Swords and Crowns and Rings (49 page)

Jack hesitated. ‘I don't like to, Dad. It's a doctor's job.'

They had bread and a bit of cheese in the tucker-bag. Jack made tea in the billy, stirred it with a green twig, poured it into the enamel pints. Colour came back into the Nun's face.

‘I never even said anything about that fella in the train,' he said apologetically.

‘Forget him,' said Jack, slapping cheese on the bread.

‘But how'd he get in there with us? Ghost, I nearly jumped outa me skin. But I fended off that right of his, didn't I, eh? Just reflex, it was.'

‘Fast as lightning,' said Jack, passing the food to Jerry, who champed, saying, ‘He musta come over the top of the truck. You reckon? What scum, eh? Woulda thrown us off, you know.'

Jack wondered how many of the hoboes found dead and mutilated beside the line had been thrown off by such as Big Owen, murderous hulks who'd had a whale of a time during the War and now found their metier in the Depression, bashing up tramps.

‘Think he might lay a complaint for assault, though.' Jerry was worried.

‘Not him,' said Jack. ‘Can you see him spreading around the good news that a dwarf stretched him out? Just the same, that guard picked me, and I'd be easy to find. Still, I've got to chance it, so stop worrying.'

Far away he heard a dog barking. He bounded up on the permanent way, stared around. The sun was rising and mist, steaming in feeble wisps, marked the course of a creek. Then, as the sun rose higher, Jack saw a twinkle amidst distant trees. It was the reflection of an unpainted corrugated-iron roof.

But that homestead was perhaps four or five miles away.

He said to the Nun, ‘I'll go there, and get help. We could get you on a horse.'

‘I can walk,' said the Nun firmly. ‘I'll make it there on foot.'

Jackie could not dissuade him. He re-bandaged the wound, got the trousers back on him, rolled up their swags, and they set off.

It took them the best part of the day. The young man cursed and abused the older one for his stupidity and obstinacy, but the Nun wouldn't give in. Every time they stopped for a rest, the Nun dug a few more cactus spines out of Jackie's back. They were already inflamed and festering.

By the time they came in sight of the dwelling a morose silence hung between them. They were closer to disagreement than they had ever been. Jackie went a few steps ahead, carrying the swags, his stomach growling. The Nun tottered along behind, pain plucking at his leg at each step. The muck from the abscess had oozed through the bandage and hugely stained the leg of his pants. Jerry could think of no way he could clean his trousers; he felt so feeble and light-headed that tears came into his eyes at the thought of this fresh calamity.

The dwelling in the wilderness was a shack, built of a mixture of unpainted timber and packing-case sides. It was a rabbiter's hut. Skins hung drying on wires, and on the veranda traps were piled. But it was in its way neat and weatherproof, the grass was cut, and a rose bush bloomed meagrely near the steps. Fifty yards away a comatose creek sulked in a chain of shallow pools.

Three heelers, excited and hostile, met Jackie. He thought it prudent to coo-ee to the householder. Immediately a woman ran forth, booted the dogs away, turned welcomingly.

Weary and depressed as he was, Jackie could not help grinning at her expression as she looked at him.

‘Yes,' he said, ‘I'm a dwarf. Jack Hanna is my name.'

‘Well,' she said swiftly, ‘whatever your shape, you've a grand pair of eyes on you.'

She helped him to get Jerry into the house, her strong shoulder of far more value than his. She was the rabbiter's wife, a gaunt, rusty Scotswoman from whose craggy face looked small eyes blue as butterflies. They laid the exhausted man on the sofa, where he instantly fell asleep.

As the housewife slapped saucepans and pans around on the grid over the open fire, Jackie told her what had happened. She said decisively, ‘Well, my man can drive him into town as soon as he comes in from the traps at sundown. And in the meantime I'll take a peek at that leg in case it's gathering.'

‘He'll fight you,' said Jackie. ‘He'll give you a battle for the pants.'

‘We'll see,' she said, smiling. ‘Sit down and eat, boy. You must be famished. On the track, are you?'

Her name was Het. She had a dappled neck and big pale hands, well used to skinning rabbits. Jackie tried to be jaunty and saucy; it was an attitude that always softened and amused women, but once he had eaten his head almost nodded into the remnants of the treacle pudding that lay on his plate.

