The Secret River (35 page)

Beyond the cluster of people waiting for him to speak, the cliffs hung over the river, mysterious, colourless in the early morning shadows. At this hour the cliffs were a coarse cloth, the weft of the layers of rock, the warp of the trees straggling upwards. Beyond the ragged line of tree-tops, the sky was a sweet blue. A sudden gust of wind on the river ruffled it into points of light and the forest heaved under the morning breeze.

I can have us packed in an hour
, Sal said.
Be miles away by dinner-time
. She was holding out her hand for Johnny to come with her, but the calm knowing angle of her mouth as she spoke lit a flame of rage inside Thornhill.
They ain’t never done a
hand’s
turn
, he said. He could feel himself swelling into his own indignation.
They got no rights to any
of this place. No more than a sparrow
. He heard the echo of Smasher’s phrases in his own words. They sat there smiling and plausible.

That’s as may be, Will
, she said in her matter-of-fact way.
All I
know is, better even Butler’s bloody Buildings than creep around the rest of our
lives waiting for a spear in the back
. Little Johnny was picking his nose with one hand and scratching at a mosquito bite with the other. Bub and Dick and Willie stood together with their bare feet broad on the dust. None of the children was looking at their father.

He jerked at Sal, at the arm still reaching out for Johnny.
We
ain’t going
, he shouted.
It’s them or us and by Jesus Sal it won’t be us!
He saw her stagger as he grabbed her, but she would not look at him. He took her by the shoulders, and the puniness of them filled him with despair. She stood there, frail as a bubble, but stone-hard too.
Them blacks ain’t going to stand in my way!
He came at her hard, yanking her around, her face next to his.
Nor you neither, Sal!

We ain’t staying here and that’s flat
, she cried back. She sounded like someone shouting into a gale. He found himself taking a step and standing over her, tall so she had to tilt her face to look at him.
Damn your eyes
, he shouted.
We ain’t going nowhere
. His arm
moved up and his hand opened itself out, almost of its own accord, to strike her.

She looked up at him, at his raised hand, with something like astonishment. He saw that she did not recognise him. Some violent man was pulling at her, shouting at her, the stranger within the heart of her husband.

But the stranger was not going to cow her.
Hit me if you please,
Will
, she cried.
But it won’t change nothing
.

He saw her as she had been in that other life, with her saucy look. The picture as clear as a glimpse through a door. Then it went. This moment, with his hand raised against her, was all there was.

He dropped his arm. The heat of his anger was gone as quickly as it had come. What curse had come down on his life, that he was full of rage at his own Sal? He had a piercing wish to go back, do everything different from the start. It was too late, it was all gone too far. His life was a skiff with no oar, caught on the tide. He had got them into this place, and it had pushed them into a corner from which there was no way out.

Look Sal
, he started, but now Dan was there with them, panting and red in the face, trying to tell them something. They had to wait while he bent over, heaving, to catch his breath.
They’re
burning Sagitty out
, he gasped.
I seen the smoke from down on the point
.

Thornhill waited for Sal to look at him, but she would not.
Willie
, she called,
bundle up all our things, there’s a lad, and get them down
to the river. And you, Dick, gather up all them tools
.

She set off for the hut, getting a fresh grip on Mary and snatching Johnny’s hand. Thornhill had to take hold of her arm to make her stop.
Look Sal
, he said again, but she spoke over him.
You go and help Sagitty out
, she said.
The minute you get back but, we’re on
our way
. At last she looked at him, full in the face.
With you or without
you, Will, take your pick
.

~

As soon as they got the
Hope
out into the stream they could see the smoke rising into the sky from Sagitty’s place. As the boat edged up into the mouth of Dillon’s Creek, Thornhill leaned over the bow, squinting ahead. He could not see the hut, and there was no skiff drawn up on the riverbank. He had an impulse to turn the other way, watch the cliffs on the other beam and the sprays of breeze on the water.

But Ned was craning over the bow, saying
Something’s up for
sure, Mr Thornhill
. He put the oar over reluctantly.

