In Effort to Trade
BETRAYEDBYthe willi-willi, Charlie gained the nearest cover at Olympic speed, ending the spring with a dive for Bony’s cotton bush.
Following the dieting of the walkabout to the Neales River, Charlie had fattened on Sarah’s white-man tucker, and was now in excellent condition, his arms and legs of Grecian proportions, his tummy less to be admired. All he wore was a pair of dark-brown shorts; his only equipment a hessian bag subsequently found to contain a small calico bag of tea and a gnawed leg of fire-charred kangaroo. On coming to rest under the cotton bush, his head was within fifteen inches of Bony’s head. When their gaze clashed, Bony said mildly:
“Good day-ee, Charlie! Are you travelling?”
Charlie grinned, genuine humour associated with astonishment in his black eyes.
“Day-ee, Mr Bonaparte. Bit hot in the sun, eh?” Then realization of the situation smote him and he shrank away without thought of the sunlight burning his feet beyond the bush. “Crikey! This your bush, eh? I’ll get going.”
“We go together,” purred Bony, standing with Charlie. “We have much to talk about, and three miles’ travel to the next camp. We go that way, to my horses.”
Charlie found dislike of the hard blue eyes and of the automatic directed to his stomach, and ultimately disliked the hard smile on Bony’s face. He was ordered to unhitch the pack-horse and lead it to Yorky’s next camp, and on glancing backward now and then, it was to see Bony mounted, the pistol in his right hand. Escorted occasionally by an indifferent willi-willi, they moved over the flats and the low sand ridges, through the swamp gums, across dry creek beds and narrower gutters, to arrive at a bough shed erected beside a lake of shallow water maintained by a bore half a mile away.
Here Bony told Charlie to remove the load from the pack-horse. Then with his left hand he unstrapped one of the pack-bags and took from it a pair of handcuffs. They were not of the kind Charlie had seen previously, which are manacles rather than wrist-cuffs. Still, he knew their purpose, and he offered no resistance. The heavy pack-saddle was lifted into the shade of the bough shed, and then, before he understood what was going on, one of the cuffs was unlocked from a wrist and relocked to the iron structure of the pack saddle. Thus he had one hand free with which to protect his face from the flies, and if he wanted to run, well, the saddle went with him, and he wouldn’t run far and never fast.
Save for its proximity to water, the camp site was unsatisfactory, open to the westerlies, unprotected from the dusty ground churned by the hoofs of nomadic cattle. Although brackish, the water was good enough for tea if taken with plenty of sugar, and the closer to the bore, so was the water more heavily laden with alkali, hot almost to boiling point at the mouth of the L-shape iron outlet pipe. Day and night gushed the water from the depths, year after year since the bore was put down.
Bony made tea, gave Charlie a pannikin of it, opened a tin of beef for each of them. He tossed the charred kangaroo leg to the already gathered crows, and then when they were smoking and the sun had gone down, he began the interrogation.
“You’re a rotten tracker, Charlie. Too much Mission learning, eh? You learn to read and write, but you’re no tracker.”
“I followed you all the way from Mount Eden, anyway,” reminded Charlie, cheerfully, and yet with wariness in his eyes. “I done no wrong. Free country. Mr Wootton go crook when he knows about this.” He raised his cuffed wrist, and for the first time anger glowed. “I got my School Certificate, like Meena and the others. I’ll write to the Chief Protector of Aborigines in Adelaide.”
“Do that, Charlie,” Bony said kindly. “Ask him to call on you in jail. You see, Charlie, I’m a terrible liar. I’m the worst liar you ever met. I may-it will depend on you-arrest you and put you up on a charge of interfering with a police officer in the execution of his duty, obstructing the police, assaulting a police officer, taking unlawful refuge inside a willi-willi, and several other matters I could think of.”
“You got to prove all that.”
Charlie was as yet unimpressed, because his respect for Constable Pierce was due to that policeman’s tolerance, and also to the result of a little learning and association with a Missioner. Evil white men hadn’t entered his ken. On the opposite side, Bony knew all too well that you cannot abstract with violence information from an unwilling aborigine. He was sure that Charlie hadn’t tracked him of his own volition, that he had been ordered to do so, and most likely was instructed not to divulge who issued the order.
