Mud and Gold (59 page)

Charlie let go his grip, and the little boy
began to scramble off the chair towards his mother. ‘No, you
don’t,’ Charlie said, taking hold of his arm. ‘You played up for
me, boy. I’m going to teach you a lesson.’

David looked at him with fear but no
understanding, but Amy understood only too well.

‘Charlie, no,’ she begged.

‘He’s got to learn.’ But the look of triumph
on Charlie’s face said clearly that it was her he sought to punish,
not the trembling child held firmly in his grasp. ‘I’ll teach you
to do as you’re told, boy. I’m going to give you a good
hiding.’

David had never had anything close a
beating, but he had seen his older brother sobbing from the effects
of one often enough. He howled his terror and tried to pull out of
Charlie’s grip. ‘Mama,’ he wailed. ‘Mama!’

‘Don’t go crying for your Mama like a baby,
or you’ll get a worse hiding.’ Charlie tried to drag David from the
room, but the child struggled so hard that instead his father
picked him up and carried him outside tucked under one arm.

‘Don’t hit him, Charlie, please don’t,’ Amy
pleaded, hurrying after them. ‘He didn’t mean to annoy you. He’s
just a little boy, don’t hurt him.’

Charlie said nothing until the three of them
were behind the shed where he kept a length of supple-jack handy
for chastising Malcolm. He turned to Amy and gave her a scornful
look.

‘What are you going to do about it? Run to
your pa and tell him I gave my son a bit of correcting? It’s your
fault, in any event—you’ve been babying the boy. It’s time I took
him in hand.’

Amy stood silent and helpless. Charlie was
right; she could not take the boys off him just because he punished
them when he considered they deserved it. He did nothing to the
children that she had not seen her own father do to his sons, and
if he did it more harshly and at a younger age he was still within
his rights.

She turned her face away so as not to see
the blows falling, but she could not shut out David’s screams.

There were six strokes. David’s wails hardly
abated when the blows stopped. Amy reached out her arms for him,
but Charlie kept him firmly in his grip. He put David under his arm
once again and carried him to the verandah bedroom, where he shoved
him through the doorway.

‘You can stay there till you stop that
noise. You don’t leave this room till I say you can.’ He shut the
door on the sobbing child. ‘Keep away from him,’ he warned Amy, and
though she looked with longing at the closed door she followed him
obediently back to the kitchen.

‘Food’s cold,’ Charlie muttered as he
finished his chops and vegetables. Amy had no stomach for her own
meal. She served up Charlie’s pudding, willing him to get on and
leave the house so that she could comfort her miserable little
David.

He stood up at last, but before he reached
the door he turned back and stared at Amy. ‘Leave that boy alone.
You keep away from him until I say you can go in there.’

‘I just want to see if he’s all right,
Charlie. Please let me—’

‘No,’ he interrupted.

Amy glared at him. ‘You can’t keep me away
from my little boy. I won’t let you.’

He gave her the same look of triumph she had
seen earlier. ‘You go near that boy without my say-so and I’ll give
him another dose of the same. Understand?’

So that was how he wanted to fight the next
round: using David as a weapon. Amy turned away from him and
nodded.

When Charlie had gone, she selected one of
the longest locks from the mournful pile of shorn curls, tied it
with a piece of ribbon, and placed it on her chest of drawers
beside the photograph of her mother.

It was a wretched afternoon. Amy was torn
between an almost overpowering desire to rush to David and comfort
him, and the knowledge that she would be responsible for getting
him beaten again if she did.

When Malcolm arrived home from school, she
was almost grateful for the distraction he provided as she gave him
some milk and biscuits.

‘Where’s Dave?’ he asked, looking around the
room for his brother.

‘In the bedroom. He got in trouble with your
father, and he’s not allowed out of the room.’

‘Did Pa give him a hiding?’

‘Yes, he did. Leave Davie alone, Mal.
Malcolm!’ she called as Malcolm, ignoring her, made for the door
into the parlour.

‘Where are you going, boy?’ Charlie said
from the door, coming in for his afternoon tea.

‘I want to see Dave.’

‘You can’t. He’ll stay in that room by
himself till he stops his bawling. Come here and sit down.’

Malcolm did as he was told, but he cast
almost as many glances at the intervening wall as Amy did.

Charlie took Malcolm off to help him with
the milking, leaving Amy once again alone in the house with the
weeping David. From time to time she heard the little boy crying
out to her.

