The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith

by Thomas Keneally

  Jimmie swam long, pleasurable strokes. Here, in the river, came the peak of his delight at having done the limited rights he could do by Mort and the teacher.

  The three pursuers could see him because of the burden he had roped to his shoulder, because – though he made distance with such great panache – he was the only thing that broke up the still of the water.

  Now, he told himself, he could make arrangements for meeting death, decide what mode to die in, an exercise he had been unable to think of under Mort’s eyes and McCreadie’s. He was convinced now that some sort of salvation was in order for Jimmie Blacksmith, and had forgotten the three men on the north bank.

  Then a hot hand bore away his left cheek and upper lip. There was more hot blood in his throat than he could swallow. Pain sprang up from cover of mere numbness. For lack of other available protest he swam on, amidst no sound but the considerable one of his arms breaking up the static river.

  Nothing else happened. The pain remained in limits, the south bank jolted in his vision, another element in a weird vacuum to which – so he seemed to understand – the men behind him did not belong.

  On the south side were no shallows; the river cut a clean bank and he had to pull himself out by the roots of willows. His tongue was intact but swollen, so that it took a long time to probe the injury, for he would not touch it with anything so brutal as hands, and he must keep jolting south from the river and west from the ferry-road.

  It seemed that a bullet had entered below the left cheekbone, torn out the teeth of his upper jaw and left through a split in his upper lip. Now that he had left the water the estuary saltiness tormented him.

  Yet how spurred he felt by this concrete contact with his hunters. Spurred and freshened. Not towards anything.

  It was known now that:

  He is south of the river Manning, north of Port Stephens, east of the mountains, and wounded.

  The same diabolic energy that set him to his monstrous work last July in Wallah drove him to a remarkable feat in the swimming of the Manning River, though it should be noted that the river was, at that time, at slack tide and favoured his escape.

  Sydney Morning Herald

  Given that swim, it is a pity that he had a history of female homicide, for it was the act of a hero. Those who minimize it by pointing out that the estuary was at slack water ignore three facts; that the conditions should have favoured a marksman as well as a swimmer; that the river is at this point at least half a mile wide; and that the swimmer accomplished the distance with a rifle and bag of supplies lashed to his shoulders.

  The Bulletin

  As Dowie and Dud Edwards had felt somehow absolved and justified by being photographed within the ambience of Mort Blacksmith’s body, Jimmie felt absolved, justified and even enriched by the swim and the wound, that harsh edge of reality he had kept losing by evading armies.

  In this mad intoxication he marched all morning gape-mouthed. About noon he came to a luxuriant place. Two Chinamen and a woman were tending melon-patches, corn, a banana plantation. He used their back door and poured himself a glass of water from the kitchen tap. The workers did not turn, but continued at their wordless harrowing or hoeing. What fine people, the Chinese. Taking their wonderful produce to town, selling it for a song, “Tree-pens, missie”; while the town brats circled their docility singing a mocking song called, “Chingy-Chingy Chinaman”.

  Now Jimmie felt a gratitude close to tears for them, far off in the clearing, making straight the ways amongst their ripening melons.

  He found a saucepan of boiled rice and knocked tiny balls of it, fashioned by his fingers, down his throat.

  Last, he found a mirror under a black cloth on a table by the bed in the far corner. Uncovering it, he looked down soberly at the bloating moustache of injury, tilted his head to the left, the better to catch the light.

  Blood fell on the mirror and, impishly, to frighten the poor Chinawoman, he left it there.

  Higher up the valley, he found shelter under a granite plug, close to a small stream of running water.

  The first drying of blood and torn flesh had tightened the wound and he shook his head with infinite slowness on a pillow of blankets; and grew predictably fevered.

  The pain of his mouth became the pain of tooth-excision at his initiation. He dreamt continually of a beautiful mother, a primal Dulcie, greasing her gums and thighs religiously, to aid his cure and birth from the great Lizard. Endlessly she smiled and covered her teeth with unguents.

