Alone on a Wide Wide Sea Page 4

  “Only One Way Out”

  We could see it happening right in front of our eyes, every day, every night. And we didn’t do nearly enough to prevent it. There’s a lot in my life I regret, a lot to feel guilty about – too much. But I don’t think anything troubles me more than what happened to Wes Snarkey at Cooper’s Station. I still have dreams about it, and about him, all these years later. I should have seen it coming. I should have had the courage to stand beside him, but I didn’t. Nor did Marty, and nor did any of us, except Ida. At least Ida tried.

  It all went back, I’m sure, to that glorious day when Wes knocked Piggy Bacon down in the yard, then sat on him and clobbered him. Wes became our hero that day, but he also replaced Marty as Piggy’s favourite victim. He would bawl him out all the time, pick on him at every opportunity. Wes found himself chosen for the worst jobs, the ones we all dreaded, the dirtiest, the heaviest, the smelliest: cleaning out the latrine, digging ditches, carting stones. And Piggy was as clever about it as he was vicious. He knew how Wes loved to work near Big Black Jack in the stables. Everyone knew it. Wes had made no secret of his love for the horse, so Piggy deliberately saw to it that he was never anywhere near his paddock or the stable. And he made sure as well that Wes worked mainly on his own. He deliberately set out to isolate him from the rest of us.

  Hardly a day went by when Wes wasn’t hauled out in front of all of us at evening punishment parade. Sometimes Piggy would just bellow at him. Sometimes he would take the strap to him and give him a hiding. He’d always find some excuse, any excuse to punish him. We could all see Wes was getting it a lot harder then the rest of us. And Piggy was enjoying it too – I saw it in his face. When he whacked Wes it was always done with more venom, more violence. Thinking back, I’m ashamed to say there was even a sense in which I felt a little relieved because while Wes was on the receiving end, then at least I wasn’t.

  Wes grew in stature in our eyes with every whack of Piggy’s belt. He never once flinched, never once complained, and so far as we knew he never even cried. For long weeks and months, it was his resistance and his defiance in the face of our hated enemy that kept us going and gave us all hope. I longed for the day that he’d have a go at Piggy again. I was sure he would. I thought, and Marty did too, that Wes was just biding his time, picking the right moment.

  Then I began to notice that Wes was becoming more and more silent, more withdrawn, even with Marty and me, and we were his best friends. It happened slowly, so slowly that it was difficult at first to believe it was really happening. To start with I thought it was just because he was never allowed to be in the same working party as Marty and me, so we were simply seeing less of him. He often wasn’t with us during playtime either – Piggy regularly made him work on longer than the rest of us. And even when we were together, in the dormitory, Wes seemed to be shutting himself off from us. We’d been a threesome, all pals together, but now however much Marty and I tried to include him – and we did – we could both feel him slipping away from us and turning in on himself.

  In time he became almost a stranger to us, a loner, just as he’d been before during those first months at Cooper’s Station. We wanted him to be one of us again because we liked him, and also because we admired him for how he was facing down the loathsome Piggy Bacon, and humiliating him every day on our behalf. I thought maybe he was dealing with it in his own way, bearing it stoically and in silence. I thought he could take it. I was wrong.

  One morning Wes wouldn’t get up for roll call. He lay in his bed and wouldn’t move. Marty and I tried to persuade him, but he ignored us. He just turned his face away from us. We knew what would happen. Later after roll call, we were all standing out there in the cold of dawn, listening to Piggy inside the dormitory doing his worst. We heard him whacking Wes, yelling at him. “You asked for it, you little devil! I’ll teach you. If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll teach you. No work, no food. See how you like that!” Every phrase was punctuated by the swish and whack of his stick. He was giving Wes a real pasting, and to our shame we just stood there and let it happen.

  Then we heard Wes talking back, a steely calm in his voice. “I won’t work for you, not ever again. And I won’t eat your rotten food either. You can keep it.” Moments later Piggy came storming out of the dormitory hut on to the verandah. He stood there surveying us all breathlessly, his face a beacon of rage.

