In Dubbo, at the same time, Mrs Blacksmith was dismissed from custody. There was no indictment against her bunned hair, her crushed green dress. She passed into another capture.
Two Sisters of Mercy took her away in a closed carriage. There was a jolly Irish one who put her finger on the baby’s chin.
“Yer dear little dove,” she said, “yer young t’ be after leaving prison. None of my family ever managed it so young. They’d be jealous. Yes they would, pretty baby.”
She produced a brown cord with two little felt squares attached, one of them a picture of Virgin and Child. She arranged the cord about the child’s neck so that one square lay on its chest, the other fell down its back.
Tears were in Gilda’s eyes. She knew that as a mother she should resist such encroachments. But her tears had no authority and her large straw hat put them in deep shadow.
After Toban’s funeral, three of Dowie’s party made their case for going home and went. It was not for fear of the Blacksmiths. Everyone knew, by noon on the day after Toban’s death, that the Blacksmiths could not now be found by any amount of dedicated riding.
One of the young men wanted to enlist, the other two had their fathers’ acres to attend to, and – in every town – letters of paternal complaint waited on them calling them home.
In October, the Blacksmith brothers dared cross the Divide and come down to the western slopes, circling Tamworth at night and north-west then, towards the towns of the plains, Wee Waa, Gunnedah. Insensate travel for its own sake, innocent of scheme, its direction betrayed by their need to ransack.
They travelled at night. Two days of rain they spent cosy on top of a provident farmer’s high hay storage beneath a chattering tin roof.
Deep in interstices between hay-bales, in the dusty corridors mined through last season’s fodder, rats or tired black snakes moved. Mort would sit up, listen for a few seconds, become reassured and lie down again on his spread blanket. He wore only his trousers; it was steamy beneath the iron roof. He was full of alarm of things – grain-rats, for an example – that would once never have worried him.
In the small hours of a Friday they came on a lit-up hut whose owner, a neat-suited little man, had come out to his doorstep, spying on the stars and approving that they could all be seen while, by the light over his shoulder, he took the cardboard stiffeners from his hat.
The Blacksmiths spied on him in turn and Jimmie envied the day’s business he would do in Tamworth.
The brothers spent the rest of Friday there.
Once inside, Mort slept, but Jimmie found a corner of newspapers. The top was a Herald of September 30, 1900, the bottom a Mail of May 1, 1899. Jimmie opened them at random in the dawn light. What he looked for were items that proved his own sharp reality yet at the same time did not raise in him any ambiguities of feeling. He did not want to be further confused.
First he found a reference of Toban’s death. It satisfied him to know the boy’s name.
Frank Toban became the latest victim of the black desperadoes as the result of an unfortunate mistake.
Police and volunteers, acting on information, had surrounded the aboriginal reserve at Pilbarra. Mr Toban, a member of Mr Dowie Stead’s party, was asked to go from one station on the reserve perimeter to another. He was unfortunate enough to have met the Blacksmiths amongst the shanties on the northern edge of Pilbarra. It seemed that, after shooting Mr Toban in the stomach and head, the brothers escaped through the very hole in the defence which Mr Toban had been on his way to cover.
This further exhibition of barbarity …
But Jimmie skipped the moralizing.
Yet he could not make himself forgo seeing the earliest reports of those eons-old killings at Newby’s. He rummaged until he found the appropriate editions. Though he could not read well and did not want to read them head-on he brushed his eyes up and down them and could sense a crystalline indignation that made his nape prickle. Finding a far too appropriate Mail edition, he saw a photograph of the Newbys’ house, substantial, ugly. He felt nauseated and forced the copy deep into the 1899 end of the pile.
“Fuck up the old bastard’s system!” he muttered.
Then he found that Jackie Smolders had been sentenced to death.
Yet it was touching to see this old man in the dock, a grizzled elder of his race, painfully respectful of those about him and of court procedure. It made even more incomprehensible the outrages he found it in him to commit at the Newby homestead at Wallah in July …
The twelve sturdy Dubbo men and true who made up the jury withdrew, but returned after ten minutes with a verdict of guilty as to the charge of the murders of Mrs Newby and Miss Vera Newby, and accessory to the murders of Miss Mary Newby and Miss Petra Graf.
