by Gregory Day
‘Bob Balme had no choice but to investigate and so it went, for months in fact, the big news, with Leonie having to answer questions she didn’t even know the meaning of, and Rickie Keith whittled away by Nat’s demands of that pliant copper Bob Balme until, with it all over the Tassie papers and even The Argus, as a curious tale from the backward islands no doubt, the poor digger just packed up his kitbag one day and left on the cargo tramp. An innocent verdict was given but it was too late. He’d come back from one war only to find another waged against him. He’d been given no help from the Settlement Board: no fences, no housing, had not much of an idea about farming, and now this. But, in truth, it had nothing to do with Rickie Keith. It was Nat’s war. Still is. And if you don’t believe me, you can head up past that junction next to Shakespeare’s and ’ave a look at Rickie Keith’s wagon, coz it’s still standing there by the join of the roads. Or what’s left of it.’
He went on. ‘After that she was different for a time. I reckoned she’d found a friend in kind ol’ Rickie Keith, a friend from elsewhere, which was a big part of it. Unlike every other bugger on King he knew nothin’ of Alma dyin’ to bring her into the world or her father’s trouble with that or what she’d had to put up with. I imagine it was all cards and pancakes as she said, just somethin’ nice in that wagon, and I’ve asked her and she says it was not much more. Anyways, I reckon she took it all to mean, even as a kid, that she was destined to be friendless on the earth. Cursed. I dunno to be honest but for a time the people already here, those of us from here, who remembered her beautiful mammy Alma from Victoria and the storm and knew all about Nat and her and that, well, for a time we didn’t count for nothin’. She just shut up shop on the lot of us, even me. Got herself one of Doc Ray’s bikes and you’d only ever see the back of her, takin’ off to some place or another, up high onto the gusty capes, up onto the Wickham uplands and the like . . .
‘But then one day, I dunno, maybe a year and a half since Rickie Keith packed up and left, she showed round here wanting to know about the scrimshaw, of all things. Was almost like meetin’ a stranger. She’d grown up a bit and she didn’t come in sniffin’ but speakin’ whole sentences and knowin’ what she was about.
‘I was just glad to see her, couldn’t help her enough, showed her all the pieces of our pa’s in this house – of course she’d seen all the stuff Nat had on the walls back at Tuck’s – but what she wanted was the knowhow. Well, I couldn’t help her with that coz I never learnt from Old Nat. He taught the eldest and no one else. So Leonie’s dad got it all but wasn’t much interested, gettin’ madly into Tuck White’s cattle and that when he was young.
‘Anyways, what I could show her was how to get the ink, coz that was one of my chores when we was young. So I give her the rundown on that, it was all I could do, and we went around for a few days then catchin’ cuttlefish by lantern at night in the coves, and fixing up what had been lost between us. I showed her back here in the yard, on this here bench if the truth be known, how to cut out the sac and dry it to dust and the like and add water and I told her she was a clean slate to me, I didn’t care to think about the past and that she was as at home in the old Fermoy house where she’d been born, as anywhere in the world.
‘She took it all on board and went off her own way but she’d stop by at least from time to time after that. Showed me the ink she made and told me too just why she was makin’ it for Nat, thinkin’, god bless her darlin’ heart, that it would cure him to set his hand to the ol’ art rather than workin’ with bulls his whole life.
‘You see, young fella, she’s stayed with him, that’s what you gotta know. She stayed with him right through, you see. Right through it all. Just out of worry and love. She spent bloody months waitin’ for the right weathers and gettin’ enough ink at night so he’d be right as rain and accordin’ to her he actually did turn his hand back to it for a while, on a rib of our pa’s, but ended up throwin’ the results into the lily lagoon by the gate on Tuck’s there. Stormin’ around afterwards, she said, worse than ever for weeks.
‘But she’s stayed there all right, every night she’s back there. It’s damn unnatural the amount of love that girl’s got for a father like that but, yes, she’s stayed . . . right through . . . she’s nursin’ animals and wandering down to talk to the swans on the Sea Elephant, but she ain’t got closer to anyone than she is to me and the Robinsons this whole time.
