That Deadman Dance (26 page)

Sheep, sugar and knives

Look, the estuary was welling, brimming; the river already running faster, frogs singing out …
Wetj
would be nesting and reluctant to move far,
Yongar
would turn their backs obligingly and not expect you coming at them against such a wind. There would be no whales. The Noongar left the coast and soon no one at all remained at the whaling grounds.

Bobby knew most of the shepherds, none better than Jak Tar, and found him in some shade overlooking a flock of sheep. Jak looked up from the book he was reading as Bobby, rolling on the wind, was almost upon him and Oh! Bobby saw the little fear in his eyes, then relief. Bobby lifted the book from Jak’s hand, read its title.

The Last of the … the …

Mohicans.

Jak said, Err … about the other day, Chaine’s temper and all that …

But Bobby laughed it off. Menak was always too bossy, wasn’t he, like that dog of his. Binyan? She was with the sheep, and Jak walked away a little as he spoke to get a view of her and the flock. She’d be glad to see you, he called back to the young man, waving to get her attention, but she couldn’t see him and so he walked a little further. Kept walking, kept walking and still she didn’t look but just kept moving further away.

Eventually he reached her. They hugged, they kissed; he might not be a young man anymore, but oh yes, they were very happy to see one another. When they finally got back to Jak’s resting place there was the book, facedown, but no Bobby.

Jak Tar and Binyan were so fond of each other it was quite some time before they thought to again check the sheep, and when they did about a dozen were missing. Binyan assured Jak there’d been none missing before.

But where are they, what happened?

Binyan looked around her, reading the ground, and pointed the way the sheep had gone.

Jak Tar rushed along their tracks; he could read the prints enough to follow, they could not be far. And there were other shepherds in the vicinity with their own small flocks.

Jaky! Binyan called out to him; he turned but would not wait.

Within twenty minutes, seeing about eight Noongars driving his sheep, he called across the distance, Leave those sheep be! He didn’t recognise any of the men, but kept striding in pursuit. Jogging. As he reached where the river ran, shallow and rapid over some rocks, he realised he was the one entrapped, because the others had turned, and were now quite close—he had entered a half circle they made—with their spears ready to throw. He stopped, surprised. He had never thought. The river tugged at his ankles.

Kaya
, he said,
ngaytj wort koorling yey.
Hello, I away going now.

But another voice called, and there was William Skelly higher on the other bank, aiming his rifle. Where’d he come from?

If you spear that man I will gladly shoot you.

Skelly’s voice seemed so very thin. A bird called something scornful. The moment stretched. Skelly would be speared many times over in the time it took to reload after his first shot. Eventually, each Noongar man unshipped his spear and, with spear and spear thrower in one hand, lifted the other waist high and palm down in front of him, calming. Jak Tar heard his name called, caught someone’s eye. Some small laughter. The long spears shifted, and the Noongar men turned their backs and walked away.

Jak Tar and the two other shepherds in the vicinity penned their sheep together and took turns keeping watch. Jak kept Binyan by his side.

In the morning half the flock was missing.

Jak Tar and Binyan stayed with the flock, and a spare revolver, while the other two shepherds searched for the missing sheep. Jak was alert and anxious, and spun around at the sound of Bobby’s voice somewhere behind him.

You look bit shitty-arsed, Jak Tar.

Jak told him about the sheep being stolen, the spears held against him. Bobby looked surprised, and Binyan interrupted: They far-away men. Bobby reminded Jak that many people from further east had come visiting over the last few years, because of all the whales, you know.

Bobby stayed for an hour or two, conversing in Noongar language, slowing down and repeating himself at times for Jak’s convenience. But of course Jak struggled, especially because Bobby often moved into that sort of singsong manner the Noongar sometimes used. Binyan was at times helpless with laughter. The third person in a conversation dominated by the other two, Jak was perhaps more observant than usual, and he noted that Bobby lifted his head at the sound of what Jak assumed was a bird call, and took his leave just a little later.

