The Secret River (16 page)

By the time they had finished, the sun had dropped behind the ridge. The shadow had moved across the clearing and swallowed them into its chill, although the cliffs over the river caught the last rays, blazing brilliant orange where the flesh of the rock had been bared.

Down on the
Hope
, Sal was still pressed in under the half-deck with the baby and the two young ones. A little colour had come back into her face, but she had a convalescent look. She seemed in
no hurry to examine her new home. While she went on sitting in the boat she was, in a manner of speaking, attached to the place she had come from.

Thornhill saw that although this voyage, from Sydney to Thornhill’s Point, had taken only a day, and the other voyage, from London to Sydney, had taken the best part of the year, this was the greater distance. From the perspective of this unpeopled riverbank, with its whistling leaves and crying birds, Sydney seemed a metropolis, different only in degree from London.

Willie went over and squatted beside her.
We got the tent up, Ma,
it’s real good
, he said.
And a nice fire, get you warm
. Sal’s mouth tweaked itself into a smile, and she gathered herself to stand. Willie seemed to feel she still needed coaxing.
We got the billy boiling
for a drink of tea
, he said.
And a damper going
. Bub swallowed at the thought of tea and damper and glanced at his mother. Little Johnny dropped the end of rope he had been fiddling with and held up his arms to be carried.
Damper, Ma
, he cried.

Sal levered herself up, pulling the shawl around herself and the baby. She was willing enough, Thornhill saw, but could not find any words just yet. Bub spoke louder to rouse her.
I’m real
hungry, Ma!
Dick took her hand to help her between the bags and bundles in the hold, and over the sticks they had laid on the mud, onto dry land.

The tent, the fire leaping between its stones, the clearing among the trees so calm, had seemed welcoming enough. But seeing it through her eyes, Thornhill knew what a flimsy home it was. By contrast, the hut housing the Sign of the Pickle Herring had been as solid as St Paul’s.

It was only just coming to him how big a thing this was. Life would be hard here for Sal. She would be on her own for a week at a time while he took the
Hope
up and down, with only the children for company. If a snake got one of them there was no surgeon, not even a parson to say a prayer over a corpse. His blind
passion for a piece of land had let him leapfrog over this in his mind: Sal here, making a life where only the flicker of their own fire was human.

Snug as a flea in a dog’s ear
, he announced. In the sceptical silence that followed, the rueful bird let out its cry of regret.

The children watched their father, their thin faces wary. Sal glanced around as if for something she could recognise. He could see that it all looked unfinished to her: the thick tufts of grass, the crooked trees, the unsettling hiss of the breeze in the river-oaks. Through her eyes this place was merely the material from which the world was made, not the world itself. There was not a stone here that had been shaped by a human hand, not a tree that had been planted.

He had camped with Blackwood often enough when the tide caught them. He knew that a person could survive such a place. But Sal had never gone beyond the Governor’s garden.

Is this it then, Will, she said. Is this the place
. It was not really a question. She pushed back the hair that was slithering out of her bonnet.

Little Johnny, usually running about everywhere on his baby legs, stood pressed in against his mother holding a fold of her skirt up to the side of his face. Bub began to whimper. At five he was too old for such snivelling. There were times when Thornhill wanted to knock the child’s head off.

For an instant he saw that it was impossible. How could such a flicker of humanity—this pale-faced woman, these children hardly old enough to walk and talk—make any impression on the vastness of this place?

He looked down the hill at the river, dimpling with the change of tide. Something about the tender light on it and the glow of the cliffs beyond made him forget the cold forest, the difficulty, the despair that Sal was failing to hide. The sky was full of radiance: expansive, depthless. The eye never exhausted it. A fingernail of
moon was as crisp as if cut out of paper and stuck on: the very same moon that he had seen a thousand times rising in the evening sky over the Thames. It was, after all, the same earth, the same air, the same sky. And they themselves were the same two people who had already been through death and come out the other side.

