Benang

by Kim Scott

  That poor family. The man of that family was as good as dead. Their breadwinner. Their saviour. They would not be able to fend for themselves, they would need help...

  Others might come, their kind.

  Why, there’d be a natives’ camp right in town before you knew it.

  See! That Sandy Two was back already, as if he knew this was going to happen. And that meant a Cuddles would not be far away.

  They were family, together. They placed the husband the father into the wagon, and bundled blankets and cushions around him. Fanny and Kathleen went one way with him, their cargo, and Sandy Two and Chatalong went another. They were family, together.

  Once around the foot of the ranges, Fanny, Kathleen and cargo camped at a waterhole. Kathleen leaned toward the water, and saw that the paperbarks behind her did the same.

  The dogs barked a warning. She and her reflection spun away from each other, leaving only trees, clouds, sky in the pool. And now, from between the trees, came oh so many people. There were kids, men, women; there were horses and a couple of carts. (One of which, Kathleen saw, was held together with wire and rope and continued to sway even after the horse had stopped.)

  Sandy Two waved to her from a cart which was laden high with possum skins.

  And there, standing precariously at the very top of the load, so dark against the sky and holding his arms out as if he were about to fly away into it, was Chatalong. Chatalong—where’s he been? Doing what? He was grinning, laughing, letting words fall fast and almost incomprehensible from his lips.

  What parson tellin’ you,

  Ole Mister Dodd,

  Tell you in Sunday School?

  Big pfeller God!

  He slid down the skins, and came to a sudden stop right between Fanny and Kathleen. The two women stepped back, and Sandy One, who they had carried and propped protectively at their feet, keeled over. Now they bent to him, and their patting, plucking hands reassured him and one another.

  Chatalong explained as best he could. ‘You know ’em,’ he said to Fanny. ‘They know you.’

  Fanny thought of a young dog running to and fro, excited, not sure which master to stay with.

  Kathleen climbed the stack of soft possum hides and looked down upon Sandy One, the father, who once again had fallen, and lay stiff and pale amongst animated limbs, mouths, voices. He seemed another being. Suffering.

  Kathleen had seen a dark-bearded man on a cross, in the schoolroom and church.

  She might also be one apart. Like Chatalong, who—because of all that talking—also was. And yet was not. Because of all that talking.

  The other children, having looked at Sandy (what’s this, a tree? Oh, this is old Sandy) now dispersed in the way water rushing down a gully might pause and divert its flow at a heap of earth before spreading across flat ground.

  It was sandy ground they camped on, shaded and dry. At its centre there was a spring.

  The elders circled this one who had called himself the father.

  They were moving again; there were buggies, carts, horses, but mostly it was walking. Some would stop, dig in the earth, collect food.

  Sandy One lay, pale and paralysed, in the wagon. His gaze moved about the sky, focused on the edge of the blanket they’d rigged up to shade him, returned to the distance. He looked impassively at faces that happened into his vision; his family’s, or those many impelled by curiosity and who spoke his name.

  Sandy Two and Fanny would lift the old man down, and drape a blanket from the wagon for Fanny to bathe him.

  Chatalong came to Kathleen with some kind of fruit. From that plant with the blue flower. It dries you up.

  Its bitter seeds took the moisture from her mouth.

  Fanny would wander away during the day, as she used to do when she was young, and in the years her children were at the mission. Once again, she was not alone.

  They came back with vegetables from the bush. Usually, there was kangaroo, rabbit, possum. So much more here than at the goldfields or the drier land to the east. But not quite like home.

  Late in the day, when they stopped, shelter quickly grew. Some places it was something draped over a buggy to block the wind while the buggy kept off any rain. Or it might be a tent, or a wall of bushes. There were rushes or bark woven through sticks jammed upright in the earth, and small bush shelters leaning each side of a tent, with a leafy roof reaching out to the fire.

  These were uncles, aunts, cousins camped around them. And although Sandy Two surprised his little brother by saying that there were lots who had gone and were dead, still there were many people, and in some places they stopped it seemed that there were fires going all about them as if they were only one among stars in the sky.

