Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  Sometimes he gave me important news in this tangential way. As ever his information seemed broader and superior to mine. I turned to the woman who stood as if waiting to be dismissed. She said something and laughed frankly. Long and I were thus at least amusing chimeras.

  Now she turned away and began calling to unseen friends on the hill above. The air filled with shrieks, her own and those of other women. She was still near us though, as if everything on earth – staying, returning – was of equal value to her.

  I thought of Horace and some of his apposite, remarkable lines.

  ‘Mater saeva Cupidinum …’

  ‘The savage goddess of amours, allied with wild freedom, returns me to desires which I thought were dead.’

  In trying to rid ourselves of the young woman we shooed her ahead of us and so ourselves rose up the slope. I noticed that many of the harsher-barked trees around were covered with fat grey moths, often – it seemed – to a depth of three or four. These were the bogongs which had again, like last summer, begun invading our huts, and sat in layered torpor on many a yardpost. Above me, some native children, perhaps six-years-old to ten years, studiously ate from a tree, easefully plucking the moths away and devouring them like nougat. Seeing us, these children ran off to another source further up the slope, where they resumed eating with a glazed and sated contentment. Beyond them stood a group of older men, one so old that even in this warm air he was wrapped heavily in what seemed two kangaroo-skin cloaks. There were perhaps twenty men in his party. Some sat on the ground to watch us, others remained standing, but all their air was that of gentlemen in a country of plenty.

  I led the woman up to the men and, using mime, gentle pushing and other gestures of rejection, I indicated that we did not want any more such generosity. Even as I worked at this, I was overtaken by a sense that I was involved in a futile lesson. It was not helped by the fact that some of the men exposed their robust crooked teeth and laughed at me. Meanwhile the woman skirted the men and vanished at the same casual pace at which we had brought her here.

  To demonstrate to them that I was no chimera and would not vanish from this country, I went to one of the many moth-encased tree trunks, peeled one plump, torpid insect off the surface of the mass, and without even plucking its wings, determinedly ate it whole. This act of small bravery proved far more pleasant than I expected. The moth tasted like a sweet nut, and I swallowed it without any hardship, and would have willingly taken another.

  The elders hooted fraternally this time as if I had offered them a compliment. But had I proved my substantial nature so much as shown myself a clever manikin?

  An adventure to bring in December! We needed to go into the mountains to muster our cattle which, left to range, wandered off into the range to the east, the one Goldspink and Treloar called the Tinderies. I will not rehearse here the joys and perils of such an experience. But we were rather short of men who could ride well. O’Dallow was a ferocious bush hussar. Sean Long too rode with a Celtic vigour. One of the newer men, named Presscart, though born to be a weaver rather than to the saddle, had somehow acquired the gift of riding in New South Wales. He was a personable fellow, a fresh-faced Englishman who had been tried in Shropshire for his part in helping to destroy a mill full of mechanical looms, which he had thought would take away the living of himself and his parents.

  Of all of us, only Long and O’Dallow were competent at using a stock-whip, producing that sound that threatened to split the day apart and which compelled cattle.

  I was nervous, I confess, taking my short-handed felon cavalry into broken, rocky and wooded country, full of peculiar hazards – the nest holes of the large slothful wombat, for example. But Long said to me that this was the country for which the light, sure-footed New South Wales stock horses, the walers such as Hobbes, were bred. Brothers in that confidence, we rose up the mountain slopes and encountered scattered members of the herd, which broke away through the striking verticals of the ghost gums. Separating into two parties, Long’s and mine, each of which ended miles from the other, we ascended harder than the cattle, and outflanked and drove them towards a central gully which would serve to funnel them down to the plain.

  I saw my overseer amidst the dust and raucous animal protests as his party and mine drew close. Long was zealous in heading off with whistles and howls and plying of his whip the young bulls which tried to break out of our thin cordon. The dog with his party – Brutus – keeping always close to him, worked in an ecstasy.

