The Secret River (31 page)

Smasher pushed past Thornhill and shouted,
Get your idle black
arse out of there
. Thornhill saw the whip catch her around the small
of the back as she stumbled outside. In the sunlight her skin was flaky and grey. She stood holding up the chain that joined her ankles.

Under that sun, so white-hot it seemed to make things dark, Smasher was a puny man with a whip at the ready in his hand. He was smiling a small wet smile.
Black velvet
, he said, his tongue flickering out around his lips.
Only kind of velvet a man’s got round here,
unless that old Herring piece takes your fancy, which she don’t mine
. When he had enough of laughing at the idea of Mrs Herring, he came up close to Thornhill.
She done it with me and Sagitty
, he whispered.
Back and front like a couple a spoons
.

For a terrible vivid instant, a scene lit by lightning, Thornhill imagined himself taking the woman. Could feel her skin under his fingers, her long legs straining against him. It was no more than a single hot instant, the animal in him.
You game, Thornhill?
Smasher was asking.
Only watch out, she got claws like a poxy cat
. Thornhill could not find any words, managed only to shake his head and turn away.

Smasher took flame as if he had been waiting.
Too good for a bit
of free fanny, are you?
he shouted, and spat out of the side of his mouth. The spit glittered as it arced through the air and fell on the dirt.
When even your precious Thomas Blackwood has a black bitch
.

Thornhill was seized with a desperation to get away from this airless place. If he did not he would stifle to death there and then.
Damn your eyes, Smasher, forget them dogs
, he shouted harshly. Smasher’s tight smile faded.
Give us just the five then
, he said, but Thornhill did not want the dogs now, not at any price. They were maddening him, snarling and barking, their teeth shining with spit, their muscular tongues working in and out of their long throats.

It was a relief to shout.
I said forget the dogs!
Shouting let something out, burned it off. He heard his voice echo from the ridges. Felt that the whole place, every tree, every rock leaning down the slope, was listening.

But Smasher was not impressed.
Takes a certain kind of a man,
don’t it
, he said after a while.
To handle them dogs
. His tone was conversational.
Maybe you ain’t that man, Will Thornhill
.

As Thornhill got into the skiff and heaved at the oars, forcing the boat along, he turned his face away from Smasher. The greasy smoke hung low over the water.

~

Imagining the moment of telling Sal about what he had seen—even thinking the words in his own mind—filled him with shame. It was bad enough to carry the picture in his memory. Thinking the thought, saying the words, would make him the same as Smasher, as if Smasher’s mind had got into his when he saw the woman in the hut and felt that instant of temptation. He had done nothing to help her. Now the evil of it was part of him.

~

If he picked his time right, when every man on the river was getting in his harvest, a trader with a boat full of reaping hooks could do well on the Hawkesbury. Thornhill had bought ten dozen at the beginning of February and had sold the lot by the steamy first week of March, even the one with the split handle. Now he was gliding down on the tide by moonlight, the
Hope
riding high and skittish on the water.

For the sake of a quiet life he always agreed with Sal when she reminisced about the way things were back Home. He agreed that the light was too harsh here, the days too hot, the nights too cold. There were too many snakes and things that stung. It was the end of the earth, with the nearest neighbour an hour away in the boat. He never tried to explain to her that, in spite of the mosquitoes and the brassy sun, the Lower Hawkesbury had its consolations.

The river was all silver and black in the moonlight. Above the
cliffs a waxy moon floated over the frayed horizon of trees, making the stars pale in its light.

Night on the river could be sweet, and part of the sweetness was how well it was known to him. He could see the rounded hump of his point along the metallic water, the way the ridges dipped and rose over the valley of the First Branch. They were as familiar to him now as Wapping Stairs and Swan Wharf had been.

He was calmed, full of pleasure as he sat in the stern of the
Hope
, feeling the river push back against the tiller like another person. He had thought to die a kind of death in coming here, but was beginning to see that a man did not have to be Jesus Christ to rise from that particular death.

