The Potato Factory (64 page)

'G'warn then, Mr Strutt, tell us the one about the woman and the stuffin' o' leaves!' one of the prisoners asked one night when they'd moved from Richmond Gaol, and were accommodated at the out station in the bush.

They were sitting around a fire, Ikey seated next to the always silent Billygonequeer. Billy appeared not to listen to or even understand these horror stories. Instead he sat on his haunches with his back turned to the fire, and seemed more interested in the sound of the wind in the gum trees and the call of the frogs from a nearby stream.

This stream ran into a small wetland and Billygonequeer seemed to take an unusual interest in the frogs which resided there. Every once in a while he would cup his hands to his mouth and precisely imitate a call, though at a slightly deeper pitch. Whereupon all the frogs would grow suddenly silent. Then he would carry on in a froggy language as though he were delivering an address, pause, then deliver a single, though somewhat different note, and the frogs would continue their croaking chatter.

At first this was seen by the men as a great joke. But Billygonequeer would continue in earnest conversation in frog language until the gang got so used to his nightly routine of croaking and ribet-ribet-ing with nature that they took no more notice than if a loud belch or fart had taken place among one of their number.

'Oh aye, the woman with leaves, that be a most pleasin' hunt,' Strutt chuckled in reply. 'The women be the worst. They'll scratch your eyes out soon as look at you.' Strutt stroked his beard as though reviewing all the details of the tale before he began. 'There be three of us, Paddy Hexagon, Sam O'Leary and yours truly, and we's huntin' kangaroo in the Coal River area when we seen this gin who were pregnant like. "Oi!" we shouts, thinkin' her too fat to make a run for it, and five pound in the bounty bag if you please and very nice too! And if the child be near to born, another two for what's inside her belly.' He paused and the men laughed and one of them, a wit named Cristin Puding, known of course as 'Christmas Pudding', made a customary crack.

'That I needs to see! A government bounty man what pays two pound for what's not yet come outside to be properly skinned and cured!'

'Well we shouts again,' Strutt continued, casting a look of annoyance at Puding, for he did not wish him to steal even the smallest rumble of his thunder, or tiny scrap of the laughter yet to come. 'And she sets off, waddlin' like a duck and makin' for the shelter o' some trees not twenty yards away. She's movin' too, movin' fast for the fat black duck she's become.' This brought a laugh, for the gang had heard it often enough and were properly cued to respond.

'We sets off to get to her, but the grass 'tween her and us be high and she be into the trees. By the time we gets there she ain't nowhere to be seen. High 'n low we searches and we's about to give it away when we hears a cry up above. We looks up and there she be, up fifty feet or more in the branches of a gum tree, well disguised behind the leaves and all. How she gone and got up in her state I'm buggered if I knows. It were no easy climb.'

The road gang grew silent and even Billygonequeer ceased making his frog sounds.

'There she be, high up in the fork o' the tree and, by Jaysus, the child inside her is beginnin' to be borned! She's gruntin' somethin' awful, snuffin' and snoofin' like a fat sow and then it's a screamin' and a caterwaulin' as the head and shoulders come to sniff the world outside! "Here's sport for all!" Sam O'Leary, me mate, shouts. "We'll wait this one out!"'

'Wait this one out!' Cristin Puding shouted, turning to the others. 'Get it? Wait this one
out!'
But the other prisoners hushed him fast, anxious for the story to continue.

'Well, you'll not believe it,' Strutt continued, once again ignoring Puding, 'though I swear on me mother's grave it be true! Out come the bloody mess. The child's got the birth cord twisted round its neck and stranglin' him, only later it turns out to be a her, a little girl, and it's hangin' itself in the air, and the black gin's tryin' to hold onto the cord, but it's slippin' through her hands. "Five shilling to him what shoots it down first!" Paddy Hexagon shouts.'

Strutt stopped suddenly and rocked back on the log he'd sat on and then began to chuckle softly.

