The Dickens Boy

by Tom Keneally

  As we began to ride, Fred ruminated on the ways of the South Australian police and their invasion of the border country southwards, saying, ‘They took one of the young men and his wife hostage for a day and the others believed they’d killed them. However, when the troopers demanded the return of a sextant that had gone missing and it was brought back by a native child, clearly not the thief, the couple were let go.’

  His certainty about what he said, the way the names and the motivation of the natives were so familiar to him and rolled off his tongue demonstrated to me yet again what an accomplished colonial he was.

  After reaching Myer’s Creek, and watching the flock drinking, we left them there. Dandy’s replacement boundary rider would move them on eastwards to another water source in time.

  17

  As we rode back to Dandy’s hut, Fred’s mind seemed as much concerned with the difficulties of the group of natives we had met as with the difficulty of Dandy. However, as we got closer to Dandy’s place something looked awry about the wooden structure above the well, the whim, which looked far too solid, like a filled-in space.

  Suddenly, Yandi stopped his horse and began to howl, crying, ‘Bad stuff, Mr Bonney. Real bad spirit there, sir.’

  Looking at the whim more closely, I saw it was the body of a hanging man filling out the whim’s framework.

  We rode closer and saw that it was Dandy who had hanged himself, his face swollen and his neck looking absurdly stretched. As I dismounted and raced towards the structure, my dread mounted at the sight of Staples lying by the edge of the well. Fred rushed from his horse to Staples’ side and frantically felt his neck.

  ‘There’s barely a pulse,’ he said grimly.

  Looking down we both saw that Staples’ shirt was saturated with blood. A long wooden staff was near him, which he must have been using to try to hook Dandy’s noose back towards him.

  ‘Get some water,’ Fred said, looking grim.

  As I rushed back to my horse, Yandi was shouting and chanting in Paakantji as he rode around us at a distance.

  Fred tried to feed Staples the water but he couldn’t take it in. Fred sent me off to the cart to get the brandy bottle, but brandy and water didn’t revive him.

  ‘Lift his jacket and shirt,’ Fred ordered.

  I gasped when I saw the wound, its lips torn asunder, mocking any idea of it ever closing up again.

  Fred bustled into the hut and found a saddlery needle somewhere. He threaded it with some brown twine, poured brandy over the wound, and asked me to drag its two sides closed. I did my best, but Fred was forced to give up.

  As we realised our quest to save him was futile, I felt tears rising in me and tried to resist them. Sighing, Fred rose and went over to Dandy’s hanging body, saying, ‘How will we get poor Dandy down?’

  It was soon clear that Dandy had gone to the trouble of calculating rope lengths to ensure he could dangle in the mouth of the well without being retrievable after he cast off. If we reached forward to where his feet swayed, one foot bare, that boot having fallen into the well, we would tumble in ourselves. At last, Fred hit on the idea of retrieving him with a stock whip, though he expressed regret that doing so would mark the corpse.

  Shouting out to Yandi, Fred asked him to get horses into the shafts of the cart, which was some fifty steps from the well. Before Yandi did so he set fire to some leaves and ignited a whole fallen branch, which he waved over the cart, still chanting, smoking it and thus driving the demons out. Grabbing the whip from the cart, Fred gave it a powerful crack, which caught in a coil of strands around Dandy’s lower legs. Fred gestured to me to haul it in using the handle, and we managed to draw Dandy close enough for me to mount the whim and cut the rope. Fred laid Dandy’s body down gently, the noose still embedded in the flesh of his neck. Though Yandi showed no obvious reluctance to help lift the Soldier into the cart, Fred could not persuade him to handle Dandy.

  Dandy’s body was a great weight for Fred and me, and stank of urine and, I thought, already of death. We carried him past the pungent smoking branch Yandi had taken up again and deposited him in the back of the cart along the tailboard. Fred asked me to tether my horses to the cart and to sit in with the Soldier and report any revival. He rode it at a good pace for the rest of the day and into the night, asking me at intervals whether there were any signs of life in the Soldier. I told him I thought the signs were diminishing.

