The Secret River (19 page)

Smasher’s dog was a big brindle thing called Missy. She was the softness in a hard man. She sat on his feet and as Smasher talked, on and on, until white spittle gathered at the corners of his
mouth, he fed her bits of food from his fingers and bent over her, fondling her ears.
Best dog a man ever had
, he said.
Keeps a man from
going dilly in this godforsaken place
. The dog’s eyes narrowed in bliss.

Sal told Smasher everything: Swan Lane and Butler’s Buildings, how Dick had considerately waited until they put into Cape Town to be born, why the inn in Sydney had been called the Sign of the Pickle Herring. She showed him the trunk of the tree he was sitting under, with the tally-marks, and made the day’s mark then and there to show him how she did it, although it was only afternoon.

Thornhill saw for the first time how much she missed having people around her. It was a little death, not being able to make a tale out of the small moments of life and share them with someone for whom they were new. Thornhill surprised a pang, hearing her voice warm, and watching how her face came to life as it had not since they had been on the river.

She had never spoken of her loneliness. And he had not thought to ask. It was part of that area of silence between them.

After a time Dick grew restless with the baby and Sal took her so he could go and play knucklebones with his brothers. With the children out of earshot, Smasher got onto the subject of the blacks. It seemed that no story about them was too terrible for him to repeat.

They had scalped two men alive up at South Creek, he said, and taken a child from its cradle, slit its little throat and sucked it dry. Thornhill found himself picturing it: the black mouths on the white flesh. When pressed, Smasher admitted that he had not seen the event personally, but he had spoken to a man who had, and swore it was no word of a lie. They had cut open a white woman, he said, down at the Cowpastures. Had got the baby out from her womb and eaten it. He had not seen that for himself either, but swore with a hand on his red flannel heart that it was in the
Gazette
, so it must be true.

Smasher, flushed with the pleasure of an audience, did not notice that Sal had gone thoughtful. She sat on the log, holding Mary so tight that even that uncomplaining child cried out. Thornhill finally caught his eye as he embarked on another tale.
That’ll do, Smasher
, he said, harsher than he intended. He tried to make his voice lighter:
You’ll have us scared out of our blooming wits!

Smasher stopped. Oh, he cried, full of reassurance.
You ain’t got
to worry, Mrs Thornhill, just so long as Mr Thornhill keeps his gun by his
hand
. It was not the reassurance that Thornhill might have wished, and he stared away without answering, but Smasher did not get the hint.
I got three guns
, he said.
Loaded ready to shoot any black arse
comes near the place
.

Thornhill was starting to feel he would be pleased to throttle Smasher.
That’s enough
, he said, but Smasher was drunk on company.
A whip, now
, he said, addressing Sal.
A whip is a mighty handy
thing to have round your average black savage
. He nodded and smiled at her.
And the dogs. Missy here, I trained her up special to go for black skin
.

Neither of his hosts responded. Thornhill put the cork in the rum bottle, making a business of doing it, but Smasher only tipped his drink down his throat and held the empty cup waiting for more.
Soon be slack water, Smasher
, Thornhill said.
Don’t want to
miss that tide
. At last, with many last shouted farewells, Smasher got into his boat and pushed out into the dusk.

There was nothing to say. Smasher had filled the place with noise, but he had left behind its mirror-image, a silence in which his violent stories echoed.

When the children were asleep later, rustling against each other on their mattress of dried grass, husband and wife stretched out too. It was the time of day Thornhill liked best. The whole measureless world shrank to the flame of the wick in the saucer. The shadows hid the drooping canvas of the tent around them, the muddled heaps of their belongings on the ground, the meanness their life had come down to. Sal was again that young girl,
smiling her serene smile with that irresistible mouth. He cut up one of Smasher’s oranges and gave her the pieces one after the other as they came off his knife. It gave him pleasure to see her lying on an elbow eating them, and to have the pungent smell all around them, hot and thick, the smell of sunlight.

