Champion

by Gee, Maurice

I leaned my bike on the front veranda and led the others down the path at the side of the house, past the shed that housed the motorbike. This machine, a Harley Davidson, had a sidecar, and Grandma sped about Kettle Creek on it with a sack of vegetables sitting up beside her like a fat old pumpkin-headed passenger. Grandma was the nearest I ever saw to Rockfist Rogan, except that she wore dresses on her bike. How she embarrassed me and how I loved her!

  Her garden was walled by coal sacks nailed to tea-tree posts. Beans over-reaching their frames waved at the top and marrow and cucumber vines crept out the bottom.

  ‘Wait here,’ I told Leo and Jack. I unhooked the coal-sack door from its nail and stepped in, advanced down a lane with tomatoes on one side and silver beet on the other. Grandma’s garden affected me differently each time. I might hear growth humming and roots drinking and sap running and fat leaves creaking as they turned to follow the sun, and might start humming myself and feeling my own sap rising in my limbs. Or I might see tendrils reaching and marrows like pythons curled in the shade, and feel that I was threatened, food for them. Or I might imagine myself in Africa and put my foot on a pumpkin, a beast I’d shot. Or simply be hungry – pick a tomato, crunch a butter bean. And always I had to warn Grandma I was approaching.

  ‘Grandma,’ I said.

  ‘Who’s that?’ She was behind a bean row.

  ‘Have you got your clothes on, Grandma?’

  I saw a naked arm go up and pluck a hanging dress from a pole. It fluttered in the green jungle as she pulled it on.

  ‘Rex, dear,’ Grandma said, coming into the path, advancing to kiss me. Her dress was one of her old baggy multi-coloured ones. I often thought she’d look better in sacks. She wore laceless sandshoes with her big toes breaking out and a tennis sun-visor casting green light on her face. Her long white hair hung down her back. My hands got tangled in it as I kissed her.

  ‘All right,’ I called, ‘you can come in.’

  Jack and Leo came through the opening, along the path, single file. I saw their eyes go darting about.

  ‘Grandma, this is Private Coop, from Chicago.’

  ‘Jackson, ma’am. Call me Jack.’

  ‘Hello, Jack.’ They shook hands.

  ‘And Leo,’ I said. ‘From the vineyard.’

  Grandma tapped a finger on his head. ‘This young man I know. You peeked in my garden this morning so you could see an old lady worshipping the sun.’

  Leo went red. The hand Miss Betts had strapped opened and shut. But Grandma wasn’t really cross with him. ‘What did your father think of my parsnip wine?’

  ‘He liked it,’ Leo said. I could tell he was lying.

  ‘Well, you boys pick yourselves a tomato. There’s no spray, they won’t poison you.’ She turned to Jack. ‘What do you think of my garden, Jack?’

  ‘I’ve never seen any place like it. I’ve never seen pumpkins so big.’ I saw how it affected him – a wonderland.

  ‘Tomato?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘There’s no mystery, Jack. Sun and pure water and natural manure. Cow dung’s best. Let nature do the work.’ She lectured him as he ate tomatoes, one, two, three, squirting seeds on his army shirt. Leo and I picked beans into a bucket, then tagged along as she took him to the end of the garden to show off her compost heap. Grandma was known in Kettle Creek as ‘the Compost Queen’. She heard it as a title of respect.

  ‘See the richness.’ She held out a handful. ‘Smell it.’

  ‘Yeah, good.’ I don’t know what he really thought. It wasn’t a bad smell, but you had to be Grandma to find it sweet. She plunged her arm in, up to the elbow.

  ‘Feel the warmth. Roll up your sleeve.’

  Jack obeyed. He pushed his arm into the compost, uncertain at first. Then his eyes widened. ‘It’s hot.’

  ‘That’s nature cooking good things for herself.’

  ‘It’s warm as my blood.’

  Grandma pulled her arm out. She stepped into a lean-to beside the heap and in the dark and damp there lifted sacks. ‘Come and see.’

  I was ready to slink away if Grandma made a fool of herself. At the same time I told myself we didn’t have to care what Jackson Coop thought; he was no one. Grandma set the sacks aside and displayed her worms. There were thousands of them, inch-long, pink and shiny; a spaghetti farm. She scooped up a handful.

  ‘Don’t let anyone tell you that the dog is man’s best friend. Want to hold them?’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Jack said, swallowing.

