Hammers Over the Anvil

by Alan Marshall

  Elsie got a letter next day. It was delivered by Jeanie’s brother, a little bloke with a tooth out in the front. He delivered it because if it had gone through the Post Office Miss Armitage would have opened and read it. Miss Armitage was like that.

  When Elsie read Jeanie’s letter it said, ‘Would you come and see me. I’d love to talk to you.’

  Elsie didn’t want to go; she was afraid. She’d heard someone say that Jeanie McLean had had a baby but it died. Mother thought she ought to go. ‘She is a sad girl’, mother said.

  So Elsie walked to Jeanie’s place and knocked at the door. Mr McLean opened it. He was a thin man like a drover’s dog, but he had a face that had been out in the wind and rain a lot. It was a good face. Elsie told him she had come to see Jeanie.

  ‘Yes, yes’, he said. ‘She’s in the bedroom. Go in to her.’

  Elsie walked down the passage and went into a little bedroom like a box. It was lined with tongued and grooved boards, and the bed nearly filled it. But there was a chair there. Jeanie was sitting on the edge of the bed with a dressing-gown on.

  ‘I’m glad you came’, she said to Elsie. Elsie sat down on the chair. ‘I suppose you’ve heard about me’, Jeanie said.

  Elsie said something but Jeanie went on. ‘I wanted to talk to you, Elsie, because Johnnie McPhee told me you had gone through the same experience. You went away for a holiday, didn’t you? – You know, about three months ago. When Hughie James came to see me, he told me he’d heard about it.’ Elsie stood up. She couldn’t think clearly. She kept saying, ‘It’s a lie, it’s a lie!’

  Jeanie stopped when she saw her face and she talked about something else. But it was too late to do anything about Elsie.

  EAST DRISCOLL

  Sometimes in the dead of night I would awake to the sound of horse’s hooves pounding the roadway past our home. I would sit up in bed and look hurriedly out of the window and wait for the yells that always heralded this rider’s passing. The yells were an accompaniment to the hoof beats, the trumpet calls above the roll of drums. They laced the sound into one wild melody, the untamed cry of a moonlit night.

  It was a sound that quickened the heart beats of people in sleeping houses and goaded the village dogs into a frenzied barking.

  ‘Yah-hoo-oo-oo-oo. Ho, ho, ho, ho. Whoo-oo-oo-oo-oo!’

  Some awakened husband would mutter to his wife, ‘East Driscoll’s on the booze again’, then turn over and return to sleep. The wives remained awake staring into the dark while they remembered his provocative eyes, his grin, his lithe flexible body and his swagger. He had flashed messages past their husbands’ heads to all of them at one time or another.

  Dad once said to me, though I didn’t understand what he meant until years later, ‘A good rider on a horse takes from the horse the virility and vigour of the animal and makes it his own. A man riding easily on a free-striding horse is a bigger man than when he is on the ground. Women think that he is all they have missed.’

  East Driscoll was the local horse-breaker. He dressed in white corduroy riding trousers, held in place with a broad leather belt fastened by a buckle of silver in the form of a horse-shoe framing a horse’s head. He wore Gillespie’s Elastic Sided Boots and a white shirt and had a red cotton handkerchief knotted around his neck. His hat had a broad brim and he wore it pulled to one side. His eyes were bright and eager and laughter lurked in them. The women thought he was handsome and when he rode past them, sitting loosely and easily to the movements of a horse walking proudly, the women dropped their eyes before his glance.

  But he was a larrikin. He obeyed no rules. He had a contempt for authority and went on wild benders when he felt like it.

  He had a stockyard with an eight-foot high post and rail fence beside his house on the outskirts of Turalla. I would climb up on this fence and sit on the top rail and watch him breaking in horses brought to him by farmers who had neither the time nor the skill to break them in themselves.

  To me he represented freedom and I always looked at him with a feeling of admiration. Elsie thought he looked like a God with the spirit of a horse.

  ‘He’s not only a good rider’, Dad said. ‘He’s a good horseman, and that is rare.’

