The Secret River (20 page)

Then Webb arrived, a skinny bit of a man with hair rough as a dog’s, its tufts showing where it had been hacked against the nits with a knife the way Sal did the boys’. Webb waved away the offer of a piece of log, making himself comfortable on the ground.

Thornhill hoped the conversation would turn in another direction, but the blacks seemed all anyone could talk about. Webb—they called him Spider—was at Half Moon Bend, bounded on three sides by cliff and forest. It was easy for the blacks to creep down the hillside. They had come one day when sickly Mrs Webb was alone in the hut. They wanted her skirt, but could not work out the placket, so they got the knife and cut the whole thing off and she was left in her petticoat. They took the meal she was getting ready—chicken, pot and all—and were long gone by the time Spider got back.

Spider was born unlucky. He was caught in Smithfield Market when a man recognised the silver buttons on his coat as the ones his master had missed from his house a week before. Now, apart from the visits of the blacks, he was the settler always washed away first by the floods, eaten out first by the corn-grubs. He had lost one boy to the snakebite and another to fits.

Thornhill thought privately that he should not have called his holding Never Fail.

From his narrow head Spider’s hoarse voice was a surprise.
They’s vermin,
he said,
the same way rats is vermin
. He sounded the way a man might if he had been hanged and come back from the dead, Thornhill thought. Which was, of course, true of them all.

Like Smasher, Spider was making the most of an audience.
They cut us up like you would a beast
, he said.
Eat the best bits
. Smasher,
his face creased with the fun of it, shouted,
What bits would they be,
Spider? You would be a lean old pick!
That changed the pitch of the laughter, as if everyone was thinking of their own body sliced up neatly for a feed.

Loveday’s place was across the river from Webb’s, so they had come down together. Thornhill knew Loveday from having shipped his crop of pumpkins and melons to Sydney more than once. A tall awkwardly put-together fellow, he had no more idea of farming than the man on the moon, but anyone could make things grow on the river-flats.

He sat on the log with one leg crossed over the other like a man in his parlour. Although gaunt in the face from too many pumpkins and melons and not enough of anything else, Loveday was something of a gent, enamoured with the sound of his own smarmy voice. He was out of place among these men who had no more words to rub together than they had coins. Loveday—
Parson
, as Smasher called him—was the only one there with boots on, even though his had been made for a man with much bigger feet.

Loveday had a story about the blacks, too, and stood up to enjoy his moment telling it: of how a native had speared him one day while he was relieving himself in the bushes. He even undid his britches and peeled them down at the side to show the scar on his hip. Since that day, he claimed, he had not eased himself, but was waiting to return to England where a man could attend to the call of nature without getting a spear up his backside.

Even mournful Webb laughed. Loveday looked around, his bony face flushed with the pleasure of an audience, and winked at Sal. Thornhill saw that he kept his distance from her, not wanting to overwhelm her with his height: a gentleman’s delicacy. He was pleased to see her laughing back. He himself made sure he laughed the longest at the tale, so Sal would know that it was only a story to entertain some newcomers, not sober fact.

This was a valley of men, apart from two women: Mrs Webb
was not visiting because one of the children was sick with a fever, but the widow Mrs Herring had rowed herself down from Cat-Eye Creek. It appeared that Mrs Herring was the nearest thing this part of the river had to a surgeon. She could deliver a baby, stitch up an axe wound, had saved the littlest Webb from the chin-cough. She was no beauty, with a high square forehead, eyes that seemed to bulge out of her face and a one-sided smile that always had a stained white pipe in it.

Mrs Herring was a shrewd old soul. That lopsided mouth looked as if many thoughts were going on behind it, but she kept most of them to herself.