  They camped close, families in their own places, several steps away from one another. There was rabbit stew, or roo onion potato, maybe possum baked on the coals.

  They propped Sandy One among them, and Fanny fed him.

  A great fire, a party crowd. This wasn’t just corroboree stuff, Sandy Two told his little brother. You got all sorts of Entertainments here. There were people here who could play a piano. Plenty could paint in watercolours and oils. Some read and recited poetry.

  The strange wheezing of a piano accordion drew Chatalong into the circle of firelight. The flames and music leapt away from him, up. Pieces of wood tapped, but they were dancing a waltz. A woman grabbed him, ‘I’ll show you.’

  ‘But,’ he boasted, ‘I already know.’

  The woman’s face in his; together they looked at their feet sliding across the earth, looked back into the other’s grinning face.

  Sandy One came gliding past.

  A woman held him in her arms, and was skipping, was dancing on the waves of the accordion. Chatalong could see old Sandy’s toes trailing on the ground. The woman’s laughter was unceasing, rolling with the music. Fanny pushed through, saying no no, but her hands slid down the back of the dancer and she was laughing too, unable to stop herself. People bent double, slapped their thighs, and all the time Sandy One’s expressionless face, its chin contentedly resting on the woman’s shoulder and its watery eyes blinking, seemed to float through space. Kathleen was laughing with the rest of them.

  Fanny kissed her husband on the cheek. People chuckled still, even as the music and the dancing finished.

  Chatalong sat at the edge of the circle, behind the shifting accordionist. His back was cold in the darkness, his face hot from the smouldering inside him.

  Chatalong shivered. He went to the fire and joined the kids already there. They built and stoked the fire until it was crackling and throwing tongues up at the icy sky, out to the random geometries of bush shelters and tents. The shadows played, caressing the ground, only settling, only drawing the night back in from between and beyond the trees once the children had fallen asleep.

  Chatalong wanted to creep to Fanny and Sandy One, mother and father, and sleep with them. He found Fanny curled around the old man, whose face held a thin moon and sharp stars.

  So he huddled with the others, fire warming them all.

  Mostly they burned off timber which had been cut and stacked the previous year. Some of the men knew the older farmers. They spoke of how there were so many new farmers, spreading out from the snaking spine of the railway Chatalong had still not seen. There were new fences, too.

  Sandy Two went with some of the old men, and they organised work. If the farmer knew the police, or had a general permit, they also organised the money among themselves.

  Occasionally a woman did laundry for the farmer’s wife. They never went into anything like a town. ‘Wait until closer to home,’ said Sandy Two to Chatalong, ‘you can stay with us. Uncle Harry has a block there. You’re not too old for school, never too late to catch up.’

  The farmer who came down to their camp on horseback had a rifle. ‘You’re not camping here.’

  But they always had. And he owed them money.

  ‘Only for a job well done. Look, this is my land. I�
�ve sweated for it. You’re fouling my water, the dogs will have my sheep.’

  He fired the rifle into the ground in front of them, and left no way to argue.

  They used the axes, and rolled small timber onto tree stumps, felt the wind; a good wind meant a clean burn. They lit fires early in the day to burn the roots out of the ground, then went out for meat. After dark they walked back among the fires, stoking and rolling red orange yellow hearts back over where the claws of stumps still gripped the dark earth.

  Back closer to home, Harry Cuddles, who had hunted possum with Sandy Two, held a small property the white men’s way. With him lived his mother—a cousin of Fanny’s—and a wife and several children. He and Sandy Two had been earning a good living from possums for years now. Like Sandy, Harry had a wagon and horses, and had money to build a shed, put in a well. He would need to make improvements to keep the lease.

  ‘No woman good enough for me,’ Sandy Two would say, often, grinning.

