Hammers Over the Anvil

by Alan Marshall

  After a while the pig stopped walking and stood a moment looking at the world. Then it staggered – the blood was not coming so fast now. Then it suddenly fell to its side, gave a few convulsive kicks, then lay still. The two men would go down and grab a hind leg each and drag it back to the table where they lifted it on to the table, lying on its side. It was the women’s job to pour the boiling water on to the pig. It had to be scalded before it could be scraped.

  Mrs Hanrahan, who was a big woman, took the first lift of the boiling water, but they had to be very careful they did not spill it on anyone. She poured the scalding water over the carcass and handed the half bucket to Mrs Carmichael while she walked over to the fire to get another one.

  When the pig was drenched by the scalding water, Mick Hanrahan and Tom Carmichael drew the scrapers against the lean of the hair and the hair came away from the skin. They scraped without ceasing. There was no part they missed. More boiling water was poured and the scraping continued. Mrs Carmichael would keep filling the buckets from the tank and carry them to the fire which they kept supplied with wood. As soon as the bucket began to boil it was poured over the pig.

  After one side was complete, they turned the pig over and continued their scrape on the other side. There was nothing they missed. They scraped the pig’s head. They scraped its feet which they turned into pig’s trotters. When the pig was completely naked, they cut off its hind legs, put hooks behind its hocks and attached the carcass to a rope and pulley on the high limb of the grey box-tree and they raised the carcass till it swung a man’s height above the ground. Then they gutted it. All the entrails were dropped into one of the kerosene tin buckets and Mrs Carmichael added water to them and put them on to the fire to boil up for the ducks’ food. They wrapped up the liver and the heart in paper and took them into the kitchen to put in the Coolgardie safe from where Mrs Hanrahan would get them to take home.

  Mr Carmichael had spent the previous week building a small smoke shed, like a dunny, in the yard. It had a crossbar high up inside from which the pig would hang and a place down below for green leaves and wood to make a fire. The fire was surrounded by sheets of galvanised iron, backed by earth so as to hold it secure. This would be used in a few weeks’ time.

  Tom Carmichael had made a mixture of brine with some herbs in it known only to himself. When the pig had been gutted, it was pulled up high over the heads of us all to set in the cool night air. Its carcass hung up there without a head, without legs, swaying just a little in the breeze. They had scraped all the hair from the head and now they split it into two and Mrs Hanrahan took half which she added to the liver and the heart in the Coolgardie safe.

  In the morning when the flesh of the carcass had set, they lowered it from the tree and split it in half with an axe. They took the two halves and lowered them into a barrel almost full of the brine Tom Carmichael had prepared. Joe’s father left a broom handle beside the barrel and we were told that each time we passed the barrel we had to stop and give the brine a stir. It must never be left to settle or it wouldn’t cure the pig evenly.

  We lived with that pig in the barrel for three weeks. I heard its screams in my sleep. The screams followed me into sleep and I would wake and sit up sweating. Then I would bury my face in the pillow and sob, ‘Oh pig! pig! pig!’ a call that I had made to horses once when I was little to help me bear pain, but now this cry wasn’t like that. I wasn’t even calling pigs to a meal; I was crying for pardon to my damp pillow, pardon from one solitary pig for the part I had played in murdering him.

  After the pig had been pickled, the two halves were lifted from the brine and hung in the smoke shed Tom Carmichael had built and they started to make it into bacon. You could flavour the bacon by burning different leaves – some people burnt the limbs of orange trees or lemon trees. They made a great smoke when they were green. Tom Carmichael liked the flavour of the gum leaves, so he dragged in piles of leaves from the gum-trees and set fire to them between the sheets of galvanised iron and piled on more green leaves till the thick, heavy smoke moved up and filled the little hessian hut and the smoke came through the hessian like the breath of the bush itself. And Joe and I had to keep that fire going for a week. We would pull in the leaves and pile them up and the smoke oozed out all around the little hut and the smell of eucalyptus was everywhere. Joe’s mother told us that we were good boys and because we did all this work she promised us that we would never get another cold for two years. And she was right, too, because we didn’t.

  When the pig had become bacon, Tom Carmichael cut rashers from the carcass and gave me a big parcel to take home with me. Mother fried it up with yellow eggs and she made the bacon crisp and it was beautiful. I never associated the bacon with the live pig. It seemed so long ago because that bacon lasted over a year in Joe’s house. He often talked about it.