Asked if he wanted to say anything, the old man rose and spoke as follows: “I only wanted to give Jimmie his initiation tooth [a ritual tooth to remind a black of his tribal obligations – Ed.] to let him know he shouldn’t have married a white girl. Mr Newby wouldn’t give us food so we went to argue with Mrs Newby. We never expected for a second we’d kill them. Jimmie was a good worker [he added, rather irrelevantly] and I ain’t afraid of dying because I earned hanging with what I done [sic].
I never done nothing [sic] like this before. You would think it would take up a good while to make up your mind to kill someone and then to kill them. I’m just an igorant [sic] black man but take my word for it, it only takes a second.”
Poor Jackie Smolders giving the people of Dubbo an honest warning against the suddenness of homicidal fury. A few of them might live to be in need of it.
Mrs Gilda Blacksmith gave evidence on the first day of the trial.
She is a thin girl who looks more fourteen than eighteen.
She displays a considerable compunction for the time she spent with her black husband and says she was often afraid.
They didn’t say what of, that was the point. And black husband was unfair, he thought. The white seed might have been the bad seed.
She said that she and James Blacksmith had beenrespectably married before a Methodist minister and due witnesses in Wallah in May. In July a child was born to her, somewhat before its time, at the Newbys’ homestead …
Jimmie trembled: intrusion dressed up as Newby charity. As for Gilda, he felt the pity which a man can easily mistake for love. She existed less for Jimmie than did, say, Mrs Healy, and he could not hate her, seeing through the news report her transparent cunning, her bankrupt ambition: to escape charity and be acknowledged as her own voice.
Five days later, a number of Blacksmith’s relatives had arrived and two hovels were built beside the Blacksmiths’ small bungalow. She said she had felt afraid from that minute. Asked if she received indecent propositions from any black man other than her husband, she replied no, but that they had drunk a lot and that her husband had to put much expense towards keeping them there.
Without warning, newsprint in disarray all about him, Jimmie understood that he had a copious love in him and had not spent it. He would die with his head full (he thought of it as a headful) of unspent love. The waste of life he had already made certain of. The truest crime remaining to him to commit was the waste of love. It should be bequeathed, as land is.
He began to compose a message to leave here for Gilda and the cook’s child. But then people are not always happy to receive inheritances. Perhaps he could say or beg that the child should not be treated in terms of the murders its father … its father (let it stand! he thought) had done.
And he could say that Jackie Smolders was a gentle man, liable to fright.
But then he imagined the press reducing the importance of his will of love to something inane and comic, as they had reduced Jackie Smolders with their “sic”. “Sic”, Jimmie felt sure, was a term of superior mockery.
In the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, he noticed, there had been a second reading of the Attorney-General’s Bill of Outlawry of the Blacksmith Brothers.
The journal was at pains to instruct citizens on their rights under the bill.
This bill will increase penalties against those harbouring the fugitives, provide a reward of £5,000 for their capture, and cancel all the Blacksmiths’ rights under common law and the law of the State. They can be shot on sight, or – if captured as the result of surrender – be put to death, it seems, without question, by any citizen using any means of execution.
Jimmie Blacksmith was, in fact, cheered by the rigor of official opinion, by the absolute nature of outlawry. He decided he had best get some sleep. But before he drowsed off, two other minor items of news attracted his eye.
One in the exact, high-toned Herald.
The date of the execution of Jackie Smolders, condemned to death in connection with the Wallah massacre of the past August, has not been stated, and informed observers say that it may be a policy matter to postpone the execution until the capture and trial of the Blacksmith brothers. An officer of the Chief-Secretary’s department has stated that it would be considered inappropriate for the State to conduct executions in relation to so emotional a matter as the Wallah massacre at a moment so close to the great event of Federation.
In the more sentimental Mail:
Mr Toban was a member of Dowie Stead’s band of comrades, who all intended to enlist for South Africa once the Blacksmith killers had been tracked down. Therefore it can be said that the cowardly bullets of James and Morton Blacksmith have deprived the Queen of a fine soldier.
