The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith

by Keneally, Thomas

  At the homestead the big, meaty, moral women considered her triply fallen, for piling black marriage on white conception on black fornication. Miss Graf told her there were homes for unfortunate women, that they didn’t have to cleave to a black.

  It was not hard for Miss Graf to suppose that society guaranteed its members against certain ultimate shames. That was what charity was about.

  Miss Graf transmitted such presumptions to the Newby girls; so that Mrs Newby could say at Friday shopping in Gilgandra, “It’s been so good for the girls to have Miss Graf staying at the homestead. She’s got real tone.”

  Every morning Jimmie hoped for Tabidgi’s departure. He considered putting bad omens on the bagging where Jackie Smolders slept – a butchered barn owl, strange stones, rags dipped in blood which Tabidgi might presume to be menstrual and so fatally potent. But these were always projects for tomorrow, recourses almost as final as beating him away with branches.

  And because the child in the house was not his and showed up the folly of his white marriage, he somehow felt unequal to making a strong expulsion of his maternal uncle.

  Now he worked automatically, without aim. Work was a sedative for a man with a magic uncle bent on liquor, a lying wife, a bastard child; all within his walls.

  Mort helped Jimmie work. Not wanting any definite return for it.

  Certainly Mort had matured. Sometimes, however, he would snigger at bulge-eyed, shovel-bearded Newby sucking at his pebble. When he hit his knuckle with a mallet one day he crowed with laughter as long as the pain endured.

  Their work was not an economic success. Two divided the labour but did not double the work rate. Most of his day Jimmie spent in a private frenzy, as if seeking space of his own amongst all the strangers who had claim on him. To mock Tabidgi’s laziness he might hunt possums at night, perhaps for half the night. So there was always the soft meat of phalangers for Jack Smolders and thin Gilda (who got very sick of it).

  Easily, without his noticing it, the possum-hunting became for him something more than a duty of hospitality. It was an inverted sort of testing of God, Gilda, the Newbys, his tribe. It was only when he had given all the justice that was in him, rendered what he could to each, that he would be entitled to stand back and declare himself accursed. And knowing himself such, he would have untold liberties of rage and rampage.

  Every night he would buffet and rut away against Gilda, threatening that she’d bear a blackie yet. Her menstrual blood put him to flight one night. It was the very taboo he had thought of using against Jackie. Patronizingly, he had thought that an old savage like Jackie would be flummoxed by it.

  Now, flummoxed himself, he climbed into the lean-to and lay down near Mort, shivering and hating God.

  Late on a Friday morning, in the frosts of July, Mrs Gilda Blacksmith went to the homestead to leave her weekly order. She did not take her baby with her.

  Coming to the home-yard gate she could see, in the sun in the angle of the two-winged house, Mr Newby napping in an upholstered chair. He was dressed for town in a butterfly collar and tweed suit.

  Sitting on the veranda boards, also dressed for town, were the two sons. Both had their coats open, showing off the slim strength their vests defined. One had a homburg tipped over his eyes. All night they had worked bagging wheat at the old homestead (now used for silage) a mile away. They planned to work the whole of the Friday night as well.

  She stood still, remembering the day Mr Newby had come across her and her baby by accident. He had been droving steers to new pasture. Gilda always avoided him if she could, but he rolled up to her on his horse, vaulted out of the saddle and exposed his patriarchal blunt genitals, slug-white and sitting in his hand for her information.

  “When yer find a bigger’n than that on a nigger, Mrs Blacksmith, let me know.”

  Within ten seconds he was covered and back in the saddle. His dogs were barking and the sullen cattle moved.

  Now, on the Friday, she hoped to creep past his dozing form. But as she put her foot on the bottom step, Mr Newby woke.

  “G’day, Mrs Blacksmith. Kin I do somethink?”

  “I jest wanted to give in me order.”

  He stared sympathetically at her crushed dress of green muslin. Freckles and poor pearls of sweat were on her cheeks.

  “But I’m sorry,” he told her. “I spoke to yer husband. I told him I couldn’t go on f’warding him advances in the form of groceries. Not since the place has turned into a blacks’ camp like that. I’m never certain whether he’ll git any work done next week or not. I don’t want to be left with an unfinished boundary. I made that clear to yer husband, Mrs Blacksmith. The cure’s in his hands.”

