The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith

by Thomas Keneally

  “That tree there is the Eucalyptus gigans. It has been introduced to the isle of Cyprus, I believe, with resounding results.”

  Oxalis ran yellow up and down the aisles of the orchards.

  “The gold is welcome,” said Mr Neville. “But there, that purple on the embankment, that is far from welcome. It is Mediterranean bugloss. The Hunter River people call it Paterson’s Curse.”

  Or again, “They have begun an open-cut coal mine down the valley. A fine outcrop of coal, a godsend. They call it Greta. You don’t have to go down into the mine, you see, you don’t have to ruin your lungs. You work on the surface. You dig into the hillside. It might be possible one day for you to get work there, Jimmie.”

  Mr Neville was happy now, in a decent pastorate in a decent town. He knew that the white women with their corseted bounteous wombs would not tempt as he had been tempted at Brentwood.

  Going to the butcher’s for Mrs Neville, Jimmie Blacksmith saw a kinsman squatted in the shade of a draper’s shop. It was a man called Wongee Tom Carstairs, aged about forty.

  Wongee Tom demonstrated Wilf Blacksmith’s dictum:

  Black feller kin eat,

  Black feller kin drink.

  Black feller can’t do both

  And drinkin’s happier.

  Wongee Tom was sleeping off his happiness but had one eye out for friends, such as Jimmie. His cheeks folded themselves strangely into creases of apparent contentment.

  “Hey, yer paley bastard!” he murmured.

  “Hey, Wongee Tom.”

  “Yair, that’s who. How’s that old sow Dulcie goin’?”

  “Dulcie’s good. Wilf’s drunk.” It was a safe enough prediction. “Dottie’s good, Mort’s bloody good. Are you good?”

  “Yair, not workin’ much.” He chuckled at his own joke. They could get very superior, these travelled blacks who had seen the large towns.

  “Are there other Emu-Wren here?” Jimmie asked in Mungindi.

  “Emu-Wren?” Wongee Tom mocked. “Bullshit.” But he gave in to the old language. “I’ve come a big walk from Brentwood, walking all the way. Hardly a black man to offer me a roll of his wife. No Emu-Wren. I don’t know why I left the plains. The crayfish here are good. Nice red meat.”

  “You got a job?” Jimmie asked. In English, for in Mungindi there was no word for job.

  “I catch ’em possums. Sell ’em skin. Thrippence a skin. Not much. Wish I had a gun. Whitefeller don’t like Wongee hangin’ round homestead catchin’ possums. You bugger off, blackie! Thrippence a skin, that’s all.”

  “Long time since yer skinned yer last possum,” Jimmie Blacksmith teased him.

  “Like hell, yer paley bastard!” Then Wongee Tom gave in and laughed out his admissions. “Don’ know when last one was. Possum meat scrawny, full of bones. Wongee rather pinch bacon.”

  Both black men sat, watching a farmer’s family, who had crossed the pavement to the draper’s door.

  From within came the gurgle of the store-owner welcoming custom. The mother and three girls passed both black men without a glance. All of these were sucking with a varying degree of blatancy and a half-pound bag of boiled sweets was secure in the possession of the eldest girl. Only the youngest, perhaps four, blue-eyed beneath a sailor’s cap on which was printed H.M.S. Sugar and Spice, delayed at the door to look full at Wongee Tom. Already, it seemed, she knew that she must take whatever chances of direct gazing came to her, since her mother would soon have her taught to observe such people only obliquely, in a manner that did little for one’s knowledge.

  Wongee smiled at her tolerantly. “Yer oughter come back twenty years’ time, plant them blue eyes on Wongee …”

  The little girl ducked away from the proposal and into the draper’s gloom, where her mother was testing the strength of a square of serge.

  “Oughtn’t say that sort of thing, Wongee. Give us a bad name.”

  H.M.S. Sugar and Spice dashed past them as her family left the store, the tough square mother bound flinty-eyed for her next shopping task.

  “Would you like a white woman, Wongee?” Jimmie Blacksmith asked Wongee – since Mrs Neville had mentioned the possibility for him.

  “Don’t seem ter make the cow-cockies happy, having white woman for ‘is wife. Why else he come after black girls? Must be sum’pin to white women we ain’t been told.”

