The Coves

by Whish-Wilson, David;

  The sitting room was dark beneath the joists and beams and shingles of the exposed roof. There were swift nests up there and spider webs that in the weak light appeared like finely spun glass. Sam could look past his feet through the floorboards onto the cobbled ground where the Mayor’s clerk in his black suit was boiling a kettle in a corner hearth whose chimney was made of river stones.

  Like the Mayor, the clerk was a Mormon and dressed in a black suit with a white shirt and black tie. He smoked a cigar while he waited for the kettle to boil, running a hand through his long hair. He looked up at Sam and spat on the floor, shifting on his haunches. He hadn’t been friendly to Sam upon his arrival, and his expression told Sam that this wasn’t going to change. A swift landed on the chair beside Sam and stood there on its delicate feet darting glances around the room, ignoring him as part of the furniture. It flew to a corner and retrieved a piece of straw from a pile of sweepings, and flew back into the roof and began its shrill chorus. Sam closed his knees around the leather bag that was the purpose of his visit. It wasn’t heavy, and so likely didn’t contain gold, and nobody had told him not to look inside but he didn’t anyway.

  After dressing himself and eating his daily ration of shellfish soup at Missus Hogan’s kitchen, he’d gone to Clement in The Stuck Pig and received his orders. The old man was grave in manner because Mayor Bannon was, he said, one of the most important but also most dangerous men in the colony. Clement retained the leather bag while they sat on a bench-seat because he could see that Sam was eager to do his duty.

  ‘Don’t be fooled by the sobriety of Bannon’s dress and speech. Like some painted king, his actions cannot be predicted.’

  And so Sam waited for the Mayor to open his door. He lacked a timepiece, and instead measured the length of his waiting by the number of times the family of swifts returned to the sweepings pile and gathered material for their nest, and the fact that the Mayor’s clerk had now smoked three cigars and had drunk two mugs of coffee downstairs.

  Presently the clerk climbed the stairs. He thumbed cigar ash in the sweepings corner, looked at the leather bag and indicated for Sam to follow. There was no handle on the Mayor’s door and the clerk merely pushed it open to the reveal the Mayor, not praying as Sam had assumed, or studying from his holy book, but reading the newspaper with a vexed expression while the loose pages were cast about his desk and across the floor.

  Mayor Bannon was a big well-fed man with black moustaches and angry brown eyes, and huge red hands that he beckoned toward Sam, who approached and proffered the leather bag. Bannon didn’t open it but placed it under the table while he looked Sam up and down. Clement had schooled Sam toward adopting the posture of someone resolute, but also respectful and impressed by the dignity of the man’s office. He held Bannon’s eye for the appropriate measure and then looked away and put his hands at his belt and waited. Apparently satisfied with what he saw, Bannon nodded to the clerk, then returned to his reading of Sam.

  ‘Are you a Christian, boy?’

  ‘I was raised so, yes sir.’

  Bannon looked sceptical. ‘I’m not given to proselytising, but on the matter of nationhood I except myself. You’ll make a fine American, son, I can see that. For we need white men in this territory. But in the meantime, is it true that there are blacks in your colony called New South Wales? And if so, how did they come to be there?’

  Sam had been advised to humour Bannon, and to not rile him, and so he pretended a thoughtfulness that he didn’t feel. ‘I assume they’ve always been there sir. Beyond that, I wouldn’t hazard—’

  Bannon held up a hand and cocked his head like he’d caught a nearby sound. ‘Curious. For the redskin natives of this land are certainly descended from a lost tribe of Zion, of which there are others still strayed from the shepherd. Would you say, based upon your observances of the black men of your homeland, that they too might contain the holy seed and derive their ancestry from the sacred land of Israel?’

  Sam looked to his boots, which had left prints of dried mud. ‘I couldn’t say, sir.’

  ‘… because because if you even suspect that they carry the holy spark, it behoves you to return to your native land and bring them back into the flock, wouldn’t you say? And for this purpose I can supply you, should you be called.’

