The Commandant

by Jessica Anderson

‘One of us must be here. Can the hospital be left untended?’

  ‘Captain Clunie thinks you may do both.’

  ‘Impossible! How?’

  ‘Why, Murray, by putting the bullocks to the gallop. Oh, how you will sway and clutch the sides! Oh, how they will cheer!’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Under a hot but not torrid sun, and a crescent moon like milky glass, Henry Cowper, with Collison, Lazarus, and four other prisoners walking abreast in his rear, was riding through the open and slightly undulating country northwest of the Limestone Station. The grey slops of the prisoners, like Murray’s dusty bay, might have been chosen to accord with the colours about them, but the red of Henry’s jacket facings and Collison’s coat, that thick ungrained red of woollen cloth, was as clashing in this landscape as blood in a child’s hair. For here there were no such positive colours. On Henry’s right hand a few clumps of tall trees, their rough bark the colour of iron, and their foliage a dun green, stood with the junction of trunk and root shrouded by tall pale grass; and although at his left the river marked out a fissure of brighter greens, none among them were the sappy greens of England and Ireland or the dense fleshy greens of the coast. There were no mangroves here, nor any of the dark tufted pines to be seen on the shores of the bay and the lower reaches of the river. On these banks all the tangled shrubby things were touched, however slightly, with bronze or silvery-grey, and their flowers, when they bore any, were so small that they were visible only by their slight effect on the general colour of the bush. Among and behind this scrub stood big trees with foliage in similar colours, and with trunks of grey or silvery-grey, or of mauve shading to grey or rust, or of the beautiful colour of pink clay. It was as if everything here inclined not to the sun’s bright spectrum, but to those of the mineral earth and the ghostly daytime moon, excepting only those two moving and invasive particles of red.

  The sun beating on Henry’s shoulders was tempered by a wandering wind. Now and again, listening to the wind and the regular swish of the men’s legs in the long grass, he would momentarily feel that his body had become weightless, and was peacefully floating in a vast bubble of warm air. Collison had told him that it was in similar weather of heat and irregular breezes that Patrick Logan had ridden out of the Limestone Station two weeks ago. Henry, who had gone with Logan on a short expedition in ’twenty-six, knew how responsive he was, or used to be, to moving into such pristine spaces as these. It had not lulled him into peacefulness, as it did Henry, but had induced in him a taut animation and gaiety resembling the state of a man freshly in love. Away from the balk and perplexity of governing men, he had moved with enormous relief into government by nature. Collison agreed with Henry that this was his usual mood on riding out, but this time, said Collison, he had been ‘low’, and ‘like a lump’.

  Henry had not had time to hear Collison’s story before leaving the settlement, but had done so on the way to the Limestone Station. ‘Do you believe him to be dead?’ he had asked at last.

  ‘First show me his dead body,’ Collison had replied.

  At fifty yards distance the river bank rose abruptly to a sparsely wooded hill, on the farther side of which the river made a sharp turn, and appeared again diagonally across Henry’s way. When he drew close enough to see its shallows he turned in the saddle.

  ‘Collison!’ And, after a pause: ‘And you, Lazarus!’

  For Lazarus could not be allowed to walk behind Collison and Henry, as could the other four, all of whom were due for early release. Although Clunie had seemed pleased to see Lazarus changed from the yellow of the gangs into the grey of the first-class prisoners, he had told Henry not to let him out of range of his pistol or Collison’s gun. When the two men came up Henry pointed to the river. He had slowed to a walk and they fell in by his side. ‘Is that the first ford?’ he asked Collison.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then that must be the hill.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Cowper. We were at about this spot when he comes riding back. Of course I seen them myself by that time, and am coming on fast.’

  ‘Collison,’ said Henry, ‘two hundred blacks couldn’t conceal themselves on that hill. There is not enough cover.’

  ‘I never said they were hid, Mr Cowper. They stood among the trees, but were not hid.’

  ‘In that case he would have turned back before they rolled the stones. Indeed, as soon as he noticed them.’

