The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith

by Thomas Keneally

  “That’s good. Is the minister orright?”

  “The minister’s orright. He got a bloody tartar for a wife.”

  “How d’yer mean?”

  “Made me chop up whoppin’ load of timber. For nothin’.”

  “The hide of her!”

  “She was jealous. She ain’t happy with the minister.”

  They laughed. It was their first married dialogue.

  The witnesses were Mrs Treloar and the promised warden. The lady kept both eyebrows raised throughout, sceptical of the value of the Methodist form of marriage vis-à-vis the Blacksmiths. The warden was a sour old Wesleyan with rugged brows and a jaw like a peninsula. But he caused no trouble.

  After the rite, Mrs Treloar called Gilda aside for a long talk by the vestry door.

  At the gate, Mr Treloar went from foot to foot, aching for the right words.

  “Well, Jimmie, a big day, eh? A very important day. I hope you’re very happy, you and Mrs Blacksmith. The Newbys, I’m sure, will be very kind.”

  Mrs Treloar kept on, persuading Gilda of something. Mr Treloar was coughing and, trapped by the paucity of gestures, found himself offering Jimmie his hand far too early.

  “Yes,” he said, reddening, “the Newbys will be very kind. I often have the family to services here and you must feel welcome to … come if you want.”

  “I ain’t got no proper clo’es,” Jimmie told him, “No suit or nothin’.”

  “Well … I’m sure a good worker like you soon will have.”

  Meanwhile, Mrs Treloar had intense hold of Gilda’s arm, giving counsel that could possibly be worth the guinea.

  Mr Treloar called jollily: “I’m going in now, love.” As if she were open to hints.

  Ten minutes later, Gilda was dismissed and joined her husband. Again they had the use of the hack.

  Now Gilda Blacksmith and Jimmie had their second marital dialogue.

  “What was Mrs Treloar beltin’ yer ear about?”

  “Stuff I didn’t think any parson’s wife’d know.”

  “What sort of stuff?”

  “How to avoid having babies.”

  “None of her affair.”

  “That’s what I thought. But yer can’t say nothin’.”

  It came to Jimmie that although they were church-wed and had been named a family, they still had very little right of reply in a population that sprouted blunt precept.

  “Some of the stuff I couldn’t tell yer. It was … well, she couldn’t have learned it from Mr Treloar.”

  “If anyone’s learnin’ anythin’, it’d proberly be that poor bastard.”

  All over the pastures of the rich farmers of Wallah, a melancholy wash of deep green let you know that night was coming and you had not yet reached home.

  The girl changed in mood, and began to cry secretively when they sighted the little one-room house with its flue of beaten tin. The floor was earth and cold. There was a hessian bag inside the door as a doormat.

  They lay on the bed, for the journey had drained them. It was a mercy that neither was in the mood for loveplay, for suddenly they felt defeated, two conspirators trying to get into that other ether where the Hayeses and Newbys subsisted, trying in bafflement to learn the rites, the motives and notions.

  Gilda, in fact, wanted to die. For weeks she had told herself that she would have a new house. These ideas become aggrandized in the tight secret minds of girls who come from houses of charity to shovel potatoes onto Mrs Hayes’s plate. Now Gilda found herself in a definite one-room shack, she wept … although she had known that this was all she could expect; and if Jimmie had asked her what else she wanted she could not have answered. She knew well enough what her rights were. She could feel them in her marrow. They were not ample rights.

  As night came on, Jimmie found himself making white promises about the land they would come to own and the people who would call them sir or madam. He was desperate to soothe this girl he did not love, without knowing why he tried. Perhaps he did not want to be caught by the momentum of her despair, which became more explicit the more she wept.

  A slowly descending white was wedded to a black in the ascendant. That was what Jimmie hoped had happened. He hoped they might survive on his momentum.

  “Jimmie’s a nigger,” he said, “an’ he’ll work like a bloody nigger.”

  Afterwards, in the bright night, she made him some corned beef and potatoes. That made her feel better. An exercise of domesticity.

