“What offer?”
“Yer better ask Mrs Blacksmith.”
“It ain’t up to that bloody fat schoolteacher to make no offers.”
The Newby boys stared narrowly at Jimmie and their father, defensive for the sake of their schoolmistress-lodger.
“Listen, yer black bastard!” Newby was saying. “Don’t talk to me like that. I’ll soon bloody …”
All at once, Jimmie had the rifle against Newby’s stomach. Triumphant, Newby then seemed; as if that bullet were his ambition. The odds-on bet he had placed, in bedroom and kitchen conversation, with all the Newbys and the Friday wiseacres in Gilgandra, had come off in the end: Jimmie had shown his native malice.
Meanwhile, Jimmie cool-headedly chose not to shoot Newby. He took the muzzle away from Mr Newby’s belly.
“That settles it, yer sodding darkie. Go home and straight t’ bed. We’ll talk about what’s to be done t’morrow.”
“Yair, we’ll talk.”
“One thing. You and yer bloody tribe are going t’ pack up and git.”
Secure about his wife and big-beamed daughters, he shut Jimmie and Tabidgi out.
Now Jimmie himself knew that Newby was not what he wanted. He was in a fever for some definite release. Killing Newby, however, was not it. When he put his rifle against Newby’s gut, he knew that he wished to kill that honey-smooth Miss Graf. His desire for her blood, he understood, came as a climax to his earlier indecencies – relinquishing Harry Edwards to Senior Constable Farrell, for example. He wished to scare the schoolmistress apart with his authority, to hear her whimper.
In our world, the delusions that killers let into their bloodstreams are the stuff of newsprint and videotape. A reader should be spared. Enough to say: Jimmie admitted to his body a drunken judgmental majesty, a sense that the sharp-edged stars impelled him. He felt large with a royal fever, with rebirth. He was in the lizard’s gut once more.
There was little besotted about Tabidgi’s sense of direction. He knew with a groan that they had turned for the main homestead once more.
“Yer not goin’ back t’ see the ole girl agin?” he complained.
“I got t’ give them whites a scare.”
“Christ Ormighty,” the old man groaned. He laughed a little at all this commuting. He began to chant at random, for boredom and weariness.
Men vault rivers,
Fear in their eyes.
Women surrender.
At dawn we are beyond your hill
At midday we stalk you on tip-toe from a distance.
At dusk we are at your throat,
Closer than child to pap.
This time the Newby woodheap got between them and the kitchen lights. A full-sized axe as well as a neater tomahawk or block-buster were sunk into the wood. Jimmie propped his rifle there. An axe was more apt. He eased the cutting edges out of the hardwood block and told his uncle to hide the block-buster under his coat, and then sent him off to the door for one last, formal tempting of white contumacy.
“Chris’ why?” Jackie asked but obeyed. There was so much he did not understand about the white world, and perhaps the reasons for carrying a concealed chopper under your coat while interviewing a farmer’s wife were beyond his mental strength.
Out in the dark, Jimmie watched his uncle knock at the door and tell Mrs Newby that Mr Newby wanted them to be given flour.
“Did he give yer a note?” she asked.
“He was too busy, missus.”
“D’yer expect me to go traipsing off to the old homestead to find out whether yer lying or not?”
“Tell him t’ go away, Mum,” the elder daughter called from indoors.
“Git yer rifle,” the second one suggested.
There was a second’s pause, then Mrs Newby turned from the door, perhaps to do as her daughter had urged. In the dark twenty yards out, lithe Jimmie thought explicitly how strange it was that she would never complete such a simple action, a robust woman with plenty of breath and deep red organs.
He thought so under cover of the axe, which was for him more than a mere cutting edge, was replete with command.
Out of the dark he ran yelping at her. Her hand was on the rifle and she was turning to shoot when the axe reached for her. It took her above the shoulder blade and mined the deep sinews there.
All the women in the kitchen commenced to scream, while Mrs Newby fell away from the axe. Jimmie vaulted her and waited on his light feet for Miss Graf to break from her warm corner by the hearth. Though one of the daughters ran towards her mother and perhaps the firearm, Jimmie Blacksmith did nothing to prevent her, and then chopped Miss Graf leisurely between hip and ribs.
