Our Sunshine: Popular Penguins Page 4

  Nine scars listed on his face, running north to south.

  Sallow complexion! Low forehead! Eyebrows meeting! Strong evidence of his criminal nature, if not membership of the apes!

  Those old fishy prison lags not put off by scars and fierce eyebrows give the boy a try. He can state that none of them succeeds. (Every prisoner claims that, but convicts can pick the truth. Something missing in the eyes thereafter gives it away, they say; the spark goes out.) Most of them he just glares at and says nothing. Those toadfish that keep trying, or gang up on him, he warns he’ll kill.

  ‘All day,’ he says, ‘I’m handling picks and bars and sledgehammers, and handy with them.’ He’s in a work party of trustees quarrying bluestone and building piers around the bay. ‘You won’t always be together,’ he says. ‘You’ll need to sleep sometime, and without dreaming of a crowbar through the skull.’

  These gaol dregs are so dense you’ve got to get it across that you’re quite prepared to die yourself before they take the message in, before they understand the fact of that calm and tight-closed fury and give up.

  But one afternoon behind the Newport breakwater, one lag’s so crazed he won’t. He pulls out two ugly things, one a gaol-made knife, grins another sickly grin and makes another stab. The boy just shrugs and quickly moves. In fact, he doesn’t need a pick or hammer with all the man’s got on his mind. He takes one cut on the elbow, whips a spiky branch of kelp across the straining face and the lag trips on his own dropped pants and without fuss has his jewels stamped in the sand.

  When he comes off the hulk he’s just eighteen, six foot, with a beard. Double the scars. A quieter man who hates the smell and sight and motion of the sea. At least now he can imagine hell: a greasy winter shore bisected by a loamy rivermouth, a city’s slimy bay, froth-stained with tar and sawdust, phlegmy flotsam, puffy things with pecked-out eyes. And on the high-tide line, strings of smelly sea-grapes pretending to be rosaries.

  Well, why not? He’s seen the sea as gaoler, molester, killer – and graveyard, too, for countless bloated cats and dogs, several cows, two drunkenly shotgunned sea lions, one pig and three people, one a street-girl still in her stays but minus her head. He’s jumped aside as four spooked Clydesdales bolted a dray of pitch and bluestone foundations off the end of the Gellibrand pier like it was a cartload of feathers. And seen them every day for a fortnight after, in frozen frenzied gallop down below, still in harness, crabs and toadfish politely diminishing them from the lips and nostrils backwards. Until a pack of tiger sharks with a taste for everything but the stone and iron wheel-trims cancelled the tableau in twenty minutes.

  He’d face the gallows before doing it again.

  She’s got a shock for me, she says, as I walk in the door. She’s marrying George.

  George?

  The baker. The American.

  Well, she’s right. I’m shocked. Coyly asks me to be a witness. Everything’s so wrong, I squirm. I’ve just got out of gaol. Can’t I sit down first, have a drink, take my boots off? She’s a flickery version of herself, she’s lost her grip. She mixes frowns and giggles and holds up bolts of cloth for me to nod at. A wedding gown! She skids around the house, not finishing jobs, ignoring children, dabbing at her hair like she’s eighteen, not a widow.

  George can get the cake for free!

  He doesn’t much fancy the Pope, the groom announces, if it’s all the same to her, so they do the deed in Benalla according to the rites of the Primitive Methodists. Well, who’s ever heard of them?

  Of course he doesn’t last the distance. Soon rides smiling down one Sunday morning to the hawker’s wagon for a new axe-head and forgets to bring it home, or himself with it. Children numbers nine and ten are his. George M. King was his full name, not the best advertisement for California, Protestants or the baking trade.

  He hasn’t been as bone-and-muscle tired as this since she married King. For a month after the wedding he’d just kept drinking rum, more or less forgotten to eat, then woke one morning with a violent craving for the Diggers’ Special at the Bellevue Tearooms in Beechworth. The Pork De Luxe With Eggs. This feast was a legend in the district. Streaky bacon, fried pork steaks, smoked shoulder ham, a slab of brawn, a bottom stratum of boiled trotters, all neatly layered in a mound, grouted with navy beans and crested with four fried eggs so that the pierced yolks flowed down the hill.

