Swords and Crowns and Rings (12 page)

Jackie had been outraged and indignant when he had been first taken to the barn by the fat brother, who threw his baggage on a stretcher and said shortly, ‘You sleep there. The hands are called at six. Late, your wages get docked.'

Later, when he saw the rough conditions of the bunkhouse in which the transient hands and the pickers slept, he was thankful for the privacy of the barn. The pallet was clean and dry; his bedding was regularly replenished by unseen hands. And, also, for some unknown reason, he was left alone there. The larking and teasing that kept his days in emotional turmoil never followed him to the barn. It was as though they wanted him to recover his equanimity for the next day's ordeal. So he began to look upon the barn as his only place of peace and shelter. And indeed, long afterwards, he would be able to close his eyes and reconstruct the barn's rustic interior as though upon a dark screen, the horse-collars on spikes, the saws in sheaths, hames, rabbit traps, fence posts, explosives in a metal box on a high bracket, harness on pegs, boxes of staples, barrels of nails, poultry food, potatoes in bins and onions in nets, wooden hayforks and part of a harrow that glinted like a row of sabres in the moonlight. There was the smell of oats, the drier smell of chaff, and now and again the acid whiff of excrement from the litters of wild squirming kittens, creatures of the shadowy loft high up under the eaves.

He slept so exhaustedly that when Ellie awoke him the next morning he had no memory at all of the fat brother's violently shaking him twenty minutes earlier.

‘You gotta be quick,' Ellie said urgently. ‘Ma's covered up for you, but you don't want to be picked on for being late the first morning. Have a sluice at the trough and come up the back way for breakfast. Quick!'

And he lurched away with his unexpectedly agile gait. Jackie followed him in a mad scramble. Somehow Ellie's nervous trepidation had communicated itself to him. Outside the world was dark except for large home-going stars that wavered in a fuming sky. Everything was starched white with frost. Jackie, his lungs stabbing, realised that the clothing he had brought was far from being warm enough. He ran for the kitchen door, which showed a sharp knife-line of orange at its foot. The air was full of a strange pungent smell of burning oil, and far away, suspended in air, was an unidentifiable pink glow.

The kitchen was full of interlaced shadows, and the scarlet tongue of the fire waved intermittently through a stove-hole as Mrs Linz moved a cooking pot. The little woman did not speak or look in his direction. She and Maida must have been up for far more than an hour, for the table was covered with food—platters of steaming fried potatoes, hot scones, fish stew, mountainous steaming dishes of chops and steak patties. Jackie saw that other men were at the table, overalled strangers who kept their heads down to their plates and shovelled in food as fast as they could, sibilating around it to cool it as they did so.

‘You want to eat up, Humpy,' advised one of them. ‘It's a long morning.'

‘Don't call him that!' hissed Maida suddenly from behind Jackie. ‘He's not a hump-back.'

‘All right, then, Lofty,' said the man amiably. ‘How come you're so short? You sure could walk under a log.'

‘He's one of them dwarves,' said the dark brother, fixing Jackie with a serpentine eye. ‘That's why he'll only get half a man's pay.'

Jackie ate in silence. Ellie, Maida, and the mother flew around, replenishing dishes, the huge teapot, the milk-jug. Even alongside that prodigious blue enamel milk-jug Jackie felt himself dwindle. Everything about this place, these people, made him feel small and insignificant. His spirits, vulnerable since yesterday, sank lower still.

Now and then he stole a look at Maida, illuminated intermittently by kerosene lamp or firelight. About her face there was something flat-planed, almost medieval, that made Jackie remember the Dutch pictures in his dwarf books. Now and then she gave him a speaking glance. It may have been only to ask him if he wanted more tea, but to Jackie it seemed to cry to him for help, rescue, solace. Her little wrists, as she bent across him, seemed to be those of a child. The odour of her body reminded him of Cushie's, a little milky, a little soapy. Her hands were already hardened, with split weeping chilblains and the long brown of a burn across one thumb.

One by one the other brothers stamped in, engulfed food. There was no conversation except for grunts, an occasional half-sentence thrown out as though it were any dog's bone.

Hof was red-eyed, coughing, his face and clothes grey with soot.

‘What time you start lighting, Hof?' asked one of the hands.

