At breakfast Paul Scott arrived, and the remaining helpers, the Lutheran Schulers, turned up just as the hot clamp of the sun finished its drying out of the wheat. It was the best moment of the day — as it turned out, the best for Walter in the entire harvest, for things were soon to turn sour. The horses champed away at a last minute feed, rigged powerfully in their leather collars and iron hames. The trace chains hung slack, but in a minute they’d clank and stiffen, and the clatter and swish of machinery would eat its way across the yellow and blue haze. But nothing could happen until Blacky surged back from his look at the wheat — there he was, giving his signal, a scarecrow in white shirt and stained waistcoat — and with his shout everything began.
Walter would be alone until the first harvester arrived ready to unload at the bagging point. He squatted, nibbled a straw, and spat. Old Pepper had fixed on the idea that he was a “scholar”, but his only contact with the university he was supposed to know all about was a fading ambition, which the old-timer had picked up God knows when from his parents. At tea the night before when Walter ambled in, Mr Pepper had drawn attention to his “scholar’s stoop”. This had given Billy the chance to make a crack:
“What does he know?”
Mr Pepper considered the brown depths of his teacup. “I believe in an education. It can change a man’s fortune without half-killing him. Why, you tell ’im, Wally.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“Modest,” nodded the old man, and swung round to confirm the virtue with his wife, who was checking the stew for the Reids — who’d woken with fearful bad tempers and immediately disappeared down to the yards. Mrs Pepper said nothing. Sometimes even her silence healed things, but not now.
“What I know isn’t much use around here. Besides,” Walter insisted, “the more you know, the more you realize you’ve got to learn.”
“Do tell,” sneered Billy.
Walter had meant to make a gift to Billy’s point of view. Out here on the plains there existed only the equality of hands. But he had sounded merely priggish.
Billy mopped his plate with bread and swigged his remaining tea. “No pudding for me,” he told Mrs Pepper.
Her husband now addressed Walter with a sharpened curiosity. “Look here, what happened to Ian Gillen’s boy, eh? At twenty-five or thereabouts he’s got nineteen thousand acres producing like his father never could.”
“His Dad had the money to start with.”
“Science, that’s what done it,” said Mr Pepper, and nothing would shift him. Suddenly Billy appeared to be holding everything against Walter, as if he had been getting away without scars, and would have to be wounded to make things equal. If it came to a fight, Walter’s only weapon, words, would be next to useless. Billy’s weapons, sharpened on rough experience, could do their work swiftly.
Even now, as Billy cajoled the horses from his high seat on a harvester, something was building up. Walter had no sense of a special quality which he had held over Billy to cause all this: as far as he could see it was himself, the accidental he that all his life had shaped, which had mysteriously become a point of contention. Two hares dashed by his boots, and the painted shells of quail scuttled from the path of approaching horses: all the disturbed life of the wheat paddocks flew out again as it had when Walter felt worst about Mrs Mackenzie, barely two weeks before. But now, instead of brooding, he stretched, gave a wave to the Schulers, and adjusted his hat for the job ahead.
The morning’s work soon took over. Dust and chaff flew, Blacky shouted — you could hear him a mile off — Paul Scott and Eric Schuler swore and grunted as they hefted the granite-hard wheat bags onto the wagon. Blacky and Ned and Billy drove the harvesters, wheeling up to the bare apron of paddock where the bags sat ready, checking harness while Walter and Otto Schuler clipped empty bags to the bins and opened the shutes, guiding the dry torrent of wheat downwards. Then they took the bags by the ears and lugged them aside and got on with the sewing: six high-armed stitches, a ram of the funnel, and the wrinkled top of the bag swelled with extra wheat — then the final stitches, and the next bag and the next.
It seemed the Peppers would never arrive with morning tea, but at last their dray crept around the stubbled edge of the paddock and stopped under the lone tree on the fence.
For a few minutes no-one but Mrs Pepper spoke, and she said only “tea”, “sugar”, “buns” — these were yellow rock-cakes — and clicked the tin billy on the enamel mugs as they were held out for more. Then everyone had their breath back, and spoke at once. Finally Blacky’s voice overrode the rest:
“Nobody,” he said, “is working hard enough.”