  Sam thought of Thomas Keane in his own office, feet up on the plank-table, smoking his cheroot and watching Sam through the blue-grey smoke. Keane was a convicted bushranger and known murderer who hid nothing of his exploits and declared them fully.

  Bannon on the other hand was a church leader and mayor who ordered murders and lived by tithing the criminal elements of the town. If he suffered from the censure of his Mormon God then he didn’t show it in his speech or his dress or manner.

  The clerk behind Sam coughed and scraped his boots and Bannon looked at him and took some kind of signal that he should desist in his speechmaking. He offered a cigar, which Sam pocketed, bowing and taking the cotton satchel proffered by the clerk, who was even more mean-looking up close. Sam thanked the clerk and turned and thanked the Mayor again, and went out into the sitting room and put on his hat, and watched the family of swifts race around the perimeter of the roofline so fast that the beating of their tiny wings made a baffled sound that followed him down the stairs and into the street.

  12

  Sam knew the contents of the satchel and saw the sheaf of papers with his own eyes when he arrived at the cabin built onto Goat Hill.

  He was puffed after hiking up the dirt track. He paused to take a view of the cove, with its ghost fleet of marooned ships and the haze of wood smoke over Sydney-town; at the sight of the canvas shantytown behind the plaza square and the old Spanish Mission across the flatlands to the south. He knocked on the cabin door and was invited to enter by a gruff voice.

  Inside the cabin were three men working who were Keane’s best forgers. They occupied a table that was brightly lit by whale-oil lamps despite the sunshine streaming in the open windows. On the table were different kinds of inks and feathers and stamps and blotters made of calfskin stretched and nailed into place. The three men were equally old. Two of them were identical brothers who wore spectacles and barely looked up when he entered. Sam passed the satchel to the grey-bearded man who was their leader and whose nose resembled a turnip dug from the field. The man fastidiously wiped his hands against his apron and then opened the satchel, and slid out the sheaf of papers and grunted his approval. He took up a magnifying glass and bent over the first paper that was a blank title deed stamped and signed by Bannon. Forgery was a lucrative business in the new colony, and these lags were Keane’s favourites because they were expert in crafting facsimiles that authorised ownership to mining leases in the hills, or to town plots, which were sold to gullible new arrivals. Bannon supplied the official forms, and these scriveners filled out the claims with perfect cursive script of the government type, so akin to the originals that it was impossible to tell who legitimately owned what and with no way of settling the matter excepting by warfare.

  It was plain from the manner of the three old men that they regarded their craft with the utmost seriousness. The old man with the bulbous nose looked over the papers one by one, grunting his satisfaction and then carefully turning the page and leaning once more into the clear light cast from the nearby lamps. Sam took his leave, carefully shutting the cabin door behind him, not lingering over the view because he was eager to be reunited with his dog, who was with Clement and would be pining for him.

  The dog was good at forgiveness, and sat with its snout wedged between Sam’s thighs, and looked up at him with loving eyes, its tail beating on the floorboards while Sam scratched around its ears and the favoured red ridge upon its forehead. They had dined on the tavern stew, which the Ancient simmered in a giant pot behind the bar, and which never ran out because it was daily replenished with whatever was at hand. The stew today contained navy beans, meat, potatoes, carrot and chunks of navy biscuit that even after hours of
stewing was tough to chew. Sam gave these to the dog, which he gulped down, and asked for more with a little whine that was a precursor to his regular burst of outright howling, and that all the men thought a great joke.

  At the table with Sam was Clement, stringing a fiddle with catgut, and Keane, and two Irishmen who were from New York, drinking rye whisky and becoming loud in their teasing of one another.

