Bring Larks and Heroes

by Thomas Keneally

  He swore.

  ‘Tell me!’ he said.

  Beyond the door, Mrs Blythe proclaimed that somebody or other’s mouth was full of cursing and deceit and fraud, and under his tongue was mischief and vanity; and that he sat in the lurking places of the villages.

  Ann was not malleable.

  ‘I might have eaten it,’ she said.

  Halloran lunged for the parlour door and turned the key in it. There was Mrs Blythe cringing back from his rush, her owl’s eyes craterish, Davidic righteousness frozen in her mouth. He ran down the hall-way, through the back parlour. In the kitchen, so often locked against loving Corporal Halloran and not-so-loving Mr Blythe, both doors stood open. The sunlight had angled itself through the outer door and lay utterly quiescent on the earth. Yet there was nothing any more that was not a threat.

  ‘Where, where?’ he roared.

  Inside the far door was a water-butt, and inches from it a small ridge of clay looking dug up from somewhere. He laboured the water-butt away; it slopped and gurgled, and the hoops ticked after their three years of easeful standing in the kitchen. Where the butt had been was a cool little hole and a parcel wrapped in cloth. He had his fingers on it when Allen clumped indoors and was yards past Halloran before turning and seeing him. Two Marines, looking orphaned, muskets in hand, had edged in after Allen and were staring at Halloran, now become subvertor, rebel, all things sinister.

  ‘Oh’ said Allen over his shoulder, more amenable than he had been for weeks, apologetic as a man who has overlooked doing something mannerly. ‘Halloran! Good God, just inside the door.’

  He laughed as he had in the wilderness one night, when Halloran had been still alive.

  26

  In court it is sentencing time.

  There are the bench, Major Sabian and his brothers, all busy garrison officers with plans for their afternoons. Their work here is summary justice, judgment before midday, punishment after. Now it is a quarter to midday. The bench were drummed to court at half past nine and have not had a disturbed morning. They have kept a blunt face towards the guilty, a face like a hammer, but have laughed once; at Terry Byrne, since gone from the court. For Terry Byrne came in dressed like a classic sea-soldier. Someone had gone to the trouble of putting him in the town’s best Marine coat toned up with red ink or blood or ochre, the green facings brightened up with crayon. Poor traducing Terry whom they’d beaten half the night, over two hours anyhow, on and off, with green wands, appeared in pain within a lean grey waistcoat, with a ruffled shirt-front poked out between his second and third buttons. And he had good kersey breeches on and a plausible pair of shoes and gaiters.

  The court, the guards, the prisoners, Blythe and a locksmith near the door all held their laughter when Byrne stepped into court, sensing that someone on the bench would say what was needed to cement them all in massed and licit guffaw.

  In view of Byrne’s clinching breeches, ‘Which side does he hang?’ asked a subaltern-judge.

  They all roared together, Halloran beyond himself; his dead guts jumped at the sharp justice that had found Byrne out, his bumpkin guts went on a spree.

  Byrne had decided overnight that Hearn was Satan. He had now come to bring it to the court’s notice, that Hearn’s presence drove out reason.

  ‘We had no chance of seeing things as they are. He had us dazed. A girl like Ann Rush wouldn’t have a ghost’s chance with him.’

  (Ann is in court now. She is grey, whereas once she was willowy, actually evoked the image of a willow.)

  Sabian said, ‘This court takes no cognizance of devils. What you all planned, what you all did, that is what you turned King’s evidence to say. So say it, please.’

  It has all been said. There has been no delay, no baulking legal fiction. Marines have rights of appeal, but Halloran and the others are no longer Marines, Sabian having brought their discharges to court with him. Judgment swift, workmanlike, heavy will be on them by noon.

  The court declares Halloran and Ann dead twice over, the other three dead once only, although Miles is declared more gravely dead than McHugh and Barrett. The afternoon lies intact before the court’s various purposes. But then that strange fellow Blythe stands.

  ‘Your Honour,’ he said, ‘in view of the court’s decision, I must . . .’

