We landed on the rocks at five to one, and we sat in our small vessel until the ball dropped. The water rose, I imagined, but the boatman told me no.
I knew what we would find; my poor dead brother. I did not know his circumstance and it was shocking to my very heart and core. I will not forget it; not ever.
There he was, at the base of the stairs.
His neck clearly broken.
His body black with decay.
Oh, my dear dead boy.
The boatman took him away, and I began my work.
I would have stayed forever, if the gout hadn’t got me.
I kept my agony quiet, refused shore leave more than once, and by the time I owned up to it, my legs had to be amputated and that was it. I was back on dry land and there I’d stay.
No one could say I did not do my duty. And I think I spent the time worthily.
One oddity; I thought I saw my other brother. Not the ghost of the dead one but Lawrence, the one living, who stayed at home to watch for our mother.
He would not come, surely?
That would not be right.
John Barton
Horace Ross: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1874
I’m seeing things. It must be the dust.
Horace Ross
Allan Brennan: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1875
I see my wife and children on the shore.
Waving.
They are with another man, I think.
Are they with another man?
Allan Brennan
Charles Butler: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1876
Such a year I’ve had. No man could ever have the learning I have had.
Charles Butler
Nate Staunton: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1877
All should question what we do. Few will doubt that this suffering is deserved.
I have read their files. There is no doubt of their guilt. Wee Willie Winkie is pure evil. Beside him sits Robert Freidel, who murdered children and sent vials of their blood to their parents.
The prisoners whine to me, “We are innocent! We are wrongly accused!” They speak so slowly that sometimes the meaning is almost lost, but the whining tone is familiar. I can easily ignore their entreaties; I have children at home who whine and whine without relent and my hearing is selective.
They’ll say, “Your children need you,” or say I’ve hurt them, try to make me believe I’ve killed my own children. Beware their weasel words.
They question my routine, trying to undermine me. “You haven’t done such and such yet. Out of order! Out of order!”
But I knew very well what I had and had not done. They could not send me spare that easily.
I have fifteen evil sacks of poison blood in my care. Uneducated swill. They deserve their punishment.
I moved amongst the prisoners, replacing candle wicks with these new ones. We were not obliged to provide them with evening light, but there could be a time when I am delayed, and I would not want to walk amongst them in the dark.
“We are starved,” one creaked. I understood who he was. Wee Willie Winkie, the famous killer. He’s been here eight years. He’s thirty-six and he looks ninety. He looks like our very own Burnett Barton. Wee Willie Winkie was twenty-eight when they did him, not long preserved so the work must have been hard, at the beginning, just to contain him.
I tossed candle stumps to them. “Lighthouse keepers eat those if they’re hungry enough. That will do you, too.”
I sunk my teeth gently into one, just to know; there was an unpleasant give and a taste redolent of the Sunday roast on Wednesday.
“We’re so hungry,” the man I call the Councilor cried at me. Their voices are like the creak of a gate, almost identical to the gate of my childhood home, and so hearing it raises my spirit because it meant Father was home, or some other kind of visitor. I do not remember a time when that gate brought unpleasantness, but then I have been a lucky man with little to test me.
Irritable group of blaggards they are.
I lit the oil lamps, pondering as I sometimes did, the nature of preserving men such as these rather than one like Edward Heming, a great performer in bringing the oil lamp to prominence. I take a look at the suffering and understand that no man can continue to be an appraised member of society under such circumstances.
It took them a week, but they sucked the fat off those candles, leaving the wick behind.
I slept a lot. We do sleep a lot, in our town.
When they say sleepy town, it’s different in Tempuston. We sleep for our lives. We know the benefits; we know how much longer you’ll live if you sleep well every night. At the Club (many thanks to John Barton for setting that up for us), we nap quite happily, company or no.
If you see ghosts out and about, ignore them. Some would say they are the hauntings of the men who died building this Time Ball Tower, sixteen in all, though you could say thirty-five if you included the influenza the others came down with.
I say these ghosts are only the evil of those men made manifest and best ignored.
I spent my time talking of the outside world, letting them know all they’d missed. All the things I’d done, the things I’d seen. My children and their voices whining or otherwise, and the soft touch of my wife’s hair.
I could bring them to tears with a few words. This is worth remembering. I did not intend to be cruel, and it didn’t strike me until I was home again and my wife castigated me for this.
I said, “While the action may have been cruel, my intention was not. Does that still make me cruel?”
The way I tell it is the way it is, because history is written, and re-written, by the survivor.
Nate Staunton
Sam Stewart: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1878
Nate Staunton is a man of vivid imaginations. I might call him Dickens, I think. I will call him WhattheDickens.
