Owen Marshall Selected Stories

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  ‘That’s it,’ said Charles. ‘Last week I took an irrigation pump I’d mended back to a cocky up the valley, and at the gate a dog challenged me. Not a sheepdog either, but a Labrador. The sun was going down, and this old dog stood right before me, barking hoarsely, but it had so little belief in its own threat, or mine, that its eyes turned away as it barked. I had a feeling that it marked something in my life, but I had no way of guessing the significance.’

  ‘Kerouac called Monroe a trash blonde. He met her once and she snubbed him,’ said Evonne.

  ‘I’ve never read any Kerouac,’ said Len. ‘I come across the name from time to time, but I’ve never read anything.’

  ‘We’ll do our Kerouac dance for you,’ Judith said. She and Evonne stood up and swung their hips slowly and undulated their arms. Judith’s dress was still tucked in, and her legs were pink with sunburn, only behind the knees still white. Evonne could have been a Marilyn Monroe herself, with smooth muscles on her thighs, and heavy breast. Len gave his new, high-pitched laugh, but much softer than before.

  ‘That’s just a hula,’ he said.

  ‘Now reincarnation is another thing,’ said Charles. The beer had reached his eyes and they had a moist gleam. He lifted the strap of his green singlet, and scratched his shoulder. His thin body was crumpling in the heat and the relaxation of unforced conversation. ‘I find myself considering it quite often.’

  ‘You believe in reincarnation?’ said Ivan. Evonne and Judith still did their Kerouac dance, and Len clapped in time. It was a leisurely dance because of the heat, and Judith could drink from her mug without interrupting her movement.

  ‘Let me give you an example,’ said Charles. ‘I had this dream of hunting polar bears from a kayak, and one reared up on an ice-floe, and I felt all the authenticity of detail in an instant: how the water drummed the kayak skin against my hips, and the bear’s fur yellowed and disordered in the armpits as it raised great paws.’

  ‘An Eskimo dream. You didn’t,’ said Ivan.

  ‘What’s this?’ said Evonne.

  ‘Charles dreamt he was an Eskimo.’ The dancing was over, and Evonne and Judith sat down to laugh again.

  ‘You didn’t!’ said Len.

  ‘Only a few nights ago,’ said Charles. ‘It was so true that it woke me up. It took a while for the Arctic chill to pass. I got out of bed and went to the window. I could see some of the hill facings full to the moonlight, and a fenceline across them. But there wasn’t a polar bear in sight.’

  ‘Perhaps an Eskimo has had a vision of Dungarvie as recompense,’ said Ivan. ‘The view from your window with the dark gullies and moonlit tussock slopes of the Old Man Range, and a single fenceline to divide one side of emptiness from the other.’

  ‘Or the festival now,’ said Judith. ‘Us at our picnic here when we’re all supposed to be somewhere else. But it’s so hot. You’d hardly dream such heat.’

  Even reincarnation and the Kerouac dance couldn’t protect them all forever. The afternoon was well on, and consciences were stirring. No one voiced it, but they had a small fear that the Guides and qualified instructors might return from training and they would have to see themselves reflected in scornful eyes — five feckless people, moist-faced and idle in the sun from an excess of goodwill and beer.

  ‘I suppose we’ll have to go,’ said Len, but he continued to lie back, his suit trousers rolled below the knees. ‘I haven’t enjoyed myself so much in ages.’

  ‘We’ve still got our inspection to do, and poor Suzie Allenton,’ said Evonne.

  ‘And the meal,’ said Judith.

  ‘You didn’t give the mother helpers any of the carrots from the truck, did you, Charles?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They’re poisoned.’ Len knew this would set Judith off again.

  ‘That’s the sort of lunch issue our council runs to,’ said Ivan. Amid the laughter, Len clumsily stood up, but was unable to find his balance. Too many factors were combined against him: dizziness from standing up suddenly in the heat, pins and needles in his left leg from the hard ground, the flattery of beer and laughter, the loss of steadying inhibitions. He began to fall sideways despite whirling his arms, and the laughter increased. He tried to turn his fall into a leap across the pool, easy enough, but hit the far edge with an outstretched leg and half fell in. Had it meant his death, the others could not have stopped their laughter, which went on as Len hobbled in a circle on the grass to get his jarred leg moving properly again.

