‘There,’ Cormac begins, ‘that wasn’t so hard, was it?’ He strokes his whiskers, pretending to ponder. ‘What’s next?’ he muses. ‘Shall we try a name?’
Jon doesn’t want to give it up, tries hard to keep it down, but the word seems to come up of its own accord.
‘I’m Jon.’
‘It’s a good name. Hello Jon.’
Jon does not know if he’s meant to reply. ‘Hello,’ he ventures.
‘They’re a rotten ol’ lot, aren’t they? The Children’s Crusade?’
It might be a trap. Jon vaguely shrugs. He was ensnared once this morning, and he doesn’t want to be ensnared again.
‘You wouldn’t be the first to start off running. But there’s boys been lost in that bush before, just like yourself, not even knowing the way back to those men in black.’ He stops. ‘So you shouldn’t have run,’ he says, more firmly now.
He stands, kicks the bucket away, and sits cross-legged on the dirt. Jon is taller than him now — and, somehow, that feels wrong. He idles from side to side before deciding he too should sit on the ground. The pup waddles between them, curious at this new game.
‘You want to tell an old man why you had to run off, Jon?’
Jon teases the pup’s ears. ‘There weren’t any fences,’ he says.
It sounds stupid. He might have talked about the cottage mothers, listening to Ernest cry, what happens when boys have done something wrong and need teaching a lesson in manners. In truth, though, he could stomach all of that and more; it was only the idea of fences that wouldn’t leave him alone.
‘Did you think you could run home?’
‘We were at sea for six whole weeks!’
Cormac Tate nods. ‘So were we all, Jon, everyone who came out here. There’s no running home — least, not for a young’n like yourself.’ He pauses. ‘Don’t you have any friends in there, lad?’
Jon has not thought about George all morning. Today was going to be George’s day for village muster. He will surely have been missed.
Cormac Tate stands. He lifts the hat from his head and twirls it high, so that it lands, spinning, on top of Jon’s own. The hat is so big that it drops down in front of his eyes.
Grinning, Jon nudges the hat up.
‘Richardson’s had you eating his damn jerky,’ Cormac says, kicking at the tin plate on the ground. ‘That stuff isn’t fit for the dogs. We’ll get you a good feed and then think about sneaking you back …’
Jon does not quite understand what Cormac Tate means — but follows him, all the same, into the ranch house. There are other men milling about now, some much older than Cormac Tate, some many years younger. To a man, they are dirty and unshaven. In a room alongside the kitchen, a gang are gathered around a breakfasting table, bickering over tin plates and dainty china cups.
‘Don’t mind them, Jon. They’ve been out mustering the cattle for God knows how long …’
‘You found yourself another young’n, Cormac?’ a voice calls through the doorway. ‘Oi, kidder, what’re they up to in that school? Teaching you ways of the flesh, is that it?’
There is an eruption of laughter at the table, but some of the younger men keep their heads bowed, as if embarrassed.
Cormac puts a hand on Jon’s shoulder and shepherds him away from the door. ‘You wait out front. Our lad’s getting the wagon all oiled up. I’ll be back in a jiffy.’
The man tramps up a back stair, and Jon ventures, with the little pup gambolling behind, onto the veranda. One of the utes has its hood open, and a figure much younger than the other men is ferreting about inside. All that Jon can see is an arm flashing out to grab a spanner, fingers black with oil.
It is scorching, even in the shade. He sits down, marvelling at how the greenery erupts from the red.
‘You!’ the voice from under the hood calls out. ‘You there, get yourself up and over here!’
It takes Jon a moment to realize it is him being shouted at.
‘Yeah, you!’ the voice cries. ‘I need your fingers in here, can’t hold it myself … Are you listening, or just lazin’ around!?’
Jon teeters down the steps and crosses the yard slowly. Under the bonnet of the ute, the boy is huffing and puffing like some big bad wolf about to blow his house down. It is an English voice, perhaps even more English than Cormac Tate.
