The Coves

by Whish-Wilson, David;

  Sam could feel the old man’s eyes on him but he couldn’t break his gaze upon the gold.

  ‘Son, it won’t mean nothing to you, but in that ancient empire of China, I studied in the native script the teachings of the Mahayanan sage Nagarjuna, and Bodhidharma, the founder of Chan teaching, which is my preference as far as these things go. They’re as different in practice as night and day but the common principle is that desire is our weakness, our sadness and our burden. Take that gold there in your hand. Now cast your eyes over this bedlam congregation and read therein the general expression.’

  Sam did as he was told. The rows of men seated on benches drinking and smoking. The men lined out the door with foolish grins and bags of dust and those at table playing cards. The Ancient behind the bar. The upturned faces of the drunks splay-legged before the fiddler and fife drummer, their eyes closed. The old man called Dirty Tom McAlear who slept with a child’s look on his face and made his living eating the dirtiest things offered. Upon satisfying this boast, Dirty Tom was paid with coin by the miners who laughed and watched him eat garbage and drink from spittoons. It was said that he’d been continuously drunk for seventeen years. Beside him was the man called Oofty Doofty, whose age was indeterminate because he made his living as a sideshow to Dirty Tom, by receiving money for being punched in the head, and whose face was one livid bruise, but who had allegedly never been knocked out.

  ‘I would say they are content. Some are outright happy. Even rapturous.’

  ‘Rapturous eh? Boy, you know some words.’

  Sam ducked his head. The sweetened rum had made him bold in his language, but the old man clapped his shoulder.

  ‘Boy, that kind of flowerin speech isn’t nothing to be ashamed of. You have a sensibility for words and more too, I’d hazard, and you’d best hope that life doesn’t wring it out of you. But as to my question, and your answer, which I’m in agreement with. If anything, you understate the matter, although what you’ve described is the reason I myself am here. The quotient of ignorance is no less in this new dominion, but it has a different tenor and a different taste. Back in old Australia we was all under the yoke. There was the lash and the stock and the gallows. There was always eyes on you. Even that vast Australian bush is full of eyes. But here, my friend, in this lawless domain, it is different.’

  Clement wet his lips with a glass of water, but strangely didn’t swallow. Wiped his whiskers with the back of a claw. ‘And here is wise old Clement, talking turkey, as the Americans say, with a stripling. But you are a good listener, son, which suggests a measure of wisdom, and as for the others gathered here in this circus of inebriation on this distant shore, son, rapturous is precisely the word. They come here following the yeller but what they are really following is their heart—no longer in conflict with itself. No longer torn between onerous duty and their heart’s desire. Drawn to a flame that will destroy many of them, but in the meantime what you are witnessing in these streets is both rare and precious in the history of our species, even as it is manifest in turmoil. Do you ken what I’m saying, son?’

  Sam shook his head, but watched the glowing nub of resin in Clement’s pipe as he drew upon it in little sips that filled his lungs with the dung-scented smoke.

  ‘I speak too fast, perhaps, but I believe that you’re capable of following my elaborations, the heart of whose meaning is this. You would not believe it from a cursory view of this ragged company, but more so than anywhere else, in this remote town, we are subject to a synchronising with the general philosophic of our times. Lately even sober gentlemen have begun to find civilisation tiresome, and seek instead the thrill of adventure. We welcome them to these shores because in their naïve yearning they are our bread and butter. The scions of the rich and powerful in particular. And Keane has you in mind for some of this work, and that is why I am speaking with you of this matter. This is not a sermon but a school lesson, do you understand?’

  Sam was listening but his eyelids had fallen until he regarded only a narrow band of sulphurous light and shadowy movement. He had never felt so good in his life. His body was silent and still, and in the deprivation of clamouring sensation his mind was free. The old man grunted at Sam’s nod.

  ‘Keane and I arrived on the same clipper, and slept in the dirt by the shore. We found gold up on the American River and made a fortune until my leg got crushed. Which is why I need this redeeming smoke. But Keane carried me on a mule-cart back to this town, where I presently recovered, and where he refused to leave me marooned and solitary. So he turned to his old ways of bushranging. It was my coin that acquired his firearm, and his arm threw fire that first day and every day since. We don’t think it laudatory, but to keep us free, in the words of Mad King Lear, “we’ll do such things—/ What they are yet I know not, but they shall be / The terrors of the earth.”’

