That Deadman Dance (23 page)

Not long now, Bobby told him. And Jak Tar, remembering the last couple of years, agreed it’d be another few weeks before those southwesterly gales, and the whales, arrived. Chaine himself was due any day.

What’s not in a whale song

By season’s end Bobby had a song of the whale hunt, and his voice offered it as the ship left Close-by-island bound for King George Town. Fittingly enough, the song began with what was happening just then: the shoreline shrinking and the homefires flickering smaller and fading as their ship, like the boats in the song, pulled away from shore. The song was a search for whales as the sun our mother rose but even before that the sky was upward drawing the light from deep blue water and oh look here come the whales …

Wooral and Jak Tar added their voices and the whalers smiled and laughed, recognising the mime and also, among the incomprehensible words and infectious melody, the names of their tools and hunting cries. But mostly they delighted in the sinewy energy of the song, the resonating voices, the way it lifted you like an ocean wave, and they felt the gathering energy about to take them on a ride like that behind a whale racing from the harpoon’s sting.

This last season Bobby (and by now only Noongar knew him by another name) and his team hadn’t needed him or anyone else perched high on the headland calling out, Whale! Whale! There she blows, we rose a whale! Somehow he seemed to know when a whale was in reach, or else they went searching for them on one or another of Brother Jonathon’s ships or the little schooner Chaine now owned. But truth was they rarely needed to venture beyond the bay, though sometimes a whale hauled a boat so far it was a day’s rowing back to camp.

The schooner proved ideal for blocking the path of rival shore-based whaling boats, for there were other men from King George Town who wanted the wealth Chaine was gathering from the sea. Chaine’s successful alliance with the Americans stirred his jealous rivals’ patriotism: this was a British dominion, Sir! It stirred their resentment, too, because a man would indeed be a fey idiot to fish with a land party if foreigners are allowed into our very own ports …

Bobby’s song did not touch on such rivalries. It captured the experience of the whale hunt in a series of verses that did not always follow the same sequence. It was how he relaxed and revitalised himself and even now, at season’s end as he lay on the deck of the American ship surfing across the backs of waves with the easterly wind of summer filling its sails, he was composing and refining verses in his head. The words of whaling: harpoon and lance, sleigh-ride and bucket, blankets and book-pieces and skimmers and spoons.
Galleyed
almost made him laugh out loud, even in the dark and his almost-sleep, as he remembered the frustration and fury of other hunters as the schooner slipped between them and the whale.

Lowering in and out of sleep, Bobby saw the smooth slick surface which showed a whale beneath the water. The whale rose, dived, and the last glimpse of its tail showed Bobby where it would appear next. The boat glided there, the men rowing under the guidance of Bobby who would first see the change in the water, and the whale bursting back into their world. The lance struck home and Jak got two turns of rope around the boat’s loggerhead before the whale reacted, and then the rope was hissing, uncurling as the men shipped oars and clung to their seats and the boat was skipping across the sea’s surface like a thrown, flat stone. Foam flew about them, the rope hummed, the boat vibrated and leaned dangerously if any man shifted his weight, and Jak doused water where the rope wound around the loggerhead, adding steam to the smoke of its heat.

Early in the season, Bobby and Jak were in the one boat. Jak thought it fitting, since old Manit insisted that not only were they brothers, they were brothers to the whales as well. Least that’s what Jak heard her say. His very first throw of the season fixed them to a whale, but its dive did not send them streaking toward the horizon; instead it circled, and towed them back toward its fellows. Jak Tar stood poised to cut the line at the first sign of trouble, if it caught on another whale or …

Obligingly, the whale slowed as it reached the edge of the pod, and across the rolling backs and spouts of this crowd of whales they saw other boats in explosions of foam and spray, their tumbling bow waves testament to how big a whale they had harpooned. By contrast, they went slowly, gently towed deeper and deeper among the elegantly rolling backs of what seemed hundreds of whales. The men in the boat looked all about, nervous. What if a whale rose beneath them? In front? What if a tail …?