He took a deep breath.
It ain’t that different than the Thames, pet
, he said.
When all’s said and done
. It was a matter of making her see it the way he did: as a promise.
Just like the old Thames before them
Romans come along
. She stood sagging with the baby on her hip, that sweet mouth of hers holding itself bravely against the tears that he thought were not far away.

He should stop talking, he knew, get some hot tea and damper into her and put her to bed in the tent. In the morning, in the sunlight, it would look more welcoming. But he could not stop himself, hearing his voice carve across the clearing.
Down there by
the boat—that’s where Christ Church would be, and our little track the
Borough High Street, see it there
?

What had begun as a fancy was taking form as he looked, and one by one the children were turning to see Christ Church and the High Street. He pointed at the wall of the cliffs on the other side of the river. There was a place where part of the scarp had fallen away and left a pale gash like porridge down an old man’s front.
Remember how steep it was like that, going up St Mary-
at-Hill
?
he said.
Past Watermen’s Hall and that? Ain’t it just the same
?
He could hear his coaxing tone.

Still is
, Sal said, with a break in her voice that was half a cry, half a laugh.
Still there where it always was
. She sat down on the log he had dragged up to the fire. She shook her head, as if in wonder at herself.
Only trouble is, we ain’t
.

It was the closest she had come to a reproach.

Five years won’t seem no time at all
, he said. It sounded a weak kind of thing coming out of his mouth. But it was all he had to
offer, and after a moment she accepted it.
Yes, Will
, she said, as if it was she who had to reassure him.
It won’t seem no time at all, and
now where is this famous drink of tea
?

~

The shadow slid up the golden cliffs opposite and turned them to lead. As darkness fell, the distorted trees went on holding the fraction of light in the air.

The Thornhills squatted around the fire listening to the night, feeling its weight at their backs. Beyond the circle of light, the darkness was full of secretive noises, ticks and creaks, sudden rustlings and snappings, an insistent tweeting. Shafts of cold air like the draught from a window stirred the trees. From the river the frogs popped and ponked.

As the night deepened they hunched closer around the fire, feeding it so that as soon as it began to die it flamed up again and filled the clearing with jerky light. Willie and Dick heaped on armful after armful until the light danced against the underside of the trees. Bub squatted close up to one side, pushing in twigs that flared brilliantly.

They were warm, at least on one side, and the fire made them the centre of a small warm world. But it made them helpless creatures too. The blackness beyond the reach of the flames was as absolute as blindness.

The trees grew huge, hanging over them as if they had pulled up their roots and crept closer. Their shaggy silhouettes leaned down over the firelit clearing.

The gun lay close to Thornhill’s hand. By the last of the daylight, out of sight of Sal, he had loaded it. He had checked the flint, had the powder-horn in his coat pocket.

He had thought that having a gun would make him feel safe. Why did it not?

The damper was burned from being cooked too fast, but the
steamy fragrance under the charred crust was a comfort. The small noises they made with their food seemed loud in the night. Thornhill could hear his tea travel down his gullet, and the exclamations of his belly as it came to grips with the damper.

He looked up at where even the light of the fire could not dim the stars. He looked for the Southern Cross, which he had learned to steer by, but as it often did it was playing hide-and-seek.

Might be they watching us
, Willie said.
Waiting, like
. There was the start of panic in his voice.
Shut your trap, Willie, we ain’t got nothing to
worry about
, Thornhill said.

In the tent he felt Sal squeezed up against him under the blanket. He had heated a stone in the fire and wrapped it up in his coat to warm her feet, but she was shivering. She was panting as quick as an animal. He held her tight, feeling the cold at his back, until at last her breathing slowed in sleep.

A wind had arisen out of the night. He could hear it up on the ridges, although down in the valley everything was still. It was like the sound of surf breaking on the shore, the way it swelled and then travelled around the ridges, its whisper growing and then fading away. The valley was dwarfed by the ocean of leaves and wind.