  He was a safe man in his fever, he had done all the things that portended happiness.

  He passed two nights and a day in the fever, and woke to the numbness of dispossession. What his body craved was honey.

  He found a wild nest, a bubo of mud in a tree-fork. At the base of the tree he built a fire and then broke the nest open with a bough.

  Inside were the orderly combs which he wedged down his throat in dripping lumps, honey, wax, pupae, God knew what other debris.

  He marched and dreamed on foot that he was carrying live coals in his mouth, provider of warmth to someone – Dulcie, old Wilf, Jackie, Gilda, Miss Graf? Doing for that someone a scalding duty.

  At last he came to another small school amongst the forests. It was locked and all the children were gone. Could it be as close as that to Christmas? The air was drowsy with pollen and the cicadas improvised the pulse for his great pain.

  The residence was locked, but there were no locks on the windows. He got inside, examined the injury in the schoolteacher’s openly hung mirror. It had become such an indefinite mash of bone and flesh that he felt that it was too risky to probe, even by eye.

  He wanted a soft sleep and went through to the teacher’s bedroom. Somehow he was at a vanity table, opening the drawers, rubbing the soft feminine fabrics with his hands.

  There was a wedding photograph before him. The bride was sharp, small, pretty. The man was square and looked like a policeman. Quick-tempered, to give the schoolkids hell.

  Then he was trying a silk scarf around his nose, feeling that the wound needed some sort of compression. A number of letters fell out of the scarf and he bent over to pick them up. All his tender blood ran like loose cargo to his mouth. But he was in that stage of delirium where words torment the brain, when the fevered person reads endlessly from a sort of tortured Bible in his head.

  When he opened the letters therefore – they had no envelopes – he read them with crazy dedication.

  The first said:

  My dear Clarice,

  I certainly do not consider it wrong of you, as another’s wife suffering the ennui of the bush, to write to me. Life is at the moment too busy for me so that I sometimes feel it would be a relief to me to have a little ennui. However, I do understand your need of correspondence to break the loneliness of life in a small settlement. I know that part of the State well, that the hills come down to the coast, the country is hard and there is a lot of rain. Never mind, soon it will be summer and then the forests will be cool, and visited by breezes that don’t blow as far as Macquarie Street or into the musty chambers of our State parliament.

  As you could imagine, nobody quite knows which way to jump now that Federation is on us – very few have made up their minds definitely whether to remain in State politics or abandon their State seats to try to be elected to the new Federal parliament. I have been assured pre-selection for a Federal seat and a place in the first Cabinet if I am elected. But the chances of election are hard to calculate, there being no precedents …

  Jimmie gave up the first one here and opened a second:

  My dear Clarice,

  I was delighted to have your last and was very touched by your predictions of my success in Federal politics. If I thought that a third of the electorate shared a third of your view I would have no hesitation at all in resigning my State seat and launching out …

  You must tell me if your letters to me and my replies cause any trouble for you with Clive. I know that he can be a little
morose – justifiably, since the role of country schoolteacher is far below his obvious talents, the gifts he showed before he gave up university.

  In the meantime, let me assure you what a delight it is to hear from you again and that you mustn’t think that I’d ever be too busy …

  Poor Flo, I’m sad to say, is not well. It is her kidneys. Kidneys apparently are mysterious organs. There seems to be little that any of the renal specialists in Macquarie Street can do to give her comfort …

  I am glad that some of the farmers’ wives are becoming a little more neighbourly towards you. They can make life a living hell …

  To Jimmie it was gibberish but he read it slowly and compulsively. The ache in his mouth was numbed now that Clarice’s scarf encompassed it.

  My dear Clarice,

  Is it possible for a person to fall in love by letter?

  Though that is not the true question: I always loved you and felt tender for you. I delayed asking, and another man asked in my place.