  She put a dollop of worms in his hand and he grinned uneasily. Their coldness, after the compost, must have been a shock.

  ‘Each one of those is a little factory of nutrients,’ Grandma said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Jack said, ‘they workin’ hard.’

  ‘They will be when they get in the ground,’ Grandma smiled. ‘Sunlight, Jack. Compost. Worms. Pure water. It’s not a very long list, the things we need.’

  ‘No, ma’am.’ She amused him but he liked her. He stood there with his handful of wriggling worms and took deep breaths of the sunny compost-scented air; smiled at her and liked her and looked as if he had found a home.

  I did not care for that.

  ‘Is Grandpa in his workshop?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, yes, come and meet Freddie,’ Grandma cried.

  Jack put down his worms and we trooped out of the garden. Grandpa’s workshop was round the other side of the house beside an outlying paddock of Stewarts’ farm. It was a patchwork of iron sheets, each at a different stage of rusting away. Once it had been a garage and carpenter’s shop but these days Grandpa built inventions there. He had invented a machine for making concrete blocks and a machine for digging trenches – half built, abandoned them. Now he was busy on the one he described as ‘my best yet’. I thought so too. I really wanted him to finish it.

  He looked up wildly as we came in the door.

  ‘Freddie, this is Jack. Bernice’s American,’ Grandma said.

  ‘I can’t turn this nut.’

  He was a small spry man, seventy in that year of ’43, but behaving like twenty-two. He wore khaki shorts that bagged about his skimpy behind, and a torn singlet, horribly oil-smeared, and a beret stiff with grease, and dusty cloudy speckled specs. I’ve never worked out how he saw through them.

  He did not offer to shake Jack’s hand but demanded, ‘Do you know anything about engines?’

  ‘Some,’ Jack said. He approached and peered in. ‘Man, you got trouble in there.’

  ‘What is it?’ Leo asked me.

  ‘An amphibian.’

  ‘Lemme have a go with that wrench,’ Jack said.

  ‘Spanner,’ I corrected him.

  ‘Yeah, spanner.’ He took it from Grandpa and freed the nut.

  ‘What’s it for?’ Leo said.

  ‘Getting wounded men off beaches.’ I thought the machine was beautiful, and the idea of it beautiful too. Its double purpose intoxicated me. As Jack and Grandpa worked in the motor I toured Leo round it – and I have to say now that a more jerry-built makeshift machine was never constructed. The boat part of it was a clinker-built dinghy, twelve feet long. It sat down low on a light chassis, with four solid rubber tyres looking very naked out the sides. I never understood the transmission system or the belt arrangement that fed off power to the propeller shaft. Mechanics didn’t interest me. The engine worked, the wheels turned, that was all that counted. And out the back a propeller stuck like a celluloid toy; yet I had no doubt it would whizz the amphibian along at twenty knots.

  ‘Grandpa says I can put my BB gun on the front.’

  Jack looked up from the motor. ‘Then the other side shoot at you.’

  I looked at him with contempt. Of course they would. That was war. But they wouldn’t get me, I’d get them, I’d mow them down. I saw myself in the amphib, speeding at a beach with machine-gun rattling, then roaring up the sand with no loss of speed, and Japs in the trees falling over and lying dead. Saving wounded men wasn’t my idea of war. I jumped i
nto the dinghy, making it bounce. Grandpa jerked his hand out of the motor and nursed his thumb, looked crossly at me, and Jack waited till I settled down. I stood on the bow seat, swinging my Lewis gun, winning the war.

  ‘What’s this for?’ Jack asked Grandpa.

  ‘Ah, that’s my gearing system, for the propeller. I’m patenting that.’

  ‘I’ve seen some things…’ Jack put his face deep in the motor and studied whatever it was from an inch away. ‘I guess it could work.’

  ‘You think so?’ Grandpa was pleased.

  ‘You might have some trouble here, though.’

  ‘Yes, that’s a bit of a puzzle, bypassing that.’

  They poked and peered, unscrewed this and that, while Leo and Grandma watched over their shoulders. They took no notice of me in the bow, spraying bullets. I looked around and saw them clustered there.

  Grandma had her hand on Jack’s arm as she stood on tip-toe to see. It was only then I realised I was left out.

