Bereft (31 page)
“Goodness, that's a long time, but it might be worth it. I have nearly four pounds I took from people. Mr. Harman keeps money in a sock. I know it's wrong but ⦔
“It doesn't matter,” Quinn said and fingered the barrel of the revolver. “God is not watching us. I think perhaps we are on our own now. Nothing matters.”
She grunted in assent, stood and patted down her dress. “Yes. He finished with us a long time ago, I think. He has forsaken us.”
Quinn was exhausted. Beneath his feet he detected the grinding of the earth as it revolved in space, a lone machine tracing its eternal orbit. He squatted a minute longer on the filthy mattress. Then he stood, and they both stepped over Dalton and shuffled from the station into the quivering sunlight. He untethered the grey and led it and Sadie south along Gully Road, past Smith's orchard. Strangely, he felt no urgency, and the girl was content to amble beside him. It was an ordinary Sunday morning in the dying days of summer. Most people were in church or going about their business at the upper end of town. A breeze stirred the trees. There was no one about; indeed, if not for the sound of hymns that once again floated over the treetops as they crossed into the bushland beyond, he might have presumed the town abandoned.
M
ary Walker did not live long enough to hear what had happened to her beloved brother, Robert. The weather of her dreams had become dark and turbulent in her final days. One afternoon in March 1919, several hours after Robert was found dead from a single bullet wound to the chest, Nathaniel leaned in at her window, as usual, but did not speak. He knew, at once, that she had passed away and did not wish to confirm it any quicker than necessary by asking a question that would go forever unanswered.
In her last weeks, Mary was tormented and, it must be said, comforted by visions of her lost children, Quinn and Sarah, who she claimed gathered around her bed to bathe her burning forehead and sprinkle gifts of lavender. She said all was forgiven. She said everyone was fine. As soon as the death certificate was signed, she was taken out and buried immediately, in accordance with the regulations of those terrible months.
Afterwards, Nathaniel Walker stalked the dusty yard alone for days, staring into the distance, smoking his pipe, muttering prayers and curses to himself. Plates of food and bunches of flowers from neighbours piled up around him until the sagging veranda resembled the scene of a melancholy feast.
Several months later, he sold the property and moved to Queensland to be with William and his wife Jane. He became withdrawn and lost interest in the world and its possibilities. His hair turned silver. In 1924 he fell from a horse, was rendered insensible, and died two weeks later, never having regained consciousness.
Of the girl, Sadie Fox, nothing definite was heard again. There were rumours she had been seen in Newcastle; that she was travelling with her brother, who had returned from the war much changed; that she wore a necklace beaded with snail shells, gave birth to a rabbit, stowed away on a cargo ship bound for Ireland; that she perished in the epidemic.
Robert Dalton's brutal death shocked the tiny town. There was nothing stolen except for his service revolver and horse, and no evidence as to whom the killer might be, aside from a pair of bloody footprints that wandered out of the station, along Gully Road and faded away. Young George Carver was despatched that afternoon to tracker Jim Gracie's place, but the poor boy stumbled on a scene that disturbed his dreams for years to come. Gracie's starving dogsâseizing their chance to take revenge on the man who had for many years treated them so poorlyâwere leaping high into the air and fastening their great jaws around the tracker's bare feet. The Carver boy fled and told his tale, but by the time another man arrived at Gracie's place the dogs had vanished, leaving the tracker hanging like a man in a gibbet, his feet resembling a pair of butchered chops.
The two murders were assumed to have been committed by the vagrant Fletcher Wakefield, whom Kimberley Porteous recounted talking with that day in the graveyard, although a search of records soon revealed that Wakefield had perished in the last days of the war. It was yet another mystery, deepened by Edward Fitch's yarn about his encounter with the ghost of Quinn Walker up in the hills, whereupon the sharp gaze of accusation again fell on the man known for so long in Flint as the Murderer.
Of course
, they said.
Of course
.
By this time the epidemic had secured its grip on the nation. Hospitals were filled to the brim with coughing patients. Schools closed. Many died each and every day. Mary Walker was only one of a dozen in Flint to pass away as a direct result of influenza. By the end of 1919, when the epidemic had run its course, thousands lay dead in its wake.
With those connected to the Walker family dead or gone from the district, the stories associated with them grew, like untrimmed bougainvillea, in strange and untended directions. So too did Edward Fitch's account of his time with the Murderer, wherein Quinnâhunchbacked, his face a sunken pudding, odd as a prophet or grizzled saint, now bearing a sack of bonesâuttered cryptic slogans that clarified his past and foretold the future. Fitch was known to be unreliable, but the suspicion surrounding his meeting with the damaged man in the hills only served in the eyes of some to give his tale the shimmer of truth.
In the years that followed, a miner or rabbiter would sometimes spy a lone man lurching among the abandoned mines, whereupon the town biddies and those gossips at the bar of The Mail Hotel would be atwitter with renewed speculation as to what really happened in 1909 and again in 1919. Quinn's dark, rumoured presence became a warning to children not to stray too far of an evening, and there developed around the schoolyard a skipping rhyme that waxed and waned in popularity:
Quinn Walker had a sister, a sister, a sister
One night he kissed her, he kissed her, he kissed her
She tried to run away, run away, run away
But he said: You have to stay! Stay! Stay!
Bereft
received nourishment from many quarters. For both inspiration and information, I am indebted to:
Phantasmagoria
by Marina Warner;
The Great War
by Les Carlyon;
Sites of Memory
,
Sites of Mourning
by Jay Winter; and
Faces of the Living Dead
by Martyn Jolly. In addition, I would like to thank Lyn Tranter, Kirsten Tranter, Ian See, and Roslyn Oades for their invaluable encouragement and advice over countless drafts. But, most of all, thanks to my editor Aviva Tuffield, who worked tirelessly (or so it seemed), and without whom this novel would have been twice as long and half as good.
Chris Womersley's debut novel,
The Low Road
, won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Book in 2008. His fiction and reviews have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including
Granta New Writing 14
,
Best Australian Stories 2006
,
Best Australian Stories 2010
,
The Monthly
, and
The Age
. In 2007 one of his short stories won the Josephine Ulrick Literature Prize. Visit him at
www.chriswomersley.com
.