  He ate the lot before the eggs had dried into a trickle, stirred three sugars into his milky tea, barely made the street outside. Great rattling, gripping gurgles shook his bowels. Only nineteen and shitting sheets of water like an old cow in a lupin field.

  In that month, spaces where his memory used to be were filled with sentimental confidences and pointless arguments, surprised strangers’ busted noses. Sometimes after blurry midnight flurries with seasoned barmaids by the Broken River, he woke alone with blistered eyelids to frightening crow calls in the high sun-glare and thought himself pecked blind and hollow.

  That month he had to keep one eye closed to focus on what and whom he was doing. One eye closed against the savage sunshine, the scathing peacock, on the rare times he rode home.

  Something had to happen, better or much worse. Maybe a tiger snake bite while sleeping out. A final drunken roll down the riverbank. Who’d have thought him lucky to be arrested for riding (while passed out) across a footpath? There were burrs in his hair, grass and piss stains on his pants when they took him in a cart, unconscious, over the Broken River to the Benalla police station. Here a Sergeant Whelan, who remembered him from other matters, was in charge. Whelan took three troopers, Constables Lonigan, Fitzpatrick and O’Dea, along next morning to escort him – now on his feet, just – across the road to court.

  As if four men weren’t safeguard enough for one hungover youth, Fitzpatrick decided to handcuff him too. At this the prisoner stirred, swore loudly and lashed out. Fitzpatrick grabbed him by the throat and Lonigan the scrotum. Lonigan held on and on, and in this way they dragged him across the street and into the court.

  By this time he was sharp with pain and fury, snapped out of crapulence. His drink was hocussed, he insisted to the magistrates, to get him back in gaol. He was loud, alert, persuasive, and, surprisingly, let off with a fine.

  But he wasn’t finished. On the courthouse steps he yelled a threat. Said he’d never shot a man yet but if he did, so help him God, Lonigan would be the first.

  Did you hear that down the back? The lady said what a pity, ahem, such a strapping young fellow should have become an outlaw and did I ever consider going straight?

  Madam, I must say it’s not as cut and dried as that. Things flow over into other things. You don’t wake up one morning saying, I’ve seen the light, today I’ll toe the line, be the coppers’ boy. But you could say that in the mid-seventies I had two years of intense law abiding.

  I worked as a timber feller for Saunders and Rule, cutting sleepers for the Wangaratta–Beechworth railway, then for another sawmiller, Heach and Dockendorf, in the Mansfield district, then back to S. and R. as sawmill overseer at Bourke’s Waterhole. When the sleeper contract ran out I went prospecting up the headwaters of the King River and found commercial gold on Bullock Creek. Then cut and shaped thirty cartloads of quarry stone – using my Point Gellibrand experience – for a squatter’s homestead.

  Also had some honest paid fun, you’ll be pleased to hear, trick-riding around the country shows and boxing for fair purses. You’re speaking to the unbeaten heavyweight boxing champion of northeastern Victoria.

  Thank you, thank you, very kind.

  I CAN bend from the saddle at full gallop and snatch a lady’s handkerchief from the ground. I can stand and lie on the saddle at full gallop. I can jump fences kneeling on the horse’s back.

  Beat Wild Wright in the yard of the Imperial Hotel, Beechworth, in 1874. Twenty rounds, bare-knuckle. Officially organised – timekeeper, seconds, referee. Wright six-one and fourteen stone, me one inch and two stone less. Knocked him out in the twentieth. Anyone ca
n look it up. Teach him to lend me that postmaster’s mare.

  Some women, not the youngest ones, like such shows. Like to see a strong younger man wounded but prevail, bending easily to snatch their handkerchiefs.

  She packed a generous wicker basket; she’d been on many picnics. She laid a woollen rug on layers of pine needles and angled between two pine trees so the sun divided it. Explained that this way we’d be both warm and cool. Then she smoothed it, laying fingernails lightly on my wrist, my upper arm, in passing. Like a lorikeet’s claws, soft but serious. You knew they rested there only momentarily and could scratch if they wanted, but were grateful for the favour. She pecked at this, nibbled at that, peered at me intently from time to time with her face half slanting away to look at me better, like a brilliant rare bird on a stump.

