The Dickens Boy

by Tom Keneally

  ‘I can believe it,’ the priest said, himself a little chastened by the grandeur of the nuns. ‘For some souls, there is only one home – at the side of the despised.’

  ‘I understand what you say, Father,’ Larkin declared. ‘But you won’t stop what has happened all over the land already. My mother and my father saw the Ngarigu driven from the high plains of Monaro. I can’t say whether that is God’s work or not. My parents felt some pity, though, for those darks driven off. And yet, kindly or not, it happened. Now, if you went to see this Barrakoon man and he harmed you in any way, the New South Wales troopers stationed near Wentworth would be called out. Or the Queenslanders, if it happened anywhere near Queensland. You could be the provocation the powers of the earth seek, Father.’

  ‘Being raised Protestant myself,’ Mrs Larkin said swiftly, ‘I wonder that you would try to order around a priest, Thomas.’

  ‘I speak merely as a man to him, Gracie. I do not want to see good Father Charisse come to damage, since priests have always been thin on the ground in New South Wales.’

  ‘I accept what you say to me, Thomas,’ the priest declared. ‘But what if I came to you tomorrow and said no more smithing, you are to make barrels from now on. Would not this cause a rift in your nature?’

  Larkin did not answer.

  ‘I hope you have a good horse, father,’ said Willy.

  ‘It is a better one than it looks,’ said Father Charisse, like most normal men better impressed with his own mount than other people were.

  ‘Forgive me, Father, I’m just a Protestant like Tom,’ said Willy. ‘But surely your order cannot expect you to court martyrdom? If they did, they would soon be reduced to small numbers.’

  ‘You are a sensible man,’ the priest told him, ‘but there are reasons that exceed reason.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Mrs Larkin cheerily, ‘let us eat up.’

  She held out the hope that food would raise us to the priest’s level of reason, or else tame him back to ours.

  ‘Your father, anyhow, Mr Dickens, is a just man,’ said the priest through a fairly lusty mouthful of mutton and potato, which he swallowed prematurely to embark on a recitation. ‘“Now these tumbling tenements contain, by night, a swarm of misery. As, on the ruined human wretch, vermin parasites appear, so these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in . . .” This is your father on the place named Tom-all-Alone’s in Bleak House. Christ spoke the truth of the poor. Your father has written it as no one else has, not Shakespeare, not Voltaire, not Lamartine. Your father is like an extension of the Gospels! You must be so proud of this.’

  ‘My father would be proud to hear the claim from your lips,’ I said. ‘But I doubt that he would feel in any way parallel to Christ.’

  My father had enjoyed plaudits in his time, but he would have been astounded to know this priest in New South Wales was partnering him with Gospels.

  ‘But he always had a great sympathy for the poor,’ I lamely concluded.

  ‘And that is the Second Commandment,’ said Father Charisse.

  I did not tell him of course that my father deplored Papists.

  The dinner proceeded pleasantly, and I even had a chance to tell stories of some of the rowing expeditions the guvnor and we boys undertook on the Medway.

  I was to see Father Charisse celebrate one more apparently futile Mass in the camp of the station darks. When he elevated the Host, a few of the old widows sitting in the doorways of their gunyahs with gypsum on their heads could tell that something solemn had happened, the moment being accompanied by a small handbell rung by Tom Larkin. The women shrilled as they shrilled when Yandi survived the great smoking.

  And then the priest was gone. Cultay went with him at Fred Bonney’s request. After a number of days Cultay returned to Momba, and everyone assumed he had somehow managed to make introductions between the priest and the purist group around Barrakoon.

  27

  The Bonney brothers, like all the other pastoral folk, were still experimenting with the best blends of wool for the terrain and climate of Momba. As part of my training, and an exercise of my usefulness, Fred asked me to ride to Wilcannia with an open cheque in my possession, enabling me to buy a lot of two hundred White Suffolk sire rams at no more than £4 a head at an auction run by Mr Fremmel. Jemmy Clough, one of the Bonney brothers’ most trusted boundary riders, would come with me and apply his jaundiced eye over the sheep’s gums, staple length, hoofs and rumps. If all seemed well, we could proceed. But I had to hand over the instrument of payment, and it was an honour of which I was acutely aware. I had also been instructed to make the bidding. I had never had any such transaction laid upon my shoulders before.