Het never saw a soul from one month's end to the other. She was famished for conversation, for her man was a silent one. Even though she saw the young man was almost asleep, she went on talking, looking at his dusty black hair, home-cut, so that it curled in harsh tufts, his long eyelashes on his cheeks.

‘Times I walk over to the railway line,' she said, ‘just to see the trains go past and wave to the passengers. It's a long toddle in the heat, but there, a person needs company. Sometimes they throw me the day's newspapers!'

She touched Jackie's cheek with her hard finger. ‘It's a lonesome life here,' she said, almost inaudibly. ‘Gey lonesome.'

Then she shook him gently. ‘Up with you, lad. Undo your dad's braces and lift him at the middle, and we'll have breeks off him before he can bellow.'

The Nun awakened with a horrified start, and tucked his shirt down between the legs. Het laughed. ‘Here's a towel to cover yourself with. Now then, let's have a look at this mess. Ugh!'

‘It was a Boer done it,' said Jerry.

‘Aye, I see,' she said, and she seized hold of the discoloured metal, gave it a twist and a yank and, to the accompaniment of a mortal yell from Jerry, had it in her fingers.

‘What are you squealing for, man?' she asked in amazement. ‘It was just sitting there. Now, I'll just slap a bread poultice on that, and swaddle you up, and you'll be fit enough to sit up and eat a meal like a gentleman.'

‘God, woman,' said Jerry, holding his leg, his lips drawn back from his teeth like a dying dog's, ‘you're bloody murder!'

She laughed with delight, jeering at him: ‘Look at him there, the little old cold lad, bare as a trout, sitting on his bum bones glaring at me!'

Brisk and matter of fact, she put a hot poultice on the abscess, bound it up, oblivious of Jerry's ruffled mortification, gave him a safety-pin to hold the blanket around his middle, and bade him hobble to the table. Jackie grinned; Jerry gave him a wry shrug.

The hot food put heart into him, and he was relieved to see that Het had his trousers stretched out on an ironing-board, sponging them briskly before ironing them dry.

Her husband, Donaldson the rabbiter, enjoyed the company of strangers. He had the odd, smiling timidity of those who rarely see other human beings, keeping his eyes cast down as he ate. His wife told their story, and he listened as absorbedly as if it were new to him, nodding at intervals with a curious complacency. He and Het had been amongst the British immigrants who flooded into Australia after the War.

‘It took us three years to make up our minds,' she said. ‘Then we packed up and went, assisted. Wild black men in the streets we expected, kangaroos—och, were we green! But soon we were doing well. Heck had a bicycle shop, fittings and services: it was a goldmine. The whole world was in bicycle breeks, it seemed.'

‘Aye,' said Heck.

‘You mightn't think it,' she said, ‘but Heck has a grand business head on him. He saw the slump coming eighteen months before it arrived. Saw it clear as a vision. “Het,” he said, “we're selling.” So we did.'

Heck, pleased but modest, gave Jerry a gratified wink and nodded.

They had travelled round the country in the old car, picked at last on this piece of Crown wasteland out of Wilga—and without permission built the shack and set up rabbiting. They had between them a mutual enjoyment of their shrewdness, in ‘seeing it coming', unlike other people who hung on hoping for the best and lost everything. They beamed at each other now in innocent smugness. Yet Jackie, now restored to his ordinary wits, read on each face separate terrors and longings never as much as hinted at.

The old car was like a hearse, a tourer with its back seat removed. Heck used it to take his pelts to the dealer, and it smelt of animal and saltpetre. For five miles there was only a bush track, he said, leant on by scrub and impassable in the wet. Sometimes he and the wife lived on rabbit and damper for weeks at a time.

‘But, losh! We're better off than most.'

When they left the shack, Het gave Jackie a kiss and a hug.

‘I'll bet you've a sweetheart, with those bonny eyes of yours!'

‘If you weren't married, I would have, for sure,' said Jackie.

She hooted with laughter, but Jackie saw tears in her eyes.

When Donaldson left Jack and the Nun in Wilga, he tried to push five shillings into Jerry's hand.

‘For the doctor,' he said. ‘He'll no' work for nothing, that one.'

