The Coves

by Whish-Wilson, David;

  ‘My bones is achin,’ she whispered, as though that was a secret worth sharing.

  ‘It’s the scurvy. I have it.’

  She didn’t respond for a long while, then whispered, so quiet, ‘I was locked up these past months, before I came aboard in Sydney. Bread and water rations.’

  Sam stared into her lap, at the dog, but her breasts dragged his eye. He hadn’t sat with woman or girl for two years. ‘The American, he must’ve fed you. You was in his bunk for six weeks. We hardly saw you.’

  She laughed, but her voice was sour. ‘He fed me enough to stop me strayin, like every man I’ve known. Mutton and biscuit, mostly.’

  ‘You got to eat them turnip greens in the store,’ Sam said. ‘Nobody but me eatin them.’

  ‘Never been one for the rabbit food. And you just complained of the scurvy too.’

  ‘Sure I did. Why I’m eatin them greens. I’ll get better. You won’t.’

  ‘Aren’t you the wee sawbones…’

  Her tone was gentle, which kept Sam on his guard. ‘No I ain’t. But I had a master once, who put me to schooling.’

  ‘And where’s that master now?’

  ‘Where he lives, on the Swan River, I expect.’

  ‘Long way from here. And your head was shorn when you got on. You’re on the break. Just like me.’

  ‘I ain’t like you. And I ain’t on the break.’

  That look in her eye, like she was playing a game, finding him out, although they both knew the truth—you don’t ever confide about such things.

  ‘Sure you are,’ she said. ‘I know it. You got passage on this ship, same as me, with a shiny thieved thing. Nowhere else to run. And neither of us is goin to America for the gold.’

  Sam didn’t reply. He wasn’t sure how Sarah Proctor had got him so quickly to the truth of it.

  He thought of his mother then, just a thought with no memory, because he had no memory.

  Just what every child has—a mother—although Sam hadn’t spoken of her to another aboard the whaler. A secret he owned. He listened to them nightly voice their dreams of gold and riches in California, product of the posters nailed down the main streets of Sydney harbour. ‘Gold! Gold! Gold in California!’ With the names of the shipping companies and freight carriers listed in small print. A race to get there first, and away from the hardship at home.

  But Sam’s purpose was different. He’d tracked his mother to a brothel in the Rocks. Heard she’d gone out on the first ships, along with a madam and her complement of mollies. At least that’s what the proprietor of the now lodging house said. He didn’t know Sam’s mother, but he’d carried all their trunks down to the docks, just to get rid of ’em. Sam didn’t have a description beyond her long red hair and stooped shoulders and so he’d hoped and followed, as he’d been hoping and following all these years.

  Sarah Proctor leaned toward him, put the dog back to the bucket, where it began to sniff and dance around the fish. Her eyes grew larger, drawing him in. He decided to get her back then. He wouldn’t have her make love to him, for plot or diversion. ‘You’ve left children behind.’

  Her eyes became pinched. Her brow notched in bitterness and confusion. ‘You stupid boy. I want only to be your friend.’

  ‘Dempsey wouldn’t have you befriend me. Me or no other.’

  Sam hoisted a thumb down the deck, where Dempsey was still lording it over the lashed steersman, unfurling a length of hide. Their eyes met and the Irishman stamped toward them. No new outrage for a few hours. Days from the foreign shore, if they made it. The second mate with his head down the privy, arse reared in the air inviting Dempsey’s savage boot. Whatever Dempsey planned for the second mate would suffice to keep the mutineers in awe of his violent hand. There was no other reason for stringing it out.

  Sarah Proctor whispered from the side of her mouth. ‘You’re right that I’ve left children behind, but ain’t none of them still alive. My only boy would be your age now. I bore him when I wasn’t no older than you. Me and you and some of the others, we got to make an alliance…’

  Sam let the dog wriggle under his shirt, feeling the clumping boots approach. He glanced at Sarah Proctor and saw that she was just as fearful, shrunk now into the bulwark. The sun behind Dempsey’s great shaggy head, a sulphurous halo. Dempsey looked into the bucket and grunted. Sarah Proctor angled her head to take in the span of his majesty, widening her eyes and opening her mouth, reading for the invitation or curse.

