By now the Blacksmith brothers had crossed to the rainy side of the mountains. Dying trees wore long mosses, the tree ferns were tall, and underfoot was deep lush mould full of prosperous insects. All of the Monday and Tuesday a small belt of thunderheads moved with them, continually soaking.
They had powers of instinct not only to resist but to ignore this. But Jimmie Blacksmith’s mind itched with the quandary: whether to inform and free Mort or to corrupt and possess him. There was no hurry, he told himself, but knew that was not the truth. He had his list of enemies, and must move towards them in order. Otherwise, he fully understood, he might as well sit down and be contrite for the Newbys and Miss Graf.
Meanwhile, if Mort asked, he was favoured with lying details of the fight with the Newby men, which became more and more an exercise of honour, the sort of thing old war chants spoke of.
The wet blanket on Jimmie Blacksmith’s shoulders itched as he lied and lied.
They found out they were carrying too much food. Having foraged for five people they were suddenly a sleek, a swift two. Now they dropped pounds of that Newby beef, snatched by Jimmie on the Friday night, into a steep gorge. It was salutary to slough it off; they grinned a little at each other and felt well together. If events could only take Mort by the scruff of the neck and commit him to bloodiness but leave him sensible and full of good heart.
Jimmie himself still waited for the slump of spirits which could be expected after merciless Friday night. It failed to come. He was still in a viable balance between belief and non-belief in the dismembering he had done. At the same time, the thorough nature of the punishment he had dealt out continued to soothe and flatter him. Because he had been effective. He had actually manufactured death and howling dark for people who had such pretensions of permanence. He had cut down obelisks to white virtue. So, with his brain heaving in contrary directions, he was still largely light-hearted, and moved quickly in the irksome wet forest. He knew that he was on the same side of the mountains as some of his most cherished enemies.
Mrs Healy was worth remembering too, with something like a lover’s remembrance. If that were a form of madness, then he welcomed it.
Meanwhile, what should be done with grinning Mort? Mort had suggestions of his own. It was Wednesday. A wind had come in from the north-east and turned the rain to squalls. Jimmie felt fevered: the bedding was very wet. All at once, Mort spoke of a timber-getter he had once worked with, a low Irishman called Mullett, a feller of cedar over in the direction of the Barrington Tops. Mullett lived well, being a single man, who could usually find some genial female relic to live there with him up in the lush forests fifteen miles or so from where they stood, splashed and gusted.
The timberman could also be trusted to have warming spirits in the house and would not have heard of the Wallah murders; not that he could be relied on to care if he had.
Late on an afternoon of blinding headwinds, they crossed the railway two miles east of the Merriwa terminus and, in case their tracks be found, walked four or five furlongs westward on the rails before turning north for Mullett’s place. Where the sleepers stood up well from the rail-bed they hopped from one to the other but for at least a few hundred yards, where the track had sunk a little into its matrix soil, walked the one wet blue rail, arms out, rifle in the left hand balancing gunny-sack in the right. By these means, even a good tracker, and all those who waited for his reading of the signs, could be held up for hours.
Head-on into the gale, the Blacksmith boys walked more than twenty-five miles in hope of Mullett’s hospitality. They scarcely spoke. Morton Blacksmith did not laugh now when anything was dropped, but navigated truly through the solid drench.
Near dusk they saw the lights and heard the groan of a sawmill on their right. Then the oozing dark came down. They must steal a hurricane lamp, thought Jimmie. The wet brush spanked their thighs. They must steal oilskins.
Two hours later, Mort pointed to Mullett’s light. The approach was up an avenue long ago cleared by drag-log, partly overgrown now with young trees. Thirty yards from the front door stood a stupendous cedar trunk. Its chopping platform remained, to give it the look of a memorial.
Mort fell against the door and beat at it. At last it was opened by someone out of sight, probably Mullett’s woman. Small, wild-eyed, with ponderous moustaches, the lumber-man himself stood framed, holding a very old musket by its long barrel.
