Best Australian Short Stories

by Douglas Stewart

  It was a wonderful hailstorm; the iron roof roared under it. You couldn’t see fifty yards from the veranda. The ground whitened with hail while you watched. We stood admiring the transformation, pointing out the big fellows—like pigeons’ eggs—and exclaiming over the way the hail danced back from the veranda ledge. We hadn’t thought of it knocking every blossom from the raspberry-canes.

  Just then we saw Mr Sims coming towards the house from the lower cultivation. He wasn’t running. Indifferent to the pelting hail, he was walking more heavily than usual, and his shoulders were more drooped. We remembered the raspberry-canes then. Our voices were hushed and our eyes fixed on him.

  Within a few yards of the veranda he stopped and lifted a haggard face and a clenched fist to the sky, and shouted, “Send it down! Send it down, Hughie!”

  His wife gasped in the doorway. “Oh, Arthur,” she cried, “you shouldn’t speak like that!” And she drew back into the shadows of the kitchen.

  Mr Sims shouldered past us to the end of the veranda, and stood looking out, his hands clutching the rail. His face was no longer tan, but grey. He turned and spoke as if his outburst demanded justification. “That’s a yuur’s work gone in less than two minutes!” he said, and turned grimly to watch the hail again.

  We were silent. His arms, from shoulder to the hands gripping the veranda rail, were shaking. He spoke again. “And half the next yuur’s livin’ gone with it!” he added. Soon afterwards he slumped down on the slab wash-bench and was lost to us in hopeful reckonings and bleak meditation.

  The storm passed shortly after. The air cleared and all the earth was white. The trunks of the trees in the bush paddock lookedlike charcoal marks on paper. Then the sun shone forth, and all the world sparkled like fairyland. But we could take no delight in it. The farmer’s loss was heavy on us. It seemed as if all his hope lay under a shroud of bright ice.

  You’d have thought that a blow like that would have sunk Mr Sims for ever, but he came right side up again. Perhaps despondency was a luxury beyond his means. At any rate, within a few days we had begun work—”to take advantage of the cool weather”—on a new bit of clearing. It was in the following weeks that I learnt what it meant to uproot and destroy the forest. It was during the later part of these weeks, too, that I heard Mr Sims, as if misfortune and disaster were unheard of things, recalling with satisfaction the epic days when he and Ernie began in the virgin bush.

  The tide was on the turn while we grubbed and burnt the trees, and there came a Sunday morning in middle spring when it seemed as if soil and season were conspiring to encourage the farmer in his best hopes. Sunday morning on the selection was a time when you had the world in repose and therefore in condition for stock-taking. You couldn’t work on Sunday, but you could walk about at ease and see how things were getting on. You could look back over the work you had been doing, and plan what you were going to do next week. You might end up raking the fowlyard, but that wasn’t really work; that was just making the fowls comfortable and putting in a half-hour while waiting for dinner.

  My own Sunday morning was generally taken up with a prowl down the fern gully that led off from near the back of the house, there to commune with the boles of the aloof gums, with running waters, and to disturb the peace of a wombat whose burrow I had discovered; afterwards, perhaps, to return to wait about the kitchen in hope of a kiss from Jessie when her mother was out of the room.

  On some Sundays, however, Mr Sims would indicate a liking for my company on his tour of the farm, and we would go off something like page and Good King Wenceslas. This occasion in mid-spring proved a very hopeful morning. The pods of the early, peas had swelled nicely and would soon be ready for picking, while there was a good show of blossom on the later sowing. This was only the kitchen garden, of course, but success here indicated something that might be done in a bigger way for market. There had been plentiful rain followed by tempered warmth—good growing weather—and wherever you looked, tomatoes, carrots, cabbages, seemed to be visibly racing towards maturity.

  In the larger world of the market crops the swedes that had replaced the red clover were making good headway. “If the blight don’t get at them,” said Mr Sims, and stooped and turned up a few leaves, only to find them comfortingly clean and healthy- looking.

  In the top orchard the gooseberry-bushes were thick with little goosegogs. There weren’t many gooseberry-bushes of course. They had just been planted between the apple-trees as an afterthought, and their promise did not compensate for the loss of the raspberry crop; but still, it was cheering to see them thriving and the jam made from them would cut down the grocery bill. There were some apples, too, on the young four-year-old trees; not a great number; the upper branches were rather bare; but half-way up from the fork there was quite a showing. With careful brown hands Mr Sims turned back the leaves to reveal the delicate green fruit marked with faint bars of pink.

  He mentioned that there had been some apples last year, a few bucketfuls—all that could be expected from three-year-old trees. “And excellent apples, boy!” he exclaimed, looking up at me.

  I had thought that apples were just apples.

  “Oh, excellent apples!” he repeated, seeing that I had failed to be properly impressed. “I’ve never seen better in my life!”

  No mention of Kent! The omission seemed almost deliberate. Those last-year apples instantly loomed in my mind as large as coconuts, and I stooped to look at those his hands were revealing, convinced that they were fruit of very notable promise.