  For days Wes lay there refusing to get up, and every morning Piggy would go in and beat him, and every day he stopped his food too. To begin with Marty and I tried to squirrel away something for him, bread crusts perhaps. But Wes just shook his head. He wouldn’t touch anything. He told us we shouldn’t do it because we’d only get into trouble ourselves. And anyway, he said, there was no point, because he meant what he’d said: he wouldn’t touch Piggy’s food, even if it came secretly from us. He would stay on hunger strike, he said, until Piggy Bacon treated us properly and stopped beating us. He would drink water though. So we’d bring him that as often as we could. We kept bringing food too but it was no use. He’d made up his mind, he said, and nothing would change it. He would sometimes smile at us, but weakly now as if we were kind strangers.

  He would say very little, and as he weakened he said less and less. But he did say something one evening when we were all three there together, Marty and I sitting on his bed. He said, and I’ve never forgotten his words: “You know what I think. I think there’s only one way out of this place, and I’ve found it.” Marty asked him what he meant, but he wouldn’t say. We both of us tried again and again to talk him out of his hunger strike, but he was dead set on it. He wouldn’t listen. I know now we should have tried harder. We should have tried much harder.

  “Did We Have the Children Here for This?”

  In the end we went to the only person we thought might help. We went to the farmhouse to see Ida. We told her everything: how Wes was beaten each morning, how he was on hunger strike, how he could die if something wasn’t done soon. Even while she was listening to us, she was looking around nervously. I could tell she just wanted us gone. And I could tell too that she already knew everything we’d been telling her. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said when we’d finished. “Go now, go quickly, before someone sees you. I’ll see what I can do.” And she closed the door and went back inside, leaving us standing there. I told Marty that I was sure she’d find a way to help Wes somehow.

  “She’d better,” he said, “or else he’ll be a gonner, that’s for sure.”

  That same night after lock-up, Ida came to the dormitory. It was the first time she’d ever come inside at night. We heard the door unlock, saw the dancing light of her torch. All of us expected it to be Piggy Bacon on one of his occasional late-night patrols so we lay doggo, feigning sleep. “I’ve come to see Wes,” she whispered. “Which bed?”

  When we heard who it was we all sat up. I took her there and showed her. She sat down on his bed and tried to talk to him. Wes didn’t respond at all, not at first. He wouldn’t even turn over and look at her. Everyone was there by now, gathered round his bed.

  Ida put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ve brought you some cakes, Wes, and some milk,” she said. “Please, you must eat.” And she opened up the cake tin on her lap. “I’ve put a cherry on each one for you. You’ll like them.” Wes turned over then and looked up at her.

  “I can’t,” he said. “If I eat, he’ll make me work. And I won’t work for him. Never again. Not ever.”

  She tried. For an hour or more she did all she could to tempt him, to persuade him. She told him that God helped those who helped themselves, how she understood his suffering. “And I know that God does too,” she said, “because he has told me so. I prayed. I asked him what to do, and he said I must come to you and feed you. God loves us all, Wes. In our suffering, we must always remember that.”

  But no amount of gentle persuasion would change his mind. Even her tears didn’t seem to move him. We could hear the tears in her voice as she pleaded with him, s
moothing his hair all the while. Nothing she said or did made any difference. In the end she simply had to give up, just as we had before her.

  We had often heard the sound of fury from the farmhouse late at night, but until now it had always been a one-sided battle, with only Piggy Bacon’s voice raging and roaring, then afterwards the sound of Ida sobbing and the dog whining. This time there were two voices raised, hers as loud and as angry as his. For the first time, Ida was giving as good as she got. We could hear her every word. “The boy will die!” she cried. “Do you want that? Did we have these children here for this?” I wasn’t the only one who felt like cheering her on.

  “All children are sinful, born sinful,” Piggy railed back, “and these are more sinful than most. My task is to cleanse them of sin, to prepare them for heaven. I won’t spare the rod, because it is the only way they will learn. And the boy has to learn who is master here.”

  “I thought Jesus was master here,” she argued. “Or did you forget that? You punish the boy only out of pride, and you know it.” And so it went on. Sadly though, it ended as it so often ended, with the sound of smashing crockery, of blows, and Ida’s sharp cries of pain and the dog yelping and whining. We knew Piggy was kicking him. Then silence, and sobbing.

