by Jim Haynes
She said nothing for a while, her keen blue eyes estimating him—realising. Her eyes dimmed a little—the sun on the sand was glaring.
‘You want to go?’ she said at last.
‘Of course I want to go, I want to get out of this God-forsaken hole.’
‘Is that why?’ she asked, her voice trembling a little.
He hesitated and would not meet her look. ‘No—that isn’t why! I don’t want to leave you, Mum, stuck here!’
She said, ‘I’m glad that’s not the reason.’
‘Only Dad won’t ever let me go,’ he muttered savagely. ‘He wouldn’t let me go to town to work. He wants me here to slave for him. Mum, if he won’t . . .’ he paused, staring across the yard.
‘You’ll go? You’ll go still?’ she sighed, ‘I shouldn’t like you to go—that way.’
‘Mum, can’t you work it?’
She did not meet his eyes, but looked down on the sand.
‘D’ye think you can work it with Dad? Think you can? Will you have a shot?’
She was scraping a semicircle with the toe of her shoe. ‘Go and put the mare up,’ she said at last. ‘I’ll see . . .’
After tea he lounged against the gate post, smoking a fag.
The Old Man was sitting on the bench by the back door—the paper before him, puffing his clay pipe. He’d been grumpy at tea, wanting to know why his son had been loafing in town all the day when the sand needed scooping from the track.
The sun had dropped into the sand like a great live coal, another burning day tomorrow. Mosquitoes buzzed and he turned and slouched towards the door. He’d tell the Old Man straight out that he was going; and if he didn’t like it, he could lump it.
Staying here; and the Germans burning through Belgium, murdering women and little kids! He would tell him straight—now! Mum had been yarning to him after tea: but the old chap said nothing, only sat down with his pipe and paper. His son slouched towards him, scowled and hesitated.
‘Mum was sayin’,’ the Old Man suddenly growled, knocking the ashes from his pipe, and breaking off to blow though the stem. “Mum was sayin’, you wanted to go to the war.”
His son did not meet his eyes. ‘Got to go, Dad.’
‘Got to! Well, you got to do something. Ain’t work on the place for two—not this year! Not a drop o’ rain—nor a blade o’grass. I can’t keep you. May as well be there as ’ere! Earnin’ a bit for yourself . . . doin’ a bit for . . . you know . . .’
He blew hard into his pipe, and his son nodded and went past him.
Mum was sniffing a little to herself and putting away the dishes.
‘Mum,’ he asked a little huskily, ‘how did you work it?’
‘I didn’t,’ she sniffed, her back turned to him, ‘I just started to tell him that he couldn’t get along without you and he shouldn’t let you go. Only . . . only . . . he said . . . he said you should go . . . every young chap should . . . though he didn’t want you to . . . any more than me.’
A saucer slipped from her fingers and smashed on the floor.
She put her apron to her eyes.
* * *
And the rain did not come through the spring, when the sun was a white fire in the sky of blue glass and the springing wheat grew yellow and withered away.
Through the summer, when the sun burnt like a scarlet ball in the smoke of the bush fires and the north winds bore blackened gum leaves and scraps of fern down into the paddocks and whirled up the sand, the stock died.
Through the autumn, when the plains were a brick-field; and the sand storms whirled up over them and the sun burnt yellow from its rising to blood-red at its going, paddocks burnt up, dams dried and water was carted from the railway station to supply the house.
All this while, the boy was in Egypt, writing home cheery letters filled, as his mind was filled, with the wonders of the country.
And then the last letter came from him, written before they sailed from Egypt for the Dardanelles.
After that no more letters.
Perhaps he wasn’t allowed to write.
No promise of rain.
‘It’s to be hoped it rains, before he gets back,’ his father said. ‘Otherwise he won’t know the place. Scarcely a thing left on it.’
He’d laugh mirthlessly to the mother, trying to cheer her up and realising all the while that the boy’s absence was more to him than the drought—the loss of all things.
He wanted him back badly, he admitted to himself, wandering out to the stable to fling a few handfuls of chaff to the horse. All the time hoping to himself that the rain would come before the boy came back. Not wanting him to come home to find everything burnt up by the drought.
He had read in the local papers that when bad news came through it was always broken to the family by their minister. He should be afraid, if he saw the minister even coming to call. He hoped that he would not chance to come any time while he was away from the house, because the mother knew; she read the papers too.
* * *
The year drifted into May and still the rain had not come. Days were warm and still now, evenings too, in a muggy, clammy sort of way, as if baked plains sent out the heat of the dead summer day.
It was looking very black to the north in the mornings and the wind was getting up now and then. It might rain.
For almost a week the cloud built up and broke up in the evenings and mornings.
Then the day came when the blackness kept growing over the day and the wind sighed drearily.
The leaves from the blackened gum trees fell on the stable like drops of rain.
He fed the horse and, going out to the stack-yard, stood peering out at the growing blackness. The sand was whirling across the wastes and a sudden shining fork of light flashed from the profundity to the north—like the tongue of the snake.
Thunder afar.
‘It must rain,’ he said aloud to himself.