  Mr Sims stopped at the top of the orchard and looked back at the trees. “Yuurce,” he said, in confident and happy anticipation, “we’ll have some cases of apples to sell this yuur!”

  The raspberry plantation didn’t interest us much that morning. We viewed it briefly from over the fence that separated it from the lane. Mr Sims remarked, “We might have better luck next yuur”, but there was some doubt in his voice, and some distaste in the glance he bent on the flourishing but fruitless canes. Hope had received a cruel blow and it was clear from the way he spoke that the future of the raspberries rested with themselves.

  The rye, below the raspberries, was more inviting to look at. We could see it from where we stood, now going on for two feet high, a fine dark green, and dense, like a soft pile. Here waved the true banner of hope.

  The rye was a great source of pride and satisfaction to Mr Sims during the last weeks of its growth. It was a hay crop, for the comfort and sustenance of the horse and cows during the winter when the picking would be lean in the bush paddock and the nights frosty. It stood for the future of animal husbandry on the selection, and was of a piece with the projected pasture paddocks.

  When we passed along the lane at noon or evening, during the warming weather when we were at the grubbing and burning off, Mr Sims would often lag behind on the headland to enjoy the sight of his prospering crop, dark—like wheat—and full of sappy fragrance. The wind blowing across it made cat’s-paws of silver-grey, and the leaves rustled as if they were talking together. The crop sprang from the first sowing of grain on the selection, and Mr Sims—who could look so far back through the years—was looking forward for the first time to garnering for himself where he had tilled and seeded.

  At table, he discoursed on the technique of successful harvesting. Knowledge and good luck would both be necessary. The right time to cut would be when the lowest part of the stalks turned yellow—showing that the roots had done their work for the year—but before the grain fully ripened, while it was yet soft and milky and there was nourishment all through the upper stalk and leaves. Good weather would be looked for then, so that the crop could be cut without delay, and brought to cover without damage from rain.

  On a Sunday morning when there was a twinkle of warmth in the air, and the seedheads were beginning to make their appearance in the rye, Mr Sims took down his scythe from its peg on the wall of the tool-shed and wiped the dust and protective grease from the blade. He referred back to Kent,
of course, saying that he supposed they had reapers and binders now, at any rate on the larger farms; but in his day the grain was cut by scythemen, working as many as ten and twelve in line. Then he went out in front of the barn and had a few practice swings to make sure that hand and eye were still in trim.

  When clearing was finished the next developmental job was the splitting of posts in the bush for the new fencing. But the season was advancing and the rye harvest was in close prospect. It now loomed as the big event of the year, and we were caught up in the feeling with which the farmer watched crop and sky. We knew that even while he pulled on his end of the crosscut saw, or barked logs ready for splitting, his thoughts often strayed to the cultivation. His view of the rye was no longer confined to the headlands. He ventured a few feet into the green, here and there, crumbling a seedhead, parting the flag with his hands to examine the stalk. If he was late for meals we knew where he had been lingering.

  There came days when the rye was almost in full head, and the world seemed working up to burst with light and warmth. We were some while into the time of year when meals were eaten in shirt-sleeves, and with door and windows wide open. You could tell how Mr Sims’s thoughts were running by the way he harked back at meals and at work to little stories of harvests long past, the lucky and the unlucky.

  In the bush, work moved at a steadfast pace, and we often rolled a log into the shade before beginning on it with maul and wedges. Every green thing in forest and clearing was moving to a climax of growth. Cicadas made the still noonday loud, and Billy drowsed under the trees on three legs. Something in the air told you that the season was at the turn. The weather held; and there came an evening when Mr Sims was more than ordinarily late in appearing at table and, as he took his seat, said with the air of one making a dramatic announcement, “Well, I’ll begin cutting the rye in the morning!”

  It was a warm morning and dry, ideal harvest weather, with a late-November bloom on it—just before the pallor of high summer —when everything you looked at seemed brighter than life and a size larger; and although work made you sweat quite freely you felt a bit larger than life yourself. The scytheman, stripped to grey flannel and with a red kerchief around his neck to ward off sunburn, trimmed a few straggling stalks that had sprung on the headland, then swung into the crop, and soon the lane of shaved stubble was lengthening behind him, while the rye subsided in dark swaths above the shining arc of his blade.

  The use of the scythe is an art and beautiful to see. It takes skill that has become part of nature to wield that python handle so that the blade neither stabs the earth with its point nor raises the dust with its heels, but shears close and even. The movements of the scytheman’s body are rhythmical like those of a ritual dance. His arms and shoulders swing wide above rigid hips, and the movements of his feet are timed to the sweep of the blade. In watching our scytheman we forgot his stooped shoulders and stiff gait; youth and grace had returned to him. In the return swing his blade came clean from under the swath, leaving the windrows smooth for the binders who would come after him.

  Twice in his first strip off the side of the crop Mr Sims turned to look back over his work in careful self-criticism; and when he had turned the corner of the field and was lost to us across the green from the chest down, he upended his scythe to whet it. His left forearm lay along the back of the blade to steady it. In his right hand the whetstone flashed back and forth as if it had a life of its own, and the blade sent a keen song into the morning air. After he had slipped the stone into the holder on the back of his belt he paused to mop his brow, and stared briefly over the crop. Perhaps the shades of the old scythemen had come to swing their blades with his; at any rate before he reversed the scythe he lifted his voice in a bar or two of his favourite lay.

