Swords and Crowns and Rings (44 page)

‘That's the ticket,' said Jerry gratefully. ‘Give us a tootle to cheer us on our way.'

On the fringe of Kingsland, where the old gold town had once stood, and the stone buildings had crumbled until in 1930 the first relief workers had pulled them down, an unemployed camp had gradually grown up. Its residents called it Happy Valley. Jerry had never seen it, so as they drew level he stopped the truck to have a rubberneck.

‘God,' he said, ‘I never dreamed! I never dreamed it was as big as that!'

The camp was scattered over half a mile. People had tried to find privacy by building their bag humpies in the lee of sandy hummocks, mullock dumps, piles of shattered masonry from the old buildings. The bags had been cut open, nailed to crudely shaped frames, and weatherproofed with a coating of lime and fat. The roofs were of bark, of kerosene tins opened out flat with a tin-opener, or bits of corrugated iron salvaged from the Kingsland tip.

Women were cooking breakfast on open fires; blowflies spiralled in hosts above rubbish holes; children hurtled here and there.

Jerry was aghast. ‘I never thought to come and have a look. When I heard of it, I always thought, ah, ten or fifteen shacks, maybe. But there must be three hundred tents and humpies here. Think of winter time! Ghost, it must be hell.'

The kids had pointed and laughed at the lorry. It had never been a beauty, and looked worse now that bows had been fixed across the tray and covered with a canvas tarpaulin that could be eyeletted down against the weather.

‘Looks like a flamin' circus rig-out,' Jerry thought.

Inside they had ticks filled with clean hay, cooking gear, a drum for water, hurricane lamps, a box for clean clothes. But Jackie fretted.

‘We need a dog, that's what we need, to keep an eye on things when we're away. Something with teeth like a crosscut saw.'

They carried very little money. Jack knew all the tricks about safeguarding money in the bush, and he had persuaded the Nun to send his small savings in the shape of money orders in registered letters addressed to himself at post offices here and there along their prospective route.

They intended to drift slowly south, but by unspoken consent they first turned west, so as to detour around Ghinni and the Dovey. They had applied for track cards before they left, and it was the most demeaning thing the Nun had ever done, standing there like a big sook in the line of men, till he had to front up to a police constable he'd known since he had to cuff him for snitching handfuls of dried apples from the barrel in Hanna's.

‘Good luck, Mr MacNunn,' he said kindly. ‘Next year you'll have a good old laugh about all this.'

The Nun couldn't help it; he was too ashamed to meet the young chap's eyes. He mumbled something, pulled down his hat-brim, and cleared out of there like a scalded cat. He looked on his track card as a certificate that he was a failure, a man who had lost his livelihood, his stepson's inheritance, his wife's home.

Jack felt as though he were facing into a cold wind with which he was well acquainted. It was no colder than it had been for a long time now, but now it seemed that it blew more strongly.

So they jolted south-west, hoping they could pick up harvesting or digging or other agricultural labour. There were occasional rumours of operations recommencing on the panicky public works that the previous Government had started and often abandoned, repairing rabbit and dingo fences, driving railway tunnels half-way into intractable hills, draining swamps that no one wanted to cultivate anyway.

‘They tried, I suppose, poor cows,' commented Jerry.

But Jackie, more cynical, suspected that the demoralised quarrelling State Government had been less concerned with the life-support of the workless than with their threatened coherence under the banner of this new thing, communism, now running like a fire in bracken amongst the unemployed, flaring up in unions that had suffered in recent years. Who could blame the thousands of miners, their families reduced to starvation and homelessness during the protracted coalfields lock-out, fired on and beaten up during the Battle of Rothbury, when pickets endeavoured to prevent a mine being worked by scab labour—who could blame them for snatching at any straw, any ideology that promised a better pie in the sky?

‘This new joker Lang,' said Jerry. ‘He'll sort things out. Hotter than a tomcat full of curry, he is. You just wait, boy.'

The new State Premier was a courageous and undiplomatic radical whose unorthodox statements had already shaken the Commonwealth Government. Jackie knew little about him, and he had not yet been so conditioned by severe hardship that his mind was stimulated by the sound of any new name, any new proposition.

