The Secret River (25 page)

It was a relief to have the thought out in the open.
Didn’t want
to fret you, Sal
, he said.
But I been thinking the same
. Now she turned to look at him, smiling as she squinted against a thread of smoke from the fireplace.
Not fret me,
she said.
Think I might snap like some
fancy lady if I got fretted?

A few days later they heard a sudden commotion from the camp, a couple of the dogs having a spat and then voices calling
out. Sal was sitting on the log outside with the corn-mill between her knees.
Mrs Herring says they come more than they go
, she said.
They
like it here by the river same as we do
.

Thornhill looked at her, startled.
You asked her?
he said.
You
asked her about them?

Mrs Herring had a way of looking at Thornhill, her shrewd eyes on him as if seeing into his thoughts, that made him awkward with her. He might have his secret thoughts hidden from Sal, but he did not think a man could have any secrets from Mrs Herring. He could imagine her ironic look if he had tried to talk to her about the blacks.

Sal was concentrating on the little mill: it had a way of slipping from between her knees when she turned the handle, the whole thing flying out across the ground, the cornmeal spraying out onto the dirt.
Course I done
, she said at last, tight-lipped with the effort of grinding. He took the contraption from her—a hopeless thing, he planned to get a better one as soon as they had some ready money—and ground away himself until the hopper was empty, and tipped it up into the bowl she had ready.

She stood with the bowl in her hands and looked him straight in the face.
Coming and going is one thing
, she said.
But coming and not
going, that’s something else
. She was not going to go into detail about what that something else might be, he could see. But he knew what it was, because he felt it too: not fear, not even fret. Just a shadow over the part of their world where the smoke of the strangers’ fire never stopped rising into the air.

Mrs Herring got a different case from us
, Thornhill said.
Just her all
on her nelly up there. She ain’t got no choice
.

Sal stirred the cornmeal in the bowl with her finger. He could see a few white specks in there: weevils, ground up along with the hominy.
And us
, she said.
We got any different choice?
He thought for a moment she was challenging him, but then saw that she was really asking.
Will?
she asked, searching his face.
Ask that Tom
Blackwood, I would. See what he got to say
.

So in the colourless dimness before dawn the next day, he rowed the skiff over to the mouth of the First Branch and let the flooding tide take hold of it. A line of foam travelled along with the boat on the slick surface of the water. Thornhill needed only to sit in the stern with an oar by way of rudder, and allow the skiff to be carried up the stream.

Blackwood had found a way to live here, but his wisdom had always been too much riddles.
Give a little, take a little
. What did that mean when it came right down to it—not just words, but an act in time and place? How did it apply to a moment like the one down by the blacks’ fire, when a white man and a black one had tried to make sense of each other with nothing but words that were no use to them?

By the time the sun was lighting up the topmost leaves of the forest, he was away a ways up the valley. It was a still and silent place. The water, although clear, was as brown as strong tea. On either side mangroves masked the banks. Beyond was a narrow strip of level ground where river-oaks hung, and then the ridges angled up, steep and stony on either side.

The mosquitoes were ferocious. Thornhill watched a big one with striped legs land on his arm and push its needle-like biting part against the stuff of his shirt until it bent. Somewhere ahead of him in the top of a tree, a bird made a measured silvery sound, again and again, a little bell being struck. A fish launched itself out of the water and through the air in a flash of silver muscle. The place held its breath, watching.

Some five miles up the Branch, the land beyond the screen of mangroves opened out as if the river had cleared a space with its elbow, pushing the stony ridge further away and making a generous crescent of level ground between it and the river. It was there that he saw the smoke that must be Blackwood’s, rising into the air.

There was no wharf, not even a clearing among the mangroves for a boat to land. Thornhill passed it before he glimpsed a gap, had to get on the oars to back down and point the skiff into it. It seemed to be a dead end, but he pushed through the screen of branches and found a stretch of clear water again, and at the end there was a neat corduroy of logs, and Blackwood’s dory drawn up in privacy on the grassy bank.

