Remy knelt beside the bunk. He lifted the net.
“Boy.”
His son snorted and shifted. “Hmm.”
“Wake up.”
Tal blinked into the pillow and raised his head. He grimaced in the pale light. The lava of scabs wrinkled along the boy’s upper back. Remy could not guess how painful such a small motion must be.
Tal cleared his throat. “What is it?”
“Let me help you sit up. Come on.”
“Why? What time is it?”
Remy took the boys arm. Tal gritted his teeth, swinging his feet to the bamboo floor. He glanced at the empty bunks in his cubicle.
“Where’s everybody? What’s going on?”
“It’s all jake, just listen. There’s something going on. Everybody’s gonna be talking about it in the next hour or so. I wanted you to hear about it first from me.”
Tal rubbed his chin to wake himself. Remy watched the small flickers of the boy’s eyes as the knitting wounds across his back pricked at him.
“What is it? Is it me?”
“No, you ain’t in any more trouble, not for the moment anyways. I’m here to make sure that sticks. You got a temper, we both know that. My goal here is to make certain that when it hits, I’m standin’ next to you. Can’t see any way around it.”
“Remy?”
“Yeah, boy.”
“You’re making it worse. Just tell me.”
“Nagata. He’s doing your girl. In the window of her building. I reckon a lot of folks are watching.”
Remy had both hands ready when Tal tried to stand from his bunk. He didn’t push down on the boy’s wrecked shoulders but on his thighs, holding Tal in a sitting position.
“There’s nothing you can do. Let it roll on by.”
“Is he doing it right now?”
“Far as I know.”
“Is that where everybody is?”
“That’s my guess, yes.”
“Show me.”
Remy rattled his head. “You got no need to see this. It’s just gonna make you madder.”
Tal leaned close. His thinned lips showed the price of the movement.
“Exactly. Show me.”
The boy started to stand, heaving past Remy’s hindering hands. Remy relented, giving the boy his own shoulder to prop him. They moved into the corridor toward the buzzing of young men at the far end of the barracks.
Remy brought his mouth to Tal’s ear. “Anyone else know about you and the girl?”
“No.”
“Keep it that way.”
Remy sensed the strain of every step for his son. Since Tal’s beating, this was the first time he’d left his room. The boy walked hunched. Remy nodded as Tal set one bare foot in front of the other, proud of the gumption at the same time fearful of the boy’s rashness.
They approached a clot of boys in the corridor. “Comin’ through,” Remy said. A path was made for Tal walking gingerly on Remy’s arm. Remy strode in first, Tal followed, and every boy, even the few adults who lived in the barracks, made way. They gazed at Tal and his wounds with quiet awe.
Tal took his arm from Remy’s grip. He strode to the window. Remy stayed at his side should he need to clap a hand over his son’s mouth.
Darkness prevailed save for stars, a wedge of new moon, and the light from the girl’s room. She stood in the window, enduring Nagata behind her. The girl’s features remained graven, fixed straight at No. 11, where Tal stared back, invisible to her.
Tal clenched his jaw. Remy raised a quiet hand behind the boy’s back to calm him. Tal made no move or sound; the others in the room followed suit for no good reason other than the boy’s presence.
Tal stood with hands open at his sides. His face dropped all trace of anger and took on the same distant look as the girl. The two could not see each other but they seemed to lock eyes. The boy appeared struck by her misery, glaring as if the whole rotten spectacle was just for him.
No one spoke or left the room. When Nagata finished, the girl did not step back from the window but plummeted out of sight. Tal set his hands on the bamboo sill as though to leap out of the barracks.
“Time to go,” Remy said, turning his son from the window. Those in the room made way. Someone wished him well, saying, “You’re looking better, buddy.” Tal did not seek support on Remy’s arm to leave.
Once in the hall, the boy put a hand around Remy’s waist. They made their way back to Tal’s room. Remy lifted the mosquito netting. Tal eased into his bunk.
Tal screwed up his face and, for the first time in days, lay on his back. Remy dropped the netting, then sat with his own back against the bunk. The other boys had not returned to the room.