  Mrs Newby, a durable lady with mannishly jutted jaw, visited the new home and told Gilda to make a list of household necessaries, which she herself would buy in town on Friday and bring home in the dray.

  Then she questioned Gilda about her pregnancy, whether her ankles had swollen, were her veins playing up. All the time she twitched at the small clutch of hairs that grew from a mole on the underside of her jaw. She gave advice out of her own wide practice of child-bearing.

  “If he beats yer or hurts yer,” she said, “yer kin come straight to me.”

  “I don’t think he’ll do anything like that.”

  “Also, yer kin have yer little one at my place. We’ve got a big range and lots of linen.”

  For this invitation to an away birth, Gilda was grateful. If by an outside chance (and there were outside chances) the child was clearly someone else’s, Jimmie could not make too much fuss in the formidable Newby household; and would become reconciled.

  She was sure Jimmie had a talent for becoming reconciled, for he was gentle and tentative with her. She did not know it was for fear of loving or having pity for her. To a woman he loved he would have been far more intense and far less gentle.

  The weather grew colder. Jimmie worked passionately. Gilda played at wifeliness by bringing him his lunch along the boundary fence each day and by calling him dearest. It was his hope that they would both soon get over this coy segment of their marriage.

  Every Friday, Gilda took her constantly rehearsed, arduously copper-plated grocery list to Newbys’. On Saturdays she went to make the collection. Thus she came to identify the monoliths of the Newby household. There was Mrs Newby, her own monument to motherhood, though small farts or belches could be expected to emit from such structural grandeur without apology at the apex of uplifting talk.

  The home paragon was Miss Petra Graf, schoolmistress at Wallah, lodger at the Newbys’. Against her the Newby girls, who were big, meaty, thick-pored, could try their opinions and discover how viable they might be in proper company. For although Miss Graf was a big country girl herself and could eat a pound of steak without feeling satiated, she gave off a soft musk of delicacy and knew etiquette.

  These four sounded and resounded about the Newby kitchen, especially on Saturday mornings, when Miss Graf was at the end of her week’s work. There was a younger sister of four and a brother of eleven.

  Mr Newby and both his big boys were hard workers and one rarely saw them at home. On Saturday the boys played Rugby and raised what Cain they could in Gilgandra.

  So that there was an ascetic femininity about the Newby homestead that disturbed Gilda. There was the acrid warmth of mother Newby and the distant virginity of Miss Graf.

  Besides being finer in texture than the Newby girls, Miss Graf also had it over them in that she was engaged to a squatter’s son in Gulargambone, where her German grandparents sat out the inverted seasons with astounding, almost irrelevant (since they were in their nineties) grimness of purpose.

  The Newby women all mimed Petra Graf’s low-keyed horror at Gilda’s situation. They even took her to church in a punitive sort of way and hustled exactly marked hymn-books into her hands.

  Contact on the level of Mr Newby and Jimmie Blacksmith continued blunt.

  “How yer goin’ to raise yer piccaninny, Jimmie?”

  “He be no piccaninny, boss. He three parts white.”

  “Yair. And his kid’ll be an eighth black and his a sixteenth. But it doesn’t matter how many times yer descendants bed down, they’l
l never get anything that don’t have the tarbrush in it. And it’ll always spoil ’em, that little bit of somethink else.”

  In his way, Newby could be hard to be angry with, for he spoke as if condoling Jimmie for a sad disease which did not reflect on the patient, even though it implied fatal blindness in Jimmie’s sense of what society allowed.

  But Jimmie had worked so well that Newby now owed him fifteen pounds. Occasionally the farmer strolled over to insult him in the hope that he would stalk off without payment. This was common rural practice and whenever it failed, Newby would at least show Jimmie a sort of knockabout respect and call him a cunning black sod. Now and then, looking up from the wedges, Jimmie would see one or both of the Newby boys superbly mounted, depicted in long crystals of light through the prismatic sweat of his eyebrows. Even then he was thinking that a man could not go on for ever playing the willing nigger.

  When Gilda’s time was near, Mrs Newby and Miss Graf and both the elder Misses Newby took Gilda away to the homestead. With terrible zeal they set about the management of her parturition. They waited out her fear and contractions and told her that the pain would help her to love her child all the better. The Newby sisters knotted their chins against her screams; hadn’t she earned them?

