Diamonds in the Mud and Other Stories (19 page)

‘I'm over here, Jamey, love! Over here.'

How she'd given Dora the slip, she didn't quite know, but she was out that door, out of that wheelchair too, and she'd got rid of that mean grey dress. She was wearing her pink, her summer pink, bought from the little shop in Burke Road. And there was Jamey, holding the garden gate wide for her.

‘Mum! Mum!'

Before Dora could catch her and bring her back, she was through that gate and gone.

That's me they're writing about, Constable Johnson, though back then they all called me Bob – except the widow. I would've been in me mid thirties in '51, which was the year of them big floods. It was also the year my missus took off and I'd asked for a shift to some place a long way away from her and that worming, weaselling, little red-headed mongrel that broke up my marriage.

They sent me up to Balwarin, and I arrived there the day Jim Wilson disappeared in the floods. He was a no good, no-account bludging mongrel, but the town folk, carried away by a local tragedy, wanted to do something for the widow who lived in a grain shed with her ten kids, so we started up this fund. I did a bit of talking to newspapers, which got us a bit of advertising for donations. I'd asked for money, but a lot of folk took me wrong and every useless bit of junk, every stick of unwanted furniture in a twenty mile radius started turning up on me front veranda until I'm tripping over it every time I walk outside me bloody door.

Me lock-up was brand new – the only place in town that was, mind you. They'd built it out of cement brick after the Davis twins demolished the old joint when my predecessor locked the mad bastards in together one night. Any rate, being brick, and jammed in between the shire hall and me station cum residence, it didn't see a lot of sun – second coolest spot in town, folk said. By January '52 I hadn't used it – or not for its intended purposes, due to it being chock-a-block full of the better bits of junk donated to the widow Wilson.

There were tables and three legged chairs. There were iron beds. There were doors, old windows, crates and chaff bags overflowing with worn-out rags. There were old shoes, hats, pots, pans, books – you name it, I was tripping over it. The big Depression must have made hoarders of a whole generation – like them that lived through it, never did believe the good times was gunna last, so they saved their junk for a rainy day. Well, until the year of that flood, it mustn't've rained in Christ knew how many years, so all of their bloody junk was now raining down on me.

Twice that working-bee to rehouse the widow got buggered up by something. In November the two rooms a local cocky was donating – it was gunna form the bulk of the rehousing project – was still surrounded by floodwaters. The next time I rounded up a team, we was getting wheels under the rooms when a big jack slipped and Max Davis's hand was in the way. I ended up racing him to the nearest hospital, twenty miles down a bumpy road. So Christmas come and went, Jim Wilson's carcass remained missing – most in town reckoned there'd be nothing left of him to find anyway. We had wild pigs riddling the forest out back of town, we had foxes – not to mention crayfish and yabbies in the river.

It's normal human nature for folk to get carried away by a bit of local drama; the whole town pledged its support when it happened but, good or bad, news never stays news for long, and the widow's grain shed with its lean-to kitchen, where she'd been living since her marriage, didn't get one drop of water inside it. Her chooks had taken to the trees, her cows had swum to high ground and even her kids hadn't been too inconvenienced. They'd always rowed an old boat across the river to school, which was the only way for the poor little buggers to get there, unless they wanted to walk five miles, twice a day, around by the bridge. If the truth was to be told, the widow's only loss was one no-account, layabout mongrel who had been bludging on her for sixteen years. The Davis twins, both of them, were more than ready to fill that space in her bed, as was thirty-odd womanless, jabbering reffos Pig Iron Bob had sent to town to plague me.

During that era they were shipping them into Australia by the thousand and sending them in packs to country towns. Most of our lot were employed, in what they liked to call the timber gettin' industry, which meant the bush and sawmills; the town was surrounded by red gum forests. There was reffo doctors, lawyers, one bloke that played the violin good enough to be on the radio, but they put him and the rest to work cutting down trees and doing what they were told to do for three years.

I remember the violin-playing one real well. He lost half his hand to a saw, chopped it clean off. The day they let him out of hospital, he pitched his violin in the river. It was the only item he brought with him from wherever he come from, and that night the poor coot hung himself. I can still hear his mates jabbering when they carried him into town. We didn't need to understand their lingo that day.