  ‘All that cutting stone and so forth, no wonder you’re so hungry,’ she said. ‘Won’t it be a lovely house?’

  I’ve always liked the sighing sound air makes in a pine tree, like wild women’s whispers. One side of her mouth turned up, the other down. A small mole above it got pursed up when she hummed opera.

  ‘Indeed,’ I said, unable now to imagine her ever indoors. I gulped down every foodstuff, couldn’t stop from eating.

  Shapely lips started things. Then I did.

  She dismissed the picnic with a wave. She brushed aside the bread and gammon and satsuma-plum jam, the sliced muskmelon, the lemon barley water, and lay back on the rug. The crickets paused, the breeze dropped dead. Never seen such sights in daylight. Never seen such keen foam down there before, and the colour on her cheeks and neck went pink, then scarlet, like those inland salt-lake parrots they sell in town. Lost in herself like younger women never are – a little pressure here, just there, oh, yes. Isn’t that a funny place to feel such sensations, the artery running smoothly into there, pumping like a honeyeater’s heart.

  Little grass-ticks scurried up my legs and burrowed in my thighs and I let them. Sunshine on her alabaster belly and her birdcalls.

  JESUS, PICNICKING gives you an appetite. Buttering another crunchy bun and munching fast – crumbs exploding from my lips – I say, ‘It’s probably not the time to mention that I once took a thoroughbred or two of his. For his own good your husband ought to change his brand. I didn’t even need to burn it out and brand them again.’

  Explained how easily I plucked the hairs and pricked the skin with iodine, made the C into a perfect Q for Quinn, my mother’s maiden name – and my rowdy relatives’. ‘Now they’re cantering happily in New South Wales. The horses, I mean.’

  She frowned, then rolled her eyes and laughed. Her little finger traced our silvery snail-trails on her thigh. She dabbed me carefully dry with her silky petticoat, pushed it deep into her face, caressed her nose and cheeks, inhaled the silk, then slowly unrolled it, shook the creases out and put it on. This side of her was newly strange again. Her eyes and smile while doing this were coming from some humid foreign place. The crickets by now were used to us and started up again their hot vibration. A whiff of hot gunmetal came off her, or maybe me. I felt like someone living another way of life so thought I’d better act like it. Pressed on her trigger again just where she said to and watched her colours change. Already longing for those birdcalls – the seagull, the parrot, the magpie carolling at the sun. Then pulled her back down on me and let her falling hair shield my eyes against the glare.

  This was in my law-abiding time, in the early stages with Mrs C.

  In the final stage with Mrs C, I made an appearance on her croquet lawn, burnt naked and caked in blood. Sizzled flakes of flesh and cloth flew off us all, spikes of our clotted hair snapped off. None of us was normal. Dan, tied on behind me, was making hooting noises in the wind.

  All through those days of thirsty hiding, of guzzling blood and lurching in fires, I’d pictured her juicy green lawn. So the four of us, doubling up on two charred and limping horses, waving shaky guns, appeared like a mad nun’s nightmare in the home paddock of Mrs C.

  This was a week or so after Hare’s men poisoned our dam with three strychnine-baited pigs and a decomposed roo or two, then set alight our hideout country to flush us out. A hot February drought, with the bracken and wattle undergrowth drier than touchpaper and all the streams lower than mud. Fires surged along the gullies and up across the ridge in separate bright gashes like cutlass wounds. As the main fire came up on us on the nor’westerly we fled our hut with a neck-bag each of dubious water and the four relief horses carrying hasty packs. Panic flowed in waves from horse to smoking horse and back. In the smoke and noise, Dan’s mare Erina stumbled and Dan led her on foot in giddy spirals until we found them half-buried in the silt of what had been Six Fingers Creek sucking river stones and with their hair on fire from the ash of weeping-willow leaves.

  Spewing in the saddle from bad water, shitting too, losing more moisture from our streaming eyes, we were scorched husks by the time we’d found a granite overhang to shelter under and let the main fire jump us. By the time I’d calmed Dan down from gibbering for mother and we’d kept ourselves alive a day, we’d drunk all the water anyway. The horses were colicky and mad from eating burnt feed but Erina was the maddest so while Dan was out to it again we cut her throat, not quite looking at each other, and drank the blood.