  They went on sitting and spoke of other things. When Jimmie next saw the family of girls, the eldest was carrying a new spirit heater; and her mother, all at once, authorized all the younger ones to partake of the confectioner’s viaticum the big sister carried half open beside the heater.

  Jimmie Blacksmith fell in love with the eldest girl without delay. He wanted her homesomeness, the density of her air of family security; the way she carried and gave away, unselfconsciously bountiful, the barley-sugar, the family eucharist.

  And with love, ambitions! The son Mrs Neville wanted him to have, landowning ambitions, ambitions for contracts, for bonding one’s word and sticking to a job until it was finished.

  The girl went by in sturdy clothes and a light film of brown dust on her strenuously buffed boots. He watched her full-fleshed waist recede, and never saw her again.

  “Ay,” said Wongee Tom, “yer wouldn’t mind that fat girl! Yer stalky bastard!”

  If he had looked upon his black initiation in an evangelical way, he might have come to call this moment the one in which he lost his black core. It had been eroded by the Nevilles’ ceaseless European pride – the acclaim of gum-trees in far places, the schooling in the globe and the bulk of things British, let alone European. Even by the bright oxalis in the orchards, or talk of the open-cut at Greta.

  “I think I might git a job in the open-cut,” he said suddenly.

  “Diggin’ coal?”

  “Yair. I’ll git a job there.”

  “There’s a woman here,” Wongee Tom said in the tribal language. “She isn’t Mungara. She yawns for men and not with her mouth. She weeps for men and not with her eyes. She drinks men down, she is a cave for men.” He laughed. In English he said: “But she don’t keep the rain off. We git together in the paddock behind the Caledonian. We git a young whitefeller buy us sherry. We gotter drink ’im bloody fast because bloody p’lice come round every hour. But there’s lubras round all the time, but this special one, Lucy, see.”

  Suddenly he sounded urgent. “Don’ git a job in the open-cut. Come round to the Caledonian Sat’dee night. Is all a poor black bastard got left.”

  The Saturday night was a visit to hell. All creeping through fences, tripping on tussocks, passing money to white boys who, on the whole, were honest and brought back sherry.

  The remote laughter of whites in the Caledonian, then the sizzle of liquor down his throat, the bursting radiance of it in his chest. “Too much!” he tried to say. But it was warm.

  Time moved in jerks. Suddenly he was retching; suddenly pouring himself without joy into one of the women.

  Hiding in the long grass when the police made their rounds. Someone belching. Someone tittering at someone belching.

  More fire in his throat. Dark hands forcing bottles and thighs on him.

  As well as jerking forward, time made events seem almost simultaneous to drunk Jimmie Blacksmith, made of hours one reeling, rutting, reeking moment.

  He was arrested but didn’t know it.

  He woke, shivering and indoors, and the first voice he heard was Mr Neville’s.

  “… always been exemplary.”

  “Never Wandered orf?”

  “Once when he was a child. Some years ago now. At Brentwood.”

  “They think it’s their right to wander orf.”

  “Not Jimmie. He works well. Sticks to a job.”

  Suddenly Jimmie, who had awoken with a sense of isolation, understood and looked where he was. Someone had, it seemed, put him down on a bunk with accuracy and then he had fallen into the tangle of aboriginal legs, heads and pudenda on the floor. There was, of course, a
stink of old vomit.

  A constable whose trousers were dangerously long for such sticky treading came along the corridor to the cells.

  “Right! Jimmie Blacksmith?”

  “Me, boss.”

  “Yore friggin’ luck! A reverind’s come for yer. And Mrs Reverind too. Hope yer know how to behave fuckin’ grateful.”

  “Yair.”

  “Orright.” He unlocked the cell door. No one on the floor moved. They lay like figures in a massacre. “Don’t tread on no one’s balls. Git orf to the pump and wash yerself down.”

  It was very early, cock-crow in the yard, and an icicle hung from the pump. Jimmie washed himself unsparingly in front of the constable. He felt elated, enough to pity the policeman. Jimmie Blacksmith was baptizing himself a white man, whereas there was nothing the constable could baptize himself. He was doomed to a broken-pillar monument in Muswellbrook graveyard, with Raised by Subscription from his Comrades chiselled on it.

