Death of a River Guide (22 page)

After he died of a stroke, Reg's cheap false teeth (not comparable in the least to the superb dentures into which his teeth had been fashioned) sat in the middle of the mantelpiece, for a time in a glass of water, but then without fluid company following a family party (the only kind of party Auntie Ellie permitted) in which they found use during a dance as a set of castanets. So they sat among the photographs and ashtrays and curling postcards and wilting geraniums, two yellowing crescents bound by a musk-coloured frame, a small memorial to one man's sacrifice.

Auntie Ellie had moved from the Mole Creek district to the west coast in 1891 via Melbourne, Victoria, following an incident on a farm where two of her brothers, Jack and Bert, laboured. The brothers worked for a farmer called Basil Moore who had a property out back of Mole Creek. At the time there had been an outbreak of cow plague and Basil had to slaughter much of his herd. He ordered the brothers to dig a large pit in which the animals were to be driven and slaughtered. While they dug, Basil, depressed at the ill fortune that had struck his farm, drank from a flagon of rum, pausing only long enough to gee them along, telling them to dig harder and deeper. When he had finished the flagon he threw the empty bottle at his feet, then wandered off. He reappeared about an hour and a half later. Evidently he had been back to the homestead, because he had another bottle of half-drunk rum as well as a shotgun. He leapt into the pit, which was by now seven feet deep, some three feet deeper than when he had last looked into it, falling face first in the clay at the bottom. He pulled himself onto his knees and looked up at the faces smiling down at him from the top of the pit. His rum-flamed eyes burnt with humiliation out of his muddied face.

‘Throw me the shotgun!' he yelled at the brothers at the top. They looked at him, then at each other, then back at Basil. ‘Throw down the shotgun, I said!' hollered Basil. He threw the empty rum bottle up at them. It rose up slowly, hit a wall of the pit near the surface and fell back down on Basil, who had to duck to avoid being struck. The brothers tied a piece of baling twine around the gun barrel and carefully lowered it down to Basil, who snatched it the moment his fingers could reach. He snapped the shotgun open, pulled two cartridges out of a coat pocket, loaded them into the barrel, then snapped the gun back together. He put the gun to his shoulder, raised the barrel to the sky, closed one eye, wobbled a little, regained his balance, then let his other eye roam the sky until he found one of the brothers in his sights. He put his finger on the trigger. And then he roared, ‘Bury me, youse black bastards!'

The brothers looked down incredulously, perhaps even with a slight smirk on their faces. ‘Bury me!' Then they realised that Basil was serious. ‘I should never have left Devon,' said Basil, who, even when drunk in front of the brothers, persisted in the fiction he was a free settler from Devon rather than what all the district knew him to be, a convict from Salford, sentenced to death for bestiality, his sentence commuted to transportation to Van Diemen's Land for fourteen years. That had been when he was a young man. He was old now, and broken - by the System, by his own desire for a respectability he could never gain, by his inability to remake the land he had bought into his own image of himself.

‘If you want to take your land back, bury me!' he cried.

The effort of standing erect and looking skywards without swaying proved too much at this point, and Basil lost his balance and fell over. Before the gun exploded the brothers were already well away from the hole. They ran off with Basil's curses chasing them.

‘You pissweak black bastards. Get back here and bury me. That's what you want. That and my land. Well, come back and finish me off now. Bury me now,' and now he laboured every word, ‘youse - filthy - black -
bastards
!'

But the brothers were not to return, not the next day, not the following week, not ever, for that night there was a knock on the family's shack door. Basil had been found dead from a shotgun wound in the bottom of a pit. The brothers had planned to return once the word went around the Mole Creek pub that Basil had been chastised by his wife for drinking and had resumed his normal God-fearing Gospel Hall ways, once Basil was back to threatening them only with the wrath of the Lord and not with a shotgun. But now there was no going back.

‘They'll hang us for sure,' said Bert. ‘Ain't no one going to believe the word of two blackfellas.'

Bert, Jack and Ellie fled across the water to Melbourne where they stayed for three years, until the fateful day that Bert met Reg Lewis in a Collingwood pub, the evening before the Melbourne Cup. Reg was over from Strahan for a holiday and had lost all his money in a two-up game. Bert took Reg home to the tenement he shared with Jack, Ellie, and two other families. They fed Reg up on silverside and spuds, and Bert lent him a pound - half his week's pay as a slaughterman at the local abattoir. Reg told them how the west coast of Tasmania was exploding with life, of how Nellie Melba had even sung in the mining town of Zeehan, a town about which there was talk of making the capital of Tasmania, so rapid and astonishing was its growth. The three of them were sickening for their home and people, and they told Reg why they had to leave and how much they wished to return. Reg began to sense something about the brothers' sister, a small dark attractive woman who smiled a lot as he told his stories of prospecting in the wild rainforest of the west. His tales grew wilder as her smiles grew bigger. He told them of how some lucky diggers who struck it rich lit their cigars with pound notes, and about how they told diggers from California that the Tassie tigers ate lone prospectors. Then at the end of it all he confessed that the greatest attribute a person on the west coast could have was to bullshit even more than the bloke next to him. They laughed a lot at that. ‘Hell,' said Bert, ‘I
knew
it was bullshit. I was just amazed how much bullshit one man could produce from a feed of silverside and spuds.' And they laughed all the more, till the tenement rocked with their laughing and Reg had to wipe the tears from his eyes.

