by Mark O'Flynn
Reverend Butler of St Hilda’s was the most recent to bear the brunt of Fisher’s skew-whiff ministrations. Surrounded by his flock of wives, Fisher was always interrupting Butler’s sermons, calling out ‘Hallelujah’ for no good reason. It was putting the congregation off their prayers. So Butler sent word to the constables to have Fisher forcibly removed. In fury at this treatment, and with an eye for the symbolic gesture, if not the histrionic one, Fisher nailed his own hand to the door. This was the scene we had stumbled on.
‘Nailing your hand to the church door ain’t a hanging offence,’ said Matthew Brownrig, who might have been thinking of the paperwork.
Fisher cried out he was the messiah.
‘Shut it, Deacon,’ growled Buggery Clout.
Fisher changed tack. ‘Jesus wept for our sins, oh Lord,’ he was panting to himself. ‘Jesus wept, oh Jesus wept.’
‘Jesus wept,’ echoed Mary Morgan.
‘Keep your hair on,’ Clout said. He was still listening to Reverend Butler, who wasn’t finished with his complaints. The hammer Fisher had used lay at his feet like a dead bird.
There was some general diversion at Fisher’s predicament. Mary Morgan gasped in sympathy with her husband (the other wives were noticeably absent). Joshua looked as though he would rather have been elsewhere too. Anywhere else. Brownrig and Clout began to try to extract the nail with the claw end of a jemmy bar, using a block of wood as fulcrum. The crowbar slipped once or twice and Fisher hooted. I watched the red nail slowly withdraw, squealing against the timber. Violet shielded her eyes. The crowd went ‘Ooh’ and finally ‘Aah’ as it came free, drawing out a bright dollop of blood. Joshua Morgan was as pale as a sheet.
Fisher clutched his hand and shoved it into his armpit. ‘Christ almighty.’ The relief on his face was palpable. Violet wondered aloud whose job it would be to wash the shirt. Brownrig handed the nail to Reverend Butler. The constables turned to the crowd and told them to be on their way. All the fun was over. Then they each took Fisher by an elbow and led him, gasping and cursing, from the church grounds to be stitched up by Dr Spark and have a little rubbing alcohol splashed in the nail hole. Reverend Butler watched them go, holding the relic in his fingertips.
Clancy, Violet and I headed towards the Keffords’ house. That had been a sight, we agreed, you didn’t see every day. As we ambled along, from the rope holding up his trousers Clancy pulled out the hammer he had retrieved from the foot of the church door. No one had noticed him filch it. Not even me. He asked Violet if she would like to have it. She stared sidelong at the hammer, speechless.
‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget the look on Fisher’s face,’ Clancy went on happily.
Violet took the hammer and weighed it in her hand. She looked at Clancy and shook her head with a kind of pity. ‘You have it.’ And she gave it back to him.
Clancy accepted it graciously. ‘Thank you.’
‘What are you going to do with it?’ she asked.
‘Keep it.’
‘What for?’
‘Special purposes.’ He waved it about like a short sword. I was, in an entirely selfish way, embarrassed for him.
‘Such as?’
‘I’m thinking of the future. There are great possibilities.’ He seemed to bounce on his toes. Violet’s eyes met mine for a second. My great fear was that she might be lumping us both together in her attitude of dismissal.
Clyde Dundas, the organiser from Sydney, began to attend our coalface more regularly. He spoke to the men at the kerosene shale mines at Ruined Castle and Nellie’s Glen. He spoke to me. He said that what had happened to Ossie Farnell could happen to any one of us if we didn’t stick together. I was impressed by his passion, if not his reasoning. Ossie was sacked because he downed tools. There was the lesson. No, said Dundas, Ossie was sacked in order to keep the rest of us tentative and unsure. He was sacked because he spoke up.
It was Ossie who had written to Dundas at the Trade Union office in Sydney. He claimed North couldn’t keep up with the demand from the New South Wales Rail Authority and this had resulted in corner cutting. Profit maximisation. All new terms we didn’t properly understand. Dundas wanted to make sure that no more lives were lost. He had a bee in his bonnet about holding management to account. He was always pulling off his glasses and putting them back on, and asking the men how long it had been since we’d eaten, since we’d had a smoke-oh, since we’d been paid, since we’d slept. He was compiling statistics.
