by Thea Astley
‘It could so easily have been us who did it,’ he said. ‘The luck of the draw. They carry their punishment inside. For ever.’
‘Ach!’ Dorahy expostulated, mad with the need for retribution.
Young Jenner had fingered the silver medal on the baby’s golden chest. It moved in tiny pulses. ‘She’s a winner, sir,’ he had said. ‘You’ve given her your luck.’
The timber house was full of heating air. Sun shafts became rapiers slashing the eastern rooms of the sagging building. Dorahy swung one like a cleaver. His arm parted motes.
‘Whether you want or not,’ he cried, ‘there’ll be an inquiry. Fred Buckmaster has to put in a report to fool justice. Oh, there’ll be an inquiry all right and I’ll speak if it’s the last thing I do.’
Yet at the time he gave only ironic yelps of laughter.
BARNEY SWEETMAN’S house skulks behind a mess of wattles.
Dorahy is unable to knock upon this door, for it lies open with a frankness that is devastating. At the end of a lighted hall he can see part of a big room filled with people and for a moment only is afraid for himself and the folly of his tongue. His entry into light has the manner of stage device, for the fifteen or so people who are there stop talking as he stands hesitating before them all.
Sweetman swoops.
There is a glass in Dorahy’s hand suddenly and he is sipping amid cries of welcome that bring the bile acid to his mouth. He is clobbered silly by their greetings as they all lie and tell him he’s hardly changed.
‘I’m much the same inside,’ he says awkwardly—but it is really a threat—and this is a sardonic aid for those who talk only of externals. Something makes him want to cackle at their absurdity, but he sips again and the wine warms him. There’ll be some kindness, he hopes.
‘Part of the town,’ a fat man is saying about him with genuineness, smiling. Where had he seen that smile? In what agonised situation twenty years before?
‘You remember the old Snoggers!’ Sweetman cries, and Dorahy is grateful to be helped, feels the trembling start in the hand that holds the glass, and nods and says ‘Of course’ as his eyes track beyond Mr Boyd, town printer, to the bullishness of what can only be Buckmaster, a ruined piece of flesh propped by the mantel.
‘After all these years!’ Buckmaster is crushing his hand. Dorahy does not want to take communion but it is there, offered with fabled obliviscence. ‘Why, it’s like old times!’
All our eyes are smaller, Dorahy thinks. It reflects our nothingness. And he says, rather bitterly, ‘Not too much like old times, I hope’, and watches for shadows.
‘What’s that supposed to imply, hey?’ Buckmaster demands. But his smile is still in place. He is very lined and the wine that stained his cheeks once has now run its blemish all over his face.
‘There were times,’ Dorahy says, resolving to be careful, ‘when we didn’t see quite eye to eye.’
‘There were,’ Buckmaster agrees. ‘But that sort of thing isn’t for an evening like this. Past is past, eh?’
Dorahy takes a larger sip at his drink and repressed anger. He wants to shout ‘Not ever’ and whack the room apart with some claymore of accusation, but a certain smile on Boyd’s face stops him. There will be other moments for that, the smile says, spelling out postponement—and he is puzzled.
‘Where’s Charlie Lunt these days?’ he finally asks Buckmaster, to annoy him.
A knot seems to appear in the centre of Buckmaster’s face.
‘He moved up the coast a bit,’ he replies. ‘Gave up his old holding.’
‘It would be pleasant to see him again,’ Dorahy says, remembering the room, the bed, the rope. ‘Is he well?’
Buckmaster shrugs and catches Sweetman’s eye.
‘He was invited,’ he lies. ‘He might turn up. Haven’t seen him for years.’
‘But he should be here,’ Dorahy nags, forgetting his resolutions. He takes another gulp of his drink and feels a hugeness of just rage constrict his chest. ‘He’s the most memorable part of the town.’
‘In what way?’ Sweetman asks.
‘A martyr. A saint.’
‘Oh, God, Tom!’ Buckmaster says. ‘I thought you would be letting go by now.’
‘Saint Lunt,’ Dorahy intones, ‘appear and bless this meeting.’ His smile is lost in memories.
