by Rohan Wilson
Toosey felt it before he heard it. A quivering in the air, a distant violence. He turned and stood gazing out along the gleaming steel with his ear cocked to the sky. The boys heard it too.
She’s comin, the younger one said.
Above the canopy to the west seethed a great grey thunderhead marking the passage of the engine as she neared. Hordes of jackdaws and parrots and cockatoos vacated the clearway trees in a single screaming cloud, sent aloft by the steam disturbing the growth by the rails. When her stout black maw drew around out of the scrub and with the blare of her horn it was like the coming of a sea vessel groping through a fog. She slowed on the upward slope and behind the engine came carriages and flat beds and box-sided trucks and the draw gear snatched loudly along the consist where the slack was taken up. The windows crawling by were packed with travellers of every kind, workmen and women in sun hats and children pressing their noses to the glass. The boy had not removed his eyes from Toosey and had not removed the gun. The carriages rattled behind him in procession.
Georgie, he said over the howl of the train.
The younger one watched the train with stark wonder.
Georgie, make ready for it.
I am. I’m ready.
Mister, you try to chase us and I’ll fire a ball through you.
Toosey was staring at the gun.
Fire and be done with it, the boy said.
Toosey ground his jaw. The train shuttled by in a huge commotion.
The boy tucked the butt to his shoulder. All right, Georgie, move.
Now?
Now. Move.
High-sided guano trucks rattled past. The younger one was hardly taller than the running gear he jogged beside but he sprang and caught the wooden siderack to haul himself aboard. The older one backed up. Training the muzzle on Toosey still. At a distance of some yards he turned and slung the rifle and ran.
In the seconds that followed Toosey knelt into the bracken and went about after his letter. He’d humped that sorry-looking thing over the district for weeks and would not lose it now. He stuffed it in his pocket, and his knife with it, and he shouldered his swag and followed the train at a steady lope. Holding his hat, the swag bouncing. Riled like he’d never been. It was the last carriage and he ran between the rails from sleeper to sleeper as the train laboured uphill. Running hard, scowling, he lobbed his swag overhead into a gated tray and caught the hangladder and climbed. The boys had found purchase on the sideboards with the gate wedged under their armpits. The three of them eyed one another across the empty wagon.
There sounded in the dusk’s gloom a thundering report and the piece of planking by Toosey’s leg splintered. He looked down. A fist-sized hole was punched clean through the board. When he looked up the boys had scrambled over the barrier, the rifle with them, scrambled and toppled into the last of the guano muck, the rifle sliding about, the truck rocking, and they flattened against the boards and covered their heads. A second crack tolled and died along hills and long before it finished Toosey knew what it meant. Every nerve ending in him fizzed at once. He turned and looked downline.
Two figures sprinting full tilt up the straightaway. He could hear their boots crunching in the gravel and could see the pistol being levelled at him. He heaved himself over the barrier as another gunshot sounded and the wood burst beside his ear. He toppled into the guano muck.
Fuckin Jesus, he said.
The boys stared at him, astonished. Who is that?
The gun, lad, the gun.
They fed it out. Toosey set back the hammer and kneeled with it propped at his shoulder. The seekers had made ground on the train, close enough that in the fading daylight he could see how the girl wore a white hood. He wasn’t ready for the shock this gave. He’d heard people talk, yet seeing her for himself was another thing. He almost put the gun aside in shame. Let them be, was the thought he had. You’ve done enough. But another shot smashed the planking by his arm and he felt the wind of the passing lead and he knew for all the world he had no such choice to make. He rose with that firearm and centred the Irishman along the barrel. At this the seekers broke for the sidescrub after shelter and he tracked the Irishman to the left and jerked the trigger. The hammer gave an empty clack. He looked at the pan. It was unprimed.
Where’s your powder? he said to the boy.
Aint none.
Do not piss about. Give it here.
The boy shook his head. There’s none at all.
What?
