Joan Makes History (9 page)

Burchett had come to this dry land as a convict, in rags and scowls, and there were those who said you could still see the marks of the lash on his back and the scars of the fetters on his ankles. He had risen in the world, though: he had had a doting and prosperous spouse who had followed him to the Antipodes, and by the judicious application of cash to various points of the penal system had freed Burchett within a year. Freed, he had never looked back: he and Mrs Burchett had never been folk to put sentiment above the prospects of prosperity, so they had stayed on here and wheedled a grant of land out of those in charge of such things.

From having been one of us, Burchett had a nasty way with those in his power. He was a man with a mouth like a slit in leather, a man quite lacking the gift of the gab, but his good lady could find a way with words when it was waste with peas that had to be spoken of, or the scouring of some rotten vessel or other, and had a voice like a rasp for such moments.

Burchett, with his watch chain and his bushy whiskers, stood watching as we laboured for him. He stood in gleaming boots pointing and shouting, supervising the erection of stone columns for his lions—all the way from England, and an exact replica
of those on the gates of Lord Dover of Marchmont—to sit on either side of the iron gates. He stood watching the sweat of his assignees, his expirees, his emancipists: he stood legs astraddle, exchanging a few words with other men in whiskers about the Old Country, for all the world as if he had not come here in those foul ships at the pleasure of the Crown. With his neighbours, who did not ask too many searching questions about origins, Burchett became nostalgic for roast beef and fogs. They dreamed, all those men, of making this land look like the old one, and tried to ignore the fact that plum pudding in December brought on the heatstroke, and that the barbarous screeching birds had no respect for the British flag, but would rip it to shreds if they got the chance.

The yellow blocks rose shout by shout, and when the columns stood with their lions in place beside the heavy iron gates, there was no mistaking that this piece of dirt, barricaded behind such stone and iron, belonged to someone. The wives of the neighbours came then, and stood about while servants held their horses, gesturing about rose gardens and arbours,
and over there, a lily pond.
After the fine curved stone steps were built to replace the humble wooden ones, men presented ladies with elbows to help them up to the verandah, and at the top they turned to admire everything, and tried not to pant under the silk and whalebone. The shadows of parasols hid cheeks flushed with exertion under a foreign sky. They departed again on their meek horses, calling out to each other about sundials and goldfish, before the flies could discover a way to penetrate their shining sweat-wet silk.

I, Joan, was there, but not in silk; I was one of those who had hopes of better things in the future, but in the meantime I had to bend over washtubs and kitchen fires, and pluck fowl which
others would eat, because I did not have much choice. My destiny, at least for the time being, was to bide my time, and my days and cold nights by the kitchen hearth were spent in the company of various folk I would not have chosen for companions.

Sid was a servant and lag like myself, but was as bossy as if he thought himself my better. Sid was a teller of tall tales, tales of paradise in the interior of this land, where herds of wild cattle stood still to be slaughtered, and trees dropped succulent foreign fruit into your hands. Closer to home he had tales with which he hoped to frighten me, of snakes as big as your arm—or was it that they could take your arm off in their jaws?—up in the hillsides of bush that watched over us.

Sid was a man of bad teeth and tall tales which were not even funny, not tall enough to titillate.
You are too short in your tale, Sid,
I had shrieked at him once, after some far-fetched boast or other, and he went white, then blotched red, thinking I had spied on him in a private moment and was disparaging his privates. While he blushed and blotched I watched, and could see in my mind's eye his sad worming thing shamed in the sunlight, as clearly as if I had surprised him in the bushes with it in his warty hand. He was a man who fancied himself to have the gift of the gab, had fancied himself as a fancy man, and a fine one for pulling the wool over any woman's eyes with a tale of starving kiddies, or a get-rich-quick scheme involving cash invested into Sid's grimy hand. But he was inept, a cackler, a fool, and Sid had gabbed once too often and too foolishly, and had been presented with the gift of a long voyage to the South Seas and a few years of pease and salt pork.