  At the close of a long desert winter’s day, under a sky of scoured and streaky clouds, Clough and I camped near the Wilcannia saleyards with a number of other purchasing parties from around the district. I moved easily around the camp, without much terror that any stockman or boundary rider would recite my father’s work to me. A number of boundary riders and bullock cart drivers had gathered around a large fire, and a concertina and a fiddle were playing with an accompanying voice I recognised as Hayward’s. His cheeks, already richly glowing from the heat, seemed further aglow with rum as he sang in a plaintive, accented tenor, and the men around the fire were in an ecstasy of hilarity.

  In lodgings my brother Jim used to be,

  He lived in a little back room,

  His landlady, she was a widow, who used

  To walk in her sleep in the gloom.

  Oh! Oh! It’s a terrible tale,

  She walked into Jim’s room, I vow.

  He got such a fright that he left the next night.

  That’s the reason I’m lodging there now.

  When he finished, to tremendous bush acclamation, he raised a pannikin and emptied it. Men called for more songs from him but he told them, in a stage Irish accent, ‘Bejaysuz, I’ve been singing for yez all the fookin’ night.’

  A number of men tried to grab him as he walked away, wanting to be his friend forever. But when he heard my cry, perhaps because it was a rare sober one, he turned around.

  ‘Well, I’ll be buggered,’ he said, his face lighting up. ‘It is Plorn Dickens, is it not?’

  He came over and shook my hand, saying, ‘The fellow I was going to write to but now don’t have to. I have left your brother on amiable terms and am on my way to take over the management of Toorale Station on the Warrego River.’

  ‘Oh,’ I replied, a little envious, although he was a couple of years my senior.

  ‘In eighteen months I reach my majority and would like to go into partnership with a friend to purchase a homestead freehold and take up a pastoral lease, the management of which I would undertake. I wondered if you would be that friend, Plorn? Do you think that on further acquaintance you could work with me?’

  Secretly delighted, I nonetheless pleaded that I had three years to go to my majority.

  ‘If there were anything you could borrow against,’ he said, suddenly serious, ‘and you really wanted to join my station, would that be a possibility?’

  ‘Indeed, it might well be. I am very flattered.’

  ‘Come, Plorn, that’s what women say when they knock a chap back for marriage.’

  ‘But I am. I will write . . .’ I was going to say ‘to Aunt Georgie’, but that might have caused Hayward’s derision. ‘I will write home and make inquiries.’

  ‘Good, and by the way, my dear friend, this is just an initial proposition, a sounding out. I’m aware you need to hear good things of me in the coming times. But though a troubadour, I am capable, old chap, of deadly seriousness when it comes to making our pastoral mark. Shall we drink on it?’

  I thought about this. We were a few hundred yards from the Commercial Hotel, where many of the pastoral gentlemen were staying. I agreed.

  We set off togethe
r, Hayward trilling,

  At Trinity Church I met my doom,

  Now we live in a top back room,

  Up to my eyes in debt for rent,

  That’s what she and heaven sent . . .

  ‘You have a vast store of songs, Hayward,’ I remarked, not utterly in admiration.

  ‘Thank you, sir, though many are of the vulgar kind.’ As if to prove the point he sang:

  I once went to a country fair,

  The fattest girl on earth was there,

  She was ninety-seven inches wide,

  And we all rushed in when the showman cried . . .

  A sneezing fit interrupted him. ‘Ah,’ he continued when it passed, ‘my guvnor sayeth to me, “Why can you remember low doggerel and not your theorems?” Had I been able to answer him I might have been Hayward of the Foreign Office or Lieutenant Colonel Hayward of the Royal Engineers.’

  I said, ‘I can remember cricket scores but not theorems. I understand the cricket scores.’

  ‘Exactly, Plorn. I understood the doggerel. We’ll make excellent partners.’

  A roar of conversation was emanating from the Commercial’s public and saloon bar, but one could also hear much politer songs than Hayward’s being played on a piano – indeed, ‘Green Grow the Rushes, Oh’!

