The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith

by Thomas Keneally

  Jimmie was delighted to be finished with all but his gay, misinformed, fast, muscular brother. Now fast, craftsman-like tracks could be made. They dragged boughs behind them. High up in the Divide they came to someone’s unprofitable boundary fence, post-and-rail. Gripping the shaggy-grained upper rail with one hand, they walked crabwise along it for close on a mile. The exercise became painful. The rifles slung from their necks hunched them further into a posture of discomfort. But Mort enjoyed it all, the times this or that item threatened to fall.

  Further up still, beyond anyone’s thirst for property, they made a fire and rolled themselves in their blankets.

  At midnight cold and hunger woke them. Before dawn they crossed the central spur of the Divide and when the sun began to give warmth, wrapped themselves in their blankets and slept till the early afternoon of Sunday.

  Already Jimmie found it hard to believe in the slaughter of the Newbys. It had become remote, like an alien truth, like the story of how the Red Sea was crossed.

  Pursuit too was hard enough to believe in in the still, high forest.

  Forty-five miles to the south-west, preachers were reading their various Sunday prefigurements into what had been done at the Newby homestead.

  Jimmie loved living cleanly with his brother in the forest, feared losing Mort; yet understood that he might corrupt the boy by not confessing to the murder of women, by not sending him away. For there was no question that the blood of women overrode all kinship loyalty, and yet that he himself must keep to a reprisal list if his soul were not to freeze about the cold fact of the Newby killings.

  Mort must either be incriminated for fear of losing him or lost for fear of incriminating him. While Jimmie could not have said it in such abominably neat terms, he could feel the actual prongs of the question turning in his flesh.

  Shattered Mrs Newby lived for three days and said that it was the old one who had done her most damage.

  Attending doctors were awed by the magnificence of her will towards life. The police paid sombre compliments to the explicit quality of her evidence. Women wept at her clear-headed mourning of her daughters and the esteemed Miss Graf.

  Her dying was grand; it was royal and saintly, outscaling her weekly cheese-paring in Gilgandra, her bullying of Gilda, to an extent that Jimmie Blacksmith would have considered unjust.

  Mr Newby was tranced. Farmers who had come to offer services to the police kept drugging him from flasks of rum and whisky.

  Through the fug of sympathetic liquors, he remembered and wondered how he had ever forgotten that when he had first come to the west as an eighteen-year-old from Dorset he had seen and been numbed by its air of withdrawal, as if it had vast dispassionate and random devilries beneath its crust. Yet it had become his home, nearer to him than his heart’s blood. He did not know how he had ever settled to it. He knew he would sell up now and perhaps go into business in Sydney. To his mind, the earth and Jimmie Blacksmith had become suddenly allied.

  The elder of the two grown sons had been the first to go into the kitchen. He rode off to Gilgandra where there were three doctors. What he needed were people to say yes, they are horrifically dead; and country policemen to tell him yes, this is the worst outrage.

  All day Saturday and Sunday women – the women whose men brought flasks – brought cakes, made continual tea for policemen, doctors, mourners, condolers, and served it in Mrs Newby’s china.

  The Newby boys were still talkative. Still they wanted to speak of what it had been like before blankets and scouring brushes had been brought into play. They were insatiable for words like monstrous, unspeakable, black butchers.

  “After all Dad did for them bastards,” the younger son said, and the sentiment was passed from mourner to mourner.

  At mid-afternoon on Saturday, the first party of police and volunteers rode out of the homestead yard. Men raised their hats and wished them well as they rode towards the Blacksmith encampment to pick up a track. The clever full-blood who was the Gilgandra tracker circled the site once and could then point out the traces made in flight. These pointed east.

  “His people live over that way,” the policeman told the volunteers.

  All felt that an arrest was close.

  Early on Monday morning, Dowie Stead, lately Miss Graf’s fiancé, informed of the sad demise by telegraph, rode up to the Newby homestead leading five friends, young farmers from Gulargambone.