‘I need you to get your hand in,’ the boy begins. ‘I reckon it’s a fan belt thing. Truth is, I don’t properly know. But I’ll be damned if that old foreman’s going to come down on old Cormac for this like he did the last time.’ The boy contorts himself out of the engine. Still obscured by the hood, he draws a grubby hand across his brow, no doubt leaving black sweaty trails behind. ‘What, were you born a little girl or something? Ain’t you going to help?’
The jibe is familiar, but Jon cannot recall where he has heard it before. He shuffles forward, ready to dip his hand deep into the engine, and then the boy rears from the hood. His face, as Jon expected, is smeared in black — and, camouflaged like that, it is a moment before Jon understands.
‘Jon Heather!’ cries Peter. ‘Well, there’s an ugly little face I never thought I’d see again!’
George comes out of the scrub, sheets safely buried, with a bundle of twigs under each arm — enough so that, if any cottage mother or likely bigger boy is watching, they might think he has just been being diligent with his muster. When he emerges, some of the little ones are sitting cross-legged in the field. They have formed a big circle to play one of their games. George would dearly love to be part of that game — but he’s too old for the little ones to ever admit him. Instead, he sets his bundle down, uses it as a seat, and watches from a distance. He’s seen this game before, and thinks he understands the rules. Each boy balances a stone on his head, and nudges the boy to his right. If the stone falls off, the boy loses and has to leave the circle, go back to work and collect twice as many pieces of stick. George is certain he’d be excellent at this game, and duly picks up a rock of his own so that he might practise.
Jon wasn’t there when he went to bed last night, and he wasn’t there when he woke up in the morning. Jon Heather is certainly a very bad boy, but George isn’t going to tell. Maybe some of the other boys in the dormitory might go ratting on him — maybe even that mean old boy who caught George out this morning and wrapped him up in those dirty sheets until he could hardly move — but mostly they’re a good bunch. It was their idea to stuff Jon’s bed with sacks, in case the cottage mother came knocking.
George unbalances and the stone falls off his head. He knows it’s only a silly game, but for some reason he’s all choked up. Stupid Jon Heather. All that talk about fences and big wide worlds. They’re not in England anymore. That’s all there is.
‘Hey, little man!’
Tommy Crowe appears out of the dairy building. He waves at George, hops the fence like a blasted kangaroo, and jogs across the untilled field.
‘George boy, you got that goat done in, right?’
George shrugs. ‘I carted it off.’
‘I’m sorry I was …’ Tommy pauses, senses that something is wrong. ‘Hey, what is it? Look, you’ve done your first one, for all Judah Reed and the rest know. You won’t have another one for weeks and weeks. Maybe then you’ll be …’
George feels the wracking in his chest that means he is going to cry, and works hard to gulp it back down. When it’s back in his belly, he shrugs again.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s Jon Heather.’
There is a look like fear on Tommy’s face. ‘What about him?’
George hesitates. He’s probably being tricked. The whole Mission must know Jon’s gone already — and this bigger boy has been sent to catch him out in a lie. Then he’ll be numbered with Jon, and have to pay a visit to Judah Reed.
‘They saw him do it, didn’t they? Chop up that goat for you …’
George shakes his head fiercely.
‘Then what?’
If Peter was here, h
e’d be clever. He’d have some smart answer for the bigger boy, twist him up in riddles like a fox with a rabbit, and then it would be Tommy Crowe being picked on, not George.
George, though, is not Peter. If he tells another fib, he knows he won’t be able to gulp down his crying.
‘I don’t know where he is.’
‘You …’
‘I think he ran off. He got cross when I couldn’t do the goat, and then he didn’t come to bed, and then he wasn’t even there for breakfast.’
Tommy Crowe moves in an urgent circle, kicking a clod of earth. ‘Why’d he go and do a thing like that?’ he breathes. ‘Doesn’t he know what happens to boys like that?’ Tommy launches the clod of earth as far as it will go, smashing it into the trunks in the shadow wood. ‘Hey, you told anyone, Georgie?’
George stands up suddenly, swells to his full height. He barely reaches the bigger boy’s shoulder, so he scrabbles back and jumps on a big mound of earth. ‘I haven’t told a single tale!’
