Oscar and Lucinda Read online

  While the day outside was clay-white, the inside was as dark and sooty as a painting above a fireplace. There was jostling going on around Mr Jeffris who seemed, in this environment, as white-skinned and genteel as an officer posing for his portrait.

  The cedar cutters were insisting Jeffris must play cards with them. They spoke with humour, but if they were ready with a laugh and a wink they were also men whose faces spoke more of their cruelty and selfishness. These were faces that would “turn nasty” in a moment, and this information was, like a pitchfork, only partly hidden in the haystack of their laugh.

  Jeffris would be Captain Hackum if he had to, but he would not play them cards. He sent Moët et Chandon to Mr Hopkins’s table and the blacksmith and the bugler to go and guard him.

  Oscar was unaware of all these currents. He was pressed by a crushing physical weight of evil. Mr Jeffris had been right: the Empire had not been built by choirboys.

  At that moment he was his father’s son, and he would bring retribution on the wicked. He would burn the tavern down. It was this conflagration that gave his eyes their intensity. He did not wonder why anyone would drive a six-inch nail through the silver and copper images of the Queen but, rather, how one would leave them melted and twisted in the ash. His thoughts were of kindling, ash-buckets, Miss Leplastrier’s fireplace. He had left his laudanum aboard the wagon.

  The blacksmith had signed the pledge and the bugler (who had only bugled once, as they crossed Sydney Harbour and had, for the rest, been called to obey the diverse and dangerous orders of Mr Jeffris), was of an age when he still cut himself with his razor and diluted his rum with lemonade. He was frightened, although not yet of anything in particular. The blacksmith was also nervous. The three did not speak to each other, but bunched, as you will see cattle in saleyards back their hindquarters against the rail until the auctioneer sends a rouster to prod them with his rod and make them run and skip and shit themselves before the buyers and sellers and those cagey souls who will not sell their stock until next week.

  Mr Jeffris then excused his not playing poker on the grounds that, “This gentleman over here is a sky-pilot and it would cause him offence.”

  It is possible that Mr Jeffris was unaware of the degree to which the cloth was despised in that part of the country. He could not have known that Dennis Hasset’s predecessor had drowned after being thrown in the Bellinger.

  Oscar sat in the cold sticky envelope of his dirty skin and sipped his tepid champagne. Such was his disturbed state that he was not displeased to feel the heat of the cedar cutters’ animus. He watched, and was watched. He had a nagging pain around his eyes that would only be cured by laudanum.

  He was invited to step through the torn curtain and “dip your wee white toe in the holy well.” Several glasses of dark liquor were delivered by the publican’s pale and pimple-faced wife with “the compliments of Sir Roger Rogerer” or “Lord Pupslaughter,” each glass being placed on Oscar’s table in reverent silence, each announcement of the glass’s donor being greeted with inordinate laughing and whistling.

  You could feel the atmosphere becoming overloaded and had the tavern been a living organism it would soon have suffered a shiver of retro—peristalsis and spewed its poisonous contents out into the green shit-littered waterhole. But the tavern was inert, constructed from two-foot-diameter posts of Bellinger River turpentine, these being buried four feet down in the sandy soil.

  Mr Jeffris had not come this far to die in a tavern brawl. He fiddled with his sword hilt. The publican picked up a claw hammer and was smacking its heavy head into the fleshy palm of his large hand. It was then—at the moment when everyone seemed to have focused on this hammer—that Oscar felt himself rising to his feet. He had not planned to. It was as if the pressure of his outrage could no longer be accommodated by the bent pipe of his body. He rose without a plan, but with the clear knowledge that retribution must be meted out to these blasphemers. He could not stand straight, but at an angle, and thus must prop his long arms out on the table.

  There was a silence in the tavern. A woman was crying softly on the other side of the torn curtain.

  Oscar thought: What would God have me do?

  Everyone seemed to move and breathe very slowly. A freakishly large red-bearded man raised a glass to his glistening lips. Oscar thought: Like the hand of a clock.