  The friends varied, for Dowie was secretly romantic and practically tough. So he had both an orotund Irish-Australian called Toban and the impermeable good sense of a squatter-bachelor of thirty-five whose name was Dud Edmonds.

  They had all drunk rum with their breakfast: it aided their air of concerted outrage.

  As young Mr Dowie Stead, alone of the six, dismounted, a farmer’s wife was cooking breakfast for the Newby men.

  Another fed the four-year-old in the corner, making weaving gestures with the spoon to amuse the child, whose laughter ran thinly in the great kitchen.

  Dowie Stead looked like a national product, a tall boy with brown hair and narrow blue eyes; a face full of rather passive good intentions with a sort of Nordic coldness to it; features a little small for such a big frame yet likely to be more poetic or downright pretty if the proportion had been better arranged.

  There was a functionality about his body; and people knew, having beaten drought and fluke, grasshoppers and banks to own what they owned, that functionality mattered.

  It comforted them to see him.

  Mr Newby, drinking whisky neat with his tea, was pleased to see him, and, with a tenderness Dowie found awesome, poured one for him. Mr Newby clearly presumed Dowie was half as shattered as himself. The young squatter felt some embarrassment that he was not. He drank quickly, since that might convince the Newbys how much he needed soothing and might also help him work up some sentimentality for the girl’s memory.

  “Your intended was a beautiful girl,” said Mr Newby, and gave a strange little giggle of sobs.

  One of the Newby boys said, “After all Dad done for them.”

  “The little girl’s orright?”

  “Yair. She was asleep in her cot. She had a banana skin with her. One of the girls … or Mrs Newby … must’ve given it to her not long before …”

  Mr Newby took a steadying handful of the table and snorted up his grief.

  “Her face wasn’t hurt at all, your intended’s,” the elder Newby boy told Dowie.

  “How’s Mrs Newby?”

  “The doctor says she’ll pass away today.”

  “It’ll be a mercy.”

  “The youngest boy’s orright. Except he seen it all happen. He heard the bastards calling to each other while they …”

  Dowie Stead should have felt vastly angered. Instead he felt elected to give chase. This sense of election outweighed his guilt at feeling no grief of his own; which lack of response – he believed – was a judgment on him for rolling lubras in Gulargambone.

  It did not fully occur to him yet that he might not have loved Miss Graf, for everybody said she was good and wise and handsome. Like Gilda, Dowie had always been awed by her. It worried him that he was lightened every time he remembered that now he did not have to marry her.

  In fact, he looked forward to travelling with friends, harbouring a simple ambition, eating and sleeping in the open. Miss Graf’s tortuous standards of refinement had been swept away – or rather, hacked apart – and now he was with men, their direct, brusque warmth, all aimed at repaying someone for her outlandish agonies.

  In Gulargambone he had cashed a cheque for sixty pounds at the Squatters’ Club. Today he wondered whether he should not take out a new, blue-hatched five-pound note and say that he would not cease the hunt until he had rinsed it in Jimmie Blacksmith’s blood. It was a little wild and imaginative, and Dowie was not at all sure that it should be done. But it might soothe the Newbys, who were bona fide mourners.

  Mrs Newby, however, died during the inquest, making the gesture i
nappropriate.

  Towards the end of the sitting a post office clerk arrived from Dubbo with a telegraph message that Jackie Smolders had been found and taken to Dubbo. The news threw the inquiry out of stride. One of the monsters had been taken inadvertently, behind their backs. Farmers gurgled approval but were a little deflated.

  But the coroner himself, stressing that he made the point in an unofficial way, said the genuine devil was Jimmie Blacksmith, who, by report, considered himself at war and who could only be found by dedicated means.

  Twenty more men offered themselves for a week as mounted auxiliaries to the police.

  That very Monday Dowie Stead’s party rode off independently, though in the established easterly direction.

  Dowie was not at peace with himself. Ridiculously he had a hunger for a thin, consumptive black girl called Tessie. For him, Tessie was a passion. Desire always came to him in her form – a lazy, gristly dying girl who yet had a sumptuous impact.

