Only Killers and Thieves(73)

He flicked the rain from his face and wiped his eyes and turned his attention back to the men, still cleaning their weapons, rodding their guns. They were not just passing the time. The dull fascination with which each of them worked wasn’t born of idleness but intent. Those weapons were being readied for use, each man making preparations for what he knew was to come, and which only now Tommy fully understood. It had taken him this long. Days of riding across the colony, farther and farther from home—he had believed they were on one path but he realized he was wrong. Not them. These men knew what they were doing. They’d always known, because they’d done it many times before. Joseph might be out here, or he might not: it was irrelevant, this had never been about him, or Tommy’s family, or whatever else he’d assumed. It was only about the Kurrong: a mass dispersal was planned.

Abrupt as a dead heartbeat, the distant music stopped.

The night drew on, hour after hour, and still the rain didn’t ease. The men slept upright, the ground too bogged to lie down, hunched in their bedrolls and no different in outline to the boulders and rocks. Tommy waited. Wedged into his crevice like a bilby in its hole, sheets of water sliding down the wall at his back. No stars visible, the moon shadowed behind the clouds. Tommy watched each of the men in turn and every now and then would see one of them flinch. A portent from their dreaming. A shiver from the cold. Who were they, these troopers? Who was Noone? If a bushman had come wandering from the west and described them around the campfire back home, Tommy doubted he would have believed they were real. Paid by the government to hunt down wild blacks, recruited from the south and keen, Rabbit had told him, so fucking keen. He felt such a child in their presence, helpless, unprepared. Father should have warned them. Should have taught them about this world. Maybe he’d planned to. “When you’re older,” he used to say. Too late for that now, Daddy. We’re as old as we’ll ever be.

The rain drummed his hat and bounced from the rocks, and everywhere was rain, rain, rain. Was it raining at Glendale? Tommy wondered. Soaking the paddocks, the northern fields, swelling the creek until it broke its banks and flooded the surrounding plains? He remembered the night they had danced in the yard, Mother lifting her nightdress and Father falling to his knees. It seemed impossible. Less a memory than a dream. Yet barely a month ago he’d been out in those fields, mustering the cattle like one of the men. He’d been miserable that week because of how Father behaved; now he’d give anything to hear him complain. He remembered waiting with the others, watching him ride home drunk from the saleyards, Mother slapping him on the chest as he puckered for a kiss. Firing Billy’s shanghai against the bunkhouse wall, laughing with Mary about the smell from his boots and her telling him, in that voice that would never grow up, You stink. I mean really, really stink!

He peeled himself from his hovel and crept across the camp. Billy was slumped under the hood of his bedroll, his chin on his chest and his breathing thick and slow. Tommy gently shook him. Billy woke with a start. Tommy leaned close and told him to hush.

“What is it?” Billy whispered. “What’s wrong?”

“Come with me.”

“What? Where to?”

“I want to talk to you. Don’t wake them. Come on.”

He tugged on Billy’s arm. Billy threw off the bedroll, climbed to his feet, and followed Tommy along the little passage that led out of the rocks, past the horses standing stoically in the rain, the same disgruntled air as when they were first tied. Tommy brushed his hand along Beau’s flank and the horse briefly lifted his head. Then out into the clearing, their boots suckering the ground as they walked, until they stood in the darkness and downpour, barely the light to see each other’s faces not a couple of feet away.

“Well?” Billy said over the hissing rain. “What’s this about?”

“You know what this is, don’t you? What they’ve got planned?”

His silence gave his answer. Tommy thought he saw his brother shrug. He pointed in the direction of the crater. “There’s babies down there!”

“We ain’t here for them,” Billy said.

“We ain’t here for any of them. Joseph’s not there. He never was.”

“You don’t know that. Even so, them others might be, them that—”

“There were no others, Billy! You lied! Bloody Sullivan—it wasn’t ever about us, or Daddy, or Ma, we just gave them the cause, don’t you see?”

“Killing them’s not cause enough for you?”

“But it wasn’t them”—he jabbed his finger toward the crater again—“that fucking did it!”

“How do you know that?” Billy shouted. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Them is what we’ve got. Hell, the law’s with us and John’s with us; even the bloody blacks agree it’s right. The only one that doesn’t is you. It’s time you took a fucking side.”

“Your side? Raping and killing like you’re some kind of man?”

“You were against shooting him. I was trying to spare you, that’s all.”

“Horseshit, spare me. Was the woman for me too?”

Billy threw up his arms. “Christ! Everyone did it! She’s only a fucking gin!”

“They killed her, you know that? Threw her on the rocks.”