“Well ... yes. Who are you?”
“I’m a Kelly. My name’s Brian. What’s yours? I did hear but I’ve forgotten.”
Bony who liked frankness in other people, began to like this Brian Kelly. The grey eyes were wide and candid. He had his father’s colouring and the promise of his father’s physical power in the wide shoulders and the powerful neck. The voice was pleasing. The somewhat weathered riding togs were less so.
“The name is Nathaniel Bonnay. Nat for short. I met your father, I think, the day I arrived. You live in a nice place.”
“Nice enough on fine days, Nat. Leaks a bit when it rains. Nothing wrong with the country though. Except for the fogs. Though I like the fogs, as a matter of fact. They prevent people spying on others, like Grandma Conway’s doing right now.”
“She is, eh!”
“Have a deck,” Brian Kelly waved a hand towards the settlement. “Parks herself at the eye-piece of a glass all day. Don’t miss much, the old witch.”
Bony could see the sunlight glinting from behind a window adjacent to the general store.
“I’ll be told tonight that I don’t work fast enough.”
The younger man loaded a pipe, watching Bony at the same time with his small shrewd eyes. The wide mouth was generous, but the chin betrayed a quick temper. The flame-red hair needed cutting, and the cloth cap clamped down on it needed replacing. Bony knew that his mother had been dead several years. He knew, too, that Brian Kelly had, like the Conways in their turn, been educated at a Catholic college. That costs money and money was here in this valley. Yet Brian Kelly’s clothes were disgracefully worn, and could be his father’s cast-offs.
“Are you working for wages?”
“Contract. Seven shillings a bag,” replied Bony.
“Oh!” The pipe was lit, and Brian gazed pensively across the paddocks towards the settlement. “Where are they camping you?”
“In the cellar under the shed.”
“I’ve never been down there. Heard about it. Good hideaway, though. I understand they feed well. We eat like dogs.”
“Mrs Conway is a wonderful cook,” Bony said. “Seems to have plenty of help, too.”
“They’re civilised; we’re still savages.” He was sitting on the saddle sidewise, and the horse was placidly standing parallel with the wall. A faint smile touched his mouth.
“Didn’t think there was anything in horses these days. Stealing them, I mean,” he prompted, and Bony laughed and explained that the horses which had been his downfall were prospective racing stock. Brian wanted to know the details. He wanted to know what the country was like round Tenterfield. He asked if there was much employment in the real outback, and was pressing his questions when his face fell into a dark frown.
“The old man’s coming to argue,” he stated with conviction, adding with equal conviction. “I’m fed to the back teeth with the old man.”
Red Kelly was coming on fast, mounted on a grey mare that was feeling his spurs and crop. He was wearing smart jodhpurs and a tweed jacket, and the breeze was parting his bushy red beard and overgrown red hair. He arrived at speed, cruelly sawing at the animal’s bit. Ignoring Bony nonchalantly leaning against the wall, he shouted with unnecessary violence at his son.
“You get to hell out of here. Get on with your work. Go on, get away from here. I’ll not stand for you gossiping with every Tom, Dick and Harry, and horse-thieves and scum off the roads. Get going.”
Young Kelly sat on his horse without moving. His face was white, and his eyes appeared to reflect the colour of his father’s beard. With shattering swiftness the elder man slashed his crop across his son’s face, whisking the pipe from his son’s mouth.
“I’m the boss of Cork Valley,” he yelled. “I say go, you go. You been looking for a thrashing for a long time, my lad, a long, long time.”
Brian Kelly partly fell, partly slipped from his horse. He made a crouching run to the grey. Red Kelly lifted his crop to strike again. He was seized by a foot and tossed off his horse.
Chapter Six
A Private Fight
The question in Bony’s mind was: ‘Is this a staged brawl for the purpose of involving me and resulting in a trip to hospital, like that policeman?’ Such violence between father and son could, however, be genuine, and in either case Bony was presented with a ring-side seat.
Kelly gained his feet, blinked his small, turquoise eyes, and roared his fury. The protagonists were of the same height, but the older man had superior weight, and probably greater strength, despite his age. Bony settled down to enjoy a good match, as any man would do in a stadium. Yells, shouts, grunts and threats, combined with smacks like a storm-ripped sail, and welling gore, aroused in this man of two races instincts which he would normally be ashamed to reveal.
Now he was standing on the wall and yelling encouragement. The evenness of the battlers, their ferocity, the blood smearing their faces and fists drove from Bony’s mind what he was and had achieved, and all his maternal ancestors crowded in to take possession.
At one moment the son was standing on his father’s chest, and with both hands trying to tear the beard off him. At the next the son was staggering away and the father was on his feet. Then the father had his son in his arms and was straining to crack his ribs. Tearing himself from his father’s grip, Brian snatched up a seven-pound rock.
The rock rose and the rock descended on Red Kelly’s head. Red Kelly rolled forward on his side, flung his arms about his son’s ankles and brought him down. For perhaps a half-minute they were like little playful bears and then the younger man was on his back and the older man’s huge hands were about his throat. A vast heaving struggle slowly subsided and there was the horrific flutter of life about to depart.
Nat Bonnay proved to be the hangman’s nark. He jumped from the wall on to Red Kelly and dragged him back by the hair. As this was an unbelievable impertinence, Red Kelly heaved himself upward, threw Bony off his back and prepared to charge. But Bony was on his feet a fraction ahead of him, and the toe of Bony’s boot connected with Kelly’s chin grounding him like a plane without wings.
As one Kelly struggled to regain air and the other strove to return from a far journey, Bony was jigging on his feet: a delighted David triumphant over two Goliaths. When Red Kelly opened his dazed blue-washed eyes, he encountered eyes of indigo blue, and Brian Kelly lurched to his feet, swayed dizzily, and yelled:
“What are you doing, you black bastard? Keep out of this. It’s a private fight.”
He rushed Bony, shorter than himself by six inches, and lighter by three to four stone. Bony wasn’t there, and before he could swing about, he was being ridden like Sinbad. Bony rode high, and he did things to Brian’s neck with steel-like fingers in the manner of his mother’s knowledgeable people. Searing pain shot into Brian’s brain, unendurable and unending pain. He heard as though beyond the sea of pain the hissed words:
“I can send you mad, you young idiot. Pipe down.”
Then he was free of the pain but not of the knifing memory of it. He realised he was kneeling and sobbing. He heard his father shouting that he would murder the black bastard. The shouts turned into screams of rage, and the screams terminated in an earth shaking thud.
On Brian Kelly raising his head and looking about with one effective eye, he saw his father on hands and knees, the hands on one side of an earth-based boulder and the knees on the other, his shrinking stomach athwart the crown of rock. He began to crawl towards his sire, savage hate reborn, but when Red Kelly sprawled forward on his face and groaned, Brian crawled to his horse, clawed his way up and into the saddle, and rode dejectedly towards the big house.
Ten