The other shepherds returned, shaken and agitated. They had survived a shower of spears, and been driven away from their own hut and the ton of flour and three bags of sugar it contained. They had seen thin columns of smoke in the distance. Natives signalling one another?

The men looked at Binyan, who shrugged. They would again keep watch, and return to the farmhouse in the morning to alert Chaine and the others.

When Binyan came back to her and Jak Tar’s tiny bush shelter she found a large possum-skin bag packed tight with fresh mutton.

The ocean floor

Among the peppermint trees, upon a floor of soft sand and leaves, Bobby Wabalanginy, a brother and friends, shared a meal of mullet from a sheet of paperbark. The fins and tails of the same fish broke the surface of the shallows only a short walk away, and stirred the ribbons of seaweed floating there. It was very still. Outside the harbour the ocean had been rolling for days, some of its energy even coming through the granite channel and into the harbour. A pale moon hung in the blue sky, a reminder of yesterdays and days to come. The foamy bubbles and weed in the still settling ocean; the fragrant leaves at their feet, the leaves falling, the leaves hanging from the trees waiting for a breeze Bobby believed was just about to arrive; that thin old moon: Bobby felt himself at an intersection of many different rhythms.

Smoke lifted into the sky the other side of the harbour. Someone hunting?
Kaya, Wooral
, a voice confirmed. Between the smoke of that hunt and Bobby’s companions, the unfurled masts of two ships at anchor pointed to the sky. So very bare, like trees after a fire. Thin and straight like giant spears.

Bobby moved away and was alone. Wabalanginy, Menak had recently said to him, means all of us playing together. But you often go alone. And we cannot always be playing.

Bobby turned his back on the harbour, and as he did the wind ruffled the water’s surface and gave him the gentlest push up the slope toward the morning sun. It pleased him to read the wind so well. The loose sand shifted under his feet. Soft sand often meant graves, but there was only the one grave here. He paused. In later years, long after Bobby Wabalanginy and the span of this story, we might call this a
significant
site, a
sacred
place, and that’s just how it was for young Bobby, standing there thinking of Wunyeran and Cross.

Dr Cross had arranged his friend’s burial, allowed Menak to instruct the soldiers how to prepare the grave. Dr Cross had cried and years later, as he lay dying, had asked to be buried with Wunyeran in the same grave. Bobby Wabalanginy imagined their bodies rolling toward another as the flesh fell away, bones touching, spirits fusing in the earth.

He worried for them because of all the digging for buildings and rubbish that went on in King George Town. He thought of those two boys Geordie Chaine shot, their skeletons lying somewhere toward where the sun rises.

But the shooting was a memory Chaine had bidden him put away and never mention to the people of King George Town.

Floods would carry away the bones of Wunyeran and Cross. All along this coast of ours, bones were plucked from riverbanks and tumbled together to the sea. All those bones of ocean.

Bobby continued walking against the flow a flood might take, onto the granite hilltop and along its ridge. Saw The Farm, its buildings and fences. And oh how the storybook tree he and the Governor planted had grown. Although still tiny at this distance, it was tall beside the hut of The Farm.

He went across the edge of the old yam field (fenced) and up among the granite boulders and their bubbling spring. Beside a small fire, Menak was attaching a shard of glass to his spear. As grumpy as ever, the old man sat in the smoke, rolled the spear across one thigh of his crossed legs, hardly acknowledged the presence of Bobby Wabalanginy. He did not look up as Bobby said goodbye.

Boodawan djinang.

Coming up to The Farm Bobby smelled smoke, saw Manit being unusually attentive to a barely alight fire beside one shed near the house. She must be waiting for flour or sugar for herself and Menak.

He moved toward her. She was still distant, beyond anything but his loudest shout, when he saw the Governor’s son rushing from the house. Hugh? Looked like he was shouting, angry. Why? Hugh slapped Manit, and she bent away from him. Bobby was running now, and Hugh was kicking dirt over the fire.