  I often sat on the fence and watched him handling a horse on a lunging rein. He always talked to the horse he was handling. ‘Steady, old boy, steady. Easy does it. Lift those legs. Hup! Hup! Steady, steady.’

  Father once told me a well-handled horse never bucks, but there were times when East felt a need to display his skills as a rider. Then he would mount a horse not quite prepared for it. He was a balance rider, pivoting in the stirrups while the horse bucked beneath him. He never lost control of his head. It moved easily above him, never jerking free from his hold. He anticipated every buck before it happened and met it with responses from his body that went with the horse in every violent, grunting effort to unseat him.

  Dust would rise from the hooves of the plunging horse. Men, driving milk carts laden with cans, would pull up on the roadway and yell encouragement from their milk-stained seat on the dashboard of the wagon. ‘Into him, East. Stick to him. You got him.’

  Dad told me that this was East Driscoll’s one weakness. ‘He sometimes rides for the gallery and never thinks of the horse. He’s building up his reputation at the expense of the horse, but he’s pretty to watch isn’t he?’

  When East Driscoll went on a bender he always dressed up for the occasion. His white trousers were freshly washed; his boots shone with polish. His shirt was ironed and clean and his red handkerchief was perfectly knotted. He rode the best horse amongst those he was breaking and he rode through the village on his way to the pub at Turalla, acknowledging with a wave of his hand the greetings of all those he met. I would climb on to our gate while Elsie stood behind me to watch him pass.

  Ah! Those eyes, that cheeky grin that promised quick kisses in the grip of powerful arms!

  One afternoon he was riding a half-broken colt with a wicked eye and a nervous temperament. It veered sideways; it propped and snorted at a limb on the road or sprang sideways like a cat. It walked uncertainly, reefing at the bit, and lowering its head to snort at shadows on the road.

  ‘A dangerous horse to go drinking on’, father said.

  That night I lay in bed awake and looked out into the moonlight and watched the trees thrash in the rising wind. It was a restless, unsettled night, with gusts of wind that lifted the dust beyond my window and sent dead gum leaves hurrying like demented little people along the road. I was lying awake waiting for the sound of hooves and the wild yells of East returning to his home; but I fell asleep before he passed.

  He didn’t pass at all that night. Early next morning a farmer, driving cattle along the road in the half-dark, saw a riderless horse grazing by the side of the road. He could just see something hanging in the stirrup leather. He hurried over to the horse, then approached it quietly and held its head. East Driscoll’s foot was caught in the stirrup and he hung downwards like a bloody rag with his head and shoulders on the ground. His face and head were badly battered. The white shirt was half torn from his body. He was limp, loose, his legs bent unnaturally, one arm flayed from the grind of metal. The farmer carried him to his wagon and took him to the hospital. He was unconscious for three weeks. One of his legs was pulled out of joint; one of his arms was broken; he had a fractured skull; his face was torn; his teeth broken; his mouth out of shape.

  He had left the pub about midnight, they said. He took a long while to mount his horse, but men helped him on to the saddle and he lurched away into the night singing ‘There is a tavern in the town.’ They heard him urge the horse into a gallop, then the night closed round him. Somewhere along the road he was thrown and his foot caught in the stirrup. What happened in the mad gallop that followed no one knew, but he had been dragged for hours until the exhausted horse stopped and began grazing on the long grass near the Pejark Creek.

  For the next month everyone fought beside him for his life. T
hey suffered with him. He survived, and I saw him walking round his stockyard again; but he did not laugh or joke anymore. He sometimes looked round vaguely as if striving to remember. There was no spring in his walk; though he continued riding horses he sat heavily upon them.

  ‘East Driscoll is not the man he was’, said a farmer. ‘Half the time he’s not there. A bloody shame isn’t it?’

  JOE’S HOME

  You passed into Joe’s backyard through a gap in a box-thorn hedge. The hedge was high and thick and surrounded the house with a barrier of thorns that in the spring were concealed beneath a cloak of red berries. If you squeezed one of these red berries its inside came out, a soft inside of yellow seeds.

