Bitter Eden (49 page)

Furious gales made navigation dangerous. The entrance to Hell's Gate in Macquarie Harbor was not attempted except in calm weather. Sarah's shores and Macquarie Harbor were marked with the carcasses of wrecks. Sunken rocks bore the names of ships they had ripped asunder. Icy winds from the South Pole lashed the island. From the northwest the wind churned and blew toward Sarah and Macquarie, driving salt as far as twelve miles up the river Gordon. The turbulent Gordon, indigo blue and undrinkable, was fed by several rivulets that oozed through swampy ground and decaying vegetation. Sarah Island was not the most hospitable land for either the settler or the convict, vet it had its own harsh beauty.

By the time Peter was assigned to his place in the barracks, he was too tired to give thought to what life would be like on this raw, windswept island. That it would be unpleasant, he had no doubt. Already he was in chains again, and the older prisoners told him

he would wear them permanently. He'd eat, sleep, and work with the irons on his body. He fell asleep thinking of the irons, but it was the barren, inhospitable land he dreamed of.

At five thirty Peter was awakened. He opened his eyes to the dreary morning light, sleepy and irritated at the clanking of his fellow convicts' chains as they shuffled toward the dining hall. He was among the last to eat. A bowl of colorless, tasteless mash was given him. He looked at the men on either side of him slurping the mess as quickly as they could. The man to his right ran his dirty finger around the bowl, then lifted it to his face, licking it clean. Peter stared at the bowl, then began to eat the skilly, a mixture of flour, water, and salt. It all but made him sick, but he didn't need anyone to tell him it was all he was going to get.

After breakfast, there was a forty-five-minute period. The week's food rations were given to each prisoner. Peter took his packet thankfully and went off alone to search through it for something to add to his meager breakfast. He had just bitten into a piece of hardtack when the shadow of another prisoner fell across him.

"You're one o' the new ones they brung in, ain't you?"

Peter ignored him, taking another bite of the hardtack.

"Alius can tell the new ones. They eat up their rations the first days. They're alius the fat happy ones on Monday an' the lean hungry ones t'rest o' t'week. Take some friendly advice. It's best to be hungry seven days than starvin' for two or three." The man spat at Peter's feet, then walked back to his friend before Peter could answer.

Peter watched the man sit down and begin to mend his torn trousers. Then he looked around at the other

convicts. It was easy to pick out the newcomers. Without exception they were raiding their ration packets. The older convicts used the time to wash their clothes or mend. Many of them gathered in groups talking, their voices gruff, their laughter coarse and too loud. With one last look into his rations packet, Peter closed it up, keeping out the piece of hardtack he had started to eat. Still hungry, he put the packet in his bunk.

He came back outside just as the guards ordered the chain gangs formed. Each gang was comprised of a hundred men. They were lined up, boarded on boats, and ordered to row to the woodcutting station near the mainland. A section of Huon pine was to be cleared there.

Peter looked at the virgin forest and marveled at giant-trunked ancient trees. What ships these pines would build! For a moment he forgot why he was there and felt the surging challenge that nature gives to some men. He staggered as the guard butted him in the small of the back for holding up the gang as he gazed at the trees.

Trees felled by yesterday's work gang lay waiting to be launched into the river. Peter touched the weather-beaten bark fondly, then put his davdreams aside and bent his back to the task. Men stationed themselves along the log. At the unison call of "heave!" they lifted the log to their shoulders. Stumbling through the marshy ground, cursing as they tramped through tangled scrub and underbrush, they carried the logs to the water's edge, placing them carefully. One log at a time they began to build a road a quarter mile long.

Before noon the muscles in Peter's back were on fire. His shoulder was raw and his empty stomach gnawed at him like a rabid rat. He stripped the trees of branches, carried them, and placed them in the roadway until a "slide" was formed. Once the slide

was made, the heavier logs were shunted down it into the water. Then they were floated into an arrangement to be transported to Hobart Town where they would be used in construction and the building of ships.

