The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith

by Thomas Keneally

  One felt a certain accord with these high sentiments after a ride down the velvet Manning slopes and a good bath.

  The Manning Times wanted to interview him. Did he think the Blacksmiths were in the valley? He said that they were always in the places they were not expected to be. They were so slippery that it might be the best thing to look out for them in the direction they were least surmised to travel.

  Then Dowie and Dud talked politics in the bar. Dowie was a little disappointed with the conversation. He would have liked to think, as the beer worked on him, that with his good looks and laudible purpose he appeared to the rich town of Taree as a personification of the new Australia.

  But Dud was more that, draining beer through lean lips and giving inexact and minimizing opinions of all the new century’s hopes.

  “See, the parlerment’s supposed to meet in Melbourne till a capital city is chosen, not less than a hundred miles from Sydney. Well, what’ll it be? Gulgong? Adelong? Wagga? Dubbo? Gilgandra? Can yer imagine a country with a capital city called Wagga? Not on yer life. Make us a bloody laughing stock.”

  There was a certain meanness of spirit in Dud, mistrustful of any magnificence that distant statesmen gratuitously predicted for young countries and centuries.

  Later in the day, Dowie was surprised to hear that, merely on his own quoted word, a citizens’ committee had been formed to arrange patrols of the town and the river.

  It was embarrassing.

  14

  Mr McCreadie, the comforter, was now fevered beyond comfort, and rode on Mort’s back or Jimmie’s.

  It seemed that he grew clear of mind for a few seconds each quarter of an hour or so. Then he would drag on his porter’s throat and there was sharpness and clarity as he asked, “Are you still here, Jimmie Blacksmith? After all this time, Jimmie?”

  He nattered a great deal, rhymes and declamation, the sort of thing people go in for in delirium.

  Yea, welcome March [he declaimed] and though I die ere June,

  Yet for the hope of life I give thee praise,

  Striving to swell the burden of the tune,

  That even now I hear thy brown birds raise …

  He said it in gusts, his chest crammed against Jimmie’s shoulder-blades or Mort’s.

  In this way they carried him for an entire day. All the time they hoped that in spite of their own laxity the necessary decisions would somehow form and take them from the flank.

  The night was cool. Mort swathed the teacher up heavily and sat over him. Each time McCreadie spoke, Jimmie gave a soft dismal snort, as if the presence or illness of the teacher were a genuine pain to him. Mort felt Jimmie had little right to make such a noise, and suggested he get a meal ready.

  And Jimmie obeyed without a word, eating at a great pace once the food was prepared, strips of corned beef fried a little too well, therefore hard and fibrous. Jimmie sat there, gnawing the meat with a hurried patience, a humility.

  Finished, he threw the fat on the fire and watched it flare.

  “We have t’ do somethink with the schoolie,” he muttered.

  “Yair?”

  “We ought t’ put him on a farmer’s veranda, knock on the door like, an’ run like buggery.”

  “Jest leave the poor bugger?”

  “They c’d git him doctored.”

  Mort went back to the bundled teacher. Another inspection filled him with doubt. “D’yer think so?”

  “Er course. A doctor’ll have him right in no time.”

  To Mort’s jangled emotions it seemed an unfairness to have to deliver someone as intimate to them as McCreadie up to a doctor whose name they did not know.

  “T’night?”

  “Er course, t’night.”

  “If we git caught …”

  “Yer orright, Mort. Yer never killed a soul. I’ll tell ’em.”

  “Eh, what’s this?” Mort picked up a valedictory element in the statement.

  “Fer Chris’ sake.”

  Carrying their proper loads (they tied them onto their belts or around their chests), they shared McCreadie for about a quarter of a mile at a time. The woods became sparser and there were lamps twenty miles away, across the river, they they could see, and ones nearby, one mile or three. The night was a royal blue but distances were unscannable.

  Jimmie was about to flit into this soft temperate night. He delayed under the hallucination that he might be able to confess to Mort that he was unconsolable for corrupting him. But it had all happened under such sudden obscure furies that though he loved Mort, whose laughter he had ended, he could not believe himself a devil; but he was sorry.