  Sunset evoked a new stint of chanting from Yandi. At some time after dark Fred stopped to inspect the Soldier. Then, still kneeling on the boards, he said, ‘You rest now, Plorn. It will be a long night and I may call on you to drive the cart later.’

  ‘Is he dead?’ I asked him.

  ‘If not, he’s extremely close. It may have been apoplexy as well as the wound that felled him. Get your blankets, Plorn. You’ve applied yourself marvellously.’

  I was so exhausted I barely stopped to consider I’d been invited to sleep in the back of the cart with two dead men. I fetched my blankets and slept without demur beside the Soldier, on the edge of death as he might be.

  When we reached Momba early the next morning, the Soldier was dead. Fred and I laid him down on a blanket in the stables and I helped Fred bathe his body from a bucket of water and wash his blood away. Dead, Staples’ frame looked slight and undominant.

  Drinking dense black tea with sugar, I listened to Fred inform Edward of the tragedy and saw a tear in Edward’s eye as he said, ‘For God’s sake, don’t give the Reverend Rutledge grounds to refuse Dandy a Christian burial.’

  ‘We could bury them both somewhere a little way off from here,’ Fred agreed. ‘That won’t worry the darks.’

  ‘Ah, the darks,’ said Edward staring into his tea. ‘The Soldier would be at ease with that arrangement, I believe.’

  Fred nodded. ‘I believe he would see a certain holiness in a man like Dandy who died to avoid being anyone’s lord.’

  ‘Silly bugger shouldn’t have done it though.’

  ‘I don’t know whether it was brave cowardice or cowardly valour,’ Fred mused.

  ‘Was Yandi well?’ Edward asked crisply.

  ‘Yandi was alarmed and smoked everything, including the cart.’

  I was a little shocked to hear all this in so far as these were the sons of a clergyman yet they appeared to accept Yandi’s death rituals as appropriate, and did not see the need to submit Dandy or the Soldier to the Anglican rites.

  We all sat solemnly for a time before Fred remarked, ‘Poor Soldier died trying to save or at least cut Dandy down. In a sense, Dandy killed the Soldier.’

  ‘That’s why I believe there must be some First Principle or Creator,’ said his brother. ‘Because only that personage could understand the motives of men.’

  It was hard to tell if Fred agreed or disagreed with this sentiment. He turned to me and asked, ‘Plorn, what do you think about all this? I hope you’re not too shocked.’

  ‘My father would agree with you both,’ I replied, though I was both confused and grieving. In any case, that seemed to reassure them.

  Tom Larkin was sent to town to report the deaths. The letter Fred sent suggested against the coroner becoming involved for the sake of the family and the House of Lords. The story Fred relayed to Dandy’s family and the House of Lords did not mention that the prospect of being a lord had driven their scion to suicide.

  The Paakantji kept away from the double funeral on Momba. I got the impression they considered the ghost of a suicide very dangerous. Fred read the Book of Common Prayer and then the Soldier and Dandy were buried in the Christian tradition off to the east of the homestead in a thicket where the mouth of Myer’s Creek and Natalia Creek split from each other. All these arrangements showed me that some things needed to be done in a different and even imaginative way in New South Wales. But mourning is universal, and even some of the station hands from Mount Murchison, having heard the real story, rode over for the burial.

  18

  A week after the sorry
burial of Dandy and Staples, the greatest scandal of Wilcannia’s history struck when Maurice McArden and his aunt vanished from town. It took a day or two for their absence to be noticed because Mr Fremmel was in Adelaide on stock and station agent business at the time, and they’d left on horseback rather than taking a carriage. It was not known in which direction they’d gone and rumours about the two of them kept everyone on the trans-Darling River, including me, tantalised. One such held that Mrs Fremmel must have been wearing men’s clothes, since the innkeeper at the bush village of Gilgunnia saw two horsemen ride through the settlement early one morning.

  As a reader of Maurice’s manuscript, I was riveted by their disappearance, wondering if they’d decided to go somewhere they could gratify their desire in each other without intrusion from Mr Fremmel.

  There were men everywhere amongst the pastoralists who had taken loans through Fremmel’s agency and now feared he would behave with universal vengeance for his humiliation. As a result, the committee of the jockey club immediately voted to award him life membership at a specially convened dinner, so they might be immune.