  But the obsession with Tessie had more to it than lust; Dowie could not cease to worry at her image.

  Because, reeling from the Squatters’ Club to his horse one Saturday night and so to the blacks’ camp, he had brought Tessie moon-eyed to the door of her humpy, barring entry. He forced past her. On her mattress sat his father in shirt-tails.

  If now there was anything he wanted to pay off the black race for, it was not killing Miss Graf, canonized already by the people of Wallah and rendered remote in the process. It was for bringing his father and himself, both unbuttoned and grotesquely ready for the same black arse, face to face.

  In Balmain, a riverside suburb of the city of Sydney, the public hangman for the State of New South Wales kept a scrupulous butchery. There were clean sawdust on the floor each day, a capacious coolroom and two polite sons. He himself was an exemplary man, full of placid love. Three mornings a week he or one of his sons bought carcasses at the Homebush slaughteryards. He was at his most talkative on meat: he would pick up lumps of sirloin and praise their texture before housewives.

  His name was Wallace Hyberry. He lacked intimate friends so that he was never called anything more colloquial than Wallace – he remained Wallace, in fact, amongst a race of Wallys. The ladies of Balmain thought he was refined, almost like some of the foreign gentlemen in the hair shops in town.

  They all knew he was the public hangman and said they couldn’t imagine him hanging a soul.

  Though he was called the “public” hangman, hangings had not been public in that State since a day sixty years before when a convicted outlaw urged the onlookers to turn on every bloody tyrant in the budding Britannic colony.

  So necrophiles like Ted Knoller, a customer Mr Hyberry could have lost without regret, had to be content with newspaper reports and with buying their meat from the hangman himself.

  Late on the Monday, the day news of the Newby shambles appeared in the press, Knoller came to the butchery. He always carried a note listing the meat needs of the Knoller house, and would stand at the back of the shop against the tiles, making patterns in the sawdust with his boots and motioning women to give Mr Hyberry their order before he should.

  Mr Hyberry would work tight-lipped on the meat while Knoller was there. Tidy, efficient, with a sense of social duty, he did not think it fair to have his highest contribution to society, the painless-as-possible extinction of murderers, slavered over by a cracked navvy, relished like an obscenity.

  At last there was only a sixty-year-old deaf lady buying cat-meat, and Knoller began on the atrocity of the Friday night before, reading details aloud from the Morning Herald.

  “I know that area well,” he said. “I’m a Gilgandra boy meself. I might know these Newby people. Though I can’t exactly remember … Anyhow, the Mail’ll have all the photographs.”

  Mr Hyberry cut fillets with his fine-honed knife. “Surely not all, Mr Knoller. There are some things the public ought to be spared.”

  “How d’yer mean?”

  “Murder isn’t just a matter of being made to lie down on the floor. Even virgins and wives can die in ways that make the toughest policeman sick. There would have been photographs taken far too terrible for anyone other than doctors and senior policemen to look at.”

  Ted Knoller frowned to imply he hoped he would never be forced to see anything that was not decent.

  “I wouldn’t want t’ see nothink like that. What I mean was I might reckernize the farm or some of the people.”

  “Oh yes.”

  It was a pleasure to see Mr Hyberry at work on sirloin. Half a dozen slittings with the knife, then thump, thump, thump with the cleaver down the lines of cleavage. Behold, seven portions of meat fell from his scrubbed hand onto the marble of the scale.

  “What strikes me,” Knoller pursued him, “is this. This morning there’s news of a really bad murder. Yer just in the same position I am. Yer don’t know the killers, and yer don’t know those poor women who got killed. Jimmie Blacksmith’s a name yer never heard of. But now yer know yer going t’ meet him on the gallows. For the final act in a killing that’ll always be remembered. Yer got a ringside seat to history! … I mean, it must be an interesting thing t’ know that all the famous murderers, when they get caught, have got t’ face you in the end.”

  “I don’t face them. I don’t say a word to them. I’m just part of the … apparatus.”

