The Untold (11 page)

T
he first time Jack Brown ever touched Jessie they were on the way to a drove. There was nothing of circumstance that night to bring them together. The weather was warm. They were suffering no storm and there had been nothing exceptional about the day. They had ridden along quietly beside each other for days. And days before on other rides.

That evening he made a campfire and prepared their dinner. She went down to the river to wash herself and when she came back her skin glowed in the light of the fire and her eyes were bright. It was the first time he had looked at her that day, always she was riding out ahead of him. But suddenly there was a feeling in him and it felt dangerous. He knew that when a man has enough space and silence and time he begins to think anything is possible or nothing is possible at all. This day, all the space and silence had set him to daydreaming of her, although she was right there, if not right there beside him.

That night, when they settled down to sleep, he imagined what it would be like to be next to her, to press his chest against her back, to feel her skin. But there was no reason for it. No way of closing up that distance between them.

Until he did.

She was lying awake on her swag next to the fire. He moved in beside her. She took his hand and rolled to her side and held his hand against her chest.
Sleep now
, she said. But neither of them slept. He lay awake for some time, breathing into her hair.
Eventually, he forced himself to close his eyes, only with the hope of dreaming of her, of finding something that would flow from dreaming into life.

And then it did.

In the morning she would not meet his eyes.

We cannot ever speak of this
, she said.

My lips are sealed.

I mean it, Jack Brown. This can never happen again.

As you wish.

Do you know what Fitz would do to you? And you can guess what he would do to me. Our feelings cannot be worth both of our lives, Jack Brown. We will bury them. Right here.

He knew her words were true. There was only danger between them.

N
orth and west the inland climate gave rise to black and white cypress and tumbledown gums of ironbark. Jessie looked down from the high ridge. Around her were deep cliff-lined gorges, giant ramparts and then more canyons, more rock. There was wilderness as far as she could see. It did not end.

She had been riding for a week.

She had stepped Houdini up and over the ridges and escarpments, felt the weather change, the air dampening her skin. Ledge to ledge were animals she had seen before only as fleeting creatures—rock wallaby, quoll. Here, they did not flee. They were as still as rocks as they watched her.

She and Houdini wound farther up the mountain, crossing granite bands, observing that their ledges curved like cupping hands and contained clear pools of water from which she and Houdini drank. When she reached a large saddle of the range she dismounted and led him through. Sweeping over them was an arch of granite boulders and walking through she felt a reverence such as she had never felt.

She navigated her way by the sun, and where the forest grew so dense that it would not let the light in, there were plants on the ground that turned their heads to face the sun's direction.

At night, she took her cue from those same plants and her limbs relaxed and her head turned down against her own chest and she
slept an exhausted sleep, and when the sun rose again she traveled with the compass of the shadow of the mountain.

Her peace did not last.

She was leading Houdini over a high ridgeline when her remorse caught up with her suddenly. In front of her, a spectacular basalt scarp revealed the stretched necks and seismic heads of mother, father and child, the same faces Jack Brown had first pointed out to her from a far, far distance. It pained her to see them and feel that he should be beside her and between them there could have been a child, his or even Fitz's. And there was no escaping it, not the longing nor its looming and ancient reminder, its head lifted up against the sky.

She missed that longed-for life as if it had actually happened—as if she and Jack Brown had won their freedom, as if I were born in perfect time and strong. Days and nights she had allowed herself to imagine the simple, gentle happiness of our life together. But it did not happen. Now it shadowed her like any other myth.

She rode or walked or scraped along, leading Houdini, sometimes Houdini leading her. It was as if her eyes turned in, seeking some clue, something that in the spit and struggle of living she had missed as to how things could have been different.

Her sleep was taken up with nightmares of Fitz, so day and night she was all but ricocheting off the walls of her past and the feeling was like prison but now the prison was herself. She pushed herself and Houdini up more treacherous slopes. Houdini stepped dutifully behind her, though he was slipping more and more. She had no appetite but was reminded to graze when he did, feeding
on fern fronds that grew between the exposed roots of trees. Still, she was growing ragged.

