Brian Penton

by Inheritors (v1. 0) (lit)

  “And what about you?”

  “Well, I ain't going neither if you want to know,” Larry shouted.

  “Keep yer hair on,” Coyle said. “Nobody's calling you a scab.”

  “I'm no more a scab than you,” Larry shouted. “It was your own bloody fault.”

  “But who's saying? I ain't.”

  “It was your own bloody fault,” Larry kept shouting. He shook his fist in Coyle's face. “You tried to get me caught. And I didn't know he was that near. The light was in my eyes. . .”

  “All right,” Coyle said gently. “All right. Me and you were mates, weren't we? I ain't going to start chucking mud at a man who was my mate.”

  They were silent. “Anyway,” Larry burst out again, “what's the use striking. You won't win. There won't be no republic or rise in wages or nothing.”

  “Who's saying there will be?”

  “Then what's the use?”

  Coyle spat. “You wouldn't ask that if it'd been you instead of me they boned that night. They brought me down to Pyke's Crossing where there were five other blokes they'd arrested and they handcuffed us all to a chain. 'Screw 'em together like dogs,' the Inspector says, and they kept us like that for ten days. Even though I had a touch of the fever, not even to bog. Then they got out a law the English ain't mean enough to use for the last seventy years. When they were taking us into court the mob booed the four Johns with us and when the Beak comes in he asks what the noise was and they told him, and he said 'It's a nice place where this can happen. How many police were there?' And the Sergeant said 'Four.' And the Judge said, 'Let me see. You all had six-shooters and four times six is twenty-four shots. Not many would have booed a second time if I'da been there.' And even the John said, 'You can't shoot men for disorderly conduct,' and the Judge said, 'You could've found some excuse.' And then he give us a three stretch on bread and water and lousy stew, and we were kicked from pillar to bloody post by warders, like criminals.” He grinned. “All right, we're criminals then.”

  “Aw,” Larry said disparagingly, “You go and do your own dirty work, Coyle.”

  “My dirty work! What about yours?”

  “It can wait a bit,” Larry said. “One day I'll go up and see my ma. . .”

  “That's about how long you'll need to get the guts,” Coyle sneered. “Till the sod's piled on you.”

  “Eh?”

  “Eh what? Didn't you know your ma's dead?”

  Larry started. “Dead?”

  “Come off it!”

  “Struth! I didn't know.”

  “Nor that your old man killed her.”

  Larry looked incredulous.

  “You ain't heard about your sister and Cash? She ran away with him while your old man was at the mine once, and when he come back he went in and roused hell out of your old woman for putting them up to it, as your young brother Geoffrey reckoned he seen. But she only laughed in his mug and told him straight she'd given your sister the dough to run off with. Then he pulled off and socked her on the jaw and she fell and cracked her head on the flags. Pat Doolan was there talking to her at the kitchen door at the time and seen everything that happened. She didn't kick the bucket that minute, but they carried her to bed and she never got out again and pegged about six months ago. Sure, it's gospel. Your old man's been running about the country like a madman the last nine months looking for your sister, but never got a smell of her.” Coyle chuckled. “She's clean knocked the stuffing out of him. He's up the Reach now and they reckon he can't say boo to a baa-lamb.”

  “I never heard a word.”

  “No? Nor what your old woman said to him just before she died—that you'd come back one day? 'I tried to make him into a gentleman,' she says, 'but you wouldn't let him, so now you'll have to swallow what he is.' That's her identical words.”

  “How'd you know that?” Larry said angrily. “You're making it up.”

  “I know it because she told me. She heard I was back in the valley and sent for me and give me a message for her loving son. Lucky she died then and never found out you'd scabbed on us both.”

  “Who scabbed on her? I'll break your lying jaw.”

  Coyle only grinned.

  He stayed at the farm for the night and had fierce arguments with Berry. Larry listened closely, anxious to be convinced that the best way to get at the squatters was to stay out of the strike so that everybody would put their weight behind the parliamentary party.

  “Parliamentary party me eye!” Coyle scoffed. “It's only an excuse for poling on your mates when there's danger.”

  Larry shifted uneasily.

