Hammers Over the Anvil

by Alan Marshall

  She had white hair that didn’t make her look as old as it should. It was not white hair like what you see on the old people with wrinkled faces, but white hair what you’d see on people who loved you and were worried about you from when you were little. Like my mother’s hair, only whiter.

  ‘It’s the white hair of suffering’, my sister once said when I asked her what made Miss McPherson’s hair white, but she didn’t say what she was suffering from.

  Joe was a bit frightened of her, but it was a funny thing; I never was. All my life I’d been like that. It is a funny thing.

  I liked talking to Miss McPherson because she always said nice things. Like she’d say – ‘You look quite smart in that cap, Alan.’ It’s good to hear people say things like that.

  Joe and I used to hunt hares in the paddocks round her house. She never minded us doing it at all. All she said once was, ‘Don’t take your dog into the sheep paddock, will you. They’re lambing.’

  When she said that, Joe and I wouldn’t let Dummy go near the sheep paddock. We shouted at him and made him walk close to us. Anyway, the best paddock to raise a hare was just behind her house.

  When we’d coursed hell out of the hares in this paddock, I’d go over to the house and knock at the back door. Joe wouldn’t let me knock at the front door because he said it would frighten shit out of her. ‘When Mum hears a knock at the front door she nearly takes a fit’, he explained. ‘She thinks it’s coppers. The front door’s never to knock at unless you’re somebody.’

  Joe’s got a lot of brains about things like that.

  When I knocked at Miss McPherson’s back door Joe stood behind the fence. When Miss McPherson opened the door I’d say, ‘Thank you for letting us hunt in the back paddock, Miss McPherson. We didn’t go near the sheep paddock.’

  She’d smile at me then. It was a lovely smile, but you couldn’t see it: you could tell by her eyes it was beautiful.

  I said to Joe once, ‘If ever I have a buster and hurt my back or something and we’re near Miss McPherson’s, get her. Don’t get anyone else.’

  ‘Righto’, Joe said, then added, ‘anyway there are no stones in her paddock to land on. I wouldn’t take you where there are stones because your old man told me not to.’

  When we were on our way home we often talked about Miss McPherson’s face. Joe thought that maybe her teeth were so bad she had to hide them, but I didn’t think so.

  ‘No matter how bad they are they couldn’t be that bad’, I said. ‘I think her face must be all out of shape below the nose. Say a horse kicked you on the face. Now, say it did that.’

  ‘A draught horse?’ asked Joe.

  ‘No’, I said. ‘Not heavy like that. Say about a twelve hands pony, a well-bred sort of pony.’

  ‘Shod?’ asked Joe.

  ‘Not just out of the blacksmith’s’, I said. ‘He’s been shod about a month say. They’re a bit worn like.’

  Joe considered this for a moment, his face screwed up and turned to the sky.

  ‘I’d be buggered’, he said at last.

  ‘Well, I don’t know’, I argued. ‘You’d be alive but your face would be out of shape, that’s what would happen.’

  ‘All right then’, argued Joe. ‘Do you think she’s been kicked by a pony?’

  ‘I just don’t know.’

  ‘You know what I think’, Joe went on. ‘I think she’s been born deformed.’

  ‘Deformed?’ I was a bit puzzled.

  ‘You know – born without a jaw or something.’

  ‘That’s terrible’, I said.

  ‘Yes it is, isn’t it’, said Joe. ‘That’s why I don’t like going near her. I can’t stand deformed people. They make me feel crook.’

  ‘Yes. That’s right. Funny thing that; they make me feel crook too. I dodge them if I can.’ I agreed with Joe.

  We had reached a fence topped by two strands of barbed wire.

  ‘How the hell are you going to get over this’, Joe said thoughtfully as if talking to himself.

  ‘It’s a bad fence’, I said, ‘but I’ll get over it all right; don’t worry!’

  ‘I think I’d better lift you on to a post and you can hang across it sort of till I get over and grab you. You’ll have to lift your right leg with your hand so that it won’t tear on the barb.’

