Hammers Over the Anvil

by Alan Marshall

  On the day the ostriches were to arrive at Turalla, Joe and I sat on the top rail of a plantation fence from where we would have a good view of them coming up the Boorcan road. We were excited. There was a straight stretch of about a quarter of a mile to where the road dropped down a hill and disappeared from sight. It was from behind this hill the ostriches would first appear, all pacing evenly side by side, so we imagined, while horsemen with cracking whips, their bodies swaying from side to side with every swing of the horses, held them together in a swift-moving mob.

  Joe and I waited impatiently. ‘Do you reckon an ostrich could break two minutes for a mile?’ I asked him. I had never seen an ostrich.

  ‘It wouldn’t have a dog’s chance’, said Joe. ‘It’d break under pressure.’

  I was trying to work out how an ostrich could break, when Joe suddenly exclaimed – ‘Listen! I can hear horses galloping!’ We gripped the rail and looked towards the crest of the rise, our eyes wide with a sudden disquiet.

  We saw Peter McLeod first. His big grey came over that rise as if tossed into sight by an explosion. Peter was standing upright in the stirrups, his beard divided by the wind of his speed, each half whipping a cheek as he fought to control his horse. He went past us at a mad gallop, his eyes standing out like organ stops.

  ‘What’s happened to his bloody horse?’ I yelled at Joe. ‘It’s got the bit in its teeth. That grey never bolts like that.’

  Like Paul Revere, Peter shouted something as he passed, but what he bloody well said God knows. Joe reckoned he yelled something about mad emus over his shoulder before he was carried away, riding a roll of dust. His frantic horse went round the store corner and disappeared.

  ‘What the hell’s happened!’ exclaimed Joe. ‘Something terrible has happened.’

  ‘Hell, look!’ I shouted.

  Over the crest of the hill came the road horses led by a terrified mare with a yearling colt at her flank. She was followed by an avalanche of horses. There were draughts and ponies and gaunt brood mares with foals at foot. They were all jammed together in a tossing mass of horses. They galloped wildly, colliding, propping, their heads pushed upwards by the rumps of those in front. They bore down on the township. They took four panels out of the post and rail fence that slewed away from the pub; they leapt garden fences, sought escape through open gates. They milled in backyards, knocking over buckets and shying from prams in which squalling babies jerked rattles that brought mothers leaping through back doors squawking like hens.

  On the street the horses tied to the pub hitching-posts pulled back in terror and joined in the rush, their broken reins swinging from the bits.

  Old Jim Sullivan’s half-draught, pulling his milk wagon home at a slow jog-trot, whipped round like a stock pony and joined in the mad gallop. Old Jim grabbed desperately at the reins, then toppled over backwards to the floor of the wagon, wondering what the hell was happening.

  The street was as clean as a whistle once they passed. Not a wagon or a gig or a tethered horse remained.

  ‘May God have mercy on us!’ Joe exclaimed.

  I was considering Joe’s appeal to God with a feeling of bewilderment, when I was startled by what I thought was the sound of distant thunder.

  ‘Hell!’ I shouted. ‘Here come the bloody cows!’

  The cows, following the horses, had come over the rise at a lumbering gallop, many of them with salivary mouths and swaying with exhaustion. The calves held their tails in the air and let out frightened bellows as they galloped close to their mothers. There were cows heavy in calf, steers with glossy hides. There were Ayrshires, Red Polls, Herefords and retired bulls turned out to die. They went through fences as if they weren’t there, stood panting in yards and ran into fowl houses.

  At these scenes of destruction Joe’s nerve left him. ‘I’m getting to hell out of here’, he yelled at me, and prepared to jump.

  ‘You’ll be run over by a cow’, I shouted at him, but Joe was at home with cows. He launched himself off the fence and was swept away with an arm round the neck of an Ayrshire. I have never seen him run so fast. He took great bounds beside the speeding cow, then landed and took off again.

  I watched Joe with wonder. The length of his bounds and the grace of his movements staggered me. I had never realised what Joe was capable of once he had his arm locked round a cow’s neck while hooves pounded all around him.

