by Thea Astley
‘You know it is.’ Jenner was observing her with interest. ‘What do you pretend for?’
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘I do sometimes. Everything here seems so narrow. So small. It extends the limits.’ She grew muddled. ‘Truly, I don’t know.’ But she did in fact. She was claiming seclusion as well, an untouched-by-the-world virginality she thought might appeal. Jenner was too young to accuse fishers of men though he came close to it. His features were assuming the carved-out look of adolescence.
‘I’d like to go far,’ she said. ‘A long way from here.’ She kept smoothing the silk over her hips.
‘He didn’t mean that sort of far, really,’ young Jenner said. ‘You always take yourself.’ He was recalling something from his last Latin lesson and the vision of Mr Dorahy with only adumbrations of despair viewing the hideous ochre landscape beyond the schoolroom windows.
Her mother knew she had calved a winner. She was a pusher of whacking determination, prepared to ram citadels for those bell-like top A’s.
‘Freddie Buckmaster is nothing,’ she later warned. ‘Tim Jenner is nothing. There are other things for you.’ She sweated through committees until someone arranged a fund.
‘I’ll be leaving soon,’ Gracie announced to the rivals who were resenting their collision on her courting veranda.
‘How soon is soon?’ Freddie Buckmaster asked, being desperate to prove something to himself before she went. He scowled. It only accentuated his thickish brooding good looks.
Gracie said vaguely, ‘In a few months. January or February.’
‘That’s too soon,’ Buckmaster said. He had never heard her voice even at its most exquisite.
‘That’s too soon,’ said young Jenner, who heard only her voice.
Like the blacks, she could sing off disaster for him. His mother played the piano for her on those evenings when the Tilburns visited and Gracie, carelessly posed against one side of the unbelievable French grand that had been lugged battering miles from the south, decorated the long timber living-room with sound. It made a kind of truce between them, young Jenner and Buckmaster. Her throat affected them both.
‘I could swallow her whole,’ young Buckmaster admitted. ‘Keerist!’
‘It’s her voice I want to gulp,’ Jenner said.
When he told her that he scored a sort of victory. She rode over to his home more often, a lazy-daisied hat flapping upon her shoulders. They wandered through grass-drench to creek banks where they would sit idly watching tiddler stir or dragonflies hurtling across the surface. Rested her hand briefly in his.
Buckmaster sniffed them out sometimes, perched on his tall and spying chestnut. He had chucked school and had moved into the police where muscles and dad had won him preference. His horse could feel the irritation in his rider’s flanks.
‘You’d better be moving back,’ he would order, having no finesse. ‘We’re on the track of the bunch that raided the mill. My boys are following a little way back.’ His buckle shone. His belt shone. Some official silver buttons shone. ‘Tirra lirra by the creek,’ young Jenner said, smiling.
‘Now what the hell does that mean?’ Buckmaster asked.
He was ripe for revenge.
He crept on young Jenner one evening of long lilacs and bronze as Jenner came from the School of Arts with a bundle of books. There was no provocation, no time for specious gallantry, just the old bunch of fives smashing the nose bridge, the baffled mouth, cracking the ear till it screamed with the noise of deafness. Jenner, his visions torn, felt only bones commenting on flesh and, dropping the books in the dust, fought back with every part of him until Buckmaster, thudding his whole bull weight into his stomach, dropped him to the ground. Then he kicked him, once, with perfect timing and direction, so that his whole body wound itself up like a watch spring.
Mr Dorahy, coming down a back lane in his sulky, found Jenner vomiting by the side of the stock-and-station agent’s storehouse.
‘You’re entering the world of men,’ he said. ‘Christ was wasting his time. It would take a score of Gethsemanes.’
He took him home and cleaned the muck from his face and later, seated on the little porch, they watched the flattened scrolls of landscape making proclamations until they were absorbed in a distant haze over which the moon rode clean and indifferent. Jenner kept repressing gouts of sobs which were shame rather than pain.
‘Here’s a man,’ Dorahy stated, ‘who might restore your faith.’
