The Burial (15 page)

He called me
kid
. I have said that he did not say much, but then one day, he did.

I heard him clear his gravelly throat and then he said,
Kid, sometimes a feeling can lurk around like a bad smell and after forty-odd years I'm thinking that a feeling must be better out than in. I dunno what it is, maybe it's listening to you, but I reckon there's something in the telling and you know I don't mind a few blue words and I'll keep it clean as I can, but you'll have to bear with me, kid.

I've told you that my jaw was blown clean off and that's why my voice sounds like dry shit hitting a pot. Well, before I was buried a bastard of a man took a piece o'my chin, just like he was biting into a bit of tough steak. I'm not one hundred per cent a bastard—maybe just a bit—and I would have done the same, kid. I was stomping in his paddock where I shouldn't have went. You know what I mean, kid? I mean I had his wife.

So my arse was in the air and he was at the bedroom door and I only knew it 'cause I saw her face and her face told it all. But then her face changed as sudden as that and she lay there ginger as a cat, as if she wasn't guilty and we weren't stark naked in her old man's bed. I tore off the bedclothes, tried to wrap 'em around me, and leapt like a skinned rabbit from that bed, and then her husband smashed my shins with a chair. I fell down onto him so we were in a knot on the floor and I'd lost the sheet by then and my balls were dangling in the air—and I tell you there is no more dangerous feeling—and then the bastard kicked me right there and I wasn't seeing stars, kid, I was seeing planets and I just launched into him and I found his ear, and I bit a piece of it off.

I knew I had the smell of his woman on me so I grabbed his hair and pressed my face into his so we were nose to nose and I said, Man, your woman tasted good!

That was something I shouldn't have said, kid. 'Cause that sent him wild. He locked his teeth around my chin and shook his head like a feral dog and then he spat me out and turned me over and jumped on the back of my legs and he jumped and jumped until he'd broken both my knees. And then he dragged me across that floor and I set my nails right in and clung to the very splinters but he dragged me anyway.

I blacked out then.

And this is the thing: I saw it, kid. It was my own imminent death. It was swift and it was sharp and it was dark and it was complete.

I came to as they loaded me in their cart. They were as silent as bastards and I couldn't see their faces, just the mean cones of their heads, the two of them. Any decent man would have left it at that. He'd broken my knees and crushed my balls. He'd defended his turf well enough. I would have just rolled out of there and dragged myself away and licked my wounds and learnt my lesson and not gone back to another man's wife. But no. This fella was a prick.

They tied me up and drove me all night in their clapped-out wagon and I dunno why they chose this noisy spot, but they dug my grave right here and as some kind of punishment he had her sit on top of me so I wouldn't move and then when he was done digging he handed her a gun and he said, Shoot him in the temple, love. She said, I can't, I can't. But she aimed at my temple anyway. I tell you, that woman was a cat. And would that she had done it right, kid, but she almost clean missed my head and that may have been my second chance at life but she didn't miss me clean enough and she blew off part of my jaw instead.

And she held the gun and seemed to tremble there for a while in shock until the man said, You're not to waste another bullet on that piece of shit.

That's when I started screaming, kid. I said, You bastard! Finish me off. I am not fucken dead!

Would that he had finished me off, kid, so I wouldn't be telling this story today or lying here haunted by what it was I saw when that bastard dragged me across his splintered floor. I know it was my own death that I saw, kid, like you know anything for sure. It was a good clean death. Not this drawn-out shit.

So how did I miss my chance at death, kid? Where's my good clean death after all?

JACK BROWN LAY on the bed in the station hut. There was a bare mattress beneath him and it sank with his weight. He told himself the cell was just like any other room, except for the bars across the windows. He had improved it by turning the lantern right down to a trembling flame, so he could not see the stains on the walls, and he had propped a chair against the metal door, just in case the wind got behind it and locked him in.

