That Deadman Dance (6 page)

Part II

1826–1830

Bobby never learned

Laughing and loved, Bobby Wabalanginy never learned fear; not until he was pretty well a grown man did he ever even know it. Sure, he grew up doing the Deadman Dance—those stiff movements, those jerking limbs—as if he’d learned it from their very own selves; but with him it was a dance of life, a lively dance for people to do together, each man dancing same as his brothers except for the one man on his own, leading them. It was a dance from way past the ocean’s horizon, and those people give it to our old people. Used to be an Elder would be on his own, facing all the others as they stood tight together, shoulder to shoulder, but Bobby changed all that. Still just a young boy when he first joined in, he made everyone laugh, but there was something about the way he danced that made them all move back and give him space so that he ended up like the Elder, the only one on his own, the only one standing against everybody else, commanding them.

The dance? You paint yourself in red ochre, neck to waist and wrist, and leave your hands all bare. White ochre on your thighs, but keep your calves and feet bare, like boots, see? A big cross of white clay painted on every chest.

Each man takes a stick about the size of an emu’s leg, and sometimes you wave it about, sometimes carry it on your shoulder as you walk up and down very stiffly, sometimes hold it away from yourself with your arms outstretched. Everybody doing this together, exact same thing on the exact same beat. Everyone in line, and when you move—stepping a fast and even cadence, one after the other and all men moving the same—you stay just an arm’s length apart.

Sometimes, even though it’s a dance, you just stand dead still while one person out front moves his hand very fast, bends his arm at the elbow until the fingertips quiver beside his face. Then he stops dead still and everyone facing him does it the same, but all together. Over and over again, the many copy the one. And people clap—oh that is a wild and stirring rhythm—and they whistle. All point their stick into the air—like a rifle, of course—and bang bang bang like the boom boom boom of thunder or ocean swell meeting rock. But sharper, and the echoes roll on and on in the silence after.

A bang and a boom end the bright, whistling music. The neat, sharp dance stops. First time ever we saw that dance it was as if dead men had come back to life and, having lost everything once, were more serious and intent and all of one will. Boom, and boom again, coming from the sea.

But Bobby changed all that; he made the dance his own. One day when Menak and his woman companion Manit were leading the music, Bobby stepped out from among the others, stiff-limbed and moving jerkily to the sound of his own frightening whistle; a tune like the one we knew, but different all the same. The singing began to copy his, and all the other men—even the Elder—started to copy his actions, too, but then their minds went blank, their vision barren. They stepped back, they quailed before Bobby, went down on their haunches and clumsily backed away as he went among them, slapping playfully, hardly putting his hands on them, but laughing and grinning like a crazy man. Each man he touched lay down as if he was dead. Dead.

People loved the experience of it. To have had no will of their own but only Bobby’s, briefly.

By the time he was a grown man everyone knew it had never been dead men dancing in the first place anyway, but real live men from over the ocean’s horizon, with a different way about them. There was difference among them, too, as a grown-up Bobby learned too late, but this was something people argued about.

Different? No, they’re all the same.

Bobby would get to know them well; too well, as many said. He knew and was a friend to men like Dr Cross, Soldier Killam, Jak Tar and Kongk Chaine. Not forgetting Brother Jonathon and Convict Skelly. Some names so strange that no one could say them back then, until Bobby showed them how.

And, as an old man strutting around with his boots and gun, Bobby would tell anyone who listened that he was there when they did the Deadman Dance that very first time. Sure, not even a baby, but everyone knew his mother got him when the whale came up on the beach. All the people moving in the water around the still live whale had seen the tiny shadow, that flicker in the water as the light died in the whale’s eye, and the old man—Bobby’s father—took hold of his stone knife and cut the whale. Even then there were sails upon the horizon.

Bobby said he first saw the Deadman Dance from the ocean, not from shore. Right there, and he pointed to the deep water close to shore where we’d all seen the whales come (but not quite like then, and not so many now). And Bobby was barely a baby in a hammock of possum fur slung from his mother’s shoulder, his head rolling side to side with the rhythm of her stride. Perhaps he was still too young to know that Menak and Manit were with him, or even to know any individual other than his mother, but Baby Bobby sensed the sails and while other babies could hardly see the world beyond their mother’s breast, his baby fists clenched and clenched again trying to grasp something else.