  “Christ,” the man said, “why’ve yer gotter be the cleanest fuckin’ darkie in Australia? It’s cold.”

  “Won’t be a second, boss.”

  But he had taken his shirt off and was bringing freezing handfuls of water to his armpits. Belching secretively, he watched the new sun cut a hard line of shadow across the frost in the yard, encouraging him to be severe with himself, and long-suffering. Property was the key, he understood, and not to give it away to your kin; not when they had thirsts like Wilf or Wongee Tom.

  Jimmie Blacksmith told the Nevilles he wanted to leave and get work at the open-cut. They consented, but first they felt they must ascertain – as religious people always need to – that his motives were correct.

  “If you get in with that drunken crowd you won’t be given a job, and if you are, you won’t keep it.”

  “That mob make me feel sick, Mr Neville. I don’t want that crowd. I gotter start working so I kin git property.”

  “I’ll give you a reference,” Mr Neville said, and looked for a second, without seeming much comforted, into his wife’s approving face.

  They did not want even to look at Mr Neville’s reference when he tried there for work.

  But Jimmie would not descend to muttered black curses.

  “Orright, boss,” he said; and tried to find work in the orchards. But there had been an economic depression, they told him, and itinerant whites had taken all the work there was.

  At last he was lucky enough to get a contract from an Irish farmer up river. One of those harsh, commercially-minded Irishmen with a fat, bleak-eyed young wife to sit by his fire and ponder on the crucifix above it.

  Middle-aged farmers with prescriptive plump wife and crucifix are not known to be generous. The basis of the contract was this. One of Healy’s pastures ran uphill into forest, and cows had therefore been occasionally lost and stolen. Jimmie was to make a forest fence, post-and-rail hardwood, posts seven feet apart, going rate one shilling and sixpence a rod, to be finished by the end of September. It would cost Healy £2 12s. 2 d.

  The Irishman was always delivering ultimatums and stepping up close to Jimmie. He had a large square beard like a nobleman called the Duke of Clarence, whom Mr Neville had once shown Jimmie a photograph of and, in a spasm of recklessness, even whispered that there were people who thought the duke was Jack the Ripper. Like the duke, Healy had the air of a basilisk.

  “Yer have any religion? Other than nigger?”

  “Methodist, boss.”

  “Then I give yer me Christian promise that I’ll cut yore bloody black balls out if yer mess this job. And every post that’s out of place an inch, I’ll dock yer a shillin’.”

  “Fair enough, boss.” It would be part of his cunning, he swore, to accept insult as a business proposition.

  The means Jimmie used to acquire fencing tools are of little interest, except that he had stolen the shovel from Mr Neville’s place, knowing where it was kept and not having to fumble for it in the dark.

  Jimmie suspected that there was some sort of justice involved in that theft. Perhaps there was, for the Nevilles were the ones who, although poor themselves, had taught him that possession is a sacred state. They had even given him a parting endowment, a small amount; a deposit, they might have considered it.

  Possession was a holy state and he had embarked on it with the Nevilles’ shovel. The Nevilles had succeeded so well as to make Jimmie a snob. In the mind of the true snob there are certain limited criteria to denote the value of a human existence. Jimmie’s criteria were: home, hearth, wife, land. Those who possessed these had beatitude unchallengeable. Other men had accidental, random life. Nothing better.

  Aimed for beatitude, then, he called on the Department of Agriculture office in Muswellbrook.

  There were two white clerks quarrelling behind an oak counter. One of them spoke upper-class English.

  “Federate all you like,” he was saying, “but if you do, New South Wales will be flooded with cheap produce from Queensland and cheap furniture from Victoria. The West Australians and Tasmanians will never vote for union, anyhow. They know just how they’d fare against the stronger States.”

  It wasn’t Jimmie’s argument: he wanted a leaflet on what wood should go into fencing.

  “It worked for Canadians,” the local boy said. “Yer can’t say it didn’t work for the Americans.”

  “Ah, didn’t the United States have trouble enforcing federation? Would you like a civil war and thousands of dead?”

  “It’d never happen here. Could yer imagine Australians shooting at Australians?”

