Brian Penton Page 5

  “Can he fight?”

  “Pity you wasn't here to see when he put Black Jem, the bushranger, in his bunk and when he stoushed that bloke M'Govern.”

  “Who was he?”

  “A bloke.” Sambo pulled his line in and baited it again slowly. But his lower lip overlapped the upper for some time after it had helped to solve the difficulty of making a lump of damper paste stick on a hook. “A FUNNY bloke,” he said. “Come up from the south and started bossin' yer old man round. Bossed me too! Then he mizzled.”

  “Did they have a fight?”

  Sambo frowned. “Of course. Bloke don't mizzle in such a hurry he leaves a three-year-old chestnut behind without being hoofed out. Mind you, no one actually seen it. Night the old humpy burnt down it was, and yer old man was just gettin' better from bein' blinded. Fell in a bush they reckoned. That was funny too. Never heard of yer old man fallin' offera horse before. Funny the way he looked when we see that cove without any face down Ningpo way that night just after. And funniest of the lot a bloke leavin' that chestnut. . .” He was silent for some time, pondering. Then he shook his head and abandoned a mystery for an indisputable truth. “Chestnut's best kinda horse. Gimme a chestnut any day.” These stories scared James. All at once the glitter of the day was tarnished over. “I better go home,” he said. He sneaked into the house and hid in the room where he slept with Geoffrey, heard Emma setting the table for dinner, Cabell washing his hands behind the kitchen, heard them sitting down. Silence, except for the flies and the drip-drop-drip of water in the earthenware filter.

  Then Geoffrey spoke up. “Miss Todd couldn't find Jimmie this morning. But I know where he is.”

  Nobody encouraged him.

  “He's hiding in the bedroom, if you want to know.”

  “Sssh-shhh! Eat your dinner,” Mrs Todd said hastily.

  It was not that they expected Cabell to get up and belt James. He did not expect that himself exactly. He didn't know what he expected. He was terrified of a violence—rumoured, sensed in the cringing of men when Cabell shouted—as vague and terrible as the past from which came Sambo's stories. The ugly scar on Cabell's face, the patch on his eye, the other eye that seemed to concentrate all the light that had once been in two, the ruckles of purple flesh on his arm where a fire had scorched him, were a hint of this past and of the terrific spirit which had endured it. But it was hidden away, buckled down, and that was what frightened James most of all, for Cabell, biting his teeth on a retort to Emma, thrusting his fist in his pocket when Larry answered him back, seemed to be buckling down the devil in his heart.

  All day he hid about the house. The smell of the meat roasting for tea made a painful hole in his stomach, but he was afraid to come out and get the food Emma left about for him. He was hiding among the flower-pots at the end of the veranda now. The sun was going down. Monaghan was bringing a mob of sheep across the flat: the yap of the dogs and his shrill voice wailing “Hoy-hey,” breaking down into a rumble of bass snarls at the dogs, “Gedaway back, Blue. Gedaway back, blast yeh,” rose clearly through the froth of noises marking the end of the day—the rhythmic creak-creak, creak-creak of a wagon coming through the scrub, Sambo and Larry bailing up a wild cow by putting a noose over its horns and hauling it in on the windlass, the calf's frantic moaning, the rattle of buckets, the tame magpie whistling in the garden, cockatoos squabbling like bad-tempered old women, the dry patter-patter of sheep on dusty ground, the clink of trace chains in the yard, cicadas, a stir of breeze in the trees like leaves turning in a book, voices. . . This excited chatter of men and animals and birds finishing another day swirled round the house but did not enter it, as though the place had a hard shell to protect the soft kernel of its silence, spongy, rotten, yet ever threatening to give forth some monstrous, unexpected foliage.

  Cabell came up the steps and settled into the rocking-chair with a sigh. An oven door slammed in the kitchen and James heard the clatter of his mother's big, greenhide boots in the passage.

  She stood in the doorway watching the back of Cabell's head. The wrinkle-wires jerked in her face.

  “Well, what d'you want?”

  The silence, that always seemed about to burst and give forth some rank growth, like the yellow nut-grass that sprang up in the semidarkness under the house, clotted around them.

