by David Malouf
Jordan my name is. Jordan McGivern. I am twelve years old. I can show you this country. I been in it long enough.
When we first come up here, Pa and Ma and Jamie and me, we were the first ones on this bit of land, other than the hut-keepers and young inexperienced stockmen that had stayed up here for a couple of seasons to establish a claim, squatting in a hut, running a few cattle, showing the blacks they'd come and intended to stay and had best not be interfered with.
When we come it was to settle. To manage and work a run of a thousand acres, unfenced and not marked out save on a map that wouldn't have covered more than a square handkerchief of it and could show nothing of what it was. How black the soil, how coarse and green the grass and stunted the scrub and how easy a mob can get lost in it. Or how the heat lies over it like a throbbing cloud all summer, and how the blacks are hidden away in it, ghosts that in those days were still visible and could stop you in your tracks.
Mr. McIvor, who owned the run, had no thought of coming up here himself. He was too comfortable out at Double Bay, him and his wife and two boys in boots and collars that I saw when I went out with Pa to get our instructions. I talked to them a bit, and the older one asked me if I could fight, but only asked; he didn't want to try it. This was in a garden down a set of wooden steps to the water, with a green lawn and a hammock, and lilies on green stalks as long as gun barrels, red.
Mr. McIvor meant to stay put till the land up here was secured and settled and made safe. He might come up then and build a homestead. Meantime, my pa was to be superintendent, with a wage of not much more than a roof over our heads and a box of provisions that come up every six months by bullock dray, eleven days from the coast. To hold on to the place and run the mob he had stocked it with.
Our nearest neighbours were twelve miles off, southwest, and had blacks to work for them out of a mob that had settled on the creek below their hut. We only heard of this, not seen it. We had just ourselves. Pa believed it was better that way, we relied on nobody but ourselves. It was the way he liked it. Ourselves and no other. He wouldn't have slept easy with blacks in a mob close by, in a camp and settled. Maybe wandering in and out of the yards, or the hut even, and sleeping close by at night. Or not sleeping.
“You trust nobody, boy, there's nobody'll look out for you better'n yourself. I learned that the hard way. I'm learnin’ it to you the easy way, if you'll listen. We're on our own out here. That's the best way to be. No one watchin', or complainin’ about this or that you done wrong, or askin’ you to do it their ways. Just us. We're on to a good thing this time. We'll make it work. Damn me if we won't!”
There had been other places, a good many of them, where it didn't work. He had no luck, Pa. After a time there was always some trouble. There was something in the work he was asked to do, or the way the feller asked it, got his goat, and irked or offended him. He'd begin to walk round with that set, ill-used look to him that you knew after a time to avoid, and I would hear him, low and sulky, complaining to Ma after they had gone to bed. You could hear the aggrievement in his voice and the stubbornness and pride in his justifications.
I don't know when I first begun to see he wasn't always in the right. I might have picked it up in the first instance from Ma, from her silence, or from the way she'd start packing up her bits and pieces, things she had had from way back before I was born—a tea caddy made of tin with little pigtailed Chinamen on it, a good-sized greenish stone from the Isle of Skye, which is where she was from—them and whatever else she had an affection for and had saved out of our many wrecks. She had already begun to pack them up in her head before he even come out with it, that we were on the move again.
“I won't be treated like a bloody nigger,” he'd be telling her. “A man's got a right to a bit of respect.” I don't know how many times I heard him say that, and saw the fierce look he wore, and felt the air hiss out of him and saw the scared look in her eye.
It was his pride. His impatience, too. Something in him that made doing things another man's way impossible to him.
I never once heard him put it down to anything he had done himself, to the trouble he had knuckling under or settling. It was always someone else was to blame. Or some power of bad luck or malice against him that all his life had dogged and downgraded him, going right back, and which he saw in the many forms it took to bring him low. In a look on one feller's face that said: "This work is not done the way I want it. It is not to my liking. Do it again. An’ if you can't do it my way, then we'd better part company.” Or in a finger moving slowly up a column of figures, and a frown that said: "Hello, what's this?” Then that cloud of old hurt and misjustice on his face for being once again doubted and disrespected, and while he raged and justified, the bundling up, all in a rush, of our few bits of things.
Always the same end to every venture, no matter how hopeful he started out: anger and disappointment. But what I saw on those occasions was more than disappointment. It was shame. In front of Ma, and of me too I think, once he begun to consider me. At having so little power to hold us in one place and safe. At being always at the mercy of another man's discontents.
He wasn't always right. But Ma did not once, that I ever heard, cross him or argue back. We stuck together. We were loyal. If I learned that, it was not so much from what he told me of the necessity of it, which he did often enough, but from watching her.
Whatever strung the different places together was in what she made. In the first meal we ate there, the plates set out the same way as at the last meal we'd sat down to, and a bit later the line of clothes she'd have drying, with the wind of the new place lifting and puffing them full of sunlight. In the smile she'd allow herself when he told her, with all his old false confidence: "This is a good place, Ef—an’ he's a good man, I reckon. This'll do us for a bit—what d'you say?”