He took his time making the
Hope
fast, reluctant to leave the night. On the way up the slope he paused beside the corn, listening to its little secretive creaking sounds in the moonlight. Like everyone else’s, his was ready to harvest. The cobs with their soft gold tassles had flourished in the heat of these summer days, growing five and six on a plant, wealth on a stalk, crowding around him with their papery rustle.

They would harvest in a few days and, at ten shillings the bushel, they would make a good few pounds. Easy money, when all he had done was stick a peck of seeds into the earth and wait.

~

By night the hut was no longer a box sitting hard on the dirt but a loose container of yellow light streaming out between each sheet of bark. Where it poured from the doorway onto the ground outside, it made the bloodless moonlight seem another kind of darkness.

He knew how it felt to be in there with the fire leaping up the chimney and the lamp on the table: safe, enclosed. But from out here it was obvious what a frail and porous thing the hut was. The
bulge of the ridge dwarfed it and the breeze smothered the sounds of the people sitting in their hot yellow bubble.

He knew that Sal had callers: he’d seen the boats drawn up at the landing-place. As he came closer he could hear the rumble of men’s voices from inside.

He had not spoken to Smasher since the day, two weeks ago, when he had seen the woman in the hut. Turned away when he sailed past Smasher’s Arm. He let Andrews from Mullet Island do the trade in Smasher’s lime now. He had tried to put the picture of the woman and the red jewels of blood on her skin away in some part of his memory where he did not have to see it.

A person coming in from the leafy smell of the night was like to suffocate in the hot stink of men and rum, and be blinded by the dirty light of the lamp. Smasher was there with Missy at his feet. Sagitty had brought his neighbour George Twist, an angry stumping man with legs bowed from rickets and his hat jammed down tight over his eyes night and day. Loveday’s gawky length was slumped over the table and Mrs Herring sat up prim on the other side. In the corner beside the chimney Blackwood sat cupping an elbow, his face half-hidden by his hand.

At the sound of the door opening Sal turned, fright on her face. Loveday turned too, in an exaggerated way, drunk enough to have become a clumsy machine.
Here is your breadwinner, Mrs T
, he said, and Smasher did not miss a beat, coming in on top of him.
Crumb-winner, more like
, he shouted, and that got them started. Sagitty thumped on the table with his hand, he thought it was so funny, and laughed with a strange high noise that could have been sobs. Thornhill saw what he had not seen before, that Sagitty was something of a lickspittle to Smasher.
Like a couple a spoons
.

Sal poured her husband a tot and gave it to him.
They got
Spider, Will!
she said.
Smasher, tell him about Spider
. Smasher did not need any encouraging to tell the story again. Mrs Webb had been alone with the children on that sad chip of civilisation called
Never Fail. Webb was away down the river borrowing a reaping-hook, his own having been stolen by the natives the week before.

When Webb was on the place, he did not let the blacks come within his fences, ran out with the gun if he had to, to make them leave. But with Spider away, Sophia Webb had let them come right up to the hut, and they charmed the silly woman, too softhearted for her own good. One of them got her talking at the door, capering about and playing the fool, so that she gave him a dish of tea and a doughboy to go with it. Meanwhile half-a-dozen of the others were busy out of sight down in the field, and while Sophia Webb was pressing another doughboy on her new friend they had stripped every last cob.

Telling the story again, Smasher was blotchy in the face with anger.
Whyn’t she ask them in to have a little kip in the bed while she were at
it?
he said.
And a puff of her man’s pipe and a sup of his rum?
He was so entertained by his own wit that the few teeth in his mouth could have been counted. But Thornhill could see he did not find it funny. His laughter was just another way of being eaten up with rage.

The widow Herring was speaking up from over by the fire, chuckling around her pipe as she spoke.
Poor booby, she were taken in
just like old Mr Barnes in
Hatter’s
Lane
, she said.
My brother Tobias kept
him gabbing at the door and I slipped in behind. Fingered a card of ribbon off
of his counter, got a half-crown for it later
. She puffed away, smiling.
They do got a charming way about them when they please
.

