Dressed in a sack,
Leave our town
And don’t come back!
Farrell led Jimmie on into a dark seeping quietness, myrtle and red cedar, capable of drowning anyone’s doggerel.
But in Verona, too, children ran behind the horses, hooting Jimmie for his uniform. All the women showed up in their doorways, ululating as if the visit were an honour, all giggling. Men began to run. Even the ones indoors rucked past their chortling women and ran.
“C’mon, Jimmie,” Farrell said. He nudged his horse into a gallop and had a bludgeon in his hands. First he caught an old man and knocked him down. Then a much younger man, who seemed to be a mesh of black-pink fingers raised against Farrell’s blackjack. Just in time to snatch Farrell’s flung reins, Jimmie caught up. He found the bludgeon handed to him.
“Go and git a few more, Jimmie.”
Farrell had dismounted and begun to compose the two men he had caught, holding one of them with each hand.
Jimmie could have led Farrell straight to the grave, yet that would be silly. For he and Farrell had punishment to distribute, and that should be allowed to take its time.
But once he entered the forest he found it hard to turn in the same small circles as the fleeing men. A man broke across his front, a drinking man like Jackie Smolders, with grey hair around his ears. Reaching low, Jimmie cracked him at the base of the skull. The drinking man circled, clasping his ears. A resonance of another sort ran up the bludgeon and along Jimmie Blacksmith’s arm. He felt lordly drunk, but was less deft with a second man.
In the camp, Farrell was ranting and even the dogs were silent.
“Young whitefeller dead here. ’E die in Verona. A year back. ’Im maybe buried round the place. Close. Bloody darkie too lazy bury ’im far away. Where yer bury ’im? Eh? Yer tell p’liceman Farrell or p’liceman Farrell knock ’im bloody black head off.”
“Dead?” the old man was weeping. “What yer mean ’im dead?”
“I mean ’im maybe got killed by blackfeller.”
“Whitefeller killed?” The young man was trying to understand. One of his ears was bleeding.
“Yair. I told yer. ’Im maybe killed by some bloody Verona black.”
All the women at their doors began shrilling.
At this stage, the murderer’s name had become an almost involuntary spasm of Jimmie’s tongue and he could not prevent himself taking a risk. He placed a hand on the shoulder of one of the men he had brought back.
“This feller, ’e say Harry Edwards have fight with young whitefeller.”
The man was too bludgeoned to deny it.
“Kill whitefeller?”
“Put bloody knife in ’im.”
“Where this one Harry Edwards live?”
As everyone tenuously conscious pointed out a hovel of bark and clap-board, Jimmie Blacksmith hated them for their innocence, for not being able to dominate even the clumsiness of Farrell.
Sally Edwards was still on her doorstep, looking with a detachment at Farrell, ready to moan or shrill or giggle with all her sisters of the chorus.
“Harry Edwards yer man?”
“Yair.” Sally covered her mouth and writhed with laughter at the idea. Perhaps Farrell would have been less amazed if he had ever met Morton Blacksmith.
“What’s yer own name?”
“Sally,” she said. Jimmie could see the terror helpless beneath unceasing laughter.
“Sally, where yer man ’im husband?”
“’Im lazy bastard.” She choked on her hilarity. “’E go sleep Freddie’s place.”
Farrell went to wake ’im lazy bastard, Harry. Meanwhile, though he had been drained and half-asleep a year ago, Jimmie Blacksmith knew where the boy’s grave was. Even though the body had probably been moved for fear of its evil influence, the removal would have been much later and the marks of the low-hung load would very likely be legible in the undergrowth. Yet he must not make the mistake of vaulting ahead of Farrell’s stolid procedures.
These, within an hour, had lain Harry Edwards on his stomach. Jimmie’s blood leapt and was tantalized by the whole affair, and Jimmie knew how obscene that was, but was lost in his passion. All the nervous lubras were snickering and chanting when Farrell decided that prone Harry needed water and sent a young man to get it. Off went the boy, with a hobble of terrible biddability.
A person could see that Farrell was gratified by the progress of the case. He would have felt undermined if presented with too early a grave. But Jimmie was so restless that he actually went and inspected it.
