Bring Larks and Heroes

by Thomas Keneally

  ‘Sad it all may be,’ she admitted. ‘But they merited it for themselves. That good soldier Halloran merited it for them. God is not mocked.’

  The pattern of it all, of Halloran’s oath and laxity, and the devilish cord, and of God redeeming his pledge, was quite awesome, quite a parable. She should write it down, for, as a cautionary tale, it would be unmatched.

  ‘But it does make one go pale, nonetheless,’ she continued. ‘The death of the young is always a harsh mystery. If it be so in the green wood, Mr Blythe . . .’

  Blythe left the wall and came across the room, rubbing his forehead. Half-way to her, he stopped and frowned a private frown, as if he’d discovered himself in a small, domestic forgetfulness. Then he continued. He looked as if he might walk over her, and even try to go through the wall. She squealed and crawled away from him, but he reached her in the end, and bent to draw her upright by the shoulders. She simpered, not knowing what to expect.

  He simply drew her across the room, back to her chair. As with girls in romances, her feet barely touched the ground, so firm and strong was his hold. He sat her down and kicked her hassock into place and lifted her legs to it by the ankles.

  ‘Madam,’ he said before leaving her.

  And after a time, when, from having been handled so oddly, the dizziness and shudders had passed, she felt so brisk that she promised herself she would hobble out into the rational winter sunlight, perhaps even that very day. As well, she felt entitled to take out Ann’s heathenish red cord and shake her head and nod over it. Through her window, she could see the glossy sides of wet leaves spangled with sunlight; she could hear them tinkling with chandelier music, and she wanted to dance to it. Perhaps her leg could stand it, because perhaps her leg was dry. There had been dry westerly winds since Sunday. She threw her shawl off, and pulled her robe and petticoat and loose-legged trousers practically up to her hip. She unwound the poultice from the worst of her ulcers.

  ‘Of course, I would be very tottery,’ she confessed aloud, but the music of the leaves went slowly on, promising to keep time with her weakness.

  Yes, it was dry. She had never seen it better. She inspected the others. They were well.

  ‘Thank God,’ she said, and shards of music dropped from the leaves. It was a jig that she heard, about a man who was more blessed than lovers since he has a whiskey flask for his love, and it never flounced or answered him back. She laughed at it for being so scandalous. The tempo was gentle with her, and did not push her off balance once. She was slow and clubfooted at first, but before long, danced with increasing movement and joy.

  31

  When it was time, the Provost-Marshal came for them. He entered the hut with guards and a constable. He was perhaps two years older than Halloran, and wore a cut-away coat to show his young man’s loins. Previously he had been a subaltern in Captain Allen’s company. He knew Halloran, his eyes flickered towards him, on his haunches by the wall.

  Did your ears drown with the crack, love? Was what was occupying Halloran. How far north and south in your flesh’s fair country did the torment run?

  The Provost-Marshal lost nothing therefore, by turning full-face to the prisoner.

  ‘Halloran,’ he said. ‘What possessed you?’

  Halloran stared. He could make out the young man’s face in the far left corner of his anguish.

  ‘Sir,’ he said.

  ‘You were well trusted. You would have been Sergeant by Christmas.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Halloran.

  Ten seconds later, he began to laugh whole-hoggingly. Sergeant by Christmas. Belly sash of red and gold. Touring the country-side for recruits. Administering the oath. Administering the oath!

  They let him out of his chains and shackled his hands before him. Outside, he found himself drinking the honeyed light. At least, his skin went on gorging it vainly in. There was so much of him that would not bend the knee to death, so much of him still living with pointless care. With similar pointlessness, the peppermints along the flat part of the town frothed in his sight. Hard colours pelted his brow; his head ached. Sheaths of sound fell on him.

  He limped across the doomsday earth between two files of Marines. Ahead were the drummers, silent drums bouncing on their crooked hips. In this column, only Miles spoke. He had woken up in the night reciting a grace, and he had hardly stopped reciting it since. Now again, he nagged the God of the table of childhood.

  ‘Here a little child I stand heaving up my either hand,’ Miles said, at a furious rate. ‘Cold as paddocks though they be here I lift them up to thee for a benison to fall on our meat and on us all. Amen.’

