Salt Creek (7 page)

‘He is important,' I said. ‘The most important.' I had never thought of it, in fact, and wondered now. ‘He must be wise, he and the queen.'

He picked up a knight – ‘This one is good' – and he lifted it high and began shifting it from place to place, trying out its moves as it was permitted as if imagining the nimble leaps and turns of something real. ‘You think you know what it will do, but you can't know.'

‘Unpredictable,' I said. ‘That's the word.'

I watched him absorb it. ‘Unpredictable,' he repeated.

‘We have a government too, men who make decisions about laws – rules, that is,' I said. I had in mind Papa and his desire for us to impart civilization. ‘And bishops who know about God and the church and religion, the things we sing about on Sunday. Do you have people like that?'

‘What are rules?' Tull asked.

‘The things people may and may not do.'

‘Oh yes. We have that too. A
tendi
.'

‘I did not know.'

‘We don't eat some birds.'

‘Why not? Is the taste bad?'

‘No. They make us sick. Boys, like me. Men can eat them. Other things too, some animals.'

‘Which animals?'

‘I don't remember.'

‘We have so many rules I can't remember them all. About manners and clothes and respect. People may not kill other people, or take things from them. That is stealing. We may not steal. And other things too.'

‘Take what?'

‘Well, cattle – kill and eat them, that is. And we may not take your possessions.' I could not think what they had that we might wish for. One black had a shell necklace that I admired. I had heard people in Adelaide liked the carving on their weapons and collected them. ‘Your spears and clubs, for instance. But you can sell them, if you like.'

‘Fish? Kangaroos? You kill and eat them.'

‘They are wild. They are on our land, but you may eat them Papa says.'

‘You can eat them too?'

‘Us? May we eat them? Why ever not? Anyone may, I suppose, if they are passing along the track. It would be polite to ask, but I daresay people would not bother even if we made it a rule. How would they know that they could not do something here that they do freely elsewhere?'

Tull appeared troubled, but I could not explain it better. The king just was; our cattle and the land they grazed upon were ours; weapons and nets and canoes were theirs; game was anyone's. Tull said nothing more on the subject but reapplied himself to the chessboard.

I knew of Tull's progress, if not its scope, but it was Fred's work that I remember more clearly. There was a purposeful quality in what he did. In the afternoons he must help on the run; the work of building fences and other structures – the dairy, the storehouse, the washroom – never ended, and at other times there were the cows to be herded and milked, the cheese to be made. But he made the morning his, completing his schoolwork quickly – well enough not to be found wanting – and then sat behind the ramparts of his materials, among them Mr Angas's book about his visit to South Australia. I took it up to reacquaint myself with it. The pictures of the Coorong and the lakes were like and also not like the things I had seen. The people were not like any natives I ever saw on our land. They appeared as small and as meek as tamed animals, which could not have been further from the truth, as if they had nothing better to do than sit there, as if they spent their lives waiting for fate to have its way with them. Tull didn't like the book. He had looked at it once and glanced at us while he was doing it and put it aside with distaste. The camps were rendered with more realism. One was quite like the encampment that I stumbled upon with Skipper: spears rest against a wurly's roof, pressing into the grasses, and there is a big striped club on the other side, and clean picked whalebones piled neatly by the entrance. In the centre is the fire with its smoke rising straight. A still day, then: a rarity.

Fred said, ‘See how his plants are not correct? The leaves are ridiculous, like wool or string. They are like nothing I've seen here. And the colours are wrong, the light is wrong, the ground is wrong.'

‘But see the smoke in his fires. How does he do that?'

Fred took the book and held it close. ‘It is quite well done,' he conceded. ‘But the plants—'

‘They're not as good as yours.'

‘No, they're not.'

There was something similar in the pictures, though. Fred drew the plant, not the glass that held it or the kitchen or anything else that lay nearby. Mr Angas's drawings showed one or two natives or a detail of an encampment, but there was a smothering stillness in them. Even the smoke appeared more like a tuft of fleece than any other thing when I looked at it more closely. The natives were as fixed as pinned butterflies, for display only, when the space they lived in was vast and the sky without limit. They flowed through it as sure and inevitable as gravity, as if the space itself were a living thing and part of them and they part of it. I do not know how to explain it more.

Watching Fred, I began to wonder if it was something other than interest and curiosity alone that drove his actions. He was so purposeful in what he did. Self doubt did not occur to him; he was able to look only at the thing, the task before him. I wished that I could do the same. My own self was mysterious to me. Oh, I knew what I did, but other than that I was invisible to myself. Of course there was a mirror in the parlour and another hanging over the washbasin outside for Papa and the boys to tend their whiskers; I knew my appearance. It was not that, but that I did not see or know the difference that I made, the space I occupied in this world. I was no more than a phantasm flickering past people. I wished to know of what like and substance I was. I could see the work of translating from three dimensions to two, but could not understand how it was done. I could not feel it in my brain, though I could feel how to calculate the area of a leaf or the angle at which it branched from a stem or the regularity of its branching. There was so much else to do: churning the butter and cooking and cleaning and washing and planting and cultivating, and Addie and Albert to be helped with their lessons, and Mary to be managed if Mama could not.