  “You're a murdering hypocrite!” Berry exploded after a glance at Larry. “I know what you're after, carrying tittle-tattle here. It doesn't matter to you what becomes of your mates—it's only an excuse for getting hanged like your father you want.”

  Coyle laughed wildly. His eyes shone with the mad fire Larry had seen in them twice before.

  Larry left the room and went to bed, but he could not sleep. Arguments went on and on in his head. At last he dozed off and dreamt that he was in a court, shackled to a chain with Coyle, and the Judge was pointing at him and saying “You killed your mother, you murdering hypocrite.” On the bench in front of the Judge lay the body of his mother with her face smashed in. He was looking at it sideways, not game to take a good look, wanting to make sure that she was QUITE dead. As he looked the body stirred and sat up and it was not his mother at all, but Jean. He called out to her, but she paid no attention and walked out of the court. Then the Judge put on a black cap and turned into his father, and Larry tried to run away but Coyle cunningly twisted the chain around his legs and he fell. In his despair he dragged Coyle down and they fought, and he strangled Coyle, got free, and escaped. . .

  He woke up and sprang quickly off the bed and went out into the yard. For an hour he walked about muttering to himself. Then he went into the barn where Coyle was sleeping. He crept over the floor and touched Coyle's boot, crept nearer, and had his hand on Coyle's shoulder when Coyle awakened. “What's the idea?”

  “We better go,” muttered Larry.

  Coyle laughed softly. “I reckon we better.”

  Larry rolled up a swag and they departed as the cocks were crowing at the false dawn. “I'll be back in a few days,” he comforted himself as he took a last look at the dark farmhouse.

  They tramped north slowly. At night whenever he woke up Coyle was sitting at the fire watching him, and in the daytime, as they plodded over the dusty hot Downs, lagged a hundred yards behind. He seemed to be driving Larry before him, and as every day brought them thirty miles nearer to the Reach Larry hated him more.

  They heard that the strike was on. A coach-driver told them that the strikers at the Reach had caught Goggs, who had been working for Cabell since the last strike, and drowned him in the river, that miles of scrub and grass were on fire, and that the strikers had thrown a cordon round the homestead and allowed no one to pass without a ticket from the union. “Old Rusty's cracked up. There's no fight in him.” A couple of days later a posse of mounted infantry and police went by.

  They were in sight of the ranges now. Larry turned on Coyle and chased him a mile along the road before he landed a stone on the back of Coyle's knee and brought him down. He rushed up, but the look in Coyle's eyes, a jeering look, made him stop and bluster, “What're you looking at, you sod? The way you lag behind and sit up all night, as if I was going to cut your throat—it'd get any bloke's gall.”

  “Well, aren't you?”

  “Why should I?”

  “To save yourself walking fifty miles and meeting your old man at the end.”

  “You're a liar.” Larry began to kick him. After two or three savage kicks he went to the side of the road and sat down. “It's not the same for you,” he said in a pleading voice. “You've got nothing. But I have.”

  “A blanket and a billy and a pair of Berry's cast-off duds? A fine inheritance. Did you read the bit in the paper where your brot
her James's bringing back five stallions he paid four thousand quid for?”

  “If I can get married and settle down, that's all I want,” Larry said. “They can have the rest.”

  “Don't fool yourself,” Coyle said. “You'll never settle down. It's not in you, nor any of us. We ain't that kidney. That's why we're here. That's why they kicked my old man and your ma out, because they didn't have the blood of lickspittles. Some they hanged and some they sent to America and the rest they sent here, because they were funked. We're rebels like them and always will be as long as the blood isn't watered out.” He picked himself out of the dust and limped over to Larry. “It's not to settle down you want—only an excuse for not having another go at your old man. But what's biting you? You heard what the cove said, that he's got the stuffing knocked out. By your sister! Jesus, Larry. Can't you finish what she begun? Besides,” he added after a long pause, “there's your ma. . .”

  “She was off her nut.”

  “Suppose she was. Who sent her?” He stood up. “But just say the word—just say that you could settle in peace and have it in your mind that there was a bloke who'd robbed your ma and half-starved her and then cracked her on the mug—just say it and we'll turn round and go back to Pyke's Crossing this minute. . .”