‘No,' said Jerry firmly. ‘We're right for money. And we thank you and your wife. Great. We won't forget it.'

‘Did you believe all that?' asked Jackie, as they sat in the waiting-room.

‘Na,' said the Nun. ‘Poor as abo fleas, them two. If they ever had any money, it's all gone long ago. But they got pride. And you can't lick people like that.'

Jack grinned. ‘Never in a million years,' he said.

The doctor looked at the slug with interest.

‘I'll have that for my curiosity cabinet,' he said. ‘I'll have it for my fee.'

The Nun was cranky at having to let it go, though he realised it was the sensible thing to do. As he explained to Jack, it wasn't so much that he'd miss it after thirty-two years, but that he didn't like the idea of it in that cabinet, along with the jar of kidney stones—enough to sink a rowboat, the Nun said—and the woeful things pickled in jars, and the baby's skull with three eye-holes.

The doctor wasn't a bad fellow. For a bit of firewood-chopping from Jackie, he allowed them to bed down on clean sacks in his garage that night. His little daughter, eyes rounded with excitement at the sight of Jack, ran out with a tray of hot food for them, roast beef and beans and potatoes, and rice custard to follow. The Nun nearly cried, it was so good after the dog's dinners they'd been having.

‘Ghost,' he kept saying. ‘Ghost! It's enough to make a man say grace.'

Before they went to sleep, he said, ‘That quack says my leg'll mend up like new, and my health'll improve, too. It'll be real queer not to have a crook leg all the time.'

Later Jackie heard him say, to himself, ‘I used to be a very enjoying sort of a fella.'

In spite of his reassurances to his stepfather, Jackie was uneasy during the three days they remained in Wilga. He knew that the railway cop might well have laid a complaint against him. The guard, prejudiced by his false ideas, might well bear lying witness. So when the doctor said that Jerry could safely move on again they hitched a ride on a produce lorry going south, for the rumour was that the Government was about to start tree-planting on the desolate plains.

Jerry was tired. He felt much older than a man not yet fifty, as though the stuffing had been knocked out of him somewhere, And he worried at the thought that he and Jack might just have to wander around the country like two winds blowing side by side, getting dirtier and more bedraggled, more depressed and hopeless, until at last they were just two odd-looking derelicts—down-and-outers, just like all the others. He thought, almost with resentment, ‘I just wish Jack would take it into his head to alight somewhere.'

Immediately he reproached himself. ‘God, a man's a bastard. The little fella can't enjoy it any more than I do. But who's going to give a steady job to one like him, when there's full-sized men ready to work their guts out for their grub and a roof?'

Jerry realised he was just homesick: ‘All I want is to be back home with Peggy.' It occurred to him then that a man was not homesick for places as much as for people and time. He was homesick for eight, twelve years before. And such an ache seized him that he had to pretend to be asleep in case his face gave him away.

They hit the bottom of the pile at a pig farm a few miles west of Edith, a hamlet straggling about a railhead and a bacon factory. The word had gone around that Council was beginning new roadworks outside the town.

‘If we don't get a start there,' said Jack, ‘that'll be it, eh, Dad? Sydney or bust.'

The last of their money was at the Edith post office in a registered envelope, waiting to be picked up. It would cover fares to the city, with a couple of quid over.

They had begun that day in good fettle at Crimea, twenty-five miles from Edith, where they had had a few days' work bagging potatoes. They had landed a reasonable kip in an empty louvre truck in the freight yards; but when daylight came and the iron argument of the yards began they slipped out and drifted down the main street.

Every third shop was boarded up, its doorway filled with dirt and blown papers, and occasionally a blanket-wrapped body. Jackie combed his hair, looking into a mirror in a shop window. Dreary garments hung on huge cardboard blow-ups or photographs of girls' faces and shoulders.

Jerry blew on his fingers. A dybbuk wind rushed up the street, hating everything it touched. At the end of the road shone a solitary square. The smell of new bread came to the travellers. A real pain seized Jerry's belly at this odour.

‘Could you do a bit of fresh bread?'

‘I could eat the bloody baker.'

They had no need to check their money. They knew to a halfpenny what they had. Enough to spend a night at a boarding-house in Edith, have a bath and proper shave, wash their shirts, a few bob to get them out to the job, supposing they were lucky enough to get a start.