Marcus said that Tim must be wrong when he called out that he’d found a bottle dump and lines of drainage ditches dug around tent sites. ‘It’s in the other direction,’ he said. Marcus lined himself up with landmarks. It was the ghostly lump of the Dease and Milburn camps all right, and he hadn’t known he was standing in the middle of the house he was looking for when he searched so intently.
‘Full marks to you, Timmo,’ he said. It was by being forced to stay put and poke around with the aid of a sapling crutch that Tim found things out. What he wanted came to him that way.
A rustle in the air and a thrashing sound came from the ridge above them. They heard the thump of a falling tree and the slither of loosened branches coming down the embankment. In the mountain-bush district of the chilly plateau all was wilderness except for the civilised blade of rails cutting through, and trees fell on still days without warning. A possum was thrown from the branches as they toppled, whooshed and crashed, and that possum came bounding down in daylight astonishment towards them.
Tim dropped to the ground with a drag of his torso and made a triangle of elbows and cheekbone against the rifle stock, the better to sight the possum, which now bounded back up the slope, and paused. From his alacrity was proved Tim’s regret in never being able to sign up for six shillings a day as a soldier.
Something else went bobbing on the skyline, where the unused line went into an abandoned tunnel. ‘Two shots,’ said Tim, nominating targets. ‘Possum, and that other.’
‘Careful – that’s something up there,’ said Marcus. ‘It looks like a hat?’
‘I’m tough on hats,’ said Tim.
First crack, the possum fell over. Second crack, whatever it was, browny-white, slipped from view.
‘Why did you do that?’ said Marcus.
‘Do what?’ said Tim, smirking.
‘Why did you take that second pot?’ he said. ‘It might have been someone.’
‘A miss is as good as a mile,’ said Tim, looking pleased at proof of mettle.
Marcus clambered up the slope and approached the place along the overgrown line. Tim looked on from below. There was no way possible that Tim could climb that sixty-degree slope, which Marcus scaled with ease.
What had seemed to be a hat was an empty paper bag in a puff of wind, thrown from a train on the high side of the cut and drifting the gullies end over end. Tim’s shot had ripped through, leaving a clean puncture hole.
I do want that bloke on my side
, thought Marcus.
A
FTER RECEIVING AN URGENT WIRE
– ‘livestock valuation required immediate’ – Bert Shepherd, butcher of Harden, padlocked his shed, chained his dogs to a stretched wire, giving each a good bone and, after seeing to their water butts, packed his needs in a hessian sack, walked a mile to the station and joined the night train to Sydney.
He was dressed in a collarless grey flannel shirt and coarse flannel trousers held up by a plaited greenhide belt. On a finger of his left hand he wore a silver ring: small eyes of an eel peering out from stream water, a water animal, gilled, sea going, but crossing land at night, small sharp teeth busier than a weaving loom. It was a gypsy ring, fashioned in Turkey for an outcast band doing the dirty work of sultans. For their trouble they were buried in unholy ground. Their progeny crossed Europe becoming people of the country taking them in. Eternity had a face no different from constant change.
The German name, Wolff, had invited hostility as the war came on. Bert’s father was Fritz – Bert’s sausages fritz, too. Now fritz the sausage was devon, frankfurter, saveloy. Wolff changed to Shepherd, Albert to the commoner Bert.
Getting comfortable on the train, making a fuss over himself with the sort of flourishes due to an honoured guest, Bert was judged by his fellow passengers to be a bloke overly full of himself, as butchers so often were – the way he went patting the seat, adjusting a window catch, looking around and then easing rearwards and wedging himself on the seat with a humorous bounce.
The plump leatherwork, red cedar woodwork, the milky-white engraved glass lampshades of a first-class compartment of New South Wales Government Railways did not please his travelling companions exclusively as it might have done. That compartment had the feeling of a superior living room into which an uninvited guest had come. Listen to the way he spoke. No accent as such but an unwarranted precision, giving his listeners the feeling of being at a disadvantage in their proud, native selves by being obliged to acknowledge one so indelibly foreign as one of their own.
They stared, irritated, at this butcher and livestock dealer, as he good-dayed and hello-ed them. His small but hefty squared-off boots were smeared with animal fats, tied with leather laces. On the luggage rack his hessian bag, cinched with a leather strap, held an assortment of shapes and sizes.