  They reached the camp three days later. It was a bigger camp than the last and a lot rowdier. Police and infantrymen and strikers fought all day. The strikers pelted them with stones till they charged and beat the men down with the flat of their swords. Miles of fencing had been burnt and much grass, as the coachman had reported, but it was not true that they had drowned Goggs. They had belted him with his stock-whip and thrown him in the river, and now he was in bed at the homestead dangerously ill. Larry knew few of the strikers but they all knew Coyle and of his quarrel with his father, so both were received as heroes. The strikers took it for granted that they would do something especially outrageous and Coyle winked.

  Larry was not at all pleased to have so much expected of him. The liberties the strikers were taking with his father's property scared him. In a minute Cabell would surely wake up and take some savage revenge. The strikers expected that too. Not for a moment did they believe they would win the strike, but this made them only more anxious to destroy as much as they could while they had the chance. A regiment of artillery was coming up from Brisbane, they said, to blow them out of the camp. So they went to work firing the grass and buildings and beating up policemen, laughing and joking about it as though it was a good game, but underneath they were full of despair. The financial collapse had ended the era of wild hopes: wages were down, work was scarce, people were starving in the cities, immigrants returning to England, the dream of a working man's paradise abruptly blown up.

  “We've lost everything, but Cabell and the rest eat their three meals a day” was the burden of the speeches.

  Larry could not listen without feeling the knot of pain tighten once more in his belly, but the thought of Jean still detached him from them. One day his father rode by with the police inspector to visit Ningpo where the strikers had been trying to burn the old homestead. As soon as they saw him the men rushed out of the camp and pelted him with stones and cowdung. The cowdung plastered Cabell's back and the strikers ran along the side of the road booing. Larry held his breath, expecting his father to turn and ride them down. Instead he hurried his horse and never lifted his head. Larry caught a glimpse of his father's face and it looked as though another face had been clapped on top of the old one. It was grey and the pride was gone out of it. “We got him bluffed,” the strikers exulted.

  Next day Larry received a letter from Berry:

  DEAR LARRY, You needn't have sneaked off in the night without saying good-bye. I'm enclosing the twenty pounds I owe you for wages, as I don't expect we will see you again. I was beginning to hope that you might settle down in these parts. But I wish you luck just the same.

  JACK BERRY

  Larry was in an agonizing frame of mind. Jean, too, must think that he had sneaked off and left her for good. She might stop loving him or look out for another sweetheart. He wanted to leave the camp and hurry back to her, but that was impossible. All Coyle's lying, jeering taunts would be true. Yes, he must go through with it now if he ever wanted peace of mind, and the sooner the better.

  He brooded all that day and as soon as night fell went up the road, climbed the fence out of sight of the sentries at the gate, and crept back to the homestead. In the darkness of the orange-grove he paused. He could hear his father walking on the veranda. He was talking to himself. Larry could not hear what he was saying, but the savage sound of the words belied the theory that his father had no anger left in him. Larry crept away again. Safe in the camp once more he was ashamed of himself, and next night returned to the garden; but Cabell and the inspector of police were together in Cabell's room drinking whisky. On the third night he waited till all lights were out in the homestead except his father's. This time he found Cabell alone in his room. He was sitting at the table with his head in his hands talking to himself. The grey, prideless look of defeat was on his face. It gave Larry courage to climb on to the veranda and tiptoe to the door. With his hand on the knob he paused to look around and listen. The sound of snoring came from the open French lights. “It's hopeless,” he thought. “They'll catch me before I can move.” Then his mind went blank with the unself-consciousness of a reckless moment and he was standing before his father's startled face. For a long time neither spoke, but Larry raised his hand to his beard and twisted it till his mouth seemed to be grinning drunkenly down at the old man.

  “Larry! Where the devil did you spring from?”

  Larry let his beard go. It made a faint crepitation in the mutually embarrassed silence.

  “I've been looking for you the last six months,” Cabell said. “I. . . but sit down.” The way he spoke, nervously but not as though he was annoyed at seeing Larry, far from it, took Larry off his guard. He found himself reaching obediently for a chair and pushed it violently away.

  “I've got no time to sit down.”