  He held up his own hand. He watched, as they watched, as his wrist emerged—a living thing—from the frayed shell of his sleeve.

  “How thin my wrist is,” he told them. “This wrist God made for me.”

  No one said anything.

  “How could I smite you?”

  He did not feel afraid. He felt a great clarity. He saw his own hand. He saw it in his mind’s eye holding a shining white flower with five petals. The flower became a hand of cards.

  “But I will play you poker and I will win. And you may know now, this money will be your gift to God’s work in Boat Harbour.”

  A movement at his own table made him cast his eyes down. He saw the bugler had spilled his drink. The bugler’s red lips were moving. The boy was praying. Oscar thought: I am drunk with laudanum. He also thought: I need a little sip. He put his hand to his jacket pocket where his bottle would normally be and then remembered—how disappointing this was; how angry it made him feel—that he had left the blessed thing in the wagon. His fingers found, instead, the crumpled envelope Lucinda had given him with which to reward Mr Jeffris.

  God put this in his hand.

  He took the envelope out and held it aloft. “I have a pot of one hundred guineas.”

  “No,” cried the loathsome Mr Jeffris from the bar. “I forbid it.”

  “I would shoot you dead,” cried Oscar above the general noise, “and go to hell for it; and I am only saved for want of a weapon.” He pushed the table forward so that the blacksmith’s glass of seltzer was toppled over and both blacksmith and bugler struggled to free themselves from their tangled chairs. “You murderer,” cried Oscar. He put his hand in his pocket. His pocket was empty. Mr Jeffris had drawn his sword and was moving towards him. No one tried to hold him back.

  “ ‘The Lord is my shepherd,’ ” said Oscar, his eyes bright, his back straight, “ ‘I shall not want. Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil.’ ”

  Mr Jeffris’s hand grasped Oscar above the elbow and pulled him so hard that he cried out with pain. Mr Jeffris’s blue-black hair was carefully brushed. His moustache was waxed. He smelt of the barber’s shop.

  “Out,” shrieked Mr Jeffris. “Out now.”

  “I warn you,” called Oscar. He was yanked from the tavern like a tooth. He left much laughter behind, but he did not hear it. He was aware only of his outrage, of his pain, his impotence, his hatred. He was hurled on to the bare ground. He was kicked. Many times. There were no witnesses to save him. He was afraid. He was a crab scuttling across the grim grey sand. He was a cur. There was a wagon. He crawled beneath its rancid axle. The boot followed him. The sword poked between the spokes of the wheel.

  He prayed: Oh God, give me the means to smite Thy enemy.

  102

  A Christian Man

  Percy Smith had always thought himself a good and Christian man. He did not say his prayers by rote. The envelopes he put inside the felt-lined plate in his parish church were fatter than the custom, not because he was wealthy but because he saw it as his duty.

  He was a gentle man. He was gentle with the animals he tended and went to unusual lengths to make sure they suffered as little as possible. He was faithful to his wife, and a loving and tender father to his baby girls.

  But what he feared about his character was that all his tenderness was but the visible shadow of his cowardice. When he was gentle and kind to those who might suffer it was because he was one with them, and he was frightened.

  He could not bear to hear the stories of Christ’s crucifixion. Neither habit nor repetition dulled the pain of that sp
ear in the side, the long, slow, thirsty agony of death. When a preacher held up to him the shining example of the Christian martyrs, he feared that he—in such a moment—would deny his God.

  The journey under Mr Jeffris’s leadership had confirmed all these fears he had about himself. He was a counterfeit and coward. He had tortured Oscar Hopkins with a funnel. He had not stood up to defend him. He had lowered his eyes and “yes, sirred” the little martinet. He had “gone along.” He had persuaded himself it would do no harm. And he had sat there—how damnable this was—while natives were slaughtered. And when Mr Hopkins had protested he had been one of those who tied him to a tree—on Jeffris’s orders—so that he would cause no harm.

  All his anger and disgust, all that which should have decently gone outwards, was driven inwards and he found himself—this happy, optimistic, loving man—sharpening his axe, honing it, so it would be as sharp as a razor.

