The Secret River (18 page)

~

Thornhill had no faith in the shrivelled seeds he had bought in Sydney. It was hard to believe that such a lifeless knot of stuff could turn into a cob of corn that a person could get his teeth into. Willie gave voice to his thought.
We been cheated
, Da, he said.
Them things won’t never grow
.

Willie was half a man, but without a man’s sense of when to keep his trap shut.

Thornhill bent down and pushed a seed into the dirt with his thumb.
Ain’t nothing to me if it’s dead or alive
, he said breezily.
Long’s it
says William Thornhill got here first
.

~

Sal made a place she called
the yard
, a patch of earth that she scraped and swept until it was smooth. Within its boundary she made something domestic: the fireplace, ringed with stones, where the kettle and the pot sat on the coals, the water barrel filled from the rivulet, a slab of log laid on a couple of stones that did duty as
a table. She cooked and washed and swept, and sat on a log to mend the children’s clothes or grind up the hominy, like any other housewife.

Beyond the yard she went only for a call of nature, and did not dally. Thornhill would see her come back, her glance sliding over the forest, the rocks, the cliffs, the sky, until it came to the table, or the tent, or a child. Those things she could see. What was beyond was invisible to her. He watched her, the way she kept her face turned away from where the trees soughed in the wind.

Like any other prisoner, she had a place—the smooth bark of a tree near the tent—where she marked off each day. Every evening she went over to it with the knife and took her time making a neat line. The evening of the first Sunday, she sliced across the six lines already there. She seemed to enjoy the way the blade bit into the parchment-pale bark.

Five years is two hundred and sixty weeks
, he heard her telling Willie.
We done a week already, near enough
. As the days passed Thornhill found himself hoping she would forget to make a new mark. Sometimes the day would go by and he would think that, at last, she had forgotten, but then he would see her take the old knife with the broken-off tip and go over to the tree.

If she met his eye on the way back she might smile at him in a bright way, saying nothing. He would smile back, and that was something else not said. They had never kept secrets from each other before, or had thoughts they did not share. It was, he thought, a part of the price they had to pay—just for the time being—for what they would get in the end.

The unspoken between them was that she was a prisoner here, marking off the days in her little round of beaten earth, and it was unspoken because she did not want him to feel a jailer. She was, in a manner of speaking, protecting him from herself.

And if she did not speak of it, how could he? How could he say,
I am sorry that what I want more than anything is your prison
?
If he
said that, then he would also have to say,
So we had better go back to
Sydney
.

Thornhill’s private thoughts were in the shadow behind his smile, the dread of failure: of the corn dying in the ground, or the
Hope
being wrecked. He had brought them here, but could he make a life for them?

But within a fortnight of him poking those wrinkled seeds into the ground, a bright-green tube of leaf had forced its way up out of each one, strong enough to pierce the dirt. He had picked his time well: the weather was warmer from day to day, the leaves growing almost visibly in the steamy heat. He put the boys to watering the plants: the river water was too brackish, so every drop had to be got from the rivulet. When the plants got up a bit, he hoped they would not still need watering. There would be rain, he promised the boys, there was always plenty of rain in the spring. But for the time being, they had to trail up and down every afternoon with the bucket.

At his urging, Sal came down to admire it too, but he could see that the tender tubes of green did not stir her the way they did him. He watched her go back up the hill to the tent as soon as she could, keeping her face turned away from where the trees crowded around the edge of the yard.

She was afraid of the children wandering and being lost in the forest, and in the absence of anything to function as a fence she tethered Bub and Johnny to the tally-tree on long ropes. Nor would she eat anything except what they had brought with them: the salt pork, the flour, the dried peas. He tried one day to offer her a bunch of some green stuff that grew down by the river, that he had found not unlike coarse parsley, but she would not try it.
I’ll wait for them corn plants
, she said, and smiled up at him.
I’m right
with what we got, Will
. He was glad to see her smile, but knew she was telling him she could wait, not just for their own corn, but for the five years of her sentence.

Her dreams were all of the place they had left: long intricate dreams she told him of as they lay coiled together putting off the moment of rising to another day.
I were in the alley outside of our place
at home
, she would start, or
I was walking along past Vickery’s, around the
corner from the old place
, and he would hear the softness in her voice.

Now that they had the first few seeds in the ground, the next task was to clear a bigger patch and put more seeds in, not just as an emblem of ownership but as a real crop. As soon as that was done, Thornhill could see that he would have to turn his hand to a dwelling more significant than a tent. Otherwise, he knew that Sal’s forced cheerfulness would become threadbare.

Neither of them ever mentioned the blacks. They had not been seen since the first day. He felt sometimes that they might not exist if no one said the words:
the blacks
.

But they all felt watched. Each one of them would stop in the middle of putting a stick on the fire, or chewing a mouthful of damper, and glance into the trees. It was a thing about this place: the harder the eye searched, the more the shadows confused. Now and again Thornhill glimpsed a person watching them. But, even in the moment that he started to get up, the figure became nothing more than a couple of angled branches.

~

The hundred acres Thornhill had decided to call his own encompassed all the fertile soil near the river and ended where the ridge began. It tilted up from the gentle slope of the point as sudden as the side of a roof, bristling with canted shards of rock and thick with trees that twisted into the sky.

The first few weeks of their residence were taken up with backbreaking labour: digging, grubbing out bushes, hacking at saplings. Under the daily ministrations of the boys, the corn was coming on apace. Thornhill thought this farming was turning out to be a simple business. Food grown from his own hand! He
laughed aloud at the idea, bent to feel the leaves, smooth and cool between his fingers.

It was not until he had Willie at work on the new corn patch and had cut the twenty saplings that he calculated were the minimum to start the hut, that he allowed himself to climb the ridge. He was looking forward to it: Thornhill’s spread out under him, the corn patch stamping a square on the wildness. It would be another way to possess the place, to look down and think
everything
I see, I own
.