  Annie, Jessie, and I were the binders. We began when some of the rye had dried out a little. Mr Sims came back from the face of the crop and showed us how to take a handful from the swath, divide it, and by a dextrous twist of the hands knot the heads to make a band to bind a sheaf. After a few fumbles we caught the trick—to our immense satisfaction—and from then on we followed at a distance behind the scythe, gathering and binding the rye into sheaves and standing the sheaves by the head in stooks of half a dozen to cure ready for carting. It was warm work. The- sun smarted on our bent backs. The stubble stabbed our hands and crackled under our feet. But it was good work, and we were careful to leave our stooks in rows as straight as could be desired.

  Little by little as we followed the scythe around the field the green square in the centre grew less and less, until there came a time when we stood to raise a cheer as the last of it fell. Then Mr Sims joined us and we learnt to our surprise just how quickly sheaves could be made and stooks put together.

  The old road rewarded our hope of it, and we came to White’s Turn-off just past where the bitumen road glides up out of the gullies to take over the running on top of the range. We turned onto the bush track. The tree-butts and saplings came close to the sides of the car, and we were near our journey’s end.

  I didn’t expect—not after thirty-five years—to find the scene as I had left it. The selection was abandoned. I knew this much from a chance encounter a few weeks previously with a man who had known the Simses. Mr Sims had succeeded in making a living from the selection until, in his seventies, it had proved too much for his declining strength, and he and his wife had gone to live in the city. Here they remained until he died in his eighties, and she followed him within a few weeks. None of the sons had thought the place worth carrying on.

  In returning for a day—a blessing on John—I was realizing a hope I had nurtured for many years and in far countries. Neither time nor distance had dulled the edge of happy recollection, nor robbed the old man of stature. In my thoughts he had come to stand for all humanity, holding to its dream while heart and nerve endure. I wanted to glimpse again the ground where he had fought the good fight—just as in telling this story I have sought with words to make him a memorial.

  We reached our destination and alighted. As we passed through the broken gate I noticed that the area of the clearing had increased very little since I last saw it. The pasture paddocks had not materialized. The demands of the orchard as the trees grew in size—together, no doubt, with diminishing strength as the years passed—would explain this.

  There was little to be seen; just a clearing in the bush with a thin coat of grass over the old plough-rumpled earth. Of the young apple-trees I remembered on the right there were remaining only a couple of hoary old stumps with broken and withered arms; and on the left just a green slope where the raspberries had been. Of the dividing fence only a couple of old grey posts were standing, and the grass now hid the cart-track.

  The homestead buildings had vanished and the site looked strange, marked with a couple of tall blackwoods that I remembered only as seedlings fetched from the gully. There was a hard lump where the chimney had stood and a bare patch where the barn had been. That was all. The lips of the well had fallen in, like an old mouth turned to the sky

  We stood for a while, our minds busy with thoughts inevitable to such a place. I was wondering what the dark-haired lad in dungarees would have thought of the baldish man in city togs revisiting his morning scene, and what thoughts had been in the minds of the old man and his wife when it came time for them to retreat. The road to yesterday had brought us to the end of to-morrow—all tomorrows. It seemed odd that I hadn’t counted on that.

  It was a pleasant day, brightly sunny, blue-skied, and quiet. We could hear the water trickling down the fern gully behind us, and there was a whiff of wild clematis in the air. A magpie was expressing its pleasure about something among the trees beyond the open grass, and we saw a fox trail his brush across the bottom corner of the clearing.

  The fence around the clearing—once so trim and taut—was now in a state of collapse, rotten posts leaning up through the ruin, and a seedling shrub or two was growing on the grassland. Little by little the bush wa
s reclaiming its own— though there would be an open green place in the wilderness for many a year.

  On leaving the gate we encountered a couple of local bushmen; men at the turn of forty, they would have been toddlers when I was a lad; and from them I added a little to my knowledge of events since the days I recalled. Harry had fought right through the war from Gallipoli onwards. Jessie had afterwards gone with him wheat-farming in the Mallee, and there had married another veteran of the campaigns. Charlie and Annie were still in the district, along the new road, doing well in the red-soil potato-growing country, farther back in the hills. There was a grandson who was a young airman of some distinction. He had recently piloted across the Pacific the first of the new Constellation aircraft to reach this country from America. It was too late for visiting, but I made a note of the addresses.

  We went on then a few miles, and picnicked under the gums where King Parrot Creek comes singing from the high gorges over a bed of green and grey stones. After lunch we enjoyed climbing over the creek-boulders and mossy logs, spotting trout in the brown pools. We gathered an armful of bush foliage—harmony in low tones—and set out for the city again when the gullies were in shadow and the hill-tops golden. We travelled by the new road, gliding swiftly and smoothly around its deep bends and wide curves.

  Ethel Anderson