  Clement leaned closer and indicated with his chin the two New Yorkers. ‘Those two Irishmen are emissaries from a New York political party who call themselves Democrats. We don’t trust Mayor Bannon to hold the course, and so Keane is treating with these Democrats to support the Australian cause when elections come. The Nativists, who support the merchants, and the Democrats are bitter in their enmity, and each employ henchmen. That man Charlie Duane with the red moustache is the right hand of the Democrat leader Patrick Casey, beside him. Casey’s not a bad sort of man, but watch out for Duane, he’s a killer. They both get to drink free in Sydney-town, and you’ll be seeing them at our poker tables, where their winnings are guaranteed. That is the price of business, which is another way of saying that it’s the price of democracy.’

  Sam watched the henchman Charlie Duane pick his teeth with a fingernail, then drink from his glass of rye and gargle and swallow. Sam looked at him closely because of Clement’s description of the man as a killer. Sam had lately known plenty of killers, and he was always looking for something constant in them. Some look in their eyes or mark in their expression. Some feeling they caused by their presence. But there was nothing about this man different to any other, excepting perhaps a certain arrogance in his movements; taking up more space than he needed, and drinking like there was a fire inside him that needed dousing. Keane on the other hand sat quietly, like he always did. Every killer seemed to be different, and that was likely because what Clement said about killers was true—that they were only killers because they’d learned that killing a man was no more significant than blowing your nose. This understanding was more deadly than the act of killing itself, according to Clement, especially in the hands of a king or a general or a pope, because if killing felt like nothing, then so too death was nothing. One death or a thousand deaths or a million deaths—each and together meant nothing.

  Duane wasn’t a big man, but his grey woollen three-piece suit was new and the green top hat that he wore was also new and cocked back on his head. He caught Sam watching him and wiped his coppery moustache with the back of his hand and raised the same hand in friendliness. Sam responded in kind although they were only feet apart, because the Democrats leader Patrick Casey was expounding upon some point that he punctuated by beating his fist on the table. He wasn’t angry, and in fact appeared to be telling a joke, although his singsong voice didn’t match the hardness in his eyes or the tension in his limbs or the set of his jaw.

  Then they heard the familiar sound of knuckle on bone, and turned as one and there was Oofty Doofty, who sat with a crash on a stool and toppled off backwards and fell silent on the boards. No man had ever knocked out Oofty with a single blow, and that fact guaranteed his income, but there he was, unconscious on his back. The players at table laid down their cards, and the drinkers hushed, and all looked to the man who had launched the blow. He was tall and clean-shaved, and dressed like an American in polished boots and woollen suit, but when he spoke it was with an Irish accent.

  ‘He said I should hit him. And I but tapped his forehead. I meant him no harm.’

  Dirty Tom McAlear was at Oofty’s side, peeling back his eyelids. He looked hard at the tall stranger, but said nothing.

  ‘He’s here. Yankee Sullivan!’

  The tall man turned at the sound of his name. It was Charlie Duane, risen from his seat and spreading his arms wide. ‘Boys, this is Yankee Sullivan, the American boxing champion, who like yeselves hails from the Southland, come over to work with us on the elections.’

  But Sullivan looked past Duane to Thomas Keane, smoking a cigar and smiling. ‘Tom Keane, is that you? I’m fresh off the Panama boat, and I heard there was a Thomas Keane to be had in this establishment, but I doubted the news.’

  The two men of equal height and stature embraced. Keane called over Clement, who rose and put away his fiddle. Sam watched the introductions and in particular the hands belonging to the fighter, which were large and scarred. Sullivan caught him watching, and winked. Soon they were all drinking at table; Sam fetching the refills of porter and whisky, with Sullivan calling for a pisco punch, which he’d heard was the native drink of San Francisco. Sam had to retrieve a bottle of the Peruvian spirit from Hell Heggarty’s dram-house down the street, and some fresh pineapples from the plaza square, but by the time he’d returned Sullivan was drinking whisky like the others, and Sam passed the cocktail makings to the Ancient, who looked at them askance and stowed them away.