Beneath it were published the Boer War casualties:
Private lan Manners, N.S. W. Mounted Rifles, enteric fever.
Lieut. B. Griffith, N.S.W. Light Cavalry, enteric fever.
Sergeant L. Peters, N.S.W. Mounted Rifles, of wounds.
Private Edwin Clarke, N.S.W. Horse Artillery, enteric fever.
Mort was better sleeping by day. Sleeping by night, he did things that worried Jimmie. He would throw off his blankets and walk a few yards in a daze and plump down again to sleep without covers, on bare ground.
But, a fierce mover, he ate up distance whenever they travelled. Jimmie, night and distance he challenged with the width of his stride.
“The stain is on the inner eye,” he would sometimes mutter in Mungindi. It was part of a cautionary saying:
Woman’s blood cleaves to a man.
If he wash his eyes over and over in Marooka,
His outer eye does not see it again,
But the stain is on the inner eye.
A hunter sighted them near Murrurundi as they turned back to the mountains, and they were chased by a constable and twelve citizens into intractable gorge country to the north, a land that suited and awed them.
Friday was the best day for looting, the day country people went to town. Jimmie survived by a centimetre a Friday afternoon presumption that a farmhouse before them was empty. For days after, he kept feeling on the right side of his neck the cold breath of the passing bullet.
Onto tablelands of sheep farmers, but still October and the first days of November could have nights too chilly for them. The north had bristled, the south was too open, and Mr Jimmie Blacksmith wondered if he could withstand the echoes in the deep woods and high divide near Merriwa. Due east from where they now stood the timberlands went down to the coast, Jimmie knew. There was good cover all the way down to the pleasant estuary town of Taree, a town which Mrs Neville had always claimed exceedingly to like.
First they were in high clean vertical forests, little undergrowth, little debris on the ground. The unearthly place worried Mort. Jimmie hoped it would give onto rain-forest.
Soon it did; cluttered, homelier, creeping with insect industry. Stag horns grew on the trees and tipped crystal water into their sleeping faces. Quick wakeful brown snakes were out in their new skins. The bush-spiders were large but wary. All this somehow made it a more humane country.
The fires they made gave piquant, moist smoke that stung the eyes and made good tea.
About them, sown with little timber hamlets, spinney on spinney stretched broader than England.
They found an empty selector’s house. Someone had gone bankrupt up here in the wet forest. He had left seven bed frames, a few old copies of the Herald and the Freeman’s Journal and one black-and-white coral snake in methylated spirits. It was easy to feel sad at these few relics of hope, though Jimmie remembered immediately his own depredations against far more prosperous hopes.
Here, with stub of pencil and on the margins of old newspapers, he left parting messages for Dulcie, Jackie, Gilda, the child. The letters might never be found, and that allowed him to write more freely than he could have dared do in more frequented places. It was mad, but allowed him to say generous things to Gilda.
Dowie Stead had become more indecisive with all this riding. He had even forgotten his relief at being excused from taking Miss Graf’s high hand in marriage. The faces of the slaughtered had become remote. Miss Graf awaited resurrection in Gilgandra cemetery. Her agony was folded away now, like washed, rolled bandages that once wrapped screaming wounds.
Dud Edmonds had begun to suggest a return to normal business. Soon the shearing season would begin. The world or the wilderness would consume the Blacksmiths in the end; they would fall down a gorge or be torn by random bullets of farmers.
But Dowie shook his head. He felt he had become a figure of sentiment and that the sentiment must be maintained. He spoke of “being in at the kill”. His father, besides, kept sending bank-drafts, as if their share in a black whore compelled him to it.
Sometimes Dud’s conversation would niggle at Dowie, hint at the inanity of the chase and the shadiness of Miss Graf’s memory.
“Yer going t’ join the Masons now, Dowie?” Dud knew that Miss Graf had made it a condition of betrothal that Dowie should not join a lodge. “Yer old enough t’ join now, Dowie.”
“Petra wasn’t strong on it. She said it was like black magic. She said it was like a corroboree.”
“I don’t see how she could say that. She might’ve meant Boaz and all that. But there’s nothing the matter with Boaz. It’s all based on the Bible and Knights Templars.”
“Knights Templars?”