A tidy-bearded insurance agent shifted his buttocks aside, catching the chilly reek of the man, which could never be washed away. A clerk’s indemnities were scorned by Bert as being written on paper. A minister stared at his ring with its pagan flash. A small-town matron, wearing a fox fur and an opalesque brooch, whispered to the minister that if a brawny butcher thought so little of himself as to wear his working clothes on his travels, why wasn’t he down the rear end of the train, where he ought to be, in the train drover’s van, coupled to the darkly barred, bellowing succession of livestock wagons following up the line?
Bert fell asleep and snored with his mouth open, his blue lips gleaming with spittle, his hobnailed boots propped on the windowsill, making a pattern of squared nails that gleamed in the light of passing station lamps. The generations played over his face their ribbons of inheritance – grimace, gawp, grin and nightmare trouble. Then, like a blind being lifted, the impression smoothed over as Bert rubbed sleep from his eyes and considered the woman he meant to make his bride. He knew that as a lover he had disadvantages but could talk them all away in ten minutes of her company.
Next morning, in Sydney, Bert Shepherd did business at the State Abattoir at Homebush, where he was known, and where his cattle were unloaded, and where his telegram had seemed to bid him. But only had seemed.
For that afternoon Bert went to the Attorney-General’s rooms in Macquarie Street, to be met there by legal officials and Inspector-General Day, successor to Fosberry and his successor, Garvin, whose line of authority spoke discretion into Bert’s ear down from his father’s time. You might wonder what these higher-ups had to do with a hacker of animal flesh. The wonder was they needed him as a regulating instrument. Democratic lawmakers had needs of state the same as a Turkish sultan’s. The mortality of man was a weapon in law. The ones who wrote the laws were protected by a repertoire of knots from the most woeful meaning of their penalties.
From these powerful, careful men in a below-stairs room – those who had sent the wire covertly, no sender named – Bert collected an advance of three guineas for a trouble he took in a matter paying ten guineas in all.
A government motor car carried him back to Central Station that night, where he caught the Western Mail across the Blue Mountains. When the train reached Bathurst, the engine driver, Marcus Friendly, and the fireman, Ron Kristiansen, looked down the length of carriages and watched the crowd empty through the station gate until there was no-one left.
T
HE FEELING BETWEEN DRIVER AND
fireman was wrong. They were not on speaking terms. Often they drank a billy of tea or rimmed a pannikin of frothing beer at the end of a long shift. Tonight Friendly and Kristiansen could not wait to get away from each other after bringing the Western Mail over the hardest hills on the Western Line, through bushfire smoke and sparking trackside fires. They had little to say to each other; what little they said stung.
The executions were in all the papers. They were to take place in Bathurst Gaol. It was the first time in ten years that anyone in New South Wales had been sent to the gallows. These executions, at the height of the Great War and conscription referendums, would be a warning to strikers, agitators and utopian dreamers.
The fieriest of dreamers were the Industrial Workers of the World – the Wobblies – a joke of a name you might think for the pursuit of bringing workers the world over into One Big Union so all-encompassing it might as well be called the universe, all the broken bits joined together, a unity of the heavens, no less.
It was a blasphemy, or anyway intolerable to law. So now if you were a Wobbly it was better to hide your face, cut off your connections and behave like the opposite of who you were. Maguire, the Wobbly, was the father of Bub and briefly the common-law husband of Luana. Marcus could not, would not, deny Luana.
It was to be a double hanging. Two men on fire with Wobbly thinking, having come to a conclusion concocted from pamphlets damning imperialism and the ownership of the means of production, had shot a policeman in dusty Tottenham. Shot him in the back through a window while he did his officework.
Marcus Friendly was for their fate, after grinding deliberation. Given the chance would he save them to soothe Luana? He would soothe Luana anyhow.
Ron Kristiansen had another point of view.
‘Zest’ was maybe the word to describe the feeling Ron had, for he showed a will to have the executions happen as much as to have them stopped. Marcus did not understand Ron Kristiansen’s thinking at the time, nor for a while afterwards, until it was laid out to him by Luana.
