The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith

by Keneally, Thomas

  Late on an afternoon of blinding headwinds, they crossed the railway two miles east of the Merriwa terminus and, in case their tracks be found, walked four or five furlongs westward on the rails before turning north for Mullett’s place. Where the sleepers stood up well from the rail-bed they hopped from one to the other but for at least a few hundred yards, where the track had sunk a little into its matrix soil, walked the one wet blue rail, arms out, rifle in the left hand balancing gunny-sack in the right. By these means, even a good tracker, and all those who waited for his reading of the signs, could be held up for hours.

  Head-on into the gale, the Blacksmith boys walked more than twenty-five miles in hope of Mullett’s hospitality. They scarcely spoke. Morton Blacksmith did not laugh now when anything was dropped, but navigated truly through the solid drench.

  Near dusk they saw the lights and heard the groan of a sawmill on their right. Then the oozing dark came down. They must steal a hurricane lamp, thought Jimmie. The wet brush spanked their thighs. They must steal oilskins.

  Two hours later, Mort pointed to Mullett’s light. The approach was up an avenue long ago cleared by drag-log, partly overgrown now with young trees. Thirty yards from the front door stood a stupendous cedar trunk. Its chopping platform remained, to give it the look of a memorial.

  Mort fell against the door and beat at it. At last it was opened by someone out of sight, probably Mullett’s woman. Small, wild-eyed, with ponderous moustaches, the lumber-man himself stood framed, holding a very old musket by its long barrel.

  “Mullett, yer mad bastard. It’s Mort Blacksmith! And me brother, Jimmie.”

  Mullett blinked. “I haven’ got much food in, yer know.”

  The brothers felt deprived of the gushing Irish welcome Mort had promised. To Jimmie, even the way the man spoke his Irish was like Healy’s, with a narrow thrifty sound to it.

  “We brung all our food,” Mort sang. “We jest want t’ sleep in front of yer fire. We bin goin’ all day. Blankets’ve got all wet.”

  “Yair. Well, welcome to yer. Come on in out of the wet.”

  It was warm in Mullett’s hut. With a high opinion of his own slyness the host brought from a hiding place a stone jar of overproof rum. But Jimmie Blacksmith did not respond to it; he was bent on storing away the benefits of warmth, light, shelter.

  On the other hand, Mort drank a lot, as did Mullett and the girl. Within an hour Mort and the young lady were jigging while Mullett played a mouth organ. In this area he was highly accomplished and his eyes gleamed at the end of tunes, when he knocked the instrument into his cupped hand to beat the spittle from it. Mort sang over and over again a song called “My Black-eyed Kittie”.

  “Where yer both off to?”

  “We in trouble with the p’lice.”

  “Yer don’t tell me.”

  “Yair. We goin’ t’ go to Queensland.”

  “Bloody Queensland? What’d yer do?”

  “Killed couple’r ewes.”

  “Yer don’t tell me? What p’lice is after yer?”

  “Gilgandra p’lice.”

  “God, but yer put some daylight between them and yerselves!”

  By then, the spit had been knocked out of Mullett’s harmonica. The big sweating girl was ready again to jig.

  Jimmie Blacksmith wondered if Mullett and Mort might not come to conflict over the bumpkin girl, little as she was worth it. But he was wisely asleep before the question came to trial.

  He was tempted to stay another night under Mullett’s shelter. But people who did not know this morning of the killings might by evening. News of the murder of women would travel days faster, counties ahead of the newspapers. So they must leave and get used to being at war with the entire human landscape.

  And he had easterly enemies to strike, and the puzzlement over Mort to resolve, not to be considered in Mullett’s rowdy hovel.

  In new sunlight they marched slantwise down the valley. The nearer they came to Healy’s, the easier the profile of the country they crossed. They moved, mainly under cover, on the northern rim of the dairy and orchard country. When they got to Healy’s, Mort had been told, Jimmie would demand just compensation.

  About midday they saw a man driving a horse-drawn harrow. His back was to them and his knobbly, veined, industrious elbows. For a second Jimmie Blacksmith considered shooting him, bringing to an end an individual history of white thrift and penny-wisdom and mistrust. But that was too fanciful a gesture.

