Sound (15 page)

Bailey started baiting. “How did you find that Captain Cook, Billhook? Tasty?”

“Did not meet the man, Bailey.”

“He musta been a tough old man, an old boiler, hey Billhook?”

A thorny branch with yellow flowers flicked past the fowler Billhook was carrying and into Bailey's face. He swore.

“Something impolite about eating your own kind,” Bailey said.

“Too salty anyway. The white man's flesh is tainted.”

Bailey's silence quickened around him. Sometimes Billhook watched his brooding and imagined that inside his chest, things crashed around and tore at each other like crabs in a barrel. He glanced behind him and saw Bailey's face. One day, Samuel Bailey would like to leach my body of blood, he thought. But it is not my destiny to die in this country, with its fires and pale skies and dry, prickly earth. Where would my soul go?

Suddenly, there was Woman. She stood shining and brown, naked but for the possum string wrapped around her waist. Her sister, for they had the same shaped faces, sat on the ground, her bony knees butterflied. Billhook breathed in a quick shock of delight and felt that breath course down to his loins and stall.

Her heavy hair swayed as she raised her head. She looked straight at him. She was not afraid. All was swollen silence with that stare. The clouds flew across the sky but they were in the forest now and the air was oily from the sweating trees. There was no sound in that moment, not even the alarm calls of the birds.

Her sister leapt from the ground and stood by her side.

Bailey thudded into Billhook's back, lost in his own dark meanderings. He swore again and then stared. When he spoke, his voice was rocks in a hopper.

“So this is where they hide their titters.”

The skin of quiet broke and everything fell through. The young women shrieked together, an unearthly noise in that thick, still air. They ran into the forest, a splash of brown knees, feet, hands, hair. All that was left was the Frenchmen's compass, shining all moony on a flat, lichened stone, and next to it a woven bag half full of tubers. While Bailey sniffed into the deep, dappled green, Billhook weighted his pocket with the sun-warmed compass.

Between the two parties, they shot two kangaroos, gutting and bleeding them in the bush. They traded one of the carcasses with the cook for more brandy and rum, hanging off the
Astrolabe
while the red-faced d'Urville watched. Black Simon was already aboard the ship and the Captain seemed to want him quarantined from his crewmates. As there was only he, the Māori heathen, in the boat and three white men whose shifty, chancer eyes seemed to irritate the Captain, they were not invited to board.

As they sailed home, Billhook scooped his hand into the briny, a quick moment of grabbing the floating pumice, and then picked up the sway of the tiller again before the others noticed. Two treasures for the day.

Later when the sun hit the water low and made it bright, Weed sat next to Billhook on the rocks skirting the island. She laughed at the oystercatchers, at their red stick legs running up the granite away from each frothy surge. It was a game to her, watching them gamble every wash on the rocks.

“Tama hine,” Billhook held out two clenched fists to Weed. “A gift – which hand?”

Teeth gleaming, she laid huge eyes upon his hands and chose the right one. He opened his fist and she took the pumice stone.

“Came all the way from a fire mountain,” was what he had heard his mother say, “all the way across the sea to you, tama hine.”

She folded the holey stone into her tiny palm. “You good, Wiremu.” Her words, from over the ranges and across the plains melted into the lingo of the sealers. “Not Bailey. He no good. He call me Weed. Why?”

She could have broken Billhook in half then, this stolen child with her tammar cloak and the woollen trousers of a drowned American boy. Her smile fell away quickly and he
saw her remember that day. He was not a good man, not as good as she said he was.

That night as the fires cricked and cracked and became quieter, Billhook carved she-oak into trolling lures and sealed them with grasstree resin. While he worked, he kept an ear open towards the boatsteerers, where Bailey had ventured to barter information.

“They were in the karri forest, on the south side of the harbour, up the hill from the reed swamp, a clearing … beautiful, as beautiful as they come.”

“They like tiger snakes, Bailey,” said Jimmy the Nail. “You'll never see 'em in the same place twice.”

“Wait 'til the Frenchmen leave,” said Bailey. “We'll get them then. I'm owed a woman.”

An hour before dawn, Billhook was kicked awake with a blow to his ribs and the next to his kidney as his body recoiled and rolled away from the pain. Around him he heard the grunts and thuds of flesh on flesh and then the
crack
and
thook
of wood on bone. An Aboriginal voice shouted at him. “Get up, yer useless whitefella woman. Get up and fight me!” The kicks shuddered through Billhook again and again until, in his dozy state, he woke enough to realise what was going on. He leapt to his feet. Tangled in skins and dazed, he threw his arms around in the gloom, hoping to connect his fists with his attacker.

Whoever it was stepped back and laughed and all Billhook could see of the man was his teeth. Something hard and unyielding whacked him across the side of his head and Billhook went down.