Remy listened to Tal breathe. He’d done this thousands of times, simply taking in the sound of his son’s living. The boy coughed, a young man’s throaty voice, but Remy heard the soft hack of an infant.
He closed his eyes, to better see the grave beside the bush hut where the boy’s mother lay. The rough cross he’d nailed together from wooden slats never lasted more than a season; he’d made Sarah a new marker every spring for four years. There was not a chance that now, eight years after leaving her behind, any trace was left of her or their home. The last vestige of the woman and that place rested in Talbot. Remy envisioned the hut in the outback the way it must stand today, a windblown wreck, the grave mound a rocky pile if the sands hadn’t shifted over it. Quickly, Remy abandoned the dismal image for a better one, before the hut or grave even existed, just a flat parcel of crown land near a creek, sheltered by trees, beside the road.
He’d met Sarah in 1924, two months after leaving Louisiana. He’d booked passage on an Australia steamer. Others were trying to escape the poverty in the Delta by heading west, bootlegging, trapping, alligator farming, or joining the army. Remy, at twenty-five, had worked as a mechanic, a blacksmith and farrier, and part-time for the local sheriff delivering warrants. One day, while shoeing a plow horse for an old coon-ass, the man chewed a weed and talked about gold, how he was going to pack up and head Down Under, where the water flushed the wrong way, they ate kangaroos, and all the folks were criminals hiding out. But dang him, he said, if they hadn’t struck gold down there. He figured a hardworking American from the bayou could do better than any of those backward folk. Remy knew the man would never go, told him so, and received a cuff upside the head. The old skinner dared him to go if it was so easy a thing. Remy, with no better prospects than an adventure, agreed that maybe the man was right about how well a Yank could do. He packed a trunk, kissed his mother, and lit out for New Orleans.
The ocean crossing ran long, smooth, and blue. It was a sea journey like the one his father took to France in 1917, a voyage from which he did not return. Remy saw the Panama Canal, switched ships in San Francisco and again in Hawaii. He spent no time in Sydney after landing there. Remy knew little of cities and had no confidence that his fortune waited in one. He stayed only long enough to learn where the goldfields were. The original strike back in 1851 had been in Bathurst, two hundred miles northwest of Sydney. Seventy-five years later, prospectors had chased the color all the way to the coast, and the new goldfields lay around the towns of Woolgoolga and Coffs Harbour. Remy caught the first train north, arriving in Coffs Harbour the next morning. Near the station, he inquired in a Chinese-run hardware store about accommodations. The white girl at the cash register told him of a room to rent upstairs. He took it for two days, figuring he needed one to get himself a parcel of land and another to court the tall, raven-haired Aussie girl.
Remy was mistaken. Securing rights to fifty hectares, roughly a hundred and a quarter acres, took a single day at the courthouse, where he filed a Miner’s Right of Claim and agreed to pay five shillings a year, equal to fifty cents back home. The girl required a week.
Sarah Elias Pendergrass hailed from a large family of ranchers west of Coffs Harbour. She was one of twelve siblings, ten of them girls. Her parents had no particular use for her on the cattle pr
operty and let her go off with the American who talked of wealth. Remy married Sarah at the hardware store. Mr. Yung, the owner, was also a man of the cloth, though it was Buddhism, and performed the ceremony.
That afternoon, Sarah saw the property for the first time. Out of nothing, she conjured the house they would live in, walking the land to find the ideal spot, designing the limits of the building with a foot dragged in the dirt. This ability to see what did not exist became what Remy loved in her most. He grew convinced it was what allowed her to love him.
Remy set up a bush camp under the shade of wild grapevines, gum trees, and she-oaks. The tent became both parlor and bedroom; washing and cooking was done over a fire pit beneath a tin lean-to. Locals began to drop by with the odd tool and helping hand. None left without a meal of Sarah’s fried fish or roo steaks, boiled crayfish from the stream, dumplings, and buttered biscuits. At night, the fire warmed men playing squeezeboxes and mouth organs, women swaying with babies on their hips. Remy believed he’d found his adventure, his woman. Next was to build his home. Then find the gold.
