by Joy Dettman
Tom Palmer had been Boyle’s mill boss for years. He had five kids to feed and a house he’d borrowed money to build. He knocked on Vern’s door. Tom was a good worker, a reliable and decent family man.
‘I’m stockpiling timber no one wants to buy, Tom, and I can’t keep it up indefinitely. Come and see me again when things pick up.’
A man could manage on short rations for a month or two. Things would pick up. The government would do something. They had to.
But the government did nothing. Government machinery had not been set up to supply assistance to the needy. That was what the churches were for, and the smaller charitable organisations. They tried, but charities, set up to offer temporary relief to the needy, were put under pressure as destitution spread. The banks added to the misery. They failed to understand that you could put a stone through a mangle and still not squeeze blood out of it. The banks were owed thousands so they squeezed. Thousands were evicted from the homes they could no longer pay for, throwing more human souls onto the streets. There was real suffering in the cities. Folk were starving in the cities.
Then George Macdonald closed his bush mill. Eight men lost their jobs, and there was talk of Vern Hooper cutting down to a three-day week. And Max Monk, owner of Three Pines, a big property eight or so miles from town, sacked a chap and his wife who had been working out there for years.
‘They say he’s up to his ears in debt.’
The rumour-mongers were at it again, circulating disaster, though few believed them until Monk sacked his two farm labourers, and one of them with him for twenty years. He was home with his wife now from Monday to Sunday, home, jobless and unpaid in two months.
‘The bank is selling him up.’
‘Max Monk? Bullshit.’
Three generations of the Monk family had owned Three Pines, and for those three generations Vern’s family had been Monk’s nearest neighbours. They shared a fence, shared the creek, though the Hooper land was around half the size of their neighbours’, and their house less than half the size. Vern’s manager now occupied the old Hooper house and he cared for that land as if it were his own. For six months of the year, Monk’s house stood vacant while Max, his wife and daughter spent up big on their grand tours.
‘They reckon he’s been owned by the bank for years.’
‘He owes Robert Fulton a fortune, I know that much.’
‘There’s a lot more than Monk owes Fulton. His wife was telling mine that they’re feeling the pinch.’
‘If Monk goes under, he’ll take a few down with him. Charlie White was saying yesterday that Monk hasn’t paid a brass razoo off his bill in six months.’
‘It’s the greed of those big bastards that caused this.’
Norman Morrison’s job was secure. He’d taken a legislated wage cut. The government was finally doing something. Salaries across the board were reduced, but balanced by a drop in the cost of living. Norman watched his pennies but he managed.
The Church of England had started up a relief committee, so the Methodist church ladies started their own. Who knew for how long the bad times might last. Lorna and Margaret Hooper were good Methodists but drew the line at going door to door collecting old clothes and shoes for the needy.
Vern had wanted those girls home from the city; now he had them at home he wondered why he’d wanted them there. With little going on at his mill, he spent more time out at his farm.
He was walking down by his section of the creek when he saw his neighbour walking in his garden. Old man Monk had built his house so it overlooked the creek. His son’s wife had designed the garden leading down to the water. It was overgrown, neglected now, but as a boy Vern had envied it. Flowers weren’t encouraged on Hooper land. Vern’s grandfather had needed every square inch of his land, and his stock had got the best of it, the house relegated to the driest corner, a few feet back from the road, its only garden, then and now, a stand of shading blue gum trees and an old rose bush neglect couldn’t kill. Vern had taken two or three cuttings from it, given that rose a second life in town, and every year it repaid him a thousandfold.
He took his time in approaching his neighbour that morning, in climbing the bordering fence. He waited until Max was sitting on the grassy bank, tossing sticks into slow-running water. He’d spent a lot of his boyhood envying Max.
They said their good mornings.
‘I’ve been hearing a lot of talk in town, Max. Any truth in what I’m hearing?’ Vern was not a man to beat around the bush.
‘According to the bank, I don’t own the shoes I’m standing in — sitting in, Vern.’
‘You’ve got a lot of stock out there.’
‘The bank’s got a lot of stock.’
‘That bad, is it?’
‘They won’t get everything.’
‘How’s your wife taking it?’
‘She’s on a boat, halfway home with what she can carry. Our girl and her husband went ahead last month with a bit more. I’ll be joining them after the auction.’
‘How soon?’
‘Ask the bank.’
Max never was much of a farmer. His grandfather had been the farmer, and to a lesser degree, his father — who had made the mistake of hitching himself up to Eliza Foote, aunt of Archie bloody Foote. That was when the rot had set in. She’d watered down old man Monk’s blood. They’d only raised the one son, then made the mistake of educating him in England where he’d wed a pom who hated Australia. She’d given him a daughter who, like her mother, wasn’t fond of country life.
‘Have you got a smoke on you?’ Max said.
Vern didn’t move without his cigarettes. He offered his pack and eased himself down to his backside to sit a while and watch that creek. There was something soothing about watching water flow down that same course it had been travelling for thousands of years, something eternal about flowing water. A man’s blood might flow as strong and eternal if he made the right alliances. Vern had been guilty of watering down the Hooper blood with bad marriages. It was his grandfather’s fault, though. If he hadn’t been so deadset against cousin wedding cousin, the Hooper blood would have stayed strong.
