One

by Patrick Holland

  ‘True. I was ordered to leave.’

  The girl came back into the room and Jim and Paddy nodded to her. She stared wide-eyed at them, as though she was looking at a pair of wild dogs that had walked in and sat down at table expecting to be served.

  Jim waited till she walked back out to the store again.

  ‘Her mother and father?’

  ‘Dead.’

  Jim nodded. The priest sighed and looked out the window at the ragged band of misfits and boys unsaddling horses and shook his head.

  ‘Why do ye want hidin? Is some man tryin to kill ye?’

  ‘I’m an outlaw, so I run.’

  ‘What a strange lad ye always were, Jim Kenniff. You know,’ the priest pointed through the wall, ‘that girl had a brother. He wanted to be an outlaw. He’d heard of ye. Then he rode onto the station of the cousin of a trooper and stole a pony.’

  ‘And now?’

  The priest indicated a darkened room. Calico curtains pulled over the windows. Jim Kenniff stood up. He saw the girl in the lean-to. She was kneading clothes in a bucket of water and quietly weeping. Jim walked into the dark room and made out the body of a boy under a thin sheet of hessian. A dead body always made the world quiet. Like a dream. He winced.

  He walked back into the room. Paddy was gone outside.

  ‘No law will pursue the boy’s killer,’ said the priest. ‘Yet we have to present him to the authorities the day after tomorrow and then bury him. So ye see why ye cannot stay.’

  ‘Seems I cannot rest in any place. But I have a question, Father.’

  ‘I’m not a father anymore.’

  ‘Aye. But once you believed in God?’

  ‘A long time ago.’

  ‘You were taught by men who did.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Where go the souls of the dead? The virtuous dead?’

  ‘Heaven. The books say heaven. But I have no faith in that place, lad. I don’t believe in God.’

  ‘I have to believe, else there would be nothing for me to hate.’

  The priest looked out the empty window.

  Jim said,

  ‘Do the dead remember their people?’

  The priest looked onto the dry bright plain.

  ‘Nobody knows.’

  Jim sighed. He looked out the window and thought of haying grass before a storm. Clouds pierced by shafts of golden light that lit a girl’s face. She wore a red flower in her hair. The creek by the house ran clear with the melt from the mountains. She was so pristine and beautiful it seemed even the clouds would not wish to move across her and he could not believe that that beauty would not last forever …

  ‘You cannot resurrect the dead, Jim Kenniff. It is forbidden.’

  ‘If it is forbidden then there is a way.’

  The girl came in and said she had cleared a space on the sleepout for the men to lay down their bedrolls.

  Jim nodded and turned to the priest.

  ‘We’ll be gone before the dawn.’

  Nixon and the boy rode onto a government mission and the manager came to meet them. The manager took a cigarette from his pocket and passed his tongue over the crumbling end and struck a match on his flint.

  ‘So you’re chasin Jim Kenniff? You must be the last one out here.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you’ll know that no police who went lookin ever even seen him.’

  Nixon shrugged.

  ‘You can’t ask the dead if they saw him or not. But I reckon they did.’

  The manager raised his eyebrows.

  ‘The Kenniffs are horse thieves.’

  ‘Yes. And there are two stolen horses dead back at Ma Ma Creek not yet stinking. Anyway, I need a tracker.’

  The manager shrugged and chewed on his cigar.

  ‘I’ve got a boy could follow a crow through a storm.’

  ‘Civilised?’

  ‘Wild as a dingo bitch.’

  ‘A warrior? I can’t have trouble. I need obedience.’

  The manager shrugged.

  ‘I won’t lie to you – he’s from some tribe in the ranges. But he was taken as a boy. He’s not yet learnt any violent ways.’

  Nixon nodded.

  ‘Now, the fee,’ said the manager. ‘I’m not selling him, you understand. That would be –’

  ‘I’m a lawman.’

  ‘Yes. Forgive me. Only we’re short on the essentials here latterly.’

  ‘Like everybody else. Does he speak English?’

  ‘A little. But if he seems ignorant it’s just cause he hasn’t had any education. Don’t try and knock it into him, I warn you. You do that and he’ll run one night and you’ll never see him again.’

