That Deadman Dance (10 page)

*

Cross awoke under canvas, his tent billowing, snapping and straining at its guy-ropes. It was a very small tent, and only when Cross crawled from it did he realise he was on a vast mallee plain. He was still on his knees, forced by the wind to clutch at one of the tent pegs, and the tent was the tallest thing he could see and then it was as if the wind had him, was sucking him up into the cloud-torn sky and his little tent, shivering with the wind, was lit from within. He felt his own round face glowing like the moon, and shredded clouds cobwebbed his vision even as he drifted below them, drawn to the glowing tent. The wind had dropped.

Below him a banksia cone glowed like a piece of coal, the smell of strawberry jam oozed from the pile of kindling; these hints of home. But the Far East scent of sandalwood was in the smoke, and who might be in the shadows around the fire …

He saw himself hovering at the tent’s entrance, like an insect silhouetted against a lamp. A body in his place, beneath his blanket, was breathing deeply; calm, asleep. The soft light showed Wunyeran’s black face and thickly greased hair upon Cross’s pillow.

Cross awoke in the grainy light of morning safe in his little hut. The white clay covering the thin walls of acacia branches and twigs glowed, he could smell the clay and the paperbark and rushes of the roof and just then the flimsy door opened, and he saw Wunyeran silhouetted against the early morning sky.

Come in, he said, and sat up in his rough bed. He was so very pleased to see a native, he realised. A Noongar. He wondered where he was. Who?

Men at sea

Accepting responsibility for the settlement’s health, Dr Cross insisted a vegetable garden be established as soon as possible. The agricultural possibilities interested him, even though the current population preferred a diet of salt meat with no fruit or vegetables.

He visited The Farm at least twice a week. Strode straight up the hill from the sea in the early morning, pausing at the top to gather his breath and take in the view. Whitewashed buildings, the saucer-shaped harbour, the narrow isthmus dividing it from the sound to the east, and then two islands hovering by the horizon, white foam pulsing at the edge of the one on the right. He went across a granite scalp, and then wound his way down between boulders and wildflowers.

The men had broken up more ground, but the only one there now was the supervisor, Sergeant Killam, who Cross thought a decent but prissy fellow. The man had a passion for gardening, and had been relieved from other duties in the hope he might help provide fresh vegetables.

We got the bull, Killam said.

Some nights ago, woken from sleep by a Minotaur’s bellowing, Cross had rushed to the door of his flimsy hut as a solid shadow sped past in the darkness. He remembered the beast’s warm breath and the ground shaking beneath his feet. He remembered its great bulk. The few soldiers pursuing it passed by like ghosts: pale, insubstantial, their footsteps barely detectable.

Killam showed him the enclosure built to hold the animal and Cross was surprised at how quickly it had been completed, and how sturdy it seemed. The work of Skelly, he was told, and Cross once again thanked whatever fate had decreed a craftsman be among the prisoners; he doubted it was the good planning and foresight of their superiors. And he thanked God that Skelly had survived the spear he’d received by way of welcome. The man was a good worker, and tractable. Cross wondered how much of his sentence remained.

And sir, they been into the potatoes again. Killam pointed out the footprints.

But our own people are among these, Cross declared, pleased with himself, despite the evidence of theft. He showed Killam how the large toe of someone accustomed to wearing boots turns inward, and how different this was to a native’s imprint, something Wunyeran had explained to him.

Perhaps we should make a plaster cast, he said, and test it against each man’s foot. Killam’s expression flickered, and Cross glanced down at the man’s boots. They were distracted by a high-pitched and excited barking, as Killam’s terrier, stiff-legged and sniffing, circled the woodheap.

She’s a good ratter, sir. One of the ships’ dogs got to her in season. I could give you one of her pups, sir. If you’ve a mind.

A few weeks later Cross surveyed the evidence of yet another raid on the vegetable garden: just the one small area of digging, and what seemed two sets of footprints.

Wooral, said Wunyeran, with a snort of amusement. Wooral had been in the settlement just yesterday, he explained, was visiting from his country a little further to the east.

Nearby, Sergeant Killam pushed at the spilled soil with the toe of a well-worn boot. He’d like—no, needed—new boots, but who knew when the next supply boat was due? It was as if their settlement had been forgotten, and now even the natives were not taking them seriously, stealing a small number of potatoes each time, just enough to challenge and annoy. Every little thing added to his irritation, his frustration. Killam was a soldier and expected Cross to take command and put a stop to these games. Or order him to do something.

