Swords and Crowns and Rings (51 page)

‘You set any dog on me and I'll gum it to death,' began Jerry in an effort to lighten the atmosphere. But the farmer roared on: ‘I don't want none of yous here. I'll have the lot of you for trespass!'

Jackie saw now that the man was scared of them; he had been forced by fear to make a stand.

‘Right,' he said. ‘You do that, mister. And we'll just have a kip until you come back with the coppers. We're not leaving, and that's it!'

‘What kind of a man are you?' said the older woman faintly. ‘You ought to be ashamed.'

‘All right,' blustered the farmer. ‘But I want you out right smart at sun-up, you hear? I got pigs coming in before nine o'clock and I want to get this pen put in order.' He glared threateningly around at them, still keeping his rage on the boil in spite of defeat.

As he withdrew, the chromo stuck her tongue out at him. ‘I got a ticket in this new lottery. If I win it I'm gonna come back here and set a match to that stinker's house.' She sighed. ‘Oh, what's the use of talking?'

They all felt the same way. One by one they rolled in their blankets, tried to go to sleep. Jerry had his hat rolled up for a pillow, Jackie his boots.

It was fearfully cold. Both of them were trembling right through to their centres. The cottony blankets were no protection from the knifing wind. After a while Jerry groaned, ‘Chris'sake, boy, come closer and keep the cold off me back.'

Jackie lay down behind Jerry, pressing close. A feeble current of warmth circulated between them.

‘Can I put my hands on your stomach, Dad?'

‘No, you flaming well can't. Gawd, it's unbearable. I can feel my blood setting like a jelly.'

Jackie murmured, ‘Don't never be bitter, Dad.'

‘Don't you mock me, you devil,' growled Jerry. But in the darkness he grinned.

It was a long time before anyone got to sleep. The metho drinker near the door grumbled and uttered thin cries. One of the two loners coughed intermittently, a hideous smoker's cough, as though he had a chestful of custard.

The chromo yapped, ‘Can't you shut it up, you coughin' 'orror? How the devil can you afford smokes these days? That's what I'd like to know, eh?'

Through the rents in the iron roof big stars glared down, like little mirrors, doing their huge slow dance in a delirious nothingness. Jerry remembered being cold under the same stars in Africa, frozen, he was, so that the blood from his wound congealed in a stalactite of black glue. Who'd believe you could be cold in Africa?

Half-way through the night, with Jackie snoring, Jerry, in a half-doze, became aware of an insistent noise. The woman in the far corner was crying.

‘Ghost, lady, can't you be quiet? It's just as crook for all of us.'

‘I think my husband's dead,' she said.

Jerry was aware of nothing but fury. Bloody inconsiderate old cow, just as a man got half-way thawed. He heaved Jackie away. No wonder he was feeling warm. The boy was broadcasting heat like a little oven.

‘You got a candle or anything, missus?'

He heard her gulp, try to control herself, scratch a match. A faint light bloomed and wagged in the far corner. Jerry got to his feet, all bent over like a damaged cockroach. He felt as if he had been mangled. Jackie fell back, still dead to the world, his arms outspread in the slimy mud. Jerry could have kicked him.

He went over to the corner. The old man was as dead as mutton: fatigue, hunger, and cold had got him. He wore a good suit, now threadbare and stiff with dirt. He had one eye open, and the candlelight put a curious opalescent glaze on it. His knotty hands, still clasping the blanket, had thickened blue nails.

‘He's gone, isn't he?' said his wife tremulously.

‘‘Fraid so,' said Jerry, closing the eye. He felt a swine for being so annoyed when she had awakened him. He looked at the poor woman. She was crouched against the wall, her head wrapped against the cold in a dirty white tam-o'-shanter, so that she looked like a half-barmy Welsh bard. Jerry took the blanket off the corpse.

‘Here,' he said. ‘You wrap this round you, missus; no sense you getting crook, too.'

By now everyone was awake. The educated man relit the lantern. There were mutters and low conversation. The chromo sat by the widow, taking off her own coat and putting it over the woman's thin shoulders, patting her arm and saying how terrible it was, poor thing. Jackie and the swaggie with the cough went out into the white world and got a fire going near the swill trough. They boiled the billy.

