by Joy Rhoades
‘You too, Janice,’ her father said. ‘You’re skin and bone.’
‘What’s that, Dad?’
‘Like when we got married. You were skinny then too.’
‘I’m Kate, Dad.’
‘What?’ he said, looking at her.
‘It’s me, Kate,’ she said, worried. ‘Not Mum.’
He shook his head and went back to his chops.
Kate stared at him.
‘Mornin, boss.’ Grimes tapped on the frame of the gauze door. As he came in, Daisy disappeared into the laundry.
Grimes had the Amiens pay ledger tucked under one arm and he put it on the end of the kitchen table.
Her father kept eating. ‘They saddled up?’
Grimes started to laugh, scratching an eyebrow. ‘Here’s the bloody thing,’ he said. ‘The dagos. They can’t ride.’
Kate wondered if her father would pull Grimes up over the slur but he did not.
‘The captain fella said they could,’ he said, mildly.
‘I swear. The young’un – Bottinella? I sent im out to catch the horses about an hour ago. But he doesn’t know a horse’s arse from its fetlock. Sorry, miss.’
Kate nodded. She reminded herself that with her father more and more unreliable, she was lucky they had Grimes.
‘Can’t ride, eh?’
‘Nope. Not a flamin clue.’
Her father frowned. ‘You better teach em.’
‘Not sure y’can learn these buggers.’ Grimes went out, letting the door bang behind him. Peng shot away into the corridor as the blue of Grimes’s shirt disappeared off towards the yards.
Her father stood. ‘I’ll be off then. Back for lunch,’ he said. He blew his nose on his napkin and rolled the fabric into the silver-plate ring. Kate retrieved it and put it aside for the dirty clothes. He pulled his boots on at the back door and was gone.
Kate spotted her father’s forgotten hat on the bench. And mixing her up for her mother? She frowned, picked up the hat and went through the hall onto the back verandah. The hat was old but still in one piece, the rabbit felt soft in her hand, with a broad brim and a hole at the top of its pinch crown. He wore it so much he looked undressed without it. But now he was hatless, already halfway to the yards.
‘Cooee!’ Kate tried again: ‘Cooooee!’
But he didn’t hear her.
She went back to the kitchen with the hat. ‘You know, Daisy, you need to be careful of the POWs. They might try to do a line for you. You’d have to go back to the Home if anything happened.’
Daisy nodded over the washing, unsmiling. Kate returned to her toast, glad the girl understood. By all accounts, the Home was strict. It probably had to be, with dozens of girls, all half-castes like Daisy. They had to be fed and clothed, taught please and thank you, and stopped from speaking their own languages.
Kate put the tin basin inside the sink and ran a little water into it for the washing up. Before the war, she had never washed up, as they’d had more house help. Now Daisy was all they could get so the two of them did everything between them.
As she scrubbed the chop pan, Kate thought about what Addison, the bank manager, might have meant. With her father off at the yards, she was tempted to go into the office to see what she could find in the way of bank statements. Then again, Addison was a drongo, as her father put it. She put the pan on the sink to dry, wiped her hands and collected the broom from the cupboard.
On the verandah, she started in the corner nearest the kitchen, sweeping her way backwards and forwards, past the beans in the veggie garden, heaping the leaves and dust into a neat pile up against the house wall, always with one eye on the office door, fighting the temptation to look. A gust of wind threw leaves hard against the corrugated iron of the homestead roof and blew her pile of swept leaves about as well. She cursed it and started again.
She saw the dogs shoot off down towards the gully. It was mail day. Kate left the broom in the V of the verandah’s Isabella grape vine and went in. In the kitchen, Daisy was making scones on the marble end of the table. It still sometimes caught Kate by surprise to see Daisy preparing food, and she was careful not to tell anyone the girl cooked for them. Aboriginal girls weren’t ever to touch the food, for fear of contamination. But Kate had decided when Daisy arrived that was silly. And no one had got sick either.
Daisy was dividing the scone dough, cutting delicate circles with a floury upturned glass.
‘Hold still,’ Kate said and wiped flour from Daisy’s cheek with a tea towel. ‘You’re good at scones, Daisy.’
‘Me mum’s recipe.’
‘She a good cook?’