  ‘Yes, that would be the best way’, I said. ‘Bend down till I get a proper holt of you.’

  ‘Right’, said Joe. ‘Now put your arm round my neck. Now lift your bloody leg. Pull your back in, damn you’, he suddenly shouted. ‘You’ll catch it on the bloody barbs. God Almighty! Don’t move. We’re going to fall arse over head. Hold on to that bloody post. Grab the barb wire. Let go of it or you’ll cut your hand. What the hell …! O, shit!’

  He staggered with my weight. I let go the barbed wire and clutched the post.

  ‘It’s all right!’ I exclaimed. ‘I’ve got a grip on the post now. I’m set. Lever me over a bit. Now ease off. Steady me a bit. I’m right. I could stay here a week. She’s jake.’

  Joe wiped his nose with the back of his hand, then stepped back and looked at me hanging across the post. ‘Couldn’t be better. Now I’ll get your crutches. Don’t move. I’m coming.’

  He climbed swiftly through the fence carrying my crutches, then dropped them to the ground.

  ‘Now!’

  I put my arm round his neck and he lowered me till I stood beside the fence. He then picked up my crutches and I put them under my arms.

  ‘The worst thing abut walking on crutches is the crutches’, he said by way of a final summary.

  ‘They do slow you down a bit’, I said.

  ‘It’s a good job we’re not in a hurry’, said Joe. ‘All I’ve got to do is feed the ducks when we get home.’ He thought a while, then said, ‘Ask Elsie about Miss McPherson’s face. She’ll know. She goes up to see her sometimes. Ask her.’

  ‘I will’, I said with sudden decision. ‘I’ll ask her tonight. When we know what’s wrong with her we won’t have to worry over it. Anyway, I don’t care what’s wrong with her. I’m still going to like her.’

  ‘I will too’, said Joe. ‘Once I know, I won’t be frightened of her.’

  I asked my sister that night. She was washing up and she stopped and said:

  ‘It’s a sort of secret, but I’ll tell you because you love her. You told me you did.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘All her face is covered with white hair like a beard’, she said. ‘She has worn that bandage on her face for forty years to hide it from people. It’s sad.’

  I was horrified. I felt like I was hit by something. It seemed so easy a thing to get rid of.

  ‘Why doesn’t she shave?’ I asked my sister.

  ‘I asked her that’, said Elsie. ‘I asked her why she had wasted all those years when she could so easily have shaved it all off.’

  ‘What did she say to that?’

  ‘She said, “It was sent to me by God. Who am I to question it! It’s a Cross I just have to bear.”’

  THE CATHOLIC BALL

  The Turalla Mechanics’ Institute was a weatherboard hall built in the form of a ‘T’. The top arm of the ‘T’ housed the stage and ante-room, and the stem was where the people sat. Two little stairways, one at each end of the platform, supplied a means of climbing on to the stage. A door at the back of the stage led down some steps into the ante-room. I’ll never know why it was called the ante-room.

  They held dances and concerts in the hall and then the caretaker, old Mr Thomas, the father of the blacksmith, would light the huge Miller kerosene lamps hanging from the ceiling and the place was ready except for the floor. They had to grease it first. The secretary of the dance, or whatever it was, came with a few blokes and they walked round the hall scraping curled shavings of grease off the sides of candles. When they did this they would sit Joe and me or some other kid on a potato bag and drag us round the floor as if we were on a sledge. They swung us round at the curves and it was good fun.
If your backside slipped off the bag, it would become caked in candle grease and then you got into a row when you got home.

  On the night of a big dance a number of blokes that came used to sit in the ante-room and play poker for money. Joe and I watched them sometimes. On the table were a lot of Fields and Country Life and other English magazines, because the ante-room was also a reading room. There was a library, that’s what they called it, in a room at the end of the ante-room, but the books in it were all knocked about. They had names like Jessica’s First Prayer, Queechy and East Lynne, but I found one called The Broad Highway by Jeffrey Farnol, where this bloke Farnol described sitting under a hedge eating crisp fried bacon with a Tinker. I’d never thought of having bacon crisp before, but whenever I had it after that I used to ask mother to make it crisp the way Jeffrey Farnol liked it.