“Mullett, yer mad bastard. It’s Mort Blacksmith! And me brother, Jimmie.”
Mullett blinked. “I haven’ got much food in, yer know.”
The brothers felt deprived of the gushing Irish welcome Mort had promised. To Jimmie, even the way the man spoke his Irish was like Healy’s, with a narrow thrifty sound to it.
“We brung all our food,” Mort sang. “We jest want t’ sleep in front of yer fire. We bin goin’ all day. Blankets’ve got all wet.”
“Yair. Well, welcome to yer. Come on in out of the wet.”
It was warm in Mullett’s hut. With a high opinion of his own slyness the host brought from a hiding place a stone jar of overproof rum. But Jimmie Blacksmith did not respond to it; he was bent on storing away the benefits of warmth, light, shelter.
On the other hand, Mort drank a lot, as did Mullett and the girl. Within an hour Mort and the young lady were jigging while Mullett played a mouth organ. In this area he was highly accomplished and his eyes gleamed at the end of tunes, when he knocked the instrument into his cupped hand to beat the spittle from it. Mort sang over and over again a song called “My Black-eyed Kittie”.
“Where yer both off to?”
“We in trouble with the p’lice.”
“Yer don’t tell me.”
“Yair. We goin’ t’ go to Queensland.”
“Bloody Queensland? What’d yer do?”
“Killed couple’r ewes.”
“Yer don’t tell me? What p’lice is after yer?”
“Gilgandra p’lice.”
“God, but yer put some daylight between them and yerselves!”
By then, the spit had been knocked out of Mullett’s harmonica. The big sweating girl was ready again to jig.
Jimmie Blacksmith wondered if Mullett and Mort might not come to conflict over the bumpkin girl, little as she was worth it. But he was wisely asleep before the question came to trial.
He was tempted to stay another night under Mullett’s shelter. But people who did not know this morning of the killings might by evening. News of the murder of women would travel days faster, counties ahead of the newspapers. So they must leave and get used to being at war with the entire human landscape.
And he had easterly enemies to strike, and the puzzlement over Mort to resolve, not to be considered in Mullett’s rowdy hovel.
In new sunlight they marched slantwise down the valley. The nearer they came to Healy’s, the easier the profile of the country they crossed. They moved, mainly under cover, on the northern rim of the dairy and orchard country. When they got to Healy’s, Mort had been told, Jimmie would demand just compensation.
About midday they saw a man driving a horse-drawn harrow. His back was to them and his knobbly, veined, industrious elbows. For a second Jimmie Blacksmith considered shooting him, bringing to an end an individual history of white thrift and penny-wisdom and mistrust. But that was too fanciful a gesture.
Having fenced it himself, he knew Healy’s boundary. In fields which had been fallow when Jimmie had last been there, tall corn crops masked their approach to the homestead. They came diagonally across a cornfield, Mort in his bare feet. They could hear the panic of wintering snakes, and grain rats slithering off through the tall stooks.
Jimmie had known that if he delayed speaking straight to Mort, responsibility would shift. Mort would catch the passion or see that anyone who has loaded weapons is only a hair away from savagery; and that therefore he is still human, and in need of kin, if the hair snaps.
It was at the second when, parting the grain, they saw Healy’s sleek home, pastures and fat grazing cows that Jimmie Blacksmith knew that he had not come so much to repay Healy, unless Healy happened to be at home. It was the spacious wife he had travelled for. He could, in fact, sense her at the glowing heart of the house.
God help Mort and him. He was mad. He had become a woman-killer, given over to the bad prefigurement of women’s blood. Lush Mrs Healy was waiting to be split apart, as Petra Graf had waited.
“Run away, Mort,” he suddenly said. “Run right away, for sweet Jesus’ sake.”
“Yer only come here t’ git justice.”
“No, run away. I don’t want yer help. Bugger off. Please.”