  He could not hint that Port Macquarie might be another good port for foreign vessels. Mort did not need his guidance on travel. He needed simple deliverance. He needed what the State of New South Wales had had for three months – the disappearance of Jimmie Blacksmith. Whether boats came to the coast from hell, California or China was futile talk.

  It was not much after nine when Jimmie laid McCreadie down in his tracks and scouted ahead down the track.

  Swaddled and hooded, McCreadie lay where Mort waited, for it was his turn to carry. The fervor of cicadas drilled in the ear. The red-hot lust of the brute earth to flesh itself out with voice and bug-eyes and dry twiggy locomotion had brought them up out of the pores in soil. After a dark glutinous incubation, they now had a short season to rant, to burr and shriek notches in the night’s smoothest edge.

  For the first time Mort felt hostile to them. In his nineteen years he had never thought of being hostile or otherwise. The concept of any genuine alienation from earth or beast had not entered his head.

  And where was Jimmie?

  The schoolteacher’s breathing could have been mistaken for a slow stroke of a cross-cut saw. At the peak of every intake of breath he managed a few irrelevant mutterings.

  “The symbolist bastards … Too bloody hard to write poetry now … Too hard … The articles on Malarmé … I wish I’d never heard the bugger’s name … Malarmé … It’s a long way to Paris … Not unpatriotic … But a long way to Paris.”

  And where was Jimmie? Mort jumped over the teacher and sprinted down the purple night. Wild grass as high as a harvest tripped him up and he grazed his belly on the corner stump of a dairy-farmer’s fence.

  “Jimmie!” he yelled.

  Loping for the river, Jimmie heard him but kept to his duty.

  Mort begged the richly pastured night. “Jimmie, Jimmie.” Gone with all his excuses for doing monstrous things. Excuses Mort had rarely listened to with respect, now regretting this neglect. It was kin duty to listen to excuses. What other bastard would?

  “Mourning my kinsman,” he sang to himself. But the chant choked on itself. Not that he failed to see how Jimmie’s vanishing had taken an onus from him. And there was love in the absence of Jimmie, Mort had no doubt of it.

  Jimmie had left him native. Mort did not see that – he would not be Mort and native if he could. All he could sense was the love and Jimmie’s death.

  Being native, he swallowed grief down into his veins, where the festivals of mourning could proceed in the tides of his blood. Once a shearer’s cook in Cowra had said, more or less, that the primitive nomad did not live inside an idyll but within practicalities. Even the canons of marriage and kinship and magic rites were – in primitive terms – mere practicalities.

  Eons of fierce self-discipline were written into Mort’s guts. He knew therefore that the practicality which was McCreadie lay choking up the track a little. Within two minutes he was back with the schoolteacher.

  He carried McCreadie in his arms, putting him to ground to open and close the yowling country gates. In this way he acted the reliable cross-country traveller. That was how they had all travelled – Jackie, Gilda, Jimmie – on the very first night of their flight.

  The roll of blankets loosened and one dropped. He did not stop, but hitched McCreadie higher, as one hitches a large child.

  “Wives of schooltea
chers,” McCreadie said. “In rural areas … Rural areas – Christ! … Three shillings allowance a week. For taking sewing lessons … Three shillings! … I call that … generous.”

  If Mort had understood that this rural schoolteacher he was hauling had been clever enough to drive Jimmie away, he might not have sweated so much for him. Or might have felt obliged not to sweat so much for him, out of respect for Jimmie.

  “Forty per cent vote,” McCreadie said. “They ask the people … They ask the people what they want … They ask them … Nationhood or six bloody … colonies? The smallest continent … The largest island … And dearest land … They ask the sods … Forty per cent bother to vote … Forty per cent … Still on the frontier … Why bother t’vote? … As long as the boundary fence holds? … Why bother? … Forty per cent … They don’t know … They don’t want to know.”

  Now they were close enough for Mort to see the slanting roof of the farm. The farm dogs were already barking, and McCreadie made croakings of alarm in his throat, a school-room reproach which, in his condition, sounded so much like a death-rattle that Mort stopped to shake him out of it.

