The Burial (12 page)

Some of the men began to partner off with the girls. One of the girls took Jack Brown on as her special project and one Saturday night she brought along a friend for him. He thought the friend was attractive enough. She had big green eyes and yellow hair that was cut into a fashionable bob. She called herself a modern woman and she invited him back to her studio flat in Kings Cross and they went out for a picnic and once to a dance and once to the zoo.

For her, a modern woman's best accessory was the hipflask she carried in her handbag. On the ferry ride to the zoo she swilled from the hipflask too many times.
Jack Brown
, she slurred,
I don't care if you're black, white or brindle
, and she stuck her tongue in his ear. He felt so repulsed by her he thought he might prefer to swim across the shark-infested harbour than spend the rest of the day with her.

Aside from that, the city women kept up such a pace Jack Brown did not think there was any use in catching one or keeping one when he knew the city was no place for him anyway.

And so he replied by letter to Fitz's advertisement for an Aboriginal stockman, which he had found pinned up in the foyer of the boarding house. A couple of weeks later he received a letter from Fitz in return containing a hand-drawn map and instructions on how to find his property.

Jack Brown was nineteen years old, and aside from serving in the army and the stock work he had grown up doing on the property where his mother cooked and cleaned, this was his first real offer of employment.

After meeting my mother near the fence line of Fitz's forest he made his way again along the track. Soon, she came bolting past. She rode bareback and slipshod, like a man. She was all bones and her hair whipped up and she raised her arm, a wave and a salute at the same time, and Jack Brown could not have guessed how familiar that sight would become, and how often he would find himself trailing behind her.

BEFORE JACK BROWN appeared at the window of the station hut, Sergeant Andrew Barlow had been standing in the washroom naked except for his coat.

The rain and wind had passed but the hut seemed to hold on to the cold and it shot through Barlow's feet like darts. He had been angling his jaw to the broken mirror, inspecting his shave between the reflection of the mirror and the reflection of the blade. It was as good as he had looked since he arrived there.

When his father proposed the country posting, Barlow had imagined a hut stark on a hill and the station had proved to be not much more than that. On first actual sighting, Barlow wanted to turn back, and if it had not been his father riding beside him, himself a senior sergeant, Barlow would have felt no shame in admitting that of all the challenges of life he did not feel fit for this one in particular and returning to the city as swiftly as his horse could carry him.

But his father had a grip on him. It was the firm grip of guilt and Barlow wanted to redeem himself.

Barlow was an opium addict and his father knew it. The country air and the isolation was thought to be the solution and even Barlow believed that if he could see it through and find something in it to occupy his mind if not his soul, somehow the experience would make the best of him.

As yet, he had no idea what the best of him was.

His father hung around for a week to settle him in. Together they cleaned the place up and restored a garden that was eaten out by rabbits and overgrown with weeds. Mostly the purpose of his father's staying was to keep an eye on Barlow, to make sure that he did not fall back into his old ways. The day before his departure, he told Barlow he was doing him a favour when he searched through his bags and packs and supplies. Finding a stash of vials and syringes in a silver tin, he made Barlow smash them in front of him with a hammer.

It was not that Barlow did not want to be clean, but he had found no surer way to relieve the back pain that plagued him, that came upon him without warning and lasted for days.

By habit and by design, Barlow's mind was nothing if not expansive. He was open to alternatives. He sought them out, and before he left the city for his new posting he met a supple woman from India with a red dot on her forehead who was gathering recruits in an opium den. After Barlow described the particular pain he was in, the woman taught him a series of stretches. Before they fell asleep like a couple of cats on large cushions, they practised the postures together and she assured him they would bring him relief, immediately and in the future.

Barlow took up the routine with enthusiasm but when he demonstrated the series to his father one evening, he was surprised to find that his father became infuriated. He said,
Son, it is undignified for a man to be bending and stretching in that way, and dressed in his pyjamas. If you have to do it, for God's sake do it in private.

When his father finally left Barlow to his own devices at the station hut, Barlow again took up the routine. He performed it every day as the sun came up and again as the sun went down. If he felt any twinge of pain in between these times, he stretched himself out on the table in the station hut and swung his arms over his head and dangled there until he felt each vertebra lifting and the slow relief of it.

After a week or two Barlow's mind was clear and his body felt good. The crowded feeling of the city left him and he found within himself an unoccupied space. It was something he had never known. He turned his attention to methodical tasks and with his full focus he ordered and sorted the hut and delved into the files he had inherited from the former police sergeant.

The post had not been filled for almost a year and the files were layered with dust and crawling with mites. Barlow was unperturbed. He cleaned each file and read it, examining each criminal's headshot in detail and recording each face to memory so he would know them if he saw them, perhaps even on a dark night.

In one of those files Barlow found my mother.

She was the only woman in his files and aside from that her aliases intrigued him:
Jessie Hunt also known as Bell also known as Payne.
She had appeared in court on many charges of horse-rustling, under many different names. He lingered over her file longer than anybody else's, staring at her image, unclipping it from the file, reading and rereading her history and the sergeant's notes. He was disappointed that she no longer had to report to the station every month since her marriage to Fitzgerald Henry. But why was the file still there?

He examined her photograph with his magnifying glass and used the information in front of him to sketch a timeline of her life.

Jessie
, he said,
Jessie, Jessie, Jessie
, as if his words alone would conjure her.

BY THE TIME she was fourteen her name was being chanted by crowds under the Big Top of Mingling Bros Circus. She was the Amazing Miss Jessie. Every night it was the same: Mirkus, the ringmaster, announcing her, Jessie running into the ring, the crowds yelling out,
Miss Jessie! Miss Jessie!
as she launched herself on to the podium. Josephine/Joseph tying her to the Wheel of Fortune, a Caped Man cartwheeling in from the side, drawing his knife and aiming at her while Josephine/Joseph set the wheel spinning.