He was all the more irritated because he was putting aside a small amount of vegetables from each crop and trading with ships—whalers generally—anchored at one of the sheltered coves nearby. Ships moored there rather than Princess Harbour so as to avoid pilot fees, and to prevent crew members deserting. Killam was simply demonstrating the very initiative Cross himself kept telling people was necessary for the growth and sustainability of a tiny, isolated settlement like this. An American had wanted to make a bet with him about how many whalers there’d be in a few years. Killam would be happy to lose the bet; some hundred or more American whalers sailing along the south coast would be very good for business indeed. He sold rum to his fellow soldiers cheaper than they’d get it elsewhere in the settlement. Grog, a good garden and a regular supply of fresh meat (kangaroo was popular with the French, he believed) provided a nice supplement to a soldier’s income. He reckoned he could better it.

Let the others live for their cards and rum. Killam had too much drive for that, although he understood their boredom well enough. Perhaps that was why the natives were always quarrelling, one family with another. Was that also why they stole potatoes, just a few at a time? Because it was fun? Kept them amused?

Killam was far from amused to be among the soldiers the Commandant chose to pursue the potato thieves, especially when they were told
not
to load their rifles. Far from amused? He was furious. At least Cross didn’t give Wunyeran a rifle, too. Killam never liked seeing him heading away from the settlement with a rifle borrowed from Cross, even if he inevitably returned with a welcome addition to the soldier’s monotonous diet.

Wunyeran suggested they take a boat straight to the river mouth in Shellfeast Harbour and make up ground on Wooral that way. That path they used, remember? he said. It crossed a bit more upriver, and Wooral would go there heading east. It was a good suggestion, and spared them a long walk. Not only that, but a favourable wind meant they needn’t row.

Almost as soon as the longboat nosed onto the riverbank just past where the rocks were laid out in maze-like patterns to trap fish, the wind suddenly dropped and it was strangely quiet; perhaps it was the proximity of the water and stone to the trees that gave the air such a peculiar acoustic quality. Killam heard the sound of the pup he’d given Cross: grown, but still young. The high bark sounded very close, intimate.

It offended Killam that Cross had given Menak the pup. It wasn’t the sort of dog natives should be interested in, unless as food! He thought a hulking wolf, a lion or bear would make a better companion, but their dogs were quiet and as likely to sneak behind you as come up barking and snarling. Whereas this pup, the offspring of two small rat-catching ship’s dogs, yappy and strutting, demanded attention out of all proportion to its size. Its yap yap yap came drifting over the valley in which the settlement lay: a familiar voice, made alien in this landscape.

Menak carried the dog in his arms more often than not, and Killam had seen it sniffing the air, head up as if it ruled the landscape. He was surprised how calm it seemed; they were usually quite nervy beasts.

Now here was its voice again.

Wunyeran moved to the back of the group, assuring them all Wooral was not far ahead. (As is obvious to all of us, thought Killam, and no doubt Menak is with him, too.)

Killam stepped from a grove of peppermint and redgum, bending his head beneath a low branch, and there was Wooral, at the centre of a small clearing. Killam swung the barrel as Wooral turned and ran, and received the disappointment of a tiny click, no Boom! Killam imagined a wound widening on the native’s naked back, but the man was gone. Killam spat, cursed, and was about to race off in pursuit of other bodies running in the shrubbery when Cross called, Halt!

The soldiers glanced at one another. Heart pounding, Killam listened to Cross and Wunyeran speaking in that gladbag bastard language the two of them used together, and then Wunyeran was calling out in his blackfella talk. Half a dozen or so grinning heads appeared from around trunks and rose above the low shrubbery. Within range, thought Killam. The soldiers and Captain listened uncomprehendingly as Wunyeran and the others— Wooral among them—spoke to one another across the distance. The wind snatched at their voices and swept between pursuers and pursued, shaking the shrubs, and bending the small trees.

Wooral and the others began to walk toward Killam’s party. Halfway there, Wooral called out and Wunyeran responded. It must’ve been the answer that stopped them. Wunyeran looked at Cross, and Cross called out, Apprehend them, men!