There are too many people in the room, even for its largeness. He is reintroduced to Romney and Armitage and Wilson and all the faces have a familiarity he is too tired to unmask, even that of Freddie Buckmaster who is lounging heavily against a window pane. He is confidently forty, now, and has a wife and two legal children.
Dorahy has another drink. And another. Mellowness or daring will set in. He corners Snoggers Boyd in an angle between living- and dining-room and asks again. ‘Where’s Charlie Lunt?’
Boyd appears truly jovial, yet his mouth tightens and he says, ‘It wouldn’t have done, I suppose, his coming.’
‘Why not, for Christ’s sake?’ Dorahy cries. ‘I’ll fetch him. He can be fetched?’
Boyd sucks at his pipe, lips drawn back as he clenches his teeth.
‘Come on now, Tom,’ he says.
‘Is it possible?’ Dorahy persists.
‘It’s possible he would be unwilling.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, what good would it do? It’s years too late.’
‘For justice to be done?’
Boyd frowns. ‘You’re an impossible person,’ he says. ‘Lunt hasn’t come near this place since he left. He obviously doesn’t want to be reminded either. Who the hell do you think you are? Social conscience?’
‘You’re right, I suppose,’ Dorahy admits. ‘But I’d like to see him all the same. He was a truly good man.’
‘Let it rest a bit.’ Snoggers’ eyes are sad. ‘If it’s only seeing him you want, I might be able to arrange something. A run up the coast for you. I’ve been up there myself once or twice. How long are you here for?’
‘Just the week.’
‘And why did you come?’
‘You’re the second person who has asked me that,’ Dorahy says. ‘Curiosity. That mainly. And a hope for delayed justice.’
‘That’s the nub of it,’ Boyd says. ‘I feel as you do but I act differently. Have another drink.’
He has another drink. And yet another. He allows his mouth to remain shut against anything bar social inanities, even to Fred, ex-lieutenant, who lounges across the room to examine him more closely. Buckmaster’s soul grows bristles.
‘You two yapping away here!’ he accuses. ‘What is it? Conspiracy?’
Fred’s crassness comes from the beer-pot belly-rumbles of secure middle age. He has a moustache horribly flecked with beer-scum. He grins at his former teacher and turns into a cartoon of himself.
‘You haven’t changed much,’ Dorahy says who is referring to the soul.
‘Nor you.’ It is as if young Buckmaster has caught on.
Boyd keeps smiling into his glass. He senses thunder on the left.
But someone in the room is calling for silence. Let’s hear it for Sweetman who stands posed by a solid dresser holding out a toast glass like an olympic runner’s beacon. The conversation plays itself out in trickles.
‘Old faces, old friends,’ Sweetman is throbbing as the party noises fade. ‘Welcome home. For it has been your home and will be as long as you remain.’ Cheers from some moron. ‘It is good to see so many of us reunited after all these years, though it is sad to remember those who cannot come. But here you are now seeing what the old town has turned into. Once, and you all remember that once, it was simply a village, a bit of a township. I mean no offence. But look around you over the next few days and you will see that what was once a township has turned into a thriving town of enormous economic importance for the southern States. Those of you who were with me in the Separation League know what this means. The implications.’
He pauses to allow the implications to sink in. Boyd is again tempted to a liturgical
Domine non sum dignus, but refrains and cocks a wink at Dorahy who is broodingly absorbed. He misses six platitudes and comes to to hear Sweetman, in a stage voice nicely broken between the kinetic properties of nostalgia and actual tears, talking about mutual love and respect, the necessity to pull together.
‘Oh my God, the clichés,’ Snoggers whispers in an aside to Dorahy who frowns with his terrible righteousness and whispers ‘Twaddle!’ back at him.
There are a few isolated bravos and an epidemic of clapping while Dorahy’s hands remain firm around his glass. He is urged to shout down the fluff, the cobwebs of nonsense. It is not the time. He waits.
DORAHY THAT Sunday was filled with Godtide. He had observed the vigilante grouping of the men as he rode through the township on his way to Jenner’s. It was a horrible boil-up of masculinity, he thought, as he passed them by, resisting invitation with a cool wave and shake of the head. He sensed bloody trouble, the smell of it, all the way out of town.
