“Doctor Appleton, you there?”
It is now 1875, nine years since the Maungatapu Murders.
A young postal clerk, Jimmy O’Shaunessey, stands at the door of a modest wooden office building, clutching a leather satchel to his chest.
He raps on the door again. A freshly painted shingle hangs from hooks above the door, swaying in the breeze: Henry Appleton. Physician.
Jimmy has heard stories of kidnapping and murder up in the hills, and he knows Henry Appleton was involved. While he waits for the doctor, he looks around.
Across the road in a shop window he spots a gruesome display: the plaster casts of three human heads, lined up like sideshow clowns at a fair. But there is no laughter here: these are death masks.
“Jeepers!” He ducks in front of a slow-moving horse and cart and crosses the street for a closer look.
The sign reads: Death masks of the Maungatapu Murderers. Lecture tonight! Admission One Shilling.
The plaster cast heads are shaven and macabre, their eyes sightless. As a passing cart blocks out the sunlight, the eyes of the death masks momentarily flicker into life. The clerk jumps backwards.
“Jimmy!”
He doesn’t look around. He knows the voice – it is the doctor – but he can’t let those eerie heads out of his sight. Their eyes keep glaring at him as he backs away.
“Oi!” a farmer yells at him as he nearly falls under the hooves of a pair of Clydesdale horses hauling a wagon.
“That was close, Jimmy.”
The boy grins. Everyone likes Doc Henry. “He’s seen things,” his mother once told him. Whatever that meant. Seen what things?
“It’s true, isn’t it, Doc – you met them?”
Henry Appleton looks over at the masks, lifeless but potent. “Met them? I certainly did.” He rubs the scar on his jaw. “Now – Jimmy?”
“Oh, yes. Sorry, Doc.” From his satchel, Jimmy hauls out the envelope. “It’s from the United States of America.”
“So it is, Jimmy.”
“I’ve been wondering what’s inside.”
Henry smiles. “Well, let’s find out, shall we?”
He takes the envelope. They both peer at the sender’s name, and the young clerk asks the question that has been on his lips all morning. “Who’s Johnny Slick?”
“An old friend,” says Henry.
He brings out his pocketknife, slits open the envelope, and pauses. Could it be?
It is. After all these years, Johnny Slick’s dime novel.
Jimmy has seen these little paperbacks before, at Mr Tingle’s bookshop on Bridge Street: adventure stories from America, mostly about cowboys and Indians.
He looks closer at the magazine. On the cover there is a brightly painted illustration of a young man leaping at an older man who wields a pistol.
Henry chuckles at the glamorised depiction of his fight with Kelly in the Pritchard cottage.
There is a note attached to the book, and he reads it aloud.
To my young hero. Finally, I get to tell a story that’s mostly true.
Jimmy is impressed. “Doc – that’s you!”
He points at the cover and reads aloud, slowly: “Henry Appleton – Boy Hero!”
“Don’t believe everything you read in these dime novels, Jimmy.”
The boy doesn’t hear him. He reads on: A true adventure story from Johnny Slick.
“Wait till I tell the lads!” He skips off down the street, swinging the empty mail satchel around his head.
Henry gives his departing fan a half smile. I was a lad then. But that was a lifetime ago.
It was, in fact, only nine years ago, and he remembers it all with a chilling clarity. He remembers the crisp winter skies. The dense forests echoing with the voices of myriad birds.
The physician, Zephaniah Smith.
And despite his best efforts to wipe them from his memory, he remembers Burgess and Sullivan. They live in his nightmares.
He drops the dime novel into Smith’s old leather bag and coils his stethoscope on top. With his finger, he traces the outline of the bullet hole.
So close!
He shuts the office door and looks up at the sign:
Henry Appleton. Physician.
He taps the sign. “Zephaniah Smith, thank you!”
The doctor never returned, but he gave the Appletons the money to buy their cottage. And true to his word, he also paid for Henry to go to college. Henry is now a physician, just like the man who changed his life forever.
Henry – Doctor Henry – crosses the street.
In the shop window he sees the death masks of Burgess, Kelly, and Levy, and pauses to study them. The men who terrorised him are now lifeless sculptures.
“Evening, Doc,” says a chirpy voice behind him.
Jimmy the postal clerk and the shopkeeper O’Shaunessey join him at the window.
O’Shaunessey points at the sign: Lecture tonight! “Will we be seein’ you there tonight, Doc?”
Doc Henry imitates his friend’s Irish brogue. “Not on your life, O’Shaunessey. Not on your life.” He smiles and heads off.
“The Doc was there, Father,” says Jimmy. He points at the death masks. “He met them.”
“Did he indeed, son.”
Henry accepts that the evil exploits of the Burgess gang will continue to be the subject of newspaper articles and books.
But he and the good folk of Nelson prefer to focus on the gang’s victims: the five innocent men they slaughtered in the hills above Nelson.
