Jimmie Blacksmith left early and took an unexpected direction. Since his name now connoted someone who had crossed the Divide in the east, he went west. Not north-west along the tribal river Marooka. Not Marooka because there were towns on all its fords to drop rumours of him south to Brentwood. But beyond the Castlereagh, where the squatters were full of heart again after the long drought, there was a plague of red kangaroos. The pastoralists paid up to a shilling a tail for kangaroos shot on their property.
Leaving Brentwood he was bare-footed and his feet crunched the stiff frost, and the whining of dogs steamed round his legs. Somewhere in the camp an early-riser was hacking wood.
He had only essentials with him, and his axe and razor-sharp wedges. But he was on his way to the true station country, where money was plentiful and the squatters’ wives had servants; “nice girls off stations”, as Mrs Neville had said.
One morning, he felt sure, he would wake up “Mr Blacksmith”. Drily, gutturally, he sang a song out of the white dances they used to have in Muswellbrook. His intentions were exemplary; it was delight to find oneself a just man.
He had cleared Mudgee, pleased to have put a big town between Tabidgi Jackie Smolders and himself.
Then he met a mounted trooper travelling east from Wellington. The policeman’s broad heavy bay held its nostrils wide, stimulated by the day, and the officer himself seemed to be attempting to match this bravura by riding one-handed with his right fist on his hip. Lazily, he shortened rein and halted by Jimmie Blacksmith.
“Wot yer got in the bag, Jacko?”
“Me tools of trade.” Jimmie held the mouth of his bag wide.
“Axe, wedges,” the trooper recited. “Wot trade is it?”
“Fencin’, boss.”
“P’liceman, ’e thinks yer bloody steal all them.”
“No boss. I buy ’em with contract money from Mr Healy near Merriwa.”
“Merriwa?”
“Yair, constable.”
“I’m stationed at Merriwa. Me name’s Senior Constable Farrell. Yer watch out fer me if ever yer git on the booze, Jacko!”
“Orright.”
“I jest rook a man t’ Wellington t’ git hanged, Jacko. A man about yer own age. He killed a sixteen-year-old girl in Wellington, just because she had his bun in the oven. What d’ yer think of that sort of behaviour, Jacko?”
“Bloody disgraceful, boss.”
“I should say so. Soon he’ll meet Mr Hyberry? Yer know Mr Hyberry, Jack?”
“No, boss.”
“A famous gentleman, Mr Hyberry. A butcher from Balmain, and public hangman as well. He’s a scholar, Mr Hyberry. One of the honours of me life, meeting him. Where yer off to now, Jack?”
“West.”
Farrell raised his eyebrows at finding a black who knew his cardinal points.
“Can’t stand bloody Brentwood,” Jimmie further confessed.
“Kin yer track, Jacko?”
“Yair, I kin track.”
“Go ahead and track.”
That was easy. The west crawled with rabbits. Their spoor, scarcely broken by his own morning tracks and the trooper’s, were all over the road. His finger traced padmarks along the edge of the road and into tussocks on the verge. Somebody’s boundary fence ran to his left and above him to his right was a hillock with three ancient peppermint trees. Here was a camp-site for bullock drivers, but the earth beneath had been tortuously mined by pestilential rabbits.
There were so many clear tracks across the frost that Jimmie Blacksmith thought the trick hardly worth doing, and turned back. But there was Farrell’s horse bouncing and snorting, steam rising from its croup, and Farrell himself seemed still to be willing to be impressed. So Jimmie shrugged and went on.
Rabbit was of course no one’s totem – an imported animal, everyone’s fair game. Minute shifts in the lie of grass and twig and fallen leaf led Jimmie Blacksmith across the lacing of other tracks to a burrow.
“I can’t see nothing,” Farrell called.
“It’s a rabbit hole, boss.”
Jimmie began to dig up its secret geography with his axe. At last three animals broke from the earth between his legs and Constable Farrell, without smiling, shot one through the shoulders with his dragoon pistol.