But the soldiers’ quarry knew there was no spite in the gun barrels brandished their way, and although well within rifle range, they were forever just beyond reach of the heavy hands and boots clumping toward them. One moment they were in a circle around the soldiers, showering them with kangaroo pellets, the next they were in one group, leading the soldiers on and waving, laughing. Wind rocked the trees and shrubs, and the Noongar disappeared and rose again, so light on their feet they seemed to glide. Killam thought of men in the sea: diving not falling, waving not drowning. The same branches that alternately supported or concealed them clutched at his jacket, and tree roots tripped him.

Wunyeran had moved from pursuer to pursued, from hound to hare. Killam could hear the puppy’s excited barking. Menak must be with them, too, then. It was a game. They thought it fun.

Killam stopped to load his gun.

They had lost all sight of their quarry.

One potato, two potato, three potato, four. Bye bye redcoat, bye bye Jak Tar, bye bye.

The voices fading, and that infernal dog’s yapping.

The wrong port

Cross was relieved the natives had left on one of their journeys, their regular migrations. Feeding them proved a drain on the stores and Wunyeran and the rest often took up a great part of his day, distracting him from other things he could be doing: collecting specimens, recording, instilling in the men the importance of diet. And then—Cross was an honest man—with the natives absent, the awkward issue of his own presence was not always bothering his conscience …

Certainly, their absence pleased the rest of the settlement’s population. Friendly enough, the natives, but the smallest things could suddenly turn their mood, people said, reminding one another of the times there’d been trouble. The spearing. The theft and lying. The nuisance of them. The prisoners were glad not to be every day reminded of their servitude while inferior beings were free and feted. Those soldiers with families dined at one another’s tables. Others kept at their cards and rum and tried not to doze through their days between supervising at The Farm, or maintaining and building their homes, or at the fishing or road works. The prisoners were kept under guard, but not shackled.

Cross dealt with his correspondence and planning, and discussed morale with the Captain. He went on long walks around the coastline.

But a child ran to its mother, sobbing that a black had chased her. A gunshot echoed from the hills around the harbour, and the settlement froze. A soldier had fired at a few blackfellas he’d seen hiding either side of the path ahead of him. The way they flitted in and out of the strange trees you never knew for sure if you were safe or not.

At least with Menak and the rest, you knew where you stood. And they were friendly, they made you laugh. Where are our natives? Menak was a leader and he kept the others away. Wunyeran too, and he was such a happy young man. Had they stayed away so long last winter? Some people thought not. Why so long away this time, then? Yes, they had fought other blacks, but everyone knew they all cooperated at other times. What if they were to join forces against us? What chance would we have?

Heavy rain swept across the harbour, and in the valley between their two hills a stream of water ran back to the sea. Whales came close to shore, and a few whaling ships came into the harbour. Some visiting sailors said they’d seen blacks, and certainly their fires. There was a great crowd around a whale that had been cast up on the beach to the east of here. Hundreds of them.

The soldier’s lookout duty was increased.

*

On his own, old Bobby often agreed that yes, he really was important to the way everyone—black and white—had got on so well here in this, what did people call it? This neck of the woods, this isolated seaport, this godforsaken place? Yep. Truthfully, he had been the main man. It wasn’t his fault things went bad.

Like mallee or
moort
his roots reached out, and people sheltered close to the ground under his branches, made like a family.
Moort
means family, too.

Dr Cross and everyone remembered the special thing that happened, but they never knew Bobby was right at the middle of it. He didn’t remember Bobby from when he was still just a little boy not long on his feet who walked into that settlement set upon the windswept shore where no Noongar had been for a while and lay down beside the soldiers’ hearth, lay down upon the soldier’s bed to die. But it was Bobby. It was Bobby himself who caused the trouble and who also made the peace.

His sickness was part of the story that was circling round and round in his head, beginning with his own mother and father forgetting how to breathe properly so they could only exhale and cough, always bent over, stooped, moving like their feet hurt from touching their very own earth. They lay down quietly until the flies came around them and went into their eyes and mouth and nostrils. Lay there as the birds settled upon them with their hard and gripping feet and their beaks tore at the softest flesh first. Bobby could not keep the flies away; not the birds, either.

