‘You can’t go down there now. The man’s in bed.’
‘We can bang on the gate and wake him up.’
‘If you did that,’ Macauley told her, ‘he’d come out and eat you, hat and all, he’d be so cranky. In the morning, eh? We’ll go down first thing in the morning.’ He was pursuing the promise of appeasing her: that’s all that counted. ‘If your caterpillar’s in that shop he’ll still be there in the morning. He can’t get away. Be a good girl now, will you?’
‘Where’s my lollies?’ she said.
He didn’t care whether she was grafting or not. He gave her the bag of lollies and told her to get into the burrow: and not eat them all at once. He felt her get in beside him, and he went to sleep with crunching and schlooping in his ears.
If Macauley thought time, even a little time, would heal up the wound of deprivation, he was mistaken. The child was on his hammer from the moment he woke. She pestered him impatiently. He kept telling her they would have to wait until the store opened. He couldn’t even persuade her to go and look for another caterpillar while he got the breakfast ready. She hung about, getting under his feet. She fidgeted with anxiety and boredom, and didn’t eat anything.
‘You better get something into you,’ Macauley said. ‘You’ll be hungry later if you don’t. We’ve got a lot of walking to do. And I don’t want you grizzling to me for tucker. Eat that toast.’
‘I don’t want it.’
‘Okay. But remember. You get nothing till dinnertime.’
He wasn’t sure whether it was because of her distraction that she couldn’t eat or because she had guzzled all the lollies.
It was still only seven when he had his swag ready for the road. But he wasn’t ready to start straight away. He had something else to do. The feeling kept nibbling at him, tossing up memories of a big man with a chunky face and a laugh to shake the floorboards.
‘We’ve got somewhere else to go first,’ he told Buster. ‘Store’ll be open when we get back. Come on.’
Macauley found the cemetery and hump of soil. He stared at it for a moment. He heard the big booming voice down there. He saw the teeth like mile-pegs clamped on and wrenching the cap off a bottle. He saw the great figure in the Santa Claus outfit coming along in the back of a dray laden with toys for the kids of the place and presents for friends, and no man left out. Many things Macauley saw.
He knelt down and weeded the grave and left it clean. Best I can do for you, mate, he thought. Six feet down and dead, you’re still a better man than a lot of them up here. He had a lot of time for Callahan.
Walking away, he felt better for having paid his respects. Buster was curious. His brief answers to her questions in the cemetery had only raised in her mind a graspless conundrum.
‘What’s it called again?’
‘What?’
‘That place.’
‘The boneyard.’
‘What’ve people got to go there for?’
‘Because they’re dead.’
She had no understanding of the word, no comprehension of the state of death,
‘Do they put them in a big hole and cover dirt all over them?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Can they see?’
‘No. They can’t see. They can’t hear. They can’t feel. They’re like a log of wood. They’re finished. They’re no use to anybody any more.’
‘What do they get dead for?’
‘I don’t know.’ He had had enough. ‘Forget about it now.’
Fifty yards from the store Buster left Macauley’s hand and ran towards it. She had seen the open doors. He let her go. When he walked in she was searching the floor, and as hope began to fade her face clouded with dejection.
‘It’s gone.’ She started to sob.
‘She’s lost a bloody caterpillar she had in her pocket,’ Macauley said, to Cheetham’s puzzled inquiry. ‘You’d think it was a million quid.’
The storekeeper’s face was touched with sympathy. He studied the little girl’s movements, the anxious scouting, the lugubrious face. He saw her sit down on a bag of sugar and weep mournfully.
‘You know how kids get attached to things,’ he said with understanding.
‘All I know is I’m going to have one helluva picnic if she doesn’t find it.’
Cheetham went round the counter and squatted down in front of Buster. She hid her face in her hands away from the public gaze. Tears slipped through her fingers. She inched the fingers apart, and, having seen that he was still there, shut them quickly again.
‘Go away,’ she told him.
‘You know what I got for you?’ he coaxed.
She stopped crying, and looked at him through her fingers.