  As for your continual anxiety that I might be too busy at politics to receive letters from a woman whom I have a great affection for, let me tell you that I could not get through my week without your letters.

  Apart from their unlimited value to my heart, they have been like a continuing good omen and under their influence I have finally decided to assault Federal politics in Federation Year.

  Poor Flo is semi-invalided, I am sad to say ….

  Clarice’s correspondent gave some dizzying medical details and said he was sincerely affectionate.

  Jimmie opened another:

  My beloved Clarice,

  It is ridiculous that I should not be able to see you. I beg of you, leave him. He is a man devoted to failing in life. He is too blunt to succeed. I know his habits are low – you must remember that he was a fellow student of mine – at his rare best and his frequently vile. I have often thought with a chill, and now do so with horror, what monstrous practices he might have tried to force on you.

  I am in a position to instal you in a house in Sydney and would demand nothing of you except your respect and interest …

  Poor Flo, you see, is fatally ill. There is no blinking at that fact. She suffers greatly …

  Two parliamentary leaders stopped me in the corridor yesterday to say that they were looking forward to serving with me in the first Federal parliament …

  Names followed. Hard Anglo-Scottish names. The names of parliamentary sharp practice. Jimmie read it all, and then opened more.

  Beloved Clarice,

  I have just come from the Hospice for the Dying where poor Flo is in a coma. I desperately regret her going but – please try to understand and forgive me for saying I – I desperately need you. I beg you to come to Sydney. I shall mourn Florence as a true husband should, but at the same time have no doubt as to whom I most wish to entrust my future. If the electorate do not like the idea of a divorce from Clive then they can go hang. My business interests will provide us with a future …

  Exhaustion now ran yellow across Jimmie’s vision.

  My dearest,

  I call you my dearest because now you are that. Poor Florence passed on Tuesday. Yesterday she was interred at Waverley cemetery. It was a comforting ceremony and I’m sure that if Florence had only had foreknowledge of it, it would have helped her immensely in her final agonies. The Dean of the Cathedral read the service, her brothers joined two officers of my militia regiment in bearing the coffin. At the graveside was the Premier and all but two members of the State cabinet, as well as the leader of the opposition.

  Come to Sydney now, Clarice, when my need of the sight of your face is so sharp …

  A last one.

  Dear Clarice,

  I agree that your recently diagnosed pregnancy puts you in a position where you cannot act freely or come to Sydney. However much it costs me, I applaud your decision to remain with Clive.

  At the same time, I have had a professional disappointment. The Federal seat for which I was to have pre-selection has been given to a relation-by-marriage of the State Premier. I have still been assured that my ultimate destiny lies in Federal politics, but that I must postpone my entry into that arena for a number of years.

  It hurts me to suggest this, but perhaps we should cease correspondence for a year or more and let our destinies take on more predictable directions …

  I know I can trust you to take discreet action with the letters I have written to you, as I regretfully have with yours to me.

  Be assured of my undying respect.

  Yours,

  E

  Lunatic duty done, he went to sleep in the schoolteacher’s bed. About mid-afternoon he woke to noise. From a window he saw two men on horses riding about the schoolyard. One dismounted and came towards the school residence.

  Jimmie made for the back door. He seemed to be pushing a massive pain before him, but was able to unbolt the door and hobble westward into the forest.

  Some minutes later, Dowie was looking down at the schoolteacher’s bed. There was a wide cloud of blood on the pillow.

  “The filthy bastard,” he said, as if Jimmie had somehow defiled the schoolteacher’s marriage.

  15

  In a lucid moment at night he crossed a bridge to a low misty town called Kaluah. There had been rain, and frogs drummed in the mudflats.

  On the town’s first hill stood arched windows with lights behind them. He heard the rat-tat-tat of nuns praying aloud. A person could fit any words to the clacking chant and, in Jimmie’s state, did.

  God have mercy on poor Mort Blacksmith, young voices called.