  Not having any of their own business with Fremmel, the drovers and station workers of Momba cracked plenty of jokes. They were delighted that Fremmel’s nephew had made Fremmel ‘wear cuckold’s horns’. As for me, I was astonished by the seriousness of Maurice’s escape.

  When Mr Fremmel returned to Wilcannia, he behaved as if nothing had happened. ‘Oh, didn’t you know?’ he said. ‘I gave my nephew permission to accompany Mrs Fremmel on a holiday.’ Everyone indebted to banks and larger lending bodies by way of Fremmel’s agency made an effort to indicate they believed this tale. Or so Willy Suttor told me after he came back from a visit to town.

  About a fortnight after their elopement I received a letter with Momba’s address written in Maurice’s assured hand, carrying the postmark of a town named Lake Cargelligo. It read:

  Dear Mr Dickens,

  Confidentially and not for attribution

  I have no grievances at all about your advice on the material I was thinking of submitting to your father’s journal. I believe him to be amongst the noblest souls, but perhaps and understandably not quite noble enough to submit to having his limitations as a writer on the subject of physical attraction between characters in novels criticised as I have criticised him. Better, I think, that he should endure this limitation and be in all other ways who he is, for he is a prophet. Read, for example, chapter ten of Our Mutual Friend, the diatribe against men who live by buying and selling shares. He excoriates them no less than Christ excoriated the Temple money changers!

  I felt I must tell you that we have not fled Wilcannia for the purposes you might have surmised. For beyond desire, and beyond everything intense and momentary, there is always enduring loyalty and enduring pity. My aunt and I have fled Wilcannia for pity’s sake. Our motives will be misinterpreted, but you and Mr Suttor, to whom I send my regards, will accept that our escape was necessary and for motives your own renowned father would not disavow.

  Both touched and confused, I took the letter to Willy Suttor. After he’d read it he looked up and said, ‘I don’t think we have any obligation to tell Fremmel about this. He can spend money on private investigators, and let him do it!’

  I was relieved to hear this. I wanted my sense that Maurice had taken a risk writing to me, and that his news should be cherished, confirmed to me by an older, wiser fellow. ‘In any case,’ said Willy, ‘from Lake Cargelligo they could be travelling anywhere – Melbourne or Sydney or a thousand private places in between. Or once in Sydney or Melbourne they might take a ship for New Zealand, California or Valparaiso. We have nothing to tell Mr Fremmel. He can go to buggery!’

  So I got used to living with secrets and even to nurturing them. The mustering of lambs continued and then, between the end of the autumn and through the winter, there were country races. I received a letter from my brother Alfred telling me he was bringing two horses to compete at the Mena Murtee Station races and could I plead with the Bonney brothers to let me ride there and visit him? No sooner did I mention it to the Bonneys than Fred insisted I must go and take this opportunity of a wonderful reunion of two sons of the immortal Charles in the heart of the new country.

  19

  As soon as winter ended, Fred began preparing for the start of the shearing season. Several weeks before the shearers were due to arrive he sent out messages to the back blocks of Momba Station ordering hutkeepers to have the different detachments of sheep marched in to certain places by certain dates. With 200,000 sheep to shear, regiment after regiment had to be shifted in lots of five thousand. If there were any delays in the moving in and out of one group for shearing, Fred would still have to pay the shearers and negotiate with ‘the boss of the board’, as they called the overseer of shearing, the high priest in the huge, crude defleecing cathedrals and their shearing stands.

  I rode out with others to the north-easternmost paddock named Wonkoo, from which we used our wise dogs to bring the sheep in to Momba, passing three great lakes of artesian water, Yantabangee and Olepoloko and Peery lakes, then across the streams that flowed from them. We proceeded under the sage gaze of big red kangaroos, inspecting us from the breast-high creek grass.

  Back at Momba, a battalion of shearers had started arriving in twos and threes, some on foot and others on horseback, swags full of their worldly possessions slung across the crop of their horses. The uncomfortable shearers’ quarters they were to stay in were close to the great pile of the shearing shed, perhaps the largest structure of hardwood for hundreds of thousands of miles.

