Soon after, the New Year dawns. There is no scrub fowl for dinner, just more of McAllister’s mutton, and in the assembly hall Judah Reed does not make an appearance. The dinner is hosted by one of his acolytes instead, the gawky man in black who oversees the bedwetters’ dorm, and Jon realizes he has not seen Judah Reed in days.
Rumour is rampant — Reed is no longer in the Mission. To the newest boys of the Children’s Crusade, this is a glorious thing, something to be celebrated more wildly than Christmas, New Year, and a dozen fake birthdays combined. The child-snatcher has gone! For a little while, working hard to chew the piece of gristle on his plate, Jon is swept up in the excitement. Then, slowly, he understands.
It is almost exactly a year ago that he himself first saw Judah Reed. It is nearly exactly a year since he read that piece of paper with his mother’s name signed at the bottom. Judah Reed might not be in the Mission just now, but he’ll certainly be back — and he’ll be bringing a ship’s load of new boys with him.
There is a lighter air in the compound now that Judah Reed has gone. Boys no longer fear punishment — or, if they still fear it, they are certain it will not be as severe. They joke in the fields, make a mockery of old McAllister behind his back — and, late one night, stage skits for each other, pretending to be men in black and cottage mothers, and big, proud Australian boys.
It is lights out in the dormitory, and Jon Heather lies awake, listening to the chatter of boys all around him. Such a thing was unthinkable mere weeks ago, but without Judah Reed something seems to have slackened in the cottage mothers too. Tonight, she has made a cursory inspection, harangued a boy for not having tucked in the corners of his sheet, but taken no boy away for quiet words and lessons. Some of the boys are playing a game of pick-up sticks; another has found a rat with which to torment his friends. From the huddle between the beds, a boy calls out for Jon to join them. Jon, who has been absently dreaming of Peter and Cormac Tate, is about to drop off his bed and join them when a sudden thought strikes him: they never invited me to play games when George was here.
He settles among them and takes his turn teasing out a stick for several rounds, but eventually the thought weighs too heavily: he is almost glad that George isn’t here.
Once he has thought it, it will not go away. He waits until his turn has passed and wriggles out of the huddle, creeping across the dormitory without a word.
With Judah Reed gone, Jon Heather is not the only boy stealing out of his dormitory at night. There are lights on in the homes of the cottage mothers, but he hears china cups clinking and knows they will not bother him tonight. All the same, he keeps low and scurries past, conjuring up excuses just in case he is caught.
In the gloom before full dark, Jon steals across the compound. At the border furthest from the dairy sheds, the bedwetters’ dorm is surrounded by scrub left to grow like a thorny, green moat.
Jon tentatively pushes at the dormitory door. Here it comes: that familiar foetid smell. There are coats on hooks and rugs hanging on racks, smelling strongly of soap. White powder has been sprinkled on them and little footprints trail through the dust.
Beyond the entrance room, the beds stretch out. The few boys here are all little ones, not one of them older than five or six. At the end of the row, George lies in bed. Before Jon can cross the room, three of the little ones leap into his path. One of them yaps out in that unintelligible language of theirs, but an even littler boy pushes him back. He must be five years old, and he swells to block Jon’s path. ‘This isn’t your dorm!’
A little one can be as fierce as a dingo. They have been known to bite a chunk out of a bigger boy’s arm. All the same, Jon shoulders past.
‘George,’ he says, softly shaking his sleeping friend.
George rolls over. ‘Jon! You’re not supposed to be here!’
‘Told you!’ stamps one of the little ones.
Jon swings around and they dart for the cover of their beds. ‘I wanted to make sure you were OK.’
George shrugs.
‘Well, you’re still here.’
George nods.
‘Did you want to play stones?’
‘You’ll get in trouble Jon, if you …’ George’s voice trails off, his eyes revolving to watch one of the little ones creeping underneath his bed. There, Jon sees a biscuit tin, seemingly spirited out of the kitchens. The little one sees Jon’s eyes light on it, and pounces, like a cat trying to protect its kill.
