The Scarecrow

by Ronald Hugh Morrieson

  ‘Anyway all gangsters have molls,’ I said to Les, when we were in the orchard but Les was up a tree and said nothing.

  The roof of the shed was at two different levels, but one of the lower beams ran the full width, as a brace, and from this it was possible to hang down and swing by the crook of one’s knees. The beam was so roughly hewn it was almost round, but anyway Les and I had legs like iron. Nothing else for it, Prudence had to be in the act. She tried and tried to gather momentum to swing herself up over the beam, but she lacked the confidence and the knack of whipping the back muscles just at the right instant. We demonstrated the technique until I suspected I had strained my bowels. I excused myself and went and sat crabwise on the stile into the orchard. When I had been there some time, just staring at the back wall of the shed, I felt a compulsion to return. Prudence had stepped out of her skirt and, in tight, black knickers and blouse, was still attempting to swing over the beam. She just about had it mastered. In the end she did it. Prudence’s legs were gorgeous, full, curving, dusky. Because she was my sister I was a real skeleton at the feast, but I began to get the same feeling I experienced sitting naked in the lucerne hay the night before.

  The shed was windowless, twilit, musky. It was an odd feeling to emerge from it and find the noonday sun shining brightly and to realise it was not really late at all, only dinner-time.

  When I reached home I missed Les’s company and I began to feel unhappy and apprehensive again. I only managed to shove down half a pork sausage at dinner-time, whereas I usually wolfed everything they gave me.

  ‘You sick or something, boy?’ said Prudence, spearing with her fork what I left on my plate and getting herself in consequence a dirty look from Uncle Athol. He always looked ten years older on a Sunday, because he skipped shaving and his bristles grew out white. He often left his teeth out on a Sunday too. Herbert had told me on the quiet that he reckoned Uncle Athol had got his teeth from Mr Dabney, the undertaker. Everyone said Mr Dabney was wealthy and sure enough he wore a collar and tie and had a gold watch, but when he got on the scoot he gravitated to characters like Athol C. Cudby and they stayed on the booze together for days. I am not certain whether Herbert had his facts straight, but sure enough it was after one of these jags with Mr Dabney that Uncle Athol appeared with teeth, and started acting in a superior way, putting on the dog a bit like Pop. Pop was a real character at putting on the dog, but it sort of came natural to him. Even when he was buying an old stove or hot-water cylinder, he contrived to act as if he were only looking such junk over to install it in the gatekeeper’s lodge.

  Uncle Athol gave out that he and Pop were partners in the buying and selling business, but Pop introduced him, when he could not get out of it, as ‘Mr Cudby, Mr Athol Cudby, my, hrrmp, contact man.’ I guess that just about sized him up too, always sniffing around on the trail of a yardful of junk somewhere; but, on account of his rupture, he never contacted anything heavy which he would have to heave up on the back of the truck. For the same reason he just stood around when Pop had to change a wheel, which amounted to a lot of standing time, the little old Dennis tip-truck having been known to throw three blowouts in three blocks. One of the standard topics of conversation was five-fifty by twenty-one tyres. If I live to be a hundred years old I am still going to hear voices yak yaking away about five-fifty twenty-ones.

  ‘Great big pile of five-fifty twenty-ones yuh couldn’t jump over. Been past there hundreds of times without dreaming—’

  ‘I tell yuh it’s a five-fifty twenty-one, spanking condition, been there for donkey’s years. They’ll never miss it.’

  ‘Pretty bald in places, but they’re five-fifty twenty-ones awright.’

  ‘Been a minute earlier it ’ud been worth raking outa the fire. Coulda cried. ‘Course it was a five-fifty twenty-one. Think a man doesn’t—’

  And so on.

  In a way, I guess, five-fifty twenty-ones were the symbol of our sort of people. If the Poindexters ran to a coat of arms there would be a five-fifty twenty-one in one corner and a crank-handle in the other. Any automobile with a hint of streamlining had fat, well treaded, remote things referred to as six-hundred sixteens and that was the badge of the people on the other side of the wall.