In the awkwardness that followed, Daisy nodded quickly, her eyes on the dough.
Kate turned away, mad with herself. She shouldn’t be talking about family with Daisy. The matron at the Home had warned her against it.
Peng was curled up on the seat, unworried by the barking. ‘Siddown, Rusty,’ a man called. The barking stopped, and Daisy disappeared with the egg basket, escaping to the chook run.
‘G’day, Mrs D.’ Mick Maguire filled the kitchen doorway. A whisker over six foot, and round too, although his girth was partly hidden today by the Amiens weekly bread order. He also had a rolled up Tablelands Clarion and the week’s post. ‘There’s a letter in there for yez, Mrs D, from that handsome man o’ yours. On top.’ Maguire winked at Kate. She pounced and put the letter from Jack in her apron pocket, desperate to open it, just not in front of Mr Maguire.
‘Cup of tea?’ she asked.
‘Wouldn’t say no. Got your POWs, I hear?’
Kate took Daisy’s scones out of the stove. But there was only a little sugar in the bowl and, rationing or no rationing, Mick had a sweet tooth.
‘Back in a jiffy,’ she said, holding the sugar bowl. She picked up the post and pushed open the hall door.
‘Few bills in there, eh.’ The mailman’s voice followed her.
She stopped, looking at the letters in her hand. She never looked at the post.
Kate pulled the rubber band off the bundle and flicked through the envelopes. There were nine, all addressed either to her father or to Amiens Pastoral Company. Four were stamped Overdue; one from Mr Babbin, their stock and station agent; one from The Pastoralist, the periodical that her father liked, although less so of late; the third from Darcy’s, the engineering shop in town; and the last from Nettiford’s, the haberdasher-cum-general shop in Longhope. Kate held these four, two in each hand, and stared at them. It didn’t make sense. Her father was scrupulous about paying bills on time.
‘Jack still at Kogarah?’ Maguire called. ‘In Sydney, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ She got the sugar and went back to the kitchen. ‘As soon as his hand healed, and he managed to get it working again, the Army posted him to train new recruits. He’s been at Kogarah since, chafing at the bit to get back to the fighting.’
‘Good thing he’s safe here, eh. You seen that plane stuff in the paper? The Japs is usin planes as bombs again, crazy pilots blowin emselves up in the Philippines.’ Maguire put his mug down and pulled the rubber band off the rolled-up Tablelands Clarion.
‘Heaven help us,’ Kate said.
‘It’ll take years, they reckon. To beat em.’
That’s what she had heard too. ‘I’ll take a quick look at Jack’s letter.’
‘You do that.’
Kate pushed open the verandah door to step outside. His letter was just one page, the usual. A letter from him at all was rare as hens’ teeth: he was busy with his work. This one was not too much blacked out by the censors. And it had only taken a month to arrive.
Dear Kate,
I hope you and the Boss are well, and that Longhope is holding up in the drought.
Funny that he mentioned the district, rather than Amiens. Jack had taken to the locals; made some mates. He was different from her father, who didn’t give a hoot what people thought.
Kogarah is still full of conscripted blokes. Wheelbarrows, they call t
hem, because they have to be pushed. We train of them a month now, more troops for the Islands and even maybe Japan one day.
I’ve had a gutful of playing soldiers, teaching these blokes. It was my bloody luck I didn’t get back to the fighting in ’42, as soon as my hand got better. But not long to wait now. I’m trying to swing a posting back to the fighting. I hear I or maybe even later this year, up into .
Kate went cold. Jack might be overseas already.
The tucker is still bad, and the Yanks’ rations are better than ours. Once in a blue moon I’m off and I get a lift into the centre of Sydney for a good feed. We got the news that General Rommel is dead. Cheers here, I can tell you.
Love,
Jack
He was never one for flowery words, but Kate was glad to hear from him. She hoped he was still training wheelbarrows, not back in the islands on the front. She reread the few lines then folded the letter, put it in her apron pocket and went back into the kitchen.
Maguire took two scones, one with each hand, and put them on his plate. ‘How your POWs gettin on, then?’
‘Good.’ He was a bit of a gossip so she was careful not to say much.
‘They funny buggers? I hear they’re funny buggers. Little blokes.’
Kate said nothing.
