Shearers' Motel

by Roger McDonald

  Lenny in orbit puts the ute in a shed, drains the oil, raises the vehicle on blocks, unclips the UHF and takes it inside, puts it on a shelf out of reach of the mate’s kids, stows away the swag, climbs aboard a Boeing at Mascot, flying out for northern California, New Mexico, the central massif of France — Lenny speaking no tongue except his own, always expressing Lenny, world shearer, world beater living inside the sheep culture, and bound to the stubborn repetitive patterns of sheep.

  Back it always comes to sheep and to Lenny, throughout the sphere of the whole world. Always back to the sheep and to Lenny shearing the extra one, doing it for this one, the me-one, Lenny. Never has the worker been so locked to the material of his work. Lenny looking preoccupied and a sheep looking preoccupied have the same bothered, tragic regard. It is as if each believes the other has no existence. It is a sign of their importance to each other. They meet as worlds in collision.

  All winter Lenny stands in the slit-open back of a mobile shearing trailer, no protection from the elements of Idaho as snow whips through at twenty below. It’s when the shearing is done so you do it. In New Mexico the cooking is done on an open fire, the shearing done right there, on the dirt, with a pair of Mexicans for companionship, rough shearers, rough people, not too nice. When in France Lenny lives with his mate, a French shearer. It is good in that situation, down where his mate lives to the south of Paris, but the French people in general are cold to foreigners.

  Lenny writes to his children from all over the world. Lenny is the one who’s gone ahead of them, charting extremes they will never have to follow, because Lenny is holding the fort for them, doing something obscure, something terrible — call it work — that can only be related back to origins that would have to be guessed at. How to explain Lenny’s fixed habit of departures, his personal standards and interior codes? Do it through sheep. Early in life, Lenny learnt that a man is absolutely and unquestioningly the job he does. He was born on a farm in the South Island, son of a farm labourer, grandson of a farm labourer. The word used over there is shepherd. Lenny tends his own blood. Lenny thinks his own way through the sheep-pad paths of evolution.

  It seems to Lenny sometimes that he is the only one of anyone he knows who understands work. Really understands it. It is an individual thing. What he puts into his work he takes out of his work. What the fuck does Lenny care about this Australian thing, the big deal of formalised mateship, the traditions of the Australian Workers Union, ‘what we grew up with’, ‘how we do things here’, ‘the battles hard fought’. Lenny sees the union as a bunch of work-shirkers, excuse-makers, always supplying reasons for not doing the job, laying down the tools according to rule rather than feeling. Other Kiwis are inclined to compromise after a while in this country, they want the quiet life, no confrontations. So others sign up for the union ticket in the end but never Lenny, who tells them they’re gutless crawlers who can’t look a thing in the face. These others come to see you can’t work seven days a week in this hell of a place or you’ll drop in your tracks — unless you happen to be Lenny, the cutting edge of the Kiwi work machine, the ever-whetted blade of it, the angry tip.

  The guys are eating in Hungry Jack’s in Mount Gambier one day when a family man plods up, red-faced, with the boozing shearer’s pot belly and giveaway stoop, wearing K-Mart sportswear and trailing an edgy-eyed wife and rabbity kids. ‘Just a friendly word to you Kiwis,’ he says. ‘You’d better watch out.’ Six wide-bodied Maoris raise their eyebrows and give him the smile, beaming confident understanding, maintaining the momentum of lives that have a totally different purpose in view. They would like to fit in of course, but they are who they are, with their own fitting-in ways. Whole families of shearers like communities of law go back through the generations in their story. Their thing is not fragile. Here in Hungry Jack’s they display the stillness of a rugby pack balanced at the moment before the ball is fed in. They are the All Blacks. They have discipline, patience, philosophical calm, and a contained explosive strength. Only Lenny wants to go down to the pub and sort this out. The others say that the pub is where the trouble is. They grab hold of Lenny and he can’t move. There in the plastic booth he’s held like a sheep.

