Tamarisk Row

by Gerald Murnane

  Clement gives his food to Launder’s gang

  Every afternoon when Clement reaches the back veranda and pushes open the fly-wire door, his mother calls out – did I give you enough for lunch today? and he answers – yes thanks. Every morning as he leaves for school she makes him put his hand into his school-bag to make sure he has not forgotten his two brown-paper bags – one for lunch and one for play-lunch. The lunch is always six little triangular sandwiches with at least two different kinds of fillings arranged so that as he eats his way through the stack he never finds the same filling in two successive sandwiches, a cake or a pair of sweet biscuits, and a piece of fruit. The play-lunch may be two fairy cakes or a slice of moist fruit-cake or two cheese cakes or a pair of biscuits with jam between them, but never the same as on the previous day. Sometimes his mother asks him – in all the years you’ve gone to St Boniface’s have you ever had to buy your lunch once? He answers no, because even when there is no bread in the house on a Monday morning she sends him to school with just his play-lunch and waits at the school gate at lunchtime with sandwiches made from fresh bread. Sometimes she asks – have you ever had to take your lunch wrapped in newspaper? He answers no, because even his cakes and biscuits are always wrapped in clean lunch-wrap paper inside a brown-paper bag. And sometimes she asks – have you ever had to sit down to a whole pile of jam sandwiches with no butter? He answers no, because he always has such fillings as cheese and vegemite, egg and lettuce, apple and raisins, dates and nutmeg, peanut butter, or ovaltine mixed into a paste with the butter. His mother is always curious to hear about other boys’ lunches and listens eagerly as he tells her how half of his grade run down to Keogh’s Korner Shop with threepence for a pie or pastie or fourpence for a whole Boston bun which they eat without any butter or filling, and how some of the others have a stack of jam or vegemite sandwiches without any butter and wrapped in nothing but newspaper. He never tells her how only a few days after he first started school a small crowd of the shabby poorer boys in his grade gathered round and stared as he unwrapped his dainty parcels of cakes and took out his piece of fruit, and how a few days later some boys that he knew, even without a trial of strength, were tougher than himself snatched away his bags and tossed pennies to see who would have Clement’s fairy cakes or his apple or even the choicest of his sandwiches. In his very early days at school Clement believes that by allowing the rougher boys to plunder his lunch and play-lunch bags he is securing their friendship or at least making sure that he will be safe during the many lunch-hours when they go around looking for victims to bash or torture. But he soon finds that even though he reaches a perfect understanding with boys like Barry Launder or Michael Hannan or Fat Cormack, so that they only have to walk up to him before they go to Keogh’s and say – what have you got for us today Killer? and he hands over everything but a few sandwiches to them to share among themselves, he is often one of the first to be hauled before Launder to be dealt with – sometimes only half an hour after he has given the gang all the tasty parts of his lunch. Eventually he tries such tricks as eating all his cakes and fruit on the way to school in the morning or hiding in the lavatory as soon as the grade is let out for lunch or eating his lunch as he walks only a few feet from the nun patrolling the shelter shed. None of these tricks works for more than a few days. In the end one of Launder’s gang either bashes him or threatens to bash him until he agrees once more to hand over a fair share of each day’s lunch. Then one day a big girl in Therese Riordan’s grade, whose name he never discovers and whose face is not pretty enough to inspire or even to interest him, happens to see two of Launder’s gang dipping into his lunch bag while he stands patiently by. The girl orders them to give the food back to Clement. When they tell her to bag her bloody head she slaps each of them hard across the face, takes the lunch from them, and sends them running away. For two weeks after that she meets Clement at the school gate each morning and takes his lunch into safe-keeping. Then at playtime and lunchtime she meets him and lets him sit beside her while he eats. Two or three times during those weeks Launder and his gang prowl around just out of her reach shaking their firsts at Clement or holding their stomachs and groaning and crying that they are starving. But