Remember Ronald Ryan Read online

He and I laughed together and he bragged about how the officers were going to make grog

  So each of them had a big keg of it and they all got wasted together looking after us

  Which was why I went over the wall on the nineteenth of December the way I done

  And ran into that Salvo Hewitt whom I was supposed to assault with the rifle

  I never did and he just got hurt somehow like I tripped and hit him accidentally

  But the Herald played it up big as if I were heartless and a violent criminal

  I lie here and know that I’m not violent like the Cabinet of the Liberal Party are

  Who demand my death by hanging as they break bread with their children and their own priest

  I sat up all last night my last one

  I listened to the Christians and trade unionists down there in Champ Street

  Singing their splendid verses and sacrosanct tunes of hope

  Singing so all who hear can hope for my life still beating in this cell like this

  I cut myself deliberate so I see my wrists bleed but only to see the red of it happen

  Not for suicide but to check out the man-alive pulse of a man

  I am the pulse and I am the last life

  And still they sang and murmured hope for me whom they don’t even know at all

  I am a symbol of something inviolate and unviolated therefore

  I am an enlightenment

  I am the Holy Ghost of D Division itself of itself and for itself which is Love of God

  I lie here and am terrified

  I can hear the coffin organisers screw the lid on made of despair and oiled with havoc

  Oiled with vengeance to win the next State election by a landslide at least

  I’m just a man who has three daughters and I miss them more than the noose can say

  I have three sisters I miss more than the fear of never seeing them which is Love of God

  My father shot through on me so I despise him for his cowardice and slovenliness

  He couldn’t be bothered and you must be

  He got wasted in a filthy fruit picker’s shack and hated his body

  He thought it was funny to live and it isn’t

  My beating pulse I can hear it no matter the spirited and strenuous singing of the unions

  The unions that don’t want the death penalty back

  I’m just a symbol of what the unions don’t want

  None of those singing so angelic would like me if they bumped into me in a dark lane

  My God I laughed

  I laughed at what I said

  I’m still amusing a minute to go

  My mother she came in a different time ago

  She sat on the kapok bunk and said something that really hurt me

  She said, ‘Just think my darling you’ll be no more bother for Mr Grindlay the Governor!

  Thanks a lot Mum!

  It felt good looking in her eyes of wisdom and bright cobalt blue

  With no sandy blight in

  She was so utterly relaxed it was as though we were two old jailbirds!

  Pecking at the seeds of all the days left on Earth

  Dear is the Earth

  Dear is the face of my mother who invented the original of love and not the copy

  I am the copy of original sin

  I sinned by shooting someone at least they made me believe I did!

  They got me in a room and beat me up for nothing believing I did it George!

  They hit me all the day with an open phone book

  And then had me photographed looking slightly resentful

  Every wanted poster had that hate look in it

  Because they got the look they wanted

  I need to hold one of my young daughters immediately

  I need to hold my father’s head and kick it into the Murray

  I need my mother with me when they put me on stage in a minute

  I can look into her unjudging eyes

  She knows how innocent I am

  She knows the wind off Bass Strait

  She knows Jesus personally on a first name basis

  Christ she knows Him well!

  I can hear them coming for me now on the bluestone warped-by-time steps

  The Governor has been crying for me as well as praying for me

  His wife Audrey has been crying and praying because we know each other well

  And have joked over dinner and laughed and wept together in the shared past of Communion

  The Condemned Cell door it opens and smiles like a dreadful grin

  The Roman Catholic priest says goodbye Ron

  He sits patiently under the gallows with the holy gel to put in my nostrils and what have you

  To stop my soul from entering hell

  The heat is so hot I feel like fainting let along hanging like some exhibit for people to gawk at

  The heat is hotter than when we broke out Peter Walker!

  That incredible heatwave when we got out of here—remember it do you?

  With all that junk we tied together like dressing-gown cords and bits of wire

  And scrambled out like two very natty rats with our hair oiled in a glossy way!

  Now we are on the stage together like ordinary actors

  Except it’s real

  That’s the difference Peter it’s real alright me old!

  Now I can see the press and the photographers gawking at me

  I can smell the pong of wine on them all!

  They wrongly think it’s going to be Our Boys Own Annual!

  It’s dreary and it’s macabre and it’s me

  The Hanging Man tugs me so roughly, so roughly I lose my poise

  That’s all you have—poise!

  He tugs me so toughly and insensitively I lose all propriety

  I say, ‘For God’s sake make it quick!’ and he shoves the hood on my head in a second

  I’ve seen him before you know—he comes from WA.

  Now he works for the Department of Treasury, I’m not joking!

  I didn’t shoot you George you know that

  I didn’t do the things the press made out—none of them!