  Hatred of sheep fills Lenny with rage. Tied to their lambing millions, one down, another always frisking up ready, the only times Lenny walks off the board are when he pulls the pin on the cocky over some detail of workmanship, or snaps and beats up on a sheep. Lenny tears a muscle, does a hernia, sees red. Sheep come to seem like people sometimes. Not nice but there you are — Lenny punching and kicking the inert mass of slobberguts until the guys haul him off, tip a bucket of water on him, push him down the steps and find a beer to calm him down. Soon he comes to his senses, goes and has a shower, drives into town, sees a doctor, gets declared okay, has a few quiet beers, gets back to the shed in time for tea, and no one refers to what’s happened, Lenny beating up on a sheep, a necessity, a compulsion.

  Lenny the party man is more like him. Still boozing at daylight at Gidgee Scrubs and shearing an hour later, putting in the full day on rams and into the piss again at night, having the shed party come what may, the cut-out party, the ritual — Lenny the world shearer putting a belt around the world and pulling it tighter, his eyeballs pink-rimmed, his breath coming wheezier, Lenny caught sometimes flexing his hand when he thinks no one is watching, Lenny limping, stumbling a bit, feeling incessant pain that has to be worked through, defied, denied.

  KNIFE EDGE

  One day Harold drew him aside at the huts and glanced to the right and left as if spies might be lurking there, put a hand on his shoulder, looked into his eyes, and said, ‘Have you noticed, Cookie, that Kiwis are a big people? They need stoking up. The amount of meat you cook is not enough.’

  He pointed out to Harold that at mealtimes there was always meat left — scraps of roasts, or stews he saved overnight and offered on toast at breakfast. He reminded Harold that he always came in saying he could eat a horse, but by the third helping waved meat off.

  Harold stared off into space, with an expression implying he meant something different by all this and he had better work out what it was if Harold was ever to have any peace of mind. ‘There’s another thing. The spices you use,’ he said decisively. ‘We don’t like food that’s too spicy.’

  ‘What spices do you mean?’

  ‘Whatever it is you put in the stew. We love good plain home cooking. It’s the way we were brought up. We’re not used to all the different things you have over here.’

  ‘The only thing I put in sometimes is mixed herbs.’

  ‘That’s the one. Go easy on the mixed herbs.’ Harold looked relieved, and clapped him on the back in a congratulatory fashion. ‘Overall, let me tell you, Cookie, my friend, your cooking is outstanding.’

  His response to Harold’s criticism was not to ask for more sheep to be killed, but to leave the quantity of meat the same, and just go along the way he was going, except when he made stews. Then he cut boned legs into larger chunks, so that the meat sat on the plates in shining cubes, and wasn’t amalgamated in the gravy the way it was usually.

  Harold approved of this. With a mouthful of chew he gave him the thumbs-up. ‘Too maggot.’ It meant over the top. Then, so that Cookie had better realise he would never achieve perfection without further penalty, Harold’s expressive eyes drifted in the direction of the dog, and a thoughtful look came over his face. ‘I hope you’re keeping that Sadie out of the kitchen.’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind for myself, but I’m thinking of the health regulations.’

  ‘I’m ahead of them,’ he said.

  Harold became confidential. ‘The grower has been asking about her. Where she goes at night. Has she been eating offal and what the danger is from hydatids.’

  ‘But he knows whose dog she is. Every time he sees me I’ve got Sadie following along.’

  ‘He says he dislikes the breed, but I never let on what you told me about how she kills chooks,
and I said that Sadie couldn’t care less about sheep, and certainly wasn’t a problem in that direction, so he’s got no worries there.’

  Sadie sat on the back steps with her nose pressed to the gauze and seemed to be listening.

  ‘Does the owner have chooks?’

  ‘Well. Yes. They seem to be his main hobby,’ said Harold darkly. Then, when he saw him looking concerned, he burst into laughter. ‘See, but he does have chooks, though, Cookie,’ he giggled, then, in case he thought it was all a leg-pull, became straight-faced again. ‘True. Up behind the house there. Try and wangle a hen out of him sometime. The team appreciates a change.’

  Harold continued thoughtfully: ‘Most cooks do chicken on Wednesdays. My permanent cook before last, she did all that and she cut up all her own meat just like you do. She was a top cook. I had to let her go because she entered into a relationship with a shearer.’

