One

by Patrick Holland

  ‘Tell me everything you know.’

  A day later they sat under cover of rocks on a high dry creek bed at Albinia watching two riders approach from the west. The riders crested a hill and drew level with the gang, but as yet the riders had not seen them. Jim snapped the bolt of his rifle and rested it on his knee. He watched the riders pass.

  There had been fire in the wood the patrol rode through now. Trees had broken into charcoal. Saplings and green pick came up through the black floor. The heat was still in the earth and they rode through black snow. Then they rode out of the belt of charcoal into mist and winter-flowering eucalypts.

  Something moved like a man in a cave above them.

  Nixon pulled his rifle from the scabbard on his back. He trained the sight on the cave mouth.

  A man fell out of the cave on his knees with his hands in the air.

  Nixon smiled.

  ‘Who’s he think he’s giving himself up to?’

  King Edward scaled the rock face on his hands. Nixon and the boy rode behind a boulder and gave him cover.

  King Edward called down into the gorge.

  ‘Old bush crazy, boss.’

  Nixon re-scabbarded his rifle. He called out.

  ‘Has he got bread?’

  An old man came to the rock ledge in front of the cave. Shaking his hands in front of his face.

  ‘Yeh, man. And soup too!’

  The Reverend J Williams’s cave had a back wall of gallon gin bottles. He went by foot to the nearest town when he ran out of liquor. The man wore no shoes. His hair was matted. His beard and moustaches were tobacco-stained.

  The reverend saw Nixon eyeing the gin bottles.

  ‘Thirsty, General?’

  ‘Sergeant. And no, thank you.’

  The reverend shrugged.

  ‘You musn’t judge me. The drink helps me speak to the angels.’

  Nixon looked into the reverend’s eyes. He was not joking.

  ‘They come here at night. They tell me what will pass with the world.’

  ‘Will we see them?’ said the Skillington boy. ‘When they come tonight?’

  ‘If it’s given ye to identify such things, lad.’

  Nixon was more concerned with identifying the contents of the broth boiling on the reverend’s fire.

  He pointed.

  ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘Possum. Possum and wild herbs.’

  Nixon nodded. He looked at the Skillington boy who looked relieved.

  ‘Ye won’t find angels down there in their churches, boy.’

  ‘Down where?’

  ‘The cities.’

  Nixon laughed. The nearest habitations in view of this cave were Blackall and Tambo. It was a mighty feat of imagination to regard them as cities. And further west than those towns the places got smaller and farther and fewer.

  ‘That about the burning cities of the plain wasn’t prophecy as I remember it,’ said Nixon. ‘That was history. Those cities have been and gone.’

  ‘Yeh, and they will return. All that has been, man, will be again.’

  Nixon laughed.

  ‘You don’t believe, General?’

  ‘No, man.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because every drunk and half-educated fool who fancies himself a mystic or poet or writer of novels says much the same thing.’

  ‘Bah! You ever heard a Fred Nietzsche?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, he said it. And he was a great German philosophe.’

  Nixon laughed.

  ‘A what?’

  The reverend took another drink of gin and hit the final vowel even harder.

  ‘A philosophe!’

  Nixon smiled. He took a sheet of canvas and rolled it up and put it behind his neck and leant against the cave wall.

  ‘Well, whatever that crow did for a livin, if he talked like you are now I’d say he was a two-bit crazy. Things happen once and never again. That’s the truth of it, and everyone knows it in their heart. Things are, they pass, and then they are gone.’ He closed his eyes. He recited,

  ‘I have been dreaming all of a summer day, of songs and sonnets carven in fine gold; But all my dreams in darkness pass away. The day is fading, and the dusk is cold.’

  The reverend cackled.

  ‘How wrong you are, General! You should believe in the eternal spirit!’

  ‘Why is that?’

  The reverend pointed at King Edward.

