The Secret River (30 page)

This old fellow is a book, Thornhill thought, and they are reading him. He remembered the Governor’s library, the stern portraits, and the rows of gleaming books with their gold lettering. They could reveal their secrets, but only to a person who knew how to read them.

Watching the power in this man’s thighs as he thudded his feet into the dust, Thornhill remembered that he had slapped him and scolded him like a child. It had been a mistake, and it frightened him now. Whisker Harry was not just a stubbly fellow with an old man’s spindly shanks, as unimportant as the almsmen at the Watermen’s Hall, doddering along for their bowl of gruel. This man was old in the same way the Governor was old. A man should no more push and slap him than he would the Governor with his shiny sword hanging by his side.

The steady clapping of the sticks and the rise and fall of the wailing voice beat back from the cliffs, muddled and multiplied, a
river of sound bending over its stones. Thornhill stood behind the tree, feeling drawn deep into the sound, the beat of the sticks like the pumping of his own heart.

~

When he got back to the hut, Dan pulled him in.
Get the bleeding
door closed for
pity’s
sake
, he cried.
And the bar up quick
.

It was stuffy inside. The lamplight flickered on their faces as they turned to him.
How many of the buggers is there?
Dan said.
A
hundred, two hundred?
His voice had gone thin, frightened of the answer it might get.
No more’n a dozen
, Thornhill announced.
Maybe
not so many
. But this lie sounded as hollow as a quart-pot.

Sal had got the children up and dressed. They were all crowded around the table on which the slush lamp gave off its smoky light: Ned and Dan, and the children wan in its light. Only Dick was not around the lamp with the rest of them. He lay on the mattress, staring up into the rafters.

On the table Sal had set out everything they owned: the pannikins, the teacups, the knife with the broken tip, her other skirt neatly folded. There was Willie’s pocketknife and a bonnet she had just finished sewing. There was the bag of flour, the smaller one of sugar, and the hand-mill for the hominy. They were laid out on the table as if on a shop counter.

They’ll leave us alone, Will, if we give them what we got
, she said.
Just let them help themselves. Mrs Herring done it one time
. Her voice was very matter-of-fact, as if she had often dealt with savages.
They got
no call to do us no harm
.

In the shadows, someone went
huh
in disbelief. Thornhill thought it might be Willie and turned on him, but the boy stared back expressionlessly.

Ned spoke up:
We kin shoot the buggers, cain’t we?
His voice was uncertain. But Dan cut across him, his voice gone high as a woman’s.
They’ll burn the place
, he cried.
Flush us out like possums
.

It was a relief to channel fear into movement. Thornhill took a step across the room to Dan and belted him on the side of his head.
Shut your gob, Dan!
he shouted. He forced himself to speak calmly:
Let them know what we got, that’s all we need to do
. He took the gun down, and Willie was beside him straight away handing him the bag of shot, the pouch of powder, the ramming-rod.

He felt everyone’s eyes on him as he loaded the gun. He knew, as perhaps they did not, how pointless a thing it was. He could go through the rigmarole of loading it up and squinting along its barrel and firing. But after that, what? He could imagine the fumbling panic to reload: to ram home the shot and the wadding, pour the powder into the pan, cock the flint and fire.

In the time it took to do all that, they would be pincushions, if that was the way the blacks wanted it.

He felt a bubble of laughter press upwards, and forced it back down. He saw with surprise that his hands were steady as he poured the powder.

Then he went to the shutter, pushed it open and stuck the barrel out blindly into the night.
Put this in yer pipe and smoke it
, he shouted. The recoil was a blow into his shoulder that made him stagger and he was blinded for a moment by the flash. The explosion blasted his eardrums.

He lowered the muzzle and listened to the endless echoes of the shot bound and rebound, rumbling away down the river between the cliffs that hemmed them in.
That’ll keep them off
, he said, and closed the shutter like a man with a good job done.

