Bony and the Black Virgin

by Arthur W. Upfield

  Then the Devil blew up in smoke and flame, and an Angel stood at Bony’s side, saying: What of that spill of black hair you posted off to Superintendent Pavier by the Downers this morning? What of that place where you found the hair? What of the dead tea tree branch, and the little fire so carefully and yet, paradoxically, so carelessly buried? Would you have risen to become Detective-Inspector had you gone on strike because you felt lazy on hot afternoons?

  Emus stalked to the trough and rested on the ground to drink. A belt of even cloud at great height was slowly moving down from the north. Credit, however, to whom credit is due. It wasn’t the promise of shadow which caused Napoleon Bonaparte to take up his water bag and gunny sack, call to the heeler, and plunge into the fierce sunlight.

  The flies were infuriating. The cloud-belt would never cover the sun. There would not be any reward for this senseless tramping about. Yet no man knows what the next minute will bring to him, what he will see should he climb to the summit of a sandhill, how he will react should he feel a bull ant in his trousers.

  It was, of course, that Angel; the Devil had been doing so well, too.

  Three miles out in the shimmering heat, Eric Downer had built his two sheep camps, the second necessary when the scrub had been lopped and the bush eaten out at the first. To visit both meant following the sides of a triangle having its apex at the Well, each side approximately three miles long. Thus it was an hour of solid, withering walking to reach the first camp.

  The bones were there. The bones of the windbreak and the bones of animals whitened and scattered as though each of ten thousand foxes had sought to dine in seclusion. There was no shade, for the scrub trees had been lopped and felled, and the ground sprouted only the stumps.

  Having taken a few sips of water from his bag, and poured half a pint into the dented crown of his hat for the heroic Bluey, Bony smoked one cigarette before concentrating on every foot of the camp, on every inch of the skeleton windbreak, and finally on the enlarging encirclement, until convinced there was nothing of interest.

  The base of the inverted triangle was clearly marked for him by the truck transporting Eric’s equipment to the second camp. He was well on his way along this second side when the cloud shadow reached him, and the burn of the sun on neck and arms was lifted.

  “Rain! Rain, my foot!” he told the heeler. The cloud mass was so thin that the underside was barely darkened. In the semi-shadow, the dismal stretches of withered scrub appeared even more desolate, and the occasional gum and box trees were positively repellent now they had no shadow to offer the dead earth. By comparison the red sand country was virile.

  The light car or utility truck gave something like a shock. The vehicle had either been coming from Rudder’s Well, or going to it. Investigation convinced Bony that this cross track was older than the track of the truck he was following, and, knowing that the latter had been made about twenty weeks back, he guessed the light track had been made about two to three months before it.

  It would have to wait, for the second camp was just ahead.

  The second camp offered an appalling picture of a lost battle. Here, too, Eric had built a windbreak for his tent and table, and here were the tent-pegs and the pole, and the legs of the table cut from the scrub and needed no more.

  The posts and rails of the windbreak were still in position, but all the leaves of the tree branches laced to it to temper the wild westerlies were blown away. The foxes had licked and played with and scattered the heap of food tins. The sparse herbal rubbish, the debris of lopped scrub, even the windbreak—everything had caught tufts of wool from dead sheep whose bones were weathered and strewn over a great area.

  A few yards in front of the windbreak, the remains of the camp fire were still evident beneath the cross-stick from which cooking utensils had been suspended over the flames. On a wire hook was an almost new billycan. Leaning against a stump was a long-handled shovel, which, like the drinking trough, had yet to be collected for removal to the homestead.

  The trough was corkscrewed and drunken. Under it the foxes had burrowed great holes to seek the moisture deposited through leaks. They had clawed and burrowed for chance food scraps about the table legs, and where Eric’s stretcher had stood within the tent. The wind had teased the summits of their hillocks but failed to blot out the story of their hunger.

  As though to heighten impressions, the cloud mass passed from the sun, continuing to revolve as it travelled slowly southward. Upon the grey earth the white bones gleamed whiter, each one representing a scar on the mind of a man.