  Sam’s eyes opened, not to the scene before him, but into a memory that was perfect in its clarity. Seated at the Magistrate’s table, late at night, the old man scribbling in his diary while Sam shared the candle-flame. Sam spoke, without hearing himself speak, and the words came from a great distance. ‘Still sways their souls with that commanding art / That dazzles, leads, yet chills the vulgar heart.’

  Clement roared, and clapped his hands. He gargled and spat, packed his pipe with tobacco. ‘You ken the words of Byron the rancorous cripple. Good boy. And were he with us tonight, I would teach you how to fleece him. You are indeed a good listener, Samuel Bellamy. But I have discoursed more than my throat can bear. Now it is your turn. What do you believe? You have lived a life, I can see that. What is it that you believe, having learnt what you know?’

  Sam thought to return Clement to the issue of his mother, but he took a moment to ponder on the words and in his drunkeness they were lost to his mouth. The thought of his mother was an apparition that could vanish like smoke around a grasping hand. But while he was thinking of his mother, the memory of the snake returned, and he watched it enter the Magistrate’s wattled hut. Sam was alone in his cot, staring out to the yard, where muddy boot-prints broke the rind of silvery frost that led down to the river.

  In the trees outside, wattlebirds hawked in their throats and ravens sang out their broken-hearted songs and a chill fog sat heavy over the woodland. Sam was perhaps three or four, and too young for chores and schooling.

  The typhoid had nearly taken him as it had taken so many, but the fever had broken. His body was rimed with salt where poisonous sweats had burned the liquids out of him, and his arms were bandaged where the doctor had tapped draughts of his poisoned blood. It was a trial by ordeal, and he’d overheard the Magistrate’s wife, who he never managed to call mother, saying that the mongrel Hibernian blood of the Glasgow slums had, in the manner of like for like, seasoned him against the miasma that seeped upland from the river and carried the disease into their huts.

  It was true that the serpent abounded in those parts. Where the blacks dug into the muddy riverbank to prise out turtle. In the wetland swales where frogs gathered. On the bald domes of baking granite that bunched like curious eggs in the foothills. On the tracks worn smooth over millennia by clans passing through to the Avon Valley. The scores of serpents, seeking out sun-heat and easy food. Pythons in the trees and the black snake underfoot. The blackfellows ate the pythons but in keeping with their curious aversion for the mussel and the oyster, they refused to eat the black snake. When it entered their camps they beat off their dogs and talked to it like an errant child. To them the raven was a familiar and so was the black snake, likely an uncle or the spirit of a shape-shifting maban or medicine man.

  Sam’s black friends had told him of the dolphins that upon chanted enticements would gather in the riverine bays and herd schools of fish toward their hunters’ spears. Or how the old women chanted until an emu entered their camp, and fell down dead beside the ready fire. Evidence of the serpent’s alignment with the blacks’ enchantments was the snake’s disappearance, around the coming of the first winter rains,
when the blacks too disappeared from the great coastal plain and ascended onto the ancient plateau, where the lashing southerly wind was lesser and the kangaroo spread across the grassland tended by fire.

  The snake didn’t enter the hut like the snakes of summer, each of them curling around the doorframe and flattening along the dark wood like the shadow of a knot. The animals had no ears but were attuned to the slightest tremor, and their red-glowing eyes were angry. The snakes of summer lifted their heads when they neared water, or the native mice that lived in the reed-cladding. They changed the temperature of a room. Their concentration when they turned to you was sufficient to shock a man into stillness. When aroused, their heads arose in a weaving dance, and a hood resembling a burnished cloak shrouded the jewelled eyes and flickering tongue.