Sal embraced the widow Herring like a long-lost sister when she arrived. She could hardly credit that Mrs Herring lived alone on her few acres at Cat-Eye with nothing more than her fowls for company.
Mrs Herring, ain’t you lonesome up there?
she asked.
With no
one near?
Mrs Herring took the pipe out of her mouth and began to poke around inside its bowl.
Better my own company than many I’ve
known
, she said. She glanced at Smasher.
As for the blacks, I give them
when they ask
. She hesitated.
They help themselves now and then, I turn a
blind eye
. Thornhill saw Smasher make a crooked mouth as if he had bitten a lemon. Mrs Herring stuck the pipe back in her mouth and spoke around it:
Way I see it is, I got enough. One old biddy
is real cheap to run
.

Sal smiled, rocking the baby in her arms to get her to sleep, but watched Mrs Herring, waiting for more of an answer. She looked as if she might ask again, but there was a rustle of amusement around the men, and Smasher hawked up a knot of phlegm and got up to spit it out behind a bush. Turning back, his glance was caught by something down by the river.
Tom
Blackwood’s on his way
, he said, and Thornhill saw another glance exchanged between him and Sagitty, and a hardening of Smasher’s mouth.

Better tie the dog up, Smasher
, Sagitty said. He turned to
Thornhill.
Missy goes for him, same as if he was one of them black buggers
, he said.
Funny ain’t it?

In the five weeks they had been on the river, Thornhill had not seen Blackwood, even though he knew that he still went up and down in the dory he had bought to replace the
Queen
, supplying the Crown and the Blue Boar at Green Hills. Blackwood’s liquor was unmistakable, burning all the way down the gullet and leaving a person next morning blinking at a world gone sharp and painful. But there was plenty of it, and the price was right. There was a living to be made from it, and if he was not a rich man, Blackwood did not seem to care.

When Blackwood entered Thornhill’s clearing late in the afternoon, a keg of liquor on his shoulder as a housewarming gift, he made the place seem small. There was an authority about him so that even boastful Sagitty went quiet, watching Blackwood glumly and fingering the beard around his mouth.

Thornhill knew Blackwood better than any other man on this river, and yet he did not know anything of what went on behind Blackwood’s face. He had never seen Blackwood’s Lagoon. More than once he had suggested he might pay him a visit, but something about Blackwood discouraged the idea. Thornhill supposed it was because of the still. It seemed a silly kind of delicacy, when everyone knew he had one, but if Blackwood wanted to be private, Thornhill was not inclined to intrude.

Blackwood made Smasher edgy. His voice took on an aggrieved tone.
Them thieving buggers come down last night
, he said.
Pinched me bloody shovel that I use for shitting, saving your presence ladies
.

Blackwood had refused the offer of a log and had taken up position squatting off to the side. His face in profile was as if carved out of stone: that imposing nose, the muscular mouth that gave nothing away. Smasher started again:
They got no right
, but Blackwood cut straight across his words, speaking direct to Thornhill.
Them daisies down there
. They all watched as he picked up
a length of cord lying on the ground, that the whipping had come undone from, and coiled it in his hand.
Daisy yams, I call them
. He jerked his head sideways to show where.
There ain’t hardly none left
.

That was true enough. The daisies were easy to get rid of because once they were dug up they did not grow back again, the way other weeds did.

They give me a couple when I first come
, Blackwood said. No one needed to ask who
they
were.
I gone and give them a nice little mullet for
them
, he said and shook his head at the memory.
They was lumpy
sorts of things like a monkey’s balls
. His laugh was so loud it startled the baby awake.

Thornhill could see Blackwood tasting the flavour of the thing in his mind.
Pretty good eating, taken all round, ain’t they
, Mrs Herring said, and puffed away on her pipe, ignoring the surly looks from Smasher and Sagitty.
Sweet like
, Blackwood agreed.
And
mealy after they been in the coals a while
. But Blackwood had not come to talk about the flavour of yams.
See, them yams grow where you
putting in the corn
, he said.
You dig them up, means they go hungry
. Having said his piece he turned and looked across the river, where the sun was beginning to set.

But Sagitty burst out angrily.
They never done nothing
, he cried.
See them breaking their back to dig it up and that?
He thumped his pannikin down so hard on the ground that its contents slopped out.

