In the Blacksmith larder were a few pounds of flour, less than a pound of corned beef, one skinned possum, a portion of rice. There was also a quarter of a bottle of port – if such things counted – fetched full by Jackie Smolders from the pub in Wallah that Friday morning, along with a second one which Jackie and Mort had already drunk between them.
When Jimmie Blacksmith came into his house at dusk, the baby was crying and Gilda was sitting on the mattress, her legs awry like those of a flung doll. Her face was puckered with weeping in that corner cold as a cave.
She told him what Miss Graf wanted and that there were no groceries. Newby intended to starve him off (Jimmie could see), or was perhaps even ratifying Miss Graf’s plan to pester the marriage, as poor a union as it was, apart.
First, Jimmie Blacksmith called on Jackie Smolders. Perhaps not merely because Mort was asleep: in his anger Jimmie may have returned to the Tullam instinct for primacy of mother’s brother. Certainly he did not know his reasons himself.
For it was against all reason to take Tabidgi with him on a mission of complaint. Tabidgi was Newby’s pretext for withholding supplies. Yet, at the other pole from tribal instincts, Jimmie may simply have wanted to demonstrate Jackie to the Newbys, show them what a harmless old bugger he was.
Anyhow, Tabidgi was the one he took with him. The old man seemed a little flattered.
Jimmie Blacksmith went armed with his Enfield, though he did not intend it as his means of persuasion. In the sharp bright night he might bag something, possum or wallaby; or if the Newbys were obdurate, one of their cattle. He ranted, threats of more pervasive vengeance than that. “I’ll derail a bloody train,” he told Tabidgi. Derailing a train was the ultimate reprisal.
Tabidgi suggested a magical revenge. If Jimmie were to take the tooth and punch it into the track-marks of Newby’s beasts, women, sons, in Newby’s tracks themselves, nothing of Newby’s would ever be able to walk straight again.
“Horseshit,” said Jimmie Blacksmith.
His eye was on the distant radiance of the Newby kitchen. No old man’s witchery with teeth and tracks for him. No waiting for Newby to feel the bite. Newby must feel the bite tonight.
When she opened the door, Mrs Newby herself was carrying a rifle slung loosely between armpit and elbow. Perhaps it was a habit from a harsh upbringing in wilder country than Wallah; perhaps she had been raised in the murderous lands around Charters Towers and had it drummed into her that one never answered the door without carrying arms. In any case it was only a formality. Now, although she could see Jimmie’s Enfield, she dropped her own weapon in the corner by the door.
She was in her slippers and a comfortable dress, and was not easily made afraid.
“Possuming, Mr Blacksmith?” she suggested.
“Kin I see Mr Newby, missus? I want t’ talk t’ him about the groceries.”
But Mr Newby was bagging wheat in the old farmhouse, she explained. The men would work there until the bagging was finished, because both the boys wanted to play Rugby in Gilgandra the next day.
They argued the point. Mrs Newby said her husband wasn’t a charitable institution or somethink.
While they spoke, Jimmie caught sight of robust Miss Graf indoors. Inappropriately to the debate he thought of how he had never had a girl like that, a plump, ripe girl. The black girls of the camps had ugly fat or tubercular leanness.
“… so that I’m sure,” Mrs Newby was saying, “if yer worked well enough and got rid of those hangers-on me husband’d be only too pleased to …”
“He owes me, missus. Nine hundred yards.”
“I’m sure yer’ll forgive me for believing me own husband.”
As she began to close the door on him, he saw that Miss Graf was actually eaves-dropping intently, handkerchief rammed to her nose to hush the very rasp of her influenza, holding her breath with a plotter’s rapacity for the appropriate facts.
Then in a second, Tabidgi and Jimmie Blacksmith were in the dark again and feeling very foolish.
“Wait ’n see the ole bugger in the morning,” Tabidgi suggested.
But Jimmie felt close to a mandate to heap coals of fire on Newby’s head. Newby must be tested tonight. Jimmie would not wait till morning without knowing if, in view of the cruelties he had suffered from Healy, Lewis, Farrell, Newby, the shearers’ cook, he had a licence to run mad.
As they moved amongst the humble shapes of Newby’s livestock, it seemed to Jimmie as if the question of their ownership had come up for decision. Tabidgi complained of rheumatism. Unendowed with the same sense of noblesse as Jimmie, he could see no sense in this second appeal to the Newbys.
The hurricane lights of Newby’s old home showed up through the vacant windows. From fifty yards away, Jimmie could see one of the Newby boys working in an old satin-backed vest. There was a grating of shovels. Sweat was an art the Newbys knew. Others knew it too, from Mackay to Adelaide. From Eden to Tibooburra. Sweat was the national virtue.
When Jimmie arrived at the door, Newby himself looked up and could be seen to take fright and then cover it, pretending to have a piece of trash in his eye.