  He was interrupted by a bugle from the barracks. Midday and the affair settled. Except that Blythe’s in view of sounded like a lawyer’s tag, a disrupting phrase. For fifteen seconds the bugle prevailed. Blythe didn’t question it, held his mouth firmly. Behind him the court’s two glazed windows throbbed with the far and lovely ambience of the day.

  The bugle stopped.

  Blythe said, ‘I feel bound to make known to you that Ann Rush is with child.’

  There were two Hallorans in court. One was chained to a rail on the left on the bench, the other was as distant as an historian. What chance had the historian, being so neutral, of soothing the other one, the one in shirt-sleeves and blood-warm wristlets, who began roaring what a lie it was, and straining so hard in the chains that the historian thought, ‘He’ll cut his thumbs off if he pulls any harder.’

  Ann stared in front of her, saying, ‘No!’ too low to be heard. The historian admired her pained brow and the deep sockets of her eyes from which arose, as from two centres, the lines and planes and subtle formulas of which her face was made.

  Halloran was restrained by two Marines, one of them grunting quite amiable common sense in his ear. If there is anything calculated to send a madman madder, it is quite amiable common sense.

  ‘Strike him, Sergeant!’ the Judge-Advocate bawled down the room; which was done. Halloran stood quiet and blinking in the arms of a guard.

  ‘Are you serious, sir?’ Sabian asked Blythe. ‘It’s after midday and the thing’s settled.’

  ‘I am serious, sir.’

  ‘You could have told me earlier. It’s after midday.’

  ‘There’s nothing in the letters-patent to say justice stops at midday.’

  ‘Keep your humour, sir.’

  ‘I will,’ said cheerless Blythe.

  ‘Why wasn’t I told earlier in the day?’

  ‘It’s such painful news. Now it must out. Whatever happens.’

  It was already so clear that nothing would happen except mad Blythe would be disbelieved, that one of the bench began to laugh.

  ‘Painful? Who would it be painful to? Painful to you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re the father?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  Halloran too and Ann began again to disbelieve him, Halloran making a great noise out of his dissent.

  ‘Strike him, Sergeant, strike him, strike him!’

  The Sergeant, too literal a man, hit Phelim three times. How the impact ran before his eyes in acid colours. The Sergeant was a large man, if half-starved.

  ‘You can’t afford not to take my word,’ Blythe said.

  ‘Can’t I?’ Sabian sounded fraternal in a deadly, spurious way. He turned to Ann.

  ‘What does the prisoner say?’

  Ann shook her head.

  ‘The prisoner says no.’

  ‘The prisoner would say no. Her young man is in court.’

  ‘Who? The rowdy one?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He looks a fitter sire,’ Sabian said, just because it was a joke that came easily, and to show that he distrusted Blythe.

  ‘That might be so,’ said Blythe. His impartial jaws chewed the words. He was the most judicial figure in the room. ‘But I was the one she told, you see. Women have some acumen in these matters.’

  Ann was in a death of shame, in accordance with her great talent for it. But there was no quiet in Blythe or the bench. They did not see her
; and Halloran still was dizzy from the literal-minded Sergeant.

  Sabian kept asking her was it the truth; above all, to undermine Blythe. In the end, he was able to restate the sentence with a good conscience. Before that though, he laughed when he could at Blythe, who, with Mrs Blythe to face, still seemed possessed of his normal deadweight of composure. Halloran saw obliquely Sabian’s red chin trembling, the largesse of safety, the largesse of power rolling in that fifty-year-old mouth.

  ‘Ann,’ Phelim started to call beneath the court’s brotherly laughter. They were heaping a cairn on her, short slabs of laughter. He succeeded in being surprised that he had always expected the forces above him, the kite-eyed forces who laid plans for the waste of men, to be as sharp as surgeons. Whereas they were no more artful than the savage who clubs your back to a jelly. So that you were numb for many of the worst things. He was numb, and Ann so numb that to see her emptied him in that poisonous way you are emptied by striding into a house you have always known, the house of your childhood say, to find stony strangers sitting at the fire.

