To Name Those Lost

by Rohan Wilson

  Who’s that? William said.

  He was gazing down Brisbane Street towards the town. Toosey followed his eyeline to where a boy stood dead centre of the road staring at them. They saw that the boy was stiff in one leg when he turned away slightly. His head was shaved to a stubble. If he had anything to say for himself he did not venture it but merely stood in the street making a quiet study of Toosey across his shoulder. Wind lifted grit off the road in a wave and when it settled the lad was watching him still, hands in the pockets of his loose pants like some workshy drudge.

  Don’t think I aint seen you, Toosey called.

  The lad looked away.

  Eh? I’m talking to you. Be ready for a fight if you mean to bail me up.

  The lad shuffled away to a wall and leaned on it, crossed his arms, crossed his feet.

  Sweat melted into Toosey’s eyes, which he blinked away and, with a lengthy sideways glare, he commenced upon the street. Behind them, trawling up the eddies with his odd leg, came the stranger. Best we move along, he said to his boy.

  He was watching you before, William said. When you was in the hotel.

  Was he just.

  Do you know him?

  Not from Adam.

  They passed crook-looking weatherboard stores next to tall freestone lawyers’ houses with their brass plates and at the corner Toosey paused to allow himself a view to the rear. Rows of buildings. A merciless sun. Inebriates of all stages wandering in the bitter light. He clicked his tongue as he stood surveying the street each way. The lame boy was gone again as fleetly as he’d appeared.

  That don’t make me feel well, he said.

  I saw him once, William said. He was a caller at Stewart’s.

  I’ve not more than a shillin anyhow. If it’s robbery he wants.

  They walked on a while among merchant buildings and meagre homes and folk drifted by, liquored men, boys, coming from the troubles.

  Callers, Toosey said at length. Is that what Stewart said you was.

  Mostly.

  What else did he say?

  William picked a scab on his elbow. Said we was lost and fallen children in need. Said he alone of all the city would see to our hunger. But that part wasn’t true. Plenty of folk fed us. Them at Thrower’s Hotel would. That fat bugger Rabbit would too if we took him something.

  He could not look at the boy. Did he lay a hand on you? he said.

  No.

  Cause if he laid a hand on you I’m payin him a visit right now.

  No. He never.

  Toosey shook his head. He spat. I swear, he said. What a fiend.

  It’s Oran Brown is the one. Stewart always picks him out. Takes him to a room in the house. I give him a knife yesterday and told him to cut off Stewart’s worm next time.

  Where’d you get a knife?

  Stole it. Out of Johnson’s.

  So you stole a knife, give it to a kid, and told him to cut Stewart’s cock off with it?

  That’s about the guts of it.

  You’re a pint of whiskey, you are. Jesus.

  William looked down at the road. He perhaps didn’t quite know what to make of his father. He picked his elbow as they walked and kept quiet.

  Think he would do it? This Oran?

  Like as not.

  I’m of half a mind to let him alone then. Poor cockless fool that he’ll become.

  He fed me these weeks without Ma. He aint all bad.

  Toosey clenched shut his jaw. He turned to the boy. You ought to have stayed with your uncle, he said. Where you was safe.

  I’m old enough to take life how it comes. No need for coddlin.

  Toosey stopped then. He stared hard at his boy. He had on Toosey’s old boot, inches too large for him and the toe caved and flattened and the laces dragging. He had on Toosey’s old shirt. He had a sharpness to the brow, a shape to the chin, that Toosey also knew. He saw what he’d made of the boy and it needled him. A pair of villains we are, he said. A pair of no-hopers.

  I should like to be on that boat, William said. And be gone for good.

  So should I, lad.

  The mountainous smoke above town had begun to lean in the breeze and in the blinding noon sun the bonfires burned invisibly. Smoke and ash blew, sheets of paper aflame in the updrafts. Toosey pulled his swollen arm against himself. Under the high sun their shadows gathered at their feet and they walked each in his own pool of black towards the hospital hill, towards the home of Brother Michael Payne, knife sharpener.

  Be on that boat, he said after a while. But it’s the money we’ll need for it. That’s the grit in the oyster.

  How much did them fellows steal from the safe?

  Never you mind.

  That oriental should have shot em. Useless old pisser.

  I should say he wasn’t ready when they come back.

  William looked at him. They never come back, he said.

  Oh but they did, lad. Later on. And they took the lot.

  No, William said. I was there all night. In the lane or watching you. No one come back. Not a single soul.

  Toosey had taken a few paces before it struck him. He stopped. A moment of dizziness followed as the knowledge shuffled in his head and locked into place. He removed his hat and threw it on the ground. For the love of God and his holy fuckin mother, he said.

  What?

  Jesus, Mary and fuckin Joseph.

  What?

  You miserable whore-made lump of shit.

  William frowned at him.

  You won’t out-think me, you yellow bastard, Toosey said. He fetched up his hat and replaced it. He began to walk once more with long strides, wincing with the pain of his arm. Come on, he said. We’ll have our gold yet.