Mort laughed, more like the old Mort than at any time in the last week. He was beseeched to flee at the risky top of Jimmie’s voice but went on chuckling in the old Mort way.
Jimmie resorted to Mungindi for greater force.
“There is a woman here, fat as a grub. She is a devil woman and put magic on your kinsman so that he writhed and shivered to the edge of death. She has bewitched her husband. She is the fang of the coiled adder.”
“Yair?” Mort smirked, not understanding. “There ain’t no cure fer that sort of bitch.”
Jimmie gave up and broke from Healy’s crops, across a fence, and sprinted for the farmhouse door. He could not, however, outdistance Mort’s terrible loyalty.
So that Mort was, in fact, closer to the doorway when a gaunt, confused lady of about forty years appeared there with a level rifle. The rattle of Mort’s foot on the veranda boards caused Mrs Healy to utter a full creamy yelp inside the house. Hearing it, Jimmie stopped and shivered with his peculiar lunacy. The gaunt lady fired and the bullet, he later decided, must have passed between the hang of his left arm and his side.
Instantly Mort shot the woman high upon the right of her chest. The impact sat her suddenly flat on the boards.
How distressed Mort was! He knelt by the woman, unable to believe in the rough bloody damage he had done her. He had not learned that a person catches deadliness as a disease is caught.
There was no time to console Mort with the awful dicta of atrocity. Mr Jimmie Blacksmith stepped over the threshold.
Mrs Healy stood up, grunting terror through her full lips. She had a baby in her arms, in a long, trailing shawl. An inheritor for Healy. Healy chose to have an inheritor, the cook not to. Choice was too bloody easy for them.
It was like the positioning of stars: the baby seemed to swing into a phase where it was germane to his lust for Mrs Healy’s lightly creased, tall, shrieking throat.
Jimmie raised his rifle and sighted it beneath her full-contoured jaw.
“Yer fuckin’ husband wouldn’ even give me a ride into Merriwa,” Jimmie reminisced.
Outside, Mort was comforting the felled mother’s-aide. “It’s jest twenty-two gauge,” he consoled her. She stared ahead of her with a look of mild bemusement on her face. Her hands were beginning to turn blue.
Mrs Healy ran to the dresser corner, where she did not fit neatly because of her hips. As she turned, Jimmie shot her in the throat. There was one terrible flush of blood across the floor, then she sank and died in the corner.
Everything was compulsion now. He was standing above the baby who had remained enshawled on Mrs Healy’s lap.
“Father’s little joy!” he reproached it, weeping loudly.
Mort called to him from the door, but he was already re-loaded and fired at the child’s head, keeping his eyes shut tight.
When Jimmie Blacksmith opened his eyes, Mort was kneeling beside the ruins of Mrs Healy and her child. Mort’s face was as thick-featured and swollen as if he had wept for hours.
Jimmie Blacksmith returned to his practical, functioning body.
“Don’t say I didn’t tell yer to bugger off. I told yer and yer laughed.”
‘Healy deserve all this?” Mort asked thickly. There was no irony in him. He was silly with shock. He hoped that Jimmie would itemize Healy’s guilt, to make it commensurate with the mess in the kitchen corner.
“He starved me and he told me bloody lies.”
“But it’s woman-blood.” Mort screamed. “And it’s child-blood.”
“Don’t yer worry yerself about that blood bullshit,” said Jimmie as if Mort was distressed only on magical grounds. “Anyhow, she saw me walk all the way t’ Merriwa and passed me by, sitting up in the dray.”
“Jesus Christ, will yer look what yer done?”
“I know what I done.” He slipped into Mungindi. “She tried to take my soul away from me. She had me bewitched and she’d do it again, I know she’d do it again …” But he gave up and saw through the vacuum of the bereaved kitchen that the lady-companion was crawling on hands and knees, studiously, trying not to let her knees catch the fall of her dress short, for then the cloth might tug at her wound.