  Calverley had opened his mouth to begin Psalm 143, but decided the prisoners were beyond it, and would not say it for the sake of custom, just to edify the Provost-Marshal.

  The question was, would Miles be saved for saying grace in terror? If God was of the same mind as theologians, he would have no chance either way. For the grace was by Herrick who had written those scandalous lines about night making no difference between priest and clerk, Jane being as good as my Lady in the dark. And terror was not supposed to be admissible in the heavenly court. Yet, since his son had died, the Rev. Calverley had thought with increasing conviction that God could not have views in common with the bulk of theologians, for then he would not be God but a machine of vengeance, a salvation mill.

  They came within the crackle of voices. There was a woman’s voice wailing a sound that had pontifical authority for Halloran. He could not avoid it washing through him. It brought with it even its own sensations, coming to him with the smell of dry pinewood coffins, tallow candles, the sad hearths of bereaved families. It was the Trougha wail, an old friend and demon from the awe-struck twilights of his childhood, when from kitchen corners, he eyed the willowy cleanliness of dead neighbours. He lifted his ear up to the old sound come all those miles to see him to his grave.

  That is how to mourn the dead, he thought, proud of the wail, forgetting the dead was Ann. Then he remembered. He told his secret bride that he had left some silly flag or other flying on top of his tower of life. There was no time to climb the stairs and haul the thing down. He was sorry.

  The word sorry went through his mind in shudders of meaning. Before it, his brain parted like the Red Sea, and through the cleft he saw and advanced into the crowd, and saw and leaned to a narrow bundle hung in sailcloth from the east of the gallows. Caught by rich draughts of the Trougha, the bundle turned softly. But it was, under the harsh modesty of canvas, a neck ravened by hemp and a face ballooning. He knew. He had seen these things. This was their funny justice.

  He had been so passive. Now he moved like anger in the blood, past bug-eyed Mr Calverley. He screamed in a monotone, laid his shackled fists to the side of the Provost’s head, and kneed the hard, proud, processional belly. They dragged him away and gagged him. ‘Hell fry the balls off your damned Empire!’ he tried to tell the Provost, but could not keep the words straight. And then they had him gagged.

  The gag liberated him further still. He could speak aloud with Ann. They began to beat the drums. On he went, placid at the core. He was sure he was the worst of men, he saw it. It was because of his vanity. But there is serenity in knowing you are the worst man. You do not even have to ask for mercy.

  The drums went stuttering but he still heard the Trougha. The slow circlings of its rhythm made him dizzy, its sad old arms kept rocking his secret bride. He was so dizzy he found he could no longer see a crowd or even a man as one thing. They were lozenges and dabs. The world was decomposing. Who sang the wail? He could never tell unless the morning colours cohered again. But the passion of the wailer was coherent, and the song went on and on.

  The speed of everything then! Calverley gabbing at his side, Miles still reciting grace before meals. There was a brick-waggon beneath each noose, a man-drawn brick-waggon. The Provost touch
ed the waggon closest to Ann, saying ‘Miles!’ and the further one, saying ‘Halloran!’ He was red in the face, and made too much of his intention of separating Halloran from his lady. ‘Miles, Halloran,’ he said three more times.

  They rose like angels into the brick-waggons; Halloran had no sense of climbing. The drums gargled their pig’s arse vengeance in his face, and someone, reassured by his stupor, took off the gag. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ he then said continuously to Calverley, knowing that he was interrupting all the man’s delivery and earnestness. Halloran was happier when the parson nodded and touched his wrist, and climbed into Miles’s cart.

  ‘That’s the end of all the vapourings,’ said Halloran. In his short day, he had listened to a power of vapourings.

  The hangman came into the waggon. He had a hood for Phelim.

  ‘Listen old cock,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to wear this. What do you say? It saves the mob seeing your face.’

  ‘I lean upon the deep waters of a God who’s owned by nobody,’ said Halloran.

  ‘I know, cock, but what about this thing?’

  ‘Who is not recruited, and not spoken for by kings.’

  ‘Listen, you’re making a gawk of yourself. People are starting to look. Do you want the hood? The buggers down there want to see your eyes and tongue coming out. You’d better put it on.’

  The man started to fit the black bag over Halloran’s head. ‘No!’ Halloran called. ‘If it’s all the same,’ he said, ‘I won’t.’