But when the orange was gone she was sombre, gazing into the flame of the lamp.
That Smasher
, he said, and forced a laugh.
My word he can spin a yarn!
She glanced towards him, her face halved by the lamplight.
Just skiting, you reckon?

He could hear the doubt in her voice, and the hope. He made his own rumble with conviction:
Gammon if ever I heard any, take it
from me, pet
. But he could not forget the hands that Smasher had twitched at him, or the black bag that had once been a human, hanging from the tree.

She turned back to the lamp, staring at where the bit of twisted rag flamed away. In profile she looked as stern as the face on a coin. When she spoke again, her voice was so low he could barely hear her.
The way he were talking about that whip
, she said, and rubbed her hand across her lips as if wiping away the words that brought back the story.
I didn’t like the look on his face
. She looked at him very direct.
You think I’m a foolish woman
, she said.
But Will,
promise me you will never do such a thing?

He thought of the morning Collarbone had been hanged, that long horror. And Sal, asking about it.
Clean as a whistle
, he had said, because what was the point of breaking her heart with the truth?

Cosy by lamplight, with the night kept outside and Blackwood’s liquor warm in his belly, it was an easy enough promise to make.
I would never
, he said.
Not never ever
, and she relaxed against him and was asleep straight away, her weight sweet as a child’s against him while he stared into the shadows.

~

A bark hut looked a simple enough thing, until you went to make one. Each stage of the building was throwing obstacles at Thornhill that he had not foreseen. The earth was too full of rocks to make a decent hole for the uprights to stand in and too sandy to hold them firm, the saplings that had looked so straight in the forest turned out to be kinked, the bark sheets split as he levered them off the trees.

Chopping, clearing, building, he was discovering a new William Thornhill, though: a man who could labour against wilderness until it yielded up a dwelling. Their round of scraped and beaten earth grew with every day that passed. The place was full of the sound of themselves—the chopping down of the trees, the crackling as they burnt the heaps they cut, the thud of the pick into the earth. The larger corn patch had taken them days to clear, and then they had discovered that something had eaten through the bag the seeds were kept in and got the lot, so the planting would have to be delayed until Thornhill went to Sydney.

By the time Sal had marked the fifth week, a hut stood in the yard. It had none of the conveniences he had hoped to give it: flaps of bark that could be folded back on leather hinges to let the light in, a fireplace, a chimney. All that would have to wait.

But the hut stood up on its patch of trampled dirt, crisp against the tangle of the forest, and it was only crooked from certain angles.

At least no one could think now that the place was empty.

The air was different inside the hut. Outside, the ceaseless hummings and clickings of the place closed around a speck of human life like water around a pebble. But once there was a hut to go into, a person became again a thing separate from the place, moving through an air of their own making.

The forest took on a different aspect, too. Outside the eye was confused by so many details, every leaf and grass-stalk different
but each one the same. Framed by doorway or window-hole, the forest became something that could be looked at part by part and named. Branch. Leaves. Grass.

By night, with the lamp making a smoky bead of light, a shot of rum to hand and his pipe full, it was a cheerful enough place. He was prepared to take pride in it.

By daylight, he had to admit, it was a poor rough thing. The bark was hairy, as if the hut were the coarse pelt of some slow animal, and the underside, facing in, had an ugly flayed look. Every sheet was already warping against the next, leaving gaps big enough to put an arm through. The distinction between inside and outside was not as clear as he had hoped. One morning Willie and Dick got out of their dry-grass mattress and a long black snake slithered out after them as if thinking itself another boy ready for a slab of fried bread and a drink of tea. They all watched, a family turned to marble, as the length of dull black progressed without haste across the dirt floor, flowing around a plate, and out through one of the gaps in the wall.

Sal was the first to move.
There’s mud
, she said.
Around by the
place there where we get the water. You, Willie, and Dick, get round there after
breakfast and we’ll stop up all them gaps
. She was plain about it as if keeping snakes out of the house was something a body did every day of the week.

She never stopped surprising him.

