Owen Marshall Selected Stories

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  ‘Law. I’m doing law.’

  ‘I found there wasn’t much privacy in economics. I should say that law would be much the same: more revenue probably, but no privacy.’ Raf stopped, and enjoyed the privacy of his land for a moment. The small terraces and scarps vibrated in the heat. The bird calls were outnumbered by the muted sound of firing from the West Melton butts. ‘I’ve been thinking of going out of sheep into Angora goats,’ said Raf. ‘I read an article saying they’re much more profitable per head, ideal for smaller properties. Three rabbits?’ He tagged on about the rabbits after a pause, when we had started to walk towards the pines again. ‘Is one and a half rabbits enough for you?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘I’ve been keeping an eye on these. There’s nearly a dozen here. I’ve been looking forward to a special occasion so I could use some.’ Raf walked in an arc behind the pines, so that we would come from the broken slope where there was gorse and briar. He shot two rabbits quickly with the twelve-gauge, and then had me walk through the pines and flush another out to make the three.

  Raf and I sat on the front step of his house, and he cleaned the rabbits, as I peeled the potatoes. He went over the various ways in which the rabbits could be combined with the other food we had. We ate those rabbits several times over before we had lunch. They were good at last, though, with potatoes, pumpkin, cheese sauce, boiled eggs and beer. Repletion made Raf even more relaxed and thoughtful. ‘You get plenty of girls at the university, I suppose,’ he asked me. For the first time there was a hint of dissatisfaction in his voice. ‘Girls don’t seem much interested in privacy. I had a woman out here before Christmas. She did a lot of screenprinting. She seemed to like it here for several weeks, but then she began to mope. She said she found the landscape oppressive. She wasn’t a very tall girl, but big where it mattered, mind you.’ My brother was at a loss to explain why anyone should prefer the city. ‘I have to go into Christchurch now,’ he said. There was a note of grievance. He saw it as a lack of consideration, the screenprinting girl choosing to go back to town.

  ‘Maybe it’s the old house,’ I said. ‘Women have higher expectations there, I suppose.’

  ‘I bought a new bed for us. A brass one, original. It cost me a fat lamb cheque. She hated anything artificial: plastic, vinyl, nylon, veneers, anything like that.’ There certainly wasn’t much of such material in Raf’s house. Almost everything looked pre-war. Even the walls were tongue and groove. ‘She was a nice girl in many ways,’ Raf said.

  In mid-afternoon a visitor came. ‘It’s McLay,’ Raf said. ‘He’s bought the big place up the road. I forgot all about him. He’s come to look at my bore and pump.’ McLay was a farmer of self-importance: one of those men who walk in a perfectly normal manner, but whose evident conceit makes them appear to swagger. He parked his European car at an angle which best displayed its lines, and his sense of complacency grew as he came closer to the house.

  ‘Seen better days I’d say,’ he said, and he tapped with his shoe at the decayed boards close to the ground along the front of the house. ‘I like a place in permanent materials myself,’ he said. ‘Always have, always will.’ Raf was never defensive about his property. He considered it too much of a blessing to need its weaknesses concealed.

  ‘Most of the exterior is shot,’ he said frankly. ‘We had rabbit for lunch.’ McLay was somewhat baffled by that, and suffered a subtle loss of initiative.

  McLay would have taken his car to the pump, but Raf said it was easier if we sat in the trailer behind the Norton. McLay found it difficult to maintain his dignity there. He sat very upright, with one hand on the side to limit the bouncing, and with the other he tried to repel Raf’s greasy tools, which clattered around us. Raf had one bore sunk into the gravel, and he ran off water to his troughs. When he reached the place he switched off the motorbike, and sat there enjoying the sun. ‘Never seems to run dry, this bore,’ he said. ‘It’s with the river being so close, I suppose.’ McLay had scrambled from the trailer, and was wiping his wrist on the grass to clean it, after warding off Raf’s grease-gun. He felt a need to dissociate himself from Raf ’s scale of farming.

  ‘I’ll need to put in perhaps a dozen of these bores,’ he told me. ‘I’ve three hundred and fifty hectares, you see, and I hope to irrigate from them as well.’

  ‘I only need to run it for an hour or so each day,’ said Raf. He lifted the rusted kerosene tin that protected the motor.