But I'd noticed something else by then. That people somehow, where he was concerned, were not well-disposed, they were not kindly. He lacked whatever it is that makes people respond.
Maybe he was just too much himself. Too ungiving. Or maybe it was the opposite—he wasn't ready enough to receive. Anyway, he could never get it right, never manage to ask for a thing in a way that won men over. He'd ask and they'd frown and hum and shift their feet in the dirt, and he'd already have took offence or lost his temper before they'd even come up with an answer. They'd feel then that they'd been right to hold back, and him that he'd been a fool ever to ask.
He also discovered after a while, and long before I even knew what it was, that I did have it—the power, whatever it is, to soften people, win them over. He'd get me to ask for things he knew no amount of asking on his part could get him, and laugh up his sleeve at the way they'd been hooked. And even if it was a gift he despised and wouldn't have wanted for himself, he was happy enough for me to make use of it. He'd just stand there and listen while I soft-soaped them, and I could tell from the way he looked and smiled to himself, but it was a sour smile, that he scorned me. He was pleased I could do it, but it was something in me that he scorned and might come to hate in the long run—that's what I thought. He didn't know how I'd got hold of it, where it had come from. Not from him, not from his blood. So I needed all the more to stick close and show him, whatever he thought, that there was a connection. That I was loyal, blood-loyal, and always would be, come whatever. Whatever.
It was blacksoil country, and when the rains come, all mud. The land flowed then like a river as wide as the horizon in all directions. In the dry it was baked hard, and cracked. The low scrub got so green that the light of it hurt your eyes, and when the grass sprung up it was a lawn for two or three days, like Mr. Mclvor's lawn out at Double Bay, then it was swaying round your knees and next thing you knew the cattle were lost in it. He cursed it and had a complaint about every aspect of it. Most of all about the blacks, as if all the faults of the country were their doing. As if they'd made it the way it was.
“They'd better keep clear a’ this place, that's all I got to s
ay,” he'd tell people. Our neighbours the Jolleys, for instance, the one or two times we met.
“Oh, the blacks are all right if you treat ‘em right,” Mick Jolley would say.
“Yair,” he'd say, "well, my idea of treatin’ ‘em right is to keep ‘em where they bloody belong. Which is not on my property. Not while I'm in charge of it.” And he spat, and wiped the sweat off his face with a red handkerchief he wore, and screwed his eyes up against the glare of green.
Fact is, I loved this place we'd come to. Better than any other we'd been in.
He didn't. Not really. Nor Ma neither. For her it was a kind of horror, I knew that, though she would never have admitted it.
It was further out than we'd been before, and for her it was too far. All the things that tied her to the world—a store where she could turn things over at a counter, even if she couldn't afford to buy, a bit of material or that to pass through her fingers, a bit of talk, the sight of other women and what they were wearing—a new style of bonnet or the cut of a pair of shoes. All that, and the comfort of neighbours, of being linked that way, was gone. She went out only to hang the wash on the line, and even then I don't believe she ever raised her eyes to the country. She just acted as if it wasn't there.
But I loved it.
This is my sort of country, I thought, the minute I first laid eyes on it. And the more I explored out into it the more I felt it was made for me and just set there, waiting.
It was more than it looked. You had to give it a chance to show itself. There were things in it you had to get up close to, if you were to see what they really were—down on your knees, then sprawled out flat with your chest and your kneecaps touching it, feeling its grit. Then you could see it, and smell the richness of it too, that only come to your nostrils otherwise after a good fall of rain, when the smells were in the steam that rose up for just seconds and were gone.
Most of all I liked the voices of it. The day voices, magpies and crows and the rattle of cicadas, and the night voices, spotted nightjars calling caw-caw-caw gabble-gabble-gabble, and owls, and frogs I had never seen by day but heard after dark, so I knew they must be there, and found them at last, so small it was no wonder I'd missed them, and with the trick of taking on the colour, green or stripy-bark-like, of whatever they were clamped to, and only their eyes catching the light like tiny dewdrops, liquid and gleaming, till they blinked.
Nothing in it scared me. Not even the tiger snakes or diamond-heads you saw basking in the sun, then slithering off between hissing stems.
After a bit I would get up nights, let myself out, and lie in some place out there under the stars. Letting the sounds rise up all around me in the heat, and letting a breeze touch me, if there was one, so I felt the touch of it on my bare skin like hands.
KEEPINGthe blacks off the land was a difficult proposition. Little groups of them—women and children dawdling along and chatting as they dug with sticks, bands of fellers on a hunting party—were for ever straying across what we knew were our rightful boundaries.
Pa would put up with it for a bit, then go out with a gun and shout at them. There would be scowls and mutterings, and a shaking of spears on their side if it was the men, and on our side Pa, standing square and hard-mouthed, showing no fear, whatever he might have felt, with his shotgun across his arm.
He didn't have to point it. It was enough that he had it across his arm. They knew by now what it could do.
They were noisy and fierce-looking, them fellers, but it was show; and so on Pa's side was the shotgun. Only our show was more convincing, I reckon. Our noise, if it come to that, would be a single blast. Louder than anything they could produce, and they knew it. Louder, and from a darker place than a mere mouth.