‘Three. She ain't bad. We got down to one degree. I got the full fifteen hundred smoking, though.'

‘Forecast says fine and warm,' put in the dark brother.

Hof grunted. Nothing was explained to Jackie. He tried to be composed, in spite of the stares, nudges, and grins amongst the other men at the table. But as he left the kitchen, and he had to jump for the door knob and swing on it to open it, there was a wholehearted bellow of laughter. Quick as a flash Jackie whipped around: ‘You'll get used to it,' he said. ‘You've got used to the sight of your own ugly dials in the shaving-glass, so nothing's beyond you.'

Out in the dawn light, where a red veil sparkling like mica hid the mountains, the man who had first spoken to Jackie caught up with him.

‘Sorry I put me foot in it back there,' he said. He held out his hand. ‘I'm not such a bad bugger when you get to know me. Name's Cockie Bailey. What's yours, Lofty?'

‘Lofty will do,' said Jackie, for the man's diffident smile was engaging. ‘Jack Hanna is my name, though. I come from up the line—Kingsland.'

‘Well, Lofty, look on me as a mate if you need one,' said Cockie. ‘I been here in the valley on and off every year since I come out of the home, and I'm twenty-six now.' He spat out an anonymous knot he had fished out of a hollow tooth with a split match. ‘You lucky, Lofty, you know that. If the old man were here we'd have to work twice as hard. I never met such a slave-driver as Remus Linz. And tight! A duck's bum ain't in it.'

Jackie guessed that Remus Linz was the father of Maida and the boys.

‘He spends most of his time now away from High Valley,' said Cockie. ‘He's a blacksmith and wheelwright, travels around the countryside mostly. A booze-artist, and the most brutal hound you could ever hope to find dead in a ditch. I seen him break a calf's backbone with an axe. And he belts the old lady worse'n a dog.'

‘That old woman?'

‘The story is that's why Ellie's foot is crooked. He gave her a slamming while the kid was still in the bag.' He dropped his voice. ‘Hof is the best of a bad lot. If there's anything you want to be tipped off about, I'll drum yer.'

There was a bull's bellow from the kitchen garden: ‘Cockie, you and the new man douse the pots.'

Martin Linz, long before, had taken up a selection of four hundred acres in the almost inaccessible and intractable High Valley. He packed in his equipment and stores on a bullock sled that was set not on wheels but skids. He cut the track as he went, and he and his wife were a month on the journey. It was in Queen Victoria's time; there was no train through Ghinni then, and the hills swarmed with goldminers. Linz had no interest in gold.

His first house was a tin one, brought in sections from Bohemia, bolted together and set up on log runners in the first clearing he made. There Remus Linz had been born in 1869. There were others, daughters, but they were dispersed or dead long ago. Maida was named for one of them.

Martin Linz had planted fruit-trees from seeds and rooted slips brought in pots from the old country, and these immigrants had been the foundation of the Linz orchard. Plums, cherries, apricots, and nectarines had followed. Some time in the early years of the century the farm had gone over entirely to stone fruit; cauled Cape gooseberries fruited in sheltered hollows, red and black currants thicketed between the vegetables of the kitchen garden. Oranges, limes, grapes, and almonds, grew farther down the hillsides. Olive-green stands of native bush sheltered this fertile valley.

It became apparent to Jackie that the darkness hanging over the mountain valley was half smoke. In the orchard men carried lanterns, and their faces were as grimy as if windows had been cleaned with them. Amongst the trees a sullen humidity lingered like a low cloud. The stench of the burning oil was like that from guttering lamps.

‘I don't get it,' confessed Jackie. ‘What's it all about?'

‘Frost-fighting equipment,' said Cockie briefly. ‘Jump to it, son! Fuel's expensive, maybe eightpence the gallon. Hof says douse 'em, we douse 'em, quick. You take that row, I'll take this one.'

Many of the smoke-pots between the fruit-trees had already burned out. Jackie, fleet as a rabbit, had doused the remainder and was waiting at the end of the row by the time Cockie panted up.

‘How long does the smoke hang around?' asked Jackie.

‘Maybe four hours or so. Cars going down to the Junction have their headlights on a good part of the way. It's not good for the town; the smudge seeps through doors and window cracks when the wind's blowing that way. But what can you do? Ghinni lives on fruit-canning and the juice and jam factories. And fruit's got to be protected against frost. There's upwards of thirty thousand pots up here in High Valley alone. We ain't the only orchard in the valley, you know.'