The grass around them was very dry, though Manit had cleared it in a wide enough circle around the fire. They must have been carting straw also, Bobby guessed, because pieces of it littered the ground.

Satisfied he had extinguished the fire, Hugh turned to Manit. Bobby, his arms around the old woman, saw the surprise register on Hugh’s face, the more so when Bobby slapped him, once, twice. These were ceremonial slaps, not blows, and Hugh’s head barely flicked from side to side, but he was shocked, into rigidity apparently. Very deliberately, Bobby went to the fire and took a longer piece of kindling from among the dirt and ash and blew upon it until it began to glow. He made eye contact with Hugh. Bobby moved a few steps away from the fire. Hugh’s eyes flickered back to where Manit, crouched beside the fire, was obstinately coaxing it to life again.

It was only the three of them, an awkward sort of triangle, with Bobby at the greatest distance. He lowered his firestick and ignited a piece of straw at his feet. Hugh looked to the nearby paddock and its growing crop, the thin flames spreading, and turned and ran to the farmhouse.

The yard between Bobby and Manit was alight with thigh-high flame when Hugh reappeared from the farmhouse with two soldiers and Killam. Only Killam had a rifle, but even with a good arm he was never a decent marksman, let alone at this distance, and Bobby felt safe. The men ran to the shed, and out again with shovel and wet bags and bucket of water ready to douse the flames. Already the flames were diminishing as Bobby and Manit, because of the dying wind and the still-green crop, knew they would.

They looked across the lightly scorched earth at the men with their bags and implements. What makes Hugh the Governor’s son walk with soldiers at his side?

*

There were no whales.

Not at Close-by-island Bay.

Not at King George Town.

And, as Bobby now realised, King George Town was a growing village, spreading upward from the shore of the harbour. Might not need whales, the way its people were. He paused at the Sailor’s Rest. No longer was this the only drinking-building. Along with huts of wattle and daub, there were stables and water tanks and buildings of stone. There would be a church, so he’d been told. Further still up the hill he came to the grave of Wunyeran and Dr Cross: one grave for a black man and a white man. The difference in their skin colour had seemed just one among so many other things—but maybe it was the most important, after all. No one said Noongar no more; it was all
blackfellas
and
whitefellas
. The grave was surrounded by holes for rubbish. A man with a shovel was poking right into their shared grave.

Wunyeran’s body, buried in not quite a foetal position, must have begun to dissolve into the earth along with ochre and leaves and ash. The gravedigger’s spade, working its way around Cross’s coffin, broke and chipped Wunyeran’s bones, exposed and disordered the skeleton. It was not like the passion of flood, or a persistent wind lifting the soil to expose bones at the core of country. It was deliberate and careless all at once.

Of course there was a very bad smell. Bobby told the man to stop and, when he did not, he shoved him. Slapped him. The man left immediately. Bobby sat beside the grave, arms at his sides with forearms lifted and palms raised just as if he were a set of scales, weighing the balance. The gravedigger returned with men of authority, and Bobby rolled crumbs of earth between the thumb and forefinger of one hand, and with the other stroked and smoothed the soil beside the grave as if it were the pelt of an animal. They came at him angry and with loud voices. Hauled him to his feet. Gave him a shove.

Bobby was alone, and vulnerable.

None of Wunyeran’s people were present when Cross’s decaying, coffined body was reburied in the new town cemetery, not far from the great granite boulders near where Bobby had once rescued Skelly. Skelly’s bowed head was one of those around the patch of earth where Dr Cross’s coffin was laid and which was marked by not just a cross, but a railing and a headstone engraved:

DR JOSEPH CROSS

1781–1833

SURGEON PIONEER AND LAND OWNER

1826–1833

KING GEORGE TOWN WESTERN AUSTRALIA

It seemed Geordie Chaine and Governor Spender had for once agreed: this was more appropriate to Cross’s important role in the history of King George Town.

