Salt Creek Read online

  Papa said, ‘Tull made a proposal while we were travelling.’

  ‘Did he now?’ Hugh said. ‘And what was it?’

  ‘That we share the land with the natives.’

  ‘We do that already.’

  ‘He had in mind a more formal arrangement, I believe. They would help manage it, or we could give them some land and cattle.’

  Hugh fell back in his chair. ‘Ridiculous.’ He leaned towards Papa. ‘The blacks have no right to anything. They didn’t improve the land or work it. They did nothing. They don’t own it. And they know nothing about farming. Why should they benefit? Send them away, I say.’

  ‘They have known nothing else, but they might learn. Tull could teach them. We are right; we have the right over it. But we have done them no good. Not only us, I know that, but the fact of it cannot be denied. Only a native who also knows our world could be of any use working with them. Tull is such a person. The scheme might work with him.’

  ‘You operate within the law, above it I would say,’ Hugh said. He stood.

  ‘Yet I cannot feel easy. What my own father would— It may be the law, but as to justice.’

  ‘Papa,’ Hugh said. ‘You are no worse than anyone; in fact you are a great deal better. The familiarity you encourage. Look at Tull, a native in your own home. It’s madness to think of sharing it with them. Sell it, rather, and move back to town if it troubles your conscience.’

  ‘There’s no selling to be done. I borrowed from Stubbs against Salt Creek. It’s all I can do to pay him the interest and there’s the lease too. If I don’t pay Stubbs, the lease is his. What else could I do, as hard as things are?’

  ‘I did not realise.’

  But Papa shook his head, and his hair, which had grown untidy, fell across his face. ‘No, there is nothing for us but this. I cannot risk working with the blacks, but they do need their own land. Tull has made me see that. I must think.’ Hugh left to find Stanton, who was trying his hand at fishing again. Papa remained behind, tapping his pipe stem on the arm of his chair. He was still there when I went to bed.

  The next morning he had become purposeful. At breakfast he ate with appetite. We all noted it, even Addie, who looked to him when she burst through the door. Sometimes it seemed as if every door, every window had to be opened to allow the house to encompass her energies. He was neat, his shirt buttoned at wrist and chin.

  Passing behind his chair, she slowed, glancing at him curiously as did we all, sideways or from across the table, as if some clue might be gleaned from his hearty sawing at his food.

  None of us spoke. Papa appeared oblivious to the unusual silence. He hummed a few lines from ‘Bread of Heaven’ and drained his cup and held it out: ‘A little more tea, Hester, if there is some.’

  ‘What is it, Papa?’ Addie said. ‘You are cheerful today.’ Her cheeks flushed so that I saw that her boldness was sometimes an effort for her, and that she was not always certain how Papa might respond.

  He put down his knife and fork and cleared his throat. ‘It was the condition of the blacks at the lakes that has been on my mind. So many are ill. It will come here too, I don’t doubt. I could not be easy in my conscience if I did not try to do something on their behalf. If it were not for Reverend Taplin’s work with them I think they might die out entirely. Their suffering—’

  ‘From what, Papa?’ I said. ‘What ails them?’

  ‘Consumption, pneumonia—’ He broke off, discomfited by some memory. ‘Other contagious conditions. Skin disorders. They are the most miserable of wretches. There is to be an enquiry into their condition. Mr Baker has asked me to make a submission.’

  ‘The Mr Baker Albert works for?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. He is opposed to the mission, which I am not. But I am … constrained in what I can say.’

  ‘They are well enough around here,’ Fred said, ‘but up behind the Travellers Rest—’

  ‘For now, but they have no resistance; they are weak.’

  ‘Charles Darwin says—’

  ‘We’ll have no talk of Mr Darwin, if you please, Fred,’ Papa said.

  ‘Yet your spirits have improved,’ I said.

  ‘Tell us, Papa,’ Addie said.

  ‘I have thought of a solution that would suit us all: natives and settlers. They could be gathered and sent to Kangaroo Island.’

  ‘Kangaroo Island? Do you know what the blacks call it?’ Fred said.

