Old Man Madigan

This is an excerpt from a new short story, set in Colonial Australia, elements of the Weird playing on the edges. For the story of its creation see my blog post here.

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They rode out with the intent to kill Old Man Madigan, and the means to make it so. So they thought.

It wasn’t going to be easy of course. Madigan had been around before any of them had come to this parched and barren patch of earth. He’d been living amongst the red dust and scrub through droughts and fires and famine. He was a survivor was Old Man Madigan, not one of them doubted that.

When the trading post had first been raised, and the telegraph station beside it, and eventually, by accretion of corrugated iron and stubborn will, a town had formed, Old Man Madigan had been there. Watching them. Separate even when he came amongst them on that skinny-ribbed nag of his.

The rumours about him had been passed between drovers and wanderers for years. Some were plausible, others wild… most fell into that wide crack between the two. It was widely accepted that he had a thing for children. Everyone frowned on that of course – furrowed their brows and tutted amongst themselves in the public bar or on the steps of the church, glared at him when he came to town. As long as he just took the black-fellas kids it was a quiet rebuke. Excuses were made by some: She lured him, she was drunk on cheap whiskey, she weren’t that young really. In the end no one much cared what Madigan did to the little black girls in that hut well out of town. He took boys too though, and that was harder to explain.

The black-fellas weren’t stupid. Their mobs moved around, and soon enough they moved away from Old Man Madigan. When they came back it was in large groups – the men painted for war, carrying long spears, large shields, wooden clubs barbed with bone shards. Maybe that’s when Madigan got desperate. Maybe it was because the black-fellas had enough of losing their sons and daughters. Whatever it was, when Davey Thomas’ little girl went missing tongues were quick to wag and fingers were pointed into the north-east, along that narrow track that would lead to Old Man Madigan’s door.

Taking black girls was one thing, Madigan wouldn’t be the first to put a brown bastard in a black belly, but taking a pretty little town girl from a good church-going family, that was quite another. That was the sort of thing that would get folks riled.

John Ryan had been one of the first to stand on the step of the church and urge the men of the town to come together.

‘For justice,’ he’d cried, and the other men had nodded. Father O’Malley had called upon the gathered crowd to bring Old Madigan to the Lord for absolution, but Ryan had a different view of what justice would be and in the end more men had agreed with him than with a priest so new in town.

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