Morgan’s Run (71 page)

Everybody was grumpy thanks to the foul weather, none grumpier than the Commandant, who was engineer enough to realize that he did not dare commence building a dam in the midst of such downpours, and had a crying baby in the house. Most of the work had to be postponed and too many people had little to do beyond grumble. The only truly happy persons were the three men at Ball Bay, snug under the pine trees in a good house, well provisioned, and able to rock fish no matter how hard it rained.

Even so, the 26th of February came as a mighty shock. Dawn arrived with high winds just to the south of east and seas so high that the surf broke all the way into the beaches of the lagoon. To Stephen and Richard, who walked as far out on Point Hunter as they dared, the sight of the coastline to the west was a terrifying vista of white water crashing down so hard and high against the cliffs that the spray soared up over 300 feet and blew inland as far as the mountain four miles away.

“God help us, we are in for the father of all gales!” Stephen shouted. “We had best be sure they are battening down the hatches!”

By the time they fought their way around Turtle Bay and turned to look back, not only had lofty Phillip Island disappeared; so also had Nepean Island, close in shore. The world was a seething mass of waves as big as those in the southern ocean on the voyage from the Cape of Good Hope, and the wind continued to rise even as it swung to the southeast, throwing the whole force of sea and sky straight at the settlement. Bent double in the blast, people were shooing pigs and poultry into the storehouses and huts, piling logs against their doors and climbing inside through their windows.

So huge were the noises of howling wind and thundering water that neither Richard nor Stephen noticed the shrieking groan of a 180-foot pine behind Turtle Bay as it lifted itself piecemeal out of the ground; they simply saw it fly, its massive roots and tapering top giving it the look of an arrow, thirty feet up in the air back toward the hills. More pines followed it, the bombardment of a fortress by an army of giants, the wind their bows, the pine trees their arrows, the white oaks their grapples.

Stephen struggled on down the row of huts making sure that all the hatches were battened; finding his own house door already bolstered by a pine log, Richard elected to stay outside, thankful that Joey and MacGregor were safe. As far as his own skin was concerned, he would far rather be out than in, blinded to his fate—horrifying thought! He sat on the ground with his back to the lee wall and the log to witness the cataclysm, massive pines and huge old white oaks flying to crash into the swamp, the hillsides, the lashing spray.

Then the rain came, so horizontal that Richard remained dry even as he looked upon the deluge. Thatched roofs farther down were lifting to blow away like umbrellas, but the vastest winds seemed to be thirty feet above the ground, which was what saved the settlement. That, and its lack of trees. Had Lieutenant King not ordered total visibility, the huts, store sheds and houses would have been buried together with those inside them.

It started at eight in the morning; it began to blow itself out at four in the afternoon. The huts in this middle section where Richard and Joey lived kept their roofs, as did the bigger houses, all shingled rather than thatched with flax.

But not until the next day—innocently balmy, the breeze a zephyr—did the sixty-four people of Norfolk Island see what havoc the hurricane had wreaked. Where the swamp had been was a tumbling river lapping around the flanks of the old garden hill; the ground everywhere was feet deep in pine branches, pine tails, bushes, sand, coral chunks, leaves; and the windward sides of the buildings were smothered in debris so blasted into the wood that it needed great effort to pull the debris off. There were literal fields of felled pines, their root systems so mighty, their tap roots so long, that imagination foundered at gauging the strength of those winds. Where they had grown were craters many feet deep, and looking up to where the forest had not yet been touched by any axe, the pine casualties were as numerous. Many hundreds of trees had come down just within sight of Sydney Town; three acres of recently cleared ground on the far side of the swamp were solidly covered with pines. Not fifty men cutting down trees every day for a month could have produced so much timber.

“This cannot be anything but a true freak of nature,” Lieutenant King said cheerily to his assembled family, even its serpents in a chastened mood. “Nowhere that I have been on this island have I seen any evidence that a hurricane like this has ever struck before, at least in the however many hundreds of years it takes for the pines to grow to two hundred feet. It has simply never happened.” His expression changed to something approaching a Wesleyan preacher in full fire-and-brimstone spate. “Why did it happen in this year? Those of ye who have transgressed should examine your souls. This is God’s work!
God’s work!
And if it is God’s work, ask yourselves why He has sent this visitation upon the first men ever to inhabit one of His most precious jewels? Pray for forgiveness, and do not transgress again! Next time God might choose to open up the earth and swallow ye whole!”

Brave words which actually sank in for several weeks after the event; then, as is the wont of men, the lesson was forgotten.

Lieutenant King had cause to wonder if perhaps his own hot temper was a contributing factor toward God’s tantrum; a tree killed his privately owned sow and her litter of piglets.

That the devastation was island-wide was evident in the logs and branches which dammed up the stream in Arthur’s Vale, carried down from the hills during the torrents of rain. Spring cleaning took days for the men, weeks for the women, who bore the brunt of it, and it was a full month before the lagoon turned from the red of washed-away soil to its customary aquamarine.

But when Supply arrived in the roads on the 2nd of March, Richard and his sawyers went back to work in the sawpits. The New South Wales settlement was still hungry for planks, scantlings and beams, not to mention ship’s spars. At least no one had to ply an axe; the timber was already on the ground, though of course much of it was old and rotten.

Among others, Supply brought an experienced sawyer, William Holmes—
why
did they have to be Williams? After the trees at Port Jackson, Holmes said, Norfolk Island’s pines were a mere nothing.

