The Dickens Boy

by Tom Keneally

  While we were on our way back home, the native man told me how the country was made by two snakes who were brothers. The snakes were rainbow-coloured and were the ancestors of the Paakantji. He sang a song beneath his breath about the country they had made. I must say I found it fascinating. It wasn’t at all like Anglicanism. Part of the time these great serpents were joined at the tail by an older woman who lived in the tree-tops, and their struggle to be separate made many of the watercourses and secret places around Momba Station. That is not the purpose of this letter, to tell you this, but I know how you are interested by all the peculiarities of humans, whether they are boatman on the Thames or, I would imagine, the ancient peoples of New South Wales.

  I wanted to let you know how well Alfred is doing at Corona and how much the people there respect him. He and I spoke about the old days of course, and so much about you and Aunt Georgie, and how you would not believe how well known you are in these colonies. We meet people who can recite whole passages from your work. We meet people who think we are clever just because we are your sons. When I told Alfred I would write to you and praise him for his success, which I know will make you very happy, he said, ‘Don’t do that. He’ll think we’re in a plot together.’ But I decided that you would be kinder than that and you would indeed be proud. Alfred has made peace in the area where there was war only eighteen months ago between the earlier manager and the natives who came down from the north. By the way, and I hope you don’t mind my saying, the housekeeper there cooked the Christmas meal out of Mama’s cookery book that she wrote when she was young.

  In any case everything about Corona speaks of good management and Alfred’s great competence. He is a colonial man on the way up, and I hope that within a few years you will hear similar things of me. I know from Aunt Georgie that the American tour was very hard on you and I think you should stay at home and let Aunt Georgie feed you up, then have the Higham cricket team there to play games once the spring comes. I would love to ride to Gad’s Hill, up the Gravesend Road and past the Falstaff, for a Saturday game of cricket, but there is much to do here, and you would not believe how many interesting people come our way. There is a stock and station agent in the town of Wilcannia whose nephew has run away with the man’s French wife, and in this country where there are so few people, has managed to disappear. And nobody knows why he did this nor where he has vanished to. Stock and station agents are something like a nobleman here, and a lot of people owe him money, and so there is the pretence that the aunt and the youth are just on some form of holiday. It strikes me that these are the sort of puzzles out of which you make your great books, and that if you should visit here, as you have sometimes said you might, you would find yourself not without stories.

  I send you all my affection from Momba, and I hope you are pleased to hear of Alfred’s great success and that your foot gets better.

  Signed

  Plorn

  I had thought too of the extraordinary story of Dandy, and of Mrs Chard’s tortured, knowing diction, but was too tired to include reference to them.

  Unlike the dinners the silent cook Squeaker Courtney prepared, breakfast at Momba was a relatively slapdash affair. It usually consisted of mutton and damper, though occasionally a few refinements were drawn in like porridge and cocky’s joy and preserves, even marmalade, to eat on our damper. Sometimes I ate alone and sometimes I ate with the Bonney brothers, though any conversations at the morning table were usually urgent and short.

  One morning I was just about to enter the morning room when I heard the brothers in eager debate.

  ‘It is the time for his initiation and I’m asking you to relinquish him,’ Fred was saying.

  ‘You mustn’t think my enthusiasm is not reciprocated. And I can’t see how you have decided I should be governed by the demands of a barbarous ceremony,’ Edward replied testily, ‘and one you would not choose to go through yourself.’

  ‘But it is a necessary ceremony for him,’ Fred argued. ‘And you can see how he’s stuck uncomfortably between childhood and full manhood.’

  Edward replied that this was so much cant, and it was in the nature of young men to be surly. Then, suddenly, he came out of the room and saw me.

  ‘Don’t flee, Plorn!’ he called. ‘My brother. He is such an absolutist.’

  I turned to him and said, ‘It is all right, Mr Bonney. I wasn’t listening, and in any case . . .’