But down on the point, the clapping and the singing did not miss a beat. Thornhill imagined the blacks down there, hearing the shot, turning back to the dance with their faces stern. He imagined Long Jack, his face a landscape in itself, gazing up towards the hut, listening.

~

For every night of that week, the blacks danced and sang. All those nights, the cliffs echoed with the sharp chips of sound from the sticks, while the people in the hut lay listening, their possessions outside the door, covered with dew in the morning but untouched. After that first dawn, when they awoke amazed to be unspeared and unscalped, the fear was less. Whatever was happening, it did not seem to have anything to do with the family in the hut, but was some imperative of the blacks themselves.

Then they disappeared, as quietly as a tide going out, leaving only the usual handful of people coming and going in their unhurried way.

The Thornhills tried to go about their business, but nothing was the same. In the hut, so few: two men, a halfwit and a stripling. A woman and four infants. And the gun hanging on the wall, nothing but a machine for noise and hot air. Thornhill had known all this before, but now he could not forget it, even for a moment.

Sal knew it too. Something in her had shifted. He did not hear her humming any more, and came across her sometimes staring at nothing, a crease between her eyebrows. When the women trailed past the hut on their way into the forest, she waved and smiled, but kept her distance. She did not go over among them anymore, and no more bowls and digging-sticks were added to her collection.

~

It began to seem a dangerous innocence to have only one gun, and only one man who knew how to fire it. Thornhill bought three more guns from John Horne up at Richmond and made pegs for them to rest on, one on top of the other up the wall. Then he spent a day showing Dan, Ned and Willie how to fire the things.

To his amazement, Ned proved a natural with the gun. Clumsy with everything else, he was deft at pouring the shot into
the barrel and tamping it down. He hardly seemed to take aim, and there was the block of wood they used as a target tumbling off the fencepost again. Ned had at last found something he was good at.

Dan was awkward, dropping the ramming-rod, spilling powder everywhere, could not seem to get the hang of pressing his cheek against the butt and fitting it into his shoulder. The block of wood was never as much as scorched by any of his shots. He preferred the idea of a club he could swing in his hand. He spent a morning in the forest, coming back with a stick that had a hard bulge in one end, and spent his evenings whittling away until it was weighted and shaped to suit him.

When it came his turn to try the gun, Willie was pale. He wiped his hands down his britches. Thornhill saw that his hands were shaking as he poured the powder onto the pan.
You’re only a
lad, Willie
, he said.
No call for you to do nothing
. But the boy was determined. The first time he did not push the butt firmly enough into his shoulder and when he pulled the trigger the gun gave him a blow that sent him tumbling backwards. But he was up in a moment, grim-faced, to try again.

Thornhill knew that four guns, and three men who could use them, would not be enough if the blacks came for them. But that outline, man plus gun, was something they knew to fear. The hope was that their fear would do the trick, rather than the gun itself.

He could not forget the way it had felt in the nights of the war dances, to know how close the wall of forest crowded down. A spear could sail out of the trees and strike a man down without him even seeing the hand that threw it.

He determined to clear a space around the hut. But how wide would such a moat have to be? He cut down a stalk from one of the grass-trees and felt something of a fool, standing with his spear in his hand and everyone watching. Sal had a look on her face he could not read as she stood in the door of the hut.

Do I make a good savage, lads?
he asked, trying to make a joke of it, and even Ned had the wit to laugh. Thornhill turned himself side-on, the way he had seen the blacks do, to gather together the muscles of his chest and shoulders. He felt the spear leave his hand and pictured it curving smoothly through the air, the way theirs did, and landing tip first in the ground. But his stick only wobbled, and skidded along the dirt a few yards off.

He turned to the watching men and laughed.
See what I mean
, he called. Up at the hut Sal watched.
No call to get ourselves fussed
. He did not share with them the way his shoulder hurt.

Now Dick was picking up the spear, hefting it in his small hand. He seemed hardly to be trying, but there the thing was, singing along the air and skewering the ground a good fifty yards away, far in among the trees.