  The incident allowed Ivan and Len to make easy goodbyes, with no scrutiny of the day attempted. Laughter and spontaneous acceptance had been the start of their trivial festival, with laughter and openness they kissed and parted.

  Ivan and Len carried their shoes across the domain, and when they reached the truck they opened both doors, but stood outside for a while until the cab was a little less stifling. ‘You’d better drive,’ said Len. ‘I think you drank less than me.’ They could see Charles fitting his heavy boots as they pulled away, and when Ivan gave a farewell on the horn, Charles, Evonne and Judith raised their hands and, even at that distance and above the noise of the ute, there seemed an echo of machine-gun fire which might have been Judith’s laugh.

  Dungarvie fell over the edge of the world behind them. Soon they could see just the top of the high smithy garage. The morning’s trip seemed a life away. ‘We’re not much further ahead on civil defence,’ said Ivan.

  ‘The farmers round here say that disaster struck some time ago anyway, and today’s seminar was too late for that.’ Len was dusting his feet with his socks while Ivan drove, then he rolled down the legs of his suit trousers and began picking out spears of barley grass. ‘I never knew you’d been an actor,’ he said. ‘We should see more of each other and talk about those things.’

  ‘We will.’

  ‘Judith was the only one that didn’t tell us what she wanted to be. Did you hear her say that she was going through a break-up with her husband?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She told me while you were talking to Charles about reincarnation, or his time at Vic, or maybe his Eskimo dreams. Being a mother helper was a chance to step back from normal things and sort herself out.’

  ‘She could laugh anyway.’

  ‘That’s true. You meet interesting people by accident at times, don’t you? Scores of times I must have been through Dungarvie and I don’t think I’ve ever stopped. Yet today was some sort of fun, wouldn’t you say?’

  They talked easily in the afternoon sun. The Dungarvie Festival had been one of those oddities — a oncer — like a freak giant hailstorm, or the escape of zoo leopards into the suburbs. Those things which happen once in a blue moon, and which bind those caught up in them with a sharp sense of comradeship, and of life’s possibilities after all.

  Tomorrow We Save the Orphans

  My final voyage, a winter’s night, and Dubois accompanies me as a courtesy of farewell. After more than a year at Acme Textiles, I have been appointed a researcher with Statsfact Polling Agency. Dubois is piping me ashore. ‘I might do the same at your age,’ he says, ‘but later you’ll see the advantages of night work. Fewer people and more interesting ones.’ He’s right: they drop through the sieve of daylight employer to a nether world. The most fallible of fools and perverse of the profound.

  The breath that forms Dubois’ words is a plume in the freezing air as we stand beneath the water tower and check the sacking on the pipes. Appearance is most marked and memorable on the day that we meet a person, and the day we part. Dubois’ continental good looks are in some way debased, the casual, toss away features of a circus rouseabout, but his eyes and hands have individual authenticity. Dog-killing hands, strong and supple, with muscle raised between thumb and forefinger, and eyes that will not tolerate deceit.

  ‘I’ve been reading more about castle development and the influence of the Crusades. Brattices and the advantages of circular masonry,’ he says.

  I returned from Europe with an innocen
t bladder infection and a debt of over three thousand dollars to my parents. Acme Textiles was unimpressed with my education, but when I crooked my arm to make a muscle and talked of labouring in Wolverhampton, the personnel manager said okay, I’d got it, night work, but only if the caretaker liked the look of me. I never saw the personnel manager again. He was the Charon who delivered me to the underworld. His name was O’Laughlan. The managing director, whom I never met at all, was called Jim Simm, and the caretaker was N.F. Vincenze Dubois. Life is full of such splendid ironies.

  On this last night, a winter round, Dubois seems willing to put aside all except that final cover which is the necessary reserve to keep the glare of other people from our soul. At farewell to comradeship and proximity, it matters little if some confidences are shared which might be awkward if you had to meet again. We all learn to jog along in our relationships, not expecting too much, not admitting ambitions we can afterwards be beaten with. ‘Have you really been here fourteen months?’ says Dubois. He has a muslin cleaning rag knotted around his neck for warmth and the collar of his tartan jacket turned up against the chill. ‘Fourteen months. Fourteen months,’ he says, ‘and I don’t remember more than two or three things in that time, apart from the Middle Ages, that I care a damn about. I hope it’s different for you.’