  There is a crazed exhilaration in rushing cattle down a wooded mountain with brush-covered dips and mounds and hazards. At the bottom of the hill and in more open country they slowed, became less frenzied, more compliantly herdish and somewhat more compliant too in entering the stockyards. Here we separated out the steers and some of the calves for sale in Goulburn. Similarly heifers, and what we pretentiously called the mad bushians – a term reserved for a young bull born in the hills which had not yet seen a human, unless it were perhaps a glimpse of one of the Moth people. None of my cattle had yet suffered the brand – white paint daubed on the herd I bought earlier that year had served to mark them. The mature calves had not even that. But now I had a brand with a modified B above a bar. This would go onto the hides of all except the few cattle which carried Treloar’s brand, the modified T, and they would need to be returned to him for honour’s sake.

  On a breezeless, hot afternoon, we were still at the branding when a near-empty wagon appeared through the dust our activities had thrown up. It proved to be a tall Liverpudlian from Goulburn, one Finnerty, who had heard from Treloar that I had taken up the Nugan Ganway country. He addressed me in his jagged accent and said he would undertake each quarter to freight goods and mail to us and from us, as he had for some two years been freighting goods and mail to Goldspink at Treloar’s run. This first call of his was speculative, although he had brought some rum and canned plum duff in case I wanted to greet the coming Christmas in some style.

  And amongst what Finnerty carried as mail contractor was a letter from my two-years-younger brother, Simon, which I reproduce in part. At the time I would consider it plain and read it blithely enough, but on revisiting it years later, I saw that it reliably contained all the omens of the ultimate grief of our family.

  ‘I am happy to tell you,’ wrote Simon, ‘that I recently made an exploration of the Port Phillip and Melbourne area and find that all the best land has had the eyes studiously picked out of it by fellows who were there before me – which means not an aeon but a mere two or so years before me.’

  In this empire, a man has to be quick and born in the right second to seize a start. In a twinkling that thing we call the wilderness or ‘the bush’, the hoary nothingness, becomes some former army officer’s or prison guard’s rural estate!

  I intend to settle in the eastern section, as it is called – along a river they call the Broken. Now, consider the chart, what there is of it! The Broken is a location which will put me on the road between yourself and Port Phillip. If one day you should choose to drop over your alps and visit me – a mere ride of two hundred or so miles over snow-blocked passes and thick forest and amidst the local natives who are said to be very martial – then you shall be very welcome. One day indeed you might bring sheep to me for fattening and for droving to the Melbourne village, where mutton has a huge price! Thus we might combine commerce with brotherhood.

  Simon went on to say that Mother seemed now to be unwell in a general but

  … by no means dangerous way. I think it is that her children are leaving, and perhaps with them the basis for so much social activity in Ross and with the Batchelors out at Hydebrae. But Father is in strapping form, attending four days a week his law office in Hobart, and spending the other three days at the farm at Tiverton, conferring with the overseer Frume, drinking a little with him …

  Frume, I remembered, was a convict Luddite, a wrecker of machines, like my fellow, Presscart. In England, clearly, it had not been such an uncommo
n crime.

  He rejoices for all our sakes in the London price of wool, as I hope does his son in New South Wales.

  Now, most importantly, do you remember Elizabeth Purves, of the Purves family of Sorell? She has done me that greatest of honours … When I am established on my run, I shall return to Van Diemen’s Land for the wedding, which I well understand you may be unable to attend in view of your remoteness. My Elizabeth insists she wishes to occupy my Broken River station as my Companion on this Earth.

  Finnerty had also brought a letter for Long. It was all the way from Ireland – the postmark said ‘Sligo’ – but when I handed it to Long, he seemed to be defeated by this reminder of lost places and secreted it straight off with a grimed hand into the pocket of his brown trousers.

  On Nugan Ganway’s first Christmas morning Long and I rode out to the huts with some rum and canned plum duff. The men expressed their thanks plainly and so very touchingly. I was pleased to find no black gins around the place, though God knows that men like Shegog might have temporarily sent them away. The native fires could be seen on the hills, as banal today as on other days. Long and I rode back to the homestead half-tipsy, observed by a line of placid natives on the ridge above.