Aware that the Commandant was lusting after a third sawpit, Richard told Holmes to find three other men from among Supply’s new infusion of convict blood and take over the sawpit on the beach. A good man; he brought his wife, Rebecca, with him, and the pair settled quickly into community life. That left Bill Blackall and Will Marriner in charge of the Arthur’s Vale sawpit; while I, said Richard to himself with iron determination, take Private Wigfall, Sam Hussey and Harry Humphreys to the new third pit farther up the vale. It will be far more peaceful and I will ask Lieutenant King if I may build myself a good house nearby. Joey Long must fend for himself. All I will take are my books, my bed and feather bedding, half of our blankets and my own belongings. And one of MacGregor’s pups, since Mr. King is allowing Joey to take two of Delphinia’s five, the males. A good ratter up the vale will be a blessing.

All of
these resolutions came to pass. They were a grief to Stephen Donovan only, who did not see as much of Richard as he had when it was a simple matter of calling in at his door on the way to Turtle Bay for a swim.

Lieutenant John Cresswell and a detachment of 14 more marines arrived with winter; the work force was now formidable enough and the policing of it strict enough to see the bulk of the Commandant’s most cherished schemes come to pass, including his dam. Richard’s house was several hundred yards above it, almost at the point where the forest commenced.
Peaceful
.

Paths suddenly loomed high on Lieutenant King’s agenda. One such path was cut all the way across the island—three miles—to the leeward side at Cascade Bay, so called because the most spectacular of the many small waterfalls tumbled down a cliff there to cascade into the sea. A jagged but platformish outcrop of rock just offshore made landing there feasible when Sydney Bay’s prevailing winds prevented any thought of landing across the reef. The Cascade path was also necessary because most of the best flax grew around Cascade, and Lieutenant King resolved to set up his canvas-from-flax industry in a tiny new settlement not far above the landing place he would call Phillipburgh.

Richard went into Sydney Town but rarely, for it was rapidly mushrooming into an actual street of huts and houses. Save for attending divine service each Sunday and collecting his rations, he had no need to visit the place. MacTavish was every bit as good a watchdog as his father, and all the company Richard wanted save for Stephen, who had become so firmly “Stephen” in his mind that it was increasingly hard to remember that he was “Mr. Donovan.”

His house was ten by fifteen feet, had several big window apertures to let in plenty of light, and Johnny Livingstone had made him a table and two chairs. His roof was thatched with flax, but he had been promised shingles before the end of the year. It had a wooden floor some inches off the ground and foundations of round pine logs; the pine rotted quickly once embedded in soil, so this method of construction enabled him to ease out a rotting foundation post without dismantling the house, which was lined with thin pine boards of the most attractive kind because the Commandant had inexplicably taken against this particular grain—the wood owned a rippling pattern which reminded Richard of sunlight on calm water. Privately he wondered whether the ripples were evidence of the way the pine compensated for the perpetual winds; no one knew of any other tree anywhere which could grow absolutely straight in the teeth of a high prevailing wind, yet the Norfolk pine did, even on the most exposed clifftops. After that colossal hurricane all the young trees had bent over to touch the ground or snapped their tops off, but within two months the bent ones were ramrod straight again and the snapped ones sprouting two separate tops.

Burglaries had increased now that the population stood at 100 souls, but thieves left Richard Morgan severely alone. Anyone who had watched him pull the fourteen-foot saw through three full feet, the muscles of his naked back and chest moving beneath the brown skin, decided that he was not a man to offend. He was, besides, a notorious loner. The community’s loners, of whom there were a number, were viewed with a superstitious shiver of fear; there had to be something mentally wrong with a man who preferred his own company, who did not need to see himself reflected in somebody else’s eyes or hear himself praised, drawn into an entity larger than he was. Which suited Richard perfectly. If people thought him dangerously strange, all the better. What surprised him was that more men did not elect to become loners after years of being jammed cheek by jowl with others. Solitude was not only bliss, it was also a healing process.

The hard
core of January’s mutineers got John Bryant at last midway through winter. Francis, Pickett, Watson, Peck and others off Golden Grove were cutting timber on Mount George when—who knew how, who knew why?—Bryant stumbled into the path of a falling pine. His head crushed, he died two hours later and was buried on the same day. Half crazed with grief, his widow wandered Sydney Town keening and moaning like an Irishwoman who spoke no English.

“The mood is very nasty,” Stephen said as he walked back to Richard’s house after the funeral.

“It had to happen” was all Richard said.

“That poor, wretched woman! And no priest to bury him.”

“God will not care.”

“God
does
not care!” Stephen snapped savagely. He entered the house without needing to bend, noting its scrupulous tidiness, the lined walls and ceiling, and the fact that Richard was slowly polishing them. “Christ,” he said, sagging onto a chair, “this is one of the very rare days in my life when I could do with a beaker of rum. I feel as if I am to blame for Bryant’s death.”

“It had to happen,” Richard repeated.

MacTavish, in whom the Scotch terrier line had run true, leaped into Richard’s arms without making a nuisance of himself in the usual manner of a young dog; he has trained it, Stephen thought, with the same thoroughness he devotes to everything. How does he manage to look exactly as he did when I first met him? Why have the rest of us aged and hardened while he has preserved intact every iota that he always was? Only more so. Much more so.

“If ye get me a few stalks of the sugar cane running riot,” said Richard, gently thumping the dog’s lower spine with the flat of his hand, “in two years I will give ye all the rum ye can drink.”

“What?”

“Oh, plus two copper kettles, some copper sheet, a few lengths of copper tubing and some casks cut in half,” Richard went on with a smile. “I can distill, Mr. Donovan. ’Tis another of my hidden talents.”

“Christ, Richard, ye’re a commandant’s dream! And for the love of God, will you please call me Stephen? I am so tired of this lopsided friendship! Surely after so many years it is time ye gave in, convict though ye may still be? ’Tis that Bristol prudishness, and I hate it!”

“Sorry, Stephen,” said Richard, eyes twinkling.