Mud and Gold

by Shayne Parkinson

  Charlie had nearly finished when the scissors brushed against David’s ear for a moment. The child gave a yelp of fright and a small start, then screamed as the blades nicked his ear.

  ‘You cut my ear off!’ he wailed.

  ‘Stop that,’ Charlie roared, emphasising his words with another slap. ‘Stop crying like a baby. It’s your own fault—I’d not have cut you if you’d kept still.’

  But David only howled the louder, patting at the ear that now had a small spot of blood on it.

  ‘I warned you, boy. I told you to behave yourself.’ Charlie snatched a handful of hair at the top of David’s head, where it was still long enough to grab at, and held it tightly so that the child could not move. He snipped the last few curls off close to David’s scalp, then dropped the scissors on the table.

  Charlie let go his grip, and the little boy began to scramble off the chair towards his mother. ‘No, you don’t,’ Charlie said, taking hold of his arm. ‘You played up for me, boy. I’m going to teach you a lesson.’

  David looked at him with fear but no understanding, but Amy understood only too well.

  ‘Charlie, no,’ she begged.

  ‘He’s got to learn.’ But the look of triumph on Charlie’s face said clearly that it was her he sought to punish, not the trembling child held firmly in his grasp. ‘I’ll teach you to do as you’re told, boy. I’m going to give you a good hiding.’

  David had never had anything close a beating, but he had seen his older brother sobbing from the effects of one often enough. He howled his terror and tried to pull out of Charlie’s grip. ‘Mama,’ he wailed. ‘Mama!’

  ‘Don’t go crying for your Mama like a baby, or you’ll get a worse hiding.’ Charlie tried to drag David from the room, but the child struggled so hard that instead his father picked him up and carried him outside tucked under one arm.

  ‘Don’t hit him, Charlie, please don’t,’ Amy pleaded, hurrying after them. ‘He didn’t mean to annoy you. He’s just a little boy, don’t hurt him.’

  Charlie said nothing until the three of them were behind the shed where he kept a length of supple-jack handy for chastising Malcolm. He turned to Amy and gave her a scornful look.

  ‘What are you going to do about it? Run to your pa and tell him I gave my son a bit of correcting? It’s your fault, in any event—you’ve been babying the boy. It’s time I took him in hand.’

  Amy stood silent and helpless. Charlie was right; she could not take the boys off him just because he punished them when he considered they deserved it. He did nothing to the children that she had not seen her own father do to his sons, and if he did it more harshly and at a younger age he was still within his rights.

  She turned her face away so as not to see the blows falling, but she could not shut out David’s screams.

  There were six strokes. David’s wails hardly abated when the blows stopped. Amy reached out her arms for him, but Charlie kept him firmly in his grip. He put David under his arm once again and carried him to the verandah bedroom, where he shoved him through the doorway.

  ‘You can stay there till you stop that noise. You don’t leave this room till I say you can.’ He shut the door on the sobbing child. ‘Keep away from him,’ he warned Amy, and though she looked with longing at the closed door she followed him obediently back to the kitchen.

  ‘Food’s cold,’ Charlie muttered as he finished his chops and vegetables. Amy had no stomach for her own meal. She served up Charlie’s pudding, willing him to get on and leave the house so that she could comfort her miserable little David.

  He stood up at last, but before he reached the door he turned back and stared at Amy. ‘Leave that boy alone. You keep away from him until I say you can go in there.’

  ‘I just want to see if he’s all right, Charlie. Please let me—’

  ‘No,’ he interrupted.

  Amy glared at him. ‘You can’t keep me away from my little boy. I won’t let you.’

  He gave her the same look of triumph she had seen earlier. ‘You go near that boy without my say-so and I’ll give him another dose of the same. Understand?’

  So that was how he wanted to fight the next round: using David as a weapon. Amy turned away from him and nodded.

  When Charlie had gone, she selected one of the longest locks from the mournful pile of shorn curls, tied it with a piece of ribbon, and placed it on her chest of drawers beside the photograph of her mother.

  It was a wretched afternoon. Amy was torn between an almost overpowering desire to rush to David and comfort him, and the knowledge that she would be responsible for getting him beaten again if she did.

