In a lucid moment at night he crossed a bridge to a low misty town called Kaluah. There had been rain, and frogs drummed in the mudflats.
On the town’s first hill stood arched windows with lights behind them. He heard the rat-tat-tat of nuns praying aloud. A person could fit any words to the clacking chant and, in Jimmie’s state, did.
God have mercy on poor Mort Blacksmith, young voices called.
Taught to kill women by his bastard brother Jimmie, older and huskier ones responded.
Outflanking the chapel, he came to a lighted kitchen in the side of a two-storey house. Tall jugs of milk were in the ice-chest. Like a Spaniard drinking wine he poured some from a distance down his throat. Beef stood on a large salver and he dropped shreds of it into his mouth, willing his swallow to give them transit.
Then into a hallway. Bare buffed boards stretched beneath two kerosene candelabra, unlit. It was an ample hallway. The church built on a European scale, even in Kaluah.
All down the walls, saints’ faces softened with the joy of Christ-God. They could be seen by strong light from a half-open parlour door. Well down the hall he could see beyond the door to a someone who was, beyond question, dying.
It was a small middle-aged nun in a high-backed upholstered chair. She seemed severe, but that could have been the disease. It had thinned her body within her robes, withered her face so that the top of her throat could be seen beyond the gamp.
She had been excused chapel.
Now he had to fight with the crazed concept that to give himself up to her would be a surrender of special merit, that it would emphasize to everyone how much he wished all were restored again. Jackie Smolders to his tribe, Mrs Newby to Mr Newby, the Newby girls to their hearty country finery, Miss Graf to her squatter’s son, Mrs Healy to Mr Healy, the baby to Mrs Healy’s breast, Toban to his inheritance. His grave regret would be signified by the gravity of this dying confessor.
However, he might as an alternative simply go to bed. The further arm of the hallway ended where someone had gone to the trouble to paint in gilt on a cedar door: Guest room.
Inside there was carpet on the floor, such fine carpet that it would have done to sleep on. There was a fine white-quilted three-quarter bed that had had so little recent use that it had settled itself to the slump of its mattress.
Little else he could see by the light from the hall – a cabinet, a washstand. Drawn blinds. Four pictures. Saints persisted in their especial visions in three, and the fourth was a photograph of a fat clergyman who would have fitted into the basin-shaped bed.
Jimmie Blacksmith closed the door gently against the dying nun and mauled the white quilt down. Then he went straight to sleep.
When he woke up in that high benign bed it was daylight beyond the blinds. In the distance Dulcie Blacksmith was speaking in an Irish voice, “But that’d require a special arrangement. I’d expect to receive a letter from His Lordship’s secretary first. Really, some of these clergy! …”
“Come on, Dulcie,” he said. “None of that flash talk.”
When a woman’s shoes were heard nearing the warm March embankment where he drowsed his hand cast about for bullroarer, his head filled up with its thrumming and the woman, in terror of the Lizard, turned and pattered away.
It was night again and he was clear-headed and thirsty. But he waited till he could hear nothing but, deep down in the dark, the chant of nuns.
He let himself out. From the dark end of the hall he sighted the sick nun, tonight lying blank-faced on a sofa. Another nun, whose back was to him, occasionally wiped her face with a damp cloth. Jimmie coveted the moisture in the cloth but had no compulsion to surrender. Finding the kitchen, he ate and drank in his gape-mouthed way.
His mouth had, in fact, been cruelly asymmetrical in form, so that though there was a corner of teeth left to him to use, he could not chew with them unless his bottom teeth on the right side bit at the swollen mess of his upper jaw. It tantalized his mind, the way his mouth had been sculptured in the womb to turn against him in his final crisis.
He had sliced mutton to take back to bed with him, apricot preserve, biscuit, a jug of water. Confident as a drunk, he travelled with them back down the hall.
The ministering nun was reading to the moribund one:
… just as St Bernard of Clairvaux chose a swampy marsh as his monastic foundation, setting for his monks the twin test of clarifying the waters of a morass at the same time as they clarified the morass which is the soul of man in its natural state. The waters of contemplation sing with three sylvan notes: they are clear through their unity, their clarity is the clarity of diamond for there is no atom in them averse to the scalding unity of the divine light that shall illumine them …
Of course, Jimmie told himself, the waters by which you grow to be man are clear. The perch and the crayfish are set in them as in diamond. They admit the light. Not only that, they break it into long crystalline spangles and hurl it back into your young eyes.
Then he saw that his eyes had fixed themselves on the shine of the light on burnished board, that he was tottery; that the apricot preserve was slipping out from the hold of his left elbow.
He adjusted his arms and went back to his tall ecclesiastical bed.
He slept and his wound pained on. As any rebirth wound could be expected to.
When he was conscious and remembered how he had got the wound, he fell into a worse delirium.
Often it was the lurid corner where Mrs Healy had died between the dresser and linen cupboard. Those he loved were there considering with shoppers’ interest the bloody remnants.