  Night has a stark effect. A liposuction that removes the inessential until the bones, the sinew, the organs only of an impartial world remain. The dump skips cast perfect shadows from the moon across the frosted shingle and dirt of the yard. Larger stones are rising up like mushrooms, and cats troop Indian file silhouettes upon the wall at Pine Light Engineering with shoulder bones that undulate against the sky. Grass which grows three storeys up in the gutterings gives a faint, prairie whisper in the barely moving air, and hedgehogs fossick out from weed and fennel corners to feed.

  Frontages of industry present the latest faces, but the backsides retain the scars and emblems of old allegiances. Pine Engineering was once the warehouse of Pacific Skins Ltd, and Acme Textiles itself incorporates, among others, the bulk of Aldous D. McManus and Sons, Pastoral Agents and Scourers, estab. 1862. The brave old lettering can be seen behind the fire escapes. Dotty Standish has come to one of the small side-doors to cry, as she does most nights. Her husband died three months ago from cancer of the bowel. Dubois will not fire her yet, as she has been a good cleaner for several years.

  ‘I could have made you assistant caretaker, or night watchman, if you wanted to stay on, even though you’re no good with your hands,’ says Dubois as we check the loading bay doors. Our steps echo on the hollow wooden ramps and between the echoes is the sound of Dotty snivelling not far away. ‘I heard a new dog barking last night,’ says Dubois. ‘A Labrador, or Labrador cross I reckon, at the refrigeration depot, or perhaps further over at the seed driers.’

  Dubois is chunky and middle-aged, but nimble still. In the main machine room he vaults to the top of the spinners to check them. He leaps from one to the next. There are fourteen French Bavantes and six Wisconsin Hammonds, the names in proud red and green bas-relief on the sides of the casings over which Dubois strides. He has come to check on the Hinkles’ electrician. As caretaker Dubois has patronage to dispense; not just cleaning for the women of his choice, but suppliers and tradespeople. The Hinkles’ man has finished with the freight lifts, and tells us they should get their certificates of worthiness now.

  ‘I meant to say,’ says Dubois, ‘that my telly is playing up. The sound cuts out every now and then.’

  ‘I’ll call in on my way out,’ says the Hinkles’ man eagerly.

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘No sweat, Jesus, no. If it’s anything serious we could let you have a nearly new set we’ve repossessed.’

  ‘Tell Keith I’ll probably need someone out to fit new fluorescent lighting in accounts. I’ll know for sure in a week or two.’

  ‘Right. No sweat. See you then,’ says the Hinkles’ man. Dubois conducts the conversation from the height of the spinners, which accentuates his mastery. He now climbs higher as the electrician leaves. Into the steel rafters he moves to check his rat baits, disturbing delicate colonies of wool fibres built up over the years. Some fall lightly in clumps like varicoloured lichens, others disintegrate and drift for a time before the lights as a haze of green, or gold, or blue.

  ‘The bastards have been at it.’ His voice is tight with satisfaction. ‘Oh rat, rat, you’ll feel thirsty now.’ Dubois half swings through the bolted rafters above the machines, leg and arm, leg and arm, careful to protect his head. ‘Rat, rat,’ he says, ‘you feel the thirst of death.’

  The factory at night is a titanic; dimly lit and throbbing. A place of many levels and decks, with lives a world apart separated by just a bulkhead, or a narrow stairway that says factory staff only. The boiler pipes are never silent in this season, the air conditioning fans resonate with individual melodies from deck to deck. A persistent vibration gives a sense of movement, of voyaging, so that Acme Textiles is pressing on over the sea of the night.

