by Peter Kocan
The youth recalled from his reading that Henry Lawson had been broke and hungry at Weegun. He’d sold a poem to the local newspaper for two shillings and that’d kept him going. The platform was the original one from the 1890s or thereabouts, and the youth got so vivid a sense of Lawson there, of a kind of time-warp, that it made him feel peculiar.
Just before five o’clock he meandered back to the shopfront. Some of the same men were back there, hoping to get a start if the people on Rita’s list hadn’t all shown up.
At five-fifteen a big flatbed truck roared up and stopped and tooted its horn. A bunch of men had come out of the pub and were having a last drink on the footpath. They came over with their bags and began to climb onto the truck. The youth got on too. Other men came from inside the pub and got on, chucking their baggage into the centre with the rest, until there was hardly any room left. One of the last to get on was a wiry sharp-faced man with a gammy leg. It took him two or three goes to heave himself up next to the youth.
“One time a bloke would’ve jumped up here like a wallaby,” he said. “But that was back when a man had two good legs.”
The truck moved off abruptly and everyone grabbed for something to hold on to. For the ten minutes of the journey the youth was so busy trying to keep from being jolted off the truck that he saw almost nothing. There was just an impression of flat fields with endless neat rows of green. Then the truck turned through an elaborate white-painted gateway. On an arch above it was a logo of the letter “C” intertwined three times to stand for Continental Cotton Corp. They were at the chippers’ camp.
Now he was staring into the campfire. He’d had a meal of shepherd’s pie and been allocated a bed in one of the huts. It was nice at the campfire, with the buzz of talk all around. There were bursts of laughter and shouts of greeting from elsewhere in the camp as people sorted themselves out. Some of the chippers were regulars, travelling workers who followed the fruit-picking round the country and had added cotton-chipping to their circuit. The dozen or so caravans mostly belonged to them.
The youth was very tired, and made his way to the hut. There were two beds in the little room. Someone’s suitcase lay on one of them. Sheets and blankets weren’t provided, but the youth had one small thin blanket of his own, and a big towel, and these would do. He lay down and drifted into sleep. At some point he became conscious of someone clanking into the room and muttering and coughing. The next thing he knew the light of morning was in the window.
HIS ROOM-MATE was the bloke with the gammy leg. But the leg wasn’t just gammy, it was artificial. It was lying beside the man’s bed, its straps and clips all loose. The youth went out and splashed water on his face from a tap. The sun was beginning to blaze up from below the horizon and the youth went back to the room to get a cheap cloth hat he had in his bag. He’d need it to shield his eyes from the glare. He burnt easily too, because of his colouring, and he knew he must be careful to keep covered all day.
The man was sitting on the edge of the bed pissing noisily into a tin. The youth averted his eyes and fumbled in his bag for the hat.
“You’ll have to pardon me,” said the man. “A bloke ain’t got two good legs to walk outside to the pisshouse.”
“That’s alright,” the youth replied, going out quickly with his hat.
A breakfast of scrambled eggs with tomato and bacon was served across a counter at the cook-shed. There was plenty of toast to go with it, and big mugs of tea.
At a quarter to eight there was a loud toot like a factory whistle and people began assembling at the edge of the camp. The flatbed truck was there. It had a metal rack attached at the back, full of long-handled hoes. A short man stood on the tray of the truck. He wore jeans, a check shirt, high-heeled cowboy boots and a white cowboy hat like Rita’s. He put his hands on his hips and began speaking to the assembled men with a slight American accent. He said his name was Denny and that he was the ramrod.
“Ramrod?” muttered one of the men.
“Fuckin’ Hat-rack would be more like it,” muttered another.
There was a ripple of amusement. The hat did look very large in comparison with the figure underneath it.
Denny paused for a split second, then went on: “Some of you guys are old hands from previous years and you pretty much know the score, so I’ll be lookin’ to you to bring the new fellas up to speed. Rule Number One is that Alcohol and Non-Employees are strictly barred from Company property. So don’t bring booze into the camp, and don’t bring floozies either.”
The youth wasn’t sure what “floozies” were.
“The other Number One Rule,” Denny went on, “is that Jerk-offs and Wise-guys get no second chances. The Company’s interested in one thing only: an Efficient Operation. Okay, let’s go!”
About half the assembled men climbed onto the truck, the youth among them. The driver called to the remainder that they’d be the second load. The truck set off.
The property was like a showplace. There was hardly a blade of grass out of alignment. The fences were all white-painted and perfectly straight and even, and the dirt roads neatly edged and graded. Deep concrete ditches ran along the sides of the fields, with pipes and pumps, all white-painted and new-looking. In the distance, across the perfect flatness of the fields, you could see what looked like a depot of enormous-wheeled machines. Above it all was the sky, utterly blue and clear, stretching from horizon to horizon.
They got off the truck and picked hoes out of the rack and stood looking at the green rows of plants. The truck left to return to the camp and Denny drove up in an open jeep. He explained, for those who were new to it, what the work was all about.
