The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith

by Thomas Keneally

  The once or twice he was thrown he would lie belly-first in the dirt and then roll on his back, one leg crooked like a tickled dog, hooting and whooping glee.

  “All the bloody time laugh, Mort, it’s no good.”

  “Why?”

  “Yard boss say bloody stupid boong … Next thing yer know about yer git yer marchin’ orders.”

  But the laughter persisted, and had a hint about it that Mort’s joke was very private and cherished for its secrecy. Whites resented such hints.

  One night Jimmie had another strange experience of this endless chortling. At the blacks’ camp outside Scone, he slept with a full-blood in the same room where Mort had her half-breed sister. The symmetry of the situation was not planned, yet might have accounted why, half-way through his penetration of the girl, Mort could be heard chuckling. And the girl too, as if he had passed the contagion of his joke to her with his seed.

  The truth was that Mort was only seventeen, and awkward.

  In the late autumn of 1899, the two brothers went home to Brentwood. In the mission station the legend was rife of the Blacksmith brothers’ success in the large world.

  A child who saw them called out, “Here come the rich fellers.”

  Tabidgi Jackie Smolders waited at Dulcie’s place to receive the maternal uncle’s share of their goods and money. Forty-two years, but an ancient man. His status had not stopped him from drinking sherry-and-varnish. As a result his beard had fallen out in tufts.

  “Yer don’t want t’ think us Blacksmiths rich boys,” Mort told him. “I got fifteen bob and some beef and flour.”

  Tabidgi was visibly disappointed at Morton’s pathetic inventory. Nonetheless he took what Mort had and distributed it amongst Emu-Wren, as much as distribution was feasible.

  The ambitions of Emu-Wren being blatantly alcoholic this chilly day, Jimmie Blacksmith made a sour face at the tribal system itself. Mort, less complex, less undermined, could not be dissuaded from simple, giggling joy at being home.

  “How yer off, Jimmie?”

  There was a crowd to see Jimmie Blacksmith give up his fortune to his kin. To them one was identified, endowed, augmented, in the giving.

  “How’m I off?”

  “Yer got much, Jimmie?”

  “Much what?”

  Everyone was frowning.

  “Christ!” Jimmie screamed and took notes and silver from his pocket and pelted them at the dust.

  It was a great loss to him. It was the measure of his experience of the world, his £2 15s. It should not have come from him so easily. Now he had only the things that swagmen have, flour, beef, tobacco.

  In the shock of having done what he had done he went indoors in Dulcie’s hut and lay on a mattress with his face to the wall. Where bark had shorn off, a piece of tin was hammered to an upright, but free at one end. It trembled delicately with the wind – Dulcie would have to see to something more adequate than that. Nammonia – to use Dulcie’s word – got in at places like that. Nammonia had killed Wilf.

  Dulcie followed him inside.

  “Tired?”

  “Yair. We have a gab a little later, eh, Dulcie?”

  “Orright.”

  She pottered about, crooning.

  Child of mine, spill what tears you have

  As you grow to be a man

  Your tears will grow to be

  Rivers in high flood.

  “Tabidgi made Wilf nice cross,” she called. “The parson say his prayers real nice for poor bloody old Wilf. He was awful sick. He was always talkin’ about findin’ you, about goin’ off. He use t’ call yer name out when he had his fits.”

  For the rest of his home-coming day, Jimmie Blacksmith slept off his confusion. As he slept, Tabidgi selected men to sneak into town for booze.

  He stayed two days only at Brentwood, sleeping a great deal and in a kind of languor. Sometimes he was awoken by lurching songs – all his money going up in bad music.

  He found out too that Dulcie had remarried: that was a detail Dulcie had not mentioned. The groom was a half-breed half-wit who chuckled like Mort, yet far more vacantly, far more quietly. He sat in corners studiously spitting bloody phlegm into a peach tin. You could have fitted a cricket ball between the sagging ganglions at the base of his throat.

  Of course, Jimmie vacated the marriage mattress and slept wrapped in a blanket, slept strenuously, sapped and in shock. Perhaps in what anthropologists would call cultural shock later on, too late to help Emu-Wren.

