The Blacksmiths and Tabidgi and Peter fled east in the dark, over the open pastures of sheep farmers, important men, squatters. Like responsible travellers they closed the long, whining pasture gates behind them.
Tabidgi, cunning enough not to forget the port bottle, was yet incoherent, shrieking now and then in his derangement. “Ghosts started by my hand,” he would mumble,
Spirits fleeing back to their totem fathers,
My barbs deep in their bodies,
Come not near me.
Here in the night I reign,
Bullawi the great lizard,
Whose scream shakes the hills apart.
Mort and the girl had been told that there had been a battle and some of the Newbys hurt. They were promised more detail later, when they had built up a distance between Wallah and themselves.
What was she doing, the girl asked herself, fleeing by night with black men? Apart from being afraid of contradicting Jimmie in his battle flush, she was expiating for having borne the wrong child. And then there was fear of charity, Miss Graf’s charity or the high, butterfly-collared, chaste-camisoled charity she had known as a child.
For Mort, there was duty towards wronged kin, Jimmie Blacksmith, whose mood was valiant, the mood of a man grandly misused. Morton Blacksmith felt enlarged, escaping across a landscape barred by strangers’ fences. To him, Tabidgi’s yammering was nearly funny.
The girl wept a great deal, her arms ached, but the baby slept and murmured in its sleep. Mort laughed as Jackie continued to shriek his warning against spirits. The misery of Jackie Smolders’ situation was that he had hacked and thwacked women dead because their screams had frightened him, but now he was frightened of silence. But Mort could not know this.
North of east, Jimmie knew, a knot of forested mountains travelled deep into the plains. Beyond their crest were places where he had been lusty and (he had once thought) clever. Queensland remained an abstract haven. There would be time to strike out for such a place.
In the meantime, he moved in a slumber of the limbs, a returning suspension of effort which he had lost through all his barter and contracting and which had come back to him now (he must pretend) as a reward for his work on the Newbys.
At miserable first light, seven hours after their march began, Jimmie Blacksmith let them rest. Gilda watched her husband and Mort conspiring, staring at old Jackie Smolders who was hugging a wet tree, retching, and falling at last into a coughing bundle. The frosted leaf-mould went black where his body rolled. It was a cold morning.
Are they planning to kill us? she wondered. Why should they? Why should they not? She could not move any more, and mentally bid Jimmie Blacksmith welcome to her life and even to the boy’s.
The child, however, woke and called for the breast. She sat in a spiny embrasure of myrtle-tree roots and unbuttoned her breast, draping a blanket for modesty over her left arm. The vaporous cold grabbed at her nipple, but then the child found it and took nourishment.
“Little man,” she said. “Poor little man. Yer should be much more black. Oh yairs yer should, yer villain, much more black.”
So she fell asleep.
Jimmie gave Mort his knife and told him to go down and kill some farmer’s sheep. It was safer, more sensible, to take fresh meat now, while they travelled in advance of the news of what had been done at Newby’s.
Mort slung the sheep-skin over a fence, happy in service of his brother.
“Old Newby and his sons said we could starve,” Jimmie had confided to Mort. “So we took to ‘em with axes.”
Which accounted for the clotted state of Tabidgi’s trouser ankles. Old Tabidgi could be expected to stumble about at the honest business of killing those who denied due food.
Laughing benevolently, Mort woke Gilda from a two-hour sleep, and held tea close to her dazed face.
“Yer better tuck up, missus,” he told her. “Too bloody cold.”
The frost was still on the ground, and the first day of Jimmie Blacksmith’s new era sat greyly beneath the trees, and Jackie Smolders repented in crazy monotones in the place where he had fallen.
But, above his simious nose broken in play, Peter’s wide-awake eyes seemed to be expecting damage. Gilda did not care to look at him for long.
When Jimmie strode up to her, rifle slung over his elbow, an ungovernable flush of brood heroism caused her to cover the child with her body.
“D’yer think I’d do anythink like that?” he asked.
“I dunno, Jimmie.”
“Listen, we got t’ keep on now. Let yer go soon. You and the littl’un. How’s he?”
“He’s feedin’ well. Real well. And he slep’ well.”
