The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith by Thomas Keneally
Mort could be depended on to debate, and McCreadie could be depended on to mention everything, even – in the end – Healy’s baby.
“Yair,” Mort said, “but Jimmie’s wife says she’s goin’ t’ have Jimmie’s piccanin’. When it gits itself born it ain’t his but some white bastard’s.”
“But don’t you believe your totem … your animal spirit … that’s what makes children come?”
“How yer know all that?”
“A man called Andrew Lang. He writes about it.”
“I’d teach him t’ write if I got hold of him.” Mort was frightened and angry about Andrew Lang’s writing. God knew what secrecies of his heritage were written down for whites to read. “Not white childs get born that way. Only black. Black mother, black husban’. It’s pricks do the work all the rest of the time.”
For the first time Jimmie saw that Mort was aware yet unaware that they were only half-brothers. You were brothers or not brothers. The two governing elements were Dulcie and Emu-Wren. Half-brother was a white genealogical nicety.
McCreadie listened with respect, polishing his nose and worrying runny eyes with a handkerchief, his breath grinding up and down his throat.
Because of this weakness of the wind they needed to scout ahead, one waiting with McCreadie for his breathing to improve.
“Inhale, exhale,” he would groan, doing his strangled breathing exercises. “It’s a bad time of year. The air is full of dust and pollen and animal hair. I can’t even ride a horse in October or November without getting sick.”
The Blacksmith brothers argued sullenly with each other, about cooking and brewing tea and fetching things. They clung to McCreadie as mediator, yet maintained to his amusement the fiction that he was a hostage. For the fiction’s sake, they lost five miles every day of the week.
Yet they were not moving at random. They were travelling in what should prove to be an unexpected easterly direction, down the valley escarpments to the sea. When they slaughtered cattle here, farmers presumed it the work of timber-fellers, who were notorious gatherers of free meat. Jimmie’s tactic was to go south and cross the Manning River by boat and continue on into the hills above Port Stephens.
Heedlessly, he mentioned Port Stephens in front of the teacher, talked of hiding away in one of the American timber ships that came there for the cedar. It was a soothing proposition; America was as good a hope as any to invoke.
McCreadie was thinning. The high colour of his ears was bad health, not weather-blains. Against the spitting fire and within the dome-like, hollow noise of rain in timber, the rasp of McCreadie’s patient strangulation could be easily heard.
“You better let me go,” he’d murmur. “I wasn’t raised to do this sort of thing.”
But both brothers needed a third party, could not imagine speaking to each other without McCreadie about. Also, McCreadie filled and diverted their day. From dawn they would bicker about the man, arrange concessions to him, grumbling about poor mileages, choosing camp sites, granite ledges with overhangs.
McCreadie peered at all their quarrels as if about to intervene like a polite guest and say they should not go to trouble for him. But he said nothing; his eyes simply descended through plane after plane of wistfulness and he gave small, tight, unavailing coughs that did not dent the surface of his asphyxia.
At one time they had to let him rest for two whole days. They each let him have their second blanket, and wrapped up by Mort he slept with a look of intense obedience on his face.
“Sleeps like a bloody nigger, that feller,” Jimmie remarked and laughed paternally.
Suddenly the weather got drier, the sun took on an Advent ferocity as if to dry out the fervour of Christians in that hemisphere. They were pleased to be in cool places, ragged country that cast shadows. The summer skirling of cicadas began. They smiled about the hubbub, sadly. For that insect rant was at the heart of their first memories; their first prey on summer mornings about 1886.
They were near the coast road now, going very slowly yet, luckily, in an unlikely corner of the coastal hills. McCreadie was not better. His big eyes knew that he must soon prevent them from sucking at his substance.
“I know all this country,” he told the brothers. “I was raised just down the hill, about twenty miles down, near Croki.” He pointed to the summit of the hills just to their left. “There’s something up there I want to show you. A big place of stones. Holy stones. Magic ones. Shaped like a womb. For initiation, you understand. For when they circumcised the boys.” McCreadie made weary cutting motions. “The whole of the Manning River tribes used to use it.”