  At the store corner, Mrs Carruthers’s car swept into sight. The car and Joe’s cow swerved simultaneously. Joe was carried on by his Ayrshire, but the car swerved drunkenly and met the deluge of road cattle head-on.

  In the car was Mrs Carruthers, gossamer-bound, cushion-propped, adventuring forth to see for herself the effect of her efforts to supply Turalla with wings of ostrich feathers.

  Sitting beside her on the back seat was Lady Grassmere, a visitor from Melbourne specially invited for the occasion. Lady Grassmere resembled Mrs Carruthers except for the size of her bust which knocked Miss Tittell Brune rotten and left Mrs Carruthers prancing at the post.

  In the front seat the chauffeur sat stiffly erect, clean as laundry, but by God, he was a Man! He stuck to his post.

  After that first desperate swerve, the meeting of car and cattle was a sight to behold. Oldtimers had never seen the like. There was an instantaneous eruption of legs, horns, whipping tails, brass lamps and cow shit. An arse-up cow shot across the bonnet. The bloody car was covered in cows. From underneath this convulsion of udders the brass horn kept up a desperate honking. There were moans of anguish from shitting cows and ladylike exclamations of alarm from Mrs Carruthers, sounds lost in the deep bellow of a bull with a brass lamp caught up in his balls.

  The car emerged lurching as if drunk and shaking in a frenzy from a racing engine. The anguished chauffeur, already sensing a reduction in salary, clutched the steering wheel as if it were a life belt. I couldn’t see Lady Grassmere and Mrs Carruthers because the windows were covered with cow shit. The car moved blindly forward and finally found refuge in the churchyard.

  I was determined to stick to my rail until the ostriches appeared. They came at last. Their long necks, like masts of distant sailing ships, shot over the horizon in silence. There were ten of them. They were all running strongly but erratically. There seemed to be no purpose behind their running. They veered from one side of the three-chain road to the other. They turned and tried to run back. They stepped high, darting in swift spurts then stopped in bewilderment. Behind them horsemen barred the way. They had to follow the road, but the surroundings confused them. They sometimes collided then sped away from the other. They passed me with their small wings lifted, their naked thighs displayed like girls with their skirts up. I was amazed at the lightness of their tread, their sudden speedy shying away from danger. They could move from a slow gait into rapid movement without pause.

  Where the roads converged at the blacksmith’s corner, they became confused and slowed down. The horsemen that had been following close behind them all the way from Boorcan circled them on their sweating horses, seeking to drive them up the road leading to the special paddock reserved behind Mrs Carruthers’s impressive gateway. The paddock, enclosed by a high cyclone fence behind which they would live, was about a mile away and to reach it the birds had to be turned and taken up a narrow roadway past the church.

  Then stupid Johnny Melford must appear. Mrs Carruthers had the only car in the district, but Johnny had the only motorbike. The motorbike was a BSA with a rubber-belt drive clasping the back wheel. Its speed was controlled by two small levers at the end of a Bowden cable attached to the handlebars. It was started by running desperately beside it until its exhaust burst into life and it took off with the rider hanging on to the handlebars.

  At this stage the rider’s only connection with the earth was through his hands, since with wide-spread legs he floated above the roaring bike until he could land on the saddle. A few yards of wobbling and he was secure.

  Johnny shot amongst the ostriches and panicked the
m. Though his education embraced a great deal of knowledge about cows and horses, it did not include ostriches. I doubt whether he had ever seen a picture of an ostrich. But here he was in the midst of giant birds flaunting naked thighs underneath his very nose.

  Johnny's feet and hands worked very swiftly doing everything necessary to bring a tremendous burst of speed from his bike. His sudden acceleration was a credit to BSA engineers, while the ostriches’ acceleration could only be attributed to God. But Johnny challenged the Almighty and crouched low on his seat, linked to the handles by curved arms.

  He tossed most of the ostriches in the first twenty yards, but one of them had left its weaving companions and kept pace with him as he started up the road past the factory. Johnny really got down to it here. He wiggled levers, crouched low and hugged his bike with love as they approached the hill.