“Righto.”
“Jimmie?”
“Yair?”
“I don’ care if yer shoot me fer sayin’ it.” But she had to take this, one of the rare times since the birth that Jimmie had spoken to her directly, not obliquely, by way of the child or of a piece of furniture. “I really thought the baby was yores. I really thought. I should’ve thought it might of been that other feller’s. But I really truly thought it was yores.”
Jimmie Blacksmith looked at the pale jaws and the mouth that tended to hang open; at the bun she had made of her variably grey-brown hair; at her damp straw hat and charity-case top-coat of navy serge slung like a tent over the childishness of her body.
It frightened him that he wanted to forgive her and talk of the slaveries they each had suffered. It might happen to be one of the strict rules of self-balance that if he saw Gilda Howie as victim today he might see Miss Graf in the same light tomorrow. She should, by the rules, be a kind of enemy but her paltry face and sharp shoulders were inadequate to the role. Perhaps she was her own special case and quite safe to pity. He didn’t know and didn’t feel like taking risks.
“If yer think anyone cheated me, yer kin tell the p’lice. They’ll ask yer a lot about me and yer kin tell ’em.”
They marched for another hour.
Jackie Smolders, Mungindi elder and cherisher of enchanted teeth, had given up. He had seen four women’s blood, when the sighted blood of one was sufficient to bring on catastrophe. He had laboured in the potent blood of women’s throats and hacked-out wombs. He closed his eyes and blood slanted in torrents across the darkness behind his lids.
“Jimmie,” the white girl, heels blistered, called aloud to her husband. “Jimmie, for pity’s sake!”
Until the sun was high in the north, he ignored her. Then he told them all to rest and began himself to cook a forequarter of the carcass Mort had butchered, quickly bled and cheerfully carried all morning.
Tabidgi was in the mood for dying, but innocent enough to believe it could be induced in the old way, by acceptance of omens.
Jimmie came down to Gilda and the baby. He had dropped everything, his load of food, his rifle.
“I goin’ t’ take yer t’ the Dubbo road. Yer’ll git rescued by a farmer or somethink. Tell the p’lice I said I declared war. Tell ’em about how bloody measly Newby was. Tell ’em all the damage done at Newby’s I did, not Tabidgi. And I declared war. Orright?”
“Yairs, Jimmie.” In the joy of escaping him she could pity him and even put out a hand, as if to pat his face. But his eyes blinked, warning her off tenderness.
“I’ll carry the little’un for yer.”
“No, it’s orright.”
“Christ, he was almost mine. Let me bloody carry him.”
It was as well, for most of the mile-and-a-half they walked was uphill, sown with boulders; then down through a wooded defile to the Dubbo road, as Jimmie had promised.
“Make his bloody father give him a help in life,” he advised Gilda and gave the child back to her.
Jimmie looked back on her from the top of the defile. She had seated herself cross-leggedly, with care, on the grass verge. She looked pitiably open for all the fresh miseries that would roll in on her with the creak of a farmer’s dray.
In late afternoon they had to leave mumbling Jackie Smolders and the boy Peter on a tributary road with meat and tea to last them the day. The boy was schooled to announce Jackie Smolders’ innocence to all comers. Contrite, tender, guilty – all these Jimmie could have felt for Jackie Smolders, who had come to him for honest reasons of kin and tribal sorcery and cash for liquor. But he could sense how unprofitable they would be. It was, in any case, impossible to talk to the old man.
Jimmie was delighted to be finished with all but his gay, misinformed, fast, muscular brother. Now fast, craftsman-like tracks could be made. They dragged boughs behind them. High up in the Divide they came to someone’s unprofitable boundary fence, post-and-rail. Gripping the shaggy-grained upper rail with one hand, they walked crabwise along it for close on a mile. The exercise became painful. The rifles slung from their necks hunched them further into a posture of discomfort. But Mort enjoyed it all, the times this or that item threatened to fall.
Further up still, beyond anyone’s thirst for property, they made a fire and rolled themselves in their blankets.
At midnight cold and hunger woke them. Before dawn they crossed the central spur of the Divide and when the sun began to give warmth, wrapped themselves in their blankets and slept till the early afternoon of Sunday.
