Tommo and Hawk

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Assumption? Assumption ain’t proof! That ain’t knowing!’ Mary snaps, still protesting.

  ‘Ah, but if you buy the land in the Huon Valley he’ll know soon enough, won’t he?’

  Mary thinks a moment then sighs. ‘You be right.’

  ‘But Mama, what if we tell them we wish to make peace? If we admit that Ikey left you all the money but that you wish out of the goodness of your heart to do the right and proper thing and give Hannah her half?’

  Mary looks at me astonished. She’s lost for words so I continue quickly. ‘Mama, it would wipe away the wrongs done, and guarantee our safety. Ikey always said: “Mutual greed can make the worst o’ enemies the best o’ loving friends.”’

  Mary sighs and looks at me despairingly. ‘Hawk, you is always trying to fix what can’t be fixed between folk. This ain’t a peace what can be bought. Them lot is filth, they won’t abide by no goodwill, no conditions!’

  ‘But don’t you see, Mama? We’ll make it so they must! We’ll leave a sealed envelope with Mr Emmett. They know he’s the governor’s chief clerk as well as being your good friend and so can’t be corrupted. We’ll give him instructions that it’s only to be opened if harm comes to any of us and they’re involved. The note will tell the authorities about Hannah’s possession of Ikey’s money that rightly belongs to the Crown. Then we’ll tell Hannah and David about the letter lodged with Mr Emmett.’

  ‘Ha! Fat chance o’ pulling that off! What about our money? The law would confiscate that, too!’

  ‘What money?’ I smile. ‘We’ll say Ikey left instructions before he died to give Hannah all his money, that when I came back from London I only acted as courier for a small commission. You were his executor, entitled to ten per cent that you’re now perfectly prepared to rebate to the Crown.’

  Mary shakes her head and tut-tuts. ‘You’ve gone barmy, Hawk.’ But I can see she’s thinking. Frowning and drumming her fingers on the white tablecloth.

  ‘Tell you what,’ she says at last.

  I shrug and spread my hands. ‘What?’

  ‘Get Tommo to stay put, to stay at ‘ome with us and after he’s been sober one year and worked with me in the brewery, we’ll do it. We’ll give Hannah a quarter share. That be more than what rightly belongs to her!’

  She looks closely at me now, reading my consternation. ‘And you still can’t tell Tommo about Ikey’s money neither. You hear me now, Hawk Solomon, you’ve got to stay stum!’

  I shake my head. ‘Mama, I must give Tommo a reason to stay! I must tell him. Helping to protect you from any harm might be the only way to convince him to stay. Please, Mama!’

  ‘No, Hawk, he’s not to be trusted yet!’

  ‘Mama, Tommo would do nothing to harm us!’

  Mary’s lips are pursed. ‘Be that as it may, you’re not to tell about the money. Nor about David and Hannah hating us. Tommo ain’t no fool, he’ll want to know why.’ Now Mary looks directly into my eyes. ‘I’m worried he’s going to run away from us. You’d not scarper too, go with him, would you, Hawk?’

  My heart sinks. She must be able to see how distraught I am, how my throat aches with concern for her. Mary is counting on me and now, with Tommo returned, him also. She knows, though, that the brewery can get along without Tommo, but it will be harder without me.

  ‘Mama, I can’t leave my brother. I swore that if Tommo came back to us I’d never leave him again. If he goes, I must go too.’

  I can feel the tears running down my black face now. I sniff, my hands working fast. ‘Please, Mama! I beg you to understand. You must let me get the badness out of Tommo! Then we’ll come back to you, I promise!’

  Mary says nothing. Instead she pulls at the chain around her neck to bring up her Waterloo medal, which she clasps tightly in her fist. When Mary holds her good luck charm, it means she’s not going to budge an inch. She will never surrender.

  I feel defeated. Telling Tommo about Ikey’s money was the last card in my deck, my only chance to make him stay. I was willing to compromise Tommo’s peace of mind for the greater good, believing truly that he would be best off here at home with us. But now Mary forbids me this. She expects me to let Tommo go away on his own again. She’s making me choose between my love for Tommo and for her. Mary, whom I love with all my heart. Mary, to whom Tommo and I owe our very life, who made us her own when Ikey brought us home in his tobacco basket, two brats of a whore died in childbirth, rats already eating the birth mess when he found us in the early morning sunshine.

