by Rohan Wilson
Give us your drink, she said.
A lump swelled in his throat as he looked down at her. Is it hurting? he said.
She splashed herself. Yes, she said.
Oh, my love, he said.
Give us it here.
He unwound the leather thong, passed her the bottle. She plunged it into the trough that was chipped out of a single block of stone fringed with moss from the damp. She plunged the neck and the surface boiled.
We should fetch the surgeon, she said.
His lump tightened. Come on now, he said and it hurt to talk. Come on.
We should.
Cross them hills, you see, and it’s clear country the other side. That’s where he’s gone, isn’t it? Cross them hills.
Then let him run, she said and passed the dripping bottle.
No.
We’d be back tomorrow. We’d have that fellow a surgeon.
Give him a day, you might as well give him a year. No. We are close. We shall find him in the valley lands tomorrow or you can hang me from the walls of Derry.
Caislin Flynn dried her hands on her pants, stood, and with the ease of ritual drew the hood over herself and she was, again, that singular man all the world saw. She, his truest blessing, hidden somewhere inside, the illusion of her manliness so complete, so compelling, that even he had taken it to heart and turned it, he believed, to their good. He ought not to have allowed Caislin to follow. She was in pain. She was troubled. Her sisters needed her at home. But how, when she had appeared to him that day he left, dressed in this costume, her arms stiff by her sides with anger, how was he to say no? So here they were on the road together and he was glad for it.
There is them biscuits, she said, if you’re hungry.
I’m all right.
You look hungry, she said. You look pale.
Pale never killed nobody.
She fished a bundle from her pocket and unwrapped it, held out to him a pair of hard-looking meal cakes. He took a piece and bit into it, surveying the hills and hills of scrub as he chewed.
What a dour bit of bush, he said around the cake, and, by God, with him in it somewhere.
Flynn moved out into the field of oats that filled the back paddock, and here he paused and took stock of what he saw. For cut through the crop was a trail, snaking out towards the hand-cleared land beyond, the piles of unburned gum and bracken and rows of severed stone-grey stumps. A trail writ plainly in the broken oats, the heavy boot prints of one man. Flynn chewed his biscuit. You are some sort of fool, Thomas Toosey, he said.
Caislin drew up beside him.
See that, he said, and pointed to the divots.
What if he dies? she said. Him back there.
Without another word Flynn set off, adjusting the knapsack on his shoulders, his tin pots ringing. She looked back at the house and she looked at her father hiking through the young oats. She lowered her head and followed after him.
That’s our doing, she called.
Flynn walked on.
We might have killed him, she said.
Still Flynn did not stop but spoke across his shoulder as he went. You struck that chap, did you? he said. You beat him three-quarters dead with a focking piece of wood and focking stove his skull and whatnot?
Caislin trod in the tracks he’d made and kept quiet.
Aye, well, and keep your thoughts on what was done, he said. Keep them there. It shall stiffen your arm when the time comes.
He followed the trail towards the wooded range and where it led into wild land unwalked by common folk, the preserve of absconders and bushrangers. The sun grazed a barren sky above. They crossed into bracken taking hold at the scrub’s edge, formed up close together, father and daughter, and entered the bush among the racket of cicadas and the desiccant heat. They laboured up a rise that was loosely scrubbed with blackwood and great sallow swamp gum, Flynn leaning into his stick and scouring the trail, beside him his daughter lifting her boots over the rearing stones and setting them heavily down.
Stiffen your arm, he said, as if he’d been considering it this short while. Stiffen your heart too. For that time is coming and we must not flinch.
LIFFEY VALLEY
IN THE EARLY EVENING DARK AMONG the man ferns of the damp hill’s foreslope Toosey unbundled his bedroll and sat watching his backtrack and waiting. He built no fire and took no tea but sat on the blankets peeling a turnip with his knife, passing slices to his lips. A bone-splinter moon rose wondrous within the overspread of stars, the dark below the gums deepening into blue and then black, but still no one appeared upon the slope. Had he eluded them? There was no way to know. He shaved a long shining slice, curved like the very moon above, and ate.
When it was full dark he unwound some wire snares from his coat pocket and spread them on his swagroll. Wallaby runs cut here and there through the brush and he walked out and planted stakes and hung the snares with a four-inch loop across the hollows. He made his bed by a ridge where the warmth of the day gave off the stone and where he was hidden as if in a pair of jaws. He settled back and after a time he pulled a crumpled envelope from his pocket. It was addressed to him, care of the Deloraine post office. He slipped the paper out and unfolded it. There wasn’t moon enough to read but he knew it by heart.
My deer Mother is dead. I have been turned out of Home. I have nothing at all Deer Father I wish you wood come back. There is no home for me with out you. I have only You in the hole world to love. I hope You will stow this letter safly as a tresher of my faith in You your loyal Son.
He lay listening to the night and charting out the matter of finding his boy in that dog-poor town. Below the canopy the shrieking of possums, the falling and breaking of sticks. It was easy to imagine someone spilling out of the bush for him, yet as he looked about there was only the dark. A night sown with stars. He laid back and watched the moon loll onward into the void. He clutched that letter and kissed it.
