Swords and Crowns and Rings (50 page)

‘Two bob over,' said Jack. ‘Come on, mate!'

The baker was a lively monkey with light blue eyes in a brown face of antique beauty. His name was Vince Panebianco.

‘Funny, eh? White bread! Here, you come and sit down in the warm near the oven.'

He was so glad to have company in the melancholy dawn he almost danced from the door to the bread trough he was cleaning. Thankfully Jackie and Jerry entered that small crammed haven of heat and light. They tried to buy something, but he would have none of it, pressing a rubbery new loaf upon them, scraping around in a canvas bag, finding a red pear of cheese and cutting off two thick slices.

‘I know, I know! I was on the road. Two years! No track rations then either. Terrible! Living like a stray dog! I lay out in the rain in a paddock, hoping to catch some sickness and die. You believe me? What your name, little one? Jack! Giacomo! You have room in the stomach for a hot pie, Giacomo? And you, mister?'

‘Oh, you're a gent, you are,' groaned Jerry.

The pie was so boiling hot he couldn't eat it. He wobbled a mouthful from side to side of his mouth, his eyes rolling.

‘But how did you come to be a baker, Vince? What happened?'

‘All the time I was on the road, starving, begging, hoping to die, there was this letter following me around, this post office, that one, where is this Vince Panebianco? Is he dead, is he in prison? But at last it came to me. In this town. Crimea. It said my uncle was dead. In Naples. He had left me a little money. What will I do with it, I said? I was standing out there on the footpath, there! I saw the bakery. The old man was sick, he wanted to retire. I went to him and said: for a year I will work for nothing, do all your work. You be the padrone, sit there in the easy-chair, tell me what to do, teach me! Then I shall buy the bakery. So it has happened. I am most fortunate man. But I do not forget what it is like on the road.'

All the time he had been talking, the baker had been loading loaves into huge trays. Jackie and Jerry helped him carry them out and slide them into the back of his little van.

‘Where you going, then, which way? I go as far as the Four Mile, on the Edith road. Good!'

He filled their tucker-bags with buns and bread. They set off, the earth wheeling down into the sun's steady light, the paddocks starched with frost. The frigid air seemed to scintillate; the steely sky softened, became a sweet blue.

‘Listen!'

As Jerry and his son got down at the four-mile peg, the baker leant forward, held up a finger. A bird in a tree cried out a long incomprehensible message like a muezzin.

‘When you think all is spoiled, all is over, then comes God with a hand to help. You remember!'

He smiled, waved, turned the van down a pinkish mud road that wavered between the chocolate fields. The two travellers shouldered their swags and continued along the road to Edith. Mile after mile there was no sign of life. Yet this had been a populous region; grey, derelict wooden farmhouses, crazy toppling barns stood here and there amid lime-yellow groves of winter wattle.

Farther on, perhaps six or seven miles from Crimea, the warming air had the fresh odour of frost-bitten soil, and sometimes, hidden by wind-breaks of macrocarpa or tall holly, they saw homesteads amidst potato and turnip paddocks. But they had food; there was no need to go asking for a hand-out.

On these long tramps the Nun liked to talk about his early life with Jack's mother, how she had looked when he first saw her: ‘Pouring hair oil outa that little green cask on the shelf, you remember it, Jack? And spilling it all over her feet. Buttoned boots she had, brown ones.'

The younger man listened with pleasure. Still, it always amazed him how his stepfather could speak so freely, and with such enjoyment, of his dead wife. He, Jack, could scarcely bear to think of Maida or Carlie; but Jerry was comforted by his memories.

They ate and rested at midday, hoping some vehicle would pass. Two hoboes, an oldish man and a stripling, passed, going at a steady, mile-eating rate.

‘You for the roadworks out of Edith?' called Jack, and the elder one replied in a refined voice, ‘If we're not too late!'

After they had begun walking again, three bike swaggies in a loose group, as though they travelled together but were not friends, overtook them. They passed half a dozen large trucks carrying pigs, gravel, green produce, belting along at forty miles an hour and not even slowing when Jack held out a hand.

At half past four Jerry was ready to drop; it was all he could do to get one foot in front of the other. The sun had set, and the air was biting.

‘Well, mate, we aren't going to make the metropolis before nightfall,' said Jack. ‘Better look for a place to camp before the dark comes down.'