“Christ, what yer doing here?”
One of the sons stretched and yawned with fists extended; then surveyed Jimmie without interest, and picked up a shovel.
“Yer know I haven’ got anythink t’ eat, boss. Yer know that.”
“I can’t go on f’wardin’ yer supplies. The way yer working now.”
“It isn’t f’warding. I already earned everythink yer give me.”
“Look, yer aren’t working as good as yer did before them others came. Yer giving signs of giving up the job. Then I’ll have all the expense and inconvenience of finding someone else.”
“I already done nine hundred yards.”
“Listen, Jimmie, don’t come the bush-lawyer with me.”
“I’m jest sayin’,” Jimmie said, “I got a hungry wife and kid at home.”
“She knows where she can come if she wants steady tucker. Miss Graf’s made a generous offer.”
“What offer?”
“Yer better ask Mrs Blacksmith.”
“It ain’t up to that bloody fat schoolteacher to make no offers.”
The Newby boys stared narrowly at Jimmie and their father, defensive for the sake of their schoolmistress-lodger.
“Listen, yer black bastard!” Newby was saying. “Don’t talk to me like that. I’ll soon bloody …”
All at once, Jimmie had the rifle against Newby’s stomach. Triumphant, Newby then seemed; as if that bullet were his ambition. The odds-on bet he had placed, in bedroom and kitchen conversation, with all the Newbys and the Friday wiseacres in Gilgandra, had come off in the end: Jimmie had shown his native malice.
Meanwhile, Jimmie cool-headedly chose not to shoot Newby. He took the muzzle away from Mr Newby’s belly.
“That settles it, yer sodding darkie. Go home and straight t’ bed. We’ll talk about what’s to be done t’morrow.”
“Yair, we’ll talk.”
“One thing. You and yer bloody tribe are going t’ pack up and git.”
Secure about his wife and big-beamed daughters, he shut Jimmie and Tabidgi out.
Now Jimmie himself knew that Newby was not what he wanted. He was in a fever for some definite release. Killing Newby, however, was not it. When he put his rifle against Newby’s gut, he knew that he wished to kill that honey-smooth Miss Graf. His desire for her blood, he understood, came as a climax to his earlier indecencies – relinquishing Harry Edwards to Senior Constable Farrell, for example. He wished to scare the schoolmistress apart with his authority, to hear her whimper.
In our world, the delusions that killers let into their bloodstreams are the stuff of newsprint and videotape. A reader should be spared. Enough to say: Jimmie admitted to his body a drunken judgmental majesty, a sense that the sharp-edged stars impelled him. He felt large with a royal fever, with rebirth. He was in the lizard’s gut once more.
There was little besotted about Tabidgi’s sense of direction. He knew with a groan that they had turned for the main homestead once more.
“Yer not goin’ back t’ see the ole girl agin?” he complained.
“I got t’ give them whites a scare.”
“Christ Ormighty,” the old man groaned. He laughed a little at all this commuting. He began to chant at random, for boredom and weariness.
Men vault rivers,
Fear in their eyes.
Women surrender.
At dawn we are beyond your hill
At midday we stalk you on tip-toe from a distance.
At dusk we are at your throat,
Closer than child to pap.
This time the Newby woodheap got between them and the kitchen lights. A full-sized axe as well as a neater tomahawk or block-buster were sunk into the wood. Jimmie propped his rifle there. An axe was more apt. He eased the cutting edges out of the hardwood block and told his uncle to hide the block-buster under his coat, and then sent him off to the door for one last, formal tempting of white contumacy.
“Chris’ why?” Jackie asked but obeyed. There was so much he did not understand about the white world, and perhaps the reasons for carrying a concealed chopper under your coat while interviewing a farmer’s wife were beyond his mental strength.
Out in the dark, Jimmie watched his uncle knock at the door and tell Mrs Newby that Mr Newby wanted them to be given flour.
“Did he give yer a note?” she asked.
“He was too busy, missus.”
“D’yer expect me to go traipsing off to the old homestead to find out whether yer lying or not?”
“Tell him t’ go away, Mum,” the elder daughter called from indoors.
“Git yer rifle,” the second one suggested.
There was a second’s pause, then Mrs Newby turned from the door, perhaps to do as her daughter had urged. In the dark twenty yards out, lithe Jimmie thought explicitly how strange it was that she would never complete such a simple action, a robust woman with plenty of breath and deep red organs.
He thought so under cover of the axe, which was for him more than a mere cutting edge, was replete with command.
Out of the dark he ran yelping at her. Her hand was on the rifle and she was turning to shoot when the axe reached for her. It took her above the shoulder blade and mined the deep sinews there.