It was easy to see it was not the first time Dick had thrown a spear, or even the twenty-first or the hundred-and-first. Thornhill saw on his face that the boy realised what he had told them, but this was not the moment to take him to task. This was the moment to realise how far a spear could travel, even when thrown by a skinny boy not yet eight years old. That could wipe the smile right off a man’s face.

He paced out the distance the spear had gone, added another few yards, and got them to work. Every tree—apart from the one on which Sal marked the weeks—was hacked at with the axe until it fell. Every bush was grubbed out, every loose rock was rolled away and the whole lot fenced. As far as this bumpy land could be, a protective circle around the hut was flattened. Nothing remained that any man could hide behind.

They won’t try nothing on us now
, he told them. He could see Sal watching his mouth make the authoritative words, and could not meet her eye.

He had made something of this place. He had cut down trees, got rid of bushes, chopped out the tussocks that were big enough
for snakes to make a home in. With each day that passed, a little more progress could be measured: one more tree cut down, one more yard of bushes cleared, another length of fence.

He loved the thing a fence did to a place. The tidy square of ground inside a fence had a different look from the ground outside it. A fence told a man how far he had travelled, and beyond the last length of fence he could see where he might go next.

There was this about it, though: no matter how much a man did in this place, the everlasting forest could not be got rid of, only pushed back. Beyond the patch of bare earth he was so proud of, the river-oaks hissed and the gumtrees rattled and scraped the way they always had. Up above the cliffs a flock of birds, black against the heat-bleached afternoon sky, heeled and veered together like a scarf flying in the wind.

~

The idea of Smasher’s biters had become more interesting to Thornhill. He was not looking forward to Smasher gloating, but swallowed his pride one calm Sunday at the beginning of March and took the skiff downriver.

He could hear the dogs long before he could see the hut. Their barking echoed raggedly around the valley. As he walked up to the hut they lunged at him on the ends of their chains. He gave them a wide berth, skirting round to where Smasher was clearing bushes off another few yards of land.

Smasher straightened up, watching Thornhill. His face was sour and pale under his hat like a man not eating any greens.

Thornhill did not waste time on pleasantries.
Want to buy a
couple of dogs off you
, he said, straight off. But Smasher wanted to spin it out.
Savages come visiting I hear
, he said, his smile full of gaps.
Won’t leave you be after all, that it?
but Thornhill did not wait to hear him out.
Couple a bitches and a dog, five pound, take it or leave it
. Smasher pretended to consider, scratching his jaw so the stubble
rasped.
Thing is, lot of call for my dogs just now
, he said. His narrow face was rubbery with triumph.
I could say not less than ten pound,
Will, and cheap at the price
.

But Thornhill would not be sneered at.
Guineas, Smasher
, he said.
Five guineas my last word
, and turned, was walking back towards the boat when Smasher gave way, as he knew he would.
Got to stick together
, he called, and Thornhill looked back.

Smasher was a sad skinny figure, standing crooked on his crooked bit of land, his trousers flapping ragged around his ankles, his bare feet caked with dirt, sweat streaked down his face.
Give us the five guineas then
, he called.
One white man to another
.

~

On their way back to the hut for Thornhill to pick out his dogs, Smasher shouted over their barking:
Got something to show you
. Some sly excitement in his voice made Thornhill hesitate but Smasher edged him into the doorway.

After the brilliance of the sun it was hard to see much inside, just a shadow split with bands of brightness where the light came in between the sheets of bark. But there was some sense of movement in a corner, and a powerful smell, part animal, part something gone rotten. As his eyes adjusted Thornhill could make out something, a mattress was it, with a thin hot ribbon of sunlight, and beside it a dark shape. There was the clink of a chain, and another breathing, not Smasher’s and not his own. He thought it must be a dog, but in the moment of the thought he saw that it was a person crouching with a stripe of sunlight zigzagging down its body: a black woman, cringing against the wall, panting so he could see the teeth gleaming in her pained mouth, and the sores where the chain had chafed, red jewels against her black skin.