Otto and the other Schulers stared humourlessly across the rims of their mugs. Walter sensed that Blacky was working around the half-circle of reclining men to take a crack at him, so he waited while the Lutherans were reassured by Blacky’s wink and his “never mind”, and a poke in the stomach for Otto, and then he was forced to take it on the chin.
“I think young Wally’s tired himself in town.”
“That’d be right,” sniggered Ned.
“Wally,” crooned Mrs Pepper, “a sweetheart?” Mrs Pepper habitually wore her hair coiled in a black and silver pile and had the energy of someone much younger: it was this — the breath of delight in others’ lives — that kept her young. She pounced on Walter and poured him a fresh mug of tea, and urged another bun. The dry crumbs refused to go down when he swallowed.
“Well?”
“There’s the daughter of a certain publican in Forbes, Mrs P, and she and Wally I understand are very thick.” Blacky used his white mug as a pointer, though to Walter’s eyes it butted the air like a fist.
“Whatsername,” slurred Ned, and snapped his fingers as if he’d stated something.
Walter shot Billy a hot look which said: if you wanted to, you could stop this silly carry-on. But while Billy wasn’t smiling and laughing like the rest, it was plain that he wanted things to get worse.
“Yeah, I hear Wally’s ‘in love’.”
“Go on,” breathed Ned with thick wonder.
“Oh, he told a friend of mine all about it,” said Blacky, “and a very touching tale it was too. The only thing is” — and here he spoke to Mrs Pepper alone — “the lass herself ain’t sure it’s mutual.”
“Stanley Reid!” admonished the woman, realizing too late what had happened. Walter gave Blacky a hard stare, and from the corner of his eye saw Billy slip from the dray and head back to his horses.
“A barmaid is a wonderful talker,” observed Blacky to the world. He poured his tea-leaves clot by clot to the ground and rested his mug upside down on the dray.
The Schulers seemed barely aware of what had happened. They nodded to each other and thanked Mrs Pepper with pleasureless smiles. For the rest of the day, though, Walter took refuge in their company. He was wild at himself for not hitting back straight away, yet any attempt at redress would have been hopeless — he felt himself floundering at the centre of a ring of raised and mocking eyebrows.
Still, at dusk, when he and Billy sat on the veranda after their wash, he tried to wrest things back.
“What’s Blacky been saying, eh?”
But Billy merely shrugged, sneezed, and cursed the wheat dust.
At tea-time Eddie Harkness rolled up to the front of the house driving his father’s “Hudson 33”, a motor car as sleek as a dressed plank.
The inspection called for several lamps to be lit, and a rag to wipe clean the inquisitive paw marks of old Pepper.
“Who wants a run to town?” Eddie beamed, showing his white teeth, and exhausted as they were, Blacky, Ned and Billy piled in, leaving Mrs Pepper’s apple pie untasted in the kitchen.
“What about you?” asked Eddie as he fiddled with his expensive gloves. His father owned the general store. Eddie took what he wanted.
“I’m buggered,” said Walter.
Off they went shouting and singing — someone yodelled “Ta-ta my bonnie Maggie darli
ng” down at the gate, and Walter knew he was the cause of the laughter that followed. The acetylene headlamps peered weakly back as the car swung around and negotiated the dry creek.
With its owners gone the house seemed friendly. When the table was cleared and the dishes washed and stacked away, and her old man gone outside to fetch wood, Mrs Pepper apologized for getting things wrong at morning tea.
“It wasn’t you,” said Walter, staring at the stains on the bare wood table: cigarette burns, the brown rings of hot saucepans, dark clouds of liquid drifting down the years.
“You’re not like the others, I can see that now.”
“Aren’t I.” It was a dull statement, not a question.
“They’re just a mob of no-goods.” She spoke with fire. “I could tell you things about Blacky Reid that ought to hang him.”
It appeared she was serious.
