily, to her hair, which was tied behind with a strip of blue cloth, and did something to it without noticing. Her small breasts showed sharp under the blue dress. Her eyes were on the carpet and her full lips drawn in.

‘Oh Byrnie,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Poor boy…’

‘You must hate him,’ he accused her. ‘Why don’t you leave him? Is it fair, do you reckon?’

‘No, I don’t,’ she said, sombrely. ‘I don’t hate him. I’m the biggest fool of all.’ She rose as she spoke, and looked towards the diviner. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘This isn’t what you thought we were like.’

He glanced up, absently, with eyes that had grown sullen. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about me.’

‘I hope you’ll come to the pub and meet him.’

‘Yes,’ he said vaguely. ‘I’ll do that. Goodbye, Mrs—ah, Kestrel.’

She was taken aback by that. So were we all. It sounded like someone else’s name. But she smiled after a moment, and turned away to Tom.

‘Must go home, Pa,’ she said to him.

‘So that’s home,’ he said, ‘is it? Ah well.’

She dropped a gentle kiss on him and went out.

When she had gone, Byrne stretched out his long legs. Then he scratched himself, intimately. Then he said, in an injured tone: ‘She reckons she’s doing him a big favour. Who does she think she is?’

‘Shut up, Byrnie,’ said Tom.

He took no offence, but continued to glower at the piano. ‘I’m mixed up,’ said the diviner, with a sigh.

‘Come and have a drink,’ said Byrne, but with no particular eagerness.

‘Not now,’ the diviner said. ‘Thanks.’

‘Perhaps you’d like to see the town,’ I hoped.

He beat on his knee with the flat of his hand, irritably. ‘My head’s cracking open,’ he complained. ‘Oh hell. Tom——’

‘I’ll get you something in a minute.’

‘I didn’t know the girl was your daughter.’

‘She’s not,’ Tom said. ‘Well, foster-daughter.’

‘They don’t seem very happy across the road.’

All of a sudden he had deteriorated, had become querulous, like an invalid. He made this last comment fretfully, as if the fact were an injury. The peeling forehead was knitted with pain above the resentful eyes. I felt that he meant us to leave him, and prepared to go quite gladly because, I discovered, I didn’t care for him. He was no longer prepossessing.

‘Are you crook again?’ Byrne enquired, with excessive sympathy.

‘My head,’ he said, sounding confused. ‘Doesn’t matter, just get worse, got to expect it.’ He put his hands up to his eyes, and kept on muttering in muffled tones from behind them. ‘Have to stop thinking, that’s all. Could have been dead, anything else is pure gain.’

Byrne looked at me, at a loss, and then at Tom, who removed his spine from the edge of the door and went out. In a moment he returned with a glass of water and a couple of tablets, which the diviner took and swallowed without opening his eyes. Then for a while the room was still.

‘I’m off,’ Byrne said at last, getting up. I rose too.

‘Sorry,’ the diviner murmured. ‘Some other time.’ But as we passed through the door he called out: ‘Byrnie.’

Byrne responded like a sheepdog.

‘My rod,’ the diviner said. ‘Tom said you might make one. Can you?’

‘Sure,’ Byrne said. ‘In the forge up at the mine. Glad to do it.’

This he need not have said, for he looked like the recipient of some outstanding honour as it was. But the diviner had his eyes closed.

‘Good bloke,’ said the diviner, weakly, and relapsed into the self-absorption of his pain. So we went out, Byrne and I. But we heard, as we entered the shop, his voice rising to ask Tom some question, and Tom’s replying, with irony and compassion.

In the morning, feeling aimless, I came out of my back door and wandered across a stretch of bare red earth to the gaol; my gaol, to which I am constantly returning, the shrine and the museum of law in Tourmaline. Against the intense blue of the Tourmaline sky, the walls of the exercise yard, like a low square tower, glimmered with all the light and purity the sun could discover in their pale stonework; and I noticed again, with pride, the rough beauty of the round window set high in the front wall, the handsome curve of masonry above the gate. The wooden door that used to cover that gate has fallen from its hinges and lies, cracked and blistered, in the open sun. The gate, lightly filmed with rust, cried out as I put my shoulder to its resistance.