  The girl called Josephine McClinton had been produced by the people on the other side of the wall. Josephine was a blonde, whose smooth and shapely legs propelled a new bicycle down Smythe Street twice a week. I hid behind a stove when I saw her coming with her music case and through the grating I saw her look our junk yard over with a curious and scornful expression that wrung out my innards. She was definitely a six-hundred sixteener.

  In the afternoon, Pop, blowing hard and red-faced from cranking the Dennis, shouted out at me over the noise of the engine, if I wanted to come with him on a trip. It was beginning to look as if something had prevented Les from coming around which left me at a loose end so I said ‘OK.’

  Anyone who climbed up into the cab of our tip-truck found himself pretty high up in the world; but the horse-hair sprouting out of the black leather seat and tickling your legs, and having to put one’s feet on the fly-wheel housing because the floor boards were gone, and banging one’s head on the roof every pothole, and having to yell out to be heard, were not aspects calculated to give one a superiority complex. I will admit here and now I was ashamed to bounce along in that old bomb and I was glad when I found we were heading out of town. Glad but worried.

  ‘Where we headin’, Pop?’ I screamed.

  ‘Te Rotiha,’ he roared.

  ‘Te Rotiha? Yuh nuts! It’s miles and miles. We’ll never make it, we’ll never get back.’

  Pop now set out on a long harangue about the merits of the Dennis and how it would not be the official vehicle of the firm of Dee-aitch Poindexter if it were not and so on and so on, and how over the years it had etc., etc., and despite what ignorant people said ad infinitum, ad nauseam…I only heard a word here and there. I had only been as far afield as Te Rotiha once before so I consoled myself reflecting that a guy really ought to travel if he ever wanted to speak on different topics with any authority and, also, as Ma was wont to point out, while I was doing this I wasn’t doing anybody else out of anything. But I was pleased and surprised when we actually got to Te Rotiha all the same, as it must have been the best part of twelve miles from Klynham.

  There is just a chance that if I had not gone on that hazardous bump-bottom journey that Sunday afternoon this tale would not have been told. As we turned off the crossroads I glimpsed, for the first time, the sinister man.

  The Dennis ground its way in low gear down to the station yard and Pop and I exchanged a quick look. Pop was bursting with conceit and trying to hide it. I was beginning to feel a bit proud about the old heap of nuts and bolts myself but as we crossed the railway lines behind the train that was being made-up on the back line I heard the explosion I had been waiting for the whole trip. If there was one word that was completely taboo at home it was the one Pop shouted out at this juncture. I was not too sure what made it such a terrible word but my eyelids went on the flicker.

  I think we both panicked for a moment as the lorry slewed around and nearly stopped but Pop recovered his wits and put his foot on the gas and we climbed over the last set of tracks to safety before we settled down. The motor died and a giant despair claimed me for its very own. Te Rotiha! The last place on God’s earth! A flat five-fifty twenty-one at Te Rotiha!

  As we climbed down from the cab there was a second explosion followed by a faint hiss which was plainly distinguishable from the hissing of the locomotive at the far end of the shunting yard. A sheep looked down at us from a bracken-covered embankment and munched steadily in a cynical sort of way. Pop leaned against the tray of the truck and hooked his thumbs in his pink underpants which showed over his trousers and for an awful minute I thought he was going to start howling.

  ‘Neddy,’ he told me, ‘if ever a man wuz dogged by fate and hounded by circumstances beyond his control it’s yuh o
le dad Dee-aitch Poindexter. If there’s another man walking the face of the globe who’s seen as many blown out and punctured five-fifty twenty-ones as yours truly muh heart bleeds for him like a stuck pig. Words fail me when I think of the countless ignorant, no-hoper twots running around the countryside on six-hundred sixteens without a care in the world and not a man-jack among them that could tell a Shacklock stove from a worm-eaten dunny seat.’

  I could see the iron had entered Pop’s soul in a big way this time. There was nothing I could say which would even begin to cheer him up so I leaned on the tray myself and hooked my thumbs in the top of my trousers. I never ever did find out where we were supposed to be going exactly, but there was a dirt road just ahead of us that wound up through the stockyards to the top of the embankment and I suppose there was a load of junk up there somewhere that Pop or Uncle Athol had sniffed out.