The place was as his own had been on that first day: the mangroves, the thicket of river-oaks, and then open ground with scattered trees. Over in the crook of the ridge a lagoon shone like a piece of zinc in the early light. It was lined with river-oaks, a length of the river broken off and abandoned there under the mass of rock.

He could see Blackwood’s place, a neat slab hut with a bark roof, and his corn patch, luminous green in the early light and a few fowls bobbing at the ground. The hut and the cornfield sat easily among the trees. Blackwood had not cleared his place the way Thornhill and the others laboured to do. There was no bald patch defined by heaps of dead wood that marked where civilisation began and ended. This was a place where clearing and forest lived together on the same ground.

Blackwood was waiting for him, his bulk filling the doorway of the hut.
You’ve got
yerself
up here, Will Thornhill
, he said.
Stickybeaking
without no one axed you
.

It was not much of a welcome.

We are real private up here
, he said, and watched Thornhill while he looked for
we
.

I got a blacks’ camp along of me
, Thornhill started.
Come out of the
blue
. He could hear how his voice was uncertain. His words made no difference to the great rock of Blackwood’s face. He stopped and looked away towards the lagoon. There was a thread of smoke there rising above the trees: the still, he supposed, where another batch of Blackwood’s gripe water was brewing.

Just come without so much as a by-
your-
leave
, Thornhill tried again. He wanted to explain the airless feeling of having the blacks so close. The way they treated the place as if it was their own. The foolish feeling of trying to explain to the old fellow about his hundred acres.

He could not think of the words to share any of that. There was something intimate about it, like some pale hidden part of the body it was shameful to expose.

The blacks come and give you a fright, is that it?
Blackwood said at last. Thornhill had the feeling that he was amused. Blackwood thought for a moment, then said abruptly,
Best you and me have a
drink of tea then
.

They sat together with their pannikins of tea on a bench outside the hut. Blackwood had picked a sweet spot, with the grass spreading under the trees, the lagoon glinting in the sun at a distance, and the birds carolling away near the corn patch. He had made himself comfortable. He had a stumpy stone oven where a loaf was proving under a rag. Beneath a shady tree there was a bench with his wash-basin on it and the razor-strop hanging off a peg hammered into the bark, and a bit of mirror stuck in a crack.

Over by the lagoon, the smoke billowed up, faded away, strengthened again. Below the noises of the birds and the breeze in the leaves, Thornhill thought he caught other sounds. Voices, was it, and a dog barking? But just as a sound was beginning to come clear, a bird would start a long liquid warbling.

When Blackwood began to speak, it seemed to have nothing to do with anything.
Come back from Sydney one day
, he said, all in one piece.
Not a breath of wind and the tide going out fast. Up round Sandy
Island, that bit of beach
. It was as if he had thought his way along a considerable conversation, but only this end-point had surfaced as words.
Blacks there waiting for me
.

Thornhill tried to imagine it: Thomas Blackwood standing on the beach at Sandy Island, the black men coming to meet him.
Did
you now
, he said, then waited. He had learned not to rush Blackwood. He could be an obstinate bugger.

His patience paid off.
They come down, see
, Blackwood said.
Tell
me to bugger off
.

Bugger off, eh
, Thornhill said, waiting.

Had their bloody spears up ready, I was pissing myself
. Blackwood showed with his thick hands how they had stood around him.
Like
they was waiting
.

Blackwood glanced across at the cliffs. The sun had risen behind them so that they were blanks in the landscape.
Give them
some victuals
, Blackwood said.
But they
wasn’t
having none
.

Thornhill thought he might have heard enough stories about how dangerous it was to be a white man on the lower Hawkesbury, but Blackwood’s slow way could drive a man mad, and silence was threatening to take hold around the words again.

So what was they waiting for?