'Well you never seen such a loadin' and firin' and missin' and, all the time, the cord stretchin' longer and longer with the black woman holdin' on to it at her end and screamin' blue murder! Then Paddy takes a bead and fires and the little black bastard explodes like a ripe pumpkin! There be blood rainin' down on us! Jaysus! I can tell you, we was all a mess to behold. "Bastard! Bitch! Black whore!" O'Leary shouts at the gin screamin' and sobbin' up in the tree.' The foreman laughed again. 'His wife just made him a new shirt and now it be spoiled, soaked in Abo's blood! Paddy and me, we damn near carked we laughed so much!'

He paused, enjoying the eyes of all the men fixed upon him. ' "You'll pay fer this ya black bitch!" O'Leary shouts upwards at her, shakin' his fist. Then he takes a careful shot. Bullseye! He hits the gin in the stomach. But she don't come tumblin' down, instead she starts to pick leaves from the tree and stuff them in her gut, in the hole what O'Leary's musket's made. We all shoot, but she stays up, and each time a shot strikes home she spits at us and stuffs more leaves where the new holes be. There we all be. Us shootin' and her stuffin' gum leaves and screamin' and spittin', the baby lyin' broke on the ground. It were grand sport, but then I takes a shot and hits her in the head, dead between the eyes, and she come tumblin' down and falls plop, lifeless to the ground.'

The men around the overseer clapped and whistled. Only Ikey and Billygonequeer remained silent.

Ikey turned and spat into the dark, thankful that Billygonequeer would not have understood a word of the foreman's grisly tale. Then someone threw a branch on the embers, and the dry leaves crackled and flared up and in the wider circle of light cast by the fire Ikey saw that tears were flowing from Billy's dark eyes. Large silent tears which ran onto the point of his chin and splashed in tiny explosions of dust at his feet. The fire died back to normal, and in the dark Ikey reached out and touched Billy's shoulder and whispered softly.

'You
got
to learn to be like us, Billygonequeer!' Then he added, 'Not like them. Jesus no! Like a Jew. I'll teach you, my dear. You could be a black Jew. All you got to learn is, when you've got suffering you've got to add cunning. Suffering plus cunning equals survival! That be the arithmetic of a Jew's life!'

Billygonequeer turned slowly and looked directly at Ikey, sniffing and wiping the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand.

'You good pella, Ikey,' he said, his voice hoarse and barely above a whisper. Then, 'You gib me name, Ikey!'

Ikey looked momentarily puzzled. 'You've already got a name, my dear. It ain't much, but it serves as good as most.'

Billygonequeer shook his head. 'Like Ikey. Name same like white pella.'

'Oh, you wants a proper name? Is that it, Billy?' He pointed to the men around the fire. 'Like them pella? Puding, Calligan, Mooney? Name like so?'

Billygonequeer nodded and smiled, his sad, teary face suddenly lighting up.

Ikey considered for a moment. After promising to turn Billygonequeer into a Jew he thought to give him a Jewish name, but then changed his mind. It would take too much explanation and might get Billygonequeer into even more trouble.

'William Lanney!' he said suddenly. It was the name of a carpenter mechanic who owed Ikey five pounds from a bet lost at ratting, a debt Ikey now knew he would never collect. 'Will-ee-am Lan-nee,' Ikey repeated slowly.

'Willeeamlanee!' Billygonequeer said in a musical tone as though it were the sound of a bird cry.

'No.' Ikey held up two fingers. 'Two words. William. Lanney.'

Billygonequeer was not only a dab hand at mastering frog calls, for he seemed now to grasp the pronunciation of his new name quite easily, 'William Lanney... William Lanney,' he said, with tolerable accuracy.

Ikey laughed. 'Good pella, Mr William Lanney!'

Billygonequeer stretched out and touched Ikey's face as though he was memorising his features through the tips of his long, slender fingers. 'You good pella, Ikey! Much, much good, pella!' He tested his new name. 'William Lanney!'

It was time for the evening lock up. The prisoners were led to their huts, mustered, and then each was manacled to his bunk and all locked in for the night, except for Billygonequeer, who was manacled and chained to a large old blue gum to sleep the night in the open.

