To Name Those Lost

by Rohan Wilson

  It was an accident, that is the truth.

  Judging you is not my concern, Thomas Toosey. Stoving your skull is what I’m about.

  You righteous Irish prick.

  Aye, and make ready now.

  Toosey began to circle, bearing his weapon up, strings of hair in his eyes. The blade appeared in a beam of moon and then vanished, like a light doused in the dark. Toosey crabbed around, circled right and cut back left and Flynn turned with him. But the Dubliner had reach on his side and he used it. He swung a blow at Toosey that bounced off his leading forearm. They broke off and circled each other, weapons up. Toosey raised his voice.

  That’s weighted with lead.

  Flynn swung hard overhead at him. Toosey raised his arm to take it. The bulb struck full weight and Toosey cried out. He skipped backwards.

  It is.

  Fuckin Jesus.

  Toosey was cradling his arm and doubling over. Flynn swung the staff again before him in a double-handed pass that sounded through the air and the effort caused him to hiss and scowl at Toosey. The return swing caught Toosey across the knee and upended him. He fell to his back. Flynn seized the advantage and strode forward. He lifted the stick and pummelled the bulb into Toosey’s chest and drove the wind from his lungs in a loud expulsion. Before the next blow fell Toosey rolled. He found his feet but his head was hanging low and the knife was only loosely perched in his hand. He stumbled backwards out of range.

  Flynn moved with him. He swung high, the staff whistling in the quiet, and brought it down like an axe across Toosey’s lifted arm. The thud it made was woeful. Toosey yelped, yet he did not retreat. For in that action Flynn had exposed his belly and Toosey leaned and buried the blade clean to the handle.

  A second passed where Flynn was standing over him in numb silence, a long subsiding wheeze releasing from his lips. He looked down at Toosey with a grimace, the staff going slack in his grip, slipping down by Toosey’s ear. Flynn stepped slightly and shuddered.

  The blade ripped sideward with a vicious flair. Flynn rocked back. A knot of cut blue bowel hung through the slit in his shirt and he looked at it like he didn’t know what it was. He slumped to the ground, grasping for his staff for what good it might do him. He toppled.

  Toosey cradled his arm at his waist. A huge welt had formed and he could not close a fist. He braced it against himself. At length he reached down and picked up his knife and wiped it clean on his pants and placed it in his teeth. He turned to look at the Irishman.

  The ground greased with blood, pooling blackly in the dark. The Irishman was tenderly returning the cords of intestine into his wound and his hands were bloody and shaking. For a time Toosey just stood gazing at him splayed out there in his mess, fumbling with his internals. He walked over to Flynn and knelt with him.

  Flynn tried to sit up. He held the ragged gash, his eyes on Toosey. Toosey sat forward over him and took the knife from his mouth and with a single forceful motion he punched the steel into the heart’s hollow. Blood ran around the weapon, ran hotly through his fingers. Flynn clawed for Toosey’s neck. Toosey raised the knife and brought it down again. Then he stood and moved away. Flynn’s eyes tracked him as he paced. He watched the Irishman in return.

  Don’t you linger, you bastard, he said.

  He walked up and down watching the mouth of the lane, the men out there in the smoke. Flynn wheezing softly in the dark. He paced and he waited for Flynn to die. Flynn lifted his hand and let it fall. Soon he sagged inside his clothes and lay still.

  Toosey slipped his jacket tenderly over his bad arm. He dried his hands on the lapels and he crouched by his old friend. A pair of pearl-hard eyes alight in the moon, his mouth agog. Flynn looked like a child seeing suddenly the shape of a constellation. If there was more of a world beyond that laneway it was to him peripheral in those brief beats of the heart. All he knew was that man, those eyes. He shook out the jacket and laid it over the Irishman.

  A lump was growing on his forearm. He tested the contusion with his thumb and the pain was fearful. He braced it to his chest and found some small relief. It was broken, but it didn’t matter now. He needed to get away from here and that was all he could think about. He stood and began along the lane and after a few steps he stopped and turned back. There was something else. Squatting again beside the dead man he reached into the jacket and retrieved William’s letter and he kissed the greasy paper and placed it in his shirt pocket. He walked to the street. Into a world wholly new. And he was pale as a figure of carven bone.

