Only Killers and Thieves(78)

30



The washroom was on the ground floor at the back of the house and had been painted all white. Floor, ceiling, walls. Two paintings hung in gold frames: a seascape, and a man catching fish. The copper bathtub was near the window, half-filled, the clean water shimmering with a golden tint, and beside it lay a rug with a swirling pattern and a pile that was meadow-thick. A trio of candles burned. They were grouped on an ornate wooden pedestal table and sent a flickering shadow light across the room. Dusk fell outside. Purple clouds dotted the sky. The sunset was jigsawed by a lace curtain, irregular fragments visible through the weave, and the window was misted on the inside. Steam rose from the bathwater, settled on the panes, dribbled, and collected on the sills.

Tommy stared into the water and shivered. The rug pile bristled between his toes. He was naked. His bloodied clothes lay like entrails by the door. His gaunt body bore bruises, grazes, and cuts, and was darkly sunburned on the arms and neck. The burned skin flaked; the remainder was apple white. On his left hand he wore a fresh white dressing that Weeks had just applied. The vet had peeled open the sodden rags and winced when he’d seen Tommy’s wounds. Two stubs, the last and the ring fingers, blistered and swollen and raw—after the amputation, Pope had cauterized the ends with a heated bowie blade. While he worked, Tommy asked Weeks for more detail about Mary’s passing; Weeks shook his head and spoke with his eyes down.

“Your sister’s been in the ground ten days just about. There ain’t nothing can change that and talking won’t help. Best make your peace with it, I’d say.”

Tommy reached a foot tentatively over the rim of the bath and felt the water scald his skin. He held it there a moment, the water rippling in concentric rings. His foot prickled and steadily numbed, then he climbed fully into the tub and stood in the water to his knees. It burned him. He fought the instinct to get out. His feet and ankles looked red beneath the surface, but that might have been the reflection of the tub. A scum formed on the water. It clouded and thickened and swirled, and floating in there were twigs and burrs and other nameless things. Tommy sat down. He gasped as the heat caught his midriff and groin. The water washed against the sides of the tub. Steam clouded his face. Sweat broke on his cheeks and brow. He scooped up the water one-handed, tipped it over his hair, splashed his face, then sat there very still. The water ebbed gently. He closed his eyes and breathed the steam.

Mrs. Sullivan had told them about Mary the very second they rode in, like she’d been waiting on the verandah all that time. She ran down the steps to meet the horses, her eyes fixed on Tommy and Billy, barely a glance for her husband or the other men. None of the blacks were with them, neither the troopers nor the women they held. On the way in they’d found a blue-gum clearing that was suitable for camp; Sullivan had promised grog and tucker would be brought, then the whites had gone on alone.

Tommy watched her coming. Thought at first it might have been good news. She had her skirts bunched in her hand and her hair flew as she ran, and the house behind her was so grand and majestic that Tommy struggled to keep his emotions down. Everything perfect here, everything clean: as if he’d wandered from a nightmare into a rich and vivid dream.

“What is it?” Sullivan shouted, dismounting. He walked out to meet her but she ran past him to Billy, standing beside his horse. She went to embrace him, saw the state he was in, and instead touched him lightly on the arm. She waved Tommy closer. Her eyes went to his hand. She slung Sullivan a hateful glare. He tried to speak again but she silenced him, then told the two brothers, tears in her eyes, “She was just too young to fight it. Weeks did what he could, but Shanklin never came . . . he never came.”

Tommy looked up at the house, at the window of Mary’s bedroom, the room where he’d pictured her lying ever since they left; the room where she’d died on her own. They should have been with her. They should have been at her side. He should have known when he left her what would happen while they were gone. He didn’t even say a proper good-bye. If they’d been here they could have helped her, or tried to help her, or at least could have held her hand, instead of which . . . instead of which . . . what were they doing, he wondered, the day their sister died?

Tommy was pulled out of himself by Sullivan spitting on the ground.

“Ah, shit,” the squatter said, wiping his lips. “Well, least we got the cunts.”

There was soap and a flannel on a stool by the bath; Tommy reached for them and tried to rub up a lather but couldn’t manage it one-handed, so applied the soap directly to his skin. It glided soft and smooth and smelled of blossom in the spring. A foam settled on the water. It washed like surf against his body and over his knees. He took hold of the flannel and scrubbed himself down. Gently at first but then harder and harder, until he was tearing at his skin, pulling hairs, breaking scabs, making sure it hurt. He cried out and tossed the flannel into the bath and sat there heaving, the breath surging out of him, body shaking, fighting back tears.

Slowly he calmed. Wiped his face, exhaled, leaned back, and stared through the pattern of window lace. She was out there somewhere, Mary, buried in the little graveyard on the hill. It hadn’t seemed right at first, but now Tommy quite liked the idea of his sister’s body in a rich man’s soil. In years to come folks would see her name and assume she was grander than she was: she’d be a princess forever up here. Plus, it had really pissed off Sullivan, a McBride lying in his private family plot.