There was no feeling like getting away from the job, out onto the main road through the last property gate, steering along with two fingers on the wheel, feeling the ruts in the road dictate the swoops and sways of the truck, not having to take part in anything. There was a beautiful sadness about that, the little family always breaking up.
At Mount Vulcan the little family kept regrouping. Originals were gone, like Willie-boy, Barbara, Davo, Old Jake. But Harold, Bertram Junior, and Lenny were all expected. In fact here they were in the kitchen looking right at him.
‘Cookie, how are you doin’?’
It was Bertram Junior with his brothers crowding in. They had come to greet him. Seeing Bertram Junior’s smiling, ironical bulk made him glad. ‘What brings you here?’ They shook hands, a bone-crusher, rocked back on their heels, and Bertram Junior eyed him and his kitchen. He said he had driven over the Victorian border from Woolpack, the shed where he was working. He told him what a terrible cook they had there. (He liked hearing this.) He told him that his old best mate, Davo, was only a two-hour drive away. In return he gave Bertram Junior a message for Davo, saying come over some weekend, they’d have a beer at Jens. Bertram Junior pursed his lips. ‘I’ll do that, Cookie.’ Then his eyes drifted away, surveying dusty white dinner rolls rising in baking dishes on the table. ‘Still into your bread, eh?’ He said it wistfully, as if his making bread at a station where he wasn’t working was betrayal. There was a suggestion in the air around Bertram Junior that people ought to restructure their ideas of friendship a little. They never gave quite enough. They were moons and asteroids in relation to the pale, troubled planet, Bertram Junior. ‘Still making a big hit with them rolls of yours, but, are you, Cookie?’
‘Take some back with you,’ he invited.
‘What, and make our cook mad?’ Bertram Junior stared. ‘I’d have to be out of my mind.’ Then he folded his arms and darted his eyes around. ‘So you’re still good mates with old Davo, are you, Cookie?’
‘Yeah. Sure.’
‘I was just wondering. Davo has not had a very good year. Probably you haven’t heard. I dunno what it is. Maybe he just can’t hold a team together, or something.’
People kept rising and falling in the estimation of each other in shed life. Familiar likeable family members kept getting replaced by strangers — now another person, new to him, was one. Boland. They said Boland only cared about shearing and gambling — not women, grog, or possessions, or improving his position in life. Just those two aims, one tied to the other. Whenever the wool was away he headed for the Adelaide casino.
In the kitchen when he first met him, Boland put his arm around his shoulder and told him he hated hot food. ‘Remember that, won’t cha, Cookie, cool it down before you serve it, and I won’t give you no trouble.’ He coughed, spraying him. He had a cold, an infection: a ball of green snot bubbled from his nostrils.
Bertram Junior reappeared before he returned to Woolpack. ‘You’ll be interested in this, Cookie. We’ve got another old mate of yours over at Woolpack.’ Jiggling his eyebrows up and down: ‘It’s that young derro, Wade. He’s offensive. I might off-load him on Harold. Then you’ll be with your old mate again,’ he grunted, and laughed briefly, sending out an ironic, sidelong glance.
At other times Bertram Junior came to Mount Vulcan but did not come into the kitchen at all. He sat out in his car holding court with the mates. He overheard him saying what he’d said before, that Harold took everything that was good away from him, his best sheds, his best workers, his best cook.
Night after night, people drifted past him to the inner door leading to the mess, glancing at him sideways. In the dining room voices were raised, shoulders bumped walls, boxes of draughts and chess men spilt, benches tipped over, stubbies slipped from hands and smashed on the hearthstone, while cassettes played at full volume on Calvin’s ghetto blaster, which others wanted from him but which he hugged to himself like a weapon, a bomb.
One night a noise woke him, sloshes of liver splashing from the fridge to the floor, fat spitting in the pan, stage whispers bouncing from the walls, ‘Sshh! Or you’ll wake our Cookie.’ Only three hours to go before he had to be up again, cooking twenty breakfasts, and a mess was being made in there.