  He was flat out when the ostrich passed him – he was also flat out when he hit the ground. He left the bike like a sprung Jack-in-the-box and began running. He took the stone wall like a hurdler then fell to his hands and knees. The ostrich had disappeared over the hill and after a while Johnny came back and rode his bike down to the blacksmith’s shop where he sat on the anvil and told Mr Thomas, ‘I tell ye, there is a power of strength in them there fat-legged birds. I’ve never travelled faster in me life. I was doin’ sixty when he passed me.’

  Joe wasn’t around next morning; but he turned up about ten o’clock and told me he’d been up to have a look at the place where they kept the ostriches. ‘What I can’t make out’, said Joe, ‘is that there’s only nine of them. What happened to that bloody tenth ostrich?’

  ‘Would it be the one that chased Johnny Melford?’ I asked.

  ‘It could be’, said Joe. ‘Yes, it could be, but then again they might have lost it at the foot of the Mount. They broke up there when they were bringing them in and shot off everywhere. How about asking Mr Goodman?’

  ‘Won’t he be up with the ostriches?’ I said.

  ‘He’s in the pub’, said Joe.

  I went over to the pub and hung around for a while. After a while Mr Goodman staggered out of the bar clutching half a bottle of whisky.

  ‘Hey, Mr Goodman’, I said. ‘Hey, Mr Goodman.’

  He turned and looked at me with lowered head nodding while he backed off.

  ‘Could you tell us what happened to the tenth ostrich, Mr Goodman?’ I asked.

  ‘Whassa matter? Listen, boy’, he said, ‘do you think I’d be on this second bottle of whisky if I knew where that tenth ostrich is. Now shut up and tell me. Where’s the piss-house?’

  MISS TRENGROVE

  Miss Trengrove was thin like a rush. She moved through Turalla cloaked in religion, a cloak that shielded her from sin. Sin to Miss Trengrove was always associated with sex. She had never married; she was far too fastidious. There had been a gentleman to whom she could have become betrothed but that was long ago, so long ago that the years had misted his memory, leaving only his gentlemanliness like a bleeding heart to strengthen her.

  She lived alone in a house buried under shrubs and trees that in the spring dropped pink and white petals on the roof and clutched her like hands when she walked to the gate.

  ‘You should take a boarder’, Elsie said to her – Elsie is my sister. ‘It’s lonely in this big house.’

  Miss Trengrove agreed that it would be nice to have a boarder – ‘provided she was a good-living girl, of course’. But there were responsibilities. She would expect at least one good meal a day, whereas now she only had to cook for herself.

  ‘I eat so little’, Miss Trengrove explained. ‘A poached egg and a slice of toast is all I need of an evening. With a boarder I’d have to cook a roast at least once a week. Then there’s breakfast; I’ve almost forgotten how to make porridge.’

  But the idea must have appealed to Miss Trengrove, for a few weeks later she told Elsie that she had heard that a young assistant teacher at the school was looking for board. ‘She is quite a nice looking girl, well developed figure, carries herself well, is really quite charming.’

  Miss Evelyn Wilson was the name of the school teacher. She was twenty years of age and had long blonde hair neatly coiled into a bun that rested on the back of her neck. She came from Melbourne and when she was told that Miss Trengrove would most likely accept her as a boarder she stood outside the house looking at it for a few minutes before opening the picket gate and walking along the pathway to the front door.

  Both Miss Trengrove and Miss Wilson liked each other, so Miss Wilson became a boarder at the house. She dried the dishes that Miss Trengrove washed and listened with interest to all that Miss Trengrove told her about the people of Turalla.

  ‘Our new teacher’s name is Miss Wilson’, I said to Joe. ‘She’s beaut. I put up my hand to ask to go out and she told me that if ever I wanted to go out I needn’t ask her but just go out and come back quickly.’

  ‘Yes’, said Joe. ‘Some kid’s pissed himself while she was writing on the board; that’s what’s happened. Once you piss yourself they can’t get you out quick enough. It won’t last. Just you wait and see. Every kid in the school’s going to start marking time before clutching his guts and making for the door. There’ll be a crowd in the boys’ shit-house laughing their heads off and arguing who’s to go back first.’

  ‘Bugger them’, I said with feeling.