  ‘As he did, sir. When they move to roll the stones, that was when he first sees them. If I had been in advance with him, I would have seen them before they moved, my eyes being sharp.’

  ‘And his—’ said Henry with sudden uncertainty.

  ‘They serve him well for most things, Mr Cowper, but for small distant things he uses mine.’

  Henry had always thought himself observant; he was both amazed and abashed. He had seen Logan shifting papers into comfortable range, but had never considered that his distant vision might also be defective. Yet the evidence had been there: he saw again the raised hand beneath which Logan had watched the black prisoner rising from the grass on the other side of the river, and heard again the anxious voice. ‘On his feet, is he?’ He wondered what else Collison knew, and was so used to knowing, or so barely conscious of knowing, that he did not think it worth mentioning. He said, ‘Is that why he asked if you had seen white men among them?’

  ‘It was, sir. Or else he was comparing what he seen with what I seen, which he also does. I don’t call him half blind, nor even a quarter so. It’s just the little sharp distant things, like the difference between a black face and a white face rubbed with ashes, like they do.’

  Lazarus quickly pressed his fingers to his jaw to crush a fly. In the lee of the hill the wind hardly reached them; Collison and Henry had both begun to wave flies from before their faces, and the horse was regularly swishing his tail. Henry spoke in an idle manner that he hoped would take Collison off guard.

  ‘And did you see such a thing?’

  Lazarus turned his head and looked at Collison’s profile. Such hard attentiveness, thought Henry, was the closest he dared come to a threat, but Collison, not easily unnerved, ignored the stare, or perhaps (not sensitive either) did not notice it. He replied with his usual dogged common sense.

  ‘Not to swear to, sir. I seen nothing I could swear to.’

  Lazarus blew his nose, flicked the stuff into the grass, and wiped his thumb and forefinger on the seat of his trousers. ‘I alwuz knew about ees eyes,’ he said quietly.

  Collison was inclined to jeer. ‘Easy to know once you been told. Sir,’ he said to Henry, ‘we are coming up to where they rolled the stones.’

  As Henry looked up at the hill, he narrowed his eyes in an effort to approximate Logan’s faulty vision. Fire must have passed over the hill last summer, for although the foliage of the small sparse upright trees had grown afresh, most of the trunks were still charred. The crowd of blacks standing in the shifting shadows of the leaves must have kept as still as the trunks of the trees. Henry wondered if that immobile massing had been a simple show of strength, their first warning to the commandant to turn back, or if Lazarus had just spoken the truth, and the commandant’s enemies had discovered his weakness long ago, and on that day, seeing him ride well in advance, had trusted in it to keep them obscure until they released the stones. Henry thought it likely that Lazarus had told the truth; intense hatred is a wonderful sharpener of the observation. And if Lazarus knew, so did other prisoners, and other runaways: Boylan, if he were really alive and in the bush, would certainly know.

  ‘And sir,’ said Collison, ‘here are the stones theirselves.’

  They lay among others at the foot of the hill, in an apparently natural formation, but Collison leapt forward and distinguished them by pushing them with the flat of his foot and showing them not embedded like the rest. They were big and jagged; Henry would have ca
lled them boulders. They could have broken a horse’s legs and tumbled the rider.

  Their pause had given the other four prisoners time to plod up, passive and tired, taking off their hats and wiping their sleeves across their foreheads. The party had left the settlement at dawn, travelled by water to the Limestone Station, and had set out from there a little after ten. Henry took out his watch. It was two o’clock. He turned the horse and took him to the river at a trot, so that every man should increase his pace before stopping to drink at the ford.

  At their approach a flock of white and sulphur cockatoos rose screeching from the bushes on the opposite bank. They rose slowly, in almost perpendicular flight, against the background of tall trees, then disappeared rapidly beyond their tops. Like any sudden flight of birds, they seemed to take the spirit up with them. ‘Surprised while watching white cockatoos,’ he remembered Lazarus saying. And now Collison was saying that he had never seen so many as on his journey with the commandant.

  ‘Not here, but further up, flock after flock. He would stop and watch.’

  And would see them as flowing white clouds streaked with sulphur, thought Henry.