  THE PARK

  CAISLIN FLYNN SAT ON A FALLEN tree watching the road. Not the smallest rain had fallen in months and the track through the hills had cauterised into a span of bedrock that showed two stone ruts where cartwheels had ploughed the winter mud. All night she’d waited for Fitheal Flynn to return, but by the daybreak light her father had not appeared. With the advance of morning she began slowly to change in her bearing. She dropped her head. Canted forward. Soon she was sobbing into her palms. The sun reared brightly over the forest and it was a queer heartsick sound that she made among the birdcall of dawn. Silence followed by a moaning release. As if she’d finally seen some sombre truth about the world.

  In the heat of morning she gathered herself up. For a time staring dumbly at the camp, the sundries of billytin and bedroll and possum-skin blanket laid among the gum bark and bracken. She pulled on her hood and again all sound dimmed and the heat of her breath grew close. After a while she walked off and left. Cicadas hummed in the gums above and, elsewhere, the call of ravens. On a pasture cut from the forest, fleets of cockatoos foraged among the sheep. She passed by, and they raised their thousand eyes to her. Mid morning she reached the market farms of King’s Meadows. Here the track rejoined the main road and she saw that this road was filled with a good many folk decamping the town. They filed past laden with hessian sacks, roped-up bedding, dragging children like captives. A few came in gigs and others came that had very little or were barefoot, hatless, attended by lean dogs and clouds of flies. She adjusted the eyeholes of the hood to better see. She made for a menacing presence descending out of the scrub. She was starved, dirty and in despair, and the men and women on the road whispered to one another and gave her room.

  She walked and, later, upon broaching a hill, she was given a view to the branching rivers and the rooves littered along the banks. Several columns of smoke stood centred above the town against the stainless sky and for a while she just stood staring at these frail towers. They grew tall and thin until at the head they swelled into the shapes of flowers, each a differing shade of lead. But as she pondered on them, on the character of them, the plain conclusion gradually revealed itself. A great violence had taken place in Launceston. She pushed on more quickly.

  As she walked, her thoughts returned to her fath
er and that calamitous day when their sky had darkened, standing at the railing fence with her sisters, Ashley and Brannah, just babes the two of them, and herself a child of nine, watching their mother drag a stillborn calf from the birthing yard on a spring morning so cold the rails had thistled with ice and when the heifer in the far corner turned and made towards their mother the children didn’t see the danger, no one cried beware, and only when the heifer struck did they scream, but it was done in that moment and she was damned and the heifer crushed her against the mud and butted again and again and trampled her underfoot and their mother, making no sound at all, rolled limply with every blow and bled on the mud, and when after an age their father entered the yard and carried her out the younger girls were tearing their hair in anguish, screaming, screaming, but there was not a thing to be done and their father carried her to the house, slack and trailing blood, and he towelled the dirt from her wrecked face in silence and sat and stared at the wall equally in silence while the girls cried and Caislin fetched water and firewood but their mother was not breathing, not moving, and that was it and she was gone, gone, and their father seemed at first quite philosophical for after a while he stood and poured some tea, saying not a word, staring at the chipped cup, until on a sudden it fell from his fingers and he stalked into the thin daylight and after a while he returned carrying O’Malley’s pistol and entered the birthing yard and he shot this heifer, this killer, clean through the eye and then he walked down paddock and shot another of the herd and another and Ashley and Brannah had not ceased crying and would not for days and all this was a long time ago, ten years at least, but on that morning years later when Caislin had appeared hooded in a flour sack from which she’d cut eyeholes hastily and jaggedly with a knife and told her father that for all he might fight and curse she would not let him set forth alone, she’d been met with the same deadly silence that prefaced his long-ago bout of slaughter and she knew then what he was about, what he meant for Toosey, and it left her in fear for them all.

  • • •

  Desolate civic streets. Smoke like a morning fog. Caislin walked, crunching over glass as she crossed the inner part of town through wide stone buildings, hovels of weather-aged scantling. The streets were strewn with wreckage. Furniture had been stacked and burned in pillage and the cinders smoked in the sun. She walked and she stared, murmuring to herself in disbelief. There was no good explanation for any of what she saw. Among the destruction wandered men and boys searching for bits and pieces of value and they eyed her across the road. She steered away from them. Soon she came to the police house, scorched by the flinging of blazing bottles, the tall palisade around it buckled, the gates wrenched out of true.

  A pair of territorial troopers sat their mounts before the ruined building with their clubs drawn. As Caislin came by, her gaze to the ground, the senior of them tapped his stick on the rump of his horse and trotted it forward. Caislin stopped. He was chewing something and he leaned and released a squirt of dark liquor and sat upright once more. He wiped his considerable moustache.

  That’s close enough, he said.

  She looked off along the road. She looked up at the trooper.

  You aint seen an Irishman around? she said and her voice was muffled. Funny old hat on him. Bout yay tall. She put her arm out to indicate a height.

  The trooper chewed. Lad, I saw near every bastard in town this last night. Most of which was tryin to kill me.

  He carries a stick.

  They all had sticks, the senior man said.

  Caislin lowered her head. She put her hands in her pockets. If you do see such a fellow, tell him I’m lookin for him.

  And who are you exactly?

