Hammers Over the Anvil

by Alan Marshall

  To be first to the factory in the morning was regarded by these men as an achievement. It was a reason for boasting. It carried a suggestion that this evidence of early rising was proof of a hard worker.

  Pat Corrigan was always first. It was no use trying to beat him. Everyone recognised this. ‘To beat Pat to the factory you’d have to bring in the cows before the dog was awake’, a farmer once said.

  Sometimes in the summer when the carolling of awakening magpies brought me blinking from my bed, I watched the long sun stretching its arms across the grass and I felt I was the first up in all the world, it was an exalting experience. Then, across the paddock, I would hear the grating of brimming milk cans being pushed on to a wagon and Pat’s shout to a reluctant horse, ‘Hold up there.’ I didn’t mind sharing the first of the morning with him. He owned it.

  There were times on such mornings when I hurried through the feeding of my pets with still an hour to go before breakfast. When this happened I would bound out on to the roadway and wait until Pat’s wagon came over the rise, pulled by old Meg, the half-draught horse with the walleye and the dragging hooves. Pat had had her shoes tipped with steel to counter the wear of her tired gait, but she wore the toes flat just the same.

  When Pat saw me standing there waiting for him he pulled up.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Corrigan.’

  ‘No time for talking. Hop up now. What are you doin’ up and about at this hour?’

  ‘I wanted to go with you.’

  I think he liked me saying that. If he were in a bad mood it took him out of it and he would smile. I’d sit beside him on the dashboard and, if he was running early, he would take out a plug of tobacco and shave a pipeful on to his palm while Meg stood with drooping head waiting. When he rubbed his hands together to shred the tobacco you could hear the rasping of his palms.

  ‘Plenty of time this morning, Mr Corrigan’, I said.

  ‘Time enough’, he said shortly. ‘None of them have a dog’s chance of beating me. There’s only one bloke I’ve got to watch and that’s Conneady. He told Bill Young that he’d beat me to the hoist one of these mornings.’

  He lit his pipe and drew on it with swift puffs as if mention of Conneady had made him aware that he was wasting time.

  ‘Come on now.’ He slapped Meg’s rump with the loose reins and she moved into a trot.

  It was good listening to the farmers talking while they unloaded the milk and washed the cans. Pat just stood around after the carts started coming in. His cans were emptied, washed and stacked in the wagon. All his morning’s work was behind him. He stood there enjoying a situation that brought attention upon him and I stood behind him enjoying it too.

  He chipped the blokes coming in late: ‘Sleep in this morning, Harry?’ It made me feel good somehow. I liked being first at the factory better than anything.

  One fine morning I stood by the side of the road waiting for Pat to come over the rise. He was late. I kept looking up the road towards the factory to see if any wagons were ahead of him. I’d never known Pat to be so late. At last he appeared, urging Meg along at her fastest trot. He kept looking anxiously up the road along which Conneady would be travelling. He pulled Meg back on her haunches beside me and exclaimed urgently, ‘Hop up, now. I’m late. Hurry up.’

  I clambered up on to the dashboard beside him and hung on. Meg was prancing like a three-year-old and she jumped forward with a jerk when he loosened the rein.

  ‘Bloody bastard!’ he kept repeating. ‘I oughta bloodywell be shot. It’s a bloody bastard!’

  He lashed Meg with a switch he had cut from the hedge. I clung to the dashboard which bucked under us like a young horse. We bounced along the track, the cans rattling.

  ‘What’s a bloody bastard, Mr Corrigan?’ I gasped at last.

  ‘Cut out that bloody swearing’, snapped Pat angrily. ‘A kid like you shouldn’t be swearing like a bloke twice his age. What you want’s a good clip on the ear’, and then turned to his own worries, ‘It’s a bastard, I say!’

  ‘I don’t usually say “bloody bastard”, Mr Corrigan’, I explained.

  ‘Shut up!’

  The cans seemed to be rattling more than usual and I turned to look at them. No milk was splashing from beneath their lids.

  ‘Hey, Mr Corrigan!’ I said in astonishment. ‘You’ve forgot your bloody milk.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about’, he shouted. ‘Shut up and stop that bloody swearing or I’ll kick your bloody arse, crippled and all as you are.’

