To Name Those Lost

by Rohan Wilson

  What did I tell you, Toosey said.

  You’re up to your neck now, old cock. Eh? Aint you.

  Not by a mile.

  Up to your neck in shit I would say.

  The Dubliner is goin to want his money when he gets here, Toosey said. And he will soon know who’s in possession of it.

  I never saw no money.

  Toosey breathed hard through his nostrils. He almost laughed. I picked you from the start, he said. The one who dances well when fortune pipes.

  The deadman twitched a little at this.

  Two hundred is a lot better than forty, Toosey said. That’s what you’re thinkin. Keep a secret from the Irish. Keep the money. Oh yes. But when you go to the dance, take heed who you take by the hand. For you don’t know the first thing about me.

  A pissin old bushman due his comeuppance. That’s you, I’d say.

  Toosey dipped his head. I am due it. But not today. Today I have out-thought you. If you want to keep that money, and I know you do, then it is a simple matter of cuttin me loose.

  The man straightened up. He hooked one thumb through his corded belt as his mind worked upon the problem of the bushman.

  I’ll lay it out for you, Toosey said. Straight as I can. Cut me loose. Keep the money hidden. When the Dubliner arrives you tell him you never saw me.

  Is that your fabulous scheme? the deadman said. Give away the money to avoid what you have comin?

  That’s the first part. The second is comin later.

  It was a long and silent moment in which the deadman turned away to pace the shed in a pretence of thought, as if he had a choice that he might otherwise make. He dragged his sleeve across his nose where a sweat had formed upon it. Toosey waited while the man wandered, scuffing his nailed-up boot to make a divot, his eyes on the rutted roadway visible out the door, upon which would soon appear the two ominous figures, the Irishman and his brute. He replaced his hat and pushed on the crown and faced Toosey once more.

  All right, you tiresome prick, he said. All right. I’ll turn you out. But see now, I want you makin northerly over them hills. Swear it to me. You meet them micks on the road and it’s all our heads.

  I have every intention of avoidin them.

  Swear it.

  Best if I keep meself intact. Aint it?

  Then swear.

  I swear.

  The deadman studied him for a time. He whistled his birdcall tune. He stepped outside.

  Among the tools and bits of harness leather littering the floor there lay an axe handle hewn from red-brown myrtle that was coming unsplit in the grain and Toosey was staring at it when the fellow returned, bringing with him the gun. He directed the muzzle at Toosey as he moved around the post, knelt down, and began to uncinch the ropes. Each of Toosey’s wrists bore angry welts that showed where the plaiting had bitten. He squeezed his fist to get the blood pulsing. He pulled his sleeves and buttoned the cuffs and sat looking around himself. The man was standing with the gun on him.

  Go on, he said. Away with you.

  Toosey rolled onto his hands and knees. The dog with its ears raised was watching him. He coughed and stooped into a crouch, coughing and spitting, haggard as he was. Lowering the gun, the man gave a little smile. He started to speak. You need the—he said but then stopped.

  It looked like a glowing iron come from a fire, igniting, dousing, igniting as it passed through the sheeted lights in succession, giving off a faint and even hiss, striking the man in the jaw and pitching him over sideways, his arms in a peculiar loose-limbed flail like rag things, the gun spilling, a red spray of blood aflame in the light shears and speckled with shards of teeth and his hat momentarily hanging where he’d been before plummeting with him to the dirt.

  Toosey was on his feet and standing over him and he raised high the axe handle and hammered it down. The deadman scrabbled over the floor making an unholy wail. There was a wild look to him and he screamed out for Toosey to stop but Toosey would not. He swung blow after blow and swung one that took the deadman above the ear, a vicious thing, well aimed, that tore back the scalp to the bone and the deadman sagged and lay insensate among the hay, his fresh blood a brilliant shade on the straw. Toosey tossed aside the handle. He smeared his palms down his shirt. He crouched by the milk bucket and lifted the ladle off the rim and drank. In a corner of thick dark the dog cowered and turned away from him.

