Bony and the Black Virgin

by Arthur W. Upfield

The old man was becoming heated, and Bony said:

  “You aren’t really barracking for the rabbits, are you?”

  “Course I am. Country’s not the same without the rabbits. Who wants the rabbits cleaned up? The rabbits are the poor man’s food. While there’s rabbits no working man and his children need starve in Australia.”

  “Anyone listening to you, Dad, would think you were a working man,” Eric said, soothingly.

  “Well, I am at that.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re a full blown pastoralist with no ruddy sheep to your name. So close your clapper.”

  The ire faded from the old but bright hazel eyes, and slowly a smile spread over the dark face marked so vividly by the white moustache. Humour rushed to the rescue.

  “A pastoralist! Me! Crikey, so I am, Eric. To hell with the working man. What d’you say, Inspector?”

  “I say you two would be most obliging did you call me Bony. Everyone else does.”

  “Suits me, Bony. Anyway, you’re welcome to stay as long as you wish. We’ve only two bedrooms here in the house, but the hired hand’s room can be made comfortable. Can you play cribbage or poker?”

  “Both, reasonably well, I hope.”

  “Then we’ll all be set. No money, though. We play for matches.”

  An hour later, when local gossip dried up, Jim Pointer left, and the Downers carried out the promise of making the room at the end of the machinery shed truly comfortable.

  “Do what you like,” old Downer told Bony, and Eric added:

  “Take you anywhere you want, show you anything you want to see. We’ve still a little petrol left for the truck.”

  “Now, Eric, you fix that room, and I’ll show Bony around,” importantly ordered John, and Eric smiled behind his back and winked, and said he would convey the visitor’s baggage to the guestroom.

  “When Eric fixes it, you’ll be all right here,” John said, as they stood at the open door of the room under the same roof as the machinery shed. Then the old man showed Bony exactly where the body of Paul Dickson was found, moving a saw bench to give a clear view.

  “I have seen the official photographs,” Bony said. “By the way, you never did find your son’s hair or the watch?”

  “Neither. Not even the cards those locks of hair was sewn to by my wife, rest her soul. I still get headaches thinking on what happened here.”

  “We’ll have to talk it over quietly some day, John. I am far from satisfied with the picture as you saw it when you and Eric came home from Mindee.”

  “Me neither. Long time back, though. Terrible lot of dust and sand blown over any clues since then.”

  “The abos might make it rain,” Bony said. “Rain might wash the dust off a lot of clues, mightn’t it?”

  John Downer brightened.

  “If those black bastards do make it rain! Did they seem real anxious to get down to it?”

  “Yes, I think so. After the Medicine Man made up his mind. We stopped at Bore Ten on the way out to Blazer’s Dam, and they weren’t about when we passed on the way home. It’s probable they had already gone off to dig up their rainstones.”

  They were walking towards the shearing shed, which Downer proudly wanted to show, as a shearing shed, with its pens and yards and interior plan, is more complicated than a house.

  “What d’you reckon?” he began. “Think the abos can make rain?”

  “I do think that by observing signs they tend to make believe their rainstones when properly ‘sung’ will bring rain.”

  Bony was shown around the shed, and was informed that John had built it with Eric’s assistance, and Eric had installed the machinery for the two-man stand, and that the wool press had been purchased in Sydney.

  “Another feller and me shore twelve thousand one year,” claimed John. “That was before Eric came home for good. Three years ago him and me shore close to nine thousand. Now we got nothing.”

  “How many did you have at your last shearing?”

  “Fourteen hundred and nineteen they tallied. That was last June.”

  “You put all the shorn sheep out at Rudder’s Well paddock?”

  “Yes. Feed around here and up north had gone.”

  “Did you muster them for a count after you returned from your holiday last September?”

  “Took a rough tally at the Well. About a hundred died when we was down in Mindee. Why?”

  “Unlikely, then, that Dickson, with or without Brandt, was engaged in sheep stealing?”

  “Not likely. Don’t think.”

  “Dickson was buried where?”