It’s gone. All of it.
In the bush by the rail line the Irishman continued at a flat run, flushed and heaving as the wash from the smokestack eddied past him. Some yards back his hooded shadow lumbered along and they seemed for a time, the two of them, to be growing smaller. Toosey watched through the holes in the wood. He had begun to believe them gone when the sound of the engine changed. It was losing speed shy of the hill’s peak and slowing and the hissing of its pistons grew laboured. Now they gained ground. Toosey wiped his palms on his shirt and then he removed the knife from his jacket. He turned to the boys.
Get up the back, he said.
They talked over each other.
Who is that?
We never done nothin, did we?
What have we done to them?
They’re killers.
Get up the back I said. They won’t hurt you. Just keep your mouth shut.
Toosey rolled onto his knees and stole a glance over the rim of the barrier and dropped down again. Just get up the back, he said again.
The Irishman was first to make the train. He grabbed the hangladder and heaved himself up. Through the bullet holes Toosey watched it unfold, a run of events as if in a dream, the thick knots of knuckle locking on the rungs, one, a second, and then the corrugated forehead and pinched eyes of Fitheal Flynn as he rose into view. He chose his moment to lean above the barrier swinging the knife. It was directed at Flynn’s arm. The blade cut a gash there in the coat and Flynn let go of the ladder, startled, and toppled onto the rails. He crashed and rolled in a spray of gravel. The engine was broaching the hill and the whole train built momentum as the heavier front end descended and hauled with it the long snaking consist. The Irishman clambered to his feet, aimed his gun, and called.
Square off to me like a man. You hear me, Toosey? Like a man.
He fired a useless shot above the truck. The train pulled away ever faster.
A batch of sweat had formed in the ridges of Toosey’s brow. He wiped away the damp hair. He looked across at the boys and they stared nervously in return. His small black hat sat in the muck rocking with the motion of the train. He brushed it off, replaced it. The carriage passed further into a wooded cutting and the sun flickered in the overhang of limbs, picking two frightened boys out of the shade at intervals, their eyes like clean spots in the grime, staring through the unsteady light.
Who are you, mister? Some kind of runaway or somethin?
I told you, he said. The freight truck swayed beneath them, the bone-break sound of the wheels. I’m the wildest man you will meet.
The boys drew close to each other, crouching in the guano dust and made pale with it, and they hardly dared take their eyes off this uncommon bushman, for he was not yet done with them. He stood with the sway of the truck, clutching the side gate, and stepped towards them. He put out his hand.
Now, he said. I want the money back.
The older one fumbled from his pants the leather pocketbook and passed it up.
Toosey eased it off him. He stood a moment longer, looking down at them, their arms around each other. He turned and shuffled to the rear and took up a place by the bullet-holed gate. Through the wounds in the wood the country passed by and in time he closed his eyes and appeared to almost doze off, so that when he sat rapidly upright and began to pat himself over it caused the boys some alarm. He slapped at each pocket in turn, felt around inside his jacket, and produced a creased and stained envelope. Once more he leaned back, holding that letter, and like a chi
ld with a sugar-rag it somehow soothed him. Lowering his hat across his eyes and leaning back, he locked his hand in his lap and rocked with the ocean-roll of the train.
LONGFORD
THEY DESCENDED OUT OF GUM FOREST, Flynn and his daughter, and followed the rails across the flatlands west of Longford. In the late dark the stars hung like points of ice, looking singularly cold and distant. The whole moon steam-white. They walked and Fitheal Flynn sang along a few bars of a taverner’s ballad he knew from the old country, tapping his stick to keep time. ‘Tis well I do remember that bleak November day,’ he sang, ‘when bailiff and landlord come to drive us away.’ Soon the few faint lights of Longford loomed up out of the plain ahead. They walked ever towards them.