My mother thought he was fonder of speaking than getting off his fat behind and doing a decent day’s work. There was some friction in our humpy over the definition of work. She was still vexed over the inability of the community to help Mrs Grainger at her worst moment. What good were we if we couldn’t help each other? Dundas was all hot air. But several of the men, including Douglas and me, were keen to find out more of what he had to say. He also had tobacco, which he gave out freely. Some of the men had a list of gripes and mizzles to which he turned a willing ear, but other miners saw in Dundas a threat to their livelihoods. What they didn’t trust, I think, was Dundas’s clean-shaven jowls, his smooth hands, the ballast of his bottom.
When he wasn’t wandering about the mines in the valley (much to the annoyance of Crusher Edwards), Dundas divided his time between the collieries at Lithgow, Clarence, Hartley, Gladstone and elsewhere. (‘Who pays for all this gallivanting about?’ my mother asked.) If Edwards ever accosted him for stirring up trouble he merely said, ‘I am a sightseer come to enjoy the scenery, as any number of other people do, and against which there is no prohibition.’ Crusher flexed his hands.
Dundas told us, ‘You won’t know yourselves if only you realise what strength you have in numbers. You have to make some decisions. Which among you is prepared to come to another meeting to discuss your grievances, to elect a spokesman, perhaps to vote on certain motions?’
There was no harm in attending a meeting, was there? There was no harm in discussing these things.
‘When would this meeting take place?’ asked Harv Selby.
‘It will take place on company time,’ said Dundas. ‘Say, the first Wednesday morning in October.’
The same old reservations were put forward. ‘What if they give us the run?’
‘That will not happen,’ Dundas insisted, ‘not if you all stand together. Ossie acted alone.’ (I was a bit frightened to admit that he hadn’t acted entirely alone. My name was, I suspected, probably in somebody’s notebook.) ‘North will hardly sack his whole workforce. We could bring the whole shindig to a standstill. We will make his profit margin drop out of his fundament.’
‘But,’ said a squeamish voice, ‘our wages will be docked.’
Dundas had all the answers. ‘Is that not a worthy sacrifice? Better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s prayer bones. Are you with me, lads?’
Some of them were. I was one of them. Being involved in these deliberations made me feel like a man. These matters cut to the heart of things, I felt. How a man should live. What a man was worth. I began to understand I had a voice. Our hut was full of strident debate as my parents, Clancy and I discussed these issues. Douglas believed in the strength of unity. Clancy preferred chaos. Emma wanted to know when we were going to scrub the pots. While I relayed what Dundas had said there was something pessimistic in Clancy’s level of self-interest. Perhaps he felt he was above our menial concerns. I could distract myself with the causes of the working man, but at night as I lay in my bed all I could think of were Violet’s cheeks, which were the rosiest I had ever seen.
Across the room Clancy snored quietly in the dark. That evening, over our dinner, I’d noticed a faint smudge beneath his nose and I thought for a moment he had forgotten to wash the coal dust off his face. Then I saw it was the faint down of new whiskers. I hadn’t noticed them before. Now, under cover of darkness, I felt my own lip. Had Violet noticed Clancy’s whiskers? Suddenly I felt an ungracious spasm of hatred for them; in spite of my weariness, that night it t
ook me a long time to fall asleep.
I became troubled by what I sensed as the dawning of some new division between Clancy and me. Whiskers were the least of it. While I took pride in my duties at the mine and felt deeply involved with the concerns that affected us all, Clancy, on the far side of the chasm, hated work. Why grovel for twelve hours a day for one lonely pound, he believed, when light fingers and swift feet could bring him anything he needed. In fact Clancy’s light fingers were becoming increasingly audacious. One day I saw a notice in the Katoomba Times:
Gladstone Estate. Ten-pound REWARD offered to any person who will give information leading to the conviction of persons found purloining building material, iron tools, or other property from the above estate.