  Chatalong and Sandy Two built a little bush shelter beside the tent for old Sandy to sit under during the day. The old man was improving. He could move his head and right arm. He could read—if they held a page before him—and signal with a gesture of his head, and speak just a little. At least, he made noises and Fanny interpreted for him. Chatalong liked to sit with him. He would take out the old fellow’s pocket watch, show it to him, and put it back. He began to find it easy to be silent.

  The old man’s eyes often welled with tears, which ran down his face and onto his chest. If they propped him up he could remain in a sitting position, although he had to be shifted regularly because of his sores. He would close his eyes, and still the tears ran. Chatalong wondered at this desire for blackness before your eyes, at what went through the old man’s mind.

  At least now, Sandy One was remembering. He must have seen it clear; such things as corpses shifting with the wind or ocean water, scattered bones, ears and other purses of flesh strung over a mantelpiece, and pools of water showing his own face against a blood-red sky. Yes, like an island in some bloody fluid. And he had memories even—although not strictly his own—of his own absence. And the island sinking in the rising aftermath of violence.

  Harriette came to see them, with all her children. Daniel was ill, she said. He’s in the hospital for a few days.

  It was the first time she had visited, a long time since they had spoken.

  They sat around a blazing fire. The night bright with a moon; calm, cold. If you let your eyes adjust you could look into the dark and see shadows, and each leaf seemed cupped to take water from the air.

  A bird called hauntingly. A curlew.

  The dusty roads gleamed in the moonlight, and curlews walked along them, uttering their weird, mournful cries. They held their heads high, and lifted and replaced their feet so proud and fastidious.

  Harriette said to her child, ‘Listen? Hear that?’

  Listen.

  ‘What? Someone been dragging their toes in the ground. Not lifting their feet proper, not putting them straight in front.’

  ‘Not me, Mum,’ said Will.

  ‘Well, they’re crying. They’re crying for some silly people not walking properly; not walking proud. They feel sorry for them—they always walk so nice and proud themselves.’

  Harriette looked across at her mother. Was she thinking the same thing, of a young girl barely out of the mission being lifted from the wagon by a group of strange men? The mother did all she could; she threw a blanket over the other children so they would not see.

  ‘Constable Hall is no more. He’s gone; to war,’ said Sandy Two. He was fairly beaming. Bobbing and ducking to keep his image in the tiny mirror hanging on the tree before him, Sandy Two shaved, slicked his hair with water, and when they came back from town he and Harry had new clothes and shoes for all the kids.

  Sandy had seen the constable. It was true, there was a new one. The constable said that the kids had to go to school.

  ‘And me,’ said Sandy Two, ‘I’m joining the army, the horses.’

  Now, as both Uncle Will and Uncle Jack liked to point out to me, the roads in the old days were quite different to those of today, even if we disregard the bitumen ones.

  All that talk of roads on which they’d worked. Of corners where the gradient wasn’t right, or where the surface had become holed and pitted. Maybe it was because they’d worked on the Main Roads Department gangs, or because we so often spent our days on bitumen. Sometimes we drove with the windows open, slowly enough that the wind did not roar or whip at us too much. I felt like I rode its back, or within it, quite still at its centre, yet rushing along. You could taste the air, even amongst the desolation of cleared and fenced land. Yet, because Grandad or Uncle Will often had some sniffle or cough, we usually drove with the windows up, and drove faster because of it. Then the air was stale, and country and western music or weary voices came from the radio; too loud and too thin. I used to lean my head against the glass and see my reflection superimposed upon the landscape behind it; monotonous, flat paddocks stretching away from the fence line either side of this black strip we sped along.

  ‘The roads then...’

  They used to talk like this sometimes as we sat around a fire of the evening and they sipped at their cheap, sweet wine, even holding a glass of it to Grandad’s lips at regular intervals. The roads then were mainly tracks on the natural surface. Sometimes limestone, or gravel over the boggier parts. Powder would form from the earth being ground by the steel wheels of loaded wagons and the tramp of heavy draught horses. The surface of the road was powder, and was not at all corrugated like today.

  Such smooth dusty roads made a wonderful surface for reading imprints of man, beast or bird.