  ‘I tell ye, I was once witness to a killing. I saw a black man run and he fell as he was shot, but I saw his figure still running on. I watched most carefully and saw the same sight several times, and I went up and saw the body lying dead. You see, there is a natural and a spiritual body. What I saw was the latter.’

  ‘And how do you explain that?’

  ‘I don’t. I saw it.’

  Nixon hated that kind of talk. It was born of stupid hope. He threw his cigarette into the fire and shook his head and his mouth twisted.

  ‘Stupid fucking stupid hope,’ he said under his breath.

  He was about to speak again but thought better of it. There was only so far you wanted to tease a man like the reverend.

  The cave gave a good vantage to the west. A gaslight was burning on the horizon. Nixon did not know what the light meant. The Milky Way roared silent above them. He closed his eyes and thought again of that city he was briefly allowed into. He thought of Moreton Bay, and he remembered Chinese lanterns hung from the lights of the esplanade. Tram cars. Bòhemes playing trumpets. And in a hall by the sea was a small orchestra playing music of great elegance that the woman at the ticket desk told him was a thing called Motes Art music. There was an auburn-haired girl sitting on a bench in front of the hall. She was beautiful. So very beautiful. He was about to ask her if he might buy her a ticket to accompany him inside the hall to listen to the Motes Art music. But a young man in a tweed suit and with pretty curls came and took her by the arm and they went inside together.

  That’s well enough, he thought. The young man looked like a decent man. He hoped he was. God, how lovely the girl seemed. He did not go inside then but sat down on the bench where the girl had sat listening to the music inside the hall and watching the ocean … Now he imagined what it would have been like - had that girl not had a fiancé, or whatever the man was. If she had been free to take his hand and he had gone with her inside the hall to listen to the Motes Art music. And what if they had been married? That was a fool thing to think. But anyway, it was his dream and he could take it as far as he wanted. What kind of wife would she have made? What kind of husband would he have made for her? And what would their children be like now? Blue-eyed like their mother. Fair-haired. Soft and pale and beautiful. He dreamed this lying in the black of the cave, staring out on a desolate plain. He liked to think that that was what he had been fighting for – that girl. The fine cut of her dress. The Motes Art music playing in the hall. The Chinese lanterns on the esplanade where she could walk in peace with a decent man beside the ocean. There was chaos enough on the fringes of the world – no one escaped it, and it was his lot to stand with his back to it. To keep it distant as long as he could from the auburn-haired girl in the pretty dress, and always to keep watch. But he would not be one of them. He sighed, ran his hand over his windburnt sunburnt face. He would never be one of them. Don’t teach me how to fish, he thought. Don’t teach me how to fish. Teach me only that there are fish to be fished and feed me for today.

  ‘Reverend!’

  ‘Yeh?’

  ‘Get me one of those bottles.’

  The patrol rode north across a red plain. Dry lightning on every horizon and no hope of rain. Hawks had abandoned their nests at the tops of dead trees. Lightning struck a dead tree and the tree was alight when they rode by it at dusk into Tabor Station. The woman of the station said her dogs had barked some nights before, and she had gone out on the veranda and seen riders in the distance in the timber.

  King Edward saw stones knocked
out of their setting. Then definite tracks of shod horses.

  The next three days they followed the tracks after King Edward’s lead. Tracks that avoided main roads. Stopped only at secreted camps.

  Dark cloud gathered on the northern horizon. A cold wind blew across the plain and struck flush on their faces.

  They followed the tracks north to Juandah Station and then east to Auburn Station where the tracks were washed away by a scouring rain.

  The storm passed and they rode onto a plain where a settled camp of Aborigines was bartering guns to an Arab camel driver in return for tobacco and opium dross.

  An old man in a third-hand top hat and filthy pants stood displaying his arms at the feet of Nixon’s horse. He held a spear and a revolver with a missing cylinder. A brass plate was slung over his shoulder.

  Nixon made the old black king understand he was not here to arrest anyone of the tribe.

  He pointed to a tin and timber humpy that a mission had built.

  ‘Can we go out of the sun?’ The black man nodded.