  ‘I know of the sealers, but they could be induced to leave, or would be less trouble if they were outnumbered. The land is suitable.’

  Addie said: ‘What are you saying? Send them all away? And Tull? Is Point McLeay not far enough? What can you be thinking?’

  ‘I have been there.’ He turned his whole self slowly and stared her down. She subsided. ‘I know it to have game aplenty.’

  ‘It is the Island of Death to them, where spirits go after they have departed,’ Fred said. ‘They are in mortal dread of it.’

  ‘Indeed? How have you discovered this?’

  ‘Only by conversing with Tull, Papa. How else? As you wished us to do, to civilize him, and now that he is civilized you have sent him away.’

  ‘Superstition, which we cannot indulge. I had thought we had cured Tull of such beliefs. They would soon find that was not the case. They won’t all die of terror.’ He wafted a hand through the air. ‘Natives such as Tull might stay. In any case, they are useful. It is like enough to here. It would do very well.’

  ‘What do you know of their lives?’ Addie asked.

  ‘That they are superstitious in the main, and that they are in great need and that sharing the land has not worked.’

  ‘Do you know what birds live there, what rushes grow?’

  Papa said nothing.

  ‘Because not all are suitable for their purposes.’

  ‘Be careful, Adelaide.’

  But her voice kept coming: ‘There are some for baskets, and some for bags and some for fish traps. Is there somewhere they can build fish traps? The water needs to be shallow and not too fast flowing. But I’m sure you knew that.’

  ‘Enough,’ Papa said, louder. ‘I do not wish to remove them because they are a nuisance.’

  ‘But they are a nuisance, stealing the stock, burning fences, God knows what else,’ Stanton said.

  ‘Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain,’ Papa said. ‘I suggest Kangaroo Island for their safety.’ He made a coughing sound in his throat as if that would release the next words. ‘To preserve them.’ They sounded false to my ears, as if he had repeated them several times already in the quiet of his mind. ‘This will be my recommendation to the enquiry. That will be unexceptionable.’

  In November, Papa and Hugh and Stanton went to the inland run and mustered and sheared the sheep and returned and did the same on the Coorong. Many of the older sheep had succumbed to the wet weather and dingoes. There were some lambs, though, and the fleeces were a little better than previously. In time, a long time, the flock would build, but Papa was not a patient man. He began reckoning spidery columns of figures again and even if he would not say it, I could read well enough that what small profits there were would keep us in food for the year to come, but not give hope that we would one day have enough to leave.

  Hugh and Stanton blamed the blacks for some missing stock and Hugh advised shooting one or two, if not to kill at least to wound and thereby warn them off. ‘Everyone does it, Papa,’ Stanton said.

  ‘There will be no harm done to them by us,’ he said. ‘Do not contemplate it. I will not have it. My Kangaroo Island solution might come to something. We will wait. Let us have faith, and hope.’

  Papa took supplies from the missionary society to a native encampment he knew. It seemed to relieve him in some way, for a while at least. He began to take a bible with him wherever he went as if it were a talisman or a charm that might protect him against whatever came his way. I saw him slip it into his saddlebag one day. He fastened the leather strap and rested his hand on it, h
is head bowed.

  ‘Do you speak to the natives of what is contained within?’ I asked.

  He threw his head up. ‘Sometimes. I should more often. It is the comfort of it. The reminder to do what is right, that the Lord is with me always. It is for me.’

  Yet he did not look comforted.

  Sometimes I could persuade myself that it was not all his fault, what happened, that he was just a person luck didn’t run smooth for, that it snagged on things, like wool on wire, and caught and tore and became useless.

  He began to drink again in the evening, sitting outside at night. His conversation was not as it had been, being reminiscent in nature, but his tone was pleasant, which is to say that it was a welcome change from what it had been of late. He dwelt more often on the far distant past. Perhaps all of us who have children will do the same one day. I speak of the Coorong to Joss. I had thought we had heard all the stories of his adventurous youth, but two of them were new to me and they have often been in my mind since. I make a note of them now in case they are of interest. Of course, to recall some things is to consign others to obscurity. My brothers and sister might tell their children other stories and it will seem that they come from different families. It is only that these two stay in my mind.