  As he was dipping for a refill and trying to slow his breathing the light of the doorway filled with someone’s shape and a shadow settled over him. He looked around. Here was the wife, hand to her mouth and silent and horror-struck. He replaced the ladle. He nodded.

  I give him fair warnin. Give it to you both.

  Jacky, she said.

  Reckon you better fetch yourself out of here.

  What did you do?

  I’ve done for him.

  You what?

  Best you leave, he said. They’ll be here soon.

  She turned and bolted. Toosey followed into the white-hot day. She was going full flight among a herd of cattle and she stumbled and corrected herself, her eyes huge as she looked back. Yet it was not the wife fleeing that held his attention there in the noon sun. He pinched up his eyes. Away along the road blew a faint cloud of dust. He waited and he watched. The road cut out of the hills, down through gum stands rising chalk white from a cover of tussock grass, and among that scrub he saw two figures emerge from the trees in a hint of movement. And that was all he needed to see.

  Back in the shed he found his faded black hat and planted it on and stacked in one corner was his swag and his few meagre things, a billytin, a pannikin, turnips, flour, raisins in a gunnysack. These he rolled inside his swag. Flies had begun to gather on the deadman and, squatting there, Toosey rolled the fellow onto his back and opened his waistcoat and removed the pouch of money from an inner pocket. He thumbed through, counting notes quietly to himself, and stuck the book inside his jacket. He took up his swag and settled it across his back, tugged down his hat brim, and stepped outside.

  The seekers had advanced somewhat along the roadway and he pressed his hand above his eyes and studied them, two dark nicks against a sand-brown groove, coming only for him. He turned and cut across the field towards the forested hills looming like great unshorn beasts from the farmland, keeping a steady measured pace out through the crops.

  TWO SEEKERS

  THEY SLOGGED SIDE BY SIDE UP the incline where horse carts had traced a pair of thin gutters down from the farmhouse. First came the aged man but in this image he was deceiving for his arms were as thick as derricks contained within a coat tightly buttoned at his wrists. With his hefty walking stick, with the printed neckerchief knotted at his throat, he seemed like some gentleman on tour leisurely viewing his vast ancestral estate. Second came a shorter fellow, spindly armed, and he carried a rolled blanket horse-shoed over his left shoulder. Upon his head was drawn a white cotton hood cut with eyeholes. The two shared neither word nor gesture as they laboured up the hill, studying that secluded parcel, two souls avowed in a common aim.

  The farmhouse was a crude building in a field of feed oats. They stopped near the cobbled forecourt and looked around themselves. There was no sight of anyone. The wall scantling was hand cut and the planks had buckled for lack of decent nails. Little Sussex hens stepped with theatrical care among the weed and thistle. The traveller propped on his stick and removed his bushman’s hat, a limp and sagging thing, with which he waved away the flies. He had on his back a canvas satchel and when he took it off the pots inside clanged in the silence. He moved towards the farmhouse calling out a long cooee. The house listed a foot out of square and a row of props had been placed to counter the mighty lean. Clothes like the quartered dead were pegged on a rope between these braces and he pushed them aside as he bobbed under the poles.

  He entered the kitchen, scattering hens. A fire burned in the stove with a pot of water on the plate. He made a slow circuit and found a crate loaded with turnips. A wad of butter on a
dish. He picked it up and sniffed and put it down. He went outside again. The hooded man was standing in the shade, leaning on the shed. He crossed past him, came before the shed door and stood staring into the depthless black inside, a blackness cut through with shafts of light. He was craning his neck better to see when a bestial scream came from within.

  Mother of fock, he said and staggered back.

  There burst from the dark a madwoman. She was wielding a blood-greased axe handle over her head and she caught him by the throat to club him, but the traveller was fit for this game. He broke her grip with a shove and stood facing her, waiting for what would follow. At her side was a stockdog that showed its teeth and growled. Woman and dog looked between those two strangers in a panic.

  Careful there, marm, the traveller said.

  Get out of it, you bastards!

  She swung hard. The traveller stepped aside and watched it sail by. On the backswing he caught the handle and disarmed her. She scrambled out of his reach believing herself in danger, yet the traveller merely examined the point of the handle, frowned at the blood there, tested it with a finger, and threw the gruesome thing to the ground.