At this stage of their growth, cotton plants were in danger of being choked out by weeds, so the rows had to be kept free of them. Since there wasn’t any machine precise enough to remove the weeds without damaging the crop, the job had to be done by human chippers with hoes. You had to move slowly along each row and chip out any weed you saw, and “weed” meant anything other than the cotton plants. If the weed was right up against the stem of the cotton plant, it was best to bend down and pull it out by hand rather than risk harming the plant with the blade of the hoe.
“That’s the other Rule Number One,” Denny said. “Don’t damage the product!”
He got back into his jeep and sped off.
The youth’s confidence rose. This was just his kind of work. It was like chopping serrated tussock or Paxton’s Pea, except gentler and easier.
There were thirty of them and they were told to spread along the first thirty rows and get ready to start. A soft-spoken Greek named Panos was the foreman. He had a list of names and marked you off as present and working. He also had a whistle. At eight o’clock sharp he gave a blow on it and the chipping began.
The youth had the hang of it before he’d gone a dozen steps along the row. The hoe felt balanced and familiar in his hands and the chipping action came easily. But the work could be hard on the back. You had to keep bending slightly awkwardly to work the hoe from side on, as the weeds couldn’t be seen from directly above the cotton plant. He decided to develop a more upright, straight-on stance. If anyone could find a better method, it was him. Using a hoe was the one thing he knew he had a gift for.
It was getting quite hot, although now and then a sigh of breeze came and ruffled the leaves a little. There was a powerful smell of earth. The youth had never seen such rich soil.
The one-legged man was a couple of rows along and he kept up a constant grizzle.
“Time was I’d’ve shot along here like a flamin’ two year old,” he’d say to no-one in particular. “But that was when a man had two good legs.”
The youth thought how hard it must be to work the artificial leg in the soft soil, and how awkward to have to bend with it every few moments. When the man bent right down he would let out a loud groan of “Ahhhhh!” and you would hear a metallic cl
ick, as though a locking device was clicking in and out. Sometimes the man would have trouble raising himself from the bent position and would do the groan again: “Ahhhhh!” It sounded like a noise Long John Silver would make: “Ahhhhhh! Avast ye lubbers!” The youth thought of the man as Long John, and imagined him with a cutlass and a parrot on his shoulder.
A few rows away on the other side were two young chaps about twenty. They talked to each other in hoity-toity voices. They kept saying the word sar-tra. The youth could not follow enough of their conversation to figure out what sar-tra was.
Denny kept a watch on everything. He would walk along a row where the chipper had been, checking how good a job was being done. Sometimes he’d call the chipper back and show him where he’d missed some weeds or had damaged a cotton plant with the hoe or had trodden down the soil too much. Then he would cross a few rows and walk back along another chipper’s line and check that out. He came along the youth’s row once, but didn’t say anything. Then he crossed to Long John and asked him how he was managing. Long John suddenly seemed invigorated. He declared that he was goin’ like steam, and that he’d done more hard yakka in his time than he’d had hot dinners, and that young fellas nowadays didn’t know they were born. But as soon as Denny was out of earshot he resumed his grizzling: “One time a man wouldn’t’ve put up with a pissant like that, but that was back when a bloke had two good legs!”
Denny was constantly coming and going. He’d do some checking of the rows, then speed off in his jeep, then reappear twenty minutes later. Other times he’d sit in the jeep using a pair of binoculars. Sometimes he’d be standing up in the jeep, one hand on the windshield, the other holding the binoculars up to his eyes.
“Hey, look at that,” someone said when they first noticed. “He thinks he’s fuckin’ Rommel!”
“Nah,” said someone else. “It’d have to be Patton. He always wants to be a Yank!”
“He oughta watch out, standin’ up there like that,” another chimed in. “If the wind got under that fuckin’ hat he’d take off!”
The truck came with the morning tea and Panos blew his whistle for a ten-minute break. The youth sat in the shade of the truck, with his back against one of the wheels. He sipped his tea and looked across the endless rows and listened to the buzz of talk. The two young chaps were going on with their discussion about sar-tra and he guessed that sar-tra was a person. They spoke softly in posh voices and it was hard to catch all they said, especially with other talk going on. They mentioned “tutorials” and “the campus” and a “Professor” Somebody and the youth guessed they were uni students. He looked at them admiringly from the corner of his eye. How clever they must be, he thought.
When the tea-break was over the truck driver pulled away with a lot of revving and a couple of wheel-spins in the dirt. Denny was nearby and yelled at him to take it easy. The driver stuck his head out and grinned and said something that nobody quite caught. The truck sped off. When it returned to pick the chippers up at lunchtime it approached fast and pulled up with a skid. Denny was a fair distance away, next to his jeep, but the youth noticed that he put his hands on his hips and stared in the truck’s direction. They had their lunch-break back at camp. When they went to climb back onto the truck afterwards there was a different driver. Denny had sacked the other one.
“What did he sack him for?” asked someone.
“For bein’ a lair,” another replied.
“Somebody oughta front up to the bastard!” declared Long John. “Sackin’ a bloke! One time I’d’ve had a go at him, no worries!”