“Crusaders. They were the beginnings of the whole Freemason business. And the blokes who built the pyramids.”
“I wonder if they’ve gone down to the coast? Round places like Port Macquarie, Taree. The Blacksmiths, I mean.”
“I know a family in Taree, Dowie. Two nice daughters. Yer can’t live like a monk for the rest of yer life.”
Dowie uttered an ambivalent grunt. “Well,” he said, “the Blacksmiths aren’t going to try to live like monks. As poor bloody Toban found out.”
“Poor bloody Toban. Yer know, I don’t think he really meant all that Irish business and running down the Queen. I wouldn’t mind betting he would’ve turned Mason.”
“Never.”
“Yair, I tell yer. In every community yer got them. The ones who join in to serve – like yer own father – and the ones who join to be served. Toban would’ve joined to be served.”
“That’s a bloody awful thing to say about a dead friend.”
It seemed clear that Dud was aiming at throwing question on Petra Graf’s image, that Toban was merely the first step.
“Shut up, Dud. Yer bloody indecent.”
“Listen, Dowie, there’s a lot of bullshit talked about death.”
“Jest wait till you’ve had a dose of it.”
“Come off it, Dowie. We both know you didn’t want to marry that Graf girl.”
“Shut up, Dud.”
“Look, I’ve stuck with yer …”
“Don’t make a song and dance about it.”
“At least I ought t’ be allowed t’ talk honestly. I’m just as shatoff with the whole business as you are.”
“Righto! Say what yer bloody like.”
“Listen, Dowie, yer know yer’d jest as soon not git yoked with that high-hat schoolie.”
Dowie felt naked. His face ached with shame. For some seconds, he felt he was about to assent.
Then something unfortunate happened. Dud had not really wished to speak honestly, not with penetrating honesty. He was, in fact, the sort of man whom society could depend on not to let the cat out. So that he now went grey with alarm and dropped to his knees, hanging his head.
“I’m sorry, Dowie. I oughtn’t to say that. Yer can punish me if yer want.”
At least it fruitfully occurred to Dowie how lush with gesture and eccentricity people could be, the quietest, safest people. He himself had his hand half-way to Dud’s shoulder; but then needed to go beyond the firelight to cry. A man did not cry, as he did not perform a natural function, within a fire’s ambience.
He wept for not having wept for Miss Graf. He wept for his father. What’s the matter with me that I can’t feel grief in its proper place?
If he gave up the chase, he feared, people would spot it in him: that he didn’t feel the correct, the ordained things.
Dud waited up for a while, then arranged his blankets, sighed, and went to sleep.
The Blacksmiths were hale. Around Gunnedah and on the tablelands they had eaten the best of mutton, slaughtering at will on the big sheep farms. Therefore the November damp of rain-forest did not penetrate them. If the high sun touched wet cloth, steam rose in the warm air. The winter of their bloody doings was over and they might live for ever in the coastal valleys.
Yet they would not have chosen to. To deliver themselves from the ceaseless trees, they again willed deliberate crises on themselves.
One midday they crossed a track with wheelmarks deep in it and came to an open slope where two buildings stood. One was a schoolhouse, Tambourine Public School 1891, it claimed in black paint. Behind its window was a burr of talk or rote learning.
Below it was a school residence with children’s clothes on a cord across its veranda, declaring some unknown woman. The woman came out after they had waited half an hour, felt the clothes, winced and went indoors again empty-handed. She was young but older than they. Her parted hair, unpinned, obscured her face, but Jimmie’s special sight picked out a brown eye, a pale nose.
After his long abstinence, he feared so much that he might want to kill her that the impulse actually arose. As he fought it, it seemed to grow with strength borrowed from his own marrow and guts.
Both brothers fell asleep and were awoken by the afternoon thunder. It was mid-afternoon, and Jimmie was peevish, sleeping too long and from fear that he might ravage the woman.
“Schoolteachers spreadin’ bloody lies,” he said, half-conscious, and felt vindicated when his senses cleared and he found that the teacher was busy spreading one now.
The children were chanting:
“That ain’t his bus’ness,” Jimmie said. “Dearest land of all. That’s got fuck-all to do with school-teachin’.”
