Swords and Crowns and Rings (41 page)

‘Heard there was work going up the line a bit. But I dessay it'd all be gone by the time I got there. Story of me life since I got the boot from me real job.'

He brought the potatoes over to the fire. He had wan sand-blighted eyes and a gamey smell.

‘You one of them drorfs?' he inquired.

‘Yeah,' said Jackie. He offered the man his tobacco pouch. It was grabbed eagerly.

He had the gaunt jaws, the decaying teeth common to the unemployed. Other things marked them. There was the change of expression in the eyes, a sort of dumb defiant self-consciousness, and then a wildness—a hostility ready for hostility even before it appeared. The older men quickly got a hangdog, beseeching expression; the young ones developed a snarl; the kids looked bewildered.

So did Jackie judge the huge calamity that had come upon his country by the human detritus that washed up upon this distant sand.

‘Like a mug of tea? Cut yourself a hunk of brownie, too.'

The hobo, starving again after his earlier meal, ate savagely. With mouth full, he told Jackie a rambling tale of being laid off from his boot factory in Balmain, Sydney. Two year ago now; nothing but casual work, and bloody little of that.

‘A good clicker I was.' His tone, like that of most of the hoboes to whom Jackie had spoken, was aggrieved. ‘Done me time, come out of it a first-class tradesman, and what happens? Laid off. Wife had to go back to her parents; I hardly ever seen my kid. Got a weak chest he has—no wonder, the rotten start he got. Not my fault. Laid off, just like that, a first-class tradesman.'

He looked with feeble rage at his hands, still faintly marked in whorl and pore with black cobbler's grease.

‘It hurt at all, being a drorf, I mean?'

‘No,' said Jackie.

‘Just thought I'd ask like.'

Later that night, the hobo went to the camp boss and said he would do Jackie's job just for his tucker.

‘You'll get a toe in the backside, that's what you'll get,' said the boss good-naturedly. ‘Don't get up young Jack's nose, I warn you; he's as strong as an ox. Break your neck with one hand.'

The man looked sick, and avoided Jackie thereafter. He spent his time the next day fetching in cast branches for firewood, breaking up the thorny, fossilised-looking wood clumsily, wearing a hopeless, sulky expression.

‘Think you'll come back, Lofty?' asked the camp boss, as he said good-bye to Jackie. Jack shook his head.

The boss nodded. ‘You're doing the right thing. The cattle industry's dying on its feet. Sure will miss them doughboys of yours, though.'

Jack saw the grateful relief on Dad Wright's gnarled face.

When he and the hobo reached the siding, the man scuttled away with a grunt, not looking at him. All around the lines vagrants were lolling in the long hay-like grass; there were twenty or twenty-five of them. Jackie knew that wherever a train slowed down, men of this description jumped on like fleas, to be mercilessly harried by train guards and railway cops, thrown off in desert places, or perhaps left alone by a good sport who risked his own job to turn a blind eye to poor devils legally forced to wander. To be eligible for unemployment benefits they could not stay in one place for more than a specified time—in one State a week, in another for only a day. It was the responsibility of the police to keep this army of homeless travellers on the move. They were an itinerant labour force, dirty, flea-ridden, riding bikes and old sulkies, bashed-up lorries and cars; they included families, couples, solitary wanderers whose only hope of a roof on a winter's night was to commit some petty crime and get collared for it.

Looking at them, Jackie wondered what it all meant, why a land overflowing with productivity should thus be forced to a standstill, whirring helplessly, while her people starved. Jack had better ideas than most about the realpolitik of the Depression. The reasons why it had happened seemed clear to him. What was baffling was why it had been allowed to happen.

An elderly man with a collapsed face, a burred chin, approached him, bummed a cigarette, sat near by. He was so thin his clothes looked empty.

The old man blamed everything, the War, the Depression, on
them
, faceless pullers of strings—politicians, churchmen, bankers— who had manipulated the country into ruin for their own benefit.

‘Well,' said Jackie, idly, ‘we've got a Commonwealth Labour Government now, anyway.'

The old man became furious. Thin pink ran down his hairy cheeks.