Mr Jenner was hoeing vegetables in a patch at the rear of the house. The peace of it was almost comic. He was a tall man with a crop of receding red hair and a frightening calm. So slow appeared everything he touched one nearly missed the steady forwardness of it.
Dorahy said abruptly, ‘They’re on their way. What can we do about it?’
Jenner put his hoe down carefully and straightened up amid the silver beet.
‘Who?’
‘The men of God. The town elders. They’re out on a black hunt, as I predicted yesterday.’
Jenner seemed to be staring into lost distances. ‘What do you want to do?’ he asked at last.
Dorahy found his mouth full of angry saliva.
‘Go after them. See that no harm is done.’
Jenner sucked at this idea for a while. He could have bitten straight through to the centred seed but preferred rumination, if only for the look of the thing.
‘Two of us only?’
‘Your son, perhaps.’
‘Three! Two men and a boy! They’d laugh in our faces.’
‘Some protest must be made.’
‘It will do nothing.’
Dorahy frowned. ‘It puts our case. I had thought Boyd—but he was with them.’
Jenner smiled. ‘But so feebly,’ he said. He picked up the hoe and began walking back to the house. Dorahy followed. Day was beginning to blaze. In such sunlight, which could eat its way through sinew and bone towards the soul, both men felt exposed.
‘Still,’ Jenner went on as they neared the back steps, ‘I do see your point. I’ll come with you. The smallest protest force in history. My God! But we’ll achieve nothing, you know.’
Tim Jenner was painting railings. The wife and daughters were seated sewing on the long veranda. The contrast of it made Dorahy laugh sourly at the thought of that ten-strong band of yahoos bristling with guns.
He said, ‘It will express our point of view. Our conscience.’
‘They’ll find us a joke,’ Jenner said.
‘It will prick them.’
‘So?’ Jenner said. ‘That isn’t enough you know. Not nearly enough.’
Dorahy said, ‘I’m wanting more than that, if it’s possible.’
‘What, then?’
‘I want them to know the town is divided. That other opinions have force and must be taken into account.’
‘What a hope!’ Jenner said.
From the bottom of the veranda steps Dorahy smiled up at the three women on the veranda. Putting the case to them, he asked what they thought. He had never believed that to be female was to be incapable of judgment.
Young Jenner put down his paint brush and said, ‘May I come?’
‘I should hope you would,’ his father replied.
‘Then that’s all there is to it,’ the boy said. He would lose his simplicity with time. His face shone. He believed Dorahy to be always infallible. ‘Are we taking guns?’
‘No guns,’ his father said. ‘That’s the whole point.’
They rode out together, the three of them, trotting steadily north to Mandarana, aware both of folly and the older wisdom of justice.
The men were moving in a solid formation after the trees thinned out on the slopes west of the peak.
They were aware of, though at the moment they could not see, the dark shapes moving ahead of them towards the rock-crops and the scrub on the eastern face. Lieutenant Freddie Buckmaster, slicker than paint in a too-tight jacket with wicked silver buttons, pulled up his big bay and called a halt. Manoeuvres, he was explaining to them. Tactics.
There were ten men of God with him that sweating noon, well-mounted, well-set-up fellows, muscular as their horses and dangerous as their guns. Pillars of the town. Not even the flies troubled them as they sat loosely in their saddles, their thighs gripping lightly and easily at their edging mounts.
‘We’ll split into two groups,’ Lieutenant Buckmaster said. He was enthusiastic and sullenly young. ‘If Mr Sweetman would take the northern side of the hill with four of you, the rest of us will go round by the south and pin them in.’ (After all, he hadn’t read his Hannibal for nothing and momentarily, crazily, in the tea-tree scrub, Dorahy’s face and sour snaggle-tooth smile blazed at him above a chalky desk.) ‘If they take to the slopes, as I think they will, we’ll tether up and follow on foot. There’s too much shale for the horses.’ His face was set in firm lines. ‘The dirty buggers,’ he said.
Trees were mnemonics for more and more trees.
In silent cheers and leaves the two parties cantered off, Buckmaster senior taking his burly form after Sweetman.
Sounds now of hoof-rattle and leather-squeak in a thickening air of tenseness and anger leaking out of their sweating flesh.