“You know Constable Pierce, Charlie,” Bony went on. “Some other place boss policeman over Constable Pierce, and some other place bigger boss policeman. Now I am a Big Chief policeman. I’m like Chief Canute. What I say goes. I tell lies about you and everyone believes me, not you. You tell the judge I’m a big-feller liar, and he’ll add six months more jail. I say you did all these things, and you go to jail for three years. Better for you to tell me where Yorky is, and then instead of jail Constable Pierce will make you his tracker.”
“Sezyou,” scoffed Charlie, and Bony was dismayed because Charlie now appeared to be more sophisticated than he had thought.
“You must have been to the pictures,” he said.
“Too right! Down at Loaders Springs. Us Missionabos was allowed by the Missioner everySat’day night. Took us to town in his truck. We seen BobMitchum and Gary Cooper and all them.”
“You astonish me, Charlie. The cinema on Saturday night and hiding in a willi-willi on Sunday morning. Singing in church on Sunday evening, and pointing the bone on Monday afternoon. Still, you’ll be seeing films in jail once every month, and singing songs when locked in a nice cold cell at night. And, Charlie, while you’re in jail, do you know what will happen?”
“What?”
“Some other aborigine is going to take Meena.”
With boosted confidence, Charlie countered with:
“Meena belongs to Canute. No blackfeller can take Meena.”
“But you tried, Charlie. I saw you the other night. She slapped your face, and then let you kiss her. She let you kiss her twice when you made the doll of her and gave it to Linda. I know you like Meena. I know that she likes you, too. But you’re afraid, aren’t you? You’re afraid of old Canute. You know that if you run away with Meena, the bucks will track you and catch you, and you will be speared, and Meena’s knees will be broken so that she can’t run away another time.”
The scenting nostrils were flaring, for love and desire are not the prerogatives of the white man. Almost dreamily, Bony went on talking.
“You want to marry Meena, Charlie, and old Canute say: ‘No, you don’t. Meena’s my woman. I got her when she was a baby. I bought her from her father.’D’you know who Meena’s father was?”
Charlie frowned, then shook his head.
“Does Sarah know?”
Now Charlie grinned, saying:
“She’d know nothing like that for sure.”
“Then who did Canute get Meena from when she was born? I don’t think Meena was promised to Canute ever. I think it’s a yarn. Having visited the white man’s halls of culture called ‘the pictures’, you’ll have heard the word ‘Sucker’ and will know just what it means. You, Charlie, Sucker Charlie.
“Long time ago, and when I look back I’m astonished how far back on my tracks it was, I met my Meena,” continued Bony, and instantly Charlie’s interest was increased. “My Meena was lovely and soft and warm, just like your Meena could be for you. But my Meena made out she didn’t want me. You know, let me kiss her on the tip of her nose and only that. You know what theseMeenas are, I’m sure.
“Well, a long time went by, and I only ever got as far as kissing my Meena on the tip of her nose. Then one day the Missioner came, and I asked him straight if he’d marry me to my Meena. When he said ‘Yes,’ I grabbed my Meena and ran her to the Missioner, and he read out the words, and when he asked me if I would, I said, ‘Yes,’ and when he asked my Meena if she would, and she wouldn’t answer, I pinched her bottom till she did. D’you know what I did then?”
Celibate Charlie was caught.
“I dragged my Meena away from the Mission, and away from the camp, and soon she didn’t have to be dragged any more. She ran with me, and presently we came to a creek. Beside the creek was a great place where tobacco bush grew all round a billabong, and among the bush were ducks laying eggs, andwaterhens mating, and ibis standing in the water catching silver bream. Then I made a humpy of bush and gathered leaves to make the ground soft and warm. Andd’you know what, Charlie?”
“What?” pressed the entranced Charlie.
