Prindy woke suddenly, said, ‘Motor car!’
They sat listening. The sound came from beyond the little station, which was out of their line of sight because a rake of waggons intervened. Across the road from the station was the line of railwaymen’s quarters. The motor stopped. Then there was heard the familiar sounds of the nightmen at their operations, in which invariably they showed as little regard for the populace they served as probably it felt for them.
The pair beside the engine house sat listening. The racket came to the station dunnies, ended there. Now there was only talk and laughter. But suddenly, to Prindy’s acute ears, sound of bare footsteps: ‘Somebody come!’
They leapt up. A flashlight beamed through the couplings of waggons right before them. The flashlight leapt up with its owner’s climbing over the couplings. Snatching at Prindy, Nell dragged him towards the entrance to the shed, just a step or two. But the beam caught them even as they turned the corner. Someone shouted, ‘Lookit!’ The entire crew were coming through couplings, evidently heading for the water-tank.
Nell dragged Prindy into the gloom, heading for the black bulk of an engine, stepped into an ash-pit, fell sprawling in cold ashes, with the boy on top of her. They disentangled in a flash, but to lie still, as bare feet came thudding in, beams of light darting overhead. Then a beam found them — more beams — behind them a panted chorus: ‘Eh, look out!’
A gabble of voices identified the crouching blinking captives. Then one asked, ‘Wha’s matter . . . you run-away, eh?’
Only blinking for answer. Then the face of Billy Noseda, the foreman, showed itself in the light. He said, ‘No-more fright’. We on’y nightman. Come on out o’ dere.’ He extended a hand that stank of his occupation even as he shoved it down to help.
Although the pair, dragged up and surrounded with torches and quizzing faces and voices, would not speak at first, their silence was as unnecessary as their fear, as they were being told over and over: ‘You steal him kid from Mick Cusky tek him way. We savvy all right. We ain’t goin’ tell nobody. We ain’t p’liceman. We nightman . . . eeeeeahhhh! But you can’t do it like o’ dat. P’lice gitchim you. Where you reckon you go . . . where you reckon you go . . . where you reckon you go he can’t gitchim you?’
At last Nell told them she was going to Lily Lagoons: ‘Dat Mullaka he look-out for we.’
The men admitted it. ‘Yeah . . . but how you goin’ ’o get dere? Dat hundred-hundred mile?’
‘Foller him up railway line.’
‘What ’bout fettler . . . he goin’ o’ see you?’
‘We plant him long o’ bush spone somebody come.’
‘Too many whiteman down dere now. Dey’s buildin’ new road. Big mob gang dere now . . . camp all dem sidin’ . . . Helena River, Caroline, Alice.’
‘What you goin’ ’o do tucker?’
Someone giggled: ‘Tchileep long o’ gang, eh?’
There was a general guffaw.
Someone else said, ‘P’liceman goin’ ’o tell dat lot keep eye out for you two-feller.’
Prindy piped up, ‘We go long o’ Mooragetaghee.’
Another chorus of: ‘Eh look-out!’
One asked, ‘You no-more savvy Mooragetaghee?’
‘I savvy all right . . . him dat-a-way.’ Prindy jerked his chin sou’westward.
‘Das right!’ someone exclaimed. ‘How you savvy? Dat not you country.’
‘My huncle been show him me. He tell him he tek me dere. I reckon he sit down dere now. We gitchim up, he look-out we.’
‘Wha’ nam’ huncle, young feller?’ asked Noseda.
‘Dat-one King George.’
A chorus of exclamations. Noseda said, ‘Dat King George, he no-more long o’ bush . . . he dere now, long o’ Sanitary Depot . . . him-two-feller Peg-leg.’
Now the pair exclaimed, although surely from different reasons of interest. ‘Where dat place?’ they both asked.
The others said they themselves were heading there now, had finished their round, and were only going to wash up at the tap. ‘You wait . . . we tek him you.’
As the half-dozen of them went towards the water-tank, Noseda turned back, said to Nell, ‘Spone I tek him you, you gi’ me, eh?’
She drew a deep breath, nodded, breathed out, ‘Yu.’