  I know what Mary has done for us, Tommo and I saw it often enough when we were small. Each morning at eight o’clock, after the Reverend Smiles had eaten lamb’s kidneys and fresh eggs, with his napkin still tied about his neck, he’d take up his prayer book and come out to the churchyard beside the foundling home to bury the newborn dead. He would say what passes for a prayer for the unwanted infants left to perish in the churchyard or on the docks, under bridges and in ditches. In a hurry of words too fast for their meaning to be understood, he’d bury what the scavenger cats and dogs and the dock rats had not eaten. ‘Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, rubbish to rubbish,’ he might as well have said, for it makes no difference when there’s nobody to mourn.

  Tommo and I would have been in that graveyard if Ikey had not found us and Mary taken us in. They weren’t man and wife, nor even living as such, but they became our mother and father. And Mary raised us up properly. She tutored us in reading and writing and sums until we were more advanced in these skills than other children and even most adults on the island. She loved us with a great fierceness, scolded us, bathed and bandaged our cuts and scratches, dried our tears and taught us how to be on our guard against a hostile world. Each night she held us tenderly. ‘My boys,’ she always said, kissing us on the cheek, ‘my lovely little boys.’ It was the last thing we heard every night.

  Then when we were kidnapped, she went into the wilderness to look for us. She went on her own where no woman had ever been alone before, her life a hundred times endangered in the process. When she found me, she killed the wild man who’d captured me.

  Now we are back together and all she asks of Tommo and me is that we stay and share in everything she’s built with her own hands. That we stay and build her precious brewery now that Ikey’s fortune makes it possible. That we become rich and happy and give her grandchildren to rock on her knee in her old age. But we will not. We cannot. Tommo’s broken inside and needs to go away, and if I let him go alone, I know he’ll never come back. Tommo doesn’t think his life’s worth a pinch of shit and it’s up to me to help him see otherwise. If he’d never come back from the wilderness perhaps I could have eventually lived my life. But I grieved him every day he was away, and I always knew he wasn’t dead. He was in my head first thing on wakening and last thing at night and a hundred times in between. Whatever should come to pass, I can never let Tommo go out of my life again.

  The silence grows between Mary and me until it is almost unbearable. I sit at the table, looking out the window through my tears with nothing I can say. And Mary waits. Finally I cease blubbing.

  ‘Tommo comin’ ‘ome for dinner then?’ Mary asks at last. ‘There’s a nice leg o’ mutton in the oven.’ She says it quietly, then when I don’t answer, she asks, ‘Wapping, is he?’

  I nod, grateful that she’s left the topic of our conversation, but dreading she’ll return to it.

  ‘Drunk again, I suppose.’

  She looks up to see my hands reply but I keep them in my lap and say nothing.

  ‘Me old man were a drunkard,’ she says quietly. ‘How long’s Tommo been drinking?’

  ‘Since almost when he was taken into the wilderness. Six years, maybe more, he doesn’t say exactly. The timber getter he was with ran a still.’

  Mary sighs and shakes her head. ‘Don’t make sense. He can drink all the beer he wants here at ‘ome!’ She looks up and gives a bitter laugh, her eyes bright and wet. ‘His mama owns a bleedin’ brewery. Tomahawk’s the
best drop o’ beer in Tasmania!’

  ‘Mama, it’s spirits he’s taken to. He says it’s the fire that’s needed to kill the cold inside him.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Mary is suddenly angry. ‘He even talks like a drunk! Drink don’t drive away the demons, only character can do that!’ Mary clucks her tongue. ‘You can’t make excuses for him, son. He’ll promise you everything but he’ll let you down, Hawk. Tommo’ll break your heart before it’s all over!’ She stabs her finger at me. ‘Mark me words, if Tommo don’t stay, you won’t cure him by being with him. Love never cured a drunkard! Hard work and watchin’ over him like a hawk, that be the way, if there be a way at all.’

  Watching over him like a hawk, that’s funny, but Mary doesn’t notice the pun. She leans over and touches my hand. ‘Listen to your mama. If he stops here with us, at least we can both watch over him, keep an eye on him. We can see he don’t come to no harm, maybe even bring him eventually to a cure.’

  ‘Mama, Tommo’s afraid. He’s scared that if he stays he’ll shame you, spoil things here.’

