A Kindness Cup by Thea Astley Page B

crackle.
    Well, Lieutenant Buckmaster? Did you not recognise one of the gins?
    The courtroom air was like a giant and fetid bubble of Freddie’s blood.
    No, he said.
    For the moment, Mr Sheridan said, sipping at a glass of water beside him, let us leave that. Have you proper control over your troopers?
    Yes.
    Butthis group was not all native troopers?
    No.
    But you had proper control over the whole group?
    Lieutenant Buckmaster began sweating again.
    Well, Lieutenant Buckmaster? Had you control over the whole group?
    I cannot really say.
    Really
say
, lieutenant? I put it to you that at one stage your troopers and the townsmen with you acted as separate entities.
    That could be possible.
    Had you given orders to the entire group?
    Yes.
    What was the nature of those orders?
    I told them to go into the scrub and disperse the tribe.
    Disperse? That is a strange word. What do you mean by dispersing?
    Firing at them. I gave strict orders that no gins were to be touched.
    And your orders were not obeyed?
    To my knowledge they were.
    But the group had split into two punitive forces, had it not?
    Yes.
    Then how would you know whether your orders were in fact obeyed?
    Lieutenant Buckmaster offered silence.
    Mr Sheridan’s colour deepened. I must insist on an answer, Lieutenant Buckmaster, he said. If there are warrants issued then you are, I take it, acting correctly when you try to disperse or capture certain blacks. But in this case there was no warrant. I wish to know what induced you to give an order than could result in indiscriminate slaughter.
    There was no—
    Lieutenant Buckmaster,were your orders in fact obeyed?
    I don’t know.
    I see. And do you think it proper to fire upon the blacks in this way in such circumstances?
    They don’t understand anything else.
    How many bodies, Lieutenant Buckmaster, did you see when all—I repeat—all your forces rejoined?
    I saw six.
    Was there not a gin killed as well?
    Dorahy leant forward against the rail in front of him, his face, his entire body, suffused with a kind of delighted anguish. He shouted, Yes yes yes yes yes, and for the second time that day Mr Sheridan had to ask for the witness to be removed.
    Lunt lay on his bed listening to the dust settle. Or thought he could.
    Not the same bed. He had burnt that, dragged it out into a rose of fire made by the first of the failed mills. Listening for the strain of rope and water being spewed up its pipes, he substituted the satiric fire instead, dragged on the putrid mattress where still he could see some of his own hairs and the old man’s. Such a marriage. Consequently he uttered some sort of prayer during the sheet and the blanket. His girl had never. Not ever. He would have laughed if it hadn’t seemed unkind at the best and blasphemous at the worst.
    So he lay, returned and nursed back to some sort of health, for he had lost a leg, severed at a southern hospital, and he stumped round on his new wooden one. The only true separationist, he told himself, grimly smiling at the sick joke. Gangrene had got him, had entered silently a minor graze below the knee so that the old man’s poison had done for it. So he lay, hearing the dust move, and knew that soon he would have to be about the simplicities of living—the horses,the dog, his few scraggy cattle whose rumps were leaner than his own. What day of the week it was he wondered, knowing he should have smelled out Saturday with his heart.
    He put on his breakfast. The effort of it. Sat munching some bran mash in milk and sipping tea—the terrifying comforting monotony of it—and saw from the edge of his veranda, a long way off, a horseman who turned into Dorahy trotting across the outer paddock.
    Dorahy was being rational and categoric that morning with the sun finally up and classes week-ended. He was full of dour logic.
    â€˜You must take action,’ He tapped the wooden leg. ‘The whole town is aware of who and when and why.