As he struck and kept striking, Jimmie learned the ease of killing. People wrongly saw it as such extreme, terrifying work.
A second murderous theorem: the rate at which dignity could be severed. He had imagined Miss Graf playing somehow the cool moral arbiter to the end. To be raucous as a beast was more than he had hoped for from her.
Unreasonably, she rose to walk, below apprehending that he had knocked apart her rib cage and split her hams.
At the same time, he was aware of what Jackie was suffering, and what others were suffering from Jackie. Blood and screaming and starting eyes had stampeded the old man. Jackie would go on hacking at them out of terror. The horror Jimmie’s first blow had made of Mrs Newby could only be fought with more and more blows.
One of the daughters too had become terrible, for by accidental mastery, Tabidgi had cut off her right hand.
The youngest son, eleven years old, came into the kitchen in a flannel nightgown. It occurred to Jimmie, drunk as he might be with insights, that Jackie Smolders would attack the child merely for horror of its eyes.
Jimmie yelled something preventive to his uncle, but Jackie was fighting demons and did some damage to the back of the boy’s neck; who struggled for balance, hurdled his mother’s body and sprinted out into the dark.
Within seconds, the yelling had strangely diminished to that of one of the daughters, who was sitting on her hips trying to rise. Behind her screams could be heard the sobbing of the child in its cot.
Jackie went on beating at the silent body of the other grown daughter, whose head lay half-scalped on her mother’s lap. The juxtaposition looked like a mockery of a family-picnic photograph.
Mr Jimmie Blacksmith rolled on his feet and chopped off the back of the remaining Miss Newby’s head. The axe was flecked with the strange grey mucus of the brain.
The sudden silence was enhanced rather than intruded on by the sobbing child, who sounded quotidian, likely to be taken by sleep at any moment.
Jimmie was frankly astounded at this instant absence of all enemy voices. How could he believe that Miss Graf’s monumental concern over his marriage to Gilda had been removed from the earth?
Shivering Jackie Smolders had himself propped against the wall. Sweat shone in the grey stubble of his jaws. He had let his weapon drop amongst the slaughtered Newbys.
Though he felt buoyant enough, Jimmie Blacksmith knew that he had become an incurable. He knew in an instant that he must see into his acts the fervid illusions they were based on. He chose therefore to know and not go mad.
At the same time he must be able to see the four hewn women as culprits, and so the mere beginnings of an agenda of mayhem. Yet to see them fully and without doubt as the first necessary casualties of a war regally undertaken was itself a mad act of the mind.
Therefore he was to spend the rest of his life in tenuous elation and solid desolation between self-knowledge and delirium.
But at first the illusion, and the brain-heat from the killings, swallowed him whole, or nearly whole. He knew, without knowing he knew, how meanwhile to keep some cool true planet winking far out in his brain.
But the illusion must be tested against the fact of the women’s bodies.
Somehow he was pleased to see that one of Mrs Newby’s arms was moving, that the elder girl’s face was compo
sed and free of blood. Unfairly, she looked country-sweet, innocent of venom.
The younger lay on her side and like a person felled in midstride. Blood was splashed before and behind her, as if as a result of her own momentum.
Then Miss Graf. Her light-brown hair. The split bowl of her belly was in shadow.
The inspection took a little less than five seconds and was accomplished by small jolts of the head. He took Mrs Newby’s rifle and roused Jackie to give it to him. But Jackie, already bedevilled, would not take it.
In the same corner as the rifle was a well-used hessian bag – possibly bedding for some household pet, deceased or wandered off. Jimmie shook it out and within half a minute or so had tipped into it some flour, beef, lard, bacon, bread, treacle, biscuit and rice – more or less Gilda’s grocery list for the day. There was freedom for movement in that diagonal of the room. Most of the killing had been done in the opposite corner and against the front wall.
Ammunition for his and Mrs Newby’s rifle was in the dresser and he threw the cartridges in with the food bought that afternoon in the quiet town of Gilgandra.