  The manager presented the boy. Hair washed and combed, but with a hole where a bone had gone through his nose, cicatrices across his chest, one of the two upper incisors avulsed, and a hessian cloth wrapped around his shoulders for a coat.

  ‘You said he was a boy?’

  ‘He’s fourteen. They look older than they are. You know that.’

  Nixon eyed the manager. He took his knife from his saddle sheath and pointed it at the Aborigine who stared back with eyes of winter stone.

  ‘What tribe is he?’

  ‘Like I say, I can’t remember. I was told once. All those names sound like gibberish to me.’

  Nixon put the blade under the Aborigine’s hessian cloth and lifted it. Six welts in stripes along the ribcage.

  ‘You don’t get those till you’re sixteen in the range tribes. And those are old markings.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that. His papers say he’s fifteen. You want him or not?’

  ‘You said fourteen a minute ago.’

  ‘I don’t know, Sergeant. You want him?’

  Nixon scowled.

  ‘Why’s he here?’

  ‘He got into some trouble or other. Theft, I think. Robbed a storehouse. Or speared a bullock. Fell in with the wrong lot of savages.’

  ‘You mean his family?’

  ‘Aye, well, you know what they say – can’t choose em.’

  ‘This boy’s born to violence.’

  ‘Are you gonna take him?’

  Nixon nodded.

  ‘I can teach him law. And so peace. But you’re not getting any fee.’

  The man shook his head and spat.

  ‘You can teach him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘By givin him a carbine and taking him after outlaws? Shootin men in the back and cutting their throats in the night?’

  ‘It won’t end up that way. And he doesn’t need a gun for the job he’ll do for me.’

  They rode over Mitchell grass plain, blue limestone ridges in the distance. ‘Jesus Christ almighty,’ said the Skillington boy looking back over his shoulder at the Aborigine who rode in tow on their erstwhile packhorse. ‘I can’t decide if this one’s more likely to be a devil worshipper or the devil the rest of em worship.’

  Nixon turned and looked at the black boy. He turned back to the track and smiled.

  ‘Amazing how civilised some of em can get. I knew a black tailor up north as civilised as a tea planter’s cat.’

  The Skillington boy looked over his shoulder and whispered.

  ‘Yet there’s others wouldn’t get used to civilisation in ten thousand years of it.’

  They came to an ironbark scarred by a hackamore. They rode after a circle of birds and found a horse with a broken leg, shot through the head and lying in a dry creek.

  Nixon looked at the Aborigine then pointed into the creek at the horse with his revolver.

  ‘Go see how dead it is.’

  The black boy furrowed his brow.

  Nixon bit an invisible hock of meat. Then pointed again to the horse.

  They camped. The Aborigine – whom they had christened Edward after the King, for the straight-backed way he sat on a horse – crouched on his heels over a slab of red horsemeat, hacking at it with a skinning knife.

  The white men eyed him acro
ss the fire. Nixon pulled out a hock that had been roasting.

  ‘Tomorrow, Edward. We go after horses. Stolen horses. Like this one. Understand?’

  King Edward nodded and said nothing.

  The Skillington boy held up his hands as though to warm them and talked behind his hands.

  ‘Would I be wrong in fearin he could slit our throats in the middle of the night as easy as roll over in bed?’

  ‘He’s never slept in a bed.’

  ‘Funny.’

  ‘I’m not joking. A nun at the mission told me they made up a bed for him but he slept on the dirt beside it.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘He’ll be alright as long as we keep him fed.’

  ‘I should tell you, Sergeant, that the blacks in this country tend to be savage.’

  ‘He’s not local. Not with those markings on his ribs.’

  ‘What is he?’

  ‘At that mission, with those markings – I reckon he’s the son of Breelong blacks. Remember the ones who slaughtered nine women and children at a homestead one night with tomahawks? It was west and south of here.’

  The boy swallowed.

  ‘I remember hearing of it.’

  ‘Police chased them. They ran fifty miles a day. Ate kangaroo raw when there weren’t missions to raid – so their fires wouldn’t give them away. They were the outcasts of two separate tribes. And they had Irish blood, too. The mission Aborigines were terrified of them. No white man could match them. Nor live beside them. Police picked off the younger ones – ones that could still be trained – and sent them to the surrounding missions.’ Nixon raised his eyes in the direction of King Edward. ‘But, like I say. We will teach him peace.’