  Chapter 7

  Dawn has visitors

  Grandma gave us scrubbed carrots to eat, and Leo and I took Jack down to the mangroves to see the canoe. Leo ran ahead.

  ‘It’s gone,’ I heard him shout.

  I ran to join him. Flattened bracken showed where it had been. We hunted round. Leo’s face was white. He kept on throwing looks at me.

  ‘I didn’t take it.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Dawn Stewart, I’ll bet.’

  Jack arrived.

  ‘Someone’s pinched my canoe.’

  ‘Dawn Stewart,’ I said. I had no doubts.

  ‘Okay, let’s get her,’ Leo said.

  We headed off along the bottom of the cliff, above the tide-line, through mangroves that were stunted and dry, leaving Jack to find his own way. We climbed up a bank into a paddock and ran along the edge of a clump of trees and came to the place where the mangrove swamp curved into Stewarts’ farm.

  ‘In here.’

  We climbed a fence with sacks wrapped round the barbs and followed a path through scrub and mangroves. The path angled off along planks laid on the mud, but a climbing way showed in the trees. We saw muddy footmarks on the branches and followed those. The broken jetty appeared, and then the launch, leaning to one side. We jumped on to the jetty.

  ‘Stewart,’ we yelled.

  She was there at once. ‘You get out.’

  ‘You pinched my canoe.’

  ‘I did not.’

  We picked our way along the rotten planks. Dawn had her bucket ready. She had a way of throwing that spread the water in a sheet. We almost lost our footing as it hit us, and by the time we’d recovered she had dipped the bucket in the creek and was holding it ready again.

  ‘Get out.’

  ‘I want my canoe.’

  ‘I haven’t got it.’ Then her eyes looked past us. Leaves rattled and feet hit the jetty. Jack had arrived. He stood politely, with his cap in his hand.

  ‘Howdy, ma’am. That’s a nice launch you’ve got there.’

  Calling her ‘ma’am’! Dawn Stewart! Again I looked at him with contempt. ‘She stole Leo’s canoe.’

  He took no notice but smiled at Dawn. ‘Mind if I come on board?’ He picked his way past us on the planks, still held the bucket.

  She lowered her bucket. ‘Only you. Not them.’ She raised it again as we edged closer. Jack stepped over the rail and stood on the deck.

  ‘I’ll keep an eye on them. They’ll behave. Hey, this is great. Does the engine go?’

  ‘Not any more.’ She watched angrily as Leo and I climbed on. ‘This is my place.’

  ‘Where’s my canoe?’ Leo said.

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘You pinched it, Stewart,’ I said.

  ‘Hey, hey!’ Jack lifted a hand.

  ‘She did.’

  ‘Well she says no. You always got to believe what a lady says. That’s good manners.’ He strolled on the deck and looked down the creek, then smiled at Dawn. I saw, with some puzzlement, that he was happy. What was there here to be happy about?

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘for letting us come on board. We won’t come back again unless you invite us.’

  His courtesy made Dawn blink. She put down the bucket. ‘You can come,’ she said, with a look at us that made it plain we couldn’t.

  ‘Who cares?’

  ‘Where’s my canoe?’

  Jack took no notice. He looked at the deckhouse. ‘That your house in there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You mind a visitor, ma’am?’

  ‘As long as they stay out.’

  But Leo and I looked in from the door. We saw the table and cupboards and cushion and rug and concealed our approval. Jack still held his cap in his hand. He stood as though in someone’s front parlour and smiled at Dawn. ‘Nice house.’

  She kept her sharp elbow in the door, barring us. He saw the photograph tacked on the wall.

  ‘That’s a real nice lookin’ lady.’ He looked from it to her, then back again. ‘Your mother, eh?’

  ‘Yes,’ Dawn said.

  ‘She’s real nice lookin’.’ Dawn stepped away from the door. She was pleased by his compliment but stayed offhand. ‘This launch is named after her. My grandma named it.’

  ‘Rose,’ Jack said. He must have read the name from the bow.

  Dawn was surprised. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  He smiled at her. ‘Your daddy must be a May-or-ree, eh?’

  That made me, at the door, give a snicker. Jack turned his eye on me. It was cold.

  ‘Yes,’ Dawn said, ‘he was.’

  Jack picked up the ‘was’ and looked back at her. ‘Your daddy’s dead?’

  ‘When I was a baby,’ Dawn said.

  ‘So it’s you and your mammy and your grandma?’