The original, still raw grave was hastily filled. A town dog scurried away with something in its jaws; a cat, hunching its back and showing its teeth, would not be moved. Small bones were left to grey in the sun, be trodden in horseshit and piss and vomit as the town grew and bright moons waxed and waned.

Bobby roamed the ridges the other side of the harbour, where limestone broke through the thin, sandy soil like enormous old skeletons, and the ocean moaned and spat in the hollows and tunnels in the earth beneath his feet. The moon was old bone in a blue sky, dissolving as the sun rose higher. Clouds gathered in the southwest, drifted to meet a plummeting sun and spread across the dome of sky so that by dark-time there were no stars or even a moon, only a soft and drizzling rain.
Mitjal
: a rain like tears.

Deeper in the night the wind lifted and rain began to drum the earth. It fell and fell and fell; it gathered in the hearts of grass trees, in forks of branches and cups of leaves, in clefts and cavities of rock and small indentations in the earth. Fell, overflowed, and began to move together again.

Bobby entered a rock shelter flickering with firelight. The little dog leapt to its feet barking so wildly Bobby thought it might burst, until Menak growled it into silence. Bobby had travelled alone and so at first Menak and Manit looked around for his companions, before realising there was no one. Menak’s two younger wives and an assortment of children, mostly asleep, were beside another small fire.

Manit raged for a while. Call yourself men? She spoke to Bobby, but included Menak somehow.
Winyarn
, she said,
Noonook baal kitjel don
. You coward and weakling: spear them! But after a while her abuse slowed and she relented. The white man’s guns, for one thing, and all these strangers and the other Noongars they will turn against us. Fighting will not help us; we would need guns like them, and they are now more than us.

Bobby had brought his brooding silence into the camp with him. The raw grave, the hollow in the damp earth that had held Wunyeran, his bones. They all felt Bobby’s diminished spirit. He could not smile. He did not dance, he did not speak.

Menak wanted to know nothing of the white men, anyway. Sadly, he could see their fires from here. On calmer days you could even hear their voices from way over there across the water. He was absorbed, was singing about rain. It was easier to sing with him, softly, than try to speak of this, of all that was happening in their lives and the terrible change of it. That they were spiralling downward, like leaves from a tree, yes, a tree that had already fallen. Cut down.

Manit—over her rage—struck the fire so that sparks rose and tongues of flame grew and multiplied, greedy in the dying light.

Menak sang, Manit too, and Bobby, barely moving his lips, traced his finger across the wall of granite beside him, drew something of the trajectory of the tune and the words. Rain ran down granite slopes either side of the valley floor. Water streamed from she-oak slate roofs into earthenware pots, and over the brim, over the brim flowed …

The open gutter one side of the path sloping down to the harbour spilled over, and the path itself became a growing stream. Rain fell in great bodies, slamming the earth, then recovered, collected its many selves and flowed, chuckling, past flimsy houses and pubs of clay and twigs, swirled around the footings of the stone church awaiting construction, rushed beneath the footbridge built across what was usually a tiny stream at the bottom of the slope. Not a tiny stream today, but. The footbridge—no longer spanning the stream but isolated at its very centre—tilted, leaned, rolled over on its side and was swept away.

What had been a path was now a torrent carrying twigs, branches and household rubbish. It pushed pieces of building rubble and stones and similar things, rolled them over and swept them to the sea. No trouble at all then, taking bones to the ocean. Always been this way. Bones from riverbanks washed down toward the sea, and only a kindred spirit and tongue can find them, maybe bring them alive again, even if in some other shape.

The wind scuffed the ocean into whitecaps, and waves raced across the harbour to fling themselves at the torrent rushing to meet them. Fresh and salty water jostled, swirled …

Did all those bones reach the sea and join a path of whalebones across the ocean floor? Or years later become part of the foundations of the town hall and its clock with ticking faces looking north, south, east and west and, right at the very steeple top, that very great weight: a nation’s fluttering flag?

But forget it. That’s long after this little chapter of a single plot and very few characters, this simple story of a Bobby and his few friends.