He tore from his room clutching his trousers, telling them to fuck off, piss off, get out of there. He had the true cook’s spirit of insanity upon him. Calvin loomed bearlike over him, spittled lips and dark tongue trying to shape a word and his impassive eyes not indicating which way he would topple, into rage or compliance. If Calvin chose to shut him up with a fist in the face, a knife in the ribs, a bottle over the head, a mere shove, he would do it. But instead: ‘Sure thing, Cookie, sure thing. Cool it, eh? Cool it, Cookie,’ as he ambled off.
Finishing each night’s kitchen work, he gathered together chef’s knives and choppers and every glittering sharp-edged instrument of cuisine he could find, wrapped them in clean tea-towels and hid them in the pantry behind dusty boxes of Scotch Buy toilet rolls.
One midnight before his work was finished the door of the kitchen crashed back and Boland entered, nose ballooning snot, face coming close, breath meat-rotten, tooth-rotten, eyes hard slits. ‘Eh, Cookie, have y’got a sharp knife, a stabber — that one’ll do.’
‘Not that one, Boland, Jesus —’
‘I’ve got this idea,’ enthused Boland, getting a knife in his hand, ‘I can’t explain it, Cookie, the words are right here and I’ve been trying to tell the others.’ He held a two-litre plastic bottle of Schweppes Cola upside-down above his mouth. Now Calvin loomed behind him, dazed-looking, grinning and holding a bottle of Jim Beam.
‘You want to make a Spanish wine bottle, a goatskin?’ he suggested, seeing what Boland was after.
‘Good one, Cookie. Yeah. We can pass it round the fire and share, without touching it with our mouths. Now if we make a hole here —’ The knife point, filed to needle-sharpness for boning, zipped across Cookie’s chest and up around his ears as Boland gesticulated.
He suddenly roared: ‘Boland, gimme that knife. Here’s a better one,’ he added tightly, handing over a small paring knife.
‘Excellent, Cookie, excellent,’ grunted Boland as he gouged a slit in the plastic bottle top, tested the idea, squirted cola all over the place. ‘Ah, Cookie, goodnight, have a good sleep. Come on’ — to his henchman, dreaming Calvin — ‘we’ll let Cookie sleep now.’
4
FIRE STONES
WELCOME CORNER
There was a sizzle and a snap. Everything lit up, then shook, with thunder rattling and rumbling away into the distance. A storm stalked its way across the landscape on stilts of white electricity. People paused in their work, wondering what next. A tree turned pale as a photographic negative through the open doors of the wool bay. All the galahs and white cockatoos flew off screeching. A long draping curtain of rain dragged across the distant blond expanse of the Mitchell grass plain. Loose sheets of galvanised roofing flapped in a dust-squall. Bits of garbage from the quarters, bread wrappers and balls of greaseproof paper spilled onto the dirt and bowled along driven by wind against the steel mesh of the sheep yards.
The team bent to the job again. The grower was out on his motorbike urging in the last mob. They could see him in the distance, weaving his way along, dust curling up against his back and his hat pulled down over his eyebrows. What was the bastard up to? What was he thinking about? He’d never make it to cover in time. The sheep crept along in front of him when they should have been galloping. He should have done this last night. Or first thing this morning instead of hanging around at smoko, eating toasted sandwiches and drinking tea. The light inside the shed became duller and darker. A swathe of heavy raindrops hit the roof with a slow whiplash. With wet sheep the team would have to wait around into tomorrow instead of cutting out tonight.
So they went socking into the bastards, sawing the wool off, and the less consistent ones started tearing skin, making bloody cuts in a fit of madness. They were
one man short here. He was the best shearer there was, Rocco, and he was over in the huts spewing his guts out.
‘No hurry there, boys,’ called Harold.
‘What the fuck are you talkin’ about, “no hurry”?’ challenged the next shearer in line, Oxley. He went into the catching pens to get his next sheep, and had a piss there, jamming sheep back from his stream with his bowyanged knees.
The cook came into the shed, a symptom of alarm and despondency at the wrong time of day. He told Harold the gas had run out. ‘There’s a roast in the oven and it’s still raw. I can’t find the spanner anywhere.’