The Caped Man, knife in hand, would dash around the ring, brandishing his blade in the air as Josephine/Joseph gave chase. When they lassoed him he would not stop running. He would slice the rope with his knife and throw the tail end of it into the crowd, who would be hissing. Josephine/Joseph would run back to the podium to spin the wheel. Then it was like this, always the same: the flung knife, the cackle, the bloodcurdling scream and the crowd whispering,
Did he get her?

He never did.

Josephine/Joseph would untie her and she would cartwheel to a horse; still dizzy from spinning, she would jump neatly onto the horse's back and flip herself into a handstand for a whole lap of the ring.

One night, after the show, as the crowd spilt out of the circus tent, a waif ran beneath the stalls, through the streams of light and dust and columns of shadows. He ran until he reached the end of the row and then, peering under the tent and seeing no one on guard, sprinted to the stables.

When Jessie reached for a clump of hay to feed her horse she grabbed a fistful of the boy's shirt instead. She did not let go of it until she had pulled him right out of the feeder.

He was one of the filthiest creatures she had ever seen. Skinny legs and skinny arms and his head too big for his small shoulders.

Who do you belong to?
she said.

When the boy said nothing she thought him mute. But he was not mute, he was mesmerised. Here was the Amazing Miss Jessie, the star of the show. He had seen her on all the posters.

At last he said,
Miss Jessie
. And then he bowed.

Where is your mother?

I don't have a mother
, he said.
I grew on a tree.

You're not a fruit
, she said.
Of course you have a mother.

I don't
, said the boy. And that was the truth of it.

What's your name then, kid?

My name is Bandy Arrow.

She laughed.
Who named you?

I named myself. I'm a performer, just like you.

Jessie walked him out of the stable and into the light to take a good look at him.

A performer? What can you do?

I can show you my round-offs and turns
, he said.

Jessie watched as he launched his small body into motion. Blond hair like a flame, flame over feet, around and around he went and he did not stop until she told him to.

That was it. She was fourteen and he was seven and Bandy Arrow became my mother's pet, her sparrow. When the troupe travelled from town to town they sat together on the back pole wagon. Their legs hung over the edge, way off the ground. It was their job to watch for horses that strayed from the procession. From the back of the wagon their view was wide and when a horse swayed out into open country, they would launch off the wagon and chase it down, pounding the ground with their bare feet, feeling the grass against their bare legs, without a care between them.

SERGEANT ANDREW BARLOW thought of himself as a Man of Science. It was more than just his fondness for scientific props, vials and test tubes or his various experiments in preparing opium. For him, it alleviated the pressure that was in him. It was the inherent discipline of it, the formulas, and he regarded it as another man might regard his religion. Barlow believed in gravity. Gravity helped him make sense of things. Every night as the sky opened up he knew it was gravity that was keeping the planets in orbit. And the days that he felt as though he might just float off the earth, he reminded himself of the fact of gravity. It consoled him.

Riding through Fitz's forest, it was gravitational forces that Barlow had in mind. From his study of Newton's
Principia
, Barlow knew well enough the pull that large planetary bodies had on each other. But until now, it had not concerned him what force humans, in their distance or closeness, might exert on each other.

He was thinking of my mother.

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of bellowing. He caught up to Jack Brown and they rode on the track side by side, listening out.

The sound was disorienting until they found the source, a cow with its head caught in Fitz's barbed-wire fence. They swung down from their horses and Barlow pulled a small pair of pliers from his saddlebag.

Jack Brown looked surprised at Barlow's initiative and he held the cow's head while Barlow cut the wire from around it, and then they both stood back as the cow scrambled to its feet and took off down the track.

They rode out into Fitz's paddock, Barlow wondering how all of it—himself, Jack Brown, Jessie, a bellowing cow—could fit into an ordered universe of perfect pull and perfect force.

But arriving at Fitz's, Barlow was reminded of the catch in Newton's theorem, his
deus ex machina
. It looked to him as though some furious hand had swept in and in one violent blow crushed the house.

With Jack Brown's help, Barlow raked through the house, examined every surface. There were footprints leading in and out and Barlow concluded that a day or so after the fire the place had likely been ransacked, and if there were ever bodies to be found there, they had been carted away with the kitchen sink.

Life in the valley was grim. The place was full of desperate men and thieves. By Jack Brown's telling, many of them were ex-soldiers who had been given plots of land, but they were not farmers and they did not know the land or how to survive it.

In terms of finding Fitz or Jessie there was little for Barlow to go on. The only way he knew how to approach the investigation was scientifically and methodically. He would begin by visiting every hut in the valley. He would piece together a trail. He could not guess, yet, what would be at the end of it.

It was Jack Brown's idea that they ride to the postmaster's hut, as the postmaster was the only person in the valley who knew what places were inhabited and what places were not. Arriving there, Barlow talked the postmaster through the fire and the disappearance of Jessie and Fitz. The postmaster seemed inspired and he began to make an elaborate drawing of individual huts. He had even begun to draw rooftops and chimneys when Barlow said,
Thank you for your artistry, sir, but an x on the page will do well enough to mark a hut.

But Sergeant
, said the postmaster,
I am trying to show you that these are the huts I have delivered to and these are the huts I have not—the ones that in all my time have never received a letter or a telegram. And, sir, you can imagine what kind of man that is. Not used to visitors, I would say. But the huts with the chimneys are the ones that I have seen lately blowing smoke. So you know there is something live in there and will perhaps be cautious and prepared in approaching the others that may not.

May not what?
said Barlow, confused by the postmaster's explanation.