No living thing could be seen: no Sagitty, no dog, no fowls pecking about.

Then they saw the skiff. It was hard to smash in the bottom of a boat, but it had been done, a ragged hole in the planks either side of the keel, and the oars broken into splinters. Beyond a field of burned corn like Thornhill’s, where Sagitty’s hut had been, there was only a smouldering heap from which one or two charred timbers protruded.

Dan’s voice was scratchy with fear:
The blacks got him!

Nothing moved in the valley, only the smoke slowly rising. Thornhill got the guns out from their place in the bow and took his time loading them. He had left the fourth with Willie and let himself imagine the boy’s pride in walking about with it. Prayed he did nothing silly. Dan got out his knife and strapped it onto the boat-hook.

But no matter how slowly they went about their preparations nothing changed in the place that had been Sagitty’s.

At last Thornhill, gun in hand, led the way. His hand was slick with sweat on the stock of the gun. He heard a crunching under his boots and looked down to see Sagitty’s smashed plates. The rags of a shirt flapped from a bush. A tin cup had been crushed with such force it had been driven into the ground.

Near the ruins of the hut, Sagitty’s dog was still on her chain, but her throat had been cut.

The only thing not burned was the water barrel. Behind it they found Sagitty. He was lying on his back like a man admiring the sky, except that the full length of a spear was sticking up out of his belly.

In the instant Thornhill saw him, he longed for him to be dead. You are dead, he thought. But he was not dead, although it was clear that he would be soon. His face was a dirty grey, his eyes were sunk back into his head. Blood so dark that it was almost black had welled up thick out of the wound, through his shirt. Thornhill could see where the cloth had been pushed into the flesh by the spear. Flies swarmed over the place. His mouth was ajar but no words came out. Only his eyes spoke, never leaving Thornhill’s.

The end of the spear quivered with each shallow breath he took.

Thornhill longed, like a physical need, for it to be yesterday, or even an hour ago, a time in which this thing did not have to be dealt with.

He heard Ned make a noise part surprise, part disgust.
The
buggers have gone and speared him
, he blurted. He took a step forward and made to touch the spear, but Sagitty gave a terrible urgent cry. Dan spoke from behind his hand, as if Sagitty would not hear him.
He ain’t got a hope, do he, Mr Thornhill?
Sagitty blinked and one of his hands closed slowly, as if around an oar.

Die, Thornhill willed him. For God’s sake die.

But Sagitty did not die, only went on staring at them. Blinked and stared again. Around them the clearing was steamy, airless. Beyond Sagitty’s field the forest was like a wall. Thornhill felt caught up in events that he was not prepared for. It felt as if someone else was speaking.
Get him on the boat, up to Windsor
, he said.
The hospital
.

They went back to the boat and cobbled together a stretcher out of a sail and a couple of oars. It was a comfort to be dealing
with objects. Sail, rope, oars: all behaved in the usual ways. The making of a stretcher could seem a normal enough thing to do, as long as they did not remember that it was because a man lay with a spear through his vitals not fifty steps away.

When they got back to the place where Sagitty lay, he had still not died. He cried out, one single strangled sound, when they lifted him onto the stretcher. It took the three of them to carry his weight, so they had no free hand to hold the spear steady. Sagitty gripped it with both hands to keep it still and made a high urgent sound with every step they took. His knuckles were white with holding the thing so hard. Thornhill felt himself running with sweat. But at last they were in the boat and could lay him down.
Here matey
, he said.
You’ll be right now
.

Dan put the rum bottle to Sagitty’s lips and tilted. The liquor ran down his chin, blood and rum mixed. Why do you not die, Thornhill thought, looking down at him. He hated him for not dying. Got out his handkerchief and covered his neighbour’s face with it to keep the flies out of his eyes and nose.

And to stop him looking.

~

The tide was with them, Windsor no more than a couple of hours away. Throughout the journey, Thornhill could not look at where Sagitty lay in the dirty water that slopped backwards and forwards over the planks. He could not go on watching that length of dark wood sticking out of his middle, swaying with every movement of the boat.