  I remember everything

  Everything that ever occurred

  The births of my three daughters in the bush

  Me and my wife on either end of a bush saw together cutting up weatherboard planks

  When I lived in Cranbourne near the railway line

  In that shack furnished with stolen property and thieved towels from the Cranbourne Public Baths

  I showed up one night after leaving you for dead

  And I had a pinched big furniture track filled with pinched walnut tea tables and heaters

  And you said, ‘It’s a bit late for a delivery isn’t it love?’ and you laughed

  Even though I lobbed at four in the morning

  And I said, ‘It’s the only time the truck is available my lamb!’ And we both laughed.

  I guess I imitated Micawber

  I guess I was hopeless

  I guess it’s time to die but I don’t want to!

  What can they stop me seeing once they execute me for something I didn’t do?

  Who can they stop me from loving or from joking with after they do it?

  I feel so giddy like I’m in freefall or something like that

  Why don’t you just not do it?

  ‘And send me home to my sisters and daughters and my missus if she’ll still have me?’

  She came in to see me like Mum did on her Pat Malone

  She told me like a grim story she’d remarried

  But he croaked it sitting up having a cup of tea only last month the poor thing he is!

  Here are my black gym shoes lined up together to sail through the trapdoor

  Here are my shaking legs

  Here is my dick doing wee on my own pants sort of thing

  They tighten the rope so hard I can hardly concentrate

  One of the journalists has cause t
o rapidly vomit on seeing me go through

  Now my face is black and Father is administering Last Rites

  He is saying the Mass or at least I think it’s the Mass or something impressively gloomy

  My heart is racing like a rocket even though my neck is broken

  It beats for nearly twenty minutes as they just leave me hung

  The way they bury me is to chuck me in a lime pit to disintegrate my name of Ryan

  I have slugs as fellow escapees now

  And worms as confiders

  They like to confide in a man like me

  A no-hoper like I was

  It’s all incredibly peaceful in jail now

  The prisoners have ceased weeping and know I am home in Balranald in New South

  I am home at last like a whirlpool is home at last in its safe home—the mighty Murray River!

  There is nothing more they can do to me except forget me forever

  They won the State election after all that fuss

  Then abandoned the death penalty forever too

  I’m sitting up nice and straight in Balranald again in the merest finger of sun

  And my mother is of course and naturally enough singing to me

  I keep waiting for my reprieve

  Three reprieves in point of fact

  Three sheets of truth telling a lie

  That I never shot you George Hodson

  Not once and certainly never twice nor thrice

  The jury swore they believed the witnesses in Sydney Road

  The witnesses swore and you ought not to swear in a Christian society

  The particular rifle I pinched off that sleepy guard

  Didn’t make smoke from its breach

  It didn’t simply because it didn’t

  Yet the witnesses testified I went into a kangaroo shooter position

  And shot you but I didn’t dear old friend of the eternal punishment

  The eternal refreshment that is my daughters

  The eternal laughter that is my family

  The eternal whimsy that is the sunny park and the sunny attitude of relaxed trees

  You with whom I used to play chess

  George Hodson with whom I shared many a joke

  And bold were the jokes and casual the repartee

  You walked up to me and said, ‘Give it away Ryan you haven’t got a chance!’

  And there we were together me and Peter Walker

  Smack dab in the middle of bubbling-hot Sydney Road—tested

  And that Greek guy in his Mr Whippy van nearly ran us over deliberately

  Trying to make a big man of himself

  Even Mr Whippy wants to be a folk hero

  Even Mr Whippy gets up in the stand

  To testify

  Whether it shall be almond or strawberry ice-cream is the sticking point

  I knelt dear friend but I did not fire at you

  I didn’t understand just how to fire it at you

  I just knelt and saw you tumble into the hot steel rail tram barrier

  I saw you spin and seem of course to faint next to put-out travellers to Town

  We always called Melbourne Town when we were kids

  Two officers shot you George from their high towers

  And they committed suicide because they knew they did it together

  So that’s the information

  Enough for a play

  Or an epilogue

  Or a psalm or a piece of pathos or theatre

  Which it is and which it was

  That a no-hoper like me got hanged for doing nothing

  Doing nothing but knocking off junk in a warehouse but I was armed

  That is why George I got seventeen years of smashing bluestone into fragments

  Like the portions of my life

  That are the record of my wife’s births of our three little kids

  She had her babies in the scrub

  With her and me on one end of the bushman’s saw

  She was strong as well as pretty George

  Now they are weighing me for the execution

  And one of them said I’ve put on weight since my trial

  It’s the porridge that whacks it on

  Now they are summoning my hanging fellow

  Who I hear gets time and a half

  Because he’s in the Public Servants Union and fully paid-up!

  Now it is now and not before

  The judgement second is upon my neck and secret spirit and shy soul from the countryside

  I never killed George Hodson

  I never did and yet they do it to spite my family and despite my innocence!