Anyway, mustn't get sidetracked here. We finally set the date for the house raising and come seven o'clock on the Saturday morning, I drive down to the widow Wilson's property, eager to get cracking – and the only movement there is the widow's chooks scratching for their breakfast in the yard. At nine the Davis twins and their crew of reffos turn up with half a house hooked on to the back of a log buggy, so in I go to town reckoning there's been some mix-up with the meeting place, expecting to see a mob of blokes expecting a lift down.

The town's a proper hive of industry. There's three mongrel dogs, two Aboriginal kids, Mrs Crump settling the dust on her bit of footpath and Willie Watson supporting one of the pub's veranda posts, playing cockatoo for Percy Porrit, the SP bookie. If I ever hated a man, I hated Watson. He reminded me of the red-headed mongrel that run off with my missus.

I sort of nod affably.

‘Picked an 'ot one for it t'day, Bob,' he says, his trousers hitched, hands darting in and out of his pockets, head swivelling in a near circle.

‘Too hot for you, I take it,' I say back. ‘You had me fooled, you know. Here I was thinking you at least was a good friend to Jim Wilson.'

His mouth opens in a grin, displaying one lone pearl in a diseased oyster. ‘Yer, I were like. I broke the news to his poor bloody missus.'

‘So, where was you at seven – you and the rest of the town what was so bloody concerned for his poor bloody missus and kids a while back? I been down there for two hours, me, the Davis twins and the reffos.'

Willie licked at his lower lip, his tongue darting on either side of his lone tooth. His work-stained hand scratched at his ribs through a convenient hole in his sweater while he looked everywhere but at Percy Porrit's vehicle, which increased its speed as it bypassed the hotel yard.

‘Wave the bugger in,' I say. ‘You've got half an hour to place your bets, then if every man jack on my list doesn't show up at the widow's, Percy will be spending next Saturday in my lock-up and you with him. You get my drift?'

‘I got ya. Yeah. Too right. Least we can do fer a good woman – least we can do, Bob,' he says.

They all called me Bob, except the widow. Any rate, within the half-hour, Watson turns up with eighteen blokes and work gets underway.

We had to knock down the chicken-wire fence. Chooks overran the widow's vegie garden, but the donated rooms, complete with veranda, windows, doors, and white ants, were jacked in beside the lean-to kitchen. What no one considered was the stove flue which was now smack up against the new lounge-room wall.

‘It will go up like a bonfire the first time she lights that bloody stove!'

‘We'll shove a bit of asbestos behind it.'

Everyone threw in his ha'penny's worth, until Lefty Davis gets bored listening and does his block, and I'll tell you straight, I wouldn't've missed it for quids. He ripped that stove out singlehanded. Built like a tank, he was, with a face that looked as if it had been run over by one. A bit of the flue falls off and lands on his foot, so he pitches it like a javelin into the yard and it hits one of the reffos, who takes it personal.

Lefty Davis didn't get his nickname by making daisy-chains with his left hand. He's into them, the whole pack of them, and the back wall of the widow's lean-to cum kitchen is down, taking a couple of reffos with it. He's got two more under his gorilla armpits, and he's about to run them, head first, into the donated rooms, when Harry, a bricklaying reffo who's armed with a bucket of water to mix his mortar, lets Lefty have it. Most of it hit a wheat bag curtain which the widow had been using as a kitchen door.

When the dust settles, we feel it almost immediately. We're standing in this wide passageway between two solid enough constructions, where there's a pleasant breeze blowing in through that wet wheat bag and out the knocked-out end, cooling that area by degrees. It's like standing in a Coolgardie safe – the ideal place for the sandwiches, supplied by the ladies, and the nine gallon keg of beer donated by Mick Lawton, who due to business commitments couldn't attend. He'd sent his brother down with the keg; apparently the brother himself used to be a builder before he got half his brain blown out in the war.

What I'll never understand is why we let that poor fool design the widow's new kitchen. Incapable of walking a straight line sober, Simple Simon Lawton attempted to step out, heel to toe, the blueprints of a replacement kitchen while thirty-odd advisers, having first helped themselves to any receptacle capable of holding fluid, urged him on.