‘What?’ she glared.
‘Something real beautiful,’ Cheetham said softly, enticingly. ‘You dry those tears now and come and I’ll show you.’
He picked up a corner of his apron and wiped her willing face: she took the white cloth and blew her nose. Cheetham took her hand and led her towards the end of the counter. There he pointed to a tilted cardboard box filled with rag toys. Buster looked with a grave face from the storekeeper to the box and back again.
Smiling, he picked up a teddy bear. ‘You like that?’ She shook her head after a moment’s study, and he picked up a rag doll for her approval. She didn’t think much of that, either. He had showed her four or five toys, but she wouldn’t settle for any of them. Macauley felt embarrassed by the child’s seeming ingratitude. He seemed about to say something, when Cheetham caught his expression and shook his head with a frown of warning.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’ll put that box on the floor and you pick your own toy. How’s that?’
They watched Buster casting amid the medley, deciding and then changing her mind again, until finally she dragged out her choice, and beamed as she turned it upside down and this way and that while the rest of the classier animals and dolls stared in dumb astonishment wondering what was the matter with them.
Macauley, too, was puzzled as he gazed at the new addition to the family. He couldn’t make out what it was. It was a thing of brown felt; it looked as though it had started out to be a giraffe, changed itself to a cat, and then called off the deal at the last moment in favour of camelhood.
‘What made her pick that?’
He frowned.
Cheetham shrugged his shoulders, and smiled. ‘No telling with ’em, is there?’ He felt he had to explain the reason for the distinction between it and the other toys. ‘Made by old Mrs Evis down the road for a church bazaar. About half a dozen there were. Different kinds. You know? But nobody’d have ’em on at the fete, so I ended up taking them off the poor old thing’s hands. I thought I’d tossed them all out. Must have missed that one.’
‘Thank God, you did.’ Macauley grinned. ‘What’s the damage?’
‘On the house,’ Cheetham said. ‘I wouldn’t know what to charge you, anyway.’ A thought struck him as he saw Macauley lift his swag. ‘Say, which way are you going?’
‘West.’
‘Ah, what a pity. I was going to say, young Jim Muldoon is leaving this morning. You might have got a ride in his truck. But he’s going the other way.’
‘Where, Moree?’
‘Through there, yes. He’s going to Boomi. His father’s had a stroke and it doesn’t look as if he’ll last. So they sent for Jim.’
Boomi. Macauley turned the word over in his mind. He said, ‘I heard there was a bloke looking for a burr-camp cook at Boomi.’
‘That’s right. He was here yesterday. Apparently they’re in a bit of a spot; can’t get a cook for some reason or other.’
‘O’Hara?’ Macauley said.
‘That’s the man. He’s been looking all over the place, he reckoned. He left here yesterday on his way back.’
‘Sam Bywater told me. You know him?’
Cheetham gave a hooting laugh. ‘Old Sam, yes. He was here yesterday, too. Put the nips into me for tea and sugar and toba
cco in his usual style. The biggest bludger in the country, and can’t bear it. Can’t help it, but can’t bear it.’
‘What a helluva way to be.’
‘Good old stick, though. Wouldn’t do you a bad turn.’
Macauley was chewing over the prospect of going to Boomi. There was no urgent hurry to get to Walgett. In fact, there was no solid reason to get there at all. It was merely a destination and a speculation. There was the chance of a job at Boomi, though if he had to walk there he wouldn’t have considered it. A ride there was a different matter. It was quick and convenient. Especially with the kid. He didn’t overlook the conjunction of circumstances, either. There was a hint of predestiny about them, as though fate was giving him the nudge. Why not take the opportunity?
‘I think I might be in it, that ride to Boomi,’ he said.
Cheetham took him out on the verandah and pointed out Jim Muldoon’s place. He stood there as Macauley and Buster walked off, and he was standing there again, as though he hadn’t left the spot, when an hour later the truck passed with Macauley’s swag in the back. He waved, and for a long time he saw Mrs Evis’s monstrosity being waved in return.
