‘She’s back again now’, said Joe. ‘Hey! Mrs Bilson. We’re going to pinch some apples down at Forster’s orchard. Do you want to be in on it?’
When we asked Mrs Bilson to come pinching apples with us, she always jumped to her feet and wanted to be in it straight away. I thought this was because she wanted us to get going before she had time to think about it and change her mind, but Joe reckoned it was because it was something she had wanted to do all her life but never had the chance.
When we were going to sneak into a place to pinch fruit, we all changed somehow. We talked in whispers like crooks and sneaked along the fences like farm dogs ganged up to kill sheep. We walked in a crouch and I swung my crutches wide so as to keep low. We went through the grass like hares. Mrs Bilson always took over. She was the boss. We just did what she said. It came natural to us to do what she said. We just knew she had the game by the throat. It didn’t start off that way. Joe would have a plan and I would have a plan and he’d say we’d do this and I’d say we’d do that, but it always ended up by Mrs Bilson, with her long neck pointing down at us, saying firmly, ‘Alan, you know the dog now. Take this bit of bread and crawl under the back fence. Sneak along till you reach the apple shed. Make friends with the dog and bring him back here. Once you get him here, I’ll keep patting him while you and Joe fill your pockets with apples.’
It always worked. It was bloody marvellous. I knew every dog about the place. One day old Bluey Harvey caught a glimpse of Joe and me in the orchard and started bellowing out like a bull. Old Mrs Bilson always told us, ‘Remember – it’s every man for himself when the whips are cracking. Get to hell out of the place once somebody sees you.’
Joe and I always felt a great need of Mrs Bilson when anybody was trying to cut us off. We’d follow behind her like a couple of pups and I tell you, she could go. She went over the grass, holding her dress above her knees and bent like a question mark. She didn’t give a damn about showing her legs. Joe said to me once, ‘I can’t stand seeing Mrs Bilson’s legs above the knees. They are so bloody thin. You’d think they would break. I’m buggered if I know how she walks with legs as thin as that.’
If we could keep Mrs Bilson in sight we’d be set. She’d slip under a fence like a hare. She never waited to get her dress off a barb – she just kept going. She used to worry over it a bit when we were sitting in safety behind the stack. ‘When I was a girl’, she’d say, ‘we wore so many clothes that we’d walk a mile to go through a gate. We were too bloody frightened to climb over it.’
We’d sit there eating apples and if Mrs Bilson took her mind and went off with it somewhere we’d still talk about her while she sat there beside us. We talked in our ordinary voices and when we wanted her to be in it with us we would raise our voices. Mrs Bilson knew the difference between the two ways of speaking. When she was expected to be in on it, she seemed to stretch herself as if she had just woke up. After that, if she got up and started walking, she’d move in a crouch like a fox.
I’ve seen Mrs Bilson running long-legged over the grass with Joe just behind her and me bounding along behind them both. When I came up to them their heads would be sticking out from behind the stack, Mrs Bilson’s head just above Joe’s. She was alive then. You could see it in her eyes. She was thinking quickly and she was moving good too, and it would be all because we heard Mrs Herbert’s voice coming across the paddock – ‘Mum! Mum! Come home at once. Your tea is getting cold. Mum! Do you hear me?’
When we were going home, Mrs Bilson gradually became older until, when we reached the back door, Mrs Herbert would exclaim, ‘Mother! You look exhausted. You know you are seventy-six. I tell you, you’ll never see eighty if you keep on like this. Why do you do it? You’re killing yourself.’ Then she would say to us, ‘How is she today – wandering? Did you get any sense out of her?’
‘She’s always sensible with us, Mrs Herbert’, I said.
‘Has she kept herself clean?’
‘Hell yes’, said Joe. ‘She’s the cleanest woman we’ve ever met.’
We had to be very careful not to get any pig shit on Mrs Bilson. Nothing made Mrs Herbert more wild than that. She didn’t mind cow shit, which was natural, but a smear of pig shit on Mrs Bilson’s dress made her froth at the mouth.