  Now Dulcie was old and slept with dying men. The maternal uncle was a moulting drunkard. Dottie had consumption and a husband who beat her. Emu-Wren was hawking up its living tissue.

  He should have been glad but was unconsolable. When Dulcie brought him food he turned his head into a corner.

  “You paley bastard make me sad,” she said. But she was not desolate. Her brain sat warmly behind its tribal vapours. And booze too. One night she would fall down drunk and frost would grow over her. A swift nammonia would see her safe into Brentwood cemetery.

  5

  Jimmie Blacksmith left early and took an unexpected direction. Since his name now connoted someone who had crossed the Divide in the east, he went west. Not north-west along the tribal river Marooka. Not Marooka because there were towns on all its fords to drop rumours of him south to Brentwood. But beyond the Castlereagh, where the squatters were full of heart again after the long drought, there was a plague of red kangaroos. The pastoralists paid up to a shilling a tail for kangaroos shot on their property.

  Leaving Brentwood he was bare-footed and his feet crunched the stiff frost, and the whining of dogs steamed round his legs. Somewhere in the camp an early-riser was hacking wood.

  He had only essentials with him, and his axe and razor-sharp wedges. But he was on his way to the true station country, where money was plentiful and the squatters’ wives had servants; “nice girls off stations”, as Mrs Neville had said.

  One morning, he felt sure, he would wake up “Mr Blacksmith”. Drily, gutturally, he sang a song out of the white dances they used to have in Muswellbrook. His intentions were exemplary; it was delight to find oneself a just man.

  He had cleared Mudgee, pleased to have put a big town between Tabidgi Jackie Smolders and himself.

  Then he met a mounted trooper travelling east from Wellington. The policeman’s broad heavy bay held its nostrils wide, stimulated by the day, and the officer himself seemed to be attempting to match this bravura by riding one-handed with his right fist on his hip. Lazily, he shortened rein and halted by Jimmie Blacksmith.

  “Wot yer got in the bag, Jacko?”

  “Me tools of trade.” Jimmie held the mouth of his bag wide.

  “Axe, wedges,” the trooper recited. “Wot trade is it?”

  “Fencin’, boss.”

  “P’liceman, ’e thinks yer bloody steal all them.”

  “No boss. I buy ’em with contract money from Mr Healy near Merriwa.”

  “Merriwa?”

  “Yair, constable.”

  “I’m stationed at Merriwa. Me name’s Senior Constable Farrell. Yer watch out fer me if ever yer git on the booze, Jacko!”

  “Orright.”

  “I jest rook a man t’ Wellington t’ git hanged, Jacko. A man about yer own age. He killed a sixteen-year-old girl in Wellington, just because she had his bun in the oven. What d’ yer think of that sort of behaviour, Jacko?”

  “Bloody disgraceful, boss.”

  “I should say so. Soon he’ll meet Mr Hyberry? Yer know Mr Hyberry, Jack?”

  “No, boss.”

  “A famous gentleman, Mr Hyberry. A butcher from Balmain, and public hangman as well. He’s a scholar, Mr Hyberry. One of the honours of me life, meeting him. Where yer off to now, Jack?”

  “West.”

  Farrell raised his eyebrows at finding a black who knew his cardinal points.

  “Can’t stand bloody Brentwood,” Jimmie further confessed.

  “Kin yer track, Jacko?”

>   “Yair, I kin track.”

  “Go ahead and track.”

  That was easy. The west crawled with rabbits. Their spoor, scarcely broken by his own morning tracks and the trooper’s, were all over the road. His finger traced padmarks along the edge of the road and into tussocks on the verge. Somebody’s boundary fence ran to his left and above him to his right was a hillock with three ancient peppermint trees. Here was a camp-site for bullock drivers, but the earth beneath had been tortuously mined by pestilential rabbits.

  There were so many clear tracks across the frost that Jimmie Blacksmith thought the trick hardly worth doing, and turned back. But there was Farrell’s horse bouncing and snorting, steam rising from its croup, and Farrell himself seemed still to be willing to be impressed. So Jimmie shrugged and went on.