  Slow speeds are good for thinking.

  Sandy Two left for Frederickstown, thinking of the people Hall had chased away. Unlike them, he chose to go. Hall had gone first. It was almost as if Sandy Two felt he had chased him away, and meant to chase him still. Now Sandy Two, a citizen (he believed) and a taxpayer, was going to fight for his country.

  He left in a sulky drawn by a big grey gelding.

  Sandy left. Harry Cuddles had children, a wife. ‘It’s not my war,’ he had said. ‘Not that one.’

  Sandy was alone. The clouds in the sky.

  He felt it was almost like sailing. He sailed on a breath of trust toward new country. But the land was not like the sea in that it slowed you, dragged you down to it. It was slow moving.

  He read the road. Hooves, wheels, snake.

  The gentle jingle jangle of draw bars in their steel rings, clinking of chains, creaking of wagon timbers; the murmuring of iron tyres along a sandy track.

  A horse can follow the way and it swings along easily.

  Clouds. Sand. Disturbed stones.

  It is hard to stay awake.

  The footprint of a bird.

  When he woke in the night and heard the call of the curlew, it occurred to Sandy that their steps were not so much careful as tentative. Stepping out on the moonlit road, they held themselves proudly, and yet were careful, were cautious. You had to be.

  What with Hall, Done, Starr, Mustle ... What was expected of him?

  He was as good as any man. As good as any white man. Better.

  He must believe that.

  a coolman and school

  ‘Nah Will, it wasn’t your fault. Leave that one out.’

  Well, Uncle Jack saying that just fired me up. Any suspicion of the two old men censoring a story, especially on the grounds that it might prove awkward or embarrass any of us, and I became fervent, mad, desperate to hear it. Straightaway.

  I knew Uncle Will wanted to tell, really. He was brave enough to recount memories which hurt him, and while I have none of his courage, we did share a certain masochism when it came to words. But my desires had developed more strongly in other directions. It used to please me, when my grandfather and I lived in a crumbling house, to carve words into his skin. My blade drew letters with a fin
e white line, but in an instant all precision would be lost in gushing blood. I bandaged his wounds to conceal what I wrote and, bathing them, considered how they grew, how they altered and elaborated on what I had intended. Anger was all that was available to me, back then. I burnt with it, was cold and sneering with it, and wanted to scar and shape him with my words because his had so disfigured me.

  I was a success.

  And Will had his way after all, and he and Uncle Jack gave us a speech, a newspaper article, and something else they had learnt at school.

  The new constable at Gebalup was prepared to go against the wishes of the local community to see the letter of the law upheld. He visited the Cuddles property and told them the children must attend school.

  It was a long trip to school for Kathleen, Chatalong, the Cuddles kids, and they were lucky to have one old horse to share between them.

  The date on the blackboard at the other end of the room was refined each morning, and each morning Chatalong did the subtraction: he was eleven years old. The oldest of his family there.

  So Gebalup School had seven new pupils. Five—the Cuddles kids—had never been to school before. They had been kept away, one way or another, from towns.

  It was a crowded classroom, and organised according to age; with the exception of the new kids, who were all put together. Will—even though he was not the eldest—was stationed among them as a sort of apprentice teacher. The teacher ordered him to hand out materials to his cousins, and called across the room that he’d have to help them.

  The name calling began on the very first day.

  Nigger.

  One of the older students—Mark Mustle it may have been, someone anyway—used to turn around when the teacher had turned her back. Sneering and smirking, he would hold his nose, Pooh. Whenever he could he grabbed the skin on one of the little kid’s forearms and twisted it. ‘See,’ he liked to say, doing it more gently on his own arm, ‘mine goes white and then red when I do it.’

  Kathleen and Chatalong were jogging to catch the others. They’d been detained, and asked about their previous schooling. ‘Oh, I see,’ said the teacher. And then told them that Wirlup Haven school was closing down. ‘Were there any other Aboriginal children there? No? Good.’