Only Killers and Thieves(100)
A peculiar agony in the sounds he was making. A peculiar kind of pain.
*
In the scant moonlight Tommy followed the trail through the trees and the clearing with the watchman’s hut. Retracing the path he and Billy once took, Mary strapped bleeding to his front. Now he rode alone through the same bush and across the barren wasteland that led to the boundary trees, picking his way carefully between the boulders and termite mounds and unconsciously searching for the pair of Moses bushes in which he and his brother had hidden. Anything to hold on to. Anything that was real. His memories of his family were all he carried with him, but the memories felt as flimsy as dreams. He was hollow. Hollow and bereft. As Beau struggled to keep his footing on the shingle and scree, Tommy imagined him falling and pinning him to the ground, imagined the two of them lying out here wounded until it was time. Like that woman from Bewley who’d been found half-eaten—a bad death, Ma had said. Tommy would have taken that. He would have taken a bad death now. It seemed all the same to him. Bad life, bad death—was there any difference between the two? What lay before him was no kind of life, running from Noone for the rest of his days. He was heading for Glendale because there was nowhere else he knew, but then what? Where did he go at sunup? If he didn’t leave, he and Billy were dead; Tommy didn’t doubt Noone would keep his word. He was oddly principled in that way. Locke had had it coming since that first night in the scrubs, when he’d threatened Noone with a gun. Now look at him. Look at how he’d screamed.
In the blue gums Tommy dismounted and led Beau by the reins, picking a route through the trees. These same trees in which they’d once chased a dingo or emu—they’d never been sure. What if they hadn’t? What if they’d gone south to hunt instead? Would all this still have happened? Would anything have changed?
In the trees he heard the rustle of creatures moving through the branches, possums or flying foxes going about their lives, utterly indifferent to his. They didn’t notice his suffering. They didn’t care. After all that had happened, life carried on. Tommy was realizing this now. He had lost everything. So many people had died. It was nothing. The world watched on impassively. It barely even blinked.
When Tommy mounted up again, Beau seemed to sense they were on McBride land, and quickened his pace for home. Tommy gave him the reins and let him carry him, and they were almost at a gallop as they crossed the final fields. The dark husks of the buildings came into view and Tommy let out a deep moan. He had not been back here since the burial. The pitch of the house roof, the outline of the stables and sheds, the empty skeleton of the stockyard rails. As they neared, he mapped the scrubland behind the house, searching out the two mounds of broken earth and the little white markers at their heads. He believed he could see them. Even in this darkness, from so far away. He watched and he watched, his attention so fixed on finding those graves that he missed the little campfire burning outside the bunkhouse door.
He was alongside the stockyard when he saw it: he slowed Beau to walking and moved cautiously across the patch of open ground, before halting at the edge of the yard. A small fire. Little more than a single flame and its surrounding glow. One log, maybe. The kind of fire meant to go unseen. The bunkhouse doors were open but there was no one around. Must have heard Tommy coming and hid. He checked the other buildings. They stood silent and empty in the gloom. The house with its verandah, the stables, the sheds: these makings of a life he recognized but no longer owned. He pulled himself back out of it. Someone else was here. He had no weapon but it didn’t matter—with one kick of Beau’s flank he could be gone.
“Show yourself or I start shooting. That’s my barn you’re hiding in.”
There was movement in the bunkhouse doorway. Tommy braced himself, ready to flee. A figure stepped into the fireside glow. Tall and lean, wild-haired and bearded—Tommy’s breath caught in his throat, his chest tightened, he scrambled down from the saddle and ran across the yard and threw himself into Arthur’s embrace, the old man’s body warm against his, enveloping him, his hand cradling the back of Tommy’s head, stroking him gently, and Tommy was weeping, weeping, so hard he could barely stand, pouring it all out of him, everything that had happened, everything he had, and all the while Arthur whispering, “I’ve got you now, Tommy. I’ve got you now.”
Gippsland, Victoria
1904
38
After lunch he sits alone on the verandah, looking over the leafy gully, drinking his coffee and having a smoke, his hat beside him on the bench. Still in his work clothes, the shirtsleeves rolled, his stockinged feet crossed before him on the deck, and his blue eyes narrowed in a squint that never leaves, even in the shade. Fair-haired and stubbled, the stubble gray and gold, hints of red when it’s long. Beside his outstretched feet a black-and-white sheepdog lies sleeping; her ears twitch as he draws on the cigarette, then the eyes open irritably when he sighs out an exhale.
“That’s me told,” he says, smiling. “But it’s my bloody deck you’re on.”
The dog closes her eyes again, and he laughs and shakes his head, gazes out over the gully, over his land. The selection is spread across a meandering hillside, cut only by the east-west track running close to the house, then continuing all the way down to the creek far below. Once, he’d worried that the creek was too far away, that he’d have to find a means of pumping his water uphill, but in fact the hillside is riddled with trickling streams, either on the surface or just beneath, and he’s never been short of water here. It has taken some getting used to—the seasons running backward, not pining for the next rainfall. Still gets dry in the summer, but the fodder is generally lush and plentiful, and by rotating the paddocks his cattle hardly know the taste of grain. Free to roam, bellowing happily, no idea how it feels to starve. Only after the fires of ninety-eight was there ever any trouble, but the grass recovered quickly enough. He’d only just arrived here and it had seemed so arbitrary that he was spared. Not everyone had been as lucky. Closer to town whole houses had been razed, cattle burned, yet the worst of it had missed him by a mile.