  He did not think: A razor for my wrists. He thought no actual words. He worked the round whetstone on and on, tasting only the great deep well of evil from which he had drunk.

  When he had done the axe he began on the tomahawk.

  He was seated thus, in the Ladies’ Compartment, when he heard a cry and saw Mr Jeffris, sword raised high, booting Mr Hopkins in the backside and ribs. Mr Hopkins held an envelope which Mr Jeffris tried to snatch.

  Mr Hopkins disappeared underneath the wagon. And then he was up beside the Ladies’ Compartment, trying to clamber up the steps.

  “God help me,” said Oscar Hopkins.

  Mr Hopkins was almost in the wagon when Mr Jeffris took him by his shoulder.

  Percy Smith raised his tomahawk and brought it down on Mr Jeffris’s upper arm. The head had not much weight. But Mr Smith was a strong man. He felt the bone cut. He felt the most immense satisfaction, a great shudder of something so close to pleasure you could not give it another name.

  As Mr Jeffris stumbled back from the wagon, blood spurting through the fabric of his bright blue coat, Mr Smith saw that Mr Hopkins had hefted the axe.

  Mr Hopkins stood with his feet astride, the axe held incorrectly, the two white hands too close together. His face was blazing red. His mouth open. As the clergyman brought the axe up above his head, Mr Smith thought: He will hurt himself, he does it wrong.

  “Hi,” screamed Oscar Hopkins.

  He brought the hate-bright axe down in the middle of Mr Jeffris’s glistening, brilliantined head. And then his hands sprung loose from the handle. They were quivering and clapping. Mr Jeffris slumped to his knees and then tilted forward in the direction indicated by the ash axe handle. The blade was three inches into his skull which split around the orbit of his left eye.

  All the drinkers were inside the tavern. Mr Smith noted this before he did a thing. Then he took the blanket from the seat and wrapped it around the quaking Hopkins. He brought him forcefully to the ground and there, without thinking why or what he was doing, he swaddled him as though he were a little child. He stilled the thrashing limbs by force. He held him bodily across his knees and patted him.

  103

  Did I Not Murder?

  “Mr Smith, did I not murder a man?”

  “We did, we did.”

  “Then tell me, pray, why this dreadful levity? And why are we here? And where is our party?”

  Oscar had awoken on the morning of the day after the one in which Mr Smith had wrapped him in his blanket. It had taken some time to loosen himself from his sweaty swaddle, but when he was outside the familiar stained canvas walls of the tent, he discovered, not the scene of his nightmare, but a cool blue stretch of the Bellinger River, a wide, still sheet of water at a place where a rough little wharf had been constructed. At the wharf were moored two barges, or rather (because they were long craft with square-sawn bows), lighters. It was here that he found Percy Smith, a clean white shirt upon his back, busily hammering and sawing. He had already constructed an open platform across the two lighters.

  “Our ‘party’ is at this moment going south in pursuit of Mr Jeffris,” called Percy Smith, bestowing upon Oscar a cheerful grin and running his hand through his short hair so that it stood up at the back in a cocky’s crest. “They now think him nought but an oiler. They want their pay, and so they’ve gone to relieve him of it.”

  “Oh, Lord,” said Oscar, and groaned, holding his head in his hands.

  Mr Smith put his hammer in his belt and sprang up the bound sapling ladder to the wharf.

  “Whoa,” he said. “Whoa, Neddy.”

  “Oh, God,” said Oscar, unconscious of where he walked, stumbling on piles of bearers which were stacked about his feet. “Oh, dear God, what have we done?”

  “Ssh,” said Percy Smith, guiding his friend back through the tangle of hessian bags and beams, off the wharf to solid ground.

  “Ssh, you must not fear.”

  “I have killed a man.”

  “Your Maker will forgive you.”

  A shudder passed through Oscar’s thin white body. Percy Smith felt it, and knew it for what it was. He was not without symptoms of the same variety, and yet what he felt, for the most part—he begged God forgive him—was exhilaration.

  He felt so light. When he came across the wharf to Oscar he could have skipped.