  Having fenced it himself, he knew Healy’s boundary. In fields which had been fallow when Jimmie had last been there, tall corn crops masked their approach to the homestead. They came diagonally across a cornfield, Mort in his bare feet. They could hear the panic of wintering snakes, and grain rats slithering off through the tall stooks.

  Jimmie had known that if he delayed speaking straight to Mort, responsibility would shift. Mort would catch the passion or see that anyone who has loaded weapons is only a hair away from savagery; and that therefore he is still human, and in need of kin, if the hair snaps.

  It was at the second when, parting the grain, they saw Healy’s sleek home, pastures and fat grazing cows that Jimmie Blacksmith knew that he had not come so much to repay Healy, unless Healy happened to be at home. It was the spacious wife he had travelled for. He could, in fact, sense her at the glowing heart of the house.

  God help Mort and him. He was mad. He had become a woman-killer, given over to the bad prefigurement of women’s blood. Lush Mrs Healy was waiting to be split apart, as Petra Graf had waited.

  “Run away, Mort,” he suddenly said. “Run right away, for sweet Jesus’ sake.”

  “Yer only come here t’ git justice.”

  “No, run away. I don’t want yer help. Bugger off. Please.”

  Mort laughed, more like the old Mort than at any time in the last week. He was beseeched to flee at the risky top of Jimmie’s voice but went on chuckling in the old Mort way.

  Jimmie resorted to Mungindi for greater force.

  “There is a woman here, fat as a grub. She is a devil woman and put magic on your kinsman so that he writhed and shivered to the edge of death. She has bewitched her husband. She is the fang of the coiled adder.”

  “Yair?” Mort smirked, not understanding. “There ain’t no cure fer that sort of bitch.”

  Jimmie gave up and broke from Healy’s crops, across a fence, and sprinted for the farmhouse door. He could not, however, outdistance Mort’s terrible loyalty.

  So that Mort was, in fact, closer to the doorway when a gaunt, confused lady of about forty years appeared there with a level rifle. The rattle of Mort’s foot on the veranda boards caused Mrs Healy to utter a full creamy yelp inside the house. Hearing it, Jimmie stopped and shivered with his peculiar lunacy. The gaunt lady fired and the bullet, he later decided, must have passed between the hang of his left arm and his side.

  Instantly Mort shot the woman high upon the right of her chest. The impact sat her suddenly flat on the boards.

  How distressed Mort was! He knelt by the woman, unable to believe in the rough bloody damage he had done her. He had not learned that a person catches deadliness as a disease is caught.

  There was no time to console Mort with the awful dicta of atrocity. Mr Jimmie Blacksmith stepped over the threshold.

  Mrs Healy stood up, grunting terror through her full lips. She had a baby in her arms, in a long, trailing shawl. An inheritor for Healy. Healy chose to have an inheritor, the cook not to. Choice was too bloody easy for them.

  It was like the positioning of stars: the baby seemed to swing into a phase where it was germane to his lust for Mrs Healy’s lightly creased, tall, shrieking throat.

  Jimmie raised his rifle and sighted it beneath her full-contoured jaw.

  “Yer fuckin’ husband wouldn’ even give me a ride into Merriwa,” Jimmie reminisced.

  Outside, Mort was comforting the felled mother’s-aide. “It’s jest twenty-two gauge,” he consoled her. She stared ahead of her with a look
of mild bemusement on her face. Her hands were beginning to turn blue.

  Mrs Healy ran to the dresser corner, where she did not fit neatly because of her hips. As she turned, Jimmie shot her in the throat. There was one terrible flush of blood across the floor, then she sank and died in the corner.

  Everything was compulsion now. He was standing above the baby who had remained enshawled on Mrs Healy’s lap.

  “Father’s little joy!” he reproached it, weeping loudly.

  Mort called to him from the door, but he was already re-loaded and fired at the child’s head, keeping his eyes shut tight.

  When Jimmie Blacksmith opened his eyes, Mort was kneeling beside the ruins of Mrs Healy and her child. Mort’s face was as thick-featured and swollen as if he had wept for hours.

  Jimmie Blacksmith returned to his practical, functioning body.

  “Don’t say I didn’t tell yer to bugger off. I told yer and yer laughed.”