  The judges had gone, but Blythe stood on at the back of the court to see the iron collars put on Miles, McHugh, Barrett, Halloran. Each collar connected to another one with chains and was a weight on the collar-bones. Within these chains, it was hard to walk as a team so that the others mightn’t be choked or chafed, and no one felt like learning the narrow art of it today.

  There were no chains for Ann Rush. It was difficult enough to get her to move.

  27

  This was, according to the Court, their second-last dusk. They lived it out in the utter box of the detention hut, and would not have been aware of it as dusk except for the tear in the roof. Halloran had a porcelain fragment of sky in view. Cut off raw from heaven’s haunch like this, it was at first deep blue, and bled itself away until cloud came between. In the clouds there were bronze throes and then a pinkish sort of submission. Halloran couldn’t keep his eyes from all this, though it hurt him; and he was grateful he saw clearly for a change, so that he could see it, and know what a kingly thing it was to live.

  He was of course frightened, and aware of two things, though not in so many words. The first was, what a lie it is to compare the life of man to a day, and the death of man, stinking, apoplectic, pop-eyed, to a sunset. Human death had no dignity, Ewers had none; he and Ann would look monstrous, and even those who died gently were hardly less for very long. Hence, the poetic lie of the sunset of life, of ‘Here rests . . .’, ‘Here lies at peace . . .’ and all the rest of it. To save man from going mad at being mortal.

  The second thing was of what coiled violence there would need to be in the noose, if the constellations of the mind, the far countries of emotion, the warrings of powers, the roarings of loins, the hordes of twitches and gasps, purrings, shudders, itches, aches, funny-spots were all to be killed out in a second. Could you depend on hemp for such violence? If Ann had the sense that he had, of time passing, of time washing a person adrift from his agony, if he could have known that she had this sense strongly, he could have been braver. More than hell, he feared to have her jerking in the full, uninformed terror of strangling.

  It was very dark in the hut. The other three started to sing a foul and funny song called ‘The Colonel’s Lady’. It was practically the story of Daker, except much funnier, and the Colonel was a far better kind of man than Daker, so that the song ended very benignly. Just the same, they sang it hysterically loud, emphasizing the rhythm. The words came like hammer-blows, like curses. When they could not see each other for the dark, they gave the song up.

  Then they were on their own, as Halloran had been all the time. What they each wondered was what Halloran wondered. How will there be colours, how will wind bluff and crackle in ears, how will hot meat call to the nose, without me there to give the circle of sense its centre?

  McHugh and Barrett were dependent on Miles, calling out,

  ‘There, Bert? Hey, Bert. There?’

  The wind rose, put a knife in the ribs of the detention-hut, scathed Halloran’s neck. He knew he had no right to avoid it. He took it flush, in case it got at Ann.

  The Reverend Mr Calverley came early in the night. He held up a lanthorn, not for vision, because it gave him little, but as a gesture, a symbol, little more practical than a crozier. He had refused to be escorted by the Constable, and pushing the door to behind him, began his message far too quickly, betraying his ill-ease.

  ‘He rained flesh also upon them as dust,’ he said, and straight-way the three began to pelt him with the best blasphemies they had. ‘And feathered fowls like as the sand of the sea.’

  He lifted up the lanthorn to throw light on the hatred of the Word coming from all sides. He raised his voice against the mystery of wanton hatred.

  ‘So they did eat, and were well filled.’

  Halloran shook his head at the little fellow’s awkwardness.

  ‘For he gave them their own desire; they were not estranged from their lust. But while their meat was yet in their mouths, the wrath of God came upon them and slew of the fattest of them.’

  They rang their chains. They had heard the vinegar of his message, though. They were listening better than he thought they were. Now he raised his voice to get the honey to them.

  ‘And they returned and inquired early after God. And they remembered that God was their rock, and the high God their redeemer.’

  He didn’t quake backward one step from their impiety, though it stank like the hut itself.