they never dare to bash him, even after the girl has left him. Then one day the girl tells Clement that he should know by now how to handle the boys if ever they bother him again, and leaves him to eat his lunch alone once more. About a week later she sees him in the yard and says – those little brats haven’t been pestering you again have they? He says – no thank you very much, because he doesn’t want to put her to any more trouble. But of course they have been ransacking his brown-paper bags since the first day after the girl left him. During the next few weeks he does not care how much they take from him so long as they do it quickly and out of sight of the girl who thinks she has saved him. As time passes and he and the gang move up through the grades they begin to trouble him less. Sometimes he tells his mother he doesn’t feel like too many sweet things and she gives him only a tiny slice of cake. He shows this cake to the gang as proof that his mother doesn’t allow him so much for lunch as she used to and so that when he eats his cake on the way to school a few days later they will believe that she has finally given him none at all. Some of the gang order him to tell his mother that he is dying for cakes and biscuits, but by then he is more skilled at deceiving them so he tells them that his mother says sweet things are ruining his teeth or that she is too sick to bake. Sometimes they forget about his cheesecakes on Monday and fairy cakes and fruit-cake on other days because they have more money to spend on their own lunches – enough for lollies or even a small bottle of soft drink. By the time they are all in grade three together the gang often finds it easier and more satisfying to steal money from their own mothers’ purses than to grab a few cakes and sandwiches from Killeaton, and for days at a time they leave him alone. Then sometimes when he offers them something tasty to placate them, they refuse it or gulp it down and tell him it wasn’t good enough to get him out of the trouble he is in with them. Several times during the grade-three year when he is threatened with a bashing from them he begs them to remember all the hundreds of good things from his lunches that they have eaten since the bubs’ grade but they take no notice. One day towards the end of grade three when they are already wondering what it will be like next year at the Brothers’ College, Miss Callaghan sends the boys out with their readers to the little wooden seats under the pepper trees. She tells them to sit six under each tree where she can see them from the windows and to go on reading to their monitors until she calls them back inside. Clement is monitor of a group that includes Barry Launder and one of the feathered friends, a boy named Reginald Pearce. As soon as someone has started reading, Launder and Pearce start talking to each other. Clement takes no notice of them until Miss Callaghan pokes her head out of the window and says – Clement Killeaton remember the names of all the talkers please and report them to me when you get back inside. Clement calls out – yes Miss Callaghan, as she goes away from the window. Barry Launder grins at Killeaton, sure that he is safe. Reginald Pearce, whose hair is always long and dirty, who wears his older brothers’ patched trousers and their loose-hanging jumpers with unravelled cuffs where the sleeves have been cut down to shorten them, who lives in the shabbiest house that Clement has ever seen, with no curtains in the windows and a backyard heaped with scrap metal and empty beer bottles, who is so dirty himself that the girls make faces when they have to stand near him in line, and who is probably the least cruel of the feathered friends, looks Killeaton in the eye and says with no suggestion of a smile – don’t pimp on me Killer please Killer and tomorrow I’ll bring you a nice little piece of cheese from our place – tasty cheese – you like cheese don’t you Killer? Clement thinks at first that Pearce is teasing him, but as he looks again at the boy he is not sure. When it is time to go back to the classroom Pearce walks close behind Clement and says softly – don’t pimp today Killer – a nice little piece of cheese C
lem. Inside the room Miss Callaghan is so busy that she says only – monitors send their talkers out to me please. Clement goes to his desk and says nothing. Pearce does not bring the cheese and never mentions it again. Whenever Clement sees the boy during the following weeks he shudders to think of a piece of cheese gripped between Pearce’s dirty fingernails and wonders whether he ought to offer him some of his lunch because the boy might not get enough to eat in his shabby house.

