Brian Penton

by Inheritors (v1. 0) (lit)

  He blushed and stammered. “I don't want no wife. I'm going on the wallaby.”

  “Oh, Larry, Larry,” she cried out. “You ungrateful fool. What d'you think I've waited for all these years. To see you cadging snout at homestead doors?”

  The vehemence of her cry startled him. He looked up again shyly. How frail and helpless she seemed against the background which her words conjured up, of scourgers, jailers, drunken squatters. His lips, thick with stubbornness, smiled suddenly, and he rubbed a hand across the knuckles of his fist. “You should've seen the old bull this morning. That Hereford near tore the ribs out of him. He's over the back there now licking himself, and the Hereford's with the cows.”

  Emma narrowed her eyes. “You keep away from the shearers' hut, I tell you. It won't be him who licks the wounds. He's dealt with harder men than you or any of them.”

  But Larry was with the shearers that morning in 1889 when they came down to the washpool and clustered in a silent circle round Cabell. Coyle stepped out. “We want a word with you, boss. It's about what you're going to pay this season.”

  “I'll pay the usual if you come up to scratch. Don't worry.” The men shifted their feet in the dust. “Haw will yer?” Goggs said. “Very kind of yer.”

  Coyle turned his empty eyes and Goggs fell back. “Righto, you go him.”

  “It's like this,” Coyle explained. “The boys think they're due for something more.”

  Cabell glanced round, recognizing some of the men who had been shearing at the Reach for years—Goggs, Wagner, Greasy Bill, and, in the back rank, Berry picking anxiously at his thumbs, and Larry. “You think so, eh? Well, you're wrong. I pay the same.”

  The disarticulated features of Goggs's mongrel face collapsed in a heap around his mouth. “What'd I tell yous? No use wasting words on a dingo.”

  Cabell took a step forward and Goggs got behind Coyle. A stir of alarm passed through the crowd.

  Berry's voice turned their eyes. “After all, boss, you've had a good year and got more coming. The boys don't want much.” He plucked nervously at the buttons on his shirt. “Only what's a fair thing.”

  “A good year! A fair thing!” Cabell snorted. “D'you think I've been slaving here for forty years to give it away to you. Get to work or get out. Shearers aren't wanting.” He looked about for a break in the ranks but they stood solidly together, encompassing him with their mob hostility, which irritated him. He made straight at Goggs. “Get out of my way.”

  But Coyle pulled him back. “A word before you go,” he said in his quiet, reasonable voice. “If you don't fork out this year you'll have to next. There'll be a union of shearers next year and they might say all hands off your wool. The carters wouldn't cart it, the wharfies wouldn't ship it. You're short-sighted.”

  Cabell pushed him aside. “Oh-ho. Threaten me, eh?”

  Coyle smiled.

  The thin, mirthless smile struck a spark in Cabell's memory. “You're the spit of your old man, Coyle,” he said. “A bad egg. You can get off this place now. You're leading these poor fools by the nose.”

  “That's all right. I was going.”

  “And the rest of you get back to work,” Cabell said, and while they were waiting for something to happen pushed his way out.

  Goggs spat angrily. “You shyster,” he yelled. “Who robbed his mates? Who pinched their goldmine?”

  His infuriated squeak stirred the men out of their anti-climax. They turned to watch Goggs run after Cabell shouting, then followed. “Yes, who skinned Sambo?” they took it up.

  “Who robbed his mates?”

  Cabell got on to his horse and rode off without haste. His stiff shoulders flung their insults back, maddening them.

  They were running on each side of him now. From the tail of his eye he could see Larry out on the right wing, striding along, saying nothing, watching him with a grin of venomous satisfaction. Every now and then he stopped and tried to shake off Berry's hand and trotted on again to catch up with the mob.

  At the gate, as he bent to lift the catch, a lump of hard cowdung hit Cabell stingingly on the side of the face. In a spurt of rage no longer to be repressed he turned his horse and galloped into the crowd knocking the men over and scattering them in all directions.

  At a safe distance they halted and drew together again. “Yah, you bastard, if we had you off that horse!” Goggs yelled.

  Cabell went after Goggs. He caught the flying figure by the slack of the shirt, dragged it round in a circle, climbed off, stood it on its feet, and laid it flat with one swingeing blow between the eyes.

  The men ran up babbling and clustered around them.