  ‘Oh my people,’ he called, his ankles cringing from the heads of serpents, ‘what have I done to you, that you should repay me thus?’

  The door bounced open. Moonlight drenched Halloran’s feet. ‘Sweet,’ he muttered. He felt himself to be knee deep in the bounty of fish from a burst net. ‘Sweet God,’ he said.

  Following the moonlight came the Constable with a chain in his hand. He beat at the four man-soft corners. The chain clattered and plopped across wood and flesh, hissed along Halloran’s scalp one way, then another. It was hard and noisy. Halloran kept his hands up to his ears, and it fell like hoofs on his shoulder, then roared away after the obscenities still running wild at the far end of the hut.

  Mr Calverley’s belly leapt with the chain, bit the blasphemers, head and shoulders. Both his hands were tight as paws, folded chin-high, his lanthorn in them. When he saw that he was standing so, like an eager little animal, he filled with shame, or rather was drained of anything else.

  ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it, Constable!’ he roared.

  He brought down his foot, such a small foot that he seemed to be merely taking the first step in a polka. ‘Stop it!’ The cords of his little neck were hard as bark. He was horrified, in part at himself. ‘In God’s name, stop it!’ he shrieked, while silence took him unawares.

  ‘Go away, please!’ he said.

  But still he thought that stripes these four deserved, and stripes they would get in their pit in hell.

  The Constable left, dragging his chain to show that he thought officers of the Government should not slight each other in public.

  ‘There is no other name but the name of Jesus given in heaven or on earth by which it behoveth a man to be saved,’ proclaimed the chaplain quietly.

  ‘And he works for Government House,’ John McHugh called, feeling out his chain wounds and crying over them.

  Four big steps for such small legs, and the chaplain stood over him, holding the light up, looking for the impious features. McHugh snuffled through a moustache of blood, sounding and looking like a frightened horse. The chaplain struck him on the jaw, and gave up the four of them.

  ‘You consecrated bastard!’ Miles called out behind him.

  ‘Who when their children ask them for bread they give them a stone,’ said Halloran, feeling weirdly hilarious from his beating.

  ‘
What?’ asked the little chaplain, who was nearly at the door. ‘What?’

  But he showed no sign of waiting, so that Halloran indulged his tipsiness and called tragically, ‘In God’s name, help me!’

  ‘Ah!’ said the spirit of Mr Calverley. It was full of interest in this brand of anguish. Interest, not pity. As far as he knew he was bereft of pity. He knew that he was no more to blame for this than a store-keeper whose store was empty. He was not ashamed of being arid. He wished he would die. But this, in one dark corner out of four, was the anguish he was called to cure, this was bruised reed and smouldering flax. He turned the light of his lamp upon it.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘My poor son. My poor brother.’

  ‘I am, I am,’ said Halloran starting to cry.

  ‘Hush,’ said Mr Calverley, and shook Halloran by the shoulder. ‘Redemption is at hand. We shall pray together.’

  ‘If you say.’

  But he continued to cry, it was so easeful. His scalp was stinging and his ears roared like hives.

  ‘The girl’s on her own,’ he said when he could speak. ‘The hut’s as bad as this one. I know. Then there’s the Constable.’

  ‘I’ve spoken to the Constable,’ Calverley told him, thinking that here was at best, brute loyalty and at worst, brute jealousy; knowing that he lacked the vital energies to exalt whichever one it was to the level of redemption. ‘I shall be seeing the girl when I leave here.’

  He was so disappointed. He could not avoid saying, ‘You need not be afraid that she might trade flesh with the Constable.’

  Halloran roared, turning away, and bit into his chained left hand.

  ‘I grieve for you,’ Calverley said. By heaven he did, but this fellow wouldn’t believe him. He did not go away, and he felt sure that here, in the eight o’clock pit of the death-hut, was the final collapse of his mission to men.

  ‘My wife will sit with her the whole night,’ said Calverley, and added, not without mild wonder, ‘my wife is a Christian.’

  ‘Don’t pester her with texts,’ Halloran said without facing him. ‘Please don’t.’