The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith

by Thomas Keneally

  Like a pressured husband, Mort began to gather his blankets and load of food.

  “Yer can’t bloody fly with a mountain in yer beak,” Jimmie told him.

  Mort shook his honest head and put them down again.

  “Yer can’t, Mort. I bin fair.”

  But Jimmie Blacksmith, holding the burlap ajar with his rifle, was already pointing a direction. They slipped northwards from the door, towards the dark fringe of the camp. Jimmie Blacksmith was sick with fear of death.

  Someone took a glimpse at them from behind burlap. They were an event, likely to be brought to a killing peak by fusillades from the camp perimeter within ten seconds or so. Jimmie’s throat was dry deep down into his guts, and he was certain of his own death. Too frightened to move or stand still, he remembered the presage of women’s blood, and then the virgin Christ barbarically used; but could not find a mode in which he should prepare for dying.

  He scarcely thought of Mort’s feelings. There was terror in them, but a fatalism too. Dulcie’s sad white man had bred most of the fatalism out of Jimmie, who now sweated on that account.

  Anyone else who saw Jimmie Blacksmith and Mort would have said they were moving with great craft on the dark side of the shanties on the north of the camp. They did not look like men filled with complex dread.

  Then, as often happens in places charged with fear, an unexplainable event occurred.

  A young white – it was Toban – stepped in front of them. He peered and was out of place, blinded perhaps by watching the bonfire. In his hands was a shotgun.

  Mort was so close to him that all he had to do was lower his rifle and shoot the white man in the stomach. Toban fell backwards cawing like a woman. Within a second the earth was slippery with his blood.

  About them people were running, there was the hooting of the women and the baritone orders of white men. But Toban, silent now, and Jimmie and Mort did not move. Toban grunted, not much more than a man trying to settle in bed. His eyes were open and he seemed very much at rest.

  Then, all his old moralities jangled by the events at Healy’s, Mort re-loaded. Jimmie, seeing in it Mort’s loss of innocence, was indecently pleased.

  “Jesus and Mary!” said Toban. “Don’t do that. I might live.”

  But Mort shore his head apart with a shot.

  The brothers still stood, physically feeling the tides of sound in which they had made their new killing; but a comforting killing, this time, a hunter brought down.

  It had all taken seven or eight seconds.

  Without a word both sprinted east on rising ground. There were bullets at random from their left but the far uglier noise of hoofs to their right. By mere yards they evaded horsemen. After half a mile they hid their rifles and climbed into a peppermint tree, a familiar smell, hinting at childhood, and painful initiation by stone, and Methodism.

  They lay flat-out along the limbs, warily regaining breath. Survival had made them drunk, the canny air they drew delighted them.

  Both of them were bare-footed. Shoes, food, blankets were all back at Nancy’s place. Nancy would have to explain them. People like Farrell would be very hard on Nancy.

  “You and yer bloody women,” Jimmie whispered.

  And on his branch Mort was still elated and laughed beneath his breath. He did not remember and never would, that his rigor with Toban was an infection from outside. He seemed to be content that it had arisen from an antique code and was aligned with frequent placation of spirits and rare tribal face-to-face warring. Besides, Toban was a man. That itself seemed a wonderful renewal to Mort.

  Five whites and a constable galloped by, found the ground ahead too heavily bouldered, turned confusedly right, and halted. The policeman and two followers got down from their saddles and went off, crouching, towards the boulders. Meanwhile the other three dismounted at greater leisure, ready to shoot any Blacksmith who might be flushed from cover.

  Not being shot dead or jumped on from behind, the policeman and two volunteers returned to their horses. Then the party rode south.

  The Blacksmith brothers climbed down to earth and went up the spur behind the boulders. They loped at their ease, back again in country where the horse was futile. Such terrain meant something to them now. But it was cold. Jimmie was aware of the precarious warmth of his body moving through absorbent veils of cold.