Oxley, looking over his shoulder, saw Harold pull his gear out, get rid of his sheep, grab his towel and mop his face.
‘It’s here somewhere, Cookie,’ Harold looked around for the tool kit. With his towel he dabbed under his armpits and smeared his forehead, ‘Jeez, but it’s hot though. Steamy.’
Harold took a pull at his water cooler and Oxley, grabbing his next sheep, gibed in a low grating voice: ‘Harold havin’ a half day? Can’t stand the pace?’
It was his usual way of talking. But Harold’s eyes focused sharply on Oxley.
‘What did you say?’
‘Gah, keep your shirt on, brother.’
Bits of wool, dogs’ hackles, hair on the backs of human necks, Harold’s glance, the cook’s exasperation, the time of day, heat, thoughts of tomorrow, another splat of rain, the absence of Rocco from among these men, Rocco who was a joy to shear with and inspired all manner of dreams — there was a slam of everything aligned in a certain direction, and so all things, including look, thought, action, disappointment, remembrance and anticipation carried a charge of electricity here at Welcome Corner shed. It only needed a connection, a strike point.
Harold found the spanner and threw it to him across the wool table. It hit him on the arm and he glanced sharply at Harold before picking it up from the floor. Then Harold tromped back to the board, collected his next sheep, reached for his handpiece and started shearing again.
The hot greasy spanner tingled in his hand in tune with every other piece of metal under the sky. Rooftops, bits of steel, trailing wires, the metal sheep yards — anything that could attract lightning and bring it with shocking force against the life of a person. Who would be the one? He had to walk across two hundred metres of open ground back to the huts and kitchen. He moved along under the galvanised roof of the shed, past the metal wall supports, nails in the floor, electrical conduit, decaying rubbery electricity cords snaking to the classer’s old-fashioned fan. Just before he left the shed his eye was drawn back down the long rod of the shearing unit that had a power of its own, whirling around above the six shearing stands, a lightning rod of another dimension, all metal, its force transferred down to the six handpieces demanding to be held just so or they would jerk away like stumpy lizards from the hands of the shearers, and thrash around in crazy circles hitting the floor with nasty repetitive clunks, even shooting sparks.
He saw Harold deliberately pulling his handpiece out of gear again, deliberately getting rid of his sheep, deliberately mopping his torso with his tattered hank of towelling, and all the time glaring at Oxley.
Oxley looked up and gave Harold a defensive grin that had ‘Oh no, not this’ in it. He could see the charge coming so he got ready for it, getting rid of his sheep with a rude jolt in the direction of the catching pens. ‘Fuck off, you shitarse.’
Anger was lightning, it could strike as hard. Anger in the sheds: what was the start of it? Lying in wait, swirling in the atmosphere some days, positive and negative awaiting discharge in the catching pens, on the shearing board, in the meat house, at the woodheap. There was always an axe waiting for someone to grab walking past — lodged in the splitting block with splinters of kindling underfoot, a square of red gum or gidgee waiting there. Metal axe-heads and hunks of four-by-two waiting to catch the eye of those who threw their fists in the air, shouting, shaking, crackling with a white fire they stoked in themselves and imposed on others, the always-angry, the smoulderers, the wordless ones. If you couldn’t understand what it was that controlled you, you could always say: ‘It’s in the blood from way back. The Maori people are a fighting race.’
The charge came out in the shape of a thought in Harold’s head: Okay, let’s sort the men from the boys.
With a whomping paw he sent Oxley flying backwards, and then he half-knelt as if he was going to lift him up, administer kindness maybe, but he just belted him again while he was down on the floor, so hard that Oxley’s shaved head cracked on the boards, and a bead of blood dripped down the pigtail at the back of Oxley’s neck while he struggled to get up. Even this was not enough to release what Harold felt, and he made ready for another blow, but the boys huddled around him, dragging him off.
‘I feel like putting that fella in hospital,’ said Harold, twisting. ‘He’s too much. I festered and I festered.’ Harold examined his pudgy, burr-swollen, split knuckles. ‘That wasn’t too smart of me,’ and he laughed, everything drained out of him, as the rain started to beat down ferociously on the tin roof.
