Old Drumble (3 page)

“Now, hurry up and finish your greens, I’ve got a nice golden syrup pudding for you. And after that I’ll make your father a cup of tea and you can give me a hand to
get the dishes done, and then it’ll be time for you to get to bed. I wonder when Andy will be along? He promised to drop in a cutting off Mrs Charlie Ryan’s camellia, her white one.”

“If Andy comes,” Jack said, “can I help him drive the sheep?”

“Drive the sheep?”

“Oh!” Jack whined with his voice going up. He thought of finishing with a click, but stopped just in time.

“What will the boy be asking next?”

“Just down the other end of Ward Street?”

“We’ll see,” said Jack’s mother. “Mind you, I’m not promising anything.”

A
NDY THE DROVER
turned up on Tuesday morning, his mob of sheep left over the other side of the hall corner, where there was never any traffic and they had a bit of grass.

“Where’s Old Drumble?” asked Jack.

“Holding them.” Andy nodded back past the hall, and Jack saw Old Drumble standing, daring the sheep to move a foot nearer the corner. “Old Nell and Young Nugget, they’re back the other end of the mob,” said Andy.

He was taking his reins, passing the bight through the fence wires, up and over the top of a post. Nosy, his old horse, was smart at opening gates. She’d never worked out how to get her reins off the fence yet, but set about it now, as Andy reached inside the split sack—what he called a pikau—over Nosy’s back, behind the saddle.

“What would Nosy do if she got her reins undone?” Jack asked.

“Mooch along the fence and munch the heads off your mother’s flowers. She wouldn’t like that—I mean your mother—I’d never hear the end of it. Or she might wander back and have a word with Old Drumble. She wouldn’t go far,” said Andy. “Those two stick together. They like each other’s company.” He pulled out a carefully packed sugarbag from inside the pikau.

Andy’s voice was dry and creaky, from walking and riding in the dust behind a thousand mobs of sheep and cattle. His face was dry and creaky, too, with grooves worn by the wind and the rain, the sun, the frosts, the hot days and the cold days, springs and autumns, winters and summers through which he’d driven stock up and down, across and around the North Island.

He slept on the ground, in a tent, in huts, under trees, in haystacks, in scrub, under bridges, in barns and sheds, in long grass, in short grass, on stones, on rocks, on logs, on sand, on thistles, on branches, on piles of leaves. “You name it, Jack, and I reckon I’ve slept on it,” Andy always said, and he walked with a slight crouch, as if his back hurt.

Andy had a white scar on one arm where a scared horse had bitten him. He had a healed red tear in the right corner of his mouth where a cattle beast had caught its horn and ripped open his cheek. One of his fingers was bent where he had cut a tendon while dog-tuckering a sheep. His face and hands and arms and legs were a tangle
of lines, grooves, and scars, each with its story.

He wore a broad-brimmed hat against the rain and the sun. He wore a long oilskin coat in the wet, and rolled it in front of his saddle in the dry. Both his hat and his oilskins were dusty, lined, and grooved like his face and hands, and they were dry and creaky, too.

He wore an old suit jacket that had once been black, but now was the colour of the roads he’d walked and ridden. Under his jacket he wore a waistcoat with umpteen pockets. It was the colour of the roads, like his saddle-tweed trousers and his hobnailed boots, which he called his Bill Masseys. They looked dry and creaked today because the road was dusty.

Jack liked the look of Andy’s face, his hands and arms, his clothes, and his boots. He liked the dry, creaky sound of his voice. He liked his stories. Most of all, he liked Andy’s rich smell: the smell of cows and sheep and horses and dogs, smoke and dust, the smell of the drover, the smell of the road. It made Jack think of places he hadn’t seen, of places he wanted to see, places he didn’t even know about. When Andy mentioned the names of roads and rivers and districts far away from Waharoa, Jack listened and thought the words were like music, rare and strange.

“Some day, I’m going to see all those places you talk about,” he’d say to Andy the Drover.

“You’ll have a cup of tea?” Jack’s mother called from
the door. “Don’t worry about your boots.” She’d filled the teapot and flung down a row of sacks so Andy could tramp inside and sit at the table without his hobnails taking the polish off the lino.