  Sam took his position on the bench. While collecting the pisco from the dram-house he’d witnessed a private moment between the wild Irishman Hell Heggarty and Keane’s man Barr, both of them inside the shadowed doorway. Heggarty was the bigger and older man, and he held Barr in an embrace from behind, his arms gentle-clasped around the younger man’s waist while he nuzzled Barr’s neck. Both of their eyes were closed in a kind of rapture. It was the tenderness of the embrace which surprised Sam, who lingered outside the doorway rather than disturbing them. For a full two minutes the men stood, saying nothing and leaning into one another, as though every moment was precious. Sam knew that men used other men as women, because he had seen as much in the Boys Home, but he didn’t know that there might be love. He felt surprised by this knowledge but also betrayed. The adult world that he remembered from Australia was full of masks and disguises, but it wasn’t like that for the people of Sydney-town.

  The understanding triggered in Sam a determination to act, to show them what he might become. He slid closer to Duane on the pretext of refilling his whisky, keeping his place beside the Irish Democrat whose glass was emptied every few minutes. Duane was turned in his seat, adopting the posture of one preparing to interrupt a conversation and make a point of his own, and only Keane and Clement noticed Sam’s position. Keane embarked upon describing his memories of Yankee Sullivan while they were sixteen-year-old boys on the run together in New South Wales, surviving for three months as wharf rats and housebreakers before they were recaptured and sent to different jails. But even while he talked he was warning Sam with his eyes.

  ‘Boys,’ said Sullivan, turning to Casey and Duane. ‘Thomas Keane was my brother back in New South Wales and you have chosen your ally well. Never have I known a cleverer or fiercer man—’

  But Charlie Duane, who’d been drinking freely, as Sam predicted, began to talk over Sullivan. ‘Boys, you likely won’t know how once upon a time this madman sailed incognito from New York to London, from where he’d been so cruelly transported those many years ago, and successfully challenged the British champion, Hammer Lane, for the crown-title and a purse of one hundred pound, before the English learnt his true identity and he had to smuggle himself back to old America.’

  The blood was hot in Sam’s face, and his heart was thumping, but he leaned his left elbow onto the bench the better to listen to Duane, and ignoring the warning look in Keane’s eyes let the fingers of his right hand trace the bottom hem of Duane’s broadcloth jacket. The problem was that Duane was animated in the telling, and sitting up and down a few inches. Sam’s fingers found the side pocket of Duane’s jacket and tested the opening by walking it open with a scissor movement. The weight in Duane’s pocket sat on his thigh, and the opening was under no tension. Sam’s fingers slipped within and his fingertips traced the twine-bound handle of a leather cosh and beside it a small leather purse with a snap button. He tested its weight with his two fingers and it was heavy. He knew that if he dropped the purse it would land on Duane’s leg and alert him. Duane stood up then and Sam saw the response in Clement’s eyes, which was to reach for his pistol, but the Irish Democrat wasn’t re
ady to cease his memorialisation of Yankee’s heroics.

  Sam caught the glance from Thomas Keane to Yankee Sullivan, who shrugged, because the tale was true. Keane shook his head and smiled, but the smile was pinched because he was still looking at Sam, who had the purse now in his fingers and slid it down his shin and onto the toe of his boot. He then put both his hands onto the bench and refilled Duane’s whisky and kept his hands above the table where everyone could see them.

  ‘Now, Yankee, to the matter at hand,’ said Casey. ‘Tom Keane here will find you a place to live and eat among your countrymen and recreate according to your appetites, but in the meantime, how do you fancy putting those fists to work?’

  Yankee Sullivan looked at his hands, and made them into fists. The action appeared to hurt him, and he grunted. ‘Sure, if there’s takers I’ll take them, and their money too. But let’s go now before I drink myself to foolishness.’

  A cheer went around the table where dozens had gathered to see the big man, who stripped off his jacket and shirt and removed his boots and socks. Sullivan’s back was junked with cruel scars, and so were his arms equally marked, and there were the familiar rings of proudflesh at his wrists and ankles where he’d suffered the irons.