  Rabbit was of course no one’s totem – an imported animal, everyone’s fair game. Minute shifts in the lie of grass and twig and fallen leaf led Jimmie Blacksmith across the lacing of other tracks to a burrow.

  “I can’t see nothing,” Farrell called.

  “It’s a rabbit hole, boss.”

  Jimmie began to dig up its secret geography with his axe. At last three animals broke from the earth between his legs and Constable Farrell, without smiling, shot one through the shoulders with his dragoon pistol.

  When Jimmie had fetched it, Farrell tied the little corpse to his saddle with string. “ Give him t’ Mrs Public House in Mudgee,” he explained. “I been told t’ recruit a tracker for Merriwa. Don’t want any of them lazy boongs from Verona. What about yerself? Seven and six a week. Tucker, horse. Yer sleep in the stable. No boots. Yer kin git ’em out of the seven and six if you want t’ pretend yer a gentleman. But I tell yer it isn’t any kind of lazy black’s job. Yer look after all the horses – three troopers’ and yer own, and yer cut the firewood for the station and the residence.”

  Saying nothing, Jimmie began to hanker for the work. It must be a good reference, to have worked for the police. In a police station he would be fortified against his demanding kinsmen. He watched the brightly wounded animal. Its back legs shivered ever so little.

  “Well, d’yer want t’ be a p’liceman? Cut a figure with the gins in Verona?”

  “Seven an’ six ain’t so bad,” said Jimmie.

  “Orright. But yer got to be at Merriwa by this day next week. I got other darkies in mind and if yer don’t come, Jacko, yer kin go begging.”

  “Orright, boss.”

  Senior Constable Farrell rolled away comfortably on his mount. Like everyone else, he knew that a black could walk twenty miles a day, day after day. If only he had a boot in the arse to help him along.

  But when they gave him his uniform, Jimmie Blacksmith understood his mistake. The blue coat was a giant’s, the cap loose, the trousers knifed him in the crutch. He had taken a florid foreign oath to Victoria and was now on the books as a tracker, a comic abo in some other black’s clothes.

  “Roll up the sleeves,” Constable Farrell suggested without interest. “Give ’em all a wash if yer want to. Ole Bunyal was a good tracker, but a dirty old bastard. Wot yer want us t’ call yer? Ole Bunyal got registered under his abo name, yer know. Not that we care either way. Only we have t’ send all the papers to Sydney. T’ make it official. So wot yer want us to call yer?”

  Jimmie told him, J. Blacksmith.

  “Is that so?”

  “Yair.”

  He was allowed to sit against the wall while they waited for a junior constable to come and show him his duties in detail. At the desk Farrell had begun attending to the paperwork. His public service pen whimpered his signature across the secret paper which senior constables were permitted to make marks on. Once he looked up.

  “Yer a missionary black, Jimmie?”

  “Yair.”

  “I kin always tell a missionary black. Bunyal wasn’t one. Mind yer, a bloody good tracker.”

  Jimmie’s face prickled. He had been a policeman for half an hour yet now wanted to commit murder. He was more officially a black now than Tabidgi or Mort: a registered, accredited, uniformed black man; more deeply, more damagingly black than ever.

  There was, in fact, so much to keep him busy that he could drug the sense of his folly with the strong drug of a demi-military existence. He had three mounts to see to, cavalry saddles to clean, weapons to maintain, fires to feed, many fires, since Merriwa was high and frosty. Three times a day he cut wood, and ran messages for the junior senior constable, who was married (unlike Farrell) and thought that he, therefore, should occupy the police residence. The balance was adjusted, the junior senior constable thought, by using Jimmie for private convenience, such as for fetching meat from the butcher’s.

  Sometimes he rode on duty up the pass to that camp of bad omen where the white boy had been knifed and inadequately buried a year before. But no one in Verona seemed to recognize Jimmie in his unfamiliar uniform.

  There was little tracking to do, but whenever a constable had to arrest a black, Jimmie was expected to accompany in case persuasion was needed, or a show of strength.