Jimmie Blacksmith was suddenly jealous for black secrets himself. He asked how McCreadie knew so much. McCreadie again invoked the name of Andrew Lang.
That sort of stunt put Jimmie in a fury. All scholarship came down to Newby refusing groceries. Andrew Lang had not written Newby into a generous state of mind. Andrew Lang was therefore just a prying bastard.
“We don’ want t’ go t’ a place like that!” Mort said quickly, because there was a strange pull in the suggestion.
“I was coming up this way one day,” McCreadie chattered on, “when I was about ten. An old black met me and said if I went up there that day I’d get my water cut off. I think they used to use it as recently as that.”
“Why do we want t’ go buggerin’ round a place like that?”
McCreadie’s wide eyes flitted about for a reason.
“There’s no one to visit it any more,” was the best he could manage. “They’ve got all the poor blacks herded together down at Purfleet.”
He didn’t dare say too much. He had found the place potent and believed it might act potently on the Blacksmiths.
Mort was talking urgently in the secret language, while Jimmie hawked and pretended not to be touched.
What Mort was suddenly proposing was that they should face the cherished centre of another tribe, test their justice and magical immunity against foreign spirits. They would find out all at once if they were cursed. Mort was suddenly keen on instantly knowing.
Mort taunted his brother in the nasal, falling tones of Mungindi. Jimmie listened and made mouths, coughing the fright and dryness out of his throat.
“Orright!” Jimmie kept roaring. “Orright!”
At the end of patience he asked McCreadie, “How bloody far t’ this place?”
“A mile. Straight up the scarp. You can see the sea from up there.”
“Orright. If yer both got that much wind …”
The dread of his assent and of the sight of the sea thoroughly parched Jimmie out. For he expected a high, reeling, vertiginous place.
Their native awe of where they were going was coloured by the residue of H. J. Neville’s Christianity. So they were raiders and outdarers and adjurers but also pilgrims, bearers of onus, seekers for justification, desirers of exorcism.
“Rest, please!” McCreadie had to keep demanding beneath his rattling breath.
At one pause Mort painted his face. One must use every subterfuge in the heart place of another race, one must caulk one’s flesh. Jimmie himself would have liked to do it.
“Fuckin’ stupid boong,” was all he could say, for he could not claim the same native rights as Mort, and resented it.
When McCreadie said they would see it in half a mile, remarkable things began to occur.
Mort took a branch and flayed his body with it and then, strangely, Jimmie’s back. Not a genuine flagellation, a mock one, like the flagellation of monks. Jimmie, whose face McCreadie could not see, tolerated it.
It lasted perhaps a minute, then Mort ran ahead with the branch, laid it on the ground and began to kick dust over it.
McCreadie did not understand, except that it was some rite of deception or diversion of spirits.
Soon after they stepped out of shadow onto a wide abutment falling away on the east to the Blacksmiths’ first, remote sighting of sea, a mere inverted triangle of hazy blue between coastal hills.<
The place itself was terrible enough, compelling. Molars of rock eight feet tall had been used to outline the womb and between the monoliths ran smaller stones white-grey. It was spacious and holy here. Even if it were only clean magic that had been practised, it had been practised long, with such hope, such memory and dedication. Here black boyhood was fashioned to the purposes of tribe and marriage, hunting and kinship, confirmed in a special and delicate vision of the world.
Now the vision and memory lay truncated and blurred in places like Purfleet. So it was a sad place, it waited for restitution.
The entrance of the womb was on the north where the platform met a face of black-stratified rock, looking in the manner of The Moonstone, thought McCreadie, like a god from whom a diamond eye has been stolen.
Mort and Jimmie had dumped their gear at the south end and began to skirt the stones, Mort with his hands out – implying goodwill – and chanting a broad drooping chant.
What he sang was:
Strangers yet well-intended we have come,
Wary of strangers’ totems,
Fugitives who have seen all the bad omens of blood
And need the mercy of foreign people,
Warmth, song and food.