  “The Lord was his Maker, too,” said Oscar severely.

  “Look,” said Percy Smith, “we are alive. He is dead. Give thanks to God for our deliverance.”

  Percy Smith held Oscar by the arm and led him to a log beside the smoky campfire. He found some little sticks and leaves and, in a moment, had a blaze going. “They were nice enough to leave us tea and sugar and a billy. For the rest, they were in too much of a hurry.”

  “My church,” cried Oscar, struggling to his feet.

  “They did not take your church.”

  Oscar looked around him wildly and Percy Smith could not help laughing.

  “Oh,” said Oscar screwing up his white face into a crumpled page of irritation, “you are a madman.”

  “Your church is here,” cooed Mr Smith. “Your church is here, my reverend sir. Indeed it is.”

  “It is no good to me here, fool,” cried Oscar, standing straight up from his log and brandishing the finger-thin stick With which he had been poking into the little fire. “It must be in Boat Harbour. I have murdered the man who might get it there. And you, you—” he sighed. “Oh, dear.” He sat down again. “I cannot blame you, Mr Smith, and what does any of this matter now when we are likely to be arrested?”

  “Dear Mr Hopkins, please do be more cheerful.”

  “Cheerful!” shrieked Oscar.

  “You are a regular little rosella. Look at you—burnt crimson and shrieking from the treetops. If there were troopers here they would soon know where to find us. But there are no troopers in the district.”

  “No police?”

  “And even if there were a herd of Sydney constables, I bet you your laudanum bottle they would be too slow for Percy Smith. You should be proud to know me.”

  “Oh,” Oscar said, “I am far worse.”

  “Do not ‘worse’ me, Hopkins. The knave was buried before a soul came out to see the sunlight. Congratulate me.”

  “Oh, I am sorry, Mr Smith, I cannot.”

  “Then have some johnnycake. It is a shame you were not awake to enjoy it hot.”

  Oscar sipped his tea while Mr Smith watched him. “Who would have known me for a murderer?” he said. “I would not have recognized it in myself. Think of my poor mother, when she suckled me …” He stopped and gazed into the smoke.

  “Do not stew on it.”

  Oscar cupped his tea in his hand and looked around their campsite. Percy Smith watched him narrowly.

  “You must not dwell on it.”

  “And where is the church on which account so much blood has been spilt?”

  “It is all around you. Do you not recognize a pane of glass?” And indeed there were parts of the iron and glass church—all with their little labels flapping li
ke manila leaves—scattered in neat piles all around the campsite and out on the wharf as well.

  “I thought you were going to trip on the mullions.”

  “Oh,” said Oscar softly, “oh dearie me.”

  “Do not dearie me.”

  “Oh, Lord.”

  “Oh, nonsense.”

  “And where are all the crates? And how will we …?”

  “’Say not the struggle nought availeth,’ ” said Percy Smith. “ ‘Our struggles and our hopes are vain.’ How does it go? You have seen the crates.”

  “Smith,” said Oscar, “I beg you, I am in no state for silly puzzles.”

  “Then listen to me, and do not stew. I have rented these two lighters on the wharf. They are not, individually, big enough to carry the church, so I have done the mathematics. Now your church is fifty feet long and twenty-five feet wide.”

  “twenty-two feet and six inches.”

  “Good. And all these bits and pieces weigh twelve tons, as you have told me often enough. And to support twelve tons on the water we will need barges to displace two hundred and forty cubic feet. And these chaps here, these ones will do this. We can take the church up-river on the tide. I have arranged for help in the construction. Two men can pole and row to keep the barge in the centre-stream. I figure we can be there in two days.”

  “And then we must construct the church.”

  “Not then,” said Percy Smith. He stood up. He began to stride around the fire. “Not then, now, here. On the barge. You see, I have worked it out. We will enter Boat Harbour in glory. Can you imagine it? Can you see the look on their godless faces? A crystal vision. My oh my. Can you see it, Mr Hopkins? What a visitation it would be to see God’s temple come to them upon the water.”