by Mark O'Flynn
‘She’s not on her own,’ Clancy interjected. Clout’s fingers squeezed. Clancy flinched. Ann peeled some tar from her thumb and rolled it into a sticky little ball.
‘There must be difficulties. The Chinky Chonk can hardly pay generously.’
‘There are no difficulties,’ said Ann. ‘It puts food in our bellies.’
‘I hope that is all he puts in your belly.’ Buggery Clout looked at the sky. ‘There are other means,’ he continued, ‘by which a woman can earn money.’
Ann’s jaw dropped momentarily, before she spoke with a tremor – whether of rage or fear I couldn’t tell. ‘You can let him go now.’
‘I shall take the lad indoors, while you finish your caulking, and give him a good talking-to. Man to man. How about that?’
‘There is no need.’
‘I mean no disrespect. I shall enjoy it. I mean to help. We’ll nip this thievery in the bud. What he requires is a guiding hand. And I have such a hand.’ His fingers were cutting off the circulation in Clancy’s arm.
Ann thought about what Clout had said. ‘I don’t need your help, Barnaby, to raise my own son.’
‘Yet here it is, Ann, whether you want it or no. On a silver platter.’
‘I don’t want it.’
‘We shall see.’
‘I am happy on my own.’
‘Is that possible for a woman?’
‘You must understand I want you to leave me be.’
‘And do you know why I will not do that?’
‘Why?’
‘Because you remind me, so very dearly, of someone I used to know.’
There was nothing tender in Clout’s voice, and I could tell Ann was afraid.
‘I can’t help that.’
Clout waved his hand dismissively. Her pitch was drying in its bucket. There were clouds on the horizon to the west. Clouds, green about the edges, that, even in spring, still threatened snow.
Buggery Clout took Clancy into the small kitchen and sat him down at the table. Clancy told me later that Clout’s grip was so fierce that he didn’t even attempt to wriggle free. Clout shook his head at the state of the room. He examined the dishes on the sideboard and set it rocking on its uneven legs. Clancy was suddenly aware of the poverty of the fire in the hearth, the second bucket of pitch thickening over its feeble embers.
Clout sat down at the table opposite him, still holding his wrist. ‘Whatever you do, boy,’ he said in a low growl, ‘do not make a sound.’
With his other hand he slid Clancy’s shirtsleeve up to the skinny bicep, gripping the exposed arm in his two great hands as if it was a length of kindling he could snap across his knee. Clancy dared not squirm. He could hear his mother packing away her brushes. He kept thinking of Joshua. Perhaps he could jab a finger into Clout’s eye. Clout stared at the thin, freckled arm for a long time and didn’t move.
TEN
Not long after this, Clancy came back to live with us in the valley. In need of a guiding hand, Ann said, although it was more likely to keep him out of harm’s way. Clancy hadn’t realised he had made so many enemies in the town. Even the nightsoil man with his stinky cart and spavined horse had said that Clancy was a menace, ‘A regular little larrikin.’ He must learn to keep his head down. He had, in a moment of desperate honesty, real trepidation in his eyes when he spoke of Buggery Clout.
‘Did he bite you?’ I asked from our secret place on top of the Ruined Castle.
‘No, but I felt mighty sure that he wanted to. He would have if my mother hadn’t banged about on the porch. He was like a butcher choosing his cut.’ Clancy rubbed the bruises around his forearm like the fur of a rabbit.
There were other reasons for sending Clancy back down to the valley. Ann hoped that with his removal Clout would have less cause to call on her house and bother her. Also, she hoped that Clancy might find a job to occupy him. North had announced that with the expansion of the mine, and to meet his contractual obligations to the New South Wales Rail Authority, he would be taking on more men.
My father got on well with Baldy Baldock, who put in a good word for Clancy and me to join the expanding workforce. It seemed as though, six months after Clancy, my schooling had also come to an end. Baldy took us to meet Crusher Edwards, saying quietly, ‘If he shakes your hand do not show pain.’