  Goggs rose dizzily and smeared the stream of thick blood over his face. “Who yer—hit one yer own size.”

  Cabell had his fist raised for a second blow when a strong hand seized his wrist from behind and jerked him away. It was Berry. “There,” Berry said. “You've given him enough.”

  Cabell saw the big moon-face through a red haze, swung his fist up, and sent Berry staggering into the arms of Larry. Something snapped in the pit of Larry's stomach and the hard aching pain of hatred came up into his throat like vomit. He'd hit Berry, even Berry, who'd always stuck up for him and held the men back. The rotten, unjust dog!

  He pushed Berry aside, and while Cabell was turning his face, tense with anger, around the semicircle of faces, planted his fist on his father's mouth. Only when he gazed down at his father, spreadeagled among the men's legs, did Larry realize that he had moved at all.

  “Larry!” the men roared, and fell away.

  Berry took a step forward, but Coyle restrained him. “Leave them. They've been waiting for this.”

  Cabell rose, licked his lips, pulled his cuffs back, and came slowly towards Larry, his head thrust out and sideways to focus his eye, the patch, slightly skew-whiff on its string, revealing the purple, ball-less gash of his blind eye-socket. The red blood-spot in the white of his eye seemed to glow and grow like a live coal and the scar on his cheek was like a lick of flame.

  “Stop them,” Berry shouted. “He's too old. Larry will kill him.”

  “Let him,” Coyle said softly.

  But Larry backed away, intimidated by his father's white, speechless fury and the slow, animal persistence of his advance. Cabell followed him round and round the ring through ten long seconds, then sprang across the space between them and socked a vicious one-two on to Larry's face. It was enough to have laid him out for a long time, but he swung back and the fists just grazed his jaw, ripping the skin as though Cabell had drawn two pieces of raddle across his cheeks. Larry fell on his knees and stayed there, not shirking but trying to control the trembling in his hands and knees.

  Goggs pushed through the crowd with a hat full of water. “Here, take a drink, Larry.” He splashed Larry's face. “And don't let him close on yer.” Cabell was waiting with his fist drawn back, ready to hit. His lip was swollen from Larry's blow. The sight of it gave Larry the strength to rise. The men cheered and pressed in.

  “Go it, Larry.”

  “Stick it into him, Larry.”

  “Dump the bastard.”

  “Look out for his dirty left.”

  They met in a fleshy slash of fists, conscious of nothing except their unbearable detestation. Through Larry's brain, as he sparred and swung and threw himself on his father's tireless battery, raced images of insults nearly thirty years old. . . “YOUR brat. Dregs. Scum of the earth.” Cabell pushing his mother aside. “Take it you're a paid hand here. . .” A feeling of relief, release, joy swept him. “I can beat him and go away,” he thought. And in an interval, when he stood back from battering his father's head, the revelation came to him, “I couldn't go away TILL I'd beaten him.”

  They rushed together again.

  “His eye,” Coyle shouted, in a piercing, unrecognizable yell above the men's voices. “Hit him in the eye. Blind him.”

  Larry smashed through his father's guard and sent him staggering among the men, followed,
and pounded at his body.

  Suddenly the men stopped shouting. They felt, all at once, that this fight did not concern them at all, that it tapped sources of hatred beyond their understanding, which would not be satisfied with a bloody nose or a black eye. Their own hatred cooled. The brutal abandon of father and son shocked them now.

  “Stop them,” Berry shouted, struggling away from Coyle. “It's gone far enough.”

  But just then, measuring Larry's onrush, Cabell landed squarely on his jaw and spread him out, unmoving, in the dust. The men looked down, appalled, at the bleeding wreck of Larry's face, then at Cabell, also bleeding freely and waiting for Larry to rise.

  “Jesus, your own son!” Wagner said.

  Their shouting broke again in jeers of disgust. “Swiped his own son!” “Tried to murder him!”

  “What a swine!”

  Lumps of cowdung began to fall in the ring and break upon his face and bare head.

  Berry held up his hands. “Boys! Give him best. He hit him square.” Cabell turned on them. “Who wants best? I'll fight any man here.” He looked round for the biggest. It was Wagner. “I'll fight you.” Wagner grinned. “No, you won't. I'll wait for the Utopia and summons you for back pay.”

  “You!” he shouted at Coyle. “Come out here, you crawler. I'll give five pounds for a hit at you.”

