The Secret River (11 page)

The black natives of the place seemed to come in two sorts. The visible ones were those who lived in the settlement. There was a man who hung about the Thornhills’ hut, so black his skin swallowed the sunlight. They called him Scabby Bill because his face had been mauled by the smallpox. More than once Thornhill went out of the hut at night on a call of nature and found him near the door: a piece of the darkness moving as if the night itself was standing up to take hold of him. In that moment he was not just Scabby Bill who whined all day for a bit of bread. Thornhill felt a quick pulse of fright, then the man turned away and was gone.

In the morning Scabby Bill could be found sleeping up against the back wall as if he owned it, collapsed into angles, one long skinny leg sticking out, his entire naked black body on full view except for the once-pink bonnet on his head, sitting on black hair frizzed as if singed, a tattered ribbon hanging down over one ear, one hand closed around a silk fan gone to shreds, his eyes nearly closed, singing and chuckling and frowning by turns. When he woke he coughed in long spasms the way Thornhill remembered his father having done before he died.

Yet he was still a fine figure. The sunlight fell on the crags and slopes of his face, the eyes cast into deep shadow beneath the ridge of brow. The creases beside his mouth could have been carved in stone. On his muscular shoulders and chest were rows of scars.

This was a town of scars. On board the
Alexander
, Thornhill had once seen Daniel Ellison flogged, after he had forgot himself
so far as to raise his hand to a guard. All the male convicts had been brought on deck to witness his punishment. Later Thornhill watched over weeks as the wounds thickened into lumps, the skin slowly closing.

On a lag’s back the point about the scars was the pain that had been inflicted, and the way they marked a man to his dying day. The scars on Scabby Bill’s chest were different. It seemed that the point was not so much the pain as the scars themselves. Unlike the net of crisscross weals on Daniel Ellison’s back, they were carefully drawn. Each scar lined up neat next to its neighbour, a language of skin. It was like the letters Sal had shown him, bold on the white face of the paper.

At times during the day Scabby Bill would appear in the doorway, a black silhouette against the sun, calling,
Missus, Missus
. The first time she saw him there, Sal blurted out a high embarrassed laugh, and turned away from his nakedness. Thornhill saw the colour flood into her face—he had never stood before her naked—and smiled to see that cheeky wife of his reduced to confusion by a shameless black man.

But like everything else that was peculiar here, Scabby Bill’s nakedness soon became ordinary. She grew used to him calling at her, and would tear a bit off the loaf to give him.

He would take his crust and go and she would say,
Thank God,
Scabby Bill has buggered off
. She did not seem to fear him: he was the same as the ants or the flies, a hazard of the place that had to be dealt with. Every time he left, she was confident that it was for good.
He’s gone off to die, Will
, she would say.
Taken his bleeding cough
and gone under a bush somewhere
.

He saw that she understood it as a transaction. In exchange for a crust of bread he would leave them be. But later they always found him back again, leaning up against the wall.

Scabby Bill accepted crusts, but what he preferred was a sup of rum. Liquor seemed to act on him with astonishing power.
Thornhill envied him, the way it went to his head so quick, so entire.
If them others got legless so quick we’d be out of business
, Sal said. A white man might have to be coaxed along to empty his pockets before the world seemed a friendly place to him, but Scabby Bill needed hardly a mouthful.

It turned out that Scabby Bill was good for business, because for the promise of rum he could be got to dance. Everyone liked to watch him gather the sticks of his limbs together and get to his feet, stamping into the dirt, thudding so the dust flew up, staggering and calling out, pointing his ragged silk fan at his audience, droning through his teeth to himself. Men came from all the streets around, cheered to watch this black insect of a man capering before them, a person lower in the order of things even than they were.

~

The other sort of native was the kind that Thornhill had met on that first night, when they been on the very edge of civilisation. This sort of native was invisible to those like Sal who confined themselves to the township. They lived in the forest and in the bays where settlement had not yet reached, and melted away if any of the new arrivals tried to come close. Even in the few months Thornhill had seen the settlement grow, he had watched how those hidden ones retreated with each new patch of cleared land.