  When Malcolm arrived home from school, she was almost grateful for the distraction he provided as she gave him some milk and biscuits.

  ‘Where’s Dave?’ he asked, looking around the room for his brother.

  ‘In the bedroom. He got in trouble with your father, and he’s not allowed out of the room.’

  ‘Did Pa give him a hiding?’

  ‘Yes, he did. Leave Davie alone, Mal. Malcolm!’ she called as Malcolm, ignoring her, made for the door into the parlour.

  ‘Where are you going, boy?’ Charlie said from the door, coming in for his afternoon tea.

  ‘I want to see Dave.’

  ‘You can’t. He’ll stay in that room by himself till he stops his bawling. Come here and sit down.’

  Malcolm did as he was told, but he cast almost as many glances at the intervening wall as Amy did.

  Charlie took Malcolm off to help him with the milking, leaving Amy once again alone in the house with the weeping David. From time to time she heard the little boy crying out to her.

  When he came back for dinner, Charlie went out to the verandah while Amy stood and listened in the doorway between the kitchen and parlour.

  ‘Are you going to stop that bawling?’ The sound of weeping came to her through the open doorways between them. ‘Then you’ll stay there till you do. There’ll be no dinner for you tonight.’

  ‘Mama,’ David sobbed as the door closed on him once more.

  ‘He’s very little to go without his dinner, Charlie,’ Amy said when Charlie had come back to the kitchen and sat down at the table. ‘He hardly had any lunch, either.’

  ‘It’ll teach him a lesson. It’s time he grew up a bit,’ Charlie said.

  Malcolm was visibly subdued during the meal. When he had finished eating he looked expectantly at his father for permission to go to his room.

  ‘I need to put the boys to bed now, Charlie,’ Amy said, trying hard to keep her feelings out of her voice. ‘I have to help them get undressed and tuck them in.’

  Charlie stared narrowly at her. ‘All right,’ he said after a pause. ‘Put them straight to bed, mind. None of your babying nonsense.’

  Malcolm pushed ahead of her, eager to get into the bedroom. ‘Did you get a hiding, Dave?’ he asked breathlessly the moment he was in the room.

  David was curled up against the wall on the side of the bed furthest from the house. He turned towards them at the sound of Malcolm’s voice, and his wretched, bewildered face sent a pang through Amy. His eyes looked bigger than ever now that his hair had been shorn; they were full of fear like a captive creature’s.

  ‘Mama,’ he whimpered, holding out his arms to her. ‘Cuddle me, Mama.’

  ‘I can’t, Davie. I’m not allowed.’ Amy blinked away tears as well as she could manage at the sight of her poor, shorn little boy. ‘Come on, Mama will help you get your clothes off.’

  She unbuttoned his frock and lifted it over his head, careful not to touch his bruised buttocks. ‘My bottom hurts, Mama,’ he said, his voice trembling.

  ‘I know, Davie. Lie on your tummy tonight, it won’t be as sore in the morning.’ Her arms ached to hold him close, but she half expected Charlie to burst in on them at any moment.

  Malcolm started pulling off his own clothes when Amy had helped him with the buttons. ‘Hey, your hair looks good, Dave,’ he said. ‘You look like a
boy now.’

  ‘Do I?’ A tiny spark of animation came into David’s tear-streaked face.

  ‘Yes, not like a stupid girl.’

  When Amy had buttoned his nightshirt David reached up to where his curls had been, fingering the cropped hair with new interest. ‘Papa cut my ear off,’ he said when his hand brushed against the tender spot, a small note of pride in his voice.

  ‘No, he didn’t, Davie,’ Amy corrected gently. ‘He just nicked it a tiny bit.’ She pulled back the covers and watched David scramble into bed, making sure that he lay face down. ‘Don’t be rough with Davie tonight, Mal,’ she said. ‘He’s got a sore bottom.’

  ‘I know that,’ Malcolm said scornfully. ‘I know all about getting hidings. Let’s see your ear, Dave.’ He checked the ear and whistled his appreciation. ‘He nearly cut my ear off too, once. You’ve got to sit real still when he cuts your hair, and it takes hours. What did you get a hiding for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ David said, bewildered again. ‘I must have been naughty.’