“Healy deserves to see his kid. And so does Gilda and … and all the friggin’ others. Anyhow, the old girl’s left yer a decent rifle.”
He pointed out the weapon, abandoned on the veranda boards.
Improbably the woman continued, past the woodheap, bleeding onto the grass and blurring the patterns of her blood with the passage of her knees.
“Yer got a dinkum rifle now,” he told Mort. Mort’s eyes widened. They could not apprehend this woman- and child-killer, or how he had sprung up in the familiar features of his half-brother.
To the right of the homestead gate fine heifers were beginning to mill for milking. They ignored the arduously creeping lady-companion.
Meanwhile, Jimmie busied about looking for food and cartridges, while Mort sat weeping.
“Let’s git away, Jimmie. Let’s git away t’ Queensland.”
“Healy’s got t’ see this. This is all for Healy.”
“I fort it was b’cause she wouldn’t give yer a ride in a fuckin’ dray,” roared Mort.
“Jest sit there, Mort, and git it out of yer system. Yer weren’t here in the first place. Yer don’t know jest what these people did t’ me.”
All Mort did was lay his head down sideways on the kitchen table, his spatulate nose seeming further widened from his new acquaintance with horror. Half a dozen loud creaking sobs came out of him and moisture from his mouth ran onto Mrs Healy’s sandsoaped country table.
When Jimmie paused in his busy ransacking it was to wonder if he should put a bullet into the doggedness of the lady-companion. It had brought her very close to the homestead gate.
But before she had got that far, Healy came riding up on a tall black horse with white facing. He was fully visible through the open kitchen door. In his hand was the second household rifle.
Jimmie backed to a front corner of the kitchen. “Jest let him have a good look at what he bloody caused.”
Already Healy was out of the saddle and consulting the lady-companion. He laid her back to rest and came on with his rifle high, the butt at his right armpit.
Without warning Mort left the kitchen door, staggering comically, as if it were the old gay Mort miming, perhaps, drunken Jackie Smolders.
Even Healy was amazed, thinking either that Mort was wounded or mocking him or attracting his aim. At last the farmer fired, but at the very second Mort went into one of his arbitrary sidewise totters.
Healy’s right hand was now in his pockets scrabbling for cartridges. Mr Jimmie Blacksmith stepped out into daylight and shot him through the heart.
Healy cheated once more. The big harsh man died touchingly as a saint. He dropped his rifle to one side, like a tool relinquished deliberately and with common sense. In the same second he knelt and made a deep salaam until his forehead touched the earth. Three seconds later he tipped sideways in this same posture, in which he had ridden in his mother’s womb in 1854 in Sligo.
“Yer stupid bastard,” Jimmie told his limp half-brother. “I wanted him to see what he bloody caused.”
Mort it was, though, who was practical enough to go out across the moist black soil and proliferating grass to see if Healy was really gone. There was no doubt. He went on to the thin bitter lady he had shot and lifted her in his arms.
“Put me down,” she said, “yer black devil.”
Mort was too distressed to plead his goodwill.
‘Yer’ll hang for this, yer know. When they hang yer, remember how I predicted it.”
Mort sobbed confirmatory sobs. The woman babbled away, short of breath but at length.
“And then yer’ll go to the deepest hell. Mr Healy went to Communion last Sunday and has been working long days ever since. He’ll go to heaven and yer’ll go to deepest hell.”
“D’yer want a drink of water?” Mort pleaded. “And I’ll wrap blankets round yer. It’s only twenty-two gauge.”
“Mr Healy knew yer were coming. But he didn’t for a second b’lieve yer’d turn on her. On him, yairs. But on her!”
Indoors, Jimmie seemed scarcely uneasy after all his luxurious homicide and wanted something savoury. He had found a ginger-cake and come out, bulge-mouthed, waving wedges at his brother. He could easily have felt hollowness and boredom but still knew they were the luxuries of the repenter and the madman.