“What’s it bloody matter?” Mort asked. “Every kid in school gits taught that.”
“Fuckin’ dearest land of all!”
“What yer goin’ t’ do, shoot him for it?”
But the incantation over, children marched out, broke ranks.
A boy got another down in the long grass and punched him square in the face three times, then let him up. Even the after-school loitering was clipped. The children had to ride home to help with the afternoon milking.
They were all gone in five minutes, kicking old bareback nags up the cart-track. Then the teacher came in his vest, rolled-up sleeves, watch-chain and Wellingtons, his coat over his arm. He was short, but with a rangy country gait. He had glasses, a Society of Friends beard; and looked aggressively content.
When he vanished into the residence they heard him calling out greetings to a child, and, from further inside the house, a girl’s light voice telling him with a little dissatisfaction of something domestic.
Then he came out again to chop wood. The Blacksmiths made for him.
They were only yards away when he saw them. He looked up at them through strong lenses that magnified the eyes beyond them. These eyes, Jimmie could tell, were trustful in the sense that they had had experience of human rancour yet still could not break themselves of some habit of credence.
“I know who you two are,” he told them. “God, you’ve travelled fast.”
Jimmie could not allow people like him to establish their intent. He raised his Enfield and sighted it on the schoolmaster’s heart. For two seconds he clenched his eyes shut and then fired. The bullet went well wide of the teacher. Those two blind seconds had cheated or saved Jimmie.
“Jesus!” the teacher muttered and sat down on his chopping block.
The thin girl who had been sighted earlier came onto the veranda and began to scream.
“It’s all right, darling,” the teacher called. “We spotted a rabbit. You go inside. I’ll be in in a moment.”
The girl’s large eyes were not reassured. She remained where she was and raked her hair from her forehead so that she should not fail to see any further pot-shooting.
“C’mon, Jimmie,” Mort said. He was afraid for the witnessing lady.
“No.”
“C’mon!”
There was silence, set against the small-talk of forest, of falling twigs and chattering birds. The schoolteacher began to speak but gave up and drew his hand down the length of his spiky hair from the back to the forehead. A gesture of conciliation.
Then he said, “If you two gentlemen are in any doubt as to whether to kill us, just let me tell you my wife’s sick and I don’t have much insurance.” He struck his fist three times on the knee of his trousers. “And we’re both bloody innocent.”
“Yer got any flour, bacon?” Mort asked.
“Oh yair, enough of that.” He shrugged and looked up at them, his lips quivering beyond control. “You don’t have to think you must kill me. You let an old man live up in Barrington Tops.”
“Soon as we turned our backs, yer’d be off to the p’lice,” Jimmie said. “It was a schoolie did for Ned Kelly.”
“You’re welcome to take my horse. I’m twenty-two miles from a police station. A walk like that would take me two days. Look, I know I can reason with you, because you aren’t mad, either of you.”
After a second of looking up from beneath his eyebrows, and looking always more and more blameless without trying, after an instant of licking his long sad lips, he laughed sharply and in considerable fright, and stood up.
The Blacksmiths could see that he understood – perhaps from the classroom – the ways control shifted from one to another and that he suspected it might somehow pass to him; that, at least, his family would not be hewn or shot.
“Let me show you something you’d enjoy. It’s in the Bulletin.”
Mort followed, dangling his arms, and Jimmie came too, though much more creakily, his rifle at the port. There was one of those near-comic crushes – somehow implying the parlous state of Jimmie’s command – at the doorway, where the schoolmaster halted for the sake of frankness.
“By the way, you aren’t going to believe me if I say I’ve got no arms in the house. In fact, I’ve got a bonzer Martini Henry carbine. My father-in-law gave it to me. I’ve been intending to clean it – I haven’t touched it for a year. It was a wedding present. Everyone said it was a funny wedding present. Someone said it was to keep the cow-cockies away from my wife. I haven’t got any ammunition for it.”
They went on then, into the kitchen. The teacher chattered on, the wife watched out of her vast witnessing eyes.
Meanwhile Jimmie felt desperate. He was letting consequences pile up against him by letting them live. Yet he had no passion for this woman’s blood.
