Only Killers and Thieves(14)
“Is he really not coming back?”
“No, he’s not. Joseph’s gone away.”
“I never liked him anyway,” Billy said. “We’re better off rid.”
Mother stiffened suddenly. “We should report them, tell Magistrate MacIntyre what they’re doing out here. If he sent word to Brisbane, they might make Noone stop.”
“Make him stop?” Father said. “Who d’you reckon sent him out this way in the first place? Who buys their weapons, their tucker, pays their wage? Christ, Liza, where d’you think he sends his reports when he’s done?”
She sat there chastened.
Tommy said, “Aren’t they meant to be on our side too?”
“Supposed to be. Meaning we’d be the dogs that turned on our own.”
“They hanged them others after Myall Creek,” Mother said defensively.
“Which was forty bloody years ago, and this is Queensland now, don’t forget—Billy Fraser shot six blacks on the steps of Juandah bloody courthouse and they let him walk away.”
Mother crossed herself at the mention of the Fraser family and the events at Hornet Bank. “That was different. As you well know. But we can’t just sit here . . .”
“I already said I’d talk to John.”
“When will you?”
“After the sales. Same as always.”
“For all the good it ever does.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning nothing. Talk to him. Again. See how much things change.”
Father was still glaring at her as the slow clap of hooves came into the yard, Arthur mumbling to his horses, encouraging them on. The family sat listening: Mother stiff-backed and formal, might have been in church; Father with his brows furrowed; the children’s eyes darting between each other and the door. No one said anything. Waiting as he passed by the house. Arthur chatting amiably, the dog muzzles jangling, two sets of hooves plodding by. The noise receded and the room took a grateful breath. Mother smoothed her apron on her lap. Father pushed himself to his feet, crossed toward the door, and Mary asked him, “Daddy, will Joseph be alright out there on his own?”
“I don’t know. It was his choice to go.”
She frowned and looked ready to ask another question, but Father went out through the door. As his boots thudded down the steps he shouted, “Arthur! Hold up!” then his footsteps crunched away across the gravel in the yard.
“If he wasn’t so soft on them in the first place,” Billy said, sliding back his chair and standing, “Joseph would never have dared leave.”
“You don’t know anything about it, Billy,” Mother told him. “You should learn to watch your mouth.”
Billy shrugged, went to the bedroom, flapped open the curtain, and walked inside; they heard the bed joins creak. Mother came and stood between Tommy and Mary and draped an arm around each, drew them into her sides. Her hips were sharp through her housedress, the bony ladder of her ribs, but Tommy took comfort from her warmth all the same. He felt her hand move softly to his head and her fingers comb his hair. He needed a bath, she told him. They all did, after today. She noticed the rope burns on his hands, turned them over, inspected both palms, then ordered him to stay put while she went into the scullery to fetch her healing balm.
6
The bunkhouse door was ajar but there was no answer from inside. Tommy knocked again, called Arthur’s name, still no reply. He transferred Mother’s food parcel into his other hand and heaved open the door, stirring a flurry of dust into the air, and slid himself in through the gap. He stood at the threshold, waiting. It took a while for his eyes to adjust. Blinding sunshine outside, murky twilight within. The bunkhouse was long and empty, as big as any barn; a single window threw a column of sunlight across to the other wall. Dust motes hovered like flies. The air was thick and close, fusty, and strewn about the floor were the remnants of the last man to leave: Reg Guthrie’s litter and the abandoned iron frame of his bed. It was turned on an angle and had drifted from the wall, like a boat come loose on the tide. Even alone, Arthur had kept to his end, behind the curtain two-thirds of the way down. Force of habit maybe. Father was unusual in allowing his black stockmen to sleep indoors: most were made to live apart, in camps. But the white workers had never liked them being there, so the curtain had gone up, and each color kept to its own end of the barn. Now only Arthur was left, and still the curtain was drawn.
Tommy walked through the building, scuffing the dusty floor, remembering the bunkhouse when it had been full. A dozen men once slept here, sometimes more, in the iron-frame cot beds that Father had since sold, or in swags rolled directly on the ground. Some preferred to be outside, beside the campfire they lit on the edge of the yard. Father would join them sometimes, sitting up late, drinking, laughing, and singing songs, and Tommy and Billy would lie awake, listening, trying to follow what they said, then fall asleep to the lullaby of some old bushman’s lament. But that was many years ago. One by one the men had left or been let go, and Father did his drinking on his own these days. He didn’t sing songs anymore.
Tommy felt along the folds of the curtain, searching for the divide, the material thick and plush as velvet in his hands. He found the parting and opened up a gap and peered through, into the quarters that Arthur and Joseph shared. Had shared. Here was another window, and the back door was open, light flooding into the room. Arthur’s possessions were spread along one wall: his bed, a cabinet, a table and chair, a luggage trunk patterned in gold and silver leaf. Much of the furniture looked salvaged, repaired, and there were odd little trinkets on the shelves. Horseshoes, cigar boxes, ornaments gummed together with wax. On the floor by the bed a Bible lay open at the Gospel of John. The blankets were knotted, recently slept in, but Arthur wasn’t there.