That’s what I’ll call him.
Sam Stewart
William Webster: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1879
It’s better than being at war. But these things. These things. They’d make a newborn baby feel the guilt.
William Webster
Alexander Manning: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1880
I spend my time staring into the prisoners’ eyes. Work has been done to show that images can be captured in the retina. More usually it is the eyes of the dead examined by researchers but perhaps?
Imagine that.
If all your bad deeds. All your evil. Would be captured in your very vision itself.
Alexander Manning
Percy McCarty: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1881
On one thing we agree; there is evil elsewhere in the world. The very President of the United States, murdered at a railway station. Assassination is not new, but it does not make it any less shocking.
Nor does it make these prisoners any less deserving.
Percy McCarty
Stephen Moore: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1882
I like to call them The Bones. I have twenty-five men in my care; twenty-five bones, if you like. Each one worse than the last, and I can only imagine what suffering they wreaked on dry land. This one is a cannibal. He still talks of it. That one committed acts so abhorrent I wish my ears were deafened. I would give up hearing for life, to not hear him speak.
But. But. Can we keep them long enough for repentance? If they live long enough, they may be in a position to ask the Lord God for forgiveness, and we will have saved twenty-five souls from the devil. Perhaps the angel Gabriel will take them from us. Who can say?
We can do no more than that, as Burnett says.
Skin and bones, most of them. Slow as mockery and twice as vicious.
I carried Bleak House, Dombey and Son, The Old Curiosity Shop. Sketches by Boz, as well. Burnett Barton ensured I was well supplied.
Grief never mended no broken bones. That’s Charles Dickens, in Sketch
es by Boz.
And bones never mended no grief, either.
I came here full of grief.
Distance will help, they told me, when they recruited me for the job on the mainland. Shanghaied, more like. As if I can stand separate from what lies within.
I am haunted by memory of my lost tiny one. The sight of the children seeking mussels on the shore fills me with bitter regret.
With my binoculars I can see them, boys with shorts or pants rolled up, tiny girls with skirts tucked up in bloomers. The older girls on the shore, watching, I think, with nostalgia for this lost freedom. How we steal from ourselves small choices. How constrained we are, how tight are our nooses.
I am weak. A coward, for all my war record. My daughter thrust out into the world with a great roar, but that was the most we ever heard from her, as if she used up all she had in that moment. We had five gentle years together, although the pain of our daughter in pain…and the knowledge that she would not reach maturity, she wouldn’t live life’s full gifts… As she lay dying, her mother begged for Preservation, to keep her alive. But how could I do such a thing? She will blame me into the afterlife as I will myself.
Why did I travel to Perth for business that week? Why did I go? Because the doctor assured me she was no nearer to the end than she was last week or would be next week. My wife insisted we needed the money, to buy comforts to ease our daughter’s pain and sorrow. I was so pleased she was speaking to me, I would have agreed to almost anything.
Five days I was away from my beautiful girls. I bought gifts galore because away from them I think of them even more. Other men mocked me for my devotions. I pity such fellows.
On my return, I dearly anticipated my daughter on her chair in our front garden where she sat each and every day, with her mother or friends who came by with treats and stories to cheer her. She wasn’t there and at first I was pleased, thinking she was out with friends, enjoying herself. That somehow she had recovered her youth and strength.
That was not the case.
My wife’s handwriting was a beautiful thing to behold and a source of great pride to her. The letter she left for me (I found it first, before I found them) was in that beautiful hand. Yet uglier words were never written.
“I cannot bear her pain anymore. I will not take the laudanum I gave to her, though. I don’t deserve that easy release.
“We are both in God’s Hands.”
I do hope so. My daughter, of course. But my wife committed two mortal sins and is therefore probably elsewhere.
I blame my distress for the mistake I made in the Tower. If I had my chance again, I would tell my charges, these remnants of human decency, nothing of meaning. Take this from me; tell them nothing they can use against you. I was lonely, desperately so, and they drew out of me my terrible story of loss.
One night, I heard the voice of my daughter, calling, “Father, Father don’t let her do it, please Father, I want to live,” her sweet voice asking me for treats, open the windows, she asked for air and for food, but only when I had crawled on my hands and knees towards the voice, too distraught to walk, my tears so salty and numerous the cracked skin on my cheeks gave me pain, did I realize it was the prisoners, the bones, calling out so cruelly to me.
“He believes in ghosts, the innocent!”
I made the further error of defending Dickens, dead these twelve years, saying, “He speaks the truth. He knows how to express the pain of a lost child because he’d lost both child and sibling as I had.”
They took that advantage. They drew it out of me like leeches.
I call them The Bones.