A horse and buggy was clipping its way down the dirt road towards them, its driver a solid fellow and deliberate, a man from back country who had once worked a barren and hopeless holding that he had tried to milk with half a dozen windmills. On the testimony of willow-twigs, he had believed implicitly in the presence of a great artesian source and had sunk his shafts with the same faith as a miner. In his half-finished shack he had waited the arrival of his girl. Drays drew north and then coaches and she had failed to step from either into the dream. It had been ten years and his letters did not tap her source either.
Now he had moved closer in, but his ill-luck followed. Ground he touched dried mysteriously. He had no luck with cattle, though he pumped from a creek, and his animals grew lean and ribby like the grass on which they fed. Yet he laughed from time to time, committed to help others who were luckier, begrudging them nothing he could give.
Taking tea now beside Dorahy and the boy, his chunky body was propped against the veranda steps. Moths were coming in, unsober with candle-light. Lunt lifted one delicately from his tea.
‘And what were you doing in town?’ Dorahy was asking.
‘Just picking up a few things.’ Lunt drew deeply on his pipe. ‘A bit of tucker, some pipeline and a crank handle,’ But he seemed to have lost interest, even though hope still pummelled him.
He leant back to look at the boy. ‘How’s your dad?’ he asked. ‘He’s been a great help to me over the years, did you know? Not that I like to lean. But you need a bit of a hand. That’s when you sort ’em out.’
‘Sort what?’
‘The real people. You see, I believed in that water. I believe in Eden. And I’ve tried to make one. But all the time I get the feeling the world’s just a dream in God’s eye.’
What a hope, thought young Jenner, but he said wonderingly, ‘Maybe Eden’s whatever you make. It’s the trying.’
Dorahy sighed. ‘Pliny had a heating system, you know, a water system, right through his farm home just a few decades or so after Christ. If he could do it then, why not you? Here. Now.’
Jenner was moved by this idealism, but he could see it was mad impractical stuff. They couldn’t put the water there.
‘Did he now?’ Lunt said with interest. ‘Yes. It was there all right. I only had to tap it. But it came in trickles like tears. It broke my heart when I knew there was enough of the stuff there to float a navy. A great inland sea of it. And now I’m not doing much better.’
Even the landscape was isolate. Trees, floating moon.
‘You should come by more often,’ Dorahy said, ‘and talk to me. God knows I need it. Is it very lonely out there? Any lonelier than here, I mean?’
‘I still have mills,’ Lunt said simply, ‘sucking away at the creek. It’s almost as useless as it was before, but each has a different voice and at night they yacker between themselves. Drive most people mad, I suppose, but they’re good pals. They keep trying for me.’
He pulled a bag out of his pocket and fished out a sandwich.
‘You mind if I eat? Haven’t had a bite since this morning. I’m giddy with the world.’
‘There’s some soup going,’ Dorahy said. ‘I was just going to have some with Tim.’
His kitchen lay at the back, a feverish little lean-to with a small wood stove backed up against a sheet of iron. Heat became personal here. There was a dresser with three cups, a few plates and half a dozen beautifully polished knives and forks that he kept in a box. The small sitting-room expressed its soul through a mass of books and
candle-light.
Dorahy was ahead of them looking out the back door where he spoke to a darkness that moved.
‘Who’s there?’ he inquired of a shifting twilight.
Standing by the water-tank, Kowaha showed up in the chiaroscuro of the oil-lamp, the pretty bluntness of her face shining in planes and gentle arcs. She smiled merely and Dorahy, shoving his own face into lamp-light, asked, ‘Kowaha? What is it?’
Stuffed with shyness she could not speak. Stood staring up at him on the top of his steps, giggled a moment, staring at him and the two darker figures who had come in behind him. The solidity of them frightened her.
‘You want tucker?’ Dorahy asked then.
She shook her head and he was conscious that she was holding something.
‘No tucker. Then what?’
She gestured with the bundle in her arms.
Swinging the lamp, he went down to the yard while the other two, breathing in dust and dark, stood waiting.
‘What is it, Kowaha?’ Dorahy asked, peering down at the coiled arms of her.