He screamed for the teacher to shut up and hit him on the jaw. The woman shrieked at the blow. Her husband began to weep silently in a detached way, in a way that did not diminish him.
“A schoolie did for Ned Kelly,” Jimmie diagnosed. “I don’t want no schoolie to do fer me.”
“Yer got any liquor?” Mort asked dismally, as if the terms they were negotiating had shrunk to that. “There won’t be anythin’ more bad happen t’ yer, missus,” he muttered at the woman while the teacher went fumbling for rum in the kitchen cupboard. The teacher passed a flask to Mort without interest and held out his arm to receive his wife.
“It’s all right,” the teacher said, whether instructing Jimmie or comforting his wife no one could tell. “If they were going to kill us, I’d tell you so that you could pray. My wife is religious.”
“We’re Methodist,” Mort stupidly said. “We not goin’ t’ kill yer, missus.”
The headmaster blinked. Gobbets of tear were spiked on his lashes. He began to look around him.
“Where’s that copy of the Bulletin, dear?” He found it slung across a dumb-waiter. “Here, look at this.”
It was a caricature of two plump aborigines camped in a forest setting, feeding police bloodhounds with legs of mutton. One of the two aborigines was telling a satiated police-dog, “Go back to yer boss an’ tell ’im yer ain’t seen nothing!” Both natives were smiling, and the one not bribing the bloodhounds was reading a newspaper which bannered the news: Blacksmith Brothers still at large after two months.
“What’s it say?” said Mort, after Jimmie had read the thing a second sombre time.
Jimmie explained as drily as he could manage. He was unwilling to confess being touched. But once the bones of the joke were stated, Mort propped himself up with Mrs Healy’s lady-companion’s rifle and bent over with laughter, and then Jimmie himself conceded, and the headmaster smiled.
It was preposterously more than a joke. The pen-and-ink man had restored the Blacksmiths to the comic realm, an area which, they thought instinctively, everyone had closed to them. It gave them leave from the corroding business of being incubi; absolved them from the bogy role. At once Jimmie saw the remote potentiality of becoming a figure of myth in this first breaking of the monumental visage of appal the press had so far turned towards their fumbling homicide and talent for flight.
And the teacher knew all this.
“There’ve been three thousand men out looking for you two, you know,” he told them.
“Three thousand!” Mort whispered. In a sparse country, Mort was impressed by the immensity of thousands.
As the wife told Mort where the groceries were kept, Jimmie remembered the passage in the Herald about saving Jackie Smolders’ hanging until the Blacksmiths had been taken. The idea of a hostage, of someone who could be bargained for Jackie Smolders, came to him.
He knew how unlikely the concept was. But here they had been treated with a sort of respect, been given room to speak in their true selves. It was all so simple: they wanted to go on being seen as the two gay fugitives of the caricature. And this teacher was a man to whom they could speak of their crimes in level, wholesome, even comic terms.
Jimmie could not have explained all this. But for taking a white with them there was one word, which the force of his understanding pushed up his throat.
“Hostage,” he said, and everyone became silent.
“I couldn’t keep up with you two. I’d hold you up. I’ve got respiratory trouble.”
Besides which, Jimmie knew, there was a great risk of the prisoner becoming master. Some of the blindness that goes with falling in love forced Jimmie’s decision. Mort’s eyes also shone. He wanted company.
“We wouldn’t hurt him, missus,” he said in actual apology. “Three thousan’ sure t’ catch us in the end. Then he kin come home.”
“Git yerself some blankets and ground sheet!” Jimmie told the man.
Instead, the schoolteacher was caressing and soothing his wife and began to argue against the nonsense of taking him. But, being no fool, he began to see that they were answering one of the imperatives of their history and were fixed.
Soon his wife was fussing about, packing his things as if he were going for a train journey. It was all very insane. “Take the double blankets,” she said. “Keep warm but not too warm. It’s a dangerous time of year. And wear your rough-work boots. What about Wellingtons?”
“It’s too hard trekking in Wellingtons. Have you seen my Palgrave?”
“How many pairs of socks? And don’t forget to keep the flannel round your chest.”
She was meanwhile seeping tears all the time.