By smoke-oh time the smog had drifted away in huge soiled cumuli towards Ghinni Junction. Through them Jackie discerned the muted colours of the landscape. A dry winter had left the countryside bronze, sepia, malachite; the walls of gorges showed as grey as skulls; the shrunken creeks, awaiting spring rains, licked sleek islets of sand.

‘You'll be real good, Lofty,' said Cockie Bailey. ‘For a little fella you got plenty of muscle.' He added, abruptly, ‘Don't you let them big squareheads poke too much borak. A man's got his right to respect.'

But the Linz brothers were like a ring of animals, not fierce feral beasts, for they were too easily amused for that, but something mischievous and derisory like monkeys.

They never let up for a moment. Each remark carried ill-concealed mockery. All the banter seemed to be directed at Jackie's appearance, the shortness of his legs and arms, the size of his head, his probable virility. The small contrivances by which he lived and worked as normally as possible sent them into fits of inexhaustible laughter. The sight of Jackie hopping up on chairs; swinging nimbly on door handles; jumping up and snatching what he needed, like a cat; carrying around a little box so that he would be high enough to work at a bench—these things were precious to them. They waited and watched so that they would not miss anything.

They had also little personal ploys of their own. The drunk brother liked to snatch off Jackie's cap and put it on to demonstrate how much bigger Jackie's head was than his own. The sight of his half-mad eyes peering out from under the brim never failed to send the rest of them into roars.

And the dark brother, whom Jackie detested most of all, because in his hatred he discerned apprehension, had a habit of leaning an elbow on the top of Jackie's head, as though by mistake, and then apologising extravagantly: ‘Thought it was the table, I swear I did, or the work-bench, or the top of a stump.'

Ah, Jackie could have murdered the dark brother. When he thought of him, a vicious tremble began in his diaphragm.

Though as a child Jackie had been no stranger to teasing, he found this new situation so alien he had no idea how to deal with it. He could not believe that mature men could enjoy for so long such baiting. Only in later weeks did he understand that the teasing arose from a peasant humour so simple it was almost innocent. Before that realisation he made many errors. Pushed willynilly into the role of court fool, he stood on his dignity, glared, answered back, became sullen.

In the back of his head he could hear Jerry MacNunn saying, ‘They're only waiting for a bite. They want to know they've stung you where you live. Ignore the bastards.'

But he could not. The joke went on too long. And yet it concerned small things: for example, the fat brother, at breakfast, stealthily taking food from his plate whenever he looked away, the tiny petal lips pursed in a smile of delighted expectation, waiting for the reaction.

‘Ask the tub of lard if he's still hungry,' advised the Nun in Jackie's head. But instead the boy leapt up, shouting, ‘Why don't you take the frigging lot?' and shoved the hot plate of food down the front of the fat brother's shirt. He heard Maida's cry of alarm, Ellie's hysterical burst of laughter, and then he was slammed against the door by a back-hander from the fat brother.

‘I'll murder the freak!'

The man looked like a charging elephant. Jackie slipped under his fist and behind him, leapt on his back and tried to throttle him. He wanted to feel his hands sunk in the yielding flesh, the eyes gouged out, warm blood gushing. But instead he was plucked off the fat man's back by the drunk brother, as easily as if he were a bug, and amidst lacerating laughter he was borne outside and hung on a peach bough by his braces. He cursed, spitting with rage and frustration, and at the same time he knew coldly that his limbs were moving with the foolish ineffectuality of a fly on flypaper.

‘Leave him alone. You asked for it, Kurtie,' rumbled Hof, restraining the carmine fat brother. And, growling, he lifted Jackie down. The rescue was as galling to the boy as the quarrel, and he wished he were dead.

The woman, his Aunt Eva, took a curious attitude. To Jackie she was still, after a week, an ambiguous personality, sometimes cringingly friendly, but brusque with him when her sons were in hearing. He thought she was hateful. He couldn't stand the sight of her soiled scalp through her sheep's curls. He hated the way she carped and whinged at Maida, as though, having been bullied all her life, she was now getting in for her cut. She had a word or two to say to Jackie, too, after the peach bough episode.