  Senior Constable Farrell’s passion was boar-hunting. Very few other people between whom contempt existed could have achieved such a unity of expertise as did Farrell and Jimmie Blacksmith on the track of a boar.

  Then occurred the come-uppance that brought Jimmie’s police career to a head.

  The postmaster’s son, driven by conscience, came nervously to Farrell. He hadn’t wanted to insult a respected family, he told Farrell (the statement sounding rehearsed and creaky), but a boy called Jack Fisher, who had vanished a year ago, had been drinking after hours in the Prince Albert in Merriwa the night he disappeared and had said about ten that he meant to ride out to Verona for some black velvet.

  Farrell knew that at the tail-end of sprees in town whites often took off for Verona to lie with the gins. There was many a town elder who had reason to cringe at the sight of some trachoma-eyed half-caste child who had his jaw or nose or forehead. It was always the white man’s good luck that the lubra knew nothing so obscene as blackmail. If you were an alderman who had once gone with a gin, the worst you had to fear was that the woman might call out a greeting to you in the main street, even within sight of the superior architecture of the municipal offices or School of Arts.

  “G’day, Eddie,” she might sing in a musical monotone, one third ironic, one third resigned, one third heinously innocent.

  For their part, men never boasted about their love-making with gins. Perhaps the sport was too easy for that. And no one willingly admitted that there was an especial pull in the easy, slack-mouthed lubras. Certainly they provided a free whore-house just beyond the limits; but everyone suspected that there were degenerates who actually preferred black flesh, whatever economies were involved, and men were pointed out in whispers whose taste for black flesh had so sapped them that they no longer wanted white.

  Now Jack Fisher’s father, undertaker, free-holder, Merriwa Croesus, had died and could not be hurt, said the postmaster’s son.

  Feeling no danger, Jimmie Blacksmith in fact exulted that the question of the dead white boy, aching with inconclusion, had been raised again.

  He would be savage, a regular vengeance in his too-big blue coat, to the guilty of Verona.

  Farrell too was especially enjoying himself.

  “We enquired of yer at the time,” he said grandly, “and yer mentioned nothink about the darkies’ camp.”

  “I thought it’d be too much for old Fisher. If he knew Jack had disappeared in that manner.”

  “And yer were out there too, and didn’t want t’ git yerself into trouble from yer father.”

  “No, that wasn’t the reason.”

  “Were yer out there?”

  “No.”

  “Come on, it’s obvious.”

  The boy’s freckled hand pinched his forehead.

  “Orright.”

  Farrell said, “This is serious. Yer knew he’d gone fuckin’ gins and yer didn’t
tell us.”

  “I was worried about old Fisher’s health.”

  “Did he go out there regular? I mean, did he have a regular gin?”

  “No. No. I was one of his best mates and I don’t know that he went out to Verona much.”

  “The gin he had that night. Wot was her name?”

  “I don’t know. He went off to another hut from me. Later I waited where the horses were tethered, but I kept falling asleep.”

  “Ah, wear yerself out, did yer?”

  “So I thought Jack must be making a night of it, so I rode back home.”

  “And the darkies took his harness and ate his horse, I s’pose?”

  “I don’t know. He should’ve been safe there.”

  “Well, he wasn’t. But we’ll find him. And then yer can tell Merriwa all about courting gins.”

  “But I’ve got a fiancée.”

  “Then yer better get her in the family way. Then she can’t back out.”

  So Farrell’s viciousness went on consecrating itself to the sacredness of Jack Fisher’s right not to get his vitals punctured in Verona.

  Of course, Jimmie knew, Farrell was not normal and had once begun to caress him, before deciding it might be bad for authority. Farrell enjoyed putting terror into lusty boyhood.

  Jimmie himself was in a vindictive state of mind. The Verona people were to be punished for their vulnerability. There was a lust in him to punish the race through the man who had done the knifing. Near the dry tip of Jimmie’s tongue the man’s name wavered. Harry Edwards was the name.

  Farrell armed himself and Jimmie had the horses waiting at the front of the station. Both nursing private excitement, they rode through the town’s quiet midday. Small boys came running to the wire fence of the school.

  Black, black,