So Bobby told it, anyways.

His little cluster of people had travelled with the wind at their backs, touching the earth lightly, buoyed by the journey their old people had made over and over before them. The place was beginning to shrivel in the heat, to shimmer at the edges, and withdraw back into itself: rivers shrank to a chain of pools, frogs burrowed deeper underground into silence, flowers and leaves withered as roots and tubers grew.

Smoke showed the family group’s trail, their return to the place of their youngest child’s creation and to this very centre of home by the sea’s edge. First there was smoke, and then, much later, their figures crested a hill like they were sliding with no feet, like they were gliding on heat waves, moving above the ground toward the water.

The wind swung around as they walked toward their old camp, the clouds gathering in the western sky. The smell of ocean and approaching rain refreshed them and their arrival was like entering an embrace; a ridge sheltered them from the open ocean to the south, and white sand surrounded a circle of enclosed ocean this side. There was a bubbling spring, a river pausing in the sand dunes, paperbark trees waiting like old friends ready to help repair last season’s huts.

Familiar.

But something had changed.

A collection of objects lay in a pile beside their old campfire and, even coated with ash, their smooth surfaces screamed. Such hard and bright things—Bobby would learn the words, we all would:
beads
,
mirror
,
nail
,
knife
—were passed around as the rest of the family arrived. Look, feel, smell them; and oh the sharp taste of steel. Some said they remembered them, from the time of the dance. And the footprints without toes.

There had always been a particular rhythm to their visits, and now this new pulse, at first feeble, began its accompaniment. More sails were noted, and more things detected: a cairn of stones, for instance, and within it—once the stones were dismantled—some markings on thin bark inside a container of glass. Smoke rose on the islands, as if a signal by someone approaching.

In later years it would be horseshoes, the remains of saddles, a revolver, buried food and bodies … But all that is for the future. Bobby’s family knew one story of this place, and as deep as it is, it can accept such variations.

Gifts? they wondered. Then, these visitors? Where they from? Where they gone?

The wind, blowing to the horizon and back.

They danced like dead men, cruel brutal men.

But they were never dead.

Bobby Wabalanginy believed he was a baby then, and still only a very young boy when yet another ship came close and spilled people upon the shore. Bobby spoke as if it had just come to him and was on the cusp of memory, inside the face of a wave of recollection about to break.

Was it really Bobby? No matter who, it was a very young, barely formed consciousness, and watching from some safe place somewhere else.

These men had yet another strange tongue,
oui
, and Bobby Wabalanginy must’ve gone on their boat with his special Uncle Wunyeran—or perhaps it was Wooral or Menak or some other of those old people—because he remembered that first sensation of the deck shifting under his feet, rolling with the swell. And Bobby made that a dance, too, a small stepping shuffle one way, then the other, to and fro. Not quite the dance of strangers, not quite a dance of this country, people would smile as they shuffled and swayed to Bobby’s strange tune.

Some of his extended family learned seasickness from another ship’s visit, and something of its speed: how home could recede, and rush back at you again.

Menak and Wooral and Wabakoolit and Wunyeran all went on ships, Bobby would say in his old age, mouthing names that sounded so strange to many of his audience’s ears, names of people no one else could remember. White people
asked
us to go on their ships, Bobby emphasised, and Wunyeran was first to wear the sailors’ clothes. He went on deck of a ship anchored at the mouth of the harbour, and people stood on either bank calling out to him, and to the sailors, too, but they were deaf, they could not understand anything of what we said, we may as well have been seagulls squawking.

Silly things were traded—a shonky axe for a mirror, a spear that would never fly straight for a hat. Each party was delighted with the novelties, and there was strange food to be tasted.

Bobby Wabalanginy heard the stories so many times they lived as memory, and now he told them as if he was the central character: the gifts, the sails, the Deadman Dance, the whale and his mother, the shifting deck beneath the enclosed wind rushing them out past the islands to the horizon and back.