  Dawn shook he head. Her eyes slid away. ‘Mum’s not here. She works in Auckland.’

  Jack nodded. He turned and looked round the deckhouse again. Then he smiled and touched her arm. ‘That’s a real pretty colour. Lena Horne’s that colour.’

  Dawn went pink under her brown. And right there Dawn became his friend. I saw it happen. And Leo Yukich was his friend already. And so were Mum and Dad and Gloria and Grandma and Grandpa. I was the only one who wouldn’t like Jack. It took me a little longer yet.

  Dawn gave him an apple and we stayed on the launch while he ate it. I had another dig or two at her about the canoe. She kept on denying she’d taken it and Jack said, ‘Hey, leave it be.’

  ‘We’ll look for it tomorrow,’ Leo said. I agreed to meet him after school. He jumped on to the jetty and climbed away through the mangroves. Jack and I walked up through the farm at Dawn’s invitation – rather, she invited him and I tagged along. I should have headed off to pick up my bike but I was beginning to be possessive. Everyone else seemed to be grabbing Jack and although I mightn’t like him he still belonged to me.

  ‘Them’s cows for milking?’ Jack said.

  Mrs Stewart was herding them into the yard. I noticed Dawn grow nervous as we approached. When she saw us Mrs Stewart stopped short. It was as though she’d got one of those pains that stand you still for fear of making them worse.

  We walked up the other side of a fence. ‘Grandma, this is Jackson Coop from America,’ Dawn said.

  Jack put his hand over the fence. ‘Hello, ma’am.’

  She made no move to take it. ‘Close that gate,’ she said to Dawn.

  ‘Yes, Grandma.’ Dawn climbed the fence and closed the gate behind the cows.

  ‘I don’t let people on my farm.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jack began, but Dawn was back.

  ‘It was a short cut, Grandma. I said they could.’

  ‘Well, they can’t. It scares the cows.’

  Even Jack could see that was a lie. But he didn’t know what to say and I felt I had to protect him. ‘He’s one of our allies. He’s been wounded.’

  He stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, ma’am. We’ll be on ou
r way.’

  ‘The gate’s up there.’

  Jack nodded politely. He put on his cap and gave a small salute at Dawn. ‘Come on, Rex.’

  ‘She can’t talk like that.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘You’re a soldier.’

  ‘That don’t make any difference. Main thing,’ he whispered, ‘we don’t make any trouble for that girl.’

  I looked for Dawn but she was hidden by the cows. Perhaps she had bent down to hide herself. We passed around the side of a wooden shed, both barn and workshop, filled with the junk of thirty years of unsuccessful farming.

  ‘Watch out for the dogs.’

  Two underfed mongrels, part collie, part mastiff perhaps, strained and leaped at the end of their chains. Their bare teeth, laid-back ears and matted coats turned them from farm dogs into wolves.

  ‘They’ll bite.’ As he didn’t know cows, I thought he mightn’t know dogs.

  Jack walked up to them. ‘Ain’t no puppy dogs sceerin’ Jackson Coop.’ He was putting on his happy Negro act. The dogs went into a frenzy of snarls, but he stepped into the range of their teeth and suddenly they were still, sniffing the hand he offered them. He tousled their ears and necks. ‘Jus’ gotta show them you ain’t sceered.’ The dogs whined. ‘We’re buddies now, ain’t that so?’ They wagged their tails and seemed to agree.

  ‘Give ’em a pat.’ I put out my hand and touched their heads, even though they stiffened and stopped their wagging.

  ‘That lady there, she ain’t so friendly as her dogs.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, we best keep out of her way.’

  We walked up the drive.

  ‘You like some gum?’

  I hesitated.

  ‘Saved some for you.’

  ‘All right. Thank you.’

  I took it, unwrapped it, put it in my mouth. Jack and I went on to the road and round to Grandma’s for my bike. We talked of this and that: worms, canoes, dogs, cricket, baseball, as we went. I began to see he wasn’t the person I had thought he was. I had to go right back to the beginning and meet him again and go on from there.

  I’m surprised he was so patient with me.

  Chapter 8

  Sugar

  I’m the only one who knows the truth about the great sugar mystery. Jack told me, and I promised never to tell. I’ve kept my promise until now, but this is Jack’s story so I have to put it in. Dad puzzled over it for years and came pretty close to the truth now and then.