‘Sure we have, at bloody long last. But how do you expect them poor sods to clean up years of mismanagement? Put the whole country into the hands of the Jews them last jokers did, and now Scullin and his mob are supposed to fix everything up in a year or so. While They sit back and smoke their cigars and laugh at us. Them! A marvel a man don't run berserk.'

He was ferociously alone, his wife dead, his daughter in hospital with ‘chube trouble'. He had broken his bottom denture and there was no hope of repair.

‘Who'd give an old ragbag like me a job? I keep me good navy in me swag for interviews, like, but how can you friggenwell look like a decent workman when your front tats are gone?' He gave Jackie a half-embarrassed look: ‘Your monicker Hanna by any chance?'

Jackie nodded.

‘Thought so. My married daughter, she lives in Ghinni Junction where the inquest was held.'

With relief Jackie heard the snoring of the train far away. He climbed up the embankment fence, saw the black serpent switching its tail through the blond grassland. The sun ran up and down the rails like quicksilver.

‘I'd better get down there and flag her down,' said Jackie. The old man sighed briefly, came to the point. ‘Couldn't spare a few bob, could you, mate?'

Jackie gave him three shillings, which was almost all he had in his pocket besides the train fare which the camp boss had advanced on his cheque, and the old man scuttled away, not looking at him, triumphant and hating himself.

Before the train was due, the men vanished like rats in the long grass. Jackie boarded it, and all through the long dreary night he awakened at intervals to think of the hoboes, frozen stiff on the splintery floors of open trucks, bumping and hammering over the lightless land, their eyes bunged with coal-dust, bellies growling. On the way from nowhere to nowhere, and for what?

‘Being out of luck is like being sick,' thought Jackie. ‘No meaning, no use.'

He found comfort that he would soon be seeing the Nun: it was like looking forward to a sunny day.

In a starry pre-dawn he changed to a slow freight train, fruit-vans and tarpaulined trucks, and three dog-box carriages dredged up from before the Boer War. The passengers had been travelling most of the night. They slept wearily, all their heads nodding in unison like seaweed in a current. The only seat left was in front of the WC; every so often Jackie had to get up and turn the seat up so that people could get to the lavatory.

At first light, people awakened, dirty-eyed and stiff, yawning, grinning—a kind of simple comradeship amongst them. There was small talk about the slump, unemployment, how many miles to the next halt for refreshments.

When he left the train to wait for the passenger train which would take him to Kingsland, he saw three hoboes being dragged from under a tarpaulin. One looked drunk or unconscious.

‘Bloody cockroaches!' said the porter, secure in his uniform.

The passenger train was crowded. Jackie rode on the platform, leaning against the washroom door, watching half-dazed the trees whipping away beside the line, and in the distance other trees changed by mirage into fuming islands, trunkless, afloat in heat.

Shortly after seven the next morning the seamed green hills of his native town rose before him. Stiff as an old man, he left the train, washed his face in the familiar waiting-room, shaved in cold water.

He thought he would have a drink at the early-opener before going home.

He walked into the Princess May, and in the time it took him to move from the door to the bar the talk stopped and the silence gathered about him. He knew the two kinds of silence, the silence that is, and the silence that's made; one is dumb and the other has meaning.

He knew which one this was.

‘Well,' he thought, ‘the story's been here before me.'

He lowered a shoulder and let the swag drop, slapped the dust out of his trousers, meantime glancing casually around the saloon. Strangers mostly, some looking familiar as though they were older copies of boys he had gone to school with. But all silent. A museum of dummies.

‘Middy,' he said.

The barman didn't move. Jackie looked at him coolly.

A year ago he might have felt outraged, bewildered. But that was a year ago. He stared at the barman.

‘Did you hear me, mate?'

The barman swivelled an eye at his boss in the little office off the lounge. The publican came behind the bar, stood in front of Jackie, his hands flattened on the counter, his smooth woman's arms showing to the folds of the rolled-up silk sleeves. His name was James Tidey.

Someone yelled from behind Jackie, ‘You ain't wanted here, Hanna.'

‘Get your swag,' said James Tidey, ‘and get going.'

Jackie glanced around at the men. Some looked away, some grinned, others stared him out with a virtuous challenge.

‘That's how it is?' said Jackie.

‘That's how it is,' said the publican.

Jackie picked up his swag. ‘Shove it then,' he said, and turned for the door.