Will was a young man like a damper gone wrong, with tiny creases of features on a white face that looked as though it would
take on a dent if you pressed it with your finger. Will did the horses, and was simple, and not particularly willing, except to champ his way through any kind of victuals, and sit with a slack dribbling grin listening to gabby Sid.

I did not like them, and they did not care for me: their eyes flickered over my face, noting every pockmark, every wrinkle, every infelicity of feature, and with each one they loathed me more. My ugliness had saved me many a carnal experience I had no desire for, so I had no argument with my ugly face, but I had spent much profitless time in my life longing to be elsewhere, or someone else altogether, and there had even been days when it had seemed preferable to be any stubble-jawed leering man than a woman as plain as a frying pan. At such times I knew I would spend my days being shouted at by angry people who, being more beautiful, should have been kinder.

Burchett and his good lady had their land, their servants, their pretensions to glory: they congratulated themselves that, thanks to them, civilisation had come to this valley. Civilisation was fine stone houses with lions and sundials, it was legs of mutton and tumblers of rum and water, and it was solid fences that left no doubt at all about ownership. All day the valley was filled with the hollow knock of axes against wood as another bit of postand-rail went up around another square of dirt: a fence gave a man like Burchett the courage to puff himself up and become righteous about thieves and robbers.

By whom he chiefly meant the blacks, of course: the blacks who came to the kitchen door from time to time, grinning in their saucy way and cadging a bit of sugar or tea or flour, exotic delicacies to them. They did not understand about fences, or owning things, and they did not have to labour mightily with
hoes to extract a bit of nourishment from the soil, and we, in our unnecessary layers of clothes and our frowning worries about everything, were figures of some fun to them.

They had been here long before us, and had lived here for who knows how long without any assistance from sundials, lily ponds or stone lions, and seemed to have managed without two sets of themselves, one in chains and one in silk. These folk seemed to have managed, in fact, with no more paraphernalia than one or two carefully chosen sticks to throw or dig with, and with this elementary equipment they did what we could not: they did all right from this unfriendly landscape.

What did they find here to eat, those skinny black folk, in these empty-looking hillsides of nothing in particular? What were they feeding on in the nights, that made them laugh so much? I knew they did not recognise pease as food, which personally I saw as one more sign of their intelligence. We knew about the wallabies, thrown in great chunks onto their fires, hair and all, and once or twice I had felt the juices gush into my mouth, catching a whiff on some cold evening of the smell of singed wallaby hair and roasting flesh over embers. They were generous folk, and sometimes offered us the bleeding flesh, but we were haughty and shy of their generosity.

It was not always wallaby or possum: I had seen them returning from the hunt with small dead creatures—lizards, things like rats—that they had tucked into the belts around their hips. The bark trays they carried were sometimes full of clam-like things from somewhere—we in our skirts and aprons could never find such delicacies—and there were other times when I had peeked into their trays and seen grubs, fat white caterpillars, bits of berry and roots and the unappetising-looking stems of some
white plant. I had tried pointing and mouthing and miming the actions of eating, but they were too clever to understand, and only laughed with their fine teeth and shouted to each other and laughed all the more.

What could a toad-white invader, spotted from too many pease and skinny from this lean life, do then, but show her own bad yellow teeth, laughing back? I saw them watch my mouth and its rotten teeth, saw them watch my grey face wrinkle when I laughed, and they called out to each other and laughed behind their hands, looking at me sideways as I had looked sideways at the dwarf and the bearded lady at St Alban's with my beau George, before everything had gone wrong. I had watched their deformities with just this askance horror and just this kind of smile, though I had not had the good manners, as these folk did, to hide my emotions behind my hand.

They were feckless folk, and for their cheeriness the builders of fences accorded them nothing but contempt and the suspicion that they were not as guileless as they seemed. If a sheep was found killed and thrown on one of their fires, or if a blanket went missing, Burchett grew purple with outrage, and small bands of men went up into the hillsides with guns over their shoulders and retribution on their minds.

