by Mark O'Flynn
The miners sat on the Swede until Sergeant Brownrig and Constable Clout came and hauled him off between them. He went so quietly his feet dragged in the December dust. That is to say, he was unconscious. Garbutt’s report, too, seemed to have run out of puff.
Douglas, however, was left unable to walk properly. The knife hurt more with the coming out than the going in. There was some severed gristle. He swore like blazes. Dr Spark, summoned to patch him up, had shown no pity for him at all. A hard man, the doctor, by all accounts. But the main gist of Garbutt’s message was that Douglas couldn’t work. Edwards had put him off. There’d be no wages this Sunday.
‘What a windbag,’ said Emma, as Garbutt sat sheepishly, worn out by his narrative. ‘Why didn’t you say that in the first place?’
Ann plonked a mug of tea before him, and after a few bush cakes he took his leave. We suddenly realised how much we all relied on Douglas Wilson. After more discussion through the evening, Emma and Ann decided that, before Mary Morgan got wind of the news, the eldest sister, my mother, would climb back down to the valley to nurse him. It seemed that in her visit Mary Morgan had given them to believe that poor Douglas Wilson, all on his own, abandoned, was in need of his third wife to return to him. Neither Emma nor Ann cared for the sound of that, and they had made sure to remind Mary of the mice and other hopping creatures, not least of which were the wives of other miners who came into the humpy whenever they pleased and borrowed whatever they wanted. Did Mary really want to return to that? She had not answered immediately.
‘Can I come too?’ I piped up now.
‘Of course,’ said my mother, ‘but you’ll still have to climb up of a morning when school starts back.’
‘All right. I will.’
Actually, the decision was not quite as democratic and amicable as I have made it sound. The initial suggestion was that Ann and Clancy would return to the valley, but Clancy threw a tantrum. He raved and would have broken things had there been more to break. No no no no. You can’t make me. I will not go. We must all stay together. There was spittle at his lips. He stamped his hardened feet. He swore and threw his empty fists. Ann slapped him. Not hard, but enough to instigate a powerful silence. His jaw gaped wide. At that moment my mother demurred and took onto herself, as the eldest, the task of going back down into the valley.
In this way one crisis was averted. However, another, more pernicious, one began to smoulder, like a lone burning coal under a pile of wet leaves. Before this moment we had all been vaguely united, like any family anywhere, with the schisms of any family. Now Clancy’s own sense of where he belonged began to form and firm like a glowing mould into which he poured himself.
As a compromise, it was agreed that for the duration of the summer Clancy would come down to the valley too. I breathed a quiet sigh. I wouldn’t have liked to be parted from him so distinctly. And after the holidays we would see each other at the schoolhouse, wouldn’t we? Wouldn’t we? Yes, yes, Ann agreed. She couldn’t separate two peas in a pod. Why did Clancy change his mind? Was it simply that she had slapped him? Clancy had defined his place and, by extension, hers. He would show her. He would show her that she belonged to him alone. But for the time being there was no school. We were free. Ann was confident of getting some work at the market garden. What work? Clancy demanded. It was really no concern of his. But what work? Weeding, she said, between spuds and cabbages (or leprosy, as we called it), and so on. Who would pay her? Clancy persisted. His sense of where he belonged seemed contingent on a great many things. Their relationship seemed so much more fractious than Emma’s and mine. Ann would be in the employ of Wei Sing, the Chinaman. Clancy and I looked at each other. A Chinaman? It would be outdoors, Ann continued. She was looking forward to it, as a change from laundering. Look at her hands. Clancy would not rule her life. Ann was seizing some of the definition back for herself.
SIX
Back down in the valley Clancy and I ran like dogs freed after too long on the rope. We raced through the forest, along tracks as familiar to us as long-lost maps. Clancy was right: no one could catch us. We tracked lyrebirds all over the talus slope. We knew the valley floor better than anyone, all the way down to Pitt’s Amphitheatre. The towpath alongside the pony tramway, leading from the village two miles around the base of the escarpment to the Incline, was like a signposted road to us. The tracks leading up and over the isolated mountain, and over the ridgeline into the Cedar we also knew well: Snarling Dog Ridge, Growler Ridge. We felt the views from up there belonged exclusively to us. Wild lads like us did not get lost. Or not for long. We were aware that we would have to part when school resumed, but this remained an unspoken knowledge, one that seemed to weigh more heavily on my mind than Clancy’s.
