Five days later, Tabidgi Jack Smolders arrived with Jimmie’s initiation tooth. With him were laughing Mort and a boy called Peter, a cousin. Sauntering up the road from Wallah, they surprised Jimmie at his work.
When they saw Jimmie’s surprise, Tabidgi began to chant high up in his nose, a runic circular chant. Mort danced, laughing, miming some long-necked beast spying into a haven to see if brother or enemy were there.
“Come fer booze?” Jimmie asked them. “I ain’t got no booze.”
He hoped they had come for mean reasons. For he felt guilty before the unbudging wrinkles of Tabidgi’s face.
Jackie Smolders took the white tooth from his left, cleaner, unmagicked pocket and offered it to Jimmie with cupped hands.
“Yer got married t’ white girl. Tooth’ll keep yer safe.”
“It’ll keep me safe, will it?”
Jimmie struck Tabidgi’s hands apart. The admonitory and guardian tooth flew into long grass. Everyone was silent, the fourteen-year-old appalled. Mort took him by the shoulder and began to hunt in the grass.
Jimmie was thinking what idiot bastards they were to approach him with such high tribal seriousness.
But, finding the tooth, Mort held it up and he and Peter knelt in the grass and beamed. So that Jimmie Blacksmith was suddenly ashamed and overcome with a fatalism native to his blood, the fatalism that had kept him at Verona once against his will.
Now he understood that Jackie Smolders would stay and, very likely, drink what he could. And Mr Newby would call more frequently and drop blunt hints.
But the tooth would still have been brought if there had been no such thing as fermented liquor or Mr Newby’s attitudes. For the tooth gave tribal safeguards against the unknown sortilege of a white woman’s body.
Jimmie Blacksmith received it, excised with stone in his thirteenth year, and stuffed it into his pocket.
“Orright. It’s good o’ yer t’ go t’ the trouble. It’s a long walk yer come.”
In invocatory style, Tabidgi recited all the well-omened places they had passed, all the evil grounds too, to find their kinsman in his need. Tabidgi’s utterance in these matters verged on the holy, the lore in his drunken old head made of it a holy stone. He could not be sent away like that, as if fermented liquour were the whole truth of him.
So Tabidgi, Mort and Peter – but particularly Mort – constructed a lean-to by the Blacksmiths’ place. Gilda could not refuse that, having the cook’s child to explain away, having Jimmie to palliate.
With his uncle and giggling Mort and the boy Peter, he did not mention the cook, for pride’s sake. Perhaps they never knew and if they had known would not have considered it significant.
It surprised him that he was apologetic towards his kin who had brought back to him, almost physically with the tooth, the incisive canons of tribal kinship.
“Tell Tabidgi to bugger off back to Brentwood,” Jimmie instructed Mort but would not do it himself.
He consoled himself by beating Gilda a few times. Once he beat her because he found a cut-out advertisement for a Twin-Vulcan kitchen range. The nullity of her ambition to possess one mocked his own soured dreams. His fist flew for the little hollow beneath her temple. She did not know why she was being beaten, but seemed to think it was one of the normal exchanges between married people. He could spend a long time looking down at the child and Gilda would stand passive and withdrawn but ready to protect her child’s flesh.
Jimmie would stand by the baby and covet it. When discovered, he would walk away.
“Grow up t’ be fuckin’ white know-all. Won’t want t’ know me when he grow up.”
A very frail, thin-hipped girl, Gilda had grown sickly since the birth. Her heels were so reduced and sharp that she was always sewing away at holes they made in stockings, strange, punched holes, not the holes of ordinary wear.
Her child made her welcome. No one else did, though moon-eyed Peter was often willing to sit by the cradle of the white child with its little down-turned white nose.
Not knowing he was an elder and that the runes of antiquity were written in his boozy old mind, she feared and hated Jackie Smolders.
At the homestead the big, meaty, moral women considered her triply fallen, for piling black marriage on white conception on black fornication. Miss Graf told her there were homes for unfortunate women, that they didn’t have to cleave to a black.
It was not hard for Miss Graf to suppose that society guaranteed its members against certain ultimate shames. That was what charity was about.
Miss Graf transmitted such presumptions to the Newby girls; so that Mrs Newby could say at Friday shopping in Gilgandra, “It’s been so good for the girls to have Miss Graf staying at the homestead. She’s got real tone.”
Every morning Jimmie hoped for Tabidgi’s departure. He considered putting bad omens on the bagging where Jackie Smolders slept – a butchered barn owl, strange stones, rags dipped in blood which Tabidgi might presume to be menstrual and so fatally potent. But these were always projects for tomorrow, recourses almost as final as beating him away with branches.
And because the child in the house was not his and showed up the folly of his white marriage, he somehow felt unequal to making a strong expulsion of his maternal uncle.
Now he worked automatically, without aim. Work was a sedative for a man with a magic uncle bent on liquor, a lying wife, a bastard child; all within his walls.