  ‘I can promise you that, mate. It’s all the same.’

  Now he could see a dozen shrunken men by each shaft of his waggon. They were the brickyard teams. They would race the other waggon, and bet on Miles or on himself to strive longer, to twitch, double, poke out his tongue or urinate, this way or that or not at all. They were in the centre of his sight, they slewed but were visible, and their red wounds of eyes took him in.

  Surely, the eyes said, you know the secret of our daily sweat, and of our long closeting in the red earth, this year or next year, or some year close even to this honest morning.

  ‘How does that suit you?’

  The hanging man was back. He had the hairy noose over Halloran’s head and tightened and arranged it with small tugs that could afford to be kindly.

  ‘Good-bye,’ he said simply. He was a stupid man, full of drama and business.

  Halloran squinted out at all the brown scars of faces, luminously agog, aimed at him.

  Snarl of drums. The Government House party arrived, His Excellency forbearing, with his right hand, to address the crowd.

  The Provost-Marshal’s sword rose and fell. The waggon-teams began pulling. He had to dance slowly as the waggon floor began to move without him. He could actually hear cheering.

  It was as he had foretold. Every prayer, curse and snatch of song unleashed itself up the vent of his body. Oh, the yawning shriek of his breathlessness, above him like a massive bird, flogging him with its black wings; the loneliness ripping his belly up like paving-stones. On his almost closed lids, six-sided pillars of light came down with terrible hurtfulness. It was with such a surpassing crack that his head split open, he being borne presiding through so many constellations, that he asked himself, panic-stricken, ‘Am I perhaps God?’

  For reading group notes visit textclassics.com.au

  The Commandant

  Jessica Anderson

  Introduced by Carmen Callil

  Homesickness

  Murray Bail

  Introduced by Peter Conrad

  Sydney Bridge Upside Down

  David Ballantyne

  Introduced by Kate De Goldi

  A Difficult Young Man

  Martin Boyd

  Introduced by Sonya Hartnett

  The Australian Ugliness

  Robin Boyd

  Introduced by Christos Tsiolkas

  The Even More Complete

  Book of Australian Verse

  John Clarke

  Introduced by John Clarke

  Diary of a Bad Year

  JM Coetzee

  Introduced by Peter Goldsworthy

  Wake in Fright

  Kenneth Cook

  Introduced by Peter Temple

  The Dying Trade

  Peter Corris

  Introduced by Charles Waterstreet

  They’re a Weird Mob

  Nino Culotta

  Introduced by Jacinta Tynan

  Careful, He Might Hear You

  Sumner Locke Elliott

  Introduced by Robyn Nevin

  Terra Australis

  Matthew Flinders

  Introduced by Tim Flannery

  My Brilliant Career

  Miles Franklin

  Introduced by Jennifer Byrne

  Cosmo Cosmolino

  Helen Garner

  Introduced by Ramona Koval

  Dark Places

  Kate Grenville

  Introduced by Louise Adler

  The Watch Tower

  Elizabeth Harrower

  Introduced by Joan London

  The Mystery of

  a Hansom Cab

  Fergus Hume

  Introduced by Simon Caterson

  The Glass Canoe

  David Ireland

  Introduced by Nicolas Rothwell

  The Jerilderie Letter

  Ned Kelly

  Introduced by Alex McDermott

  Bring Larks and Heroes

  Thomas Keneally

  Introduced by Geordie Williamson

  Strine

  Afferbeck Lauder

  Introduced by John Clarke

  Stiff

  Shane Maloney

  Introduced by Lindsay Tanner

  The Middle Parts of Fortune

  Frederic Manning

  Introduced by Simon Caterson

  The Scarecrow

  Ronald Hugh Morrieson

  Introduced by Craig Sherborne

  The Dig Tree

  Sarah Murgatroyd

  Introduced by Geoffrey Blainey

  The Plains

  Gerald Murnane

  Introduced by Wayne Macauley

  The Fortunes of

  Richard Mahony

  Henry Handel Richardson

  Introduced by Peter Craven

  The Women in Black

  Madeleine St John

  Introduced by Bruce Beresford

  An Iron Rose

  Peter Temple

  Introduced by Les Carlyon

  1788

  Watkin Tench

  Introduced by Tim Flannery