  They were above two thousand feet when they stopped. Below them they could see a line of campfires, though they could not afford one for themselves. Tomorrow, men would rise up from the cinders and climb after them. Jimmie did not suspect, though, that that was the reason why Mort bedded down on the cold, spine-niggling earth with such compliance.

  On this, the dry and hardy side of the mountains, they had to part and look for shallow water on rock ledges.

  Jimmie found some where there would have been a waterfall in wet weather. But all the rain that had drenched them on the way to Mulletts had failed to crest the Divide and fall here.

  The water had a slight vegetable stink to it, but was delightfully chilled.

  He drank and went back to meet Mort, whose luck had probably been similar.

  It was sick-grey quarter-light and the harsh myrtle-trees watched him with the remote quizzicality of witnesses.

  When he got back to the place where they had slept he found that Mort was standing agog for the sound of Farrell’s wakening army and had painted his face white with white clay. This in the morning! As if he were resigned to dying.

  It made Jimmie peevish. He came snorting up.

  “What’s this bullshit?”

  Mort continued in his listening stance. He explained in his own language.

  “Our enemies have found us. We wanted white ones to kill. Soon there will be white ones, tribe on tribe. We shall make a mighty killing.”

  “So’ll bloody they,” Jimmie said.

  “We shall die in courage. They will chatter about the courage of Tullam man.”

  Jimmie could almost have given in, thinking again of all the weary savageries he might have to do to imply a meaning in what had already been done.

  “But we got t’ show we ain’t jest women-killers.”

  “They know ’bout that. Yer fought the Newby boys fair.”

  It was a bad time for candour, but Jimmie couldn’t help himself. It made him testy: Mort should have been able to sort the truth about what had happened at Newby’s from what he beheld at Healy’s. It seemed pig-headed of Mort not to have understood and accepted the full toll of Jimmie’s murders.

  “It weren’t the Newby boys. It weren’t old Newby.”

  “Christ, what yer tellin’ me?”

  “What I’m sayin’. It wasn’t old Newby and his sons.”

  The ghost face peered at him. Mort rose.

  “It was bloody old Mrs Newby and the girls and that bloody schoolie.”

  “Yer fuckin’ devil-man,” said Mort after some seconds.

  “I’m yer brother and I got bloody mad and … It’d happen to anyone. C’mon. We gotter git some food and blankets.” He snorted because the mute face did not move. “I got t’ show ’em I aren’t jest a woman-killer.”

  “They know yer fuckin’ devil-man.”

  “I’m yer brother. Yer shot a woman yerself.”

  “That was acc’dental.”

  “All mine was bloody acc’dental.”

  “Yer better git away from me, devil-man. Yer better go away.”

  “Orright. Yer better stay here and pertend t’ be Ned Kelly. They’ll shoot yer into mince.”

  “Orright. I don’t care. I’ll show ’em we ain’t all woman-killers.”

  “Orright. Yer kin go t’ hell.”

  They gazed at each other for twenty seconds. Across their silence came a clear white shout from beneath them. Suddenly Jimmie could see that, under the heavy white clay, Mort was holding tears. He was only a boy, and now his brother had his soul.

  Therefore Mr Jimmie Blacksmith started off on the jog. A minute later he heard Mor
t behind him. Slantwise, across his face, Mort had made four furrows with his fingers in the clay matt.

  As the morning turned blue and the birds began to sing he even began to seem a little reconciled to living. But he said, about mid-morning, “If yer married Mungara none of this would of happened. Now yer kin see why Tullam takes Mungara.”

  “Horseshit,” said savage Mr Jimmie Blacksmith.

  To make false tracks that morning they rode some cows they found high up. Mort laughed again, rolling about on the loose pelt of his milker. Half a dozen times he must have come within an inch of pitching off, which did something for his buoyancy and made him loose and agile with hysteria.

  A calf loped behind, moon-eyed and confused at this strange usage of its mother.

  By midday they came on shallow, clear water. They did not resist the main line of the Divide, which took them north-east towards – once more – the cluttered forests leading to the Barrington Tops.