‘So,’ and now Uncle True squinted straight at me as he spoke, ‘you’d be best to get a lookout or somethin’, or watch yourself is all I’ll say, coz my bet is that where my brother’s concerned you’d be walkin’ pretty close to a boxthorn right now. You wouldn’t want to end up the way of Rickie Keith . . .’
The day of work hadn’t even begun but there were so many sparks flying in my head now and I didn’t know where to look.
‘But, True, she’s not nine years old anymore,’ I said.
‘No,’ he said pensively, running his fingers through his stubble. ‘No, in many ways she’s not.’
‘But . . . do you mind if I ask, does he still hit her, do ya reckon?’
The old beachcomber stared at me again, this time without speaking. It was a look unmistakeable for the guilt that he felt. He’d never been capable of doing anything much about the situation. Except by being a friend to her, no, a proper uncle, and to offer a gumbo and a good ear whenever she felt the need to come by his way. But right then he ceased to be able to put his feelings into words.
With the silence came the beginning of work. And it was then, by way of a lighter conversation bearing at least some resemblance to the eternal small talk of the weather, that I mentioned how that morning I’d found muttonbird feathers in my pocket. As I gingerly wrung the oil out of each sad and sooty bird, Uncle True told me how the birds moult before they take off in the autumn and that the feathers get into everything. ‘You wait,’ he said in earnest, ‘from this one day of workin’ ’em you’ll be pulling ’em outta the hair in your armpits for months.’
We set about it. Being inexperienced it would take me an inordinate amount of time – a good ten minutes – to be sure I’d properly gurried each bird and, given the size of True’s pile beside me, of cast-off hook-beaks and tiny heads, legs and wings flung and flopped into light-catching angles, eyes blank as charcoal but still facing you, I knew that I was terribly slow. But not once did Uncle True even look sideways at what I was doing. He stood at his bench ripping the feathers away from the birds in clumps, chopping the heads and wings and feet with his hatchet, and placing the prepared bodies in a hessian sack with a stencil of a red poll on it that he had hanging from the bench beside him. When my gurrying was extra slow he’d patiently wait for the next bird, happy now in the release of the activity to yarn away about things that had occurred to him concerning people and life, certain notions he had, in which occasionally I’d catch more glimpses of his disapproval for the way his brother Nat conducted his farm and affairs. In the midst of his reflections he would often get a slug of rum in before I handed him the gurried bird and, of course, at all times he had a roll-your-own hanging from the corner of his mouth.
To my surprise Leonie showed up right on time, pedalling around the back shed from the northern end of the yard, to a generous ‘Hooray’ from her Uncle True. She pedalled right up to us, leaned the bike against the narrow end of the plucking bench and reminded her uncle that he’d forgotten the scalding.
Anyone else on the island would have pointed this out as an example of why True Fermoy was a hopeless case. A dipso worth a laugh at the pub but nothin’ more. He’d even mentioned the scalding of the birds when he was explaining the process to me, and then the two of us, caught up as we had been with Leonie and Rickie Keith and the Fermoy sorrows, had completely forgotten it.
Slapping his weathered forehead with the flat palm of his hand, he grinned at his niece like a ham actor. He shook his head, as if he cared more about the scalding th
an anything else on the whole island. ‘Well it’s lucky your friend Wesley here’s as green as the grass. And as slow. Not much wasted, we’ve only done ten birds.’
It was as if he could have lectured us then on the merits of starting work late, as we had, due to his rhythms with the rum and cloves. Fact was, if we had’ve started on time he’d likely as not have remembered the scalding, but that wouldn’t be the point, as he saw it. If you take your time, like a leatherback, I imagined him saying, you’d be the last in the race to make mistakes. And here we go lassie Leonie, and Wesley the War Hero, this mornin’s the proof of it. We’ve been conductin’ important business that required our full attention. Anyway, let’s get the fire goin’ and conjure up the water.
Between the plucking bench and the salt-eaten red shed behind us was a setting of driftwood and rubbish waiting to be lit. Beside it sat another drum but this time sawn raggedly in half, and blackened by past fires. Leonie crossed the grass and disappeared into the shed before re-appearing in a leather apron even heavier than her one at the co-op, the kind which I’d seen fellows wearing in the abattoir. She still hadn’t said hello to me yet.