  That was life with Joe’s family. It was hard for them to live without getting any dirt on the floor, because in the winter Joe and Andy and Bill would bring mud in on their boots. But all the kitchens of the houses in Turalla shone with polish. Each morning you had to blacken your boots; the stoves were covered in Zebra stove polish and polished with a brush until the black iron sent out gleams from its surface. If there was only a board floor with no linoleum, the boards were white and clean. My mother told me that when she was a little girl, she used to crawl round the floor on her hands and knees remembering the heroine of a book she had read who always polished the heads of the nails on the floor; and my mother did that when she was little.

  OLD MRS BILSON

  Sometimes when Joe and I were out rabbiting beyond McLeod’s we would see old Mrs Bilson standing upright in the rye grass. Around her were the open paddocks and the sky. Beyond her, on the top of a rise, a tiny fence was a tripwire for the clouds racing ahead of the pursuing wind. Their shadows passed over Mrs Bilson, then went on. After a while she would walk over to the haystack near the bottom fence and stand behind it amongst the half-dozen fowls that made it their home.

  She was old and thin and straight and grey like a post.

  ‘People say she is mad’, I said to Joe. ‘That’s what they say. What do you reckon?’

  Joe was sitting on the grass pulling burrs out of his socks. He stopped to consider this. ‘She’s not as mad as they think’, he said finally. ‘That’s what I reckon. You just watch her. Her trouble is she can’t remember nothing. But that’s not being mad.’

  ‘No’, I said. ‘That’s not being mad.’ I often forgot things.

  We sometimes called in at the house where Mrs Bilson lived with her daughter and a bloke by the name of ‘Pudden’ Sampson who did all the work round the place. He could play ‘Home Sweet Home’ and ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ on the mouth organ as good as any bloke I’ve ever heard, but he always seemed to be itchy and used to scratch himself against the post like a horse. He blamed the flannels he wore.

  ‘New flannels give you the itch’, he told Joe and me one day, ‘but not “Doctor” flannel. “Doctor” flannel soaks up the sweat on ya and you don’t get a cold or nothin’.’ After that Joe and I were authorities on flannels. We’d say to anyone who mentioned flannels to us, ‘You can’t beat “Doctor” flannel – they never gives you colds or nothin’ when you wear ‘em.’

  Why ‘Pudden’ Sampson worked for Mrs Herbert was because you could work for years for her without working. She only milked six cows. She kept a couple of sows he had to feed. Sometimes Joe and I helped him to feed them, so we got on all right with him.

  Mrs Herbert lived in an old place that crouched like a hen in a nest of box-thorn. We’d just drop in when we were going hunting round the paddock and we would say, ‘How are ya goin’’, or something like that, to Mrs Herbert. It was just by way of being friendly. We meant nothing. As Joe said, it cost nothing to be polite and Mrs Herbert was often good for a couple of scones. It didn’t take much to get Joe and me into the kitchen table for half an hour or so.

  If we stayed at the table for long, Mrs Bilson
would come out of the back room. She was Mrs Herbert’s mother and that’s where she lived. The two of them lived with ‘Pudden’ Sampson, but he lived in a room built on the end of the buggy shed and only came inside to eat, which he was pretty good at.

  I think there must have been a time before old Herbert died when Mrs Herbert’s family had lived there too. But they seemed to have all shot through for some reason or other and Mrs Herbert was left with her mother.

  Mrs Herbert spoke to her mother like a kid when anyone was around. Like she’d take over when her mother came into the room and put her hand on her arm and say, ‘Over here now mother … steady … on the easy chair now. Wait till I fix it. Now sit down. That’s good. Stop there. I’ll get you a cup of tea. Alan and Joe have just come in. You know Alan and Joe, don’t you? They meet you down the paddock. This is Alan and Joe, mother. You know …’

  Her words were kind but her eyes never seemed to fit them somehow.

  I don’t think she was ever talking to Mrs Bilson when she went on like this. When Joe and I were there she’d talk to us, but pretend she was talking to Mrs Bilson. Mrs Bilson knew she was talking to Joe and me, but she never said anything. She just sat there looking.