  It seemed they had made an honest escape and were a little heady with it, even Mort, after the morning’s vicious revelation. As Jimmie marched he suffered minor but lasting unease about the mad bounty of Mort’s love and loyalty.

  He had not resolved this disquiet when at three in the afternoon they came to a smoking little home in a clearing of rich tropic grass. A white horse, whose belly scarcely cleared it, cropped away, the fattest horse you could possibly see, his underjaw bald and spiky, a horse kept out of sentiment and beyond his twentieth year.

  There were neat sections of cross-cut red box in the woodheap, and a washing line, where a woman’s nightdress caught the sun coming down steeply but full over the top of the cedar and tall blue messmates of the forest.

  The Blacksmith brothers circled the house. It was well-kept. It could have been a logger’s. It could as likely have been a miser’s. For Jimmie had heard of misers in this part of the country, where the defiles were said to run with alluvial gold and the jungly ridges hid prodigal veins of quartz. Old fossickers, it was said, kept maps in their head and nuggets in gunnysacks under the floor.

  But all Mort thought of was the nightdress.

  “Let’s get on,” he kept mumbling. “No more bloody women.”

  Jimmie walked on in his circle behind the first veil of forest. He could not have explained what he was waiting for. It was some sort of mandate to remove every unjust man, every miser. He was a tender-hearted murderer who needed to feel that he was priest and judge. If this man, with his house-pride and pot-bellied horse, were an unjust man, he would show it by the way he answered and so be fair and obligatory game.

  If on the other hand Jimmie now closed out his count of killings, he sensed, he would be left with a long contemplation of the deaths he had wrought.

  “Go t’nother place,” Mort spat, half turning back into the woods all grey and blue with afternoon, no comfort in them, damp earth.

  They had not eaten for a day.

  Jimmie waited without hope for the sense of mission to come to him, by which he could with assurance pounce forward into the sight of men. His great fear was suddenly that when the high moment of encounter came, how could you depend on a white to be ugly or to blunder?

  Then an old thick man came out of the house, stood at the door and called strongly to someone inside, something loud but conversational. He was a block of a man. He picked up his axe and began to split the sections of box-tree with a hint of enjoyment.

  The Blacksmith brothers unaccountably (they had lost full self-control after Healy’s) stepped forward together and came at him across the sunlit quarter of his yard.

  Very soon he saw them and stood up straight with the axe held across his chest. Indeed he was old, seventy years or more, but no part of him seemed yet to have begun to sag. His nose was imperial, his mouth tucked into a wry corner at one end; giant veins stood out on the insides of his elbows, and his hands were large beyond the limits of belief: rampaging veins ran across intricate scars, creases. An atlas of great tree-fellings.

  Jimmie already began to believe that his anxieties had been prophetic.

  “Yer the Blacksmith boys, aren’t yer?” the old man stated.

  “Yair.”

  “Yer bin killin’ all them poor women.”

  “We ain’t killin’ no more women,” said Mort. “Yer kin tell that t’ the p’lice.”

  “We shot a man last night,” Jimmie contributed.

  “God forgive the two of yer!”

  The old man bent and began to beat the wood from around a knot.

  When that was done he stood straight up again – no clutching of the spine. He looked at them. His great nose was the nose of a prophet or general.

  “I got a wife sick in bed. Aged sixty-five years. Yer goin’ t’ kill her?”

  He was over seventy years but believed in forcing issues. He was not afraid. Unless he were immediately shot he would undermine them. But he refused to take on the victim’s manner. He was immensely older than they were and vastly cunning.

  “We got no food at all. We need some food and blankets.” Jimmie Blacksmith, who had kept an army in the saddle, felt intimidated and immediately qualified, “Two blankets would do O.K. And some beef and tea. A billy too.”

  “Why should I feed yer? Yer unclean.”

  “Listen, take us in the house.”

  “I forgot. Yer a bloody specialist on indoor work.”

  “Take us in, mister,” Mort pleaded.

