Once more the three old men and I camped among dunes and small trees, and were sheltered from the wind; as Sandy One, Two, and Fanny had been. It was not so far from where they’d found Chatalong and Kathleen, and a beach walk west led to the town of Wirlup Haven where a jetty was being built. Such was the angle of the coast that it seemed possible the jetty might eventually reach all the way to the island.
Sandy Two came from the paperbarks of the soak, through the dunes, to the tossing sea. He carried his new little brother on his back, and his mother walked beside him. Jack Chatalong was riding high, looking around, enjoying the wind blowing from the sea, from out past those islands which they could not make him see. Out there, they pointed, out there! There! as if they were apparitions in the glare and salt haze.
Jack liked it but. Look at him.
The boy’s nose was up; sniffing the wind, he was remarkably quiet. The wind blew his hair back, showing the extent of his forehead, and how vulnerable he was. He grinned, put his tongue out and, tasting the wind, let it whip his words away before they had even formed.
The light raced along the face of the tiniest waves as they curved and crashed onto the sand. It was dark blue out there but so clear here where tiny bubbles of ephemeral white froth floated in the water.
They walked around the beach, just to renew footprints, to skirt the edge of the reaching, receding sea. It was curiosity that made Sandy Two go that little further around the bend, to see what was stranded there.
Fanny hung back, but Sandy Two kept on, with the boy on his back until they looked down upon the body. Sandy Two thought of his mother, and what she had told him of some ancestral hero, and of how she came to be with his father.
This man had been dead for a long time. Sandy picked up a small axe which lay beside the body, and its rusty outline remained on the crushed billycan it had rested on.
The man had been tall. His clothes, although somewhat deflated, still held the shape of what the body had been. The rim of a hat remained, circling the skull. There was very little smell. Sandy noticed that the body wore two pairs of socks, and that the too-big boots had been fastidiously placed more than an arm’s length away. Then the man must have stretched out, belly up, and gazed at the sky. Still beside him was the faint remains of a fire, and one hand rested upon a small Bible.
Sandy Two was fascinated—although he could not have said quite why—that the man should choose to read so close to death, that he had stayed away from his home, that he wore the clothes of Sandy’s brother-in-law, Pat Coolman.
Pat’s name was in the Bible.
The body was surrounded by the tracks of lizards, birds, crabs. Bits of the dark vest and moleskins had been picked away, but the cloth had proved too heavy and thick.
Sandy Two ceased his inspection to shoo little Chatalong and his incessant chatter away from the body. The boy tottered in the discarded boots. Sandy Two took them from him. They were pretty good boots; lace up ones.
‘Not gunna do him no good, eh little brother? He just another dead man.’
They were stiff, but otherwise a perfect fit. Sandy took some trouble with the laces.
Sandy Two told his father all about it that evening, discreetly, so as not to disturb the children, Kathleen particularly. It was his contribution to the evening’s talk.
The things they used to talk about of an evening. It was the old man mostly, with Fanny filling the gaps, adding body to the yarns. She talked in the day though, when it was quiet and you were close; when you were not really listening, or didn’t want to be, sometimes. She seemed to be talking to herself, and it was not that she was sad, because she laughed so much so often, and used to say that she was home, this was her home. But it was like she was lonely. Well, what could you do?
Around the fire everyone is shadow and firelight. If you hold your hands before you in that light you see all the lines and pores. The light flickers, dies, comes back again. The talkative—and yet always ready to listen—Jack Chatalong would fall asleep, and then there was space for others to speak.
Sandy Two, his body still learning the way of a little rum and a day’s work, would be drifting up and down; asleep, awake, asleep.
The fire crackled, flared for a moment, making their skin look old, like parchment. Unlike my grandfather and myself they had no words written in their skin, but there were lines, and small markings, and it is this you have to read on such fibre. You have to read the very weave of the stuff itself, even your own. There is so little else.
Fanny led the sleepy but excited Chatalong away. As he lay prone in the dark, stars fell into his eyes, words leaked from his ears.
Sandy One boasted that he told all. Of when he first came here. Of when they lived in Frederickstown, and his children were registered and went to a mission school for a few years, and he worked the boats again. How he and Fanny and the children were reunited, and came back this way, further east, went from the coast to the goldfields and back, worked on the stations. You remember, he said to Fanny, how I saved you. Saved us all.
In the firelight, the movement of eyes, seeking reassurance.
Fanny embellished, linked, led him on. Later in the night, Fanny and the fire spoke to all the sleeping, slumped bodies. She mumbled, and sang softly to herself, often with words that they might not know. Sometimes of children she had lost, the father mother that were taken. Her brothers, sisters.
Wondering, always, how to say it softly enough so that they might remember.
At the stations, Fanny used to go to the camps to find who remained, and where she could place herself among the living. Those who had been closest to her were gone. She felt surrounded, almost, by the dead. They circled her, and there were more and more of them.
At times she still wondered if it were true, that the white ones were the dead returned; brains askew, memories warped, their very spirit set adrift. But this one, her own man, was growing stronger.
And she had recognised her children. That was the connection between the past and now.
At one station, the one at the bay shaped like a boomerang, Fanny was sitting on a wagon, looking down upon the upturned face of a sister who worked in the house, when she heard a sound, a bell, a sweet sound something like water in rocks. The expression it caused upon the face before her. It was as if that sweet sound was a frightening command, and her sister was gone. Fanny watched her disappear into the dark and solid house.
In the house—Sandy One told her—there were coloured ribbons hanging. Each rang a different bell, and each was a command to a different person to come running.
An uncle slept on a verandah. The woman of the house used to wake him in the night, give him cakes, and have him hurry hurry himself to the hut on the bay and fetch small packages of paper from the ship. Sometimes, the old man said, it was in the deep of night. The light in the window there, the post office window, told the missus to send him. It was words from her family.
Fanny saw the old man again at a later time, through the doorway. He sat beside a fire, wrapped in shadow and the smoke of very green wood. He coughed his way out to see her, and she could smell the staleness and the smoke on him.
He sat by the fire all day; it was a warm but gloomy place to be. He blew to keep the flames alive. He thought there was nothing left for him, nothing but the sound of the flame, the word for which was his name. He was the sound of flame burning low, burning backwards along a piece of wood.
A third time she called and he had gone. It was a sickness that had come with the white people. The smell of them. There were still people dying from it now; and the very boldest ones, those wanting to escape the savage fire inside them, they ran into the sea and were quenched.
The old man had stumbled, shuffled away from the verandah. Someone jeered, said look at him look. The white woman called him back, said there was a message. She shouted at him as he threw off his clothes. See them, the clothes, his erratic footprints? He was out of balance, his weight was shifting about. He walked into the sea and it swallowed him.
Sometimes, Uncle Jack Chatalong brought guests to our campfire as we moved along the coast in those years after I had first attempted reading and rewriting, and then burnt my grandfather’s work. The survivors. Only a few, because not only was there the passing awkwardness of my fair skin, the searching for family names, but there was also the fact that I usually hovered in the air just above everyone’s head. It was laughable, it was frightening.