Silver Rowan wins a great race
When Clement Killeaton is five years old his parents visit a doctor in Melbourne to see why they have had no more children. One afternoon while his wife and son are shopping in Melbourne, Augustine visits Len Goodchild and asks the Master to keep an eye out for a horse that Augustine can buy cheaply and race around Bassett. He tells Goodchild he will phone him each week from Bassett to keep in touch like the old days. As soon as he is back in Bassett, Augustine waits until his wife and son are out for the day. He locks the front and back doors of his house and pulls down the blinds against the late afternoon sun. He takes off his shirt and singlet and puts on the green and silver racing colours and takes a whip in his hand. He gathers the pillows from Clement’s bed and the spare bed and heaps them on the double bed where he and his wife sleep. He forms the pillows into the broad powerful back and the rump and withers of a racehorse. He rides his mount out of the barrier with the whip to show it who is master. At almost every stride during the long race he has to urge the horse with his heels and elbows. As they near the turn Augustine glances back and sees the moist green shape of Ireland already far away. The straight leads past a coast of high cliffs in western Victoria. When he looks for the winning post the rider sees instead the raggedly forested hills around Bassett. As soon as the field straightens up he begins to swing his whip with an emphatic rhythm that matches the horse’s galloping action. Again and again he brings it down with all the force of his arm onto his mount’s hindquarters. He hears distinctly among the roars of the crowd the voices of people he once knew. One stride past the post he collapses, gasping and sweating, on the horse’s neck. Someone calls out that Silver Rowan has done it again at last. Someone else says – that’s the same trainer who once had a champion called Clementia but the horse broke down before he had a chance to prove himself. A crowd of thousands looks up at the winning jockey who has just ridden the race of his life but who, as he leads the field back to scale, affects a look of dignified sorrow to suggest that this race has only brought him back to square after many years of narrow unlucky defeats and that the people he wanted most to see his triumph are far away.
Sternie named for a mighty punter
For nearly four years after Silver Rowan’s great win, Augustine spends nearly every Saturday at a race-meeting, sometimes in the Bassett district but more often in Melbourne backing horses that Len Goodchild recommends. From time to time Goodchild says to him – I haven’t forgotten I’m supposed to find you a horse of your own Gus, and Augustine says – all in your own good time Len – I can wait. Then, one afternoon in 1947 Goodchild takes him to the backyard of a strange house in Caulfield and offers to sell him for next to nothing a big ungainly chestnut gelding named Sternie that is still a maiden. Augustine agrees and says he will take the horse back to Bassett, give him a long spell, and then try to win a race with him at some weak northern meeting. Then he asks about the gelding’s history. Goodchild looks round to make sure that they are alone and tells him a little about Mr Sternberg. In a suburb of Melbourne where people walking along the footpaths can only guess what a great blank expanse of windows lies hidden behind the massed foliage of shrubs and trees, lives a Jew named Hyman Sternberg whom Augustine has never met. Augustine has occasionally seen a pudgy man in a crumpled suit talking to Goodchild at the races, but he has never dared to ask Goodchild afterwards whether the pale man was the Jew that they sometimes speak about. Mr Sternberg hardly ever goes to the races. Two or three times a year Augustine hears a whisper among his racing friends that the Jew is coming to back a certain horse. The horse is always a short-priced favourite but the Jew reckons that any price is a good price about a certainty. Someone says that Mr Sternberg hates going to country race-meetings because he feels uncomfortable away from the few miles of suburbs where he travels between his home and the factory that he owns. Only the greatest of certainties tempts him away from Melbourne, and then he sits well away from the windows in the back seat of someone else’s car glancing almost fearfully at the harsh paddocks and scrub that keep slinking past and taking up a position between him and the city. Augustine has spent years getting to know Len Goodchild, but much of the Master’s life is still a mystery. One of the things that Augustine never discovers is just how Goodchild is connected with men like Sternberg. Augustine is sure that the Jew is far more powerful and cunning even than Goodchild but Sternberg belongs to a secret inner part of the racing world where Augustine might never be admitted. The Jew boasts for years that he will never own a racehorse because it is cheaper to back other men’s horses, but at last after a run of successful bets he buys a well-bred yearling. Even before the horse starts in a race Sternberg decides that it is not worth keeping and sells it, not caring in the least that he will never have the pleasure of seeing his own colours carried on a racecourse – a pleasure that thousands of other people cheerfully pay hundreds of pounds to enjoy. The man who buys the horse is an acquaintance of Goodchild, one of what he calls his outer circle, but does not understand how secretive even those men have to be and how closely they must guard their privacy. The new owner thinks it is a good joke to name the horse Sternie after Mr Sternberg. Goodchild does not smile as he tells Augustine how angry Mr Sternberg was to think that even that much of his name would be printed in racebooks for people to stare at, how he cursed the horse and its new owner and said he hoped the vucking mongrel would never win a race, and how so far the curse seems to have worked because the horse Sternie is still a maiden. Augustine laughs and says – there are dozens of small races up north that he could win – curse or no curse. Every morning before daylight he trots the horse behind his bike for a couple of miles. Once a week he takes him to the racecourse and Harold Moy gives him a fast gallop. Every afternoon after work he leads the awkward chestnut for miles through the least-frequented streets around the edges of Bassett. The sun goes down and the inland frost gathers over the city, but Augustine keeps on walking. He plans to give Sternie two races and to get Harold Moy to keep him so far back each time that the northern district bookmakers and punters come to think of Sternie as a hopeless hack that someone races just for the fun of it. A stranger stops to admire the horse Sternie as Augustine leads him back towards Leslie Street. The stranger asks – what’s his name mate? Without stopping, Killeaton says – Silver Rowan.