  Through the home paddock gate, he went perhaps ten yards and put McCreadie down. The bundle seemed as small as are the bundled bodies of the dead. How had they managed to make this good man small and sick? It was hard for Mort to understand that some men’s bodies might put up physical barriers against fifteen-mile-a-day marches in rain forests. It was easier to believe that they – his brother and he – had passed on some malignancy.

  The farmhouse door opened, it was so full of light, and the bald, blinking farmer was edged with gold.

  “Who’s that?”

  Mort called out in the nakedness of his blacks’-camp vowels.

  “Got Mr McCreadie here, the schoolteacher from out at Tambourine.”

  The door flew shut. The gold snapped off, and behind the window, the lamps were being turned down low. A gun barrel nosed at net curtain. There was the awful farting roar of a bullet and Mort felt dirt fly near his ankles. Inside the house, two women at least were weeping, expecting depredations.

  “I’ve got three sons,” the farmer lied at the top of his voice. “They’ve all got rifles. Yer better put Mr McCreadie down and bugger orf.”

  There was another shot, and Mort felt in the soles of his feet the thud of it in the deep moist soil.

  “Watch out,” he yelled. “Yer might hit Mr McCreadie.”

  “Then clear orf and leave him there.”

  “Orright.”

  The dogs were standing in their leashes, half-throttled to be at him. He went politely, re-latching the home gate. He hated to leave McCreadie to the heavy doctorings that whites went in for.

  Hard-headedly, without too much sentiment, he recognized all the portents that went to prove bedevilment: the red ankles of brother and maternal uncle on the first night; the red omen likewise on the breast of Mrs Healy’s tough lady; the harm that had jumped without his willing it from his hand to Toban’s body; the infestation of Mr McCreadie.

  Now he had nothing to do but act upon the fact of his history of bad magic.

  He ran north, coming to one of those steep timber roads where there are usually traffic, schoolchildren, bullock-teams dragging great stalks of cedar on braked tray waggons, rich farmers with timber concessions as vast as Flanders. Here he slicked his face white and slept without blankets, hunched belly-on towards his token fire of twigs and old eucalyptus leaves.

  In the dawn he woke as a farmer rode past on a huge snorting grey. The man reined to one side and squinted at him through the trees; then seemed to demand tip-toes and speed of his horse, who was too prestigious a hulk, too quantitative and well-fed, a horse of substance, to give either.

  So early in the morning the farmer had been wearing, Mort noticed, butterfly collar and suit, and did not seem to be armed.

  The morning was dull and cool for late November. Since a cold death would change nothing, he wrapped a burlap sack around his shoulders and prayed for his daily bread and to be delivered from temptation.

  At last the man in the butterfly collar came back frowning with three others from behind the underbrush on the far margin of the track. All four had rifles and seemed intent on taking him unawares.

  Aware, he smiled for a second and waited. Thunder rolled familiarly, without ill intent, along the top of the hills.

  They conferred then, very close together. They had hats and dolorous moustaches. Two of them wore old collarless shirts and the fourth a deep-blue flannel vest, with a new narrow-brimmed, full-crowned hat, the type popular with rich men and politicians.

  Someone, Mort heard, was having trouble with a bolt handle. Then, in an instant, they were dispersed and hidden. They were not such fools. They were acquainted with the landscape and now implacably concealed.

  High to his right the thunder nestled itself down amongst its daily hills.

  Then he was shocked by two terrible impacts from his left that lifted him almost to his knees; low, keenly placed, exact bullets, but cancelled a second later by two like impacts from the right.

  He lay as Healy or a rabbit, forehead down, worried for breath, appalled more by the force than the pain.

  Life, he sensed, was cast in certain jagged rhythms and there was some sort of lasting merit if a person gave himself up willingly to them.

  Meanwhile, the man in the suit arrived above him. Empowered by the New South Wales Government’s Act of Outlawry to do anything he wished, he lowered the rifle muzzle close to Mort’s left eye. Jagged rhythms. Yet it seemed that all his soul jumped with an electric thrill to that threatened eyeball and bled softly from it.