And Mort – trust Mort! – was the first of them who got the idea of painting himself with tints from the rotten traces of Jimmie’s old hatreds; painted his cheeks and chin with dipped index finger and looked at the effect in a glaring mirror on the left of Jimmie’s vision and seemed happy with it.
So intently, no indecent gaiety, they all began, competing with patterns against each other. They would not be told or warned off. Their purposeful limbs faded from his hold.
Then Farrell rattled about. All at once, Jimmie was in a hospital. He had never been to one before yet recognized it by its solemnity.
His churchman’s bed lay beside that of a naked white boy with neatly sewn hare-lip. The boy was to be married today but was fatally sad. He could not be persuaded to put on his wedding suit.
And so on. Jimmie slept in hell.
One day the sun struck at him, quick as a blow. Something had gone wrong. It had flown beneath the dark rafters. His legs were hot under bed-clothes. His jaw was milder. The teeth they had ripped from him had begun to itch.
Then a cunning door in the forest opened and into the heart of tribal secrets stepped Dulcie Blacksmith.
He threw his arms about. It was well established that they would be damned by seeing each other.
But bloody Dulcie would not be stopped. There was a sternness he had not been used to in her face.
She said, “My poor man, you’ve done so many evils and suffered so much.”
From the Bulletin:
There is great irony in the fact that the notorious homicide-cum gynocide-cum-infanticide should have been found in a dignitary’s bed in a country convent. Sister Cecilia entered the guest room of Kaluah Ursuline Convent to prepare it for the visit of His Lordship Bishop Thomas Grogan. She found a swollen-jawed aborigine, surrounded by corroded pieces of food, in a delirium in the bishop’s bed. She ran in terror from the room – not for a moment thinking that she was eligible for £2,500 in reward money. It seems that a citizen’s arrest was then made by Reverend Mother Evangelist.
Jimmie Blacksmith is now recovering in Kaluah lock-up of a wound contracted two weeks ago when a stray bullet from one of his pursuers damaged his jaw.
Meanwhile the bishop’s sheets are being thoroughly laundered. It seems that while the flower of the manhood of east and west were pursuing him, Jimmie had spent four days at least in the convent’s guest room and foraged for food while the nuns were in chapel singing their office.
The Bulletin was the work of safe city-dwellers, who could afford to be flippant.
Dowie Stead and Dud Edmonds were one day late to Kaluah. It made Dowie feel hollow and ridiculous that Jimmie Blacksmith had snared himself in the guest room of a convent.
They remained in Kaluah two or three days but it became obvious that Jimmie would not quickly recover.
“He’s still an outlaw,” said Dud. “Yer got a right t’ go into the lock-up and shoot him.”
Dud was right, legally speaking. But Dowie did not have the nervous energy, after the long dismal ride, to act with such Mediterranean force.
To complete a pattern he felt to have been imposed on him, he went south and joined the army. His father wrote to him complaining that because of his enlistment they would have to hire a manager for the property. Could he visit stock and station agents in Sydney and find someone honest and capable and preferably unmarried? Jessie would perhaps keep such a man happy.
Dowie failed to complete the ideal and necrophiliac Romantic pattern: he did not die at a Boer’s hands. By the time he reached the Southern Transvaal it was difficult to find a Boer to pay you the compliment of a bullet.
A letter (published) to the Editor, the Bulletin:
Dear Sir,
It appears from a report in your edition of January 15th that the jailhouse parsons are already at work on Jimmie Blacksmith. It all reflects on the ridiculousness of hanging such a murderer. As a man of primitive mind, and in the hothouse atmosphere of the condemned cell, he will be easily persuaded of the prospect of heaven for the repentent sinner and will therefore die easily at a nominated time by a humane method.
Why then hang him? It is no punishment. If a murderer must be punished, if punishment is the motive behind the hanging, should not the public executioner be permitted to enter Jimmie Blacksmith’s cell at an unpredictable hour and cut him to pieces with an axe?
Either do this to him, or leave him in prison longenough for boredom and doubt to enter his bones, so that he will die in doubt at some unpredictable time. After all, this is the “punishment” we all suffer, a heavier one than hanging.
I say too, keep the parsons away from him. They will not awaken him to his guilt but rather drown it in false comforts.
Yours sincerely,
Tom Dancer,
Secretary
Union of Wharf Labourers
A letter (unpublished) to the Editor, the Methodist Church Times:
Dear Sir,
I believe that I carry some responsibility for the recent sad history of atrocities committed by the half-caste aborigine, Jimmie Blacksmith. It was I who, lacking any definite instructions on how to proceed in the management of a mission station, encouraged particular ambitions in Jimmie Blacksmith – the ambition to work and complete work, the ambition of owning property, the ambition of marrying a white woman. As inexusable as Blacksmith’s crimes are, there was almost certainly some white provocation of the young half-caste, especially in the matter of his marriage to a white girl.
