The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith

by Thomas Keneally

  The brothers spent the rest of Friday there.

  Once inside, Mort slept, but Jimmie found a corner of newspapers. The top was a Herald of September 30, 1900, the bottom a Mail of May 1, 1899. Jimmie opened them at random in the dawn light. What he looked for were items that proved his own sharp reality yet at the same time did not raise in him any ambiguities of feeling. He did not want to be further confused.

  First he found a reference of Toban’s death. It satisfied him to know the boy’s name.

  Frank Toban became the latest victim of the black desperadoes as the result of an unfortunate mistake.

  Police and volunteers, acting on information, had surrounded the aboriginal reserve at Pilbarra. Mr Toban, a member of Mr Dowie Stead’s party, was asked to go from one station on the reserve perimeter to another. He was unfortunate enough to have met the Blacksmiths amongst the shanties on the northern edge of Pilbarra. It seemed that, after shooting Mr Toban in the stomach and head, the brothers escaped through the very hole in the defence which Mr Toban had been on his way to cover.

  This further exhibition of barbarity …

  But Jimmie skipped the moralizing.

  Yet he could not make himself forgo seeing the earliest reports of those eons-old killings at Newby’s. He rummaged until he found the appropriate editions. Though he could not read well and did not want to read them head-on he brushed his eyes up and down them and could sense a crystalline indignation that made his nape prickle. Finding a far too appropriate Mail edition, he saw a photograph of the Newbys’ house, substantial, ugly. He felt nauseated and forced the copy deep into the 1899 end of the pile.

  “Fuck up the old bastard’s system!” he muttered.

  Then he found that Jackie Smolders had been sentenced to death.

  Yet it was touching to see this old man in the dock, a grizzled elder of his race, painfully respectful of those about him and of court procedure. It made even more incomprehensible the outrages he found it in him to commit at the Newby homestead at Wallah in July …

  The twelve sturdy Dubbo men and true who made up the jury withdrew, but returned after ten minutes with a verdict of guilty as to the charge of the murders of Mrs Newby and Miss Vera Newby, and accessory to the murders of Miss Mary Newby and Miss Petra Graf.

  Asked if he wanted to say anything, the old man rose and spoke as follows: “I only wanted to give Jimmie his initiation tooth [a ritual tooth to remind a black of his tribal obligations – Ed.] to let him know he shouldn’t have married a white girl. Mr Newby wouldn’t give us food so we went to argue with Mrs Newby. We never expected for a second we’d kill them. Jimmie was a good worker [he added, rather irrelevantly] and I ain’t afraid of dying because I earned hanging with what I done [sic].

  I never done nothing [sic] like this before. You would think it would take up a good while to make up your mind to kill someone and then to kill them. I’m just an igorant [sic] black man but take my word for it, it only takes a second.”

  Poor Jackie Smolders giving the people of Dubbo an honest warning against the suddenness of homicidal fury. A few of them might live to be in need of it.

  Mrs Gilda Blacksmith gave evidence on the first day of the trial.

  She is a thin girl who looks more fourteen than eighteen.

  She displays a considerable compunction for the time she spent with her black husband and says she was often afraid.

  They didn’t say what of, that was the point. And black husband was unfair, he thought. The white seed might have been the bad seed.

  She said that she and James Blacksmith had beenrespectably married before a Methodist minister and due witnesses in Wallah in May. In July a child was born to her, somewhat before its time, at the Newbys’ homestead …

  Jimmie trembled: intrusion dressed up as Newby charity. As for Gilda, he felt the pity which a man can easily mistake for love. She existed less for Jimmie than did, say, Mrs Healy, and he could not hate her, seeing through the news report her transparent cunning, her bankrupt ambition: to escape charity and be acknowledged as her own voice.

  Five days later, a number of Blacksmith’s relatives had arrived and two hovels were built beside the Blacksmiths’ small bungalow. She said she had felt afraid from that minute. Asked if she received indecent propositions from any black man other than her husband, she replied no, but that they had drunk a lot and that her husband had to put much expense towards keeping them there.