  The black man was dead. The farmer desisted from blowing his face apart, remembering that reward might depend on easy identification.

  Eight hours later Dowie and Dud rode up to the barn where Mort’s body lay on a bench, a blanket up to its neck, its face washed black again. He had been bled in the cow-shed and dogs scented the stain of his historic blood on the earth floor, and cattle lowered their slow snouts. The photographer from Taree was packing his equipment into a dray, but recognized the young men and asked for the favour of an on-the-scene photograph.

  Such is the power of the press, even of the Manning Times, to magnify and consecrate that Dowie and Dud felt fulfilled, justified in the epiphany of phosphorus flash. As a result they stayed at the farmhouse that night, celebrating with the farmer his giant-killing.

  One week later, their pictures all appeared in the Mail, high-chinned, craning faces, their rifles propped on the floor, their big hands on the barrels that looked like sceptres.

  At lodge, Wallace Hyberry’s political friend had news. He had spoken to the Premier about the butcher’s royal honour, and the Premier had hinted that if Jimmie Blacksmith were to be shot down as his brother had been, there would be no reason why Mr Hyberry should not be honoured in the January 1902 list.

  The politician expected to be thanked for this inside news, so Mr Hyberry thanked him; but was sleepless all night again with the implications.

  The public – and the Premier, one of the public’s highest forms of self-expression – were interested in protecting themselves from killers. But executioners were mistrusted, especially if they had the sweet honour of exacting a publicly-stated, publicly-felt vengeance.

  Seven years before, a drunken police commissioner had rushed Hyberry away from a public dinner, taken him by cab to Clarence Street Police Station, and opened for him a confidential packet of photographs. These were evidence in the murder of a pregnant eighteen-year-old by a gently thirty-seven-year-old estate agent and father of three. They were properly appalling. The girl’s wounds were given a terrible livid tumescence by the photographer’s flashlights.

  What had the commissioner been trying to do? Display obscenities to stiffen Hyberry’s intentions? Rouse in him a lust for the estate agent’s death, something to relish during the clinical carry-on of ritual hanging? Force him to morbid joy tha
t the killer would get from his hands the hempen reply to the bloody statement which was the girl’s body?

  He suspected that the commissioner’s motives in 1893 had something to do with the Premier’s nicety in 1900.

  Because Jackie Smolders had been all bewilderment and stupidity at his trial, he had ceased to be murder incarnate. People and the Premier had forgotten that he had chopped up Mrs Newby and kept his head down to the work until ruins alone were left. His hanging had become a mere public duty.

  The message for the hangman was that there were drudgery hangings, for which a man could be rewarded, and heartfelt hangings which were somehow less decent. These latter were perhaps too much enjoyed by the hangman and should not be asterisked with a royal honour.

  God knows my justice, Hyberry knew, if Premiers and the Sporting Chronicle doubt it.

  I could resign, he thought. He filled the night with letters of resignation addressed to the Chief Secretary. They were flippant, they were trenchant, they were curt, they were stately, they were explicit, they were an apologia for the craft and virtue of the hangman, they punned, they were as fluffy as de Maupassant, as sonorous and blood-red as Dickens.

  But few of them were like him. In fact, none were. He must always be steady and keep his virtue secret, and in that spirit it was hardly worth resigning.

  And whoever they then brought in, a new man or a visitor, might fumble and make a mess. It was most important, morally, for the disappointment of all the high and low Knollers, that no one should make a mess of Mr Jimmie Blacksmith.

  Mort was a day dead but Jimmie had not heard the shots. Now, in three-quarter light, a mile upstream from the ferry, a patrol of three citizens saw a black man wading into the shallows. With a length of rope beneath his armpits he had cleverly tied a rifle and a hessian bag to his shoulders.

  The banks were soft and eroded. The three men dismounted and began to run towards him. He saw them coming and stood for a second defined clearly against the water, tides in balance, tranquil as a set jelly.

  This he now broke apart with his sprinting. Suddenly the depth took him; for there is little gradual about the profile of a great flooding river.