  ‘Mine will have to be electric, with remote switches. I won’t be able to spend all day mucking about with petrol engines,’ countered McLay. Raf wound up the starting cord, and pulled with no result. ‘Gives a bit of trouble, does it?’ said McLay. Raf tried again and again. The only result was one cough, which flicked the starting cord up to give Raf a stinging blow across the face. McLay gave an understanding laugh. ‘Pity it’s not Briggs and Stratton. They’re the only small motor, I always say. I think you’ve flooded it.’ Raf seized the choke, fully extended it, and bent it across the motor. McLay was quiet. Two veins began to swell beneath the skin of my brother’s forehead. They made an inverted Y the colour of a bruise. He tried twice more with the cord, attempts of elaborate calmness, then he went to the trailer and brought back the crowbar. He systematically beat the four-stroke motor until the cooling fins had coalesced with the cylinder head, until the various attached parts had broken away. The crowbar made a solid crump, crump sound of impact, and the pipe from the bore rattled in its housing. Some of Raf’s sheep stopped grazing to regard him for a while then resumed feeding. McLay had an uneasy smile, and his eyes switched furtively back and forth from Raf to me.

  By the time Raf had finished, the veins in his forehead had subsided, and he wiped the sweat away with a sense of achievement. ‘Never underestimate the perversity of objects,’ he said. ‘Never let them get away with it. A switch won’t function, a fitting or tool won’t work, then before you know — open revolt. Don’t give an inch. Did you hear what I said, McLay? Never underestimate the perversity of objects.’

  ‘I’d better be on my way now,’ said McLay. There was an increasing air of placating wariness about him, as he realised the full extent of my brother’s eccentricity.

  ‘I’m going to use a windmill here,’ said Raf. ‘I should really have fitted one long ago. We’re going to have to get back to wind power a lot more in this country.’

  McLay rode back in the trailer without attempting to speak against the noise of the Norton, and when we reached the house he went off with a minimum leave-taking. ‘An odd sort of chap. Didn’t you think?’ Raf said. There was no irony apparent in his voice.

  Raf brought out more beer, and we sat again on the front step to drink it. The rural delivery car went past his gate without stopping. ‘At Lincoln,’ he said, ‘the postman was a woman. She used to pedal about in yellow shorts, and her legs were very strong and brown.’ He paused, and then said, ‘So very brown,’ in a wistful way. ‘She used to like me making puns about her having more mail than she could deal with. I have to go to Christchurch now.’ The inconvenience of it rankled. ‘I thought I might have had a letter from the Agriculture Department with information about goats,’ he said. ‘I intend those to be my two priorities this year: goats and the windmill.’

  My brother’s prevalent attitude to life was one of convinced cheerfulness, yet the non-arrival of the department’s letter concerning the goats, and the poignant recollection of the Lincoln post girl’s legs, had brought him as close to depression as I had ever seen him. The drink too, I suppose. We’d had quite a lot to drink. I felt it was a good time to tell him of my present. ‘I brought you a present.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Cabernet sauvignon. It’s only New Zealand, but it’s a medal winner, and four years old. I remembered you liked it best.’

  The secret of Raf ’s joy in life was his appreciation of all the pleasures, irrespective of scale. He got up from the step in excitement. ‘What a day!’ he said. I got the bottle from my pack, and we h
ad an uncorking ceremony. Raf put the bottle on the step to breathe and warm. ‘We won’t have any more beer now until after the wine,’ he said. ‘We don’t want to be unable to appreciate it. Afterwards it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I’ll have to go at six or seven. I don’t want to have to hitch into Christchurch in the dark.’

  ‘Right. I’d take you in, but I’ve only got one helmet, and the lights on the bike aren’t going.’

  Raf seemed to have forgotten his disappointment about the goats and other things. His thin face was alive with speculative enterprise again. ‘What to have with the cabernet?’ he said. ‘We can’t drink a good wine with just anything.’ The full sophistication of a mind which had achieved honours in economics was given to the problem, and while the world grappled with the exigencies concerning inflation, corruption, guerrilla warfare, spiritual degeneration and environmental pollution, Raf and I sat amidst his seventeen quiet hectares at West Melton, and discussed the entourage for our cabernet. My brother was a great believer in immediate things.

