The Complete Stories of Alan Marshall

by Alan Marshall

  He worked at these jobs while waiting for someone to die. He’d grease the hearse by jacking up the wheel and unscrewing the hub nut, then he’d pull the wheel back and slap a dab of axle grease on the axle. No one liked to hear squeaking axles at their funeral, so Duke was very fussy about this.

  He used to polish the glass with a piece of chamois, then crawl inside the hearse and polish it inside too. While he was kneeling down inside the hearse, he’d yell out to us, ‘Good-day. Come inside and I’ll take you for a drive.’ Joe and I thought this was bloody funny and we used to laugh like hell. Duke had a sense of humour.

  He was anxious to get on the road of course. He had to work with another bloke called Mr Forbes. Mr Forbes did the laying out and all that sort of thing and had to sit beside Duke on the box seat. He had the look of a bloke that would soon be riding inside. Why Mr Forbes couldn’t drive was because he was shit-scared of horses and believed in bikes (‘it takes all sorts of people to make a world’, Dad reckoned). I suppose it was only natural that Duke was anxious for someone to die.

  ‘If I don’t get a funeral this week, I’m going to knock someone off’, he told Joe and me.

  ‘Do you think he means that?’ I asked Joe.

  ‘Blokes that drive hearses are always funny blokes’, Joe pronounced. ‘No matter what that bloke did I wouldn’t be surprised about it.’

  Mr Reg Windsor had lent Duke a black coat with two long tails at the back like a grasshopper. It was black, but there was green in it somewhere. When the sun hit him from the side, you could see the green in it. He showed us a pocket in one of the tails. You put your hand behind you, just over your behind, then flicked the tail up and you could put your hand into a pocket. Duke kept his pipe and tobacco in this pocket. ‘You never know’, he explained, ‘there’s always a chance to have a puff when you least expect it.’

  Mr Edward Carter Esq. died behind a privet hedge growing in front of his house out along the Glenormiston road. ‘He suffered a lot from guts-ache’, Duke informed us, while giving a final rub to the outside of the hearse before taking off. ‘Yes, he certainly suffered a lot from his guts in his day. They get ulcers in them you know. It’s a hell of a place to get an ulcer they tell me. They are bad enough when you get them in the leg or the arm but, by hell, they are crook when you get them inside.’ And then he stood back with a chamois in his hand to have a look at the hearse. ‘I’ve never seen her looking better’, he pronounced. ‘We are certainly doing the old bloke proud today. Now I’ll hop in and put on my clothes’, he finished. ‘Hang around.’

  Duke was going to put on a pair of striped pants which Reg Windsor had lent him and he was going to wear a bell-topper. This doesn’t sound as if it’s possible. But it’s the truth. Reg Windsor told him that on no account was he to wear the bell-topper skew-whiff.

  When the ‘Duke’ came out of his room built on the end of the hearse shed, you wouldn’t know him. He looked like a bloke from a picture in the Girls’ Own paper. You’d think he would be worth a thousand quid just to look at him.

  He changed his walk to suit his clothes. As he walked he kept looking down at himself, squaring his shoulders and brushing imaginary pieces of fluff from the lapels. Ordinarily he used to walk like a lair with a bit of a sway. You’d pick him for the bell horse in any team. It was funny how clothes changed him. With a suit on he tucked his head down as if he felt the pull of the reins and he had a solemn look on his face that made Joe and I want to laugh. He sat very stiff on the seat, looking straight ahead while they were carrying out the coffin.

  They picked six blokes to carry out Mr Carter—they’d all been mates of his when he was alive. Joe and I stood near the fence to watch. By looking through a gap in the hedge we could see them walking down the verandah, then turning and coming down the three cement steps to the garden path. The coffin rested on the shoulders of these six blokes, each of them encircling it with an arm. They all seemed to be bald. Their heads were lowered and they watched their feet as if they were picking their way through a cowyard. Their bald heads shone in the sun. When they came to the top of the steps they stopped and turned like a badly driven horse team. They wanted to straighten out before they started the descent, but their heights were all different and the coffin wasn’t level. One of the leaders was a little bloke, rather fat, and he’d never learned to back. He should have sat back in the breechin’ when he took the first step down, but those behind him were not moving well and they came forward a bit too fast. When they hit the garden path, Reg Windsor should have come forward with a whip and pulled them together a bit before they started down the garden path. They went well round the bends in the path, all stepping high like show ponies, but they were all carrying too much weight for the distance. They got through the garden gate, then started the short home-stretch to the hearse. The little bloke was the first home. He got rid of his load with a heave that gave the coffin the necessary push to get it sliding down the runners. They all stepped back then. They’d had it. None of them were worth a cracker when they began making their way back to their own particular buggy.

