I Got His Blood on Me: Frontier Tales

by Lawrence Patchett

  At length we came upon a bay where the greatest number of victims seemed to have come ashore. Here a great many bodies were laid in threes and fours under blankets and lifebelts above the waterline, rescuers bringing more in. Among the people gathered were police and trappers and men from the station, and newspapermen and photographers as well. Also there were gentlemen from the city in fresh clothes, watching the rescue and in some cases posing for photos. Worst of all were a half-dozen clearly related to the missing or drowned, who went about in a frenzy, calling out and searching the bodies for nieces or sweethearts they’d expected to collect off the ferry at Wellington.

  In this confusion I was grateful to have orders to follow, to begin our work of bringing bodies from where they’d tangled on rocks or sand in various bays, lifting them clear of the waterline and covering them for their dignity until they could be identified by their families and removed. I will not pretend the task was an easy or noble one. I was the least proficient of our party, the rest being hardened to such realities, it seemed, by farm life, and by the fact they’d had much practice the previous day. Nevertheless I worked with all my strength, handling the victims as gently as their saturated weight would allow. I did not shrink from any passenger, not even the children dressed forlornly in their pretty clothes, or those who’d been floating for some time and were not in good repair, their clothing torn half-away, their faces and hands confused against rocks and bloodied.

  Throughout that afternoon the work went on and on. There were so many passengers. Their great number shamed me. Near the end I was asked to wash a young woman we’d recovered from driftwood, a job which took some time as her eyes were stuck grittily with sand. Dousing them repeatedly with a shirt soaked in sea water, I at last had them clean; then I arranged her hair where it snaked over her torn ears, one with an earring still attached, another red and shorn of its jewellery and skin. It took a long time to clean her and once I’d finished I walked to the scrub and retched there, shuddering until a station man came up behind and laid a hand on me.

  ‘There, mate,’ he said, ‘we’re leaving soon. Can you ride?’

  It was the shorter of the two men who’d rescued me the day before.

  I nodded and wiped my mouth.

  ‘Rest up, mate,’ he said. ‘You’ve worked hard. We’re riding out soon.’

  I was determined, however, to return to the recovery operation. I’d come to the coast with a purpose and didn’t wish to sit idly while the station men laboured to bring rest to passengers less fortunate than I had been. Thus I stood and went down for fresh orders.

  But the men were remounting. We were indeed returning to the station—the man had not said so merely to calm me. Some police were remaining behind to keep watch over the drowned, and an eye out for unlikely survivors. The onlookers, meanwhile, had departed for the city, and once we were out of earshot the station men began to grumble about those observers from town, some of whom had volunteered to assist but many of whom, young males included, had made no attempt to be involved. They’d come to the coast, it seemed, simply to see.

  This low current of grumbling passed along the line of shepherds riding in front of me until the constable, who was second in the lead, turned in his saddle and growled. ‘They were a bloody collection of ghouls. But don’t dignify them with your yapping. That’s my advice to you.’ Then he added, ‘You all did well today.’

  Clinging exhaustedly to my horse I was pleased the constable had silenced them. Throughout the day I’d been fortunate in the tasks given to me.

  Early that afternoon I’d seen a young man of perhaps sixteen staring at a dead child half-covered by lifebelts, one of the girl’s tiny boots torn away and the other laced tightly to her ankle. Trapped in the mesmeric pull of those mismatched feet, the boy had stood frozen until a station man seized him by his collar.

  ‘Here, give us a hand with this lady,’ he said.

  The young man stared at him and the dripping dead woman we carried, and stammered.

  ‘So clear out, then,’ said the station man. ‘If you’re not here to help, bugger off.’

  Resuming my own grip on the woman’s sleeve, I felt briefly for that scolded boy. He’d come to look at disaster and, confronted with its awful shapes, shrunk away. Only the job I’d been given that day separated us. I could not pretend to be nobler than him.

  If the trip out to the coast had been steadfast and brisk, the return round the bays without provisions or survivors to cheer us was dreary and long. I was deeply fatigued and my horse seemed to find the rocks difficult to pick over. I was last in the line of riders and doing all I could not to fall behind. Urging Betty over an outcrop between one bay and the next I saw at my periphery a man floating in the bay.

  Turning in my saddle I cried out, as he seemed in that half-glance and the irrationality of my exhaustion to be swimming, still striking out for the shore. I stumbled down the rocks and plunged in the water to my thighs. As I lifted his face I felt his body float and was then swamped in a wave that rose to my chest, the man’s body rising and rolling in the swell. I could feel his arms hanging about me, but still believed there was life in him. Taking hold of his face I slapped his cheek in the idea I could wake him—and of course his eyes stared back at mine, dull and watery.

  At that point I gave way to the strain of the past days. The man was neatly dressed and in his shaven face and bald head I could see a life well-ordered in the higher reaches of the sales or trades. Unable to lift him wholly free of the water, I cried out with frustration. Up the shore the line of horses were paused on the rocks with the station men turned in their saddles to watch me, exhaustion showing in every line of their bodies. They were, it seemed, too stunned by their fatigue to assist me.