  Clement sees wonderful things in marbles

  At night when Clement is adding to the entries in his book of marbles he sometimes urges his father to bring his book of chooks’ pedigrees up to date. But while Clement will not be satisfied until every marble of the two hundred and more that he owns is safely written up under such headings as Where It Came From, Who Might Have Owned It Before Me, Its Colours Seen From A Distance, The Colours Hidden Inside It, The Man It Stands For in Professional Foot Races, and The Horse It Stands For At Race Meetings, Augustine claims that he can keep most of his chooks’ pedigrees in his head for the time being. One night to prove his claim he says – say we start for argument’s sake with Green Ring the best of the clutch that Long-legged Granny hatched in the old barrel in the second woodshed – well she was the daughter of Long-legged Granny by the rooster I bought from Ryan Brothers at Wensleydale and Long-legged Granny was a daughter of Young Granny the hen that was chased and scruffed by that greyhound when she was grazing in the church-hall yard that night by Jim Senior the rooster I bred myself from a beautiful hen with a yellow ring who was never any good as a layer just the same and Young Granny was a daughter of Old Granny by the full brother to that rooster I was always sorry I killed for eating because his first lot of daughters had such miserable tails. Clement soon loses track of the pedigrees but he remembers many of the fowls that his father names because he used to peer at them as they sat brooding in tea-chests or barrels or petrol drums in out-of-the-way corners of the ramshackle sheds or crouching with their copper-coloured chickens safely huddled beneath them in cosy nooks under low clumps of the morning-glory that crept all over the heaps of rotting timber or in the deepest thickets of the bamboo, although their nests have long since disappeared because his father tidied up the sheds and the yard once in his holidays and the hens now search for nesting-places among the weeds or against the bare walls in the shadows of sheds. Among all the clutches of chickens that have scratched and pecked their way across the backyard, through the barley patch, around behind the horse’s loose-box, past the tamarisks, under the lilac-tree and down towards the square of lucerne and the front of the house, and all the pens of pullets that have been fed on mashes of the best bran and pollard and have grazed every evening in the church-hall yard next door and have had their first eggs identified by Mrs Killeaton, who had to run outside whenever she heard a certain kind of cackle in the mornings and bring in the new-laid egg and report to her husband that night that the pullet with such and such a ring left the nest cackling that day, and have been finally either killed and eaten or kept in the special layers’ pen or allowed the run of the yard with the select breeding flock depending on the number of eggs that they laid in their first season and the size and shape and colour of their eggs, and the smaller pens of cockerels who have been killed and eaten for such slight faults as a lack of sparkle in their eyes or the wrong shade of yellow on their legs until only two or three remained who danced round each other and sparred with their beaks in tests of strength until one was finally chosen to be let loose with a mob of pullets to see what sort of chickens he would sire and whether he deserved to be kept as a replacement for the old rooster or as a second sire to keep some variety in the bloodlines, Augustine remembers the names and the main characteristics of a small ruling house whose generations have come and gone while he and his son have grown only a little older and the shrubs and sheds and fences that are such mighty landmarks for the poultry have scarcely changed. Sometimes at the dinner table on Sunday Augustine reminds his family that they are eating a daughter of Granny the third who was only four years old but had become too fat for laying and whose best daughter would carry on the blood-line anyway or a son of Jim Senior who was unlucky enough to be born with a crooked breastbone. He punches holes with red-hot wire in the toes of hundreds of chickens and slips rings on the legs of hundreds of pullets and cockerels and every week-end moves a few hens from one pen to another according to some obscure system of classification that he keeps in his head. Sometimes he nails up a small crate of birds to be collected by a man in an old truck and sold at the market in Bassett, but he admits that the money he gets for them does not even pay for a week’s supply of wheat and pollard and bran. Sometimes a crate arrives from Bassett railway station with the label of a breeder of pedigreed Rhode Island Reds in some suburb of Melbourne and the notice PLEASE GIVE ME A DRINK with an arrow pointing to a jam-tin inside the crate. Augustine throws a hen from the crate over the fence into one of his pens. Before she can find her legs, a rooster runs with drooping wings and gaping beak and bounces up and down on her. Augustine hooks a long piece of