‘Out in the run, are they? Your Eye-ties?’
‘No. At the yards.’
‘Yards, eh?’
‘I’ll walk you out,’ she said; he was angling to see the POWs. She set the tea things in the basin and gave him her weekly letter to Jack to post. Then she went for her hat on its peg at the gauze door. She liked the hat. It had been a hand-me-down from her mother.
‘You seen them bills in your post?’
Kate paused, looking at her hat in her hand, and she took her time in turning back. If they were short of money, it would not help to have Maguire know that. ‘Dad’s been here since the First War. I’m sure we’re all right. But with a place as big as ours, people will always talk, don’t you think?’ She smiled at him and put her hat on.
She walked so fast across the lawn towards the wooden gate and his truck, he had to move to catch her. Out the back of the house, Daisy was at the clothes line, wrestling with a white sheet in the breeze. Above her, two rainbow lorikeets, a flash of bright green and blue and yellow, swooped across, screeching from the bottom of the garden to the jacaranda tree. Daisy stopped, her hands on the sheet, her eyes following them. She loved the lorikeets.
‘See ya, Daisy,’ Maguire called. She delivered a half-wave, bumping the sheet on the line with her hand, then disappeared into the washing.
‘She’s shy, your Dais. She ever smile?’
‘She’s better than she was when we first got her. Took her a while to settle in here after the Home.’ In fact, it was Ed who could make Daisy laugh out loud. She suspected the stockman had a crush on Daisy, but she certainly wouldn’t tell gossipy Maguire that.
After Kate got Maguire into his truck and watched it retreat down the hill towards the creek crossing, she collected her father’s hat and headed for the yards.
Once over the rise, she could see the men, with Harry, and all eyes were on the ring. Grimes had the bearded POW in there with Mustard, one of their young stock horses.
‘You forgot your hat, Dad.’ Kate gave it to her father and turned back towards the house.
‘You should stick around.’
Kate stopped, uncomfortable; the only woman among these men. Next to her, Ed had his stock whip as always, coiled and hooked onto his belt. Buffalo Bill, Grimes called him, as most used whips only for cattle work, not sheep. But Kate knew Ed was always prepared, in case he came across a cranky scrubber in the wrong paddock, or a ram that wouldn’t back off.
In the ring, Grimes held the stock horse’s bit but Mustard shook her head unhappily. Not their quietest, she was an odd choice for a teaching mount. The bearded POW, his shirt half untucked now, hung his head but kept a wary eye on Mustard. Kate noticed a scar on his arm that she hadn’t seen at the station: a long scar. Eight or so inches and up to half an inch wide in places, it ran from below his elbow to the back of his bicep. It was purple and white – a wound that had healed badly. He looked scared, and Mustard would know that. ‘Dogs and horses smell fear,’ her father always used to say.
The bearded POW opened his mouth and took a breath. He grabbed the pommel of the saddle with his right hand and hitched his foot up, trying to get his boot into the stirrup. He failed and dropped the foot to the dirt again. Mustard flicked her tail and pulled up with her head, once and then again.
‘Bottinella!’ Grimes yelled. ‘Reins. Pommel. Stirrup.’ He pointed out each item as he went through the list, the reins still hooked round his arm. ‘Up. Orright?’ His voice was loud, as if the man was hard of hearing.
Bottinella looked blank.
‘Get outta the bloody way and I’ll show ya,’ Grimes said. ‘Watch me. Reins. Pommel. Stirrup. Up.’ In one fluid move, he mounted Mustard. The horse seemed relieved to have someone on her who knew what he was doing. When she made for the yard gates, the manager pulled her round.
Grimes dismounted and held the reins out to the POW. ‘You have another go,’ he said, still loud. He held the bridle strap to keep Mustard where she was.
The POW got the reins crossed right on this go, yet still too loose.
‘The reins gotta be taut, bit to pommel. Not like this!’ Grimes yelled, flapping them.
The POW’s face was still blank. He managed on the next try to get his left foot into the stirrup but the horse moved off round Grimes. The POW hopped along on his right foot to keep up with her.
‘Git up, for Chrissake,’ Grimes called.
Kate’s father raised his eyebrows, and Ed grinned.