Blackwood glanced at him as if in surprise that he was there.
Search me, mate, but I took me flaming hat off me head and give it one of
them
. He went on, smiling to himself, seeing the scene before him.
They wasn’t fooled
, he said.
You know, a man’s hat!
He swirled the dregs of his tea around his pannikin, tossed them out in a sparkling arc on the ground.
Long and the short of it was, they let me stay. Made it real
clear—stay on the beach. Couldn’t a been clearer if they’d of spoke the
King’s
English
.

This was not quite all.
Had a good old sing-song later on up the hill
.
You know, sticks and that
. Blackwood clapped, a steady rhythm, and moved his head as if to music he could hear.
Kept away like they said
. He smoothed his palms together.
Never got me bloody hat back
. He laughed.
Buggers kept me hat
.

There was another silence. Thornhill was wondering if there was any part of the story he might apply to his own case.
Give a
little, take a little
. The exact mechanics of that were still vague, unless it meant laying in a good supply of hats.

The smoke had faded to a shimmer of thicker air above the trees.

Blackwood seemed to have said everything. He took the empty pannikins and got to his feet. But as Thornhill stood up too, there was a voice calling out, definitely a human voice, coming from the lagoon where the branches of the river-oaks made a net of dark and light. Thornhill looked, seeing no one, but Blackwood called out in response, the form of his words unclear, jammed up together, and then one of the shadows moved forward and resolved itself into a black woman. She stood at the edge of the trees and Thornhill could see her mouth shaping itself around a running jumble of sounds, but he recognised the angle at which she was holding her head. When Sal held her head that way it meant she was angry.

She took a few steps and now he saw there was a child behind her, invisible except for a hand like a pale starfish on her black thigh. The woman curled a hand around the child’s shoulder and with the other she gestured at Thornhill, her voice becoming louder. There was no mistaking that Thornhill was a cause of displeasure.

Blackwood answered her, and at first Thornhill thought that he was blurring the words together and swallowing them in his usual way. It took him a moment to realise that Blackwood was speaking in her own tongue. The words were slow and clumsy, but Thornhill could see the woman listening and understanding. The child edged out from behind her, staring at Thornhill with a fist up to its mouth, and he caught a glimpse of straw-pale hair and skin the colour of watery tea, shocking against the woman’s black leg.

Blackwood turned to Thornhill, watching him watching. He waited for his neighbour to look at him and was ready, meeting his eyes straight on. Thornhill could not remember ever seeing Blackwood’s eyes before. They were a blaze of astonishing blue in
his brick-like weathered face, eyes that in a woman would have made her a beauty, that hyacinth blue, and the long lashes.

I find them quiet and peaceable folk
, Blackwood said at last.
Which a
man cannot say about many of his neighbours
. He made a movement with his fingers, feeling out the words he needed.
I telled her you’ll
keep your trap shut. About what you seen here
.

The glare out of his eyes was as hard as a raised fist.
I better
have got that right, Will Thornhill, and if I ain’t, by Jesus your life ain’t
worth a brass farthing
.

~

When Thornhill told Sal what he had seen, whispering so Ned and Dan would not hear in their lean-to, she said nothing for so long that he thought she might have fallen asleep. At last he felt her stir, heard her sigh.
That’s a different case again
, she said.
No more
help to us than Mrs Herring. Got to work it out for ourselves, looks like
.

~

Going on eight now, Dick was old enough to have his jobs: feeding the fowls, collecting kindling for Sal—
no bark mind
, she would call as he trailed off into the trees, Bub running behind with a sack, trying to keep up,
just them nice little sticks
—and filling the water barrel. Dick lugged the pail along the path to where the rivulet left a bright green crack down the side of the hill. Bub was not allowed to go that far. They had dug a tank and lined it with stones: sweet enough water, although they had to strain it through a bit of muslin to get the wrigglers out of it. It took six trips back and forth to fill the water barrel outside the door, and one more to fill the iron pot that sat by the fire.