  Then two of them dismounted and came down. Coaxing me back to the rocks, they eased the man’s body from me. Then the constable came down too. In the low scrub they laid the corpse on its back, facing the sky. As there was no covering the constable removed his own coat and laid it over the chest and head of the drowned man, pinning the blue fabric on four sides with rocks and a wind-fallen piece of tree.

  I became conscious of the great care the constable was taking to protect the man from further decay, and it came to me that he hoped by assuring me of this man’s rest to keep me from similarly collapsing.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, to his kneeling-away form.

  The constable said nothing until he was finished; when he turned I saw for the first time the grey in his face, the lines grooved in by the day. Holding my eye he shook his head slowly.

  For a moment I couldn’t speak, and I tried to indicate with my hands that I was sorry I had collapsed so badly, sorry I’d added to his workload at the end of such a day.

  Again he shook his head as if an apology was not what was required. ‘You noticed him,’ he said. ‘It was good work, sir. We would have missed him otherwise.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I thought he was alive.’

  ‘Please mount up, sir,’ he said. ‘You need to get home.’

  Dully I made my way to my horse and into the saddle. Settling on Betty I felt my legs, unaccustomed to riding, resume their muscular ache of before. The line of station men were on their horses ahead of me, facing politely forward to afford me the dignity of privacy. Then the constable remounted and we rode in our line through the failing light to the station.

  *

  Word had been sent to my employer, and when I left the station the next day and completed the long journey to Karori, then on to the city and my new boarding house, I found a parcel of food and clothes waiting there. My employer and new colleagues had donated it to me. That afternoon in my room I put the package to one side and slept right through the night until dawn.

  Waking early, I sat on my bed to unfold the parcel from its four-way tie of string, and the kindness I found inside touched me deeply. I forced myself to hold up each pressed item and feel grateful, but it was difficult, as each shirt, sock, underwear, tie and polished
shoe reminded me of the torn-away clothes I’d seen distributed with such abandon on the coast near the Penguin. I sat on my bed for some time, the bundle of borrowed clothes on my knees.

  At last I recovered sufficiently to go down to breakfast, and from there I proceeded to the office for the first day of my Wellington employment. The firm was down by two clerks, so my work was noticed immediately and welcomed. Right away, then, I could begin the long work of repaying my firm for its generous pack of donated clothes.

  In the week following the wreck, there was the public funeral for the drowned and missing of the Penguin. As the losses had been so great and the mourners so many, all of Wellington had been afforded a holiday to attend the ceremony. Taking my place in the church among the survivors, I listened to the ceremonies, and I shook hands with some people. But I couldn’t join the procession that followed, the carts laden with coffins leading a long line up the Kelburn hills and on to Karori Cemetery. Those doleful horses took that trip without me.

  The streets were clogged with mourners and observers, and it was some time before I could ease my way to a park, remove my jacket and sit without attention. There I was alone for some time until suddenly there loomed above me, silhouetted against the sun, someone who called to me quietly. Shielding my eyes from the sun I stared up until I could place him—the smaller of the two men who’d lifted me from the beach at Terawhiti.

  He’d been at the service, and he did not look well. At the coast and station he’d been busy, fluent in the spare vernacular of action that seemed the natural language of the station men. Now he looked entirely drained. In his good clothes and small stature he had the appearance of a lost rider, one who’d just completed a journey right across Australia.

  ‘I didn’t expect to see you,’ I said. ‘It’s a very long way from Terawhiti.’

  ‘Are you in good health?’ he said. ‘Nothing—no problems?’

  ‘I am well,’ I said. ‘I’ve been very fortunate.’

  I offered him the seat alongside, and he seemed relieved to be there, rather than facing me. Then he began to work at the calluses in his palms, digging at the skin with his fingernails.

  ‘What did you make of the service?’ I said.

  Still working on his calluses, he didn’t reply. I watched a few pedestrians drift through the park.

  Then I said, ‘Is it all right at the station?’

  ‘What’s your work, sir?’ he said. ‘I never asked you.’

  ‘I’m in the Prudential,’ I said. ‘I’m an under-clerk there. I began there this week.’

  ‘An under-clerk. What’s that then? It’s in an office, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes, a large office,’ I said, and smiled. ‘I thought that might have been obvious. I thought it would be obvious I was an office man, out there at the rescue.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Nothing like that.’

  He was working on his palms again. After each burst of speech he would look up and study my face as I replied, then return to his hands, picking and digging with his fingernails.

  ‘Do you like it in town?’ he said. ‘Wellington?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘It’s too early to tell.’

  He tried to smile at this, but couldn’t really.

  ‘I’m glad you found me,’ I said. ‘On that beach, I mean. I’m very grateful. I owe you everything, it seems.’

  This time he looked up, startled, as if I’d said something to frighten him.

  ‘I don’t think you should say that,’ he said.

  ‘Pardon?’ I said. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It wasn’t right,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t thank me.’

  ‘With respect, I don’t agree with that,’ I said. ‘You saved many people—saved their bodies. And you saved me.’

  He shook his head. ‘It went badly. I made a bad job of it.’

