The Untold (14 page)

B
y the time Barlow and Jack Brown were heading back to the station, Barlow's whole body ached and the sun had not warmed him. When they arrived at the station hut, it was dark again and Barlow was glad of it. It was a veil for his mood. Jack Brown put the horses in the holding yard and, inside, Barlow lit two lanterns and found a blanket for him.

When Jack Brown came in from the holding yard, Barlow threw him the blanket and said,
There's an empty cell. Make yourself at home.

Jack Brown acknowledged him with a nod and disappeared into the cell.

Barlow sat down at his desk, between the lanterns, and he opened my mother's file again. The photo of her was no bigger than the palm of his hand, but it was enough to reveal her. He could see her eyes like smudges of coal, her jaw jutting out, the look of defiance. The more he looked, the more he felt that there was something live in it.

He lined up all his props—a sable brush, a pot of lampblack, glass slides, gummed paper, his magnifying glass. He put on his white gloves. Then he unwrapped the enamel cup the old man had given him. Dipping the sable brush into the pot of lampblack, he hooked his finger around the handle of the cup and began to dust it. The dust collected around the smudges of her fingerprints.

Suddenly, he felt full of life. He rolled out the gummed paper
and pressed it over each print, collecting four perfect samples—three of her fingerprints and one, on the rim of the cup, of her lips.

From her file he took out the impression of her fingerprints. He lined up the gummed paper samples next to it and, using his magnifying glass, he compared them.

He had her. There was no doubt that each print was one and the same.

B
y midmorning the sun was high in the sky and the bush was radiant, inexhaustible in the heat.

Within the mountains were streams that gathered up in gorges, following a predestined course, crossing narrow ridges of rock. Jessie dropped to her knees next to Houdini and drank from the stream. She did not cup water with her hands but put her face into it and drank, like any other creature.

She unwound the bloodied tangle of her clothes, dressed in them again, and then she lay down in the shallows and let the water wash over her and wash her clothes clean. The rushing stream collected her hair and she felt it against her scalp like fingers stroking her and then those same fingers twisted her hair and pulled at it and she knew then it was not water that had a hold of her, it was ghosts—Fitz, Aoife, Septimus, Bandy Arrow, me. Even Jack Brown, she felt, had sent part of himself out after her. All had scraped up the mountain beside her and, despite her pleading, would not leave her.

Drenched as she was, she pulled herself from the stream and led Houdini towards the ridgeline. She viewed the mountain range, and the highest, steepest slope within it. And although it looked thick with scrub, impassable, she mounted Houdini and rode in the mountain's direction anyway, determined to escape all the ghosts that trailed
her.

Y
ou must have seen the tracks all over the country. The imprint of birds and cows and horses and humans, crisscrossing one another. And that's just the top layer of dirt. Beneath it are layers upon layers of fossilized things and rotting matter that tell something different again. Because down here stories overlap, like bodies underground, and they become intimate in the strangest way.

When I first heard his voice it was like stones rattling in a pot.
You b-a-a-a-a-s-t-a-r-d
,
he said.
I am not dead!

It was not my voice in echo. It was something else.

He said,
Thank Christ you've quit ya screaming and carrying on. Between you and them fuckin' birds, a man gets no peace.

The earth was moving around me like something was burrowing up. He pushed a small button through. He said,
Here, suck on this, kid.

If I was at two feet, he was at three, and if my mother had kept on digging, she would have dug his bones right up. I took him at his word that it would have been a terrible sight to see. He said his jaw was blown clean off and that, over time, the worms had eaten him out completely. Of course, that's when he was still alive enough to be eaten. So physically, you would say, my companion was not much to speak of. It did not matter to me. I grew fond of him anyway, my neighbor at my elbow.

He became my measure of time. Every day, at the same hour that he was rolled into his grave forty years before, he yelled,
You
bastard, I am not dead!
Every day it came out of him like an explosion and he said it was just his way of clearing the air. Apart from that, he did not say much. He said,
A lot o' fuckin' good words did me in life, so what good are they here?
But that did not stop sounds rolling out of him—rumbling and farting and moaning. He was never truly quiet.