  ‘Nah, Pa just gets wild sometimes,’ said Malcolm. ‘He gives me hidings just for nothing. The other day he—’

  ‘Good night, you two,’ Amy interrupted. She did not dare give David a kiss in case she were caught in the act. ‘Don’t talk loud or Papa will hear you.’

  ‘I’m hungry, Mama,’ David said plaintively.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling, I can’t give you anything to eat. Try to go to sleep, then breakfast time will come around faster.’

  She put out the candle and closed the door on them as Malcolm went on whispering his own experiences of his father’s rough justice. It was not a topic she would have chosen for David on such an evening, but it was a small comfort to her to see Malcolm treating his brother as an equal instead of with the indifference he usually showed the younger boy.

  Charlie was sitting in the parlour with his newspaper. He looked up at her entrance.

  ‘Behaving himself now, is he?’ he asked.

  Amy sank into her own chair and cast a bitter look at him. ‘He’s miserable, and he’s very hungry, and he doesn’t understand why you hit him. Is that what you wanted?’

  ‘I want him to behave. What do you mean, he doesn’t understand? I told him what he was getting it for.’

  ‘He’s only a baby. He didn’t know what you meant.’

  ‘He’s not a baby, for all you’ve been treating him like one,’ Charlie said. ‘Keeping his hair like that and him in dresses all this time. Making a fool of the boy.’

  ‘Better than making him miserable, isn’t it?’

  ‘Making him grow up, you mean. He’s not your baby, woman. You’ve got no baby.’ He looked at her through narrowed eyes. ‘If you want a new bairn to fuss over, you know how to get one.’

  ‘And you know how to get rid of one,’ Amy thrust back. She rose to go to the kitchen. In the doorway she turned and looked back. ‘Charlie, don’t make your son hate you just to try and upset me.’

  ‘Don’t talk crap,’ Charlie said from behind his newspaper. ‘I gave him a lesson, that’s all.’

  Amy shut the door on the sight of him and began on her breadmaking. I suppose it was silly to think Charlie would just give in. He’s no right to use Davie like that! Poor little Davie.

  When the mindless work of kneading dough had given her time to mull everything over, she felt calmer. Charlie might think he had found a way to force her back to his bed by being cruel to David, but it would not work. His sense of justice was different from hers, but he had one nevertheless, and it would not allow him to go on punishing David without cause. He loved his sons in his own impenetrable way.

  The battle with Charlie would not be over quite so quickly as she had hoped. Fighting it might take the rest of her life. She accepted the knowledge without dread. If that’s the way you want it, Charlie.

  26

  April – May 1891

  Frank knew there was a good deal of scoffing going on around Ruatane about his ‘funny looking cows’, and not all the scoffers bothered to hide their derision. He took the sly grins and occasional rude remarks in good humour, confident that he was doing the right thing. And when the results of the butterfat tests Frank had the factory run on the Jerseys’ milk became noised abroad the jibes began to fade away. There were a few die-hards who insisted the Jerseys were too thin and frail to last a winter, but the richness of their milk gave the lie to any insinuations of ill-health.

  His mind was so busy with self-satisfied musings on the quality of his Jerseys and speculations on how many heifer calves he might get out of them in spring that he almost forgot to tell Lizzie about the small good turn he had done on his way to the factory one morning. But he remembered the incident in time to mention it idly to her over lunch, and in the process changed the course of at least two lives, though he did not know it.

  ‘I ran into the teacher this morning,’ he remarked as he buttered a thick slice of Lizzie’s fresh bread. ‘Poor thing was in a bit of a state. You know she’s got a horse and gig she hires so she can get out here? One of the buckles on the reins had snapped where it joins on to the bit, and she was standing beside the gig looking as though she couldn’t decide whether to bawl or swear.’

  ‘Miss Radford wouldn’t swear, Frank,’ Lizzie said. ‘She’s a teacher. Joey, hurry up and eat those carrots instead of pushing them round your plate.’

  ‘Don’t want them,’ Joey muttered.

  ‘Do you want a belt on the bottom instead?’ Joey shook his head vigorously and began shovelling carrots into his mouth, and Lizzie turned her attention back to Frank. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I looped a bit of string around the rein and tied it on to the bridle, but it won’t hold for more than a couple of days and she won’t be able to trot the horse with it like that. I told her she’d better get a new buckle fitted as soon as she can.’