In the tin, Jon spies hunks of mutton, fished out of today’s broth. It was, Jon remembers, a remarkably good broth today. There is always something that tastes better about it on the days when Laura is toiling in the kitchens. Perhaps it is only that she scrubs the tins clean between helpings, scouring up all the ants and other creepy-crawlies from the bottom of the mulch.
‘They let you eat in here?’
‘Oh no!’ George gasps. ‘They’d teach us a lesson if they found out, so we have to keep it a secret …’
‘We take it to the wild boy!’ a voice pipes up.
The boy on the bed, Martin, scampers after the little one who cried out. After delivering a short, sharp thump, he returns to his vigil.
‘Who?’ asks Jon.
George suppresses a beam. This time, it is his turn to tell Jon a story. It’s nice to be able to pay back your friends.
‘The boys in here talk about him all the time. They see him down by the latrines at night. Not every night. Sometimes he isn’t there for weeks and weeks. But then, there he is! Ferreting around in the heaps …’
On the other side of the latrines, there is a patch of land where the girls from the kitchen pile their scraps. If it isn’t fed to the animals, the piles are left to rot and are spread on the land when it comes time for sowing. It is commonly held that there’s more of the boys’ muck in that slurry than there are peelings and apple cores. As every boy will take glee in telling you, not a jot is wasted when you’re part of the Children’s Crusade; Mission boys practically eat their own shit.
‘I saw him, Jon. I thought he was just a story, like the Mystery at Witchend, but there he was! He looked me right in the eye and scampered off.’ George is suddenly still. ‘I think I frightened him, Jon, but I only wanted him as my friend.’
It is a custom for the bedwetting boys to pay late-night visits to the latrines at the rear of their dorm, where the Mission ends and the wild emptiness begins. Sometimes the man in black looks over them as they go, but often they sneak out alone; a boy being watched cannot always make himself go, and then there are bound to be sodden sheets in the morning.
George was there one dusk, with a rag of little ones — and it was then that he saw the wild boy. He was tall and dark — not the same as the blacks but still dark enough — and his hair was wild and woolly like Peter Pan before Wendy. Rags hung from his waist, tied there with a thick piece of string, and he had a tucker bag open on the ground, into which he was piling pieces of peel.
Since then, the boys have been putting out scraps so that the wild boy might take them away.
‘Maybe he’s the boy who ran away,’ says George.
Jon shoots him a look. George doesn’t like to talk about running away, not since that night Jon disappeared.
‘The one who lived in the hole,’ he goes on eagerly, sickness seemingly gone. ‘Maybe he climbed out of his hole and started growing up properly. What’s that boy called, Jon, who lived in the jungle with tigers and bears?’
‘He’s called Mowgli,’ says Jon.
‘I’m going to call him Mowgli,’ says George. ‘We’re going to keep him if we can.’
Jon recalls, starkly, the chicken bones, piled up in a little pyramid, in the shadow wood at night, the scuffed marks like footprints all around them.
‘George, buck up,’ he says severely, though even he could not say why. ‘You can’t go throwing food out like that. There’s rats and dingoes and …’ He flounders. ‘… probably devils, for all you know. That’s what’s taking your food. You oug
htn’t to go hungry for a …’
George trembles. ‘But I’ve seen him, Jon …’
‘You haven’t,’ says Jon, his teeth grinding together. ‘It’s not a game, George. I’ve …’ He does not want to say it, for he still remembers that night after he came back, George grappling him as they lay together in bed. ‘… been out there. There isn’t anything. There isn’t even a fence.’ He holds back; it feels, somehow, not only as if he is punching George, but punching himself as well. ‘There aren’t any little wild boys. There’s just nothing.’
Indignant, the little ones gather around. The one named Martin pushes from his bed, elbows past Jon, and hands George his own pillow, a threadbare thing made from string and sack. When George accepts it, clinging onto it in the face of Jon’s fire, another of the little ones crawls over and offers the same. This time, George — suddenly embarrassed — says no, and the little one skulks back to his own bed, holding the pillow like a boy back in England might his teddy bear.