  He was getting the hang of Harold’s mental leaps. Food, dogs, women. Harold was saying he’d better not stretch his feeling for an animal into the world of people, or he’d find his cook’s employment prospects dim.

  ‘Isn’t that her private business?’

  ‘It’s her private business up to a point,’ said Harold. ‘But you see, she was neglecting her work, and was always over in the shearer’s room when she should have been washing up. This is that very attractive lady called Hazel I am talking about. I think you know her,’ Harold looked at him sideways.

  ‘We met in town on Saturday,’ he nodded. ‘I had a beer with her.’

  ‘I thought you did.’

  ‘And with Packard. Her boyfriend,’ he added.

  ‘Right you are. Well, then, you know the sort of person I am talking about. Very much a cut above the average, with an ex-husband and grown-up boys, fifteen to twenty-two, they’re shearers too. She’s been asking for her old job back, did she tell you?’

  ‘No. She said she was happy working for the team she’s with now. They’re moving back into South Australia, and that’s where she comes from, from around Mount Gambier, so she’s glad.’

  ‘Packard and me used to be mates, but now we ain’t talking. If it wasn’t for the messes he gets himself into with women I’d be overjoyed to shear with him all year.’

  ‘He said he was going to South Australia too.’

  ‘That’s a real shame. I’ve got the perfect job for him coming up, if only I could bring myself to ring him. It was so hard to believe when I used to come in and find all the dirty dishes still unwashed at eleven at night. It was like old Packard had put a spell on Hazel, and she wasn’t the woman I thought she was, and the whole team went funny.’

  The kitchen floor at Gograndli Station sloped at an angle towards the stove, and was covered in a sheen of fat. He decided that before the job finished he would clean it off. He made an arrangement with the owner to go over to the homestead one day, and use the phone. He wanted to ring the storekeeper in Hay and order a cleanser. He didn’t mention the reason for the call to the owner, because Winston Didale was the one who hadn’t bothered to clean the fat off in years, and anyway Didale was personally hostile — he decided — resentful maybe that he had phoned before the job and asked if he could have a killer ready. Didale never visited the kitchen to pass the time of day. But he was polite the day he approached him in the holding yards and said he wanted to ring through for stores to come out on the next mail truck, and to make a reverse charges call to his wife. Would that be okay?

  ‘Absolutely. Use the phone in the book-keeper’s office. Take the side path past the vegie garden to the office at the back, round past the poultry yard.’

  He left Sadie under his truck. It was the first time he had ever tied her up, and she hated it. She gazed at him unblinkingly, then started snapping at flies. He walked across the log bridge and along the river and up the laneway to the back of the stylish Gograndli homestead. A dozen glossy black hens and a coppery-tailed rooster were in a narrow henhouse surrounded by a fox-proof chainlink fence. There were fresh hollows in the dirt where a dog had been trying to dig its way in and he knew it was Sadie. She slept at the foot of his bed but sometimes when he woke at night she wasn’t there. He’d go outside and whistle softly, but she’d be nowhere around.

  In behind the henhouse was a blacksmith’s forge, a chiller room with a cold water tap poking through the side, a meat house and a killing cradle. An enamel mug was chained to the iced water tap, and he ran himself a drink. It brought back a childhood memory: standing in a station yard at Louth and drinking water from a tap like this one. It seemed like a miracle in those days having chilled water coming out into the heat, as if there was a block of ice inside the room, the same size as the room.

  As he drank, he eyed the killing cradle. Fresh purplish blood sparkled on the cement. Fresh meat hung in the meat house. This was rich. It showed contempt for people. Up at the book-keeper’s room, a spray of blood marked the shiny brass doorknob, and on the cream-painted door-panel there was a bloody thumb print. No station hand would be so careless around a boss’s office. This was a boss’s doing. He’d lied about not killing his own meat, and now was off somewhere in his Piper Tri-Pacer, chasing preselection for the Liberal Party, and talking about his respect for workers.