  The whale calf

  ‘Did I ever tell you of the time we caught a whale,’ Papa said one night. ‘This was before I met your Mama, when I was young and ran away to sea. Oh, she fought the barb.’ He drank. ‘We drew her in by degrees, her calf at her side. It would not leave her but stayed close, touching her all the while, and her crying out her alarm and thrashing, but fearful of hurting the calf and protecting it with every bit of her that remained. An argument broke out in the boat. Some wanted to kill the calf; others wanted to drive it away. We did what had to be done to the mother and she did not go easy and pulled her on board and the work began. I went to the rails more than once to watch the calf, which swam all around looking for her, very desperate and agitated. It disappeared beneath the ship and surfaced and plunged down again – more than once it did this, mind – and a seaman came up with his eyes as wild as if he’d seen into the pits of hell. “The ship’s haunted, so it is,” he said. “There’s a crying and a moaning down there.”

  ‘“It’s nothing but a whale calf,” I told him, and he went back down relieved but was up again directly saying that it was more than a man could bear to hear. “Kill it,” he said. I went below thinking to scoff and put him at his ease, but it was as he had said a most piteous sound coming through the wood and water. It went through us all.’ He closed his eyes and put his hand to his waistcoat front, over his heart. ‘I returned to the railing and the calf appeared once more sobbing. It rolled on its side and looked up at us hanging over the railings – only a fish, mind you – and I could not do it, nor the captain order us to, and we had to go below later to sleep, which we could not do because of its cries.’

  Papa poured a little more liquor into his glass.

  ‘And the calf, Papa?’ Addie said. ‘What of it?’

  ‘Oh, it stopped crying after some hours, towards dawn. The horizon was beginning to show, you know how it is: as if someone has drawn the line there. The watch had just changed.’

  ‘What about the calf?’

  ‘It was dark around the ship. I could not see. But where there is whaling there are sharks. By the time the sun came up it was done.’

  ‘No, Papa,’ Addie wailed.

  ‘It is just the way of things. There was no saving it. I did not feel right about it. None of us did. We have dominion, and it is not always a comfortable thing. I am too soft I think. Your dear Mama thought so.’ The idea seemed to give him some satisfaction. The gaunt lines of his face eased.

  In bed I thought of the whale calf in the black sea, searching and finding nothing but unyielding wood, and when the wind moaned across the peninsula and through the reeds I could imagine a whale calf to be searching the lagoon.

  Papa’s drinking became more frequent and steady and he dipped deeper and travelled more often to the Travellers Rest to renew his supplies. After supper he took a bottle outside instead of pouring a little into his glass and after a while he did not bother to replace the cork in the bottle.

  Hearing his voice on the veranda one cool evening when the rest of us preferred to be indoors, and thinking there might be a native come to speak to him on some matter – more often now they arrived asking whether there were jobs to be done about the run, which they would do for a little packet of sugar or flour, or even a twist of tobacco – I went to the door to see. There was only Papa and he a black shape hunched into the chair. He could have been a bundle of rags or an old coat, sacking, but for his high cheeks showing pale in that light above his beard. He seemed to be speaking to someone I could not see, the words coming out in a sort of song.

  ‘I said I would show thee and so I shall. Thou shalt see what I be made of. Remember what thou sayest. I remember; I cannot forget. I will bring coin and gold and pour it upon thee until thou art covered and cannot move for it or speak or breathe. Then we shall see who is the black sheep, the prodigal. It is not I, never was and never shall be.’

  I went out to him. His eyes were open and looking towards the thin moon and its reflection on the water and the darkness which by some illusion seemed always to be drawing inwards but never reaching us.

  ‘Papa,’ I said.

  He jerked and closed his eyes and rubbed them in pretence of waking from a dream, which he was not; he had been as awake as I. ‘Hello, dear. Hester. What is it?’

  ‘Nothing. Just you. I wondered who you were speaking to.’