  There were some big dances at the hall, but the biggest and best of the lot was the Catholic Ball held once a year. It was the biggest night in Turalla. Every Catholic from twenty miles came – and a lot of people that weren’t Catholics. There were blokes with big black beards, and bullockies with their shirt sleeves rolled up, and kids of all sorts. There were horses and buggies and gigs parked in the yard round the hall and two dunnies had been specially cleaned out for the occasion. The dunny for the Ladies was in one corner of the yard and the other for the Men was in the opposite corner.

  You soon got to know all the kids in the district. Joe and I knew them all. We knew the big kids from the bush and the tough, wiry little buggers from out beyond Emu Creek. We knew two or three kids from the plains out by Darlington and some from Purnim; some of these kids would just as soon have a fight as a feed. They always stuck together; hit one you hit the lot.

  There was a family from Beech Forest way, a place called Sorenson’s Gully, called Wilson; they always came to the Ball. I’d gone with Peter McLeod down into this bush country behind a six-horse team a year ago. We camped down there a couple of days in one of the Wilsons’ sheds. There were three kids in the family, one girl and two boys. I got to know them when I was down in the bush with Peter and I used to see them in Balunga sometimes when they came in on sale day. I knew the eldest kid as Blue, but I think his name was Sammy. They called him Blue because of his hair which was the colour of a brick and was straight and long. He was seventeen years old and looked like a man. He had never been to school when he was young because there were no schools to go to in the bush. But when the school started he went to it because he wanted to know how to measure a ton of wood and learn the tables up to ten and perhaps learn to read a bit. His old man arranged with the woman schoolteacher down there, Miss Pearce her name was, to give him lessons on his own, so he sat at a desk away from the other kids – I’d been to his school and saw where he sat.

  Blue’s other brother – Snowy – was a real funny bugger. He made us laugh. They reckon the teacher down at Sorenson’s Gully liked him a lot. Well, you wouldn’t be able to help it.

  They had a mate called Jim Smith. He was a lively bloke who was always in on anything and could fight like a threshing machine. He was a thoughtful bugger who watched you kindly. They reckoned he was a good backstop if someone hauled off and swung a punch at you.

  On the night of the Catholic Ball the darkness around the Mechanics’ Institute became pierced with shafts of light from windows and open doorways. There were no hidden dangers in the darkness that remained behind the hall or that was spilt between the buggies and gigs and horses that moved through it or stood motionless while the shadows of men moved between them. There were sharp commands – ‘Hold up there; Whoa-back; Get over.’

  The shadow of one man held a bottle towards another and said, ‘Here, have a swig before you go in.’

  Every sound was exciting and full of life. Life was darting round the hall like night birds in flight. The sound of fiddles being tuned came through the open doorways. The laughter of girls fluttered like moths across the beams of light. Men laughed. They sat in the porch and pulled off their heavy boots which fell with a thump to the floor. They took newspaper-wrapped pumps from their coat pockets. They were made of patent leather and had soles as thin as the board in a cigarette packet. They slipped them on to feet unused to them, then stood up and flexed their legs and danced a few steps to get the feel of them. They stacked their boots in rows along the wall.

  Children chased each other between the buggies and gigs or stood in the hall and gazed at the girls sitting on the forms that followed the walls around the hall. Some of the kids would take a run towards the centre of the hall then slide on the candle grease, standing erect and balancing with outstretched hands. Some of them went right across the hall. I couldn’t do this. What a bastard! Joe reckoned they were showing off, but if I hadn’t been there he’d have done it. He was a good bloke, Joe.

  When Big Dave Fraser came in he hunted the whole bloody lot off the floor. He was the MC and don’t you forget it.

  ‘You kids get to hell out of here’, he said, and we got.

  Joe and me had joined up with the Wilson kids who’d come down from the bush with Jim Smith. Jim told me they’d brought enough black wattle seeds with them to plant the whole of the Western Plain. Black wattle seeds were not easy to get round Turalla where the black wattle had all been cut out by farmers clearing their land, but they were common enough where the Wilsons came from.

