A Kindness Cup (7 page)

What did you do then?

I dispersed them.

How did you know they were the blacks who had committed the thefts? Had you any direct evidence?

The boys at Mr Romney's told me these were the blacks. They said the tribe was in the habit of coming across their land to move south down the coast.

And that was the only evidence you had? Did you not, for example, recognise one of the gins who had been seen frequently about the town?

Come on, boy! Dorahy encouraged silently from the rear of the court.

The silence began to crackle.

Well, Lieutenant Buckmaster? Did you not recognise one of the gins?

The courtroom air was like a giant and fetid bubble of Freddie's blood.

No, he said.

For the moment, Mr Sheridan said, sipping at a glass of water beside him, let us leave that. Have you proper control over your troopers?

Yes.

But
this group was not all native troopers?

No.

But you had proper control over the whole group?

Lieutenant Buckmaster began sweating again.

Well, Lieutenant Buckmaster? Had you control over the whole group?

I cannot really say.

Really
say
, lieutenant? I put it to you that at one stage your troopers and the townsmen with you acted as separate entities.

That could be possible.

Had you given orders to the entire group?

Yes.

What was the nature of those orders?

I told them to go into the scrub and disperse the tribe.

Disperse? That is a strange word. What do you mean by dispersing?

Firing at them. I gave strict orders that no gins were to be touched.

And your orders were not obeyed?

To my knowledge they were.

But the group had split into two punitive forces, had it not?

Yes.

Then how would you know whether your orders were in fact obeyed?

Lieutenant Buckmaster offered silence.

Mr Sheridan's colour deepened. I must insist on an answer, Lieutenant Buckmaster, he said. If there are warrants issued then you are, I take it, acting correctly when you try to disperse or capture certain blacks. But in this case there was no warrant. I wish to know what induced you to give an order than could result in indiscriminate slaughter.

There was no—

Lieutenant Buckmaster,
were your orders in fact obeyed?

I don't know.

I see. And do you think it proper to fire upon the blacks in this way in such circumstances?

They don't understand anything else.

How many bodies, Lieutenant Buckmaster, did you see when all—I repeat—all your forces rejoined?

I saw six.

Was there not a gin killed as well?

Dorahy leant forward against the rail in front of him, his face, his entire body, suffused with a kind of delighted anguish. He shouted, Yes yes yes yes yes, and for the second time that day Mr Sheridan had to ask for the witness to be removed.

Lunt lay on his bed listening to the dust settle. Or thought he could.

Not the same bed. He had burnt that, dragged it out into a rose of fire made by the first of the failed mills. Listening for the strain of rope and water being spewed up its pipes, he substituted the satiric fire instead, dragged on the putrid mattress where still he could see some of his own hairs and the old man's. Such a marriage. Consequently he uttered some sort of prayer during the sheet and the blanket. His girl had never. Not ever. He would have laughed if it hadn't seemed unkind at the best and blasphemous at the worst.

So he lay, returned and nursed back to some sort of health, for he had lost a leg, severed at a southern hospital, and he stumped round on his new wooden one. The only true separationist, he told himself, grimly smiling at the sick joke. Gangrene had got him, had entered silently a minor graze below the knee so that the old man's poison had done for it. So he lay, hearing the dust move, and knew that soon he would have to be about the simplicities of living—the horses,
the dog, his few scraggy cattle whose rumps were leaner than his own. What day of the week it was he wondered, knowing he should have smelled out Saturday with his heart.

He put on his breakfast. The effort of it. Sat munching some bran mash in milk and sipping tea—the terrifying comforting monotony of it—and saw from the edge of his veranda, a long way off, a horseman who turned into Dorahy trotting across the outer paddock.

Dorahy was being rational and categoric that morning with the sun finally up and classes week-ended. He was full of dour logic.

‘You must take action,' He tapped the wooden leg. ‘The whole town is aware of who and when and why. Don't let it settle.'

‘There's no purpose,' Lunt said, sad for the other bloke who was so righteous in his pettiness.

‘There's every purpose. This stinking tiny town taking people by the nose and then ramming them in their own filth—or worse, the filth of others. By God!' he breathed.