Jack waited to see Andy take off his hat. His grooved and lined face was as brown as the back of his hands but, when he took off his old, dry, creaky hat, his skull from above his eyes to the back of his head was a startling colour, muddy white like a boiled suet pudding. Andy put his hat on the floor under his chair, winked at Jack’s stare, asked after his father, emptied a cup of tea, and opened the sugarbag.

As Jack’s mother refilled his cup, Andy said, “There’s the last of Mrs Jenkins’s asparagus, and she won’t be at Institute this coming Wednesday because she’s going over to Cambridge with her sister, Biddy, to see their cousin, Ethel, the one who’s moving down Gisborne way to be near her parents. They must be getting on a bit.”

“Going all that way!” said Jack’s mother. “It might as well be the other side of the world, for all Mrs Jenkins will see of her now.”

“It’s where she grew up. There’s a few chops to keep you going,” said Andy, dumping a brown paper parcel on the table, “and there’s the comfrey root Mrs Burns said she’d let you have. ‘Keep it watered,’ she said, ‘it’ll take off, no trouble, and it doesn’t mind a bit of shade.’
She says just to scrape a bit of the root when you want a poultice; use the brown outside as well as the lighter-coloured inside. You can put it on hot or cold. Nothing to touch it for drawing a boil or a stone-bruise, so she reckons.

“Oh, I nearly forgot, there’s a setting of eggs in that tin—Mrs McKenzie said you’ve got a clucky chook. They’re Rhode Island Reds, good layers and sensible chooks to have around. They lay a nice brown egg.

“And here,” Andy said, “that camellia cutting Mrs Ryan’s been promising you for ages.” He took a clay pot from the bottom of the sugarbag.

“That’s not a cutting—she’s struck it for me! Oh, I must let her have the jasmine she’s been wanting.” Jack’s mother nodded. “I’ll give you a loaf of bread, if you wouldn’t mind dropping it in to Mrs Kennedy. You’ll be passing her place. And there’s a jar of marmalade for yourself, and one for Mrs Feak. You can take a tin of ginger-nuts when you go, and I wonder if you’ve got room for a cake for old Mrs Gray? She does like a bit of fruit cake, and she’s not up to making them for herself these days. Her poor old hands, it’s the rheumatism, you know.”

Andy nodded and drank his tea. He and Mum talked about how Mr Gaunt’s front paddock was closed up for hay, and how it had come on since that rain last week, how Arnolds’ big macrocarpa hedge up the Matamata
road was needing clipping or it’d get out of hand, and how Eileen MacLean was coming back to take a job teaching at Hinuera School. Jack listened as the messages and gossip went to and fro.

Then Andy was on his feet, fishing up his hat from under his chair, hiding his astonishing skull, carefully stowing the reloaded sugarbag in Nosy’s pikau, flipping his reins off the fence, whistling and waving to Old Drumble, Old Nell, and Young Nugget. Jack heard some barking and, Old Drumble leading, the sheep came pouring across the Turangaomoana Road and along Ward Street.

“Can I give Andy and Old Drumble a hand, Mum?” Jack asked. “Just as far as the other end of the street? You promised, Mum!”

“I never promised a thing!” Jack’s mother looked at his face. “Oh, I suppose so. But just as far as the bottom of the street,” she said, “and not a step further. You make sure you stop there, and come home at once.”

Old Drumble trotted over, nosed the back of Jack’s hand, and trotted back to his place at the head of the mob. Reins hooked over his arm, Andy waited and fell in behind, stick in his hand. Jack walked beside him. Young Nugget rushed from one side of the road to the other. Old Nell took it more quietly. And up the front, over the backs of the sheep, a black and white tail waved high in the air.

The back of his hand still wet from Old Drumble’s nose, Jack looked at the tail and grinned. It reminded him of the feathers on the governor-general’s plumed hat, in the photo in the
Weekly News
.

J
ACK TRIED TO LOOK
as if his face was all leathery, dusty creases; he tried to sound creaky when he walked; and he tried to take steps the same length as Andy’s. When Andy whistled, Jack pursed up his lips and tried to whistle, too. When Andy waved a signal to the dogs, Jack wagged his hand, too, but behind his back.

Old Drumble paused at the corner of Whites’ Road, made sure there was nothing coming, and led the mob on down Ward Street.

“That Old Drumble, he’s what you call a handy dog.” Andy licked a crumb of ginger-nut off his moustache. “He can hustle them along with a bark like a huntaway, and he can head, and work them silently ’cause he’s got a bit of strong-eye in him, too. You can see the border collie in his head and his tail, and the huntaway in the length of leg.”