  This way we lasted another two days. In daylight we hid under rocks from the police patrols, at night we doubled back behind them across the burning hills. Even the blacktrackers couldn’t see in smoke, at night, and where we could we back-burned our tracks. By now we were the scorched and brittle texture of the bush around us. We nibbled the bodies of small charred animals – a spiny anteater, goannas – and vomited again. Steve and Joe chewed burned gumleaves to get the taste out of their mouths while Dan kept sucking rocks like they were toffees. It took an hour just to raise the spittle but then I ate my chinstrap. When at last we found another cave we killed two more horses to celebrate. We fell on their hot necks, pressed our faces in as if they were the iciest mountain streams.

  Blood was the only food we could keep down. We drank six horses dry before we saw the croquet lawn three days later and guessed we’d live.

  Coming close to Mrs C’s property, we took the chance the bushfire had forced her husband and eldest son and men out mustering. Her Chinese laundry girl spotted us first but fled to the lavatory at the sight of these spirits of murder victims. Certainly we were a charnel house on legs. I – the scorched beast-creature in front – croaked after her, ‘Get the missus!’ and as the horses tottered to the water trough we peeled off their backs like scabs and pushed our snouts in alongside theirs.

  Seeing us slobbering in the horse trough made her lose her colour. We weren’t welcome with my lorikeet. First she sent her other children to their rooms. When she could speak properly she said, ‘You’re such a ghastly sight I wonder if I should shoot you for humanity’s sake.’ Both sides of her mouth now turned crisply down. She said, ‘I didn’t think anything could disgust me. I’m well travelled and a country woman and have seen many rough things in my life. But nothing like this.’

  She shivered like she was the half-dead one while we shuffled like doomsday omens on the laundry floor. We were beyond shame or trousers. It wasn’t just the blood and ashes clotting our hair and beards, our disgusting odours, our weeping organs, burnt, then chafed from riding. Our skins were layered stiff with blood, crackling and reeking, our mouths were crusted holes. Our blood-coats even had their own high noise: we hummed with flies.

  I hadn’t let on, but Joe blinked at her, then me, with ruptured eye veins from the smoke, and gave a sideways grin. ‘Sunny days …’ he sang. He was croaking a banjo song of his and Aaron’s, his eyes protruding like blood-reel marbles: ‘Funny days. All our milk~and~honey days …’ Bow-legged little Steve, flyblown in several distant parts – maggots had begun to surface – stood deathly silent, bare feet splayed for balance and eyes squeezed shut, while she picked the wrigglers off him. Dan was the groggiest of us, made groggier by
the medicinal brandy she’d brought out. Reeling and eyeing Mrs C, he tweaked his blackened prodder, saying, ‘I don’t suppose you’d go a spot of croquet?’

  ‘You took a risk,’ she hissed at me. ‘Don’t do that again.’

  ‘I don’t intend to,’ I said. Didn’t have the strength to laugh. I was feeling odd. Scrubbing and bathing gingerly, I was thinking how these blood-coats had soothed our burns and protected us in lieu of clothes. In a strange way I was loath to give mine up.

  ‘Coming here, I mean,’ she said. ‘Phew, the smell of you. Like a badly slaughtered animal when they hit the bowels.’

  Roar away, lion. Catch my smell on the breeze. Just another animal marking out its territory. And this is mine: this pool in the clay, these gum roots, the shine on those wet shadows, these weeds trampled by my nervy to-and-fro, that warm gust of sentimental human song.

  Jesus, where’s that train? Where’s Hare? What’s the time? Why aren’t they here?

  Wish we had our peacock here.

  Why now these depressed and gutless moments? Keep thinking it’s still not too late to end all this safely, for everyone to stay alive.

  Alive or dead. It’s not as if alternatives haven’t been considered. Even canvassed this wild card: whisking off the Governor from the cosiness of his country residence at Mount Macedon.

  I can see it now: Relax, Marquis, Lord, Your Excellency, dismiss your underlings and I won’t lay a finger on you. Even though you’ve signed things to have me shot by total strangers, I’m doing this the civillest I can.