  His half-drowsy edict made her want to assent and get clean away. At least the baby has my milk, she thought.

  “Sorry, Mr Newby.” She began backing.

  “No. Yer looked knocked up. Make yerself a cup of tea in the kitchen there. No one’ll disturb yer. I’m jest waiting on the women. Oh, yer better knock, though. Miss Graf’s home for the day with influenza.”

  Gilda noticed that one of his cunning sons snickered with closed eyes at the mention of Miss Graf and her influenza.

  In fact, she found Miss Graf in the kitchen, in a flannel nightgown pulled tight about her neck; breathing bronchitically and occasionally pushing a small handkerchief to the tip of her nose. Gilda stared, as she was meant to, at the unattainable degree of womanhood Miss Graf achieved even in the deeps of winter influenza.

  Yet what had that boy been chortling for?

  “Come in, Mrs Blacksmith.”

  “Mr Newby told me to git meself a cuppa tea.”

  “By all means. I wonder would you care to make one for me? Tea’s on the mantel.”

  “Yair, miss.”

  She busied about to distract the schoolmistress from making her onerous judgments.

  “How’s your baby?”

  “Well, Miss Graf.”

  “Have you left him at home?”

  “Yairs, Miss Graf. With Peter.”

  “Peter?”

  “The boy, Miss Graf.”

  “The black boy?”

  “Yairs, Miss Graf.”

  “Well, I mustn’t keep you too long.”

  “Orright, Miss Graf.”

  Gilda spotted rosary beads around Miss Graf’s neck, tucked away into her bosom. In the home for wayward girls, the chaplain had impressed on the wayward girls that Papists were dense, unwashed and subject to secret witchcraft. Poor remnants on the margin of the progress of man. How unfair then that Miss Graf should seem to be centre stage, to own the book of moral judgment.

  Her pedagogy was said to be severe, and the farmers of Wallah approved of it.

  A minute later Mrs Newby came from some deep part of the house into the kitchen. Her dugs were ponderous as law within her brown velvet.

  “Mrs Blacksmith! I didn’t expect ter see yer here this week. Mr Newby told me yer wouldn’t be ordering.”

  “Jimmie must’ve forgot to tell me, Mrs Newby.”

  “Mrs Blacksmith is kindly making us tea. Would you care for a cup in your own house, Mrs Newby?”

  “No time, dear. How’s the baby boy, Mrs Blacksmith?”

  “Very good, thank you.”

  Mrs Newby stared without too much apparent pity at the arduous bun Gilda had made of her back hairs.

  “Yer hair looks nice, dear.”

  “Thank you, Mrs Newby.”

  “The baby’s been left with the boy,” said Miss Graf, as if this should qualify Mrs Newby’s praise.

  “What boy?”

  “The aborigine boy Peter,” Gilda pleaded. “He’s got so heavy, you know. The baby.”

  Mrs Newby advanced one massive button-up boot.

  “Is the boy trustworthy?”

  “He’s a nice boy, Peter,” Gilda pleaded.

  “It’s yore child, Mrs Blacksmith. But a white baby oughtn’t let be grow up with tribal blacks.”

  “Peter likes him. Peter’s
very gentle.”

  “Did you know I was getting married in the new year?” Miss Graf asked.

  “Congratulations, miss,” Gilda told her, as if a merely and mildly social reason were behind Miss Graf’s news.

  “What I wanted to say was that I’m sure we, my future husband and I, could employ you at Wallabadah. That’s the name of my fiancé’s property.

  “It’s yer chance!” Mrs Newby whispered. “Yer’ll only lose that child of yores if yer stay with the blacks.”

  The four-year-old, Mrs Newby’s late fruit, came in and looked at her conspiring mother with green eyes, the family’s best. If I had a child as safe as you are safe, Gilda thought.

  “You’d have your own room, Mrs Blacksmith, and be able to have the baby with you all the time.”

  But Gilda was no simpleton. She knew with some exactness how long an employer like Miss Graf could tolerate her. When the soup was cold, the saucepans boiled dry, the wedding silver tarnished, the bone china cracked, Miss Graf would with regret cast Mrs Blacksmith and her bastard back on the public care.