  Sometimes Mrs Herbert would talk about Mrs Bilson while Mrs Bilson watched us carefully from the other side of the table.

  ‘It’s hard to work out what she sees in wandering round the paddock. Old people get like that sometimes. They walk around and enjoy themselves, then they stop for a while and have a look around. Mother gets a lot of pleasure out of things like that. She goes down to the haystack and looks for eggs. She never seems to be in a hurry to get home. If she finds an egg, she brings it back to me. It’s an interest I suppose. But I don’t like her climbing over the fence into the big paddock.’ Mrs Herbert stopped pouring the tea and held the teapot motionless in her hand while she looked at Mrs Bilson and wondered why she went into the big paddock. ‘She lives in a world of her own’, she said at last, shaking her head and getting back to pouring out the tea. ‘If only she wasn’t so helpless.’

  While Mrs Herbert was talking, Mrs Bilson would close her eyes and begin pulling back into herself like a snail after it has been touched, back into the silence and the dark. I used to think of her sitting a way back in there, away from it all. She would come out before we left, just long enough to mutter angrily, ‘Helpless! eh!’

  Old Mrs Bilson wasn’t that bloody helpless. Joe and I knew her a damn sight better than Mrs Herbert ever did. We often met her down the paddock when we were setting traps at the pop holes along the fence. She never needed any help down the paddock. She’d hold the spring down on the trap with her foot; she’d chop a stake with a tomahawk – she was a champion. But we shut up about that.

  Mrs Herbert liked her being helpless. Sometimes while we were there, Mrs Rogers (she lived down the road about a mile and loved talking) would drive in to get some eggs or something. One day she said, ‘And how’s your mother today, Mrs Herbert?’

  ‘Oh, not bad. She keeps quite well. She gets rheumatics a bit. But all old people suffer from that.’ Mrs Herbert loved talking about sufferings of all sorts, especially Mrs Bilson’s.

  ‘She looks well.’ Mrs Rogers didn’t like giving people this pleasure.

  ‘Yes, I think she does. I feed her up. It’s her mind that’s the trouble. Her memory’s quite gone. She just can’t carry on a conversation. She wanders off on some subject that has nothing to do with what you are talking about.’ She spoke as if she were blaming Mrs Bilson.

  ‘Yes, that would be a problem. You’re lucky she is able to look after herself.’

  ‘Yes, that’s a blessing. I’d hate to have to send her to a Home.’

  ‘As long as she doesn’t take to wandering there should be no need for that.’

  ‘I hope not. That will be two shillings. The hens are starting to lay again; I should have plenty next week.’

  Mrs Rogers looked hard at Mrs Bilson while she paid Mrs Herbert for the eggs.

  ‘She was trying to work out whether Mrs Bilson was square dinkum or not’, Joe explained later.

  ‘I often see her down the paddock.’ Mrs Rogers made the remark sound like an accusation.

  ‘She does wander a bit’, Mrs Herbert was quick to explain. ‘You know – round the paddock and that, nothing to worry about. But up to date she always comes home at night … touch wood. She never stops out after dark. She’s always been interested in cows and she likes looking at the pigs. She would never wander far away. Everyone knows her. I never worry over her. What’s the use. Anyway, the boys keep an eye on her. Joe and Alan often bring her home, don’t you boys?’

  We agreed we always watched out for her. The truth of the matter was that Mrs Bilson kept her eye on us.

  ‘Don’t you tell that old bitch where I am’, she warned us once, after we had given her a butt to smoke down behind the pig-house. ‘She’s got eyes like a hawk.’ Mrs Bilson started to chant, ‘Don’t go there, don’t do that, don’t sit in pig shit, don’t stand in cow shit, tidy your hair …’

  As Joe said once, ‘No one would ever think to look at Mrs Bilson that she could swear like a trooper.’

  ‘I wonder why she hates her daughter so much’, I said.

  ‘You can’t never tell’, said Joe. ‘She was boss once you see; now she’s not. That would get on your nerves you know. I can’t stand being bossed around; old Mrs Bilson don’t like it either.’

  ‘But I’ve never heard Mrs Herbert bossing her much.’

  ‘That scrap’s over’, said Joe. ‘Mrs Bilson’s just working her way round the ring waiting to hop in and have another go. One of these days she’ll king Mrs Herbert. It will be because of something she says like.’