He lay on the ground not sure what had happened. Scuffles and shouts continued around the camp but Billhook was too dazed to understand. Beside him in the gloom lay Smidmore, sleeping. Billhook shook him by the shoulder but all he did was
breathe a groan. Billhook's hand came away from Smidmore wet with warm blood. Down the hill, the women were screaming.

Billhook rolled over and got to his knees, put out a bare foot and tried to stand. As soon as he was upright, someone, the black man, hit him again. In the haze of sparkles at the corners of his eyes he heard Tommy Tasman and Hobson shouting.

“Randall! Where are you, ya fucking snake?”

“I'm gonna fucking kill you, Randall!”

A shot blasted through the air. Jimmy the Nail lit a brush torch from the dying embers of the fire. Billhook was on his feet and saw Hobson standing with the rifle, reloading. “They reckon we got no powder, the fuckers. I'll show them,” he growled.

Jimmy prowled in a circle, holding aloft his torch. “C'mon! C'mon!”

But the attackers had left the camp as furtively as they arrived. The islanders threw some brush on the fire until the flames reached high enough to see about the camp. Smidmore was still down. Neddy sat on his haunches, rubbing his neck. Samuel Bailey wasn't to be seen.

From the women's camp they heard Sal sobbing.

“Randall's got his woman back then,” said Jimmy the Nail. “Only took him a year.”

“What,” said Billhook. One side of his head hurt. He still didn't know what had happened.

“Randall's back,” said Hobson. “He's got those two blackfellas with him. That Pigeon from Sydney and the kid from Kangaroo Island.”

“Budgergorry's no countryman of mine,” said Neddy, indignant. “He's from New South Wales land.”

“And Tommy North and Bill Bundy,” continued Hobson. “The mob that turned up here months ago, the mob from the
Hunter
that I saw off.”

“What about Sal and Dancer?” said Billhook. As his mind sobered he realised the women's screams meant they were being attacked by Randall's men.

“Fuck 'em,” Tommy Tasman laughed. “At least Randall's not hitting us anymore.” But he looked sideways at Dancer's owner Jimmy, ready to dodge a blow from him.

“Send off that next shot, Hobson,” said Jimmy the Nail. “Just to let 'em know the time.”

“If you don't want to kill anyone, you gotta get the blackfellas out of the camp for the night,” Randall said, “You know that, Jimmy. Cleaner work that way.”

Despite being ejected from Breaksea Island months ago, when John Randall returned to claim Sal from Smidmore, he had Jimmy the Nail's allegiance. It was Jimmy's guns that had procured Sal for Randall three years before. That night the two men had sailed from Kangaroo Island to the mainland, walked over moonlit grassy dunes and into the samphire flats of the lakes system. They stepped with stealth through the tea-tree swamps until they found the village of huts where a quiet fire was circled with men, women and children sitting on beds of dried grasses eating and talking. In the screaming chaos that followed the two men walking out of a night forest with guns, Sal's father and uncle were shot dead and a three-month-old baby burned so terribly in the fire that it did not survive.

By the time the sun rose and shone on Breaksea Island, Randall's men were done with the women and they walked up the track to the main camp. Bailey, holding a bloodied piece of cloth against his temple, glowered at Randall. The two black men squatted at the fire and the two white men stood behind them, watching.
Jimmy the Nail and Randall shook hands and gave each other a wry smile.

“Why didn't your dogs bark?” asked Jimmy.

“They're muzzled in the boat.”

“Hit him on the other side with the ugly stick this time, Randall,” Tommy North laughed, noting Smidmore's scars and turned eye.

Billhook sat Smidmore up and leaned him against the hut. Smidmore lay his head against the canvas wall and groaned again. Billhook peeled away some of the Gael's hair to look at the wound. He put his hands around Smidmore's head.

“I think your bones are not broken,” he told him and set about cutting the long black hair away from the wound with his good knife.

“Not like my bleedin' face last time I was on this island,” said Tommy, pointing to his left eye. “Now that was a fight.”

Jimmy and Randall continued to talk in low voices. Samuel Bailey positioned himself closer so that he could hear them. Hobson, furious after his first successful eviction, stalked about with his gun. He couldn't override the authority of the two other boatsteerers when they were chatting like the old mates they were. It looked like the
Hunter
crew were here to stay until someone came to take them all off the island.

“
Hunter
's not comin' back,” said Randall. “Boss Robinson's left his crew on Rodrigues last I heard and was trying to sell the
Hunter
in Mauritius. Market's dropped. No good, these bastard nobs. Left two men on St Pauls with nay more than a knife. Blew off the island and didn't go back to supply them. No food, gunpowder. Nothin'. ”

“Jesus! St Pauls. That's down near the Pole.”

“Yep. They'll be raving, or dead, next time a ship gets down there to carry them off.”

On the boulders where the sea sucked in, Dancer, Mary and Sal squatted in the water to clean themselves.