They left well before dusk, so that she could start for a neighbour’s place before dark. She stayed on the veranda, spilling tears and chewing her bottom lip.
It was like a dream, this fantastic insistence on a hostage, and had no more logic than a dream. They found that the schoolteacher’s name was McCreadie. Now they intended to show McCreadie the daily virtue of their fear and strenuous survival. He had short breath, however.
“I warned you,” he said.
It rained and the schoolteacher’s asthma became louder in the slowly dripping, still forest. Towards one o’clock in the morning they halted.
McCreadie sat against a trunk, assuring Mort he was not as ill as he sounded.
“The secret,” he grunted, “is to get rid of the entire load of air before breathing in again. Most asthmatics take short, quick breaths, but that only makes things worse. A person must never panic, or think that each time he breathes out is the last.”
“Panic?” Mort asked.
“Do your bundle,” McCreadie explained.
Mort understood that that was how McCreadie had won, by giving things time, by passing around the latest edition of the Bulletin.
Spreading a groundsheet, Jimmie saw Mort gathering kindling wood.
“No fire,” Jimmie said, “They’ll be lookin’ fer fires.”
“Who’ll be fuckin’ lookin’? The schoolie needs a cup.”
“Don’t be such a bloody ole lubra. He’s here fer us. We’re not here fer bloody him.”
“Mort wants one too.”
“Fuckin’ ole women’s church turn-out.”
But he drank some when it had been brewed. Then McCreadie put his glasses away in his jacket, his eyes with the blunt look of the acutely short-sighted, and began slowly rolling himself in his blankets.
“No school tomorrow,” he wheezed, before going soundly asleep.
The McCreadie-Blacksmith connection was initiated by Jimmie in the hope of finding a genial self-reflection in McCreadie. But people are never passive mirrors.
Jimmie became quickly disenchanted with the teacher who seemed to be receiving confessions from Mort, or perhaps even conspiring with him. Suddenly McCreadie began to see little comedy in two men evading three thousand, and became fixed like Mort on the fact of Jimmie having axed women.
Mr Jimmie Blacksmith felt as cheated as a man who marries a bitter woman. It was clear that the teacher would emasculate and sunder them; and that he intended it.
Meanwhile Jimmie wanted to be blunt and vicious with McCreadie, in the manner of a Healy or a Farrell; but harshness like that did not transfer well to the teacher, who could not be appropriately frightened or angered.
On a clear damp morning, for example, he fetched water from a mountain sink in sandstone, a fed pool with sweet little crayfish in the soft abrasions of sandstone which covered the bottom. He filled a can, and rose to see McCreadie gathering wood in the undergrowth ten yards away, his suit collar turned up and his elf-shaped ears pink as if it were mid-winter.
He went straight to McCreadie. As often before when Jimmie had confronted the teacher, Mort materialized from the forest to watch, to see after McCreadie’s welfare.
“When I went t’ work fer farmers, fer farmers like Newby,” Jimmie said, “they was always afraid I was goin’ t’ turn their prop’ty into a blacks’ camp. They always said a filthy blacks’ camp. It looks as if yer aren’t keepin’ yerself very clean, Mr Schoolteacher, and I don’t want my place turned into a filthy whites’ camp.”
Then he poured the can of water over McCreadie’s head. It washed the glasses off the short-sighted eyes, turned the beard to a thin goatish tassel of hair and flooded the good cloth of his shoulders.
But the act worked no magic for Jimmie. McCreadie’s wet pink ears and beard and all made a flat joke. Of course, Jimmie Blacksmith understood, the reasons why it was a flat joke were the same reasons that made vengeance a yawning lie.
How Mort would once have laughed, the young Mort. The Mort he had become groaned his intolerance across the space between them.
A quick shiver ran through McCreadie, but he did not move.
“Yer stupid bastard, Jimmie!” Mort called, passionately, a genuine opponent.
“I’ll tell you,” said the schoolmaster, “if I get one of my chest inflammations …”
“Go an’ fill up the can,” said Jimmie. “That’ll help keep yer warm.”
“Why don’t yer go an’ fill it yerself?” Mort suggested. “Yer the stupid bastard that spilt it.”