At the bow Jak Tar waved his sharpened steel this way and that, and it was as if the harpoon were a magic wand. They slowed even further, and now the water was a smooth, rich brew brimming with bubbles. Then the line fell slack: the harpoon had loosened; oh, their whale was gone. Frantic activity; another harpoon? Amazingly, the whales slowed, rested, were apparently waiting as the men wound in the rope, and wound it in a dripping coil. Surrounded by whales, the men could pick and choose. Jak readied himself to drive in the dart.

But think: how would they escape the pod, towed by a panicking whale? The whales were packed closely, their very motion carrying the boat along with them: any acceleration from here would smash and sink their good selves into a deep watery grave. Best not to try a harpoon just now; best wait until things cleared a little. They could see the sense in that, but each man was also in line for a percentage of the total take—his
lay—
and here was money all around them.

The whales closed in tight. Whale eyes held them, whale breath descended like warm mist, and the men felt a solidarity so far out to sea, surrounded by the very mass of these mammals. It was like being in the shelter of a headland, except that the headland was in motion.

Eventually space opened up as the whales slowly moved along their ocean road. Space cleared, and so did the hunters’ heads. Jak Tar went to seize the moment; this was their opportunity. Look what was to be had. He lifted his harpoon. No! Why waste it on such a whale? And swung to another rising to the surface, but once more held his arm. Poor Jak Tar was a flurry of indecision, and the men in the boat, usually leaning into their oars and moving with one mind like a school of fish, pointed in all directions and insisted on various targets. The men were cursing and accusing even as those targets moved out of range.

Jak Tar threw. The harpoon stuck, the whale shook itself … the harpoon came loose. Tails waving goodbye, the whales were gone. The men sat at their oars, bowed heads shaking as whale backs rolled into the distance, breath tolling, their spouts a semaphore of farewell. Perhaps with a ferocious Chaine barking from the steering oar, or an equally fiery and wilful harpooner pointing the way they might yet have won themselves a whale. But not today, not this pod, not this Jak Tar.

*

Bobby grew into the role, and by season’s end, as the two or three whaleboats raced one another to the whales, his voice was heard urging the men to land me on that whale’s back, boys, I’ll fix a whale and take us for a ride. He stood, legs bent, on the rear thwart, watching the water for sign of a whale, its reappearance, or change of direction. Heave, heave, my strong men. Land me on that whale’s back and I’ll steer him home.

One day they succeeded: landed Bobby on a whale’s back, but not from the momentum of headlong pursuit; it needed the whale’s help. The harpoon had stuck, but unusually the whale did not dive and race away. In fact, it hardly reacted. It seemed more curious than in pain, and shifting its tail around in what seemed an exploratory way, struck the boat a glancing blow so that Bobby was catapulted into the air. He landed on the whale’s back and was on his feet in an instant, arms out wide and feeling a deep trembling through the soles of his feet; and then the whale dived. Bobby felt the angle shift, and the soles of his feet stuck for a moment, gripping the black whale skin as water rushed around him and there were bubbles and silver and below him the great shape dwindling, shrinking, disappearing into the blue darkness. He felt the bright whip of the harpoon line cutting past him, taut as a long silver spear, and when he came spluttering to the surface his steerless boat was already distant and skipping toward the horizon. He raised his arm, called to the other boat rowing his way.

Jak Tar leaned over the gunnel. Need bridle and saddle for riding whales that way, Bobby!

No longer needing the risk of try-pots on a ship’s deck, they set them up on land. Dead whales floated in the shelter of the headland, and the sloping granite was a ramp up which the whales were hauled, their blubber peeled from them. The try-pots sat just above, boiling and belching smoke. Wooral (Bobby’s song told) slipped on the blood that flowed down the rock in sheets. Sharks waited. Wooral went screaming into the bloody water, and in an instant heads turned to him see him silhouetted on the headland high above them all. He held a shark in his arms. So ended another of Bobby’s verses, and another man joined the refrain.

Bobby sang, and it happened just as in the song: the boats left the shore and home receded, but the singer was on the boat, not on the shore like in the old songs, not on a hill and watching others leave, not scanning the seascape for a first or last sight of whale spout or tilting sail. Singing, Bobby thought of the marks he’d made when he was on lookout: his pen on paper, his chalk on slate, his
roze a wail
and the like, but there was no getting those marks into song, though sometimes he wrote letters in the sand, to show whaling men he knew their schooling and way of being civilised, too.

