Cornelius has observed Caroline amongst the vines, her black dress catching in the briars. He has seen her out there under the stars, staring at the vineyard. He has seen her take those four young boys into the vines to pull away the weeds. He has come upon her swimming in the pond wholly naked and he has walked away, surprised but not alarmed by her boldness. That kind of freedom must be hard won for a woman, he thinks. To grow a thing is to grow a little certainty , satisfying a soul that life is worth living. Take a hit when it dies and start anew. Be grateful when the wallabies and opossums haven’t got inside the fences, or when birds don’t strip the fruit before bottling, or some fool hasn’t walked drunkenly through a new crop of squash or corn. After she d eparts, he sets aside leather and metal to make a pair of shears and gloves to fit her small hands. A week later, Cornelius presents these items to Caroline. She tries on the gloves, delighting at the fit, and marvels at the lightness and convenience of the shears. Cornelius then draws from beneath his workbench a pair of boots and tells her it must be ten years now that he has been saving the leather. A kangaroo skin from the red deserts far away to the north, won in a card game. He has lined the boots with she epskin. ‘Plenty of cold days ahead yet,’ he says, ‘even in summer , and likely wet ones, too. Feet like to be warm.’ ‘How did you know the fit, Cornelius?’ Caroline asks, doing up the laces. ‘Mrs Douglas, if I know the hands, I know the feet.’ ‘They are perfect,’ she says. ‘I do not know what to say ... but thank you. Thank you, Cornelius. I am ...’ He smiles. ‘What shall I pay you for them?’ she asks. ‘No, Mrs Douglas, the gloves are as we agreed, but the shears and the boots are a gift. Mr Broughton would be well pleased that you have
intentions for his vineyard. Consider them a gift from him, if you cannot acc ept them from me.’ She smiles. ‘I acc ept them from both of you gratefully , Cornelius. And if you are speaking with Mr Broughton, there in the afterlife ...’ ‘Yes,’ says Cornelius. ‘Then please let him know I have no skills, but I take strength from his encouragement and I will do my best to learn.’ She cannot know the pleasure Cornelius has taken in the crafting of his gifts. He wants to remember the goodness of the world. Caroline must be about the same age as his youngest daughter , if she lives. He doubts it. In some ways he hopes not. He hopes she has been dead for years and no longer endures what must be endured at the hands of men. Her mother , too. He will never see any of his children again. He walks to the back of the forge and takes down a hoop of rusted metal. ‘Mrs Douglas, do you know what this is?’ Her gaze is thoughtful. ‘It is from a cask.’ ‘Yes, it is.’ ‘You made the casks for Mr Broughton?’ ‘I r epaired a good many. All French oak. Some had stored brandy, others rum. He did things properly , Mr Broughton.’ In the coming years, Corneli us and Caroline will watch the seasons transform the valley. They will admire golden afternoons and night skies. Caroline will share stories with Cornelius that she will share with no one else. Cornelius will do the same, when he has the courage to remember . It is a slow unfolding.
