A Kindness Cup (2 page)

He was friendly with them, as friendly perhaps as Charlie Lunt on his hopeless block of land west of the township; friendly even when they robbed his accessible larder, noting the small fires they made at the boundary fences of his shack; or when he caught Kowaha, shinily young, pilfering sugar and flour, eyes rolling like humbugs with the lie of it while he did a bishop's candlesticks—‘But I gave them to you'—confusing her entirely. Bastardry not intended, he told his ironic self. Yet she asked next time, and the next, always at half-light so that the scurrilous tongues of settlers along the road were never sure of shadow or concretion.

Nort
, Mr Dorahy inscribed meticulously on Buck-master's ill-spelled prose.
Nort
, he gently offered, as Trooper Lieutenant Fred Buckmaster gave his evidence before the select committee.

Do you think, the magistrate, a bottle-coloured Irishman had asked, you should be cognisant of the facts before you take your measures? Have you no written or printed instructions?

No
printed ones, Lieutenant Buckmaster said, truculent and oiling slightly. I act on letters received from squatters.

Do you think, the magistrate pursued, hating the stinking obese fellow before him, that it is right to pursue these blacks—say a month after their depredations?

I always act immediately, Lieutenant Buckmaster said flatly, immediately I am called upon. But it is the tribe I follow. Not individuals. You can never see the actual depredators. (Conjugate that verb, Dorahy whispered to himself. Oh, conjugate it, man!)

Mr Sheridan tapped his fingers on the edge of the greasy desk. He was not in love with his job.

Do you not think there is any other way of dealing with them except by shooting them?

Lieutenant Buckmaster smiled.

No. I don't think they can understand anything else but shooting. At least that is the case as far as my experience goes.

And your experience goes a long way, does it not? Another point, then. Tell me, are your police boys in the habit of taking the gins from the tribes … for whatever purpose?

Buckmaster edged slightly. His real rash irritated, but this was now a rash of the mind. It was very hot in the little court.

No. Except with my instructions.

Did they take any this way in the previous case at Kuttabul?

No. Buckmaster could not conceal his contempt. There were no young gins there. Only old ones. Later some young gins followed us up from the Kuttabul scrub.

And do they stay with you? The magistrate could not blur his wonder.

No, Lieutenant Buckmaster admitted. They only stop a night and get a piece of tobacco in the morning and go away. (Mr
Sheridan raised his eyebrows at this point.) But generally we have to flog them off. They will follow the men all over the country. I have known them to follow my boys for as long as five days and I have had to flog them off in the middle of the night.

Have you indeed? Mr Sheridan inquired, unable to control himself. And watched with interest the slow red on the lieutenant's ruined face.

Dorahy had been observed by the port-nosed Buckmaster allowing some slight scrap of black flesh to depart his humpy unmolested long after sunset. So long after sunset that Buckmaster was returning from his own bodily revenges on a depressed white woman who ran an out-of-town shanty on the Mandarana road. His sexual angers were unsatisfied, not merely because of the fifth-rate partner who accepted his adulterous attentions like a necessary lash but by sighting a sleek gin slipping with a sugar-bag of something from the sour schoolmaster's. ‘To be in charge of my boy!' he raved inwardly, kicking his horse into a canter. Its nervous rump responded quiveringly to the crop. He could have been flogging Dorahy or the gin or the woman he had just left.

All round him, however, was the benison of cane arrowing on the back roads to his farm, the beige spearhead of flower proving gentleness. Yet he was sickened by cycles of it and sometimes wondered if he really were committed to farm.

His own house was pocked with slow pools of light from the kerosene lamps along the back veranda where he found, gripping the rage within his flesh, son Fred playing a game of chess with young Jenner.

Both boys stared curiously at this unsated man who communicated distemper with his first words.

‘Where's your mother?'

Fred dangled a lost pawn. It was an insolent gesture over-interpreted
by the father who saw himself thus. ‘Sewing,' Fred said. ‘In the front room.'

His father could have been choking when he roared, ‘And what are you two wasting time on now? We don't keep you on at school like bloody gentlemen, you know, simply to fritter. Yes, fritter, by God! This is the last year of it and then you'll have to earn your keep. Slumped around here!' His voice was lumpy with scorn.