  But this snake did not slink along the walls. It drew its full length into the sunshine within the doorway, the largest of its kind Sam had seen. It was five yards long and fat as Sam’s thigh, sleekly black and glistening with dew. It did not taste the air with its forked tongue because it knew by some intimation that Sam was alone in his cot. He remembered it from his dreams; the serpent who watched from its corner outside the hearth-light, as the Magistrate placed the severed head of a black warrior murdered by settlers on a dinner plate and centred it on the table by candlelight. Thinking Sam asleep, the Magistrate painted the head in his notebook, dipping his bleeding brush in water, blowing on the pages. The Magistrate paused in his meditation of the warrior’s head and instead began to compose, scratching the pages with a goose-feather quill, following the notations with little chirrups of sound until his song was complete. He whistled, then sang it back to himself, a choral piece in the manner of Purcell, and seemed pleased. That night while the Magistrate slept, and Sam watched rigid with terror, the snake entered the old man’s bed and, unlocking its jaws, began to sheath itself upon the man’s head, consuming him in inches painful to watch, until there was only snake.

  The Magistrate was troubled enough the following morning to leave off his labours in the vegetable garden, but Sam never mentioned the snake. Now it watched him, mighty in its silence and poise.

  ‘Wara!’ Sam said, as he had been taught, but the word never left his lips. The snake shifted its bulk, and lifted its head, and something broke inside Sam, although there was no sound. ‘Noorn,’ Sam whispered, the serpent’s name. And the snake answered, recognised—shivered its flanks, began its silken glide into the bush.

  Sam’s eyes opened, and his head rocked. Seconds had passed, or hours. Clement took his glass and gargled, spat onto the boards, looking out over the crowded groghouse and nodded to Barr, at his position by the door. He turned to Sam and leaned close.

  ‘Boy, I said this was schooling. Tell me, can you feel anything in the air?’

  Sam shrugged himself upright. The drinkers were drinking. The gamers were gambling. There were shouts, guffaws, scraping chairs punctuating the silence. The fiddler, guitarist and drummer had gone silent at a nod from Clement. One by one the dozens of men on the floor began to look around, nudge one another, then look around some more.

  Sam cleared his throat, and spat. ‘Somethin’s comin.’

  Clement nodded, wiped his moustaches and slipped out of the blanket draped over his shoulders. He wore a knife at his belt and opened his vest to show Sam the smooth-bore pistol.

  ‘I can smell danger forthcoming and so can the men around you. Let us see what we shall see.’

  The man Patrick Ryan emerged in a leather vest from behind the blanket-draped doorway bearing a musket, at whose end was fixed a glinting bayonet. Behind him, Mannix the red-haired giant, toting a rifle, his neck strung with bags of powder and ball.

  Clement laughed. ‘Patrick, he does favour the musket and bayonet, for its reach. He was caught once between reloads, it ended in a knife fight, and never again.’

  The two armed men sat astride a bench along the row from the Americans Sam had brought to the street, who were looking around to increase their number. Several of the company in the room cashed in their chips for gold dust spooned into leather sacks and made to leave. Not a word was spoken, but it was precisely as Clement had prophesied, with more armed men arriving from behind the curtain and more men leaving and nothing but the thickening air to suggest the reasoning.

  Barr had turned from the doorway and leaned into the alley, his pistol cocked and primed with ball and powder. A rifle was placed behind him by another man dressed in pelts, who set about priming a musket with a long tamp. He was himself armed with a fowling piece whose barrels were black and octagonal, and lined in his belt were a dozen of the flechettes that Sam had seen upstairs.

  Clement had been watching the preparations with the expression of a doting uncle. He turned to pack away his favoured pipe and accessories, which he slipped inside one of his boots.

  ‘This is more than intimation, my son, as I first thought. This is intelligence. There are enemies among us. My advice is for you to take a corner. And this. Keep your finger off the trigger, for the sake of your health and mine.’

  Clement examined the bore, pan and lock of his pistol with a practised eye, then passed it to Sam. ‘The corner. Always a corner, with eyes on the doors. You have one shot. Shoot between breaths. Calm thyself beforehand. Shoot, then run.’

  But Sam didn’t move from his seat. His legs felt long and heavy. When he tried to stand it seemed as though the chair and floor were weighted against his back, and he sat again. The dog repeated Sam’s action, although kept its eyes on Clement, who helped the musicians pack away their instruments behind the stack of firewood.