I think Pa liked what it felt like to just stand there and watch them fellers dance and shout, singing out loud enough, but powerless. It made him all the quieter, just standing and watching how the puff went out of them after a bit. One or two of the fiercer ones among them would make a run, but only two or three steps, and he'd stand his ground, smiling to himself; no need to react.
It was a feeble token. They'd already decided to back off. And when they did, slinking off one by one and throwing dark looks over their shoulder, and muttering, he'd keep standing. I think it was the best he ever got to feel maybe in his life, being left like that facing the empty bush, the last one in the field.
If it was a bunch of just women and little kids he didn't even bother to confront them. He'd just fire the shotgun once in the air, and laugh at the way they squealed and run about rounding up their kids, then scattered.
Most of the time I was there beside him, since most of the work to be done round the place we did together. I was his off-sider, his chief helper. We had no others.
I was too half-grown and scrawny to offer him much physical support, but me being not yet a grown man, even by their lights, was a constraint on them, and in that I gave him an advantage he didn't maybe appreciate. I know this because when I didn't have any jobs to do for Ma, and wasn't out working with him, I'd wander off alone and pass right close to them and all they'd do, whatever they were engaged in, was look. They never offered any word of threat. They'd just look. Like I was some curious creature that had come into view, that was of no use to them because I couldn't be hunted, and was just there—but in a way maybe that changed things and made them curious.
They didn't give me any acknowledgement, either one way or the other, except just with their long looks.
And no trouble, neither. But I'd feel the skin creep on my skull, and I'd walk on as if I was walking on eggshells or air, and I'd just whisper to Jamie, if he was with me, "Just keep on walkin', Jamie, and don't give ‘em no notice,” and felt there was a kind of magic around us, that come from their looking and protected us from harm. Though all it might be was us being so young.
And that day?
It seemed no different from any of the other occasions. We were in the home paddock grubbing out the last of a patch of low mulga scrub, him all strained and sweating with a rope around his middle, me with a crowbar under the dug-out roots. Suddenly he looked over my head and said quietly: "Get me gun, Jordie. Leave that now.”
I looked to where he was looking and didn't move quick enough for him. He had slipped clear of the rope. He jerked his elbow at me and I jumped and run. When I come back he was standing with an odd little smile on his face. I don't think I'd ever seen him so good-humoured, so playful-looking.
Before he took the gun from me he rubbed his palms on the side of his pants; they were grimed with dirt and sweat from the rope. Then, still smiling a little, he ran his fingers through his hair.
He had curls that sometimes flopped into his eyes. Now, with his fingers, he smoothed them back and his bronze-coloured hair was dark wet.
I handed him the gun and he kept watching while he loaded it. He had never taken his eyes off them. But what I remember, even more than what was happening, was the mood that was on him. That was what was unusual. The rest was like any other occasion. He shot me a lively look that said, "Watch this now, Jordie,” as if what was coming was to be the purest fun. I loved him at that moment. He was so easy. So happy-looking.
The blacks, all near naked, were striding along through the scrubby dust and in the heat-haze seemed to bounce on their heels and rise up a little. To float.
There were three of them. The leading one carried something slung across his shoulders; they weren't near enough yet for us to see what it was. And there was a small mob at their back, not many. A dozen, no more. About thirty yards back, in the scrub.
There was no way we could have known what it was. We'd had no notice they were coming.
Pa put his hand up to stop them. They kept coming at the same slow pace, their bodies swaying a little, or so it looked, as if they were walking on air. “Stop there,” he shouted. They were closer than they had ever got before.
“That's far enough,” he called. They were still coming.
I looked across to him then. He was all fired up, but not panicky. Not angry neither, but he had a brightness to him I had never seen before. It was like I could hear the blood beating in him, or maybe it was mine. I think it was the moment in his life, so long as I had ever known him, when he felt lightest, most sure of himself, most free. Five minutes back he'd been straining his guts out over that stump, every muscle of him strained—the sweat running out of him in streams. He was still sweating now, but it was a glow.
He raised the gun and I thought: "He'll just fire over their heads and scare them.” He fired, and I saw the black, the leading one, take off into the air a little and what he was carrying on his shoulders fly up. And as he stumbled in mid-air and rolled towards us, the meat, the side of lamb, went rolling in front of him. Meantime, the other two were scurrying back, and the mob gave a cry, and the women begun wailing. It was done. It had happened.
Out of that slow-fired mood he was in. Which did not ebb away. So that even when he saw what he had done, and lowered the gun, he was still lightly smiling.
I was astonished. That he could stand there with the sound of the shot still in the air and all that yelling and be so cool. Inside the heat there had been a cold, clear place, and he had acted from there, lightly and without thought. It was like he had just hit on a new way of being inside his own skin, and from now on that was the way he would live, and I was the first, the very first, to get a glimpse of it. But he wasn't thinking of me. He just turned his back on the whole thing, and swaggering a little, walked away, leaving the blacks, who were quiet now, to creep forward and drag off the man who had been killed or wounded, while the side of meat just lay where it was, rolled in the dirt.