From a roof hook a hand of Queensland bananas. He would march into Queensland, he promised himself. He might live in a cave and raise the boy to be a rebel.
Insanely he took a single banana into the hallway and found the bedroom where the child was weeping.
“Hungry,” the small girl said. “I were hungry.”
“There yer are, old girl,” Jimmie said, in the almost Cockney accent of the aborigine speaking English. He gave her the fruit for comfort.
Somewhere in the dark her damaged brother reeled towards old Newby. But Jimmie was the master. In him the night was vested, and the gift of swift action. He decided he should enjoy it while it was there, this possession and being possessed.
9
The Blacksmiths and Tabidgi and Peter fled east in the dark, over the open pastures of sheep farmers, important men, squatters. Like responsible travellers they closed the long, whining pasture gates behind them.
Tabidgi, cunning enough not to forget the port bottle, was yet incoherent, shrieking now and then in his derangement. “Ghosts started by my hand,” he would mumble,
Spirits fleeing back to their totem fathers,
My barbs deep in their bodies,
Come not near me.
Here in the night I reign,
Bullawi the great lizard,
Whose scream shakes the hills apart.
Mort and the girl had been told that there had been a battle and some of the Newbys hurt. They were promised more detail later, when they had built up a distance between Wallah and themselves.
What was she doing, the girl asked herself, fleeing by night with black men? Apart from being afraid of contradicting Jimmie in his battle flush, she was expiating for having borne the wrong child. And then there was fear of charity, Miss Graf’s charity or the high, butterfly-collared, chaste-camisoled charity she had known as a child.
For Mort, there was duty towards wronged kin, Jimmie Blacksmith, whose mood was valiant, the mood of a man grandly misused. Morton Blacksmith felt enlarged, escaping across a landscape barred by strangers’ fences. To him, Tabidgi’s yammering was nearly funny.
The girl wept a great deal, her arms ached, but the baby slept and murmured in its sleep. Mort laughed as Jackie continued to shriek his warning against spirits. The misery of Jackie Smolders’ situation was that he had hacked and thwacked women dead because their screams had frightened him, but now he was frightened of silence. But Mort could not know this.
North of east, Jimmie knew, a knot of forested mountains travelled deep into the plains. Beyond their crest were places where he had been lusty and (he had once thought) clever. Queensland remained an abstract haven. There would be time to strike out for such a place.
In the meantime, he moved in a slumber of the limbs, a returning suspension of effort which he had lost through all his barter and contracting and which had come back to him now (he must pretend) as a reward for his work on the Newbys.
At miserable first light, seven hours after their march began, Jimmie Blacksmith let them rest. Gilda watched her husband and Mort conspiring, staring at old Jackie Smolders who was hugging a wet tree, retching, and falling at last into a coughing bundle. The frosted leaf-mould went black where his body rolled. It was a cold morning.
Are they planning to kill us? she wondered. Why should they? Why should they not? She could not move any more, and mentally bid Jimmie Blacksmith welcome to her life and even to the boy’s.
The child, however, woke and called for the breast. She sat in a spiny embrasure of myrtle-tree roots and unbuttoned her breast, draping a blanket for modesty over her left arm. The vaporous cold grabbed at her nipple, but then the child found it and took nourishment.
“Little man,” she said. “Poor little man. Yer should be much more black. Oh yairs yer should, yer villain, much more black.”
So she fell asleep.
Jimmie gave Mort his knife and told him to go down and kill some farmer’s sheep. It was safer, more sensible, to take fresh meat now, while they travelled in advance of the news of what had been done at Newby’s.
Mort slung the sheep-skin over a fence, happy in service of his brother.
“Old Newby and his sons said we could starve,” Jimmie had confided to Mort. “So we took to ‘em with axes.”
Which accounted for the clotted state of Tabidgi’s trouser ankles. Old Tabidgi could be expected to stumble about at the honest business of killing those who denied due food.
Laughing benevolently, Mort woke Gilda from a two-hour sleep, and held tea close to her dazed face.
“Yer better tuck up, missus,” he told her. “Too bloody cold.”