  On the phone the storekeeper recommended caustic soda to de-grease the kitchen floor. ‘It’ll eat it through, pile it on.’ So he ordered a kilo drum of caustic soda flakes to come out on the mail run.

  He and Sadie took walks together in the afternoons, wandering upstream along the river away from the shed until Sadie grew tired of scaring up kangaroos from shade, and of sniffing out lizards in the crevices of stumps. Then she started wheezing and whining with exhaustion, wanting to turn back. It was never clear who was in the lead.

  On more than one occasion he found her with snakes wrapped around her legs, the first a brown, the second a tiger. She killed them by angling her head back and breaking their spines with a clamping bite. He’d get hold of Sadie then in a kind of loving ignorant rage and hurl her out into a green pool of the Lachlan, where she landed on her back in a helpless gyration. His idea was to wash off any venom and minimise the consequences of snakebite. Watching Sadie swim ashore was heartbreaking, and he felt his fate tied to hers, and ready for anything.

  They rested by the riverbank and he would watch Sadie sleeping, waiting for the instant when her bloodshot eye would flick open, and she would be staring back at him, straight as an arrow. She wasn’t going to die.

  When they turned back, homing on the sight of the flattening smoke from the kitchen chimney and meeting the smell of the evening roast from the woodstove, Sadie would run ahead and wait for him on the kitchen steps.

  One day Harold approached him with a pained expression and raised the subject of Hazel again. He’d been on the phone to Packard apparently.

  ‘The thing about Hazel,’ said Harold, ‘is that Packard is a top shearer, and this shed we’re going to next, Woody Park, well, the grower there has particularly asked if he can have Packard back this year, and seeing as how I’m in bad need of a little more support on the board, what with our friend Cal just being a learner and only pushing out his ninety a day, I can’t see how I can keep you on, Cookie my friend, if I am to get myself a situation where I need to punch out the numbers.’ Harold let this sink in. ‘The point being that Packard and Hazel always work together. I can’t have one without the other.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He hated the way disappointments made his heart sink in this work. He’d already assumed that the Woody Park job would be his, and the shed after that as well, and so on into the future for as long as he liked until something snapped in his brain and he became like all other permanent cooks he had ever heard of — a raving troublemaker who hated the life instead of loving it too much, and whose life was a succession of sackings. This industry wasn’t made to be a page where a cook wrote his own story.

  ‘However,’ continued Harold, raising his eyebrows. ‘My brother has a week of lambs to d
o at Merryford, on the Darling there, near Wilcannia, and he was asking about you on the phone last night, whether you’d be interested in helping him out. It doesn’t start for another week, so you’d have time to get home and see your kids and missus, no worries. Then after that Bertram Junior will be heading up to Wilga Station, way up north again, and I know for a cert he’ll need a cook there.’

  ‘Tell him I’ll do it,’ he nodded, feeling better for being chosen, liking the thought of working with Bertram Junior again. He calculated that by the time the work finished at Gograndli Station he would have four or five days free. He decided to spend them driving through a wide circle of country and camping out, living on leftover shearing stores.

  Late one night he hung his gas lantern on the nail above the sink and halfway through the washing-up went out to the cook’s room to fetch a clean tea-towel, and while he was there, feeling exhausted, he lay down on his bed and fell asleep. He woke to the smell of smoke and the sight of tiny flames through the kitchen window. He ran in and beat the flames out with the tea-towel.

  In the morning he reported the damage to Harold, who clicked his tongue and looked at him wonderingly, then laughed with a kind of accusing delight. ‘Best to chuck out that old gas lamp of yours.’ The flames had left nothing worse on the window surrounds than another layer of black. ‘I’ll mention it to Winston,’ said Harold, wagging his finger at the man and grinning. ‘Get your bags packed ready, just in case.’

  Later Harold reported to him that Winston Didale said the huts were so old it would have been an improvement if they had burnt to the ground.

  On his last morning at Gograndli he spent an hour mopping caustic soda around the stove. It made no difference to the layers of fat, only seemed to even them out, spreading the thicker patches wider. He then mopped his way backwards into the mess-room where Harold sat writing cheques, obligingly lifting his large feet, one and then the other.