  THE STAR OF THE NORTH HOTEL

  HE CUT ALONG THE ROAD WHERE the cave-mouths of shops stood, the plate glass smashed and spread about in a frost of shards. There were men here looting clothes, shanks of meat, camp lanterns, some calling to each other and one man making off with a rifle yoked behind his neck. Toosey watched them pass from the dark of a lane. Keeping to the shadows, he crossed to a stable and bent and washed his good hand in a water trough, brought up his boots and rinsed the blood there as well. He buried his face and took a drink. Across the way the druggist was on fire. He dried his face on his sleeve. Smoke tumbled upward from the window frames and ran along the portico. There was an odd greenish tinge to the blaze. A man was attending to it with a bucket, tossing water through the windows. The fire, however, grew only fiercer. At his last toss he dropped the bucket, put his hands on his head, and knelt in the street. He began to cry and call to God. Toosey dried his hands on his pants and moved on.

  He would have a few hours before the municipal police found Flynn with a knife in his heart. Then he’d be holding a spread of cards he could not play.

  On reaching the Star of the North Hotel he hung off a distance watching the place. There was moon enough to see by and what he saw made him swear. A group of men, one with an axe, were at the door of the place. The shining head winked on the backswing then the thud as it buried sounded along the street in a rumble. Glass and splintered wood littered the path where they’d destroyed the windows each side of the door. Toosey stepped into the street, cradling his arm, sweat falling off the point of his chin. The axe struck and the door buckled. When the figures moved out of shadow he saw how they weren’t more than boys, thinly bearded and built slim through the shoulders. The axe had left a great fissure in the panelling of the oakwood and they peered inside now and whooped and cheered. Toosey came forward.

  Ho there, he called.

  The five of them formed up on the top step.

  Ho yourself, old bloke, the first one said. He was young and wore his felt horseman’s hat angled after the fashion of the louts around town. He hooked his thumbs through his braces.

  Toosey pulled his arm close. That’s my hotel you’re breakin.

  She’s the night for it, aint she lads? the one with the axe said.

  They gave a uniform laugh and turned to study the place. It made for a miserable sight, dark and half sacked.

  Get away from there, Toosey said.

  The five looked among themselves.

  What’s that he said?

  Told us to bugger off.

  Did he?

  Believe you’ll find he did.

  The foremost man spoke. What did you say?

  Aint nothing in there worth takin, Toosey said. Get along and leave it be.

  See? What did I tell you?

  Old man must be full, one said.

  Looks like a bush tramp.

  They peered at him through the moony dark.

  What’s he think he’ll do?

  Never mind him. Just have at the door.

  They stepped clear while the axeman levelled the head before the locks then hiked up the blade behind his ear and struck the centre panel. The wood made a bone-crack sound. He jerked loose the axe and lifted it. Toosey spat on the dirt. He was half wild with the pain in his arm. He wanted to chase them away but he was at a loss. One-armed and weaponless. Thoroughly outnumbered. This would not be simple.

  He was looking around the street for help when his ey
e was called to movement inside the hotel window. It was fortuitous timing, for as he looked up the Chinese proprietor showed his head over the registry desk, his white gloves two bright points in the gloom, fumbling with a small palm gun. Toosey frowned. The door kicked under the blows of the axe. He looked to the men but the men had not seen the proprietor perched behind the desk now cocking the pistol. He began to back away.

  With the last blow the door collapsed suddenly inwards. The louts rushed forward, all of them calling and whooping, holding their hats, and they stood gazing around at the cheap chandelier and the wide curving staircase in the middle of the lobby and it was dark enough that they did not see the proprietor lean and fire from a recess beneath the desk. The muzzle flash showed them posed like wickerwork mannequins in the dark. All the men cried out. His next fire lit them faltering and colliding at the head of the steps, wearing a common look of dread. Toosey had shifted well back from the scene when they burst forth, taking the steps at a sprint, bolting up the road.