  We drank some rum with Clancy and O’Dallow in their hut, a few yards from my own, and then one of the men carried a rough Christmas dinner to the homestead, where Long and I dined in masterly isolation, talking of nothing but our recent muster and the increase figures. Long was entitled to have deposited in the savings bank in his name his small portion from our first sale of steers and calves. We were dining on nothing but mutton and some beef as usual, enhanced however by the appetite morning rum had given us and spiked up by the pot of mustard I had also bought from Finnerty. As I ate and we conversed, I noticed that the letter Long had received weeks earlier now lay beside his plate. At last I pointed to the letter. ‘News from home?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘No bad news in your letter, I hope.’

  There was silence. I could hear Clancy and O’Dallow and a few other men singing in the second hut.

  ‘It is written in a dense style,’ he told me. ‘In a script I have to do battle with.’

  ‘The work of a notary or a scribe, I suppose.’

  ‘My papers say Reading and Writing, and I can get the better of some print. But not fully read this.’

  ‘I don’t wish to intrude, Sean. But I would be pleased to supply that service.’ I knew as soon as I spoke that this was not a good offer to make on Christmas Day. In his world few wrote letters idly.

  He thought, ate some more mutton, sipped his rum. Then Clancy brought us two bowls in which lay segments of the modern miracle of English canned pudding, and when that was reduced to fragments, Long abruptly passed the letter to me.

  I unfolded it and found it was indeed a densely written letter. I hoped the poor fellow had not been trying to make sense of it for days.

  ‘Dear Son,’ I read aloud, ‘With this come my devout prayers for your endless well-being. I am reconciled to the woeful truth I shall never see you in this world again but think daily on the hope of that better location where we shall be face to face without the veil of distance.’

  I heard Long grunt, as if to cast doubt on the idea of better places.

  ‘There is no day passes that I fail to think of you and what your life must be. I see your dear wife and children, young Sean Pat being now nine years of age and yourself reborn. To behold him is at the one time a joy and a sharp sorrow. He is sturdy and has your quiet manner, so I am left to hope he does not harbour dark plans and eat his soul alive as did you. Your dear wife’s family is a well of kindnesses to me – I thank God they are so numerous, for they have supported her and me in your absence.’

  Long packed a pipe as he told me casually, ‘Yes, I was married, Mr Bettany.’

  ‘I knew that,’ I said. ‘But somehow it means more now …’

  ‘I signed that paper men can sign. To petition that she be sent here to join me. But nothing’s been heard. There’s plenty of English wives brought out. But in Ireland you have Dublin Castle, and it never finds the means.’

  ‘Your son though?’

  ‘I have two of them. One older than Sean Pat. They’ll join me perhaps when they’re grown and I’m prosperous.’ Yet he did not suggest his wife might come. ‘Would you ever mind reading on now, Mr Bettany?’

  I did, and was soon sorry. ‘We have just had here the saddest news which I hate to break to you of your dear brother Martin’s death with the army in the Indies. It was fever, and old Mr Mulcahy who served in the Indies as a boy came to the wake to your dear brother’s memory and said that fever is awful in the Indies or in Jamaica …’

  I broke off and said, ‘My dear fellow, this is all dreadful news.’

  Long looked at his hand and murmured, ‘God rest him then.’

  I could not read on in this phase of bereavement. The silence grew. I said, ‘Your brother was a soldier then?’

  ‘Ah, he was with me in the little act we arranged for the Marquis of Sligo.’ They had, it seemed, while wearing some thin disguise, broken into the marquis’s house to utter threats over rent. This was the old marquis, he told me. I had indeed read in a copy of the Times at Barley’s place that the father had been succeeded by a somewhat more open-handed, Whiggish son. ‘There’s five whole battalions of the 60th Regiment and they fill them up from the gaols. They counted me a little old for that purpose, but they took Martin, and he knew it for a fever ticket.’