But Tull: I did not think of him until I paused in my playing one evening to search through the music in the piano stool for something ‘more melodious – no, more celebratory!', as Papa had requested. He was in good spirits. The cheeses made in spring had been sent to the market in Adelaide through an agent at Wellington and had fetched a good price, though the cost of transporting it had been higher than Papa liked. Since I had been practising exercises from Mama's old Clementi (
Introduction to the Art of Playing on the Piano Forte
)
,
anything would fulfil his request.

‘I don't know what to think,' Mama murmured to Papa. She clicked her knitting needles and jerked some wool free. ‘He's a native.'

‘It is your fine teaching and your gentle manner,' Papa said, with a look of tender regard. ‘You have a civilizing influence, my dear. On us all.' He rested his hand on her cheek and Mama rubbed against it a little, as a cat might. The warm summer had improved her spirits, and we hoped it would last despite the evenings of late autumn drawing in.

Noticing me, Papa pulled his hand away and Mama became herself again. She shook her head. ‘It's not that. The progress he's made. It's not winter yet. You would scarcely believe it. He is something quite out of the ordinary. What are we doing? He will be a misfit forever. What need does he have of knowledge?'

‘He will be – he is – a bridge, as I hoped from the beginning.'

‘There will be no one for him.'

‘As to that we cannot judge. We must trust in the Lord to provide.'

Evidently Papa's curiosity was piqued. At breakfast next morning he announced that he would come home early that day, before we had packed away our books for lunch. ‘And then you may all show me a little of your learning.'

I resolved to do something to make him proud. In the event I didn't know how. My hand in dictation and composition was as untidy as ever, and though my equations were orderly enough for anyone with understanding, Papa was not mathematically disposed and his eyes drifted unfocused across my work. ‘Very good, Hester,' he said, already looking past me, and that was all. He tweaked Addie's curls. ‘Now, Miss, I hope you are attending to your Mama.' His tone suggested that he thought it very likely she was not and he did not mind, which made Addie giggle. Fred's map of the run, the location of its sucks – the freshwater springs that formed natural pools – and its hills and tracks made him pause and stroke his beard and rest his fingertips on Fred's shoulder. But this was just by way of arriving at Tull's side.

Tull had been tense all morning. He held his pen too tight for neatness and seemed on the edge of running. It was months since he began to attend our school, and not once had Papa visited while our lessons were in progress.

Mild and quiet as could be Papa drew up a chair and sat alongside him. Tull darted a glance at him. ‘You read well, Mrs Finch says. I wondered if you would read a little for me. Anything you care to.'

Tull gazed towards Mama.

‘You may read from today's dictation, Tull,' she said.

He drew his slate close and cleared his throat, and began. His voice was not quite smooth; he halted at some words – ‘void' and ‘heaven' gave him some trouble – and lost his place once, before putting his finger beneath the line and continuing: ‘And God saw the light and that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.'

We all stopped to listen. We would have in any case, out of the strangeness of Papa's presence, but it was the surprise of watching Tull too, as if a new person had come among us. We knew that he could read, but we had not heard him read so much or so clearly. Mama was in the habit of drawing him off to one side. I had thought she was sparing his feelings at appearing ignorant among us. We continued to stare when he finished, which made him fidget and rub a hand on his breeches.

‘Well, well, Mrs Finch is right. You read very well, very well indeed,' Papa said in a quiet sort of voice. His face was more eloquent – rapt, as if he had witnessed a miracle – and I had to look away.

‘Well? He reads better than Stanton,' Fred said.

Addie snorted. ‘
Albert
reads better than Stanton.'

Mama pressed her lips together and frowned and shook her head, and said, ‘You do read well, Tull.'

Tull looked about in confusion. He had no idea what he had done. He could not know that Papa had never before looked at me or at any one of us so.

Papa gave three small nods and swept his hair back from his brow in a curiously youthful gesture, as if had a hat been there he might have tossed it into the air. ‘And God said, Let there be light: and there was light,' he said.

‘What does it mean?' Tull asked.

‘It's about the beginning of the world. Creation,' Papa said. ‘About knowledge and sin. How we fell from God's grace. Not that bit – that's further along. The part you read is just night and day and how they came to be.'

‘Oh,' Tull said, looking back at the words and running his eyes over them again, slowing more than once, and frowning, in no way enlightened. Papa couldn't see that.

We were spared further encomiums by Skipper's warning bark. Papa went outside and we followed, and it proved to be two troopers riding down to the house: a great novelty. We watched him walk towards them.

Seeing them, Tull slipped back behind us all. ‘Why are they here?' he said.

‘How would we know?' Addie said. ‘Papa will find out and tell us.'

‘Are they the same ones? Does Mr Finch know them?'

‘The same as what?'

‘As a long time ago.'

‘Whatever do you mean?' I said. ‘We've never seen troopers here.'

Papa had reached the gate and they began to speak. New people, who I had not seen for more than a year, appeared stranger by far than any native painted and carrying weapons and wearing fur and grass and seaweed and other things so connected by colour and substance to what was around us. The troopers' clothes were blue and their buttons bright.

‘A long time ago. People, blackfellas, saw men like that with Mr Finch.'

‘Troopers, do you mean, with Papa?'

‘They know his hat.' His hand inscribed a curve above his head – Papa's gaucho's hat.

‘Papa's? I suppose it's not the only one of its kind,' I said. ‘The man with the hat, what did he do?'

‘He was there with troopers when some blackfellas were killed.' He nodded towards the troopers. ‘Two.' He circled a hand about his head and drew tight on an imaginary line and jerked it up and his head flopped to one side.