The men were ready in about ten minutes. As they came back one of them took Prindy by the hand, saying he was his uncle, and helped him through the couplings and across to the smellful truck, and bumped him up into the cabin after his mother. The awful atmosphere was left behind with the truck’s moving off. They ran on past the shunting yard, crossed the railway where it became a single track again, turned into a waste of torn trees and earth through which a strip of new yellow gravel ran straight as a die, the beginnings of what was intended to be the Transcontinental Highway, being constructed, like those oil tanks of Shell’s, for strategic purposes, so it was said. A dismal prospect for people used to travelling by tracks that were part of the bush itself, as much pathways for wild things as for men, winding from water to water, dodging the bigger trees and rocks.
They went thus for a couple of miles, with here and there a dry gully with all resemblance to what it had been gone, slabs of concrete serving as the beds of the creeks that had bottomed them, creeks that perhaps had been so dealt with as never to run again, except as drains. Then a white notice loomed in the headlights on the left: SWEET CREEK ABORIGINAL SETTLEMENT, with an arrow pointing. Noseda slowed down and turned into another straight road of recent making, but not nearly so broad, since not designed for the transport of men and their guns in battalions. They followed this down through sparse timber for half a mile, then swung left again onto a bush-track, where there were curlews to be seen blinking for a moment in the headlights, then winging upward, and a couple of wallabies. Suddenly they were in dense scrub, bumping over timbered corduroy, slow enough to have the essence of their load envelope them again, along with the miasma of maritime mud. A short distance: and there ahead was a clearing, with several white buildings, big and small, and what looked like a shiny black wall, but was seen at closer range as a long line of stacked sanitary cans freshly tarred.
The truck ran on through the clearing, to stop at last where there was the glint of water ahead. ‘Here we are,’ said Noseda, and cut his engine and his lights, then got out and came round to let the others out, because they were having trouble with the door. The three were alone, the rest of the crew, by the sound of talk and laughter back where the houses were, evidently having dropped off as they came through. Lamps were being lit there. Noseda led his charges towards them, along with a whining swarm of mosquitoes. He told them that the crew would be having crib after they’d showered, and that he would light a bin of mangrove leaves to drive the mosquitoes away. He took them to a shed used for eating in, and left them slapping at the mosquitoes, only to have them coughing and weeping soon in a cloud of acrid smoke pouring from a drum he had set match to.
The crew came at last, wearing clean clothes, and made tea and cut up bread and beef, and told how George and Peg-leg were camped dat-a-way, with jerks of lips and chins, to be reached only when the tide was low and the bar across Sweet Creek exposed. Prindy fell asleep with fair head on the table, to be picked up and carried off by his new-found uncle, to a hut where there were stretcher beds, on one of which he was laid.
Noseda, carrying a hurricane lantern, took Nell to another hut where there were similar beds. He blew out the light, and without further ado, flung her down on a bed, and dealt with her. When he got up and went outside, and she was sitting up to put on her drawers again, someone else burst into the hut and pushed her down and did likewise. He went also. She was at the door when the third came. No more after that. Perhaps relationship forbade it. She came out warily. Some of the men were still sitting in the dining-shed, talking and laughing. Watching them, she went like a wraith across the clearing in the direction Prindy had been taken. There were several small buildings. She stared at them
for a while, then went and sat down beside the one furthest from the men and out of sight of them. A mopoke was calling that the district was clear of evil things, while she swatted at the mosquitoes. At last she lay down, and still swatting, and scratching where she had failed to swat, slept fitfully.
Nell woke wide at last to find a small form standing over her, distinct against the pearl of dawn. She heaved herself up, looked about through the smellful gloom. After a moment she whispered, ‘Where dat-lot?’
‘All lot tchileep.’
‘We go find Queeny Peg-leg.’
‘Dat-way, he reckon.’ Prindy turned eastward. He looked back at his mother, then turned again and led the way.
Fifty yards or so brought them to a wall of mangroves, but with a gap in it, and the damp mud well trodden. They entered it, soon to hear the click-clack of the life of mangrove swamps now familiar to them, and to have a myriad mosquitoes join them. Then the glint of water. They emerged to find a wide silvery expanse of estuary, chased with the agitated movements of fish trying to get back to the deep through ambuscades of large predators who occasionally betrayed themselves with skimming fins or spines. The bar was just beginning to show, like the broken top of a sunken wall some three to four feet wide. A slippery track led down to it through gravelly mud. They went down, leaving most of their mosquito escort, only to enter a veritable haze of sandflies. Almost as fast as they went out on the slimy wall it rose above the water. Several times they had to stop at gaps through which the water boiled, not only with its own force, but with leaping fish. Prindy remarked on how easy it would be to fill a sugar-sack if you had a spear; but his mother was more concerned with what might be behind them in human form, and kept looking that way — while the sky ahead turned from pearl to rose. It was gilding as they climbed up through a similar gap in a mangrove jungle on the other side.