Their first week was not a good one. The road was potholed, rutted, coral red, an Etruscan road; bushes beside it were enamelled with dust, the truck itself red all over. And everywhere travellers, some on rusty bikes, but most trudging with swags up. Dirty faces swinging towards them when the lorry ground up behind them. Suspicious faces, disordered with the pouches and puckers of long-standing fatigue.

Jackie was adamant that none of these swagmen be allowed in the back of the truck.

‘If they can fit in the cab, all right,' he said. ‘I'll go round to the back. Anything we've got in the back we need, and we're not losing it, so that's flat.'

‘Cripes, you're getting stony-hearted, son,' said the Nun.

‘Better stony-hearted than stony,' replied Jack.

The Nun sulked a little. After the Boer War he had been on the track, and his experience was that when times were hard people drew closer together, looked after each other, and did in fact share their last crust.

Jack agreed. ‘These travellers have a code all right. Ratting the swag of a fellow stiff is out. But compared with the hoboes you and I are millionaires. So we're fair game.'

‘Something's gone out of him,' Jerry pondered, ‘or come into him. I dunno whether I altogether like it, bloody little firecracker.'

Jerry did not realise that Jackie's hard-line attitude was because his stepfather needed protection. Within three days Jack saw that Jerry was not physically fit enough for a vagrant's life. His limp, though he tried to conceal it, seemed worse; he slept little; but he tried to make the best of it.

‘I'm just green. End of a week I'll run rings round you, me old Jack. Compared to the veldt, this is a picnic'

‘You're jake,' said the younger man carelessly. He shepherded Jerry all he could without the latter's noticing, was up early to light the campfire and cook the breakfast, changed tyres on the truck, fetched firewood, walked around the towns hunting work for them both. Once or twice when there was work for only one, he let Jerry have it, figuring that it would buck him up, make him feel useful.

They had luck at first, near Glen Ida, stooking and general labour with a wheat cocky—thirty bob a week and food in the kitchen with his shy wife and nudging, snickering kids.

‘I know the pay's not up to rates,' he said, ‘but the tucker's good. Not like last year, when we lived mostly on boiled wheat.'

The children's teeth were chalky and the last baby had rickets.

Jackie played his mouth-organ for the children while the wife and the big daughter washed up. The daughter was a colourless lump, with straight red hair and tiny wombat eyes, glowering about something, flouncing and banging pots and plates until the mother in an undertone told her to stop performing.

Jerry and the wheat cocky sat on the veranda and talked Depression, the farmer saying that if the prices didn't come up this year they'd have to walk off. He and two others were the only survivors in the district. The wheatgrowers' Depression had started years before, with a sequence of big droughts and small yields.

‘I've got a bonzer harvest this year,' he said. ‘Never seen anything like it. But they say the price will collapse. I suppose the farm will end up in the claws of the Bank like so many others. That's what they're doing, you know, grabbing bankrupt properties to sell later on, the bludgers.'

‘But there's that Moratorium,' said Jerry.

The cocky pulled a long face. ‘Don't affect me, mate. They got a lien on me crop, you see, and that don't come under the Act. I'd cut me throat, honest, if it weren't for the missus and the kids.'

He was a phlegmatic man, but Jerry could hear the terror in his voice.

He took Jerry down to the homestead fence to show him the crop. Most of the harvesting would be done by people round about, to be paid in wheat.

‘Pretty, ain't it?' said the farmer, watching the wheat turn silver in the fading light. ‘Makes you wonder.'

Jack sat on the veranda in the twilight, and after a while the daughter came out and sat on the steps. She had in the meantime drawn on a Joan Crawford mouth with the lipstick her auntie had left behind, and she kept touching it with a finger so that he would be sure to notice. She was bursting to talk to someone younger than her parents.

She told him morosely that her father had sent away her sweetheart, the farm handyman—that was why Jackie and his father were getting work on the wheat. The boy and her were real stuck on each other, but her dad thought she'd get into bother, if Jack knew what she meant, if the boy stayed.

‘He's that good looking, real romantic,' she said. ‘Big brown eyes.' She brooded. ‘Someone else will get him now that he's in town.'

‘Well, if he's keen on you...' began Jackie awkwardly.

‘Oh, you!' she snapped. ‘What could you know about love?'

‘Lorraine!' called the mother from inside. ‘What are you doing out there? Come in here at once.'

