The Roving Party (18 page)

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING WAS COLD IN
the shadowed trenches of those back hills, cold enough to quiet the bird call and quiet the captives as well. But they slogged on and by midday had reached Brushy River. It was muddied with meltings from the snows and it seeped down the valley through the wooded hills like the discharge from some sore on the planet’s crust. As they tracked along the banks squalls of mosquitoes lit on their bare skin, broad things the size of Spanish dollars, and the assignees beat at themselves with long switches of gum to drive them away. The clansfolk shuffled along clinging each to the other, mothers to children, sisters to sisters, and only the young warrior boys watched the white men, but they did so out of fear. For two days Jimmy Gumm had been carrying a child, a girl round of cheek and belly. During the spells he passed the child back to its mother and when they moved out he hauled it once more onto his back. The child did not grin or show any enjoyment but nonetheless Gumm persisted in befriending the little
girl and seemed to derive some sort of satisfaction from caring for her. The next morning from a hill’s crown they saw the crenellated mountains away north lying sunlit under snows with the mythic blue of Ben Lomond looming above them all. Thus the distance home was laid out before the party men.

On the morning of their fourth day of walking, the disordered party gazed across a vast plain and saw in the dawn the hamlet of Campbell Town clustered around the green row of river trees that wound through it. There was no wind to speak of, no clouds, so that the chimney smoke tracked straight up into the sky. Among the stubbled wheatfields wandered sheep in flocks and some early risers were seen to move along the cart roads. The assigned men wiped their noses and smoothed down their matted hair as best they might and the party set out towards the settlement and their first civilisation in a month.

They entered Campbell Town by noon. Folk stood in their doorways staring as the nine of the roving party moved the captives along the main street. A load of turds tossed from a night bucket reeked on the road ahead. At Batman’s command the rovers circled around the captives and held their firearms readied. They stepped over the ruts and watched the wary townsfolk pick up their children and spit in the direction of the blacks, but after the party passed the townsfolk formed to the rear and followed them down the roadway. A number of public houses lined the main street, squalid huts ruinous and wrongly aligned and clad with palings cut from
whatever grew at the riverbanks. Raw timber slabs were stood upon sawhorses to function as bars and the drinkers wheezed over their rum and made the sign of finger and circle at the black women. One toothless old fellow tottered forward and thanked the party men for ridding those parts of babyeaters. He shook their hands one by one, the paddock dirt still black upon his own. When he reached Bill he looked up into that hardened face and his eyes opened wide.

We’ll be paid. No need for thankin. John Batman moved the fellow aside with his forestock. Then some of the children began to peg rocks at the clansfolk. They called obscenities and gave names to the blacks even Bill had never heard.

We’ll have us some nice black shoes, said one, when they’s tanned up this lot.

His hair was cut high around his ears and his young teeth were already yellowed but in truth every child in that group was as wretched and wild as the rovers themselves. They dashed in with sticks and stabbed at the warrior boys. Pigeon caught one by the shirt and shook him viciously then cuffed him around the ears, and the rest of the children hung back after that but they called and sang their crude songs just the same.

The only stone building on the high street was the gaol. Its squared fronting rested along a section of cobble and the assigned men stood in the street before the place they’d so freshly quit and they muttered under their breath and spat. A
set of wooden double doors stood ajar and through the crack was heard the rough hacking of the inmates. An evil stink of disinfecting vinegar hung upon the whole place. John Batman brought the party up before the doorway. He straightened his wide-brimmed hat and his coat and took himself inside the doors, his boots clapping away over the flagstones as he disappeared. The rovers gripped their weapons while the people in the street gathered to watch the unfolding of events. They clamoured about as if some medicine show had pitched its tent and promised acts of miracle. Batman re-emerged bearing his hat in his hand. He was accompanied by Sergeant Bickle who, on seeing the mob of captives, twitched his moustache and stood off as if they were diseased. The clansfolk gazed on him with near identical disdain.

You’ve gone and done it, he said. By God you have.