When I showed this to Clancy he merely shrugged. ‘What has this to do with me?’
‘The hammer? The chisel? The green ribbon?’
‘Will you give that a rest?’
‘Clancy, you have a lot of enemies. A lot of people might think it’s you.’
‘I’m worth more than ten pounds.’ He laughed and walked away.
Our father, while ignorant of the thieving, was sick of Clancy’s general attitude, and told him, over our evening tea, to pull his socks up. We were big lads now, eating them out of hut and humpy – if Clancy lost his job they couldn’t afford to keep him, and that would place his mother under greater pressure. The metaphor Douglas chose was lost on Clancy, who didn’t have any socks, only his alberts made of sacking. He sniffled and coughed weakly, saying he was too ill to go to work. He claimed he had Scarlatti fever. My mother folded her arms. Douglas called him a lazy spine basher. ‘Look who’s talking,’ cried Clancy, and this caused fiercer words between them.
He wasn’t too ill, however, to go topside to call on Violet. He never complained about the climb when he had that objective in mind. One rainy evening he told me how he had appeared that afternoon at the back door of the Carrington at the end of Violet’s shift bearing an umbrella. Needless to say, Clancy didn’t own an umbrella. (I had been left behind to help the Garbutts repair a roof.) They walked side by side in the drizzle, Violet’s bonnet framing her face. Her cheeks flushed with the cold.
‘Don’t you have anything better to do?’ Violet asked.
‘No,’ said Clancy. ‘I couldn’t think of anything better than this.’
Once or twice the hand holding the umbrella brushed her shoulder. He told her how he was going to make his fortune and lavish it on someone he loved, bedeck her with jewels and fine silks.
Violet looked at the state of his clothes, his too-small boots, his new whiskers. She wasn’t even sure that he had stopped growing. She laughed at him. (Violet’s version of the story I heard later.) ‘Which lucky someone might that be?’
He refused to say. Her house was drawing closer and he slowed his pace because he knew he wasn’t welcome within sight of it.
If people passed them by Violet fell silent until they had gone. But when they were alone she laughed freely at the ludicrous things he said. As I have told you, she liked his humour.
‘My Scarlatti fever has cleared up, thank goodness. There has been a lysis and I will now survive to a great age.’
‘That is very interesting.’
‘Do you know that black cockatoos foretell rain?’
‘It’s already raining,’ she said.
He told her of his favourite pit pony, called Dandy, who had beautiful blue eyes. Her steel shoes were as small as an Oriental bracelet.
‘When did you ever see an Oriental bracelet?’ Violet asked.
‘My mother has one.’
‘I didn’t know that ponies could have blue eyes.’
‘Dandy does.’
In the scrub at the foot of the hill on Lurline Street he lifted a masking branch of wattle and showed her a bowerbird’s shrine, the twin arms of the bower arching above the collection of blue treasure. Violet saw among the found objects the sapphire of a doll’s eye. Also blue buttons, the membrane of a drop of blue paint. She was, at long last, secretly moved when Clancy leaned to the display and picked out for her an azure feather.
When Violet rejected the gift of the umbrella (‘My father would ask where I got it’), he pretended that it didn’t matter, but later, disappointed, he threw it in a bush.
Violet’s brothers and sisters, who knew everything, regaled their parents with choice tidbits from Violet’s life.
‘Violet has a boy.’
‘Violet has a boy who gives her things.’
‘Violet has a boy who gives her blue feathers.’
To which their father responded, ‘Violet shall wear the back of my hand unless the lot of you shut your sponge holes.’ Tom Kefford had a reputation as a man with quick fists, though not the logical mind to direct them.
The vicarious details that I garnered from Clancy attracted and appalled me. I was strangely disturbed by the intimacy that these stories suggested. At fifteen my emotions were hazy and obscure and mysteriously intense. I couldn’t say why the idea of Clancy and Violet together dejected me so. Was I jealous of her, or him? Had we not all been together in Miss Husband’s schoolhouse? When had the easy friendship of three people become something from which one might be excluded?