It was eight o’clock that night before the truck rattled its way down Boomi’s main street. Macauley and Buster got out, and Muldoon went on. Buster watched the red tail-light dwindling in the distance. He had another seven miles to go.
Macauley knew his way about the town, but he wasn’t going to bother with home cookery tonight and he wasn’t going to bed-down for a while yet. During the trip he had been thinking of the job at the burr-cutter’s camp, conjecturing why O’Hara was finding it so hard to get hold of a cook. Muldoon didn’t know, though he had heard of the man running round like a blue-arsed fly, as he said. Macauley intended to put out a few feelers.
He went into the Greek’s and sat down in a cubicle. Buster sat opposite with the strange three-part animal on her knee. They ate hungrily and in silence. Buster made a mockery of giving her charge a bite of bread.
‘Eat your dinner, Gooby,’ she reprimanded.
Macauley looked up. ‘What’d you say?’
‘When?’ the child looked inquiringly at him.
‘Just now. What’d you call that thing?’
‘Gooby,’ she said shyly.
‘Gooby?’ he said unbelievingly. ‘Gooby?’
‘Yes, that’s his name.’
‘Gooby. Where did you get that name from at all?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Nowhere. He just looks like a gooby, that’s all. Don’t you, Gooby?’ She stroked her cheek on the animal’s hide with love and delight. Macauley didn’t know what a gooby was, but her obvious fondness for it and the happy expression on her face stirred a strange sentiment in him as though he had been cheated of something. He thought he should have been the one to give her something like that, and he wondered why it was that he hadn’t thought of doing it. He was piqued with a nag of jealousy against the man who had beaten him to the punch.
When the young white-coated Greek came to take away the plates Macauley said point-blank, ‘Who’s O’Hara round here?’
‘O’Hara? Aw, he’s an auctioneer, and a sort of contractor.’
‘He offered me a job,’ Macauley said, ‘as a cook out at the burr-camp.’
The youth looked at him with a quick, birdlike intentness, as though he thought Macauley was about to tell a joke. ‘You didn’t take it?’ he asked.
‘I did take it.’
The Greek ran a hand over his liquorice hair and grinned. ‘Boy, you’re game.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Aw, I don’t know,’ the Greek gestured, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Not very nice – you know – men out there. Fights, trouble. Every Saturday they come to town and get drunk: come in here and give cheek and make a mess. You know.’
Macauley’s hard expression didn’t alter. What was a pack of toughs to the brown-eyed, soft-bellied, pasty-faced Greek was not necessarily a pack of toughs to him.
‘That all you know?’ he asked.
‘That’s enough, isn’t it?’ the Greek said with a grin of very white teeth.
Macauley put down the money, threw his swag up. ‘Don’t ever be too frightened,’ he said, ‘of anybody, or anything. It only helps the other bloke.’
The Greek looked after them, his face squinched in thought. Outside Macauley looked up and down the empty street. There was nothing but a few lonely lights. He walked down the road. He paused at the door of the billiard room, looking in at the green baize tables under the brilliant arc-lamps, seeing men sitting along the sides of the wall, and players making their shots in the bluish smoke atmosphere.
‘You got a smoke, mate?’
The voice came from the outer darkness, and as Macauley looked a dark shape detached itself from its leaning posture against the front of the building and slunk towards him. The whites of the eyes he saw first before he saw any other feature. Then he was glancing at the beanpole figure of an Aboriginal, dressed like a pauper, from the floppy hat with the new felt crown sewn into it to the boots without laces, broken at the seams so that the sides of the feet down to the little toe extruded.
‘Sure. Help yourself.’
He watched as the long fingers rolled a cigarette the size of a cigar. He knew the score. It was the Abo’s wily way of taking enough tobacco for three cigarettes. After a few draws and when away from his benefactor he would gut the first cigarette and take out the makings, or, preserving it intact as the repository, would pluck just enough weed from it to roll himself a match-thin cigarette when he needed it.