The townspeople have paid for a large granite obelisk to be built in the local graveyard. Its inscription reads: Erected by the citizens of Nelson, in memory of the victims of the Maungatapu Murderers. 1866.
This evening, on his way home on Duke, Henry takes a long detour to the Wakapuaka Cemetery, and there, high on the hill, he pauses in front of the monument.
His eyes rest on one phrase: Vengeance is mine – I will repay, saith the Lord. Is that true, he wonders?
He looks around at the granite headstones scattered across the gentle slopes of the cemetery. This is the last resting place of respectable Nelson settlers who lived into old age, but also of children who did not live beyond the cradle.
They are at peace now, the newer headstones sparkling in the crisp evening light, the older headstones beginning to crumble, with weeds forcing up between the cracks.
We all end up here, muses Henry. How many of us will be remembered?
Burgess and his gang are still talked about, their names more familiar than those of their hapless victims. What does that say about us?
“Doctor Appleton!”
A short distance away, a smartly dressed gentleman waves in Henry’s direction.
“Mister Canning! What brings –”
“Planting trees, naturally.” Charles Canning chuckles, and gestures towards three workers who are leaning on shovels nearby. “Planting trees. It’s my besetting sin – but hopefully a pardonable one.”
Henry slides off Duke, and the two men shake hands.
“You’ll long be remembered for the many trees you’ve gifted to the town, sir.”
“Do you think so?” asks the older man. “There’s an adage: ‘The evil which man does lives after him, but the good is oft interred with his bones.’”
“A gloomy thought,” says Henry. He indicates the memorial obelisk. “I had just been musing on the same theme myself. The names of Burgess and Sullivan are well known. But not their victims’.”
“Burgess – what a fascinating man,” says Canning. “Evil, of course, but with his own twisted sense of right and wrong.”
Henry nods. Burgess. Probably my father. But Charles Canning doesn’t need to know.
He recalls Charles Canning and the other jurors listening wide-eyed as Burgess read his “Confessions”.
The two men stand in silence. Then Henry asks:
“How is your boy William, sir?”
“Still poorly, I’m afraid. Perhaps you would be kind enough to pay us a visit this week.”
“I shall, sir.”
“And stay for dinner,” says Canning. “Well – back to my little oak trees.”
Henry bids him farewell, and watches as the farmer and his workers resume their digging. More oak trees; more reminders of the country they still call home.
He rides back towards town, before veering into the familiar fields. Past the chapel, through the forest that still features in his nightmares, past Murderers’ Rock, and finally home.
He hears a small boy’s voice cry out “Pow, Pow!” and recalls the days when he himself was desperate to own a gun. Not anymore.
He rides up to the farm. Bluebell Cottage. The familiar nameplate, somewhat faded, still hangs on the porch.
A boy of six is leaning out the window with a toy wooden gun. “Pow, pow!”
Miriama is working with Henry’s mother in the garden. There are beans, cabbages, kūmara, potatoes, and pumpkins… gooseberries, rhubarb and sweet corn… a small orchard of apple and plum trees… and rows of lavender, mint, rosemary, and sage.
The oak tree they planted soon after their arrival is now as tall as the cottage.
We are so fortunate.
Zephaniah Smith arrived in town seeking revenge. Instead, he found redemption. And he helped us start a new life of our own.
Henry turns in the saddle to look beyond the cottage. On the land once claimed by Chadwick, a Māori family is tending a large vegetable garden bordered by stones. One of them looks up and waves. Henry returns the wave, then dismounts.
He calls out to the boy in the window: “Little Zed! Kia ora!”
“Papa!” The boy runs out, carrying his toy rifle. Henry puts the gun aside and sweeps the boy into his arms.
Miriama appears at the door in gardening clothes and waves.
Henry’s mother joins her, and she and Miriama watch as he lifts his son in the air.
“Come inside, Little Zed, and I’ll tell you a story,” he says. “It’s about bad men… and guns.”
“Yay!” the boy cries out.
Doctor Henry smiles at his mother and his wife, and tells his son, “Your mama and grand-mama are in the story too. And a man called Zephaniah – just like you.”
Henry reaches into the doctor’s bag and pulls out Johnny Slick’s dime novel.
The boy studies the cover and sounds out the words: “Henry Appleton – boy hero!”
He looks up at his father. “Is it a true story, Papa?”
Doc Henry smiles. “It is mostly true, Little Zed. Mostly true.”
* * *
Later that year, Dr Henry Appleton, his wife Miriama Te Aroha Appleton and their son Zephaniah William Appleton sail to England, where they meet Queen Victoria.
Henry spends days searching for his birth mother, without success.
They travel home via America and visit the writer Johnny Slick. He takes them to meet President Ulysses Grant.
They arrive back in New Zealand in 1878. Miriama becomes a teacher, and Henry serves the Nelson community as a physician for the rest of his days.
THE END