On the bed, he emptied out his pockets and found the postmaster's map. It was folded up and raggedy and softened by his own sweat. He drew up his knees and smoothed out the map and noted how many huts they had visited on the north-west arc.

To Jack Brown, each hut had been no more than a self-appointed cell and within them were lonely men whose very faces reminded him of what life could look like without tenderness, without a woman.

Riding from hut to hut, across country that was so familiar, Jessie was everywhere he looked. In each open paddock he could see some version of her rounding up cattle or showing off or making him laugh with some dirty tale she had heard in prison. But then, hut to hut, he felt the conflict within him, a steel trap in his chest that could lock him in its teeth at any minute.

Why had she deceived him?

He knew that in escaping, Jessie had escaped him too. She had broken their pact of waiting. But then the sharp feeling that she had deserted him and left him to take the rap for her crime was matched by another. He wanted, again, to be riding beside her.

He needed to find the truth in it. That would be his only freedom. What seemed clear to him now was that it was not fate—that escaping together was just a fantasy and in reality he only had himself. The only way to find relief from fantasy or disappointment was to forget her, to strike off each memory like he was striking off each pencil-drawn hut from the map.

But how did he do that, when his memories of her were inked all over the landscape itself?

That night Jack Brown did not dream of my mother. He dreamt of Fitz. In the dream he and Barlow were not cutting the bellowing cow out of the barbed wire, they were cutting out Fitz. In the dream it was Fitz who they freed. It was Fitz they watched run limping into the forest.

When Jack Brown woke in the morning he smelt himself and he smelt rank. He found his way to the washroom but he did not like the look of it, the broken mirror, the narrow tub, so he went outside and stripped down in front of the water tank. He splashed water over his body, soaped himself up and rinsed the soap off. He wiped off the water with his hands and felt his skin come alive with the heat of the sun.

Back in the cell, he dressed in fresh clothes then moved to the front of the hut where he found Barlow sitting at the table, lamps and candles burning around him. His hair stood straight up in a greasy pile and there was ink all over his hands, his arms and his face.

Rough night?
said Jack Brown.

Barlow held up his stained fingers in a salute and, without looking at Jack Brown, continued to roll ink onto plates of glass and press his fingers into them. Already there were pages of prints scattered across the table and floor.

It's all coming to the surface, Jack Brown.

Jack Brown's guts began to churn. He feared that after all these days of riding that Barlow was finally going to declare him a suspect and arrest him.

Look here
, said Barlow
. Look at this rise. Do you know there's not another man alive with fingerprints like them?

Jack Brown looked at the prints and the lines and curves of them.

Press your finger onto the page.

Jack Brown froze.

What are you afraid of?

Jack Brown pushed his thumb into the ink and then down onto the page.

It's just a smudge
, said Barlow
. What are you, some kind of spirit child?

Jack Brown looked at his thumb. The skin was marbled with ink.
Pulled too many pots from the fire, Sergeant.

He was relieved when Barlow said,
I need you to hook those thumbs around your horse's reins. I need you to return to the postmaster's hut and pick up a delivery and I need you to do it soon.

Jack Brown was happy to get out of there. He mounted his horse and set off down Old Road. Riding, he could see the earth had begun to separate. Fine cracks revealed themselves across the surface of the road and riding over it was like riding over a patchwork of seams. At the edge of the road, the paddock was golden. He pushed out into it and the grass gave off a clean, fresh smell of heat and spring.

He rode on.

The mountains unfolded and soon he felt with all of his wanting that she would split the summit, come tearing out through the trees and ride determinedly towards him. But she did not.

Riding further into the day he thought he could make her out just ahead of him, and pelted towards her until he realised it was another trick of light and heat and nature.

SOMETIMES A PATH seemed to appear and Jessie could not tell if it was just a depression in the earth or if other men had walked upon it and walked it down. There were spurs and ridges that could send her off on the wrong course and some paths were split in four directions or more so that choosing one seemed to be a test in itself: at the end of each path there would be a certain fate, waiting.

