Ironbark (12 page)

Passing through a break in the bush he found the way ahead was suddenly clear. Giant trees lay like fallen soldiers on a battlefield. Stark evidence of a recent bushfire. Remaining upright were the survivors,
blackened trunks of ironbark and bloodwood eucalypts that already sprouted a profusion of mint-green leaves from their burnt limbs – evidence to Jake of Nature's bountiful assurance that no fire could ever permanently destroy her.

When Jake drew rein to relieve himself he saw a white object that he expected was some animal's bones. On closer inspection he knew the truth.

A human skull lay bleached by the sun. A black beetle crawled from one empty eye socket. Lying in the undergrowth was a skeletal frame, arms outstretched in a cruciform shape, legs slightly parted as if in a desperate race to cheat death despite being shackled by leg-irons.

‘Jesus wept. You poor bastard.' Jake's voice rasped with the effort of forming the first words he had spoken in days. Kneeling beside the unknown bolter he wondered how far he had staggered from his iron gang. No doubt he had preferred the risk of this lonely death to being locked up each night in the suffocating heat of one of those portable convict huts so densely packed with prisoners that only a corpse could lie horizontal.

Jake began stacking rocks to form a cairn but he hesitated in covering the dead man. No name. Nothing of value to bury with him. Somehow that didn't seem right.

On impulse he tugged off his gold wedding ring and re-read the words engraved inside.
5 May 1833 Jakob and Jenny – Eternal Love.
The same in-scription was on the matching ring Jenny had abandoned. Defiantly he tossed his wedding band into the open grave.

‘No use for this rubbish,' he said. He covered the bolter with rocks, placed the leg-irons at the head of the grave then remounted Horatio.

A few miles down the road he slowed between two lines of giant scribbly gums stretching out across the road to form a cathedral dome that filtered out the sky.

The sound of sledgehammers and picks was now close. Rounding a bend Jake approached an ugly scene that was all too familiar.

A road gang of some thirty emaciated convicts hacked at sandstone boulders under the relentless sun and the encouragement of an officer's musket. Most had shaven heads. All wore convict slops, sun-bleached garments branded with numbers or black arrows. Caps or knotted handkerchiefs covered their skulls. Shackled leg to leg, the gang looked like some strange species of human centipede.

The scene reminded Jake he was only one generation away from this punishment. Isaac Andersen had been transported as a prisoner-of-war after the British Navy captured a Dano-Norwegian ship allied to Napoleon. Pa claimed he was lucky to serve his time in the humane era of Governor Lachlan Macquarie, who had granted him land and a pardon. Pa had struggled with the soil to a state of fecundity and Mam's fertility ensured a supply of free farm labour.

Jake could never pass a road gang without a friendly word.

‘G'day to you lads. It's a real bugger working for Her Majesty in this heat, eh?' Amid their curses and laughter Jake detected a half-dozen accents: Cockney, Irish, Scots, Gaelic and other dialects that bore scant resemblance to the English tongue as he knew it.

The sole officer in charge looked no older than Jake and a bit gormless. He sweltered in his serge winter uniform with the new issue baggy blue Cossack trousers. The flies were driving him mad and he swatted at them with a switch of gumleaves.

Perhaps the lad's stuck out here alone as punishment. God only knows what the bloody military gets up to.

‘Left you on your tod, have they?' asked Jake.

The soldier looked morose. ‘Sergeant in charge rode back to camp for water and supplies – so he said. More like a tumble with his assigned wench. We don't ruddy well get supplied with enough of anything out here. Water, decent firearms, food or grog.'

‘Or women?' said Jake.

‘What's
that
!' snorted the soldier. ‘Ain't seen one of
them
in months.'

Jake unbuckled his saddlebag. ‘Could you go a drink of rum? Better inside a man than inside a bottle, I reckon.'

The soldier downed a tot of rum in a flash and Jake was quick to encourage him.

‘Send another down to chase it. All right by you if I give your men some water?'

The soldier nodded. Jake's cask was still cold with billabong water. He told the prisoners to pass it down the line. Each drank greedily before the next demanded his share.