He noticed a shovel that he’d left out against the fence. He walked over, picked it up, walked with it into the stable and hung it up in its place.
He felt the wind buffet the tin shed and something pattered on the roof. ‘Just leaves perhaps,’ he thought.
As he walked to the house cool wind gusts caught at his clothes.
He walked through the house to the kitchen as the first drops hit the roof.
She was there.
‘It’s here,’ he said.
And then it was raining!
At first it pattered in big drops upon the roof, a broken pattern, then it picked up quickly into a roar of noise.
Conversation was not possible. They sat and listened until it settled into a steady drumming.
Though it was only midday, it was dark almost as night, until the lightning burnt in blue flames out of the blackness.
They were sitting together in silence, the mother and he—listening to the steady din on the tin roof. And the regular thunder—the guns at the Dardanelles must sound like this thunder.
They sat, understanding that the drought was broken and what it meant to them. Understanding what it meant to the boy when he came back . . . listening to the drumming and the thunder . . . or was it all the drumming and the thunder?
Then they realised at once that someone was rapping hard at the front door, shut against the pelting rain.
AN ERROR IN
ADMINISTRATION
ADAM MCCAY
SMITH WAS BROUGHT UP in the city, though his fathers before him had been men of the forest and sea; and he naturally became a clerk. But the blood asserted itself, and he threw away his billet to go up-country, and finally got a job on a Gippsland selection, where he spent his days and nights in the ‘cleared country’ with the sheep.
In Gippsland the country is thoroughly cleared when most of the undergrowth has been hacked or burned away, and the trees ring-barked so that they all stand dead.
Such a country is bad for the nerves, especially for those of a man like Smith, whose father had not been particular
ly virtuous. It consists of an interminable stretch of gaunt grey timber, and in the morning and evening twilight the dead trees seem to wobble their crooked arms towards one another, and join their skeleton hands in a ghastly, jerky minuet, which makes your flesh creep.
They begin to do this when you have known them for about a week; and very soon, if you have a steady head and an adequate supply of tobacco, they stop, and turn into inanimate timber again. But an ex-clerk who has been addicted to inhaling cheap-cigarette smoke, and finds a pipe too much for him, sees their antics for a good while longer. When the darkness has put a stop to this entertainment, the sheep sometimes get restless, and an unquiet flock of sheep at midnight makes a most dispiriting noise, which is a shade worse than the dead stillness.
Sometimes, too, a tree falls without any apparent reason just as you are dropping off to sleep; and when a Gippsland tree comes down it shakes a whole hillside and sounds louder than a cannon. Altogether, a cleared selection in South Gippsland is a cheerless home for a solitary neurotic man.
So it came to pass that Smith contracted many little peculiarities in his behaviour. He would spend hours on his back, looking up towards the sky and trying to fix the outline of a tree on his mind, and it always vexed him that he forgot one limb as soon as he set himself to master the next.
He began to talk to the sheep like human beings, for he had no dog; and he swore at them because they did not answer him in English and he had forgotten the French and Latin he had learnt at school. He got tired of the trees being so grey, and he took to staining them with grass, and watering their bases in the hope of making them sprout again. He was conscious that there was something wrong in his being out there all alone, and he came to the conclusion that he had a deadly enemy somewhere, but he couldn’t quite settle who it was. It wasn’t the sheep, for they seemed as frightened as himself; and it wasn’t the trees, for two of them had fallen within a chain of his hut without doing any damage. After this event he regarded them as his especial friends, and he laughed and clapped his hands when the dance got more than usually mixed—in the mazurka, for instance.
At other than twilight hours he sat still and brooded over his wrongs.
One day the boss rode out himself instead of sending a man with Smith’s rations, and explained that he intended to build new yards where the hut stood, because the railway was going to pass right there. The shepherd smiled as if he didn’t quite understand, and said that the railway would find it rather lonely, and he hoped it wouldn’t hurt his trees.
‘They’re just learning the quadrilles,’ he said.
The boss stared at him and went away. Soon after, a couple of men came and told Smith to take his sheep out of the road, and he drew off and watched them for the rest of the afternoon.
When it dawned on him what they were going to do, and he saw the destruction of all his hopes of the grand chain in the evening, he went up and asked them who had ordered it. Then he sat down and thought a great deal about the boss, until at last he came to a decision.
Now it is very clear that the Government of Victoria has much to answer for. If it had not decided to build that railway, Smith’s trees would have been left untouched, and he might have gone on quite harmlessly until it was discovered that big timber was bad for his brain. The sheep would not have been left alone that night while a man with a sharpened knife made his way to the homestead. The kitchen-maid would not have been driven screaming along the passage, three men would have been without a very exciting experience of ten minutes’ duration, and one of them would not walk lame. Also, the boss’s only son would be two months younger and a good deal stronger, and his wife would be able to give an intelligent answer to a simple question—which, as matters stand, she cannot do.
Smith came out, probably, better than anyone else. He was supported for six months in an asylum, and then sent to a situation up Yackandandah way, where he will not see a stretch of big timber in a lifetime.
If he ever happens to get into different country, most probably someone will be murdered.