Nobody should come here to forget sorrow, but somehow, at night, every night, I dream that history is rewritten. That my wife and daughter wait for me at home and that it was all a terrible dream.
This is reality.
I said as much to Lawrence Barton, who came to relieve me for a while, although perhaps he was not supposed to, having never been a keeper. He spent time in solitude, down in the basement where I choose not to go. Cleaning up, he said. Such a good man.
There always needs to be a cleaner.
Much as I have loved my time here, I can’t wait to see my wife and daughter.
Stephen Moore
J.C. Harcourt: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1883
I wish Lawrence Barton would visit me, too. These prisoners are not enough company. All they have to talk about is their terrible crimes, and all I have to tell them is more crimes and more.
“Did you hear about William Gouldstone?” I ask them, “One of your lot. Wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up here. Killed all five of his kiddies, drowning and hammering, every last one, and said he was a good man for the doing.”
Do you know they all shifted over, as if making room for William Gouldstone? A good man would not assent like this lot did.
J. C. Harcourt
Freddie Heath: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1884
The one we call the Mayor because it makes him cry to think of what he lost. This man systematically murdered every member of his isolated village one, by one, by one, by one, before transporting himself to Australia.
He tells me, every day, of the death of another. He has not forgotten a single one.
Freddie Heath
Thomas Bunting: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1885
The executioner still has family ashore. You can hear them singing on a clear night. They still believe he killed correctly under the auspices of law.
His thumbs. Long, and thick, twice the size of mine at least. So strong they can stop a pulse.
He has done this.
He could stop the pulse of a sweet young teacher, or perhaps a shop girl gone missing.
I have stopped him now. He will not use those thumbs again. The crack as they broke is one of the sweetest sounds I have ever heard.
Thomas Bunting
George Parsons: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1886
Bunting did a bit of damage all right.
I don’t blame him, though.
Don’t blame him at all.
George Parsons
Ned James: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1887
My grandfather built this place. He always was a solid man. Died when I was nine but had already made an impression. He’d take me out in the brightest part of the day and have me look out.
“See that?” he’d say. “That’s our troll. While we look after him, he looks after us. But let the tower fall and he will need to be reckoned with.”
I get out here to find it’s all illusion. A stain.
Doesn’t mean I don’t keep the place maintained, though.
Ned James
Jack Barnes: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1888
You’d think they’d be used it by now. You’d think I’d be used to it. My small house, right on the shore, rowdy as all get out, so you know I’m used to the noise. But I hear chitterings and unimaginable things. These prisoners do all they can to disconcert me. Making me hear things in the night.
Jack Barnes
John Sheward: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1889
It is a pleasant thing to be fêted, and something I could get used to. Mostly, it’s the victim’s families, who thank us, who give us gifts, who give us many favors. They would love to see the suffering up close, but good enough are the stories we can tell on return.
Should they be keepers? It seems not.
Even the best people are capable of revenge.
John Sheward
David Hennessy: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1890
Such big boots to fill and here my feet the size of a twelve-year-old’s. Is that any reason to take on this job? To make myself seem larger than I am? My great-grandmother Harriet would have wanted this, had she been here.
It’s as good a reason as any other.
We stood, the boatman and I, on the shore. I had boxes and packages galore; did others have such a load? I a
sked. I never want to do out of the ordinary.
Every man is different, he told me. He was a quiet one on most days, but today he seemed loquacious, as if trying to fill me with words as sustenance.
He rowed out with his back to the Time Ball Tower, leaving me with the vision ever approaching.
“What is that? All up the side, tall as a giant, full of color? It looks like a stain, as if someone has thrown a rotten bowl of meat and fruit against the wall.”
I could make out no features.
“That is a troll. Painted by the builder who believed in such things.” He shook his head at me as if surprised by my ignorance. Yet I have kept myself away all my life, deliberately, wanting this experience fresh.
He did not turn around to look, and as we neared I understood the reason. Such malevolence! Such anger and bitterness painted into the features!
“What did the painter hope to scare away with this?” I asked, but the boatman did not respond.
Each man is different indeed. Many do not feel the need to make a good report. Others cannot do so because of circumstances, such John Sheward, whose life ended in tragedy. The boatman set out with him on a clear, bright morning. Yet somehow they capsized, too far out for rescue.
The shattered boat washed to shore by the tide, but their bodies were never found.
Some children claimed they saw a troll reach out and grab the boat, tipping the men out, then plucking them out of the water to eat.
Long scratch marks down the side of the row boat lent power to their story, and that’s why you’ll hear it well into the future, I’m sure. All we have of Sheward’s report are the notes he left behind in the tower.
Tide of Stone Page 8