She held the bundle forward suddenly so that he could see the tiny child within, fuzzed and sleeping. She did nothing but smile, holding the child up for the three of them.
‘Already?’ Dorahy murmured. ‘Your baby already?’ He had not seen her for several weeks.
She was pleased with herself.
Dorahy put out a careful finger to touch the sleeping face and breathed, ‘He’s beautiful.’
‘Girl,’ she said. Laughing at his idiocy. ‘Girl.’
‘You’ve come for this?’ he asked. He loved the world. ‘To show me your baby?’
‘Show baby.’
Lunt and young Jenner, male-abashed before the marvel of it, stood back in shadow.
‘My friends,’ Dorahy said. ‘Tim and Charlie. But you know Mr Lunt, don’t you?’ She giggled at him again.
He was hesitating, searching for some commemorative thing that might be spelled out concretely.
‘We must give your baby a present, eh? For luck. For lots and lots of it,’ he added, swinging round to the boy. ‘But I don’t know what. I simply don’t know what.’
In the house Kowaha squatted on the floor above the child. It lay naked and kicking gently, frail, its skin a tender gold. Kowaha gurgled down at it.
‘I have one thing,’ Dorahy mused, moving into the bedroom and shuffling through drawers. ‘Only one thing she might wear.’ He pulled out a little leather bag from which he drew a silver medal. ‘How about this, Kowaha?’ And he handed her a small dulled disc with the arms of Trinity College, Dublin, insanely shimmering in the oil light.
‘Classics,’ he said to young Jenner. ‘My final year it was. I knew there’d be a use for it.’
Kowaha held the medal gingerly, lifting it up and smiling, then running her fingers over the embossing.
‘For luck,’ Dorahy said. ‘It used to be my luck. In a way. I give it to you.’
‘Luck,’ she repeated.
He threaded it with a strip of leather thong. Then he bent down and placed the circlet over the baby’s head.
‘Little girl,’ he pronounced and he wasn’t laughing about it. ‘Classical first.’
MR SHERIDAN re-enters Dorahy’s mind, which is boiling in this crowded hotel. He is sitting back as the others register. His gentleness is fraying.
Do you ever receive warrants against blackfellows guilty of offences? Sheridan asked.
Lieutenant Buckmaster shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
Very few. I have received two.
What do you do with them?
I try to execute the warrant and, if I am not able, I send it back again.
Where do you send it?
I send it back to the Inspector General of Police.
Would it not—Mr Sheridan’s pencil began a slow tap—I repeat, would it not be much better that the warrants for this part of the country should remain in your possession so that you might be able to execute them as occasion offers?
I have got copies.
You have?
A copy is sufficient, Lieutenant Buckmaster replied sullenly.
Then, Mr Sheridan said leaning forward, do you know of a great many being in existence for various offenders? Copies, I mean, of course. What, if I may ask again, would you have?
Only two, Lieutenant Buckmaster said. The bouncing ball outside reached towards a window.
Sergeant, Mr Sheridan ordered, remove that child.
Two? he pursued. I thought perhaps there were three. What are the two you have, Lieutenant?
I know of one for Wilson. He paused.
Yes? said Mr Sheridan gently.
The bouncing stopped. Inside the court they could hear the gruffness of the sergeant. Mr Dorahy breathed ironically, Suffer, imperative, little children! It was all a question of a misplaced comma.
And one for Kuttabul Tommy.
For what?
Attempted rape.
And the third?
There was no third.
I think there was, Mr Sheridan suggested. You acted as if there was a third.
No, Lieutenant Buckmaster insisted.
Do you not know of one for Mr Lunt’s blackfellows?
Mr Dorahy from the body of the court noted with interest Buckmaster ease his thick fingers about his collar.
There was no warrant.
But you acted as if there were one?
Perhaps.
For what? Mr Sheridan asked, softly, so that Dorahy in the thickening fetor of the little court had to strain to hear him.
The murder of a gin.
But, Mr Sheridan said irritably, the murder took place after you acted, not before. Is that not so?
