The Roving Party (19 page)

D
AYS PASSED WHERE THE FOREST IN
all its dead summer heat resonated with cicada song but Bill could not be still. He crossed the fragrant gullies and hills searching the sky for smoke. He shot possums and wallabies and in those lonely backwoods he catalogued every place a man might prosecute an ambush. He knew the likely approach routes to his shack too, stepping out distances and firing test shots at a roo skin propped on a branch until he had his range from all parts. Mornings he went ahead of his woman as she walked the miles to Batman’s house into a sun that cast long stabs of yellow through the trees, and evenings he waited for her at the forest edge where she came carrying what few rations Batman had allowed for her day’s work and together they returned to the shack.

This particular afternoon as he waited for his woman on the fringe of Batman’s cleared land he read the weather in the flight of certain birds he knew and he understood the heat
would break. And so it did. When the sky split open sometime that night the rain battered the roof and water seeped through the shingles and turned the dirt floor to mud and dampened their bedding. As they lay listening, Katherine kicked out her legs. She moaned and rolled. Bill turned to study her.

Are you sick? he said but she said nothing.

The rain bore down and she writhed on the bed, her groans guttural and her breath ragged. He huddled down for sleep that never came and sometime near midnight he climbed from the bed of possum skins to stand over her.

I’ll fetch Mrs. Batman, he said.

Stay, stay, she said. She was breathless.

He crouched beside the bed, the sound of the rain deafening him.

He held her hand and she howled, throwing back her head as if she was a penny girl having her throat cut. In the quiet moments he felt between her legs for signs before the screaming came again and she struggled anew on the sweatslicked rugs. When in time he could see her outlined on the bed in the first blush of sun the head was coming through and he knelt and received the child where it was birthed. It made no sound but squirmed and contorted as he held it nearer the light and
appraised the thing in its first few moments. It was glossy like a carcass peeled of skin. The head was mishapen and lurid welts showed where eyes should have moved.

Give me, she panted.

But he did not.

Give me, she said and pushed herself upright.

The child’s features, the neck and the veined head, were run together in one lumpen misconception. Bill clenched his teeth.

Give me here.

He drew his knife, severed the cord and swaddled his child, his son, with a soft wallaby skin Katherine had readied. Then he passed her the bundle. Nothing needed to be said. She cradled the child as it drew the only breaths of its short life and she watched it claw its face in pain and soon it ceased moving. Bill relieved her of it. Katherine clutched her belly and she began to cry. Her throat was hoarse and her woe was queerly muted. She huddled on the bed and cried as if she had lost everything in this world and the next.

He carried the dead child outside into the wet as the first slate shades of dawn towered above and laid the tiny bundle on the mud. In the near dark he fetched up some firewood and erected a pyre of stones and branches in rough accordance with the Panninher ritual, this custom almost lost to him. Onto the
firewood he poured a flask of Batman’s rum kept over from his rations. Then he laid the wrapped body of his son among the sticks and lit the blaze with a brand taken from his hearth, moving back to watch the smoke funnel towards the boiling grey sky. As the body was consumed Bill tried to sing those old dirges he’d once known but they were gone from his memory. Instead he sat upon the stones, bearing witness to this time.

The vague sun tracked unmarked across the gloom. Black Bill stayed long by that fire staring at the flames while the sky sagged. Katherine wept on her bloodied skins yet he remained impassive. A likeness of a man carved in cold black marble. All he felt was the pain. The pitiless certainty of this death. He weighed a length of wood in his hand and poked at the coals with it and by the time night had fallen again on the forest he knew this evil was the headman’s doings. He gripped the wood and pondered on his redress.