  The change that came over Sarah Proctor shocked Sam, and he waited for her lies. To put him in, or slight him with a manufactured story, but there was nothing, only the empty eyes and slack jaw.

  ‘You seen a cat?’ Dempsey asked of him, ignoring Sarah Proctor.

  Sam couldn’t hide his panic. Nor could he reply. But the woman took Sam’s side, and spoke his words. ‘A cat with nine tails?’

  ‘Lift up your shirt, boy.’

  Sam turned before he knew he was moving. He put aside the dog and hoisted up his cotton shirt, showed Dempsey the stripes. He’d been whipped many times at the Boys Home, as had every other boy, excepting the most expert liar and seasoned betrayer.

  ‘That’s not cat-claws. That’s a bamboo switch. Nothin more than scratches. I’m talkin about the cat. I seen you makin things and I asked if you seen one.’

  ‘I have.’

  Sam dropped his shirttail and turned. Dempsey was now holding a pistol under his nose, smelling it like a fine cigar. The breech-loaded pistol had a walnut handle and a single percussion cap. Snub-barrel fixed with a polished brass ring.

  ‘That’s a navy model deringer,’ Sam said.

  Dempsey looked thwarted in some way, and Sam saw him glance at the letters on the rifled barrel, understood that the Irishman could not read. ‘Philadelphia,’ Sam blurted, as though the word would redeem him. ‘I seen it in a catalogue I got to studyin back in Van Diemen’s Land. It had every gun in it, American or British. Drawins, an’ all. Every brand an’ every model.’

  But Dempsey just grinned. ‘Well, I never seen the like of it. American. No craftsmen of such fine things in the blighted land we just departed. They must be real savvy to the crafts of war in this new colony. Home to half of Ireland.’

  ‘The cat. Yes, I seen one.’

  A lie, beyond the toy-model cats the boys’d made in their games from torn cotton slops, knotted over pebbles. ‘You desire me to fashion one.’

  ‘To put your pretty little fingers to use boy, yes.’

  Dempsey tipped the rawhide sheet off his shoulder. Under it was a leather jerkin that he likewise tipped at Sam’s feet. From his waistcoat he produced a handful of lead fishing weights, fashioned into dough-balls and speared with a hot pin. ‘Found these in the hold. Not to be used for fishin.’

  Dempsey nodded to Sam’s knife in the bucket. ‘Best get to work. This storm-cloud clears, the moon’s face will be showin tonight. The Tawny Prince will have his honour.’

  Sarah Proctor waited until Dempsey was shy of her voice. Hissed, ‘I knew him for a tinker.’

  Sam Bellamy found a whetstone in the Captain’s cabin, used it to put an edge on the deadman’s sword. The sword was hung off a nail and he wanted to have it. Knew it to be ex-army, and reckoned it to be his now. Sam held up the weapon and imagined himself in the corner locker, the sword pointed toward anyone who dared break the lock and drag him out, that eerie light in their eyes. But soon as he saw himself thrusting the sword it became heavy in his hands. The image shrank from his sight.

  The rawhide cut easy but the jerkin was tough. Sam knew he was doing wrong, which made it harder to cut. Dempsey would want the cattails to be rawhide, so they soaked up blood and got heavier, but it was the jerkin Sam cut into nine long strips, and the rawhide he pleated into a single rope. After that he bound the lead balls into the tails and fixed the rope and nine tails with some twine.

  Dempsey would certainly be angry. There he was outside the cabin, capering around the mutineers like a priest at his liturgy, assail
ing them with couplets taken from some gypsy song. Whatever Dempsey planned would have the way of unholy ritual about it, and Sam making the whip arse-around would worry Dempsey’s superstition in whatever happened next. But Sam had done it anyway, the way he was used to doing. Small acts of defiance done inside a thing, like the boys in the Home sewing the shape of guns and knives inside the sleeves of their shirts, no way for the master to see them but their satisfaction in the knowing.

  Sam didn’t present Dempsey the whip but left it draped over the netting by the mainmast. The storm had passed and the swell returned to its long slack hooping. Sam knew nothing about boats and wanted nothing to know. Still couldn’t look at the liquid horizon without a tightening in his bowels. Couldn’t believe some men found comfort in the absence of land. The sun was falling to the invisible seam between water and sky, and it felt like they were sideways on the world. There were monsters beneath them, too, of that he was sure, waiting in the depths. He feared night on the ocean but he feared tonight even more.