  The birth was quite normal, and the Newby girls learned a great deal. Jimmie was not allowed to see the child for several hours – he was kept squatting by the woodheap. One at a time the Newby men rode in from their work and were permitted into the house. They could be heard clomping around the kitchen and came onto the veranda to call out such things as:

  “Congratulations, Jimmie. I believe yer have a real genuine white.”

  The lamps had been lit when Mrs Newby came out to call Jimmie.

  “I want to show yer yer son. Will yer behave yerself, Jimmie?”

  “Christ, missus, I ain’t a savage.”

  “Orright. Come on.”

  They went through the wide high kitchen, large as a Methodist chapel, and through into the sitting-room. Here a fire burnt and gave the green velvet furniture – the best out of the catalogue – a cosy sheen. Gilda was not about. Miss Graf stood in front of the fire, a baby in her arms.

  “Mr Blacksmith,” said Miss Graf, “I should like to show you the boy-child your wife has given birth to.”

  The baby’s blankets were formed like a capuche above its wizened head, but now Miss Graf pulled them back. The querulous, bubbling face writhed slightly and Jimmie took a survey of the features.

  It was not his child. He could tell, though not with reasons, that he could not have begotten a child of that face. He wished he had, his hand was already out towards the child, an arrested movement of fatherliness. He thought how close he must have been to siring it; the cruel odds of the seed.

  At a second look, he could tell immediately whose child it was. The superior cook’s. But he would never have married Gilda. A dense girl like that would interfere with one’s study of Fabian socialism.

  “What do yer think of him, Mr Blacksmith?” Mrs Newby asked as meaningfully as anyone could.

  “Orright. Yer kin all laugh now. He ain’t my baby.”

  “You can’t be sure,” said Miss Graf. “Certainly, it doesn’t look as if … Anyhow, I don’t think it’d be wise for you to see your wife tonight.”

  “I must say,” Mrs Newby said, bowing to her own necessities, and twiddling her hairy mole, “that I think her conduct is dreadful and I sympathize with you, Mr Blacksmith.”

  Jimmie stood aching for some sacramental word to be said that might alter the nature of the bundle so that it became his. He felt certain that there was something that could be amended easily, coitus being such a random thing.

  Coitus is random. Children are definite. This child was definitely the cook’s. What Jimmie could nearly have begged for aloud was to have it re-consigned to its origins and arrangements made at the source so that it should show up in Miss Graf’s arms as his.

  Miss Graf was speaking to him. Her light brown hair was brought forward onto the top of her head and her neck seemed white marble in the fire-light.

  “Will you be angry with her, Mr Blacksmith?”

  Jimmie snorted. Knowing he would not touch Gilda; he would despise and leave her body unmarked.

  He said, “I had a right t’ think it was my kid.”

  “Indeed you did. I want you to promise me here that you’ll never strike her for this.”

  Enchanted by the statuesque girl he nodded three times. Then she said, “You should let her go now. And the baby. There’s others better set up to look after them.”

  But he said nothing. His blood drummed. Miss Graf did not move, nor doubt that she was the one appointed to say whether he was finished with the persons of his marriage. The blood in his ears sizzled.

  “No, you fat bitch!” he called out in the secrecy of his belly.

  On his way home, the Newby boys made a few bird sounds and asked him if he’d seen any cuckoos about.

  He didn’t understand what they were talking about.

  Of course, Gilda told him over and over that she had been certain it was his, that it was astounding to her that the baby should have the cook’s long head.

  There was high moral glee in the women of the homestead. There was uncouthness on the veranda where old Newby chortled and doubled that Jimmie should have been shot-gunned into the wedding.

  Jimmie Blacksmith was bereft, but there was not enough to Gilda to warrant sustained hatred. She had a wispiness of soul. The marriage, to exist, needed a child. His child, not the cook’s long-domed child.