A white woman could be the most dangerous thing in the world, Cornelius knew. Don’t look at them, don’t talk to them, watch out for them. They feared you. They would make you suffer for that fear, especially if they liked you a little bit. The brands on his arms were old now, worn down over the years to smooth. His fingers still travelled over them some nights when he lay awake, proof of things he had survived. A boy dragged from his village like a fish on a line. He was not put to work in the fields but apprenticed to the blacksmith. When he was barely grown, he was given a wife. Her first husband had died running. Runnin g away with her, shooting at their pursuers with a pistol he had stolen. When they caught him, they cut off his manhood in front of her, cut out his tongue and dragged him behind four horses. They shackled her and brought her back, whipped her though she was pregnant. When she gave birth a few months later, the child was light-skinned. She took it to the big house and gave it to one of the slave women there. ‘I will kill it otherwise,’ she said, and the woman understood. For four years, she and Cornelius were man and wife. Her skin smelled of the wind, of the baking she did for the master and his family. She did not resist him, but nor did she surrender . She behaved as if their bodies were s eparate from them, her eyes almost always closed. Sometimes she took him, surprising him with her passion, but it faded afterwa rds into an aberration of the night. ‘Don’t you go loving,’ she said. ‘Don’t let that in the door. It will bite you like a wasp and then you will stop breathing. Don’t be a fool. Love is for people with hope, and we don’ t have that.’ He tried to give her a place to rest with the things he could make, the work that he did, waiting for a softening in her that he thought might be possible in time. At the forge, he made nails, horseshoes, hooks, wheel rims, hammers, pitchforks and shovels, the fire taking his lust and his anger and
burning it all into metal and dust. Thinking he might yet make her smile, really smile. ‘I saw his arms torn out of his shoulders,’ she told him. ‘The skin scraped from his body, and still he lived and they dragged him until he was a rag of flesh. I’m not going to feel anything if that happens to you.’ She birthed two children, a boy and a girl, and they were dark-skinned and bright-eyed and he thought he had never seen anything more beautiful. He held them, sang to them, tried to remember stories from his childhood to tell them, and wished for a different world. She tended them, too, ensured they had what they needed, but she was not an easy mother . ‘They are going to be living all their days with fear in their bellies. The fear of life itself. And if they forget, I will remind them. Nothing to trust here. Nothing to rely upon.’ She was fierce in her unloving, and he came to love her for that more than anything. Word came of a dispute, some legal matter the master was implicated in. All the women and children were to be sold. ‘Will they ke ep them together?’ Cornelius asked. ‘They fetch a better price sold one by one,’ was the overseer ’s r eply. The day they were taken away, the men who had lost their wives and children were chained in irons, and they worked in irons for the next two weeks. Six of them were given one hundred lashes each and left overnight on the triangles for refusing orders. A week later, two of them were lashed again, and every slave was called to watch. The man who had taught Cornelius all he knew of fire and metal, coal and wood, was dead from a hacking cough. A cough that had him spitting blood until he collapsed on the path and was buried in the back field where they were all buried, their graves unmarked. Cornelius was the master blacksmith now. The mistress of the estate came to see him, bringing with her a fragrant pink rose that she laid upon the bench. She was accompanied by a house servant who waited beyond the forge. ‘I wish to give my daughter a wedding gift, Cornelius,’ she said. ‘Could you fashion one just like this, wrought in iron?’
She had a small body that had grown soft with fancy living. ‘Why are you called Cornelius?’ she asked. He didn’t know why he had been given the name, only that a man with an eye as white as an egg had assigned it to him, written it on a board and hung it about his neck. That was the first auction, just off the ship, their soiled bodies washed down with buckets of salt water. Then they were given oil to rub on themselves and paraded naked. From then on he was Cornelius. There was another auction, and another voyage, until he arrived at the plantation with its long fields of sugar cane. At first he shared a room with a dozen other children. When he was given his wife, they got a hut of their own and they made a little garden to grow corn and beans and squash. Now he lived in the hut alone and the rains had washed away the footprints of his wife and children that had lingered by the door and between the garden beds. ‘Would you like to hear a poem, Cornelius?’ the mistress asked. He didn’t like her asking this. He didn’t like one of the house slaves waiting beyond. She had perched herself on a bench and was turning the mistress’ s parasol in her hands, making eyes at him. Unaware, the mistress began in her low voice: ‘ Dim as the borr owed beams of moon and stars, to lonely , weary, wandering travellers is Reason to the Soul; and as on high Those r olling fir es discover but the sky , not light us her e, so Reason’ s glimmering ray was lent, not to assur e our doubtful way , but guide us upwar d to a better day ... ’ She had him r epeat the words, returning on several days to hear it, until he could recite it himself. Perhaps it was unintended, but he felt an invitation. They seemed like words to light the place where his hatred lay. The hate he felt being unable to save his wife and his children from whatever had befallen them. He knew what had befallen them. He imagined it over and over, and it took all his focus to ke ep it from eating him alive. He made her the rose and, before he could stop himself, he said, ‘I could make a gate. A gate of roses. A wedding gift.’