These convicts were so rough they could pass muster as second cousins to an ape, Jake thought. The last in line was different – young, swarthily handsome with dark, wild curly hair and eyes of the same dense black. On his left chest a heart-shaped gaol tattoo held the letter K. Despite being underfed the man was tall, well-muscled and agile. Jake recognised the body of another fighter.

The water cask was empty before it reached him.

‘Thanks, pal.' The prisoner shrugged, ‘That was a friendly idea that ran out.'

Jake took note of the unfamiliar word ‘pal' and the fact his voice had a trace of a Welsh lilt, plus something indefinably more foreign.

The soldier remained planted in the shade drinking rum, so Jake decided to chance it. He took the last rum flask from his pack and squatted beside the young convict.

‘Do me a favour and finish this off for me, mate,' said Jake. ‘I've got an almighty hangover.' He offered his hand. ‘Name's Jake. I reckon from the looks of you, you're like me. Gone a few bare-knuckle bouts in your time, eh?'

The man hesitated in surprise then accepted the rum and the handshake.

‘Name's Gem. I won nineteen out of twenty fights. Lost that one because I slipped in the mud.'

Gem sighed with appreciation as the rum hit his stomach.

‘Been in the colony long?' asked Jake.

‘Too bloody long. The beak insisted I build this road for them after I bolted from a pocket of hell they call Gideon Park. Know it?'

Jake nodded. ‘Yeah. Same county as Ironbark and Tagalong. You're lucky to be shot of the place. Its reputation stinks to high heaven.'

‘That's putting it mildly.' Gem was politely curious. ‘I take it you were once one of us?'

‘Pa was. He's an emancipist now. I'm as home-grown as a kangaroo.'

‘So that's how kangaroos learned to box.'

Jake laughed aloud for the first time in weeks. He liked the young man's style.

‘I'm a Currency Lad, all right, but don't let that fool you. I've served time. A boss cocky refused to pay me my wages. I knocked him out cold. Turns out he was a mate of the magistrate. So I did a stretch inside. But I don't intend to back up for seconds.'

‘I told my wife that.' Gem shrugged. ‘But here I am, working for William Four.'

‘Not now you're not. He went to God – heard it straight from the town crier in Parramatta last time I came out of the Watch House. We've copped a young queen now – Victoria, not a bad looker. Well, mate, hope you dodge being sent back to Gideon Park.'

Gem took a final swig of rum. ‘I might try the bushranging lark.'

Jake shook his head. ‘That's a dead-end road. Stick to prize fights and you'll make your fortune. The colony's full of blokes who'd wager on flies walking up a shithouse wall.'

The soldier appeared to be itching to get the men back to work, so Jake rose.

‘I'd like to watch you fight sometime, mate,' said Jake. ‘But I warn you. Match yourself against me and you'll come a cropper.'

Gem's smile was confident. ‘Don't bet your shirt on that, pal.'

Jake sauntered over to yarn with the soldier whose tongue was now so freed by rum he confided that he would rather be a farmer than a
soldier. Jake offered him a bit of advice.

‘One day you Brits will run out of prisoners. You're already beginning to flood us with free settlers. Grab yourself some land while the going's good.'

‘This country's plum crazy. Seasons are arse up, the system stinks, you Cornstalks can't talk proper Queen's English and I'm buggered if I know what makes you laugh.'

‘Can't fix the weather or the system,' said Jake. ‘But you'll get along fine if you can cotton on to our odd sense of humour. It'll be hell for you if you don't, mate!'

Back in the saddle, Jake glanced around to see Gem giving him an ironic salute.

As he headed towards Goulburn, Jake felt light-headed, blinded by sunlight as if he had just emerged from a long dark tunnel of despair.

‘Can't waste no more time feeling bloody sorry for myself, Horatio. Got to clean myself up. Get a regular job. What about Rolly Brothers? Mac says they're aiming to wedge in among the big coach companies. He reckons they're decent bosses as far as bosses go.'

Jake made Horatio a witness to his vow.

‘When I'm back on my feet I'll track down my baby Pearl if it kills me. But from now on the only wife I want is the kind I can hire for the night. No woman's ever going to best Jake Andersen again!'