‘It gives you a certain prestige,' Fred said unwisely, ‘having an unemployed wastrel adult son.'

‘By the living Christ,' Buckmaster roared, ‘I won't take, I don't have to take
that!
' Slamming his broad hand across the side of his son's thick head.

Young Jenner said, offering his handkerchief towards the bloody nose, ‘It's true, you know. My father reckons we'll do much better for ourselves. Ever so much better.'

‘With your piddling bits of filthy Latin! With your sexless poets, your witless grammarians!'

(He has quite a flow, Jenner commented later to Fred, for an uneducated man.) Now he said, ‘We can't help it, sir. We're the victims of parenthood.'

Mr Buckmaster had moved to the wine-rack near the kitchen door. ‘I am an important man in this town,' he stated redundantly. ‘I have thirty boys working for me on the farm. I must have a son who can control, share with me, know how to handle men.'

Young Buckmaster was too absorbed in blood and shame to dribble anything but snivels into this.

‘Your father,' Buckmaster pressed on, gulping some ferocious indigo liquid that always failed to make him feel better, and swinging on young Jenner, ‘is a step beyond my reasoning. The biggest property in the district. Two score of Kanaks hauling in his profits. What does it matter what his soft-haired boy does, eh? What the hell does it matter? You'll sleep sweet on a sugar-bed as long as you live and you can take this fancy education from
that snot-nosed teacher of yours and whatever it does for you, for it won't do much but make you useless when it comes to dealing with men.' (He was fond of dealing with men, was Buckmaster, and could handle women in much the same way.) ‘So I'd thank you to keep your privileged presence and fancy ideas'—the chessboard was scattered at this point across the veranda flooring—‘to yourself.'

In protest Jenner cried out, ‘But it was for Mrs Buckmaster I called. My mother sent over a book she had asked for.'

Mr Buckmaster, slowed by wine, thought this one over.

‘Sewing, you said?' His son nodded sullenly. ‘Not reading? Not wasting the light?' He mumbled into his glass some winey incantations and, as on cue, his wife came through suddenly from the front of the house to ignore her son's bloodied face and begin stoking up the last of the fire to make tea. She was forty and ruined, not so much by her husband as by the country and the tyranny of it.

A strange woman, the neighbours said, and would continue to say for her resistance both to them and to her husband who had used her as an incubator to breed sons but extracted only daughters except for this youngest, gulping mucus and tears. She continued to read—it seemed to her husband to be a sickness with her—despite him during those hours he was away being a man among men. For his part, he respected and almost feared those sinews of character she retained, but resented them. ‘My wife's a great reader,' he would boom among the husbands of cake-makers. It gave him cachet, he suspected, and somehow atoned for those moments when, with him biblically ranting, Old Testament sexually referring, she would laugh at him. He was a violent man, but
imposed restraints that threatened to burst the blood out of his facial skin.

Jenner, who at sixteen should not have understood but nevertheless did, handed him his cup of tea and sat sipping and watching from behind the light of the lamp.

Young Fred was still sulking. He could wait till death for a formal apology from his father, who was sorry but could not say so, offering instead a kind of blessing with a supper hunk of bread and cheese. Fred took slow bites before deciding on speech. Finally: ‘Jilly Sweetman tells me there's government troops coming up this way to flush out the blacks.'

His father, who had known about this for some weeks, who had privately and quietly officially requested, said, ‘Now there's a man's job for you instead of this rubbishing school. They're going to clear out the lot who've been raiding the coast farms. Drive them back north and west where they come from. Shoot the thieving bastards if they catch them at it.'

‘They're still around,' Fred said, trying eagerly for paternal favour. ‘The fellows have seen them out near Dorahy's place. He encourages them, he does.' Oh, the lad could spill the sins of others with horrible readiness. ‘And old Charlie Lunt's as well. Sugar and flour and things. Tobacco. They give them, I mean.'

‘Do they indeed?' asked his father, who knew.

His wife was silently stirring knowledge in with sugar and tea.