  All day he hadn’t been able to think straight. Not one moment when he looked at something and knew it to be an aspect of the true nature of things. No birds in the sky or flowers on trees. No dirt-smell or dew-glistening animal hide. No laughter but the cruel laughter of the men. Even the dog, his familiar, was distant from his heart.

  Sam Bellamy took up the dog and sat in the last sunshine, the light coming apart into golden pieces. He nuzzled the dog’s whiskered face, wondering if his distance from the feeling of things was a portent of death coming. The body knowing all. The eyes blind. Sam had no prayer but the words of the poet-seer that the Magistrate had schooled into him. ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness… Thou foster-child of silence and slow time…’

  He stared into the dog’s eyes and recited the words, but saw nothing of the mystery that had sustained him until now, those rare moments when there was something uncanny about an ordinary thing: a finger of light on a patched blanket, or a mote of dust in a darkened room. Steam rising off a bowl of porridge and shrouding the face of a boy in a wooden hut. The blue crayfish in the tannic creeks near the Boys Home. And his earliest memory, which still had a hold of him: the vision of a black boy with a raised spear on the Swan River flats near the Magistrate’s estate, upriver from Guildford. Early morning sunlight playing across the skin of the black boy and the brown river, so placid that the water looked an aspic, and the boy not moving either, but poised eternally. Smoke from their campfire rising in a perfect grey column into the sky. A troop of koolbardi carolling in the flooded gums, and the air so warm on the skin it was possible for the five-year-old Sam Bellamy to imagine himself indivisible, part of the quiet stillness, and just the feeling of watching himself being watched by the whole living thing. Then a quick action, and the thin spear was gone from the boy’s arm, only the surface slicing as the spear jiggered and danced and the silver flank of the mullet bowed and straightened then floated to the surface. The black boy’s smile. ‘Djildjit ngaarniny!’—and the voice not the boy’s, but Sam’s own.

  A cloud crossed the sun and the ocean turned grey. A rope creaked and the dog whimpered in his arms. Smoke from the cooking brazier at the foredeck drifted down. Sarah Proctor’s cackle from below deck. Sam turned his back and cradled the dog like a baby, as he’d seen mothers do. The dog lay there in his arms, watchful and still, aware that the cradling was a human language for something that it understood, and was grateful for. Sam’s heart finally swelling with tender feeling, the dog’s heart throbbing on his ribcage, its belly-skin slack and rubbery. Sam Bellamy drew upon the tenderness and let it guide him, and it was with his eyes closed, and his mind on the remnant feeling of loving communion that Sam smelled the fire on the wind to starboard. He opened his eyes as the sun sank into the horizon. He knew the smell. Not the fumes from the rough brown coke used in the iron brazier, but the angry smoke of a bushfire. Invisible to the eye, but there on the low wind that walked the ocean from the lands to the east.

  The dog scampered around his feet as he carried the bucket of fish to the cook-pot. He returned to the lashed steersman with a ladle of water. The third mate was an American, wore moleskin breeches and a natty blue coat. Had brass rings that hung from his ears, sunburned like the rest of his face. Eyes the colour of Spanish beans. Long hair and black beard tied with leather braiding. Wrists lashed to the iron spokes inside the ship’s wheel. Lips cracked and scabbed. Sam lifted the ladle and the American buried his face, reclined his neck as Sam lifted higher.

  ‘You smell it, I hazard,’ Sam stated in a whisper. The American closed his eyes and nodded amid his supping. When he had drank off the ladle he tried to speak but his doused tongue made a strangled hiss. The man retched and coughed, wiped his mouth on his shoulder.

  ‘That’s the smoke of the mountain forests. No the desert. No far to go now. And we’re in the trade lanes, boy. Tis but a matter of time before we have company. My countrymen. You want to be on the right side of this traitorousness, you loosen my bonds and get me a knife. I gut that Irish savage, the rest will fall away.’

  Sam kept his eyes on his feet, tried to measure the heat of the American’s voice. Found it wanting. More desperation than rage.