My father was happy to have us back with him. Of course he was. Happy also to be able to put his feet up and let someone else do the work for a change. The punctured foot itched in its bandages. He ordered us around, demanding johnny cakes and flybog and tea. Sometimes, when he became too high-handed, my mother would knock him on the foot, which would make him howl, and tell him how close he was to having Mary Morgan come back to look after him. ‘She would eat the thigh bone off of you as soon as look at it.’
Our neighbours brought extra things for us, knowing that money was tight with Douglas laid up. They had missed my mother, her singing and her spirit among them. They wanted to help. And with Ann up in the house in Ada Street they could pretend that the bigamy business was merely something they had imagined. Perhaps it was. Besides, we weren’t the only ones. Not everyone in the valley was church-married. We felt at home. Or at least I did.
Late one night, in the darkness, I heard Douglas whisper to my mother in a voice I wasn’t meant to hear, one I couldn’t help but hear, and yet squirmed to hear. He said, ‘I have not been this warm in years.’
One day, far beyond Duncan’s Pass and Black Dog Creek, to the south of the village, we sat resting by the Cox’s River. There were trout to be caught there, although we hadn’t come prepared for them. The sky was clear and the sun was hot. Gradually, the wind in the trees dropped away. The birds, too, fell silent. Clancy was tossing pebbles into the river, normally fast flowing after heavy rains. The day seemed to sigh around us and I felt as if the very bush was watching us.
‘Clancy.’
‘What?’
We both looked up. He felt it, too, as if we were being observed, like ants under a glass, like our lives weren’t really necessary. Even the gurgling of the river seemed to slow to a trickle.
‘I don’t think we belong here.’
After a while Clancy nodded. ‘Let’s go then.’
And the river seemed to flow again and the deafening noise of the cicadas resumed.
As I have described, the height of the cliff in whose shadow we lived meant that evening, when it came, fell thick and heavy. There was no electricity in Katoomba at that time. We had candles and the starlight of a divided sky by which to prepare for the night. Each humpy also had an oil lamp, which seemed to attract every bug in Creation. One night a Christmas beetle crawled into Bunty Garbutt’s sleeping ear and nearly drove her mad with its scratching, but her mother was eventually able to float it out by pouring a thimbleful of warm oil and mutton fat into her lug. When Bunty finally fell asleep again, leaving the echo of her shrieks ringing in the air like a blow over the head, it was as if a weary cloud had descended on the village.
There was no shortage of firewood, the coals of which my mother and all the other women of the village cooked on during the long afternoons. Clancy and I stacked enough firewood for ten families. It was like our childhood had started up again. It didn’t last long. After a few weeks Aunt Ann sent word that Clancy was to return to her. She didn’t like to be in the house by herself. Fisher had been visiting again, pressuring her to return to the fold. But Clancy had become reaccustomed to life in the valley, the primitive pleasure of it. He blithely refused to return to Katoomba, apparently indifferent to his mother’s plight. U
ntil my mother said to him sternly, ‘You must go.’
Seeing she was implacable, Clancy changed his tune once more. He was nothing if not adaptable. As he prepared to leave the valley, Clancy told me that his place, he had realised, was in the town. He had outgrown us. Douglas and the villagers were parochial, although that wasn’t the word he used. However, we made our secret pact again, slapping our palms together and sending the spit flying. My mother called us godless barbarians. Douglas called us chalk and cheddar.