  ‘Healy deserve all this?” Mort asked thickly. There was no irony in him. He was silly with shock. He hoped that Jimmie would itemize Healy’s guilt, to make it commensurate with the mess in the kitchen corner.

  “He starved me and he told me bloody lies.”

  “But it’s woman-blood.” Mort screamed. “And it’s child-blood.”

  “Don’t yer worry yerself about that blood bullshit,” said Jimmie as if Mort was distressed only on magical grounds. “Anyhow, she saw me walk all the way t’ Merriwa and passed me by, sitting up in the dray.”

  “Jesus Christ, will yer look what yer done?”

  “I know what I done.” He slipped into Mungindi. “She tried to take my soul away from me. She had me bewitched and she’d do it again, I know she’d do it again …” But he gave up and saw through the vacuum of the bereaved kitchen that the lady-companion was crawling on hands and knees, studiously, trying not to let her knees catch the fall of her dress short, for then the cloth might tug at her wound.

  “Healy deserves to see his kid. And so does Gilda and … and all the friggin’ others. Anyhow, the old girl’s left yer a decent rifle.”

  He pointed out the weapon, abandoned on the veranda boards.

  Improbably the woman continued, past the woodheap, bleeding onto the grass and blurring the patterns of her blood with the passage of her knees.

  “Yer got a dinkum rifle now,” he told Mort. Mort’s eyes widened. They could not apprehend this woman- and child-killer, or how he had sprung up in the familiar features of his half-brother.

  To the right of the homestead gate fine heifers were beginning to mill for milking. They ignored the arduously creeping lady-companion.

  Meanwhile, Jimmie busied about looking for food and cartridges, while Mort sat weeping.

  “Let’s git away, Jimmie. Let’s git away t’ Queensland.”

  “Healy’s got t’ see this. This is all for Healy.”

  “I fort it was b’cause she wouldn’t give yer a ride in a fuckin’ dray,” roared Mort.

  “Jest sit there, Mort, and git it out of yer system. Yer weren’t here in the first place. Yer don’t know jest what these people did t’ me.”

  All Mort did was lay his head down sideways on the kitchen table, his spatulate nose seeming further widened from his new acquaintance with horror. Half a dozen loud creaking sobs came out of him and moisture from his mouth ran onto Mrs Healy’s sandsoaped country table.

  When Jimmie paused in his busy ransacking it was to wonder if he should put a bullet into the doggedness of the lady-companion. It had brought her very close to the homestead gate.

  But before she had got that far, Healy came riding up on a tall black horse with white facing. He was fully visible through the open kitchen door. In his hand was the second household rifle.

  Jimmie backed to a front corner of the kitchen. “Jest let him have a good look at what he bloody caused.”

  Already Healy was out of the saddle and consulting the lady-companion. He laid her back to rest and came on with his rifle high, the butt at his right armpit.

  Without warning Mort left the kitchen door, staggering comically, as if it were the old gay Mort miming, perhaps, drunken Jackie Smolders.

  Even Healy was amazed, thinking either that Mort was wounded or mocking him or attracting his aim. At last the farmer fired, but at the very second Mort went into one of his arbitrary sidewise totters.

  Healy’s right hand was now in his pockets scrabbling for cartridges. Mr Jimmie Blacksmith stepped out into daylight and shot him through the heart.

  Healy cheated once more. The big harsh man died touchingly as a saint. He dropped his rifle to one side, like a tool relinquished deliberately and with common sense. In the same second he knelt and made a deep salaam until his forehead touched the earth. Three seconds later he tipped sideways in this same posture, in which he had ridden in his mother’s womb in 1854 in Sligo.

  “Yer stupid bastard,” Jimmie told his limp half-brother. “I wanted him to see what he bloody caused.”

  Mort it was, though, who was practical enough to go out across the moist black soil and proliferating grass to see if Healy was really gone. There was no doubt. He went on to the thin bitter lady he had shot and lifted her in his arms.

  “Put me down,” she said, “yer black devil.”

  Mort was too distressed to plead his goodwill.

  ‘Yer’ll hang for this, yer know. When they hang yer, remember how I predicted it.”

  Mort sobbed confirmatory sobs. The woman babbled away, short of breath but at length.