He called inside the double doors and two more soldiers in misused livery stepped onto the street. They stared at the women’s bare breasts.

Bickle wiped his sweaty neck. How many you got?

Eleven.

Eleven. Well I’ll be damned. He waved at the lockup, a gesture of dismissal. I aint got nowheres to keep that many.

I’m contracted to collar the bastards, said Batman, or shoot them. So as you can see, Sergeant, my part is played. Their lodgings dont much concern me.

Plenty round here would see the mongrels hang, said Bickle.

Batman looked at him. Then hang em.

The gathered crowd roared in approval.

They aint worth a length of rope, cried one.

Said another: We burn heathens, dont we?

They ought to be speared just how they speared Mrs. Gough and her tots.

The sergeant clapped his hands and appealed for quiet and the protests died away. They’ll be fed. More than that I cant swear to.

Protests began afresh but he signalled the guardsmen to lead the captive clansfolk into the gaol’s wooden maw, the children gripping the women’s cloak flaps as they went and the warrior boys straight-backed and meeting the eyes of all. At the doorway leaning on his weapon was Black Bill and as the clan filed past him, each in turn stared into his dark face, seeking some show of solidarity, some inkling that their fate lay with him, but the Vandemonian bent his head and would not look. He stared down at his boots, split open at the toe and caked with street crud, exuding a fierce stench. He stared down even as the door squealed shut on its hinges and the clansfolk vanished from sight.

Bill turned up his thick collar—there was an edge of snow on the breeze—and lowered the brim of his hat and put forth along the road alone. John Batman called his name, the name given to him by James Cox, Esquire. The boy called it too but the Vandemonian walked and ignored their cries. He walked and the townsfolk parted around him.

B
EREFT OF THEIR WOMEN AND CHILDREN
the clansmen crossed their clanhold at pace and progressed along the frontier as if they were as insubstantial as the stays of mistfilled light between the silver wattles. After them came the rovers, unhindered by their roped prisoners and full of their own success. The rovers traced them over shale and peat land and plain, heard of them spied atop a certain hill or camped on a certain riverbank. They walked the sun up and down eating what they shot and sleeping on the bare granite. Spring snows, a foot deep in the back hills, slowed their pursuit but they did not relent. Late October they came upon some little mia mia contrived out of broken branches and stocked with looted blankets and clothes. In the hearth pits were dead fires kindled from books torn savagely apart. The party men took rum against the frostbite, relit the native fires and slept in the native shelters. In the following days a great tail of smoke led the rovers to the corpse of a young stockhand smouldering in a hut which had been razed around
him. His body black bones but his head oddly intact. His two boiled eyes steaming in the cold. They kicked through the ashes for things of worth and Batman lifted the lock of a gun with a stick and studied the redhot iron. The stockhand had made a stand inside his shelter until the bark roof was set alight by brands; no doubt he recognised a worse fate than burning awaited outside, yet no blood and no dead blacks were to be found in the underbrush. The assignees grubbed out a shallow hole in the ground into which the stockhand’s bones and his roasted head were thrown and they raised a little cairn upon the grave mound so that the devils might be kept off the corpse. From that place they trailed the war party around Ben Lomond. It was a mob of at least twenty they were hunting, warrior men, youths, a meeting of broken bands come together before a foe that ran them without halt. Lately the weather had begun to advance and the spring coolness changed to an unmuzzled heat. With this the bush also altered as the trees grew brittle and the parched leaves rattled in the desert-driven northerlies. It was here, amid the rows of blue gums and acacias dried by the elements, that the war party crossed their tracks and cut back behind their pursuers. The Dharug men lay on the ground reading the faint signs pressed into the earth and they tested the depressions by finger but the deception was only understood when the blue gums along their back track flared alight like matchsticks. In all directions towers of smoke began to rise and the rovers saw there their fate. They bolted up the slope
as the conflagration drew the wind inwards and climbed until they found sanctuary on a ridge. That night the underbelly of the clouds burned orange and showed the rolling front of flame and the smouldering star points in its wake. They stared at the bushfire and held their empty bellies till dawn. Come morning they walked down through the burn, their clothes blackened and their feet blistering through the skin shoes. There was nothing but devastation in all directions and even Bill knew not where to lead them in a land become suddenly alien. From there on they passed days and nights in search of the clansmen’s trail. They crossed and recrossed the same cuts of country. Saw the same shepherds working the same beasts. And as the heat of summer peaked and the days began to shorten the inescapable truth presented ever more insistently. They found themselves one morning crouched over ochre diggings weeks old and collapsed under the rains and no heading could be taken nor sign discovered. John Batman looked up to the sky as rain came anew and in that moment his resolve shifted. He looked to his men, shook his head and walked away from the diggings. They passed a hard night billeted among the lime ferns and prickly box but soon after he led them homewards, goading them on like cattle when they tired. Some days later they spilled from the forest onto the cleared ground of Kingston and for a few beatings of their scabbed hearts they were satisfied, even the Vandemonian. That night Batman made free with his rum and the men drank. William Gould produced a piccolo upon which
he played over and over the same sad song and the men danced at first but soon took a seasoning at the rum keg and slipped into a sullen stupor. The fire burned low and as the men passed out one by one, Black Bill was left to drape blankets on them and watch another dawn disfigure the treeline.