With Clancy gone, it became solely my job to make sure the old forty-four-gallon drums we used for water were kept full and covered. Every other day I would scramble down through the scrub to Causeway Creek on the valley floor. The wreckage of the collapsed aerial railway still lay in the jungle at the bottom, the fallen corves and coal skips left to rust. If it had been raining I went to one of the dribbling overflows, or leaps, showering off the escarpment where I could fill the empty flagons and water bags. It was a never-ending chore, but at least I got to rest at the bottom and dip my head in the creek on hot days. Occasionally I would meet a lyrebird who, if I followed quietly, would show me his scratching mound. Once I sat clicking my tongue in the shade of a man fern until, eventually, the lyrebird clicked in reply. This was a world in which I felt profoundly at home.
I also had to scrape the wrigglers off the surface of the water in the drums, to try to keep the numbers of mosquitoes down. It wasn’t quite as pleasurable doing these tasks on my own as when I used to do them with Clancy.
When school resumed, in February, I saw him most days at the schoolhouse, but with the climb there and the equally long descent I only attended for a few hours, and even fewer in winter. There was barely time for us to talk. Besides, by then Clancy was finding his diversions elsewhere.
After climbing back down the Incline, it was also my job to drop in to Aulds’ store to pick up a bag of spuds, salt, flour or leprosy, which I would carry home in the mutton sack. My mother would greet me each day with johnny cakes and flybog. They tasted of coal dust.
In time my father’s foot got better and he returned to work, hobbling tentatively. I think he exaggerated his limp so that Emma wouldn’t consider leaving him on his own again, for sometimes when he thought no one was looking he walked quite comfortably. And even I could see that Douglas and Emma were both happy. At night, when they thought I was asleep, I heard them whispering. Frequently on these occasions he asked her to stay, or rather he said he hoped she wouldn’t leave again. My heart gave a skip, and at the same time a little pang. It seemed I was always being pulled between the two things I desired most, one life at the top of the cliff, another at the bottom. My mother said she would think about his proposition, because she was worried about her sister, alone in Katoomba. It wasn’t only Fisher who was pestering her.
‘She’s not alone. She has Clancy.’
‘For all of that she may as well be alone.’
‘Maybe she wants to be pestered,’ Douglas said.
‘Surely it’s up to her to choose who shall do the pestering?’
‘Come here. I’ll pester you.’
‘Leave off, or I’ll clock you one.’
I rolled over and blocked my ears. Through a crack in the wall where the sheets of bark didn’t quite meet, a shred of moonlight illuminated some night beetle clambering over the leaf mulch, not six inches from my nose.
We stayed. Once my father had returned from his digging, and I from the schoolhouse, once our tea was done, and my chores, there was always the long night to be got through. He asked what I had learned at the schoolhouse and I was able to tell him f-l-y, fly, b-o-g, bog, put that together and you got … and more besides. He was particularly impressed when I came out with s-h-a-l-e, shale.
‘Use it in a sentence,’ he said.
I said, ‘My father asked me to use “shale” in a sentence.’
‘Don’t be a clever britches.’
But when I spelled out S-h-a-d-y, Shady, he lost his temper. ‘You don’t have to concern yourself with what other people call you, Byron. That’s their damned problem. We live a good life here. We do a good job. Don’t let anyone tell you elsewise. Be proud of it. If any of them pommysnobs up top beg to differ, well they don’t know what in the blazes they’re talking about.’
My mother listened to this little speech with an expression of bemused approval. Douglas had surprised her.
A few times Emma began to read to us from her old Bible (it was still the only book in the hut), but Douglas reckoned that wasn’t the most lively entertainment and said perhaps he might go to bed, so she laid it aside. I think she really preferred the singing. During cold weather he claimed his foot ached. Yipe and youch. If he held the missing portion of his finger in a candle flame he reckoned he could feel it.
We got into the habit of retiring early and waking with the birds. I noticed that the birds, golden whistlers and yellow robins, sang differently in the morning than they did at midday. The currawongs, a sociable bird, had a particular warble for danger. They also sang differently now in autumn than they had back in summer, like someone gargling with a mouthful of marbles.