They wandered about, naked as worms, sheltering under an overhang of rock or a sheet of bark. Their dwellings were no more substantial than those of a butterfly resting on a leaf. They caught their feeds of fish, gathered a few oysters, killed a possum or two, then moved on. The most Thornhill ever saw was a silhouette stalking along a ridge, or bending over with a fishing spear poised to strike through the water. He might see the splinter of a canoe, fragile as a dead leaf against the dazzle of the sun on the water, with a figure sitting in it, knees drawn up to its shoulders, or a twist of blue smoke rising from some hidden place in the forest.
But the canoe had always gone by the time he rowed over to it, and the smoke vanished when he looked at it too closely.

During the day, if a person kept to the settlement and did not look about himself too hard, he would see no one out there in the tangled landscape. He might even imagine that there was no one there at all. But at night, a man out in a boat on Port Jackson saw the campfires everywhere, winking among the trees. Sometimes the breeze brought the sound of their singing, a high hard dirge, and the rhythmic clapping of sticks.

There were no signs that the blacks felt the place belonged to them. They had no fences that said
this is mine
. No house that said,
this is our home
. There were no fields or flocks that said,
we have put
the labour of our hands into this place
.

But sometimes men were speared. Word would go round the settlement: that so-and-so lay at this moment in the hospital with the spear still in him and the doctor shaking his head. That another had got one in the neck so the life had pumped out of him in a minute and left him as white as a piece of veal.

Thornhill never spoke of those spearings to Sal, but she heard of them from their neighbours, and he had found her more than once poring over the smudged pages of the
Sydney Gazette
, her finger under the words, mouthing them out to herself.
They got him just along
the way here
, she said without looking at him.
Just around in the bay
.

But there was no point dwelling on the spears of the blacks. They were like the snakes or the spiders, not something that could be guarded against. He reminded her that even in London a man might be killed for the contents of his pocketbook. He meant it as a kind of reassurance, but Sal went silent. He came to dread seeing the
Gazette
spread out on the table.

Whatever he said to Sal, he was glad to spend his days out on the water. On land he was always within range of a spear.

~

Down in Sydney Cove, working for Mr King, Thornhill met more than one old friend from the Thames, among them Thomas Blackwood. The false bottom to Blackwood’s
River Queen
had done him proud until the day someone had blabbed. He had been condemned to death, and then to life.

Blackwood was a big man, bigger even than Thornhill, with a lighterman’s brawny calves and arms. He had a kind of rough dignity about him, a closed-in quality, like a bag drawn up tight around its contents. He ran deep and silent, his face always turned away, his eyes always elsewhere. His few words were broken by something like a stammer.

It was not polite, here in this township of men and women with histories, to inquire too closely, but he asked Thornhill straight out one day, what had brought him to New South Wales. And watched him narrowly as he told the tale of the Brazil wood.
Somebody blown the gab on you
, Blackwood said with finality.
Lucas don’t
go on the river at night for his health
. After a while he said,
A bugger blown
the gab on me too. Had his eye on the reward
. He laughed a hard laugh with no mirth in it.
My word but the maggot is sorry now
, he said.
Feeding
the fishes at Gravesend for his pains
.

Blackwood did not have the appearance of a man bowed down by his fate. On the contrary, he was doing well for himself. He had got his pardon and had a boat of his own now. It was another
Queen
, a sea-going sloop with no need of a false bottom, because the passage-trade between Sydney and Green Hills was enough to bring a man a legitimate living.

The Green Hills were a fertile stretch of country on a river fifty miles inland, the best place that anyone had got food to grow in this sandy land. A rough track ran there from Sydney, but absconders and blacks hid in the forest on either side, waiting for a man with a full cart. The better way to get crops to market was by the river, sailing down its length until it met the sea, and then beating down the coast the thirty miles to Port Jackson.