Somehow now, he must prop up Mort until Mort was reconciled enough to prop himself.
Meanwhile, as Mort ran about getting blankets and water for Mrs Healy’s friend, Jimmie put on a harsh front. “Why don’t yer run and fetch the p’lice as well?”
Jimmie promised. No more women, no more women. He felt secretly lightened in that no other woman on earth suggested herself as victim – not, anyhow, in the compelling manner of Mrs Healy and Miss Petra Graf. Not Mrs Hayes, certainly not Mrs Treloar.
At dusk, both brothers felt strangely exposed, as if the act of mayhem at Healy’s had conveyed their names instantly to all the people of the area.
Lewis would be forewarned now, and Farrell too; Jimmie eagerly debated strategy with Mort. It’s a war, he told Mort; if he, Jimmie Blacksmith, went to those who had wronged him and asked them like a gentleman to give his due to him, they’d laugh. And then he tried to convey to Mort how all they wanted from a black was foreseeable failure.
But no more women, Jimmie promised. No more women. Trying to restore Mort, he secretly let his mind run in splendid patterns, patterns close to dementia, patterns to besot yourself with. In the heart of house-proud Merriwa he would shoot down Farrell. All the women of the countryside would be in terror of his name; they would sweat palpable fear. He was a walking rape of women’s souls.
Yet he went on soberly swearing: no more women, Mort.
He let Mort have a little of the brandy he had taken from Healy’s place, but not too much. For in the morning they must double back north-west and confuse their tracks.
Even after a warm portion of liquor, Mort painted his face with white clay before sleeping. So that spirits, especially those freshly started, suddenly unloosed, uncertain of night’s profile, could not identify and latch on him.
In the morning it was Jimmie who woke heartsick. But his primal talent of navigation and speed over the ground, the numb, easy talents of the senses in contact with terrain, these restored him.
The journeying life, each camp no true point of arrival, braced him now that he had resigned from the white cycle, in which the ground is broken, the pod laid down and the seed puts out its roots.
They came close to Verona the next night and saw that mounted police had encamped there, at least fifteen. A black-tracker watered the horses from the camp tank, out of square, tea-tin buckets. His luck!
All the police could do, in the face of Jimmie’s manifesto of blood, was mill at places he had once been. The brothers sensed this, were heartened by it.
Again, that night, though they were miles on into the hills, they could not have a fire. Mort, however, was permitted the rest of the brandy. “Here are we, Tullam men,” Mort sang gently,
Dressed in the night,
Dressed the grey hue of sleeping plants.
Our shoulders press the wind towards newer moans,
We are in its change of voice.
Be careful and do not sleep,
For nothing more terrible than Tullam man
Will ever break the sleep of living man.
Be careful,
When the moon turns pale,
It is for Tullam man.
When stars run for the cover of thunderheads,
It is for Tullam man …
Jimmie welcomed the song. It didn’t sound like self-mockery. Perhaps it meant that Mort was trying to fit their movements into a tribal pattern.
For they saw salutary things that week, things to knit them closer. At the timber village of Borambil, high in the Divide, an armed picquet! Many families seemed to have moved into the school residence and post office, and children, even those too young for school, played in the schoolteacher’s garden.
They were shot at while flanking in upon a scarcely habitable shanty in a clearing.
It was as if their story had turned a corner – first Jimmie’s spree, then encouragement towards zeal for survival.
West again over the Divide, they found an empty house to steal from. Was it a Friday or perhaps a funeral? Though he might be a man who had killed women, Jimmie secretly fretted that it might be a funeral. It was not a rich man’s hut, not the hut of an established man, but commodities were exactly laid out in it, all in order, the cups in the dresser, the wood in its box, the wick in the hurricane lamp white and precisely trimmed. A battler’s house, not the house of the sort of man they had made war with. Jimmie didn’t wish on its owner a funeral and a looting in the one day.
There were no newspapers for Jimmie to read what a plague he was.