The most famous journey was that of Menak, a very wise man, said old Bobby, forgetting his own youthful opinion. And he would perform the story of Menak’s deception and betrayal and revenge. The character of Menak’s enemies was easily shown: he enacted their slaughter of seals (and it was this, the laying out of bodies, that had first inspired Bobby Wabalanginy’s version of the Deadman Dance). As his audience listened on the sandy beach inside the harbour, not far from where they’d disembarked—the very place Menak had returned to after terrible days out on the horizon—they could see one of the islands, blue and distant, way beyond the harbour’s entrance.

Old Bobby Wabalanginy remembered Menak the storyteller—the old man with his many ridges of scars and his high forehead catching the firelight, sharing his younger self with Wabalanginy, that most avid of listeners.

Bobby Wabalanginy shivered, because now
he
was the old man, and the young ones never listened as he had. Sometimes he was talking to himself, but even then he imagined that he was Menak recounting his adventure. It became Bobby’s story to his listeners.

Faces swam back into the firelight, toward those eyes glittering in the dark hollows of old Bobby’s face, and Bobby was once again saying he had been out there, out to the islands that—now that darkness had fallen like a blanket over them—his listeners could not see.

And if I tell you about those islands, Bobby said, you know we don’t always see them from here, with leaves and trees and rocks between us and them. You know them as well as Menak did then, because before then he had never been out there to see the sun rise from a horizon further away still, and ocean all around and between him and this very shore where we now sit and where he was born.

And old Bobby would kick the fire with his big heavy boots so that sparks leapt into the air. Poke it with his silly old spear. Grumpy old Menak had been right, and it hurt Bobby to admit that to himself again. It hurt to be Bobby Wabalanginy the old man, remembering, but it never hurt to be Bobby Wabalanginy the child or Bobby the young man, or even Bobby Wabalanginy the yet unborn.

Menak always began with the scene of his return, and so Bobby did too, telling of when he was but a baby and the black man and white man first lived together here in this very place and why he had remained unafraid and been so trusting.

*

Menak fell from the boat, waded in the shallows, stumbled across the sand to the grove of peppermint trees just as quick as he could because he did not know these people who had brought him back from the island. They seemed almost the same people who stranded him out there in the first place. He was confused. Yes, frightened.

With some distance between himself and the strangers, Menak collapsed into the burned-out hollow at the base of a favourite tree. The smooth charcoal, the cool shade and the scented carpet of dried leaves soothed him. He looked back from within the sheltering frame of leaves and branches at the strangers so busy on the shore.

Oh …

And as he spoke, old Bobby would reach up and pluck leaves from a peppermint tree, crush the leaves in his palm, inhale and pass his hand under the noses of his listeners so they might share the scent.

Breathe it in.

Oh, poor Menak, one moment lost in salt-grained sunlight, dizzy in sparkling blue sky and sea, then his feet felt beach sand again. He smelled these leaves, Bobby told his listeners, and his pulse come strong straightaway.

Strangers had rescued him, but it was also strangers that left him out on the blue island that when you get up close is solid rock in the middle of water and sky. The sealers took him out there and left him. They killed his cousin-brother, took the women.

Menak had been on boats before, but not so small as this one, and this time some magic had confused and weakened him. He’d forced himself to swallow the first mouthfuls of that drink they’d shared. Their food had made him thirsty.

He’d trusted them, ate and drank and fell among soft sealskins singing their songs and embracing them like brothers, faces so close that Menak saw his reflection in the blue eyes of the other.

He laughed as the boats left the shore; even sitting he felt unsteady, perched on the ocean’s skin like this. Each surge of the oars unsettled him, but then he got the rhythm of it and when they put up the sail and the power of the wind hauled them along slicing the sea’s surface, the bubbles and foam were laughing same as the blood in his veins. His blood was thickening as they approached the island, but Menak sprang from the boat and onto the shore of what he had really only ever known as a blue shape on the horizon. Really, he should have been frightened, shouldn’t he?