‘All right, all right!’ Tommy says, stifling an obvious laugh. ‘No need to be so plucky. Gosh, Georgie! Let’s just hope he gets hungry real quick, eh?’ He turns, gazes into the shadow wood. ‘And let’s hope he still knows the way back …’
George gets down from the mound, embarrassed to have raised the attention of the little ones further down the field. They have broken from their circle now and are scampering back into the fringes of the forest to pick up their bundles. To George, they look like rabbits scattering in the shadow of a hawk.
Tommy Crowe whistles softly. ‘Looks like something’s up, Georgie …’
When George follows his gaze, he can see three figures marching his way — their cottage mother, the boy who caught him out this morning, and a man in black — Judah Reed himself.
‘You reckon it’s Jon?’ Tommy Crowe asks, suddenly grave.
But George cannot bring himself to say the thought that jumps into his head. He hopes to hell they’re coming because of Jon — but, secretly, he knows they aren’t.
His eyes flitter back to that patch in the trees where he buried his sheets — and then, unable to hold it in any longer, he cries, long and loud, for all the world to see.
In the shadows of the wood, the little ones look back. They’ve seen this before and they know what’s coming next.
‘You look silly as hell in those clothes, Jon Heather. That’s what they’re making you wear, is it? You’d look better running around naked.’
Jon has seen some of the little ones running around like that, so it doesn’t seem as big a joke to him as it does to Peter. He stays stock still, can’t quite believe Peter is standing there, wearing the same jeans as Cormac Tate, the same wide-brimmed hat. His fair skin is almost completely freckled and burnt, but, apart from that, he looks the same as Jon remembers.
‘I never in a million years reckoned you was the runaway, Jon Heather!’ He hoots it out — but Jon cannot tell what he’s laughing at. ‘Cormac’s seen his share of boys bolting from that Children’s Crusade, but I never in a thousand years thought you’d come this way …’
‘A million,’ says Jon.
‘What?’
‘You said a million. Then you said a thousand.’
Peter ponders it. ‘I see they been teaching you how to count,’ he surmises. ‘But there’s only one thing I got to ask you.’ He stops, hands squarely on his hips. It is an attitude Jon has never noticed in Peter before. ‘Where’s George?’
Before Jon can answer, Cormac Tate appears out of the farm building. ‘They been in my things again, Pete. You seen which one of them it was?’
Peter — he has never been called Pete — shrugs. ‘I had my head under this hood.’
Cormac Tate lumbers over to meet them. ‘That’s the third time them farmhands been in my packs,’ he says, cuffing Jon around the shoulder. ‘The sooner we’re shot of this station, Pete, the better.’
‘I do believe you’re right,’ Peter says, adding a little mock bow that brings a smile to Cormac’s face.
‘You two been getting acquainted, then?’
Cormac Tate stands between them, looking from one to the other. Jon wants to speak out, but something stays his tongue. Perhaps Peter doesn’t want the old man to know they used to be friends. Perhaps he always wanted rid of Jon and George and all the other boys of the Children’s Crusade. He’s dressed up differently — that’s for sure. Maybe he wants everything different, now they’re not in England.
If that’s so, Jon doesn’t want to let him down. He keeps his lips sealed.
‘Ach, we came over on the same boat, Cormac,’ Peter finally admits. ‘This here’s my comrade, Jon Heather. Jon, this is Cormac Tate. He’s not so different from us, so you can stop feeling frightened or whatever’s going on in that little head of yours.’ Peter squints up at Cormac Tate. ‘Jon’s a thinker. Got a head full of stories, so you never can tell what he’s thinking on next.’
‘Nothing wrong with that, kid,’ says Cormac Tate.
When they took the bigger boys off the boat, Peter explains, there were men waiting, ranchers just like Jon’s already seen — and, if they took a shine to a boy, he was sent off with them, to earn his board at a cattle outpost or a wheat farm, or sometimes even a telegraph station or railway. Jon wonders if these are like the honoured guests he has heard about, but doesn’t think it right to ask. Once a month, one of the men in black is supposed to come and find out how Peter’s doing, whether he might make a rancher himself when he grows up — but Peter hasn’t seen hide nor hair of them, and he couldn’t be happier. He’s going to stick with old Cormac Tate now, follow him from station to station, wherever there’s work.