As for Mort, he was restored and given new vigor by touching household things, tea canisters, sugar scoops, jam tins; even if it was only with the relative innocence of a thief that he touched them. He left the place tidy, at least, and there was no blood on the walls.
Dowie Stead thought of his comrades as a fast striking force, like the new striking forces that were being formed in South Africa to hunt the slithery Boer. By arriving at Healy’s only the day after the Blacksmiths had been there they had proved their quality and had their sense of being the vengeance strengthened. Not that they were presented with the direct evidence of Jimmie Blacksmith’s work. The coroner, wise enough to know that babies are powerful stimulants one way or another, and that this one would merely stimulate hysteria, sent a telegram that only first-degree relatives were to see the remains. So Dowie Stead had learned nothing at Healy’s, nor from his conference with the lady-companion.
But while squadrons of Mounted Rifles, sent to Dubbo instead of Cape Town, encumbered the west, and parties of volunteers solemnly followed the Blacksmiths’ cold spoor, they had been only a day behind the devil himself. That proved their competence, they told each other.
Dowie Stead was no fool, however, and secretly feared what might not be accomplished; that there might be no consummation to the chase. No blood to dip his fiver in.
“I wonder,” he said, “if Blacksmith knows about the telegraph. Gilgandra can telegraph direct to Sydney and so can Merriwa. But there’s no telegraph direct between the places where he’s most likely to move.”
“I hadn’t thought of it,” said Dud Edmonds.
“He’s not as clever as all that,” said Toban.
In their night encampments some of them spoke as if the manhunt were a novitiate for the war in South Africa. They were unlike the clerk who gave Jimmie the leaflet on fencing in 1897. Their inheritance – combined – was not in thousands of acres but in hundreds of thousands. Except for Toban, they were Britannically minded.
“What makes me doubtful about South Africa, there are too many fellers dying of disease.”
“Righto. Yer got t’ risk the disease t’ git at the Boer. Righto. They print the list of those who die of disease. But they don’t say how many of them’ve killed a Boer or a bunch of bloody Boers.”
Toban said: “There aren’t even a few British soldiers ’ve killed one, let alone a bunch.” It gave him satisfaction.
“Yer can’t get away from it. Yer look at the lists in the Herald. Private Briggs, enteric fever, Private Brown, of wounds, Corporal Jones, enteric fever, Private Smith, enteric fever, Captain Ponce McGillicuddy, enteric fever. The lists are bloody endless. Enteric fever is what they’re fighting. The British Empire versus gut-ache. They ought t’ put out in front of recruiting places a sign that says Recruits ought to be told that if they join Her Majesty’s Forces they might have to bloody well fight Boers.”
Toban, son of the son of an Irish evictee, spoke as expected.
“It’s Britain’s war, not ours. Every Australian gets shot or goes under t’ fever is a crying waste. We’re going to federate. We’re going t’ be a bloody power in the world. And our world’s our world, not Britain’s. If it was, why did our fathers and grandfathers come here?”
“Singin’ too-ral, li-ooral, li-addity,” said someone, from an old song about the convicts.
“I can tell yer Father Reynolds, who’s of Irish descent all right, but no fanatic, yer all know that, he’s just come back from Rome and he tells me Britain’s stocks in Europe are so bloody low they wouldn’t even buy a pound of butter.”
Everyone whistled and groaned to let Toban know that he had been admitted to their number because of his sillabubs and horsemanship and power with liquor, in spite of the colour of his opinion, which was generally anti-monarchist and Papist.
“Oh Paddy dear, and did yer hear,” they sang at him.
At the end of the hubbub, someone said, “The Boers’ve got a lot of sympathy, it’s true what Toban says. I mean, all they wanted to do was to have their land and keep the black man in his place. Isn’t that our policy, here tonight? The Boers wanted to keep the black man in his true naked state. If we hadn’t flattered and put clothes on our blacks … I mean t’ say, our blacks are far more backward than any South African black ever was, and if we hadn’t tried to turn ours into Europeans, then –” he coughed, as if worried at reminding Dowie of his grief or duty of grief “ – then you know what.”