After examining our physiques – I was broad across the back, Clancy was lean as fencing wire – Edwards took us on. Although we weren’t yet fully grown he could see we were keen. Or keenish. Our muscles had potential. We could fit into confined spaces. He liked Douglas Wilson well enough.
‘But don’t you disappoint me, lads. Work is work. I’ll have no hijinks in my mine. And if you try to oozle me – watch out.’
Edwards, scowling, led us to the store hut where he provided us, in some form of initiation, with our crib, or meal tin. ‘You had better,’ he said, ‘get yourselves a good pair of boots.’
My mother didn’t object to the new arrangement. She had, after all, nursed Clancy at her breast. She was fond of her nephew, and I, of course, was happy to have Clancy back with us. My other life returning to me. Until he came back, I didn’t realise how much I had missed his presence in the hut. Or perhaps I did realise, but couldn’t bring myself to admit it. On his first night there, over our tea, my mother said a short prayer. Douglas, Clancy and I, the men of the house, had forgotten the words. We laughed at her shocked, offended face. Then she joined us in our guilty mirth. ‘Well, I have to thank someone.’ Clancy ate our plain dodger with gusto.
Clancy and I were now working men earning one pound per week. With the extra body in our small hut I wondered how so many of us had shared it before, squashed in as we had been. Together we helped Douglas add onto the shack another room and a lean-to. The lean-to had a bark roof and wasn’t completely waterproof, but it kept the fog out. It also showed Clancy and me that we could make things, manipulate, adapt the world to our requirements.
Our chores were passed down. There were other, younger lads in the village. They were the ones now to fetch the water from Causeway Creek, to scrape wrigglers from the barrels, to collect firewood and run errands to Aulds’ store.
At the mine, we started at the bottom. Early on, Clancy worked as the cover boy, throwing sheets of canvas over the skips to stop the shale tumbling out as they went up the Incline. There was a certain level of skill to this, which he quickly acquired. I worked with the tippler discharging torbanite into the skips which Clancy then covered. It certainly made a change from the schoolhouse. After learning these jobs we progressed to stoking the furnace and opening the baffles for the wheelers and ponies to come out, also to direct air into the adits. In a year or two we’d be clippers, then wheelers ourselves. Eventually we might be able to go down into the tunnel with Douglas who, in time, would teach us to swing a pick without putting it through our own foot.
At the end of each day we trudged home and dunked our faces in the wash water, which soon turned black. We ate every morsel on our plate and slept the sleep of exhausted men. Not even the mosquitoes bothered us. And there was some more oodle coming into the hut.
For a while Clancy was too wary to go back to the house in Ada Street. There were, he said, too many ratbags turning the compost. One Sunday I arrived at Ann’s with a message from my mother: Please send Clancy’s spare trousers. There is a stink to these ones that I cannot get out. Em. There was no answer to my knock. Knowing the alternate way in I ducked under the house, through the dust of our old hidey-hole and along to the trapdoor up to the box. I suppose in another house it would have been called a larder, or pantry, or even cupboard, but we just called it the box. With all the manual labour I was getting too big for the trapdoor and my shoulders only just squeezed through.
After I had replaced the floorboards I stepped out into the kitchen, where I was startled to see a figure sitting in the shadows by the chimney stove. Then I recognised the long legs of Buggery Clout stretching out into the room.
‘Brutus,
you surprise me.’
I said nothing. My guts had turned to water in fright.
‘Should I arrest you?’ he asked. ‘Is this not trespass?’
‘I have no key.’ I managed to find some words. ‘Ann lets me come in that way when she’s not here.’
‘Does she indeed.’
‘She must be at her work.’
‘Yes. I am waiting to surprise her. And instead you surprise me.’ Even the shadows about his face seemed to conspire with him. He crossed and uncrossed his ankles. Our conversation appeared to have reached its natural limits when there was a sudden knock at the door. I moved through the house to open it.
Standing on the step, a big breath in his chest, was Tom Kefford, brandishing what looked like a brand-new set of ironmonger’s forceps. I knew immediately, although not the chronology of it, that this must be something Clancy had purloined come back to bite him.
‘Come in, sir. Please, Mr Kefford, come in.’ I opened the door wide and bade him follow me through the house.