In the yard, nothing has changed for many years. The long cell facing the entrance is unroofed now, and the wall around its doorway has collapsed, covering the floor with rubble. An odd collection of old basins, bits of harness, branding irons, ledgers and journals and papers, buries the paving of the yard to a depth of about a foot. I squatted in the cool shadow, luminous with reflected light from the walls, and began to read a report, in brown ink, of the disappearance of a box of gold between Lacey’s Find and Tourmaline. The affair was mysterious, and I had my suspicions of the constable who recounted it. But I couldn’t help liking him for his generous commendations of P/H (or Police Horse) Rory.

While I was reading, a shadow came across the light from the gateway, and I looked round and saw Byrne there, watching me. He was returning from his second home, the hut on the hill, and had seen me go into the gaol.

‘What’ve you got there?’ he asked, idly, standing over me.

I showed him. He glanced at the pages, but quickly lost interest. And I remembered that reading was something of an effort to him.

‘I’m going to see Mike,’ he said. ‘About the rod.’

‘You’re making it, then?’

‘When he’ll come and show me. I don’t know what he wants. I thought they used a bit of bush, but he doesn’t.’

‘He’s a very serious young man,’ I suggested.

‘He doesn’t muck about,’ Byrne agreed, looking very spindly and drought-stricken as he stood there among the high walls.

‘Come with us,’ he invited.

‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s a long hot walk to the mine. I’ll stay and dig about in this.’

He looked down at me, with his bright black eyes, like a clever sheepdog’s. ‘You’re getting an old man,’ he remarked, as if he had never observed this before, and thought I too might be interested to know. ‘I forgot that.’

‘I forget it myself,’ I confessed, rummaging among the papers. ‘But there’s plenty to remind me—especially in here.’ I went on, as I spoke, to flip through the pages of an ancient police gazette from New Zealand, studying the interesting faces of long-ago felons; but I was aware that as I did so he stood, with thumbs in his belt and long head on one side, studying me. The thought had come to him, I suddenly knew, that I must die. And what will become of Tourmaline then, he wonders.

I scanned the sad features of one Timaru Joe (robbery with violence) and waited for Byrne to follow up the painful topic. But on this one day he seemed less inclined to pass on the first thought that came into his head; there was even an air of conscious tactfulness about him, as he stood over me, which depressed me profoundly, and drove me to say at last: ‘You’re wondering who’ll come after me when I’m gone.’

But to my intense humiliation, he replied: ‘What’s it matter?’ I had misread him, utterly.

‘I am the law,’ I said, as humbly as such an assertion could well be made; for I meant by it, the memory and the conscience of Tourmaline. ‘Grant that to an old man.’

He looked at me with pity—with genuine pity, I swear it. It was too much, too much to bear. ‘But there’s Kes,’ he said. ‘And Tom, and Rocky. And Jack at the mine. And now Mike. What do you want?’

‘The law,’ I said. ‘The memory.’ But I could not express myself to him. He was young, and would have interpreted my sentiments as senile conceit, as a mere frightened fist-shaking in the face of nothingness. In the bright cool shade of the stone yard I felt alone and threatened, as if abandoned, by night, on the great shelterless plains through which the diviner had passed to come to Tourmaline.

‘You’ll live forever,’ he said kindly. ‘Don’t worry.’ Because he himself had discovered hope, only a few days ago, he could patronize me, flying his brand-new purpose from the masthead. He was absurd, but also touching.

‘Bless you, Byrnie,’ I murmured, with an irony not ill-intentioned. ‘I can manage to keep on.’

He grinned, moving back into the gateway. ‘I’ll go and see Mike,’ he said, ‘and get this rod sorted out. And then you’ll see what’s going to become of Tourmaline.’ His blue figure, with a kind of salute, stepped out into the sunlight. ‘See you,’ he called back, and vanished around my walls, making for the road.

I squatted, meanwhile, in my cool light well, deciphering a letter from a lady of Geraldton, who demanded with some force that her ex-de facto husband be compelled to contribute to the maintenance of the child he had inflicted on her. Her style was terse and embittered. She appeared to upbraid my predecessor, to indict in him all members of our sex. I was a long time pondering over this letter, which pleased me with its wealth of domestic detail, and in unearthing other documents of a later date, some of them in my own writing.

So the morning passed away. And poor Byrnie, denied admission to the diviner, who was indisposed, settled down in the hotel to get drunk.

*

That evening he was singing, as usual, on the war memorial, his reformation already a thing of the past, apparently. Deborah came out to speak to him, kind but disapproving. He was far gone by then, and began to weep, abjectly, clutching his guitar and staring straight at her, like a child. She said: ‘Poor Byrnie,’ and went away again.