The huts construction took six months. Remy excavated for the floor, then poured a mixture of termite clay, dried cow manure, and chopped hay. Trees on the property provided rafters and framework. An iron roof was laid with much help from the growing rank of able-backed friends. Sarah kept the men hammering and hoisting all day with billycans of strong tea and plates of johnnycakes slathered with honey. After the iron chimney and hearth were fashioned and installed, Sarah told Remy she was pregnant.
He did not take a day from his labors to celebrate the news; Sarah did not ask him to. They bore down harder and swifter to raise their home from the bush. When the news of Sarah’s condition spread, their circle of friends intensified their efforts as well. Eastern Australia was in the clutch of an outbreak of dengue fever. Remy and Sarah wanted their baby born inside the house, protected from the mosquitoes.
Neighboring banana farmers contributed dozens of hessian fertilizer sacks. Sarah stonewashed these in the river, slit them down the seams, and sewed them into bolts. Remy nailed the bags across the studs. Sarah followed, troweling the bags with an ocher slurry of termite clay in thick layers, to make fine adobe walls. Stores in Coffs Harbour provided empty packing crates. Remy used the pine boards to make slats, shelves, even furniture.
The outside of the hut took its final shape. Remy had purchased little, only the roofing iron, twine, nails, and creosote. All other materials had been harvested out of the bush or donated by neighbors and friends. Remy and Sarah, tanned and strong, admired their home hand in hand. Her belly had begun to show. Remy wanted to move her out of the tent and into the hut. She demurred until one more chore was completed.
Over the six months of their marriage and work, she’d been collecting newspapers, magazines, calendars, and posters. With a paste of flour and water, she coated the mud walls with a hard shell of newsprint, to smooth and insulate them. Next, Mr. Yung arrived with long sheets of brown wrapping paper that Sarah glued in place. Finally, she created her own wallpaper, festooning every room with cutouts from the colorful prints she kept dry in Remy’s trunk. The kitchen glowed with a frieze of apricots, apples, plums, peaches, oranges, and watermelons carved from the labels of jam tins. Remy could not afford glass for the windows, but the push-out shutters he’d made were adorned with travel posters, outdoor scenes, and landscapes. When the shutters were closed against the night or weather, Remy and Sarah and the coming child would not be isolated from the world but surrounded by the Eiffel Tower, a sunset, an ocean, a pasture. In the baby’s room Sarah crafted a fresco of ships, stars, animals in the jungle, the Egyptian pyramids. She told Remy she would have a son, but if she were wrong, she had a cache of flowers and rainbows stashed in his trunk.
Just as she’d said, Talbot Mark Tuck was born in August, one year after Remy’s arrival in Australia. The boy was laid in a crib made from oak that Remy cut from his own land. The parents covered the infant in a kangaroo skin and sat up nights by kerosene lamplight, listening to a windup gramophone that Remy bought for his wife the week after the birth.
The boy came into the world healthy and stayed that way. Sarah tended him, joining the community of women around them with youngsters to mind. Remy turned his attention to his fortune.
He’d long ago dropped any intention to mine for gold. Remy had watched men, many of them friends, endure hardship, poverty, disease, just to get a glimpse of the color in the ground. Every day of their lives was a lottery and an addiction. Of the thousands who lived in tents or the holes they dug, a few hit on a nugget or shook dust in their pans. Most found enough to make themselves a wage and no more. Remy took a long look at the prospector’s life and decided that while it might suit him, it would not do for Sarah and Talbot.
He decided instead to rely on the skills he’d brought from the bayou. Many miners had a horse or donkey needing shoes. Every one of them had a pickaxe, a shovel, chisels, iron tools that broke against the hard clay and granite reef. On the part of his parcel nearest the road, Remy opened a blacksmith’s shop.
For five years, he serviced the goldfields as farrier and smithy. Most of the miners he worked for were foreigners to Australia, they were Chinese, Irish, English, Italian, Afrikaans, men who’d chased gold around the globe. From each he learned something new about the world, the vast range of humanity, language, culture, appearance, history. More important, Remy saw what all men share in the base of their hearts. Any man will risk anything, for luck.