  In this protected, sheltered yard were fowls and ducks and geese and a couple of turkeys, but a fox took the turkeys one night when they roosted too low on the grey box-tree. Joe reckoned the foxes jumped ten feet to get them, but I don’t. I think they scratched their way up the trunk and grabbed the turkeys by the necks then jumped down with them.

  The fowls were French fowls Joe’s mother told me. French fowls are different to all other fowls and are rare. They look as if they turned their backs to a strong wind and their feathers were blown backwards. I feel sorry for French fowls.

  You took a turn to walk behind the house after you passed through the opening in the box-thorn hedge. The eel post was sunk into the ground here. It was a post with the head of a big nail sticking out near the top and we used it for skinning the eels we caught in Emu Creek. We’d hang them on the nail by pushing the gash we had cut at the back of their neck around the head of the nail, then with a pocket knife we began to skin them.

  When you managed to lift the first quarter-inch of skin from the eel, you rubbed the palms of your hands in the dust so as to make them dry, then you grabbed the eel and began pulling downwards until the skin began to unroll from the body. You kept on until you pulled it down over its tail like a glove.

  We caught a lot of eels in the creek and often used the post. You gutted them after you skinned them and threw the guts to the ducks. Ducks will eat anything. We always kept the bladders which the eels use to keep them up in the water. We dried the bladders in the sun. They were hard to bust. You could squeeze them with your fingers but they still didn’t bust. You had to jump on them to bust them.

  Joe’s mother often watched us with her thin, sad face. She was a short, tired woman who sometimes lowered her head as if expecting a blow from God. She was always singing without words. She hummed as she washed in the tubs which were made of half a barrel. You left the suds in them so they wouldn’t shrink. When the suds where cold flies fell in them. Flies were everywhere. You couldn’t keep them off your face. I often looked down on the drowned flies. After they’d been drowned about two days their eyes went red.

  Joe and I would sometimes fish out a fly that had just drowned. We’d put it on a sheet of paper then cover it in dry salt. The salt would suck all the water out of it and it would come alive again. Joe reckoned it might be good to do that if one of us got drowned – that’s if we could get enough dry salt. I wouldn’t like to chance it. It would be too bloody risky.

  There was a lean-to at the back of the house. On one side was Joe’s and Andy’s room – he was Joe’s little brother – and on the other was where Bill slept. He was a big brother – he must easily have been twenty. You stepped up into the kitchen where everybody sat round the stove on a winter’s night. There was a kitchen table with a form along the wall where the kids sat.

  Mrs Carmichael was always working. In the mushroom season we would bring her buckets of mushrooms and she would spread them out on the table and sprinkle them with salt. In the morning beads of water would be sitting on the gills like pearls. She would boil them then and make mushroom ketchup.

  She had a Coolgardie safe out on the back porch and it kept the butter hard in the summer, but no matter what you did the meat often got blown. I’ve never seen a woman take meat out of a safe without smelling it all over. If it had just been blown there was a little pile of maggots and you could brush these off, but it was harder when they’d burrowed in. Most women used to wash the meat with vinegar to freshen it up. My mother didn’t like flies but Joe’s mother was used to them – the ducks and geese brought them.

  Flies were just as thick in the house as they were outside. Milk jugs were covered with a little net covering hung with beads to keep it in place. Flies fell into your cup of tea. You fished them out with your spoon and plonked them on the saucer. I hated drinking tea that flies had drowned in.

  Jam dishes were traps for flies and they got their legs stuck then crawled out covered in jam. We had net covers for every jam dish.

  One of the things we used to catch flies was a sticky sheet called tanglefoot. The sheets came stuck together so you could buy them without making your hands sticky, but when you pulled them apart they were held together for a while by long strands of stuff like cobwebs that kept breaking until the two sheets were free and then you had two sheets of tanglefoot. You laid them flat on the dresser or the table or on top of the safe, but you were never to put them on a chair. Flies used to land on them and buzz themselves to death. When the sheets became so thick with flies and seemed alive with buzzing wings, they were finished. Then you burnt them. If you wanted to catch fleas with tanglefoot, you spread sheets under your bed and fleas used to hop on to them and get stuck there.