  You done this, she said. You sent that man.

  Oh, he said with a kind of sadness. That man. You’ll be meanin Thomas Toosey, I suppose.

  She was pressing the heels of her hands to her eyes. Oh my sweet saviour, she said. He’s an animal.

  He is, aye, he is.

  A bloody animal, she screamed.

  Where did he go, marm? Can you tell me that now?

  You sent him our way.

  Where is he, marm?

  You killed . . .

  The traveller waited for her to finish. What, marm? Killed what?

  She had backed up against the layered wooden cladding. A quivering took up in her limbs like the violent shake of a hypothermic and she pressed one hand over her mouth, her eyes pinched and beginning to run, and she collapsed as if struck by something vicious.

  At first the traveller seemed unmoved by her display. He watched her shiver and soon stepped away to scan the back paddocks, the thickly covered hills to the east. His eyes searched for sign of the man he’d tracked this last month through scrub stands and fern glades and down trails that ran everyplace across the district, a man he’d seen in his sleep, seen in the black scrags of burnt wattle, seen in the ever-rising dust of the foot roads. But his hooded companion was also watching and the suffering of the farm woman seemed to stir something in him. He moved closer to where she was hunched up, blood on her skirts, blood on her hands, her windblown hair like twine. He hung his arm around her shoulders and rocked with her and smoothed her hair and she collapsed into his shirt folds as if emptied of everything that filled her with life.

  The traveller, resting on his staff, observed the scene from a small remove. What a blessed bloody mess, he said.

  The woman sobbed. Beside her the hooded man with his stark black eyes sat holding her. That animal, she said through her hands. We was meant to be in town meetin his old grandma today. We was meant to walk into town.

  For the love of God, the traveller said, what’s goin on here? We’ve come to find Toosey, not to focking hurt you, begging your pardon. At least let me see if I can’t help.

  Don’t you go near him.

  Near who, marm?

  She was silent, digging the points of her fingers into her forehead, raking at her own skin.

  Can you hear me, marm?

  She looked out through her fingers as if from a cage. You’re Flynn, aint you? she said.

  Aye, Fitheal Flynn, marm.

  They talk about you, Flynn. In Deloraine. Mad as a sack of rabbits they say, the two of you.

  Fitheal Flynn allowed himself the slight tugging of a smile. In matters of redress, marm, he said, better mad than dull.

  Forty blinkin pound, she said. God, you poor silly man.

  Is your husband about? he said, but then it all struck him at once.

  Stupid, silly man, she screamed.

  He glanced around, and his eyes settled upon the shed. He walked to the unlit doorway and peered through. On the ground lay a chap spread in his own blood. Flynn removed his hat. Oh Jaysus, he said.

  Inside, the heat was thick enough to cut. A squall of flies covered the bare parts of the fellow stretched out among the straw. His eyes were bloated shut and in the swelter the blood had congealed into a sort of tacky confection. Flynn stood over him, clutching his hat to his chest, chasing flies with his other hand. There was black around the dead man’s nose where his wife had tried to bring him around by some burnt rags. His shattered jaw was so misshapen that his lower teeth no longer aligned. The gentleman knelt beside him.

  Let’s have a wee look at you, he said.

  Placing his hat aside, Flynn began to feel through the pockets of the husband, first the inner and outer of the jacket and then down to the waistcoat and pants. He pulled out a watch chain to which no watch was attached. He found a few matches in a box, mostly struck. But he did not find what he was looking for, a sheaf of bank notes written out in ten-pound denominations, stolen from him by the miscreant Toosey.

  On winking terms with the devil, is Toosey, he called to the woman. You’re not the first he’s ruined.

  He leaned over the husband’s mouth. Still breathing.

  He stood and replaced his hat and arranged the droop of the brim so that he could see past it. When he stepped out into the furious sun the wife was watching him through the bars of her fingers. He flicked a thumb at the shed and looked away.

  We best be moving him, he said. The flies are eating him up.