There was a cook with them only a short time. First time Wooral and Bobby came for their food, the cook said it wasn’t his job to serve Niggers. Kongk Chaine was there and Jak Tar, too, and they rounded on him like sheep dogs. Said we are one here, we judge people on what they do, not their skin. This is not your home. Chaine sent the man away soon as he found someone who could take his place.

The business of a white man thinking he was too good for a Noongar was not in Bobby’s song, but instead the men onboard ship, black and white and a Chinaman, too, if we want to keep saying people are this or that, and Yankees and convicts and froggies and soldiers … They all joined voices with Bobby as the melody grabbed them, held them, hauled them along behind. For some it was recognising the words—their whaling language in the midst of all the blackfella talk—and they called out, putting their voice beside the singer, trusting him and themselves to get to the end.

Asked to describe the song many would have struggled. One of those blackfella songs, they said, but with some of our words in it. They caught familiar words and snatches of melody, but something in the sound and the rolling momentum of liquid syllables moved them, put them at sea again and full of spirit.

Chaine was reminded of Indian flutes, or even a fiddle, the way the melody wavered in quavers. Toward the end, each verse suddenly dropped an octave and men eagerly joined their voices to the rumbling refrain, proving they were as one, together, even if not knowing all the words, and even if only for the singing of this small part.

And such solidarity strengthened when Bobby and Wooral and Jak Tar mimed what they sang: the harpoon throw, the men crouched in the boat with oars raised, and then that relentless octave-down drone at each verse’s end. Other voices joined theirs, and once more Bobby on steerer had them tap-tap-tapping across the sea, wallowing, bouncing and tumbling at the heart of spray and foam, helpless and taut with excitement, until the bright focus of the glinting lance entering the whale again and again stilled them. His song had them in a boat suddenly made small and frail, dodging tail and fins and a great head as waves and whale threw them about and showered them in clotted, hot blood and they heard a brother whale’s low-down dying groan …

Bobby sang of the long rowing, of towing the whale back to the beach or ship, and their red selves covered alike in dried salt and thick blood (Bobby planned dancers covered in thick red ochre, their bright white eyes shining at the audience). Finally—and here voices joined him as he sang small pieces of many of the songs people had brought to the campfires—he sang of the whalers sharing their songs of celebration back at the campfires, singing bits of the very verse he now sang, and the rum and the voices of different brothers and the congratulations and love of Noongar people made them lose their selves, drew them together …

Bobby’s song had little of cutting up the whale. It did not say the whale’s blubber was peeled and sliced into long strips. It did not detail the ‘blankets’, or ‘leaves’ or ‘book-pieces’ into which the blubber was further cut. Only the verse about Wooral referred to the clanking of the windlass hauling the whale from the water and onto the granite slope. There was little of the thick blood that ran in rivulets, the driving wind and rain, the pink and gory water, the black gritty smoke of the try-pots, the stench and the sorry shapeless whale carcasses floating in the bay. These things were not in Bobby’s song.

Bobby had no part in these things. He could find whales, and could chase and run with them. But his hands could not kill a whale. He was only steerer. And when it was time for cutting and boiling and for stepping through bloody gore and smoke he often went to where his people and their friends were feasting on the whale carcass on the sandy beach. He sought out Menak, wondering why he kept so distant, but that man was getting too old and grumpy, too set in his ways and angry about how things had changed from the years of his youth.

Some of these people came from far away for the bounty of whale meat, and not all respected the Noongar whose country it is. Menak growled if you so much as spoke English near him and, with his little yapping dog, kept a sharp lookout. He didn’t want strangers rushing close.

The old man snorted his contempt for Bobby’s song: those foreign words, that horizon people’s bleached and salty tongue and prickles of strange melodies held in a familiar sound. There are too many whales ashore, he said, and too many people come from all around, and do not greet us when they arrive or say goodbye when they leave. We are pressed by strangers from the sea now, and from inland, too.