Sometime later Eliza shook him awake. He was lying backed against the store shed in the sunshine and on instinct he pulled his knife and raised it. Her hard eyes searched him over as he sat upright, straightened his hat and sheathed his blade. The pockmarks in her tanned cheeks stretched and shifted as she spoke.

You best see yerself home, Bill, she said, those green eyes lingering on him. Yer wife has need ayou.

Yes mam, he said. He stood up.

As he picked his way among the unconscious assignees lying on the ground he passed by the boy, who opened his eyes and rolled over. Bill continued on for the fields but the boy called to him.

Where you off to? he said.

Bill looked around. Back home.

You dont got one.

I got one. He pointed out the knot of shaded scrub beyond the sheep fields. Out bush there.

In the bush?

Yes.

Like them blacks back there?

No, not like them. I got a humpy. Got a woman.

Can I see it someday?

Anytime, boy.

Batman wont allow it, will he?

Bill shrugged. Who knows what that man will do?

Are we to be given tickets now?

That there is the Governor’s business. He does as he sees fit but were I him I would see my way to it.

The boy drew his knees up. Take care of yerself.

Yes, boy. And you too.

He took the track through the scrub to his humpy at a jog. The shadows dappled in a weave patterning his skin, his booted feet slapped the earth and his fowler clattered on its securements. Long before he made the hut he smelt a smoke tang on the air and he saw the column of it rising white and crimped and brittle through the canopy. Soon he entered the clearing he’d cut by axe and shovel in the middle of that bush gully. Hearing his noise, Katherine appeared in the doorway in a disheveled pinafore and she bore in one hand a smallmouthed pistol of the kind favoured by gamblers and charlatans. She stared at him. The weapon was on the cock.

Missus, if you shoot some fellow with that little thing and he finds out, by God he will come back and flog you, Bill said and he laughed.

But his woman disappeared inside. He looked over the gums pressing in on all sides and he dropped his kit by the door, following her in. She cut strips of mutton onto a plate and placed it before him at the table where his mug filled with river water was also put down. In the smoky light Katherine appeared much aged and hard done by. The months alone had done her no favours.

Where’d the pistol come from?

I trade. Rifle too big.

Too big. Yes, I reckon it was.

Bill’s woman bent down to the fire with her legs splayed outwards to permit the swell of her belly and her knees made a stretched leather groan under the load. He ate meat with his fingers and watched her set logs in the fireplace, the flames licking around her fingers. Then she turned to face him, eyes pinched against the smoke.

You find that bungana? she said.

No. He has some cunning in him.

The fire popped. She watched him a moment longer, intently, then went back to the wood and reaching flames.