‘Now I think I made my point to you,’ he said to Oxley, straight to his face. Oxley nodded, and the two of them started laughing, they saw something funny about it in the same way they saw something furious about it before.
There are two kinds of lightning. One has a tense beforesmell, the dry lightning before rain, when the light goes yellow and sick, making everyone uneasy. It is succeeded by the rich release of lightning in rain, that comes with a rich aftersmell, boiling purple sky, harsh bolts crashing down everywhere and making people whoop and shout, sweat running from their bodies in bucketfuls.
It wasn’t a problem any more that the cocky had wet sheep and the cook had raw meat in the oven, and Rocco was going to be sick for days.
‘I seen you coming,’ said Oxley, ‘and I thought to myself, there is nothing going to stop this guy until he kills me, so I might as well get ready for it, this has got to happen.’
‘Well you drove me to it, there is no doubt about that,’ said Harold. He chuckled and shook his head. ‘I saw the whites of your eyes. You were afraid.’ He laughed, wringing his sore fist to get the blood circulating. ‘You were like an animal at bay, my man.’
THE BUG
Getting to know Rocco, a champion international competition shearer since the age of twenty, he sat in his room on a wet day, when Rocco was sick from eating shellfish that Oxley had thrown in a bag, tossed in the back of a truck, and driven to this point far from the sea among all this red earth and storm-subdued inland light. They had eaten it the night before, when it was already a couple of days old, rank and rich in the damp burlap.
‘I must have been out of my mind,’ grimaced Rocco, gripping his stomach, bending double, staggering outside and heading for the dunny again. ‘I’ll be back in a while.’ He was the only one to get sick.
Months before, he had eaten sea urchins with Rocco and Harold behind the sandhills at Port Fairy, cracked them apart with his curved butcher’s knife, so that the hard, spiky, mauve-patterned shells crushed with a twist of the handle. He had found a taste for them there: tipped them back till juices and slime ran down his chin. They had seemed like the essence of sea life, concentrated living slimy intestines and eggs of the spiky kina evoking the sway of kelp and the shedding of green, glassy water from shining rocks. That same time they had eaten abalone by hooking it live from the living shell with the fingers, biting into the clean, rubbery pulse of the meat. It was a feast that had continued back at Reuben’s house, with Rocco saying grace in Maori, and men’s wives bringing barbecued abalone to the table while men and Louella rinsed their palates with milk, Coke, and Fanta, reaching hungrily for the food. Calls for follow-up helpings were led by Reuben, who got his wife’s attention by saying, ‘This is your husband speaking!’ — and the extra lots were swiftly cooked in the microwave.
No wonder Rocco and the rest of them had fallen on the sack of shellfish when Oxl
ey bowled in, driving his Toyota truck with its whippy UHF aerial and 30-30 clipped to the rifle rack behind his head, and inviting anyone who was interested to hog in. It was a food reaching back to the place they always called home.
‘This always happens with me. I get too greedy or something,’ said Rocco when he returned to the room, looking pale and peaky. ‘Especially when seafood is involved. All my life I’ve been fighting against myself, for sure. It’s only this book that has saved me.’ He reached out to his bedside table and touched a well-thumbed Bible. ‘I was twenty-five before I learned to read properly, I’m thirty-six now. I decided I would start at the beginning and work my way through. This book is my schoolbook, my teacher, and my friend. My font of wisdom, Cookie.’
Rocco looked off into the distance in a semi-agonised fashion. The horizon was broken by a turkey’s nest dam and a slowly turning windmill. Otherwise it was just red earth and scattered silvery saltbush meeting low drizzly cloud in a ragged line. ‘When I remember what I was like when I was first married I am amazed at myself. I was a warrior-type guy, trained in the martial arts, and if anyone so much as looked at me sideways I would punch them out, no questions asked. I gave my wife a hard time. I banned her from smoking and drinking. I forbade: no glass in hand, no cigarette. One night she sneaked out for a smoke. I saw what I was making her do. I was ashamed. And I said, sit right here, have your smoke, I will never put the hammer on you again.’
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