Inside the pub, Horse Carson, who was also drunk, was having an argument with Kestrel. Horse’s bark face was slightly flushed, but not, of course, animated—nothing could have made that eroded, deep-channelled plain less immobile. But he gestured now and then with his mallee-root fists, and seemed concerned to prove something.

‘Would you throw the poor bugger back again?’ he demanded of Kestrel. ‘Is that the kind of bastard you are? You ought to be driving that truck yourself, by Jesus.’

‘Did I say that?’ Kestrel asked, in his curiously soft voice.

‘What did you say, well?’

‘That he ought to go back where he came from. What’s he want here? We don’t need him.’

‘“We don’t need him,”’ Horse quoted, with scorn. ‘Ah no, mate. We don’t need water. We got rum to wash gold in. If we ever feel like a shower, we can always come down here and get you to tip a bottle over us. What would we want with water?’

‘There isn’t any water,’ Kestrel said, with an edge.

‘So we got your word for it,’ Horse said. ‘When did you set up as a dowser?’

‘Look, d’you think no other silly bastard’s ever tried?’

‘This bloke’s no ordinary silly bastard,’ Horse affirmed. ‘This bloke’s something special. You only got to look at him.’

‘Ah hell,’ said Kestrel in disgust. ‘Rocky, talk a bit of sense into him.’

‘What makes you so sure he’s no good?’ Rock wondered. He was standing, sad and sober, beside Horse, and gazing into his drink, which he did not seem to want. ‘He’s the sort of bloke who might know something. I’d trust him. I’d even pay him to try his hand at it, if that was what he was after. But he isn’t, by the looks of it. He just wants to stay here.’

‘He’ll be a social asset, all right,’ Kestrel said. ‘One of Mary’s mob—a man with religion.’

‘Ah, so what?’ Horse said. ‘You don’t drink now, do you? Everyone’s got some little virtue that craps someone else to death.’

‘Lay off, Horse,’ Jack Speed said.

‘I’ll lay off when Kes lays off the new bloke,’ Horse replied.

In the meantime Byrne had come in, trailing his guitar, and had pushed himself in between Horse and Rock. ‘Give us a drink?’ he asked Kestrel.

‘You’ve had a bellyful,’ his cousin said. ‘Go and ask your mate for a bucket of water.’

‘Buy me a drink, Horse.’

‘Sure,’ said Horse, who had credit (in gold) with Kestrel. ‘Give the poor sod a glass.’

‘You’re a bludger,’ Kestrel said to Byrne.

‘Yair,’ said Byrne. ‘Makes you thirsty, don’t it?’

‘Bludge off me then,’ Kestrel said coldly. ‘Not off your mates. I’ll make sure you work for it.’

‘Okay, okay,’ said Byrne, ‘I’ll bludge off you, Kes. Keep it in the family.’ But he helped himself, absent-mindedly, to Rock’s glass while he was waiting.

‘Kes doesn’t think too highly of the bloke across the road,’ Jack Speed said.

‘He’s a good bloke,’ Byrne asserted, rather slurred in his speech by this time.

‘Who, Kes?’

‘Kes is a good bloke,’ said Byrne, sentimentally. ‘Mike’s a good bloke. We’re all good blokes, all us bastards. Horse’s a good bloke, now,’ he further particularized, putting his arm round Horse’s shoulders and leaning on him heavily. ‘He’s a real good bloke, old Horse. I like you, you old bastard.’

‘Yair, well, get off of me,’ Horse said, removing himself.

Byrne staggered a little. ‘Mike’s crook again,’ he rambled on, in his drunken monotone. ‘He gets these headaches. Will he be like that all the time, d’you reckon, Rocky?’

‘How do I know?’ Rock said. ‘Could be.’

‘Hope he gets over it. He’s a good bloke, that one.’

‘You seem to have said that,’ remarked Kestrel.

‘Don’t be that way, Kes.’

‘I’m sick of the sound of this joker,’ Kestrel confessed. ‘But what the hell. He hasn’t done anything to me.’

Byrne belched, and drank, and then, still muttering something about good blokes, planted his elbow on the bar, forearm up. Horse did the same, and they grasped hands. Rock and Jack moved aside, as the struggle began, to see who could force down the other’s arm; a long deadlock, tedious to watch, a commonplace event in that bar of Kestrel’s. Byrne’s tongue protruded with the effort. Horse’s face was red.