Augustine has a bad day at Flemington
Early on Saturday morning Clement meets Augustine bringing Sternie through the front gate after his exercise. The boy asks his father – will Sternie have a race today? Augustine says – he’s not ready to start in a race yet – I have to make sure he’s properly fit before I give him his first big race. Then the man hurries inside and puts on his best suit and prepares to go by train to the Melbourne races. On the evening train from Melbourne back to Bassett Augustine sits in a corner of a crowded second-class compartment. He peers through the window at the shapes of the sparse northern forests that gallop past in vying packs and straggling files, still far from home in some interminable race. A half-drunk man talks loudly about his big win at Flemington that day and asks Augustine if he went to the races too. Augustine says – I’m sorry mate but I don’t know the first thing about racing. At the Bassett station Augustine finds a seat in a crowded taxi. A man in the front seat asks to go to Americans’ Gully. The car travels through deserted city streets between cumbrous facades of shops and hotels that were built seventy years before, when Bassett was being hollowed underneath by the tunnels of gold-mines that are now abandoned. Near Americans’ Gully the shapes of mullock heaps blot out whole fields of stars above the rows of old flimsy cottages that were first built for renting to the miners. The passenger opens the front gate and steps straight onto the veranda of his house. The taxi skirts the city by way of the shuttered windows and leaning balconies of Chinatown and then heads vaguely towards Leslie Street through streets where on even unimportant corners there are small squat hotels hardly bigger than the houses around them with only the word BAR gl
owing faintly green or orange against some covert light bulb to distinguish an occasional window. Killeaton tells the driver to stop in front of a row of small houses that were built with a few feet of front yard so that the clerks and shop assistants and tradesmen who first lived in them might plant a rose or a lilac between the parlour window and the picket fence. He finds his wife sitting by the stove in their kitchen. In his darkened bedroom Clement lies listening. Augustine refuses the meal that his wife has been keeping in the oven, and asks for just a cup of tea. He asks her – what did I tell you on Friday morning was the bet of the day at Flemington? She says – I’m sorry I can’t remember. He says – you must remember – I should have written it down so I could show you now to prove it – anyway you can guess what happened – I started the day off badly but I’d fought my way back almost to square by the second-last race – Goodchild’s men were pouring money on a thing I knew nothing about so of course I had to be with them. It was a good thing beaten if that’s any consolation – well to cut a long story short I had just two quid left to put on Tamburlaine in the last – as I said on Friday morning it was the bet of the day – It won with its ears pricked but I still came away a few pounds down on the day instead of sticking to my own judgment and having a decent win. Mrs Killeaton asks – do you mind telling us how much we owe at the moment? Augustine says – I’m too sick and tired to work it out now. Then he explains that in future he will stay away from the Melbourne races unless he sees one good bet sticking out like Tamburlaine. He will concentrate on getting Sternie fit to win a small local race. The money that he saves by not chasing Goodchild’s tips in Melbourne will make a nice little stake to put on Sternie when he has his first try. Augustine finishes his cup of tea and walks up the passage whistling between his teeth. Clement throws himself around in bed, pretending he has only just woken up. Augustine comes in and asks the boy is he all right. Clement says – I was just wondering what will happen if Sternie never wins a race. Augustine sits on the edge of the bed and tells his son about a racecourse that encompasses all the folds of hills and prospects of plains that the boy has ever seen from high places in Bassett. At its farthest side there is still a horse, obscurely placed near the tail-end of a big field, whose rider has only just begun to urge it forward with tentative thrusts of his arms, and whose owner, if its long run from that seemingly hopeless position brings it home too late after all, will send it around still another course which reaches even farther back, whose far-flung curves and stupendous straights allow even the least likely straggler to come from behind and win, and where a race sometimes takes so long to be decided that many of the crowd who came to watch have left and are far away before the leaders come into view but the truest stayer will always win.