  Cabell drummed his fingers on the table and his eyes shifted between Larry and the floor. Larry noticed again the grey, abject look, the haggard pouches under his eyes. He was trying to say something, but the words stuck in his throat. Half a minute passed before he managed to mumble, “You heard about your mother, I suppose. She. . . passed away seven months ago.”

  “I heard.”

  “Hmn.” Cabell licked his lips, glanced up and down again. Then he blurted out indignantly, “It wasn't my fault she died. The bitch starved herself to death. I was never hard on her. Other men would have used her a damn sight worse. I married her, didn't I? And as for you—you'd've had your due.” He looked at Larry again shiftily. “Haven't I had men looking all over the country? I wanted to make you manager at McFarlane's.”

  “He's trying to get round me,” Larry thought, but felt at the same time that his father's eager, conciliatory words were not really addressed to him, that there was someone else in the room. Cabell's eye wandered restlessly and he seemed hardly to see Larry, as though he was concentrating his attention on making some eavesdropper hear what he was saying. This so affected Larry at last that he turned and peered into the shadows beyond the light's circle. When he looked round Cabell was peering there too, and his gaze remained fixed on the corner for several seconds before he raised it to Larry and asked hoarsely, “Did you hear something?”

  “Hear what?”

  Cabell gestured, “Oh, nothing,” looked back at the corner and laughed uncertainly. “Nothing, of course. It's the damned loneliness of the place since—this last year. It gets on your nerves. But now you're back. . . You'll take over McFarlane's, won't you?”

  Larry answered nothing, twisting his beard again.

  “Confound you, man,” Cabell flared. “Can't you speak? Isn't it enough?”

  “I don't want any favours.”

  “Favours?” Cabell said, conciliatory at once. �
��It's not a favour. You're my son, aren't you? When I die it'll be yours, along with the rest. Don't look as if you didn't believe me. I offered to make you manager before, didn't I? In front of her. And you refused it? Didn't you? Now you can't deny that.”

  “I don't want nothing from you.”

  Cabell stood up. “You sulky dog, you'll take it. D'you hear? Hell and damnation, it's ME who pays for your dirty temper. She robbed me of my daughter for it.” He sat down again, breathing heavily, and there was a long pause. “I don't say I wasn't a bit quick off the mark myself in the past,” he admitted mildly, “but you didn't want to be handled with kid gloves, did you? Just the same, I'll”—he frowned, swallowed—“beg your pardon if you want it. And now let us be friends.” He held out his hand. “Eh? You'll shake on it?”

  “No!” Larry banged the table, making the lamp-glass rattle and the flame splutter and leap on the wick. “I won't be bought. You killed my mother.”

  Cabell shook his head. “No, Larry, that's a lie.”

  His meekness had put fire into Larry. “Yes, you did. You starved and neglected her. Then you hit her on the face and knocked her down.”

  “Don't say it,” Cabell said miserably, glancing right and left. “Don't say it. You'll bring bad luck on me.”

  “It's the truth,” Larry cried, whipping his rage up. “You robbed her. You hit her. You killed her. You. . .”

  Cabell sprang from his chair and tried to put his hand over Larry's mouth. They struggled. Cabell half fell and started to rise, and Larry kicked him on the temple and he fell again. He lay, semi-conscious, trying to cover his face with his hands and catch hold of Larry's foot, which struck him again and again on the head, and the jaw, and the mouth, with its heavy metalled toe. Larry did not see the door open on Geoffrey's fat face, which shook like a jelly as he squealed, “Murder! Help! Inspector Carmody.” As though his boot was controlled by a spring which had started to unwind in the pit of his stomach and could not be stopped, it rose and fell, missing its object three times out of five, while Larry observed its movements as if it was somebody else's boot and somebody else's rage propelling it. Once, when it left off kicking Cabell for a moment to stamp on a set of false teeth which had fallen from his father's open mouth, he chuckled; and all night, as he sat in the woolshed handcuffed to a beam and heard the sentries walking up and down outside, he kept thinking of those teeth and grinning. “He even spewed his teeth,” he kept saying to himself, as if it was a confession of Cabell's final, hopeless impotence.