  Sometimes the cat jumped on to the table and landed in the middle of the tanglefoot. When it did this it never waited to have a look around to see what had happened, but it took off like a cracker. But the sheets held its feet and it used to land skew-wiff on the floor and skid and fall on the bloody stuff. Then it turned some somersaults and made out through the door with the tanglefoot wrapped around it. There was always hell to pay when a cat got stuck. The more she tried to tear herself loose, the worse she made herself. The only way to remove the sheets was to run out after her and throw a bag over her. Then you grabbed the bag and sat on the end of it. You unfolded it gradually until you could see a bit of fur, then you would clip her with a pair of horse clippers while you held her down. Afterwards she would dart away and hide under the marshmallows and we wouldn’t see her for a couple of days. Anyway, I didn’t like looking at her after that. She always looked horrible. Cats were never made to be clipped.

  Joe’s father, Tom Carmichael, was a short man with a sandy moustache. He rode every morning to Mrs Carruthers’s place where he worked. Every autumn he joined up with Mick Hanrahan and the two of them put in and bought a pig – there were no flies about then. It was never a very big pig, but it died just as horribly as a gigantic pig. They bought it to kill to turn into bacon.

  There was something about seeing a pig being killed that made you feel like a rabbit must feel when a snake sways in front of it. You wanted to bolt away and hide in long, quiet grass. But you couldn’t; you stayed and watched every horrible detail and for ever afterwards you never forgot them.

  Joe reckoned that since we didn’t become friends with the pig it made it easier to see it die, but I don’t think it made any difference at all.

  They began preparing for the killing a week or so before. In the backyard they put a couple of iron rails on supports of bricks and cut enough wood to be able to keep a fire going for a few hours. Everyone had kerosene buckets in those days. They cut the top off a kerosene tin, then punched two holes – one on each side but dead centre – through which they hooked some wire and curved it to make a handle. Each kerosene tin bucket held four gallons of water. There was room on these iron railings to place four of these buckets side by side, and early one Saturday morning in the autumn, when the weather was cool, they built the fire and filled the tins with water. It took some time to get them all boiling.

  They had been feeding the pig up for a couple of days and it always looked fat and healthy.

  While the four-gallon kerosene tins were heating up to the boil, attended by Mrs Carmichael and Mrs Hanrah
an, Tom Carmichael had made the scrapers from pieces of hoop iron. These were curved with a piece of bagging tied at each end to give a firm grip and everything was ready for the big scrape.

  Joe’s father used to say that to make good bacon a pig must be properly bled. To do this they ‘stick’ it with a long knife and its heart would then pump all the blood out of it. The pig didn’t make any fuss after it had been ‘stuck’.

  Since neither Mick Hanrahan nor Tom Carmichael had a tub big enough in which to scald a pig, they had a strong kitchen table standing near the boiling water. Mick Hanrahan would loop the thin rope round the pig’s hind leg, just above the hock. Then the Hanrahan kids, Joe, Andy and me would haul on the rope like sailors and drag the pig up to the feet of Mick Hanrahan standing with his axe.

  The screams of the pig as it was dragged up to be killed were terrible to hear. I used to think they knew, but Dad told me they didn’t.

  When the pig was in the right position, Mick Hanrahan would bring the back of the axe down on the centre of its forehead and it would fall stunned to the ground. As soon as he did this, Tom Carmichael would leap forward with his ‘sticking’ knife and ‘stick’ the knife into its heart just in front of the brisket bone. He had to be quick before the pig recovered its senses. Then it would shake its head, get to its feet, give a puzzled grunt, then walk round while great spurts of blood came forth to the rhythm of a heart beat from the small hole in its lower neck. If it wasn’t well bled, the meat wouldn’t keep.