  The Skillington boy tilted his head.

  ‘Even so, I say we sleep between him and the guns.’

  Nixon threw a bit of horse gristle into the fire.

  ‘I’d bet he can kill a man with his bare hands.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll sleep much better now.’

  Nixon smiled.

  The Skillington boy spat into the dark.

  ‘Sarge?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What did Jim Kenniff ever do to you to make you hate him so bad you’d risk gettin your throat cut to catch him?’

  Nixon stared into the fire. Then he looked at the boy.

  ‘I’m an officer of the law. Like you wish to be. If not us, then who will keep order?’

  ‘You ever get near them? The Kenniffs?’

  ‘I’m the man who arrested the Riley brothers. The first men in this country who rode with them. So I am entrusted.’

  Nixon looked up at King Edward.

  ‘You heard of the Kenniffs, lad? Jim and Paddy Kenniff?’

  King Edward shook his head.

  ‘Bushrangers. Haters of the law. You understand?’

  He nodded.

  ‘That’s who we’re hunting.’

  King Edward nodded and did not speak.

  The Skillington boy broke the silence.

  ‘Why aren’t we lookin for Doyle’s patrol into the deal?’

  ‘Because I don’t think we’ll find them.’

  They lay down. When the fires were cold the Skillington boy slept. He dreamt that King Edward had cut their throats and left them to the crows and wild dogs. He was looking up at the stars and knowing he was dead.

  At dusk they climbed a hill and looked down on a plain and pins of light that were the town of Sapphire. They rode past a pair of mounted native police and past itinerant Chinese families who sat by firedrums watching the night.

  They came to a hotel. King Edward and the Skillington boy watered and stabled the horses. At the bar Nixon asked for Betty and the woman came to meet him though no smile softened her face.

  ‘Why should I welcome you?’

  ‘If you’ve forgotten I won’t remind you.’

  A blonde prostitute walked out of a back room and came towards them but the woman called Betty waved her away.

  King Edward sat on the side stairs of the hotel and the Skillington boy came inside. Nixon allowed him a beer.

  A boy with a dirt-stained face and wire-ripped clothes came into the saloon selling a bay horse.

  Nixon went to look at the horse. The horse stood sixteen-anda-half hands and had Arab blood. It looked like it had been ridden a good distance that day. Nixon looked at the brand.

  ‘Where’d you get this horse, boy?’

  ‘It’s mine.’

  ‘How long’s it been yours?’

  ‘Since it was foaled.’

  Nixon nodded.

  ‘Now answer again. This time without lying.’

  ‘I told you, since … a man traded me.’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  Nixon nodded.

  ‘I’ll take it from you, boy.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. The price is –’

  ‘There’s no price. I’m takin it in on behalf of the Kingdom a Britain.’

  ‘The Empire,’ the Skillington boy corrected. Nixon glared at him.

  ‘But, sir –’

  ‘This horse is stolen. You should think yourself lucky I don’t pursue the matter legally. You could end up in gaol for a decade.’

  ‘But sir, I’m the owner and –’

  ‘And if the true owner shows up lookin for his horse should I send him to you? What’s your name, boy?’

  ‘Kibble, but–’

  Nixon backhanded him to the ground. The boy stood up, bleeding from the lip. Nixon backhanded him again, and this time the boy stayed down.

  ‘I’m takin this horse on behalf of the law, boy. Whether you stole it from its proper owner or only from the last man who stole him, either way, you’re lucky you ran into me. I’m a generous man. But without law …’ He looked at King Edward who was watching from the stairs. ‘Without law everything breaks,’ said Nixon. ‘A boy like you, a woman, an invalid, they have no safety. The law might seem hard, but it is so that later it can be better and gentler towards men. The alternative to the rule of law is worse.’

  Nixon came back into the bar and asked Betty to bring him whisky.

  ‘I see you’re still a man of virtue.’

  Nixon said nothing. Betty shook her head.

  ‘And by that I mean not afraid to knock the teeth out of a poor unarmed Irish boy.’