THE FEUD
D’ARCY NILAND
A MAN CALLED FINGAL lived with his family in a house in the shade of a great tree. The tree and Fingal were enemies. Every time he came out of the small paddock, where his potato bags stood, or when he came from the bush with his shirt open and the axe on his shoulder, he saw the tree and he sneered.
He could see it a mile off, from a peaky hillock, and when he came down along the windbreak, with the sky as a backdrop behind it, in red and russet. It was a thick, massy monster, a hundred feet high, and wide as the shadow of a mountain. With the evening dying out in quiet colours, it went sable and ominous. There was a menacing witchery about it, as it towered over his little house.
And there was never a good air about it, but always evil, a cunning, waiting, patient evil. In the moonlight it was like a black cloud suspended by his dwelling, threatening to float into it and engulf it. When the dusk was well down, the light yellowing from the window gave no cheer, because he could see the horrible, stifling giant, standing without a movement. And in the morning, when the sun expanded through the trees in filtering radii, creating a golden haze like sunlight in the western dust, that tree was evil, and no sun crept into its dark bosom.
When the storm came with a helter-skelter flurry, it unlimbered itself with a dreadful patience, like a calm but terrible man rolling up his sleeves. It threshed and creaked, growing more powerful, howling and sighing in thunderous fury, all the other trees were as sighing echoes of it.
It swung hard with a semi-gyration. It laboured terrifically. And then, when the storm was gone, after its typhooning, after its invigorating bath and gymnastics, it moved gently, tired and exhilarated. To Fingal it looked more terrible.
His face, cracked like a walnut, came to glower naturally, and he even thought of the tree before he saw it. Its appalling personality gave him no rest. His senses gripped it and rolled it in the hate of his mind. One day, when he and his son were husking corn, the boy asked:
‘When are we going to cut down the tree, Dad?’
‘Soon.’
‘You’ve been going to cut it down for a long time.’
‘Yes. But it is a big job. I will destroy it soon.’
‘Mum doesn’t like you putting it off. She said she thought you were afraid of it, too.’
‘Ah, your mother is a foolish woman,’ he snapped. ‘Afraid? That’s likely! Me—afraid of a tree?’ he scoffed. ‘It’s her that’s put the fear of it into you all. She sets a fine example with her ideas. She is only trying to work up excuses to get away to the city. I know how she hankers after the grimy dump.’
The boy was about to remark again, but the father told him sharply to get on with his work. His wife was always nagging. If it wasn’t one thing it was another. He resented her quality of determination that jarred with her spirit of submissiveness. She accused him of putting matters off; she detested the scrimping and scraping that made management a travail.
She often came into Fingal’s mind; a pale mouth working in the pale face, set into a frame of wispy hair. Always there was an exhausted air about her, as though she had walked a long, long way against a heavy wind. But he never pitied her, never sympathised with her. He just appreciated her as a utility that put a steaming meal before him. He would sooner watch ants steering down pencil tracks, and hate the tree.
He realised his inconsistencies, and he blamed the tree. He blamed it with a hatred that violated sense and reason. It had sucked out of him the very energy that had once made him industrious, and had left only indecisive remnants. And these remnants merely gave him, when necessity impelled, the spurts that caused him to plant corn, and sow potatoes and garden vegetables—enough to keep alive.
* * *
Two years ago he had come into the bush to make money and buy himself a farm. He had stood in the sun and seen the land, the wilding grass, bent and silver under the tameless wind, the trees straggling, and the great mons
ter that drank their sappy blood. But then, at that time, he had not realised.
He had hewn the timber and built a house by the great tree, and, achievement filling his heart, had set out to clear the earth and make it arable.
Then, he saw broken stumps all about the monster, and the withered grass, monuments to the gorging appetite of the brute; dumb witness to the striving strength and power, the lushness and greenness for which they had died. And out further it was reaching, with a vampire lust, to other trees. The mark of death showed in their drying leaves, and their stripping bark and stunted growth.
Long ago it had sprouted up through the earth with others. They had all fought to live. They basked in the sun, they breathed in the air, the wind strengthened them, the frosts made them hardy. But not all.
This one, this rapacious giant, took much of what belonged to the others. It fought them. It dug its hold deeper, spread its roots and multiplied them, and clawed into the earth with a callous tenacity.
It grew, full of might that terrified the others. They struggled madly to reach up to the sun; the earth groaned with their straining. And then it weakened them. Slowly, and with a horrible sureness, it drained away all their life. They suffocated. It spread over them, a darkening, enlarging shadow. Its sinewy legs bulged out of the earth, and gnarled themselves together. And the others died. For long years, this selfish murderer had killed to feed itself, encroaching on space even, and claiming an enormous gap.
Fingal cleared away the stumps. He cleared away the other trees; and always it howled in self-mourning. It ranted and dirged. It would grow no more. It could thieve no more. Then it was quiet, like a man done wrong, who schemes vengeance.
Fingal’s crops were poor. He made little. He took an axe and gashed and severed its great toes. He ring-barked it, and waited, smiling grimly.
The tree apparently never noticed this disfigurement. It went on in awful, relentless calm. Fingal cursed. There was domestic trouble. His mind changed until he came near to psychosis.