  I was silenced as if a trusted horse had lashed out at me. I wanted to think about it.

  By the time we were trotting beneath the hoist I had concluded Pat was touchy about the quantity of milk he was getting and that the cans were probably only half full.

  Beneath the hoist Pat stood up in the wagon and shouted at one of the men looking down through the square opening above him.

  ‘Has Conneady been here yet?’

  ‘No one’s been here yet’, said the man, ‘but you certainly cut it fine this morning, Pat. Hook ’em on before the next cart gets here.’

  Pat was suddenly confused. ‘I just ran down the same as usual, so mark me up as first here and that’ll do for the time being. I’ll be back later with the milk. I’ve got a few jobs I want to do first.’

  ‘No bloody milk!’ exclaimed the man. ‘Well, I’ll go to buggery!’

  ‘Right, but don’t forget I’m first here’, said Pat. ‘Make a note of that now.’

  ‘You are the first here all right,’ said the man, ‘but …’

  ‘Good’, said Pat. ‘Now I’ll go and get the milk.’

  He gathered in the reins and stirred old meg into a walk for the return home. I sat beside him wondering about the strangeness of grown-ups.

  Pat was in no hurry. He took his plug of tobacco from his pocket and began cutting slices from the side where pale inner leaves were visible.

  ‘It’s this way’, he said to me, feeling some explanation was necessary. ‘I was down at the pub last night and got stuck into it. I was out to it till about an hour ago.’

  He looked at me, but I just had nothing to say.

  ‘Thanks for taking me to the factory, Mr Corrigan’, I said when we reached our gate. ‘I think you’d better let me off here. This’ll do.’

  He pulled up and I climbed down to the ground.

  ‘Get home now and hop into some breakfast’, he said, ‘and cut out that bloody swearing. It’s not for the likes of you.’

  ‘All right, Mr Corrigan. Now I’d better be going I think.’

  ‘You know’, said Pat, bending down from the dashboard and looking at me, ‘I think that leg of yours is getting a bit better. Giddup Meg.’ He hit the old mare with a switch and she moved off at a trot.

  MR THOMAS

  Bill Thomas was the local blacksmith. He was also an Elder of the Presbyterian church. His face had been the battlefield of many an emotional conflict and the blows of defeat had left lines of tension engraved upon it.

  He must have thought a lot about sex. His gaze did not linger upon women – Elders of the church were free of lust – but even his averted gaze carried the knowledge of what a brief glance had suggested. He leant towards you as he spoke, smiling ingratiatingly and displaying teeth as strong as anvils.

  He dressed in black when going to church on Sunday mornings. He walked ahead of his wife who followed like a conscience. She was a little woman. She was short and thin, but she smiled at me sometimes. ‘She has a sweet face’, somebody said. I thought she had.

  When they reached the church he stood aside for her to enter first; he was always courteous to women. He bowed and spoke to them all. He didn’t do this to the husbands.

  There was a girl he spoke to. Her name was Nellie Bolster. She was an orphan from a Home and had come to Turalla to live with Mrs Frank who was always ill. Now Mrs Frank didn’t have to do any work at all; Nellie did it.

  Nellie used to call in at the blacksmith’s shop and
talk to Mr Thomas. She would sit on the anvil but before she sat on it Mr Thomas would wipe it clean with a piece of cotton waste. He was a clean man and didn’t want her to dirty her frock. He helped her to sit down and while he helped her his hands escaped him and moved over her thighs and bottom. Nellie didn’t mind.

  One day a kid at school told me that Nellie was up the duff. I didn’t know what this meant but I knew it must be pretty terrible because this kid heard his mother telling someone and when she discovered him listening she roared hell out of him.

  Joe told me it meant Nellie was going to have a baby.

  ‘All girls have babies’, I said. I knew far more about girls than Joe.

  ‘Yes, but they’re not allowed to have them until they grow up’, Joe explained.

  ‘Nellie’s grown up – well, nearly’, I said. I was patient with Joe.

  Mr Thomas must have thought she wasn’t grown up, because he was terribly worried over her. He told the men who came into the blacksmith’s shop. He said, ‘If I could get my hands on the man who got her into trouble I’d murder him. To take advantage of an orphan is as low as you can get.’