When Jimmie had fetched it, Farrell tied the little corpse to his saddle with string. “ Give him t’ Mrs Public House in Mudgee,” he explained. “I been told t’ recruit a tracker for Merriwa. Don’t want any of them lazy boongs from Verona. What about yerself? Seven and six a week. Tucker, horse. Yer sleep in the stable. No boots. Yer kin git ’em out of the seven and six if you want t’ pretend yer a gentleman. But I tell yer it isn’t any kind of lazy black’s job. Yer look after all the horses – three troopers’ and yer own, and yer cut the firewood for the station and the residence.”
Saying nothing, Jimmie began to hanker for the work. It must be a good reference, to have worked for the police. In a police station he would be fortified against his demanding kinsmen. He watched the brightly wounded animal. Its back legs shivered ever so little.
“Well, d’yer want t’ be a p’liceman? Cut a figure with the gins in Verona?”
“Seven an’ six ain’t so bad,” said Jimmie.
“Orright. But yer got to be at Merriwa by this day next week. I got other darkies in mind and if yer don’t come, Jacko, yer kin go begging.”
“Orright, boss.”
Senior Constable Farrell rolled away comfortably on his mount. Like everyone else, he knew that a black could walk twenty miles a day, day after day. If only he had a boot in the arse to help him along.
But when they gave him his uniform, Jimmie Blacksmith understood his mistake. The blue coat was a giant’s, the cap loose, the trousers knifed him in the crutch. He had taken a florid foreign oath to Victoria and was now on the books as a tracker, a comic abo in some other black’s clothes.
“Roll up the sleeves,” Constable Farrell suggested without interest. “Give ’em all a wash if yer want to. Ole Bunyal was a good tracker, but a dirty old bastard. Wot yer want us t’ call yer? Ole Bunyal got registered under his abo name, yer know. Not that we care either way. Only we have t’ send all the papers to Sydney. T’ make it official. So wot yer want us to call yer?”
Jimmie told him, J. Blacksmith.
“Is that so?”
“Yair.”
He was allowed to sit against the wall while they waited for a junior constable to come and show him his duties in detail. At the desk Farrell had begun attending to the paperwork. His public service pen whimpered his signature across the secret paper which senior constables were permitted to make marks on. Once he looked up.
“Yer a missionary black, Jimmie?”
“Yair.”
“I kin always tell a missionary black. Bunyal wasn’t one. Mind yer, a bloody good tracker.”
Jimmie’s face prickled. He had been a policeman for half an hour yet now wanted to commit murder. He was more officially a black now than Tabidgi or Mort: a registered, accredited, uniformed black man; more deeply, more damagingly black than ever.
There was, in fact, so much to keep him busy that he could drug the sense of his folly with the strong drug of a demi-military existence. He had three mounts to see to, cavalry saddles to clean, weapons to maintain, fires to feed, many fires, since Merriwa was high and frosty. Three times a day he cut wood, and ran messages for the junior senior constable, who was married (unlike Farrell) and thought that he, therefore, should occupy the police residence. The balance was adjusted, the junior senior constable thought, by using Jimmie for private convenience, such as for fetching meat from the butcher’s.
Sometimes he rode on duty up the pass to that camp of bad omen where the white boy had been knifed and inadequately buried a year before. But no one in Verona seemed to recognize Jimmie in his unfamiliar uniform.
There was little tracking to do, but whenever a constable had to arrest a black, Jimmie was expected to accompany in case persuasion was needed, or a show of strength.
Senior Constable Farrell’s passion was boar-hunting. Very few other people between whom contempt existed could have achieved such a unity of expertise as did Farrell and Jimmie Blacksmith on the track of a boar.
Then occurred the come-uppance that brought Jimmie’s police career to a head.