• • •
Come dawn he stowed his bedding and walked out to pull the snares. In one a potteroo gone cold and wooden. He stuffed it inside his billytin for eating later. Having cleared the wires, he picked a path further west for country he had crossed in the winter, country that he knew in some manner. He descended down the rainforested slope where stringybarks grew tall and full of sun like gargantuan flowers, stopping to study the bush behind him, listening for voices. The low-down dawn light burning his eyes, he crossed a creeklet and mounting the far bank he scared up a host of crayfish that scuttled away to chimneys pitting the soil, and soon the relic rainforest lessened. He left the incline and within a mile the scrub thinned and then, on a sudden, he was standing on a plain of tufted grass that covered the land away to the bluffs. He followed the scrub’s edge where there was cover, bent under his load of swag, the billytin in his fingers rattling and him setting a mad pace.
His first sight of the island as a child of fourteen sent out for thieving two overcoats in the winter of 1827 was the sandstone buildings studding the hill above the harbour in Hobart town and when they brought him above decks of the Woodford in iron fetters and set him aboard a longboat for the shore he’d thought Hobart a pissing version of his own Blackpool, the inlaying of warehouse masonry much like the stores on Talbot Road, the stark shapes of houses near the same, but then the winter mist parted from the mountain peak above and he knew he was in venerable country, as old as rock, and it wasn’t long before he became indentured to the frontiersman John Batman who ran a trade in victualling the army, and here the boy Thomas learned how the island’s wilder parts truly belonged to the tribal blacks, a displaced people taking refuge in the hills, and for a government bounty and to secure his land this frontiersman meant to hunt them by whatever means just or unjust, bloody or brave, and he marshalled a party of transportees and black trackers and put into the scrub armed for war and war it was, a bloody war, in which all hands were soiled and Thomas’s no less than another’s for a killer now he was, an easy killer, and yet while he was diminishe
d by it, made less in God’s eyes and his own, he saw in the bullet, the knife, and the club a power that could make a man his own master.
In the early afternoon he climbed a hillock and lay flat to scan the terrain he had crossed. He removed his hat and held it before the sun to shade his eyes. He could see over the backhills and grasslands he had recently quit and he could see kangaroo mobs and feel their pounding through the earth and see a small flock of rosellas dipping and swinging and making horrible cries. The sun caused his eyes to water, which he wiped on his sleeve and it was then, as he was dabbing, that he saw a flash of white in the far-off scrub. The trees leaned, worked on by a current. He watched and waited, finger halfway to his face. In the bloom of the full sun his eyes teared. Nothing but the wind, the trees ajig, his own track left snake-like through the grass. An uneasy feeling remained lodged in his abdomen as he humped up his gear and left.
On the hard walk down the hill he produced the pocketbook, untied it and thumbed through the banknotes. They were stamped with the Launceston Bank for Savings insignia in fine blue ink and he considered this as he tracked out through a copse of long-ago burnt gums that wore a green fur of regrowth. He counted the notes, retied the cord, and tucked the pocketbook into his coat. Late in the day he forded a knee-deep creek, scrabbled up through ferns on the far side into the land beyond with the horizon light in his eyes, blunt light sheared by cloud, sheared by the whitish trees. Soon he passed that country through and came upon the railway that had been his destination.
He stood gazing left and right along the rails. They split clear through the brush on a bed of blue metal, drawing away to a point in the infinite distance. He dropped his swag and kneeled in the ballast and pressed his hand to the iron. He sat for a moment with it so and then he bent down and rested his cheeks against the bullhead. There was no pulse that he could discern, no movement, and so he stood and looked again along it. The sun was falling into the hills and throwing a thin wafting light over the forest. He resettled his bedroll and made easterly along the clearway beside the line.
• • •
I see you over there, the voice said. Don’t think I don’t.
Toosey had stepped off into the wayside and found a hollow in the feathery infant wattle where he could hide. He’d dropped his swag and was sitting on it to wait for the train. It was a meagre sort of nest beneath parched bush that was flaked with dark smoke-stack soot but he had a view of the rail line cutting around the bend, tracking up a hill, and that was all he needed. He would see the train before it made the incline, would have time to set himself for the chase.
I said I seen you.
Then you aint seein me right if you still think I give a shit, Toosey said.
On the far side of the track two figures emerged from the gorse. A boy of fourteen or so, and beside him another boy who was younger and grubbier, and if they had anything more than the rags they stood in Toosey could not see it, no bags, bedrolls or blankets. They studied him through the brush. The older one towelled his nose with an overlong shirt sleeve and sniffed.
Has someone given you a touch-up or somethin? he said.
Toosey looked down at the blood on himself. He hadn’t noticed it.
Got any grub? the older said.
We are hungry is all, the younger said. We aint hardly had more than a mouthful in days, I swear. A mouthful of bully beef is all we’ve had.
We aint eaten in days, the older said.
How long till that train? Toosey said.
She’ll be along. You’ll hear it. Watch for the smoke over the trees.
When?
The boy looked confused. When you hear it, he said.