‘Have you been climbing into the pigsty again, mother?’ she would exclaim in anguish. ‘Look at the filth on your clothes. You must never go near those pigs. I’ve told you again and again.’ Then she turned to Joe and me, ‘Please see she doesn’t get filth on her, boys. I’m always scraping stuff of her frock.’
Mrs Herbert didn’t like Joe and I using the word ‘shit’, especially in front of her mother; so we couldn’t say it till we were down the paddock the next day and met Mrs Bilson again.
‘Hey, Mrs Bilson’, said Joe after we were sitting down for a yarn, ‘Why can’t we say “shit” to you in front of Mrs Herbert?’
‘The old bitch is mad, that’s why’, said Mrs Bilson.
I don’t think she liked Mrs Herbert much. Mind you, she didn’t hate her or anything like that; she just didn’t give a bugger for her.
Joe’s mother told Joe a lot about Mrs Bilson. She said to him – ‘Don’t ever be hard in your judgements on the auld lady, God bless her. It’s meself that knows the truth of it all and wild horses wouldn’t be after draggin’ it from me.’
Then she told Joe and Joe told me and it was sad to know it. It was too big for Joe to hold.
‘I’d like to die on the grass’, Mrs Bilson told us, pulling a tuft of it and holding it against her face.
Joe didn’t like her talking like this. He’s a Catholic and death meant a hell of a lot to him.
‘Joe and I will be sorry if you die, Mrs Bilson’, I said.
‘Yes, yes’, she said quickly. Then laughed. ‘No one will ever know the truth of things. I’d like to have told you two kids – but that’s how it is …’
Joe looked thoughtfully at the sky, then leant over and touched her shoulder. ‘Mum told us, Mrs Bilson; we know Mrs Herbert is not your daughter. Don’t ever worry about us knowing.’
Mrs Bilson sat very still when Joe told her this. She just kept looking across the paddocks. I felt we shouldn’t be there. I nudged Joe and we went away.
Joe and I were never shy with Mrs Bilson. She was a mate to us, another kid like ourselves.
‘You know why I like Mrs Bilson’, Joe said to me.
‘No. Why?’
‘Because you can sit with her and you just don’t give a bugger. You can say anything you like.’
I felt like that. I said to her once, ‘If ever you want to do a piss, Mrs Bilson, just tell us and we’ll look away. Never piss yourself, for Christ’s sake, or we’ll get into a hell of a row from Mrs Herbert.’
Me saying that seemed to please Mrs Bilson a terrible lot. She smiled and it was a bloody lovely smile.
‘I think I’ll have one now for the hell of it’, she said getting to her feet. She went behind the stack and pissed there.
You couldn’t help but love Mrs Bilson. Like she said once to us, ‘It’s good to be alive in the spring when you are young. The heifers are coming in and the cows chew their cud while lying in the grass. You can smell the breath of them when you shake out the cloth at the back door after tea at night. It comes across the paddock, it does. On frosty nights … yes, I love the frosty nights; they are bloody good.’
There was a frost the night they found her dead in the paddock. She was white as snow, ‘Pudden’ told us, lying on her back near the pigsty with her frosted face looking up at the sky.
‘She ran out into the night when she felt it coming’, ‘Pudden’ said. ‘I’m a light sleeper I am an’ I never heard her go.’
Joe and I stood there in the morning holding our traps, but Mrs Bilson wasn’t there waiting for us. She was dead and in all the world there was no one we could talk to like we had talked to her.
MISS ARMITAGE
Miss Armitage walked to the Post Office every da
y. She was forty.
‘I was engaged once’, she used to say, ‘but my friend was killed in the war.’
Time had robbed this statement of its anguish. She now made it as proof of the gay youth she once possessed, as evidence of a past victory over her pale personality.
She walked to the Post Office to help Mrs Robinson sort the letters and put them into pigeon-holes. Mrs Robinson was the Post Mistress and had a thin mouth. She held her head to one side as if listening at a half-opened door.
Miss Armitage liked Mrs Robinson. ‘We have a lot in common’, she sometimes said.
When Mrs Robinson heard this remark she smiled at the one to whom it was addressed, a smile that admitted the claim while denying the equality it implied.