“What d’yer think I am, the bloody schoolie’s servant? Yair, yer’d like me t’ go, so yer kin tell him how yer never cut up any women an’ yer a nice abo off a mission.”
“Well, I never cut up any women.”
“Jest shot one in the chest. But that don’t count, I s’pose. Christ, they ought t’ have yer fightin’ the Boers.”
Without warning, McCreadie, a gobbet of water still on his nose-tip, let out his classroom roar.
“Be quiet!”
The arguing brothers were jolted more than they cared to be.
McCreadie said severely, “If you stand there comparing evils, you won’t stop till you’ve shot each other through the heart. You ought to know that no one does a murder unless he wants to.”
Jimmie Blacksmith morbidly hoped McCreadie meant that, for it would weaken him with Mort, who believed now that people could stumble into the act of killing.
“Yer kin hurt people by acc’dent,” Mort said.
“Oh yes,” the teacher conceded. “But you harmed the people you harmed because you chose to go to them ready to harm them, with the arms to do it.”
Mort put on a sulky face, as if he were hurt to be lumped with his brother, the axe-murderer, and disappointed by McCreadie’s poor opinion of him.
Once more the thought of shooting McCreadie came to Jimmie, but dismayed him. The startling thing was that a bullet could not hurt McCreadie on the plane on which Jimmie hoped to hurt. Something so endowed with energy and the grace of the Lord as a bullet from Birmingham could not prevail.
“I’ll go and get the water,” said McCreadie at last.
He went away in the maladroit amble Jimmie Blacksmith had become accustomed to seeing. A stiff, sick-man’s walk, anyone could see.
Yet he had such hopes for, such need of McCreadie. It was not to be thought of, letting him go.
Not only in his butcher’s shop was Mr Hyberry considered wide open for scrutiny. As Grand Master of his Balmain lodge he must endure a Master who, far from being a night foreman of a marshalling yard, was a State Member of Parliament and an industrialist.
This man was delighted as a child with all the lines of influence he controlled, and enjoyed flexing them in public to show people that they really existed.
Grand Master Hyberry was always surprised by the man’s blunt line of approach.
“Hah!” he’d say secretively, whenever he met Hyberry, “tell me, Grand Master, did you ever go to sea?”
They might talk health, weather and the vague politics which are all a politician can afford to speak with strangers. But it always returned to, “Tell me, Grand Master, did you ever go to sea?”
The parliamentarian had been to sea. His father had owned small clippers and once he himself had signed on for the Sydney-Valparaiso-London run.
Mr Hyberry always said no, he regretted he had never been fortunate enough to go to sea. Then the politician would actually begin to talk of knots, of knots and seizings; unmanageable, iced-up knots off Patagonia.
It was not as subtle even as Knoller, but the purpose was the same. They wanted to find out that he was privately a monster with a profound lust for his task.
Hyberry refused to tell them how he had had a sober maternal uncle, a devoted man who, fallen to arthritis, merely wanted to hand on an onus of public duty to someone who would carry it with dispassion.
In the early hours of a November morning, however, Mr Hyberry, sleepless in his high-prowed marital bed, could not be dispassionate. The loud-mouth politician had told him – in confidence! – at lodge the evening before that the Premier had put down Hyberry’s name for an M.B.E. on a preparatory list of nominations for royal honours. The list was to mark the new year and the new federation.
“But he can’t now, Wallace, yer understand. Not till those Blacksmiths have got caught. If they git shot, good-oh, all above board! But if yer have to hang ’em, what with the public interest in the case, it’ll look like yer gitting a reward for stringing them up. Never mind, in a year or two …”
Mr Hyberry wanted a royal honour, humbly knew it to be his due. He thought it was unfair that whether he got one or not depended not only on the normal vagaries of politics but on who committed murder and when, on when they were captured and tried, and on the intensity with which their murders struck the public mind.
“I mean t’ say,” the politician had said, “it’ll be hard enough choosing a time to hang ’em. Everyone’ll be in such a high frame of mind with all this federation nonsense. Hangin’ and things to do with it’ll be a little bit out of place.”
They would probably give the M.B.E. he coveted to a senior sewage engineer. For sewage was less contingent than crime and punishment.