‘They've gone now,' Lunt said. ‘My squatters. My dark campers.'

‘There was a massacre,' Dorahy said, ‘the very next day while you were gasping it out. No one wanted to tell you.' He couldn't resist ill-tidings for the life of him. ‘But there was a bloody massacre.'

Here, Lunt recalled, was an explanation for averted eyes during his convalescence, the clipped-off utterance. Remembering the point of light in a glass of water steady on a bedside table while truth somehow refracted around the steadiness of light. Lips became oblique as words.

But Dorahy was not oblique.

‘Someone,' he said, ‘Buckmaster, someone, lashed you to that bed leaving you to die.'

‘I'm unkillable,' Lunt grinned for the folly of it while Dorahy stirred his tea angrily.

'The
whole school is buzzing with it now that you've come back—like this.' He gestured towards the wooden leg. ‘They're like blowflies buzzing over the dead meat of that week-end. The town. I'll stir things up, truly. There'll be a commission about this.'

Lunt said, ‘That will only fatten their self-importance. They'll grow big with a commission. Let it rest.'

‘But it's not just you,' Dorahy replied, wiping a trickle of tea from his long chin. ‘It's the old man as well. It's Kowaha. It's her husband. It's Kowaha's child.'

‘The child?'

‘A miracle,' Dorahy said. ‘I've been looking for one in this place. A blooming of Eden, as you say. They collected her, those vigilantes of justice. Some curiosity or oddity, they thought. The Boyds looked after her for a few weeks and now the Jenners have her. There's no one left, with the tribe scattered to buggery.' The word sounded terrible on the teacher's tongue. He felt a vile taste and heard Buckmaster.

‘I see,' he remembered the other man saying, ‘the bloody kid came top in Latin! Some sort of prodigy, eh? You coach them younger and younger, Mr Dorahy?'

‘She was more apt than the Lieutenant,' he had countered.

Now he watched Lunt shift his good leg, rubbing at a stiff thigh.

‘Please,' he begged. ‘Please. Don't let them get away with it.'

Lunt's clear blue eyes speculated on distance. The mills were unmoving, their arms dead wood. If only the water. It could be his salvation, that lost coolness.

‘It could so easily have been us who did it,' he said. ‘The luck of the draw. They carry their punishment inside. For ever.'

‘Ach!' Dorahy expostulated, mad with the need for retribution.

Young
Jenner had fingered the silver medal on the baby's golden chest. It moved in tiny pulses. ‘She's a winner, sir,' he had said. ‘You've given her your luck.'

The timber house was full of heating air. Sun shafts became rapiers slashing the eastern rooms of the sagging building. Dorahy swung one like a cleaver. His arm parted motes.

‘Whether you want or not,' he cried, ‘there'll be an inquiry. Fred Buckmaster has to put in a report to fool justice. Oh, there'll be an inquiry all right and I'll speak if it's the last thing I do.'

Yet at the time he gave only ironic yelps of laughter.

B
ARNEY SWEETMAN'S
house
skulks behind a mess of wattles.

Dorahy is unable to knock upon this door, for it lies open with a frankness that is devastating. At the end of a lighted hall he can see part of a big room filled with people and for a moment only is afraid for himself and the folly of his tongue. His entry into light has the manner of stage device, for the fifteen or so people who are there stop talking as he stands hesitating before them all.

Sweetman swoops.

There is a glass in Dorahy's hand suddenly and he is sipping amid cries of welcome that bring the bile acid to his mouth. He is clobbered silly by their greetings as they all lie and tell him he's hardly changed.

‘I'm much the same inside,' he says awkwardly—but it is really a threat—and this is a sardonic aid for those who talk only of externals. Something makes him want to cackle at their absurdity, but he sips again and the wine warms him. There'll be some kindness, he hopes.

‘Part of the town,' a fat man is saying about him with genuineness, smiling. Where had he seen that smile? In what agonised situation twenty years before?

‘You remember the old Snoggers!' Sweetman cries, and Dorahy is grateful to be helped, feels the trembling start in the hand that holds the glass, and nods and says ‘Of course' as his eyes track beyond Mr Boyd, town printer, to the bullishness of what can only be Buckmaster, a ruined piece of flesh propped by the mantel.