  “It’s a trick many a boy’s had tried out on him,” Newby told Jimmie Blacksmith. “Marry me because I’m pregnant. Sometimes she’s not pregnant at all. Sometimes she is by someone else. Her husband has his doubts all his life. But yer don’t have any doubts. There isn’t a grain of native in him. He looks like a Supreme Court Judge.”

  7

  Five days later, Tabidgi Jack Smolders arrived with Jimmie’s initiation tooth. With him were laughing Mort and a boy called Peter, a cousin. Sauntering up the road from Wallah, they surprised Jimmie at his work.

  When they saw Jimmie’s surprise, Tabidgi began to chant high up in his nose, a runic circular chant. Mort danced, laughing, miming some long-necked beast spying into a haven to see if brother or enemy were there.

  “Come fer booze?” Jimmie asked them. “I ain’t got no booze.”

  He hoped they had come for mean reasons. For he felt guilty before the unbudging wrinkles of Tabidgi’s face.

  Jackie Smolders took the white tooth from his left, cleaner, unmagicked pocket and offered it to Jimmie with cupped hands.

  “Yer got married t’ white girl. Tooth’ll keep yer safe.”

  “It’ll keep me safe, will it?”

  Jimmie struck Tabidgi’s hands apart. The admonitory and guardian tooth flew into long grass. Everyone was silent, the fourteen-year-old appalled. Mort took him by the shoulder and began to hunt in the grass.

  Jimmie was thinking what idiot bastards they were to approach him with such high tribal seriousness.

  But, finding the tooth, Mort held it up and he and Peter knelt in the grass and beamed. So that Jimmie Blacksmith was suddenly ashamed and overcome with a fatalism native to his blood, the fatalism that had kept him at Verona once against his will.

  Now he understood that Jackie Smolders would stay and, very likely, drink what he could. And Mr Newby would call more frequently and drop blunt hints.

  But the tooth would still have been brought if there had been no such thing as fermented liquor or Mr Newby’s attitudes. For the tooth gave tribal safeguards against the unknown sortilege of a white woman’s body.

  Jimmie Blacksmith received it, excised with stone in his thirteenth year, and stuffed it into his pocket.

  “Orright. It’s good o’ yer t’ go t’ the trouble. It’s a long walk yer come.”

  In invocatory style, Tabidgi recited all the well-omened places they had passed
, all the evil grounds too, to find their kinsman in his need. Tabidgi’s utterance in these matters verged on the holy, the lore in his drunken old head made of it a holy stone. He could not be sent away like that, as if fermented liquour were the whole truth of him.

  So Tabidgi, Mort and Peter – but particularly Mort – constructed a lean-to by the Blacksmiths’ place. Gilda could not refuse that, having the cook’s child to explain away, having Jimmie to palliate.

  With his uncle and giggling Mort and the boy Peter, he did not mention the cook, for pride’s sake. Perhaps they never knew and if they had known would not have considered it significant.

  It surprised him that he was apologetic towards his kin who had brought back to him, almost physically with the tooth, the incisive canons of tribal kinship.

  “Tell Tabidgi to bugger off back to Brentwood,” Jimmie instructed Mort but would not do it himself.

  He consoled himself by beating Gilda a few times. Once he beat her because he found a cut-out advertisement for a Twin-Vulcan kitchen range. The nullity of her ambition to possess one mocked his own soured dreams. His fist flew for the little hollow beneath her temple. She did not know why she was being beaten, but seemed to think it was one of the normal exchanges between married people. He could spend a long time looking down at the child and Gilda would stand passive and withdrawn but ready to protect her child’s flesh.

  Jimmie would stand by the baby and covet it. When discovered, he would walk away.

  “Grow up t’ be fuckin’ white know-all. Won’t want t’ know me when he grow up.”

  A very frail, thin-hipped girl, Gilda had grown sickly since the birth. Her heels were so reduced and sharp that she was always sewing away at holes they made in stockings, strange, punched holes, not the holes of ordinary wear.

  Her child made her welcome. No one else did, though moon-eyed Peter was often willing to sit by the cradle of the white child with its little down-turned white nose.

  Not knowing he was an elder and that the runes of antiquity were written in his boozy old mind, she feared and hated Jackie Smolders.