‘I saw him, Jon Heather,’ he whispers.
Jon narrows his eyes. It isn’t like baby George to fight back. Then, he sees the little ones arranged around, and something starts to make sense.
George has friends in here, that much is true — but Jon cannot help thinking he would be better off being bullied, back in his old dorm.
The ute swings wildly. Peter has never been able to gauge the dust on the road properly, and Cormac Tate reaches out to steady the steering wheel. He’s just about tall enough now that his feet can reach the pedals at the same time as he peers through the windscreen. Peter can fix wagons, and that’s to be applauded — but Cormac Tate says he really ought to be able to drive one as well.
There is a hump in the road, where red dust has hardened over a roadkill. The wagon crashes over it, jarring Cormac Tate’s back.
‘Pete, if you ruin the chassis, not even those deft fingers of yours are gonna fix her up. The foreman’ll knock it out of your pay, and then you’ll be a bonded slave for the rest of your days …’
‘I’m already a slave, Cormac. They brought me over on a boat and everything.’
Cormac Tate grins. ‘Boys to be farmers, and girls to be farmers’ wives,’ he says. ‘You play it right, you could have a perfect life, just like me …’
They’ve shared this joke before, but that doesn’t stop Peter from laughing. There are moments when Peter thinks Cormac’s life might be perfect — out on the plains, sleeping under the stars, with no one in the whole world breathing down his neck — but the old man obviously thinks differently. Peter’s happy enough to go along with the joke for now; Cormac Tate’s life is a bank vault, and eventually he’ll find the key.
At Cormac’s command, he pulls over into a patch of scrub and they swap seats. They are near the old farm, the first one to which Peter was posted, and it wouldn’t do for the foreman to see Peter driving the wagon. That sort of thing could get reported back to the Children’s Crusade, and if there are too many black marks, Peter might be parted from Cormac Tate forever. Neither one will admit it, but that would make both of them sick.
Once they have arrived, Peter helps Cormac into the station house. They have been nine nights out on the range without a bed to sleep in, and Cormac says he’s getting too crook to keep it up. Upstairs, Peter dumps the packs. Steak sizzles downstairs — the housemaid, one of Booty’s daughters, cooks it up the best in the territory — and Cormac heads off to dunk his head in the water trough.
Peter sniffs his shirt, decides it will do for another few days. He has started to sweat more in the last six months, but that’s probably just this cruel Australian summer. He isn’t sure how he’d react, these days, if there was some old man in black or housemaid telling him when to wash and eat and take a shit. Cormac spends all his time grumbling, talking about the good life — apparently this means a pretty little house, a dog, and time to potter around in a garden — but Peter doesn’t want to hear it. The good life is already here; Cormac Tate doesn’t know he’s born.
He begins to rest his eyes, but stirs quickly when he feels a dry snout against his face. When he opens them, the yellow pup jumps up and snaps, playfully, at his nose. He’s bigger than when Peter last saw him, grown broad shoulders and giant paws.
‘Dog,’ he says. ‘You ought to go stick your head in that water trough with Cormac Tate.’
He wrestles Dog down, lets him gnaw happily on his fingers. Perhaps he hasn’t learnt to play properly, because suddenly he takes it too far, chomps down and tears the skin. Peter whips his hand back, and Dog sprawls backwards. When he looks pensively up, Peter can’t bring himself to scold him. He remembers too well what it was like to be a little boy and have nobody to play with. It can turn you a little wild if you let it. Just look at Jon Heather, trying to turn himself into a boy of the bush.
Dog goes off, sniffing around the edges of the room, while Peter bandages up his fingers with an old sock, just the way Florence Nightingale would have done it. When he’s done, he looks down — but he’s too late; Dog is already ferreting in one of Cormac’s packs. He grabs the curious critter by his rear legs. Dog resists, but at last Peter wins out. He is glad nobody was here to see him wrestling, and almost losing, with such a mangy little puppy — but now there are bigger things to worry about: Dog’s got a dirty shirt wrapped around him, and he’s slobbering all over a pile of papers and a little book bound in leather.