  Without warning, newsprint in disarray all about him, Jimmie understood that he had a copious love in him and had not spent it. He would die with his head full (he thought of it as a headful) of unspent love. The waste of life he had already made certain of. The truest crime remaining to him to commit was the waste of love. It should be bequeathed, as land is.

  He began to compose a message to leave here for Gilda and the cook’s child. But then people are not always happy to receive inheritances. Perhaps he could say or beg that the child should not be treated in terms of the murders its father … its father (let it stand! he thought) had done.

  And he could say that Jackie Smolders was a gentle man, liable to fright.

  But then he imagined the press reducing the importance of his will of love to something inane and comic, as they had reduced Jackie Smolders with their “sic”. “Sic”, Jimmie felt sure, was a term of superior mockery.

  In the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, he noticed, there had been a second reading of the Attorney-General’s Bill of Outlawry of the Blacksmith Brothers.

  The journal was at pains to instruct citizens on their rights under the bill.

  This bill will increase penalties against those harbouring the fugitives, provide a reward of £5,000 for their capture, and cancel all the Blacksmiths’ rights under common law and the law of the State. They can be shot on sight, or – if captured as the result of surrender – be put to death, it seems, without question, by any citizen using any means of execution.

  Jimmie Blacksmith was, in fact, cheered by the rigor of official opinion, by the absolute nature of outlawry. He decided he had best get some sleep. But before he drowsed off, two other minor items of news attracted his eye.

  One in the exact, high-toned Herald.

  The date of the execution of Jackie Smolders, condemned to death in connection with the Wallah massacre of the past August, has not been stated, and informed observers say that it may be a policy matter to postpone the execution until the capture and trial of the Blacksmith brothers. An officer of the Chief-Secretary’s department has stated that it would be considered inappropriate for the State to conduct executions in relation to so emotional a matter as the Wallah massacre at a moment so close to the great event of Federation.

  In the more sentimental Mail:

  Mr Toban was a member of Dowie Stead’s band of comrades, who all intended to enlist for South Africa once the Blacksmith killers had been tracked down. Therefore it can be said that the cowardly bullets of James and Morton Blacksmith have deprived the Queen of a fine soldier.

  Beneath it were published the Boer War casualties:

  Private lan Manners, N.S. W. Mounted Rifles, enteric fever.

  Lieut. B. Griffith, N.S.W. Light Cavalry, enteric fever.

  Sergeant L. Peters, N.S.W. Mounted Rifles, of wounds.

  Private Edwin Clarke, N.S.W. Horse Artillery, enteric fever.

  Mort was better sleeping by day. Sleeping by night, he did things that worried Jimmie. He would throw off his blankets and walk a few yards in a daze and plump down again to sleep without covers, on bare ground.

  But, a fierce mover, he ate up distance whenever they travelled. Jimmie, night and distance he challenged with the width of his stride.

  “The stain is on the inner eye,” he would sometimes mutter in Mungindi. It was part of a cautionary saying:

  Woman’s blood cleaves to a man.

  If he wash his eyes over and over in Marooka,

  His outer eye does not see it again,

  But the stain is on the inn
er eye.

  A hunter sighted them near Murrurundi as they turned back to the mountains, and they were chased by a constable and twelve citizens into intractable gorge country to the north, a land that suited and awed them.

  Friday was the best day for looting, the day country people went to town. Jimmie survived by a centimetre a Friday afternoon presumption that a farmhouse before them was empty. For days after, he kept feeling on the right side of his neck the cold breath of the passing bullet.

  Onto tablelands of sheep farmers, but still October and the first days of November could have nights too chilly for them. The north had bristled, the south was too open, and Mr Jimmie Blacksmith wondered if he could withstand the echoes in the deep woods and high divide near Merriwa. Due east from where they now stood the timberlands went down to the coast, Jimmie knew. There was good cover all the way down to the pleasant estuary town of Taree, a town which Mrs Neville had always claimed exceedingly to like.