There was no one strong enough to bury his mother and father, or send them on their way properly. So Bobby had wandered away from them and into the soldiers’ barracks, into the walls of white clay beneath the roof of thatched grasstree rushes. It was a large inside space, smelling sharply of earth and dried vegetation. He could not speak the language then, only ‘hello hello’ and anyway there was no one about. The floor inside the big hut was worn and hollowed from the soldiers’ sweeping and sweeping, so that he stepped down into what was like swept and packed ash, like soothing talcum powder. The breeze came cool from the harbour through openings on one side of the barracks and out the other, refreshing his hot cheeks. There were no soldiers there, but the beds were laid out side by side to the left and the right. He picked one in the very middle. Sat upon it.

Lay down.

He sank into the bed, the smell of soldier, snuffled at the rough blanket prickling his nose. The smell of soldier who was no longer a stranger. He went very silent and deep into the cave of himself.

When the soldier came in he saw a very young boy soft and all but naked on the bed, and leaking.

Cried out.

And the voices went out, saying a young native boy (it was his old self, Bobby knew, he felt it still) had died. But Bobby was deep inside himself, gone very tiny like a pale mouse and was watching, listening. The voices went away from the barracks that was the centre of this trouble, and his own people were angry, of course, because how could a young boy die just like that? Someone must be to blame. The soldiers, see.

The men came into the settlement trembling with anger, shaking their spears.

Dr Cross went up to them, heading straight for Wunyeran and ignoring the spears. He wanted just to talk, and the other men moved back from Wunyeran, and a few soldiers walked quietly up to stand behind Cross so it was the two men—Cross and Wunyeran—with the others standing behind each of them. Two groups, apart.

Wunyeran was wild, and the soldiers and their prisoners and Dr Cross and the soldiers’ wives and children all looking on had known Wunyeran only as a laughing, playful man. They hardly thought him a savage now. But here he was with his people, shouting and glaring at them and shaking spears more than anyone.

Some of Dr Cross’s people stepped further back. They were standing close together, their arms reaching inward to one another, wives and children clutching at their men.

Wunyeran strode around, leapt in the air, shouted. His face was terrible to see, and he ripped his
wadjela
shirt from his body and tore it with his teeth. He hurled the tattered thing to the ground and stomped on it.

One of the men, Wooral it was, threw a spear. It only just missed Dr Cross and went right through the wall of the barracks. The soldiers lifted their guns, but Cross called out, No no, don’t fire. There were more men with spears than men with guns. Dr Cross kept speaking to Wunyeran, and did not let the soldiers fire. He got one of his soldiers to carry the boy out and then took the limp boy in his arms. Tears on his cheeks, and tears on Wunyeran’s cheeks, too.

It was Wabalanginy, Bobby Wabalanginy. Dead. But Bobby Wabalanginy remembered all this, he will talk about it when he is older. Other people will listen, and they will tell it, too. He was only a small boy then, and he was dead in Dr Cross’s arms. Cross gave the poor little body into the arms of his friend Wunyeran.

And then the body, Bobby Wabalanginy, sat up while the two men’s arms were crossed and still upon him. He sat up in their four arms and then, only a little boy, he climbed up onto the shoulders of Dr Cross, and Wunyeran moved beside his good friend and the boy Bobby Wabalanginy stood with one foot on each of the men’s shoulders holding the hair of their heads. Dr Cross’s hat fell to the ground.

Those two men, with the tiny boy on their shoulders, walked away from the barracks with the soldiers and wives, their children and the prisoners, too, on one side, and the Noongar men on the other. People had stretched out in a line each side to see the boy and the two men, and spears and the rifles pointed up to the sky as Cross and Wunyeran carried the boy who came to be known as Bobby on their shoulders, carried him between them. He stood high in the sky for everyone to marvel at, and he stood on their shoulders.

Not everyone remembered this story like Bobby Wabalanginy did, but he knew no fear, see, and knew it was him, floating from the soldier’s bed in the barracks and floating forever safe above the long guns and percussion locks and caps and even his beloved family’s fighting spears. And he would tell you that he rose even higher into the sky that day, little boy that he was, and saw future graves: Dr Cross and Wunyeran curled together, and two others curled tight, too, a man and a woman: one from here, and one from the ocean horizon. It took him some time, but started then: Bobby looked into future graves, and into some people’s hearts and minds, went into the hollows within them, into the very sounds they made. All his friends and their goodness kept him alive. And he never learned fear, because he was not just one self. He was bigger than that, he was all of them.