‘I’ve come to have words with that rogue of a brother of yours,’ he called as he followed me. I think Mr Kefford would have preferred to have those words on the doorstep, within view of the street, not in the kitchen. He didn’t want to get comfortable. He pulled up short when he saw Clout sitting in the corner. The constable seemed not to have moved a muscle.
‘My aunt isn’t here,’ I said.
Stumbling over his words, a little deflated, Mr Kefford said it was Clancy he wished to see. He said he wished to warn Clancy off bothering his daughter, who wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the likes of him. ‘It’s not right,’ he growled. Terrified, eventually I said, ‘Clancy isn’t here either.’ While I was frightened of Mr Kefford I was even more scared of Clout sitting in the shadows.
‘Oh,’ said Tom Kefford, rubbing his massive forearms, which seemed to have come prepared for work. ‘Oh. I see. Well, in that case I shall have to return at a better time.’
‘That would be best.’
‘Unless it is you who has been bothering my daughter.’ He seemed determined to be cross with someone.
‘No. Not me.’
‘Oh. Right then. Because she’s too young to be taking up with the likes of you.’
‘Yes, sir.’
All the angry words had been said. The fire seemed to have gone out of his bluster. His eyes kept drifting against their will to Clout in the corner. Dragging them back to me, he reiterated his edict about Violet before taking his leave.
When he was gone, Clout rose to his enormous feet, picking up a little glass bauble that rested on the mantel about the chimney. He held it up to the light of a window, then replaced it. ‘Your aunt seems to have no shortage of gentleman visitors.’
I didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t wish to add anything that might delay his departure.
‘Do you think,’ he asked, ‘I am wasting my time?’
‘In what way?’
‘In the way of cultivating your aunt’s attention.’
‘In that,’ I said tentatively, many things running through my brain but mostly what would Ann want me to answer, ‘I would have to say yes.’
Clout considered this. ‘Perhaps she is too old for me. Perhaps I would prefer someone younger. Tell me …’
‘Yes?’
‘Why do you think that fellow just now, the one with the young daughter, why was he carrying a brand-new forceps? What do you think he had in mind to do with them?’ Without waiting for an answer, Clout ambled to the front door, which he unsnibbed.
I followed at a distance, relieved that he was leaving. As he was descending the steps I called out after him – foolishly I know, but I could not help myself – ‘Why does your fob watch have no hands?’
He stopped on the bottom step. He didn’t turn. ‘A memento, Brutus. A memento mori.’ His boot heels scuffed in the gravel of the pathway. The sky was a painful blue.
When I later told Ann of this interaction she listened intently, then she took my face in her hands and kissed me on the forehead. A gesture I have always remembered.
ELEVEN
The year flew. The year of work. Clancy and I grew stronger. We ate like horses and our muscles filled out. No way could I fit through the trapdoor in the box now.
All the miners on our side of Narrow Neck agreed they would like to be paid more – who would not? The arithmetic we’d learned at the schoolhouse taught us the logic of that. Oodle equalled dodger. However, it was hard to see how that might be possible given that the mine, by North’s accounts, made no profit at five shillings per ton. Given also Mr North’s past history of bankruptcy. He was never really happy with third prize.
‘No profit my fanny,’ spat Ossie Farnell. ‘He’s got profit dropping out of his bunghole. There’s oodle here you wouldn’t believe. All we’re asking is a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.’
Ossie, without a family of his own, had a lot of time to devote to these matters. He slowly stirred us into action. A meeting was organised by Farnell and Garbutt summoning all the miners from both sides of the plateau to the Congregational Church Hall (built, incidentally, by J.B. North). The meeting was to be held on the first Sunday of spring in 1891.
‘But, Ossie,’ said my father, playing devil’s advocate, ‘Sunday is our only day of rest. I don’t even like to think about work on a Sunday.’
‘I know, Douglas, but the company won’t allow us to hold a meeting on their time.’
My mother wasn’t too happy about being left on her own on a Sunday. Sometimes the bush spooked her with its whispering. She could see Mary Morgan’s point about disliking the antechinuses, which found their way into her flour sack. She waged war on them, and the possums, with her broom.