She bent down and struck a match into the rubbish and wood, which caught immediately. She then walked over to where True’s saucers of metho sat on the barrows, picked one of them up and tossed the contents onto the pile. Flames immediately surged, grasping the strait wood hungrily.
The fire was soon all ablaze and, as she stood waiting for it to shift itself down enough for her to put the half-drum on top, Uncle True ran a thick brown hose from a tank by the backdoor of the house, ready to fill it with water when the moment came. I watched these two Fermoys at work from my spot at the gurry barrel, but suddenly from a great distance. They may have had their troubles but they were at home there at Yellow Rock. It was I who felt like the stranger on the earth. ‘As green as the grass,’ True had described me as in jest to his niece. ‘As dark as a cave,’ was how I put it to myself as I stood there by the blackened barrel.
But then she turned her face, all lit like a lamp from the fire, bringing me back into the picture. And all the scribbling I’d done in those last few days, page after page of it, seemed instantly to have been worthwhile. Was it the nature of the work itself, the act of recollecting or the ingredients remembered, or simply her acknowledgement that I existed on this average island working day? Either way, my voice replied to her hello with a transparent eagerness, as if I’d unclipped my battle gear and stood in the heart’s mufti before her, saying, ‘Yair hi, hello, g’day!’
By lunchtime I had learned that to gurry a bird in ninety seconds flat was acceptable, given their internal structure and the slow drip of the oil and the way this varied slightly from one to the next. I stood and watched as Leonie took this full allotted time over the barrel to last out the drips, before handing the bird to me to scald in the drum of boiling water. I would hold each bird by a wrinkled claw and submerge it twice, once to loosen the nibs and the next to make sure before laying it on the ground beside me. When I had a pile of twenty or so I’d carry them quickly to True’s bench, in between Leonie handing me more birds and making sure I didn’t burn myself. Uncle True would then cut off the legs and wings and head, in four always slightly tentative movements, and then he’d pluck the bodies. We’d work like this for half an hour or perhaps forty minutes, shooing away the flies, glancing westward above the roofline of the house to see where that reef of cloud held in by ropes had gone, and then Uncle True would call for a rest to smoke, and in that five or so minutes break Leonie or I would stoke the fire with more wood from the tumble – you wouldn’t call it a stack – that True had over near the red shed, and make gentle conversation. In this manner lunch arrived with perhaps a third of the original pile completed.
We stayed outside to eat but moved to the chairs and table True had positioned at the Wickham end of the house, where his mother’s correas still stood in a wind-sculpted hedging around an area of about ten or twelve square yards of thick lush kikuyu. From the bottles and butts all around it was obvious that this was a place Uncle True liked to sit.
Leonie had removed her abattoir apron and wore a thick woollen dress with a sleeveless vest over the top in a brown and yellow argyle pattern. I had come unprepared but wished I’d left my coat on as I worked, for I was filthy with oil and grease and grit and ash, and of course feathers also. Uncle True had worn a knee-length coat for the plucking and he kept it on, filthy as it was, during lunch. So Leonie looked not only beautiful to me now, but heroic and shining as well.
In the afternoon we worked like Trojans, with True filling Leonie in on the Vince Moynihan arrangement and how the rush of it all was not to his taste but that it was the nature of contraband to require last-minute arrangements. Leonie didn’t say much as her uncle talked but when she did it was only to agree with him, or to ask if he needed a rest.
By 4 pm the unnerving stillness of the day had finally begun to shift, with a constant range of cloud moving across, untethered and scudding from the open west. As if in tune with this, Uncle True’s mood also began to change, as his cursing at Moynihan’s expectations increased, not to mention his curses at the ‘bloody yowlers’, as he called the birds, until finally at around four-thirty, with a third of the pile still to go, he announced he was done for the day. Already feeling some kind of investment in the process, what with the talk we’d had in the morning, the burns on my hands from the fire and the water, the gurry all over my clothes and skin, I felt like protesting that it would be good to finish the pile, but Leonie got in first: ‘No need for you to keep going, Uncle True. Wesley and I can knock the rest off and you can go inside and put the dinner on.’
‘Dinner be damned, girl,’ Uncle True replied.