With the last log finally placed in the slide, Peter and several other men were assigned to the log launch. Reluctantly they waded into the icy river, awkward in their chains. The water closed over knee, then thigh, creeping up to his waist, and finally Peter stood in the river, the water cold and tight across his chest. He looked up at the slide. From his new vantage point in the river, it appeared as tall as a mountain, its angle steep and precipitous like the side of a great pyramid.

His anxieties rose as he watched the men at the top of the slide put into position the first giant log to be sent careening down to the men in the river. Erratically the great trunk rolled downward, bouncing and bumping, sometimes catapulting off the uneven slide surface into the air. Peter and his crew scrambled frantically, their movements hampered by their leg irons, their footing uncertain on the slippery river bottom. Peter submerged, shoving himself away from the hurtling log. The crash of the log exploded the water around him. He came up blowing water and shouting imprecations at the grinning men at the top of the slide. His words were drowned out by the thunderous roll of the next log.

Hour after hour the logs tumbled into the water. The river crew maneuvered and shoved them into formation. Peter had never been so painfully cold in his life. The frigid water ate through his skin and muscle and bit deep into the bone. His feet were raw from the rocks in the river bottom. His hands and upper torso were cut and scraped and bruised from the logs.

At six o'clock that evening work ended at the wood station. In that instant when the river crew looked to the top of the slide and saw no more logs being positioned, their leaden arms dropped immobile. Peter looked longingly at the dry river bank and wondered if he'd be able to climb it. With the work stopped, he seemed to have no strength left

But only the logging had stopped. There was still the long rowing back to Sarah Island and the march to the barracks with their chains dragging, becoming heavier with each step. Peter set his mind on the food rations that awaited him in the barracks, not permitting himself to think of the pain in his back or the hot agony of his shoulders or his feet that looked like the Union Jack; white skin mottled with blue bruises and ragged streaks of blood.

He fell into his bunk, not even able to reach for the ration packet. His eyes shut, but he could only doze. The hunger cried and tormented him, yet the deep cold of the river was still in his bones and demanded he seek the warmth of unconsciousness.

Finally, unable to stand it any longer, he reached for his rations. He brought up the pouch from his hidey-hole. Empty. He stared at the pouch. There would be no more food for a week save his skilly in the morning. One day on Saxah Island and already Peter knew he'd die there. Most likely he couldn't last the week with no more to eat than skilly. He might survive if he could beg or steal or bargain for rations from the other convicts, but he'd never survive the cold of the river or have the agility to handle the deadly logs that hurtled down the slide to him. His mind clouded with quick visions of himself being crushed among the weighty lumber, being pressed beneath the foaming river, and then he was blank. Only a deep immovable sorrow worked up from his loins,

pressing through his stomach and chest and invading his throat and eyes.

He didn't notice the convict who sat on his bunk beside him, nor did he seem to understand or move when the man held out the contents of his looted ration pouch.

The man put his hand on Peter's shoulder. "Cheer up, mate. I tol' you this morning not to be eatin' your rations too soon. But you didn't listen, so I thought I'd best show you what comes of a man who don't keep his ration pouch in sight." He pushed the rations into Peter's empty pouch. "I didn't take none. Damn if you didn't tempt me though, but I didn't touch a bloody crumb. Here—take it. Come on, now, mate—it ain't the end yet."

Peter's hand clenched the pouch. Suddenly he leapt from the bunk, wheeling to face the man. "You damned, bloody interfering bastard!" The man guffawed. "So you are still canny!" Peter charged at him, the pouch still clenched in one fist, the other doubled and poised to drive into the man's belly.

Darting lightly from side to side, the smaller man seemed to enjoy Peter's rage. "This be thanks? After I saved your dinner for you?"

Peter lunged at him, missed, and staggered forward on legs that were still numb with cold.

"Come on, mate, I did you a good turn. Don't make me lay you flat on your back for bein' a fool again." The man put his hands out.

Peter, his face twisted with anger, came at him once more.

The man shrugged. "Seems like you're determined to be a donkey's ass, mate." He shouted at another man. The convict met Peter's attack, butting him in

the diaphragm as his friend came from behind Peter hitting his legs.

In seconds Peter was flat on the floor, the small convict sitting on his belly, a knee firmly planted on each arm. His friend stood nearby.