  First they were in high clean vertical forests, little undergrowth, little debris on the ground. The unearthly place worried Mort. Jimmie hoped it would give onto rain-forest.

  Soon it did; cluttered, homelier, creeping with insect industry. Stag horns grew on the trees and tipped crystal water into their sleeping faces. Quick wakeful brown snakes were out in their new skins. The bush-spiders were large but wary. All this somehow made it a more humane country.

  The fires they made gave piquant, moist smoke that stung the eyes and made good tea.

  About them, sown with little timber hamlets, spinney on spinney stretched broader than England.

  They found an empty selector’s house. Someone had gone bankrupt up here in the wet forest. He had left seven bed frames, a few old copies of the Herald and the Freeman’s Journal and one black-and-white coral snake in methylated spirits. It was easy to feel sad at these few relics of hope, though Jimmie remembered immediately his own depredations against far more prosperous hopes.

  Here, with stub of pencil and on the margins of old newspapers, he left parting messages for Dulcie, Jackie, Gilda, the child. The letters might never be found, and that allowed him to write more freely than he could have dared do in more frequented places. It was mad, but allowed him to say generous things to Gilda.

  Dowie Stead had become more indecisive with all this riding. He had even forgotten his relief at being excused from taking Miss Graf’s high hand in marriage. The faces of the slaughtered had become remote. Miss Graf awaited resurrection in Gilgandra cemetery. Her agony was folded away now, like washed, rolled bandages that once wrapped screaming wounds.

  Dud Edmonds had begun to suggest a return to normal business. Soon the shearing season would begin. The world or the wilderness would consume the Blacksmiths in the end; they would fall down a gorge or be torn by random bullets of farmers.

  But Dowie shook his head. He felt he had become a figure of sentiment and that the sentiment must be maintained. He spoke of “being in at the kill”. His father, besides, kept sending bank-drafts, as if their share in a black whore compelled him to it.

  Sometimes Dud’s conversation would niggle at Dowie, hint at the inanity of the chase and the shadiness of Miss Graf’s memory.

  “Yer going t’ join the Masons now, Dowie?” Dud knew that Miss Graf had made it a condition of betrothal that Dowie should not join a lodge. “Yer old enough t’ join now, Dowie.”

  “Petra wasn’t strong on it. She said it was like black magic. She said it was like a corroboree.”

  “I don’t see how she could say that. She might’ve meant Boaz and all that. But there’s nothing the matter with Boaz. It’s all based on the Bible and Knights Templars.”

  “Knights Templars?”

  “Crusaders. They were the beginnings of the whole Freemason business. And the blokes who built the pyramids.”

  “I wonder if they’ve gone down to the coast? Round places like Port Macquarie, Taree. The Blacksmiths, I mean.”

  “I know a family in Taree, Dowie. Two nice daughters. Yer can’t live like a monk for the rest of yer life.”

  Dowie uttered an ambivalent grunt. “Well,” he said, “the Blacksmiths aren’t going to try to live like monks. As poor bloody Toban found out.”

  “Poor bloody Toban. Yer know, I don’t think he really meant all that Irish business and running down the Queen. I wouldn’t mind betting he would’ve turned Mason.”

  “Never.”

  “Yair, I tell yer. In every community yer got them. The ones who join in to serve – like yer own father – and the ones who join to be served. Toban would’ve joined to be served.”

  “That’s a bloody awful thing to say about a dead friend.”

  “Death doesn’t alter facts.”

  It seemed clear that Dud was aiming at throwing question on Petra Graf’s image, that Toban was merely the first step.

  “Shut up, Dud. Yer bloody indecent.”

  “Listen, Dowie, there’s a lot of bullshit talked about death.”

  “Jest wait till you’ve had a dose of it.”

  “Come off it, Dowie. We both know you didn’t want to marry that Graf girl.”

  “Shut up, Dud.”

  “Look, I’ve stuck with yer …”

  “Don’t make a song and dance about it.”

  “At least I ought t’ be allowed t’ talk honestly. I’m just as shatoff with the whole business as you are.”