‘Better take a few papers, too,’ Macauley invited, letting the Abo know he was a wake-up.
‘Thanks, mate,’ the Abo said simply.
‘Listen,’ Macauley tossed off the question, ‘what’s the strength of all this trouble they’re having with cooks out at the burr camp?’
‘You goin’ out there?’
Macauley didn’t miss the tone of the apprehensive interest.
‘I’m the new cook there,’ Macauley lied.
‘Geez, you wouldn’t get me goin’ out there.’ The Abo spat eloquently. ‘Buggersafellas, them out there. No good.’
‘How many cooks they had out there?’
‘They had three – no, four. Them fussy humps, you can’t satisfy ’em. They had four cooks and they all went.’
‘What, turn it in, did they?’
‘No, the first two, boss sacked ’em. Men was growlin’ crook tucker, getting the jimmies, an’ all that, they said. But they was makin’ it worse than that it was. Geez, I eat anything, but them humps out there, they want the bloody King for breakfast.’
‘What about the other two?’
‘Well, Jimmy Abbott, he put in a week. Then he told ’em in their gunga. He give ’em some curry. He didn’t have to lay down like a sheila to them, he told ’em, not when he could get twenty quid a week in Sydney cookin’ for human beans, he says, instead of billygoats like them. Other bloke – forget his name – he just took his apron off one morning and said he was finished. He only lasted a fortnight. But you know what?’
‘What?’
‘Be all right if they let a man chuck the job and get away. But they don’t. Them fellers I mentioned, them cooks, they all got hidin’s. Not one of ’em left without gettin’ beaten up. I tell you, them humps out there, they want shootin’.’
‘Oh, well, some like to have fun.’ Macauley hoisted the swag. ‘So long.’
‘Good luck, mate,’ the Abo said. He called after him. ‘Thanks for the smoke. You’re a gentleman.’
Macauley and Buster camped just a little way out of the town. He was awake first and had the fire going when she woke. The first thing she did was look beside her to see if Gooby was still there. She jumped up immediately, all trace of sleep instantly gone. Macauley, squatting down, holding a broken piece of looking glass in his hand, was scraping off the whiskers with a blunt razor. His face was red when he finished. He us
ed a dab of butter rubbed to grease in his hands as an emollient.
‘Remind me to get some razor blades at the shop today,’ he told Buster.
He ate slowly and thoughtfully. She fed herself and Gooby and enjoyed the pantomime. Towards nine they strolled back into the town. The shadows on the road were still damp. There was no one about but a man in a red cardigan hosing down the footpath outside the pub.
Macauley sat on his swag in the doorway of the auctioneer’s office and watched the town come to life. A girl crossed the street from the bakery. He looked at the swell of her breasts and the swing of her hips and desire stirred in him. He couldn’t see her features clearly when she turned her face in his direction, but just the red flash of her mouth on the white skin was enough to whip up his feelings. She was a stranger, an anonymity; he didn’t know her and he felt nothing for her, but she was a woman and it was a long time since he touched the flesh of a woman. A long time since he had a wife.
In a little while the girl went back across the street, and Macauley watched her until she disappeared into the bakery.
Buster was sitting on the kerb. He looked at her back that he could span with his hand, the thin stalk of the neck as she bent her head over the toy. And somehow his thoughts seemed foolish and unclean.
A tall blond man came and opened the office. Macauley sauntered in. But he wasn’t there long. The man took his name, but he told him he couldn’t do anything about interviewing or hiring labour. He would have to see O’Hara, and O’Hara wasn’t back yet. They didn’t expect him till round about lunchtime.
The man could give him some details: where the camp was, how long the job was likely to last, the rate of pay.
Macauley went down the end of the town, lay back with his head propped against his swag and thought it over.
‘Gooby wants to go for a walk, dad.’
‘Gooby’ll get plenty of walking,’ he said.
He could knock up a decent cheque. There was plenty of tucker. It would be a break, a change off the road, a rest in a way. The bank was beginning to sound pretty hollow. And it didn’t rain money.
The Shiralee Page 4