The postmaster’s son, driven by conscience, came nervously to Farrell. He hadn’t wanted to insult a respected family, he told Farrell (the statement sounding rehearsed and creaky), but a boy called Jack Fisher, who had vanished a year ago, had been drinking after hours in the Prince Albert in Merriwa the night he disappeared and had said about ten that he meant to ride out to Verona for some black velvet.
Farrell knew that at the tail-end of sprees in town whites often took off for Verona to lie with the gins. There was many a town elder who had reason to cringe at the sight of some trachoma-eyed half-caste child who had his jaw or nose or forehead. It was always the white man’s good luck that the lubra knew nothing so obscene as blackmail. If you were an alderman who had once gone with a gin, the worst you had to fear was that the woman might call out a greeting to you in the main street, even within sight of the superior architecture of the municipal offices or School of Arts.
“G’day, Eddie,” she might sing in a musical monotone, one third ironic, one third resigned, one third heinously innocent.
For their part, men never boasted about their love-making with gins. Perhaps the sport was too easy for that. And no one willingly admitted that there was an especial pull in the easy, slack-mouthed lubras. Certainly they provided a free whore-house just beyond the limits; but everyone suspected that there were degenerates who actually preferred black flesh, whatever economies were involved, and men were pointed out in whispers whose taste for black flesh had so sapped them that they no longer wanted white.
Now Jack Fisher’s father, undertaker, free-holder, Merriwa Croesus, had died and could not be hurt, said the postmaster’s son.
Feeling no danger, Jimmie Blacksmith in fact exulted that the question of the dead white boy, aching with inconclusion, had been raised again.
He would be savage, a regular vengeance in his too-big blue coat, to the guilty of Verona.
Farrell too was especially enjoying himself.
“We enquired of yer at the time,” he said grandly, “and yer mentioned nothink about the darkies’ camp.”
“I thought it’d be too much for old Fisher. If he knew Jack had disappeared in that manner.”
“And yer were out there too, and didn’t want t’ git yerself into trouble from yer father.”
“No, that wasn’t the reason.”
“No.”
“Come on, it’s obvious.”
The boy’s freckled hand pinched his forehead.
“Orright.”
Farrell said, “This is serious. Yer knew he’d gone fuckin’ gins and yer didn’t tell us.”
“I was worried about old Fisher’s health.”
“Did he go out there regular? I mean, did he have a regular gin?”
“No. No. I was one of his best mates and I don’t know that he went out to Verona much.”
“The gin he had that night. Wot was her name?”
“I don’t know. He went off to another hut from me. Later I waited where the horses were tethered, but I kept falling asleep.”
“Ah, wear yerself out, did yer?”
“So I thought Jack must be making a night of it, so I rode back home.”
“And the darkies took his harness and ate his horse, I s’pose?”
“I don’t know. He should’ve been safe there.”
“Well, he wasn’t. But we’ll find him. And then yer can tell Merriwa all about courting gins.”
“But I’ve got a fiancée.”
“Then yer better get her in the family way. Then she can’t back out.”
So Farrell’s viciousness went on consecrating itself to the sacredness of Jack Fisher’s right not to get his vitals punctured in Verona.
Of course, Jimmie knew, Farrell was not normal and had once begun to caress him, before deciding it might be bad for authority. Farrell enjoyed putting terror into lusty boyhood.
Jimmie himself was in a vindictive state of mind. The Verona people were to be punished for their vulnerability. There was a lust in him to punish the race through the man who had done the knifing. Near the dry tip of Jimmie’s tongue the man’s name wavered. Harry Edwards was the name.
Farrell armed himself and Jimmie had the horses waiting at the front of the station. Both nursing private excitement, they rode through the town’s quiet midday. Small boys came running to the wire fence of the school.
Black, black,
Dressed in a sack,
Leave our town
And don’t come back!
Farrell led Jimmie on into a dark seeping quietness, myrtle and red cedar, capable of drowning anyone’s doggerel.