  Marty began the chorus, and raised to sudden courage we all joined in: “For she’s a jolly good fellow, for she’s a jolly good fellow, for she’s a jolly good fellow, and so say all of us.” We sang it out loud, again and again, at the top of our voices to be sure that Piggy could hear us. He heard all right. He came out of the farmhouse and bellowed at us to stop or he’d come over and whip the lot of us. So, cowed once more, we stopped. I felt even then that our silence was a betrayal. The shame of betrayal is something that never leaves you.

  All of us knew that Ida had done battle for Wes and for all of us that night. None of us knew that although she may have lost the battle, she had not yet given up the fight. Wes didn’t know it either, of course, which is why, I suspect, he decided to do what he did.

  He disappeared the next morning, but he didn’t go alone. We came back from work for our soup and bread at lunchtime as usual, and found his bed was empty. I immediately supposed that maybe Ida had come over and taken him back to the farmhouse to nurse him and look after him. So I ran over and found her at the back, digging in her vegetable garden. She hadn’t seen him, she said. She left her digging and joined in the search. Everyone was looking for him now, including Piggy Bacon, who was stomping about the farm, shouting at us to look here and look there, and ranting on about how, if Wes had run off, he was going to find him and thrash the living daylights out of him. Then he discovered, or someone did, that Big Black Jack was missing too. Now he went really berserk, volcanic. I’ve never seen anger like it. This man of God let out a seemingly inexhaustible explosion of expletives, spat and spewed them out, all the swear words he must have been bottling up inside himself all his life.

  It was quite a show, and we loved it, every moment of it. We kept our distance, of course, each of us secretly savouring the futility of his fury, celebrating his impotence. Wes had done it. He’d escaped. This was what he had been talking about to Marty and me that night on his bed, this was his “only way out”. Wes had gone walkabout with Big Black Jack, and he wasn’t coming back. We were all willing him to make it. I think that maybe I even prayed for it.

  Piggy went after him of course. He rode out on one of the other horses, and we scanned the horizon all day hoping he wouldn’t come back with Wes, but fearing the worst all the time. That evening we looked out of the windows of the dormitory hut and saw Piggy come riding in, slumped in his saddle, his face covered in dust, his lips cracked – and he was alone. He hadn’t found him. Wes was still on the run. We all jumped up and down in the dormitory, clapping one another on the back, ecstatic in our triumph, not just because Wes had succeeded yet again in humbling Piggy Bacon, but also because we all of us suddenly believed that where Wes could go, we could go too. One day, somehow, we could do the same.

  There was another raging row that night in the farmhouse, with Piggy calling Wes “a stinking, ungrateful little horse thief”. And we heard Ida standing up to him again.

  “What did you expect, treating him like you did?”

  It cheered our hearts to hear her fighting back, and our response was quite spontaneous. We burst into another chorus of For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow, and this time Piggy didn’t come out to silence us. We had silenced him. Our triumph was complete, we thought. But then we heard the dingo dogs calling. We’d heard them often enough before at Cooper’s Station, seen them loping about in the distance, seen one or two lying dead out in the paddock, shot by Piggy Bacon, and left there he told us as a warning to the others. We were used enough to dingoes by now. But on this night their cries struck a terrible fear in my heart. It was an omen of something, I was sure of it.

  Next morning we’d had roll call and breakfast, and were just about to go out to work when we saw Big Black Jack. He was a long way off, but it was definitely him. He wasn’t alone. There were a dozen or more bushmen alongside him.

  With sinking hearts we looked for Wes. It wasn’t until they came close that we saw him. One of the bushmen was carrying him in his arms. But Wes wasn’t clinging on round his neck. His arms were hanging down. He was limp, and I knew at once he was lifeless.

  “Just Watch Me”

  I’ve seen several dead people in my lifetime, but Wes Snarkey was the first. You don’t forget the first. I thought I’d be frightened to look at him, but when it came to it, I wasn’t. He was laid out on the long trestle table in the middle of our dormitory, and we stood all around in silence gazing down at him. When I first saw him I was too angry to be sad, and I was angry for all the wrong reasons. I was angry because Wes hadn’t made it, angry that he’d ended our dream this way, taken away all the hope we’d vested in him. I wasn’t angry at Piggy Bacon, not yet.