It was later than he thought when he came out of the forest. Harry was lying in the shade of his lean-to, and Farrell was interviewing some of the ladies, who tamped laughter back down their throats with maladroit, splay-fingered hands. Sublimely hating them for the wounds they so childishly contracted, Jimmie aligned himself by Farrell’s side.
At last someone was willing to take them to the first grave. Where the second was, they said, they didn’t know, because the man who had helped Harry make it had left Verona.
It began to rain, but the eroded tracks were clear. Harry and his assistant had carried the corpse uneconomically, sidewise, had broken and altered the history of the undergrowth. It was likely, of course, that they were drunk at the time.
Jimmie Blacksmith followed the traces for a quarter of a mile in the wet, in a forest slack-boughed, limp beneath the thick-dropped rain, pliant as the men who followed Farrell and would do any necessary digging. A tableau recurred to him, a vineyard of gallows from which hung all the inept, unfortunate race, emphatically asleep. Their limbs span in a breeze, so well had sleep invaded all their ligaments.
It’d be a good thing, Jimmie felt sure; like a white realist.
Meanwhile he kept his darkie’s place so well that he found a bungled grave above a running stream that must have been quite beautiful by sunlight. The boulders it had tumbled in flood made a bastion of the place and allowed soil to accumulate to a depth.
Frightened Harry had not exploited depth sufficiently, however.
Now the men were set digging. Soon there was a stink of corpse and men warded it off with hands and groans and hysterical chuckling.
Farrell hit one of the laughers and more of them laughed, and attained paroxysms by the time the bones appeared in their remnants of wet flesh.
Jimmie felt justified, once more knowing the emotion indecent and one that might run beyond his control; but justified. Atrocious death, the boy’s and even his own, had always lain latent in Verona. Now he had somehow struck back at it.
The fact of this discovery was detailed in the sombre Sydney Herald, and the Sydney Mail wrote to Mr Farrell for a photograph of himself and Jimmie.
“Bloody nonsense,” Farrell said. “Take up too much time.” But sent one of himself.
At the funeral, Jack Fisher’s mother came up to Farrell, the mouth fixed in the strange leer of those who have determined to pay their debts exactly, zealously.
“I don’t begrudge you, constable,” she said, and gave him three hundred pounds.
“Should I inform my superiors of yer generosity, madam?” Farrell asked in an outbreak of gallantry.
He came back to the station so inflated with public regard and the minister’s oratory that he made a speech of his own, about how he respected blacks that showed talent and the terms on which the white man and the black man could work together.
That these terms were not exactly reciprocal might be indicated by the fact that he gave Jimmie £2 10s. of Mrs Fisher’s reward.
One night soon after, Senior Constable Farrell began to drink in the office by himself. In Farrell drunk there was no trace of fun, not even a spurious sense of fellowship. He howled and stumbled, and swore about people who had wronged him.
Harry Edwards understood the dangers in drunkenness and began chanting in terror. Jimmie could not tell what the murderer was singing in the cells; it would have been about dying among foreigners, amongst people whose
totem he did not know, whose totem he had stalked and devoured.
Songs utterly unavailing to sing in a country station of the New South Wales Mounted Police.
Meanwhile, Farrell sang too – “Phelim Brady”, and a song called “Come All Ye Lachlan Men”. He did not sing well or becomingly and had, in fact, taken his uniform off, song by song, jolting about the office in his drawers. His phallus became erect. Jimmie, who knew Farrell’s weakness and the traditions of jailhouse sodomy, decided to escape to the stables.
As he passed the cells Harry Edwards raised his own song to a clamouring yodel.
“Mr P’liceman,” he called to Jimmie. Strangely, he had not seen in this man the accomplice to last year’s killing. All his congenital powers of recognition were jangled by Jimmie’s European uniform.
“Yeah?” Jimmie stood still. For a mad second he thought of explaining to the man how, because he was wanton and stupid, Verona had sprung blood onto his hands.
“Away and make way for the bold Fenian men!” Farrell howled in a cracked baritone.
“Wot for yer leavin’ ‘im Harry to Mr Farrell?”
“’Im Harry murder white boy.”