  They had ridden through the night and they slept deep. They woke in the afternoon with a cool shower of rain moving towards them across the plain. Spits of rain kicked up dust.

  The King spoke.

  ‘That shock you, sir officer? Sellin weapons?’

  ‘I’ve seen it before. But I need information.’

  The old man stroked his white beard. ‘You got yingi?’

  ‘I’m a policeman. And I just saw you buying some.’

  ‘That’s just ash. I’m not a fool, officer. I know the difference between black ash and yingi.’

  Nixon looked at the paraphernalia against the wall of the King’s hut, penny ink bottles, steel knitting needles and tobacco tins.

  ‘The answer is still no.’

  The King nodded.

  ‘You got whisky?’

  ‘No. Only tobacco.’

  ‘I remember more with whisky.’

  ‘I have no whisky.’

  ‘Money?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Tobacco?’

  ‘Yes. Only tobacco.’

  The old man nodded and was quiet. Nixon spoke.

  ‘I am hunting riders. They passed this way. Only in the last few days. I think they have been long without decent water. I think they will have stopped here or somewhere close.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because there is water here.’

  ‘How much tobacco?’

  ‘I’m a policeman. I belong to the authority that protects you. You are obliged to –’

  The old man nodded.

  ‘How much tobacco?’

  ‘Three twists.’

  The old man nodded.

  Nixon thought, Who else would even tell me their name if I didn’t know it already for three twists of tobacco?

  ‘Four twists.’

  ‘In the name of the law and the King of the Commonwealth I tell you–’

  ‘Who is this invisible king? I have always wanted to ask. I think maybe you white men dreamt him up.’

  ‘The King is not a dreaming king. He is real. The law is real.’

  ‘I am real. And you can see and hear me. And I can put my feet on the ground and my hands in the dirt. This is my country, Sergeant. I do as I please.’

  ‘You forget who put that brass plate on your chest?’

  The old black man took the plate in his hand. He pulled it over his head and put it on the ground.

  ‘My women laugh at that thing.’

  ‘King Billy. You’re an old man. If you submit to the authority that put that plate on your chest you will be left in peace. And you will be under the protection of the government and its laws, not merely subject to them. You understand?’

  ‘And if I find my woman lying with a Mohammedan or a British officer and I spear her arm, what will happen to me?’

  ‘In my experience your gins are yours. For better or worse. But I tell you this as a friend. If you fight the law you will be defeated. You will be put in a mission, or even prison’

  The old man pointed out the window at King Edward. The black boy was playing at fighting with a young boy with a woomera. He stood upright and broadened his shoulders to show the full array of scars on his ribs.

  ‘How do you go teaching him your law?’

  ‘Well.’

  ‘I just wonder how you’re gonna hold him. The further you get from anywhere. The less he sees it does him good to stick to you. Where did you find him?’

  ‘A mission.’

  ‘But he’s one of those warlike blacks from the Gorge. Karinjbal, or Moolayember. The ones who would kill me dead if they got half a chance. Let alone you. And a lot of those myalls have pacts with the scalpers and outlaws up there. I know they trade with the Kenniffs.’

  The old man smiled. Nixon became angry.

  ‘That boy will stick.’

  ‘That’s good. If he’s done nothin to make you doubt his loyalty, that’s good. But I tell you, wise man, you don’t want to get to a place where he thinks the men you are chasin are stronger than you are, where he’s near enough to walk to em. He’d turn at the drop of a hat.’

  ‘Are you wise enough to see your own fate, Aborigine?’

  The old black man humphed down his nose and put his hand out for a twist of tobacco that he saw now in Nixon’s coat pocket.