One day Clancy and I were in the bush near Cedar Creek when he told me that Violet had let him hold her hand. On closer questioning this turned out to be so that she might keep her balance while she stood on one leg to shake a stone out of her shoe.
‘Have you,’ I began, ‘have you ever spoken to her of me?’
‘What would we talk about you for?’
I shrugged and blushed to my throat, a state he left me in for some time before saying, ‘She has asked about you, though.’
For a moment the sun stood still. ‘What did she say?’
‘She asked about our mothers.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I told her we shared the same father.’
‘What did she say to that?’ I stared at the side of his face.
‘She asked if you had six fingers.’
‘What? And what did you say?’
‘I told her no, don’t be stupid, but you had fifteen toes.’ He ran off before I could hit him. As I chased after him only a part of me was laughing. Suddenly I felt unclean. Did Violet see me as a Shady? The underground pallor of my skin. The coal dust under my fingernails like a disease I had been born with. All about me the disease I had been born with. A thought that Clancy’s disdain held up in my face.
FOURTEEN
And yet Douglas called it a good life. Something that, in order to dispel my gloom, I chose to see myself.
Douglas had made further improvements to the humpy. It was certainly not as fancy or recuperative as the Carrington Hotel, or even my Aunt Ann’s weatherboard cottage on Ada Street, but he had built some good solid foundation walls from stone he and I had dragged out of the surrounding forest. Many other families in the valley were sealing their homes against the drizzle and the fog. Arnold Medlow, who had been a stonemason back in Suffolk, couldn’t keep up with requests for assistance. If someone was lucky enough to find a termite mound they could transport the mud back and use it to seal chinks between stones against draughts.
My mother was a very proud hut-keeper. That was, unless her sister came to visit. Ann couldn’t believe she had once lived down here. She didn’t know how Emma could stand it in the damp and the cold. Didn’t her knees ache? Emma reminded Ann that this was where her husband worked and the deal was that she, Emma, would stick by Douglas. There was silence for a moment while Ann tried to recall the deal, and recall just whose husband Douglas was again. She shrugged. Now it was Emma’s turn: what news of the attentions Ann had been getting from Fisher and Clout? They seemed to have got the message and were leaving her alone, thank goodness. Wasn’t she lonely? Ann considered this. Well, yes, if she thought about it, sometimes she was. And that, said Emma, apart from their houses, was the difference between them. Not so lonely as that,
said Ann, not so.
Crusher Edwards had it in for Clancy. If he didn’t want to work for the Australian Kerosene Oil and Mineral Company then there were plenty of other men who did. For once my father agreed with Crusher. It was hard enough feeding an extra mouth, but Clancy really was a lazybones. Clancy complained that he’d had a recurrence of his Scarlatti fever. Besides, his boots pinched. There were any number of reasons he called upon to avoid work.
One night, over our makeshift dodger, my father presented Clancy with a pair of secondhand boots he had been keeping for himself. With a bit of newspaper stuffed in the toes they were a good fit. I had received my new boots a few months earlier, direct from Mullany’s Universal Emporium. They gave me bad blisters for a while but I soon wore them in. Clancy was modestly grateful but, looking back, I wondered why I always received my boots before Clancy.
Clancy swung his pick, he filled the stinkpots, he did his job, but there was no – a funny word – love in him for it. While I saw that it was nothing but hard labour, I took Douglas’s point that there was a certain pride to be found in work if you were prepared to hunt for it. On Sundays Clancy was a young man with too much coin in his kick. Of course he gave a few shillings to my mother for dodger and keep, and he gave some to his own mother, or so he said. More and more, as the weather warmed, he was now in the habit of going topside on his own. It didn’t seem completely right for me to ask where he was going, nor if I could go with him. Perhaps I was too proud. If Emma intercepted him as he slipped away and asked where he was going, he replied, ‘Church.’ My mother could see that I had been abandoned, but that was a situation she couldn’t rectify. I used to wander out to the isolated mount beyond the Ruined Castle ridge, but it was not the same. There was no one to share my thoughts or my discoveries.