The gate was the finest thing he had ever made, a thing he lit the lantern for at night just to go visit it, amazed that he could make such a thing. She came often to see its progress. When it was finished, he packed it in straw, piece by piece, and took three other men with him to fit it together . The mistress and her daughter came to inspect it. They clapped their hands. The mistress invited Cornelius to the verandah of the big house. There was someone she wanted him to meet, she said, a guest at the house. On the verandah , he was offered lemonade by a maid. He did not acc ept it. He was observed by a young man on the verandah with a waxed moustache and wet black eyes, wearing a white suit, white shoes and a straw hat. ‘I have recommended you, Cornelius,’ the wife said, as if she were granting him a favour . ‘You are to go to Panama.’ There was no saying goodbye to the people he had lived with all those years, nor the forge where he had breathed fire and metal. No farewell to the hut hollow with the past. Ke ep breathing, he told himself, on the journey to the harbour . His legs and arms were shackled alongsi de four other men. The road took him away and he knew he would never find her again, nor his children. A scream curled tight within him, a burning howl he could never let loose. In the hold of the ship were many others, gathered from the markets. Scars on their bodies, ridged, scored, singular and many. The days and nights were all the same below decks, an eternity of sickness and torment. Upon arrival in Portobelo, he was branded again, each man marked on his shoulder with a crescent moon. Cornelius worked a forge in a warehouse on the waterfront. No making things of beauty now. Wagon wheels and axles and every metal thing it might take to move a cargo of tobacco, coffee and sugar from the Caribbean to the Pacific Ocean. To travel across Panama was to avoid thousands of sea miles and the risk of losing the cargo in the mighty oceans off Cape Horn. Some said the real cargo was gold and silver. The man in the white suit, Cornelius learned, had made this journey over the mountains to Veracruz before. He was a Spaniard, and to the men he was known as El Diablo. A caravan of wagons drawn by bullocks, along with slaves loaded with packs, d eparted the town. The weight of the cargo on their backs was
formidable. The mud of the jungle was red, the air close and thick with mosquitoes. The hills were ste eper than any Cornelius had ever seen. Men dropped in the heat. They dropped from fever. Alive at night and then dead in the morning, their faces haunted with the yellow agony of death. ‘What does it matter?’ El Diablo said, smiling his youthful smile as he turned to the men gathered before him, the dead laid out in the mud. ‘You are here because you are strong,’ he said. ‘Strong as bullocks . There are always more bullocks.’ The word whispered amongst them as they lay shackled at night was that only half of them might survive the crossing. It was his smile Cornelius would come to despise. El Diablo smiled when the day was wet, when it was unbearably hot. He smiled when he had his overseers flog a man for lagging , even if the man was sweating from fever. He smiled at the young girl he’d taken from a village to wash his clothes and make him meals. In the afternoon, when the rains came and they rested, he took her into his tent and they could all hear him with her, and her cries. One day he stripped her naked and had Cornelius tie her thumbs and her ankles to a board, a strap of leather tied across her waist. Then he lashed her with a short, plaited whip. Three cords, each tipped with silver . The overseers watched indifferently as they played cards, laughing and smoking. The slaves continued cooking and mending, chatting, making themselves busy , resisting the horror . By the time Cornelius was instructed to untie her, her back looked as if she had been attacked by a jaguar. This is how we forget to be men, Cornelius thought. He hated poetry then. He hated the roses he’d crafted from iron. The girl found a blade and cut her own throat. When El Diablo discovered her, he had her naked corpse nailed to a tree, her arms flung wide like the foreign god. The caravan of bullocks and wagons continued across rivers, up mountains and down, the mud and the wet and the heat and the crescendo of the jungle all ines capable. Cornelius dug wagons out of the mire and r epaired the things that broke. Dragging a fallen tree from the path, he felt something give low down in his back. He did his best to conceal the pain.