Dowie spoke, with all the authority of his bereaved state, just now suggested. But without rhetoric. They kept Toban for that.
“British authority has been challenged by the Boers. There’s been deliberate provocation. An insult to the Queen.”
“Pardon me, Dowie. I respect yer right to speak, but I beg to point out the flaws in yer statement.” It was Toban again, the great flaw-pointer. “I mean, t’ talk about an insult t’ the Queen! If an Eskimo in the Ar’tic wrote bugger the Queen! on the wall of his igloo, would yer go all the way up there t’ shoot him for it? It’s nonsense. The Boers are a people like us. They’re tough and there wouldn’t be any South Africa without them. Just the same as there wouldn’t be any Australia if it wasn’t for the downtrod of Britain’s filthy cities and the victims of tyrannous British eviction.”
Again they cheered ironically at Toban’s Irish catechisms. “Where from, Toban? Where were people evicted from? What country did that happen in? It’s those bloody Catholics again, evicting the poor bloody Protestants!”
“Don’t you worry! Our grandparents all had the arse out of their trousers. Out here we live like kings in Australia. Who did that for us – the Queen? My grandfather farmed an acre and a half in Kerry. Now my father runs sheep on twenty thousand acres. And we can afford t’ ride out like this, like knights, and hunt …”
He began to look solemn, as the other young man had some seconds earlier.
“… with all respect, Dowie, hunt the killers of girls who nothing can make up for.”
Someone said, “Well put!” and the words sank beyond trace into the shadows beneath his jaw.
Dowie Stead let his mouth set in mute lines that could easily be interpreted as grief. Secretly he mastered a compulsion to tell them all to shut up their sombre prognostications. For they nearly all knew what it was to slaver after dark women. Even Toban. And he couldn’t blame that on evictions.
In Muswellbrook, Mr Neville told his wife that if he could he would go off after the Blacksmiths unarmed.
“Poor Jimmie!” he was always discovering himself saying.
And always Mrs Neville said, “What do you mean, poor Jimmie?” In a tone that suggested that she might not have married him if she had known of this tendency towards sympathy for killers.
Mrs Neville wept for the obvious things which were all reproduced in one special edition of the Mail. The photograph of the Newby family, taken at Christmas time, 1898.
“What a fine solid couple they made,” said Mrs Neville of the Newbys. The two murdered girls were marked with a white cross.
“So young, so young,” said Mrs Neville.
“But you must remember,” said Mr Neville, “that they would have grown considerably since 1898.”
“Of course, of course.”
There was Miss Graf’s firm face, strenuous shoulders and bust.
Mr Neville was no fool. He knew what sickness Jimmie was suffering. Having a true talent for religion, he understood the obsessive spiral, and understood that he himself might have been sent racketing around it if ever he had touched a black woman. The only anodyne, the sole apology for one abomination, becomes a second, and so on.
The Mail had printed too a photograph of Mrs Blacksmith, waif-wife in crumpled dress and straggly, bunned hair, squinting at the phosphorus flash. Mr Neville remembered with nausea that he had recommended this sort of marriage to Jimmie, this stupid, cunning and insipid girl. Did Mrs Neville remember that? He hoped to God she did.
Appropriately deaths and burials were numerous in his congregation during the first fortnight of the Blacksmith spree. The Rev. Mr Neville had got beyond the words of the funeral rite and found that total extinction after death and survival in God’s sight were both equally hard to disbelieve in.
Likewise he found it only too easy and totally impossible to believe that his Jimmie Blacksmith was at loose killing women.
In Sydney there was a promise of spring, but first, harsh nor’-westers. All Mr Hyberry’s customers had colds and Ted Knoller, waiting against the antiseptic wall, sniffled into his scarf with a furled copy of the Sporting Chronicle under his armpit.
