“It makes every difference.”
“Not to me. Not to us. We’re still the same people, Katie. And look at us, look where we are. We’ve built a fucking empire.”He spread his arms to the room.
“So it was worth it? Shame on you, Billy McBride!”
She turned back to the window, and in the long silence that followed, Billy finished his whiskey and poured another, quicklydrinking himself into a stupor, the deadening weight of the liquor, the air around him thick and full. Yet for some reasonhe wouldn’t leave her, wouldn’t walk out. He felt a need to persuade her, hear her tell him he was right. He fell into oneof the fireside armchairs and sat staring at the ash in the grate, the upright clock counting the seconds, tick-tock, tick-tock.
Finally Katherine joined him. Lowered herself into the other armchair. Watching him coldly, she said, “You’re going to tellme exactly what happened back then, Billy. The absolute truth this time, nothing altered, nothing left out.”
It took a while before he could answer: “Why?”
“Because you’re my husband, and I don’t have the slightest idea who you are. I thought I did, but I was kidding myself. There’s a hole running through you, eating you alive—I’m scared one day it’ll swallow the rest of us too. Tell me, then at least there’s a chance I’ll understand. At the moment all I can think is the worst.”
And he could feel it rising inside him, the truth, threatening to erupt. A truth he’d been hiding from himself, even; whoseevery glimpse scared him to his core.
“You’ll hate me.”
“Maybe. But right now I can hardly stand to look at you as it is.”
Billy shook his head. He needed another drink. He went to rise but Katherine put out a hand and he slumped back in the chair.“Christ, Katie, I was only sixteen.”
“That doesn’t change what happened.”
“But it does—don’t you see? First into that house, finding Daddy and Ma, Mary dying, Tommy spilling his guts on the floor.I had to do something. I was the one, I had to choose. So we came up here and John brings in Noone—it’s not like I could have ever said no. Blokes like that, there’s no arguingwith them, then they’ve got you, for the rest of your life it seems. Did you see the state of Drew Bennett in that courtroomearlier? Do you know what Noone did to him?”
“Again, you were there, Billy. You talk like it wasn’t you too.”
He looked at her with incomprehension. How couldn’t she see?
“But that’s what I’m telling you. I had no choice, with any of it. I only went to the Bennett place because he threatenedyou and Tommy, I didn’t know he would burn down their fucking barn. He shot those four blacks after like they was nothing,like they wasn’t no better than dogs.”
She didn’t know who he was referring to—the missing troopers, maybe—but at least she had him talking. She nodded and reclineda little, waited for him to go on.
“See, that’s what I’m up against, the kind of man he is. Acts like this harmless politician but there’s something wrong inhis head. And if I’d said what really happened in court today, I guarantee he’d be up here killing us all too.”
What really happened—a prickle of fear down her spine. She tried to keep her voice even: “There’s only me now, though. We aren’t in any dangerhere.”
“Aye, well, it seems like you already know anyhow, so . . .”
Though she’d known it was coming, the admission snatched the breath from her chest. The truth, after all this time. “You mean,you did it? Like they said?”
And he laughed then, somehow. Laughter riven with pain. “None of them knows the fucking half of it.” Casting about the roomfrantically; his body had begun to shake. “Yes, we caught them others in the ranges, but there wasn’t no gunfight or anythinglike that, just had them chained back-to-back in the camp. Locke did one on account of that spear but John said if I killedthe other and . . . if I killed him and . . . I’d be a man by the morning, he said.”
She asked it as gently as she could: “If you killed him and what?”
He couldn’t look at her. “There was this gin they had tied up on the ledge behind. John took her to this cave and . . .”
He drifted into silence. “And what? What did you do?”
“I shot the black with Locke’s revolver but it went in near his neck, bloke wouldn’t die, kept reaching out, like this . . .”He mimed it, the clawing. “I couldn’t get another round in to reload. Tommy had to finish the job.”
“The woman, Billy.”
“I had no choice, we all . . . it wasn’t just me, everyone took a turn.”
Revulsion surged through her, a bilious, violent lurch. She cupped her hand to her mouth and managed to keep it down, hereyes on him cold as stone.
“I ain’t proud of it,” Billy pleaded. “But John forced me just about.”
She swallowed painfully. “Did he force Tommy too?”
“It was never the same for him, though, was it? Tommy had me to look out for him—who did I have, Katie? Who did I have?”
She was silent a long time. “And after? The tribe?”
Billy shook his head, stared at the dead fire. “It was too late when I realized. There wasn’t anything I could have done. Aye, we killed the lot of them, just like they said. But d’you want to hear the funny thing: Joseph wasn’t even there!”
He began laughing wildly, breaking now and then into tears. They gathered in his eyes and fell down his cheeks and he didnot wipe them away. And they were for himself, Katherine knew, not the Kurrong, not that woman in the cave. Impassively shewatched him keening, his head in his hands, fingernails clawing at his hair, until abruptly he managed to stop himself andsit upright, attempting a smile as if, because it was out now, everything between them was somehow all right. He wiped hisnose with the back of his hand and left a