  ‘You can’t keep a good lurk like that to yourself,’ pronounced Joe with a gesture of one bowing to the inevitable.

  Joe and I made a welter of it next day. We were both as dry as a bone by lunchtime, but Miss Wilson told us to stay back for a minute.

  ‘You two boys were out a long time this morning’, she said, smiling. ‘I thought you must be sick. Are you all right now?’

  We both agreed we were all right now.

  ‘Good’, she said. ‘Run along now.’

  When we were going out the door she called out to us. ‘Just a minute.’

  We stopped.

  ‘Pass the word round will you – not longer than two minutes. Thank you for listening to me.’

  ‘I tell you’, said Joe when we were outside. ‘I’d piss myself before I’d try to put it over her again.’

  ‘It makes you feel a bit of a bastard, doesn’t it’, I said.

  During the summer months Joe and I were out trapping rabbits most nights. I liked those nights when there was a full moon and I could see the ground quite plainly. The big stones in the paddocks cast domed shadows on the grass and holes were patches of darkness when the moon was full. I rarely fell on moonlight nights.

  ‘It’s better for me, too’, Joe assured me at times. ‘I could break a bloody leg as easy as you.’

  The stone walls were easy to climb over. You could get a grip on them. There were footholes between the stones and you could rest on top of the wall if you were tired. They were better than wire fences.

  ‘Barb-wire is a bastard’, Joe said, remembering triangular tears in his trousers, ‘but stone walls are bloody good.’

  We trapped rabbits along the stone walls. They dug their burrows deep beneath the foundations so that portions of the wall sometimes collapsed, spilling stones amongst the grass.

  One such wall we approached curved away amongst trees. It was patched with shadows and these shadows sometimes moved. If you stared at them for a little while they always moved. A deep shadow made a pathway along the foot of the wall – it was always still and when you were kneeling in it no one could see you.

  We had climbed the wall and were kneeling in this shadow. There was a burrow here, a burrow with a platform of flattened earth at the entrance. Fresh pellets of rabbit shit littered this trodden section. Here we decided to set a trap. Joe was digging the set when we heard voices. A girl laughed and said, ‘Don’t be impatient.’

  ‘God!’ exclaimed Joe, ‘Miss Wilson!’

  We jumped to our feet and stood close together looking along the wall. Miss Wilson’s head appeared rising above it against the sky. Her
hands gripped the coping stones and she sat there a moment looking back at someone who suddenly levered himself up and sat beside her.

  ‘Tom Dixon, the bloody blacksmith!’ I whispered to Joe.

  Joe was afraid for some reason. He shrank back and looked quickly around him.

  Miss Wilson giggled and dropped to the ground. She turned and faced Tom Dixon and her head was all you could see. It projected from the wall’s shadow and the moonlight shone on it and on her smiling face.

  Tom Dixon dropped down in front of her. In the same movement his arms went round her and they fell to the ground with Miss Wilson hidden beneath him. His hands clutched at her.

  ‘God Almighty!’ exclaimed Joe. ‘The bastard’s murdering her. Let’s get to hell out of here.’ He went over the wall like the shadow of a fox. I reached to the top where the stones were wide enough apart to give me a grip and was dragging my crutches up beside me when Joe’s arm came up out of the darkness and went round my neck. He pulled me over like a sack of spuds and I fell on to my hands and knees on the soft grass.

  ‘Get to your feet’, he hissed. ‘He always carries a trimming knife in his belt. He’ll cut all our throats. God have mercy on that poor devil of a girl. She kept calling out, “No, no.” She’s going through hell this very minute. Are you set? For God’s sake don’t fall over.’

  He ran ahead but kept coming back with outstretched arm. ‘Hurry. Hurry.’ I bounded beside him across the paddock. We sped on in silence, Joe suiting his pace to mine.

  ‘It said on the back page of the Union Jack that Jack the Ripper had come to Australia’, Joe went on breathlessly. ‘I read it myself.’

  ‘My father told me that wasn’t true’, I panted.

  ‘By hell! He wouldn’t say that if he’d seen Tom Dixon this night I’m tellin’ you’, gasped Joe. He pulled up for a blow. He lay on the grass and I sat beside him.