I ain’t got no cards of ribbon, Mrs Herring
, Sagitty said. He could not hide a shake of anger in his voice.
I had four bags of wheat, just
into the bags and that, buggers come and robbed me
. George Twist had caught alight at Mrs Herring’s mildness, too.
Asking for trouble, ain’t
they
, he said, his chin sticking out as he looked around waiting for anyone to disagree.

Twist was never a happy drunk. He had hogs up on his place and was a good customer, buying as much salt and as many kegs
as Thornhill cared to bring him, and shipping the pork out on the
Hope
. Just the same, Thornhill could not warm to him. He had never told Sal, but Twist was famous for the fact that one of his hogs had killed his youngest infant, and rumour on the river had it that he refused a burial on the grounds that the hog might as well finish what he had started.

There was more to the story about Spider. He had come back with the reaping-hook while the blacks were still there. He had the gun with him and got off a shot, but the blacks overpowered him while he was trying to reload. One stood over him, daring him with his spear, while they made Sophia cook them every egg the hens had laid, scoffed all the pork, and ate their precious store of sugar out of the bag in handfuls.

They did not molest her, poor toothless skinny woman that she was. Even Smasher did not suggest that. But they put on the few clothes the Webbs had: Sophia’s good bonnet with the pink ribbon, the shawl that had been her mother’s, Spider’s spare shirt. Shiny with pork-fat, they capered around in these, jabbering away as if a bonnet with a pink ribbon were the best joke in the world. Finally they carried away everything that could be carried away: the axe, the spade, the box of tea, the pannikins, even the little girl’s rag doll that one of them fancied.

Webb’s oldest, a surly freckled boy, kept saying,
Stop them, Dad,
stop them
, but his father could only stand there watching everything go. The boy burst into angry tears.

The last one turned and called something over his shoulder that made the others laugh. Wiggled his black arse at them as they stood in the door of the denuded hut, wiggled it and slapped it mockingly. It was a detail that Smasher enjoyed telling, demonstrating with his own arse and his own hand. Ned watched with his mouth open.

The message was clear, and Spider had decided not to wait for another. He would turn his back on Never Fail. He was going
to try his luck at Windsor, where the blacks could not get into the township. Set up a public house there and sell Blackwood’s liquor. He would let other men grow the corn and deal with the blacks.

Loveday was so drunk he had gone rigid, not blinking, one hand holding his pannikin, the other clenched on the table like a man having his portrait painted. But suddenly he thundered across the room so that everyone looked around:
No set of people in
the known world were ever so totally destitute as these are of industry and
ingenuity!
Ned nodded, looking solemn as befitted the grand phrases.
Their innate indolence renders them inattentive to the very means of
subsistence
.

But the story was Smasher’s and he was not going to be bested by any ragged gentleman with a mouthful of words.
Meaning they are lazy thieving savages
, he interrupted, but Loveday for once stood his ground. He belched, slapped his hand on the table for attention and went on, unstoppable as a tide.
Our sable brethren,
lazy savages as you so rightly call them, reap by stealth and open violence the
produce of a tract they are themselves too indolent to cultivate
. His eyes were unsteady in his head but the phrases rolled splendidly out of his mouth.

Thornhill looked into his rum, silenced by so many words. Smasher whirled around, miming a gun to his shoulder.
They
understand this lingo all right, Parson
, he shouted. Sagitty held up his pannikin in a toast, but stopped it on the way to his lips, struck by a thought.
Keep back a couple of them gins eh?

Mrs Herring sniffed.
Mind how you speak, Smasher Sullivan
, she said sharply.
There’s those of us don’t fancy it one bit
.

At this a silence fell around the table. Smasher smirked at Thornhill. Thornhill licked his lips and looked away. He wondered if all of them had been invited to share that woman who crept along the wall in chains. Sagitty was smoothing the beard around his mouth smiling.

Ain’t no one listens to an old woman
, Mrs Herring said.
But I tell you
straight, you are heading for your come-uppance, Smasher, carrying on like you
do, and you too Sagitty Birtles, don’t think I don’t know what goes on
. And stuck the pipe back in her mouth hard, as if putting a cork in other words she would like to say.