  When the wall exploded and the pelted man beside Barr clutched his throat and peered down his nose at the jagged spear of pine embedded there, and Barr climbed off the floor where he had been blown by the mighty percussion, and the next blast of the fowling piece from next door opened up another great hole in the brothel wall and the Australians dived to the benches, Sam was still at his seat beside the glowing stove.

  The remnant American party had taken a spray of buckshot and they too rolled a bench and reached for their pieces. There were five of them, and Sam saw Mannix nod toward Patrick, who indicated his agreement. Neither of them fired, saving their ball for the Americans in case they turned on their hosts. But mostly the Americans swore and wiped blood from their pitted faces and looked for means of escape. There were shots from up and down the street and down the alley and from behind the benches and the room filled with smoke and the stink of saltpetre. Barr was on his belly using the dead pelted man as a shield, and the spears of flame from the fowling pieces and muskets and rifles were like sulphurous lightning, and Sam was deafened and gathered the dog and scuttled on his knees behind the stove, whose iron belly rang out with the bashing of shrapnel and buckshot.

  He pressed his hands to his ears and closed his eyes but his eyes and nostrils retained the images of fire and the stink of brimstone.

  And then it was quiet, and his eyes were open. His hands shook and the dog shivered beside him.

  Barr hefted the pelted man’s shotgun over his forearm, peered into the gun-smoke. Turned and waved the others past him, who flitted like ghosts between their building and the next. Some shots were fired, while Mannix and Patrick helped the Americans to their feet, and indicated they should leave the back way. Clement emerged from behind the woodpile.

  There was cheering from the street. A face powdered black from firing emerged inside the frame of the blasted brothel wall, and nodded. Held up a hand indicating five dead, every man in the room still deafened. A hand clamped Sam’s shoulder and he looked up into Clement’s face. Saw not weariness but excitement. Sam was led behind the blanket and down some stairs into an alley that smelt of wet grass, then into the street where a briny wind blew off the ocean and men with torches surrounded a kneeling man dressed in the black frockcoat of a minister. Sam’s hearing began to return, and he looked to Clement’s lips and made out the words, ‘Dudgeon. The Hounds’ General.�
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  There were now hundreds in the middle of the road, and more coming. Men and women spilled from the clustered ale and dram and bawdy houses that rose and fell down the street in motley formation like a row of broken teeth. Accents from the counties of the British Islands and the homelands of Australia. Faces illuminated by torch and whale-oil lantern and the full moon that cast a chalky pall over the proceedings. Clement pulled Sam aside, and in his wake the Australian leader Thomas Keane entered the firelight, bareheaded and grim-faced, the great revolver drawn. The Hound struggled against the pairs of hands that fixed him to his knees. He was not wounded or dirtied or cowed. There was defiance in the American’s face, although his fate was certain. He spat at Keane’s polished boots, and tried again to rise, shouted something lost to the jeering crowd. Keane raised a hand, and the crowd fell silent.

  ‘You can shoot me like a dog, or you can give me the chance—’

  More jeering and hoots of ridicule. But the American wasn’t begging.

  ‘—to fight…on equal terms.’

  Keane smiled, and struck a match off his canvas sleeve. ‘You might win the battle, but you’ve lost the war. What’s the point?’

  ‘That is a victory I would cherish, above all mine others. And then your seconds might shoot me down.’

  Keane looked around at the shaking heads, but he didn’t measure his response against their own. ‘It’s true enough. If I fall, another will take my place. But The Hounds are gone, and I would die happy. Give him a weapon of his choosing.’

  Keane cocked the mighty Colt, and held it to Dudgeon’s head. The American looked to the armed men, avoiding their faces, seeking out his favoured armament. Saw Patrick’s musket, and made come hither with an urgent hand. Patrick nodded to the men whose hands were upon the American’s shoulders, and indicated he should rise. The crowd murmured their apprehension, knowing the musket as a piece with a true aim. They parted in a fearful silence, and fell away against the horse-rails and doorways and plank-board steps. Patrick marched Dudgeon thirty yards into the gloom, the bayonet at his belly, and waited for Clement to cease his whispering to Keane, who stared impassive. Then Keane held up his pistol and shouted, ‘I will match the musket’s single shot, and then, if no man is fallen, we will take to it with knives.’