There was no need for them to go on with the ’im business – it was part of the police concept of how the native spoke English. For that very reason, for the sake of putting Harry at a distance, Jimmie Blacksmith kept to it.
“Yair, but Mr Farrell ’im goin’ t’ do somethink bad to ’im Harry.”
“’Im Harry ought t’ git somethink bad done to ’im.”
“’Im Harry knife ’im white boy. But …” And Harry, not knowing that Jimmie Blacksmith had already heard it, told the story of how the boy, after lying with Sally, began to destroy the house.
“Still Harry got a knife got too bloody sharp edge.”
“Christ, don’ leave ’im Harry. Harry ’im don’t want ’im Farrell muckin’ round.”
Jimmie Blacksmith knew that he was being exquisitely cruel and that it was bad for his soul, that it might put him closer to madness most ruinous to his ambitions.
“Why ’im Harry give ’im woman to ’im white boy?”
Harry did not understand the point.
“Whiteman ’im don’t lend no one ’im wife. ’E keep her all the time, even when ’e borrow gin all the time. She lie down with ’im other man, whiteman kill ’im wife. Maybe kill ’im man too, often as not. So why yer bloody give Sally for ’im white boy ride?”
Certainly Harry tried to understand the point. His eyes glazed with the import of it.
But Jimmie Blacksmith went and rolled himself up for sleep and slept obdurately, hearing unwillingly sounds of Harry’s misuse, which Harry had merited. By not understanding.
In the morning he made Farrell’s tea in the big kitchen of the station residence. Beyond the window there was a benign splendour of frost and unequivocal early sunlight. The wet fences of the town ran downhill and, pitched into the bottom of the valley, the main street had a new-born look which Jimmie loved yet knew would not last much beyond nine o’clock. In a white town, Jimmie affirmed the morning as a way of disaffirming Harry Edwards.
Farrell’s tea was ready and Jimmie took it to him. The senior constable was soberly asleep by the stove, between two blankets. He wore a police issue shirt and, as it proved, his breeches – very much On Her Majesty’s Service.
Apart from a knotted look on Farrell’s high forehead, there was no sign of last night’s drunk, and it was only on turning to go that Jimmie saw Harry Edwards hanging from the roof of his cell. The colour of his eyes was lost in staring, popping white. A long thick tongue, loose as a broken serpent, lolled out of a mouth fixed as if for screaming.
“Harry Edwards hanged himself with his belt,” Farrell informed Jimmie. “I’m going t’ see the magistrate. While I’m away I want yer t’ take Harry down, take his clothes off and burn ’em, wash him and wrap him up in a blanket, head and everythink. There’ll have to be a inquest.”
Jimmie Blacksmith detachedly took down the corpse, his mind as shut as a nurse’s might be to its reek of shit and urine and seed. If he was tender at disposing the limbs, it was with the workaday tenderness one would expect of someone used to handling the dead.
The belt was new, at least by Harry Edwards’s standards; the finishing still shone, there was no crack into the texture of the leather. It was certainly Farrell’s belt and Jimmie laid it on Farrell’s blotter … to indicate contempt. Then he tucked Harry away in a blanket.
To the fire he made of Harry’s clothes he added his own over-long coat and crutch-nipping blue trousers. The cap he left on the jailhouse bench for whoever would be Farrell’s next tracker.
Then he put on his old clothes and had walked ten miles by noon.
He was twenty years old, going back over the mountains again, on the look-out for a cheap Enfield or Sharps rifle.
“Yer can’t trust ’em,” Farrell told the junior senior constable next day. “Yer just git one of ’em into shape and they go off on bloody walkabout.”
6
Next November, beyond hot Cowra, under a high sun and by the heat-trap of the Weddin mountains, Jimmie got work as a sweeper on a shearing floor. He swept droppings and tailings.
As well, he helped the cook, a man with a strange past – so everyone said – who spoke like an educated Englishman, wore a butterfly collar, however soiled, while cooking. When he swore he said damned or even deuced. He received the London Illustrated News by post and knew all about Communism.