Sometimes we would lend salt or damper to our neighbours, and sometimes we would have to borrow in return. If I caught a few possums I could often exchange one for a little damper from other families who had their own fires and dodger. My mother said we had to look out for one another. That was what being in a community meant. There was no one else to look out for us, apart from our own small society. This was the feeling of oneness I was speaking of, to which Clancy was impervious. Many of the people were single men. They had to belong somewhere. Between us all we knew a lot. Abe Thornycroft could tie a knot in rope that no one could undo. Billy Lynch could adze a plank smooth and straight as a plumbline. When Finbar Lyohon got boils my mother told him to eat a fig ingested with gunpowder three times a day. She said she couldn’t remember where she learned that, perhaps the Salvationists taught it to her. Aulds’ store got the figs and the powder in specially, and the boils cleared up.
For the last few months we had been looking out for Mrs Garbutt, who was about ready to have a baby. As well as Bunty there were two or three other Garbutt children running about the camp. A year or two earlier, one of them had been bitten by a spider and his arm had festered and gone septic. Figs and gunpowder didn’t help on that occasion, but a poultice of vinegar and wattle sap seemed to do the trick. I wondered about what Douglas had said: a good life.
One April evening, after our stew, I was weighing the balance of my losses. I had two distinct lives, and I wanted them both, even though they each seemed to cancel the other out. The exciting life that Clancy enjoyed up in the town, and the sense of family I had down in the valley. I moved my collection of cicadas around, but found it an empty activity. Some of the legs had broken off, and Clancy had poled all the best ones, only to forget about them. I didn’t care. It was a child’s pastime. They only had meaning in our shared gaze. If you crushed them they turned to dust.
From the darkness outside the hut a child’s voice called out, and then Bunty Garbutt stepped into the light of our oil lamp. ‘Mrs Wilson, Mrs Wilson, my ma says can you come quick. Her baby’s comin’.’
My dad stayed very quiet in case he should be asked to do something.
‘Byron,’ said my mother, ‘fill the quart pot with hot water and bring it over to Garbutts’. I’m comin’, Bunty. Have you fetched Mrs Thornycroft?’
I looked at my father but he merely said, ‘Do as she tells you.’ He stayed staring at the fire, combing his beard with his fingers, thinking whatever thoughts about babies he had to think.
I fetched the water and hefted it to Garbutts’ hut. A great moan came from it.
‘Another one, Byron.’
Why did she need all this water? I guessed that Mrs Garbutt was in need of a strong cup of tea. I was kept busy building up the fire and lugging many buckets of hot water to the Garbutts’. Once I sloshed some of the scalding water on my foo
t, but there was no one to give me any sympathy. My father stayed put staring at the flames. There was a lot of screaming, and some bad language that I was surprised Mrs Garbutt knew.
After several hours my mother came out and said I should go to bed. She looked flushed in the face, as if she had just given a mattress a good beating. The other Garbutt children had been sent off to sleep the night at the Thornycrofts’ wurley, and a couple of neighbour women took over tending the fire. The rest of the village was quiet. Even the possums and quolls and night birds seemed to be still, listening to these strange noises. My dad was on his cot with his thin pillow over his ears, although I saw that beneath the blanket his foot was jiggling. Having a baby seemed to put everyone on edge.
In the morning, the men, all except William, left early for the mines, eager to be away. No one had told me to go to school. I wondered if they would need more water. It seemed to be a thirsty business. Mrs Garbutt’s tired cries still issued from the hut. The village women came and went, stepping through the canvas flap that served for a door.
The morning sun crept up over Sublime Point. The cliffs looked like a giant lump of bitten cheese. Adjacent to the Incline and Orphan Rock the cliffs resembled the face of a huge, yawning dog. When the first rays hit the village through the trees, the escarpment all orange and ochre, Mrs Garbutt gave a horrible shout and then there was the new gurgling sound of an infant’s squall, like water trickling over rocks. William Garbutt burst from his neighbour’s hut where he had been bustled out of the way for the night, tortured by his uselessness. From his humpy came the sound of Mrs Garbutt’s sobbing, then laughter, then sobbing, then laughter. But from all the other women, including my mother, there was silence.