  The proprietor darted through the inner dark of the lobby. He took position and fired through the window. The men skidded and changed course, lurching for the deeper shadows before the row of shops. Toosey backed away.

  Run you mongrels, he called after them.

  At that sound the proprietor turned and fired wildly at Toosey.

  Stop that, Toosey called. I aint the one you want. Stop firing.

  Another round fizzed by.

  Chung! Put that thing down.

  You break my door, the Chinaman called. You break my window.

  I never done nothin.

  Break my door, you get bullet.

  The hotel interior lit for an instant as he fired. The round kicked up dust on the street.

  I mean bastard too, he called. We two mean bastard.

  My gold is in there, Toosey cried. Why would I break your bleedin door?

  You get bullet you come my hotel.

  I don’t want to come in. I’ll stay where I am. Just toss the gold out. That’s all.

  Get away my hotel.

  Toosey thought about what to say next. He needed the oriental to see sense. But poor luck that night knew no halt. From a side road two territorial police emerged, brought no doubt by the sound of gunfire. They were mounted on a pair of bay mares fitted with black saddlebags and tack and the riders had on tall custodial helmets and long trench coats that covered the stirrups. When they saw the pack of louts running through the intersection they glanced at each other and kicked their horses into life. Within a few yards they’d ridden down the five and, drawing batons as long as swords, the officers beat them from the saddle and raised cries from the men at each blow.

  Toosey watched for a chance to run. Horses reared and men fell, screaming horribly, and one of the constables was caught by the leg and hauled halfway from the saddle but holding on to the cantle he turned his mount and spurred her up the street. Toosey broke for the mouth of a back lane along by the hotel.

  In the street the wailing of horses. Elsewhere the distant chant of the riots. He crossed into the lane in a burglar huddle and trudged in the blackness past a broken cart jacked up on bricks to where a pestilent bog of washwater lay, and beyond, rounding into a bend, following the rear wall of a theatre, he found a back entrance here below a broken gaslight. He looked around. High up, a line of women’s stays strung on a line between the walls. The doorstone of the theatre stained with mud. Everywhere piles of refuse. He wedged himself down in the door and braced his arm to himself and ground his teeth for the pain.

  In the dark he lay listening. Were they looking for him? It wouldn’t be long. A dozen people had seen him at it with Flynn. He tried to think but the hurt in his arm was immense. He needed to leave and he knew it. He needed to get out of town. What o’clock was it? He looked at the stars. Dawn was hours away. And somewhere in the guts of it was his boy, the only sort of good his life had ever known. Hold that thought as close as you would hold him, for it is all you will get now, fool.

  THE LANE BY THE HOTEL

  IT WAS GUNSHOTS THAT WOKE THE boy from a shallow sleep. He sat up. A pack of men broke past the mouth of the lane where he lay hidden, all holding their hats, three, four. Then a fifth. Looking back. Wearing grins of terror. Some foul-sounding voice cried, Run you mongrels! as they passed and more shots popped and the street was briefly lit as if by lightning. The boy sank back below the springcart where he’d taken shelter, a wheelless wreck set upon stacks of bricks. He hid there and listened to bootsteps fading on the road. For hours he’d been waiting for his father to come along, tucked away in the deep and cobwebbed dark. He crawled further into the blackness.

  This was the second mob turned away tonight. The first had come at dusk. They’d started on the hotel’s broad double-door, kicking at it, likely after money and grog, but the fellow inside had begun to give fire out of the windows. Those fellows, like the ones just now, had rightly fled. He huddled in the shadows under the cart and held his breath.

  His trouble wasn’t finished though. In the street rose a new sound, of horses bellowing and men screaming. He crawled out to where he could better see. Two mounted police, as black as snakes in their leathers and long coats, were riding down the larrikins and giving them blows about the head, wide swinging blows that sent blood, and the larrikins fell and cried out and the horses reared, pawed the air, their eyes grown immense. The whole scene like something rendered on a canvas. He edged back into the gloom under the cart. He hugged his knees to his chest.

