David Malouf - The Complete Stories

He was wrong, I know that. He was wrong every way. But I want to speak up for him too.

Even when Mick Jolley come across and yelled at him and tried to get him to pay the blacks what he called compensation, I was on his side; not just by standing there beside him, but in my heart.

He did not know that black was a messenger. Who had the right to pass through all territories without harm. How could he know that? And even if he had, he mightn't have cared anyway that it was a consideration in their world. It wasn't one in ours. That they should even have considerations — that there might be rules and laws hidden away in what was just makeshift savagery, hand-to-mouth getting from one day to the next and one place to another a little further on over the horizon — that would have seemed ridiculous to him. Given they had no place of settlement nor roof over their heads to keep the sun off, nor walls to keep out the wind and the black dust that made another duller blackness where they were already blacker than the most starless night. No clothes neither, to keep them decent, and had never raised even the skinniest runt of a bean or turnip, nor turned a single clod to grow what went into their mouths, only scavenged what was there for anyone to crawl about and pick up. “Consideration,” he would have said. “Consideration, thunder!”

Yet it was true. There were messengers. Given a part to play like any sergeant or magistrate, and recognised as such even by strangers.

Though not by us.

Which made us, in some ways, the most strangers of all.

I don't believe he knew what he had done — the full extent of it. And with all that light in his blood that made him so glowing and reckless, I don't think he would have cared.

I didn't know neither, but I felt it. A change. That change in him had changed me as well and all of us. He had removed us from protection. He had put us outside the rules, which all along, though he didn't see it that way, had been their rules. The magic I'd felt when they just stood and looked, as if I was some creature like a unicorn maybe, had come from them. Now it was lifted.

These last months I had taken to going about the place with Jamie. I was just beginning to show him things, things I had discovered and knew about our bit of land that no one else did except maybe the blacks, and places no one else had ever been into, except maybe them, when it was theirs. I don't reckon those hut-keepers and shepherds had ever been there. They were places you could only reach by letting yourself slide down a bank into a gully or pushing in under the low underbrush along a creek, so low you had to go on your knees, then on your belly. Jamie would have followed me anywhere, I knew that, but I was careful always to show him marks and signs along the way. Even when he was too little to talk, he was quick to see, and knew the signs again on the way back. He had known no other place than this. There were times, little as he was, when I felt he was showing it to me. Only now I kept a good eye open when we were out together. The whole country had a new light over it. I had to look at it in a new way. What I saw in it now was hiding-places. Places where they were hidden in it, the blacks. Places too where ghosts might be, also hidden.

The story I have been telling up till now is my story. But at this point it becomes his. Pa's.

It is the story of a twelve-year-old boy treacherously struck down in the bush by unknown hands, his body hidden away in the heart of the country and for days not found, though many search parties go looking.

The mother is distraught. She has only one woman to comfort her. All the rest of those who gather at the hut, take a hasty breakfast, and set out in small groups to scour the countryside, are men, embarrassed to a profound silence by the depth of her grief. Only when they have stepped into the sunlight again, to where their horses stand restless in the sun, do they let their breath out and express what they feel in head-shaking, then anxious whispers.

They feel a kind of shyness in the presence of the father as well, but there are forms for what they can say to him. They clap him roughly on the shoulder, and impressed by the rage he is filled with, which they see as the proper form for his grief, they reach for words that will equal his in their stern commitment, their vehemence.

He is a man who has been touched by fate, endowed with the dignity of outrage and a cause. It draws together, in a tight knot, qualities that they felt till now were scattered in him and not reliable. When the body comes to light at last, the skull caved in, the chest and thighs bearing the wound-marks of spears, and he rides half-maddened about the country urging them to ride with him and kill every black they come across, he inspires in them such a mixture of horror and pity that they feel they too have been lifted out of the ordinary business of clearing scrub and rounding up cattle and are called to be heroic.

He is a figure now. That is why it is his story. The whole country is his, to rage up and down in with the appeal of his grief. His brow like thunder, his blue eyes bleared with weeping, he speaks low (he has no need to shout) of blood, of the dark pull of it, of its voice calling from the ground and from all the hidden places of the country, for the land to be cleared at last of the shadow of blood. He is a new man. He has discovered one of the ways at last to win other men to him and he blazes with the power it brings him. He is monstrous. And because he believes so completely in what he must do, is so filled with the righteous ferocity of it, others too are convinced. They are drawn to him as to a leader.

One clear cool act, the shedding of a little blood, and all that old history of slights and humiliations, of being ignored and knocked back, of having to knuckle under and be subservient — all that is cancelled out in the light he sees at last in other men's eyes, in their being so visibly in awe of the distinction that has descended upon him.

But that little blood was my blood, not just that black feller's. Pa's blood too. So he did come to see at last that I was connected.

For a season my name was on everyone's lips, most of all on his, and in the newspapers at Maitland and Moreton Bay and beyond. Jordan McGivern. A name to whip up fear and justified rage and the unbridled savagery of slaughter. For a season.

The blacks in every direction are hunted and go to ground. They too have lost their protection — what little they had of it. And me all that while lying quiet in the heart of the country, slowly sinking into the ancientness of it, making it mine, grain by grain blending my white grains with its many black ones. And Ma, now, at the line, with the blood beating in her throat, and his shirts, where she has just pegged them out, beginning to swell with the breeze, resting her chin on a wet sheet and raising her eyes to the land and gazing off into the brimming heart of it.

1

Up at the house,Angie told herself, they would be turning in their bunks and pushing off sheets in the growing heat, still dozing but already with their sights on breakfast. Bacon and eggs and Madge's burnt toast. “Burnt?” Madge would bluster; "I don't call that burnt, I can do better than that. Besides, burnt toast never did your father any harm. It didn't kill him off, he thrived on it, so did your uncles. Now, who's for honey and who wants Vegemite? That's the choice.” The children would yowl and make faces but bite into the burnt toast just the same. It was a ritual that would begin precisely at seven with the banging of Madge's spoon.

Meanwhile, down here on the headland, in an expanding stillness in which clocks, voices, and every form of consciousness had still to come into existence and the day as yet, like the sea, had no mark upon it, it was before breakfast, before waking, before everything but the new tide washing in over rows of black, shark-toothed rocks that leaned all the way inland, as they had done since that moment, unimaginable ages ago, when the earth at this point whelmed, gulped, and for the time being settled. Angie drew her knees up and locked them in with her arms.