But in Verona, too, children ran behind the horses, hooting Jimmie for his uniform. All the women showed up in their doorways, ululating as if the visit were an honour, all giggling. Men began to run. Even the ones indoors rucked past their chortling women and ran.
“C’mon, Jimmie,” Farrell said. He nudged his horse into a gallop and had a bludgeon in his hands. First he caught an old man and knocked him down. Then a much younger man, who seemed to be a mesh of black-pink fingers raised against Farrell’s blackjack. Just in time to snatch Farrell’s flung reins, Jimmie caught up. He found the bludgeon handed to him.
“Go and git a few more, Jimmie.”
Farrell had dismounted and begun to compose the two men he had caught, holding one of them with each hand.
Jimmie could have led Farrell straight to the grave, yet that would be silly. For he and Farrell had punishment to distribute, and that should be allowed to take its time.
But once he entered the forest he found it hard to turn in the same small circles as the fleeing men. A man broke across his front, a drinking man like Jackie Smolders, with grey hair around his ears. Reaching low, Jimmie cracked him at the base of the skull. The drinking man circled, clasping his ears. A resonance of another sort ran up the bludgeon and along Jimmie Blacksmith’s arm. He felt lordly drunk, but was less deft with a second man.
In the camp, Farrell was ranting and even the dogs were silent.
“Young whitefeller dead here. ’E die in Verona. A year back. ’Im maybe buried round the place. Close. Bloody darkie too lazy bury ’im far away. Where yer bury ’im? Eh? Yer tell p’liceman Farrell or p’liceman Farrell knock ’im bloody black head off.”
“Dead?” the old man was weeping. “What yer mean ’im dead?”
“I mean ’im maybe got killed by blackfeller.”
“Whitefeller killed?” The young man was trying to understand. One of his ears was bleeding.
“Yair. I told yer. ’Im maybe killed by some bloody Verona black.”
All the women at their doors began shrilling.
At this stage, the murderer’s name had become an almost involuntary spasm of Jimmie’s tongue and he could not prevent himself taking a risk. He placed a hand on the shoulder of one of the men he had brought back.
“This feller, ’e say Harry Edwards have fight with young whitefeller.”
The man was too bludgeoned to deny it.
“Kill whitefeller?”
“Put bloody knife in ’im.”
“Where this one Harry Edwards live?”
As everyone tenuously conscious pointed out a hovel of bark and clap-board, Jimmie Blacksmith hated them for their innocence, for not being able to dominate even the clumsiness of Farrell.
Sally Edwards was still on her doorstep, looking with a detachment at Farrell, ready to moan or shrill or giggle with all her sisters of the chorus.
“Harry Edwards yer man?”
“Yair.” Sally covered her mouth and writhed with laughter at the idea. Perhaps Farrell would have been less amazed if he had ever met Morton Blacksmith.
“What’s yer own name?”
“Sally,” she said. Jimmie could see the terror helpless beneath unceasing laughter.
“Sally, where yer man ’im husband?”
“’Im lazy bastard.” She choked on her hilarity. “’E go sleep Freddie’s place.”
Farrell went to wake ’im lazy bastard, Harry. Meanwhile, though he had been drained and half-asleep a year ago, Jimmie Blacksmith knew where the boy’s grave was. Even though the body had probably been moved for fear of its evil influence, the removal would have been much later and the marks of the low-hung load would very likely be legible in the undergrowth. Yet he must not make the mistake of vaulting ahead of Farrell’s stolid procedures.
These, within an hour, had lain Harry Edwards on his stomach. Jimmie’s blood leapt and was tantalized by the whole affair, and Jimmie knew how obscene that was, but was lost in his passion. All the nervous lubras were snickering and chanting when Farrell decided that prone Harry needed water and sent a young man to get it. Off went the boy, with a hobble of terrible biddability.
A person could see that Farrell was gratified by the progress of the case. He would have felt undermined if presented with too early a grave. But Jimmie was so restless that he actually went and inspected it.