At Longford station they left the tracks and dropped their bedding and other pieces under the raised platform deck. They crouched there beneath it for a time assessing the town across the mud streets, a row of double-height buildings following the curve of the main road, erratic in design and material, a bank with fluted columns of white stone and a plain emporium painted green. Elsewhere, a brick hotel under the sign of a carven coat of arms. Light from the hotel windows spilled onto the street and that was all the light there was for their camp. It would be a long night, one more in a series of many.
They found what small comfort they could under the platform decking sheltered in their blankets, empty bellied. Soon a song started in the hotel that drifted faintly by. Caislin had a wedge of damper that she had wrapped and kept from their last meal and she passed it to Flynn, but he was in no mood to eat. He sat cleaning the bulldog pistol, pushing spent shells with the ejector pin and ramrodding the cylinder with a rag, holding the barrel to the moon and peering through it. She watched him from her slackly hanging eyeholes.
I’m to blame, he said. I had him clean as daylight and I missed.
It wasn’t clean, she said.
Near as we will get.
He packed in new rounds from his shirt pocket.
O’Malley should never have given you that, she said.
Let me be worrying about it.
You aint thinkin this through, Pa. What if you had shot him today?
He exhaled. The world would be thanking me, he said.
And if you’d been caught for it?
Flynn snapped the cylinder closed. Aye, well, he said. Would have been a bastard, wouldn’t it.
It’s the money, she said. That’s all we want.
No.
We aint after blood.
Flynn looked up. We’re not after money neither.
Caislin fell silent. There was fiddling coming from the hotel that was only dim at this distance, dim and made mournful by the wind.
He could be anywhere, she said.
That made him smile. No, he said. Tis the bills. They’re not worth a cuss till he changes them.
Someone might change them for him.
Two hundred pound? Flynn said, his eyebrows drawing together.
Then what?
He does it hisself. Does it at the bank.
Launceston, she said.
Another thing, he’s a wife and child there.
Bloody Launceston, she said and her head dropped.
Watch how you speak.
That’s twenty mile.
If we be leaving at dawn, we’ll make it by night.
I know. Don’t make me like it any more though.
Caislin broke apart the bread. She lifted the hem of the hood and passed bits up to her mouth.
Take that off, he said.
No.
You need air. You need light.
He could see the outline of the cotton shifting with her jaw. She chewed and he watched her. Then she removed the hood. Flynn drew a sharp breath. He looked away. Oh my girl, he said.
She folded the hood by bringing in the corner and doubling it through the middle and the cotton was as mottled with stains and was as soft and pliant as a sheet of ancient vellum. She laid it neatly aside on her bedroll for replacing in the morning. She tore the bread and ate more.
Soon Flynn began to cry. It was a quiet sound, constricted, and he wrung his hands and could not look at her as he squeezed his mouth and eyes closed.
My love, he said. Forgive me.
That won’t help us, she said.
Forgive me.
Caislin worked the hard wad of bread around with her tongue. That don’t matter no more, she said.
I shouldn’t have left you there. Left you with the money.
We’ll get it back. That will be the end of it.
Flynn wiped his eyes.
Let Toosey get away and where’s the use in any of this?
Aye, said Flynn, I know. You’re right. Course you’re right.
Caislin turned away and stretched out on the canvas still in boots as was her habit. She tugged the blankets around her chin.
Go to sleep, she said.
All right.
But he sat for a long time feeling a familiar ache. She was outlined against the dark, all in black, like a feature of the land. Her breath rising and falling. He grit his teeth until his jaw ached. He squeezed shut his eyes. That one name wandering the blank of his mind. That one thought of pain. After a time he took up the pistol and cracked it and finished loading the cylinder.