Jack nodded and said he could see the border collie in Old Drumble’s head and tail, and the huntaway in the length of leg.

“He’s as good on cattle as he is on sheep. He’ll split a mob to let a car through, and he’ll lead all day and never make a mistake. See how he’s dropped back to one side because he spotted that somebody’s left their gate open? You’d think folk who live on a stock route would have more sense. You watch, and you’ll see Old Nell move up into the gateway, and he’ll take the lead again.

“There he goes. He knows there could be trouble at the church corner, turning them out on to the main road.”

“How does Old Drumble know?” Jack asked, but Andy just grinned and wiped his moustache with the back of his hand.

“Old Drumble knows every corner of every road, every gateway, every fence, and every farm in about six provinces, I reckon. It’s like he carries a map of the North Island inside his head.” Andy shook his own head in wonder.

“Once for a bet, y’know, I give him six sheep and says to him, ‘Take these sheep to Waharoa.’ We were just this side of Rotorua, coming past Ngongotaha Mountain, and I’ve got to see a cocky, around the lake, about a mob of cattle beasts he wants brought up from Opotiki. At the turn-off for the Mamakus, I says, ‘Old Drumble, you take these here six ewes to Waharoa, and put them into the school horse paddock. I’ll be along in a day or two.’

“And, y’know, Jack, when I gets to Waharoa four or five days later, them six ewes are in the school horse paddock, and Old Drumble’s lying across the gateway so they can’t get out. He’s smart enough to open the gate, Old Drumble, but he couldn’t figure out how to shove it closed again. Of course, that gate gets a bit heavy from time to time, even for a man.

“The headmaster, Mr Strap, he told me that Old Drumble rounded up them six ewes at the same time each evening, trotted them down the Turangaomoana road as far as the Domain corner, and put them down the bank of the creek under the bridge, to water them. Then back he brings them to the horse paddock, turns them in for the night, and lies down across the gate-way again.”

“Did you win your bet?”

“Did I what?” said Andy. “Five bob that bet won me off young Tom Cookson, and five bob each off his mates, Mick Ruruhi and Russ Tulloch. Fifteen bob all told. They won’t be in a hurry to go laying bets against Old Drumble again, more’s the pity.”

“What did Old Drumble do for tucker himself?”

“I give him a few bob,” Andy said, “when I started him off from Ngongotaha. Each morning, once the ewes were feeding quietly, Old Drumble nicked across the track to Mrs Besant’s bakery and bought himself a mince pie. It only took him a couple of minutes, and he’d be back
sitting on top of the gatepost, blowing on his pie and chewing it, and keeping an eye on his little flock. He’s very fond of a hot mince pie, Old Drumble.”

“Didn’t he get thirsty?”

“Course he did. A dog drinks a lot more than a sheep. But he knew how to turn on the school drinking fountain, when he wanted a drink. It only took him a few seconds to lap up a gutsful, and the sheep didn’t have time to notice he’d been gone.”

“Hello, Jack!”

Jack glanced and saw Harry Jitters and Minnie Mitchell waving from behind their gates. He looked straight ahead, as if he’d never seen them before, and strode out beside Andy, his face all creased and leathery, as if he’d been droving all his life. For a moment he thought of whistling Young Nugget and giving him an order.

“One thing you never do, you never give orders to another man’s dogs,” said Andy. “Here’s the bottom of the street, and see how Old Drumble’s heading for the church corner? He’ll take a mosey round, make sure the main road’s clear of traffic, then lead the mob out and turn them right. This is as far as you come, Jack.”

“Mum wouldn’t mind me going to the church corner, just to see Old Drumble lead them out on to the main road,” Jack said, but Andy grinned and shook his head.

“Maybe next time, but you’re not getting me into hot
water, young fellow-me-lad. Your mum said the bottom of the street and not a step further. Thank her for the cup of tea, it’s always a real life-saver, and tell her I said them ginger-nuts of hers are in a class of their own!”

Jack stood at the bottom of Ward Street and watched them go down to the church corner and disappear. He was too far away to see how Old Drumble managed to turn the mob right. Slowly, Jack turned himself around; slowly, he took a couple of steps homeward; then something perked him up so, instead of dragging his feet, he strutted.