  We leaned there on the truck for a long time and never spoke a single word, just let the gloom of the place seep into our bones. I think I must have been nearly asleep when I heard Pop say, ‘Well, Jimmy Coleman! Fancy you coming across us like this. I’m a glad man to see yuh, Jim Coleman. If someone hadn’t come along and spoken to a man soon in his current perdicment I don’t know what I’d uh done.’

  Jim Coleman is my brother-in-law who had to get married to Constance. What a stroke of luck he was the guard on the train that was getting made-up down the line apiece. Wonders will never cease! And, of course, it was not long before he suggested we slip along and get into the guard’s van and make home that way. It gladdened my heart to hear Jim Coleman come to light with that suggestion. Apart from being glad because it was a way of getting home, it was also going to be a new experience. I had never been on a train before.

  ‘Looks like you’ll hafta come back through the week, Pop,’ Jim Coleman said after he had pushed his cap back and scratched around in his skimpy, red hair. ‘If yuh kin raise a couple of tyres I’ll see if I kin smuggle yuh back on the early goods some morning.’

  ‘Yuh’ll never guess who’s sitting out there in the carriage,’ Jim Coleman continued when we had scrambled up into the van. ‘There’s a Mrs Breece and her niece and, stone the crows, if she isn’t the aunt as well of this poor girl that’s gone and got her throat cut. She’s getting the kid away from it all for a while, she told me. You could’ve knocked me down with a pick-axe when she told me she was this Daphne Moran’s aunt.’

  ‘Yuh mean the girl that’s been murdered down in the city?’ I cried excitedly.

  ‘Sssh,’ said Jim Coleman. ‘Yeah, that’s who. Now look Ned, if yuh don’t make yuhself too conspicyus, you kin go out on the platform and just have a bit of a peep into the carriage. Once we get going yuh kin stay there if yuh like, but for Chrissake don’t get blown off and don’t start playing with that wheel because that’s the brake.’

  Pop stretched out on a pile of half-filled sacks.

  ‘I’m a weary, disillusioned man, Jim Coleman, and it’ll take more than the proxy of two cellyberrities to stir me from this here pile of sacks. If the Queen of Sheba was out there in her birthday suit I wouldn’t budge an inch unless I thought she knew where there was a pile of five-fifty twenty-ones a giraffe couldn’t look over without straining his tonsils.’

  Chapter Three

  A large truck, turning off the main highway into one of the narrow roads which shoot away and vanish like arrows aimed at the eternal haze of the backblocks, drew up at the crossroads a few hundred yards from the Te Rotiha railway station. When the truck rolled off on its way to the distant hills, it left a tall, gaunt man standing motionless beside the dusty road; for all the world, in the rays of the declining sun, like a scarecrow, strayed from the cloud-shadowed field. The shadow he cast heightened the impression of a scarecrow for, under his arm, he carried a cardboard box and this gave great width, in silhouette, to the shoulders of his flapping suit coat, as if his arms were spread. He topped the six-foot mark by three or four inches and was thin to the point of emaciation. He was hatless and balding. His suit, of some dark cloth, was old, crumpled, streaked with dust. The man looked derelict, like a person who has slept under a tree with a handkerchief over his face. That his grimy shirt was held together at the neck by a black bow tie was ridiculous, but some power emanating in and projected from the sunken eyes would have silenced derision. After some moments spent, apparently, in contemplation, he began to walk down the rough road to the smoke-blackened buildings in the hollow.

  If a railway junction can also be a whistle stop then Te Rotiha, twelve miles inland from Klynham, is both. Unless carrying passengers bound for Klynham or the coastal town of Oporenho, the express trains thunder contemptuously through Te Rotiha taking the curving track which hurtles towards the hills. There are only a pub and a grocery store to mark the existence of Te Rotiha to passing motorists, but the railway station is kept reasonably busy most of the time. There is always freight to and from the coast to be handled, and, to the station’s own stockyards, come daily consignments of cattle and sheep, dog-harried, lowing and bleating their way beneath umbrellas of dust along the lonely country roads. Even on this day, Sunday, the station displayed some signs of activity.