• • •
The sun, risen from a fire in the hills, had burnt for an hour and below the paltry station platform in their exhaustion they slept. The tin whistle of a guardsman woke them and in the brewing warmth of morning Flynn crawled from their cubbyhole and stood and arched his back, blinking in the hard light. An imposing double-span bridge stretched across the river into town, the stone centre pier set upon an island, and a locomotive was running the whole length of it sending blooms of steam up through the girders. He popped his back and watched the train roll and halt with a horrendous squeal. The guardsman signalled folk to stand clear of the dropaway and blew his whistle and moved along the carriages unlatching the doors of first and second class. Flynn scratched an armpit, sniffed and spat.
Rouse yourself, he said.
But Caislin had stirred already at the approach of the engine and sat gowned again in her hood.
You must be hungry, she said.
I could gnaw off my own arm.
She went about the rolling of the blankets.
The sound of applause caused him to look up. He scratched himself. Pouring out of the carriages were upwards of a hundred formally dressed Rechabites, each wearing across his shoulder a splendid blue and gold sash proclaiming the title of his independent order. Some held aloft ornate banners strung on poles and others carried brass instruments, playing scales to warm their lips, beating senselessly on drums. The crowd applauded and Flynn shook his head. What in the name of fock, he said.
Who are they?
Caislin had dragged out their gear and stood now likewise staring.
Teetotallers, he said. For the love of God, would you look at them.
Elaborately dressed men descended the stairs from the platform into the street. Flynn stood with his hands on his hips just watching them pass. After an interval the two of them humped up their gear and followed. With their week on the back roads they’d slowly acquired the look of derelicts, which by many measures they were. The folk they passed in the road stepped aside at the sight of them. Flynn though kept his head high and looked elsewhere.
The smell of bread brought them to a red-brick bakery sheltered by a painted awning and written with the name Smiths. A bell rang atop the door as it opened and rang again as it shut and they stood in the shop gazing variously at the wicker baskets stacked with loaves and pastries and the sacks of flour piled like corpses. The proprietor emerged tucking a cloth into his apron string and he placed both hands down on the stone counter. Flynn came forward. He pointed at a gallon loaf. He began to speak but the proprietor was looking past him at Caislin.
What are you sposed to be?
Flynn had a handful of coins and he doled them out o
n the counter. Give me a loaf of that there, he said
An Irish clown show is it?
Póg mo thóin, Flynn said.
Some mick bloody clown show or somethin, the proprietor said. He reached for a loaf and placed it before Flynn and took two of the coins. His eyebrows and sidewhiskers were white with flour and his jowls shook when he laughed. The peatbogging clown show, he said and laughed at himself.
They broke bread squatting in the street as the Rechabites stood about conversing in their dozens, shaking hands in a strange fashion with one another, a secret perhaps devised among themselves. They were meant to be a temperance movement, but of late the Rechabites seemed given more and more to the intrigues of politics and the power of a secret. A tent had been erected in the main road where ginger ale was served from a washtub and a woman came past, four mugs in each of her hands passing them out. She came past and she saw Caislin and gave a little start. What the devil, she said and steered away, sloshing ale in the dust.
They had contrived a podium out of apple crates and soon the chief ruler took to it and raised his feathered bicorn and called for quiet. Behind him some fellows held a banner that depicted Jane inviting Jonadab onto his chariot, and stitched across the silk in black lettering was the motto: Is thine heart right, as my heart is with thy heart.
Brothers, the chief ruler cried, we are come here today to loudly condemn the making, levying and enforcing of the railway rate.
This was met by wild applause.
Oh Jaysus, Flynn said. It’s the rate they’re on about.
We should be movin, Caislin said.
Would you look at him up there. I’d like to punch him in the cakehole.
There are three great historic curses, the chief ruler cried. War. Pestilence. Famine. But corruption is the unknown curse. It is corruption that we should fear. Corruption that keeps us in a state of serfdom. Since our inception the Rechabite movement has taught thousands to make their own way to self respect and has created in them a spirit of manliness. We have energised just as many in social and religious matters. We have created among the people the desire for self-government. But the parliament. The parliament, my brothers. That troupe of thieves. That society of cowards. They have abandoned us to the wolves of greed.