On the morning of the following day Bill stood on John Batman’s verandah looking everywhere but at him as the man ranted about the new laws the Governor had passed, laws that protected blacks beyond the settled districts. Their bounty hunting was at an end. Manalargena was known to be sojourning on the east coast beyond the frontier where settlements encroached upon his homelands and in a place where food was
readily come by. In those parts he still had domain and he did not run or hide but led his band in the habits of old. But the rovers couldn’t hunt him. Batman folded his arms and spat off the deck. His native boy, Ben, was squatting in front of the house and Batman and Black Bill watched the child drag his fingers through the mire and take handfuls of it for throwing. He was crouched between his knees, his short pants and shirt ballooning like a nightdress.

Bill cleared his throat. My boy died. The Vandemonian looked out across the paddocks. He come out all wrong. I reckon he died of it.

His old friend inclined his head slightly then looked away. Tis the nature of things, he said.

Batman had lost a child once, a son. He was buried in an unmarked hole and spoken of never more. The mound of dirt had been dug up by the devils soon after and the tiny foetid boy devoured but Batman had put his men to refilling the hole and straightening out the little stones before Eliza saw those desecrations. She remained unknowing even now. Batman stepped down and caught up the native boy in his hands. He carried him up to the Vandemonian and offered him over. Bill looked at the boy and he looked at Batman. Then he took the boy against his chest and kept him there just so as they spoke about farm business. Talk that Bill had no mind for as he cradled the boy and thought long on the headman.

Bill returned through the bush from Kingston with small sacks of flour, tea and tobacco in his pocket and a weight of mutton across his shoulder. It was generous. He knew Batman would not have given so much but for the misfortune. By now the pyre was gone cold. He dropped the stores beside his shack and walked over to pick through the ashes for pieces of bone. He found the skull and a reedy thigh bone and using handfuls of sand and water he rubbed the pieces over until the charcoal was polished away. The white beneath glistened. In the doorway Katherine sat holding her belly and watching him at his work. When the bones were clean she placed them in her palm, little shards of porcelain shattered in the heat. Clutching those bones she gazed across the entanglement of bush running down the gully as if she thought to see some wild apparition working its ruin upon her again. But there were only the trees, robed in their long shadows. She gripped the skull and stared.

The following day Katherine was splitting wood and fetching up water in the dress she’d worn for months: ragged, yellowed, disintegrating, and now stained with afterbirth. Bill removed his hat and from a wooden bowl kept for the purpose he fingered out some animal fat and smeared it across his face,
following the line of his jaw. He stropped his knife a few times against the heel of his boot then shaved his chin and throat. He wiped the blade on a gum leaf and made another stroke. Katherine placed a bucket of water before him that he might check his reflection and wandered off inside but he called to her, his voice enormous in the clearing.

I mean to find him, he said.

She reappeared in the doorway.

Find him and be done.

At her neck was strung the child’s skull on a woollen cord and she closed her hand around it.

He looked at her. I’m leaving at dawn, he said.

I come, she said. I help.

No. You cant barely walk.

I can walk.

No.

Katherine stepped inside and was gone a moment before she stood again in the sunlight showing her pistol. With her free hand she palmed back the hammer.

Before he could speak she aimed down at his feet and fired. Bill dropped the shaving knife and skipped back as the dirt blossomed. The emptied gun hung quietly between them and he moved over and took it from her hand. She looked him cleanly in the eye.

You sleep I cut your throat, she said. You walk away I shoot your back. You take me. You take me or you be killed.

He slipped the pistol into his pocket. Then he looked out across the stumps and the bracken growing in the cleared spaces around the shack. Better get some decent walking clothes at least then. A blanket. A drum.

Katherine didn’t answer. She stood there in her tattered dress and her hand went again to the skull. Then she turned away and stepped into the humpy where the sound of her movements drifted to him through the cracks in the bark walls. Bill retrieved his knife and once more set to working the sharp edge along his cheek. He flicked the scum off the blade and taking another glob of possum grease smeared it over his scalp. With the knife set on an angle he began to shave the hair away. Inside he could hear her throwing things, the chair, mugs, and he stopped to listen for moment then shook his head and went about his shaving again.