  “I’ll show you. Out back of the shed.”

  The grave was marked only by rails nailed to four posts.

  “The police wanted to put him in the wife’s plot down front of the house,” John said. “Eric wouldn’t have it, and I wouldn’t of had it either if I’d been handy, which I wasn’t at the time. You see, the wife’s plot is only big enough for her and me. I don’t much like this, though, just planting a man with nothing said over him. So I read a bit of the service, and put up a cross, and weeks after, when I came here, the cross was gone.

  “I didn’t find it, and so I put up these rails, and afterwards I asked Eric about the cross, and he made no bones about telling me that the feller was a criminal and wasn’t entitled to a cross. What do you think?”

  “Ticklish question, John. However, I think I’m on your side.”

  They moved on round the rear of the house, and the hen yard, and then John said:

  “We mustn’t take notice of Eric, Bony. The lad’s had a real tough time with the sheep and the drought and all. It’s his first drought, you understand. Terrible lot of his mother in him, rest her soul. She was a real woman, if you understand what I mean. Couldn’t bear to see suffering. Eric was always closer to her than he’s ever been to me.

  “Mind you, I got nothing against him. We been good cobbers always. But watching animals die, and not being able to do much about it, sort of tossed him off balance. He battled hard to save the sheep. I knew he hadn’t a hope, but I gave him his head. It made him very touchy. Sort of broke him down. He didn’t used to be like he is.”

  “At the end of the drought, and when you have to build up the flocks again, he might regain his old self, John.”

  “I’m hoping so.” John paused, then said: “Feller has to be hard, don’t you think? Has to be able to shut his mind off what can’t be helped. I’ve had to do it. So have others.”

  “One has to be philosophic,” agreed Bony. And now they were at the road gate in the fence enclosing the entire homestead. “Tell me, when you and Eric returned from Mindee to find the dead man, was this gate open or closed?”

  “Closed. I remember having to get down to open it for the truck.”

  “It isn’t closed now. Was it usually closed then?”

  “Only at night time to keep the dogs from going away hunting. We had three then, you know. The chooks was always out and about the place during daytime, but was locked up at night to save ’em from the foxes. What’s on your mind?”

  “It’s said that Brandt chained the dogs to prevent them from following him. He’d just killed a man, and he wouldn’t delay getting off with his packed bike. He had to leave by this gate. Why did he delay to close it?”

  “Crikey! Yes, why?” echoed John. “No man would muck about with a gate when in a tearing hurry to get away from a murder.”

  “Doubtless Brandt’s mind was at the time most unsettled,” Bony pointed out. “No one else came here after he left and before you and Eric arrived back? Could there have been someone?”

  “No one from L’Albert,” replied Downer. “They’d have noticed something wrong.”

  “No one came over from L’Albert, John. I asked Pointer that. You haven’t any other near neighbours have you?”

  “None at all. Besides, if anyone had come, they’d have banged on the house door, and, finding no one at home, would have slipped a note under it saying they’d been.
Don’t have no strangers, no travellers this way, Bony. Only a feller like Dickson who escaped custody.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  A Page of History

  WITH THE sun far down the western sky this calm hot day, Lake Jane was like a marcasite in a setting worthy of a more precious jewel.

  The surround of orange sand dunes was unmarred by the print of man or beast, and had been caressed and moulded by the wind to fantastic shapes, majestic outlines, and to the delicate curves of the rose. Here in playful mood the wind had buried a tree up to its first branches, making it appear as a bloated cabbage, and there had lifted another to stand absurdly on its splayed roots, through which a steer could gambol.

  As Bony walked down the slope to the lake with only a towel about his middle, he might have been the First Man to venture into Eden before it was made ready for him, and although his bare feet made not the slightest sound, he felt the urge to walk tiptoe. On the hard white beach, the towel cast aside, he flexed his arms, expanded his chest and tightened his stomach, and felt like shouting, and dared not. Starkly nude, he was one with this starkly nude land.