  A bad silence began. Hyberry’s industrious sons kept working. Knoller could not stop sneering, hinting that there was surely a morbidity in the hangman to keep his own company. Hyberry was a prude. If he himself had been hangman he would have been happy to pass on little intuitions and professional yarns. It must all have its humorous side.

  Mr Knoller, living in terror of death, was very interested in its humorous side. He began to niggle the butcher, from a new direction.

  “Anyhow, these Blacksmiths are aborigines. I believe blacks present problems.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean ordinary problems. Scientific problems, yer might say. Problems with hanging, yer know.”

  “I didn’t know. I’d better leave such questions to you, Mr Knoller, since you are the expert.”

  “Well, that last black yer hanged. In Bathurst. I don’t like to say it, but the newspapers did.”

  “They said what?”

  “That he nearly got his head pulled off.”

  Mr Hyberry shuddered but showed no fear. Hanging was a trade for which there could be no apprenticeship. One only got one’s craft bit by bit and in the practice itself.

  So that when you hanged a thin aboriginal man, an old man almost, and the rope savaged and part-severed the thin neck at the end of the fall, then you learned more about weight, age, momentum.

  But he had a furious contempt for people who passed on such stories.

  “What newspapers said that?”

  “Truth and the Sporting Chronicle.”

  “What’s a sporting paper doing, printing that sort of stuff?”

  Mr Knoller shrugged. “Have yer got any decent blade steak?” he wanted to know, as if it was Hyberry who had been delaying him with abominations.

  10

  By now the Blacksmith brothers had crossed to the rainy side of the mountains. Dying trees wore long mosses, the tree ferns were tall, and underfoot was deep lush mould full of prosperous insects. All of the Monday and Tuesday a small belt of thunderheads moved with them, continually soaking.

  They had powers of instinct not only to resist but to ignore this. But Jimmie Blacksmith’s mind itched with the quandary: whether to inform and free Mort or to corrupt and possess him. There was no hurry, he told himself, but knew that was not the truth. He had his list of enemies, and must move towards them in order. Otherwise, he fully understood, he might as well sit down and be contrite for the Newbys and Miss Graf.

  Meanwhile, if Mort asked, he was favoured with lying details of the fight with the Newby men, which became more and more an exercise of honour, the sort of thing old war chants spoke of.


  The wet blanket on Jimmie Blacksmith’s shoulders itched as he lied and lied.

  They found out they were carrying too much food. Having foraged for five people they were suddenly a sleek, a swift two. Now they dropped pounds of that Newby beef, snatched by Jimmie on the Friday night, into a steep gorge. It was salutary to slough it off; they grinned a little at each other and felt well together. If events could only take Mort by the scruff of the neck and commit him to bloodiness but leave him sensible and full of good heart.

  Jimmie himself still waited for the slump of spirits which could be expected after merciless Friday night. It failed to come. He was still in a viable balance between belief and non-belief in the dismembering he had done. At the same time, the thorough nature of the punishment he had dealt out continued to soothe and flatter him. Because he had been effective. He had actually manufactured death and howling dark for people who had such pretensions of permanence. He had cut down obelisks to white virtue. So, with his brain heaving in contrary directions, he was still largely light-hearted, and moved quickly in the irksome wet forest. He knew that he was on the same side of the mountains as some of his most cherished enemies.

  Mrs Healy was worth remembering too, with something like a lover’s remembrance. If that were a form of madness, then he welcomed it.

  Meanwhile, what should be done with grinning Mort? Mort had suggestions of his own. It was Wednesday. A wind had come in from the north-east and turned the rain to squalls. Jimmie felt fevered: the bedding was very wet. All at once, Mort spoke of a timber-getter he had once worked with, a low Irishman called Mullett, a feller of cedar over in the direction of the Barrington Tops. Mullett lived well, being a single man, who could usually find some genial female relic to live there with him up in the lush forests fifteen miles or so from where they stood, splashed and gusted.

  The timberman could also be trusted to have warming spirits in the house and would not have heard of the Wallah murders; not that he could be relied on to care if he had.