Cormac drifts away from them, to inspect Peter’s work with the engine. For a moment, Peter seems anxious to know that he’s done well — but, as soon as Cormac Tate’s head dips underneath the hood, he rounds on Jon. ‘So?’ he snaps. ‘Where is he?’
Jon flounders for an answer.
‘I mean, you’re the one I put on looking after him — so it just stands to reason that, if you were gonna run, you’d be taking George with you. What did you do, stash him away somewhere when you found out the ranchers were onto you?’
He can’t possibly tell Peter that it wasn’t like that, that he just started running, that he curled up in some burrow and woke up already ensnared.
‘You left him behind, didn’t you? Jon Heather, you goddamn selfish bastard.’
Peter has obviously been spending his time with his head in a thesaurus, because he never knew words like this before.
‘I didn’t think …’
‘No, you didn’t think, did you, Jon Heather? And now little George is all alone, back in that silly little farm with Judah Reed and who knows what else!’
‘It’s a Mission …’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘They call it the Mission.’
Peter almost grins. ‘You know better than that. That’s their word for it. You don’t have to use their word for anything.’ He stops. ‘It’s not the only one, you know. There’s another farm school for the Children’s Crusade in New South Wales. New South Wales — can you believe it, Jon? They came to the other side of the world, and named it New South Wales …’
‘Who did?’
Peter breathes, exasperated. Jon has heard this tone before — it is the way he would sometimes speak to George, back in the Home.
‘The first settlers, Jon. The first Australians.’
‘If they came from Wales, weren’t they Welsh?’
‘Jon Heather, you don’t know nothing … They were Welsh when they left, and Australian when they arrived.’
It is a bewildering thing. Jon wonders what might have happened, somewhere over the Indian Ocean, that suddenly changed those settlers.
‘Does that mean we’re Australian, Peter?’ His lip trembles when he thinks of his letter. He had promised his mother he was still her English son.
‘That’s too much thinking, Jo
n Heather. We’ve got things to be getting on with. Got to sneak you back under the noses of the Children’s Crusade, for one thing …’
‘I can’t go back, Peter. Judah Reed …’
‘You got to go back, Jon. You’re not leaving George with those dirty old bastards. Someone’s got to look out for him.’
Jon burns. Why can’t George look after himself? He’s barely a year younger than Jon. He ought to be able to get his own clothes on in the morning. He ought to be able to clean up his own mess.
Cormac comes up from under the hood. ‘Pete’s right, young’n,’ he says, wiping his brow. ‘I’d have you here if I could, but, well …’ A fleeting sadness crosses his face. ‘… I tried to help out you runaways once before.’
Peter nods sharply. ‘There was a lad, long before we came, used to visit all the farms and take away scraps. Then he just wasn’t there anymore.’
‘I reckon that boy went bush,’ Cormac says sadly. ‘I thought he might be out there with the bush blacks, but we never heard a thing. Even asked Booty to make some investigatings, but …’
The old man lumbers over, drops to his knee and strokes a stray curl out of Jon’s eyes. ‘The thing is, lad, they’re your guardians now. That’s the law. Only way to avoid them is to go feral, and you don’t want to do that.’
‘In loco parentis,’ Peter interjects. ‘That’s English words.’
‘It’s Latin,’ interjects Cormac, reaching through the window to test the ignition.
‘Yep,’ Peter nods, ‘and it means they’re your parents now, Jon Heather.’
‘They’re not my parents.’
Cormac slams down the hood of the ute, swings into the driver’s seat and kicks the engine into gear. It rattles ominously, but then it purrs. Cormac throws Peter a look, nods sharply, and Peter salutes in return. It’s obviously another Australian trick.
‘It’s time,’ he says. ‘We don’t get you back in before you’re missed, you’ll cop it, Jon. They’ll make you …’ Cormac’s eyes mist over, as if he is lost in a memory. ‘… take your medicine,’ he finishes, voice trailing off.
Peter scrambles into the back of the ute and reaches out to help haul Jon up. As they round the first bend, Peter lifts a shoulder and gently barges Jon’s own.
Little Exiles Page 13