  “I could imagine people who are mean-hearted, narrow and uncultivated committing every conceivable brutality. If the cap fits … And you seem to forget, my friend, that there’s no such thing as an Australian. Except in the imaginations of some poets and at the editorial desk of the Bulletin.”

  “No such thing as an Australian?”

  “Not in the political sense. Not in the sense in which there are Belgians or Germans or Frenchmen …”

  “Or your indomitable bloody breed!”

  “Or Englishmen,” the Englishman agreed. “Here there are only New South Welshmen, Victorians, Queenslanders, Vandemonians and so on. But there is no such thing as an Australian. The only true Australians are –”

  At that moment he noticed Jimmie waiting at the counter.

  “– the aborigines,” he murmured.

  The Australian too adverted to Jimmie.

  “Jacko?” he called. “He’s an honest poor bastard but he’s nearly extinct.”

  “And, surprisingly, that is the work of those you so fancifully call Australians.”

  “It’s a hard country. Lower ways of life give way to higher. Your crowd believe that. Look what yer done to the Irish and the poor bloody Highlander. My grandfather was a poor bloody Highlander. Christ, yer gave them a chance, didn’t yer? So poor bloody black Jacko’s gone. It’s sad, but he had to go, and now there are six States that wish, without any necessary disrespect to the mother country, to make themselves into a federation and face common enemies.”

  “What common enemies?”

  “The Asiatics. The Russian Pacific ambitions.”

  The Englishman sniffed. “I don’t think you’ll be seeing any Cossacks. I think you put too high a price on your quite unstrategic country.”

  “I wish we put a high enough price on it to keep out wingeing buggers like you.”

  “Don’t you worry. I don’t intend to stay here for ever. There are financial problems attached to going home. The fare …”

  “When we’ve got a federal government, my friend, it’ll pass a law to give every single wingeing bloody Pommie his fare home to England. Back to the smoke and the sun shining ten days a year and shit in the streets. Yer can have it. We’ll have Federation, thank you.”

  The Englishman pretended to sort papers, but the Department of Agriculture wasn’t getting its value out of either of them today.

  “All I can say is that we’ve had a unitary system
of government since the Saxons and it doesn’t seem to have done us any harm.”

  This appeal to Saxon kings, to a deep past, to strata of common-sense government, to an imperial apogee, could raise an ambivalence in the consciousness of Australians, who were

  – yet were not – of that profound Britannic inheritance. To say it more clearly, it could make them peevish.

  “Yer got by at the price of tyranny and the price of slaughtered Scots and Irishmen. Not to mention the poor fucking Indians.”

  “Come now,” said the Englishman. “Language!”

  “And what about the Boers? Yer want to fight them. Actually want to. Yer bringing it on, no matter what the papers say. That lecturer from the Fabian Society says England actually bloody wants the war. Then yer’ll want all the poor bloody Australians and New Zealanders and Indians to enlist. The first Australian who gets a bullet through him’ll be delighted to know there’s no such thing as an Australian.”

  “Goodness, your attitude to England is inflammatory. What a pity you’ve never been there.”

  “What a pity you didn’t fuckingwell stay there!”

  The Englishman went on palely stacking leaflets.

  “We shall see when Mr Parr rises from his bed of influenza, we shall see what he thinks about insulting a fellow officer of the Department before a visitor.”

  “In front of a visitor? Jacko over there? Mr Parr’ll kick yer arse in for wasting time. With his No. 9 arch-support boot from Anthony Hordern’s, he’ll kick yer bloody arse in.”

  The Englishman stamped his foot. His hands were full of handbills, entitled Feed-Crops for the Dairy Farmer, which trembled.

  “I won’t tolerate this, in front of a visitor. You will kindly serve the visitor or I shall place a complaint in memorandum form on Mr Parr’s desk.”

  “Yer can place your memorandum on Mr Parr’s desk or do any other bloody thing with it that suggests itself.”

  “Carmichael!”

  The Federationist shrugged and strolled across to the counter.

  “Yair, Jacko?”

  “I want t’ know about fences, boss, what yer got to do to ’em before yer put ’em in the ground. I got this contract, yer see boss, an’ I want t’ do a fuckin’ good job.”