Reg talked more of how they ought come to the west coast, which was awash with people from everywhere around the world and where they would never be found out and where there were plenty of jobs to be had. They nodded their heads and thought no more of it. The following day, in the race before the 1891 Melbourne Cup, Reg put the pound Bert had leant him on a thirty-six to one horse that ended up winning. Reg tracked Bert down at the abattoir the next morning, paid back the pound fivefold, and then handed over three one-way boat fares from Melbourne to Strahan. The family met and discussed the offer and in the end decided to go, feeling that it ought now be safe enough for them to return to Tasmania under aliases. Before the steamer had even got to the heads of Macquarie Harbour, Ellie had accepted Reg's proposal of marriage.

 Auntie Ellie, 1941 

It was near the end of Harry's second year at Strahan that Auntie Ellie felled the white cow belonging to the manager of the Mt Lyell mine. Her granddaughter Daisy had fallen badly ill with a fever. At first Auntie Ellie had not worried unduly. But when night came and the fever became so pronounced that Daisy went into convulsions, Auntie Ellie decided to go out and fetch the doctor. She walked across to West Strahan to his house, only to discover that he was playing cards at the other end of the town at Lettes Bay. She walked along the long dark lonely road to Lettes Bay and felt all her old fears resurface. The darkness felt like a hole into which she might fall. She had, like the old people, always been frightened of the dark, but this time the fear grew and grew in her stomach until she could no longer hold it down. She screamed and began to run. And behind her she could feel a white face, chasing her. She held her dress up high and ran as hard as she could. Her clay pipe fell from her mouth as she began to pant and she had to leave it where it fell, scared to even pause to retrieve it. She ran until her guts ached and her throat burnt. Still she ran on, and as she ran she felt the stories of the old people coming back, stories she had forgotten since childhood, about how the whites had come for them in the dark, about how the mothers stuffed bark into the babies' mouths to stop them crying lest the noise give them away to their hunters, and how because of this the babies sometimes died. How there was not even the light of a fire to keep Werowa from stealing the dead babies' spirits away, for fear the smoke from the fire be sighted. She ran and her arms ached and her chest was afire, and still she felt the white face behind her. She remembered how they had told her their forebears had been snared and handled like wild beasts, how at Oyster Cove Dr Milligan gave them medicine to prevent them having babies. And the terrible stories that her mother had told her, how soldiers would keep a black girl tied up all night, then set her free and shoot her running in the morning. The story that Lallah had told her mother, of how some soldiers had roused them from a corroboree, and Lallah saw one of them stick an infant on his bayonet and put it on the fire.

And then she could run no more. She slowed her pace to a jog, then to a stagger, then halted altogether. At first the sound of her own panting, the pounding of her own heart, was so great it temporarily overwhelmed her fear. Then, as her breathing became more regular, she felt hot breath on her neck and knew the white face was behind her. And she knew it was Werowa's breath announcing a death. But whose death? She felt paralysed with total fear. She felt air surge through her flaring nostrils, felt her whole body tremble, felt the sweat on her nape grow cold as the breath of the white face that fell upon it.

Auntie Ellie suddenly swung around and threw as powerful a punch as she was capable of. She felt her fist strike something soft and velvety, then slide onto slobber and teeth, and then there was a tremendous bellow and a huge form slumped to the ground. Auntie Ellie looked down to see an unconscious white cow. She stood transfixed. Then she cried and cried.

Still weeping, she walked the remaining short distance to Lettes Bay, found the doctor, and together they drove back in his baby Austin to Auntie Ellie's home. But, as Auntie Ellie already knew, it was too late. They came into the house to find Harry sitting on the floor in front of the fire with Daisy's little limp body cradled in his arms. She had died some time before, of meningitis, the doctor said. Harry said she had gone into convulsions for a second time, then gone quiet. He had known, he said, the moment she had breathed her last. He didn't cry, though Auntie Ellie wished he would. He was a man, all right, she thought, even if he was only twelve. But when he looked up at her and asked why there was so much death, she could not help but seize his head and pull it into her own belly, black, damp and pungent smelling with the rain, heaving hard with heavy long sobs.

 Auntie Ellie, 1946