  Both the elder Newby girls came in in velvet and Gilda had to explain again what had happened to her child – that he was in the care of a savage.

  According to the Sydney Mail, said one of the Newby girls, blacks ate each other in Queensland.

  To Gilda came the image of the pensive ages the boy Peter spent contemplating the deal box her baby lay in; endlessly willing to pluck the child’s rattle and hear its belly-rumbles of satisfaction.

  “I’m Christian-married to Jimmie,” she pleaded.

  “They’re not Christian. It doesn’t matter what yer are – Methodist, Catholic. But not all the missionaries in the British Empire ever turned one black into a Christian. Are there any black bishops?’ Mrs Newby knew well enough there weren’t. It would have been in the Sydney Mail if there were. “Are there even any black ministers of religion?”

  “The Benedictine priests,” said Miss Graf, “did – I believe – ordain three aboriginal priests.”

  “And what happened?” all the Newbys wanted to know.

  “They all wandered off. Not one of the three was seen again.”

  “I think Miss Graf’s made yer a Christian offer,” Mrs Newby decreed.

  “Thank you, Miss Graf.”

  “Thanks won’t get yer far. Yer force me to say it. Yore a scandal t’ all of us.”

  The women watched Gilda avidly, as if waiting for her to take some decision owed to them. Why was she depended on? Why did large, tough women pretend she threatened them? What was it that excommunicated her? For she was humble and would have accepted any morsel of grace they might extend her.

  Suddenly she heard, as if from another person’s throat, creaking noises of bemusement in her own mouth. That sneering Newby boy had had Miss Graf, Gilda wanted to say; and how was it they could evade being encircled and judged?

  On the range the kettle sang. No one took notice of it. Meanwhile the elder Newby girl gratuitously pledged on the spot that she would never marry any black.

  Mrs Newby’s long belly growled. “Yer grieve us, miss. Yer must leave them natives.”

  “I beg you,” said snuffling Miss Graf, “that you’ll see the sense of my offer.”

  For no more than a second Miss Graf’s authoritarian vowels carried to Gilda the pod-bursting smell of imprisoned spring in the yard where wayward girls were exercised. Gilda opened her mouth and began to roar in full voice. The four grown women and the child stared at her in her cold latitude of culpability.

  “Aw, swallow it!” awakened Mr Newby called from his armchair on the veranda.

  Gilda could not understand why it was that if she spoke of the day the patriarch had shown off his phallus it would shame her and no one else. She could not understand why she had no standing in the moral market-place.

  When she ran out of the house, “Kin we drop yer part of the way, Mrs Blacksmith?” Mr Newby called.

  His sons uttered thick laughter, as if they knew of their father’s eccentricity towards her.

  She did not stop sprinting until the homestead was lost somewhere behind her in the timber.

  8

  In the Blacksmith larder were a few pounds of flour, less than a pound of corned beef, one skinned possum, a portion of rice. There was also a quarter of a bottle of port – if such things counted – fetched full by Jackie Smolders from the pub in Wallah that Friday morning, along with a second one which Jackie and Mort had already drunk between them.

  When Jimmie Blacksmith came into his house at dusk, the baby was crying and Gilda was sitting on the mattress, her legs awry like those of a flung doll. Her face was puckered with weeping in that corner cold as a cave.

  She told him what Miss Graf wanted and that there were no groceries. Newby intended to starve him off (Jimmie could see), or was perhaps even ratifying Miss Graf’s plan to pester the marriage, as poor a union as it was, apart.

  First, Jimmie Blacksmith called on Jackie Smolders. Perhaps not merely because Mort was asleep: in his anger Jimmie may have returned to the Tullam instinct for primacy of mother’s brother. Certainly he did not know his reasons himself.

  For it was against all reason to take Tabidgi with him on a mission of complaint. Tabidgi was Newby’s pretext for withholding supplies. Yet, at the other pole from tribal instincts, Jimmie may simply have wanted to demonstrate Jackie to the Newbys, show them what a harmless old bugger he was.

  Anyhow, Tabidgi was the one he took with him. The old man seemed a little flattered.

  Jimmie Blacksmith went armed with his Enfield, though he did not intend it as his means of persuasion. In the sharp bright night he might bag something, possum or wallaby; or if the Newbys were obdurate, one of their cattle. He ranted, threats of more pervasive vengeance than that. “I’ll derail a bloody train,” he told Tabidgi. Derailing a train was the ultimate reprisal.