  The signs, and there were many, gave the picture of a man frantic to leave a scene where finally he had been defeated, with no loss of honour. He had slain the last of his sheep and skinned them, tossed the skins on to the truck, added the skins previously taken from sheep that had perished, collected his stretcher, bedding and personal possessions, not thinking to add a shovel, a billycan and perhaps lesser equipment. Abruptly surrendering, leaving the field to the growing horde of foxes, he had turned his back to horror, but had been unable, figuratively, so to turn his mind.

  Bony was walking back to the camp from his farthest circle when he entered a shadow, and for the second time saw a vast cloud mass. It, too, was slowly revolving, but travelling from east to west. Reaching the camp site, he lit a fire and poured a little of the water from the bag to his billy for tea, and then recalled that the first cloud mass had travelled from north to south.

  Bony sat with his back to the stump which had carried the tent’s ridge-pole, and shared the remains of his lunch with Bluey. Thereafter he smoked two cigarettes, and the smoke rose straight in the windless air.

  To his right were the legs cut from the scrub to carry a board for Eric’s mess-table, and, as elsewhere, the foxes had burrowed and scratched in the hunt for a chance-missed bone or bread scrap. There was an object lying between the legs, probably a small bone, and Bony’s eyes were tired and his brain wearied by white bones, large or small. The shadow departed, and the glare returned, when the very whiteness of that small bone again demanded his attention, because it was where it ought not to be.

  The cloud wheel was passing to the west, and the sky behind it was deep and pale blue. Cloud masses did not usually behave like this, but the interest in this phenomenon was slight in the balance opposed to that secret camp amid the tea tree, and the concealment of the fire in the sandalwood clearing. Bony stood, and almost at his feet was the little white bone. He picked it up. It wasn’t bone. It was plastic. Half an inch long; it was a delightful replica of a white horse, having an attachment ring in place of a saddle.

  It appeared to be a talisman such as is carried by a man. Or it had graced a bottle of a well-known whisky, or perhaps come from a woman’s charm bracelet. Was there a charm bracelet in the Treasure Chest at Lake Jane?

  About the place where the table had been erected, Eric’s boots would have reduced the top soil to the fine grey powder in which the foxes had fossicked and chanced to raise the white horse to the surface. A man’s actions are concentrated about a table, and would also be concentrated about his stretcher bed. With the tip of the shovel blade, Bony methodically tilled those two tiny fields.

  A sieve would have served so much better, but the shovel brought to light two shirt buttons where the stretcher had stood, and, where the table had been, he salvaged a small tin containing tobacco and papers, and a hair comb. The comb was curved, and the teeth long. And no man uses a curved comb.

  If the little white horse did not fall from a man’s watch-chain, then possibly it had been attached to a woman’s charm bracelet. In these days, what man wears a chain attached to a pocket watch? With his hands, Bony scarified the powdered ground and found nothing more of value.

  Tired and triumphant, this patient man sat and smoked and pondered, the dog lying at his side with head on forepaws.

  “Where, friend, is this investigation going to lead me?” he said aloud. “A woman’s comb and a white horse, found here in a
man’s camp?” Had Robin Pointer visited here with her father? Quite often she did drive alone to Lake Jane, and she could have run out here to see Eric. “I shall have to dig into that, Bluey, old cobber. The affair between those two could have been much deeper than the respective fathers appear to think. Now what is the matter?”

  The dog had stood, and was as immobile as the tiny white horse. Bony stood and gazed to the point indicated by the dog’s nose. Two kangaroos were passing the deserted camp, loping easily and without haste. Then the first stopped, swung himself round, and lifted to his full height to stare back whence he had come. The second ’roo stopped and also stared back, the two as motionless as Bluey.

  That they had been disturbed, probably by a dingo, was proved by the line of progress. They had come from the north and were running to the south before stopping to look back. The sun said it was after five o’clock, at which time they would be making towards Rudder’s Well from the east to the west. Like the cloud wheels, they were behaving abnormally.