It was later than he thought when he came out of the forest. Harry was lying in the shade of his lean-to, and Farrell was interviewing some of the ladies, who tamped laughter back down their throats with maladroit, splay-fingered hands. Sublimely hating them for the wounds they so childishly contracted, Jimmie aligned himself by Farrell’s side.
At last someone was willing to take them to the first grave. Where the second was, they said, they didn’t know, because the man who had helped Harry make it had left Verona.
It began to rain, but the eroded tracks were clear. Harry and his assistant had carried the corpse uneconomically, sidewise, had broken and altered the history of the undergrowth. It was likely, of course, that they were drunk at the time.
Jimmie Blacksmith followed the traces for a quarter of a mile in the wet, in a forest slack-boughed, limp beneath the thick-dropped rain, pliant as the men who followed Farrell and would do any necessary digging. A tableau recurred to him, a vineyard of gallows from which hung all the inept, unfortunate race, emphatically asleep. Their limbs span in a breeze, so well had sleep invaded all their ligaments.
It’d be a good thing, Jimmie felt sure; like a white realist.
Meanwhile he kept his darkie’s place so well that he found a bungled grave above a running stream that must have been quite beautiful by sunlight. The boulders it had tumbled in flood made a bastion of the place and allowed soil to accumulate to a depth.
Frightened Harry had not exploited depth sufficiently, however.
Now the men were set digging. Soon there was a stink of corpse and men warded it off with hands and groans and hysterical chuckling.
Farrell hit one of the laughers and more of them laughed, and attained paroxysms by the time the bones appeared in their remnants of wet flesh.
Jimmie felt justified, once more knowing the emotion indecent and one that might run beyond his control; but justified. Atrocious death, the boy’s and even his own, had always lain latent in Verona. Now he had somehow struck back at it.
The fact of this discovery was detailed in the sombre Sydney Herald, and the Sydney Mail wrote to Mr Farrell for a photograph of himself and Jimmie.
“Bloody nonsense,” Farrell said. “Take up too much time.” But sent one of himself.
At the funeral, Jack Fisher’s mother came up to Farrell, the mouth fixed in the strange leer of those who have determined to pay their debts exactly, zealously.
“I don’t begrudge you, constable,” she said, and gave him three hundred pounds.
“Should I inform my superiors of yer generosity, madam?” Farrell asked in an outbreak of gallantry.
He came back to the station so inflated with public regard and the minister’s oratory that he made a speech of his own, about how he respected blacks that showed talent and the terms on which the white man and the black man could work together.
That these terms were not exactly reciprocal might be indicated by the fact that he gave Jimmie £2 10s. of Mrs Fisher’s reward.
One night soon after, Senior Constable Farrell began to drink in the office by himself. In Farrell drunk there was no trace of fun, not even a spurious sense of fellowship. He howled and stumbled, and swore about people who had wronged him.
Harry Edwards understood the dangers in drunkenness and began chanting in terror. Jimmie could not tell what the murderer was singing in the cells; it would have been about dying among foreigners, amongst people whose totem he did not know, whose totem he had stalked and devoured.
Songs utterly unavailing to sing in a country station of the New South Wales Mounted Police.
Meanwhile, Farrell sang too – “Phelim Brady”, and a song called “Come All Ye Lachlan Men”. He did not sing well or becomingly and had, in fact, taken his uniform off, song by song, jolting about the office in his drawers. His phallus became erect. Jimmie, who knew Farrell’s weakness and the traditions of jailhouse sodomy, decided to escape to the stables.
As he passed the cells Harry Edwards raised his own song to a clamouring yodel.
“Mr P’liceman,” he called to Jimmie. Strangely, he had not seen in this man the accomplice to last year’s killing. All his congenital powers of recognition were jangled by Jimmie’s European uniform.