I don’t understand, Lieutenant Buckmaster said.
You will, Mr Sheridan assured him.
At this point the assistant magistrate intervened.
There was a coroner’s report, he said. Was it that you heard of?
I’m not sure, Lieutenant Buckmaster replied sulkily.
Are you or have you been liable, Mr Sheridan went on, in the course of your patrol to meet any of Mr Lunt’s blacks?
It is possible.
Of course they keep out of your way if they know you are after them; but if they came within your reach you might meet them?
There might be a chance—a very little chance.
But there was no actual warrant, was there? It had not been decided by whom this gin had been murdered?
Lieutenant Buckmaster declined to reply for a moment.
Mr Dorahy leant trembling against the hard arm of the wooden bench.
We will return to that, Mr Sheridan said. Tell me, he inquired, fixing his Bible-stained eyes on the sweating lieutenant, do these blacks not cross to the coast?
It is possible.
And make their way to the island?
It is possible.
I understood you to say earlier in your evidence that there had been one complaint by Mr Barnabas Sweetman and another from Mr John Watters with regard to depredations on their property?
Yes.
Then you were informed by Mr Sweetman what tribes had done these things?
Yes. He mentioned the tribe.
And are you going to tell us what tribe it was?
Lieutenant Buckmaster shifted his feet which felt larger than the world.
The Lindeman tribe.
Ah, said Mr Sheridan. And do you know, to change the subject a little, of other cases of rape besides that which you have mentioned? His interest was terrible to see.
Not exactly rape, Lieutenant Buckmaster replied. But assaults on little girls at Bingin and an attack on a woman at the Mulgrove station.
Their eyes met and held.
Do you think the crime of rape is common among the blacks? Is it on the increase among them?
It is on the increase as they become civilised.
As they become civilised? That is a strange answer, lieutenant.
As they b
ecome civilised, the cases of rape become more frequent, Lieutenant Buckmaster repeated stubbornly.
You are suggesting that white customs lead to degradation in an observant other race?
I suppose so.
Mr Sheridan was feeling completely bemused. Idiotically he asked, Do you observe much mortality among the blacks?
Lieutenant Buckmaster blew his nose. There have been a number of cases since I came to the district.
Mr Dorahy began to laugh out loud. A great racking bawling sound escaped his throat.
Remove the witness, Mr Sheridan ordered without taking his eyes off Buckmaster.
SNOGGERS INTONED, interrupting some easy-chairmanship tralala at the end of the room, Domine non sum dignus, and there was an instant babble and quacking of agreement with him.
Bloody thinks himself, the chairman complained softly, unaware that Snoggers had publicly denied this. Order! he cried over his agenda sheet and unblotted papers. Order!
The council ripples petered out. The moment became a blemish.
Snoggers Boyd was the town’s printer. He had found himself in this town more by accident than anything else, dedicated to bring out a struggling broadsheet weekly. Not one of the big men, but a necessary irritant. Not an active member of the Separation League, but a man who printed their agitations. He owned a pleasant home and a beautiful wife who had been in love, as far as he could judge such a private matter, for a few moments with old crumbling Lunt. During a crisis, his wife and Lunt had once held hands and at the moment, despite its brevity, Mr Boyd observed as well his wife’s face full of unhappy movement. She had been nursing Lunt through a bout of pneumonia and the clasp of hands was permissible. She had never held his hand again, that he knew of, and he reverted to his cynical unwatchfulness.
‘What we are here to decide,’ Mr Sweetman of the short dark curls and angelic playboy-manqué face said to his reordered henchmen, ‘is the punitive quality of our protests and the form they must take. Are we merely to restrain and hand over or are we to take action into our own hands?’
‘Please!’ he shouted above the dissonance then. ‘One at a time.’
Mr Buckmaster rose. He had discovered the force of the eye which now he let move about the table, sifting the perhaps of those ten faces, each set in its own prejudice and bigotry. Man among men, he projected his strength into each watching face, even that of the town printer who had proclaimed his unworthiness. Bloody comic, thought Buckmaster. Aloud he said,