Peter has never known Cormac to read or write. Sometimes, he brings Peter comics from stores he happens to pass, but he never even asks what’s in them. All the same, something tells him that Dog’s discovered something here. He feels suddenly guilty and hustles Dog away. Dog obviously thinks it’s a game, and throws his front paws down on the ground, yapping out a challenge. Peter mimics the gesture, and Dog scuttles for cover underneath one of the beds.
Peter hurries to cram the papers back into Cormac’s pack. There are photographs, envelopes, a tiny boot of brown leather. He sees a woman and two children — daughters — standing beneath giant karri trees. Then, a picture much older still, a blur of black and white: rows of children lined up in smocks horribly familiar to one he has seen before.
At the bottom of the photograph, a wooden board reads:
Farm Boys of the Children’s Crusade, February 1923
Peter scans the faces. He can’t be certain, but some of them seem hauntingly familiar. All of them are beaming, but he has seen boys smiling like that before. He smiled that way himself, when they had him back at the Home. In the middle of them, a tall, spindly man in black stands.
‘It’s you who goes through my packs, is it, Pete?’
In the doorway, white whiskers still dripping wet, stands Cormac Tate. He flushes a deep, dirty red. ‘I never had a thought it would be you. I thought I’d been good to you.’
Cormac snatches the tucker bag away, starts cramming the papers and pictures back inside. ‘Didn’t those bastard priests beat any manners into you?’ he snarls. ‘Don’t you know to respect an old man’s property?’
Peter knows he ought to say something but, for the first time he can remember, the words evaporate before he can say them out loud.
‘Damn it, Pete, I liked you.’
Cormac hoists the pack onto his back, the tucker bag over his shoulder, and makes for the door.
Peter dodges a flying hoof, crashes onto the bare red earth. He isn’t as good with horses as he is with wagons — but, still, fixing a simple shoe shouldn’t be taxing him like this. He throws a look like daggers at the horse, but it just snorts derisively. That’s another reason wagons are superior; Peter hasn’t once been mocked by a motor car.
He tries three times, each time wishing the horse a graver ill. In the house, the farmhands are feasting. Booty appears from the shade, a scrub chicken squawking helplessly in his hand, dangling by its feet. Throwing Peter a cheery grin, he passes out of sight.
He stares at the house for a long time. Damn Cormac Tate isn’t going to get any pleasure out of this. He
turns square to the horse and marches right back up to it, ordering it to lift its leg and let him get on with his work. It was bad enough having men in black order him around for four years; he isn’t going to be bossed by a creature that can’t even talk.
‘I’ll nail this shoe to your head if I have to,’ he says. ‘One over each eye. How does that sound?’
‘Sounds about all she deserves.’
Cormac Tate’s shadow has reached him by the time he turns, but the old man himself is still halfway across the yard. There, he stops. He has a tin plate in his hand, and he sets it down on the ground.
‘I ain’t no dog,’ Peter says.
At the mention of his name, Dog rises from his blanket on the porch and noses forward.
Cormac comes forward, hands the plate personally to Peter. On it, there sit chicken wings and a hunk of cold steak, garnished with a mountain of sauerkraut.
‘This is yesterday’s steak,’ Peter says, prodding it about the plate.
‘Yeah,’ Cormac replies. ‘And it’s my yesterday’s steak, so just you eat it up.’
They sit, cross-legged, eating the steak in silence. On occasion, the horse looks back to see what they’re doing. As if embittered that she’s no longer causing such consternation, she shuffles back so that her tail swats Peter.
‘Eating steak in the shadow of a horse’s backside, Cormac. We know how to live.’
‘Living like kings,’ says Cormac.
The silence returns. When at last the plate is clean, and not a fleck more meat or shred of sauerkraut can be found to punctuate the silence, Peter looks up.
‘Why have you got a picture of little boys from the Children’s Crusade, Cormac?’ He says it so quietly that it might be he’s hedging his bets; if Cormac explodes, he can deny he ever breathed a word.
Little Exiles Page 15