As he went he heard a voice say self-righteously: ‘Good on yer, Tidey. A man has to draw the line somewhere. I mean, his own wife and kid...'

He walked down the main street. Kingsland didn't look different, except for the garage where the Chinese General Store used to be on the corner. But the town had a scaly, run-down look, not paintless, but with everything years overdue for repainting. Jackie halted here and there, looking for familiar names on signboards, trying not to look at the people who peered out of windows, drew each other's attention, hurried past. His heart pained him. He was no longer a boy but a man; yet he was wounded that this, his own town, should believe such evil of him.

His step quickened as he saw the Nun come out of Hanna's and sprinkle the sunny pavement with a bottle of water, preparatory to sweeping it. Jackie withdrew a little to one side to watch him. The Nun's face had changed; temples and jaws were prominent; the skin of his throat was loose.

‘How are things, Dad?' he asked softly.

The Nun jumped. Joy lit him.

‘Ghost!' he said. ‘You little son of a gun!'

They embraced each other out in the street, punched each other wordlessly, then drew apart with foolish smiles. The Nun blew his nose, wiped his eyes.

‘Better cut this out. People'll think we're a couple of poons.'

He walked Jackie through the shop, which seemed dusty, desolate in some way. It was only when Jackie was in the familiar kitchen behind that he realised the shelves had been half empty, tinned food arranged in a single line to cover the hollowness, apples and potatoes laid out on paper instead of being heaped in baskets and sacks.

‘And you been travelling all that time! Days! Bet you're empty as a boot. I'll have a feed ready for you in two shakes.'

‘But the shop?'

The Nun shrugged wryly. ‘Ain't going to be a rush. Never mind that. Sit down, me old Jack. How's things been for you?'

‘About as bad as they've been for you, I guess.'

‘Yeah. Musta been a knock, coming on your other trouble, I mean.'

Jackie nodded. He suddenly felt depleted, exhausted. He sat down in his mother's chair.

‘Couldn't believe it when I got your letter. I thought she was built to go for ever. I wish I could have been here when it happened, to help out.'

‘That's all right.'

The Nun slapped fried eggs and bacon on a hot plate, began to make toast on a long fork thrust up against the fire bars. He laughed. ‘Remember how your mum always burned the toast, every bloody time? I bought her one of them electric toasters before she really got crook, but she was scared to use it, thought it might blow up. She went on charring the toast and swearing about it. Gawd, Jack, she was a woman in a million, she was.'

His voice shook. With dread Jackie averted his eyes from the Nun's crumpling face. He knew that if his stepfather broke down he himself would be good for nothing. Fortunately at that moment heavy boots sounded in the shop, and a voice shouted:

‘Hey, Nun, where you keeping yourself? Got that chook food bagged for me?'

The Nun blew his nose shamefacedly, wiped his eyes. ‘It gets me now and then. Sorry, Jack. You bog in now.'

He limped into the shop, and gratefully Jack began to eat.

That night he climbed along the bough and into the treehouse. The door had swollen with rain; he had to shove it to get in, and it squalled off its hinges. The treehouse itself had become very small. The floor was a foot deep in leaves, there were damp patches on the ceiling and the walls, and birds had nested in the roof, leaving behind them on the rafters archipelagoes of white dung.

He stood there as though in a dream, feeling unreal, seeing Cushie and himself lying there on a blanket, Cushie giving a cry of pain and saying, ‘Don't mind. It doesn't matter if you love me, Jackie.'

But he had never had Cushie in the treehouse. It was just that as a boy he had so many times dreamed of having her there. What she had said had been said in her own bed, in Moys' house, that long-ago late spring.

Sharp as a knife were memories of other times with Cushie, the sweetness and the confidence of them, no thought of pain and bereavement. Ah, more than that, no knowledge of them!

What had happened to Cushie in the years between? He had gone so long without thinking of her, so that his love for Maida should grow unimpeded. Did she ever think of him, his golden-haired princess? The games they had played: silly as owls they'd been, as though life were a fairytale and everything came out all right in the end by Divine Law. He tried to imagine Cushie there, in the treehouse, grown-up. She'd be tall, like her mother probably. But he was still the same size. Perhaps she'd despise him, be horrified at what they'd been to each other for all those years.