So that one wonders if society is yet ready to accept the ambitious aborigine. And the question then arises, what should we, as pastors, do in regard to our black or brindled flocks? Should we raise our own kind of hopes and ambitions in them, ambitions of industry and honourable labour, of increase and ownership of property, connecting these hopes and ambitions to the message of Christ? I certainly thought so once, but wonder now.
Should we, as an alternative, attempt some amalgam of Christianity and the native spirit? Is such an amalgam possible?
If we cannot readily answer these questions (I make the point because I cannot myself and must rely on more enlightened colleagues) we must examine carefully our role in native mission camps and even ask ourselves what we are doing there at all.
I humbly request all your readers, sir, to pray for the repentance of this murderer who once lived under my roof; assuring them that due to his imprisonment, he has come to a lively sense of horror for his crimes against Christian men and women.
Yours etc.
Rev. H. J. Neville
Muswellbrook, N.S.W.
Mr Neville was permitted to visit Jimmie, who was shocked to see him. Mr Neville had, in Jimmie’s mind, always connoted a black gloss of clerical certainty.
Now he looked like a man who had surrendered. The black silk of his clerical stock was worn at the collar bone to show the stained buckram beneath. The notebook in which he took down the names of people to whom Jimmie wanted him to write letters of goodbye and repentance was full of fluff, and the pencil so blunt that he had to work lumps of wood away from the lead with his fingernails.
Jimmie got a terrible feeling that here too was one of his victims and was glad that distance and duty kept Mr Neville from visiting him more than twice. The young parson from whom Jimmie was contracting his jailhouse fervor was natty and unblessed with doubt.
Jimmie had not liked Mr Neville’s stammer of laughter when he said, “What I git sorry about is I never had no good woman to love an’ respect, like you and Mrs Neville.”
Of course the trade unionist was right. Jimmie Blacksmith underwent a fundamentalist conversion in jail. In the early days of his recovery he had been beaten up by policemen – in Kaluah, on the ship to Sydney. More blood in his throat to go with the sea sickness.
But in Darlinghurst, that kingly jail near the Hospice for Dying, he was treated well though coldly, and a chaplain was kind and opened his heart to Christ.
The sweetness of it carried him through a swift trial in December. In the dock, he told how innocent Jackie and Mort and Gilda were.
Then Australia became a fact.
It was unsuitable, too indicative of what had been suppressed in the country’s making, to hang two black men in the Federation’s early days.
Press cartoonists sketched the nascent motherland. She was young, with shoulders like a boy and a firm mouth. In one hand she held perhaps a tome with a title such as “British Civilization”, in the other a blank parchment entitled “The Fresh New Page of Democracy”.
She rather resembled Miss Graf.
Easter came and filled centre-ring at the Showground with hearty rams and wide-snouted bulls and stallions from Lismore, Moree, Cobar, Coonabarabran, Kiandra, Jerilderie and all the nation’s strange-entitled towns.
People laughed in their state of grace, the old crimes done, all convict chains a rusted fable in the brazen Arcady and under the roar of buskers in temperate April 1901.
And the other viciousness, the rape of primitives? – it was done and past report.
Scratch a Labor politician and even some of the others and you find twentieth-century daring. Votes for women. Pensions for the old and for the widow. Industrial courts benevolent to trade unionists. Had anyone in London, Paris, Vienna, Washington even hinted at such eventualities? You could bet your bottom dollar they hadn’t.
So the candy-floss was eaten in sunny April, the spring of the southern world. Men from Quirindi and Deniliquin rode mad bulls. Men from the cedar forests behind Nowra, Kempsey and Murwillumbah, dressed in athletic vests and white pants, raced each other at log-felling, and the summered biceps of a mettlesome gaucho-people flew in the high sun on the day of Christ’s crucifixion.
They knew they were good. They knew they were strong. They knew they were free and had a fury for equality. The Bulletin, after all its irony, kept saying so.
It was happy Easter and open another bottle as the wild men pitched over the necks of crazy bulls from Wyalong.
You couldn’t hang blacks on such an occasion.
And all the time, Jackie Smolders, his murders now nine months gone, was sequestered from all hints of his tribe and tribal landscape. The walls of Dubbo jail shut out all moieties and totems, and the tjurilnga could lie broken in its holy cleft. Jackie Smolders, wrapped away in the utmost privacy of quarried stone and mortar, had become concerned with his immortal soul, as his nephew had.
In May Mr Hyberry went to Dubbo and hanged old Jackie. It was a quick and easy hanging.
The next day Jimmie saw an eye he was not used to, peering full, blinking rarely, at the Judas window. A new warder? Jimmie wondered. A politician? Jimmie, on the second last day of life, had the prisoner’s thirst for novelty and eye for small changes.
Mr Hyberry was away three days in all, and his fine boys could cope with the customers.