But the way up was blocked at every turn by a great bulge or overhang of mouse-grey stone. A man set against that was nothing more than an ant toiling up and down until he was swallowed. He began to feel too small for the place but forced himself on, climbing over rocks and through bushes and sprays of tough grass. He could hear himself wheezing. His hand was wet with blood where he had taken a hold of that grass to pull himself up a steep pinch. Its leathery blade had cut him as clean and private as a knife.

In the end he had to turn back and settle for the platform of flat rock that ran around the base of the ridge like a step. Above him the page of the sky opened out, scrawled with cloud. The cliffs glowed orange in the late sun. Below him the thumb was laid out plain, the river to right and left of it. He could see Sal, made small by distance, bending over the washtub on her makeshift table, and Willie leaning on his pick when he should have been digging another yard of corn patch.

I see you, Willie
, Thornhill said out loud.
By God, lad, I see you
there
.

His voice had no resonance in this air. He cleared his throat to cover the puny sound.

An enormous honey-coloured ant ran out of a crack in the rock near his feet and zigzagged over it as if stitching it together, running fast and high on its thready black legs, carrying along the
shiny bulb of its body. It was the ant that made him notice that there was a line freshly scratched into the surface of the rock. At first he thought it a flaw formed by some natural action of water or wind. But the line joined another a little further along, and then another. Even when he saw that the lines formed the outline of a fish, his first thought was to admire the way nature could mimic a picture. It was only when he saw the spine on the fish’s back, the exact fan of spikes of a bream, that he had to recognise a human hand at work.

He walked the length of the fish, four or five yards. The lines were more than scratches: they had been grooved to a depth and width of an inch, standing out as bright against the grey skin of the rock as if carved that same morning. A bulge in the rock surface made the fish seem to be bending itself against a current, and its long frowning mouth could have been just about to open on its row of teeth.

Towards the tail another cluster of straight lines and triangles half-overlapped the fish, a pattern that made no sense until he came around to look at it from the other side. Then he saw it was a picture of the
Hope
. There was the curve of the bow, the mast, the sail bulging in a good breeze. There was even a line that was the tiller, bending in over the stern. All that was lacking was William Thornhill holding that tiller, listening to the creak of the ropes and staring out into the forest on his way up the river.

He heard himself exclaim, a high blurt of indignation. It was the same tone he had heard from a gentleman in Fish Street Hill when William Warner had lifted the watch out of his pocket.

The sound was swallowed up by the watching forest as if it had never been. With his foot he scraped over the lines, but they were part of the fabric of the rock.

He looked around, but no one was there watching him, nothing but the eternal trees, and the air under them where the light was full of shadows.

It came to him that this might look an empty place, but a man who had walked the length of that fish, seen the tiller and sail of the
Hope
laid down in stone, had to recognise otherwise. This place was no more empty than a parlour in London, from which the master of the house had just stepped into the bedroom. He might not be seen, but he was there.

Far below him Sal straightened up from the dish and went over to the rope she had strung up by way of drying-line. He could not see the line itself, only the way the squares of the baby’s napkins danced as she put them up one by one, and then hung still after she went back into the tent.

He would tell her about the fish, even bring her up to see it. But not yet. She was content enough in her little round of flattened earth: what was the good of showing her the other world beyond it?

The thing about having things unspoken between two people, he was beginning to see, was that when you had set your foot along that path it was easier to go on than to go back.

~

The hut was not yet finished when, in their fourth week on the Hawkesbury, they had their first visitor. Smasher Sullivan came up one day with a housewarming present: a few of the last oranges off his tree, a packet of green powder against the rats, and a keg of lime. He had guessed, as Thornhill had failed to, what a difference it might make to a woman to have some whitewash and a weapon against the vermin.

He arrived on the tide and walked up from the river with the keg on his shoulder, his dog trailing behind. Out of his skiff he was a runty fellow with the body of a boy but the narrow face of a man. In his own crude way he seemed to be something of a dandy: he had put on his best for the visit, a blue coat with gilt buttons, so tight under the arms he was like a soldier on parade, and a dirty red shirt done up to the neck.

Smasher was not a man to whom Sal would have warmed in the normal way. But she welcomed him like an old friend.
Take the
blessed coat off, Smasher
, she cried, seeing him sweating in it.
No need
to stand on ceremony among friends
.

She gave the baby to Dick to hold and bustled around making Smasher welcome: gave him the best spot on the logs that were for the time being the extent of their furniture, put the kettle on for a drink of tea, mixed up a batch of johnny-cakes with some of their precious wheaten flour.

Smasher made himself comfortable on the log and accepted all her offers. Yes, he would have a drink of tea, and yes, he loved a johnny-cake like nobody’s business, and a sup of rum by and by would be very welcome too. He peered into the baby’s face and showed Dick how he could take his thumb off and put it back on again. Thornhill sat down with him to be sociable, but he would just as soon have been off lopping another sapling.

Smasher was a man starved for company, that was easy to see. He could not stop talking. He told them his story, how he had been caught in the Mile End Road with a box that had fallen off the back of a wagon. He had been about to return it to its owner, as innocent as that babe there.
But no one believes a poor man, do they,
Mrs Thornhill?
he said, and dropped a wink at Sal.
My word you make
a good johnny-cake, Mrs Thornhill
.

Thornhill watched him sourly, thinking his praise only angling for the plate to be passed to him again, but after a time he saw that praising the food was Smasher’s way of giving thanks for human company.
My word it does a man’s heart good to have a yarn
, he said. His smile was a sudden sweet thing, opening on his pinched face like a flower. In that smile was a guileless boy on whom life had now laid its mark.