Moving forms of men wanting their souls returned to them.
There is nothing we wish to destroy,
Being already under threat from wronged spirits.
It was contradictory to use poor subterfuges such as face-paint yet then to chant such admissions. But even Mort had lost some of the black protocol. Jimmie sang nothing and was afraid. Gasping McCreadie could see the fear and perhaps confusion. Mr Jimmie Blacksmith, mighty terrorizer, lost beyond repair somewhere between the Lord God of Hosts and the shrunken cosmogony of his people. Mort Blacksmith, however, still had his nearly intact black soul. Surely his brother saw it, McCreadie hoped. In his fever, and head light from lack of breath, he believed the womb a violent place. Like magnet to magnet it snatched up Mort’s mind. It left Jimmie unpolarized though uneasy. And surely Jimmie saw it!
I have separated them, McCreadie thought, staggering, sweating, eager for breath. Or assured their separation. No small thing. No small thing.
But the state of the secret place disturbed him. Many of the large stones had been toppled, the small glaucous ones uprooted and heaved in every direction by picnickers; by exhibitionizing young men of the Manning valley. By young men in love whose tongues were no more fitted to speak love than hoofs are, but whose hands were big enough to hurl large rocks in celebration.
There were inanities written too on the slabs. There were bottles broken and rebroken to small pieces. Mort’s feet, summoned by awe, trod without harm on the amber grit.
Both great stones marking the womb-mouth were in place. On the left hand one a message was rasped deeply by knife. “CENTRAL TAREE – MANNING RIVER CHAMPIONS 1897”. Then, in charcoal – “TAREE – NORTH COAST CHAMPIONS 1898. DEFEATED PORT MACQUARIE 27–2.”
McCreadie felt ashamed. Such a threadbare response to a ritual gate, a stone-age basilica; not like Stonehenge, millenia-abandoned and a prey to tourists and the graffiti of corporals from Aldershot. A used place, this. There were men in Purfleet who knew what the uses were.
Had the footballers from Taree, heady with their twenty-five-point margin, been so incurious as not to stand back and ask what the pattern was and who had made it?
McCreadie felt the heat of tears on his lids. He fingered one of the desecrations.
“That’s awful,” he said. “That’s bloody awful.”
On the right portal was, “McCAFFERY SLEPT HERE.” “SO DID BAINSHAW.” “CLIVE LOVES IVY FROM THIS DATE, 21.2.93.” “CLIVE’S GOING WITH A BLACK GIN. WATCH OUT IVY, 16.1 1.94.” “CROKI RUGBY PREMIERS 1898.”
McCreadie said, “This is dreadful. This is too bloody dreadful for words.”
The nursery refrain: Build it up with iron bars, iron bars ran through his head.
“We must build it up again,” he said, listening to himself with amazement, knowing himself to be agnostic as Zola or Marx could want. “God will forgive us if we build it up.”
Jimmie began arguing, on practical grounds. It would take them all day, he said. But it was no use being reasonable with Mort and McCreadie.
They went on with their survey. A desecrated aisle opened out spaciously, and to one side of the inner wall stood a prow of stone in tilted layers. Perhaps the fertilized ovum, McCreadie surmised, on the womb-wall. Did the elders know as much anatomy as that? It was a natural stone, not man-hauled, and its sea-facing front had lateral clefts. Scattered around it were fragments of small stone that looked as if fashioned. The Blacksmiths knew what they were, tjuringa stones, each the external capsule of someone’s soul, some black man initiated ten or fifty or a hundred years past.
And those who picnicked here had been thorough. The tjuringa had been fished from the clefted rock in dozens or perhaps hundreds, small smooth wedges, a few intact, others snapped across the middle, others ground with perverse injury to smaller, irreparable pieces. Soft coastal tjuringa, loose-grained as the souls they held, too much yield in them, no ferocious, tight-texture. Far too like the men whose calyx they had been. Far too like the yielding loose-grained men of Purfleet, Burnt Bridge, Verona, Pilbarra, Brentwood.
