The Secret River (22 page)

At breakfast by the campfire Thornhill saw Dan looking around between mouthfuls of damper. He took in the cliffs on the other side of the river, the valley of the First Branch where it bent up between the furry ridges to the north.

Thornhill knew what was in his mind. Others had tried to walk to China through that forest. Sometimes they would stagger up to some settler’s hut, wild-eyed, nearly dead from hunger and naked from where the blacks had stripped them down to the skin. From time to time a skeleton would turn up in a remote gully. Mostly they vanished forever, absorbed into the endless formless distance.

But Dan had not been in the colony long enough to know what happened to felons who were fooled by the absence of walls.

Thornhill waited until Dan’s gaze at the ridges and valleys met his.
Looks real easy, don’t it, only fifty mile back to Sydney
. He made sure his voice was mild. Dan looked away sullenly at the cliffs across the river, hanging in a dark wall with the sun behind them. The cliffs stared back. Thornhill felt his mouth shaping that superior Suckling smile.
You got me down here,
he said.
Or the forest
and the savages out there
. Dan gave him a glance he could not read.
Up to you
, Thornhill said.
No skin off my nose
.

~

That first morning—the morning of the first day of their seventh week, as Sal remarked over breakfast—Thornhill set Dan and Ned to making a lean-to on the back of the hut where they could sleep, while he made a place for the fowls where the wild dogs could not get them at night. He had already cut the saplings for the lean-to and Willie had stripped a couple of sheets of bark off the trees. All his new servants had to do was trim the saplings for the frame and make holes in the bark to tie it on.

It became apparent, though, that Ned was inclined to fall down in fits just when he was most needed. Even when upright he had a nervy tremulous way with him. He could not be trusted with the axe, so Thornhill gave him the gimlet to make the holes in the bark. The threat of Thornhill’s hand over him could make him go through the motions, but he could not make a proper job of it. By the time he had finished, what were supposed to be neat holes in the bark were long useless splits.

Ned took satisfaction in stating the obvious. Looking at the ragged edge of the bark he announced,
Don’t look too good, Mr
Thornhill
, and laughed a silly whinny. Thornhill looked at him, the loose grin that seemed to show too much of the inside of his lips, the eyes that were a little loose in their sockets.

Could a man be punished for the pitch of his laugh?

After so long on the transport Dan was not a fit man, and the breathless heat of these spring days made the pasty skin of his face break into blotches. As he heaved with the axe at the hard wood he panted and his nose dripped with sweat. The minute he thought himself unobserved, he would lean on the axe and stare out at the forest. His back in the striped slops flickered with a mass of flies, but what they liked best was his eyes, his mouth, that expanse of sweaty cheek. He flapped his hand and squinted and blew and tossed his head to dislodge them. They circled but always landed again. In the end he nearly sliced his leg open with the axe, trying to twitch them off his hand.

He flung it down in a temper and looked at where Thornhill stood in a patch of shade.
Give us a break
, he said, and the
Mr
Thornhill
that he did not add hung in the air.
Give us some water at
least
. He squinted against the sun, hitting out at the flies.

Thornhill remembered how it felt to be sweating and panting and begging from another man. He realised now how begging made a man ugly and hardly human: easy to refuse.

Regulations, Dan, felons to work during daylight hours
. He heard the rich pious tone in his own voice, lying.
I ain’t going against what
the Governor says, being an emancipist myself
. He smiled blandly, enjoying the words.
Get on now, finish that and we’ll see how things
go along
.

Dan looked at him, his face wooden. He made no move to pick up the axe and get back to work. Thornhill wondered if he had gone too far, whether Dan was going to call his bluff and refuse to work. He pictured it: Dan holding out through bread and water, through beatings. He had seen it on the hulks, men who got it into their head not to give in. He had seen them rather die than yield.