To keep the miners claim to his property, Remy and friends sank a twenty-foot shaft not far from the house. He expected to find nothing below the ground. The boy, only six, hauled up buckets of dirt, Sarah lowered the workers lunch and tea. When the hole came up empty, it was not without benefit: the Tuck family was rewarded with a new long-drop privy.
Remy never knew where the mosquito came from. Maybe it was the privy, though he threw lime into it once a week. Maybe the stream, which ran low sometimes in drought and pooled. Sarah’s death from dengue was the result of her strength. She refused to be laid up by the fever and shivers, she did not let chores go undone from hurting joints and a terrible ache behind her eyes. Remy protested that he should fetch the doctor, but she insisted she was fine. Her symptoms subsided after three days. A day later the pains returned, just as Remy’s radio reported a second, small outbreak of dengue in New South Wales. He lit out for Woolgoolga and the mines to find the physician. Remy took two days to bring the man back, almost by the coat collar, but the medicine the physician left behind did little to stem Sarah’s fever. In the goldfields, a hundred had died. Within the week, Sarah was swept out of her body. Remy fashioned a new pick and shovel in his shop, used them to bury his wife, then smashed them on the rocks in the stream.
That winter, Remy closed his business. He’d lost the heart to strain over a bellows, travel into the goldfields to repair and deliver tools, go to the farms where the shoeing work was done. Hard work was what he’d shared with Sarah. Without her the sweat lost its sweetness.
A year before her illness, Remy had played his first card game in the canvas city of the goldfields. On that single evening, he made more by the turn of a card then he could with a week of pounding iron. Remy found himself a cool hand at the table, with a clear mind and a bland face regardless of the cards or the money in the pot. He’d grown up on the bayou reading horses, mules, and the vagaries of hot metal. He’d tricked and chased down deadbeats to serve them the sheriff’s warrants. A drunken, gambling miner in Australia posed much less of a challenge for Remy to judge.
He hired an old teacher to nanny the boy while he rode off to the camps. Often, Remy would be gone for several days. He discovered there was more money in the miners than in the mines. He took to arming himself with a pistol, to protect the rolls of cash he carried.
For four years, Remy played poker. He won many times over what he might have earned as a smithy. He never cheated, and was never deemed a sharp. The boy grew talle
r, brighter; he walked a mile each way to the schoolhouse. Remy taught him cards, ironwork, what he’d learned at the mines about mankind, and about the boy’s mother. Talbot cried sometimes for her loss, though his recollections of Sarah were dimming. Remy told him there was nothing they could have done to save her, she was chosen by God and taken. God was the only one they couldn’t outwit or bluff.
The Aussie gold rush petered out. The camps dwindled. The new color was being mined elsewhere; the latest hot spot was the Philippines, especially after the United States raised its price for gold. In 1935, Remy sold his land, home, and all his furnishings. He laid a wreath of vine and oak on his wife’s grave, added a new cross and more stones. With his nine-year-old son and a grubstake of fifteen thousand Australian dollars, he boarded a liner for Manila.
Upon arrival, Remy changed his mind about a city as a place to find his fortune. He let go of his plans to head for the gold mines of northern Luzon, and took a house in the San Nicolas district of Manila. With little effort, he found a community of ten thousand Yanks, half military, the rest diplomats, businessmen, and their families. The gents were eager to sit at a friendly game of cards over gimlets and cigars to escape the tropical heat. Many Manila watering holes catered to them: the Army Navy Club, Bay View Hotel, Polo Club, Dixie Kitchen, Elks Club, the opulent Manila Hotel. Under layers of smoke, around dewy highballs and skidding cards, the expatriates talked of the Depression in the states, Roosevelt’s economic policies, Japan’s plans for Manchuria and her growing designs on all Asia. Remy kept them chatting, distracted and drinking while the games were played. He made himself welcome with tales from Down Under, a quick wit, and a ready billfold. He never won too much in one game, and would not fleece any player to the point where the man would refuse to play with him again or spread an ill word. Remy Tuck became known as a professional gambler, an honest and pleasant one. Players at every skill level liked to tilt against him.
Broken Jewel - [World War II 05] Page 6