  ‘My brother will no doubt tell you what you may have guessed. I am made in the narrow mould, Plorn: I like men. I have been taken by one in particular . . . But I am a rational man. I am not some predator.’

  ‘Very well,’ I told him, which I would have said to any confession he made, and he’d made this one so frankly that I wished to disappear. ‘There is no need –’

  ‘There may be . . . because of my earlier excessive behaviour to you.’

  I realised then they were still debating an attachment Edward had to give up so that a rite could take place. I decided to retreat to my room until they had had it out.

  ‘Well, I am going,’ I began.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘you were on your way to breakfast. Keep on, keep on, Plorn.’

  So I did and found Fred abstracted, and still I had no idea what person they were arguing over.

  26

  Over the following few days the Bonneys returned to what I considered normal discourse, to the extent that I wondered if I’d dreamed my exchange with Edward.

  But I got a glimmering one morning when Fred excused me from the day’s mustering and asked me if I’d like to join him for what he called Yandi’s man-making ceremony.

  ‘I have the honour to be invited,’ Fred told me, ‘and I know you have always shown sympathy for them, and would be instructed by what you saw.’

  I agreed somewhat hesitantly and walked with Fred to where he said the ceremony would be taking place. After we’d passed the huts of the Paakantji, we saw a group of older men, including Cultay, waiting for us wearing kangaroo-skin cloaks, with throwing sticks and boomerangs in their belts. One of the old men, Hughie, real name Boolingooroo, wore a cap of leaves, and had branches and leaves tied around his head to ease a headache: Fred had explained to me that these were the leaves of the snake vine, and its milky sap was considered a sovereign remedy. The red fruit of the bush and its yellow flowers smelled of urine, but its curative powers made all this acceptable to Hughie.

  These older men started moving south-east to the Momba waterhole, and we walked a little behind, ignored but accepted.

  ‘Do you notice how sullen Yandi has been?’ Fred asked. ‘He was fearful the old men would capture him and take him off to initiation, which is something many of the young think of as involving terrors. But he was also in fear they wouldn’t do it, and would leave him a child forever.’

  ‘In two minds,’ I suggested.

  ‘Yes, being left as a child forever would be the worse outcome,’ Fred told me. ‘I haven’t seen Yandi recently and when I’ve asked the men where he is I’ve been getting only mumbles. Now I understand his absence. I think he’s been moody lately because after they tell him the reality of the world, and death, and all the rest, they leave him alone to contemplate it on land surrounded by ghosts. And Yandi has a mortal terror of ghosts. Remember how frightened he was of the stammerer?’

  I would find out in time that if a woman or a white stockman stumbled upon the place where a newly initiated boy or man was enduring his isolation, the ceremony and the mysteries and the bewilderment the older men induced in the young needed to be started all over again. And so the young initiate was given an implement Fred told me it was known as a moola-uncka, consisting of a piece of flat wood with a hole in it which the Paakantji could whirl through the air on the end of a thong to make a monstrous whooping sound like a huge predatory bird or a booming, guttural monster.

  After a mile and a half we followed the old men into a copse of trees where we found a group of youths sitting in a very small open space with Ya
ndi among them looking barely recognisable, in that he had white clay all over his body. I was impressed by the strange and unexpected augustness of this and realised it was the most graphic way the natives had of letting people know that Yandi was a new man; and indeed he looked re-made. Sitting on a bed of bush fuchsia branches – which must have meant something too – he had a majesty to him and his hands were splayed serenely on his upper legs, which were bent under him.

  In a line in front of Yandi sat a number of younger men with their backs to him, each carrying a narrow shield decorated with ink and ochre and carvings. Like a council of some sort, the old men sat and faced these young men. This was followed by an extraordinary scene in which the young men rose to full height and seemed to abuse and insult the older men, making dismissive gestures with their hands, as though complaining about their folly and tyranny. The old men grew slowly enraged, and they too rose and consulted each other with angry eyes and gestures and sneers, theatrical yet awe-inspiring, though they said nothing. After a while the insults seemed to reach a climax and the old men began throwing their fighting sticks and boomerangs at the younger ones, who bounced them away contemptuously with their wooden shields. When there were no more digging sticks and boomerangs to throw, the old men rushed forward as if to punish the young, but the young men grasped them and threw them to the ground. After that the old men got up, acting disgruntled, and left the clearing singing an ominous chant.