  When he said this he lifted the horse’s leg and shod it.

  Everyone admired Mr Thomas. ‘You mightn’t like him’, I heard a man say, ‘but you’ve got to give him his due. He’s even offered to pay her expenses because she’s an orphan and he’s sorry for Mrs Frank.’

  Mr Thomas went to see Mrs Frank. When she heard Nellie was going to have a baby she collapsed and had to go to bed, so Mr Thomas had to talk to her in bed.

  ‘Don’t you worry, Mrs Frank’, he told her. ‘I’ll attend to the lot.’

  ‘After all I’ve done for her’, moaned Mrs Frank.

  ‘Yes, yes, I know’, murmured Mr Thomas.

  ‘I couldn’t possibly keep a girl like that around the place now all this has happened’, said Mrs Frank.

  ‘I agree, I agree’, said Mr Thomas, loosening the collar around his neck and grimacing. ‘There’s an orphanage at Ballarat that attends to such matters. I’ll …’

  ‘Will you?’ asked Mrs Frank with such relief that she sat up in her nightgown.

  ‘I will’, said Mr Thomas, lowering his eyes.

  ‘Oh, you’re a good man!’ sighed Mrs Frank. Her face took on an expression of distaste. ‘I’d like you to arrange everything with Nellie. I just can’t talk to her in my condition – with things being as they are – you know – it’s so sordid and everything.’

  ‘Leave it to me’, said Mr Thomas, feeling brighter.

  Nellie wouldn’t tell who was the father of the child. She just looked at the people who asked her. They said she was stubborn as a mule. The ladies wanted to know more than the men, but they couldn’t break Nellie down. Nellie remained silent as a mourner.

  Mr Thomas took her by train to Ballarat and we never heard of her again. She was ‘no good’, they said, but I had always liked her. She used to laugh a lot.

  THE OSTRICH MAN

  ‘The unknown frightens animals. When I was a boy a horse dropped dead in the shafts of a wagon standing in the Turalla railway yards. The long train carrying Wirths’ Menagerie and Circus had just drawn into the station and, as the elephants and camels walked down the ramp from their railway truck, the horses gathered in the yard panicked and fled, their carts leaping behind them.

  Father explained that animals with weak hearts sometimes dropped dead with fright at the sight of strange objects. When the first cars and motorbikes appeared on the roads, horses bolted in terror and otherwise tranquil cows burst through fences in their efforts to escape from the reports of exhausts and the panting of motors.

  But the horses and cows of Turalla had never experienced mass terror until the ostriches came. After that, ostriches paced through the nightmare-haunted nights of every cud-chewing road cow and deserted horse for months afterwards.

  The coming of the ostriches was announced by Mr Goodman. He came before them and they called him ‘The Ostrich Man’. Joe said to me, ‘He’s a marvel; he knows more about ostriches than your father knows about horses.’

  ‘You stupid bugger’, I said, ‘that’s impossible.’

  ‘Well, nearly as much.’ Joe always knew when he had gone too far.

  Mr Goodman waited for the ostriches at the pub. While he waited he talked about them. He explained that it was the feathers on their wings that were worth money. In fact he seemed to think there was more money in plucking ostriches than in milking cows.

  I explained to Joe that Mr Goodman didn’t know what he was talking about.

  ‘When does he pluck them!’ I exclaimed. ‘Every bloody night or what? The bastard’s mad.’

  ‘Listen!’ said Joe. ‘When it comes to money, you and I don’t know the time of the day. We reckon ten bob’s a fortune. Ten bob!! God Almighty!! Argh!’ Joe spat his contempt of such a paltry sum. I’d never seen him so contemptuous of money. Ten bob had suddenly been revealed to him as worthless.

  ‘I tell you. Ten bob wouldn’t buy a feather off an ostrich’s arse. Do you know what ostrich feathers cost?’ This rhetorical question seemed to demand an answer, judging by Joe’s expectant eyes. I had nothing to say so Joe supplied the answer.

  ‘Ask Miss Tittell Brune’, he announced to the paddocks around us, making them a party to the discussion by a wave of his hand. ‘Ask her. She’d know what ostrich feathers cost if ever anyone knew.’