  “Wait a bit,” Coyle said, “and I'll give you a chance for nothing.”

  “You then,” Cabell roared at Greasy Bill.

  “I get enough fight cookin',” Bill said.

  Crouching before them, the blood pouring down his shirt front, he looked like a bull baited half-mad.

  “Get out. Get to hell,” he said. “I'll shear without you.”

  They carried Larry to the river and brought him round, and an hour later rode past the homestead and out the gates, boo-hooing as they went. For miles around they raddled on sheds and fences:

  DON'T SHEAR AT CABELL'S REACH

  HE TRIED TO MURDER HIS OWN SON

  WHAT WOULD HE DO TO A SHEARER?

  Chapter Nine: Father and Daughter

  “Even your own son!” Emma said. “And now you'll kick him out, will you? WILL you?”

  “Bah.” He jerked the rocking-chair away and raised his paper between them, but the menace of her anger, like the sensed presence of a snake in a dark room, made him put it down and look at her uneasily.

  Twisting her apron into a rope between her brown hands she was leaning over him with an expression of such viperous threat in her eyes and the sprung wrinkles of her mouth that he started back. “There's only one way to deal with a man like you,” she said, summing up a long train of thought.

  His alarm became audible in the rustle of the paper on his lap. “Do your damnedest,” he muttered, but as though in her eyes, sunk into her head under the weight of their evil knowledge, he read what that damnedest would be, he shot his hand out and caught her arm. “What I mean. . .” He waved towards the shearers' hut. “You know yourself, he's been getting thick with Coyle and Goggs these last four or five seasons, and what are they out for but to work up troubles for me.”

  She shook his hand off. “And whose fault was that? If you'd treated him right and not driven him into their arms he'd've been different. But you did it on purpose—to destroy him, like you're trying to destroy the others. Letting Geoffrey go down to Brisbane with Shaftoe and his racecourse crooks.” She put her hand out appealingly. “Can't you see? You're like what you said about your own father—that he was to blame for your brothers being wasters and you being what you were. And now you're to blame for Larry being mixed up with a lot of bad eggs instead of—oh, doesn't the world ever get any better?” She leant against the railing and beat her fists together in a kind of exasperated despair. Her apron, released, writhed to the ground, spending the energy her hands had twisted into it, and lay in still folds about her body, drably creased like her face, which sagged with sudden discouragement. She let her hands fall limply into her lap. It was as though claws had dragged across her face, scarring it with wrinkles. She looked old.

  The energy seemed to have flowed into him. He threw the paper aside. “He didn't need me to make a blackguard of him. He was one by birth. YOUR brat.”

  A slight convulsion round her mouth turned into an ironic smile. “YOU can say that! YOU can call somebody else a blackguard! Why, you couldn't even call Black Jem. . . you couldn't even call another man a”—she leant over and whispered at his upturned, gaping face—“A MURDERER.”

  “Eh?” He bent and picked the paper up and folded it slowly, watching her.

  She smiled again and nodded. “You must forget that sometimes, or you wouldn't be so free with your tongue. Men weren't just made convicts for that, you know. They were. . .”

  He waved his hand in front of her mouth. “I know. I know.”

  But she insisted, with slow, malicious, ruthless pleasure, “Hanged.” And, her voice rising, her two hands about her scraggy throat, repeated it, “Hanged—hanged—hanged!”

  He beat the air with both hands, looking fearfully around while she bent over him laughing. “They hanged them. They were worse than the common thieves. They were the lowest of the lot. And they hanged them.”

  She spluttered into silence against his hand, pushed roughly over her mouth. But he could not cover her eyes, vindictive and evilly knowing. He took his hand away, felt for the chair, and sat down again. She nodded. “You just remember THAT.”

  The evening was settling. From the other end of the house came the subdued sound of a piano and a clear, low voice singing.

  Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt Weiss, was ich leide. Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt Weiss, was ich leide. Allein und abgetrennt Von aller Freude, Seh ich ans Firmament Nach jener Seite. Ach! der mich liebt und kennt Ist in der Weite.

  The sad melody ended on a discord and a murmur of harsh protest. Emma sniffed.

  Cabell's shifty eye met hers. “I never said I was going to kick him out, did I?” he said. “Only keep him out of my sight, that's all.”