Clement fights the son of a bookmaker’s clerk
One morning as Clement Killeaton hurries along McCracken’s Road on his way to St Boniface’s school an old man with a dirty beard rushes out towards him from the doorway of Corcorans’ butcher shop. Clement turns and runs back towards the corner of Leslie Street. Warm urine sprinkles the inside of his thigh. He runs a few yards further and looks back. The old man is not chasing him. The boy walks the rest of the way home with his legs held wide apart. His mother gives him a clean pair of trousers and he sets out again for St Boniface’s. He reaches the school gate with a few minutes to spare. He finds the boys from his grade all playing the game called snatchers. Sometimes they forget about snatchers for weeks on end until one morning before school a boy from Barry Launder’s gang, which rules Clement’s grade, cups his left hand over his cock and balls, runs silently at some boy who is staring in another direction, and with his right hand wrenches the fellow’s balls until he screams and drags himself free. The boy who has been snatched puts his left hand over his smarting privates and runs at some other boy who has not yet realised that snatchers is on again. The boy who started it runs at someone else, and within a few minutes every boy in sight has one hand between his legs to guard himself while he creeps or sidles or dashes without warning towards someone whose left hand has strayed from its place. The game goes on all day. No boy dares to put his left hand on guard while a nun or a lady teacher is watching, but many a boy stands in line and marches into school with a hand poised high on his thigh ready to ward off the dreaded snatch between the legs from behind him, or the sudden attack from the boy in front who may wheel around when the teacher is not looking and snatch boldly in sight of the girls. Even in school the left hands are kept ready for the boy who saunters down the aisle as if to borrow a rubber but in fact to snatch under cover of the desk tops. This morning a boy named Ronald Fitzgibbon sees Clement walking through the gate and calls out to him – look out for snatchers. Clement puts his left hand up at once and during the few minutes before the bell stays close to Fitzgibbon who seems to be the only boy he can trust not to snatch at him. When the bell rings, Clement is so fond of Ronald that he walks towards the assembly with his free right hand around the other boy’s neck and shoulder in the way that best friends always walk in St Boniface’s schoolground. Clement tells Ronald that he has a secret place under a lilac tree in his backyard and that Ronald can enjoy it too if he likes to visit the Killeatons’ place after school. Then he tells Fitzgibbon how he wet his pants that morning. By now they are standing in line. Just before the nun blows her whistle for silence, Ronald Fitzgibbon turns around and whispers to the boy and girl behind him – pass it on – Killeaton piddled his pants this morning. They giggle and pass it on. The message travels down the line. Clement turns to Ronald Fitzgibbon and punches him hard on the jaw. Fitzgibbon punches Clement twice quickly about the nose and mouth. Clement feels blood flowing out of his nose. He howls loudly and the nun sees him. Some of the girls tell her which two boys were fighting. She promises to strap both boys as soon as everyone is inside and morning prayers are over. She tells another boy to take Clement to the taps and hold a wet hankie over his nose. At the taps the boy teases Clement about his wet pants. He puts his hand between Clement’s legs. Clement fights him off, and the boy says – I wasn’t snatching – I was only trying to feel the wet piddle. That night Clement tells his father that he has had a fight with the Fitzgibbon boy and lost. A few nights later Augustine says to his son – I’ve been making inquiries and it turns out that your mate Ronnie Fitzgibbon is the son of Jim Fitzgibbon the man who works for Horrie Attrill the big bookmaker – Mr Fitzgibbon and I had a good laugh together when I told him about your fight – I want you to shake hands like a man with little Ronnie when you see him tomorrow – you should know by now that all bookmakers and their men are our enemies but there’s no harm in you inviting the boy home after school to play some afternoon as long as you never speak to him about racing or our horse Sternie or the racing men in Melbourne that you might hear me talking about sometimes.
Tamarisk Row Page 3