  As we approached, the pianist took up ‘The Low, Low Lands of Holland’ and a soprano voice pierced the night.

  ‘Yon lassie can sing,’ remarked Hayward.

  At that, I thought, how can I go into business with you? I rarely meet you fully sober.

  Surprisingly, as we got closer to the hotel the general hubbub of conversation seemed to make the soprano’s voice dimmer, but it still penetrated with its needlepoint sound. Hayward led me into the crowded public bar where he was obviously well known and well liked.

  ‘Here he comes, the bloody minstrel boy!’ men called out and he was shoulder-slapped in the direction of the bar, where he ordered rum for himself and ale for me. As we drank, his eyes darted from admiring face to admiring face. It was a wonderful thing that he was the acclaimed oddity of this party; that, for once, it wasn’t me.

  ‘Who is yon lass with splendid voice?’ he asked of the company.

  ‘Jealous, are you, Hayward?’ called one of the drinkers.

  ‘Desirous of an introduction,’ declared Hayward.

  ‘It’s old Desailly having a party for his chums in one of the parlours,’ one man said. ‘The singer must be one of his daughters. Or one of their friends.’

  ‘Hey,’ called one, ‘isn’t that the young Dickens boy you’re with?’

  ‘Boy? Boy? He’s as good a man as any,’ Hayward declared.

  Some besotted soul thought it was time to cheer. ‘Thinking of writing a book, are ye?’ another called, and for some reason everyone thought this side-crackingly funny.

  I didn’t like the way this was going, but I was excited by the idea that Constance Desailly might be in the hotel, and the voice told me infallibly that it was hers. I have to make some serious investment in her, I thought. I grabbed Hayward by the arm and told him, ‘I know the Desaillys.’

  ‘Do you think you can take us both?’ he asked.

  I finished my ale without replying and moved off towards the sound of the piano. The singing had stopped now but the piano was still being played.

  A man cried, ‘There goes young Dickens! Some girl’s in danger!’

  I grinned as convincingly as I could, for in Australia I’d discovered it was better to go along with the joke than be the butt of it.

  I reached the corridor and turned to find Hayward was still with me. We followed the sound of the piano to a door and I knocked. I was nervous but pleased to be in charge of Hayward, who seemed chastened for once and was holding his broad hat by its brim. It was Malleson, the law clerk, who opened the door. I thought that of course he would be there, paying court. But he behaved with warmth and courtesy. ‘Dickens, how good to see you.’

  ‘I felt that I must come and pay my respects to Mr Desailly,’ I replied.

  Malleson turned to the room and announced over the piano, ‘It’s young Dickens and another gentleman, come to give their respects.’

  Alfred and Mrs Desailly walked across the room to greet us.

  ‘We are not well dressed for polite company,’ I said.

  ‘Of course that doesn’t matter,’ Mrs Desailly fluted. ‘But come in and bring your friend.’ She and Mr Desailly were just as they had been at the time of the cricket encounter, amiable in an open-handed, colonial way. Hayward seemed quite stunned by the welcome I was receiving from the Desaillys.

  Across the room I saw Constance looking amused. She was standing by the piano wearing green and appeared ampler than she’d been at our last meeting. Her sister was at the piano, and not far from Blanche was her Mr Brougham.

  Alfred Desailly said, ‘The girls were just giving us some tunes.’

  ‘Some tunes?’ I protested. ‘Sublime melodies,’ I insisted.

  Mrs Desailly clapped her hands and everyone in the room ceased talking. I caught site of Mr Fremmel and the Reverend Rutledge with his wife. ‘May I introduce a gentleman you might already know, Mr Edward Dickens and his friend, Mr . . .?’

  ‘Hayward. New manager of Toorale,’ said Hayward, nodding smoothly around the room.

  A few ladies clapped. Toorale was a pastoral property most would have heard of, and its owner was a popular Ulsterman named Sam Wilson.

  I regretted that Hayward and I had distracted the company from the singing. I saw Constance move away from the piano as if she were about to embark on conversations around the room. So I was grateful to Mr Brougham for stepping forward and announcing he was sure the newly arrived guests and others in the room would be happy if the Desailly sisters proceeded with the third of their selections. Hayward and I rushed to say we’d be delighted to hear them. There were coughs and snifflings in the company as it settled, then Blanche began playing a short teasing introduction to ‘The Wild Mountain Thyme’, which Constance began to sing, her brown eyes ablaze.