  Taught to kill women by his bastard brother Jimmie, older and huskier ones responded.

  Outflanking the chapel, he came to a lighted kitchen in the side of a two-storey house. Tall jugs of milk were in the ice-chest. Like a Spaniard drinking wine he poured some from a distance down his throat. Beef stood on a large salver and he dropped shreds of it into his mouth, willing his swallow to give them transit.

  Then into a hallway. Bare buffed boards stretched beneath two kerosene candelabra, unlit. It was an ample hallway. The church built on a European scale, even in Kaluah.

  All down the walls, saints’ faces softened with the joy of Christ-God. They could be seen by strong light from a half-open parlour door. Well down the hall he could see beyond the door to a someone who was, beyond question, dying.

  It was a small middle-aged nun in a high-backed upholstered chair. She seemed severe, but that could have been the disease. It had thinned her body within her robes, withered her face so that the top of her throat could be seen beyond the gamp.

  She had been excused chapel.

  Now he had to fight with the crazed concept that to give himself up to her would be a surrender of special merit, that it would emphasize to everyone how much he wished all were restored again. Jackie Smolders to his tribe, Mrs Newby to Mr Newby, the Newby girls to their hearty country finery, Miss Graf to her squatter’s son, Mrs Healy to Mr Healy, the baby to Mrs Healy’s breast, Toban to his inheritance. His grave regret would be signified by the gravity of this dying confessor.

  However, he might as an alternative simply go to bed. The further arm of the hallway ended where someone had gone to the trouble to paint in gilt on a cedar door: Guest room.

  Inside there was carpet on the floor, such fine carpet that it would have done to sleep on. There was a fine white-quilted three-quarter bed that had had so little recent use that it had settled itself to the slump of its mattress.

  Little else he could see by the light from the hall – a cabinet, a washstand. Drawn blinds. Four pictures. Saints persisted in their especial visions in three, and the fourth was a photograph of a fat clergyman who would have fitted into the basin-shaped bed.

  Jimmie Blacksmith closed the door gently against the dying nun and mauled the white quilt down. Then he went straight to sleep.

  When he woke up in that high benign bed it was daylight beyond the blinds. In the distance Du
lcie Blacksmith was speaking in an Irish voice, “But that’d require a special arrangement. I’d expect to receive a letter from His Lordship’s secretary first. Really, some of these clergy! …”

  “Come on, Dulcie,” he said. “None of that flash talk.”

  When a woman’s shoes were heard nearing the warm March embankment where he drowsed his hand cast about for bullroarer, his head filled up with its thrumming and the woman, in terror of the Lizard, turned and pattered away.

  It was night again and he was clear-headed and thirsty. But he waited till he could hear nothing but, deep down in the dark, the chant of nuns.

  He let himself out. From the dark end of the hall he sighted the sick nun, tonight lying blank-faced on a sofa. Another nun, whose back was to him, occasionally wiped her face with a damp cloth. Jimmie coveted the moisture in the cloth but had no compulsion to surrender. Finding the kitchen, he ate and drank in his gape-mouthed way.

  His mouth had, in fact, been cruelly asymmetrical in form, so that though there was a corner of teeth left to him to use, he could not chew with them unless his bottom teeth on the right side bit at the swollen mess of his upper jaw. It tantalized his mind, the way his mouth had been sculptured in the womb to turn against him in his final crisis.

  He had sliced mutton to take back to bed with him, apricot preserve, biscuit, a jug of water. Confident as a drunk, he travelled with them back down the hall.

  The ministering nun was reading to the moribund one:

  … just as St Bernard of Clairvaux chose a swampy marsh as his monastic foundation, setting for his monks the twin test of clarifying the waters of a morass at the same time as they clarified the morass which is the soul of man in its natural state. The waters of contemplation sing with three sylvan notes: they are clear through their unity, their clarity is the clarity of diamond for there is no atom in them averse to the scalding unity of the divine light that shall illumine them …