  ‘They is stringy eating, the devils,’ remarked Lazarus.

  The three men were momentarily united by wry memory; all had eaten them. A low tide exposed at the water’s edge a strip of sand as clean and golden as an ocean beach. ‘Did you cross from this spot?’ asked Henry.

  ‘Yes, sir. We have the bullocks in the stream when the blacks assemble on the other side and wave their weapons and shout. We know already they crossed by the marks in the sand. And then I fire. And this same sand was where he seen the tracks on the way back, of the horse or bullock.’

  ‘Was the sand as firm as today?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then the tracks would have been distinct.’

  ‘As I told him, sir.’

  The four prisoners came up once more. ‘I have a wasp in me shirt,’ cried one to Collison.

  ‘Wasp in your arsehole!’ said Collison in disbelief.

  ‘Let him get it out, whatever it is,’ said Henry. ‘We must stay while they take off their boots.’

  All four tumbled to the bank. Lazarus, his boots tied round his neck, crouched in the shallows and gathered water in his hands, deftly, spilling hardly a drop. Henry, brushing away flies, rode over the sand to let the horse drink. Deft as Lazarus, he took a flask from his pocket and took a swig. Collison came up as he was returning it. He stood near the head of the horse, but faced Lazarus and the men, and watched them casually as he spoke.

  ‘I told him they would be distinct. What is it tracks of? I ask him. He is about where you are, on the mare, and he doesn’t answer straight away, because he is searching his teeth with his tongue. Then he puts his finger on the tip of his tongue and takes off a particle of that tooth, the one you drew. I know it was that, because he was bleeding a bit from the mouth earlier, and spitting and saying, There is still a bit there, Collison. He looks at it, and makes a face like when you taste blood in your mouth, or something bad. Then he flicks it off his finger. And I say again, What is it tracks of, sir? A horse or a bullock, he says, I will follow them. And that is the last we see of him.’

  Henry remembered the commandant’s widely opened mouth. He saw the blood beginning to seep out of the socket as the forceps moved the tooth, and his shocked reflective eyes as Henry spoke of his danger and possible disgrace. It was the day after that roistering night in the female factory, and Henry remembered as well his own debility, his reeling head and the flutter in his belly as he sat at the desk, the forceps still in his hand, and urged the commandant to intercede for Bulbridge and Fagan at their trial in Sydney. He saw the commandant striding straightly out, and heard himself groaning to amuse Knowles, and speaking foolish obscure serious words about nails being driven home, and armour that once pierced could never be made whole again. But by that time his reflections on the commandant’s obliviousness had been amplified to include his own former obliviousness to the character of Nobby Clark. The horse had drunk enough; he reined in its head and saw in a troubling flash the hem of Doctor Redfern’s trousers, his father’s gaiters, and two pairs of neat shining narrow shoes against the dark rug. He turned the horse abruptly, with a sudden splashing of water.

  ‘Let us get on!’ he said in a loud voice to Collison. ‘Lazarus, how far from here?’

  Lazarus was standing in the shallows with his hands on his hips, his eyes half shut, and on his face a look of quiet but intense pleasure. He carried this peaceful look to Henry. ‘Sir, about five hours.’

  ‘You no longer sound sure.’

  ‘I know only what I wuz told.’

  The other men were all crouched about his feet, drinking from their hands. ‘Well, you wouldn’t be told in miles or hours, I suppose,’ conceded Henry.

  Collison interposed. ‘Mr Cowper, what he says agrees with the facts. From the Limestone to the clearing where we found the saddle is more than thirty miles. We have covered fifteen, so there is more than fifteen to go. We are none of us on a good mare. We won’t cover it before dark.’

  ‘Then I suggest we cover as much as we can, and set out at daybreak on the rest.’