The girl muttered something, scrambled up like a cow, and barged inside. He heard her snarl, ‘Course I wasn't. Flirt—with him? You must be barmy.'

Jackie walked away into the vegetable garden. The girl had seemed to him to be calamitously ugly and dull; she had nothing, not even the grace of youth. But she thought she was fit for love, and Jackie completely on the outside of it. It wasn't the first time the assumption had been made, and the girl was a moron; but he felt as sore as a boil.

‘Up you, you mudhopper,' he thought.

It was an autumn of hard yellowness. The stock ponds grew shallow and slimy, the sun shone from a steely sky as though it would never go away. The wheat cocky gained hope with every day; when thunder sounded as if someone were rolling stones around in the sky, Jerry could almost see him tremble. ‘God, I hope it's heat and not rain!' he said. Neighbours and all worked as though the devil were after them.

Towards the end of the harvest, the wheat cocky's wife, still awkward and shy, said to Jackie, ‘There'll be a dance on in town, Saturday, at the Masonic Hall. You might like to go.'

For a moment Jack thought she was suggesting he should take the big daughter, but instantly realised that the girl would never be allowed into town in case she met the ex-handyman.

He said, ‘Better not, I guess.'

‘They're real nice people,' she offered. Jackie shook his head.

The Nun was vexed with him.

‘You seem to forget you're a young fella,' he said. ‘The way you go on, you might be forty.'

‘I feel bloody forty,' said Jack, grinning.

‘A lot of crook things have happened to you for a young chap,' said Jerry; ‘but they're over now. You need a bit of fun, chat up a girl. Tell you what, I'll drive you in, and maybe get a drink somewhere myself. Hear the news in this godforsaken hole. What about it?'

Jackie thought about it. ‘I used to like dancing.' He laughed. ‘Scared of a knock-back, I suppose.' After a moment he said, ‘Sod 'em! Let's go.'

Just before Jerry got the truck moving, the daughter, her eyes now invisible with crying, ran to Jackie and pushed a note into his hand.

‘He might be there,' she hissed. ‘Vic Tollery—you ask for him.'

The wheat cocky appeared from the veranda as if by magic, snatched the note from Jackie's hand, grabbed hold of the girl and shook her.

‘You bloody mug! You won't be satisfied till he's got you up the duff, will you?'

His voice was so hoarse it was scarcely recognisable. The girl began to roar, ‘I love Vic, I do, I do.' In her woe her face was positively grotesque. It was impossible to believe that anyone loved her in return.

The agitated Nun put the truck into first with a sound as if the gear-box was full of bottle-tops. The lorry kangaroo'ed forward and nearly destroyed a home-going fowl.

‘I love him,' they heard the girl howling hysterically.

The Nun safely got the truck into second and coasted away into the twilight. ‘Gawd!' he said. ‘I wouldn't have daughters for quids.'

Glen Ida lay comatose in the long iron shadows of a majestic tor. Apart from the railway and the wheat stores, it had nothing. The only two-storey building on the main street was the corner hotel, a William IV fire-trap with rusty iron crochet on long verandas over which the louts leant on Saturday afternoons, languidly spitting at the passers-by.

Atrocious music, almost drowned by the rhythmic thunder of feet, came from the Masonic Hall. The doorway was constantly filled with silhouetted figures that shoved each other in or out. Jerry's heart sank. It looked like just the sort of place where, out of sheer witless skittishness, the boys would get onto one like Jackie, and then there'd be a brawl.

‘Come and have a beer with me instead,' he said impulsively.

Jackie gave him a grin. ‘Sod you, too, son,' he said. He climbed down out of the truck. ‘Pick you up at the boozer later,' he called back.

The Nun sighed, and drove down the road to the pub.

But Jack, too, had misgivings. He wished to hell he hadn't been so stupid as to come. But he couldn't let himself down now. He danced well. He had learnt properly at school, and in Kingsland he had managed to get plenty of partners even amongst the tall girls. Maida could not dance, of course, but he had taught her, and they had often skipped around the cottage floor to the strains of Lufa's fiddle. Long ago that seemed! The memory seemed to bring back the Dovey, its blurred glass at sunset, the bog cotton flying white flags in the swamps. Wonder what old Lufe is doing now?