  The women of the station, Mrs Larkin and Mrs Gavan, kept tea brewing to welcome the arriving men, and served them damper, cocky’s joy and other primitive refreshments from a rough table. Fred had signed up all the shearers with the one shearing contractor, and most had already shorn this season on other stations, the names of which rolled off their lips lyrically – Burrabogie and Billabong, Gilgunnia and Coolabah.

  The shearing stands were great structures which stood on stilts and baulks of timber above the ground so that sheep could be sheltered from any rain that came, since shearing wet fleece rendered the shearers themselves drenched and thus in danger of rheumatism. Wet sheep therefore meant that shearing had to stop. And when that happened, the rouseabouts, pickers-up, sweepers and the boss of the board had to go on being paid, but the shearers, who were paid per head, could earn nothing and still had to pay a share for their own food. I’d been told that when this happened they became restive and began to speak of the desirability of forming unions and taking radical action.

  The day after we returned to Momba I went to see the army of shearers who’d turned up and registered themselves for a stand in the shed. I asked some of them whether they wanted to play cricket the coming Sunday, since we had a splendid team of our own, apart from the Soldier, of whose death they had all heard. They treated me with amusement and dismissiveness.

  The shearing floor before the shearers took their stands was a place of august silence, its boards dark with oil from the fleeces shorn in previous years. As the shearers entered the shed and took up their stands, most of them wore red republican singlets, perhaps to honour Garibaldi, certainly to honour the dignity of the labouring man. From the yard outside, rouseabouts yelled and rattled cans to drive sheep up the chutes. Once the first sheep came up the ramp from the yards below, it sat powerless between the shearer’s legs as he cut away. First, he would shear the belly wool off in one go and throw it on the floor, then he did the the sheep’s legs and face. In the rare case the skin of the beast was nicked, tar boys ran over to sheep with a cut and covered all slips of the shears with a mix of lampblack, kerosene and tar. The rest, back and flanks, came off the animal in one sheet, like a big wool rug.

  I was fascinated by how the shearer cut away the fleece at the neck, clearing the wool from wrinkles. As this main fleece fell to the floor the picker-uppers rushed in and lifted the whole thing as
delicately as they could and carried it to the table at the end of the shed.

  It was pure luck what type of sheep each shearer got. Generally old ewes were the easiest to shear, and the shearers called them ‘rosellas’, while they called the sheep with the stiffest fleeces ‘the cobblers’.

  The shearing had its own established timetable, with two twenty-minute breaks for the essential black tea, as well as longer breaks for lunch, and ‘tea’, which was what they called dinner. The name for everything they ate was ‘tucker’. They invited me to have ‘tucker’ one night with them at ‘teatime’. Over a long day, interspersed with these occasional pleasures, a good shearer could get through more than thirty sheep, which was considered championship level. Alfred had complained under the influence of liquor of the disadvantage of being our father’s sons, but I felt that these hearty, contemptuous men gave me a better time than they might most ‘new chums’, in part, as the word got around, out of their bush courtesy towards our father, who was to many of them like a pontiff of the universal human heart.

  I learned the terms of shearing with the rigour arising from my new spirit of application. I conveyed some of them to the guvnor in my letters to him. That, for example, rams could take three times as long to shear and counted double; young wethers were hard; and that if the shearer cut a sheep’s jugular, it perished and he had to bear the cost. The sheep being shorn at the call of ‘Time!’ was named a bell sheep and wasn’t shorn because the rouseabouts and picker-uppers would not touch its wool, nor could the boss of the board nor even the Bonneys force him to. The man who sheared the most was acclaimed ‘the ringer’. Some ringers achieved the same renown as jockeys and boxers.

  During and at the end of the day, odd locks were cut from the legs which remained on the floor until they were swept up by boys and put in baskets. The fleece proper was always spread in one throw on the table, then its ‘points’, shoulders, neck, haunches, were cut off by the classer’s assistants and labelled ‘second cuts’. Then the back of the sheep was rolled up and taken to the table of the ultimate connoisseur, the wool classer.