Grampy didn’t like the Charolais. ‘White beasts,’ he called them. They didn’t like him much either and one of them almost did him in. It was my father’s first Charolais bull, Bruno, the one he had brought over all the way from France, that bailed Grampy up against the railings of the cowshed. I was probably only four, but I remember my father and Mr Spratt carrying Grampy up the drive to the house and laying him on the kitchen table. His clothes were torn and I could see the skin beneath was swollen and broken. Nan was crying as she and my mother sponged off the blood. She begged my father to go out and shoot the brute at once.
My father refused. Not his beloved Bruno, the French bull he’d paid thousands of dollars for. But it wasn’t even the money. My father had a vision. Probably he’d deny it if I mentioned it now, but I remember him dragging me onto his knee and telling me that by the time I was halfway to being a man, there’d be a whole mob of white cows, just like Bruno, gleaming in the paddocks along the roadside. ‘They’ll be so white,’ he whispered to me, ‘they’ll dazzle the eyes half out of your head.’
But I didn’t want white cows. It had been the white beast who had hurt Grampy so that he walked with a limp from then on. I wanted pink calves again, like the one that magical morning, like the one in my mother’s secret story. To my mind pink calves were a good compromise between the white cows my father so ardently desired and the red cows that Grampy still stubbornly complained were superior. But they both ignored my suggestion.
Grampy moved out of our house because of the white cows. He didn’t want to have anything to do with them and started spending more time at the Crayburn house. He’d bought it to retire to, before I was even born, but he didn’t like it. ‘I’ve lived almost sixty years in this here farmhouse,’ he said to me. ‘It isn’t easy to just up and leave. I can’t sleep in that new place.’
He refused to help my father with the ‘white beasts.’ There were a lot of jobs that required two men and that mercifully were beyond me. Grampy figured that my father would eventually get tired of struggling on by himself and go back to Shorthorns. But he did no such thing. Instead he hired a boy to help and told Grampy he’d have to move out of his bedroom to make room for the new worker. For once Grampy was lost for words. He just drove off in his car. Babe and I helped Nan pack everything in their bedroom, accumulated over fifty years of marriage. We were both in tears. ‘He’ll grow to like the new place,’ Nan consoled us. ‘It’s got central heating everywhere, and a dishwasher.’
Nan loved working the central heating. When we visited them in the new house, she always turned it up as high as it would go so we could appreciate its full impact. Grampy complained it was like living in a glasshouse with windows that couldn’t be opened because of the double glazing. ‘It’s withering me up,’ he muttered to me one day. ‘Making me old before my time.’
There were locks on the door of the new house that Grampy shunned. He didn’t even want to know how they worked. ‘We never needed locks before.’ Nan would deliberately lock him in and go off for an afternoon’s golf. ‘Keep him out of mischief,’ I heard her tell my mother. ‘He’s getting to be an old man and he doesn’t like it one bit. He needs to rest but he won’t hear of it.’
My grandmother should probably have taken her own advice. She crumpled into Grampy’s arms one night as they were stacking their dinner dishes in the new dishwasher. Grampy grunted his approval. He thought she’d fainted from the oppressive heat of the house and that finally he’d be permitted to turn it down. It was only when her limbs began to twitch that he realised she was having a stroke. He carried her to the car and drove her to the hospital in Glenora. He didn’t want to waste any time. But when he got to the hospital, the doctor wasn’t there. Eventually he was found at a birthday party in the neighbouring county.
Nan never recovered. She was denied the house with all the modern features she’d waited so long for. The stroke plundered her body. She didn’t know anyone. She could do nothing for herself. It was as if her very soul had fled with the shock of the seizure but the body had been too slow and heavy to follow. She lingered on for several weeks in a private room in the hospital, her eyes betraying her bewilderment at the family weeping round her bed who were strangers to her now.