Our Burchett was long on retribution, and relished a bit of punishment. Of a Sunday, after the thin hymns had been sung, and the Lord of fences and justice had been invoked, Burchett got down to the business of judging and meting out punishment. Burchett sat on his rock, with a few sacks protecting his bottom from the chill. He judged, and I judged too, sitting on a tuft of wet grass watching his meaty face catching the light in an unappetising way.

My judgment on him was that he was the kind of person a new country did not need, in spite of his ability to
open up the land
and
make something of it,
and
bring the wilderness to heel,
and all the other dubious things the assistant governor had praised him for, laying the foundation stone for Burchett's square house. Burchett sat solemn on his sacks, and beyond the tiny patches of civilisation down here on the river flat, this country hummed and ticked under the sun, the hillsides all around us shivering with gums and revealing cliffs, caves, tumbled grey and yellow rock that had no time for Burchett and his judgments, or the rest of us pasty-cheeked aliens. Birds knew what we were, and even Burchett was forced to delay his ugly words while something jeered from a tree.

But spring was in the air now, and after the judging that morning I could not bear the cheerless muddle of Burchett's empire any longer. After the morning's judgment, even the dread of the birching Burchett administered to his females was not enough of a threat to stop me escaping for an hour or two. After dinner was done, and those who had had enough to eat were dozing it off, and those who had not were dreaming of loaves of good bread and slabs of rare beef, I slipped out of the house and up into that strange hillside that towered over all our puny activities in the valley.

I clambered up the hillside, out of sight of our little muddied patch of civilisation, into a sweet dry smell of leaves and sun on stone. It was what they were calling the bush, and in spite of flies it was not such a terrible hell on a smiling blue day such as this was, with winter and pease behind me and the prospect now of a fresh carrot soon, or a mouthful of cress. Even this grudging grey landscape had softened enough to throw a few
tiny spiky flowers out of some of the bushes: there was a purple one like an outlandish sweet pea, and a red one with a small alluring throat. I sat on a rock and listened to the echoes as Sid called to me to complete some dreary task of drudgery, but I soon tired of his shouts, picked up my skirts, and wandered out of range of their unfriendly voices, climbing past platforms of soft stone and down into the gully of ferns on the other side.

Sid had told of snakes and spiders in the gully of ferns, but it was sweet there with the new spring sun slanting in as if it had just found this place to warm with its fingers, the ferns were jewels of green, there were pillows of moss on stones, and a domesticated plink from water dripping off a bit of rock into a pool somewhere. Sid of the tiny personals had boasted of snakes, but what I found as I blundered and marvelled was a person, dark brown, naked, wild of eye, female, in anguish.

She had known I was there long before I had seen her, and gave me no more than a rolling white-eyed glance from her streaming face as she hunched over herself, keening among the ferns and the trickling water. I stopped short, feeling my skirt fanned out behind me, trapped on some thorn or other, and felt my lunch rise bile-like into my throat as I watched this metallic female coil over herself and retch, choking and bringing up long threads of yellow spit. She held her belly with both hands, hugging it, stilling it, crying in pain and something worse, grief and loss, and fell to her knees, still embracing her round brown belly. Then I saw that the gleam and shine on her thighs was not just the polished gleam of her skin, but liquid of the thick kind. I saw now that it could only be thick painful blood, oozing out from between her thin legs and streaming down the skin, although
with trembling horrified hands, wailing, she tried to keep inside her what was determined to come out.

I had seen nothing of this kind before, and was myself undefiled by the lust of any man, being lucky in the ugliness of my face, and the strength of my arms in fighting off the clamours and blandishments of men. But I knew what must be happening to this dark woman, and although I was helpless and afraid in this sombre gully, not sweet any more but hushed as if appalled, I knew I must approach the centre of this terrible event, and share it in whatever clumsy way I could.
It is all right,
I said and kept saying as I approached her.
Do not despair, and God is with you and will grant you another.
It comforted me to know that she could not understand the words, so I did not have to try to get them right, I needed only to speak to her fear and pain, of others near, of sympathy, of the caring of one stranger for another in travail.