  James shivered. “They're going to have a row,” he thought and felt the earth tremble under him as if its pillars were being shaken.

  “Well?” Cabell turned in his chair. “What the devil are you standing there for?”

  The sun flamed behind the silhouette of his skull for a moment, as though trying to keep itself in the sky against the slow, pitiless will of the night closing in upon it from the east, then sank into the hills in an impotent fury of crimson light which left his face ashen and pinched. The wrinkle-wires relaxed and Emma laughed abruptly. “Oh, well, you can't go on for ever—no more than the sun can. And you can't take it all with you—that's certain.”

  “Bah!” he turned away.

  She laughed again, without mirth. “You had your chance and you passed it. Now it's too late, see. TOO LATE.”

  “Stop your clack!”

  “I won't stop my clack,” she flared up. “You seem to forget that I'm not here on charity. I EARNED it. And Larry's my son. To hell with your fancies.”

  “To hell with you,” he shouted, but lowered his voice and began to argue, waving his hand against the washed-out blue of the western sky. “Christ, it didn't give you a lien over my thoughts and feelings for the rest of my life. I'm grateful for what you did that night—whatever it was—but. . .”

  “But—be damned. I'm not talking about liens and gratitude. I'm talking of what is. You know what happened. I know what happened. And nobody else knows.”

  The cow went on moaning bleakly for its calf.

  “And so what?”

  Emma was a long time answering. “Nobody wants to die in their bed more than I do,” she said at last, “but Larry's my son. He's nearly twenty-seven. It's time you gave him a chance. If you throw away what's his by right—what I earned for him that night. . . Oh, I don't know what I'd do.”

  He jumped up and the chair began to rock, with an increasing tempo, as if moved by the vibrations of his anger—then stopped. The bodiless shadow jerked a cardboard arm across the dwindling arc of light in the sky. “Nonsense, woman. You're obsessed. Larry'll get his due. Why not?”

  “Obsessed?” Emma sniffed. “And you?”

  “The run's been going to ruin and now I'm putting things shipshape again. Is that anything to make a song about?”

  “And the next thing you'll be up to your neck in debt with the place overstocked, thinking to make a fortune and serve some barmy idea you've got about Harriet. Then there'll be a drought and where will Larry be? Or Harriet or anybody?”

  “You talk as if I didn't make this place.”

  “You'd've made it different if I'd had a say. And now I have.”

  “You can mind your own business.”

  “That's what I'm doing. So watch yourself, Derek Cabell. You're not the only one with notions on this earth.”

  The darkness came in from the east like a tide, in long, slow, peaceful waves. A man marched up the slope under a load. As he approached the cowyard the cow bellowed again and tore at the rails with her horns. The man stopped to throw a stone at her and came on. It was Sambo. He went round the back of the house and knocked on the kitchen door. “Where y'want this veal hanged up, missus?” The sickly-sweet smell of fresh blood filled the house.

  “You'd do anything. ANYTHING,” Emma said. “And so would I.”

  Her feet clattered back to the kitchen and James lay shivering quietly, crushed by the discovery of his world's instability in the hands of adults, passionate, untrustworthy, given over to a struggle in which HE counted for nothing.

  Cabell was talking indignantly to himself, “Bleed me, would she. . .” But James did not want to hear. He let himself over the edge of the verand
a and crept off to a new hiding-place.

  When Cabell had gone to bed Emma dragged him out from under the house where he had fallen asleep among the weeds and the big, golden fungi.

  He wanted to hang on to her and be caressed, but she dug bony fingers into his arm and shook him till his teeth rattled. “You little fool! D'you want him to SEE you and belt the hide off you?”

  At the age of ten James lacked the key to the drama of his fears, longings, and day-dreams. Sometimes he saw himself rounding up a mob of scrubbers single-handed and heard his father say, “That's fine bit of work!” Again, he dreamt that his father chased him with a stock-whip and his mother got between them and snatched the whip from Cabell. But at the breakfast-table next morning, when Cabell kept the impassive profile of scar, hooked beak, and eye-patch turned to him throughout the meal, the sharp terrors of his adventure died away in anticlimax. He returned to the schoolroom, subdued by the implacable indifference against which the challenges of his awakening ego were hurled in vain.