  Fred and I followed them doing the same, except for the chant. I was thoroughly confused by this Paakantji ritual. As they retired up the creek, the old men chatted happily to each other, not at all aggrieved by the ritual in the clearing.

  As if Fred knew the ceremony exactly, he went up to one of the retreating old men and spoke to him softly in Paakantji. After the discussion, Fred came to me and told me we would all be returning to Yandi and his friends soon. Ah, I thought, that’s when the older men will show them who is in charge. But in fact I couldn’t have been more mistaken, because as we followed them back into the clearing again, there were no loud noises of the kind you would expect, say, of schoolmasters reimposing order amongst the young. The old men were still jovial, and took up their positions to watch the end of the rite in which two of the young men crouched down by Yandi on his bed of brush. The two men had ligatures tied around their upper arm and had cut a vein on the upper side of their wrist, the blood from the wounds streaming into a wooden bowl. Yandi, on his knees, knelt forward, his hands locked behind his back, and drank the blood as might a stooping deer or even a dog. Fred told me later that this was all Yandi was permitted to drink or eat for some days, till he was cleansed with smoke.

  Yandi and another young man, a sort of sponsor, stood wearing long kangaroo cloaks, only their heads uncovered, then sat again on a heap of green boughs of the fuchsia bush. Spread out beneath them were heaps of dry grass with sticks at the bottom which were lit. The result was not flame but a thick smoke that enshrouded the two figures, penetrating their cloaks and rising around their shoulders and throats. Both men placed a finger in each nostril to save themselves from suffocation.

  Then Yandi and his sponsor raised the rugs over their heads and the smoking continued, and the two youths remained there, almost obliterated by the sacramental vapour. I was concerned enough to look at Fred a number of times, but he merely widened his eyes and nodded his head, acknowledging my bewilderment as if in part he shared it himself. Then at last the older men began to call to the two young men at the centre of the rite and to coax them forward. When Yandi walked off the smoking ground and presented himself, the hair on his head was cut short with an edged stone, the locks falling to the ground. Yandi did not flinch as the old men then filched out bristles from his face with their fingers. This was followed by the smearing of red ochre over his body, before a necklace of twisted possum hair was placed around his neck. About now one of the young men who had earlier staved off the throwing sticks and boomerangs with shields went darting from the scene. He had the tooth one of the men had knocked out of Yandi’s mouth earlier, when his initiation was still lonely and unobserved except by old men. He would hide it near some source of water. What happened to it then was an omen, apparently, for how Yandi’s life would unfold.

  Fred and I left before the ceremony was fully completed, feeling privileged to have seen it this far. On the way back to the homestead he told me that if Yandi chose he could marry a girl in another skin group to whom he’d been betrothed as a child. But he might choose instead to wander for a wife. It was at once clear to me that it was no simpler to select a wife and be sanctioned to marry in Yandi’s society than it was in ours.

  ‘You’ll find he’s a much happier lad now,’ Fred told me as we reached the house.

  Edward was abstracted at dinner that night, confirming my suspicion that it was Yandi whom he had been reluctant to relinquish.

  I was pleased when I found out that Willy Suttor was also coming to dinner at the Larkins’, not only because he would serve as a buffer against the earnestness of the Belgian monk, but also because he’d offered to advise me on the purchase of a race horse or two, which I could run in the jockey club meetings around the region, now that I had some resources.

  When I reached the Larkins’ house, Suttor was already there, sitting at the set table drinking rum with Tom.