‘After
all these years!' Buckmaster is crushing his hand. Dorahy does not want to take communion but it is there, offered with fabled obliviscence. ‘Why, it's like old times!'

All our eyes are smaller, Dorahy thinks. It reflects our nothingness. And he says, rather bitterly, ‘Not too much like old times, I hope', and watches for shadows.

‘What's that supposed to imply, hey?' Buckmaster demands. But his smile is still in place. He is very lined and the wine that stained his cheeks once has now run its blemish all over his face.

‘There were times,' Dorahy says, resolving to be careful, ‘when we didn't see quite eye to eye.'

‘There were,' Buckmaster agrees. ‘But that sort of thing isn't for an evening like this. Past is past, eh?'

Dorahy takes a larger sip at his drink and repressed anger. He wants to shout ‘Not ever' and whack the room apart with some claymore of accusation, but a certain smile on Boyd's face stops him. There will be other moments for that, the smile says, spelling out postponement—and he is puzzled.

‘Where's Charlie Lunt these days?' he finally asks Buckmaster, to annoy him.

A knot seems to appear in the centre of Buckmaster's face.

‘He moved up the coast a bit,' he replies. ‘Gave up his old holding.'

‘It would be pleasant to see him again,' Dorahy says, remembering the room, the bed, the rope. ‘Is he well?'

Buckmaster shrugs and catches Sweetman's eye.

‘He was invited,' he lies. ‘He might turn up. Haven't seen him for years.'

‘But he should be here,' Dorahy nags, forgetting his resolutions. He takes another gulp of his drink and feels a hugeness of just rage constrict his chest. ‘He's the most memorable part of the town.'

‘In what way?' Sweetman asks.

‘A martyr.
A saint.'

‘Oh, God, Tom!' Buckmaster says. ‘I thought you would be letting go by now.'

‘Saint Lunt,' Dorahy intones, ‘appear and bless this meeting.' His smile is lost in memories.

There are too many people in the room, even for its largeness. He is reintroduced to Romney and Armitage and Wilson and all the faces have a familiarity he is too tired to unmask, even that of Freddie Buckmaster who is lounging heavily against a window pane. He is confidently forty, now, and has a wife and two legal children.

Dorahy has another drink. And another. Mellowness or daring will set in. He corners Snoggers Boyd in an angle between living- and dining-room and asks again. ‘Where's Charlie Lunt?'

Boyd appears truly jovial, yet his mouth tightens and he says, ‘It wouldn't have done, I suppose, his coming.'

‘Why not, for Christ's sake?' Dorahy cries. ‘I'll fetch him. He can be fetched?'

Boyd sucks at his pipe, lips drawn back as he clenches his teeth.

‘Come on now, Tom,' he says.

‘Is it possible?' Dorahy persists.

‘It's possible he would be unwilling.'

‘Why?'

‘Well, what good would it do? It's years too late.'

‘For justice to be done?'

Boyd frowns. ‘You're an impossible person,' he says. ‘Lunt hasn't come near this place since he left. He obviously doesn't want to be reminded either. Who the hell do you think you are? Social conscience?'

‘You're right, I suppose,' Dorahy admits. ‘But I'd like to see him all the same. He was a truly good man.'

‘Let it rest a bit.' Snoggers' eyes are sad. ‘If it's only seeing him you want, I might be able to arrange something.
A run up the coast for you. I've been up there myself once or twice. How long are you here for?'

‘Just the week.'

‘And why did you come?'

‘You're the second person who has asked me that,' Dorahy says. ‘Curiosity. That mainly. And a hope for delayed justice.'

‘That's the nub of it,' Boyd says. ‘I feel as you do but I act differently. Have another drink.'

He has another drink. And yet another. He allows his mouth to remain shut against anything bar social inanities, even to Fred, ex-lieutenant, who lounges across the room to examine him more closely. Buckmaster's soul grows bristles.

‘You two yapping away here!' he accuses. ‘What is it? Conspiracy?'

Fred's crassness comes from the beer-pot belly-rumbles of secure middle age. He has a moustache horribly flecked with beer-scum. He grins at his former teacher and turns into a cartoon of himself.