‘Christ, what's the country coming to—old man conking out in a pigsty, dying like a bloody dog? Only two or three hours to daybreak. Better get the police—best thing, eh?'

At the mention of the police the metho drinker, tocsin apparently sounding through his daze, leapt out of the pigsty with his swag in his arms and hurdled away into the darkness.

‘And good riddance to you, too, Douglas Fairbanks!' remarked someone.

The chromo came over and murmured to Jerry, ‘She wants his jaw tied up—it's dropped, love. I can't come at it somehow.'

There was nothing to do it with but one of the widow's stockings. The foot was full of holes, and cardboardy with dirt. Jerry tied up the jaw, straightened the man's arms and legs.

Jerry said to the widow, who was being comforted once more by the younger woman, ‘We'll wait for the farmer. He'll have a ute. To get into town with, I mean.'

As though he had pressed the lever of a siphon, she began to weep and talk. The old man was not her husband, so now she would not get even a pension. He was only sixty, though he looked seventy. He just wasn't fit for the hardship,

My Bert, she called him. We've been living together all these years, his wife being a very hard, unforgiving woman. Bert owned two cottages, you see? That was all the income we had. But the tenants haven't been able to pay rent for two years, so we had nothing, you see? Bert wouldn't put them out, poor souls. What's the use? So when we came to the end of our savings, I asked my sister in Werris Creek if we could stay with her awhile. But we only had train fare for one, and I wouldn't leave him; so we both went as far as Gunnedah, and then we thought we might get a lift. But it was all too much for him...

The chromo pressed the poor creature's head against her bosom, rocked to and fro, said, ‘He just went to sleep with the cold. Didn't know a thing about it. Half his luck, eh?' she added, looking around at the others and giving orders with her eyebrows. They hurriedly grunted assent. But not one of them wanted to be the stiff stretched out in the pig-pen.

A cold rage fermented in Jack. He sqatted silently by the fire, feeding it with bark, and replenished the billy as it emptied; but inside he was so angry it made him feel light-headed. To him the dead man called for defence, revenge. The cruelty, the humiliation of it—a respectable old man ending his life in a pig-pen, and one where he had been allowed to shelter only on sufferance. Jack couldn't wait for the farmer to make his appearance.

In the grey gelatinous dawn the farmer came down, stamping in his gumboots, nose red and damp.

‘Come on, yous,' he said. ‘Sun-up I want you mob outa here. Them Tamworths will be here in a few hours, and I wanta get the pen cleaned up.'

‘Shut your face,' exploded Jackie. ‘A man died in there last night. Talking about pigs when a poor decent man has snuffed it! You just bloody well go back to your nice clean dry house and get out your truck and go fetch the police.'

‘And not another yap outa you!' shrilled the chromo.

The farmer turned pale. He looked at the group confronting him, grainy eyes, home-cut hair, faces full of enmity, the men in army overcoats, dyed blue, flapping around their shins. He had been working himself up all night, determined to clear them out at the first streak of dawn. Rabble, he called them to his wife. He hated and despised them because they represented something he was afraid of becoming. They were a phantom threat.

Now he said, ‘This true?'

‘My oath,' said one of the solitaries. ‘Satisfied now, Kaiser Bill?'

‘You got no right—' shouted the farmer. But he was drowned with boos and cat-calls.

The Nun said, ‘Here, mates, put a sock in that. The boss here didn't knock the old chap off. He would have died a bloody sight sooner if he'd had to camp outside. I'm sorry, love,' he added to the widow, who hid her face and sobbed again.

‘Here!' cried the chromo, putting on a comical face of surprise. ‘You on his side, eh? Throwing in with the trumps, mister?'

‘I'm no trump,' said the farmer, dark red now with distress and resentment. ‘I'm just a working man like yous. Jesus, do you think us on the land has had it easy these past years?'

But he was lost under the cries directed at Jerry: ‘Crawler! Can't stand a man who doesn't stick with his own.'

Jerry said to the farmer, ‘Be obliged if you'd get the johns, mister. Soon as you can, eh?'

Jerry's urgent nod sent him off. The Nun turned to the group.

‘Ghost, you can be a lot of boneheads when you like,' he observed. ‘That poor sod has no more control over the times than we have. No use abusing him. Waste of breath.'