And no little boy died in the soldiers’ barracks, not ever. No, they brought him alive. No little boy died when the soldiers and sailors and Noongar lived together, not ever. No no. Never never never.

*

All my friends, old Bobby Wabalanginy would say to the tourists, in between throwing his flaming boomerangs and holding his palm out for their coins. You, my friends, you keep me alive.

All his friends and family kept that boy Bobby Wabalanginy alive, just by loving him, wanting him, and wanting him to stay where he was. Stay in this place.

*

Menak began visiting the settlement again, Wunyeran, too. Cross made no mention of their previous hijinks, for so the vegetable-stealing incident had become. Indeed, Menak was very popular; those soldiers with wives invited him to dine with them one after the other. Cross wondered at the man’s social stamina.

Content after a shared meal, Wunyeran and Cross sat within the glow of fire and candle, heads close and nodding to one another, gesticulating with wrists and fingers, speaking slowly and softly. There was darkness all around; a darkness Wunyeran seemed to fear and Cross did not know. Anyone looking in from that darkness would have seen them as if held in a sac of yellow light. Cross was drinking brandy: not a drink Wunyeran had learned to appreciate, though tonight a few sips eased his discomfort. He had recovered but was still heavily congested.

We are two men of such different backgrounds, thought Cross and, attempting to fuse them, we are preparing for the birth of a new world.

Without a woman? He would turn in his sleep, restless.

They sang to one another. Wunyeran initiated it, Cross accepting. It was a way to communicate, to say more of oneself than was possible with their limited shared vocabulary. Cross sang pieces from childhood, anthems and ballads,
Auld Lang Syne
and bawdy sea shanties. Nevertheless, his repertoire was soon exhausted, but Wunyeran was enthusiastic to hear them again and again and soon sang along.

Late one afternoon, Cross, Wunyeran, Menak, Killam and some of the other soldiers were together in a hut. Wooral came through the doorway, but hesitated at the edge of the room.

Wunyeran looked up and sang,
Oh where have you been all the day, Billy boy Billy boy?

There was a moment’s stunned silence, then the soldiers’ nervous laughter.

Sometimes the hut grew too warm and too close, as if there was not air enough to breathe despite the way, in different weather, rain collected in puddles on the earth floor and chilly air found them however much the fire blazed. On one such stuffy evening, the two men went out under the night sky—not far, because Wunyeran liked to keep fires or light close at hand—and Cross tried to follow Wunyeran’s words of what was in the glittering sky: the origins of different stars, the stories of dark spaces between, the way the sky and its slowly shifting constellations signalled that rain was due, whales would be appearing, emus nesting inland … He told sky stories of how things became the truths they are.

The two men sat either side of the hut’s doorway, the candles inside flickering, and the dark shapes massed around them—huts, a heap of wood, tents, shrubs, trees—contrasted with the sky, which lowered a net of stars to enmesh and welcome them.

You people in England, they die?

The question came after a silence between them and Cross had hardly replied that yes, they did, when Wunyeran, the timbre of his voice eloquent with melancholy, continued that his own people were dying in great numbers. He coughed and wheezed, mimicking common symptoms. Mimicking, but he knew the symptoms too well. He scratched himself.

And what then? Cross tried to ask. What of a heaven and hell? Angels? A God?

Doctor-Sunday-book-paper?

Wunyeran had politely sat through several church services and now, broken English interspersed with his own language and again with song, he expressed something of his elder brothers the kangaroos, and that trees or whales or fish might also be family. Or so Cross understood. The sun was their mother … Cross’s face showed he did not understand.

Doctor-Sunday-book-service, Wunyeran said, smiling at the clumsiness of his own language. It was a new language of sorts they were developing. Wunyeran people
dwongkabet
.

Ah, Cross understood. Wunyeran’s people were deaf to the church; they did not understand.

Now Wunyeran talk, Dr
dwongkabet
.

Cross nodded, nodded again, and was suddenly speaking passionately, as if he was a young man again and wanting Wunyeran to know his heart, the weave of his inner galaxy, his Christian beliefs. Wunyeran understood something of how individuals died and went to a place in the sky, but when Dr Cross tried to speak of heaven, and chains-of-being, and of a place of constant suffering within the earth where a big spirit-man sent bad people … Wunyeran laid his hand gently on Cross’s shoulder.