  Given a knife, this man would not gut Dempsey. Sam wanted to help, but within the sadness of his feelings was a cold fear, and a picture of what that meant. He’d learned all his life how the strong bettered the weak. And it was only his own weakness that made him reply, in whisper, the lie, ‘I shall return during the night.’

  The American spat, knowing.

  3

  The ocean had chilled to a temperature barely above ice. For a moment Sam panicked, thought maybe the American had sailed them back to Van Diemen’s Land, where the water was always cold and blue-black. The night was perfect stillness but for the cold rising off the water and the cold falling from the stars. The whaler’s try-pot sat awkwardly on the brazier, too large, sparks from the coke giving off into the mist.

  There was no sight of land but Sam could smell the smoke in the air from the eastern continent. Dempsey called down the watchman in the rigging and greeted the shivering Cornishman with a mug of rum. The twenty mutineers gathered on deck, at Dempsey’s bidding. The try-pot bubbled, a poker in the flames glowed red iron. All the Irishman’s doing. No questions had been asked. The lashed steersman couldn’t see them, slumped and facing into the dark, awake or unconscious, it was hard to tell.

  The mutineers had been drinking heavily, and Sam could guess why. None of them knew what barbarity Dempsey had planned, beyond the cat-o’-nine-tails that Sam had fashioned, there on the webbing. Only the Irishman’s proclamations throughout the day about family and blood and loyalty, amid the indecipherable Cant lingo that Dempsey preferred: snatches of phrases such as Snichel the Bear-garden Discourser, ordering Malone to go around nigging the nappers, and pointing directly to Sam, to make sure the nose-gent don’t try to shirk, neither.

  Sam had his own mug of rum, the wooden handle stained with blood, the dog sniffing and worrying Sam’s lap to get it. He’d attempted to hide in the Captain’s locker but the door was barred with a whaler’s spear lashed across the entrance. To get to the sealskins in the hold Sam would have to pass through the bunkroom that Dempsey was guarding. Sam looked around the gathered faces. Malone and some others nodded with their chins, indicating for him to drink, their eyes bright in the firelight, and worry there too. Sam pretended to drink, faked the sour burn, feared the loss of his faculties, although he feared too the men’s determination that he drink; what visions it might protect him from, like ether-fumes before the surgeon’s knife.

  Sarah Proctor took a seat beside him, gave a little nudge whose meaning Sam couldn’t decipher. He didn’t look at her, but noticed her new-fashioned hessian moccasins, tied around her ankles with a leather band—offcuts from the cat makings. She said nothing, but gulped at her rum, and he watched the faces of the men opposite, regarding her. Something about their eyes. Each of them lookin
g around the firelight, reading for a sign. A leader among them. The waiting, abrading their nerves. Worried about Dempsey’s absence. Worried about America. Starting at every sound, a possible American ship, the fate of pirates known to all.

  Sam looked into their eyes and saw that they would follow Dempsey unless the Irishman was dead. Their discomfort, like his own, the product of not knowing what came next. The nakedness of a face between masks. This recognition was Sam’s first feeling of kinship with the men he’d feared, but who were now his equals in cowardice. He could see the patience in the faces of the old convict lags, the enduring spirit behind their survival, their months on prison hulks, the transportations, the hunger and cold in the new country. The patience of the beast in the field, and that second thing the Magistrate had described to Sam, important above all others, the day Samuel Bellamy was himself transported from the Swan River colony to Van Diemen’s Land—the endurance of suffering. Not waiting it out, or desiring for it to end, but understanding that to suffer is to survive, and to survive is to suffer. The Magistrate’s hands warm on Sam’s shoulders, tears in his eyes, a great man reduced to hardship and misery. Sam Bellamy must accept his due suffering, as punishment for his sins, as Christ had accepted his suffering. Sam wanting to reply, Jesus-like, with a question. Hadn’t Christ suffered so that we might be forgiven our sins? Was Sam’s crime so terrible that he deserved exile, slavery and orphanhood? But the sadness in the old man’s eyes was bitter to Sam, who was one more failure the Magistrate had to endure. A gentleman defined by his distance from suffering, so to develop the refinements of the higher faculties, but the Magistrate brought low so many times, all his teeth fallen out, sunken eyes and jaundiced skin, that he was no longer a gentleman on his own terms.