A well-defined track went on through open forest, with several branches off, but no chance of going wrong, because there were the tracks of Peg-leg’s having gone that way a couple of times. There were also recent tracks of a small dog. After something like half a mile they came to a bit of fresh-water swamp, thickly grown with rushes and pandanus, but with scarcely a bucketful of water to be dipped out of the muddy hole to which it had contracted. At the hole was ample evidence of Peg-leg’s presence in the locality. The track away from it led to rising stony ground. As they were climbing Prindy said he heard a cough. They halted. His mother cocked her ear. No sound but a duet of butcher birds a long way off. Prindy said he heard it again, indicating a point diagonally up the hill. Then he put a hand to mouth and called, ‘Ku!’ No answer for ordinary ears; but he said: ‘Dog dere. Been squeak. Sombody been hit him.’ He called again, ‘Ku-uuuuu . . . Ngaggun!’ Again, drawing out the relationship name, ‘Nah-gag-gun!’
The reply came, at a fair distance: ‘Ko!’
‘Ku!’
‘Ko . . . Kokanjinni!’
Smiling, Prindy led the way at a trot. The track led almost to the top of the low hill, to a point where the eroded conglomerate that capped it had been weathered into bits of caverns. Two of the caverns had been made into dwellings with screens of boughs, the latter surely put up less for privacy, even though the owners, as tribal brother and sister as well as old enemies, might be expected to have as little to do with one another as possible, than a shelter from the sou’easter that could come up blustering and cool of afternoons and evenings at this time of year. They were each standing outside their respective domiciles, with a little dog between them, a little yellow and white mongrel with one ear cocked in the way of his dingo ancestry, the other flopping to other responses of his variety of canine genes, both flickering in agitated hearkening to a master and mistress who would not let him do what half his nature craved, which was to bark at intruders like a whitefellow dog — as bark, indeed, he did, shrilly and without restraint, when the parties rushed to greet each other, sister to sister, uncle to nephew, crying their delight in reunion, embracing, fondling, the women even weeping over each other — till Queeny, herself again, took a swing at him with her crutch, yelling, ‘Bloody mungus dog . . . kai-atulli!’ He squeaked and fled.
While Nell told briefly how came they there, to the accompaniment of cries of Hallelujah! from Queeny and a fit of coughing by King George, Prindy made friendly signs to the little dog, which came to him writhing on its belly. Queeny’s comment on Nell’s tale was simply, ‘Jesus been sent you . . . I been prayed.’ A hint of the extremes that had brought her to praying, as well as of the reason for the excessive affection of the welcome just now, was forthcoming with her making another swipe at the dog, yelling, ‘Dat bloody dog belong ’o shit man . . . him on’y shit dog . . . Gwon ’way, mungus dog . . . shit!’ She then explained how the pit-diggers of the Depot across the way had fobbed the animal off on her as part payment for a huge debt they owed her for goods more or less forcibly extracted from her store, tobacco, grog, clothes: ‘Bloody yeller puggin shit-diggin’ robber bastard!’ she yelled, turning towards the Depot as if she might be heard there. Then she proceeded to tell the sorry tale of her own experiences since leaving the Compound, while George went off to get food for breakfast from a hiding place. She declared that but for hiding what remained of her possessions, by now she would have nothing, thanks to those — and again she turned and raised her powerful voice to express her opinion of the neighbours.
George stirred up the fire and put on the billy for tea and produced crackers and canned beef to eat, behaving as if Queeny with her excited angry gabbling were not there; as she also did with regard to him. The mungus dog squatted quivering at a distance, waiting for the bits that now and again Prindy tossed him. Perhaps the halfcastes of the Sanitary Depot had given the poor little mongrel to her in deliberate jest. She said she had told them to get her a big savage animal as a watchdog. Some of them could have been amongst the many simpletons she herself had robbed in her long and ruthless career in business.