  ‘Why no one. A dream.’

  ‘Of whom?’

  ‘No one of importance.’

  ‘Come inside, Papa. You will catch a chill.’

  ‘Worse things happen at sea.’

  ‘Not only at sea.’

  He looked at me sternly then, and reached for his pipe and banged it against his chair and the ashes went spinning away. He came inside. The evening was grown late and we should be going to bed, but a reluctance at the prospect of solitude had fallen across us all and we sat on in quiet waiting and Papa drank some more and presently he spoke again, recounting the second of the stories.

  The hanging

  ‘You know I came this way many years ago,’ he said, ‘during the whaling station days. For a matter that had to be attended to. A sort of matter that was not within my control. The Maria. You remember.’

  Hugh said, ‘The massacre? Everyone knows. You were there? You never said so before.’

  ‘Afterwards,’ Papa said.

  ‘Major O’Halloran would not be denied. He was following orders. He wanted some men from the whaling station to accompany him and his troopers to investigate. There had been reports of untoward events. He asked that I accompany him, and I could not refuse. It was my duty as I saw it. So we rode out.’ He stopped, as if each part of the story could be dealt with in no more than discrete fragments. He went on. ‘Whalers are rough men. They wanted to go. We took two or three days to get there – I forget precisely – but presently arrived nearby the place and found some blacks who were willing, with some persuasion, to show us where the passengers had met their unfortunate ending. It was a piteous sight: women, children, the men, half-buried, in wombat holes, clothes missing, and items strewn around. You do not need to know more.

  ‘I regret those actions I helped to set in train. Dogs that are unleashed are not easy to control. But I let the men go and went with them. The blacks should not have killed the survivors, yet I cannot say that there was not some provocation. When I asked one of my men what might have happened when the blacks were always previously so helpful – indeed they saved many other shipwreck survivors – he said that perhaps the men had been too forward in their attentions to the women. He said the blacks don’t like that – most protective they are. I have remembered that. There is that which I should do and that which I will do. I do not intend to fail but the
failing is sown at the beginning. It is certain.’ His eyelids fluttered here and he nodded as if agreeing with himself. ‘But that is not part of this story. Do not attend to it.

  ‘It was right; it must have been right to act. Something had to be done. They were wearing the clothes of the poor murdered souls. Blood on the clothes, but dried, you know.’ He drew in a big gulp and his throat moved. ‘They saw what our muskets meant. One or two were wounded. And another was less fortunate. There was no trouble holding them. We were a large party. We had our orders, which were to choose and execute the guilty parties, up to three, and we must follow them. So two of the roughest, most villainous of them all were chosen. They did not make any objection, which I could not understand. We built the gallows and we hanged them. It was a piteous sight. They were fine built – fine for any men. And I will not speak against their courage. They did not flinch. Their toes touched the ground. They got it wrong you see. They could hold themselves to life. We had to stop and fetch different rope and hang them again, and dig a hole beneath them so they swung free.’ He pulled his whiskers, curling an end into the corner of his mouth. A nervous habit of his; his moustache had a raggedy edge. ‘The one I think of was a tall fellow, very well made. I felt his severe countenance on me – grave, you know. He stared into my eyes and I tell you I could not look away try as I might. Oh, I wanted to, but he would not let me. I do not suppose even God would strike such a feeling into me on Judgement Day. Call that blasphemy as you will. No doubt you are right. He was a man, same as you or I. I don’t know what else he meant by looking at me like that. We had our orders.’ He drank and did not speak much more and did not look at the boys, but at me. I felt he was saying or asking or showing me something and I was not sure what.

  Later still when everyone had gone to bed and I was tidying the dining room thinking of Tull talking of Papa and of his hat, Papa spoke once more. ‘He saw to the marrow of me – do you see that, Hester? When I pray to my maker for forgiveness in the hereafter I see that man’s face. Could I have stopped it? Could I have counselled different? I was young, but I had the captain’s ear and his respect I think. But there were orders to be carried out and we did this up to the very least and not beyond. Sometimes we must do things that we prefer not to. Do you see?’