“It ain’t right,” said someone else. “Sackin’ a bloke just because he reckons he’s a lair. Who’s he to say anyone’s a lair?”
“He’s the ramrod.”
“He’s the fuckin’ Hat-rack!”
“He’s General Patton with pearl-handled friggin’ revolvers.”
“And besides, that bloke was a fuckin’ lair.”
“Yeah, there is that.”
The new driver went very sedately.
THERE WAS what they called an ablutions block at the camp and it had an endless supply of hot water. The nozzles of the showers were broad and shiny and when you stood in the stream of water your whole body was enveloped in it. The showers were always crowded after knock-off and there was lots of talk and laughter and horseplay.
Later on, after the evening meal, the campfire would be lit. Two of the men had guitars and another a mouth-organ and they would play together. One of the guitarists liked folk music, the other was into rock’n’roll, while the mouth-organist only ever wanted to play “Swannee River.”
The folk music chap was the best musician, so he generally played and sang what he liked and the other two tried to follow along. There was a song called “Deportee” that he sang a lot. He said it was by someone named Woody Guthrie. The youth loved that song from the first moment. The tune gripped his heart and he thought the words were the most beautiful poetry he’d ever heard. He wasn’t sure what it was about at first, but gradually understood that it told of Mexican workers coming illegally into America to pick fruit, and then being deported back over the Rio Grande:
My father’s own father
He waded that river.
They took all the money
He made in his life.
My brothers and sisters
Came working the fruit trees,
And they rode on the trucks
Till they took down and died.
Then there were some words in Spanish, and a part about being chased:
Six hundred miles
To that Mexican border
They chase us like outlaws
Like rustlers, like thieves.
Next there was the part about a lot of people dying:
We died ’neath your trees
And we died in your bushes.
Both sides of that river
We died just the same.
Then came the part that made it clear why the song had such a feeling of pain and disaster. It was about a plane crash, a plane full of those Mexican fruit-pickers being deported:
The sky plane caught fire
Over Los Gatos Canyon.
Like a fireball of lightning
It shook all our hills.
Who are all those friends
All scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says
“They are just deportees.”
The youth could not stay seated by the fire after hearing that song. He had to walk far off into the dark by himself, to think about the deportees going down in flames at Los Gatos, and the Anglo-Saxons going down under the arrows, and Harry Dale the Drover drowning in the flood, and the Bushranger riddled with a hundred bullets. The refrain of the song was “Goodbye Rosalita,” and in that name was all the beauty and sorrow of the world. It made you see vivid red roses, and then the roses darkened with tragedy . . . Goodbye Rosalita, Goodbye Rosalita.
After a long time out in the dark, seeing the campfire flickering in the distance and the men leaving it one by one to go to bed, the youth would feel cried-out enough to be tired. He’d go to his hut and lie on the bed and try to keep his thoughts on dark Spanish roses until he could drift away in sleep, but it was hard to block out the sounds that Long John made, specially when he sat up mumbling and coughing and reached for his tin to piss in.
THE TWO uni students were usually working the nearby rows and the youth could listen to their conversations. It was only ever bits of conversation, but he began to piece the bits together. Their names were Simon and Patrick. They looked a lot like each other, except that Simon had black hair always neatly combed, while Patrick had an unruly mop of red hair. They talked a fair bit about sar-tra, and also about nee-cha, and sometimes about hi-digger and shoppin-hower. None of it meant anything to the youth but it sounded wonderfully intelligent
and interesting and made Simon and Patrick seem like beings from another dimension. They also talked about films, though not just ordinary films. They liked “art-house films,” whatever that meant.
“Let’s face it,” said Simon. “Beyond art-house, there’s nothing remotely watchable.”
“Absolutely,” Patrick agreed. “Hollywood’s a wasteland.”
Then he heard them mention a film he’d seen. The youth had gone into a cinema near Telford Square one time, in the afternoon, not knowing anything about the movie but feeling overwrought and wanting to be in a cool dark place for a while. The film had impressed him because it had been so strange and foreign—Swedish, it was, with people talking very intensely to each other and shots of snow on the ground—and yet he’d been able to follow it, more or less. He felt like calling out to Simon and Patrick that he’d seen that film and that it just went to show that outside art-house there’s nothing remotely watchable and that Hollywood is a wasteland. He imagined being friends with them and having interesting conversations. He could discuss 1066. Being uni students they’d know all about that for sure. He’d ask them where they thought it had all gone wrong for the Anglo-Saxons. Were the tactics too negative at Hastings? Had the effort of Stamford Bridge been too much? Yes, he should definitely have a talk to them about it. They’d probably be glad of a chance to compare notes.
He reflected on how he could get into conversation with them. He needed to have a topic ready for when the chance came. He spent hours trying to formulate something just right, something he could memorise. A question would be best. “Excuse me, I’ve just been trying to recall. Of King Harold’s brothers, was it Gyrth or Leofwine who was with him at Hastings?” And they would reply: “Oh, both of them actually, and of course it was the other brother, Tostig, who’d turned traitor and joined the enemy side at Stamford Bridge.”