He was so tired. Tired of heat and damp, the smell of men, the smell of himself, the smell of rot and mud and death. The hot iron to sear a wound closed. The salt used for flogged skin. The yellow fever busy sucking away life all around him. Dim as the borr owed beams of moon and stars, to lonely , weary, wandering travellers is Reason to the Soul ... He resolved that he was not willing to die for this man. He glimpsed that Reason might be another word for running ... and this idea took hold in him. De ep in the journey , he wrested life from two overseers as fast as he might pull a snake from a woodpile and throw it to the ground. Bringing the axe down, cracking open first one skull and then another . Desperation was a fiercer wasp than love, but there was no peace in murder . No peace at all. He ran all night along the track that led the wagons in the direction of the setting sun. He was hunted by El Diablo’ s men, but he pushed his body on and on until he knew he was hours ahead of them. A day. He k ept on running until he came out on a ridge and looked upon the Pacific Ocean. It took his breath away. It was the biggest thing he had ever seen and there was nothing beyond it. He slipped down through the jungle into the township. When night fell, he stole clothing and food. He followed a group of men and entered a tavern on the waterfron t, looking for those with pitch on their hands. They were not hard to find, the men willing to risk their lives on the sea.
The captain had a temper if he was disobeyed, but he was not an unreasonable man. Aboard were men from all parts of the globe, good men and bad, every one of them hardened. They ensured the arrival of chocolate beans and cotton, artefacts and sugar, tobacco and timber, animals and seeds across the globe. On one voyage, a Catholic priest showed him the dried breast of a woman from the Amazon turned into a pouch for coin. He had seventeen for sale. ‘Only one breast is taken,’ the priest said. ‘The women live but their babies cannot survive. It makes the natives docile.’ From the Americas, the ship made safe passage into warm places, islands where the people reminded him of his own people, gathered on the fringes of white-sand beaches eating fish cooked over a low fire. He hadn’t thought of home in a long time. He wondered if anyone there was still alive. He had for gotten all their faces. He sailed south with whalers to the Bay of Islands in New Zealand and then across an intemperate sea to an island called Van Diemen’s Land. It was a chill and sparkling place of dark green forests, hills, mountains and towering clouds. He sailed up a great river under a flock of birds moving south, obscuring the sun for most of the morning. The whales in the harbour were so plentiful they could be killed by a harpoon trebuch et launched from the shore. The mountain slopes were abundant with kangaroo. There was a settlement of sorts. A few hundred sealers and whalers, explorers, deserters and truants, men and women from many lands who had taken to the sea for adventure, fortune or survival, and found a place where discovery was unlikely . There were broad hunting fields where the grasses moved like sunshine and the trees were greater in girth than any he had ever seen. The native people came and went quietly from forest and river in small groups, hunting kangaroo and birds, eating shellfish on the shore. Sometimes there was a little trading and an attempt at a shared language.
It was a place of whale blubber , whale guts, whale stench, seal stench, fur skins, seal oil, whale oil. He learned it was a new century , although the idea of it es caped him.