And here the history of mean death and lust for booze and acquiescence to the white phallus, gun, and sequestration and all the malaise of black squalor, here it was, legible in the fracture lines of soft stones.
Sensing all this, Mort howled from the heart of his own torment and fell down on his knees and elbows. Jimmie crouched and as if from curiosity but with massive secret fear picked up some of the more cleanly broken stones and pieced them together, keeping on his face a handyman frown.
Close to him the teacher’s eager breath grated like a pump. And after a time, the teacher could be seen heaving some grey stones that were meant to fill in the ritual outline.
It had become easy for him to believe, his mind all cross-eyed for lack of air, that if the Taree footballers had not fallen to celebrating their skill on the consecrated stones of another race, there would have been no killing at the Newbys’. It seemed to him almost a principle of law, viable in a courtroom. He would state it when the Blacksmiths were taken.
They scavenged around, not doing much that was helpful. At last Jimmie came up.
“It ain’t no use,” he told McCreadie. “It’s buggered an’ no help fer it.”
The sun was low and their sweat felt cool. As volatile as bay rum to fevered McCreadie.
“You must leave Mort, Jimmie. You can see that.”
“Mort’s been in on all I done.”
“He wounded a woman, but she’s getting better.”
“He shot Toban. I need Mort. Mort needs me.”
“Would you say so, Jimmie? Would you?”
Mort was at that moment raising a shaft of stone and dismally watching the insects writhe where it had lain.
“You ought to bugger off, Jimmie, and give him a chance. You ought to leave us.”
“Why in hell?”
“The boy isn’t really your brother. He’s an aborigine, Jimmie. Not like you. There’s too much Christian in you, Jimmie, and it’ll only bugger him up. Like it’s buggered you.”
Jimmie should have been angry, but shrugged.
“I’ll ask him.”
“Don’t ask him. He’ll stay with you because he’s an aborigine, and loyalty’s in it.” McCreadie shivered from the intensity of debate. “You have to just bugger off. At night.”
He half turned to look at his brother. Oblivious amongst other men’s totem ruins, Mort had his head tilted. It was a wedge-shaped family head, rather lean. Jackie Smolders had had it, Mort had it. Jimmie owned a squarer white face but with a splayed black nose in the midst of it. A dead giveaway. The sort of thing that, Newby had assured him, could never be bred out of his line.
“I’m taking it for granted,” McCreadie said, “that you love
Mr Jimmie Blacksmith said softly, “Yer better wrap yerself in a blanket, mister, and jest shut up.”
But of course he knew it was all true; it was all inspired truth.
Dowie and Dud, recovered from that clumsy impasse by the campfire, decided that they might go down to the cool hotels of Taree and, bathed, make decisions there about their future pursuit of the Blacksmiths.
The valley restored Dowie. It was wide and rich and river-dominated. The sun came out of the sea and made a long and profuse haul to the Divide. The river was stippled with the mouths of surfacing perch, was Mississippi-wide and full of vistas and luxuriant islands of silt.
They bathed and had a late breakfast over the Sydney and Brisbane papers. The news was all Federation, and articles on the constitution and how the High Court would settle quarrels between States and the Federal Government. A biography of the Governor-General, projection of the Queen’s sacred majesty, made Dowie feel meritoriously bored.
Kruger had fled into Portuguese East Africa. Lord Roberts had declared the Transvaal annexed, but a special correspondent doubted that the war would end:
A member of a captured Boer commando told me that his people can and will go on fighting for years in a countryside they know better than any British soldier could be expected to. Because of their small numbers and mobility, they would not be subject to the deadly diseases that attend the transfer of masses of troops in an unaccustomed climate.
“Your people think the possession of towns is everything,” he told me.
There was a lesson there. Small numbers and mobility in a countryside they know. The Blacksmiths.
Joseph Chamberlain had declared the new Australian constitution a highly advanced model of parliamentary and monarchic democracy. There was an editorial praising Chamberlain for the praise.