  Several herons stood at the tip of a tiny spit, as though looking at themselves in the mirror of the lake. A party of teal ducks were as tiny black warships on a metallic sea. With the water to his chest, Bony was tempted to splash some of it upon the nude land, and tell it to clothe itself with green garments.

  “A wedge of swans came down here when I was taking a bathe,” he told his host at dinner. “The water is alive with tiny orgasma. Is there any fish?”

  “Plenty, but as yet very small,” answered Eric. “Too small to hook, but they’ll grow fast.”

  “Fish!” chortled old Downer. “Last time the Lake was full, we caught fish up to seven and eight pounds. Ducks! They laid eggs everywhere, even up the trees. Go out any time and fill a four-gallon tin with ’em.”

  “Meanwhile we have to live on kangaroo,” Eric reminded them. “I’ll have to run out to Rudder’s this evening. Care to come?”

  “Yes, I would. Four miles by the map isn’t it?”

  “You’ve seen a map?”

  “In Jim Pointer’s office.”

  “That’s a good one. A bit short of four miles actually.”

  “I take it you are still running water into the trough at Rudder’s Well?” Bony questioned. “For kangaroos?”

  “Yes. Strangely enough they aren’t about Lake Jane. They got used to watering at Rudder’s, I suppose. It might be that, being accustomed to water slightly brackish, they don’t like this Lake water. Anyway, I can always pick up one out there after sundown.”

  “Well, you’d better get going. Sun’ll set in half an hour,” the old man reminded his son.

  Seated in the truck with the dog riding behind, Bony remarked on the boat he had seen moored to a stake. Eric grinned, saying he had built it in great haste when the down flood over the Crossing cut them off, and that he was building another, for something to do.

  “According to the Old Man, and I don’t doubt him, Lake Jane will become a paradise for fishing and shooting, and the ’roos will gather around in thousands, and the rabbits will come and multiply in millions. That’ll please Dad. Mind you, he has a lot in favour of the rabbits. When the rabbits are thick, the dingoes and the foxes and the eagles don’t attack the sheep and lambs.”

  “You had trouble with the foxes?”

  “In the end it was the foxes that really beat us,” replied Eric. “I was carting water and holding the sheep on scrub, and the ratio of foxes to sheep became something like six to one. When a sheep died at the trough at evening, nothing of it was left next morning, bar tufts of wool, and bones scattered for yards.”

  Talking thus, Bony watched the track unwinding before the truck; the passing trees and scrub, areas of bare red earth, low dunes of windswept sand, and, at one place, spinifex to which still adhered feathers from the fowls Eric had jettisoned many months before. Save for a bird or two, there was no living thing to be seen, for reptiles would freeze to immobility on sighting the vehicle.

  The general impression was of drabness and aridity, until they came to a wide belt of tea tree, a ramose shrub growing to a height of from seven to ten feet, and having but little space between each. The small and bright green leaves offered pleasurable contrast, as well as the sense of intimacy gained from a forest.

  Half a mile beyond this tea tree belt, there appeared above the general scrub the tops of two sandalwood trees, their slender leaves reflecting the sunlight with the purest green of any in this world. On coming to them, Bony could not fail to admire their straight trunks and unspoiled shapes, and it was as though the poor scrub trees stood back also to admire them, for the ground on which they stood was level and paved with untarnished red sand.

  And immediately afterwards that impish, malicious, mocking Spirit of this Land, of which he had talked with Jim Pointer, fired a bolt to destroy the complacence into which he had fallen. There was a blur, a technical error in that picture of the sandalwood trees.

  The doubt was rooted in Bony’s mind when they arrived at the gate to the Rudder’s Well paddock, and during the next few minutes doubt was frustrated by the interest the place would arouse in anyone coming to it across this arid country. All about the long trough were a hundred-odd kangaroos, and, upon the grey ground, slivers of dull red slipped and dodged—the shapes of foxes, come early to quench thirst which could not wait until darkness. Over all whirled and screamed the birds, converged upon this particular place, when within a short distance was a lake of fresh water.