He sat on his heels, taking an occasional slurp from his tin pannikin, leisurely and undisturbed as ever. Jackie watched him, amazed at the way he took control of this crowd of hungry, angry, unreasonable people. And as the Nun talked, Jackie himself began to feel that he had been an idiot.

‘No wonder They can push us around,' he thought. ‘Most of us haven't any brains.'

‘If the old man had been allowed to doss down in a garage or toolshed he mightn't have died,' argued the educated man.

‘True,' agreed Jerry. ‘But if the farmer's had the bad luck he told us about, tools pinched, vandalism, maybe worse, his daughter done over or his wife terrorised—eh? Can you blame him for locking things up? I mean, we ain't all angels just because we're outa work.'

‘Just the same, the bastard is better off than us,' said the younger solitary angrily. ‘He could afford to take a risk.'

‘Well, take this fella's pigs,' Jerry said. ‘How did he buy them? Overdraft from the Bank, you can bet your boots. So he don't really own them. Still, he has to feed and house them, and maybe they're pretty well all he depends on to feed his kids in a few months' time, after he pays back the Bank, that is. But if they die, because there ain't no shelter for them, seeing that there's a mob of unemployed camping in their pen, then the Bank gets paid just the same, but the kids don't eat. He's banking on them porkers.'

‘Human bein's come first,' growled someone.

‘Yeah, granted; but the human bein's the cocky's thinking about are his wife and kids,' said the chromo. She slapped Jerry on the shoulder. ‘Regular bush lawyer, aren't you, Pa?'

When a young boy and girl came down with a basket from the homestead a little later, the hoboes meekly accepted the food that was offered. Only the widow, exhausted with grief, slept under the chromo's red woolly coat with the wet-dog collar.

Jackie's mind was buzzing. Whereas the Nun had spoken out of his simple wisdom and knowledge of humanity, Jackie had absorbed the idea in an intellectual flash. Of course you couldn't blame property owners: they were just part of the enormously complex human scene. Property hadn't done the old dead man any good because it wasn't
producing
any more. The times had made it barren.

The policeman, a fatherly old buffer, said to Jerry, ‘Ought to get up some kind of a fund for the lady, to get her to her sister's, cope with the funeral. Now, my cousin's manager of the local rag. How about a couple of you going in to see him? I'll come along. Lend a bit of weight like.'

‘Leave it to me,' said Jackie.

On the way into Edith his thoughts were still busy. Property, now. It was a commodity, and its value varied from year to year, month to month. And money, what was that?

It was a commodity too.

Jackie felt as if lightning had struck him. Why hadn't he realised it before? It was something that Banks hired out, as loans and mortgages and overdrafts, cheap when nobody needed it much and dear when they did. They were money shops.

What, then, did the unemployed have to offer?

Labour. Another commodity. The work of their hands. All they had to offer. All their eggs were in one basket, so that if nobody wanted what they had to sell they were stonkered.

Jack thought, ‘Funny how a man doesn't catch on, eh? But I could learn about all this, learn how to protect myself. Strength! That's what would come out of knowing such things. By heck, I will learn about it, too.'

He was all on fire with it, but they were coming into the town, so he resolutely turned his mind to his companions. He said to the young woman, ‘Have you a job to go to, miss?'

‘Oh, I'll manage. I turn me hand to anything, you know. I'm a barmaid by trade, but I can cook, clean. Willing to work for me keep if it comes to that. Oh, I get a bag of laughs out of life.'

‘You were really good with that poor old chook,' said Jerry sincerely. ‘Dunno what we'da done without you.'

She shrugged. ‘We're all human, Pa. Eh? Can't say truer than that.'

A moment later she was making their companions smile with a recountal of how she'd landed at the pig farm.

‘Got a lift with an egg man. Well, we're not past the first bend before he's putting my knee into gear. Fair enough, I think. Well, I mean to say, nothing for nothing in this great world. Then up goes the hand under my skirt like a starved rat. I got a toehold on his ear and pretty near took it off its hinges. Truck goes into ditch, omelettes everywhere.' She roared with laughter. ‘I beat it over the paddock and the next thing I knew I was in a pig-pen. It's the luck of the draw, boys.'

‘I don't think she's a chromo after all,' whispered Jerry to Jack, in mortification.