Kathleen had kissed them all goodbye a good distance from Mt Dempster’s reserve, and Fanny said they’d be back to get her. Sandy One being like he was, there was only so much room, see.
Returning to the reserve Kathleen saw, through and among the trees, some men from the town; a policeman with them, two...
It was like dogs surrounding kangaroos for the kill. The old people were already huddling on wagons. Others stood around in a tight group. People had bundles of clothes, a bowl, a cup; Kathleen saw a broken clock tucked under someone’s arm.
A young man—a boy—turned from the edge of the group and ran several steps clear. He fronted up as best he could to the policeman on a horse, tilting his face up to him. The policeman shook his head, turned, said something to one of his colleagues.
The boy was outside the circle of police and townspeople. Running. The shouts Kathleen heard seemed small across such a distance.
Kathleen called silently to the escapee, wanting willing him away. To her? No, the only way would be up, up into above the trees. Away, away. She watched him turn. He pranced, was up on his toes; swung his thin arms. Kathleen made little noises in her throat as the men walked through his fists. They kicked him, tied him, threw him on a wagon.
She walked to keep ahead of the man she sensed behind her. A hand held her arm, its grip loose but inescapable.
When she finally dared to turn the man smiled down at her, his Adam’s apple bobbing above the white collar.
They were well away from the reserve when Kathleen smelled the smoke and turned to see the narrow shifting stem of it joining the cloudy sky. She let her head fall against the soft and forgiving flesh of the woman whose arm surrounded her.
When the little troupe stopped it was all but dark. A circus, someone said, laughing. A zoo. A bloody freak show. There were a few rough shelters, and a small house and stable.
In the darkness, among the stuff thrown from the wagon, something struggled and made noises. It was the boy she’d seen trying to escape. His eyes rolled above the gag at his mouth as he was pushed into a large hessian bag. He continued to struggle; Kathleen saw the bag swinging on the rope which suspended it from a tree.
In the morning a rectangle of flapping canvas showed where some of the girls had escaped.
Somewhere around the middle of the day they shuffled back through the gate, followed by trackers on horseback.
Kathleen watched from the canvas kitchen. Dinah called her over, sat her before the fire, and had her knead the dough.
Outside, someone chopped wood. Kathleen sat on the step and saw the symmetry of the growing stack he made, and how the wood parted before his blows. The axe rose and fell, rose and fell, and only its rhythm held her day together.
Shaven haired women, dressed in hessian and flour bags, stepped from the kitchen with food slops.
An old man felt his way along the wall toward her. Kathleen did not move, she held her breath, and the old man’s hands found the doorframe. He detoured in a little half-circle around where she sat. The old man’s eyes were sealed, and he moved slowly, perhaps one or two steps to each blow of the axe.
Kathleen felt herself at the centre of a most orderly destruction. The wood split, was stacked. The axe man winked and smiled at her.
Once he was past her, the blind one resumed feeling his way along the wall. He coughed, and seemed to tremble with each axe stroke. Kathleen watched him draw himself up and, in a show of bravado, stride across the open space to the stable. Then he followed his hands along its wall of stone until, finding a doorway, he turned and disappeared.
Mrs Tryer carried her baby into the kitchen, and handed it to Dinah, the woman who took responsibility for the food preparation and who Kathleen had been told to assist. Dinah handed the child to Kathleen while she continued to receive orders from Mrs Tryer.
The baby held its head back, and looked into Kathleen’s face. Kathleen tickled the infant, and it chuckled and clutched at her.
Kathleen realised Mrs Tryer had stopped speaking. She turned reluctantly because surely there would be a rebuke but the pale, furrow-browed woman only smiled at her.
‘Dinah, how old is this girl?’
‘Oh, about ten years, Miss.’
Dinah spoke without hesitation, as if she knew.
A small boy sat on the steps one afternoon. He was thin, his bones but a frame for the rags he wore, and his head seemed too heavy for his neck. He rested his chin on his knees, and turned his head to Kathleen when she sat beside him, then turned away again. His eyes were open, soft and unseeing.
Light thickened. Kathleen was in a wash of purple, and the raw wood, stacked and rigidly patterned, bled into the air. The flickering yellow light of a fire was at her back. The rhythmic cracking and splitting of an axe.
Kathleen put an old jam tin of tea and a piece of bread at the boy’s side. The axeman shook his head and would not stop. The boy dipped his bread into the tea, pushed the soggy pap to his mouth, but hardly chewed.
Mr Tryer appeared from the darkness, and put his hand on the axeman’s shoulder. He took the axe from him (you have done well) and pushed him away.
Shivering in the pale morning, Kathleen stood at the woodheap. There was yesterday’s symmetrical stack of wood and two cylindrical bundles of canvas, one larger than the other. One held the body of the old blind man; and from the smaller bundle a small hand protruded, as if frozen in a secret wave of departure.
Kathleen helped clean the fireplace. She rubbed the ash into her hands, and made the fire blaze and crackle.
In the kitchen, white flour in the skin of her fingers.
Sometimes there was a teacher and Kathleen sat at the front of the class. Sat still. Did not speak. Learned to empty words into her head and spill them out onto a blank page.
She wondered what it was like in the wood-box when the lid came down, and the silent class listened to your snivelling. And she was glad she was not the one roped beneath the faraway desk at the back of the room.
When she spoke she wondered why her voice did not spring from her as other people’s seemed to. She thought of her brother, Chatalong, and how it must be to see people smiling back at you when you spoke.
Her voice did not carry, only some of her words left her. She felt them all, trapped, vibrating the bones of her face. It was easier to keep your face averted, to remain intent upon a page, or weaving, sewing.
She liked to be among others in the kitchen; the warmth and sound of fire, the smell of dough, the soups they made in the vast pot. And the kitchen had Dinah who immediately reclaimed the place taken by Fanny.