  Vincenze Dubois is more absolute captain of the firm by night than Jim Simm ever is by day. In trading hours the place is subject to the compromise and transactions of the world, taking cognisance of powers of equal, or greater, strength. But Dubois has a concentric empire, a ship of the night that rumbles self-sufficiency, and to which only minions from the outside come. This caretaker knows the place as an extension of himself. The cleaners and the routine of their tasks, the machines in all their variety, rat paths in the ceilings and cellars, the seventh skylight in the warehouse which leaks after hail. He knows the stalagmites of borer dust glinting on the lower beams of the acid store, the folded blankets behind the dye crates where the works supervisor takes Sarah from reception during breaks, the blue pigeons which have pushed past the netting on the east gable, the forgotten box of Chinese silk cocoons above the cupboard in the old boardroom presented by a trade delegation in 1949. Dubois knows Stevens of personnel picks his nose, that the three original doors nailed shut behind boxes in the old storeroom are solid kauri, that the morning sun strikes Acme first on the rusted iron above the blue pigeoned east gable. There is a piebald rat in the boiler house, Dubois tells me, which eschews all poison, and antique green jars in wickerwork ignored beneath the dust and spiders’ lace of the upper gantry. Cannington writes old-fashioned poetry on the firm’s paper, and Tess Eggleslee hides stolen lipsticks in the ledge above the toilet cubicles. There is a faint stain on the smooth wooden floor of the press room. Dubois points it out as the blood of Kenny Donald, crushed there seven years before by a forklift carrying the umber bolts of commercial grade which were so popular at the time.

  ‘Remember we talked of mead,’ says Dubois. ‘I’ve had some working, several batches, in fact, with different herbs, but it’s difficult to control the fermentation. I’m not very hopeful and honey’s bloody expensive.’

  We are in the first-storey offices, which have imitation wood grain formica desks and vinyl swivel chairs with corrective backs. There is not a cobweb, or a textile thread, in sight. From these windows the freight yard is a bleak field. In the summer the security beams suff use the penetrable and billowing air, but now their light is fractured, crystalline in the frozen night. The Tuki sisters watch Dubois check behind the wall heater and beneath the photocopiers.

  ‘You won’t find anything there, eh,’ they say.

  ‘I’ll catch you one night,’ says Dubois.

  ‘Promises, promises,’ they say.

  Dubois will miss the Medieval Age, I suppose. As well as women and machines, he likes discussion of the origin of heraldic devices, and how donjon, Norman-French for tower, became corrupted by time and usage into dungeon. Dubois likes me because I am an intellectual and simpleton. I am without authority or skills in the nether world, yet have information he finds interesting. ‘There was a Dubois with William at Hastings,’ I say, ‘and Cardinal Dubois was Premier Minister in 1772 and in effect the ruler of France.’

 
‘I was told that Dubois meant by the wood. My grandmother always said we had property in New Orleans.’

  ‘Edmond Dubois-Crance served in the Royal French guard, but became a leading Jacobin in the revolution and organised its armies.’

  ‘There’s a Negro branch of the Dubois in the States,’ Dubois says.

  ‘What did you do before?’ I ask him.

  ‘Before?’

  ‘Before becoming a caretaker,’ I say. Dubois leans away from me to peer behind the drink dispenser.

  ‘Charlotte, Charlotte,’ he calls, and Charlotte comes from one of the corridors. ‘There’s cardboard cups squashed down the back here. Get one of the girls to poke them out with a broom handle please. Michelle, perhaps: she looks as if she’d be better with that end than the brush.’ Charlotte laughs, nods, walks away, says nothing. ‘Charlotte,’ calls Dubois again a little while after. He has found something else to rectify, but Charlotte is out of earshot. ‘Charlotte? Ah, never mind. Do you ask a lawyer or an architect what they did before? Do you ask a headmistress or a mercantile banker what they did before?’

  ‘It’s just that …’

  ‘It’s just that you can’t imagine an eighteen-year-old deciding to make a life career as a custodian, right?’

  ‘No, it’s not that,’ I say, but it is exactly that. Caretaking is something that you end up doing, surely, as a result of compromises and expedients. A wintering over until you line up something more in keeping with your view of yourself. There is something in the concept of caretaker that suggests the pathological poles of murderer or poet.

  ‘It’s my life’s job,’ says Dubois. ‘I started out as a primary school caretaker and I’ve done pretty much all sorts. The more night work the better, though, because I’m interested in freedom, see, which is a form of power.’ Dubois hears a hoon car in the alley, and leaps up on to one of the canteen tables so that he can watch the lights pass his domain. We can hear the car back-firing as it slows to turn into Astle Street.