‘Do you hear anything of your mad cousin these days?’
No need to mention names. Max only had one mad cousin.
‘The last time I set eyes on Archie was a few months before his old man died. He came up here wanting me to invest money in one of his get-rich-quick schemes.’ He blew smoke at the trees. ‘I gave him fifty quid to get rid of him, and considered it well spent.’
‘Is he still living?’
‘They say not. They tracked him as far as Egypt after his old man died. The old bloke went soft on him during his last years of life and left him a few hundred quid. The family reckon Archie’s dead or he would have been back for his money — which I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on right now.’
‘What’s it going to take to get the bank off your back?’
‘Too much — though I might raise it — if I had reason to raise it. My wife hates the place and I couldn’t pay my daughter enough to spend a weekend here — and she’s barren.’ He pitched a stick into the water. ‘It’s over, Vern. As poor old Ned said when they stuck the noose around his neck, such is life.’
‘Your grandfather would roll over in his grave.’
‘Could be that he will.’
Max stood and pitched his cigarette butt towards the creek, picked up a small branch and pitched it further, watched it get itself turned around and head off downstream.
‘Life as our old folk knew it is finished, Vern. This depression has been rushing towards us for a while and we’ve sat back watching it come. It will sort out the men from the boys.’
Robert Fulton’s feed and grain store spent more days with its door closed than open. He owed, and was owed, thousands. There were whispers that Paul Jenner, out Cemetery Road, was ready to walk off his land.
It was a disease, a creeping, crawling contagious plague, which by the end of 1930 had a gr
ip on the throat of Woody Creek and was squeezing the life out of it.
Fulton’s doors remained closed after Christmas. He owed Charlie three months’ rent on the shop and more on the house he lived in. A good family the Fultons, with a bunch of well-mannered, well-behaved kids. They’d been Charlie and Jean White’s neighbours for twenty years. Jean wouldn’t have let Charlie evict them had he wanted to.
Richard Blunt had been standing behind the drapery store counter for forty years, his wife, then his daughter, sitting in the back room stitching fine garments, altering trousers, taking up hems for those who could afford to pay. Not many in town could afford to pay for fine clothes now, but the Blunts, frugal folk, owned a big old house opposite the school. They took the infants’ mistress in as a lodger. Her job was secure. She paid her rent to Richard and he paid his to Charlie.
Old man Miller and his wife from the boot shop were feeling the pinch. Boots still wore out but folk weren’t replacing them. Crone’s café-cum-restaurant did all right. No one expected old mother Crone to give anyone credit.
George Macdonald kept his big mill saws screaming a week longer than Vern’s and their howl was a wild thing’s call for its mate. Then the howl died, and the town fell silent. And the town grew still. And the mill men grew still. They leaned against verandah posts watching their kids’ clothes turn to rags, listening to their women too proud to beg, but not too proud to send those rag-tail kids up to ask Charlie for a pound of flour on tick, please, to ask the baker if he might have a loaf of stale bread, please.
‘You ask him nicely now, say please. And wash your face before you go.’
The butcher had a sign up on his door: Cash sales only. A lot of kids couldn’t read.
‘Mum said please can she have half a pound of sausage meat, please, and she promises she’ll pay you as soon as things get betterer, please.’
The Duffy family were the first to apply for susso, though they weren’t on their own for long. The government, struggling to supply some form of relief to the starving, the homeless, were not doing much of a job of it, and that bloody pig-faced officious bastard of a Denham wasn’t making it easier for those in need to ask for help.
Don Roberts and his family were starving, but he was too proud to go to the police station to register for relief, to sign that statutory declaration stating that he was a useless bastard who couldn’t keep food in the mouths of his kids. Then the saddlery closed its doors. The Abbots went on susso.
‘You’ve got to do something,’ Lenny Abbot said. ‘Something’s got to be done.’
George and Vern did what they could. Every couple of weeks, one mill or the other was started up. They cut up stockpiled timber for firewood. A bit of money in one family helped a lot of families in this town.
Kids were dying of starvation in the cities. Proud folk were being buried by the coppers, laid side by side with strangers in communal graves. If a man couldn’t afford to eat, he sure as hell couldn’t raise the few quid necessary for a funeral.
Vern had been down there looking for buyers for his stockpiled wood. No one was buying, and when he walked some of the streets, he knew why. The city shops were open and women were still shopping in their fur coats, but out in the back streets, he saw it, he smelled the destitution. He stood and watched hundreds — men, women and their kids — queuing up for a tin mug of weak soup. Winter was coming. How were they going to survive through winter? He stood out front of some place handing out clothes, handing out old army coats dyed black, preparing the homeless for a long, cold winter. He came home depressed to sit in Gertrude’s kitchen, pouring out what he’d seen.
‘How can a country turn bad so fast? What the hell were we doing? Why didn’t we see it coming, Trude?’
‘How is she living through this, Vern?’ She, Amber, that girl Gertrude had lived for, dreamed for. ‘Is she queuing up with the hundreds?’