  But Mrs Bilson never seemed to be interested in trying to take a rise out of Mrs Herbert. She just didn’t trust her. Mind you, the way she talked to you sometimes made you want to answer her back. She’d talk to you as if the words she was saying were stones. She’d throw them at you, then veer off and throw them in another direction. Like she’d say, ‘I’ve seen the day when I chopped wood, milked cows, carted wood, reared kids and bedded down with the biggest bastard that ever booted a calf …’ Then she’d go all sad-like and moan while she rocked from side to side, ‘But I should never have taken the kids to the Show that day … but they loved going out … Ah … they were fine kids … in those days they were.’ She’d suddenly throw her head back and yell out savage and sharp – ‘To hell with her.’ Then she’d start to cry without her face crumpling up. She’d just cry while her face was looking across the paddock.

  Joe’s mother told him that Mrs Bilson had had a hard life. ‘She’d had four sons who’d shot through to get away from the old man’, Joe reckoned. Joe had an idea they all came to no good. She had a daughter who stuck to her after the old man died, mainly because the bloke she married wanted to get hold of the farm. Then he kicked the bucket and now there were only the two of them left.

  What interested me about Mrs Bilson was what she was thinking. Joe was more interested in what she did.

  ‘All right’, said Joe. ‘You reckon Mrs Bilson knows that her daughter thinks she’s mad. Well now, why doesn’t she tell her off about it? Why doesn’t she say to her, “You think I’m mad you stupid old bitch. You’re bloodywell mad yourself.”?’

  Joe seemed to think this was a clever retort.

  ‘I think Mrs Bilson’s only mad at times’, I said. ‘But she’s never so mad as not to know what’s happening around her. That’s how I reckon she thinks. As a matter of fact, I think a hell of a lot of old Mrs Bilson.’

  ‘Yes, now that is, at this moment’, said Joe. ‘But Mrs Bilson is under the whip. She just won’t do the distance.’

  We’d talked about Mrs Bilson like this when she was with us. We’d just go on talking as if she wasn’t there because half the time she didn’t seem to listen. We’d give her a butt (I never knew where Joe collected the tin of butts he always seemed to have in his pocket), the
n I’d lean back against a sheaf of hay and I’d say, ‘Hey, Mrs Bilson! Where did you knock about when you were a kid?’

  If it was a day when she wasn’t feeling too good, she’d mumble something or other and keep looking across the paddock.

  ‘It’s one of her bad days’, Joe said one day. ‘Let her have a rest for a while. You never know, she might come good.’

  ‘She likes talking’, I said. ‘I think it does her good. I like to have a talk to her every day.’ While I was speaking, Mrs Bilson kept looking at me. She suddenly looked up at the sky and called out, ‘There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her; nothing at all.’

  ‘There you are’, said Joe. ‘There’s no end to talk like that. She’d go on for weeks if you let her.’

  ‘But I’m tellin’ you this, Jim Bilson, fat and big as you are, I won’t have a bar of it. Tell ya own lies and rot in hell for it.’

  ‘It’s a funny thing about Jim Bilson’, said Joe. ‘Mother told me she can remember Jim Bilson when she was a little girl. He was a big, handsome bugger she reckons.’

  ‘I always wanted a daughter’, moaned Mrs Bilson. ‘Just one daughter to look after me in me old age.’

  ‘Well’, said Joe. ‘That’s one thing she got and a lot of bloody good it did her. She wanted a daughter and she got Mrs Herbert, who is always frightened her mother’ll get lice in her hair.’

  ‘Her name was Rose Buckley’, went on Mrs Bilson. ‘You couldn’t fool me, Jim. I knew what you were doing down at the pub ever Friday night.’

  ‘I’ll tell you a funny thing’, said Joe. ‘Mum has an old photograph taken at the annual Sports Meeting when she was a girl. There was a group there … Jim Bilson was one of them. Then this girl, Rose Buckley, who worked at the pub; she was there. My grandmother was there too.’

  ‘Well, I took her in’, said Mrs Bilson. ‘I reared her.’ She kept repeating, ‘I took her in … I took her in …’ as if remembering something heard, till I caught hold of her hand. She straightened up and looked hurriedly around her as if there were a jailer somewhere. ‘Is that bitch looking for us?’