  Someone began to whimper then, a stifled sobbing that soon spread among us all. Tears seemed to fill my entire head. One by one, unable to bear it any longer, they turned away and went outside, until Marty and I were left alone with Wes. Death, I discovered that day, is not frightening, because it is utterly still. And it is still because death, when it comes, is always over. There’s only terror in it if you fear it, and ever since my first death, Wes’ death, I have never feared it. It is simply the end of a story, and if you’ve loved the story then it is sad. And sometimes, as it was with Wes, it is an agony of sadness.

  Wes did not look as if he was asleep. He did not look at peace. He was too still for that, and too pale. He was somehow smaller too, I remember that. He was cold when I touched his hand. There was a bruise on the side of his face, and cuts too. My thoughts turned then to Piggy Bacon, who we all knew had killed Wes as surely as if he had put a bullet in him. Beside me Marty echoed the hatred now burning in my heart. “Bastard!” he said, almost whispering it at first. Then he was shouting it out loud: “Bastard! Bastard!” And that was the moment we saw Piggy Bacon standing at the door of the hut. Marty looked him straight in the eye and said it again, as good as spat it at him. “Bastard!”

  Piggy seemed too stunned to hear him. He was staring down at Wes.

  “Happy now?” said Marty.

  This time Piggy Bacon did take in what Marty had said. I saw vengeance in his eyes, and I knew then Marty would be his next target. Ida came hurrying in then, and saw Wes lying there. For a few moments she stood there motionless, her whole face frozen. Then she walked towards the table, bent over, and kissed Wes on the forehead. She picked up his hands and arranged them, one on top of the other, and touched his bruised cheek tenderly with the back of her hand. She straightened up then, looked long and hard at Piggy Bacon, then pushed past him and went out of the door.

  A doctor came, the police came. More cars up and down the farm track that day than I’d seen in all my time at Cooper’s Station. They carried Wes out on a stretcher, a blanket covering him, and put him in the
back of an ambulance. We stood there watching the ambulance until it disappeared in a cloud of its own dust. That was the last we ever saw of Wes Snarkey. To this day I don’t know where they buried him. The bushmen stayed all that day until dusk, gathered down by the creek, crouching there unmoving, their own kind of vigil.

  Ida told us later how the doctors thought Wes had died. He’d broken his neck. She thought he must have been too weak to sit on the horse through the heat of the day, that he’d probably lost consciousness and fallen off. He wouldn’t have suffered, she said. It would all have been very quick. Questions were asked afterwards. Lots of official-looking people in suits and dog collars and hats came and went, in and out of the farmhouse. One or two even came over to inspect our dormitory block, and to watch us at work out on the farm. Not one of them ever talked to us. They just looked at us and made notes.

  For us Wes’ death changed absolutely nothing, except that we had lost our hero, and without him felt more vulnerable than ever. Piggy Bacon strutted about the place as usual, as if nothing had happened. He mentioned Wes’ death only once, used it during one of his Sunday sermons. It was a favourite sermon of his, about the Ten Commandments. One Sunday he added this, to make his point: “I want you all to remember,” he said, “that the last thing that boy ever did was to steal a horse, my horse. And look what happened to him. It was his fault, no one else’s. He’s only got himself to blame. ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ Disobey the Ten Commandments, and that’s what happens to you. Let it be a lesson to you, a lesson you’ll never forget.”

  In the days and weeks after Wes died, we saw almost nothing of Ida. She’d bring us our food, but she’d never say anything, not a word. She’d never once look at us. We never saw her out on the farm either. She didn’t even appear at Piggy’s side any more at Sunday services. So we had to sing our hymns unaccompanied – no squeezy box to lead us, just Piggy Bacon’s trumpeting, tuneless voice. We did see her occasionally hanging out her washing on the line, and sometimes in the evening sitting alone out on the verandah of the farmhouse, her dog at her feet. But even then she seemed not to be noticing what was going on around her any more. If ever I spoke to her, she wouldn’t answer me. She’d simply stare straight ahead of her as if she hadn’t heard me at all. It was almost as if she was in a kind of trance. She must have been like it inside the house, too, because there were no more rows, and she played no more music on her squeezy box.