fencing-wire around a hen’s leg and carries her squawking to the woodheap, where the axe leans against the chopping-block. Her friends and relations go on foraging in the yard where she will never be seen again. Augustine lifts out from under a hen the first of a new clutch of chickens. He wraps them tenderly in one of his old flannel singlets and packs the bundle into an old felt hat. He rests the hat on the hearth beside the kitchen stove so that the precious chickens will not be crushed by their mother while the late eggs are still hatching. Clement asks his father again to write it all down before he forgets it. Augustine says again that he will never forget the important bloodlines and that nobody wants to know what happens to all the hundreds or even thousands of birds that are only good for killing as soon as they are old enough. Instead of asking his father once more to try to preserve the story of the tribe of Rhode Island Reds whose ancestors came to Australia long ago from green hills on the opposite side of America from the hills of Idaho, but who have lived for longer than they can remember in a place around whose farthest edges all day are obscure sounds of other creatures whose tasks and journeys they never try to understand and within which are promises of plains that come to nothing and a dozen shrubs and creepers that are all they know of what a forest might be like, whose girlfriends and wives are chosen for them by a man whose wisdom they never question because he comes every morning and nearly every night to feed them, who forget their own relations so easily that they fight to the death with their brothers and fathers and mate greedily with their sisters and mothers, but who run up and down the wire fence at dusk to get back into the sheds where they have perched since they were small, stand solemnly calling out to some hen who has gone off to a secret place among the nettles behind a shed and comes back tossing scraps of grass over her shoulder to hide the trail to her nest from wild animals that (so Augustine says) used to prowl through the jungles of Assam thousands of years ago and calling to the others to tell her what part of the jungle they have wandered to while she has been laying, or stand up to fight a strange cat but allow the man and the boy that they know to walk freely among them so that Clement regrets that the true history of the long ages they have spent in this and other countries will never be recorded and, worse still, that the backyard where hundreds of them were born and discovered hide-outs and tunnels to secret places and great barriers between themselves and the ones that they wanted to be with and made long repetitive journeys across the same limited territory but never reached whatever lay beyond it will never be anything more than a backyard because no one sat down and wrote out their story, he sits down and writes about his marbles. He begins as a small boy in grade two making entries of a few words in each of a few columns. Before he has finished writing about half the marbles in his collection he gets from his father a much bigger ledger and starts a new system of entries with one whole page for each marble. Because his mother tries to stop him from wasting his time poring over pag
es of nonsense night after night, his list of entries grows very slowly. But all the while the number of his marbles increases steadily. Towards the end of his grade-three year he reviews what he has done and counts his marbles and calculates that it may still take him several more years and perhaps two or three more volumes to bring his work up to date. He writes of how he first came to own each marble, but he does not know where any of his marbles came from originally. When he asks his parents where marbles come from, they say that someone probably makes them in a big factory in England. There are sometimes a few marbles for sale in Coles or Woolworths in Bassett but these are brittle inferior kinds, and dozens of them have identical colours. True durable marbles are never seen in shops in Bassett. The few thousands of them that circulate among the boys of Bassett, wherever they may have come from originally, may never be replaced or added to, so that whenever a marble is lost it diminishes the total of marbles that a boy might collect in his lifetime, although years later another boy may find it again after a night of heavy rain has exposed it gleaming among the gravel and clay. One day Clement sees in a National Geographic magazine, in an article entitled West Virginia: Treasure Chest of Industry, a picture of a girl in a factory somewhere among steep forested hills almost as secretive as Idaho’s packing thousands of coloured marbles into small bags. He looks closely at the marbles. Many of them seem to be the cheap almost wholly transparent kind that are sold in shops, but a few of them are very like some of the precious richly-coloured marbles that cannot be bought anywhere in Australia, so that he goes on hoping for a long time afterwards that someone in those dark treasure-laden hills will send across the sea some of the true marbles that