  I tried to gauge what he was telling me, but he wouldn’t catch my eye. Instead he stared across the grass, his eye passing over a clot of children as if they weren’t even there.

  ‘But you helped me,’ I said. ‘And you recovered many others. I know you did. I saw you—I was there.’

  ‘You did a good job,’ he said.

  ‘I just followed instructions,’ I said. ‘Some of them were your instructions.’

  He shook his head. ‘It was all wrong.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t understand this, and I don’t agree. You saved people.’

  With his fingernails he worked at his palm, brushed the diggings away. ‘My head wasn’t right—my frame of mind.’

  ‘Your frame of mind? Good Lord. It was a shipwreck, man.’

  ‘If you could have heard me, heard what I was thinking,’ he said. ‘I mean inside. I abused them—those people we rescued. I cursed them.’

  He leaned forward and, in the silence that followed, there was only the noise of his fingernails working.

  ‘Good weather for the funeral today,’ I said.

  ‘I was angry that they didn’t carry properly,’ he said. ‘It was so hard to lift them and they slipped everywhere and fell out of my hands. I nearly kicked one of them. I got so angry.’

  ‘But you didn’t show any of this,’ I said. ‘You worked hard.’

  ‘Who cares?’ he said, turning to face me properly. ‘I know—I know how I really did things that day. I know what I was thinking. I know how I cursed those people. I wanted to kick some of them, the way you’d kick a ewe that falls over in the yards. There was one old woman who kept slipping out of my hands. I had the top end, when we were carrying her, and she kept slipping and banging her head on the rocks, landing on her neck. She was already dead, you know—and her clothes were half-gone, too. God, it was terrible—and it got so bad with her head bouncing on the rock just again and again, and her hands slipping, that I damned near booted it, you know? Without realising. Booted her head. God, I was in this ... rage. It wasn’t right—I’m ashamed of it, mate. I’m ashamed.’

  ‘I don’t think—’

  ‘Sometimes—this is a bad thought, mate, but sometimes I wish it could happen again. Wish I could do it all again and this time I’d be ready, ready for the people to be heavy and slippery, and I’d be prepared. I’d be gentler with them—in my mind, I mean. I was careful enough with them on the outside. I didn’t damage any of them. But I wish I’d done it differently in my mind. I wish I could stop seeing that woman, her head hitting the rocks like that.’

  ‘There was nothing more you could have done,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t your fault. It was a terrible accident. Nobody can judge anyone.’

  He watched my face, then shook his head as if, even though we seemed roughly the same age, I was a child who couldn’t comprehend the most basic things.

  I took a guess at something. ‘I’ve had some thoughts myself about that day.’

  He was studying his hands again, looking deep into his distress there.

  ‘I’ve been reading the newspapers about the Penguin,’ I said. ‘And in the papers it isn’t confusing. It reads so easily, as if it was all straightforward. First the boat sinks, then we abandon ship, then we wash up on the shore, then everyone is recovered, dead or alive. But it wasn’t like that. It was all dark and fast and confusing, and the boat very slippery, and everyone shouting in the pitch black, no one knowing what to do, and the waves smashing everywhere. You couldn’t predict anything, or control anything. And I was only in the lifeboat a few seconds before I was thrown out and swimming as hard as I could, then freezing in the dark—and then it was dawn and I was on the shore and suddenly there was a horse. A rider helping me up. That was you, sir.’

  The station man nodded without looking at me.

  I hesitated, unsure of what to say next. ‘My point is, there was nothing easy or clear. It was all just confusing. If we were lucky, we had a good lifeboat for a minute or so. If we didn’t, we were just splashing around in the dark, trying all of a sudden to learn how to swim. There was no right thing to do.’

  ‘But
I wasn’t on the boat, mate,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t half-drowned. It wasn’t dark—it was light when I was recovering people. And I’d worked that coast for years. I’d mustered those hills. I was at home. I should have known what to do.’

  ‘But you did,’ I said. ‘You saved people. And you weren’t prepared for that—for a hundred people washing up on the rocks. Of course you weren’t prepared for that. How could you be?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘You men were fatigued. I saw you, sir. You were beyond exhaustion. You did well to come through that without giving way.’

  ‘But I did give way! That’s what—’ He lifted his hand to his forehead, then shook it away.

  ‘Don’t forget you saved my life,’ I said. ‘I’m very glad you found me.’

  Now he groaned, as if refusing to accept any more false consolations. ‘I’m not glad it happened to me,’ he said. ‘But it did happen and now it’s over, and that’s all I’ll get now. You get one chance, don’t you? You get one chance to react, and then, whatever you did to help, you’re stuck with that forever. It’s bloody unfair. One day, and then the rest of your life. The rest of everything.’

  I couldn’t look at him for a while. The crowds from the procession were dispersing through the park; couples, parents, and friends, all murmuring to each other in the sounds of solicitude that follow a funeral.

  ‘Are you married, sir?’ I said. ‘Any children?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Are you married?’

  ‘I’m not, mate. The station’s hard on families. No one wants to live out there.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well, I’m not either.’ I said this drearily because it’d been my hope he’d have a wife and I could pin that last consolation on him.