At dawn Ikey wakened as the javelin man, the trusted prisoner in charge, entered the hut and called over for the man to come and unlock his shackles so that he might go outside to take a piss.

Ikey walked out into the crisp dawn. Above him, where the early sunrise touched the top of the gum trees, he could hear the doves cooing. When he'd emptied his bladder Ikey strolled over to the tree where Billygonequeer had been chained for the night. Here he stopped in surprise. The shackles, still fixed in their locks, lay upon the ground, but Billygonequeer was missing.

Ikey stood for a moment not fully comprehending. He wondered if Billygonequeer might have already risen, though it was customary to unchain him last of all. Then he noticed that the manacles and shackles had not been opened, and that there were bloodstains on the inside surfaces.

Ikey felt a great ache grow such as he had not felt before. A deep heaviness which started somewhere in his chest, and rose up and filled his throat so that he was scarcely able to breathe. He could hear his heart beating in his ears, his head seemed for a moment to float, and he was close to fainting. He stood very still, and he could hear the burble of water flowing over rock, and the wash of the wind in the leaves above him. Ikey, the most solitary of men, now felt more completely alone than ever before.

'May Jehovah be with you, Billygonequeer,' Ikey said, the words hurting in his throat as he spoke to the chains which lay unopened in the beaten grass where his friend had last lain. Then he began to rock back and forth and at the same time to recite the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Hot tears rolled silently down his cheeks and disappeared into his scraggly beard as the words of the ancient prayer frosted in the cold morning air.

And may he walk continually in the land of life, and may his soul rest in the bond of life.

Then he leaned against the smooth, cool bark of the gum tree and sobbed and sobbed. High above him in the silver gum trees he could hear the blue doves calling to their lost partners.

Imprisonment is intended to break the spirit, to render harmless those who are thought to be harmful. Such is the human condition that it will endure the brutal lash and the bread and water of society's pious outrage, but is finally broken by the relentless boredom of prison life. The blankness of time, the pointless repetition, the mindless routines undertaken in a bleak and purposeless landscape addles the brain and reduces a person to whimpering servility. Humans best survive when they are given purpose; a common enemy to defeat, revenge to wreak or a dream to cling to.

Mary survived her sentence because she had a dream. She saw her incarceration in the Female Factory as her apprenticeship out of the hell of her past. Henceforth, she determined that she would be judged by her competence and not doomed by the circumstances of her birth. Here, under the shadow of the great mountain, she would take her rightful place in life.

During the four grim years she spent at the Female Factory Mary knew that she had taken the first steps in her great good luck. The Potato Factory in the prison vegetable gardens had prospered and when she was granted her ticket of leave to live outside the prison she had accumulated the sum of five hundred pounds. Ann Gower also now possessed sufficient money, saved for her by Mary, to achieve an ambition she talked of a great deal, open a bawdy house on the waterfront area of Wapping.

The King's Orphan School had achieved exemplary results, with most of Mary's pupils numerate and literate and some beginning to show a most gratifying propensity for learning. So impressed was Mr. Emmett, the chief clerk, that he persuaded Governor Arthur to offer Mary the position of headmistress. This independent position meant that she would no longer be under the baleful eye of the Reverend Smedley, and would be entitled to a small salary. Much to the dismay of Mary's sponsor, she had once again refused his generous offer.

'What ever shall we make of you, Mary Abacus? Will you never learn what is good for you? A more stubborn woman would be most difficult to find upon this island! If you were a man you would be quickly dismissed as a complete fool!'

Mary, who had the greatest respect for Mr Emmett, was sorry to be the cause of his disappointment. In the three years she had been teaching he had come to support her keenly and had seen to it that she was supplied with equipment from government stores, and that the Reverend Smedley did not unduly interfere with or undermine her work.

'Mr Emmett, sir, I thank you from the bottom o' me heart for the trust you have shown in me, but I must remind you, I am a teacher only for the lack o' someone more qualified. You gave me the position only because I believed the brats could take to learning.'

'I'll give you that, Mary, I'll give you that,' Mr Emmett repeated, somewhat mollified. 'You've proved us all wrong and a salutary lesson it has been, I agree.'