  ‘She was lucky you came by. That was early for her to be on her way to school, wasn’t it?’

  ‘She said she has to get there early to write the work up on the board. She has quite a day of it, I think. She’s got to catch that horse, then harness it, then get all the way out to the school in time to get all the stuff written up.’

  ‘I never thought about that. When you’re at school you never wonder how the teacher gets there or anything. I hope that old Mrs Lawler she boards with makes her a decent breakfast.’

  ‘Then when she gets back to town at night she’s got to see to the horse before she can have her dinner. And she was telling me she’s got to mark the kids’ work and write up the lessons and stuff after tea. It’s a long day, eh? She said she won’t have a show of getting to the blacksmith’s to see about that buckle before Saturday. I hope the rein holds for her till then. It’s going to take her even longer to get to and fro, too, with only being able to walk the horse.’

  ‘The poor thing. I don’t suppose you could mend it for her?’

  ‘Yes, I could do it quite easily. I’ve got plenty of buckles, too. It’s a matter of getting her gig here, though—she hasn’t got time to stand around waiting for me to do it after school, she’s got to get home.’

  ‘I know!’ Lizzie said with a burst of inspiration. ‘Why don’t we have her to stay the night? Then you’ll be able to fix the reins for her and she’ll have a rest from doing that long drive. You can pop down to the school this afternoon and tell her to come and stay tomorrow.’

  Thus decreed by Lizzie it could not fail to happen. A grateful Miss Radford arrived the next evening to find herself bustled inside by Lizzie while Frank took charge of her horse and gig.

  Lily Radford was a tall, slender woman in her late twenties. She had a not unattractive, though very pale, face under her severely scraped back light brown hair, but the fine lines that years of poring over exercise books by candle light had etched prematurely around her eyes gave an impression of weariness and disappointment. But when she smiled, as she did at Lizzie and the three staring children, a kind nature and a wry sense of humo
ur showed through.

  ‘It’s very good of you to have me, Mrs Kelly, and very kind of your husband to repair the harness for me.’

  ‘No trouble at all,’ Lizzie assured her. ‘There’s five of us, one more makes no difference. You don’t mind sleeping with Maudie, do you? I can put her in with Joey if you’d rather have the bed to yourself.’

  Maudie had no intention of missing out on her full share of the novelty of having a stranger in the house. ‘I want to sleep with Miss Radford,’ she said. She hung onto the teacher’s arm and looked up at her with her most winning expression. ‘I can, can’t I?’

  ‘It’s your bed, dear, I wouldn’t dream of putting you out of it.’

  ‘See?’ Maudie said triumphantly to her mother.

  ‘Don’t you go wetting the bed, then. She probably won’t,’ Lizzie added to Lily, seeing her expression. ‘She hasn’t done that for months.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ Lily said.

  She begged Lizzie to let her help prepare the meal, despite Lizzie’s protests that Lily must have work to do for the next school day.

  ‘But I wouldn’t normally get back to Mrs Lawler’s for another hour, and I don’t have to see to the horse tonight, either. Anyway, I haven’t done any cooking for… oh, I don’t know how long. It’d be a nice change—if I won’t be in your way?’

  By the time Frank came in for dinner the two women were on first name terms and were chatting away merrily. He smiled at the sight of Lizzie enjoying herself with someone new to organise.

  After he had finished his meat and vegetables, Lizzie placed a lemon pudding before him. ‘Hey, this is nice,’ Frank said.

  ‘Lily made it,’ Maudie piped up.

  ‘Miss Radford to you,’ Lizzie said, waving her serving spoon in Maudie’s direction. ‘Lily made this lovely pudding, Frank. You’re a good cook, Lily.’

  ‘Not really,’ Lily said with a smile. ‘I’m terribly out of practice. Mother was a wonderful cook, though she had to learn rather late in life, and she taught me. I never get near a kitchen now.’

  When the dishes were done Lily cuddled little Beth until it was time for the children to go to bed, but she refused Lizzie’s invitation to join her and Frank in the parlour, instead fetching the exercise books she had to work on and setting them out on the kitchen table.