Already Jimmie found it hard to believe in the slaughter of the Newbys. It had become remote, like an alien truth, like the story of how the Red Sea was crossed.
Pursuit too was hard enough to believe in in the still, high forest.
Forty-five miles to the south-west, preachers were reading their various Sunday prefigurements into what had been done at the Newby homestead.
Jimmie loved living cleanly with his brother in the forest, feared losing Mort; yet understood that he might corrupt the boy by not confessing to the murder of women, by not sending him away. For there was no question that the blood of women overrode all kinship loyalty, and yet that he himself must keep to a reprisal list if his soul were not to freeze about the cold fact of the Newby killings.
Mort must either be incriminated for fear of losing him or lost for fear of incriminating him. While Jimmie could not have said it in such abominably neat terms, he could feel the actual prongs of the question turning in his flesh.
Shattered Mrs Newby lived for three days and said that it was the old one who had done her most damage.
Attending doctors were awed by the magnificence of her will towards life. The police paid sombre compliments to the explicit quality of her evidence. Women wept at her clear-headed mourning of her daughters and the esteemed Miss Graf.
Her dying was grand; it was royal and saintly, outscaling her weekly cheese-paring in Gilgandra, her bullying of Gilda, to an extent that Jimmie Blacksmith would have considered unjust.
Mr Newby was tranced. Farmers who had come to offer services to the police kept drugging him from flasks of rum and whisky.
Through the fug of sympathetic liquors, he remembered and wondered how he had ever forgotten that when he had first come to the west as an eighteen-year-old from Dorset he had seen and been numbed by its air of withdrawal, as if it had vast dispassionate and random devilries beneath its crust. Yet it had become his home, nearer to him than his heart’s blood. He did not know how he had ever settled to it. He knew he would sell up now and perhaps go into business in Sydney. To his mind, the earth and Jimmie Blacksmith had become suddenly allied.
The elder of the two grown sons had been the first to go into the kitchen. He rode off to Gilgandra where there were three doctors. What he needed were people to say yes, they are horrifically dead; and country policemen to tell him yes, this is the worst outrage.
All day Saturday and Sunday women – the women whose men brought flasks – brought cakes, made continual tea for policemen, doctors, mourners, condolers, and served it in Mrs Newby’s china.
The Newby boys were still talkative. Still they wanted to speak of what it had been like before blankets and scouring brushes had been brought into play. They were insatiable for words like monstrous, unspeakable, black butchers.
“After all Dad did for them bastards,” the younger son said, and the sentiment was passed from mourner to mourner.
At mid-afternoon on Saturday, the first party of police and volunteers rode out of the homestead yard. Men raised their hats and wished them well as they rode towards the Blacksmith encampment to pick up a track. The clever full-blood who was the Gilgandra tracker circled the site once and could then point out the traces made in flight. These pointed east.
“His people live over that way,” the policeman told the volunteers.
All felt that an arrest was close.
Early on Monday morning, Dowie Stead, lately Miss Graf’s fiancé, informed of the sad demise by telegraph, rode up to the Newby homestead leading five friends, young farmers from Gulargambone.
The friends varied, for Dowie was secretly romantic and practically tough. So he had both an orotund Irish-Australian called Toban and the impermeable good sense of a squatter-bachelor of thirty-five whose name was Dud Edmonds.
They had all drunk rum with their breakfast: it aided their air of concerted outrage.
As young Mr Dowie Stead, alone of the six, dismounted, a farmer’s wife was cooking breakfast for the Newby men.
Another fed the four-year-old in the corner, making weaving gestures with the spoon to amuse the child, whose laughter ran thinly in the great kitchen.
Dowie Stead looked like a national product, a tall boy with brown hair and narrow blue eyes; a face full of rather passive good intentions with a sort of Nordic coldness to it; features a little small for such a big frame yet likely to be more poetic or downright pretty if the proportion had been better arranged.
There was a functionality about his body; and people knew, having beaten drought and fluke, grasshoppers and banks to own what they owned, that functionality mattered.
It comforted them to see him.