‘Right,' said Jerry, forcing good cheer into his voice. Jackie saw how fatigued he looked. He thought, ‘I'll have to find a homestead and put the nips in for a doss in a toolshed—anything out of the frost.'

In half an hour they had come to a small flat beside a creek. It was sheltered only by the ashen ghosts of ring-barked trees. A campfire waved despairingly in the wind, one of the bike swaggies trying to shelter it with his army surplus overcoat. As Jerry and Jack approached the fire died.

They saw a woman, bundled in a drooping coat, skulking around picking up fallen branches.

‘Good day, all,' said Jerry cordially. ‘You ain't got any Grand Hotel here, eh? Isn't there a better place than this?'

‘You find one, let us know,' snarled one of the cyclists. ‘We been scouring around for an hour. No bridges, no trees, nothing, and a ten degrees frost coming on.'

The woman, meekly holding her bundle of sticks near by, said shyly, ‘But those two other men went up to the farm to see if they'd let us take shelter somewhere; so it might be all right.'

She put down the wood like an offering beside the bike swaggie and crept away to sit on a suitcase beside an elderly man with scooped-out cheeks and no overcoat. She put her arm around his shoulders as though to keep him warm.

Jackie saw that quite a small crowd had collected in this place that would be a pleasant camp in summer. Now it offered nothing but wretchedness.

‘Don't worry, Bert,' the woman said to her companion. ‘The farmer is sure to help. He wouldn't be so inhumane.'

‘Well, what do you think?' murmured the Nun to Jackie. ‘Better move on, or what? Hang on, here comes someone.'

Jack saw that it was the good walker with the refined voice. He had a badly sunburned face, a clue to his greenness as a vagrant. He was accompanied by a nervous, silky boy.

‘Sorry,' said the older man to the group. ‘I saw the farmer but he absolutely refused to let us shelter in any of the farm buildings. Said he'd had too much thieving. Slammed the door in my face.'

‘He was awful,' said the boy.

Jerry could sense the sullen resentment amongst his companions. He remembered the same thing in the army, an electric undercurrent of surliness, dangerous as rage. He lit a cigarette, drew on it luxuriously, said, ‘Have a draw, mate?' and passed his tobacco pouch to the most hostile of the solitaries.

‘Well,' he said, ‘the way I see it, we can't freeze to death for want of trying. I reckon we ought to all go, in a deputation like, and put the hard word on him. When he sees we have a lady with us—Ghost, he'd have to be a bit of a stinker not to change his mind.'

‘Two ladies, if you please.' The carefree toot came out of bleak dusk, followed by another woman, clad as if for the city in a red wool coat with a standing possum collar. She was a short girl with a big ginger head and a battered green suitcase. She hammered up to them on thin hard legs ending in small patent-leather hoofs.

‘And where did you come from, baby dear?' asked a bike swagman jeeringly.

‘Out of the blue and into here,' she answered blithely; ‘and you watch it, big boy, because I've got a kick like a mule.'

‘That's a chromo for sure,' whispered Jerry to Jack. ‘I can tell one a mile off.'

They all trailed up the track towards the homestead. Jack was interested in the chromo, who looked as if she had recently been wet and rough-dried, and whose face was anaemic and pinched under the gamin grin.

She whispered to him, ‘Crumbs, I'm perished! Let me hold your hand, darl,' and gave him a marble paw.

He said, ‘We've got some tucker. Buns, and fresh bread.'

He saw the glisten on her brown eyes as she rolled them.

The homestead was lit for evening. Dogs ran out barking hysterically.

‘You speak for us, cock,' said a loner to the Nun. ‘You've got the words like.'

There was a murmur of assent. Jackie saw a scuffle at the window, and a child's voice shrilled, ‘They're back again, Dad... lots of them.' The door was flung open, and light slanted across Jerry. He could see only a thick-set shape, its hair sticking up.

‘Evening, boss,' said Jerry civilly.

‘Never mind the flamin' chat. Come to the point.'

‘Well, it's like this,' said Jerry, ‘it's no night for camping out, mister, and we got two women with us...'

‘None of my business!'

‘Aw, have a heart,' pleaded Jerry. ‘We only want a roof to doss under. We're not asking for a hand-out, just something to keep the frost off.'