To be stretched out to sleep on his own earth, feeling his body lie along ground that was his—he felt he had been hurrying all his life, and had at last come to a place where he could stop. He could smell the rich damp air coming in the tent-flap. He could feel the shape of the ground through his back.
My own
, he kept saying to himself.
My place. Thornhill’s place
.

But the wind in the leaves up on the ridge was saying something else entirely.

~

A tent was all very well, but what marked a man’s claim was a rectangle of cleared and dug-over dirt and something growing that had not been there before. He had corn seeds, a pick, an axe, a
spade. It was a matter of choosing a patch of ground and opening it up to the sky.

Beside the river in a long strip the ground was flat and clear of trees, already halfway to being a field. All that was needed was to clear off the daisies and scratch the surface enough for it to take a bagful of seeds.

Thornhill walked down with Willie at first light the next morning, Dick dawdling along behind, with a hoe over his shoulder. The flat part went off to left and right. One place was as good as another to heave the pick and let it bite into the ground.

But Willie was shading his eyes with his hand, looking further along.
Look Da
, he
said. Some other bugger already digged it up
. It was true, there was a patch of freshly turned soil, laced with dew, sucking up the light. He squinted at the plants in the tumbled dirt. The brightness of the early sunlight made things hard to see. A few daisies lay loose, their thick roots broken. He scuffed at one with his heel and it came out easily.

He had dreamed of this place, had allowed himself to love it too soon. All the time he had dreamed, forced himself against wind and tide and fatigue, driven by longing, all that time it had been too late. Some other man had set his foot here, worked it with his pick. Like every other hope, this one had been snatched away from him.

He took a deep breath that felt as if it could turn into tears. Turned his face up to the sky, waiting for them to subside. He stared up, could almost see the particles of air dancing against each other.

A dankness came up into his face from the patch of raw dirt. The black bird with the cold yellow eye turned its back and flapped away.

He looked again. The dirt was not dug in a square, the way a man with a pick would do. A man with a corn patch on his mind would not have left the daisies lying loose in the dirt where they
could grow again, but would have pulled them out and thrown them to one side.

He was surprised at how calm his voice came out.
Just wild
hogs or such. Moles. Something like that
. He was airy about it, a man not bothered in the slightest by a bit of dug-up dirt.

Willie knew better than to go against his father.
Moles,
you reckon moles
, he said. Thornhill could hear his voice thin and disbelieving.

Dick was calling out from where he had got the hoe stuck in a tangle of bushes, his voice smothered by the breeze. He stumbled out, dragging the hoe, and stood staring at the disturbed ground.

Been dug up
, he said at last. Willie came back at him straight away:
No, Dick, Da says it were moles
. But Dick did not catch the warning in his brother’s voice, and piped up,
It’s them savages.
Planting them things like you would taters
.

Thornhill stared at the patch of dirt, drying grey now the sun was on it. Dick would be right, he thought, except that everyone knew the blacks did not plant things. They wandered about, taking food as it came under their hand. They might grub things out of the dirt if they happened on them, or pick something off a bush as they passed. But, like children, they did not plant today so that they could eat tomorrow.

It was why they were called savages.

He reached down and tweaked up the stalk, with the little swelling of the root attached.
Shut your gob, Dick
, he said.
Them poxy
blacks don’t plant nothing
. He threw the stalk away. It flew briefly, weighted by its root, and fell back into the dirt.

~

This ground was not like the dense Bermondsey earth that stuck to the feet in great clots after rain. This was thin, sandy dirt that trickled through the fingers. The little clumps of daisies came out
easily, the swollen roots glassy under the layer of dirt, and could be piled by the side of the dug-over square.

All the same, it was backbreaking work. Thornhill could pull on an oar, but ten minutes creeping and bending with the hoe made him stream with sweat. As the sun rose higher through the morning it became as hot as midsummer in England. The flies danced around his nose, into his eyes. He felt about to burst out of his skin with the steamy heat, cooked in his own juices.