  He was listening to the drama in the street, trying to keep perfectly quiet, when a shambling form cast in silhouette came along the lane. It was holding its guts and bending low. It entered the dark like it belonged there. Feeling its way down the wall. He watched, flushing with dread. He backed towards the unlit alley behind the hotel and made ready to bolt but stopped. The shape was coming past. He looked up. It had on a round hat. It moaned. He saw then how it wasn’t the guts but an arm that it was cradling. It seemed in pain from the sound it gave. The outline of the hat against the light of the street was round and squat and there was no denying it. He crouched in the deep moonless dark below the cart and let the creature pass.

  GEORGE FISHER, AGENT

  IN THOSE LONG YEARS ALONE AFTER Batman’s militia disbanded, the boy Thomas Toosey, now a ticket-of-leavesman free to sell his labour, wandered the roads of the conquered north and worked at whatever the season needed and these were hungry years when for a bowl of stew he would hoe turnips dawn to dusk and sleep in the rags he lugged on his back, warm with the rum the farmers gave, always rum, and as an older man he met on the road to Launceston a girl who served as a cook to a publican and they took a slipshod house together, this girl Mattie and he, for she was certainly pretty with her milk-white hair and they worked and were happy and the child that came in summer was the sweetest thing he’d witnessed, white hair like his ma, pink skinned, and he would hold his finger for the child to suckle and kiss it and sing its name like a song but Mattie grew eccentric in the month from its birth and took the child away, locking the bedroom door, crying and crying, and she would say the child was born of someone else and was not his and Thomas knew it to be so in his heart but did not care as he was the one who nursed and fed and bathed it, no other man, no other father, and when he returned home one cool May evening to find their meagre rooms empty, he felt the loss like a sickness, a slow onset followed by a long enfeeblement, in which he drank and drank and hoped to die and it was a while before the constable came, a week or more, to arrest him for infanticide on the sworn statements of Miss Matilda Welch and her employer Mr Henry Scales and he was taken and gaoled and bound over for trial by the coroner owing to the belt found tied about the infant’s neck when it was washed from a shallow grave by rain, a belt belonging to Toosey, and the judge agreed that Mattie had left the child behind with Toosey who Mattie swore in court was the father and that Toosey, in a fury, a jealous temper, had strangled his boy and buried him by the river and for
this crime and given his past offences the judge sentenced Thomas John Toosey of Cameron Street Launceston to ten years in the Port Arthur penitentiary.

  Toosey woke in a frantic state, clutching his arm. A mass of greyish smoke stained the sky above the alley, the sun somewhere unseen. It was hot and dry and his mouth was gummed shut. It must have been late morning. He palmed back his hat and straightened his legs and he was leaning forward to stand when he saw a young lad staring at him. Toosey took his time to look again. He rubbed his eyes and feigned indifference. His doltish heart beat hard, half believing it was his boy. He dared not look. He took a breath, lifted his head.

  The lad crouching against the wall of the lane was not William. He was as red eyed as a sawmiller and grubby enough in the face to pass as black. He wore his shirt untucked, his boots unlaced. He stared at Toosey like he’d asked a question and would hear it answered. Toosey wiped the crust from his mouth as he considered the lad. Likely a thief, come to turn him over. On a better day he would have wrung the little bugger’s neck. The rattling of carts over the road’s furrows carried on the air. In the end he just stood and smoothed his shirt with his good hand and started off along the lane.

  In the street before the hotel a horse and cart waited idly in the road. It was loaded with the debris of wood and glass and the huge Clydesdale harnessed to it shied as he passed by, tossing its head, jerking the cart about. There were some Chinese boys sweeping glass on to a shovel and they leaned on their brooms and studied Toosey. He was haggard and mad with pain. The boys shifted out of his way.

  I know, he said. But it’s the galled horse that will kick the worst.

  They could only stare.

  He mounted the steps and entered the hotel through the ruined double-doors. The clerk stationed there at the lobby desk lifted his head. On seeing Toosey he dropped the ledger book and he started to call for Mr Chung. At the same time he produced from below the counter a small over-and-under derringer finished in nickel plate with a two-part extractor that would put a wound in you like a shovel hole. He directed the gun at Toosey and his hand shook so much that the works could be heard rattling in the casing. Toosey stopped.