The frost was still on the ground, and the first day of Jimmie Blacksmith’s new era sat greyly beneath the trees, and Jackie Smolders repented in crazy monotones in the place where he had fallen.
But, above his simious nose broken in play, Peter’s wide-awake eyes seemed to be expecting damage. Gilda did not care to look at him for long.
When Jimmie strode up to her, rifle slung over his elbow, an ungovernable flush of brood heroism caused her to cover the child with her body.
“D’yer think I’d do anythink like that?” he asked.
“I dunno, Jimmie.”
“Listen, we got t’ keep on now. Let yer go soon. You and the littl’un. How’s he?”
“He’s feedin’ well. Real well. And he slep’ well.”
“Righto.”
“Jimmie?”
“Yair?”
“I don’ care if yer shoot me fer sayin’ it.” But she had to take this, one of the rare times since the birth that Jimmie had spoken to her directly, not obliquely, by way of the child or of a piece of furniture. “I really thought the baby was yores. I really thought. I should’ve thought it might of been that other feller’s. But I really truly thought it was yores.”
Jimmie Blacksmith looked at the pale jaws and the mouth that tended to hang open; at the bun she had made of her variably grey-brown hair; at her damp straw hat and charity-case top-coat of navy serge slung like a tent over the childishness of her body.
It frightened him that he wanted to forgive her and talk of the slaveries they each had suffered. It might happen to be one of the strict rules of self-balance that if he saw Gilda Howie as victim today he might see Miss Graf in the same light tomorrow. She should, by the rules, be a kind of enemy but her paltry face and sharp shoulders were inadequate to the role. Perhaps she was her own special case and quite safe to pity. He didn’t know and didn’t feel like taking risks.
“If yer think anyone cheated me, yer kin tell the p’lice. They’ll ask yer a lot about me and yer kin tell ’em.”
They marched for another hour.
Jackie Smolders, Mungindi elder and cherisher of enchanted teeth, had given up. He had seen four women’s blood, when the sighted blood of one was sufficient to bring on catastrophe. He had laboure
d in the potent blood of women’s throats and hacked-out wombs. He closed his eyes and blood slanted in torrents across the darkness behind his lids.
“Jimmie,” the white girl, heels blistered, called aloud to her husband. “Jimmie, for pity’s sake!”
Until the sun was high in the north, he ignored her. Then he told them all to rest and began himself to cook a forequarter of the carcass Mort had butchered, quickly bled and cheerfully carried all morning.
Tabidgi was in the mood for dying, but innocent enough to believe it could be induced in the old way, by acceptance of omens.
Jimmie came down to Gilda and the baby. He had dropped everything, his load of food, his rifle.
“I goin’ t’ take yer t’ the Dubbo road. Yer’ll git rescued by a farmer or somethink. Tell the p’lice I said I declared war. Tell ’em about how bloody measly Newby was. Tell ’em all the damage done at Newby’s I did, not Tabidgi. And I declared war. Orright?”
“Yairs, Jimmie.” In the joy of escaping him she could pity him and even put out a hand, as if to pat his face. But his eyes blinked, warning her off tenderness.
“I’ll carry the little’un for yer.”
“No, it’s orright.”
“Christ, he was almost mine. Let me bloody carry him.”
It was as well, for most of the mile-and-a-half they walked was uphill, sown with boulders; then down through a wooded defile to the Dubbo road, as Jimmie had promised.
“Make his bloody father give him a help in life,” he advised Gilda and gave the child back to her.
Jimmie looked back on her from the top of the defile. She had seated herself cross-leggedly, with care, on the grass verge. She looked pitiably open for all the fresh miseries that would roll in on her with the creak of a farmer’s dray.
In late afternoon they had to leave mumbling Jackie Smolders and the boy Peter on a tributary road with meat and tea to last them the day. The boy was schooled to announce Jackie Smolders’ innocence to all comers. Contrite, tender, guilty – all these Jimmie could have felt for Jackie Smolders, who had come to him for honest reasons of kin and tribal sorcery and cash for liquor. But he could sense how unprofitable they would be. It was, in any case, impossible to talk to the old man.
The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith Page 9