  Mr Forbes came forward carrying his hat and led Duke out on to the road. Duke had been holding his pair well in so that they would prance a bit when they started. He touched them up with the whip just before they took off. This put them right into the traces and they were right on Mr Forbes’s tail when they reached the road. He stepped to one side, then, as the hearse drew level with him, he swung up into the seat beside Duke without Duke having to stop.

  That’s a bloody good bit of driving’, I said to Joe. ‘But I tell you this, one of these days, when it’s wet, Forbes is going to slip on that bloody step and Duke will go over him with the wheel.’

  ‘Well’, Joe remarked, ‘it’d be handy just as they started. They’d just have to slip him inside on top of the other bloke. It could be done in five minutes.’

  Joe reckoned this was a hell of a funny joke. He just couldn’t stop laughing although he was trying hard enough, standing, as we were, in the middle of a funeral.

  Joes used to swell and go red when he was trying to stop laughing. He’d hold his lips tight together and look as if he’d shit himself. You could always stop him by hitting him on the shin with a crutch. I did this now and he stopped.

  It was a hell of a long funeral. It stretched two miles and Duke had to keep it moving. Amongst the buggies were always a lot of slow walkers. A gap would form ahead of such a buggy and then the bloke with a slow horse would have to whip him into a trot to close it.

  If a bloke just behind had a fast walker, you’d find yourself with a horse’s head between you and your wife. I’ve known a bloke punch a horse for doing this, but it depends who’s driving it whether you get away with it or not.

  Joe and I cut across a paddock and stood in front of the pub with a lot of Duke’s mates who had all carried their pots outside to see Duke lead the funeral past.

  The long string of buggies moved round the last bend behind the hearse, then straightened out for the drive through Turalla. Everyone was out in front of their houses to see the funeral pass. There were well over a hundred buggies and gigs behind the hearse. They stretched out of sight behind Thompson’s Hill.

  It was Duke’s big day. He touched up the horses with the whip and pranced past the pub. This was the moment. He had both horses well contained, both under control. He raised his hand and gave a lordly wave to his mates.

  ‘How ya goin’, boys?’ he called. ‘Keep a pot for me when I get back at four.’

  His wave was in the nature of a salute.

  This was the last bloody thing on earth he should have done. No one yells out at a funeral like that. You’re supposed to be too cut-up to go yelling out at your mates. As for leaning forward and waving to them—no bloke with any sense would ever think of it.

  In the group were Jimmy Virtue, Duke’s father, Peter, ‘Snarly’ Burns, Mr Goodman, East Driscoll, Old Lumsden, Charlie Robbins and half a dozen others, most of them boozed.
They raised their pots and let out a wild cheer as a tribute to Duke’s driving and to show that they were all with him to a man up there on the box seat.

  At the sound of the cheer, the two horses shied sideways, plunging into the traces as if a gun had gone off. Duke was flung back at the bound but he quickly took up the slack on the reins and put all his weight into the pull. There was no dashboard at the front for him to put his foot against as a prop. Before he got them reined in they had carried the hearse across the grass and ruts up to the road fence. He missed a telephone post by half an inch. The hearse was rocking like a ship in a heavy sea and Mr Edward Carter Esq. was getting the roughest ride he’d ever had. A tuck had been put in the funeral. Every buggy veered away from the pub at this spot and went out on to the grass, then turned on to the road again. Duke, with his prancing pair, soon pulled the crimp out of it and got them straightened out along the road. He led the way along the metal towards the cemetery between the nodding fronds of four clumps of black ostrich plumes and drawn by two black horses held in check by his black-gloved hands.

  ‘Well, I’ve buggered up this job’, he said to Mr Forbes when he had got over his fright. ‘It’s the bullet for me tonight.’

  ‘I’m afraid so’, said Mr Forbes, ‘I’m very much afraid so.’

  ‘Anyway’, Duke told Joe and me next day, ‘I saved Mr Edward Carter Esq. from a very nasty accident. We missed the telegraph pole by an inch when they shied off the road. If there hadn’t been a good man at the reins it would have been the end of the old bastard.’