  A youth wearing a peaked cap on the back of his head was seated behind the desk in the station office. He was day-dreaming and gave a violent start as a shadow fell across the desk. His mouth fell open at the sight of the freak-ugly face with its great jutting nose looming so near the top of the open doorway. In long, slow strides the gaunt stranger gathered his own shadow into an inky pool at his feet in front of the office desk.

  The youth pointed out the ancient carriage standing on a back line to the lanky and mysterious-looking traveller who, without a word of thanks, stalked away and stepped down from the platform. He picked his way across the railway lines, the sound of the clinkers crushing beneath his feet ringing out clearly in this sleepy hollow.

  ‘Now who the dickens is he?’ muttered the youth. ‘Something weird about that rooster. Cop that bow tie. Another of ole McDermott’s scrubcutters packed up and going off on a spree, I s’pose. They’re all the same. Work out there in the sticks till they’ve got a wad that ud choke a bull and then wham—on the piss for a month. Whadda life.’

  Passengers who change trains at Te Rotiha for the coast soon learn to hate the place. Mrs Breece and her twelve-year-old niece, Lynette, were fortunate that their introduction to Te Rotiha only involved a wait in the two-hour category and that it was passed in mild, early autumn sunshine. Even then, Lynette, normally a most patient and well-mannered child, began to fidget and find the delay interminable. Her supply of chocolate was exhausted. She had read all her comics again and again. The excitement of travelling had palled on her during the six-hour journey from the city and this long wait seemed to Lynette to be just about the last straw. She had been confined to her bed for some days with a fever and now she was tired and her head ached. Her aunt was no company for she fell asleep again almost as soon as Lynette managed to wake her, though how she managed to sleep propped up in a corner like that was beyond her young niece’s understanding. Even when a wagon was shunted, with a resounding and shuddering crash, into the carriage they were trapped in, Mrs Breece only mumbled something and fell asleep again.

  The carriage to which they had been directed to take their baggage and find seats was also the last straw in Lynette’s opinion. After the crowded express with its deep, red leather seats, to be alone in this antediluvian carriage which featured narrow bench seats, as hard as those in a city tram, running the full length of each side, was a decided change for the worse. It impressed on Lynette just how far she was from home and to just what sort of Indian country she was being taken. On top of her other troubles she was already becoming homesick.

  Every time the freight wagons crashed against the carriage, Lynette hoped that at last the train was made up and action was imminent, but soon she again heard the engine tooting at the far end of the yard, its puffing and hissing sounding maddeningly dist
ant. At intervals a peaked cap passed along under the windows. The windows all refused to open. Lynette tried them all. She was frightened to leave her seat for long because whenever a wagon crashed into the carriage the jar was sufficiently violent to have sent her flying. A sheep regarded her from behind the wire fence on the top of the embankment behind the stockyards. Lynette put her tongue out at the sheep. Having ascertained that her aunt was still asleep, she put her thumb against her snub nose and extended five fingers at the lugubrious animal. She made the same gesture at the top of the cap the next time it passed beneath her window.

  Time went by and Lynette became so bored and angry that, when a door creaked open and they were joined by another passenger, she could have cheered. Although she had been reared in city streets which abounded in unusual-looking characters, her eyes became round as she studied the newcomer. He looked as tall as a lamp post and carried about the same amount of fat. His dishevelled dark suit of clothes hung limply around his bony structure. He was so thin, so gaunt, he looked as if he might belong to the walking dead. In spite of the censor’s ruling, Lynette had recently seen not one, but an entire series of films about the walking dead and considered herself an authority on the subject.

  ‘A zombie,’ she breathed. It was frightening, but it was an improvement on that sheep. She had moved too far along the seat to be able to nudge her aunt. The stranger’s only luggage was a cardboard box which he placed on the seat. When he sat down himself he put one leg up on the opposite seat quite effortlessly. It was the longest and skinniest leg Lynette had ever seen. With claw-like hands he fumbled for a moment at the base of his scrawny neck and then rested the back of his balding head against the window. He looked very weary. Lynette now perceived he was wearing a black bow tie and still her wonder grew. However, to her deep disappointment the stranger showed the same infuriating capacity for sleep as her aunt. Within a moment or two she was caught in a crossfire of snores from opposite ends of the compartment.