  He drank some rum and coughed a great deal. I was at that point overcome by a partially tipsy passion to challenge his stoicism. I reached across and poured more rum into his pannikin. He took it up and tipped it onto the earth floor, the first Australian libation I had seen. I was not offended but filled my own mug and did likewise, pouring it out.

  ‘For the spirit,’ he murmured. ‘May the souls of the faithful departed … Dear Jesus, if I’d taken better thought, we might both be by the turf fire for this feast with everyone around us. I understand perfectly now there is no overturning of what is called the law. I did not know then that it could move me so far through space. That it could move me so far and be waiting here to receive me too. So here we are.’

  ‘Here we are,’ I agreed, percipient with liquor. ‘Life is all accidents.’

  Long was in the meanwhile shaking his head. ‘The mortal being scarce has time on this earth for regret or complaint. Do you mind, Mr Bettany?’ He nodded to the letter again. He did not want my tipsy reflections.

  I read on. ‘The air in the Indies is so bad, we hear. But who would have thought it could strike down a soul like Martin’s? He is at the right hand of the Virgin now, which must be our solace.’

  At that Long nodded. ‘It must be,’ he said, though not sounding as if he meant it in quite the way the letter did.

  I concluded reading at a good pace. ‘Your wife and children – as do I – long to have a word from you. We hear of you that you have been made a constable in New South Wales! Such a thing! The Drynan family have heard this from Thomas Drynan of Barryshaun who works at shepherding for a New South Wales magistrate.

  ‘So in hope of a note and in shared sorrow but with sure and certain expectation of the Resurrection, I am Your one own Mother.’

  I let the missive settle in the room, and its sadness wash over me, the lacrimae rerum, on a day when I was doing so well, and existed exactly where I hoped to be. After another sip of the liquor, which was good Indian stuff, not some Parramatta rotgut, I said, ‘Should you need to write … or any assistance … my note paper and pens are here for your use. I could also …’

  ‘You could also write it for me in copperlate and add a Latin tag.’ He sounded just an ounce shy of hostility. I could see that the same excellent liquor was making him a little more direct as well.

  ‘If you wish, I could,’ I said.

  ‘The text that must operate here, Mr Bettany is this: Let the dead bury their dead!’
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  ‘This is a little harsh on a wife. And a mother.’

  ‘Oh the harshness is not mine. One should ask Dublin Castle about that. And I have seen men waste by writing notes, and receiving notes, and pretending that these others, the left behind, are – for real purpose – the living. And being disheartened when the breathing presence can in no way be conjured. Not for me, sir. That’s not for me as I am now.’

  ‘Even so,’ I argued. ‘A word. You should write a word surely. Something to be shown to your children. A scrap of writing with your name on it.’

  He thought a while, then said, ‘It might be a sop to them, and a sop to me. Those who have crossed that line we have all crossed, we do not write a piddling letter, Mr Bettany. It would be a scar on their sight. What man, once gone, would try to scar his children?’ He suddenly raised a hand and pointed upwards and to the vague north-west, in the direction of impossibly distant Europe. ‘I regard them,’ he said. ‘I regard them, and so do not open the wound.’

  I was slow, trying to frame an answer to this.

  Long spoke again. ‘After seven years of no contact, a man is able to present himself to a minister of religion and swear that he has not written letters for seven years, and neither his wife. That they are, that is, dead to each other … I will not lie about such a thing. I will not say I have neither written nor received if I have written and received. I am trying to be a sensible man.’

  ‘It is not for me to tempt you,’ I told him.

  ‘My brother,’ he said. ‘Could you and I, Mr Bettany, drink a health to his good rest?’

  And so we did.

  Shegog has been speared! One of his shepherds appeared at my door in the middle of a hot night and screamed the news. ‘We told you we need bloody carbines!’ he howled. Leaving Long to organise Clancy and O’Dallow into a homestead guard, I rode out on Hobbes, carrying the shepherd behind me on my saddle.