When he came back for dinner, Charlie went
out to the verandah while Amy stood and listened in the doorway
between the kitchen and parlour.

‘Are you going to stop that bawling?’ The
sound of weeping came to her through the open doorways between
them. ‘Then you’ll stay there till you do. There’ll be no dinner
for you tonight.’

‘Mama,’ David sobbed as the door closed on
him once more.

‘He’s very little to go without his dinner,
Charlie,’ Amy said when Charlie had come back to the kitchen and
sat down at the table. ‘He hardly had any lunch, either.’

‘It’ll teach him a lesson. It’s time he grew
up a bit,’ Charlie said.

Malcolm was visibly subdued during the meal.
When he had finished eating he looked expectantly at his father for
permission to go to his room.

‘I need to put the boys to bed now,
Charlie,’ Amy said, trying hard to keep her feelings out of her
voice. ‘I have to help them get undressed and tuck them in.’

Charlie stared narrowly at her. ‘All right,’
he said after a pause. ‘Put them straight to bed, mind. None of
your babying nonsense.’

Malcolm pushed ahead of her, eager to get
into the bedroom. ‘Did you get a hiding, Dave?’ he asked
breathlessly the moment he was in the room.

David was curled up against the wall on the
side of the bed furthest from the house. He turned towards them at
the sound of Malcolm’s voice, and his wretched, bewildered face
sent a pang through Amy. His eyes looked bigger than ever now that
his hair had been shorn; they were full of fear like a captive
creature’s.

‘Mama,’ he whimpered, holding out his arms
to her. ‘Cuddle me, Mama.’

‘I can’t, Davie. I’m not allowed.’ Amy
blinked away tears as well as she could manage at the sight of her
poor, shorn little boy. ‘Come on, Mama will help you get your
clothes off.’

She unbuttoned his frock and lifted it over
his head, careful not to touch his bruised buttocks. ‘My bottom
hurts, Mama,’ he said, his voice trembling.

‘I know, Davie. Lie on your tummy tonight,
it won’t be as sore in the morning.’ Her arms ached to hold him
close, but she half expected Charlie to burst in on them at any
moment.

Malcolm started pulling off his own clothes
when Amy had helped him with the buttons. ‘Hey, your hair looks
good, Dave,’ he said. ‘You look like a boy now.’

‘Do I?’ A tiny spark of animation came into
David’s tear-streaked face.

‘Yes, not like a stupid girl.’

When Amy had buttoned his nightshirt David
reached up to where his curls had been, fingering the cropped hair
with new interest. ‘Papa cut my ear off,’ he said when his hand
brushed against the tender spot, a small note of pride in his
voice.

‘No, he didn’t, Davie,’ Amy corrected
gently. ‘He just nicked it a tiny bit.’ She pulled back the covers
and watched David scramble into bed, making sure that he lay face
down. ‘Don’t be rough with Davie tonight, Mal,’ she said. ‘He’s got
a sore bottom.’

‘I know that,’ Malcolm said scornfully. ‘I
know all about getting hidings. Let’s see your ear, Dave.’ He
checked the ear and whistled his appreciation. ‘He nearly cut my
ear off too, once. You’ve got to sit real still when he cuts your
hair, and it takes
hours
. What did you get a hiding
for?’

‘I don’t know,’ David said, bewildered
again. ‘I must have been naughty.’

‘Nah, Pa just gets wild sometimes,’ said
Malcolm. ‘He gives me hidings just for nothing. The other day
he—’

‘Good night, you two,’ Amy interrupted. She
did not dare give David a kiss in case she were caught in the act.
‘Don’t talk loud or Papa will hear you.’

‘I’m hungry, Mama,’ David said
plaintively.

‘I’m sorry, darling, I can’t give you
anything to eat. Try to go to sleep, then breakfast time will come
around faster.’

She put out the candle and closed the door
on them as Malcolm went on whispering his own experiences of his
father’s rough justice. It was not a topic she would have chosen
for David on such an evening, but it was a small comfort to her to
see Malcolm treating his brother as an equal instead of with the
indifference he usually showed the younger boy.

Charlie was sitting in the parlour with his
newspaper. He looked up at her entrance.

‘Behaving himself now, is he?’ he asked.