  I doubted Joe’s knowledge of ostrich feathers.

  ‘I’ll ask Mr Goodman’, I said.

  Mr Goodman would only talk to me when he was drunk so I had to wait till he was well pissed before I asked him.

  Joe’s faith in Miss Tittell Brune arose from the fact that we both saved cigarette cards and Joe had twenty ‘Gold Girls’. You got them out of Milo cigarettes. They were pictures of beautiful women and all around them was gold. The women were all actresses and one of them was Miss Tittell Brune. Joe was in love with Miss Tittell Brune. In the card he had of her she was looking down, but her eyes were looking up. You couldn’t see anything of her except a pug dog which she held against her bosom. In front of the lot she held an ostrich feather fan.

  Joe said she held the fan in front of her to hide her bosom, but I think she was trying to hide the pug dog. But she didn’t hide it because you could see its head sticking out from the feathers. Joe reckoned the fan was worth a tenner. I wouldn’t have given a quid for it – but I would have given anything for the pug dog.

  I stopped Mr Goodman on his way home from the pub.

  ‘Mr Goodman’, I said, ‘how much would that there fan cost that Miss Tittell Brune is holding in front of her bosom?’ – and I handed him the card.

  He held it away from him the length of his arm, and held his head back the length of his neck, then he half-closed his eyes and said, ‘That fan would knock her back a fiver, maybe more.’ Mr Goodman then dropped the card on to the ground and held on to the fence.

  Joe was standing well back. He was wary of drunks.

  ‘A fiver’, I told him when I came up.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you?’

  ‘No. You said a tenner.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘A fiver’, I said. I was pretty good at figures.

  The ostriches came to Turalla because of Mrs Carruthers. She was the wife of the local squatter, an extremely wealthy man who, after taking up land at Turalla in the early days, had increased his holdings by shrewd speculations until most of the farmers in the district were now either his tenants or his debtors.

  He bought a car, employed a chauffeur and sat back to enjoy his wealth in a home that towered above the garden of English trees like an English mansion.

  Mrs Carruthers was his suitable wife. She patronised the church, the peacocks in the garden, the people of Turalla and all the forelock-pulling farmers that milked her husband’s cows.

  She loved obsequiousness and servility and looked with suspicion on independence and courage.

  She frighte
ned hell out of Joe and me. Not that she was aware of us; we were always hidden in the dust of her passing car.

  Mrs Carruthers had been to South Africa on a holiday and when she came back she brought the ostriches with her. They must have been good ostriches or Mrs Carruthers wouldn’t have bought them. She brought Mr Goodman with the ostriches. She was going to start an ostrich farm – anyway that’s what they said at the pub. Mr Goodman told them.

  They had left the ostriches in Melbourne or somewhere and Mr Goodman had to wait for them at Turalla. He used to describe to those who paid for his drinks how he was going to bring the ostriches to Turalla.

  ‘I’ll drive them from Boorcan’, he said. ‘I want four well-mounted blokes who can head them off at side roads and keep them moving.’

  Now this sounds a stupid thing, but that is what the ostrich man said.

  I said to Joe, ‘Have you ever heard of a horse that can head an ostrich?’

  Joe considered this. ‘Carbine could’, he said.

  ‘Well, nobody’s going to ride Carbine’, I said.

  ‘You never know what the ostrich man’s got up his sleeve’, reflected Joe.

  Boorcan was a railway siding eight miles from Turalla. A three-chain road joined Turalla with Boorcan, and along this wide roadway, now thick with grass, the road cattle and horses used to graze. These were the cattle and horses that farmers turned loose to save the grass in their own paddocks. Sometimes a man working in the district kept a cow on the roads. He would run it in and milk it after he knocked off work. It kept his family in milk.

  All the road stock had a council tag attached to a chain around their necks. This enabled the pound-keeper to recognise privileged cows and horses at a glance and he wouldn’t impound them.

  Since the only traffic on the roads round Turalla were horse-drawn vehicles, wandering stock was in no danger of being struck by speeding cars. Mrs Carruthers wouldn’t allow her chauffeur to drive very fast. If he saw a cow ahead of him asleep on the road, he would honk his horn and the cow would rise heavily to her feet and trot off the road, her udder swinging.