  “Sit!” ordered Bony, and Bluey sat, but continued to watch the ’roos, that were several hundred yards’ distant and unaware of the man and dog. They were surely interested in something, for they continued to sit balanced on their tails.

  Through the wreckage of the windbreak Bony peered for minutes and could detect nothing likely to have alarmed the kangaroos. He expected to emerge from the landscape of bush rubbish and scrub stumps the dingo, or dingoes, which had frightened them. But nothing moved. When first one kangaroo went to ground, and then the other, he decided they were confident they were no longer being hunted.

  Whatever the cause of their uneasiness, it might be found when returning along the base of the triangle to the point where the tracks of the car or utility cut it. The shadows of this battleground were lengthening, and the sun said it was after six o’clock, when Bony and the dog left the place with no regret.

  Bony saw nothing, and Bluey scented nothing of what had disturbed the ’roos. On coming to the track of the car, they then turned towards Rudder’s Well when following this track, and quickly Bony desisted from even guessing its age. The vehicle had been driven erratically, but the driver’s purpose had been to avoid patches of low scrub, gilgie holes or soaks, and steep dry watergutters.

  The wheel-tracks crossing a claypan were barely discernible, as was a slight indentation midway between them which halted Bony. This was oblong in shape and four by five inches in size, and could only have been made by a wheel jack. The driver here had had to change or mend a tyre.

  The dog wasn’t interested. He was definitely interested in a patch of scrub which bordered this wide claypan. Recalling the incident of the kangaroos, himself seeing nothing suspicious, Bony ‘sooled’ the dog forward.

  The magnet could be a fox or a dingo, a kangaroo, even a man. Bony was led to a gilgie hole amid the scrub trees. The hole should have been wide and deep. It was now filled to ground level with cut scrub, leafless and dead and months old.

  “Sool ’em, Bluey,” Bony pleaded, and the dog nosed about and finally went down under the scrub by a hole made by the foxes.

  The result was comical. Some twenty-odd foxes raced from various holes and departed at speed, several stumbling over tree debris which their eyes, unaccustomed to the sunlight, failed to see. Then Bluey emerged, and that part of his upper jaw naturally white was now black. With ash.

  Why would someone light a fire in the bottom of a gilgie hole, and cover the site with scrub branches?

  As though he had not trudged all day in the blistering, airless heat, Bony proceeded to fling out of the hole the dead scrub, and himself to sink foot by foot to the ashes at the bottom.

  He grazed an ankle on the frame of a bicycle from which the tyres had been burned from the wheels. Without thought for his clothes, he delved among the ashes and found belt and strap buckles, the porcelain mouthpieces of two water bags, the, toe and heel plates of what once had been a pair of boots, a safety razor and the blade of another. There were three billycans and two small fry pans, as well as other oddments without which no man carrying his swag, or strapping his swag to a bike, would travel.

  Having tossed the branches back into the hole, and taken time off to roll a cigarette, Bony and the dog continued on their way to Rudder’s Well and Lake Jane. The day was nearly over. It had been a wonderful day after all, thanks to the victory of the Angel, and what now comprised the contents of his gunny-sack. The little white horse reposed in a tight pocket.

  The ground was being claimed by advancing Night, but Day still ruled the western sky with its colours of red and mauve. The bars of red rested on a range of dark mountain summits.

  The moon rose behind Bony, huge and lemon, and the moon-man puffed and huffed a little wind to cool the back of Bony’s neck and arms. And Bluey became quite excited by the scent that little wind brought to him.

  PART THREE

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Sweetest Murder

  THE DOWNERS spent the evening reading the latest acquisition, of days-old newspapers and journals. They spoke seldom, being weary from reaction of a day of gossiping, and the excitement of visiting, and, too, disappointment in not finding Bony at home. His letter saying he intended going off on a tramp was understandable, but the postscript intimating that he might not be back until the next day mystified both.

