But once Dick had done all this he would disappear, leaving Bub calling him to come back.
You’re too little
, he would tell him.
Only five, Bub, you know Ma don’t want you to wander
. He padded off through the clearing, past the heaps of laboriously cut-down trees
waiting to be burned, past the paperbarks rustling together and speckling the ground with their shadows, and even beyond that, right up into the hillside, into the hot dry ticking dream of the forest. There he would spend the whole day, as if learning the place by heart.
He brought things back to the hut for them to look at: a gumleaf curled around on itself like a sleeping dog, a translucent round pebble, a piece of wood so eaten by the white ants it had become a sponge. The others glanced briefly. Bub might marvel at the sleeping leaf, Johnny might finger the pebble before Willie took it for his slingshot, but they would not have gone looking for them, and if they had they would not have picked them out of the clutter of the woods, where the eye was blinded by so much detail.
At other times Dick went down to the river. Thornhill had seen him there more than once, around on the other side of the point.
The blacks’ side
was what they called it. He had seen Dick there on a spit of sand, playing with the native children, all bony legs and skinny arms shiny like insects, running in and out of the water. Dick was stripped off as they were, to nothing but skin. His was white and theirs was black, but shining in the sun and glittering with river-water it was hard to tell the difference. He ran and called and laughed with them, and he could have been their pale cousin.
As the white men bent over the plants in the hot sun, chipping away at the weeds that seemed to grow knee-high overnight, they could see the children, slippery and naked, sliding in and out of the river, and hear their high voices carrying up the slope.
Thornhill said nothing to Sal of this, but Bub was not a child to protect the brother who was always leaving him behind. He ran up to the hut one day, panting and red in the face, the words falling over themselves in his urgency to tell them that Dick was
down with the blacks ain’t got no clothes on!
Sal went very still, stopped in the middle of mixing up cornmeal dough, her hands covered with the gritty yellow stuff.
You best
go down and fetch him back, Will
, she said calmly.
He got to learn when
he’s
gone too far
.
He came across them down on the track to the camp: a dozen children crowding around Long Bob, who was squatting on the ground among them. It took Thornhill a moment to see his son there, staring so hard at what Long Bob was doing that he did not notice his father.
Dick
, he called, and the boy glanced over at him, his little face closing like a fist.
Come away from there and where are your
britches, lad?
Dick did not move.
He’s showing us how you make fire, Da
, he called back.
No flint or nothing
. Thornhill had heard about this business of making fire by rubbing two sticks together. Had thought it was just one more of the stories people told about the blacks. He went over, prepared to enjoy this bit of tomfoolery.
Long Bob did not so much as glance up as Thornhill came near. He had split off a bit of dried black-boy stalk, exposing its soft inside, and had laid it flat on the ground, gripping it with his feet as if they were another pair of hands. He had fitted a second stick upright into it, which he was rolling between the palms of his hands so it twisted against the flat one after the manner of a drill. Thornhill saw the strong muscles of his back moving under the skin and his hands patiently applying themselves to the job. Beside him on the ground was a leaf off a cabbage-tree filled with tinder.
He watched, but there was no sign of fire, nothing even as much as smoke. He tried to meet Dick’s eye, waiting to tip him a wink, but Dick was watching the spot where the two sticks met. His whole being was fixed on that spot, his father forgotten.
Come away there now lad
, Thornhill started, but his words were lost in a shout from the children. In the spot where one stick twisted into the other, a tiny column of darkness was wisping away into the air. Quick as thought, Long Bob tipped the sticks into the
leaf and wrapped the whole thing up, tinder and sticks and all, into a loose parcel. Then he stood in that way they did, without any of the cumbersome procedure of getting up, and began to whirl the package round at arm’s length, and to Thornhill’s amazement the thing burst into flames. He dropped it onto the ground and fed it with a few twigs, and there was the fire, neat as you please.
Then he looked straight at Thornhill. It did not take any words to understand.
Match that, white man
.
Thornhill chose to laugh.
My word but that is a good trick
, he said. He glanced at Dick and saw his tense face relax.
Ain’t it, Dick
lad?
But the boy did not risk agreeing. There was a pause while the black man and the white man took the measure of each other. The children watched, but when nothing happened they crowded down around the fire.
Thornhill put a hand against his chest.
Me, Thornhill
, he announced. His voice sounded loud, the syllables bold, cutting across the children’s light voices. Long Bob glanced at him, then away as if he had not spoken.
Me, Thornhill
, he said again.
It’s me name, get it? Me, Thornhill
.
From the corner of his eye he felt Dick watching. Long Bob looked at him at last and his face broke up into a smile that showed his teeth, strong white tools carried in his mouth.
In all the mouths of London there had never been such teeth.
Me, Thornhill
, Long Bob said, as clear as could be, and Thornhill laughed aloud in his relief that the moment had turned the corner. He took a step towards him to clap him on the shoulder, but there was something about that shoulder, striped with pink scars and hard with muscle, that discouraged a casual touch.
Yes!
he shouted.
Only it ain’t you, mate, it’s me that’s Thornhill!
He was almost dancing, poking himself in the chest.
Long Bob flicked a hand towards him.
Thornhill
, he said.
Then he laid his hand against his own chest and his mouth moved quickly around a string of sounds.
Thornhill caught the first sound but the rest evaporated into the air like steam out of a kettle. But a man who could write his own name, William Thornhill, along a piece of paper, could not be made to look a fool by a naked savage.
Jack
, he said confidently.
Good-day to you, Jack
.
The black man spoke the sounds again, his forefinger bending against his breastbone. There was the first sound, made with the mouth pushed forward. That was clear enough, but the rest was not. It was as if a word that had no meaning could not be heard.
Yes, mate
, Thornhill said.