“Take Ned,” she continued, “he’s not lazy, but he’s got no purpose. Which is the worst? He’s Blacky’s dog.”
“Why do you help them out?”
“For his sake,” she nodded to the thump, thump coming from behind the kitchen wall as her husband stacked wood. “You’re a hard worker too,” she smiled, “but you’ve got something better than this life on your mind.”
“No,” contended Walter, but he couldn’t work out what to say. Would Mrs Pepper understand dreams — the “maybe” of not ever shifting, but scrutinizing the life that swirled under motionless things? Walter mistrusted his own convictions.
And Frances — he wasn’t going to talk about her.
“I know Martha Bryant,” said Mrs Pepper, referring to the barmaid at the Royal. “She was married to a parson, did you know? But ran off with a train driver. Doesn’t everyone know?” Mrs Pepper gave Walter the kind of look she might have reserved for Rip Van Winkle. “Then she came home to Parkes. Her dad was the straightest man in town, Eris Bryant the saddler. Trust Martha to shame him: she was bold, even as a kiddie.”
Mrs Pepper then seemed to change the subject, but really it was the same story: “You’re the type of boy who doesn’t want to hurt people.”
Walter nodded sleepily, she had him exactly.
“But you will, and you do.”
“No —”
“You see,” Mrs Pepper insisted, “you have an independent mind.”
The solid-armed woman had turned florid in the practice of her intelligence. “And it’s not just that you seem to have a certain attitude. You do have it.”
She let the pronouncement sink in. A nightbird shrieked across the silent paddocks, and suddenly the house seemed not free of the Reids at all: inside and out it reeked of their ownership. Slowly Walter saw what Mrs Pepper was saying, and the injustice of it pricked him.
“You mean Blacky might have been getting back at me?” He scraped his chair signalling offence, but she restrained him with a rough hand.
She held on. “I can see what’s happening between you and your friends. They’re taking something from you after you took something from them.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.” She poured herself a fresh cup.
“Blacky and Martha, are they, you know, engaged?”
“Well, they’ll never marry,” observed Mrs Pepper tactfully, plunging her hands into a mountain of dough as she prepared the next day’s bread.
Walter was asleep when the others arrived home, though behind a tattered dream of crouching against a fence while Blacky rode at him on his motorbike he was dimly aware of low voices, dropped boots, and the distant whine of an engine.
The next day they all complained of headaches, and worked sullenly and hard. Walter yarned with the Schulers at morning tea, at dinner and at afternoon tea as well. The Reids and Billy flopped into bed straight after the evening meal. Even between themselves sociability seemed to have evaporated, and the split that Blacky had opened with his jab at Walter mattered less, though it remained. Billy was not unfriendly, but he stopped short of the way things had been before. At the end of each day he rode in to see his mother, but refused to respond with more than a word even to Mrs Pepper’s gentle enquiries.
Something had diverted them on their outing to Forbes with Eddie, but it was not until Walter and Billy rode home together at the end of the fourth and last day that Walter learned about it.
The horses, head to tail, held Billy’s voice behind. Walter scanned the lumpy blackness ahead, or just looked up at the stars. A storm was coming. Intermittent sheet-lightning showed high above Canowindra, over thirty miles away.
“We settled into the pub. Later Eddie got so drunk that Ned had to drive back. But first Blacky started roasting an old German, one of the Kaiser’s crowd, you know, their king-bloke. Blacky told him all the Germans were sausage-eaters who’d put their mothers into sausages if they got half a chance. When the old German was hopping mad Blacky told him he knew for a fact he’d put his own mother into a sausage and brought her out to Australia in a suitcase. Things ran hot, Blacky nearly got a faceful of beer, but he bought the old geezer a drink — you know Blacky — they got to be good mates.”
Ginger followed Peapod in a wake of horse smells. Lightning flickered closer now, so that a hump of black cloud was outlined. A curlew called eerily from far off.
“He said there was going to be a war.”
“Who with?”
“Germany and England. He was all for England. For Australia, anyhow. He would not stick up for his own country at all — he spat.”