And over time, he gave me more gifts. There was the button first, then came the spent bullet and a shell. I treasured each one. He also gave me an expression:
Bad to worse.

He called me
kid
. I have said that he did not say much, but then one day, he did.

I heard him clear his gravelly throat and then he said,
Kid, sometimes a feeling can lurk around like a bad smell and after forty-odd years I'm thinking that a feeling must be better out than in. I dunno what it is, maybe it's listening to you, but I reckon there's something in the telling and you know I don't mind a few blue words and I'll keep it clean as I can, but you'll have to bear with me, kid.

I've told you that my jaw was blown clean off and that's why my voice sounds like dry shit hitting a pot. Well, before I was buried, a bastard of a man took a piece o' my chin, just like he was biting into a bit of tough steak. I'm not one hundred percent a bastard—maybe just a bit—and I would have done the same, kid. I was stomping in his paddock where I shouldn't have went. You know what I mean, kid? I mean I had his wife.

So my arse was in the air and he was at the bedroom door and I only knew it 'cause I saw her face and her face told it all. But then her face changed as sudden as that and she lay there ginger as a cat, as if she wasn't guilty and we weren't stark naked in her old man's bed. I tore off the bedclothes, tried to wrap 'em around me, and leapt like a skinned
rabbit from that bed, and then her husband smashed my shins with a chair. I fell down onto him so we were in a knot on the floor and I'd lost the sheet by then and my balls were dangling in the air—and I tell you there is no more dangerous feeling—and then the bastard kicked me right there and I wasn't seeing stars, kid, I was seeing planets and I just launched into him and I found his ear, and I bit a piece of it off.

I knew I had the smell of his woman on me so I grabbed his hair and pressed my face into his so we were nose to nose and I said, Man, your woman tasted good!

That was something I shouldn't have said, kid. 'Cause that sent him wild. He locked his teeth around my chin and shook his head like a feral dog and then he spat me out and turned me over and jumped on the back of my legs and he jumped and jumped until he'd broken both my knees. And then he dragged me across that floor and I set my nails right in and clung to the very splinters but he dragged me anyway.

I blacked out then.

And this is the thing: I saw it, kid. It was my own imminent death. It was swift and it was sharp and it was dark and it was complete.

I came to as they loaded me in their cart. They were as silent as bastards and I couldn't see their faces, just the mean cones of their heads, the two of them. Any decent man would have left it at that. He'd broken my knees and crushed my balls. He'd defended his turf well enough. I would have just rolled out of there and dragged myself away and licked my wounds and learned my lesson and not gone back to another man's wife. But no. This fella was a prick.

They tied me up and drove me all night in their clapped-out wagon and I dunno why they chose this noisy spot, but they dug my grave right here and as some kind of punishment he had her sit on top of me so I wouldn't move and then when he was done digging, he handed her a gun
and he said, Shoot him in the temple, love. She said, I can't, I can't. But she aimed at my temple anyway. I tell you, that woman was a cat. And would that she had done it right, kid, but she almost clean missed my head and that may have been my second chance at life but she didn't miss me clean enough and she blew off part of my jaw instead.

And she held the gun and seemed to tremble there for a while in shock until the man said, You're not to waste another bullet on that piece of shit.

That's when I started screaming, kid. I said, You bastard! Finish me off. I am not fuckin' dead!

Would that he had finished me off, kid, so I wouldn't be telling this story today or lying here haunted by what it was I saw when that bastard dragged me across his splintered floor. I know it was my own death that I saw, kid, like you know anything for sure. It was a good clean death. Not this drawn-out shit.

So how did I miss my chance at death, kid? Where's my good clean death after all?