She had been ruthlessly dealt with from the very start of the adventure, according to her version of it. Willy Pak Poy, whom she had regarded as more than a friend and supposed would have done what she asked of him for not much more than a token fee, had charged her no less than fifty pounds, half her capital, for the trip from the Compound, demanding payment before he landed them at their destination, on the threat of taking them right back again and putting them ashore not on the Compound beach, but right in town: ‘The bloody slant-eye Chinee puggin bastard . . . yhuna mukka hai lo!’ she cried, and added more Chinese obscenities, concluding: ‘I gitchim dat bastard some time . . . I tell him ’bout dat opium he pick up what Chinee steamer man chuck long o’ sea . . . I know all ’bout it. I put him long o’ jail. I wan’ ’o belt dat bugger long o’ crutch . . . but spone I do it like o’ dat, who goin’ o’ work dat launch?’
It seemed that, having got his fee, Pak Poy simply dumped the pair ashore with their goods and King George’s boat, which he’d had in tow, on the first bit of open shore he came to, which happened to be the clearing in the mangroves of the estuary where the pits, in which what was politely and officially called Night Soil, was dumped, drained through the salt marshes on the sea. They’d had to call on the diggers and dumpers for further help, which included finding a suitable place to camp. These had begun by helping themselves to the goods, particularly to the rum and tobacco, first on demand as payment for their services, then on no less peremptory demand with the promise to pay later; part of the payment being the poor little Mungus. They had shifted them across the water and to this spot; and ever since, whenever they wanted anything, they came and took it, until they’d hidden it. What use the signatures of those who could write their names and the crosses of those who couldn’t, so glibly made against what was debited to them in her account book? Again Queeny turned westward and at the top of her rich contralto delivered her opinion of the rogues.
Now their water, which they had been told was fed by a spring and to be relied on throughout the year, was
definitely about to fail; and there was no other fresh water nearer than the New Settlement, except that in the tanks across the way, which it looked as if they’d soon have to be buying at the price of rum: ‘Bloody stinkin’ shit-diggin’ bastard!’ Queen yelled.
They would have got out before this, and gone back into the harbour and set up camp on the creek South of Rainbow Beach, only they couldn’t get the boat back into the water. The spring tide they’d come in on was higher than this last one, and the Shit-diggin’ Bastards had taken them up a creek as high as they could to make carrying to this point easier. Their efforts to launch the boat had failed through George’s lack of strength and Queeny’s inability to move about in the deep mud. George had cut corduroy to slide the boat down on, but was unable unaided to both lift the boat and get the timber under her. To ask the help of the goona shovellin’ bloody buggers would surely mean complete dispossession. Queeny wanted the last of her goods to set up a trading station on that creek for dealing with the Koonyarrakung people who passed to and from their own still wild country, buying crocodile and buffalo hides and tin from them, as she used to on occasions at the Compound, but now to do it in a big way. She needed goods to start with. It was to the end of getting the boat afloat while the tides were still high that she had been praying Jesus to lend a hand, she said. That’s all they needed: a couple of strong hands attached to feet that wouldn’t leave you stuck in the mud for the crabs and the crocodiles — and ‘Hallelujah, praise de Lord Sweet Jesus, das what we got now, ain’t it?’
It took some talking over with those Jesus had sent along; that is to say Nell, since Prindy showed little interest in anything but the dog Mungus, except when George told him that if they went to Rainbow Creek they would be able to make that trip to Mt Mooragetaghee. Nell had but one idea in mind, and that to get back to the Beatrice as quickly as possible. She took a lot of convincing that it was even easier to get there by travelling by water what was obviously westward from here when her homing instinct told her it was sou’sou’east by terra firma, following a railway line. She would know the reputation this pair had as smarties who played the poor darkies for the simpletons they mostly were. But what else could she do, especially when Queeny predicted that the shit-diggers would be over in force tonight to deal with her, for sure, because they’d had a go at her too, only that she was, as she put it: ‘All bugger up inside from what dat-lot bloody black bastard . . . this bloody one here, too . . .’ she jerked her lips at indifferent George ‘. . . been do it to me . . . Bloody puggin black bastard!’ she yelled, and took a swipe at George, which he very skilfully dodged, as if he’d had lots of practice at it.
Poor Fellow My Country Page 65