“Why, now I’ve got one son who’s a doctor missioner away up in Queensland, and two more sons as well. Of course, you won’t have any sons, and you won’t have any Meena in a nice warm humpy. Because you’ll be in jail. That’s if you won’t tell me what I want to know. Then what? Why, Meena will be looking for Charlie, and Charlie will be locked up in jail, and then she’ll come to thinking she’d like to have babies, and some other blackfeller will be waiting for her, and he won’t be so silly as to make me lock him up in jail.”
By no means without imagination Charlie pictured his Meena in the arms of a rival while he himself languished in durance vile. He had never been in a whitefeller’s jail, but he knew there were no women in them, and once there he couldn’t go on walkabout whenever inherited instincts commanded.
Seated on the ground, he rested his back against the pack-saddle, and by bringing his free hand close to the cuffed one, he managed to roll a cigarette and strike a match. It was almost dark, but the air was still heated by the hot earth. The stars were dancing their summer jig. A wedge of ducks whirred low, decided that the artificial lake was too small, and sped upward and away into the profound silence. Now and then Bony fed the small fire from Yorky’s reserve wood-pile, and the reflection of the lazy flames shimmered upon both faces, framing them within the shape of the bough shed.
Wise in the ways of the bush and its inhabitants, yet Bony was tricked. He had thought it possible that Charlie would be tracking him in company with a mate, but as the hours passed, and as Charlie had evinced no confidence in rescue, Bony dismissed the thought. His mind being intent on manoeuvring Charlie into a mood of co-operation at least, and full confession at most, he was unaware of the stalker.
And as it turned out, so was Charlie.
Bony’s task was not an easy one. He could meet a white man and know exactly how to deal with him. He could have met a wild black man and would have known how to deal with him too. In either case, a matter of plain psychology based on the race and character of the subject. Although Charlie was a pure-blooded aborigine, he was a complex being, occupying a place between the wild aborigine and his inhibitions and superstitions, and the fully civilized aborigines who in many districts near the cities of Australia are justly entitled to ‘Mister’ and ‘Missus’.
Therefore: how much was Charlie influenced by Canute and the Elders supporting the chief, and how much by the Missioner and Mr Wootton and Constable Pierce? Bony believed that by placing Charlie midway between these two groups, then moving him half way to the left towards Canute and his Elders, he would have Charlie correctly positioned.
“I tell you something, Charlie,” he said, when Charlie gave no sign of co-operation. “Suppose you say you are my friend. Then I can’t tell old Canute how you made a mess of tracking me, and I won’t say anything about that to anyone else. Then all the lubras and the little gins won’t laugh like hell at you. So we say nothing about that, and you tell me why you been tracking me, eh?”
Charlie mutely shook his head, with a faint sign of reluctance, and Bony added to the bribe.
“Suppose I tackle old Canute, Charlie. Suppose I tell him I know he and Murtee been pointing the bone, and that I’ll have them put into jail for it. Who did they point the bone at last time?”
“Dunno,” replied Charlie. “Perhaps it was at old Moses over on Titigi. Perhaps it was up on the Neales. Anyhow, old Moses he died pretty quick.”
“That’s it,” agreed Bony. “Well, I tell Canute he and Murtee pointed the bone at Moses. Old Moses died. That’s murder, Charlie. So I tell Canute like this. I say: ‘Look you, Canute, old feller, you’re too old to take Meena and Charlie loves Meena, and Meena loves Charlie, and they want to be married by the Missioner, all straight and square.’ Then old Canute he say: ‘You go to hell. I got Meena when she was born. Meena’s my woman.’ And I say: ‘All right, Canute, then you go off to jail for all your life. I know you murdered old Moses by pointing the bone at him, and I’ll tell the white feller judge all about it. Then you’ll be hung.
“ ‘Now I’ll tell you what, you silly old coot. You let Charlie have Meena, him being a young feller and able to look after her, and I’ll say nothing about you pointing the bone at Moses.’ ” Bony smiled at Charlie, and Charlie was seeing a little of the light of common sense. “Do we trade?”
“No,” countered someone behind Bony. “You take that thing off Charlie’s wrist. Go on, take it off.”
Swiftly Bony turned. He found himself looking into the barrel of his own automatic. The barrel was wavering, and the safety catch was still on. Above the hand holding the pistol was the face of Canute’s Meena.