  Mick Hanrahan

  When Mick Hanrahan talked to you, you listened. He punched his words out. You could have dodged them and turned away but I faced them and took them on the chin. I didn’t mind his swears. They were good and smelt of horses and the earth.

  ‘Who the bloody hell took my trace chain off this bloody hook? Here—look at it, that bloody hook there’, and he pointed to a hook in the wall of the stable.

  ‘I didn’t take it, Mr Hanrahan.’

  ‘Well, somebody did.’ He pulled at his beard and looked around him. ‘I think I must have shifted the bloody thing myself.’ He sat down on a chopping block near the door of the slab stable and started to shave tobacco from a plug of Dark Havelock.

  He was a tall man, over six feet high, with a loose body that sat on his long legs with a forward lean. When he rose from sitting down he straightened out in sections. He took big strides, his eyes looking straight ahead like a thirsty man making for a beer.

  Father reckoned he was not properly contained, whatever that meant, and that he’d been badly handled when he was a kid. He was an old man—he must have been easily forty—but he talked to me like as if I knew what he was talking about. I always believed what he told me but father said he was the greatest liar this side of the Black Stump.

  I didn’t like father saying that, but then he said, ‘There are liars and liars. You see, when a man tells a yarn and aims to get a laugh, he’s pulling your leg; he’s not a liar. If a bloke tells the same yarn to build himself up—well, he’s a liar.’

  ‘Mr Hanrahan doesn’t make me laugh.’

  ‘No, he makes himself laugh. Look at his eyes when he’s telling you a yarn. They are as bright as a rooster’s.’

  I liked Mick Hanrahan telling me about the fights he had.

  ‘There was Big Jim Bourke from Mortlake. Ever heard of him?’

  I hadn’t, but I made up my mind to ask Dad about him.

  ‘I fought him once—two hours it lasted.’

  I looked astonished.

  ‘Well—er—make it an hour. I tell you, I fought him for an hour in front of the pub at Purnim.’ He lit his pipe, drawing on it with hollowed cheeks so strongly that it gurgled in protest.

  ‘An hour’s a long fight, Mr Hanrahan’, I said.

  ‘Yes . . .’ He took his pipe from his mouth and looked into the bowl. ‘It’s a long fight, but then he was a tough man. The tougher they are the longer it lasts. There are some blokes that won’t lie down. He was like that. I was having a drink with him and he said to me—and I won’t forget it in a hurry—but all the Bourkes are skites. He said, “I’ve been cutting colts all my life and I’ve never lost one.” “What about Wilkinson’s draught colt you did last year?” I asked him. “What about him?” “They found him dead against the fence.” “Yair, that’s right”, he said, “and he’d still be alive today if you hadn’t told Jack to gallop him around the paddock to bust the swelling. You killed that colt—I’m telling ya. “I heard him all right; that’s what he said, so I said, “Come outside and say that.” Now, I had Big Jim’s measure. I knew bloody well that if I went down he’d get stuck into me with those Blucher Boots he was wearing.’

  (‘He’d never do that would he, Dad—not kick him with Blucher Boots?’ ‘When you’re mixing it outside a pub, anything goes’, Dad said.)

  ‘It didn’t take long to finish him’, Mick continued. ‘I kept him off while pasting him with my right—he didn’t have the reach of a sick dog. I waited for an opening like Jack Johnson used to, then I moved in and knocked him cold.’

  ‘But you said you took an hour’, I said.

  ‘Yes, it took an hour to bring him round’, Mick explained.

  Peter McLeod

  I was sitting on the top rail of a fence watching the bar doorway of the pub across the road. The shouts and exclamations of angry men fled through the doorway like a flock of escaping bats.

  It was hot with a north wind blowing and each horse in the gigs and buggies in front of the hotel rested on three legs in the shafts. Their heads drooped in the heat.

  Above the whip-cracks of curses and abuse I could hear the bull-bellow of Peter McLeod sending out his challenge. The surge of accompanying sound erupted in a sudden explosive burst and a man came staggering backwards through the doorway, arms outstretched seeking balance, a smear of blood on his upper lip, his face still awry from a blow.