‘Why don’t you come with us?’ suggested Douglas.
‘Climb all that way, for a meeting?’
‘You could spend the day with your sister. We could meet you there afterwards. You could visit the church the way you liked to.’
My mother didn’t like to be reminded of the way the Reverend James Cowley Morgan Fisher had driven the religion out of her, although there always seemed in her heart some dormant yearning. The way the hymns slipped out half-consciously. Whatever her doubts about religion she kept them largely to herself.
‘There’s nothing about the construct of a building,’ she said now, ‘wood or stone, that brings you closer to heaven. I am closer to heaven down here among the trees, in my own conscience.’
Clancy observed to me quietly that she was going grey, grey as a gang-gang parrot.
For whatever reason, she eventually decided to accompany us. So on the designated day of rest my family made its slow way up the escarpment. My father talked about the meeting as an historical event. Other miners and their families were also making a day of it. It was a glorious morning with a festive air. Magpies, wattlebirds and cockatoos chased each other through the trees. The golden whistlers whistled. The little wildflowers splashing pink and blue and yellow all over the place. The mosses dripping from the rocks, my mother said, were the greenest things she had ever seen.
‘Ireland is greener,’ said Douglas, ‘so I hear.’
‘I suppose you’ll say it’s warmer too.’
It had been several months since my mother had made the climb topside and we had to rest often. The air was filled with the sound of trickling water. She admired the new steps that had been cut out of the rock face. It was a nice feeling to see my mother so red-faced and happy with her effort in reaching the top. She had forgotten what the scene below looked like from above.
From Orphan Rock my father turned and gazed out at that view, blue, he said, as a royal vein. ‘Look at that picture, lads. Nothing like that in all the country. Imagine us, mere Wilsons, working in the heart of that. We ought to be paying them.’
Clancy farted.
‘It looks so soft,’ said my mother. ‘It makes you want to fly.’
Certainly it was a spectacle. Even I could un
derstand that, who had grown up within it. The view was different every time you looked, and even now it was changing, as a shoal of lamb’s-tail clouds drifted across the valley, their shadows gliding over the undulations of the valley floor. Clancy merely shrugged. He was an indifferent part of it, like the birds or the clouds or the trees.
‘… ought to be paying them for the privilege,’ my father continued, ‘but we’ll just see how much we can oozle out of them.’ It was a funny word, oozle.
‘I thought you believed Thou shalt not steal,’ said Clancy.
‘Did I? I think that was Fisher.’
‘You said it too.’
‘That means thou shalt not steal from thy neighbour’s wife.’
‘That is not what it says,’ said my mother, her face still flushed.
‘Of course it does. Imagine if we stole the last johnny cake from Garbutts’ – why, that would be a sin, quite apart from havin’ the little snoozers squawlin’ with hunger all night. The company can afford it.’
‘You’re off your cadoova,’ said my mother, which pulled Douglas up short. He picked her up, skylarking, tickling her. She squealed.
He put her down. ‘Well, let’s not pissant around. We’d best get cracking.’
My mother left us at Waratah Street to head to Ann’s. A steady stream of men we knew, many of them dudded up to the nines, made their way towards the Congregational Church Hall, where we joined them, standing around in small groups, smoking. The service within the hall had recently broken up and the parishioners had moved off. There was a mood among us of conviviality, of something curious and new taking place. It was like a picnic without the children or the ladies, or the sandwiches for that matter. Currawongs yodelled overhead.
A strange gig of a man was standing at the entry into the hall as if intending to prevent our access. He was wearing a kilt. It took me only a moment to recognise James Cowley Morgan Fisher, of whom we had been talking on the walk. Both Douglas and Clancy ignored him, my father seeming slightly embarrassed at this manifestation of the errors of his youth. Like my mother, he was much happier in his church of ferns, not being railed at by the likes of Fisher. I hadn’t seen the preacher in over a year and I was transfixed, and also slightly afraid of him, the Hairy Man. The wild glare in his eyes, the grease in his beard.