  “And then yer’ll go to the deepest hell. Mr Healy went to Communion last Sunday and has been working long days ever since. He’ll go to heaven and yer’ll go to deepest hell.”

  “D’yer want a drink of water?” Mort pleaded. “And I’ll wrap blankets round yer. It’s only twenty-two gauge.”

  “Mr Healy knew yer were coming. But he didn’t for a second b’lieve yer’d turn on her. On him, yairs. But on her!”

  Indoors, Jimmie seemed scarcely uneasy after all his luxurious homicide and wanted something savoury. He had found a ginger-cake and come out, bulge-mouthed, waving wedges at his brother. He could easily have felt hollowness and boredom but still knew they were the luxuries of the repenter and the madman.

  Somehow now, he must prop up Mort until Mort was reconciled enough to prop himself.

  Meanwhile, as Mort ran about getting blankets and water for Mrs Healy’s friend, Jimmie put on a harsh front. “Why don’t yer run and fetch the p’lice as well?”

  Jimmie promised. No more women, no more women. He felt secretly lightened in that no other woman on earth suggested herself as victim – not, anyhow, in the compelling manner of Mrs Healy and Miss Petra Graf. Not Mrs Hayes, certainly not Mrs Treloar.

  At dusk, both brothers felt strangely exposed, as if the act of mayhem at Healy’s had conveyed their names instantly to all the people of the area.

  Lewis would be forewarned now, and Farrell too; Jimmie eagerly debated strategy with Mort. It’s a war, he told Mort; if he, Jimmie Blacksmith, went to those who had wronged him and asked them like a gentleman to give his due to him, they’d laugh. And then he tried to convey to Mort how all they wanted from a black was foreseeable failure.

  But no more women, Jimmie promised. No more women. Trying to restore Mort, he secretly let his mind run in splendid patterns, patterns close to dementia, patterns to besot yourself with. In the heart of house-proud Merriwa he would shoot down Farrell. All the women of the countryside would be in terror of his name; they would sweat palpable fear. He was a walking rape of women’s souls.

  Yet he went on soberly swearing: no more women, Mort.

  He let Mort have a little of the brandy he had taken from Healy’s place, but not too much. For in the morning they must double back north-west and confuse their tracks.

  Even after a warm portion of liquor, Mort painted his face with white clay before sleeping. So that spirits, especially those freshly started, suddenly unloosed, uncertain of night’s profi
le, could not identify and latch on him.

  In the morning it was Jimmie who woke heartsick. But his primal talent of navigation and speed over the ground, the numb, easy talents of the senses in contact with terrain, these restored him.

  The journeying life, each camp no true point of arrival, braced him now that he had resigned from the white cycle, in which the ground is broken, the pod laid down and the seed puts out its roots.

  They came close to Verona the next night and saw that mounted police had encamped there, at least fifteen. A black-tracker watered the horses from the camp tank, out of square, tea-tin buckets. His luck!

  All the police could do, in the face of Jimmie’s manifesto of blood, was mill at places he had once been. The brothers sensed this, were heartened by it.

  Again, that night, though they were miles on into the hills, they could not have a fire. Mort, however, was permitted the rest of the brandy. “Here are we, Tullam men,” Mort sang gently,

  Dressed in the night,

  Dressed the grey hue of sleeping plants.

  Our shoulders press the wind towards newer moans,

  We are in its change of voice.

  Be careful and do not sleep,

  For nothing more terrible than Tullam man

  Will ever break the sleep of living man.

  Be careful,

  When the moon turns pale,

  It is for Tullam man.

  When stars run for the cover of thunderheads,

  It is for Tullam man …

  Jimmie welcomed the song. It didn’t sound like self-mockery. Perhaps it meant that Mort was trying to fit their movements into a tribal pattern.

  For they saw salutary things that week, things to knit them closer. At the timber village of Borambil, high in the Divide, an armed picquet! Many families seemed to have moved into the school residence and post office, and children, even those too young for school, played in the schoolteacher’s garden.

  They were shot at while flanking in upon a scarcely habitable shanty in a clearing.

  It was as if their story had turned a corner – first Jimmie’s spree, then encouragement towards zeal for survival.