Mr Newby, drinking whisky neat with his tea, was pleased to see him, and, with a tenderness Dowie found awesome, poured one for him. Mr Newby clearly presumed Dowie was half as shattered as himself. The young squatter felt some embarrassment that he was not. He drank quickly, since that might convince the Newbys how much he needed soothing and might also help him work up some sentimentality for the girl’s memory.
“Your intended was a beautiful girl,” said Mr Newby, and gave a strange little giggle of sobs.
One of the Newby boys said, “After all Dad done for them.”
“The little girl’s orright?”
“Yair. She was asleep in her cot. She had a banana skin with her. One of the girls … or Mrs Newby … must’ve given it to her not long before …”
Mr Newby took a steadying handful of the table and snorted up his grief.
“Her face wasn’t hurt at all, your intended’s,” the elder Newby boy told Dowie.
“How’s Mrs Newby?”
“The doctor says she’ll pass away today.”
“It’ll be a mercy.”
“The youngest boy’s orright. Except he seen it all happen. He heard the bastards calling to each other while they …”
Dowie Stead should have felt vastly angered. Instead he felt elected to give chase. This sense of election outweighed his guilt at feeling no grief of his own; which lack of response – he believed – was a judgment on him for rolling lubras in Gulargambone.
It did not fully occur to him yet that he might not have loved Miss Graf, for everybody said she was good and wise and handsome. Like Gilda, Dowie had always been awed by her. It worried him that he was lightened every time he remembered that now he did not have to marry her.
In fact, he looked forward to travelling with friends, harbouring a simple ambition, eating and sleeping in the open. Miss Graf’s tortuous standards of refinement had been swept away – or rather, hacked apart – and now he was with men, their direct, brusque warmth, all aimed at repaying someone for her outlandish agonies.
In Gulargambone he had cashed a cheque for sixty pounds at the Squatters’ Club. Today he wondered whether he should not take out a new, blue-hatched five-pound note and say that he would not cease the hunt until he had rinsed it in Jimmie Blacksmith’s blood. It was a little wild and imaginative, and Dowie was not at all sure that it should be done. But it might soothe the Newbys, who were bona fide mourners.
Mrs Newby, however, died during the inquest, making the gesture inappropriate.
Towards the end of the sitting a post office clerk arrived from Dubbo with a telegraph message that Jackie Smolders had been found and taken to Dubbo. The news threw the inquiry out of stride. One of the monsters had been taken inadvertently, behind their backs. Farmers gurgled approval but were a little deflated.
But the coroner himself, stressing that he made the point in an unofficial way, said the genuine devil was Jimmie Blacksmith, who, by report, considered himself at war and who could only be found by dedicated means.
Twenty more men offered themselves for a week as mounted auxiliaries to the police.
That very Monday Dowie Stead’s party rode off independently, though in the established easterly direction.
Dowie was not at peace with himself. Ridiculously he had a hunger for a thin, consumptive black girl called Tessie. For him, Tessie was a passion. Desire always came to him in her form – a lazy, gristly dying girl who yet had a sumptuous impact.
But the obsession with Tessie had more to it than lust; Dowie could not cease to worry at her image.
Because, reeling from the Squatters’ Club to his horse one Saturday night and so to the blacks’ camp, he had brought Tessie moon-eyed to the door of her humpy, barring entry. He forced past her. On her mattress sat his father in shirt-tails.
If now there was anything he wanted to pay off the black race for, it was not killing Miss Graf, canonized already by the people of Wallah and rendered remote in the process. It was for bringing his father and himself, both unbuttoned and grotesquely ready for the same black arse, face to face.
In Balmain, a riverside suburb of the city of Sydney, the public hangman for the State of New South Wales kept a scrupulous butchery. There were clean sawdust on the floor each day, a capacious coolroom and two polite sons. He himself was an exemplary man, full of placid love. Three mornings a week he or one of his sons bought carcasses at the Homebush slaughteryards. He was at his most talkative on meat: he would pick up lumps of sirloin and praise their texture before housewives.
His name was Wallace Hyberry. He lacked intimate friends so that he was never called anything more colloquial than Wallace – he remained Wallace, in fact, amongst a race of Wallys. The ladies of Balmain thought he was refined, almost like some of the foreign gentlemen in the hair shops in town.
