Benang Read online

  Constable Hall collected one of the Mustle boys, and a Done, from the hotel. They were happy to offer assistance. The fellow was armed, after all. ‘You were lucky to catch us, Constable.’ They both thought there’d been a stop put to the likes of Cuddles and this sort of trouble years ago. It was no good just sending them to prison.

  The three of them reached the coast in just a few hours, and the horses looked just about knocked up as the men slid from their saddles and into the telegraph office.

  It was the half-caste, Sandy Two, who had apparently seen Cuddles. No one knew where the boy was now, but he had left directions as to where he’d made the sighting.

  At around noon the next day the three men found an old campsite. It was Cuddles’ sure enough. The remains of a fire, some sheep bones, a flour bag and, arranged beside the fire, a set of what appeared to be Jock Mustle’s clothes. They were laid out neatly, as if the body had been slipped from within. Jock’s spectacles, with the lenses smashed, were neatly folded above the collar of a flannel shirt, and those were definitely his patched moleskins tucked into a pair of old boots. The men blinked. Poking through the buttons of the trouser fly was a fish head. They could not help but peer closer. The fish’s tail was jammed into the ground, and its clean ribs and spine curved up out of the clothing. Ants filled the eye sockets with busy life, and the dead fish’s mouth seemed formed into a grin.

  When they got back to Wirlup Haven the postmaster handed them yet another telegraph:

  Cuddles seen Gebalup with horse and half-caste woman stop.

  No, there was no stopping them now. The three of them surprised the native camp before sunrise the next morning, and those they awoke were whimpering, apologising, grumbling and shouting; all at once. Constable Hall was shocked to see Sandy Two there, and told him as much. The boy claimed that he was trying to gather information about that bloody Cuddles.

  ‘You lying bastard.’

  As soon as Sandy Two was given a moment he dressed himself, and stood on his own in the early light of day.

  The three white men dispersed the group, and sat on their horses with spines erect and flies busy about their heads.

  ‘He didn’t even have shoes on,’ said one of them.

  A couple of days later there was another telegraph from Old Jock. He’d had a horse, saddle and bridle stolen. And the house girl was missing. He’d known it was Cuddles, Constable Hall found out later, because Jock’s stolen underwear had been returned. Soiled, of course, but what would you expect from a black?

  The Dones and Mustles were helpful. Old Jock Mustle, well, he was family, wasn’t he? They were old families, and they knew about the blacks. They kept telling Constable Hall this.

  ‘Oh, and Mason; well, he’s harmless enough, but ... Well, he hasn’t made much of a life for himself has he? I mean, he married her. It’s about standards, really. And what sort of country we want this to be.’ They were sincere. They had a vision, of how other places were. One of them had been born overseas, the others planned to make a trip to the mother country one day.

  ‘Sandy Two? The son? He spends all his spare time at the camps, the women, you know. They regress, the black blood takes over, whatever some people might hope for.’

  Kevin Mustle invited Constable Hall home for dinner. The Justice of the Peace from Kylie Bay would be there.

  to the chief protector of aborigines

  Dear Sir,

  In response to your enquiries and pertinent to the new legislation I beg to report as follows:

  There are a number of natives at Mustles’ outer stations closer to Kylie Bay and Yarramoup, and I have removed all from the ration list for one month September 25 to October 25 during shearing season as per our correspondence, excepting Teapot—very old and infirm.

  I don’t feel satisfied to continue certifying these without seeing them although I get the best reports I can from PC Hall and Mr Mustle himself.

  As everywhere it seems, some of the teamsters have taken native women and it will take some time to inform them of the new legislation making it an offence to cohabit. They are, of course, very mobile and independent of spirit.

  At Gebalup itself there are very few natives. There is an older man here who has married a native woman. What is the ruling regarding their progeny, and so on? They have one son, who Constable Hall informs me has been of some help to him but who has reportedly taken to spending a lot of time with natives even though he does not see himself as fitting that category. He is half-caste. There are another two children living with the same family, both half-caste or possibly quadroon. It is hard to tell. How does the legislation apply in instances such as these?