  ‘My own fate?’ he laughed. ‘Don’t need much wisdom for that. But let me tell you something, officer. Something for your wisdom to absorb. Bout ten years ago I helped a police officer track down a bandit. I knew the whereabouts of this killer a farmers. We found the man by my trackin. Brought him in. He was hanged. There was a highwayman who rode with us, who had ridden with the bandit years before. He was no help at all, but he got a remission of his sentence, and a selection of land. The policeman we reported to got a medal and a hundred pounds. I was given a shotgun that was faulty. The bolt was rusted into the breech, but they thought I would not know the difference. And I got given that brass plate on the ground that means the myalls all laugh at me. So hear this. These outside are my people. I know what a sight they are. Your laws have a share in that. But you take my advice, sir. Leave here and take your laws with you. Leave quick or you will be in danger.’ He looked at King Edward, bareback on his horse now, within a horse’s stride of the Skillington boy and that boy’s shotgun. ‘More danger than you are.’

  Nixon eyed him.

  ‘Is that a threat or black fella soothsaying?’

  ‘Neither. It’s a warning.’

  ‘I know the men we are hunting were here, old man. That black boy out there told me and I trust him. These men are riding west and we will catch them. Then all those who aided me will be rewarded, and all those who hindered, punished. Think on what I say!’

  ‘Alright then. I will think. And thank you for the tobacco. Please, one more twist.’ Nixon gave it. The black man went on. ‘And now I will trade you one thing for another, as my honour demands. You’re huntin ghosts. Jim and Paddy Kenniff are dead. Their men are scattered in the hills.’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘Because the tracks you have seen are tracks of the men who killed them. They were here three days ago.’

  ‘Jim Kenniff has done evil things. If you know where he is it is your duty as a man to tell me.’

  ‘If he has done an evil thing, he has paid for it now.’

  Nixon stared into the black man’s eyes and thought it was impossible to know if he was lying. He thought, He sits here staring at me like winter stone, holding to a thing that could get him arrested if it is not true, and does him no good if it is.

  He sighed.

  ‘You think on what I said.’

  The patrol rode into the dusk and the night and onto roaring wastes.

  King Edward walked away from camp to dig water from a soak beside a creek. He was late returning. There was talk in the dark beyond the fire. It was in a native tongue and far enough away so they could not hear if it was one man r
eciting words, or two in conversation. Nixon saw the Skillington boy had his hand on the stock of his shotgun. They heard footfalls in the dark. Nixon reached inside his coat and touched his revolver.

  King Edward came into the camp alone. He cradled a skin of water. Nixon slid the revolver under his leg.

  It had been three days since King Edward had seen a print he recognised as a running horse. They were dead reckoning. These three days King Edward began to sing. Especially when alone, and now he sang at the camp.

  Nixon thought, He feels well, that’s all. He has become easy with me.

  The Skillington boy spat a stream of tobacco into their camp fire.

  ‘God, I wish he’d be quiet.’ He turned to Nixon. ‘You said they’re given to violence and treachery, these Breelong blacks.’

  Nixon said nothing. The Skillington boy went on.

  ‘Likely as not he’s singing to give away our position.’

  Nixon said nothing. King Edward sang.

  The Skillington boy shook his head.

  ‘Sounds like something devils sing to each other in hell.’

  The next day King Edward claimed to have seen cook smoke on the horizon. The following day, hoof prints. But they looked faint and old to Nixon.

  ‘And anyway, there are wild horses out here.’

  ‘A shoe, boss.’

  Nixon brushed the dirt with his boot. He could not be sure.

  The day after was the same. But King Edward always picked up the trail and the smoke at dusk, when Nixon’s eyes failed him. He squinted in the directions King Edward pointed but could see nothing.

  One night he was gone for hours. Gone without a word after all of them had bedded down.

  Nixon lay with eyes half open, watching him walk out of the dark into the light of the fire holding a sharp stick. A spear.

  ‘Boy?’

  King Edward threw a rabbit onto the dirt.

  ‘For tomorrow, boss. I’ll skin him now.’

  ‘There’s hours before dawn. You sleep.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Not a good night for sleep, boss. My head keeps talkin. Anyway, look up.’

  A shower of falling stars cut the north of the sky. Vanishing in the west.

  ‘Duruga.’