Amy sank into her own chair and cast a
bitter look at him. ‘He’s miserable, and he’s very hungry, and he
doesn’t understand why you hit him. Is that what you wanted?’

‘I want him to behave. What do you mean, he
doesn’t understand? I told him what he was getting it for.’

‘He’s only a baby. He didn’t know what you
meant.’

‘He’s not a baby, for all you’ve been
treating him like one,’ Charlie said. ‘Keeping his hair like that
and him in dresses all this time. Making a fool of the boy.’

‘Better than making him miserable, isn’t
it?’

‘Making him grow up, you mean. He’s not your
baby, woman. You’ve got no baby.’ He looked at her through narrowed
eyes. ‘If you want a new bairn to fuss over, you know how to get
one.’

‘And you know how to get rid of one,’ Amy
thrust back. She rose to go to the kitchen. In the doorway she
turned and looked back. ‘Charlie, don’t make your son hate you just
to try and upset me.’

‘Don’t talk crap,’ Charlie said from behind
his newspaper. ‘I gave him a lesson, that’s all.’

Amy shut the door on the sight of him and
began on her breadmaking.
I suppose it was silly to think
Charlie would just give in. He’s no right to use Davie like that!
Poor little Davie
.

When the mindless work of kneading dough had
given her time to mull everything over, she felt calmer. Charlie
might think he had found a way to force her back to his bed by
being cruel to David, but it would not work. His sense of justice
was different from hers, but he had one nevertheless, and it would
not allow him to go on punishing David without cause. He loved his
sons in his own impenetrable way.

The battle with Charlie would not be over
quite so quickly as she had hoped. Fighting it might take the rest
of her life. She accepted the knowledge without dread.
If that’s
the way you want it, Charlie
.

April – May 1891

Frank knew there was a good deal of scoffing
going on around Ruatane about his ‘funny looking cows’, and not all
the scoffers bothered to hide their derision. He took the sly grins
and occasional rude remarks in good humour, confident that he was
doing the right thing. And when the results of the butterfat tests
Frank had the factory run on the Jerseys’ milk became noised abroad
the jibes began to fade away. There were a few die-hards who
insisted the Jerseys were too thin and frail to last a winter, but
the richness of their milk gave the lie to any insinuations of
ill-health.

His mind was so busy with self-satisfied
musings on the quality of his Jerseys and speculations on how many
heifer calves he might get out of them in spring that he almost
forgot to tell Lizzie about the small good turn he had done on his
way to the factory one morning. But he remembered the incident in
time to mention it idly to her over lunch, and in the process
changed the course of at least two lives, though he did not know
it.

‘I ran into the teacher this morning,’ he
remarked as he buttered a thick slice of Lizzie’s fresh bread.
‘Poor thing was in a bit of a state. You know she’s got a horse and
gig she hires so she can get out here? One of the buckles on the
reins had snapped where it joins on to the bit, and she was
standing beside the gig looking as though she couldn’t decide
whether to bawl or swear.’

‘Miss Radford wouldn’t swear, Frank,’ Lizzie
said. ‘She’s a teacher. Joey, hurry up and eat those carrots
instead of pushing them round your plate.’

‘Don’t want them,’ Joey muttered.

‘Do you want a belt on the bottom instead?’
Joey shook his head vigorously and began shovelling carrots into
his mouth, and Lizzie turned her attention back to Frank. ‘What did
you do?’

‘I looped a bit of string around the rein
and tied it on to the bridle, but it won’t hold for more than a
couple of days and she won’t be able to trot the horse with it like
that. I told her she’d better get a new buckle fitted as soon as
she can.’

‘She was lucky you came by. That was early
for her to be on her way to school, wasn’t it?’

‘She said she has to get there early to
write the work up on the board. She has quite a day of it, I think.
She’s got to catch that horse, then harness it, then get all the
way out to the school in time to get all the stuff written up.’

‘I never thought about that. When you’re at
school you never wonder how the teacher gets there or anything. I
hope that old Mrs Lawler she boards with makes her a decent
breakfast.’

‘Then when she gets back to town at night
she’s got to see to the horse before she can have her dinner. And
she was telling me she’s got to mark the kids’ work and write up
the lessons and stuff after tea. It’s a long day, eh? She said she
won’t have a show of getting to the blacksmith’s to see about that
buckle before Saturday. I hope the rein holds for her till then.
It’s going to take her even longer to get to and fro, too, with
only being able to walk the horse.’