Grampy seemed to grow attached to the new house after Nan died. He even kept the heating turned up because it was the way she had liked it. He wouldn’t hear of moving back to the fannhouse. He bought a colour television. He was the first to get one in the entire Serpentine county but he didn’t seem to realise how wondrous it was. He’d even criticise it, while Lou and Babe and I watched it in awe, speechless.
‘Some of those television people looked better in black and white. The colours they wear together are hard on the eyes.’
It was the seventies after all.
Grampy had bought the television to entertain himself when he was alone. When we visited he turned it off, much to our dismay. He wanted to talk. He’d give us each a bottle of lemonade, which he considered a tremendous treat, and sit us down at the kitchen counter and begin one of the tales we’d heard countless times before.
His favourite story was the Field of Blood. Grampy had heard about it when he was a boy, from some of the old shepherds who worked the big stations until they divided them into small runs for settlement. Before he started, he always brought out the greenstone relics and chisels that he and his brothers had fossicked for as boys. He’d lay out the evidence and encourage us to pick up the strange stones as he told his tale.
Two Maori tribes had met on the same trail, a trading route through to the Clutha valley, near the mouth of the Eweburn stream where it flows into Red River. The tribes fought each other to the death until the two waters ran red and that was how the river gained its name.
When the three of us heard the story for the first time, we raced down to the paddock to search for Maori artefacts. We spent an entire day down there, restaging the battle and then scrabbling around, digging holes in the pasture, vainly hoping to come upon some relic of the battle. We found nothing. Lou started pestering my father to plough the paddock, convinced that it would turn up all sorts of treasures and maybe even an ancient skeleton, but my father wouldn’t hear of it. ‘That paddock will never be ploughed,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to go digging up any spirits and bringing bad luck upon myself.’
He’d heard Grampy’s stories too and held the field in a certain reverence.
Grampy warned us to keep away from the paddock. ‘Don’t go down there. It was a terrible thing that happened there. Steer clear of it. Never swim there. You’ll get a cramp and the water will pull you under.’
Naturally, being told not to go there made the paddock irresistible. We sneaked down at every opportunity, thrilled by the prospect of vengeful spirits and ancient curses. We never swam there. We weren’t allowed to swim without an adult supervising us. But we did sit on the river bank, dangling our bare feet in the water, tempting the currents. Then one day, we saw a big eel rise up only a couple of yards from where we sat. Hastily, we withdrew our feet. We didn’t tell anyone what had happened as we’d been technically disobedient in the first place. But it reinforced the gravity of Grampy’s warnings and the authenticity of his stories.
Despite the amount of time we spent down there and all our hopeful searching, we never did find any Maori weapons of war. All we ever found was a strange bone. Lou was being a Maori warrior and she trod on it while negotiating a swamp. We brought it home to Grampy, who identified it as a moa bone. ‘It was the swamps the moas fled to,’ Grampy said when he heard where we found the bone. ‘There was a huge fire, hundreds of years ago; centuries ago, a fire that almost consumed the entire South Island and the moas ran to the swamps to try and save themselves. But the fires were so fierce that the water couldn’t stop the flames. The moas were burnt to death, the swamp waters boiling around them, and that’s how the moas became extinct.’
It sounded a bit far-fetched, but we nodded our heads and gasped in t
he appropriate places. That was the local folklore we grew up on and at first it was fascinating. We clamoured to hear my grandfather’s stories. But then we got television and began to crave more exciting worlds. We wanted to be the Robinson family lost in outer space. We wanted to be a family of singers like the Partridge family and have a mother who drove an old bus. We wanted to carry guns and shoot rustlers like in ‘The Big Valley’. None of us wanted to be moas running from the flames any more. It just wasn’t exotic enough.
It was usually Lou, the boldest of the three of us, who’d ask to watch his television once Grampy had finished his story and before he had time to launch into another. He always looked a little startled but he never refused us. Aside from the television Grampy also bought five hundred acres of land outside Crayburn. At seventy-two, Grampy announced that he was going to breed Shorthorns again. He was determined to compete against his son in the interbreed cattle section of the Glenora Show. And win.
Neither of them ever managed to.