‘Gin lovers?' Mr Buckmaster asked shockingly of no one in particular; but his wife who could have endured any kind of lover at all said mildly, ‘They're kind to them. They think they're people.'

‘People!'

‘Yes. People. Christ's skin was probably as dark as theirs.'

‘My God!' Mr Buckmaster cried, inspecting her handsome
intransigent features for irony. Christ was the New Testament revealed once a week by a minister who viewed him joylessly. He was presented as totally pale-skinned and it was to a white man they sang their whining hymns. ‘My God! Up north, you know, up in the rain-forest, hunting them down makes a pleasant way of filling in Sunday.' It could be done straight after addressing his puritan white god. He enjoyed watching her wince. ‘What's the bag, eh, mate?' he pursued. ‘Ten? Eleven? Not as good as last week.'

‘Leaving them to rot,' commented his wife, suddenly brutal and vicious with him. ‘Not even a hole in the ground!'

‘Ach!' Buckmaster grunted. ‘You're like all the other women after all.' He felt unexpectedly pleased with this discovery. ‘Sentimental and stupid. First to squawk if a party of them raped you, though.'

‘I've never squawked at rape,' his wife replied calmly, putting the supper cheese closer to her son's friend, understanding his subtlety.

There was a frightful silence. Young Jenner blushed. Even young Fred, thigh doodler of private and particular yearnings, was finding the scrubbed veranda floor of savage interest.

‘There would not be,' Mr Buckmaster said finally and heavily, ‘room for much else.' A winner, he felt, in front of Jenner's bright intelligent eye.

But the boy gave a last embarrassed gulp at his tea and said to the waiting room, ‘I must be getting back now.' The innocence of his red hair was startling against his newly educated face. He stood up awkwardly and walked over to the landing uncertain whether to speak again would be the ultimate refinement in this uncivil war. But the wife spoke.

‘Good-bye,' she said to him. ‘Thank your mother for me, and come again soon.'

Young
Jenner smiled once more, stopped smiling and said good-bye. As he cantered his horse into darkness, he understood that the blows dealt in metaphor were deadlier than the thwack of flesh on flesh. He could not ride fast enough to hear silence move in behind him while his soul lugged a new and doughy knowledge.

D
ORAHY SUBMITS
to
this pull of fate.

He packs a small bag, noting how one's needs in age lie in inverse ratio to the expansion of the soul.

He hopes. He boards a lumbering coastal vessel that rocks him out of his capital and, after a sea-shaken slumber, wakes after the third night to a sugarville morning of hard blue and yellow north of the tropic. From the salty deck he observes the wide reaches of blue bay water as the boat enters his destiny. Coastal scrub has thinned out its scraggy imprecision and has become the scraggier, scrubbier buildings of a town he has not entered for twenty years, which yet, as he watches the houses grow larger with approach, fills him with a nauseating nostalgia.

He has kept apart as far as possible from the other passengers all the week, but now, as they join him along the railing, he feels obliged to share the excitement and the chatter. Hands point. Voices cry out. The boat noses its rusty way from harbour to river and river docks.

There are only two others disembarking and he hopes to avoid them, knowing the town is full of pubs. Their reason for return is the same as his and already, conscious of his ambitions for solitariness, he wonders why he has come. His elderly legs wobble on this Friday morning gang-plank but they are the same legs that strolled through this town twenty years before, and he marvels that he is experiencing grief when, he supposes, rage would
be the better thing. Turning his back firmly on the river and the docks, he walks steadily up the slope past the warehouses and enters the town.

The streets are busy with horses and big drays. There are people on bicycles bumping along the rough roads. Groggy from all this, he stands uncertain in sunlight, his bag at his feet. One should never go back. He decides this with vehemence and wonders then is he thinking of the psychic mistake of it or his own lack of charity. One does go back, he knows, again and again. One should forgive places as much as people.

This place has much to be forgiven it.

Terrible to sense the valetudinarian legs tentative along the footpath. But up here everyone saunters. He is relieved he does not look remarkable. It is a refusal to fight the heat which already is dealing him blow upon blow; rather a yielding to it. Already steam is rising from the baking township and its slow river. Already there is sweat along his hairline, the saddened back of his neck, trickling between his breasts.