They had dogs with them, too, yelping and barking in a pack hunt as the leader scented and took off after the odour of black skin glimpsed briefly a hundred yards away.
On the eastern side of the mountain trees became denser than the logic of their movements.
‘My God!’ Roy Armitage panted, drawing in beside his leader, ‘this is too bloody thick. We’ll have to leave the horses.’
Young Buckmaster chewed on this advice for another hundred yards. His thighs took a bashing in the scrub.
‘You’re right,’ he admitted. A whip of tree cracked his face half open and there was blood apart from the pain. ‘Tell the rest.’
They crowded each other in the one small space, clumping their horses together, and unslung their guns. Their irritated skins were demanding retribution.
Dismounted, they crackled through the trees on the lower slope that swept up to the beige and lilac shadows of the peak. Bracken dragged at their boots and argued with them. In the distance there was the sudden scream of a dog.
‘There they go!’ Benjy Wilson was yelling and pointing through thinner scrub at the rockier patches of the lower mountain where a score of clambering bodies glistening in light were scrambling fast and scattered up the steep slope. It was apparent from below that there was nowhere they could go but up.
Lieutenant Buckmaster paused, held up a masterly hand for attention, then tamped a leisurely pipe while his men fretted in check.
‘The others will be here in a minute. The buggers can’t get away now.’
‘I believe,’ Benjy Wilson volunteered eagerly—and there was saliva—‘they’ve some sort of ritual ground up top. It flattens out near the summit. They’ll head for that.’
‘Catching ’em at prayer, eh?’ Buckmaster grinned and drew suckingly on his pipe. He was a lumpy lad with all the confidence of a very average intelligence. ‘Listen a minute. I think I can hear the other party.’
The dogs were in first and then the men who held a confrontation under the disturbed trees, glancing up now and then at the distant diminishing figures still stolidly climbing up to the peak.
Snoggers Boyd, who had come, despite his protest, for a variety of subtle reasons the others did not know about, said over Buckmaster senior’s shoulder, ‘Let the poor bastards
be. We’ve given them a run for it.’
‘Are you mad?’ Buckmaster questioned. ‘They’ve got to take a warning. They’ve got to be dispersed. We’re going up that hill. Are all rifles ready?’
‘Not mine,’ Boyd said.
‘Jesus! Well, fix it.’
‘No.’ Boyd was mopping his fat sweating face.
‘What?’
‘God fuck Ireland,’ Boyd said simply. ‘I said, no. And no again. I’ve had enough.’
‘You’ll do what you’re bloody told.’
Boyd smiled. His fat was of the genial kind, but his eyes were sharp. ‘I’m not going to watch you,’ he said flatly, ‘butcher those poor devils. I don’t know why I came except to see fair play. And watch self-righteousness in action.’
‘Well, go to buggery!’ Buckmaster roared.
‘Thank you,’ Mr Boyd said, ‘I will’—turning his horse on the word to trot it away into the trees to the north.
‘Oh, my God!’ Buckmaster cried, appealing to Barney Sweetman. ‘Are we ready, then?’
The others were dismounted, their rifles cocked. Over all the faces was a sheen of appetite for something. They had a foxish look under the moving tree light.
‘Fan out!’ young Buckmaster cried. And the men worked themselves into a straggling line about the base to begin working their way up the slope, their feet constantly slipping and crunching on stone and gravel, their lumbering bodies bent forward with the effort of it, sixty degrees in spots once they had cleared the scrub; but their steady climb took them slowly upward towards the flattened altar of Mandarana.
Fred Buckmaster kept his glinting eyes on possibilities slipping brownly away at the crest, and once, stupidly, he aimed and fired at what he thought was a straggler while his impulse released something in all the men who began blasting away at tree and rock.
‘Hold it!’ canny Sweetman roared down the line. ‘Oh, hold it now!’
They crawled up another two hundred feet and it seemed they had the mountain to themselves under this hot sun. The light was dry and brilliant. Nothingness was scarred by crow-cry, distant and sad. Only rock, scrub and the long line of fox-faced men moving in towards a massacre. They were only ten yards apart now as the cone of the mountain narrowed and could hear one another’s snorting breaths and the clink of boot on rock.