  Chapter Six: Ideal

  Geoffrey was no comfort to his loneliness among these selfengrossed adults. He hated Geoffrey—his plump, clean face and piggy eyes; hated him for the way he curried favour with Mrs Todd by copying twice as many pothooks and hangers as James, for his sneaking tittletattle, and for running unasked to fetch his father's cigars and boots, so that Cabell had begun to expect it and to repay him with a grunt from time to time.

  He wanted to be like Larry—gruff and independent and unafraid. The shearers had knocked off for the day. “Who told them to?” Cabell demanded.

  “I did,” Larry said. “I told them.”

  “What for?”

  “The wool's wet.”

  “What if it is?”

  “Men can't work wet wool.”

  “Men can't work my—. See here, you get those men back to work!”

  “Men can't work wet wool.”

  “Men can work what I pay them to work. When you pay them it'll be time for you to say when they can't work.”

  Larry did not answer. His face was swollen and heavy with stubbornness.

  “You get those men back to work. D'you hear?”

  He did not answer.

  “D'you hear?”

  James's teeth chattered.

  Larry got up and went out. They watched him ride up the valley past the shearers' hut without stopping. The shearers sitting at the door listening to a man play his accordion waved as he passed.

  Cabell grabbed his hat, rushed down to the shed, flung the accordion away, and in ten minutes the men were back at work.

  “From now on you're a paid hand here,” Cabell told Larry. “I give all the orders here.”

  “Men ain't dogs,” Larry insisted. “They can't work wet wool.”

  James tried to make friends with Larry, but it was not easy. Larry was sullen and knew about two hundred words, which flowed only when he was talking to his father. Knowing Geoffrey, he was suspicious when James hung round the door of the stockmen's hut in wet weather watching him and the men padding their saddles, mending shoes, frying pancakes, and playing “flip the sixpence.” They had a chalked circle in the middle of the floor with a sixpence in it. The game was to turn the sixpence over inside the circle with a stock-whip. James crawled about on the ant-bed floor recovering the sixpence from corners. Once he got too close and Larry's whip took a sliver of skin off his cheek. From his idea of his brothers and their relation to Cabell, Larry expected James to run wailing to his father. He was surprised to see Emma shake James for five minutes without finding how he came by the wound on his cheek. Cabell did not even notice it.

  “Want a whip?” Larry offered the next time he met James in the yard. “Might make you one some time.”

  James hung back.

  “When I get time,” Larry grumbled, retreating into his sulky shell at once.

  But the ice was broken. He made the whip and let James help him, showed him how to stretch the bullock-hide on a wheel and cut out a circle, round and round, till there was one long thong which they pulled out and straightened; how to make the sixteen strands, thick in the middle, tapering at the end, so as to get a good belly; how to scrape off the hair and pare the greenhide into beautiful, thin, flat strings as pliable as a kid glove. When the whip was finished and greased, with a strip of red silk handkerchief in the end for a cracker, Larry said, “Better not let HIM see it. He'll take it off you.”

  James glanced at the house where his father sat in the rocking-chair with Harriet on his knee. He was tempted to tell Larry what he had heard, to share with him the burdensome knowledge that some awful disaster overhung their lives. But shame at revealing, even to Larry, that these demi-gods were capable of quarrelling and cursing each other made him blush. From some budding sense of social prudence he turned away and mumbled, “Who, Papa? Oh, he wouldn't.”

  Larry was quick to feel the boy's evasion. He turned away. “Don't suppose you'll ever have any use for it, anyway,” he said, “learning lessons from that old crow. You and Geoffrey'll be like them Jardines out Narrow Gut that live in Sydney and never come near the place in case they get their hands dirty.”

  He stalked off, and James ran after him. “I don't want to learn from books,” he said. “I want to be a stockman like. . .” He stammered, blushed again, “like Sambo.”

  Larry glanced at him doubtfully, shyly.