When Jessie did not have the assurance of the sun or the flowers with their sun-pointed heads to navigate by, she camped and waited for night. In the mountains a cloudy day often gave way to a clear night sky and she could always find within it the Southern Cross and below it the first bright star, and she knew that south lay halfway between the foot of the Cross and the bright star, or the distance of her hands outstretched.

Jack Brown had taught her that.

JACK BROWN DID not ride straight to the postmaster's hut. He found himself swinging back towards Fitz's forest and soon enough he was pushing through its tangle of trees. And then when the scrub was too thick he tied up his horse and walked through it.

He sat opposite his tree for a while and considered that facing what remained of Fitz might grow something mad in him, something beyond redemption, but then he thought redemption was just another false promise and he found himself prising back the bark with his knife and pushing his fingers behind it.

A stench seeped out and Jack Brown stepped back and covered his face with his arm. He collected a stick from the ground and prodded the shield of bark from a distance.

The sack was hanging from the knot in the tree, just as he had left it. Jack Brown took a deep breath, leant in and unhooked it.

It was mottled with damp and mould and there was a bright orange fungus growing up the side of it. He tested it with the stick and the stick sank right into it. He untied the rope, and looked inside.

Fitz had lost all form, more swamp than human. For Jack Brown, these were hardly the remains that he had found in the cellar, that he had dragged and stuffed into the tree. This was something else, something that looked like it was dissolving in front of him. Here was some other warped version of nature, disintegrating beyond the normal flow of time.

Jack Brown tied the sack up again. He found a stronger branch and secured the sack to one end with rope. Then he took off his boots and, holding the other end of the branch so the putrid bundle was well away from him, walked silently towards the river and there he filled the sack with stones, climbed up on a ledge and threw it in.

BARLOW 'S BACK WAS killing him.

Alone at the station hut, he could find nothing to take his mind off the pain of it. He had riffled through Jessie's file so many times and he was too distracted to read his periodicals or his books on science. No theorem would numb him. He needed to fix on something tangible, something precise. He began again to prepare glass plates and roll ink across them.

He pressed his fingers onto the plates one by one and stamped them across a clean page as if somehow the repetition of the task might distract him from himself. Then he held them up, compared them again to Jessie's. They were not so different. Fingerprint to fingerprint, she did not seem so far. It was proof to him that she was at last within reach, that he would find her. But not on his own.

He needed Jack Brown.

He pressed his fingers onto the page and then he smeared them across it. At last he heard Jack Brown travelling up the rise, the steady rhythm of his horse, the stretching of stirrups as he dismounted. Jack Brown would have his parcel and, as sure as science, soon there would be some relief from it all, soon everything would be alright.

But it was not Jack Brown. It was just a creature moving outside.

The pain in Barlow's back increased with his waiting. He lay across the table over the smudged and inky pages, weighting his body with his hips, hanging from the edge of it. He swung his hands above his head, swept his fingers over the floor until he felt his spine stretch, the traction of his body.

It brought him no relief.

As the night set in he drank whiskey until he could not walk, he could only crawl. Later he crawled out of the hut and lay on the grass, waiting for Jack Brown. For a moment he felt the life in the stars charging him, sparking him at points, heat and light rushing across his chest, his knees, his groin.

He watched the stars shift against each other and his theorems collapsed together in his mind and he felt the force of himself to be insignificant, and inside or outside himself there was no equilibrium to find.

He fell asleep on the grass in front of the hut and only woke when frost settled upon him like a glassy sheet.

JESSIE FOLOWED A northbound seam to its natural end and its natural end was a boulder. It was clear, just from looking, that Houdini could not pass between the boulder and the cliff face or the drop. And they could not turn back to wind down the narrow ledge they had already walked unless she was intent on suicide or being caught. It was easier, always, to climb with a horse.