• • •

At the Rolly Brothers coach station outside of Goulburn Jake talked hard and fast to convince the English manager of four things. He would be an invaluable driver. He could predict a horse's temperament as soon as look at him. He knew the colony's roads like the back of his hand. He never touched a drop of grog when on the job.

Jake walked out of the office with a wide grin and tried to look casual when Mac slapped him on the back to congratulate him.

‘When do you start work?'

‘Next time you drive a coach to Sydney Town I'm to ride on your
box seat and learn the ropes. Then drive my own coach on a new route through Liverpool, Campbelltown, the Cowpastures, Goulburn, Gunning and all. I'm in business.'

‘Good on you, mate. I leave on Wednesday so let's hop over to Bolthole Valley. I'll shout the drinks till you draw your first pay.'

‘I'll need more than a drink or four,' said Jake. ‘I haven't bought a wife for the night in too bloody long.'

Noting Mac's surprise Jake added quickly, ‘I said I was giving up
good
women for life – not the other kind!'

• • •

From his youth Jake had been no stranger to Bolthole Valley. He knew the place had once had an official name nobody bothered to use. The small respectable population was regularly swelled by drifters, escapees and cut-throats evading the law or an enemy's bullet.

After Jenny's disappearance Jake had posted her description with the local constable and Feagan's General Store, but apart from a heap of gossip, no clues had come to light.

As he and Mac rode into the village Jake thought how little it had changed since his bachelor days. The northern end of the village snaked around a rocky outcrop onto the Sydney Road. Apart from Feagan's General Store the main street boasted a bakery, produce store, livery stables, a carpenter cum coffin-maker and monumental stonemason, and a cluster of grog shanties so hastily erected they looked ready to fold like a concertina at the first breath of a westerly wind. The double-storey houses at either end of the street had always been known as the House of the Four Sisters and the Red Brumby.

Mac set up the drinks in The Shanty with No Name, placed his loan to Jake on the table then strode towards the exit.

‘I'll hop down to the Red Brumby for a tick. You know me. I won't take long but I know you're a night stayer. Meet you here at breakfast.' Mac was out the door.

During his bachelor years, Jake had created many good, lusty
memories in the Red Brumby but he decided not to revisit his past. As he downed his first Albion Ale, he studied the façade of the redwood timber brothel across the road, the House of the Four Sisters.

It looked respectable enough with permanently shuttered windows, window boxes of geraniums and a front door that never closed – except on Sundays when the customers used the back entrance. Chinks of red light glinted through the timber slats and laughter resounded from Madam Fleur's bar.

Jake was amused by the contrast between the men as they entered the brothel and the difference in their gait as they swaggered out. A few did not exit at all; the night stayers.

As a youth Jake's only knowledge about women had been picked up from drovers, stockmen and old lags in shanties. Despite the fact his pa had produced a steady stream of sons and one daughter, he had told Jake nothing about how people mated.

On his eighteenth birthday Jake had paid a girl at the Red Brumby to rid him of his virginity. He had enjoyed himself so much he continued the exercise.

Jake knew that women came in only two categories – good women and fallen women. Respectable folk made a rigid boundary between the two, but Jake wondered if women could ever re-cross that line to the other side. Were all fallen women born to be ‘bad girls'? Could a fallen woman make a new life and regain her self-respect? Was Jenny condemned to be branded for life? Jake rejected that thought, told himself he didn't care.

Yet he winced at the memory of himself at nineteen – so crazy in love with Jenny he never doubted their lovemaking would grow naturally out of his consuming passion. All he needed was to be gentle, give her time to overcome the natural abhorrence good women felt about a man's base needs – ‘the connection'. To his shock he had discovered his Red Brumby experiences had been no help on his wedding night.

After he paid for the house grog that made The Shanty with No
Name notorious, Jake returned to his seat. A man entered furtively through the rear door and sat in the far corner. Jake could smell a police informer a mile off. This one had shifty eyes, a drooping moustache and strands of ginger hair oiled across his forehead. The publican addressed him as Mr Evans and offered him a free grog – which was declined.

Jake knew Gilbert Evans by repute. The largest landowner in Ironbark was Bolthole's lay preacher and a proclaimed temperance man. So what was he doing in this shanty?