In the end it was a fly that did it, getting up Dan’s nose and making him flinch. Such a tiny creature, but it had the power to break a man’s spirit. He took up the axe and began to chip away at the sapling. Thornhill saw the flies crawling undisturbed over his face and his eyes screwed up against them. In the white blaze of the sun he was a bowed and lowly creature. The tendons stood out along the back of his neck, white and vulnerable.

Thornhill flipped the switch of leaves that he was using as a fly-whisk—he had found that the long stringy needles of the river-oaks were the best—and walked over into the shade. He felt something swell inside him like a yawn welling up from the belly.
Strolling
. That was the word. He was strolling, and carrying nothing more backbreaking than this little spray of leaves. Strolling as a gentleman might from the Old Swan to Temple
Stairs, jingling the coins in his pocket and waiting for the watermen to beg for his custom.

Perhaps Dan would get his turn, but not yet.

~

Tying a few sheets of bark onto a frame took Ned and Dan all day, and in the end the lean-to was more a kennel than a human habitation. But that night the two of them crawled in there to sleep. Through the cracks in the wall the Thornhills could still hear Ned muttering and Dan shifting in his sleep, but it seemed a different sort of sound now that there was a barrier, no matter how flimsy, between them. It was the sound of two men below them on life’s ladder.

Sal turned to Thornhill, her face young in the lamplight. The brown of her eyes gleamed translucent and when she smiled there was a dimple in her cheek that he did not remember having seen for a long time.
We will get the place real good, Sal,
he whispered. A thought came to him and he spoke without thinking.
You won’t
never want to leave
. She took it as a good joke:
Never want to leave!
Hearing the astonishment in her voice he wondered where his words had come from, and to cover them he took the jest further.
I’ll be dragging you on the boat to go back Home,
he said.
You’ll be down on
your knees
. He made his voice high and mincing.
Please, Will, let
me stay!

That got her laughing so hard that he could see the tears glistening on her cheek. Cautiously, not to make too great a rustling among the fern under them, the husband and wife embraced, front to back like a pair of spoons. He loved the feeling of Sal’s buttocks in his lap, his thighs running along against hers, her back swelling in and out with each breath against his chest, her breasts under his hands. Her musky smell was all about him as they breathed together.

Beyond the wall of bark his servants slept. He had the feeling
that some slow engine had been set in motion: wheels turning, cogs meshing greasily. New South Wales had a life of its own now, beyond any intention that any man—the Governor, even the King himself—might have. It was a machine in which some men would be crushed up and spat out, and others would rise to heights they would not have dreamed of before.

There was a companionable silence between husband and wife. The lamp was nearly out, the fat in the saucer all gone and the wick consuming itself. It was part of the difference between today and all the days before it, that neither of them got up to pinch it out and save the bit of wick for another day.

He lay listening to the night outside. Through the cracks in the walls the air streamed in, a sweet damp smell, almost medicinal. Some creature out there was making a tiny piping cry as clean-edged as a razor, and down by the river the song of the frogs thickened and faded, thickened and faded.

Five years, that was all he needed.

~

It was November, and the hot weather was starting. Even at dawn the sun was an enemy to avoid and by mid-morning the inside of the hut was unendurable. The trees gave no shade, only scattered the sunlight, and the strip of shadow that the hut made grew smaller as the day went on. By noon it had shrunk to nothing and the clearing lay flattened under the heat.

It made the new corn come along well, though, and there was enough rain—sudden fierce storms out of towering thunder-heads—that watering by bucket was unnecessary. Instead, every spare moment that any of them had was put to chipping the weeds that threatened to swallow the plants.

At first Sal thought it was just the heat making Mary fretful as she nursed, so that she tugged painfully at sore breasts.
A nice cool
night will put me right
, she said. But the next morning, even though it
was cooler, she was burning up with fever and her breasts were hard as drums. Thornhill put off the trip he had planned upriver for the barley crop, and went to fetch Mrs Herring. Good soul that she was, she came straight away, pronouncing the problem to be milk fever.