‘Yes, well, have your sherbet, of course. But if we keep going we’ll need to be fed. That way the whole thing with Vince Moynihan won’t hit a snag. We don’t want him flying over tomorrow and being disappointed. And I’m sure Wes here wants his money.’
Uncle True raised his eyebrows, pursed his whole face up in pained consideration. ‘Whatever you say, girl. We can’t stiff the war hero, I suppose.’
‘Good. We’ll be in when we’ve finished for stew.’
Uncle True snorted and rolled his eyes in a delinquent fashion. He walked off in the direction of the house.
*
An hour after the stars had appeared in the black pouches of the sky between clouds, we still had fifty or so birds to go. It was all harder in the dark, of course, colder too, we were both covered in gurry and I wasn’t as good at the plucking as Leonie’s Uncle True.
Tentatively we’d begun to talk, even before the sun went down. She told me a little about her father and True and I asked her not about the ink but about the scrimshaw.
‘They don’t have much in common, my father and my Uncle True, but they do have this: anything to do with their own father, what he did, his life, and what he made, is of interest to them. They don’t appreciate anything better.’
‘So what made True the way he is?’ I asked, mid-grimace, as I plucked a smaller bird without light.
She glanced at me quickly from over the gurry barrel. Even in the dark I could see her flashing scorn for my question. As if it was laughable that a bird at sea like me, and with such heavy wings, should behave like some wetback suitor inquiring about the more obvious members of her family.
After a squidging twist of the yowler in her hands, she said: ‘There are things I’d do for Uncle True I’d do for no one else. This, for instance. I don’t believe in killing birds in such quantities. And I’ve not much interest in breaking the law either, not like some on this island.’
I blushed in the darkness, dressed down, thinking about that episode with the digger in the wagon, Rickie Keith. What I’d asked had come out stilted and wrong. Even on moonless nights we cast a shadow.
When the last bird was done we cleaned ourselves
up as best we could, to sit down at the long old log-table in the house at Yellow Rock for what Uncle True declared to be, with a short-lived humour thoroughly inflected with the day’s rum and cloves, ‘squab in aspic stew’. The big room was surprisingly neat, the wooden floor swept, the timbers polished with wax from the wild bee-combs and gleaming, books and magazines stacked neatly on the shelves, the glass of the sideboard tea-polished too, the top of it dusted buff. I wouldn’t have doubted that behind the wide brown curtains the big windows facing twelve thousand miles of unbroken water were washed against the dark night as well, such was the fastidious gleam of the interior. The only exception to all this cleanliness were the spiderwebs left on the walls and in the corners of the ceiling. They were extravagant, hairy, colonising things, and easily swept away. Uncle True obviously had a soft spot for spiders.
Leonie explained later how it was with this houseproudness of Uncle True. A mixture of devotion and fear saw him keep the inside of the home as respectable as a shrine. Like his brother, he respected anything his father had made and also felt his mother Patsy’s constant watching of her kitchen from beyond the grave. But also, given he paid no rent, he had to guard against the potential coming day when Nat would turn up unannounced from the east and manhandle him out of the place because of its disgusting condition. Uncle True might be a hopeless case according to some, but they would never say that about his parents’ house. It was the one discipline he required of himself in life and he attended to it as if everything depended upon it. Which, given the lack of alternative snug accommodation on the island, and the punitive winters, it may well have.
The stew was predictably salty, the potatoes nutty but overcooked and at the head of the table Uncle True was quite spent. He sat, flagging then luffing like a sail in his chair, his big left hand fixed around his crystal glass, with his eyes closed most of the time. Leonie and I talked amongst ourselves, almost as if he wasn’t there, of life on Wait-a-While, and for a good hour or so of her father’s Brangus cattle, which Leonie confessed for the first time to hating, because of the way they were enemies of the island trees and groundcovers, and for the way they stiffened the ground with teeth and hoof. As it turns out this passionate confession was not just a first to me but to anyone, including True and the Robinsons, and given what she’s come to create in the garden around us here at Naracoopa that’s a fond memory to me. Obviously enough, the day we’d had, of sharing the gurrying of Uncle True’s yowlers, had brought the right stuff out of the inside of us all, not just the birds.