  Mary looks aghast. ‘Shame me? Me what’s been the lowest of the low! Shame me? How do you propose he can do that? Tommo don’t even begin to know what real shamin’ be!’

  ‘Tommo knows most folks think highly of you here in Hobart Town, Mama.’

  ‘And you think I care? You think I’d put them miserable lot before my boys, before little Tommo?’

  ‘Mama, it isn’t what you think, it’s what Tommo thinks.’

  ‘Thinks?’ Mary is growing furious. ‘Drunks don’t think anything but where their next drink be coming from. I know, I were practically one meself! Me old man were one! Christ! Don’t tell me about drunks. I seen it, been it! I been broken like Tommo, let me tell you!

  ‘See these?’ She holds up her terrible hands. ‘I got them broke by men, clerks looking for a job at bookkeeping. There was a job down the docks, see, East End. We waited, ‘undreds of us, lined up to apply. All men, ‘cept me. I gets the billet, out of all o’ them I’m chosen and it’s the happiest day of me life. I walks home, it’s misty and you can’t see nothin’ down the wharfs. They’s waiting for me, dozens of the bastards, waiting in the mist. “Woman taking our job,” says they. “Clerking ain’t for women, understand, bitch?”’

  Mary begins to weep softly. ‘They threw me down and raped me, then they held me and stamped on me ‘ands ‘til every finger were smashed and every bone were broke and more.’ She places her hands into her lap below the table. ‘That’s how I become a tart. It were all I could do, me ‘ands being useless and all. Then I were in a brothel and had a fight and run away and they sent the acid man after me, the slasher.’ She turns her head slightly, showing the scar which disfigures her pretty face.

  ‘I know how the bottle tempts you, numbs your pain when you’s hurting. For a long time that were all I had, no hope for the future, nothin’.

  ‘Then I hears on the grapevine that Ikey Solomon the fence be looking for a bookkeeper what’ll keep their gob shut. I goes to Ikey and he gives me a job clerking, then later, running a bawdy house. Ikey were the one what first gave me a chance to come good, when nobody else would.’

  Mary sniffs and jerks her chin upwards, knuckling the wet from her eyes. ‘And that’s what we’ll give Tommo, a chance to come good. To make something of himself and forget what they done to him! To stop feelin’ so bleedin’ sorry for himself and get on with it! Begin a new life, just like I done. Believe me, there’s not too many gets that chance given!’

  ‘But Tommo is not strong like you were, Mama! He’s not the same cheeky boy we loved, full of fight and vim.’

  Mary’s eyes soften at the memory of how Tommo was, then grow sad. ‘He don’t hardly say boo to a goose! He’s been ‘ome nine months and he ain’t laughed proper once, just answers me polite-like, “Yes, Mama. No, Mama.” He don’t never meet me eyes.’ The anger has now gone from her voice and she speaks barely above a whisper. She looks up, appealing to me. ‘What’s wrong with ‘im? What’s I done wrong to Tommo?’

  ‘Nothing, Mama. I told you, Tommo loves you but he’s shamed. Scared he’s not good enough for us. He loves you, but it can’t come out. It’s stuck inside. He’s forgotten how to bring it out.’

  Mary’s face grows hopeful now. ‘Then we’ll teach him! Me and you, Hawk! We’ll show him how we both loves him. Show him there ain’t nothing in the bottom of a bottle what can help him!’ She jumps up and waves me away with the back of her hands. ‘Go fetch him!’ She’s laughing. ‘Garn, scarper, be gone with you!’ She moves over to the hearth, wiping her hands on her pinny. ‘I’ll get the cabbage cooked, roast’ll be ready in ‘arf an hour. Tell him I done little onions and brown gravy too. Always liked a nice drop o’ gravy, did our Tommo.’

  Mary hasn’t yet given up on the prospect of keeping Tommo or she doesn’t want to face what we both know to be the truth, I don’t know which. I smile sadly and shake my head, then I rise and go to where she’s standing beside the hearth. Mary’s head comes to not much above my waist. I’m fifteen years old, six feet and four inches tall and no beanpole. I stoop down to kiss her. It’s not something I do often, and it’s most clumsy.

  Mary brings her hand up to her face and touches the place where I kissed her. A tear runs down her cheek and disappears into the notch between two fingers. Then she buries her head against my waist and clasps me tight.

  ‘Don’t leave me, Hawk. I loves you with all me heart. You won’t leave your old mama, will you?’