Blackwood, not taking his eyes off the cliffs, rode over him as if he had not spoken.
There was a meeting
, he said.
Governor come up on the
Porpoise, anchored off the point there
. His head jerked to indicate the place.
There was one of the blacks had a bit of English
. His thick fingers were carefully rewinding the whipping and he seemed to be talking to the cord rather than the people around him.
Upshot of it was,
Governor said
there’d
be no more white fellers downstream of the Second Branch
.

You’re lying, Tom Blackwood
, Sagitty shouted, but Blackwood calmly knotted up the whipping and snipped it off with his teeth.
Shook hands, the lot
, he said.
That’s how it was
. It was clear that he did
not care whether Sagitty believed him or not.
I were there on the aft
deck, whipping a
rope’s
end like I just done
. He looked at Thornhill and winked.
Nobody sees a waterman, ain’t that right, Will Thornhill?

Smasher was swelling with indignation.
They ain’t nothing but
thieves
, he shouted.
Don’t know how to do nothing but thieve off honest men!

Blackwood turned his face towards him, as if amused at a pup trying to bite his ankle.
Honest men
, he repeated.
You ain’t never done
no thieving, Smasher Sullivan. Oh, my very word no
.

Smasher was the only one not laughing. Thornhill could see the muscle in his jaw clenched tight, holding in his rage. Mrs Herring went so far as to take the pipe out of her mouth so she could enjoy the joke.

But Blackwood had not finished. He turned the great slab of his face towards Thornhill and waited for the laughing to stop.
You
got to work it out your own way
, he said.
But when you take a little, bear in
mind you got to give a little
. Then he got to his feet as if he had done what he came to do. Sal called a farewell as he went back down to the boat, but he only waved without looking around.

As Blackwood’s arrival had changed the mood, so did his leaving. No one seemed to have any more tales they wanted to tell. Those who lived upriver reminded each other that they had better get the tide while it was still flooding, and trailed down to the boats. Only Smasher, waiting for the turn of tide to take him downstream, sat on. There was a grim look about his face as he stared down towards the river, and the Thornhills left him alone.

Give a little, take a little
. Was it a warning or a threat? But Blackwood was not a man you could ask to explain himself. And Thornhill was not interested in hearing any advice that Smasher Sullivan might give.

~

The thought of that hundred and fifteen pounds, plus interest, kept him awake at night. It had got him the
Hope
, which was the
way to make money, but the
Hope
had been tied up idle for more than five weeks now while its master had become a farmer and a builder. It was well into October already, the store of food they had brought from Sydney was running low, and the seeds for the real crop not yet in the ground.

Before they left Sydney, he had applied for convict servants to be assigned to him, on the strength of the service he would be doing in bringing food to Sydney. Why not? A man had to think on a big scale to do any good for himself. Nightingale had done out the application in exchange for a couple of quarts of the best and, having had experience of other applications, advised Thornhill to ask for four men, hoping for three.

Now, just in time, Andrews from Mullet Island brought word that Thornhill had been assigned two men off the transport that had just berthed. Thornhill could hardly believe it was that easy.

Should have asked for ten
, Sal said. She was as astonished as he was.
Then
we’d
a got five
.

All he had to do was to get to Sydney and take his pick.

~

He would be gone a week, and if the winds were contrary it could be a fortnight. Willie, a lad of twelve, would be the nearest thing to a man the household would have for all that time. Once Thornhill returned with the convicts, he could leave them on the place while he and Willie went backwards and forwards on the
Hope
. But he had to leave the family unprotected first. Whichever way he turned the thing around in his mind, it came back to the same problem.

Smoke from the blacks’ fires was visible every day, sometimes from the ridge behind the hut, sometimes from downriver, at other times a short way up the First Branch. They were all around, all the time. But in the five weeks the Thornhills had been on the river, they had only seen the blacks on the first day. If they
were going to cause any trouble, Thornhill told himself, surely they would have done it by now.