At night the shearers used to question him about the disgrace that had made him a shearers’ cook in Cowra. Some thought he might have been a grammar-school master who had been accused of corrupting boys. Others imagined ruined servant-girls and other caddish situations from British melodrama. They all half-suspected that he was simply a native-born draper’s assistant who put his hand into the takings; but that did not satisfy their hunger for a man of mystery, a gentleman of diverse and sporty malevolence, now brought low.
The people who owned the sheep station were called Hayes. One day Jimmie Blacksmith found the cook trying to hypnotize the Hayeses’ kitchen-maid.
She was a small girl, perhaps seventeen. Her hair was lank and thin but had a clean tone of yellow in it. Mrs Hayes, a shearer had said, got her kitchen-maids from a home for wayward girls in Sydney. But this one did not look pretty or individual enough to justify the adjective. Her face was narrow. Most of the time she fretted about the house; her mouth gaping adenoidally with the effort to serve Mrs Hayes.
Now, coming into the shearers’ cookhouse, Jimmie found he had broken the cook’s concentration and flustered the girl.
The cook said bitterly, “But why should you be worked on by an amateur? Here comes the witchdoctor of the shearing floor.”
The girl looked sideways at Jimmie and let the beginnings of a smile turn up the corners of her bleak open mouth.
“Put a spell on the young lady, Jimmie.”
Jimmie glanced at her, very angry that he should be vulnerable before such a poor woman.
“I don’t go in fer that sort of stuff, Mister cook.”
“Aha! Dark and deadly tribal secrets!” the cook called out like a busker at a country sideshow.
The girl risked a small restrained giggle that allied her with the cook.
“It’s all nonsense, boss.”
“Oh, I’ve hurt your feelings, Jimmie,” said the cook with a secondary sort of sympathy that was only a small distance from sarcasm. “We Europeans are so poor in spirit that the best we can do is laugh at primitive people who, in my experience, always have something, God knows what it is, but something.”
The girl sniffed at the word something. Wayward girl that she was, she still thought she had a heritage and that she surpassed Jimmie.
Jimmie thought that if he had her alone for ten minutes, he’d teach her to sniff; though he did not consciously know what he meant by the thought, something less blunt but more compelling than a beating or sexual h
avoc.
“You want help with the meals, Mister cook?” he persisted.
“Ah, the practical turn of mind of the nomadic food-gatherer. We Europeans look on the primitive life as an idyllic if not poetic state of mind. But in fact the primitive life is beset with practical issues, and primitive man must have a mind to them.”
The girl continued to look smug that the cook could beat people over the head with rhetoric.
“I ain’t a primitive, Mister cook.” It was Mr Neville whom Jimmie had first heard use the word, often with wan eyes and in groans.
The cook persisted in a silence, to make Jimmie feel foolish or state what in fact he was. What could he say?
“I’m a half-breed. My father’s an important man in Brentwood.”
Again Jimmie felt reason to hate the girl, her adenoidal disbelief.
“Oh yes, Jimmie?” the cook asked. “What was he in Brentwood?”
The wholesome image of Mr Neville entered Jimmie Blacksmith’s mind. “He was a minister of religion.”
“My God, you do use your indefinite articles well, Jimmie. I’ve never met a black who could even use one before.”
“I don’t know what those are, Mister cook. All I know is yer really want t’ make me out a fool.”
“Now, Jimmie, you know I didn’t intend –”
“All I know, Mister cook, and I know it bloody well …” (He could feel a certain power of speech in him and knew his eyes were flashing.) “… all I know is I never leave a job until I finished it. Unless I was workin’ for a evil man. A man from Merriwa district, a unjust man. And another evil man I left.”
The girl was at first impressed by his appeal to the virtue of his labour. But the cook chuckled, as if Jimmie had missed the point, and then suggested that they’d be late with the lunches if they didn’t start work immediately.
In furious heat, with a film of sweat on her upper lip, the girl went off across the yard to make superior food ready for Mr and Mrs Hayes.
Jimmie Blacksmith had Wellingtons he had bought in Cowra, where the lady in the shop had called them gumboots. Knowing the military suggestion in the name, Jimmie preferred to call them Wellingtons. He felt they defined his outline, and was correct; so that shearers began to say, “That Jimmie, he isn’t like any other black I saw.”
The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith Page 5