  Her head rotated inside the cowl. She was gazing up at the senior man but the eyeholes stayed straight ahead. Jack Ketch, she said.

  On hearing this the senior man made a short laugh or a wet sort of cough, she could not tell which. Well you look the part at least, he said. The trooper was watching her closely. You scared of the sun or somethin? he said.

  No. It’s not that.

  Caislin pulled her hands from her pockets and let them hang by her sides, fingering her untucked shirt. She seemed about to speak but then she dropped her head again. The horse huffed and the trooper leaned and spat. Caislin turned away, wandering off she knew not where.

  • • •

  By noon of that day she found herself at the park. Spare young gums stood like convict flogging posts. The lawn a waterless brown. She walked beneath the arched entranceway and made towards the fountain where she might take a drink. In the centre of the park stood a Rechabite tent and men were bobbing under the guy-ropes as they came and went, bandaged and sutured, as bruised as carthorse fruit, and there were women in pinafores administering to them, wrapping limbs and feeding grown men from mugs. Caislin slipped up the hem of her sleeve and dipped her hand into the fountain and drank from it. She was studying the tent as she swallowed. She dried her hands on her shirt and approached.

  There was a prim-looking woman with a small timepiece pinned on her apron and she saw Caislin coming. Her expression grew concerned. She put down the tray she was carrying and came over.

  My blessed saint. What’s happened to you?

  What?

  Your face. Are you burnt? She reached for her hood to lift it, but Caislin caught the nursing woman by the wrist.

  Don’t touch it, she said.

  She looked at Caislin, looked into the ragged cut holes. Caislin lowered her eyes. There’s an Irishman I’m tryin to find, she said.

  Let go of my hand.

  Have you seen any come through?

  We’ve had a few Irish today, yes, the nursing woman said.

  Was any of em old?

  You’re hurting me.

  Was any of em old?

  Well, I shouldn’t wonder.

  He’s wearin a ratty sort of a suit. Walks with a stick. He has a way about him you wouldn’t soon forget.

  The woman was pulling at her hand. If he come through, she said, then I never saw him.

  Others at the tent had begun to take notice and some crouching men had stood and begun to approach. Caislin dropped the woman’s wrist. A chap in his underflannels was crossing the grass and coming up behind the woman. He wore no hat but had a length of white gauze wrapped about his knuckles like a prizefighter. He drew up and he stood there. He began to laugh. It was loud and it sounded across the park and soon everyone turned to see what was going on. He held his belly and crowed.

  Rodney, what’s the matter with you? said the nursing woman. The fellow, this Rodney, he wiped his eyes for the laughter. That is some piss-backwards company you are keepin, Maud, he said.

  She scowled at him. He is looking for someone is all, she said.

  Never in all my days, said Rodney and he laughed.

  Other men were drawing around to see what had caused the fuss. No one offered a word as they formed up and studied this strange thin figure. Rodney, standing with his two feet spread, slapped these men on the shoulders and pointed at the hooded figure. Slowly their faces split with grins and they too fell to laughing.

  What the devil is he wearing? one of them said.

  He’s as drunk as a wheelbarrow, Rodney said.

  No I aint, Caislin said.

  She was staring at this chap. Her breath sucked the cotton in and out. She reached her right hand around behind herself and paused in that stance before speaking.

  It’s how the lady said. I’m lookin for someone.

  Rodney steadied himself, he straightened up. Lookin for who?

  A man called Flynn.

  Flynn?

  Rodney scratched at his pestilent undershirt. Bristles of chest hair poked where the fabric had frayed. He scratched and he turned to survey the group and the men at the tent, spreading his arms in mock showmanship. Don’t see no one here called Flynn, he said.

  I’m Flynn.

  A fellow came forward from the group. His coat was torn full of holes and fad
ed, his beard growing in fleecy tussocks from his chin. He looked to have lately unseated himself from a grog shop somewhere, or was otherwise just soft in the head. The snarl of hair about his mouth parted as he smiled.

  Caislin shook her head. You aint him, she said.

  But most of them had started guffawing and clouting this chap on the shoulders and the chap grinned.

  I’m Flynn as well, said another one and they all howled at the grand joke.

  There, said Rodney. Two Flynns for you.

  He was watching Caislin closely. The nursing woman stepped in between them and she had her finger raised up, meaning to dress down this Rodney for the quarrel he had picked. She was big through the hips and carried herself in sure fashion but Rodney had no mind for it. He pushed her aside and came towards Caislin in a show of menace.

  What have you got under there anyhow?

  She backstepped.

  A leprous nose? What?

  Pull it off him, someone said.

  There was a juncture where Caislin might have turned and made away, broken across the span of dead grass for the gate. But at the final second, fearful, her eyes pinched shut, she slipped the pistol out of her belt and brought it level with the centre of Rodney’s forehead. Rodney flinched like he was whipped. He stumbled and slipped and fell to his knees. He’s armed by Christ, he cried, he’s armed.

  Finding his feet in a hurry he bolted. They all bolted, to a man. Holding their hats they dashed for the few bits of cover in that sloped and featureless park. All bar the nursing woman who stood with her arms rigidly at her sides.