  In front of him, following his backward plunge with ferocious purpose, came Peter. Arresting hands gripped his shoulders, arms like ropes encircled his waist. As this knot of men spilt across the roadway, Peter began shedding them like pieces of box-thorn hedge hooked on to him in his passage through a pig-yard fence.

  ‘Let go of me, blast ya!’

  ‘Hold your horses, Peter!’

  Excited men with flushed faces poured out of the bar.

  ‘Make a ring.’

  ‘Hold on! Peter’s been boozing all the morning.’

  ‘He’s on his feet, isn’t he!’

  ‘The bastard asked for it.’

  ‘Is Sam having a go?’

  Then I heard Peter’s voice:

  ‘Where’s that lyin’ cow?’

  ‘I’m . . .’

  ‘Ugh!’

  ‘Ah!’

  There was a sudden flurry of blows. I heard gasps and grunts. The crowd reeled back.

  ‘Give them room!’

  ‘Stand back, bugger you!’

  I hurriedly clambered from the rail and grabbed my crutches from the ground. I bounded across the roadway to the circular wall of men, flung my crutches to one side and dropped to my hands and knees. I lowered my head and thrust it between the spread legs of a tall outside man, pushed through and kept going. I went through legs, by the side of legs, around legs all anxious to avoid me. Some sidestepped when I touched them or swung away from me as if bitten by a dog. Above me in the world of heads I could hear curses and exclamations of concern.

  ‘It’s that bloody Marshall kid!’

  ‘Look out or you’ll step on him.’

  ‘God Almighty, can’t a man look at a fight without him tangling with your legs!’

  I shot underneath the last barrier of men and squatted cross-legged like a Buddha in front of the two fighters.

  This was the moment for which I had waited—to see Peter McLeod punish a bullying man. He would flatten him like a tack, of that I was sure. A hundred tales, a hundred victorious fights had been my preparatio
n for this proof of Peter’s courage.

  I waited for the killing straight left, the merciless right hook, the magnificent uppercut which his yarns supplied in plenty. But this staggering man struggling to lift himself out of a stupefying fog—this wasn’t Peter McLeod. This wasn’t the man of a hundred tales. He wasn’t even defending himself properly. He swayed and lurched into the pathway of blows that a bobbing head could have avoided. He was always off balance. No swift, tigerish leaps here, only a will that held a body upright against blows that made it recoil with sudden jerks.

  Charlie Robbins was stone cold sober. He watched Peter with the eyes of a hawk, watching for openings through which his fists shot like the kick of a horse.

  I had never regarded Charlie Robbins as a fighter. He was a heavy, thick-set farmer who rested his hands on the backs of cows while walking them into bails. He milked Friesians and in some way resembled them. Dad always said he was a good cheese man, then added as an afterthought—‘Immature cheese.’

  When he knocked Peter off his feet Peter would get up again. This was good. I liked Peter for getting up. But in the end he had blood on his face and his eyes were closed and he couldn’t get up. Some men lifted him and carried him behind the pub where they put his head under a pump.

  A man got my crutches for me and I went home. I didn’t want to tell father about it. I felt I had taken a hiding too, so I shut up-but he found out somehow. All he said was, ‘Well, he took a fall. Go down and see him in the morning and take it with him like a man.’

  I walked down to his farm next morning. He was sitting on a box outside the stable door, looking at a white horse tied with a halter to a ring on the wall. That’s all you could say about this horse.

  ‘Good morning, Mr McLeod’, I said.

  ‘Goodday.’

  I sat on the ground beside him.

  ‘I didn’t mind you getting a belting, Mr McLeod.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  After a while he straightened up and said, ‘I’m sore as a boil this morning. I can’t move my bloody neck to the left. What’s wrong with the bloody thing? I can move it to the right, but when I move it to the left it catches me here’, and he pointed to a sinew like a piece of fencing wire that braced his neck to his shoulder. He screwed up his face and went on, ‘Do you know I was sober as a judge at three o’clock. That bastard O’Connor put my head under the pump. Well! I didn’t mind that. He’s a good chap. But he needn’t have held me under it for ten minutes. Sometimes he’s as stupid as a green colt. Anyway, I came round all right. I felt good, so I walked down to Charlie Robbins’s. He’d belted me when I was drunk; I wanted to see if he could belt me when I was sober. I came across the paddock but he saw me coming and took shelter amongst his cows. He’d yarded them for milking. He was standing in the middle of them like a bull.