Victor Caldwell of Crayburn had a New Zealand champion Hereford bull that he monotonously entered every year and which the judges always felt obliged to honour. Both Grampy and my father longed for Victor’s bull to go lame.
Meanwhile, my father, spurred on by these repeated losses to Victor and by Grampy’s revitalised career as a farmer, bought a second bull from France, Dante. This was a terrible mistake. Dante proved to be trouble. He wouldn’t stay in with the cows.
Dante was a monster. He was so huge, that when he arrived in the back of the transport truck, he wouldn’t fit down the loading ramp at the cowshed. The truck driver and my father had to prod him out of the truck and make him jump to the ground. ‘Hope you like ‘im,’ said the driver. ‘You’re gonna have to buy a wider ramp if you ever wanna get rid of ‘im.’
My father wasn’t listening. He was so in awe of Dante. He was much bigger than Bruno. ‘Imagine the calves he’ll produce,’ he gasped.
But the problem was that Dante didn’t seem to like the Shorthorn cows he was expected to impregnate with his purebred Charolais semen. He showed no inclination to fulfil the task he was acquired for, preferring to exert his superior weight in fights with the other bulls instead. Trying to shift Dante away from the bulls and in with the cows was a real ordeal. It always ended up taking almost an entire day and usually several fences ended up getting wrecked in the process. These would then take hours the next day to repair. It required all seven dogs snapping at his hooves, my father belting him across his rump with an aluminium crook, and Lou and I shouting as loudly as we could and waving our arms about, to make Dante amble forward at all. And even with all that commotion, he wasn’t inclined to go particularly fast.
His favourite trick, once we’d managed to get him halfway to the mob of cows, was to turn around and take off back the way we’d just come. Back to the bull paddock, ignoring the dogs and charging straight through any fences that happened to be in his way. My father would swear and swear, as if it was some sort of incantation that might magically bring Dante back again. Sometimes his swearing carried all the way to the house, and when we got home for lunch, my mother would reprimand my father for using such language in front of Lou and me.
No one called him Dante any more. He’d been called That Bloody Bull so many times by my father that the name had stuck. We all called him that, though we didn’t let my mother catch us. We always said it as if it was an aristocratic title, like we were saying Her Majesty the Queen. My father said it in a different tone altogether.
He began to despair of ever getting Dante to stay in with the cows. He blamed everything he could think of for Dante’s inertia. The trip on the ship from France. Mawera for being a strange new environment. He even wondered aloud one day if perhaps it was a curse for grazing the cows in the Field of Blood. He wouldn’t admit that he’d paid thousands of dollars for a dud bull, which is what Grampy insisted he had done. ‘Fussy French bugger,’ Grampy said to me one day. ‘I’d cut my losses if I was your father and send him to the works. He’d lose money but he’d get the last laugh on That Bloody Bull. You can’t be a farmer and let yourself be beaten by a brainless bull.’
But Dante was far from brainless. I admired how he seemed able to outwit my father. I wished I was as accomplished at getting my own way, and avoiding all the jobs my father was always finding for me. I remember one time, we spent all day trying to get Dante in with the cows. Finally, it was done and we wearily made our way home, shutting all the gates along the way. We’d taken him by a circuitous route in an attempt to confuse him, so that even if he did jump out from the mob of cows he could never find his way back to the other bulls. The bull paddock was next to the house. We were stopped at the final gate, about to drive up to the house, an hour overdue for dinner already, when my father glanced over to admire his bulls and noticed Dante standing there amongst them.
He’d beaten us back.
It was Grampy who suggested taking a steer along with Dante for company. He said it as a joke, but my father was desperate enough to try anything. ‘What’s a steer?’ I asked my father, as we trudged along behind an unusually cooperative Dante and the young steer.
‘It’s a bull who isn’t a bull anymore,’ replied my father.