They all knew he was the public hangman and said they couldn’t imagine him hanging a soul.
Though he was called the “public” hangman, hangings had not been public in that State since a day sixty years before when a convicted outlaw urged the onlookers to turn on every bloody tyrant in the budding Britannic colony.
So necrophiles like Ted Knoller, a customer Mr Hyberry could have lost without regret, had to be content with newspaper reports and with buying their meat from the hangman himself.
Late on the Monday, the day news of the Newby shambles appeared in the press, Knoller came to the butchery. He always carried a note listing the meat needs of the Knoller house, and would stand at the back of the shop against the tiles, making patterns in the sawdust with his boots and motioning women to give Mr Hyberry their order before he should.
Mr Hyberry would work tight-lipped on the meat while Knoller was there. Tidy, efficient, with a sense of social duty, he did not think it fair to have his highest contribution to society, the painless-as-possible extinction of murderers, slavered over by a cracked navvy, relished like an obscenity.
At last there was only a sixty-year-old deaf lady buying cat-meat, and Knoller began on the atrocity of the Friday night before, reading details aloud from the Morning Herald.
“I know that area well,” he said. “I’m a Gilgandra boy meself. I might know these Newby people. Though I can’t exactly remember … Anyhow, the Mail’ll have all the photographs.”
Mr Hyberry cut fillets with his fine-honed knife. “Surely not all, Mr Knoller. There are some things the public ought to be spared.”
“How d’yer mean?”
“Murder isn’t just a matter of being made to lie down on the floor. Even virgins and wives can die in ways that make the toughest policeman sick. There would have been photographs taken far too terrible for anyone other than doctors and senior policemen to look at.”
Ted Knoller frowned to imply he hoped he would never be forced to see anything that was not decent.
“I wouldn’t want t’ see nothink like that. What I mean was I might reckernize the farm or some of the people.”
“Oh yes.”
It was a pleasure to see Mr Hyberry at work on sirloin. Half a dozen slittings with the knife, then thump, thump, thump with the cleaver down the lines of cleavage. Behold, seven portions of meat fell from his scrubbed hand onto the marble of the scale.
“What strikes me,” Knoller pursued him, “is this. This morning there’s news of a really bad murder. Yer just in the same position I am. Yer don’t know the killers, and yer don’t know those poor women who got killed. Jimmie Blacksmith’s a name yer never heard of. But now yer know yer going t’ meet him on the gallows. For the final act in a killing that’ll always be remembered. Yer got a ringside seat to history! … I mean, it must be an interesting thing t’ know that all the famous murderers, when they get caught, have got t’ face you in the end.”
“I don’t face them. I don’t say a word to them. I’m just part of the … apparatus.”
A bad silence began. Hyberry’s industrious sons kept working. Knoller could not stop sneering, hinting that there was surely a morbidity in the hangman to keep his own company. Hyberry was a prude. If he himself had been hangman he would have been happy to pass on little intuitions and professional yarns. It must all have its humorous side.
Mr Knoller, living in terror of death, was very interested in its humorous side. He began to niggle the butcher, from a new direction.
“Anyhow, these Blacksmiths are aborigines. I believe blacks present problems.”
“I mean ordinary problems. Scientific problems, yer might say. Problems with hanging, yer know.”
“I didn’t know. I’d better leave such questions to you, Mr Knoller, since you are the expert.”
“Well, that last black yer hanged. In Bathurst. I don’t like to say it, but the newspapers did.”
“They said what?”
“That he nearly got his head pulled off.”
Mr Hyberry shuddered but showed no fear. Hanging was a trade for which there could be no apprenticeship. One only got one’s craft bit by bit and in the practice itself.
So that when you hanged a thin aboriginal man, an old man almost, and the rope savaged and part-severed the thin neck at the end of the fall, then you learned more about weight, age, momentum.
But he had a furious contempt for people who passed on such stories.
“What newspapers said that?”
“Truth and the Sporting Chronicle.”
“What’s a sporting paper doing, printing that sort of stuff?”
Mr Knoller shrugged. “Have yer got any decent blade steak?” he wanted to know, as if it was Hyberry who had been delaying him with abominations.