“Well, they’ve found two of them,” he called across the floor. Once more no one but a reputably deaf spinster was waiting to be served. “The wife and the old man. You’ll have to … do the job, let’s say, do the job on them two.”
“I wasn’t aware they’d come to trial yet,” said toffee-nosed Mr Hyberry.
Knoller found the man unbearably discreet and polite. He even had a copy of the Pure Foods Act hung on the wall.
“No, they haven’t. But Christ, they were all in it. They’re sure to … Have yer ever hanged a woman before?”
“No.”
“I s’pose it’ll present its peculiar problems.”
“Indeed it would, Mr Knoller, for the simple reason I’d never hang a woman, even if ordered to do so by the Queen herself.”
Behind their father, the slicing boys did not even look up. As if they had been informed beforehand of this possible future falling-out between V R and their father.
“Not even if she’s a murderer?” Knoller asked. “I mean, a killer’s a killer, it don’t make no diff’rence, man or woman.”
“It makes all the difference, Mr Knoller. A condemned woman might be carrying another life. However squalid the origins of that life might be …”
“Yer mean, she might be in the family way? In a jail?”
“Jails are not all they should be, Mr Knoller.”
Mr Knoller was amazed or pretended to be. He pulled the Sporting Chronicle from under his arm in a manner that made the butcher fear that he might fall back on it for reference material.
“By what yer jest said,’ Knoller slyly murmured, “you’d be willing to hang a grandmother who was past bearing children. You’d hang her no matter how randy the wardens were.”
“I would not hang a grandmother, because I would respect the life she’d already given to the world.”
Then Knoller laughed, in a nasty, doubting way. It made him peevish that Hyberry was incorruptible.
The hangman himself found it possible to be lenient with Knoller today. It would be easy enough for anyone to presume that an executioner, given that he was not a monster, would obtain insights into the nature of man and death by all his cool killing.
In fact, all that happened was that Hyberry came to the jail the day before the hanging. Through the Judas window of the condemned cell he surveyed the man, never for more than five minutes. The chief warden already had certain measurements to hand to him as well. Then the gallows were inspected and Mr Hyberry set up and adjusted the rope and tried the trap.
These days it took him up to two hours to arrange matters to the limits of his scruples. Then he went home, unless it was a country hanging, in which case he returned to his hotel. At home he took a double-whisky and went to bed early. In a hotel he might have as many as three whisky-and-sodas in the lounge, reading something such as the London Illustrated News until ten o’clock.
The next day he was called at dawn. In a strange numbness he drank his early morning tea, shaved and omitted breakfast.
At six-thirty a cab took him to the prison and he looked over his preparations, though not at his victim. Most of the hour between seven and eight he spent chatting in the Chief Warden’s office, where a chaplain would join them.
There was usually a high failure rate in jail chaplains, so that Hyberry found himself frequently explaining to novice chaplains where he himself would stand in relation to priest and warden and physician and statutory witnesses.
The condemned usually behaved well. Hyberry never knew whether it was because the doctor had given them some euphoric drug or because it was easy to die if the hour and moment of death were known. He would never have asked if sedatives were used; it was not his business.
On the scaffold, Hyberry stood at the left-rear corner. The condemned scarcely ever looked at him when they came up onto the platform. Sometimes they were permitted to speak, though were usually dissuaded from it if they were in a God-defying mood.
Then two warders jostled the man gently onto the centre of the trap. Immediately Hyberry came forward, arranged the noose, put a hood over the man’s head. Three seconds later he had gone to the lever and tripped it. The clack of the trap did not always drown the incisive click of the neck breaking.
Hyberry had learned no mysteries; he was so deft at the work and so swift that witnesses often wondered why they were necessary.
So there was nothing to tell Knoller, either obscene or revelatory … apart from his mistake with the old black man.
But Knoller already knew about that.