‘All I know is she had a good husband prepared to feed her, and two kids she left motherless. All I know is, whatever she’s doing, she’s thinking of herself, not you.’
‘She was a good kid until that sod came up here and filled her head with his lies.’
‘Oh, I meant to tell you a while back, Monk reckons he’s dead.’
‘Archie?’
‘So he said. Lost in Egypt somewhere.’
‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’
‘He was saying that they tracked him there when his old man died. He was left money in the will. He would have been back for it if he was alive.’
‘I won’t believe he’s dead until I see his name on a tombstone — and I mightn’t even then, Vern.’
The depression had little effect on Gertrude’s way of life. Eggs were her money; she had no less of them now than she’d had before. She had her goats, her garden. She made her jams in season, stored her apples and potatoes in her shed. Nothing changed at Gertrude’s house.
The town still called on her, and the calls still came in cycles. Fewer babies were born in Woody Creek but she delivered more. Husbands who could previously afford to get their wives down to the hospital for the birth now came knocking on her door. She went when she was called. She gave what she had to give.
On a Friday afternoon, she pulled her cart into the shade beside the town hall where she set about unloading a box of apples, a few dozen spare eggs and a couple of pumpkins. The ladies relief committee handed out her donations to those in need — and to a few who weren’t yet in real need but held out their hands anyway.
Denham was there, sticking his nose in where it wasn’t wanted.
‘Let me help you there, Mrs Foote,’ he said, attempted to take the crate of apples.
She pushed by him, got him in the shoulder with the crate, made no acknowledgment of him. She hadn’t spoken to him since the day of the broken eggs and didn’t plan to speak to him. Maybe there was a bit of the Hoopers’ grudge-holding blood running in her veins, but it had taken him to point out to Joey that his skin made him different to the other kids’. Joey knew now, and no longer wanted to go to school, no longer wanted to drive into town with her. She’d never forgive Denham for that. She hated him for that.
He was the cause of her first disagreement with Vern’s daughters. The Denham family went to the Methodist church and Vern’s daughters considered the constable’s sourpuss wife to be one of the few civil women in town. She received regular invitations to afternoon tea. Gertrude walked in on them one Friday, and the three eyed her trousered outfit as they might have eyed a man from Mars clad in a kilt. Bell-ringing bum-sitters Lorna and Margaret, ringing their little brass bell for Vern’s housekeeper to fetch them hot water for their teapot, treating her as the paid help. She’d been with Joanne in Melbourne, had come up here with her, and when Joanne died, she’d stayed on to look after Vern. She was Gertrude’s age, a decent, caring woman who deserved better than two bum-sitting girls ordering her about.
‘Get off your backside and fetch your own water,’ Gertrude said. She hadn’t been to the house since.
She wouldn’t have driven out to Monk’s auction with Vern had she known those girls would be going. Nancy and Lonnie Bryant were out there so she left Vern with his family and made a beeline for the Bryants’ gig.
Carts, drays, motor cars were all looking for space in the shade; a lot of folk from town had come out on Mick Boyle’s dray. He’d gone into the carrying business, be it people or goods he wasn’t fussy. Property owners from further out were there, a few city agents had come in on the train. You could always recognise a city man. Monk’s better furniture and his few good paintings had been sent down to the city to big auction houses. The rest was set out on wide verandahs. Gertrude was in the market for buckets, dishes and a single bed for Joey, if she could get one for her price. Monk had a few old iron beds, a few bundles of bedding.
Lonnie wanted the disc plough and Monk’s forge. He missed out on the plough but got the forge. Lorna wanted two crates of books. Vern’s bid was the only one. Margaret wanted a mu
sic box, as did Horrie Bull’s wife. Margaret missed out. Gertrude bid on a mess of buckets and tin dishes. She got them, along with a bundle of shovels and spades she hadn’t realised were part of the same lot. She made a bid on the second bed, but Horrie, feeling guilty about getting the music box, told her he had two better beds rotting in his shed and she could have both for the price of the carrying. He’d get Mick Boyle to bring them down.
They auctioned the property late in the afternoon. The crowd had cleared, only the diehards remained. Vern wasn’t interested in more land. He’d only hung around to see what it made and to get an idea of what his own land was worth. He’d had no intention of putting in a bid — or not until the auctioneer was about to knock it down to a bloke wearing a suit and for a pittance. He upped the bid, determined that land wasn’t going to some city bank manager for a song. The agent went over him, so just to be ornery, Vern went up again. Gertrude elbowed him this time and told him not to be a fool. He moved away from her, and it was on. Eight times the agent came back at him, but he must have had a limit, must have reached it. The property was knocked down to Vern.
‘You’re a pig-headed fool of a man, Vern Hooper. What do you need with more land at this time of your life?’ Gertrude said. ‘You should be hanging on to your money. Who knows how long this will last?’
‘Land lasts,’ he said, doing his best to hide his shell shock. He’d expected the coot to make one last bid. ‘Grandpop would have approved. He kicked himself until his dying day that he hadn’t spent up big during the last depression. And he always resented Monk having a finer house anyway. Now he owns it.’
‘He’s dead, you fool.’
‘Well, he can haunt it at night.’