I still didn’t understand. But Grampy’s joke worked. Dante trotted along quite happily with his new companion and for the first time was happy to stay in with the cows and even do his business on top of them. My father hated the fact that Grampy had been right, but he was so relieved that all the money he’d paid hadn’t been wasted, he had to give Grampy the credit due him. He rang him up and thanked him. Grampy acted like it was the most obvious thing in the world to do, but he confessed to Lou and me that he was astounded. ‘French cows are queer things,’ he warned us. ‘Steer clear of them. When you have the farm yourselves, get shot of those “Sharlaze” quick smart.’
I agreed with him, swearing to have nothing to do with Charolais when I grew up. I didn’t elaborate on the fact that I planned to have nothing to do with cows or sheep or anything remotely connected with farm life. Such ambitions were best kept secret.
4
Chapter 4
Everyone called me Billy-Boy. It wasn’t short for William. It was just one of those nicknames that develops and sticks. I’d been christened after my mother’s father, though neither of my parents actually liked the name. My mother convinced my father that they ought to make the gesture. My grandfather wasn’t well at the time of my birth and had been in and out of hospital. My parents didn’t tell him what they were planning. They wanted it to be a lovely surprise. As it turned out, he was whisked back into hospital and couldn’t attend the christening. If he had been there he would have protested.
After the christening, they brought me to visit Grandfather Pearce in the hospital, and announced that I was his namesake. He moaned when he heard the news. He moaned with such anguish that my father ran to summon a nurse. ‘How could you do such a thing?’ he lamented. ‘How could you inflict this poor baby with such a curse?’
‘We thought you’d be pleased,’ my mother said tersely.
‘The sentiment is admirable,’ said my grandfather, ‘but the name is a shocker.’
My grandfather’s name was Athol. It had been a source of mockery to him for most of his life. Throughout school, and even beyond, he was known as Arsehole. The other schoolboys pronounced it with a lisp. Aaaathhholl. That was his reluctant legacy to me. He died soon after that visit, and in her darker moments my mother fretted that she had finished him off with the unwelcome compliment.
My name became a misnomer. No one wanted to use it for fear of reminding my mother of her father’s fatal reaction. Everyone was at a loss as to what to call me. My second name wasn’t much of an alternative. Palmerston. This was the town where my parents had met and although it had great romantic significance for them, it didn’t readily abbreviate into a useable name for me.
It could have been worse. They were also thinking of
McGregor in which case I would have been named after a meat pie.
My mother had thought my name sounded distinguished. It wounded her greatly that it could so readily be reduced to ‘arsehole’. She became sensitive about my name. People were always approaching her in the street, admiring me, cooing at me in my pram and naturally enquiring as to my name. At first my mother would defiantly tell them. But their polite responses were belied by their startled eyes and titter ing laughter when she moved away with the pram. My mother became embarrassed to pronounce the name. She began to mumble it which definitely didn’t help the situation. People didn’t like to ask her to repeat it, in case it confirmed what they thought they had heard. The whispering, the insinuations, the criticism, all became too much for my mother. She began to invent new names for me. She’d say the first name that came into her head if anyone happened to ask her. She even began to call me by those names herself. One week I was Sam. The next I was John. The week after that Peter. Plain names. My mother had learnt her lesson.
Finally, my father took up the same initiative and started calling me Billy. It was the name he’d favoured from the beginning. My mother had objected, saying it reminded her of camping out and damper bread. Everyone else followed my father’s lead and the name stuck. My mother resisted until I was old enough to work her reluctance to my own advantage. When she called me to do a little job for her round the house, I’d refuse to answer, on the grounds that it wasn’t my name. I’d stay where I was, usually huddled in front of the television. When my mother came to find me, I’d shrug and pretend I hadn’t realised she was talking to me.
The first time she ever called me Billy was the day she had one of her disasters. Even though I was watching television at the time, I still heard the shriek of the truck’s brakes over the volume of the television. Then my mother’s frantic wail. ‘Billy, Billy, come quick, I’ve run over the puppy.’
50 Ways of Saying Fabulous Book 1 20th Anniversary Edition Page 4