What they had in common was an interest they fed by opening and reading the most promising-looking letters they stacked in the pigeon-holes, an interest in the secret life of people.
A cast-iron kettle steaming on the stove in the kitchen behind the office supplied the means for lifting the envelope flap. When they read the letter they replaced it and pressed the still-moist flap back in position so that it was hard to tell that the envelope had been opened.
They did not read all the letter – well, not very often. There was so little time. They both suffered from a sense of guilt and this could be detected by the people coming for their mail at the little window beside the pigeon-holes. When they looked at people whose secret lives they knew, their glance was defensive. The people to whom they spoke felt this.
Confident with the information she had obtained from letters, Miss Armitage felt full of importance on her way home. She looked at the people she passed, feeling so superior in her new knowledge that she found it difficult to resist the temptation to make revealing remarks to them. She would not say anything to them about what she had learned in the letters – no, not her. She would merely cast a hint that in all probability Mary Grant was not the virtuous girl she was thought to be.
But she was very careful. Miss Armitage valued her good name. She would have betrayed or lied in order to preserve it.
I liked Miss Armitage, but I did not like Mrs Robinson. I did not know why this was so. Old Mrs Turner, now, there was a woman I liked. She made little pastry-men with currant eyes – she made them especially for me. I always ate the head last. Sometimes I carried them around with me wishing I didn’t have to eat them.
Mrs Turner had a daughter whose name was Gladys. She was about eighteen or something, but I didn’t talk to her much. She had no time for little boys. She liked big boys. I think she must have liked them too much because Mrs Turner told me, when I was sitting in her kitchen, ‘I wish she wasn’t so fond of boys – she’ll get into trouble if she’s not careful.’
I was sitting in her kitchen waiting for the little pastry-men to cook when she told me this.
‘Yes’, I said.
‘Well, it’s no use worrying’, she went on, rubbing her hand across her forehead so that it became marked with flour, ‘That’s what I always say. It’ll get you nowhere. Besides, it keeps you awake at night. There are nights when I don’t get a wink of sleep – well, not till Gladys gets in. Once I hear her safe inside, I’m all right.’
‘Yes’, I said.
I always found Mrs Turner very easy to talk to – that’s why I liked her.
One day, after I had said, ‘Hullo’, she said, ‘Have you heard anyone talking about Gladys down the street?’ Gladys had been away for a month on a holiday. She was staying on a farm and used to help the farmer feed the calves. When Mrs Turner asked me about Gladys, I tell you, I had to think quick. I couldn’t say, ‘They all reckon she’s gone away to have a baby.’ I couldn’t say that, because it’s not the sort of thing you say to anyone. It’s the sort of silly bloody thing Joe would say, but I wouldn’t. I get worried over things like that. Joe reckoned it all started from the Post Office. Miss Armitage opened letters, he reckoned. When you hear things like that it makes you look around to see if anyone’s about. I don’t like knowing it. I’d sooner not know anything like that. I said to Joe, ‘You want to shut up about things like that. You never know what might happen.’
‘What they are saying, Mrs Turner’, I said, ‘is that Gladys is stopping away longer than she should. You see, Mrs Turner’, I went on to explain, ‘they get worried over you, you being home on your own an’ that. They reckon she should be home here. I don’t say nothin’ about it, I don’t.’
‘People are cruel’, Mrs Turner said.
I suppose there are cruel people about. I’ve seen men belting calves with a whip, and once I saw Snarly Burns kick a cow in the guts that was having a calf. I’d have hit him if I’d been a man. When I grow up I’m going to hit him.
When Mrs Turner wrote to Gladys, Miss Armitage recognised her handwriting. She said to Mrs Robinson, as she held the letter in her hand, ‘Mrs Turner is writing to Gladys again – that’s twice this week.’
‘Anything wrong?’ asked Mrs Robinson, turning from the letters she was sorting. Her face was expectant, the eyebrows slightly raised, a pointer dog suspecting game.
‘You just don’t know’, said Miss Armitage, while looking at the letter she held. She turned it over and looked at the flap.