are still being made after all and save them from dying out altogether in Australia. No one is even certain of the true names of the different kinds of marbles. Clement owns a few of each of the kinds that he calls peb, reallie, dub, catseye, bullseye, bott, taw, rainbow, pearlie, glass-eye, and chinaman, but other boys often use these names to describe quite different kinds of marbles. And on the few occasions when his father takes an interest in the boy’s marbles, Augustine uses familiar names wrongly or calls some marbles by names that Clement has never heard before. Augustine himself first made Clement interested in marbles when he took out of an old tobacco tin that he kept in his wardrobe about a dozen marbles that he said were older than himself because he had found them somewhere around the old house at Kurringbar when he was a little boy. Clement values these marbles so much that he never takes them out of the house and seldom shows them to another boy. The next most precious are the dozen or so that he has found in the backyard and that must have belonged to the boy Silverstone who lived at 42 Leslie Street before the Killeatons moved there. Some of the rest he gets by swapping cards from packets of breakfast foods or toys and scraps of timber or coloured paper that his father brings home from the mental asylum where the patients make gifts for children in orphanages, or by sitting up straight in school or knowing his work on days when his teacher tidies her desk and finds there marbles that she has taken weeks before from some boy who was fiddling with them, or from older boys who think marbles are only for babies, and one day Mrs Riordan gives him a bag of marbles because he is always so well behaved when he visits her house. He watches the boys at school playing ring games for keeps, but dares not join in. The only marbles that he takes to school are a few inferior kinds which he tries to swap for some that attract him in other boys’ collections. He wonders how some boys can lose half a dozen choice marbles during a single playtime and not seem worried about it. He goes home to spread out his own treasured ones on the mat and whisper their racing names to himself. For hours some evenings he dwells on the story of a single marble – how it might be older than the city of Bassett because it had been brought to Australia by early settlers from England or Ireland, how it might have lain hidden for years beneath the soil while boys who are now dead tramped over it without suspecting what colours lay deep under their feet, and how Clement Killeaton, the one boy in all Bassett who would take proper care of it, caught sight of one faint gleam from its misty depths, prised it up from the soil, washed and dried it and thought up a name for it. At night he sits looking up at the electric light globe with a marble held close to his eye trying to explore all the wine- or flame-or honey- or blood- or ocean- or lake- or stained-glass-coloured skies or plains where winds or clouds or ranges of hills or curls of smoke are trapped forever and to decide what secret tunnels or caves or valleys or walled cities or thickets or abandoned laneways might never be explored because they lie deep inside it close to its very essence where its truest colours would envelop any traveller who reached there trying to discover what has lain for so many years in the heart of the glass that people have carried without thinking from place to place and what it is to be inside a place that all other people see only from the outside. One night when all the marbles are spread out on the mat in the lounge-room, the amethyst- and white-streaked one named Tupper after a professional runner at a Bassett Easter Fair meeting and Winterset after a famous racehorse in Melbourne rolls away and disappears down a hole in the corner of the floorboards. Clement cries until his parents notice him. He asks will they lift up the boards or find a way under the house for him, but they tell him not to make such a fuss about one old marble. Clement does not forget Tupper Winterset. Often at night he thinks of the soft dust gradually sifting down onto his purplish lakes, whose depths no light now enters, and the white arcs of his shores that perhaps no one will ever hold up to his eyes and dream of crossing and of all the years when the house still rests solidly on its foundations and he, Clement, grows up and goes away and the new family living there never suspects that Tupper is somewhere beneath them and of a time when the house falls down at last and a new one is built and of a day, perhaps long after the second or even the third house has fallen when someone finds Tupper Winterset and makes up a story about him which is very different from the stories that Clement once told about him and discovers deep inside him colours quite different from those that Clement discovers and gives him a name very different from Tupper Winterset, which was not his real name anyway just as white and amethyst were probably not his true colours and the story that Clement believed of how and where he was first made was not the true story.