  We had peas and baked potatoes, tinned red cabbage and corn. We ate it from plates on our knees, as we sat on the front step. Raf talked to me of his experiences on the continent, and how bad the vin ordinaire was in the south of France. He had some good wine glasses, and we raised them to the evening sun to admire the colour of the wine. Raf invited me to forget university, and join him on his goat and windmill farm. ‘Economics is a subject that destroys an appreciation of spiritual things,’ said Raf.

  ‘Law. I’m doing law.’

  ‘Same thing,’ said Raf. ‘Probably worse.’ He became so carried away in trying to persuade me of the deadening nature of formal studies, that he absent-mindedly kept the last of the cabernet sauvignon for himself, and so I fell back on beer. ‘If you’d seen some of the places I have — Bangkok, Glasgow, Nice — then the value of privacy would be clear to you. Space brings the individual dignity, Tony. Herd animals are always the least attractive. Have you noticed that? I think that’s one of the main reasons I want to move from sheep to goats. Goats have individuality, it seems to me.’

  ‘A goat suits a name.’

  ‘That’s my point.’ Raf sat relaxed on the step, his shingle land spreading away before him.

  Just on twilight Raf took me down to the West Melton corner on the Norton. He drove carefully, conscious of the drink we’d had. ‘Come out and see me soon,’ he said. ‘I meant what I said about forgetting economics, and joining me here to live.’ I watched him ride off, without lights, and cautious of the power of the motorbike. I could hear it long after he was out of sight, and I imagined my brother riding up his track, over the stones, towards his disreputable house. To resist the maudlin effects of the wine and the beer, I lay down in the long grass, out of sight of the road. I rested my head on my pack, and slept for an hour or so.

  So I ended up hitchhiking into the city in the dark after all. I was lucky, though, for after walking a few minutes, I was picked up by a dentist and his daughter. Her name was Susan. We talked about cars, and I tried not to breathe on Susan, lest she think me a typical boozy student. The dentist said he’d been having trouble trying to get the wheels balanced on his Lancia. ‘Never underestimate the perversity of objects,’ I said. The dentist liked that, and so did Susan. They had an appreciation for a turn of phrase. Raf would have enjoyed its reception. It isn’t often that incantations are effective beyond the frontiers of their own kingdom.

  Prince Valiant

  There’s some ugly country in New Zealand, don’t let them tell you it’s not so. Some of it is the country we are trying to form in our own image, perhaps. The Sinclair property was part of it. Bush had been taken off the slopes years before, and the soil was slumping into the gullies, the outwash spoiling what river flats there’d been. Eight and a half thousand hectares of land in an agony of transition. And Sinclair’s place was only one of several just the same.

  Sinclair had his priorities right. Money for super, then for his stock, then for his family. The country there just died without topdressing every other year. It was no use asking for anything to be done about the shearers’ quarters. Over the four seasons that I could remember, nothing had been improved. The wall above the stove was still blistered bare of paint from the oven fire we had in the first year I went. The bunks had only slats, and palliasses with a smell of mildew and string. Under the bottom bunk by the door was a pile of National Geographic magazines with the covers torn off. I could look up from the glossy artificiality of winter in Vermont, or West Irian religious rites, and see the scoured track to the yard. Dog kennels with the beaten ground to the extension of the chains, and a tide mark beyond each of a hundred mutton bones. The bones stuck from the ground like defective teeth. No one ever came from the National Geographic to see it all, even when it was summer in Vermont.

  I joined the others at Sinclair’s. The gang didn’t come up to full strength until well into the summer. I spent several months on forestry work at Dargaville, and started shearing again when they moved up country. Cathro still ran things. We had a fresh roustabout, but Neddy was the only new shearer. Neddy was younger than the rest of us: all elbows, knees, and eyes of a level intensity if you bothered to notice. Neddy was a good shearer. Tall, so that he suffered in the back, but flowing in his style and with the ability to calm sheep with his grip. Top-class shearers have that. Others, like Norman and Speel Harrison, transfer their impatience so the sheep will struggle if they can. I’ve seen Speel brain them with the handpiece when his temper was up.