All the women in the kitchen commenced to scream, while Mrs Newby fell away from the axe. Jimmie vaulted her and waited on his light feet for Miss Graf to break from her warm corner by the hearth. Though one of the daughters ran towards her mother and perhaps the firearm, Jimmie Blacksmith did nothing to prevent her, and then chopped Miss Graf leisurely between hip and ribs.
As he struck and kept striking, Jimmie learned the ease of killing. People wrongly saw it as such extreme, terrifying work.
A second murderous theorem: the rate at which dignity could be severed. He had imagined Miss Graf playing somehow the cool moral arbiter to the end. To be raucous as a beast was more than he had hoped for from her.
Unreasonably, she rose to walk, below apprehending that he had knocked apart her rib cage and split her hams.
At the same time, he was aware of what Jackie was suffering, and what others were suffering from Jackie. Blood and screaming and starting eyes had stampeded the old man. Jackie would go on hacking at them out of terror. The horror Jimmie’s first blow had made of Mrs Newby could only be fought with more and more blows.
One of the daughters too had become terrible, for by accidental mastery, Tabidgi had cut off her right hand.
The youngest son, eleven years old, came into the kitchen in a flannel nightgown. It occurred to Jimmie, drunk as he might be with insights, that Jackie Smolders would attack the child merely for horror of its eyes.
Jimmie yelled something preventive to his uncle, but Jackie was fighting demons and did some damage to the back of the boy’s neck; who struggled for balance, hurdled his mother’s body and sprinted out into the dark.
Within seconds, the yelling had strangely diminished to that of one of the daughters, who was sitting on her hips trying to rise. Behind her screams could be heard the sobbing of the child in its cot.
Jackie went on beating at the silent body of the other grown daughter, whose head lay half-scalped on her mother’s lap. The juxtaposition looked like a mockery of a family-picnic photograph.
Mr Jimmie Blacksmith rolled on his feet and chopped off the back of the remaining Miss Newby’s head. The axe was flecked with the strange grey mucus of the brain.
The sudden silence was enhanced rather than intruded on by the sobbing child, who sounded quotidian, likely to be taken by sleep at any moment.
Jimmie was frankly astounded at this instant absence of all enemy voices. How could he believe that Miss Graf’s monumental concern over his marriage to Gilda had been removed from the earth?
Shivering Jackie Smolders had himself propped against the wall. Sweat shone in the grey stubble of his jaws. He had let his weapon drop amongst the slaughtered Newbys.
Though he felt buoyant enough, Jimmie Blacksmith knew that he had become an incurable. He knew in an instant that he must see into his acts the fervid illusions they were based on. He chose therefore to know and not go mad.
At the same time he must be able to see the four hewn women as culprits, and so the mere beginnings of an agenda of mayhem. Yet to see them fully and without doubt as the first necessary casualties of a war regally undertaken was itself a mad act of the mind.
Therefore he was to spend the rest of his life in tenuous elation and solid desolation between self-knowledge and delirium.
But at first the illusion, and the brain-heat from the killings, swallowed him whole, or nearly whole. He knew, without knowing he knew, how meanwhile to keep some cool true planet winking far out in his brain.
But the illusion must be tested against the fact of the women’s bodies.
Somehow he was pleased to see that one of Mrs Newby’s arms was moving, that the elder girl’s face was composed and free of blood. Unfairly, she looked country-sweet, innocent of venom.
The younger lay on her side and like a person felled in midstride. Blood was splashed before and behind her, as if as a result of her own momentum.
Then Miss Graf. Her light-brown hair. The split bowl of her belly was in shadow.
The inspection took a little less than five seconds and was accomplished by small jolts of the head. He took Mrs Newby’s rifle and roused Jackie to give it to him. But Jackie, already bedevilled, would not take it.
In the same corner as the rifle was a well-used hessian bag – possibly bedding for some household pet, deceased or wandered off. Jimmie shook it out and within half a minute or so had tipped into it some flour, beef, lard, bacon, bread, treacle, biscuit and rice – more or less Gilda’s grocery list for the day. There was freedom for movement in that diagonal of the room. Most of the killing had been done in the opposite corner and against the front wall.
Ammunition for his and Mrs Newby’s rifle was in the dresser and he threw the cartridges in with the food bought that afternoon in the quiet town of Gilgandra.
From a roof hook a hand of Queensland bananas. He would march into Queensland, he promised himself. He might live in a cave and raise the boy to be a rebel.
Insanely he took a single banana into the hallway and found the bedroom where the child was weeping.
“Hungry,” the small girl said. “I were hungry.”
“There yer are, old girl,” Jimmie said, in the almost Cockney accent of the aborigine speaking English. He gave her the fruit for comfort.
Somewhere in the dark her damaged brother reeled towards old Newby. But Jimmie was the master. In him the night was vested, and the gift of swift action. He decided he should enjoy it while it was there, this possession and being possessed.