We only got to stop up to the height of a snake, but,
she said.
They
can’t jump, can they, Will?
That was a good joke.
And that door
—she turned to look at it, the bark flap so warped there was room almost for Mary to crawl underneath—
We’ll tie another piece along the
bottom. Knit it on, like. It don’t need to last that long, anyways
, she said casually, as if it was all a bit of a lark.
It’ll do us till we go
.

Something in him veered away from that. In bed at the Sign of the Pickle Herring, five years had seemed a long time. Now,
with the notches beginning to fill up the side of the tree, it no longer had such a generous feel.

~

Seeing that Sal was lonely enough to enjoy the company even of Smasher Sullivan, Thornhill encouraged him to spread the word of the hospitality he had enjoyed, and the Sunday after they moved into the hut, they were visited by a crowd of neighbours. It was astonishing how folk appeared out of this empty place, like bugs out of the woodwork, when it was a matter of liquor dispensed with a generous hand. For himself, he could take or leave the lot of them, but he made them welcome for Sal’s sake.

Smasher was the first to arrive, in his tight blue coat. It seemed a matter of pride in him to arrive and leave wearing that coat, even though as soon as she saw him Sal urged him to take it off and he needed no second telling. As their other neighbours arrived, Smasher introduced them, his scaly face red with the pleasure of society.

Birtles was a huge man with enormous intricate ears and a great deal of hair about his face. At the back of his bald head the scalp was ridged into deep furrows like a bulldog’s face. Birtles had a first name, but Smasher introduced him as Sagitty. It made a little story to get the conversation going: how, when he was a lad, some man of the cloth in Stepney had declared him sagacious for something he had done, and Birtles had been offended, thinking the parson was mocking him—the word had that flavour in his ears—until the man had explained that it was praise, and then the name had stuck.

Sagitty’s life did not demonstrate much sagacity. He was caught stealing four bags of soot from Mill Street in Stepney and had served three years in irons in Van Diemen’s Land. Around his ankles the scars were purple where the metal had rubbed them raw. Now he was up along Dillon’s Creek, on a fertile pocket
behind a hill, with a patch of wheat and a couple of hogs. He had to hump every sackful of grain he grew, up the hill and down the other side, to get it into the boat that would take it to market, and now had rounded shoulders like a clerk, and a lump as big as an egg on the back of his neck where the sacks rested. There had been a wife once, and a couple of babies, but it seemed that they had died under this extreme sun. He had an unusual luxury, a neighbour, one George Twist, but Twist had drunk himself to oblivion the night before and could not be roused to visit the new arrivals.

To hear him tell it, Sagitty Birtles was constantly being robbed by the blacks. They took his axe, he said, and the tin dish from inside the hut, and his shirt that he had washed and spread over a bush. They took the last of the flaming fowls, the two left after the wild dogs had taken their fill.

Sal gave Thornhill a quick smiling glance that reminded him of Ingram’s hen.

But there was nothing funny about the theft of Sagitty’s wheat, the fruit of so much labour, precious sackfuls he was about to carry over the hill to the boat. The blacks were nothing but thieving black buggers, he maintained, taking advantage of a man’s hard work. He learned them a lesson whenever he saw them lurking about.

On those words—
learned them a lesson
—Thornhill saw him exchange a smirk with Smasher. Then he leaned back scratching under his chin, where the beard was coarse. The rasping was loud in the pause that followed his words.

Thornhill found himself imagining the form Sagitty’s lessons might take. He had opened his mouth to change the tack of the conversation, but Smasher got in first. He spoke almost dreamily.
It’s
like the bleeding flies, ain’t it
, he said.
Kill one, ten more come to its funeral
.

That word stopped Sal, who was busying herself at the fire with more johnny-cakes. She turned with a stick in her hand and exchanged another glance with her husband. Smasher caught the
glance.
Oh, I ain’t talking killing, exactly
, he said, but his voice had the airy sound of a man lying, and when Sal looked away he gave Thornhill a solemn wink.
Just disperse, like
, he said, his eyes sliding away and his laugh as he spoke a harsh wheeze.