With one final push the POW flung his right leg up and got a foot almost over the horse’s back. He hung there like a saddlebag, his head and body against Mustard’s flank, and the horse moved about sharply.
Ed chortled, and even Kate’s father smiled.
‘Sit down, you idiot.’ Grimes pulled the POW off Mustard and dropped him on the dirt as the horse backed away. The man didn’t move for a bit, and Kate felt sorry for him.
‘I reckon we try the other dago, boss,’ Grimes said.
Kate didn’t want to see this. Dislike the Italian as she did, he’d rubbed Grimes up the wrong way at the station, refusing to be cowed, and that was a mistake. This would be his first lesson. ‘Dad, I’ll go back to the house now,’ she said.
‘We’ll be here for a bit, I reckon,’ her father replied.
Grimes handed the reins to Canali, who looked at them curiously.
‘Reins. Pommel. Stirrup. Up!’ Grimes yelled, pointing.
As Kate left, Grimes’s voice followed her. She was about halfway home when she heard shouting and hoof-beats, fast and deliberate, with Rusty barking up a row. Was somebody hurt? She ran back to the yards, now alive with dust and movement.
In that dust Grimes dodged the horse and rider that came at him. Canali was mustering Grimes like a calf, forcing him back into the centre when he tried to run or to break for the yard rails. The POW was angry, pushing the horse to muster a man. Grimes would be hurt. Her father and Ed shouted, waving at Canali. He rode straight at the manager again. Kate was sure she would see Grimes brought down, yet at the last moment the Italian wheeled the horse away.
‘Cut it out!’ Her father’s voice came through the dust and the noise. But the POW rode on, and Grimes was trapped in the ring. He knew he was being toyed with; he was red in the face, angrier than Kate had ever seen him.
Her father waved Ed into the ring, and the stockman climbed between the rails, good foot first. With a big arm, he unfurled his whip and cracked it once. At the bang, the horse pulled up its head. Still the rider urged Mustard on, trapping Grimes in the centre. Ed cracked his whip again, getting closer to the horse. Mustard pulled up, only to be pushed on, a white lather of sweat across her flanks. But on the next whip crack, Mustard baulk
ed and the man brought the horse up. They stopped, mount and rider breathing hard.
Grimes leapt up at the POW, grabbed his shirt and an arm and hauled him off onto the ground, giving him a kick to the ribs as he hit the dirt. The POW took hold of Grimes’s sleeve and brought him down too.
‘You blokes! Cut it out!’ Kate’s father yelled.
The bearded POW, worried, paced to and fro beside the rails, calling, ‘Luca!’
Harry stood atop the second rail, watching.
Ed led Mustard to the far side of the ring, out of the way of the men on the ground, moving her in circles around him, murmuring to her. Astride the POW, Grimes landed one punch on Canali’s mouth, then a second closer to his nose.
‘Cut it out!’ her father shouted for the third time and got into the ring himself. He went to the men and took hold of his manager’s arm, stopping the blows. Breathing heavily, Grimes dropped his arm and released the POW’s shirt. Canali fell back onto the dirt, his chest heaving. Grimes got up, dust coating his face, his eyebrows and his shirt. He moved to lean on the rails. The POW started to get up too but stopped on his knees, one arm on his chest where he’d taken a boot.
‘Jesus. Bittuva show, eh?’ Ed laughed nervously. But Johnno and Spinks were quiet, watching Grimes. Kate’s father exhaled, shaking his head, unhappy.
‘Quick learner, that second bloke,’ Ed said to Grimes.
‘I’ll job ya.’ Grimes took a step towards him, and Ed slipped behind Mustard, grinning. Ed had gumption.
Grimes climbed out through the rails and went off towards the manager’s cottage. Harry followed close behind, casting glances back at the POW, still in the dirt. Canali pushed himself up, bringing a hand to touch the blood on his mouth. He looked at Kate, and grinned, arrogant even with a mouthful of bloody teeth. When she frowned, he spat blood onto the dirt and she walked away, knowing he watched her.
CHAPTER 4
A ewe deprived of good pastures during her pregnancy, whether by a poor season or otherwise, an inferior mother makes. She cares less for her smaller offspring, which in turn suckles less and succumbs in greater numbers than their more fortunate brethren, the offspring of well-nourished ewes.