  It’s a funny thing about black wattle seeds. They were in a pod like peas and if crushed before they were fully ripened they gave off a stink that would make you sick. Joe reckoned it smelt as if everyone in the school had farted at once – that’s when we used to crush them under our heels at school. Jim reckoned their seeds were good. They’d soaked them in hot water for an hour before they left home.

  We had a sort of meeting outside and planned what we were going to do. The idea was for each one of us to put a handful under his heel when the people were dancing a circular waltz. People go dreamy when they’re dancing a circular waltz and we reckoned we’d be less likely to be noticed then. We decided to crush them about half past eleven when things were really going.

  Joe used to dream about dancing a waltz with the girl who rode a white horse at Kerry Bros Circus. She stood on one leg on its rump and went up and down to its canter. While she was doing this she looked upwards like an angel. That’s why Joe reckoned no one notices anything while dancing the circular waltz.

  The hall was a large one. There was a door at each side and one at the end. These were the doors through which we had to escape after we’d crushed the seeds. There were six lots of us round the hall and we were all to crush the seeds under our heels at a sign from Blue who was at the end.

  But you know how it is when you’re at a big dance.

  On the stage Buck McKinnon was on the piano; there were two blokes playing fiddles and a hell of a good bloke on the concertina. It got like as if you were drunk on music. What with the concertina and the fiddles and Buck on the piano, I got all excited. I couldn’t stop watching them. I was dancing with them out there where the bright girls turned and spun in a flutter of organdie, muslin and taffeta. It was beautiful.

  This was Big Dave Fraser’s night. He was the MC and was big and powerful and could swing a girl off her feet in the Lancers. He could swing a punch too and there was no messing about when he gave orders. He knew every dance – the Valetta, the Valsevienne, the Schottische, the Two Step. And what a great voice he had for whooping in the sets.

  He started them off with a progressive Barn Dance. This mixed them up. Everybody was dancing. The music floated out into the soft night where every shadow was kind. There was only happiness in all the world.

  I heard Big Dave Fraser’s voice from the centre of the floor: ‘Secure your partners for the first set.’

  Then: ‘Two more couples this way please.’

  Joe and I stood at the door to watch them. We loved the sets – the stamping men, the wild yells as they swung the girls, then:

  ‘Salute partners’, and
they were away. For some reason or other both Joe and I loved the ‘Salute partners’ – the tribute before the capture.

  Big Dave danced in the sets and called as he danced.

  The men moved with swaying shoulders, with exaggerated turns and curves. They held the girls as if challenging attempts to rob them of their prize.

  We could hear Big Dave’s voice above the whoops and stamping feet: ‘First and second couples half right and left set.’

  ‘Turn partners.’

  ‘Ladies chain.’

  ‘Promenade.’

  The music danced and romped with the people, tying them together with cords of silver from the fiddles while the piano thumped out the rhythm.

  Joe and I were entranced.

  But it was the Lancers we were waiting for. This was the greatest set of all we thought.

  The concertina player swept into a lilting melody. He smiled as he played. Big Dave’s great voice laced the yells and the yah-hoos with his triumphant – ‘Salute partners and salute corners.’

  A good dance band and a good MC made the dancers dance to the beat of the music. He gave his calls at the end of the bar and called as he danced.

  ‘First lady and opposite gent turn in the centre.’

  ‘Change ends.’

  The music was six-eight time and the stamping of the pumps and the yells while swinging – ‘Hoo-ee-ee.’

  Then Big Dave made the calls we were waiting for.

  ‘All ladies to centre and return.’

  ‘All gents to the centre and form a circle.’

  ‘Ladies join hands and form a circle over gents and swing.’

  As the circle of powerful men revolved, the girls, in their brightest frocks, tottered round nervously then were lifted off their feet as the circle gained speed. It resembled the ‘Ocean Wave’ one saw at country shows.

  The girls undulated in the circle high above the floor; the men, leaning back to take their weight, turned with them.