‘Take a quick look; see if what they are saying is true’, said Mrs Robinson, then turned swiftly away as if the movement released her from collaboration.
I met Miss Armitage going home from the Post Office while I was looking for fleas in my dog. I was eating one of Mrs Turner’s little men at the time.
‘What have you got there, Alan?’ she asked me.
‘A little man with currant eyes that Mrs Turner made.’
‘She’s very good to you, isn’t she!’
‘Yes’, I said.
‘She must be a very worried woman’, she said.
‘Mrs Turner’s not worried over anything’, I said firmly.
‘Isn’t she worried over Gladys?’
‘No’, I said. ‘Gladys is having a holiday. Gladys is a lovely girl’, I added. I thought to myself, well bugger Miss Armitage anyway. ‘She’s one of the nicest girls in Turalla’, I went on.
‘I’m glad you think so’, said Miss Armitage. ‘Other people think differently.’
I didn’t know what to say to that.
‘Miss Armitage came to see me’, Mrs Turner told me when I called on her a week later.
I was surprised. ‘She’d be after one of those little men’, I said. ‘She saw me eating one. She’s a hell of a big eater Miss Armitage.’
‘No, she didn’t come for anything. She brought me that fruit cake she made herself.’ She looked at the cake resting on the table and smiled gently at it. ‘She told me she had heard what the people are saying down the street and she put her arm round me and kissed me.’ She thought a moment, then continued, ‘I have been unjust to that good woman.’
She sat down and lowered her head on to her arms. I think she was crying, but I don’t like looking at people when they are sad like that.
I went away.
PAT CORRIGAN
When the morning sun was lying on the top of the grass and shadows were lingering behind the tall gums of the paddock, the milk carts started coming into the butter factory. The young sons of farmers, with their school days still loitering on their faces, sat on the dashboards of wagons laden with cans in which milk slopped and gurgled and squeezed through tight-fitting lids.
The horses they drove were half-draughts with mud-caked legs and hairy throats. Their harness was often held together by wire. The boys wore dungarees patterned with milk stains and patched on the back-seat with squares of new denim. The boots on their feet, stiffened by age and the mud of cowyards, were studded with hob-nails and heeled with iron the shape of horse-shoes.
The many roads leading to the township converged at a junction near the blacksmith’s shop. Down these roads came the hurrying milk wagons, anxious to be first on to that narrow track, the final stretch to the butter factory
where the drivers were forced to follow the wagons ahead of them.
Most of the wagons pulled up at this junction and hurriedly unloaded children with school bags fat with lunches hanging between their shoulders. The children sped away from the carts at a run, making for the school-ground where the shouts of their mates could be heard before they filed into school.
The wagons only stopped long enough for the child to jump to the ground before hurrying on. The drivers slapped their horses with a loose rein, jerked at the bit and urged them to a fast trot.
One section of the butter factory projected from the main building high above the ground. It formed a square archway under which the wagons stopped to unload their milk. When they moved on, others took their place so a continuous procession of wagons passed beneath this raised building, sometimes banking up one behind the other in a long line when there was a delay under the hoist.
The hoist was worked by men in the raised building who looked down on the stationary wagon through an opening in the floorway. They lowered hooked chains which the farmers attached to the handles of each can before jerking off the tight-fitting lid. They stood back while the can rose in the air, hung dangling, then disappeared into the shadowed opening, where hands grabbed it and emptied its contents into a vat. In a moment it appeared again, descending rapidly, free of its load. Another full one took its place.
When the unloading of the milk was finished, the wagon was driven to an open structure where there was a large trough full of hot water. Through a bench connected with its steam jets thrust their noses. Here the cans were scrubbed then placed with their mouths over the jets. Triggered by their weight, the jets hissed clouds of steam that scalded the cans and made them vibrate and rattle.
The farmers, now freed of the need to hurry, talked as they washed the cans. They swapped gossip and complained about the dry weather, the need for rain, the price of cattle. It was a releasing period of communication and they loitered, reluctant to begin the drive home where the obligations of farm life were awaiting them.
Hammers Over the Anvil Page 5