But Jack for short, you got such a bleeding
mouthful of a monicker
.
In the late afternoon sun the man’s eyes were deep-set points of light. His face was creased around his thoughts, shadowed and secretive.
With no one but blacks around him, other than his own son, Thornhill saw that their skins were not black, no more than his own was white. They were simply skins, with the same pores and hairs, the same shadings of colour as his own. If black skin was all there was to see, it was amazing how quickly it became the colour that skin was.
You’re a fine fellow, Jack
, Thornhill said.
Even though your arse is as
black as the bottom of a kettle
. He heard a noise from Dick, a blurted laugh smothered as soon as it was born.
But we’ll get you all in the
end
. The words came out of his mouth before he had thought.
There’s such a bleeding lot of us
.
He had a quick piercing memory of Butler’s Buildings, the coughing and cursing of dozens of men and women pushed in together. He could hear the great machinery of London, the wheel of justice chewing up felons and spitting them out here, boatload after boatload, spreading out from the Government
Wharf in Sydney, acre by acre, slowed but not stopped by rivers, mountains, swamps.
The thought made him gentle.
There won’t be no stopping us
, he said.
Pretty soon there won’t be nowhere left for you black buggers
.
Long Jack answered, a few words that got the children going again. Thornhill saw the pink tongues as they laughed, their powerful white teeth. Dick was laughing too, but uncertainly, his eyes going from Jack to his father.
Thornhill made himself join in, as if it were the funniest thing in the world. He found that he was rubbing his hands together the way the parson at Christ Church used to when ill at ease, and made himself stop. The children, still squatting around the fire, looked up at him, hiding their grinning mouths behind their hands.
He was reminded of the way Mary beamed up at him with her single tooth, crowing and chuckling, as if at some fine joke. The difference was, he never had the suspicion that Mary was mocking him.
~
Sal sat Dick down that night and tried to explain.
They’s savages,
Dick. We’re civilised folk, we don’t go round naked
. Thornhill watched the boy’s face go blank and tight, although her tone was mild enough. Among his own family he was a watchful and wary boy. She saw it too, and tried to make light of it.
Think I best take off me
bodice, Dick, and go about like them? Your father strip off his britches?
This made the children laugh. Even Dick gave a pale smile.
Thornhill was weary of the way Dick was inclined to vanish when there was work to be done.
You’re too old for them tricks, lad
, he said, and heard his voice harsher than he had intended, so Sal glanced up.
Time you pulled your weight, not play about with savages
.
But Dick, for all his dreaminess, was a stubborn little thing.
They don’t need no flint or nothing, like you do
, he sulked.
And no damned
weeding the corn all day
. Thornhill felt the rage burst in him. He grabbed the boy by the arm and pulled him outside, and in the last of the sunset, in a din of laughing jackass birds, he pulled off his heavy leather belt and beat Dick with it. Felt his arm heavy, reluctant, but would not stop. Heard the boy cry out as if surprised at each blow.
He had never beaten any of his children before. Cuffed them around the ear, the way his own father had done to him, or given their backsides a slap to make them remember. But something in him had burst. During the long three months that they had been in this wild place, the anxiety and the fear had been curdling within him and turned into fury.
Sal was quiet when he came back inside, and would not meet his eye. She put the children to bed quickly and they sat together, staring into the embers. It was always hard to leave them, they glowed so richly in the night.
You think I
shouldn’t
have
, he said at last. The silence between them had become unbearable.
You think he ought to go about with
them
…he tried to remember a word he had heard someone use…
them primitives?
Sal’s voice was careful, neutral.
It ain’t that, Will
, she said.
But if
he goes about a bit, it’s the way you and me did
. She held out her hands to the coals, although the night was not cold.
That place down
Rotherhithe way, remember? Only he ain’t got no
Rotherhithe
to go to. He never
even heard of the place
.
In the corner he could hear Dick making smothered gasps and noises. He saw that Sal was right: these children of his had no notion of any place that was not Thornhill’s Point. They knew nothing of streets and cobblestones, of houses jammed in cheek-by-jowl, the bricks sweating in the fogs from the river. They knew nothing of feet numb with cold, dead hands gripping an oar as cold as a piece of iron, knew nothing of drizzling rain that seeped out of the sky day after damp day, the dread of the bone-chilling
cold. In their mouths the very names of that other place had a peculiar sound.
This, for better or worse, was the only world they knew.
Thornhill could still feel the heat on the palm where he had gripped the belt and brought it down, as if it were he who had been beaten.
Just the same he’ll come along of me and Willie on the boat from
now on
, he said.
Do a fair day’s work for his dinner
. He saw her nod absently and touched her on the shoulder.
We call it a day, eh?
he said, and felt her hand on his cheek so he heard the bristles scrape.
We can call it whatever you please, Will
, she said, her smile pushing up the corners of her eyes so the skin there crinkled in the way he loved. They went to lie down together, but just before they did so she hesitated.
About Dick
, she whispered.
Not to fret, Will, it will come
good
. The smart on his palm, and the other smart, the one somewhere in his heart, was soon soothed by the feel of his wife’s body in his arms, her breath in his ear.
~
In spite of the beating, it was the very next day that Thornhill found Dick over in a hidden place near the soak, twirling one bit of stick on another, his face red with the effort, his little mouth set rigid.
When he caught sight of his father he dropped the sticks and sat staring up at him. Thornhill looked at the sad mess of twigs and tinder. The boy’s thin face stared up at him, frightened, but ready to defy too.
Thornhill felt a moment’s rage.
Do I got to get the belt out again
lad?
he said, but even as he said it the anger left him. He saw the boy’s face close down against him and remembered the way the belt had felt, hot in his hand. If beating him once did not do the trick, beating him twice would not do any better. He had learned that much on board the
Alexander
.