  I am informed that last year the question was mooted of making a native reserve and bringing down goldfields natives. It would be quite impossible to keep them on it. But I was informed that there are islands between Wirlup Haven and Dubitj Creek which have very good soil and although some have been grazed they are all now abandoned. If your department will pay my out-of-pocket-expenses (chiefly steamer fare, or hire of Mustle’s cutter?) I would go down on a trip to the islands and identify those suitable, and also, if time permitted, the natives and stations on the coast further around from here.

  Many of the islands are apparently well wooded and abound with Tammin, Cape Barren Geese, Muttonbirds etc. On some I am told many rabbits. I cannot help thinking that if any honest old couple of sober habits (or for a small wage the man living hereabouts and who I mentioned as married to a native woman might be interested in such a position) who may now be on the relief list were placed in charge of these islands the natives could be induced to till sufficient garden land to keep them in vegetables and a few goats and sheep would stock the land to keep down weed, and to provide meat to supplement the natural game.

  These southern blacks would then have no claim to stations, and the squatters themselves would soon weed out the useless mischievous ones as they did in the old days when Mustle informs me they used isolation on the islands as punishment.

  I have spoken to Constable Hall and all he has to say is that the islands are too good for the blacks. Some of these outlying islands ought also to be used as native gaols once again. As is they return sleek and well fed from Frederickstown and bragging to their cohorts of their adventures.

  Yours...

  whispering stories

  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 an
cestral 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.

  ‘What is he?’ I heard them say.

  a writer

  Constable Hall was a writer.

  Sandy Two was a reader, and in the newspaper he read:

  Your character, as told from your handwriting, is the truest index of your future. The tail of your J may betray meanness, whilst the forming of a T may show generosity.

  Professor Banks delineations are pretty correct. If you dislike plain speaking do not reply. Send sample of your handwriting and postal note for one shilling sixpence or twenty four penny stamps and self addressed envelope to:

  Professor J J Banks,

  care of post office,

  Perth, WA

  Sandy Two showed the advertisement to Constable Hall several weeks later and told him he’d taken the liberty of sending some scraps of the constable’s handwriting to the good professor. It was a mail day, and Sandy Two—indicating an envelope on Hall’s desk—said, ‘You’ve got your reply, by the look of it.’

  Constable Hall was ever alert. It was his training, see.

  ‘Oh yeah, I got my own results back,’ said Sandy. ‘“Creative, and confident”,’ he quoted at Hall, grinning, ‘“Destined for great things”.’

>   ‘Oh yeah?’ said Hall. ‘You heading out of town yet?’

  The constable waited until he was sure Sandy had gone. He didn’t want to snatch at the envelope too soon, because Sandy was likely to put his head back around the corner and laugh as soon as he did so. The letter was sealed, but the postmark faint. Still, it seemed genuine enough, no point accusing the bastard without good proof.

  He opened it quietly.

  He swore he could hear Sandy Two’s laughter as he read the letter. He went out into the street. There was no one about. The air felt particularly cool on his cheeks, and he hoped he was not blushing.

  jetty

  Chatalong and Kathleen. The boy was not a quiet one, whereas she was. She was very reserved, as if frightened. Kathleen would knot her hands together, slowly twisting the fingers in so many ways. Perhaps she knew she could do little but listen, because Chatalong talked and talked. He liked to hear sounds emerging from himself. He farted, hummed, sang, and—when he talked—obviously shaped his words at the very last moment. It gave him an engaging charm; it made him honest, even though so much of what he said was full of contradictions. Most of it, they were sure, was true. They were equally sure he never intended to lie. It was just that he spoke as quickly as he thought and, having picked up so many strange bits and pieces of stories in his short life, understood that the only way they could be connected was by his utterances. Sometimes he presented little recitations. Chatalong was the entertainment of the camp, and Sandy Two encouraged him, thinking of his own boy self.