“Yeah?” Jimmie stood still. For a mad second he thought of explaining to the man how, because he was wanton and stupid, Verona had sprung blood onto his hands.
“Away and make way for the bold Fenian men!” Farrell howled in a cracked baritone.
“Wot for yer leavin’ ‘im Harry to Mr Farrell?”
“’Im Harry murder white boy.”
There was no need for them to go on with the ’im business – it was part of the police concept of how the native spoke English. For that very reason, for the sake of putting Harry at a distance, Jimmie Blacksmith kept to it.
“Yair, but Mr Farrell ’im goin’ t’ do somethink bad to ’im Harry.”
“’Im Harry ought t’ git somethink bad done to ’im.”
“’Im Harry knife ’im white boy. But …” And Harry, not knowing that Jimmie Blacksmith had already heard it, told the story of how the boy, after lying with Sally, began to destroy the house.
“Still Harry got a knife got too bloody sharp edge.”
“Christ, don’ leave ’im Harry. Harry ’im don’t want ’im Farrell muckin’ round.”
Jimmie Blacksmith knew that he was being exquisitely cruel and that it was bad for his soul, that it might put him closer to madness most ruinous to his ambitions.
“Why ’im Harry give ’im woman to ’im white boy?”
Harry did not understand the point.
“Whiteman ’im don’t lend no one ’im wife. ’E keep her all the time, even when ’e borrow gin all the time. She lie down with ’im other man, whiteman kill ’im wife. Maybe kill ’im man too, often as not. So why yer bloody give Sally for ’im white boy ride?”
Certainly Harry tried to understand the point. His eyes glazed with the import of it.
But Jimmie Blacksmith went and rolled himself up for sleep and slept obdurately, hearing unwillingly sounds of Harry’s misuse, which Harry had merited. By not understanding.
In the morning he made Farrell’s tea in the big kitchen of the station residence. Beyond the window there was a benign splendour of frost and unequivocal early sunlight. The wet fences of the town ran downhill and, pitched into the bottom of the valley, the main street had a new-born look which Jimmie loved yet knew would not last much beyond nine o’clock. In a white town, Jimmie affirmed the morning as a way of disaffirming Harry Edwards.
Farrell’s tea was ready and Jimmie took it to him. The senior constable was soberly asleep by the stove, between two blankets. He wore a police issue shirt and, as it proved, his breeches – very much On Her Majesty’s Service.
Apart from a knotted look on Farrell’s high forehead, there was no sign of last night’s drunk, and it was only on turning to go that Jimmie saw Harry Edwards hanging from the roof of his cell. The colour of his eyes was lost in staring, popping white. A long thick tongue, loose as a broken serpent, lolled out of a mouth fixed as if for screaming.
“Harry Edwards hanged himself with his belt,” Farrell informed Jimmie. “I’m going t’ see the magistrate. While I’m away I want yer t’ take Harry down, take his clothes off and burn ’em, wash him and wrap him up in a blanket, head and everythink. There’ll have to be a inquest.”
Jimmie Blacksmith detachedly took down the corpse, his mind as shut as a nurse’s might be to its reek of shit and urine and seed. If he was tender at disposing the limbs, it was with the workaday tenderness one would expect of someone used to handling the dead.
The belt was new, at least by Harry Edwards’s standards; the finishing still shone, there was no crack into the texture of the leather. It was certainly Farrell’s belt and Jimmie laid it on Farrell’s blotter … to indicate contempt. Then he tucked Harry away in a blanket.
To the fire he made of Harry’s clothes he added his own over-long coat and crutch-nipping blue trousers. The cap he left on the jailhouse bench for whoever would be Farrell’s next tracker.
Then he put on his old clothes and had walked ten miles by noon.
He was twenty years old, going back over the mountains again, on the look-out for a cheap Enfield or Sharps rifle.
“Yer can’t trust ’em,” Farrell told the junior senior constable next day. “Yer just git one of ’em into shape and they go off on bloody walkabout.”