  ‘Pale Aborigine.’

  ‘You forget I’m Irish?’

  ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘Well, I know the boy’s mother. She’s a washerwoman without a husband. I’m sure she can afford to get his teeth fixed.’

  ‘The price of a burial is more than the price of fixing teeth. And the boy won’t be dealin in stolen horses anymore. It was his mother I was thinking of.’

  Nixon ate dinner with Betty but slept with a whore in a squalid room at the back of the hotel. He paid the girl twice what she was due and sent her away before midnight so he could sleep alone. The Skillington boy slept on a canvas bedroll on the floor of the hotel and King Edward slept on the veranda near the horses.

  In the morning Nixon went to the police station and found King Edward a second-hand native police uniform.

  They took the Irish boy’s horse for a packhorse.

  King Edward found tracks. Prints of more than a dozen horses. Most unshod.

  ‘Walking.’

  Nixon nodded.

  ‘They don’t know they’re followed.’ He looked at the sky. ‘How old are they? The prints?’

  King Edward nodded.

  ‘How old are the horse tracks?’

  The black boy nodded again.

  They crossed a grass plain so bare that at night they had to ground-tie their horses.

  The gang rode into dry country. Cattle went down into putrid silt up to their knees beside the skeletons of animals that had got stuck there. The trees bore the scars of stone axeheads from Aborigines drought-lopping with tomahawks.

  They cooked rabbit on a fire and slept.

 
; Again in Jim’s dream it was September. The creek beside the house ran clear with the ice melt from the mountains. But he was in the outlying country now …

  He had sold the horse on, but still he was frightened that somehow it would all come back to him. The troopers spoke his name around the bars and on the stations. He had taken the horse – a half-breed Arab – from a man named Collins.

  She walked through rain to meet him at a rock shelter in thick timber. He was both pleased and troubled to see her, for he knew what troops did to poor girls walking alone.

  ‘The police are abroad.’

  ‘Not on the way I came.’

  He held her hands then put his head on her chest on the thin calico sheet of a dress she wore and her copper hair fell down over his head.

  ‘You poor little boy. You did it for us, I know.’

  They lived on a starvation block in country where if you found a cleanskin you took it, and all men rode with rifles and revolvers at their sides. Their family stole horses even to pay the £30 government levy.

  He said,

  ‘I did it for you.’

  ‘Go into the hills, brother.’ She pointed. ‘Go directly north and there’s a scalper’s hut no one knows on my old ma’s place. The troopers will get tired of looking, and one morning soon you’ll be safe. From the scalper’s hut you can see a clearing in the west. When you’re safe, I’ll come get you, brother.’

  She called him brother but she was Tom Lawton’s sister – Jim’s first cousin. She came to the house now and lived with them as Tom did; as their father had been shot by police and their mother killed by consumption.

  She teased him at the dinner table because he could not read the books she gave him. The Kenniff boys’ mother was gone, too, but by choice. Jim made this girl a mother in her stead. So gentle and so contrary to him in every way. By the hearth that winter she read to him from a book of prayers, of the Kingdom of Peace, the place she said her own mother resided.

  ‘What is that Kingdom?’ he asked. ‘And how should we live there?’

  She only smiled. And he thought he had asked something foolish and did not ask again.

  Now in his dream she was dressed for the evening fair in her finest white dress – that was not very fine – with one of the red daisies from the houseyard behind her ear. She kissed the son of a policeman at the fair that night and the boy put his hands up her skirts and she shied away. The boy dragged her in front of everyone and called her a slut. Jim stood up from the forty-four gallon drum he had been sitting on watching men throw quoits at a steel peg and said very gently that if the boy who had shouted at his cousin did not leave her alone he would kill him. The older boy did not get the whole of the word ‘slut’ out of his mouth again before Jim broke his jaw. Jim hit him again and again and all the girls at the fair shrieked and a blacksmith’s boy came to pull Jim off the policeman’s son and was knocked down in turn and it was only when his cousin put her arms around his waist and fell on her knees on the dirt and screamed at him to stop that he let go the boy who lay bleeding in the dust. But afterwards he knelt behind a tree shaking and crying, hardly knowing what he had done.