  Neddy wasn’t disliked, and his shearing ability was recognised. He was easy and without malice. His laugh and brief replies were at once obliging and dismissive. He never drew close into the group. Perhaps it was his subtle lack of deference, or a companion’s realisation, after a time with Neddy, that he considered one person very much like another and placed no great store on any, least of all himself.

  Neddy was the one we called Prince Valiant, because of his car. It was a Chrysler Charger. He had it resprayed while they were working at the place before Sinclair’s. A metallic green of gloss and iridescence. For some reason he’d never replaced the bumpers, and the brackets stuck out like small antlers at the charge. In scroll work on each side were the words Prince Valiant. The letters were chrome yellow with black edging, and a lance was the underline, piercing the letters.

  So he was Prince Valiant, you see. At times there was something of a sneer in its use. The car was thought a pretension by the Harrisons and Sinclair. Neddy didn’t seem to mind. He spent a lot of time on his car. He had twin speakers mounted by the back window, and a line of clammy little monsters hanging suspended there. They were green and purple, the colours of cloudy jellies. He had a file box in the front passenger’s footwell, and he kept all his country and western tapes there. People like Willie Nelson and Whitey Schaeffer, Efram Nathan and Webb Pierce. Often during breaks, or after lunch, Neddy would go and sit in his car with the door open. He’d play his tapes, drink beer and gaze over Sinclair’s raddled land.

  Neddy talked to me only once about the car. I was sorting and oiling some combs, and he was making himself new sack slippers. A few deft tucks, and some stitches with the bag needle. ‘I like to drive,’ he said. ‘I like to drive at night. Close everything up, turn on the music, and drive. At night what’s outside could be anywhere. It just falls away behind. The music and me in there driving. It’s a whole world.’ He looked at me quickly with intent eyes. The laugh he gave disparaged himself, lest my reply should do it. Neddy had been expelled from school. He couldn’t get the hang of it, he told me. All the time he was at school, Neddy felt he was getting pushed around and, having no sense of the existence of other people, he couldn’t see any reason for being pushed around. Neddy’s family hadn’t done much by him, I gather. Cathro knew a bit about it. All I ever heard from Neddy was a comment in the shed when the Harrisons used the bale stencil to brand the roustabout’s backside. He said his father had used a hot clothes iron on
his mother.

  Another thing which kept Neddy a bit apart was the intensity of his interest in a girl in Te Tarehi. It had been going on most of the summer, Cathro said. No matter where they were working, every second or third night Neddy went all the way down to Te Tarehi to see his girlfriend. He’d put on his blue slacks and stock boots after tea, and that would be the last of him until the Charger came rumbling back up the track. Norman and Speel complained about being woken up when Neddy came into the quarters late, so several times when Neddy had had more beer than usual, he just switched off the car, and slept right there. I’ve come out before breakfast and seen him lying asleep, his polished stock boots dangling from his ankles, and his face pressed into the crease at the back of the seat.

  Neddy’s girlfriend was a source of undeclared envy. Speel and I resented being left with a pile of National Geographics without covers, and a monologue from his brother about the Social Credit philosophy. Speel tried to convince himself that Neddy’s girlfriend in Te Tarehi wasn’t worth it. He said he’d met someone who knew her: that she was flat-chested and the town bike. Neddy would carry on getting ready, waxing his stock boots, or taking his blue slacks from the newspaper underneath his palliasse. ‘Bite your arse,’ he’d say with a smile. The less Neddy said about his girl in Te Tarehi, the more desirable she became.

  We were due to finish the last mob at Sinclair’s on a Friday. On Thursday evening Neddy came out again ready for town. The ends of his hair were wet because he’d been cleaning his face. His blue slacks had pewter buttons on the back. In one hand he held three beer bottles by their necks like chickens. He laid them along the bench seat on the passenger’s side. Sinclair had come down to catch him. ‘You could do a job for me, Prince Valiant,’ he said. Sinclair was pleased to demonstrate his familiarity with the joke. ‘If you can get your mind off shagging, that is.’ Sinclair tried to take some paper from his trouser pocket, but the trousers were too tight, and the pocket opening was pressed flat. ‘It’s a note for the Wrightson’s agent.’ Sinclair squirmed and swore. ‘You’ll need to go to his house. The office will be shut.’