"Quiet now, mate. We don't want the guards in on this. I'm John the Pocket. This is my friend Walter Wheeler. We mean you no harm."

"No harm? Never turn your back on me, bastard."

Wheeler's expression turned ugly. "Don't you talk to John like that. He. fought two men to save your bloody rations for you. I say he keeps 'em."

"Naww, we don't want 'em, Berean. They're yours, but you've got to learn, man, or you'll not survive the month on Sarah. Now, can I let you up without you comin' at me like a crazed bull?"

Peter did poorly with his rations that week and the next. Despite the lessons his two new friends had tried to teach him, the gnawing hunger drove him time and again to the pouch. He found it almost impossible to work as he did and live on the rations he was given. Too often he found himself with nothing to eat at the end of the week. He was constantly hungry, often dreaming of what one bite of fresh meat would taste like. He could hardly remember the taste, and now it seemed terribly important that he should, for he feared he would never taste it again. No fresh meat rations were permitted on Sarah Island. The craving for food became an obsession even greater than his longing to be free.

"By God, Wheeler, we must do something for this donkey's ass before he turns cannibal on us. Did you see how he looked at that plump-bottomed little minister today? I thought the commandant would be wri-tin' to the poor soul's mother tellin' her how her son was et by a vicious convict."

Wheeler and John the Pocket laughed, but it was not all in fun. Beneath their jokes was a serious concern. They stole for Peter and taught him to be one of the lightest-fingered men in the barracks. John bragged that he could steal a man's false teeth between the bites of an apple. That other men went hungry because their rations had been pilfered was no consideration. The three of them stuck together and took care of their own.

Peter didn't realize how important this was until one day in line when he saw a settler slip a piece of tobacco to a convict in front of him. That evening word spread that in exchange for a favor from a guard someone had reported the gift of tobacco. The convict was given fifty lashes and the settler fined.

For a month Peter enjoyed a friendship with John the Pocket and Walter Wheeler. John had told Peter of his life and bragged of being the best pickpocket London had ever known. Walter, the milder of the two, and a worshiper of John, had little to say. As far as Peter could tell, Walter had been a fence for Johns stolen goods, and the two of them had been caught trying to sell the engraved pocket watch of an important lord. Since neither of them could read, they had paid little attention to the inscription, taking only the precaution of trying to sell the jeweled watch to a Dutchman. They had been sentenced and transported together four years ago.

During the interval Peter told them of himself and even dared to tell them of Callie's scarf, and what it meant to him in his dreams. As he had hoped, neither of them laughed. In fact they had envied him the ownership of such a fine talisman.

In the midst of Sarah Island's bleak, brutal life it was good to have these two men to talk and occasionally laugh with. At first Peter listened, then began to

join in, talking about women, places they had been, great exaggerated adventures they had had, successes they had known. To hear John, he had all but had Big Ben in his pocket when caught, and Walter had fenced a king's ransom in jewels. Peter's brewery had grown to the biggest and finest in the world. His fields stretched farther than a horse could walk in a fortnight. Callie became the most beautiful woman ever born, and as faithful as Penelope awaiting the return of Odysseus.

With the companionship of friends, talk of escape and return in triumph, dreams shared and magnified by hope, life on Sarah Island became at least tolerable. It eased the most unbearable ache of all: loneliness.

Peter, John, and Walter managed to get on the same river crew. They talked about it often and knew it was only a matter of time before someone on that crew would be hurt by one of the logs coming off the slide. But they were not prepared for it to happen to one of them.

The three of them stood in the cold river with the other men, shouting ribald remarks to the slide crew as they waited for the first log. The shouts changed from bantering ribaldry to frightened, angry screams as a man at the top slipped and released his log. Not one, but three logs, and the man, lunged down, jamming and tumbling over one another. The men in the water dived for safety. Walter seemed to be stunned, staring at the bloody pulp of the man hurtling down the slide, crushed by the logs. Peter grabbed him by the hair, dragging him away from the plunging logs. When they surfaced there was a telltale, expanding splotch of red staining the river. Peter dived and brought from under the floating logs the body of a convict who had been working the river crew for only