“Australia wouldn’t be in it,” said Walter. “Never,” he repeated firmly, because he was suddenly nervous. Though the peaceable bush nearby had hushed, the curlew faintly cried away to the west, where the stars, streaks of ash, burnt themselves out.
Billy urged Ginger alongside. Spittle and iron, clanked teeth, and the kick of boot-leather on horsehide held him there.
“We’re too far from anywhere,” Walter concluded.
“You could be right.”
Now they were at the crossroads, and Billy worked hard to hold in Ginger, who sensed the coming gallop along the sandy track. Walter said:
“There was nothing in what Blacky said about the Reilly girl, you know.”
“Good-oh.”
Though darkness was between them, and only the scrape of hoofs gave them away, Walter felt they saw each other clearly. And it wasn’t friendship, nor was it shared interest that caused this peculiar flow of recognition. It was as though different nationalities had been declared. When had the declaration been made? The more Walter claimed to himself their differences didn’t matter, the greater they loomed.
“The barmaid’s just a trouble-maker.”
“She’s that all right.”
Then they talked about Billy’s mother — just a couple of words. Finally they agreed that hard work could kill a man, and they were dog tired. At last, each one echoing the sentiments of the other, they parted.
Both were home and asleep before the storm struck, though their parents saw everything. At the Gilchrists’ the wind poured from the hills with the grinding sound of a huge axle. Over at the Mackenzies’, Billy’s father slammed doors and witnessed in a triple succession of lightning flashes the curtain of rain as it swayed just beyond the edge of the veranda.
That night in Parkes hospital Billy’s mother died.
8
The Uninvited Guest
“Franny, this admirer of yours —”
“Admirer!”
“Walter whoever-he-is.”
“Gilchrist,” mouthed Frances, speaking at Walter’s letter, which under its own power had raised two thick folds to form a triangle. Until this moment it had been paper alone. Now her mother was giving it importance. “He wrote, I didn’t.”
Mrs Reilly sat erect and prim, not at all herself. “I can see this Walter in a couple of years. He’s ghastly enough now with his loathsome New Year dances and funerals and mud — heavens, he’s trying so hard and all he can rise to is crudeness.”
Fra
nces saw the letter as inoffensive, even dull, compared with her mother’s own quick-tongued picture of things on other occasions. What about the “full story” of her marriage, which she’d revealed over the queer week following New Year when Pat Reilly had again left for Forbes? There had been moments then, many of them, when Frances had wanted to cry Stop, either because she couldn’t bear to see her father so unfairly investigated, or because she was in stitches. But she said nothing now, not because of this shared “cruel streak”, but because staring at the letter she felt a need to rouse opposition, and form from the swirling nothingness of her emotions a definite attitude.
“Wide hat, red face, arms like sides of beef, thick shoes. Boots! Spilling tea all over the carpet,” Mrs Reilly paused — having splashed a drop herself.
“Here?”
“Nothing to talk about but the price of wool, or cattle, or rabbits or whatever it is they kill and sell off. Asking about your music, as if he cared, producing a couple of tickets for the theatre — something awful, you can be sure — and clod-hopping with you down Pitt Street. And then, like a bull at a gate, producing a ring and asking you to cook hot dinners for ever in a tin shed.”
“He’s not like that,” said Frances, at last meeting the force which gave Walter a shape. “He won’t be like that,” she added, surprising herself by thinking about him in the future.
“He’d ask you to play something for him in the living room. And after Debussy, if he were awake, he’d ask for something jolly. ‘Polly Wolly Doodle’, or ‘Two Little Girls in Blue’.”
Frances giggled. Her mother’s secret was exaggeration — she loved to pound the heavy notes. “He’s much finer than you think.” She swallowed, and took more tea.
But her mother had not, as usual, taken this flight of fancy the extra distance and elevated it to the cosmically absurd, where peculiar figures with familiar faces were made to behave uproariously — Dad as an angel with dangling braces, Amos a possum with silver fur, Harry at the beach learning to talk under water.
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