  Tabidgi suggested a magical revenge. If Jimmie were to take the tooth and punch it into the track-marks of Newby’s beasts, women, sons, in Newby’s tracks themselves, nothing of Newby’s would ever be able to walk straight again.

  “Horseshit,” said Jimmie Blacksmith.

  His eye was on the distant radiance of the Newby kitchen. No old man’s witchery with teeth and tracks for him. No waiting for Newby to feel the bite. Newby must feel the bite tonight.

  When she opened the door, Mrs Newby herself was carrying a rifle slung loosely between armpit and elbow. Perhaps it was a habit from a harsh upbringing in wilder country than Wallah; perhaps she had been raised in the murderous lands around Charters Towers and had it drummed into her that one never answered the door without carrying arms. In any case it was only a formality. Now, although she could see Jimmie’s Enfield, she dropped her own weapon in the corner by the door.

  She was in her slippers and a comfortable dress, and was not easily made afraid.

  “Possuming, Mr Blacksmith?” she suggested.

  “Kin I see Mr Newby, missus? I want t’ talk t’ him about the groceries.”

  But Mr Newby was bagging wheat in the old farmhouse, she explained. The men would work there until the bagging was finished, because both the boys wanted to play Rugby in Gilgandra the next day.

  They argued the point. Mrs Newby said her husband wasn’t a charitable institution or somethink.

  While they spoke, Jimmie caught sight of robust Miss Graf indoors. Inappropriately to the debate he thought of how he had never had a girl like that, a plump, ripe girl. The black girls of the camps had ugly fat or tubercular leanness.

  “… so that I’m sure,” Mrs Newby was saying, “if yer worked well enough and got rid of those hangers-on me husband’d be only too pleased to …”

  “He owes me, missus. Nine hundred yards.”

  “I’m sure yer’ll forgive me for believing me own husband.”

  As she began to close the door on him, he saw that Miss Graf was actually eaves-dropping intently, handkerchief rammed to her nose to hush the very rasp of he
r influenza, holding her breath with a plotter’s rapacity for the appropriate facts.

  Then in a second, Tabidgi and Jimmie Blacksmith were in the dark again and feeling very foolish.

  “Wait ’n see the ole bugger in the morning,” Tabidgi suggested.

  But Jimmie felt close to a mandate to heap coals of fire on Newby’s head. Newby must be tested tonight. Jimmie would not wait till morning without knowing if, in view of the cruelties he had suffered from Healy, Lewis, Farrell, Newby, the shearers’ cook, he had a licence to run mad.

  As they moved amongst the humble shapes of Newby’s livestock, it seemed to Jimmie as if the question of their ownership had come up for decision. Tabidgi complained of rheumatism. Unendowed with the same sense of noblesse as Jimmie, he could see no sense in this second appeal to the Newbys.

  The hurricane lights of Newby’s old home showed up through the vacant windows. From fifty yards away, Jimmie could see one of the Newby boys working in an old satin-backed vest. There was a grating of shovels. Sweat was an art the Newbys knew. Others knew it too, from Mackay to Adelaide. From Eden to Tibooburra. Sweat was the national virtue.

  When Jimmie arrived at the door, Newby himself looked up and could be seen to take fright and then cover it, pretending to have a piece of trash in his eye.

  “Christ, what yer doing here?”

  One of the sons stretched and yawned with fists extended; then surveyed Jimmie without interest, and picked up a shovel.

  “Yer know I haven’ got anythink t’ eat, boss. Yer know that.”

  “I can’t go on f’wardin’ yer supplies. The way yer working now.”

  “It isn’t f’warding. I already earned everythink yer give me.”

  “Look, yer aren’t working as good as yer did before them others came. Yer giving signs of giving up the job. Then I’ll have all the expense and inconvenience of finding someone else.”

  “I already done nine hundred yards.”

  “Listen, Jimmie, don’t come the bush-lawyer with me.”

  “I’m jest sayin’,” Jimmie said, “I got a hungry wife and kid at home.”

  “She knows where she can come if she wants steady tucker. Miss Graf’s made a generous offer.”