  So when Cabell was away getting another governess James ran wild in the valley, and this incoherent friendship deepened—eager and admiring on James's side, heavy, sullen, monosyllabic on Larry's. They went shooting quail together in the dry thistles, went out at night after scrubbers, laid baits for dingoes, hunted kangaroos. Larry showed him how to tan a kangaroo pelt and make a knife-sheath out of it afterwards. On Sundays, when the stockmen prepared themselves to appear in dandified glory on Monday morning, James helped Larry polish his four-and-a-half-inch silver spurs and concertina his Canton moles to remove every speck from them, and on Monday morning at daybreak he would be down at the hut to see Larry put on his new elastic-sided boots, greasing his feet with tallow first because boots had to be a size too small so as to fit like a glove. The vitality of James's mind, wanting to know everything—why cattle stampeded at the smell of blood, how to break a horse in, how to make a cabbage-tree hat, why the sheep would not eat the clover till it dried off—stirred Larry's gloomy, inturned thoughts, and replaced, with a pride in knowledge he had not been conscious of, a resentment against the kind of learning Mrs Todd had been brought to drive into his brothers and sister—a learning that was drawing them farther and farther from his mother and himself. Already James's accent was clipped and slightly domineering, strange among the slurred, lazy voices of the men. Geoffrey's was more so. But it seemed less important to Larry when he saw James trying to copy the way he rode or cracked a whip.

  They were sitting down to dinner one day when the chuckme-out creaked wearily up the slope. Cabell handed out a stocky, rawboned woman in a gaberdine dust-coat.

  The new governess. “Miss Montaulk,” he introduced her.

  Her eyes looked fixedly just over Emma's head and her face, like a jailer's, repudiated the stare, disparaging and hostile, which Emma returned. She discarded her coat, washed her hands, and ate her meal without a glance at Emma.

  As he was taking her to her room after dinner Cabell stopped at the door and told James and Geoffrey, “You two had better get ready. I'm taking you down to school in Brisbane to-morrow. Miss Montaulk can't be bothered with you.”

  When he returned Geoffrey bawled, “I don't want to go. Don't make me.”

  Cabell did not notice. He was absorbed. He seemed anxious, and paced up and down the veranda looking out at the valley. Emma grew restless too, and snapped Geoffrey into silence. She recognized symptoms she had not seen for years. Instead of lying down after dinner with a paper and cigar, as he usually did nowadays, Cabell went to the stable and saddled a horse. Emma followed him.

  “Where're you going?�
�

  “Up the river. Where d'you think?”

  “What for?”

  He climbed into the saddle and turned the horse towards her, but she stood her ground.

  “Well, if you want to know I'm going to look at some country I bought.”

  “What country?”

  “The scrub.”

  She stared. “Going in for selling firewood?” But she could not hold her anger back. “SO YOU'RE GOING TO START IT AGAIN!”

  He spurred his horse and pushed her aside.

  “Where did you get the money?” she yelled after him.

  “Picked it up on the road.”

  “Thief!” she screamed. “That's what you are. Robbing your children.”

  “I can look after MY children,” he yelled back, and rode out of the yard. Now there was a revolution at Cabell's Reach. Fencers and well-sinkers were busy over the run. A gang of Chinese came to ringbark and burn off ten thousand acres of scrub, which carried the Reach back to the boundary of Black Rock on the south. Cabell brought in new rams and culled over his flocks and shot the scrubbers. Where the delicate native grasses had been eaten out he planted rich English grass. His appearance changed. He got a set of false teeth, had his beard clipped, and began to wear the starched shirt, low stiff collar, narrow black tie pinned with a golden horseshoe and frock-coat which he wore to the end of his days, long after such clothes were out of fashion. He stopped thinking about the past and its lessons, and the peace of a will resigned to death departed from him. If he sat down for five minutes he would start to fidget. “Wonder if those cattle are all right on that grass?” He would send for Sambo. “Think we better move those cattle? Can't you smell a fire?” His superstitions returned. Thirteen sheep in a pen or a ladder put up where he couldn't help walking under it made him storm. He dressed in a ritualistic order: tie, collar and shirt first, then trousers, then waistcoat and coat, then socks and shoes, and if anything compelled him to change the order went round all day expecting the skies to fall. His meanness returned too. His room at the end of the veranda was soon full of scraps of iron, bits of leather, rusty nails, boards, sheep-skins, and old clothes.