He wouldn’t tell me anything about Black Holland, only that Lewis had killed him because of an argument over the mine. ‘Ain’t fair to spoil his racket for him. That’s how he pays for his drinks, telling Pommies and others like you about the Dog Weary and how he killed a man over it. Except for one time when he got some sort of a legacy, or maybe he stole something. Anyways, he was flush with money for the better part of six months.’ I asked how long ago that would be, and when he said about three years, I knew it must have been the cash from the sale of the Solomons Seal cover.
Frosted glass windows, and mirrors advertising plug tobacco I had never heard of, gave the place an Edwardian appearance. ‘Custom-built for the gold miners,’ the barman said over his shoulder as he dealt out beers to the old men at the far end. ‘All red plush. You wouldn’t believe it, looking at the town now, but there were sixty-five saloons and a score of eating houses then, that’s what they say. And the cemetery full of kids dead within months of being born. You have a gander at the gravestones. There’s men there that were brought in by ship at the turn of the century dying of blackwater fever.’
We were on to our second beer when Lewis finally arrived. God knows what age he was, his hands gnarled and trembling, his shoulders stooped, the muscles of his neck standing out like cords, wiry hair turned grey. He was small and tough-looking, his face so creased and wrinkled it looked like the face of a mummy dried and preserved in the hot Queensland sun. ‘Heard you’re gonna buy me a beer.’ His voice was deep and husky, barely intelligible. ‘Then I tell you about Dog Weary mine.’ He wore a dark serge suit that hung loosely on his thin frame, and the bulging eyes that stared at me greedily were blue like sapphires in a bloodshot yellow setting.
I bought him a beer, and straight away he began talking. It was a long, rambling tale about his father being left to die in the desert by his partner. In essence, it was what I had already read in that letter.
‘What was your father’s name?’ I asked.
‘Him Lewis.’
‘I want his Christian names.’ The blue eyes stared uncomprehendingly. ‘Was his name Merlyn Dai Lewis?’
He nodded, the black wizened face without expression.
‘And the partner, what was his name?’
‘Him take water, gun, everything. Come back after, dig gold.’
‘Who? Who was his partner?’
‘Holland.’
‘The man you killed?’
He looked puzzled. ‘Him Black Holland. This man his father. Red Holland.’ And he went on to tell me how his father had been rescued by some aborigines on walkabout, how he had travelled with them back across all the deserts of Australia. He had married an aborigine girl and had worked in the gold fields around Kalgoorlie. ‘Me born in the desert, and sometime we live in Ora Banda.’ Then they had come east, to Cooktown, where he had been brought up, and his father had gone off to find the man who had left him to die in the desert and get his share of the gold.
‘What happened then?’ I asked.
‘Him never come back.’ And he added, ‘Mama spik me. She very sad papa no come back, she very poor, so me go look white fellow. But white fellow him dead, too.’ There was something I couldn’t follow then, about being shot and put in a hospital. The name Black Holland was mentioned. And then suddenly with a sweeping gesture of his hand: ‘Sometime me hear him working Queensland, find him and he laugh at me. Him very drunk, say many things — say Dog Weary bilong him. So me kill him, an’ now Dog Weary bilong me. Savvy?’
The barman laughed, coming towards us and leaning his elbows on the counter again. ‘Same old story, is it? Can’t get that bloody mine out of his head. Talks of going there, but never has. Lazy bastard.’ He looked across at Lewis, smiling and tapping his forehead. ‘Yu longlong. That’s Pidgin for crazy. Reck’n it was the war.’ And without my asking he got another can of beer out of the fridge.
‘You mean he was wounded in the war?’ I asked him.
‘That’s right. Something I reck’n he didn’t bargain for since he was in the Pioneer Corps. Got sent to Bougainville, an’ the Black Dogs put a bullet through his neck. Got it through there, din’t you, mate?’ And he pointed a dirty finger at the old man’s neck. ‘Well, never mind. Drink that.’ And he put the can down in front of him.
Lewis filled his glass and drank half of it in a single swallow. Then, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, he began telling me how he had found Black Holland working on a sugar plantation near the coast. His voice was already a little slurred, and it was difficult to follow, but I thought what he was saying was that this was the man who had shot him during the war. There was an argument over his father and who owned the Dog Weary mine, and Black Holland had suddenly drawn a knife. Then, quite clearly, he said there had been a fight, and in the struggle he had seized the knife and ripped the man’s belly open with it.
‘When did this happen?’ I asked.
It was the barman who answered. ‘A long time back. In 1952, and this murdering old bastard gets away with manslaughter.’ The barman’s face cracked in a grin that showed sharp brown-stained teeth. ‘The way he tells it you’d think the other fella started it. But I’ve heard it said it wasn’t like that at all, and the old-timers here, they say it was pay-back, that after the war he went looking for Holland. That’s right, ennit?’ And he glanced along the counter to the old men drinking and listening, and they all nodded.
‘Because he was wounded in Kieta?’ I asked.
‘No. Because of the mine and what happened to his father.’
It seemed incredible that this shrunken, wizened little black man should have gone looking for the man and killed him because of what happened out there on the edge of the Simpson so many years ago. ‘What happened to your father?’ I asked him. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he? When did he die?’
The old man stared at me, and when I repeated the question, he buried his face in his beer and didn’t answer.
‘Always the same,’ the barman said. ‘Tells his story the way he wants, but start slinging a few questions at him and he shuts up.’
‘In July 1911,’ I told him, ‘your father was in Sydney and signed on as a stoker on the Holland Trader. That’s right, isn’t it?’ The old man nodded almost imperceptibly, but when I asked him what had happened to the Holland Trader, he just stood there staring at me out of eyes that had suddenly become frightened, his black face puckered and worried. He knew I wasn’t a tourist, and when I asked him about the letter his mother had received, at almost the very moment the Holland Trader had disappeared, he seemed to confuse it with the envelope, those blue eyes of his darting this way and that as he said, ‘Bilong me. Yu speak Father Matthew. He get stamp money and take forty dollar for the Mission.’
I tried again, explaining that I knew about the stamps and the money he had been paid, but what I wanted was the letter that had been inside the envelope. But all he said was, ‘Yu polis?’ And he gulped down the rest of his beer like a man about to flee.
‘I told you,’ the barman said with a grin. ‘Start asking him questions and he clams up.’
But I got it out of him in the end. I took him by the arm and more or less frog-marched him to a table; then I bought him another beer, sat him down opposite me and began talking to him, asking him the same questions over and over again. I wasn’t police, but he must have thought I was giving a pretty good imitation. How did he know it was Red Holland who had been his father’s partner? Had his mother told him, or was it in the letter? But hadn’t she shown him the letter?