Toosey smoothed his moustache with the web of his thumb. He could see the boys watching him, gaunt and vulture-eyed. He reached inside his swagroll and found a turnip and lobbed it underhand across the rails into the brush beside them. They disappeared into the gorse. There was a brief commotion as they searched, followed by a longer silence. He sat back on his swag. Something thudded on the litter to his right. They began to call over each other.
I hate them things.
That aint food.
We saw your meat, mister.
Give us some meat.
We aint et today.
You got any bread? Come on, mister.
Among the fronds of bracken Toosey sat listening to the din and testing now and then edge of his knife. He reached and picked up the turnip. He stood. The boys were watching him across the barren of rail and blue metal where nothing grew save thistle, and he drew his arm and flung it hard and collected the smaller one squarely in the forehead. The boy rocked back and toppled into the brush.
Toosey stood grinning. It was a mean shot and he was grinning and thinking it a bit of sport, when the older boy pulled something from the bushes that looked like a mattock or a rake and stood holding it. Toosey’s grin fell. He found himself staring into the cavernous eye of a rifle barrel. The boy palmed back the heavy mechanism.
You fucker, you won’t laugh no more, will you, he said.
The younger one beside him began to jump with excitement. Shoot the old cuss, Reggie, shoot him in the face. Go on.
I will if he don’t give me that meat.
See now, Toosey said, there is no need for this.
Give us what you got there. That meat there and whatever you got. All of it.
Toosey stood perfectly still.
Give it here.
Well come and get it, Toosey said.
The older one made a motion with the gun towards the billytin. His small companion scaled the camber monkey-wise and crossed the rails, dragging a formless shadow over the gravel. The potteroo was stiff and stuck out straight from the can and the boy snatched it by the feet, his eyes never leaving off Toosey. Toosey stood very still, no expression at all on his face, watching the long birding gun that was trimmed on him.
How much you got? the older one said.
Toosey clicked his tongue. He looked away.
I know you got somethin. Turn him over, Georgie.
The younger one put his hands inside Toosey’s trouser pockets. Toosey made no move against him. He came away with a long twine-handled knife and a tinderbox and striking iron looped on a length of wire that he dropped on the ground. In the hacking pockets of Toosey’s thin tweed coat he found a clutch of snares and tossed them aside. When he dipped again into the hacking pocket he found a letter in an envelope folded and refolded until it had near worn through its creases. The boy studied it. He looked around at his mate.
He is skint.
Keep goin.
I have. There’s nothin.
You aint done the insides.
I done em.
You aint.
The boy unbuttoned Toosey’s jacket. He reached up for the cavities, found the pocketbook stashed there, and prised it away.
You find somethin, Georgie?
A purse.
Open it then.
He untied the cord. It’s bills.
Forget the pocketbook, lads, Toosey said.
Shut your bleedin gob. If we want it, we’ll have it.
Not this one. Forget this one.
Seems I’m the man with the piece but.
Toosey lifted his eyes, a dark and glassy brown. How far you think you’ll get? he said.
I’ll bloody fire on you, see if I don’t.
The boy had moved onto the camber and was aiming down at Toosey. He glanced variously at the bush and at Toosey as if he was beset by a whole brace of swagmen more than just this one lonely soul. His finger tapped at the trigger guard in a light staccato.
You won’t find us, he said. You aint got a hope. We know these woods don’t we, Georgie?
Better than any bugger, Georgie said.
Take the meat, Toosey said. You can have it. But forget the purse.
Come here, Georgie.
I’ve gone through some hell to have it, Toosey said.
Georgie!
The younger wa
s waving the pocketbook as he crossed the rails. It’s bills, he said.
And I will go through more to keep it, Toosey said.
The boy tapped at the steel trigger guard. He stared hard at Toosey.
You don’t scare me.
Take that purse and won’t neither of you will see another sunrise, Toosey said.
How much is in there? the boy said to his mate.
The younger fingered through the notes. I can’t read what they says.
Two hundred pound, Toosey said.
There aint.
Not another sunrise, Toosey said. As I live and breathe.
Show us one, Georgie.
The younger one held up a bill that his mate might read it. Toosey could see the boy’s mouth working as he made out letter by letter the denomination. He looked at Toosey.
This says ten.
That’s right. There is twenty bills there.
The boy shook the gun at him. Where’d you come on two hundred quids?
A sum like that, Toosey said, by Christ it will send men wild. And believe me when I say I’m the wildest man you shall ever meet.
Try it.
Reggie’s your name, is it?
The boy said nothing.
I have a son, Reggie. Not much bigger than you. He’ll be on my mind when I find you in the dark. Tonight in the dark. It will sadden me a good deal.
You won’t find us.
Sad for your father. Sad I had to hurt a boy who brings to mind me own son.
You won’t find us I said.
Shoot him, Reg. Go on. Shoot.
It’s just talk, Georgie.
Shoot him. Shoot him.
He won’t do it. He’s a pissin old windbag is what he is. Don’t let him scare you none.
Shoot him. He’ll come for us, he’ll find us.
Shut your gob a minute and listen. It’s talk, George, that’s what. Talk. Like it was talk in Westbury, remember? That bugger never come after us and this one here won’t find us neither. We know these woods.