  “Righto! Say what yer bloody like.”

  “Listen, Dowie, yer know yer’d jest as soon not git yoked with that high-hat schoolie.”

  Dowie felt naked. His face ached with shame. For some seconds, he felt he was about to assent.

  Then something unfortunate happened. Dud had not really wished to speak honestly, not with penetrating honesty. He was, in fact, the sort of man whom society could depend on not to let the cat out. So that he now went grey with alarm and dropped to his knees, hanging his head.

  “I’m sorry, Dowie. I oughtn’t to say that. Yer can punish me if yer want.”

  At least it fruitfully occurred to Dowie how lush with gesture and eccentricity people could be, the quietest, safest people. He himself had his hand half-way to Dud’s shoulder; but then needed to go beyond the firelight to cry. A man did not cry, as he did not perform a natural function, within a fire’s ambience.

  He wept for not having wept for Miss Graf. He wept for his father. What’s the matter with me that I can’t feel grief in its proper place?

  If he gave up the chase, he feared, people would spot it in him: that he didn’t feel the correct, the ordained things.

  Dud waited up for a while, then arranged his blankets, sighed, and went to sleep.

  The Blacksmiths were hale. Around Gunnedah and on the tablelands they had eaten the best of mutton, slaughtering at will on the big sheep farms. Therefore the November damp of rain-forest did not penetrate them. If the high sun touched wet cloth, steam rose in the warm air. The winter of their bloody doings was over and they might live for ever in the coastal valleys.

  Yet they would not have chosen to. To deliver themselves from the ceaseless trees, they again willed deliberate crises on themselves.

  One midday they crossed a track with wheelmarks deep in it and came to an open slope where two buildings stood. One was a schoolhouse, Tambourine Public School 1891, it claimed in black paint. Behind its window was a burr of talk or rote learning.

  Below it was a school residence with children’s clothes on a cord across its veranda, declaring some unknown woman. The woman came out after they had waited half an hour, felt the clothes, winced and went indoors again empty-handed. She was young but older than they. Her parted hair, unpinned, obscured her face, but Jimmie’s special sight picked out a brown eye, a pale nose.

  After his long abstinence, he feared so much that he might want to kill her that the impulse actually arose. As he fought it, it seemed to grow with strength borrowed from his own marrow and guts.

  Both brothers fell asleep and were awoken by the afternoon thunder
. It was mid-afternoon, and Jimmie was peevish, sleeping too long and from fear that he might ravage the woman.

  “Schoolteachers spreadin’ bloody lies,” he said, half-conscious, and felt vindicated when his senses cleared and he found that the teacher was busy spreading one now.

  The children were chanting:

  Australia is

  The smallest continent,

  The largest island,

  And dearest land of all.

  “That ain’t his bus’ness,” Jimmie said. “Dearest land of all. That’s got fuck-all to do with school-teachin’.”

  “What’s it bloody matter?” Mort asked. “Every kid in school gits taught that.”

  “Fuckin’ dearest land of all!”

  “What yer goin’ t’ do, shoot him for it?”

  But the incantation over, children marched out, broke ranks.

  A boy got another down in the long grass and punched him square in the face three times, then let him up. Even the after-school loitering was clipped. The children had to ride home to help with the afternoon milking.

  They were all gone in five minutes, kicking old bareback nags up the cart-track. Then the teacher came in his vest, rolled-up sleeves, watch-chain and Wellingtons, his coat over his arm. He was short, but with a rangy country gait. He had glasses, a Society of Friends beard; and looked aggressively content.

  When he vanished into the residence they heard him calling out greetings to a child, and, from further inside the house, a girl’s light voice telling him with a little dissatisfaction of something domestic.

  Then he came out again to chop wood. The Blacksmiths made for him.

  They were only yards away when he saw them. He looked up at them through strong lenses that magnified the eyes beyond them. These eyes, Jimmie could tell, were trustful in the sense that they had had experience of human rancour yet still could not break themselves of some habit of credence.