The farmer burst into an impassioned, rambling diatribe about the damage that had been done in the past to his plough-shed, gravel in the engine of his tractor, tools stolen. He'd made up his mind and that was that.

‘The moon'll be up soon. You can walk into Edith and get yourselves vagged. Forty-eight hours free lodging and scoff. No, I made up me mind and yous aren't going to move me.'

He turned his head and barked a rebuttal at someone behind him, probably his wife. The chromo, sharp as a tack, cried loudly, ‘You there, missus, there's an old lady with us, how'd you like to be her, eh? Out of doors on a night like this?'

There was no answer. The door slammed. The young boy began to whimper, and the older man put his arm about him. ‘Maybe we can walk into town, Gordon. It'll be all right.'

Jerry said, ‘Well, I'm not walking anywhere. I'm done to a turn and I don't care who knows it.'

‘We'll just go and bunk in one of his sheds and be damned to him –' began Jackie. The door flew open again, and the farmer shouted, ‘And don't think yous can go sneaking into me outbuildings, because they're all padlocked.'

‘That won't stop us setting fire to them, you dingo,' yelled back one of the men with bikes. The door slammed once more.

‘Got by Moonlight out of Murphy's Paddock, that one,' said a solitary, hoarse with rage. He raised his voice: ‘You bludger, you hear me? I hope you rot!'

‘Stuff him, I'm off,' said the second solitary. He picked up his bike and wheeled it away down the dark track.

Jerry said, ‘Hang on now, folks. There's bound to be some place the bastard couldn't lock up. Excuse my French, girls. We'll have a look for it.'

‘There's a hurricane lantern in our swag,' said the educated man.

Followed by the excited, sidling dogs, the little cavalcade trailed about, following the lantern, until they came to a low structure. The stink at once identified it.

‘Here we are,' announced Jerry. ‘Your five-star pub for the night, ladies and gents.'

The chromo snickered. ‘Oooh, you're a wag, Pa.'

The educated man lifted his lantern and looked inside. ‘No pigs in it now, anyway. Floor's pretty dry.'

‘Gawdelpus,' chirped the chromo. ‘They'll never believe it in Bourke Street. Well, if it's either this or freeze to death, I'm for it.' She led the way, gave a yelp. ‘Got a tenant already, comrades.'

The light showed a figure rolled in a blanket in the recess behind the heavy gate-post.

He seemed to be in a stupor; the smell that hovered about him like a fog declared him to be a methylated spirits drinker.

The pig-pen was in poor condition. The sheets of iron on the roof were rusted and gapped; some were missing. It was in the process of being cleaned out; a shovel and rake stood against the wall. The refugees crowded in. The man with the lantern hung it on a nail.

While Jackie and another man tried to start a fire in the lee of a stone trough outside, the three dogs hung about, their lean bodies vibrating with cold, then they slunk away. The wind doused the fire. The travellers could not even boil a billy.

‘And that scrooging bastard's up there, with his gut full, and his feet to a lovely blaze, you can bet.'

The enormity of it gave them a simple unanimity. They looked at each other with solemn, meaning grimaces. Jackie, dulled with cold and fatigue, realised that any of them could have murdered the man without a second thought. But the final catastrophe of the campfire had rendered them all impotent. Jack opened the tucker-bag, brought out Vince Panebianco's charity, said, ‘Might warm us up. Come on, lady, have something. What about you, mister?'

The elderly man, palsied in the wind that knifed through the cracks, took a bun. He said gently, ‘It's very good of you, young man.'

The meal finished, they talked desultorily, huddled in bits of old tent, blankets, canvas ground-sheets about the lantern, as though it gave off warmth as well as light. There were now nine of them, counting the metho drinker who was muttering in a half-delirium. The two remaining bike swaggies and the man and boy were going through to Edith. The older woman, her head sinking on her chest with weariness, and her husband, were heading for Werris Creek.

There was a commotion outside the pig-pen, dogs barking, a lantern swinging, and the farmer came in.

‘Gawdelpus, it's Attila the Hun again,' remarked a wiry, aggressive young man.

The farmer began to rave. ‘The bloody nerve of yous lot. Louse-ridden no-hopers. Get off my property. I'll put the dogs on you.'