  He gave a sharp whistle to the hooded man who was perched still with his arm about the wife. The pair of them entered the storeshed and soon returned hauling the husband between them and they swung him into the kitchen and laid him out among the unwashed plates and the enamelled mugs and stubs of candle on the table, showing him no more regard than a side of beef. The fellow groaned and stirred his legs. Flynn stood looking him over, the grotesque lumps of the man’s face like cancerous tumours, the lifted flaps of hair thick with gore, and while he was a godless man he nevertheless crossed himself out of sheer superstition.

  You’d better be attending to him in here, marm. He has desperate need of you, I should think.

  Flynn stepped into the sun before her.

  He don’t need me no more, she said.

  From the noise he’s making I wager he wants someone.

  She looked sharply up.

  Aye, what with the noise and the kicking.

  She clambered upright and stumbled towards the house. The kitchen was otherwise furnished with chairs devised out of sassafras still in its bark, and she kicked these aside for some room and reached down a kerosene lantern hung on the crossbeam and lit it and placed it for light. She took a washbowl and a cloth and began to towel the blood from his head wounds.

  My blessed saint, she was saying, my blessed saint. He’s alive.

  By the foot of the table the hooded man waited with his hands upraised as if he dared not touch the battered man but knowing all the same he ought to help. His head inside the hood was swivelling and tilting as he watched the woman at work and in the end he came beside and held the washbowl so she could better reach it. The wife wiped away the foul matter of crusted blood and soil and straw from the fellow laid out there, cleaned up the lumpen jaw and the wide and cruelly split nose, and through it all her husband moaned. The hooded man took the fellow’s hand and squeezed it.

  Which way did he go? Flynn said. He was standing in the doorway blocking the light.

  Please, my husband needs help. He needs the surgeon.

  Marm—

  He’ll come for a shilling. Please, he won’t live. He needs help.

  No.

  You must bring the surgeon. He won’t live.

  Listen. I should like to fetch the sawbones for you. I should like nothing more, upon my honour. But my companion and I have business with Toosey
that will not wait.

  Fitheal Flynn nodded towards where the hooded man was waiting by the table gripping the limp hand of the husband. Window sunlight picked out the wealth of stains in the white cotton, old brown blood, rings of dust. Each corner of the hood stood like a dog’s ear and his eyes recessed in the shadows were black and dire. A journeyman passed out of some legendary land or a night terror given shape and substance, who could say. He replaced the fellow’s hand on the table and stepped back.

  She looked from one to the other. Just who are you two? she said.

  Farmers is all we are, marm, farmers of the Quamby.

  I never saw no farmer get about with a pistol, she said and she pointed at the heavy revolving gun lodged in the band of Flynn’s belt. Flynn put his hand on the grip and let it sit there.

  Which way did he go? he said.

  She was staring at the gun. What? You mean to kill him, do you?

  That’s the head and tail of it, I suppose, marm.

  Then do it without me. I’ll have no part of murderin.

  She wrung her cloth and set to bathing her husband, nothing more to say.

  Tis less the murdering than it is the taking of justice. Don’t you see that? Well, and by God, he has all but killed your husband.

  She turned fiercely. Him? she said. I’ll tell you what I see. I see Jacky lyin here needin the surgeon, and I see you with your gun and your hangman over there, mad as rabbits the pair of you, lettin him die. Who’s the murderer? Eh? Who?

  Flynn pushed back his hat. If he was bothered he made no demonstration but just narrowed his eyes and nodded. He turned out to the cobbled yard.

  A huge wooded range filled the land behind the farmhouse, a field of white and sombre gums studded through with darker wattle that everywhere hewed to the hills and Fitheal Flynn stood for a time in study, looking towards and over the paddocks, searching for some sign of the fugitive. He retrieved his knapsack and drew it over his shoulders and took up his travelling staff as well. An eagle cruised black before the sky’s watery blue. For a time Fitheal Flynn stood sipping from a bottle bound around with twine and secured to his bag by a thong, considering the country presented there before him, the bird turning above, the range of mournful gums. When he finally looked away, came about and stoppered his bottle, he saw crouching by the watering trough his oldest child. His daughter Caislin. She had removed her hood and was splashing her forehead with water. She put her hand out to him.