J
ack Brown lay on the bed in the station hut. There was a bare mattress beneath him and it sank with his weight. He told himself the cell was just like any other room, except for the bars across the windows. He had improved it by turning the lantern right down to a trembling flame, so he could not see the stains on the walls, and he had propped a chair against the metal door, just in case the wind got behind it and locked him in.

On the bed, he emptied out his pockets and found the postmaster's map. It was folded up and raggedy and softened by his own sweat. He drew up his knees and smoothed out the map and noted how many huts they had visited on the northwest arc.

To Jack Brown, each hut had been no more than a self-appointed cell and within them were lonely men whose very faces reminded him of what life could look like without tenderness, without a woman.

Riding from hut to hut, across country that was so familiar, Jessie was everywhere he looked. In each open paddock he could see some version of her rounding up cattle or showing off or making him laugh with some dirty tale she had heard in prison. But then, hut to hut, he felt the conflict within him, a steel trap in his chest that could lock him in its teeth at any minute.

Why had she deceived him?

He knew that in escaping, Jessie had escaped him, too. She had broken their pact of waiting. But then the sharp feeling that she had deserted him and left him to take the rap for her crime was matched by another. He wanted, again, to be riding beside her.

He needed to find the truth in it. That would be his only freedom. What seemed clear to him now was that it was not fate—that escaping together was just a fantasy and in reality he had only himself. The only way to find relief from fantasy or disappointment was to forget her, to strike off each memory like he was striking off each pencil-drawn hut from the map.

But how did he do that, when his memories of her were inked all over the landscape itself?

That night Jack Brown did not dream of my mother. He dreamt of Fitz. In the dream he and Barlow were not cutting the bellowing cow out of the barbed wire, they were cutting out Fitz. In the dream it was Fitz they freed. It was Fitz they watched run limping into the forest.

W
HEN
J
AC
K
B
ROWN WOKE
in the morning he smelt himself and he smelt rank. He found his way to the washroom but he did not like the look of it, the broken mirror, the narrow tub, so he went outside and stripped down in front of the water tank. He splashed water over his body, soaped himself up and rinsed the soap off. He wiped off the water with his hands and he felt his skin finally alive with the heat of the sun.

Back in the cell, he dressed in fresh clothes, then he moved to the front of the hut, where he found Barlow sitting at the table, lamps and candles burning around him. His hair stood straight up in a greasy pile and there was ink all over his hands, his arms and his face.

Rough night?
said Jack Brown.

Barlow held up his stained fingers in a salute and, without looking at Jack Brown, continued to roll ink onto plates of glass and press his fingers into them. Already there were pages of prints scattered across the table and across the floor.

It's all coming to the surface, Jack Brown.

Jack Brown's guts began to churn. He feared that after all these days of riding that Barlow was finally going to declare him as a suspect and arrest him.

Look here
, said Barlow
. Look at this rise. Do you know there's not another man alive with fingerprints like them?

Jack Brown looked at the prints and the lines and curves of them.

Press your finger onto the page.

Jack Brown froze up.

What are you afraid of?

Jack Brown pushed his thumb into the ink and then down onto the page.

It's just a smudge
, said Barlow
. What are you, some kind of spirit child?

Jack Brown looked at his thumb. The skin was marbled with ink.
Pulled too many pots from the fire, Sergeant.

He was relieved when Barlow said,
I need you to hook those thumbs around your horse's reins. I need you to return to the postmaster's hut and pick up a delivery and I need you to do it soon.

Jack Brown was happy to get out of there.

He mounted his horse and set off down Old Road. Riding, he could see the earth had begun to separate. Fine cracks revealed themselves across the surface of the road and riding over it was like riding over a patchwork of seams. At the edge of the road, the
paddock was golden. He pushed out into it and the grass gave off a clean, fresh smell of heat and spring.

He rode on.

The mountains unfolded and soon he felt with all of his wanting that my mother would split the summit, come tearing out through the trees and ride determinedly towards him. But she did not.

Riding further into the day he thought he could make her out just ahead of him, and pelted towards her until he realized it was another trick of light and heat and nature.