  Miss Montaulk nodded over her embroidery frame. “A very nice song, Harriet,” she said, as Harriet's voice died away. “Your father's favourite.”

  Harriet grimaced, brought both hands down flat on the keyboard, and rose.

  Miss Montaulk jerked up her stubbled jailer's face. “Harriet! What are you doing? Sing. Your father will be listening.”

  “I don't want to sing.”

  “Go back to the piano and sing your father's favourite song, Harriet,” Miss Montaulk said. “Ach, you do not deserve the love of such a father. You are a wicked girl. It is beautiful the way he loves you. When he strokes your arm at the piano there it is beautiful to see. He looks almost—handsome. You will never have such a pure sweetheart as your father, Harriet.” She licked her lips. “They'll paw you, the others. Ugh! It's horrible to think of.” She sat thinking of it and shaking her head. Harriet shuddered and moved away to the window.

  With bright eyes appraising the thin, girlish figure burgeoning breasts and hips, Miss Montaulk watched her, then frowned. “Harriet, you're not wearing your dress right again, you disobedient child. It should hang below your shoulders, not on them. You know your father admires your neck.”

  Harriet crossed her arms on her breast and pulled the dress higher. “I won't wear it like that. I won't. I don't like it.”

  The bright, probing, pricing eyes swept her from head to foot.

  “Modesty is all very well, Harriet. But he IS your father. If you're afraid to show your shoulders to your father what will happen when you have a husband?” She laughed her grating, derisive cackle. “Husbands don't stand on ceremony, child.”

  She went on, cracking her smooth mask of rouge and powder, while Harriet sank into the chair at the window. For a moment the girl stared at her reflection in the window-pane—the long flat planes of her sallow cheeks, shadowed slightly in the hollows of her deep, intent eyes, her wide red mouth, her heavy eyebrows. “I'm not beautiful,” she told hers
elf, remembering the regular features and creamy complexions of the beauties she read about in novels. The thought pleased her at this moment. “I'm ugly. Loathsome.” She stretched her mouth between her fingers and pressed her nose flat and disordered her wavy hair to make the image in the window-pane more unbeautiful still. “I'll go to England and nobody will marry me and I'll be able to live all by myself like Aunt Harriet.”

  Her eyes escaped past the reflection on the window to the steep wall of the southern range. In the light of the setting sun the hills were burning up in a purple fire, glowing, shimmering like a coal. Then the glow faded and they were ashen black against the sky, with the white stark skeletons of the ringbarked trees wandering about the dusk like sentinels watching her.

  “No, I won't go to England,” she told herself, confronted suddenly by a picture of her father sitting beside her in a bower of lilac blossom with a great castle in the background where she would soon be taken and shut up in a high tower behind barred doors. “I'll run away.” She imagined herself slipping out of bed in the night, careful not to disturb Miss Montaulk repulsively asleep under a flannel night-cap, dressing, tiptoeing out to the stable, and galloping away down the winding tape of road, away, away. . .

  “Where to?” She relaxed in her chair and stared again, disconsolately, at the darkening wilderness. These childish fancies would no longer serve. For nearly eighteen years she had been gazing out of this window—watching the clouds of red and blue butterflies that came to play over the purple flowers of the lucerne on the flats, imagining herself one of them that would soon rise and flutter away into the scrub, high above the murderous reach of the Chinamen, escaping, gone; imagining herself a thistle ball torn from the dry, hot earth by the wind and whirled away into the cool blue. Sitting up in bed at dawn to watch the coach for Pyke's Crossing go by with a thud of hoofs, she had pretended that it was carrying her off on an endless journey of escape. In the winter, when the westerlies fell and the day was like a big shining crystal, she would make-believe that there was no one except herself in the glittering, clean world. And in the fever time when the rains came, throbbing against the iron roof at night like the beat of her own sick blood, she would lie in bed and let her imagination go—how she would burn Miss Montaulk with a branding-iron, tie her in barbed wire and drag her across the valley behind a horse, throw her into the cactus plant which Mr McFarlane had planted on his ridge. Thus she had tried to revolt against the will of her father, which lay over her life like a kind of fate, shaping her, for some obscure end of his own, to a personality foreign and friendless in her home. What this end was she sensed, in a rush of anxiety and distaste, when he came eagerly to see her at the end of each day and sat brooding over her as she played the piano, when Miss Montaulk fussed about preparing her for these visits like a knowing old cocotte.