Thornhill had noticed that Blackwood enjoyed giving the river its name: the Oxborough, it sounded like. There was always a little wry twist to the word in his mouth, as if there was something funny in it. Then he heard it again: Hawkesbury, and got the joke. Blackwood also owed his life to Lord Hawkesbury, but did not love him any the more for that.
A fine deep river, plenty of
water
, he said. He seemed to like the idea of Lord Hawkesbury in his own river, his eyes popping and the bubbles rising.

The other good joke about the river was that a lighterman might get rich there, and for once, a lighterman had a better chance at riches than gentry. Everyone in the colony knew that the Hawkesbury was the place to make your pile—either by farming its fertile land or by trading the grain of those who did—but not everyone had what it took. It needed a man with a strong boat to weather those thirty miles of ocean. It took a taste for adventure, too: the Hawkesbury was almost as remote from Sydney as Sydney was from London. If a man got into difficulties on its unmapped reaches, he was on his own. Most of all, making money out of the Hawkesbury took a man with a taste for danger, because it was there that the blacks were most numerous and most warlike. They gathered by the hundred, it was said, and descended on the lonely huts of the farmers. Tales came back of men speared, their huts robbed, their fields burned. The
Gazette
had a handy expression that covered all the things the blacks did, and suggested others:
outrages and depredations
. Not a month went by without some new outrage or depredation.

But Blackwood did not read, and when Thornhill mentioned the outrages, he said nothing. It seemed that Blackwood had arrived at some kind of accommodation with the river, but it was private, and he would not be drawn on it.

Thornhill watched the
Queen
sail away down Port Jackson with Blackwood at the tiller, his convict servant trimming the sail, and a month later they would be back again, with a hold full of
wheat and pumpkins, and nothing to say about where they had been or what they had done.

~

At the end of a twelvemonth Thornhill applied for his ticket. It was a simple enough thing: the master vouched for his servant’s good character, then the servant stood at the counter in the superintendent’s hut and watched while the clerk turned to the page in the ledger in which his name was written.
Thornhill
William Alexander transport
, the clerk said, scratching with his nib in one of the columns.
Ticket of leave, October the fourteenth, 1807
.

The ticket itself was just a slip of paper with words printed smudgily on it, but it was more precious than any coin. Sal wrapped it in a scrap of calico and put it away in the moneybox.
Off you go, Thornhill
, she said.
Your master set you free, why are you
still here?
and even Willie, watching from the doorway, saw the joke of it.

No sooner had Dick started feeding himself than Sal got with child again. This new Thornhill, James, was born in the March of 1808. Perhaps it was the oppressive damp heat draining Sal’s strength, but he was a sickly baby, pale and waxy, staring out of dark-rimmed eyes, with bony limbs and a tadpole-belly. In his heart Thornhill said goodbye to the lad, did not even think of him by name.

James—Bub, as they called him—wore Sal out with his fretting all night. Half asleep she rocked him in her arms until he slept and she lay down, but then the child would start up again with his jerky crying and wake Willie and Dick too. She stood rocking Bub, getting a dipper of water for Willie, singing a little song to soothe Dick, and in the morning her eyes were red as she got them their bread and tea. Thornhill saw that she was prepared to wear herself away to nothing for her children. He remembered a bitch in Frying Pan Alley that had done the same,
letting her pups suck the life out of her until she lay down one day and could not get up again.

~

It was three years now since the Thornhills had arrived with nothing, and Thornhill was proud of the fact that his family could eat meat three times a week and always had a loaf in the cupboard. Working for Mr King had turned into a good thing.

Willie and Dick were growing into fine strong lads, and if Bub planned to die, it was not because his father failed to supply his wants. Christmas Night, 1808, Thornhill and Sal toasted each other with a bottle of Mr King’s madeira that later had them groaning into each other’s ears like newlyweds.

It was not too long before Thornhill more than once began to catch Mr King looking sideways at him. He had taken on another clerk, one who was more fastidious about his lists, and did not respond to hints about benefits that might come to people who knew how to turn a blind eye.