There would be no keeping this from Sal. She would not, thank God, see what a spear did in its precise details. She would not have to hear the small noises made by a man with a spear through his entrails. But she would not need to. If he had hoped to persuade her to stay, that hope had died in the moment of finding Sagitty behind the rain barrel.

He knew her well enough to take her at her word. When he got back from Windsor the hut would be nearly empty, the bags of food and their few clothes packed and ready, the rope that she hung the washing on taken down and coiled away. There was not much to take: the things she had carefully laid out every night for the blacks would fit into a couple of bundles. She would take the kettle and the pot from the fire, the engraving of Old London Bridge, her blue shawl. What else? The wooden dishes, the digging-stick, the string made of bark. And the roof-tile from Pickle Herring Stairs.

She would leave the place without a backward glance.

After they had gone, it would not take long for Thornhill’s Point to melt back into the forest. Weeds would spring up on the yard, the bark blow off the hut. The door would be the first to go, and then the creeping things would move back in: the snakes, the lizards, the rats. The corn patch would sprout fresh grass that the kangaroos would come down and nibble at, knocking the rails of the fences apart. In no time at all, it would be as if the Thornhills had never called it theirs.

They would set up house, in Windsor or Sydney. Perhaps one day they would go back to London, that place as remote now as the moon. He would go on making money. They would be happy enough.

But nothing would console him for the loss of that point of land the shape of his thumb. For the light in the mornings, slanting in through the trees. For the radiant cliffs in the sunset and the simple blue of the sky. For the feeling of striding out over ground that was his own. For knowing he was a king, as he would only ever be king in that place.

~

At the township, other men got Sagitty out of the boat and carried him up to the hospital there. He was out of sight, but Windsor
consisted of two dusty streets and a wharf. There was nowhere out of earshot of the scream when someone pulled the spear out. Even from the bar of the Maid of the River, Thornhill could hear it, a scream that was like no sound a human made.

He did not need to see, to know that Sagitty was dead. He had been dead from the instant the spear had entered his flesh. The hours in the bottom of the boat had not been part of any cure, only an extension of his death.

A silence hung over the township when the scream stopped. Inside the Maid of the River, Spider poured out a generous tot all round, on the house. No one was able to look anyone in the eye. Each man was thinking of the way a spear would feel, deep in his own guts.

Word travelled fast. As the afternoon wore on, the Maid of the River filled with men who had heard. Thornhill told the story to Loveday and Twist who already knew.
Copped a gutful of one of
them spears
, Thornhill said. Men he hardly knew began to drift in, men from Sackville and South Creek, their faces avid for details.

When Smasher arrived he took the story over. Anyone would have thought he had been there himself. Every time some man came in who had not heard it, he told it again, adding another detail. There were fifty of them. They forced him to cut his own dog’s throat. They scalped him.

Nothing Smasher could invent was as bad as what had really happened.

Men were buying Smasher round after round. His face was aflame and he had whipped himself up almost to tears. His outrage was genuine, his voice cracking with it. Thornhill drank and said nothing. He was reminded of what he had not thought of for years, the yard at Newgate, the men rehearsing their stories so often that they took on the substance of fact.

He wondered if there was something the matter with Spider’s rum, that it was not making him drunk. He could not get out of
his mind the picture of Sagitty lying behind the barrel. The way the spear had quivered, delicate as a flower on a stalk. His eyes, begging. That length of wood locked into the private darkness inside a man.

Behind his own counter, with his name above the door and his sign swinging outside, Spider had become a bigger man. He stood leaning on the bar, his palms flat on the wood like a preacher starting his sermon.
We got to deal with them
, he said. His voice had not changed, was still reedy with effort.
Get them before they get us
.

It was a picture Thornhill could see as clear as his hand in front of him: all their tomorrows stretching out, and every one of them with a spear waiting in the forest. It would come sailing out fast enough to enter his body just above his thick leather belt. He would end up like Sagitty, staring out at a world gone grey and irrelevant. Worse—impossible even to imagine—would be to see Sal lying out on the ground with her eyes imploring him.