When she found herself kneeling against a slope and surrounded by sharp-edged rocks, it seemed to her that if she had spewed out her insides that is how they would look.

T
he first time Jack Brown rode into Fitz's forest was the first time he saw my mother.

Jack Brown had ridden his horse along the southbound track as the letter from Fitz instructed. The track had wound him through an open paddock and then into the forest, alongside the river. He moved through the forest till he heard the reverberating sound of kangaroos, their bounding noise traveling from every direction. Jack Brown pulled up his horse and halted on the track. He had heard stories of mobs attacking lone riders, although he had never seen it himself.

He lay down along the neck of his horse and a huge gray buck appeared on the track, then a dozen or so smaller roos bounded past. They traveled in single file, following the gray buck down to the river, clearing the fence line one at a time. Jack Brown had seen them traveling in mobs before, mainly across open fields, but there was something impressive about the agile way they negotiated the thick bushland without losing their order. He watched them until they reached the river and it was then that Jack Brown saw my mother, sitting on a rock ledge. She was so still he might not have seen her camouflaged against the rock if she had not sensed him near and turned around.

Who's there?
she yelled.

Jack Brown was surprised to see any human form after so long and especially a woman. He dismounted and walked his horse up to the fence line. She was already climbing up the rise to meet him.

I'm Jack Brown
, he said.
I am looking for Fitzgerald Henry
.

You're Jack Brown?
she asked.

Yes
, he said,
I've an offer of employment from Mr. Henry.
He tapped his top pocket.

I'm Jessie
, she said, surveying him. To him she looked steely and confused.
Keep heading down the track then
, she said,
and follow it till you get there.

She turned away suddenly and headed back towards the river.

Jack Brown mounted his horse.

Thank you
, he called after her. But she was already gone.

He steered his horse to the track and rode slowly, wondering who she was, if she was some forest dweller, some itinerant, and if he could expect to see her again.

He had set off from Sydney, where he had been convalescing for two months in a boardinghouse for ex-servicemen. The mood there was depressive and he was glad to leave it. It was filled with soldiers who had no family or wives or girlfriends waiting for them and they could not work immediately due to whatever injury they suffered. There were some single rooms, which were coveted, but otherwise they slept in bunk beds in a large dorm.

On Friday and Saturday afternoons most of the men would try to forget themselves by donning their army uniforms and cruising the pubs for good-looking girls before closing time in the early evening. Most often, Jack Brown was not allowed in because of the color of his skin so this usually meant smoking cigarettes outside before his party moved along to one speakeasy or another, where anyone could enter. If they arrived somewhere to find it shut down they would set up in a park or close to the harbor, which Jack Brown preferred.

Some of them began to partner off with the girls. One of the girls took Jack Brown on as her special project and one Saturday night she brought along a girlfriend for him. He thought the friend was attractive enough. She had big green eyes and yellow hair that was cut into a fashionable bob. She called herself a modern woman and she invited him back to her one-bedroom flat in Kings Cross and they went out for a picnic and once to a dance and once to the zoo.

For her, a modern woman's best accessory was the hip flask she carried in her handbag. On the ferry ride to the zoo she swilled from the hip flask too many times.
Jack Brown
, she slurred,
I don't care if you're black, white or brindle
, and she stuck her tongue in his ear. He felt so repulsed by her he thought he might prefer to swim across the shark-infested harbor rather than spend the rest of the day with her.

Aside from that, the city women kept such a pace Jack Brown did not think there was any use in catching one or keeping one when he knew the city was no place for him anyway.

And so he replied by letter to Fitz's advertisement for an Aboriginal stockman, which he had found pinned up in the foyer of the boardinghouse. A couple of weeks later he received a letter from Fitz in return containing a hand-drawn map and instructions on how to find his property.

Jack Brown was nineteen years old and, aside from his years in the army and the stock work he had grown up doing on the property where his mother cooked and cleaned, this was his first real offer of employment.