  Inside, the warm breath of the open hearth drew them. It was all one room. There was a brass-knobbed bed in the corner and a small oval-faced old woman in it. From the centre pole of the roof hung a meat-safe. Jimmie glanced at the woman and opened the safe door. There were two lumps of corned beef rolled and skewered. One was half eaten. Jimmie took the other.

  “Want a burlap,” he said.

  “Yer’ll find one about,” the old man advised him. “These are the Blacksmith boys, mother, but they aren’t goin’ t’ kill us. God won’t allow it.”

  His decree ran hypnotically between the woman and his visitors.

  Jimmie was furious with the wrong sort of fury, the anger of a subordinate. He savaged the tins above the mantel but left enough for a meal or two in each.

  Apologetically, Mort examined the old man’s rifle, which was wired together at stock and linstock and probably past use. Then he prodded some traps with his foot.

  When the food was packed, tossed without system, rice on beef on water biscuit, Jimmie approached the bed.

  “Yer can’t take our blankets. It might be September but we’re still gittin’ cold nights up here. We only jest got enough.”

  “We ain’t got any.”

  “We earned ours.”

  “Let ’em take the blankets, Dad,” the old lady whispered again and again at the hem of her counterpane. “Let ’em take the blankets.” It was like a private prayer.

  “Orright,” the old man said. “Shoot us now jest as well as take our warmth.”

  “Yer got a bloody fire!” Jimmie roared, pointing to it.

  “Of course we got a fire. This country’s too damp …”

  With his way of forcing every demand to a peak of challenge, it was a wonder the old man hadn’t been shot fifty years past. In other ways, it was a wonder he wasn’t an arch-bishop or premier.

  Jimmie snatched up a shawl and a loose blanket.

  “We gotter have these ones,” he told the old man. It was close to a plea, because Jimmie felt weak with the thought of this newer injustice: that the old man should occur now and suck their fibre, when he might have occurred earlier, barring the way to Newby’s, saving a man from madness.

  12

  In Dubbo, at the same time, Mrs Blacksmith was dismissed from custody. There was no indictment against her bunned hair, her crushed green dress. She passed into another capture.

  Two Sisters of Mercy took her away in a closed carriage. There was a jolly Irish one who put her finger on the baby’s chin.

  “Yer dear little dove,” she sai
d, “yer young t’ be after leaving prison. None of my family ever managed it so young. They’d be jealous. Yes they would, pretty baby.”

  She produced a brown cord with two little felt squares attached, one of them a picture of Virgin and Child. She arranged the cord about the child’s neck so that one square lay on its chest, the other fell down its back.

  Tears were in Gilda’s eyes. She knew that as a mother she should resist such encroachments. But her tears had no authority and her large straw hat put them in deep shadow.

  After Toban’s funeral, three of Dowie’s party made their case for going home and went. It was not for fear of the Blacksmiths. Everyone knew, by noon on the day after Toban’s death, that the Blacksmiths could not now be found by any amount of dedicated riding.

  One of the young men wanted to enlist, the other two had their fathers’ acres to attend to, and – in every town – letters of paternal complaint waited on them calling them home.

  In October, the Blacksmith brothers dared cross the Divide and come down to the western slopes, circling Tamworth at night and north-west then, towards the towns of the plains, Wee Waa, Gunnedah. Insensate travel for its own sake, innocent of scheme, its direction betrayed by their need to ransack.

  They travelled at night. Two days of rain they spent cosy on top of a provident farmer’s high hay storage beneath a chattering tin roof.

  Deep in interstices between hay-bales, in the dusty corridors mined through last season’s fodder, rats or tired black snakes moved. Mort would sit up, listen for a few seconds, become reassured and lie down again on his spread blanket. He wore only his trousers; it was steamy beneath the iron roof. He was full of alarm of things – grain-rats, for an example – that would once never have worried him.

  In the small hours of a Friday they came on a lit-up hut whose owner, a neat-suited little man, had come out to his doorstep, spying on the stars and approving that they could all be seen while, by the light over his shoulder, he took the cardboard stiffeners from his hat.

  The Blacksmiths spied on him in turn and Jimmie envied the day’s business he would do in Tamworth.