Mort helped Jimmie work. Not wanting any definite return for it.
Certainly Mort had matured. Sometimes, however, he would snigger at bulge-eyed, shovel-bearded Newby sucking at his pebble. When he hit his knuckle with a mallet one day he crowed with laughter as long as the pain endured.
Their work was not an economic success. Two divided the labour but did not double the work rate. Most of his day Jimmie spent in a private frenzy, as if seeking space of his own amongst all the strangers who had claim on him. To mock Tabidgi’s laziness he might hunt possums at night, perhaps for half the night. So there was always the soft meat of phalangers for Jack Smolders and thin Gilda (who got very sick of it).
Easily, without his noticing it, the possum-hunting became for him something more than a duty of hospitality. It was an inverted sort of testing of God, Gilda, the Newbys, his tribe. It was only when he had given all the justice that was in him, rendered what he could to each, that he would be entitled to stand back and declare himself accursed. And knowing himself such, he would have untold liberties of rage and rampage.
Every night he would buffet and rut away against Gilda, threatening that she’d bear a blackie yet. Her menstrual blood put him to flight one night. It was the very taboo he had thought of using against Jackie. Patronizingly, he had thought that an old savage like Jackie would be flummoxed by it.
Now, flummoxed himself, he climbed into the lean-to and lay down near Mort, shivering and hating God.
Late on a Friday morning, in the frosts of July, Mrs Gilda Blacksmith went to the homestead to leave her weekly order. She did not take her baby with her.
Coming to the home-yard gate she could see, in the sun in the angle of the two-winged house, Mr Newby napping in an upholstered chair. He was dressed for town in a butterfly collar and tweed suit.
Sitting on the veranda boards, also dressed for town, were the two sons. Both had their coats open, showing off the slim strength their vests defined. One had a homburg tipped over his eyes. All night they had worked bagging wheat at the old homestead (now used for silage) a mile away. They planned to work the whole of the Friday night as well.
She stood still, remembering the day Mr Newby had come across her and her baby by accident. He had been droving steers to new pasture. Gilda always avoided him if she could, but he rolled up to her on his horse, vaulted out of the saddle and exposed his patriarchal blunt genitals, slug-white and sitting in his hand for her information.
“When yer find a bigger’n than that on a nigger, Mrs Blacksmith, let me know.”
Within ten seconds he was covered and back in the saddle. His dogs were barking and the sullen cattle moved.
Now, on the Friday, she hoped to creep past his dozing form. But as she put her foot on the bottom step, Mr Newby woke.
“G’day, Mrs Blacksmith. Kin I do somethink?”
“I jest wanted to give in me order.”
He stared sympathetically at her crushed dress of green muslin. Freckles and poor pearls of sweat were on her cheeks.
“But I’m sorry,” he told her. “I spoke to yer husband. I told him I couldn’t go on f’warding him advances in the form of groceries. Not since the place has turned into a blacks’ camp like that. I’m never certain whether he’ll git any work done next week or not. I don’t want to be left with an unfinished boundary. I made that clear to yer husband, Mrs Blacksmith. The cure’s in his hands.”
His half-drowsy edict made her want to assent and get clean away. At least the baby has my milk, she thought.
“Sorry, Mr Newby.” She began backing.
“No. Yer looked knocked up. Make yerself a cup of tea in the kitchen there. No one’ll disturb yer. I’m jest waiting on the women. Oh, yer better knock, though. Miss Graf’s home for the day with influenza.”
Gilda noticed that one of his cunning sons snickered with closed eyes at the mention of Miss Graf and her influenza.
In fact, she found Miss Graf in the kitchen, in a flannel nightgown pulled tight about her neck; breathing bronchitically and occasionally pushing a small handkerchief to the tip of her nose. Gilda stared, as she was meant to, at the unattainable degree of womanhood Miss Graf achieved even in the deeps of winter influenza.
Yet what had that boy been chortling for?
“Come in, Mrs Blacksmith.”
“Mr Newby told me to git meself a cuppa tea.”
“By all means. I wonder would you care to make one for me? Tea’s on the mantel.”
“Yair, miss.”
She busied about to distract the schoolmistress from making her onerous judgments.
“How’s your baby?”
“Well, Miss Graf.”
“Have you left him at home?”
“Yairs, Miss Graf. With Peter.”
“Peter?”
“The boy, Miss Graf.”
“The black boy?”
“Yairs, Miss Graf.”
“Well, I mustn’t keep you too long.”
“Orright, Miss Graf.”
Gilda spotted rosary beads around Miss Graf’s neck, tucked away into her bosom. In the home for wayward girls, the chaplain had impressed on the wayward girls that Papists were dense, unwashed and subject to secret witchcraft. Poor remnants on the margin of the progress of man. How unfair then that Miss Graf should seem to be centre stage, to own the book of moral judgment.
Her pedagogy was said to be severe, and the farmers of Wallah approved of it.