  Eric parked the truck in front of the grass shed, saying he would take the rifle to the trough limit and select his kangaroo. Bony decided to wait in the truck with Bluey. Watching Eric walk with deceptive unhurried haste to the far end of the trough, where he waited for the animals to regather, Bony summed up this young man. Knowledgeable, self-assured, a battler, stubborn and intolerant, Eric had not his father’s resilience to pressures exerted by prolonged drought. A dashing cavalry officer, but not the commander of a besieged fort!

  Eric fired once, and the birds rose with deafening cacophony, and ’roos and foxes raced away, leaving one kangaroo to tell of good marksmanship. When he came for the truck, instead of carrying the carcase to the vehicle, Bony asked:

  “Was it away out across the plain that you held the sheep on scrub feed?”

  “Three miles out. I don’t want to live through that experience again. And yet I’m glad that I did what I could do for the sheep, and for the cows and horses that died out here.”

  Bony helped to lift the kangaroo to the truck, and noticed how cleanly it had been shot through the head. It was young, and its condition was surprisingly good.

  There were facets to this young man which Bony liked, and facets, too, which he understood.

  The sun had set when they left Rudder’s Well, but the light was still strong when they passed the two sandalwood trees, and although he strove to detect what was wrong with this picture among so many others, he failed. Doubt of its balance, its perfection, was brought by the Spirit of the Land to doubt the doubt.

  But Bony was akin to this Land, and too close to its presiding Spirit to permit a doubt of the doubt to influence him. If anything were to be doubted it was ‘Did the flaw in the picture of those sandalwoods have a connection with the investigation?’ It was remotely possible. The white man, seeing a stone lying on a bed of roses would not bother to reason why; but an aborigine who saw a spider dead in its undamaged web would spend time and thought on that flaw in the picture. Spiders don’t die naturally in the web.

  The course of the relay race with death, as Bony had described the two murders, almost certainly passed by Rudder’s Well to Lake Jane homestead, following the defined road. Thus anything amiss in that section had to be examined by one who claimed never to have failed.

  Opportunity came the following afternoon when the Downers were working on the new boat. Bony slipped away and, carefully avoiding
the road, came to the clearing at the side farthest from it. Here he sat in the shade of a needlewood tree, or rather its trunk, for the narrow leaves give but scant shelter. The natural clearing was approximately a hundred yards across, and nothing grew in it bar the two sandalwoods. The wind had swept the area clean of dead leaves and small twigs, leaving only the heavier tree debris, immediately below the trees. Sand particles blown against them proved that the prevailing recent wind had come from the north-west.

  The match he had used to light a cigarette he placed in his shirt pocket, and when done, the cigarette butt went into the same receptacle. Removing his boots, he moved around in his socks, to lessen risk of being tracked.

  At the side of the road and in the approximate position he had been when on the truck, he gazed searchingly at the scene to locate the flaw. He could see the large sticks used by a pair of eagles to fashion their nest at the very top of a dead box tree beyond the clearing. They would have caused a decided imbalance had they built amid the leafy branches of the sandalwood. This applied, too, to the position of the bag, made by the social caterpillars, suspended from a dead branch of a near-by mulga. Its being there was natural; it was certainly not the flaw he sought. There were many other similar objects, but not one to create the imbalance.

  It is a fact that one cannot see the wood for the trees. The flaw was eventually found close to his feet, and only two yards off the track.

  It was a branch torn from a tea tree shrub, the smaller subsidiary branches intact. The leaves had long since withered and vanished. The wind had partially buried it with sand, proving that it had been there for some considerable time. There was no reason to account for its presence at this place.

  The were no tea tree shrubs growing here, and the nearest was the wide belt of them half a mile nearer the homestead. So what! Well, why was the stone lying on the bed of roses?

  The wind could not have brought it, because it was much too heavy. It would not have fallen from Eric Downer’s truck, because the truck was fitted with sides and tailboard. It would not be carried by the aborigines from camp to camp for firewood. It is used sometimes to thatch the roof of an outhouse, but this material had not been so used at Lake Jane, nor at Rudder’s Well.