As the last of the passengers went through, Marcus saw a stocky man with a burlap sack leaving the station gates and thought with a calming breath, a charge of spirits, how that same man made the world right, once, to a boy of unworldly ambition, and that he would try and make it right for Luana and Bub as the feeling ran from one hand into the palm of the next, and out along a rope that was only half a trick.
B
ERT
S
HEPHERD CAME TO THE
two men, Maguire and Herbert, an hour before dawn, neither priest, warden, nor lawyer bringing a last-minute reprieve but the one who would take their lives from them as he took the lives of pigs and cattle. He stepped into the condemned cells with a soft tread, measured and weighed the pair with attentive hands.
Those prisoners, red-eyed and snarling, were witless with dread, defiance and disbelief. Wobbly anger was their immortal contract. Their shouts and bellows echoed from the lime-washed walls. They yelled the slogans of the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies, the One Big Union, the final slogan of which, after all man’s struggle was done, was to live in harmony with the earth.
So ask again. With your dying breath. Why was this wrong?
It was not. Bert did not argue with that. From his sack he pulled out a bottle. ‘Drink this,’ he said.
Heavy glass, it needed both hands. They gulped, wiped their mouths and stared through the bottle’s thickness – then drank as if the bars and girders seen through the bottle were bent wide, and what they saw was everything out there brought back whole. Then they drank again and the spirits went down in a spiral contortion of the idea that every dewy morning they would never wake to was in their keeping now.
‘Tah,’ they said, keeping their bitterness intact.
They did not ask Bert his name. He did not give it. It was vital the hangman’s power be felt and his name be nothing. His gross authority came from an abstract ideal, a legal figment. A butcher and livestock dealer outstripped the terms of his employment. Death was a blow and death was a consolation.
So they did go quiet on him, Maguire and Herbert, calmed by the obedience they found in his touch. He met them as guardian of their own goodness, its ultimate match, with the promise of fulfilment after struggle. He met them with a conception of the Wobbly contract, an ideal disallowed until it met the importance of a well-tied knot.
Bert Shepherd’s was the power to emphasise the convictions of a lifetime and bring them across into an understanding, ever so momentary, into an experience, ever so brief, that was beyond the unaided comprehension. Those roughened but dextrous hands, that vigour of touch, conveyed a feeling of yawning strength, of unlimited assistance, so it seemed filthy justice itself, so illegitimate, so wrongly based, so evil here in its foul representative, the hangman, had the purity of water and light and demanded a following – even if the boys, Maguire and Herbert, would not say sorry for murdering a constable and went to the scaffold spitting blood in ferocious justification.
However long the consolation lasted – a minute, two seconds, may it be an eternity! – the law had its way. They were marched to their deaths at 9 am on Wednesday, December the 20th, 1916.
A
YEAR LATER
B
ERT
S
HEPHERD
, prosperous butcher done up like a Christmas turkey in top hat and tails, was married under Roman rites in St Mary’s Catholic Church, Harden.
Bert brought to his bride, Agnes, a domestic servant already carrying his child, the glowing temptation of all possible happiness, the same elation he was able to bring to the mean, the murderous, the ever-unreconciled.
Don’t ask how he did it, Agnes never did, never had need to. Don’t ask her daughter, Eunice Shepherd, either, nor Eunice’s adopted-out son, Max Petersen, who lives to this day as the Federal Member for Parslow, gearing up for the vote of his party’s life as the cockatoo screeches at a hundred and ten.
Whatever lies hidden exerts a force with a following but has no name. But say it is political – give it the party name. Or say it’s the bottomless bottle.
*
B
ERT
S
HEPHERD RAMBLED THROUGH
B
ATHURST’S
streets, dust blowing about him as he went past the post office, the bank, the newspaper offices and along the gravelled pathways of the municipal park, where, in the late-December heat, roses wilted but some few blooms still struggled to make a show of it above the thorns.
He was a man strolling through clouds, his elbows in milk and clover. It was over. It was done. To anyone meeting his eye he nodded in the way of an old friend and walked on. When he thought of the Anglican priest, the Reverend Harris, who attended the day, his jaw tightened. Harris! How is that for a man? Not very much under the slumbering God’s eye, the lid slightly parted, watching, taking no sufficient interest in His own pained world as day woke from night.