A minute later Mrs Newby came from some deep part of the house into the kitchen. Her dugs were ponderous as law within her brown velvet.
“Mrs Blacksmith! I didn’t expect ter see yer here this week. Mr Newby told me yer wouldn’t be ordering.”
“Jimmie must’ve forgot to tell me, Mrs Newby.”
“Mrs Blacksmith is kindly making us tea. Would you care for a cup in your own house, Mrs Newby?”
“No time, dear. How’s the baby boy, Mrs Blacksmith?”
“Very good, thank you.”
Mrs Newby stared without too much apparent pity at the arduous bun Gilda had made of her back hairs.
“Yer hair looks nice, dear.”
“Thank you, Mrs Newby.”
“The baby’s been left with the boy,” said Miss Graf, as if this should qualify Mrs Newby’s praise.
“What boy?”
“The aborigine boy Peter,” Gilda pleaded. “He’s got so heavy, you know. The baby.”
Mrs Newby advanced one massive button-up boot.
“Is the boy trustworthy?”
“He’s a nice boy, Peter,” Gilda pleaded.
“It’s yore child, Mrs Blacksmith. But a white baby oughtn’t let be grow up with tribal blacks.”
“Peter likes him. Peter’s very gentle.”
“Did you know I was getting married in the new year?” Miss Graf asked.
“Congratulations, miss,” Gilda told her, as if a merely and mildly social reason were behind Miss Graf’s news.
“What I wanted to say was that I’m sure we, my future husband and I, could employ you at Wallabadah. That’s the name of my fiancé’s property.
“It’s yer chance!” Mrs Newby whispered. “Yer’ll only lose that child of yores if yer stay with the blacks.”
The four-year-old, Mrs Newby’s late fruit, came in and looked at her conspiring mother with green eyes, the family’s best. If I had a child as safe as you are safe, Gilda thought.
“You’d have your own room, Mrs Blacksmith, and be able to have the baby with you all the time.”
But Gilda was no simpleton. She knew with some exactness how long an employer like Miss Graf could tolerate her. When the soup was cold, the saucepans boiled dry, the wedding silver tarnished, the bone china cracked, Miss Graf would with regret cast Mrs Blacksmith and her bastard back on the public care.
Both the elder Newby girls came in in velvet and Gilda had to explain again what had happened to her child – that he was in the care of a savage.
According to the Sydney Mail, said one of the Newby girls, blacks ate each other in Queensland.
To Gilda came the image of the pensive ages the boy Peter spent contemplating the deal box her baby lay in; endlessly willing to pluck the child’s rattle and hear its belly-rumbles of satisfaction.
“I’m Christian-married to Jimmie,” she pleaded.
“They’re not Christian. It doesn’t matter what yer are – Methodist, Catholic. But not all the missionaries in the British Empire ever turned one black into a Christian. Are there any black bishops?’ Mrs Newby knew well enough there weren’t. It would have been in the Sydney Mail if there were. “Are there even any black ministers of religion?”
“The Benedictine priests,” said Miss Graf, “did – I believe – ordain three aboriginal priests.”
“And what happened?” all the Newbys wanted to know.
“They all wandered off. Not one of the three was seen again.”
“I think Miss Graf’s made yer a Christian offer,” Mrs Newby decreed.
“Thank you, Miss Graf.”
“Thanks won’t get yer far. Yer force me to say it. Yore a scandal t’ all of us.”
The women watched Gilda avidly, as if waiting for her to take some decision owed to them. Why was she depended on? Why did large, tough women pretend she threatened them? What was it that excommunicated her? For she was humble and would have accepted any morsel of grace they might extend her.
Suddenly she heard, as if from another person’s throat, creaking noises of bemusement in her own mouth. That sneering Newby boy had had Miss Graf, Gilda wanted to say; and how was it they could evade being encircled and judged?
On the range the kettle sang. No one took notice of it. Meanwhile the elder Newby girl gratuitously pledged on the spot that she would never marry any black.
Mrs Newby’s long belly growled. “Yer grieve us, miss. Yer must leave them natives.”
“I beg you,” said snuffling Miss Graf, “that you’ll see the sense of my offer.”
For no more than a second Miss Graf’s authoritarian vowels carried to Gilda the pod-bursting smell of imprisoned spring in the yard where wayward girls were exercised. Gilda opened her mouth and began to roar in full voice. The four grown women and the child stared at her in her cold latitude of culpability.
“Aw, swallow it!” awakened Mr Newby called from his armchair on the veranda.
Gilda could not understand why it was that if she spoke of the day the patriarch had shown off his phallus it would shame her and no one else. She could not understand why she had no standing in the moral market-place.
When she ran out of the house, “Kin we drop yer part of the way, Mrs Blacksmith?” Mr Newby called.
His sons uttered thick laughter, as if they knew of their father’s eccentricity towards her.
She did not stop sprinting until the homestead was lost somewhere behind her in the timber.