  This was an almost unfairly inveigling song, a true love plaint, and melodic to a fault. And I heard Connie Desailly’s crystalline soprano cutting into me like a knife. It is a song supposedly sung by a man, but as she sang ‘Will you go, lassie, go?’ I was struck by a desire to dare anything, to ride to the ochre pits of South Australia and bring that red preciousness back to her. Wherever in this continent, or at least beyond the Darling, ‘the wild mountain thyme grows around the blooming heather’, I was willing to quest for it.

  ‘Extraordinary! Who is she, Dickens?’ Hayward whispered. ‘She is enchanting.’

  I did not answer. He knew who she was anyhow. She was Euterpe, muse of song, reborn somehow on the banks of the sometimes bounteous, sometimes grudging Darling. And if my father had never sent me to the colonies, I would not have been aware that, with the dew of the divine fountains she had risen from still fresh on her, she had fetched up there.

  The song ended and, after a stunned moment, the room erupted to hand-clapping and lusty cheers from younger men as Brougham cried, ‘The muses of Netallie Station, ladies and gentlemen!’

  I saw Fremmel applauding as if it were just another song, while the Reverend Rutledge seemed distracted. Were these people even alive? I wondered.

  Hayward beat Malleson to Constance’s side, begging the honour of introducing himself. I felt vacant with enchantment. What I feared most was that he would manage to sing something like the exquisite ‘Holly and the Ivy’ he’d sung at Corona. If they sang together, it might be apparent to all that the charm of one complemented the other. They would be somehow fused.

  28

  While I stood bewildered by this question of Connie and other men, I found with a shock that Mr Fremmel was by my side.

  ‘How is life at Momba, Mr Dickens?’ he asked.

  ‘All is well,’ I replied. ‘The water has fallen in the creek system, Natiola and Momba Creeks are down on what they were when I first arr
ived, but Fred Bonney’s hoping for late winter rains.’

  ‘Fred Bonney,’ he said with a raised eyebrow.

  ‘Mr Bonney,’ I corrected myself.

  ‘You find the Bonneys good masters?’ asked Fremmel distractedly, as if he didn’t care how I found them.

  ‘I don’t know if my father bred me to acknowledge a master, Mr Fremmel, but I’m very happy working for the Messrs Bonney.’

  ‘You have not been assailed as yet by Mr Edward Bonney?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I told him, a little shocked he’d used the word ‘assailed’.

  ‘He is a sodomite, don’t you know?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s proper –’ I began.

  ‘Oh, come, Dickens, don’t be prissy. The fact is widely known. And I wondered if he had importuned you, by any chance.’

  ‘I assure you he has not, Mr Fremmel.’

  ‘Then do you know if he has received a letter from my nephew Maurice?’

  ‘I don’t believe so.’

  ‘The new postmaster says one was delivered to Momba. And I know Maurice and the Bonneys are correspondents. That’s all.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ I replied with half an eye on Constance trilling with laughter at every second sentence Hayward uttered.

  ‘You’re here for the stock sales?’ Fremmel asked.

  I admitted I was.

  ‘You have a commission from Mr Fred Bonney to bid for certain stock?’

  ‘I’m honoured to say that I do.’

  ‘A delightful man, Fred,’ said Fremmel joylessly. ‘Compared to his brother, who lacks distinction.’

  ‘Both have been very kind to me,’ I replied, as a warning.

  ‘What is the commission Fred Bonney has favoured you with in this case, young Dickens?’

  I did not like that ‘young Dickens’ – it smelled of classroom condescension.

  ‘I believe that is confidential between Mr Bonney and myself,’ I declared.

  ‘I would reckon that it’s the white-faced Suffolks. Ever the experimenter, Fred, ever the Enlightenment man. Well, let me tell you, I can get those Suffolks to you for two pounds, fifteen shillings a head, which I surmise would cause Mr Bonney to declare you a wonder-worker.’