Within a few years, the English sailed in and made an encampment on the other side of the river. They put up a flag. Soon after, word came of a massacre of the native people after the kidnapping of one of their children by a soldier. The new arrivals relocated to the whalers’ settlement, where a rivulet ran from the mountain to the bay, a place they began to call Hobart Town. Their convicts laboured to fell trees, to mill timber, to cart and to carry. The settlement rambled along rutted streets and muddy lanes. Clay was dug and fired for bricks, stone was mined and carved, land was cleared. Rocks were broken and crushed, gravel was exhumed and shells were barrowed from the beaches to be ground into roads. She ep were loosed onto the open grasslands. The rivulet was sullied with waste. Drinking water had to be collected further upstream. English hunting dogs were sent from New South Wales to bring down the population of kangaroos. More soldiers arrived to bring down the population of the natives. The New South Wales Corps were the sort of white men Cornelius had seen everywhere, drunk on certainty and rum. A few years passed when no English ships arrived and there was no tea, flour or sugar, and no salted beef for the English garrison, but still there was rum. Soon it became a day’s walk and more to bring down game, and the whales came less often into the harbour . Cornelius had a gold cap on a rear molar and scars of every sort, small and large, inflicted and accidental. He had the height of a warrior, a broad chest, eyes that had seen the worst of people, a hip that had bothered him ever since Panama. The government officials had a long list of tools required for building, taming, baking and breaking. His forge was close to the harbour. The hearth, made of brick, was as de ep as it was wide. Smoke drifted up through the shingle roof. There was an order to his tools, and an order to the room in which he sl ept and cooked. He made allegiances. He
dressed carefully to ensure he was not mistaken for another kind of black man. He gained a certain standing for his usefulness. Buildings arose, wharves overtook the shoreline, railings, walls and fences enclosed property and corralled livestock. Taverns, dwellings and shops proliferated. Prisoners continued to arrive, stumbling from the holds of ships, weary men and women hollow with hunger and weakened by captivity , quickly put to work. Soldiers strutted the streets and the flogging yard was always busy. Seeing white men enslaved brought Cornelius no balm. Cruelty was a boundle ss cycle of suffering that deserved no allegiance. One afternoon, on a walk on the mountain where he liked to sit awhile and look down upon the town, a woman st epped out of the shadows. She wore a necklace of small green shells. A wallaby skin across her shoulders was her only clothing. Her hair was cropped close. They had no shared language, but he knew what she asked. You, with skin the same colour as mine, do you wish to visit with my people? Cornelius spent nights in the secluded valleys of the mountain with fire, songs and stories, babies sle eping in their mothers’ arms. He made love with the woman under the clouded stars. Theirs were different ways. There was nothing of owning, just belonging. Her people moved between mountain and sea, gone for seasons then returning. She laughed when she saw him again and welcomed him back to the fire and the dance. A child was born and he looked into her bright eyes and felt as if he had been given the moon for safeke eping. More and more ships arrived. Sh epherds and settlers were found dead in the hills, speared, their servants, too. He heard stories of raids and massacres. The woman’ s people were hanged on the waterfront for theft and murder. Roving parties of soldiers and convicts set out and returned, sometimes bringing with them a woman shackled, or children tied by a rope, pulled through the township behind dogs and horses. Every time, he feared it was her or his daughter . He did not know what he would do if it were them. One day he saw a soldier pull a man’s head out of his pack, the hair ochred, the jaw slack, the colourless eyes rolled back. A great cheer went up at the waterfront gin. He stopped going about after dusk.
She was taken from the shore by whalers heading north, along with two other women. And his daughter . The loss was almost enough to split his heart. He was mad with grief, enraged beyond reason. He sharpened knives, sought out a boat and acquired a map to go after them. But looking at the miles of coastline, the countless islands north and south, he realised the futility of the task. They were gone and he could not save them. He knew this demon. It had been with him a long time. The ke eping of hunting grounds and forest gardens, the smoking, stitching and skinning, the making of clothes and the threading of necklaces, the carving of ornaments, the welcoming of bird and fish, the harvesting from shore and sea, the gathering of clans, the ceremonies and seasons, it went away. Stories on bark were burned, markings on rocks disfigured and grown over. Dances went undanced, tales untold, songs unsung. Wood, water, fire and air. These were the elements that governe d and gave. There was a burgeoning population with wants and needs. Men came with orders and took away his handiwork. In the forge he fed the fire, watched the shape and colour of the flames to determine the heat, judging the flow of air, waiting for red, yellow and pale blue flames. He made axe heads and the rims for cartwheels. He fashioned hinges, bolts, locks and keys, and he k ept to himself. He worked the coke, cleaned out the clinker and removed the ash and dust. He was reliable and trade was steady . One early winter day, a young man of good bearing visited Cornelius and offered him a barn where he might have a bigger forge. ‘It is over the hill, away from the town with its moods and habits. I have a cottage there. If you think you might like it, I will install an apartment within the barn where you might live.’ Bartholomew Broughton had high spirits and big dreams which he shared with Cornelius. They walked the land and Broughton invited him to dine. ‘I have been in this town long enough to observe the people who can be relied on. You are such a man, Cornelius. No doubt you have heard rumours of me, as I have heard them of you. I know that my family in England would appreciate from me a veneer of respectability . If you will help me
achieve mine, I will help you achieve yours. A win for both of us. What say you?’ The barn became his new forge, scented with oak barrels still smelling of rum and brandy, but it was a home. Cornelius made the scythes and shears that k ept the grasses in the vineyard at bay. He made the spades that dug out the cellar and the shears that cut the grapes when they ripened. He stitched gloves and boots. Convicts dug and built, harvested, carried and cleared. Broughton spoke to Cornelius about his wine, but Cornelius refused to taste it, disliking anything that might dull his instincts or summon his memories. By the sixth year, there were not enough buckets nor barrels for the bounty. There were not enough bottles. Broughton had made a champagne from earth, sunshine, vine and rain. The township was surprised by this unexpected boon, a wine far superior to anything that arrived by sea. Here is a futur e never imagined for this place , the newspapers proclaimed. Broughton read the news to Cornelius, laughing as they pr epared bottles for transport to New South Wales and to Port Phillip. They sent wine to London, Paris and Copenhagen . Broughton gave cuttings to new settlers. Tastings were offered to prospective buyers. Winemakers from New South Wales toured the farm. When the next vintage was ready, cases were loaded onto wagons and stacked onto the backs of gigs. Customers returned, pleading for another order . Broughton planned a grand house to be built on the other side of the creek. Convicts cleared the land and established pine trees to line the way from the road to the residence. Sandstone was cut and footings laid. Fences were established. Gardens were planted. The house rose from the land as if it had always belonged there. And then Broughton was dead. Perhaps it was why the young winemaker had been in a hurry with his dreams; he may have had some sense that his time was short. He was mourned by many, especially the young woman who had left her husband in the township to live with him, she from a wealthy family, too, a great scandal. Cornelius liked them well together . Like two matching bowls. Broughton’ s sister sailed from England at the news of her brother ’s death and attempted to claim the farm for herself, despite Broughton having willed it to the woman he loved. A legal duel ensued. The years passed. Blackberries encroached. Grasses tangled with vines. Birds and opossums feasted as the crop ripened. Fruit dropped to the
ground. Last year ’s growth was overwhelmed by the next. Cornelius stayed on in the barn, both blacksmith and caretaker . He had money saved, and briefly considered leaving. There were always ships willing to take a passenger . Always places in need of a blacksmith. But he was no longer a young man. His hip still troubled him and his elbows ached in the evenings, and the morning s, too. He needed an eyeglass in poor light to thread twine for leather goods. It had claimed him, this place. The seasons, the water of the mountain creeks, and the endlessly changing light upon the river. The mavericks, dreamers, scoundrels and survivors who made a life here. It was all in his bones now . When the estate was finally settled and sold, Captain Swanston arrived with his wife and children. Swanston’ s interests were in banking, land, stock and politics. He proceeded with Broughton’ s plans for the new house but dismissed the vineyard already gone wild. There was no future in it, he told Cornelius. Other vineyards had failed. Only fools would invest in such a folly. He employed Cornelius to make all the tools required to equip his convict labourers. Trees were felled, the land given to she ep and planted with wheat. A decade after Broughton’ s death, a young woman appeared with a boy at her side, asking about the cottage, the vineyard. She appeared again with Mrs Swanston and was introduced to Cornelius as the new tenant of Broughton’ s cottage. Soon he was moving furniture for her from the barn. He saw her pushing her way into the wild scramble of the vineyard, turning about and taking it in, as if she knew something of its past or could see something of its future. On the morning he discovered her afloat in the pond when he went to take his wash, her eyes were open and she was staring into the morning sky as if she were having a vision. As he watches her walk back across the field in her new boots of kangaroo skin, he wonders if she is yet accustomed to the sensation of the world having flung her adrift. Mostly what he’d seen of people was a yearning to take away the dread of uncertainty . To be content in a smallness. But some people seemed to harbour greater thoughts. Mrs Douglas, he thinks, is doing all she can to manage this unfamiliar life, and to make something of it.