  There were other matters tending to cause depression. One of the first subjects opened at L’Albert was whether the aborigines were persisting in their efforts to make rain. The Pointers could give them no information, and after lunch Robin and Eric went out to Bore Ten in the station utility. They returned to say that the men were still away singing over their rainstones, the women and children not being permitted to be with them. Both were moody, and the elders mutely agreed that the afternoon hadn’t been one of loving courtship.

  The diverse course of the cloud masses passing during the day had not escaped anyone, and at sunset, when the Downers arrived home, they believed the clouds on the western horizon to be another cloud wheel.

  Now their finite world was silent, save for the occasional rustle of paper, until John said, trying to be cheerful:

  “Ah! What I always said, lad. Listen to this. The myxomatosis, the wonder-virus which a few years ago was killing rabbits by the million, is, like the sack line, on the way out. Those that survive the first attack of myxomatosis pass their immunity to it to their offspring.”

  Eric grunted non-committally, and his father continued the observations with tremendous satisfaction in his voice. “Kill off the rabbits! What a hope! What a mass of brains, thinking they could kill off our Australian rabbits. Why, when the last man is blasted from the earth the rabbits will still be running around licking up the radiation. Scientists, they call themselves! I’m only a common old working man, like the feller who owned Glasgow Town, but I always knew the rabbits would beat ’em. If we’d had the rabbits for the foxes and dingoes to hunt, we wouldn’t have lost our sheep.”

  “Dry up,” pleaded Eric, continuing to read.

  John completed reading the article in silence, when he had to burst forth.

  “I always said the germs would get us humans, and they have, lad. There’s Mrs Pointer even today complaining about her sinus, her nose stuffed up and her eyes running ... just like the rabbits before they died, running around blind. Scientists! Oh no, they say, myxo can’t affect humans. Oh no! What have they done? They’ve reduced the rabbits, temporary, and the farmers and squatters have grown more sheep. For what? To pay more and more taxes for our politicians to travel around the world on cigars and champagne. I always said...”

  Eric flung down the papers. “I said ‘Shut up,’” he snarled, and left the kitchen. The slam of his bedroom door wrote more than a paragraph. John frowned, shrugged, blew out the table lamp, and with heavy heart groped his way to his own room.

  He was sure he wouldn’t sleep, but he fell asleep within minutes of getting into bed, and it seemed that immediately he was asle
ep he was awakened by a voice on the veranda.

  “Hey, there! Here’s a lotion for sore eyes. Come out at the double. Awake ye sluggards!”

  John recognized Bony’s voice. He heard Eric moving in his room, and, without bothering to slip on his old gown, he opened the front door and stepped on to the veranda. He was then conscious that Bony stood at the rail, with Bluey beside him, but interest in them was snuffed out by the giant striding towards Lake Jane.

  The moon at zenith sailed a sea of translucent purple in which the stars were tiny specks of phosphorescence. The moon at full shed its splendour upon a celestial glacier resting on an ink-black base. Deep within the glacier, like wire gold in white quartz, lightning lazily flickered, and the staccato bark of thunder was stifled by the steady roar of rain meeting the ground.

  Extending from the south-west to the north-east, the cloudbank slowly heightened and slowly advanced, the brilliant white of its summit in sharp contrast with the purple sky. Nowhere did it break open and reform, or dissolve and reappear. At no point did it threaten to topple forward to engulf its ebony base.

  Thus did it march upon Lake Jane. It advanced to the moon, seeming to rise ever higher than the moon, and, to the fascinated men, seeming to draw the moon down, that it and the cloud giant meet face to face, resulting in the inevitable destruction of the moon.

  About the house was a vacuum silence, beyond which the water-birds continued their ceaseless conversations. They were completely unafraid, and betrayed no sign of excitement.

  The distant shoreline of dunes did not gradually fade into the black base of the storm. Its disappearance was abrupt. Then the ebony wall was upon the water, carrying its mighty burden of dazzling ice as a barge might convey a load of sugar.