  It was not until he rode into the stream that Henry realised the significance of what Collison had just said. It was Collison’s first intimation that he did not believe his master to be alive, and indeed did not believe him to have got far from the clearing where he had been surprised. The young soldier was wading at the horse’s side, his musket held high. Henry glanced down at his face, spruce and narrow, gilded with bristle. He seemed quite unaware of the disclosure he had made, and again Henry found himself reflecting on what Collison knew, and did not know he knew. To be sure, that had been the case with himself long ago, and lately with the commandant, but in his case as in Logan’s, ignorance had been caused by effacement of facts in the service of an ideal, however absurd or mistaken, whereas it seemed to Henry that Collison’s ignorance was an unexplored darkness that yielded occasionally to accidental beams of light.

  On the opposite bank the men found some of the big seeds they called chestnuts. These lay beside their dried exploded pods, their split tan skins revealing flesh of whitish-green. The men scrambled about and pocketed them to be cooked that night, for they caused stomach pains if eaten raw, but finding bigger ones further on, they threw away the first and took these instead, until Collison abused them for the delay and ordered no more to be picked up. But a little later, coming across two native dogs who had brought down a wallaby, he himself helped to chase the dogs away and ordered the men to carry the beast by turns. They had brought only a little salt beef; fresh meat was worth the delay.

  Lazarus now took the lead, walking a few yards ahead of Henry while Collison and the others brought up the rear. Henry had noticed that leg irons affected the gait of men in different ways, according to their physical structure and their former habit of walking. After they were knocked off most continued to shuffle for a long time, but some shuffled with the feet slightly apart, as if chafed on the insides of the thighs. On setting out from the Limestone Station Lazarus had walked with just such a peculiar waddle, but in only an hour it had been defeated by freedom and the long grass, and he now walked straight, swinging his arms, his hands lightly clenched. The back of his shirt was covered with flies, but he had pushed the crown of his hat through a hole cut in a square of cloth, so that the suspended corners blew and bobbed and helped to keep them away from his face. Henry was smoking to repel them, and so was Collison, though it was forbidden. The other four also had cloth suspended from their hats, but though they occasionally swiped or shook the dead wallaby, its wound was black with flies, and its eye sockets crawling.

  Once Henry called to Collison, and when he ran up, Henry pointed to Lazarus.

  ‘Is he headed towards the clearing?’

 
‘Oh yes, sir.’

  Again Henry glanced down at the young soldier; but Collison was puffing away at his pipe, as oblivious as ever, and indeed with a kind of evening contentment, for it was almost dark, and they must soon make camp.

  ‘We could have used our heads,’ said Henry with amusement, ‘and done without the rascal.’

  ‘Not if he was told the exact spot, Mr Cowper. It’s all rough little hills and creeks and gullies round there. You might beat it for hours and pass him by. And besides,’ said Collison, taking his pipe out of his mouth and raising his face to Henry, ‘for my part, I am glad he is come if it gets him remitted. There is no good of just flogging and flogging a man. He has shown there isn’t.’

  It was four years since Henry had slept on a blanket on the ground. On the last occasion he had shared a tent with Patrick Logan, and had chivvied him as he sat by candlelight engrossed in his journals and map. Now there was no tent, no candlelight, no companion awake, and both the ground and his bones had grown harder.

  All the others were asleep. It was too dark to see much more of them than their attitudes. Collison lay on his back, as neat as an effigy, and of the four prisoners, who had no blankets, one lay prone; one, Lazarus, sprawled wide on his back, and three lay curled. Two snored. At ten yards distance the tethered horse could be heard pulling grass with his teeth.

  Of the dull little worries floating through Henry’s mind, one recurred. Why had he not thought to tell Clunie about the lead coffin at the hospital? In case of death in the administrative families, two coffins—one adult and one child-sized—had been made years ago. They had first been kept in the lumber yard, but were removed to Henry’s quarters when it was discovered that prisoners had cut squares out of them to make potato graters. Did Murray know they were there? If so, all would be well. Otherwise, poor Clunie would be running about filching a bit of lead here, and a bit there, flashings and suchlike, and even then would not have enough.

  Henry knew that if he took a drink from his flask he would be able to say peaceably, ‘Well, I can do nothing about it now. Let it be.’ But he had already encroached on tomorrow’s quota, and did not dare face tomorrow’s deprivation if he drank it now.