It didn't take long to empty that first keg, so when the truck was sent back to town to buy the hardware merchant's entire stock of asbestos sheeting and roofing iron, the driver was given instructions to exchange the empty keg for a full one. The rehousing fund was shouting.

By three pm Simple Simon was up the ladder, attempting to wed the beams of the new kitchen roof to the donated building's, which was not eager to form a union. The bedroom, formerly a grain shed but now sporting a dividing wall and two mismatched windows that wouldn't open, didn't plan on wedding anything.

So it gets to three thirty, and old Harry, that water-throwing reffo, quietly occupied in creating a masterpiece fireplace and chimney for the donated lounge room, runs out of bricks.

‘I told yer you was building it too bloody big,' Lefty Davis roared. ‘I told yer you wasn't bloody creating a lodge fer the bloody Tzar. We give ya plenty of good bricks and ya waste our bloody good bricks. No more da bloody chimney no more da bloody beer, you crazy old reffo bastard. You savvy me?'

Harry nodded, smiled, Lefty's tirade non translatable into any one of the tongues the old bloke had picked up in concentration camps, refugee camps or timber camps. Still smiling, he walks off for another bucket of water, and gives it to Lefty, in the face.

All hell breaks lose – until Simple Simon, who's got no head for heights, alcohol, or much else, falls off the ladder. When another bucket of water won't bring him around, they toss him dripping into the back of the police van.

You've got to remember, they're all drunk as skunks. It's been a long, hot day and the beer is free. I leave them to it and head for the hospital, twenty bumpy, dusty miles away. Simple is not complaining. I hope he's not dead but I don't hang around to find out. I offload him at the hospital and I get back to the job.

And the buggers have run out of roofing iron, and there's no more to be had in town. They're considering pulling down the widow's best chookhouse, but it's more rust holes than solids. I stand and curse each one of them, and the widow, and Simple Simon's bloody design, what any fool could see was more fitting for a shearing shed than a farmhouse bloody kitchen.

The roofing crew, having no material to roof with, decide to cement the floor of the new passage, ex lean-to cum kitchen, with the dozen or so bags of rock solid cement someone donated. Anyway, while I'm back in town helping to rip down a corrugated iron shed at the showgrounds, they're mixing lumps of cement with sand barrowed up from the river bend. They've got no mixer, no form-work, nothing, but they're mixing cement and shovelling it, hoping it will find its own level, and it's trying, it's trying; it's running downhill as fast as they can shovel the bloody stuff back.

To cut a long story a bit shorter, by six that floor is flat enough and setting where it is so they call it good enough. We're exhausted rabble. We've got one window left over which we fit in the cement-sheet wall of a kitchen that's gotta be near thirty foot long, and we're fitting in it one lone two foot by two foot window.

The sun is well down, the bats and mozzies flying, we're cleaning up, counting heads, and we find four of the reffos in the grain shed, now two bedrooms, where they've been having a siesta. They're trapped, due to the windows don't open and the cement floor in the breezeway is wet. The cementers won't let no one near their new floor and the reffos can't understand plain English, so when one of them steps into it, marring its perfection, the language gets interesting.

Me and Max Davis end up cutting a doorway down the end of the south bedroom to let the silly buggers out. Now we've got four doorways to fill and two doors to fill them with, but worse than that, Willie Watson, who went into town to pick up a ton more sandwiches the ladies had supplied, finds out his horse has come in at twenty-five to one. He comes back with an eighteen gallon keg, and you can bet your back teeth that him and his mates won't be moving from the widow's land until that keg is empty.

A few of us got the widow's stove propped into its gap, a few more carried those two doors back and forth, trying to find a gap they'd fit – and when they wouldn't fit any gap, Lefty pitched 'em into the yard and Max dragged 'em back. In the end we fixed one to the kitchen and the other one to the south bedroom – one wouldn't shut and the other one wouldn't open. In the meantime there's brawling, there's name-calling in ten different lingoes, those reffos now drunk enough to start world war three. Me and the sober citizens had to empty out me lock-up then refill it, you might say.