After meeting my mother near the fence line of Fitz's forest he made his way again along the track. Soon she came bolting past.
She rode bareback and slipshod, like a man. She was all bones, and her hair whipped up and she raised her arm, a wave and a salute at the same time, and Jack Brown could not have guessed how familiar that sight would become, and how often he would find himself trailing behind her.

B
efore Jack Brown appeared at the window of the station hut, Sergeant Andrew Barlow had been standing in the washroom naked except for his coat.

The rain and wind had passed but the hut seemed to hold on to the cold and it shot through Barlow's feet like darts. He had been angling his jaw to the broken mirror, inspecting his shave between the reflection of the mirror and the reflection of the blade. It was as good as he had looked since he arrived there.

When his father proposed the country posting, Barlow had imagined a hut stark on a hill and the station had proved to be not much more than that. On first actual sighting, Barlow wanted to turn back, and if it had not been his father riding beside him, himself a senior sergeant, Barlow would have felt no shame in admitting that of all the challenges of life, he did not feel fit, mentally or physically, for this one in particular and returning to the city as swiftly as his horse could carry him.

But his father had a grip on him. It was the firm grip of guilt and Barlow wanted to redeem himself.

Barlow was a drug addict and his father knew it. The country air and the isolation were thought to be the solution and even Barlow believed that if he could see it through and find something in it to occupy his mind if not his soul, somehow the experience would make the best of him.

As yet, he had no idea what the best of him was.

His father hung around for a week to settle him in. Together
they cleaned the place up and restored a garden that was eaten out by rabbits and overgrown with weeds. Mostly the purpose of his father's staying was to keep an eye on Barlow, to make sure that he did not fall back into his old ways. The day before his departure, he told Barlow he was doing him a favor when he searched through his bags and packs and supplies. Finding a stash of vials and syringes in a silver tin, he made Barlow smash them in front of him with a hammer.

It was not that Barlow did not want to be free from his dependence but he had found no surer way to relieve the back pain that plagued him, that came upon him without warning and lasted for days.

By habit and by design, Barlow's mind was nothing if not expansive. He was open to alternatives. He sought them out, and before he left the city for his new posting he met a supple woman from India with a red dot on her forehead who was gathering recruits in an opium den. After Barlow described the particular pain he was in, the woman taught him a series of stretches. Before they fell asleep like a couple of cats on large cushions, they practiced the postures together and she assured him they would bring him relief, immediately and in the future.

Barlow took up the routine with enthusiasm but when he demonstrated the series to his father one evening, he was surprised to find that his father became infuriated. He said:
Son, it is undignified for a man to be bending and stretching in that way, and dressed in his pajamas. If you have to do it, for God's sake do it in private.

When his father finally left Barlow to his own devices at the station hut, Barlow again took up the routine. He performed it every day as the sun came up and as the sun went down. If he felt any
twinge of pain in between these times, he stretched himself out on the table in the station hut and swung his arms over his head and dangled there until he felt each vertebra lifting and the slow relief of it.

After a week or two Barlow's mind felt clear and his body felt good. The crowded feeling of the city left him and he found within himself an unoccupied space. It was something he had never known. He turned his attention to methodical tasks and with his full focus he ordered and sorted the hut and delved into the files he had inherited from the former police sergeant.

The post had not been filled for almost a year and the files were layered with dust and crawling with mites. Barlow was unperturbed. He cleaned each file and read it, examining each criminal's photograph in detail and recording the faces to memory so he would know them if he saw them, perhaps even on a dark night.

In one of those files Barlow found my mother.

She was the only woman in his files, and aside from that her aliases intrigued him:
Jessie Hunt also known as Bell also known as Payne.
She had appeared in court on many charges of horse rustling, under many different names. He lingered over her file longer than anybody else's, staring at her image, unclipping it from the file, reading and rereading her history and the sergeant's notes. He was disappointed that she no longer had to report to the station every month since her marriage to Fitzgerald Henry. But why was the file still there?

He examined her photograph with his magnifying glass and used the information in front of him to sketch out a time line of her life.

Jessie
, he said,
Jessie, Jessie, Jessie
, as if his words alone would conjure her.