  Just a white t-shirt and Bob’s your uncle

  Just gymnasium pants and nothing in my pocket

  Not a cheap transistor I thieved from our community or anybody in transit

  My soul’s in transit by the way

  They hang it as they do the rest of Ryan

  They hang my family as they do me to spite my innocence and my athleticism

  My mysticism and my sacred word I never shot anybody not once

  I swear by George’s own family I didn’t do it!

  But nobody listens and nobody ever cares about scum like me

  I can hear the rodents and the rats scurry down there below the scaffold

  Looking like a whole lot of murder trial juries by the by

  My hanging is actually being sponsored by a rope company in Footscray

  Kinnears Ropes are worldwide

  Famous for their intensity of purpose and colossal willpower

  My ghost might join the Footscray Bowling Club when I’m dead

  And enjoy a family night with the jury that did me in at the Supreme Court

  Where I was handcuffed to you

  You my audience

  And my redeemer

  And you Peter Walker who escaped with me

  On the 19th of December 1965 in an incalculable way

  Got over the impossible wall in an impossible way

  Using bits of rope and wire all chained together to do it

  Standing there in our prison-issue clobber with printed black arrows on it

  And me saying to crazy motorists, ‘Give us a go! Give us a go!’

  As if they’re going to give us a lift to dreamy Saint Kilda Beach or Luna Park somehow!

  We are standing there pointing rifles at them saying, ‘Give us a go!’ ‘Give us a go!’

  The looks on their faces was worth recording I tell you that for nothing!

  The Salvation Army man Hewitt came at me real forceful-like!

  In the manner of all Salvos!

  He accidentally got clocked by my carbine not that I meant it or anything like that

  Then the Herald newspaper crucified me for a thing I didn’t do

  And the Herald artists made my face the devil’s own one

  For the repugnance and repulsion of the simple reader of their simple paper

  My fate was sealed with that wicked face on the front page of the Herald newspaper!

  Anything to sell a paper!

  Just like I who never did anything but pinch a lady’s watch at the races

  Last evening past in the Condemned Cell

  Listen to me you who care

  Last evening past in the Condemned Cell I saw George Hodson’s immortal ghost just once

  Just once I saw it and believe me once was more than enough

  He said he realised I didn’t do it

  He said he forgave me even or especially because I didn’t do it

  He said he loved me as a screw can love a prisoner

  Like a brother I never had

  Like a friend I wished I had now

  Like now dear friend at five minutes to

  Five earthly minutes till I go through to hell or Balranald

  One or the beautiful other

  The bush or Bass Strait all hosed away to Bass Strait like a sob

  But Father Brosnan waits for me down there unde
r the scaffold so impatiently

  Like he wants to put on a bet

  Go to Caulfield on a sure bet

  I just said to him

  Because I just saw him before a second ago it really was

  I said as I shook hands with the Roman Catholic priest of D Division

  And every other frightful Division of Terror and terrible things I said

  ‘Always remember you were ordained for me!’

  And he seemed to imagine I quoted it but I made it up to big-note myself

  Now they are singing the everlasting word out in Champ Street

  The trade unionists are even singing and they hate singing

  Unless it’s ‘Solidarity Forever’ or something gloomy like that

  The Teachers Union are linking arms and singing just for me

  And it’s over a hundred in the shade of Champ Street

  Last night in the Condemned Cell I had a visitor I tell you!

  An old lantern-jawed Salvation Army woman with a copy of the Bible

  She used to get a few shillings from drunken waterside workers in pubs

  And dig her collection box hard into their ribs and hurt them by the bar

  And say to them with pots of watered down beer in their paws

  ‘You’ve had enough of that poison I think. Whack a shillin’ in my box for the needy!’

  It always worked because collective guilt always does in the end

  My daughters are out there in suburbia with their sobbing boyfriends

  My three sisters resemble the Three Sisters at The Blue Mountains

  Carved out of sympathy

  Carved out of longing

  Carved out of outrage

  Carved out of our collective innocence

  They just listen to the idiotic tick of disappearing time

  Time nicking off

  Time getting away with murder

  The old lantern-jawed woman from the Salvation Army doesn’t know how to crumble

  She leant me her Catholic Bible with its golden-leaved pages of misery

  And I didn’t have it in me to tell her how I’d been sodomised each day at Rupertswood

  In their seminary by their bishops who raped me every day and called it charity

  One day they will be executed instead of a fool like me

  Such as Ryan who was a pub dudder

  Who flogged faulty pop-up top-up electric toasters to fellow Catholics who’d fallen

  What I should give to be pardoned by the third reprieve

  The third reprieve coming through the big iron-hearted door

  Shall it be liberty or shall it be my busted neck in the official Government telegram?

  Soon they shall flit it through the keyhole

  If it says life then they shall stay the hanging and my pulse shall be returned to my chest