  ‘You do us a great honour, Mr Plorn,’ said Tom, rising to meet me, his face shining. He then turned to his wife and said, ‘Who would have thought, eh, Gracie?’

  ‘In New South Wales!’ she agreed, cleaning her hands on her apron and nodding at me.

  Before anything more could be said, the priest arrived in a cassock that looked harsh-woven, unlike the normal clerical cloth. Wearing such stuff, he seemed worthier of attention, even apart from his interest in the Paakantji, whom I now believed had adequate sacraments of their own without needing the Christian ones. I would have liked to see some of the clergymen I’d met in my childhood, including the late sainted Dr Sawyer, going through or putting his parishioners through the ceremony of smoking that Yandi had survived.

  The Larkins went into a different form of exultation with the priest. I’d supposedly brought literary glamour with me, but Father Charisse brought the tenor of the saints, and might be one himself. They bowed their heads and Willy looked solemn as the priest uttered his benediction in Latin and very exactly quartered the air to make a cross above the company’s heads.

  The Larkin cottage seemed a civilised nest, from its fabric curtains to its neat little wall lamps. There was a white tablecloth and silver cutlery, probably a wedding present. Its glint of comfort and solace mocked not only the makeshift nature of the boundary riders’ huts but the austerity of grander places. Tom had that shiny look of a man who had scrubbed himself thoroughly after demanding work, and when Mrs Larkin entered the room from the kitchen the glances and touches between herself and her husband bespoke that comfort and solace. It was hard not to believe that this was what marriage was for. This ease and affection did not seem to me to come from the same place as the orphan hunger that had marked Maurice’s story about aunts. Ease and hunger could be at war with each other. What did people do when that happened?

  When one posed a question like that, admittedly the question of a youth, one did not apply it to one’s own family. I did not then, as I might later, look at how my father had sent Mama back to her family, and though he’d provided her with her own good house, had never again admitted her to his or visited her in hers. My mother’s face had seemed bruised and bleak when I caught her unawares during visits to her new house in Camden Town, and it would take some time to creak itself into her lovely full-featured smile.

  I turned away from these thoughts as we sat down at the table. Mrs Larkin had clearly put a lot of careful thought into the composition of the meal, which began with soup. Tom Larkin produced a bottle of French white wine – very likely it was a gift from Willy – and Father Charisse agreed to try a glass.

  The main cours
e was roast lamb with a fine array of baked vegetables and niceties such as mustard and mint jelly, obtainable by special order through the shopkeeper. This was accompanied by a fruity bottle of red wine.

  As we ate I attempted to imitate Willy Suttor’s easy manner with the priest. ‘Yes, I know Barrakoon, Father,’ Willy admitted, ‘but I doubt you should have ambitions to visit him. It’s unlikely he would perceive a difference between you and the crassest of boundary riders or even the prospectors one finds dragging their way to Mount Browne on the rumour there’s been gold found there.’

  I remembered the day Fred and Yandi and I had met Barrakoon’s party out in the Ullollie paddock.

  ‘My order was founded, Mr Suttor, to seek out the rejected and outcast,’ the priest said. ‘I sit tonight with genial people and at a sanctified hearth. It would be very pleasant if my place was amongst you people on whom God has already smiled. But, you see, it is an inevitable impulse of vocation to be a witness on the furthest edge of things. The fact that everyone believes that one day the Mounted Police from Queensland might pursue that outcast group means that I must number myself amongst Barrakoon’s people. It is a clear mandate, you see. I wish frequently that it were not so, and my nature hankers for a simple shelter like this and an honourable trade. But –’

  Larkin interrupted, saying, ‘My mother said that when her transport lay in Dublin Bay, she and another Sister of Mercy came aboard to visit the women on the prison deck. And all the prisoners thought it good of the nuns to visit them for the day, yet when the ship . . . the Whitby . . . heaved itself out into the Irish Sea, the two nuns were still on board, willing to travel with them all the way and minister to them . . .’