In spite of the pain it caused Sal, Mrs Herring was firm that the only cure for milk fever was to go on suckling. She ministered to Sal with hot poultices and steaming rags, then put the babe to the breast, holding her there until she had sucked her fill.

But Sal did not get better, only lay in the hot afternoons, shivering, clammy under a rug, her face flushed and grey by turns, her eyes small and dull. Bub and Dick took it in turns to sit beside her with a little whisk to keep off the flies.

Thornhill was cold with the idea of losing her. Hated the sky for coming up day after day so blue, as if nothing was the matter. Hated the birds, calling away indifferently. Hated himself, for bringing her here. Hung on every word Mrs Herring had to say and the tone of the answers she gave to his questions:
As well as can
be expected,
or
No worse than yesterday
.

Finally, at the risk of offending her, he sailed up to Green Hills and offered twenty guineas to the surgeon. It was too far, the fellow said, for any money: four or five hours in the boat, even with the tide behind it. And between the words, unspoken, Thornhill heard the real reason: Sal was only the wife of an emancipist.

In the afternoons, while Mrs Herring ground up the hominy and chivvied the children to fetch her some little sticks to make the fire hot, Thornhill sat with Sal. He watched her lying there, her eyes closed, her face wan against the pillow. That sweet worn face of hers was the only soft thing in his life. He could still see the girl in the kitchen at Swan Lane, who had laughed out of a pink mouth and helped his fingers hold the quill.

She did not seem afraid of dying, and underwent Mrs Herring’s ministrations without complaint. He dared to remind
her one afternoon of Susannah Wood, whose husband’s delight in mathematical instruments had included measuring to the last drop the fluid his wife had been relieved of. He thought he saw a slight movement of her mouth that meant she remembered, and was amused, but she said nothing.

It seemed she was not afraid of death or pain, but was filled with terror of being buried in this thin foreign soil, under the blast of this other sun, of her bones rotting away under those hard scraping trees. She stared at nothing and sighed, lying stiff in the bed, and one day said
Bury me facing the north, Will
. It was so long since she had spoken, he had to ask her to repeat it.
North, Will.
Where Home
is
. Then she pressed her lips together and watched him, waiting for his promise.

At first he blustered like a fool.
There won’t be no burying, Sal
, he cried, but she closed her eyes. She was not interested. He watched her, that face he knew so well. He knew what her words had been asking. But even in this moment, when the thought of life without her was a blank like death itself, he could not make himself say the words he knew she longed to hear:
we will go Home
.

~

News travelled fast along the river. Smasher rowed up with a couple of mangrove crabs in a wet sack, their claws tied shut with hairy string, and Sagitty brought a bit of hog belly down that he had killed fresh that day. Sal would touch none of it, but the rest of them feasted themselves to a standstill. Spider sent her a bottle of best madeira he had got from somewhere or other. Even Blackwood strode up from the river one afternoon with a mess of eels from his lagoon and a bag of new potatoes.

It might have been Blackwood’s eels that did it, or the way he sat by the bed and told her how he had gone about jellying them, the way his mother had taught him back in Eastcheap.
Grantley
Street
, he said.
There by All Hallows
. Sal smiled and found the
strength to nod.
I know
, she whispered.
Stickley’s draper round the
corner
. She sat up at last, propped weakly on the pillows, and ate a few good mouthfuls before she pushed the plate away and slid back down under the bedclothes.

The next day when Thornhill woke up he saw Sal sitting up in the bed, Mary clamped onto her breast, and looking around her.

Will
, she said, and smiled, almost her old smile. He took her hand, squeezing it too hard in his gladness.
I ain’t no oar, Will, leave
off
, she cried, but squeezed back, as hard as she was able.
Now tell
me, Will, how long have I been lying here like a lump? Did anyone make the
marks, or have you gone and lost track?

He put a smile on his face.
We done the marks on Sunday, Sal. It’s
five days past the nine weeks
. But he had to work to keep the disappointment off his face, that the marks on the tree were her first thought.