  I can feel my heart pushing up into my throat, filling my lungs so I can’t breathe. Oh God! Mary is begging me. Mary, the hardest rock I know, is crumbling.

  Suddenly I hate Tommo! Hate the ties that bind me to him. Hate him for spoiling all our lives. And I hate myself for my disloyalty to Mary. Mary is crying, sobs coming out of her breast so soft they’re scarcely a whimper. And now I can’t see her for my own tears. I am crying not because she’s forced me to choose between her and Tommo, but because I love her so very much. I put her gently away from me.

  ‘Mama, please, I beg you,’ I try once more. ‘Let me tell Tommo about Ikey’s money. Perhaps he’ll stay, if I tell him about the threat you face from Hannah and David. Perhaps that will be the difference to make him stay on.’

  ‘No!’ Mary shouts. ‘No! No!’ She bangs her fists hard against the kitchen wall, then turns to me again. ‘You’ll not dare tell him about the money!’

  I can barely move my hands to talk for the pain in my chest. ‘Then I must go with him, Mama,’ I sign to her. ‘I can’t let him be parted from me again!’

  Something snaps inside of her. I can see it, a dark thing that bursts out of her. I’ve seen Mary angry, her temper is well known, but I’ve never seen her like this. Her whole body begins to tremble. There is fire in her green eyes. Suddenly she charges at me, pushing me in the belly. She’s screaming and hammering her fists against my chest. ‘Go! Go! Go to hell, the both of you!’

  These are words I’ve never heard from her and they break my heart. ‘Mama, please?’ I clasp her wrists. ‘Mama! Mama!’

  She pulls away, but I hold onto her wrists and she spits in my face. ‘Lemme go, you black bastard!’

  So I let go of her and cover my face, weeping. She’s beating against me again. ‘And don’t you call me Mama! You both come from a whore’s cunt, a nigger and a drunken runt, you ain’t no part of me! You ain’t no sons of Mary Abacus!’

  I hold out my hands to her, pleading, sobbing.

  Mary pulls back suddenly and grabs at the medal hanging from its chain around her neck and holds it in her fist in front of her furious face. ‘I been on me own before! It ain’t nothin’ new!’ Her skin is ashen and her voice grown cold. She is breathing hard, talking in short bursts, hissing out the words, her chest heaving. ‘You hear me, Hawk! If you go with your brother the two of you will not be back! Not never again! Not to this house. You’ll not get what’s mine. I swear it!’ She pauses a moment and shakes the fist holding the Waterlo
o medal. ‘What’s swore on this can’t be took back, you hear me? Now fuck orf! Get out o’ my ‘ouse, pack your bag and get out! I don’t want to see neither of you never again!’

  I am weeping again, though it is not for Tommo and me that I cry, but for our mama. I know on the morrow or the day after, Mary will beg our forgiveness. She loves us with all her heart and mind and soul. But, like Tommo, what’s happened in her life can’t be banished despite what she’s always said. All her own hurt comes flooding back when she’s backed into a corner, and she knows only how to snarl and claw her way out to safety or perdition. She’s the small brat who’s never been loved. She’s on her own and, to her own mind, when she’s crossed, all she’s got is herself to depend on.

  In her heart of hearts I know Mary’s lost hope in Tommo and doesn’t think he’ll ever come good. But she won’t come out and say it, she can’t say it of her own son. If she does, she’ll be admitting she loves me more than him, when before we were taken it was always slightly the other way. When we were brats, Tommo always made Mary laugh, he was just about the only one who could. Mary has always blamed herself for not finding him, not rescuing him as she did me.

  And now he’s come back, she’s once again lost what she wants most to love. To realise Tommo doesn’t want her, has no place for her in his life, must be more than she can bear. And so she fights and orders us away.

  She has made me choose between her and Tommo. Either I go with Tommo, for he will not stay here with me, or I lose him forever, and that I cannot do.

  I rise slowly from the chair and without signalling another word to our beloved mama, I leave the kitchen, not sure if I shall ever return but knowing that I will ever love her.

  Chapter Three

  TOMMO

  The Pacific Ocean

  November 1856

  We’s been at sea for three and a half months, sailin’ North on the Yankee whaling ship, Nankin Maiden, what be out of New Bedford, Massachusetts. The master is Captain Mordechai O’Hara, a fearsome pious man.