by Joy Dettman
‘Then, just before lunch, we ran into Mrs Dolan and she asked us if any of the kids had been mucking around down at her place last night because she got robbed. Someone broke a little window in her pantry – which sort of got me thinking about what that bloke threw in the river – like, suddenly I knew it was a handbag. I asked her if they’d got her handbag, and she said no but the picture of that handbag was still clear.’
‘She didn’t tell me she’d been robbed,’ Tom said.
‘They didn’t get much. She reckoned it was either a kid or a skinny bloke because the window they broke is only a foot square. Anyway, to get on with the story, I go home for dinner, and Mum was talking about Rachael, and just a while back she said about her handbag being missing –’
‘How did she know it was missing?’
‘Miss Jessie told her. She accidentally heard you on the telephone talking to that policeman who’s broken down. Well, anyway, I just knew it must have been Rachael’s bag I saw that picker chuck in the river, because when I saw her last night at the station, she had a big brown bag with her –’
‘Slow down there, lad. You saw who at the station last night?’
‘Rachael Squire.’
‘What time?’
‘One o’clock-ish. She told me not to tell anyone I’d seen her, because she was leaving Gimpy, so I didn’t tell anyone. She took her wedding ring off and put it on the railway line so it would get squashed. It must have got stuck to a train wheel. It wasn’t anywhere around this morning.’ The boys had stripped down to their shorts, Billy already climbing down the bank heading for cool water.
‘Would you be able to identify the bloke you reckon pitched the bag in?’
‘Easy. He’s that big Pommy picker with the gingery handlebar moustache. I could see him as clear as day. He swung that bag around by its strap, let it rip, and it landed out near the middle.’
Tom stared at a stump on the other side of the river, thinking that maybe he might recognise a bloke from that distance – and the lad’s eyes were younger. He could know what he was talking about. He looked west, downstream at the fallen tree, and at the reed beds growing tall behind it. They were full of water rats and snakes looking for water rats – and leeches.
‘So, you’ve seen the bloke around town?’
‘Yeah. He’s tall, maybe even taller than you. Me and Billy joked about him being a good picker because he wouldn’t need a ladder. You must have seen him, Mr Thompson. You couldn’t miss his mo. It covers half his face. We were in the café on Friday night and he was in there with some of the other pickers. He’s some sort of Pommy – you can hardly understand him when he talks.’ Mike was making his way down to the water.
Tom’s tongue crept out to moisten his lower lip as he studied the curve of the river. That coot would have weighted the bag with something. It was probably on the bottom, and there were holes in that riverbed that went deep. He turned again to the fallen tree. If the bag hadn’t been weighted, it wouldn’t have gone straight down. The current could have carried it to that snag, and if it got by it, then there was a good possibility it might end up in the reed beds.
He left the lads to their swimming and walked a few yards downstream to where the bank had broken away. He took off his boots and socks, tossed his trousers over a stump, his shirt and vest with them, then, scanning the land and river for snakes, he scrambled down to the water’s edge.
Not much sand down this end; plenty of ankle-deep silt and slimy ankle-clinging water weeds – and leeches – so he plunged straight through and swam down to the fallen tree, his style more reminiscent of a water buffalo than an eel. He was no diver, and never had been, but he filled his lungs and, using a submerged branch, pulled himself down and out a few feet. While his air lasted, he had a feel around. Slime, and nothing but slime; it was like feeling for a slug in a slime pit.
‘What made you think it was a woman’s bag?’ he yelled.
‘You don’t know how you know these things, you just know,’ Mike yelled back, then the two lads swam down to join him at the snag.
‘Could it have been a brown paper bag of rubbish?’
‘It wouldn’t have flown like it did, and you had a look at the camp, Mr Thompson. Do you reckon any of those lazy cows would go to the trouble of throwing one little bag of rubbish in the river? Anyway, he swung it around by a long strap.’
‘You wouldn’t like to take over my job, would you?’
‘My old man reckons a crooked copper can make more money than an honest crook,’ Billy O’Brien commented.
Tom dived, wanting to end that particular conversation. Seconds later he emerged, water in his ears, up his nose, stinging his eyes. He had too much to do to be wasting time playing diver. Leave it to Morgan.
‘Those city blokes will get some professional divers up to have a look around – if you’re dead sure of what you saw, lad. I wouldn’t want to go bringing divers up here on a wild-goose chase.’
‘I can only tell you what I saw, and I am dead certain of what I saw. I’ll prove it to you too – if you reckon it could have got stuck on something. Anything a city diver can do in the water, we can do better, can’t we, Billy?’
Slipping, sliding, sinking knee deep in ooze and weeds, Tom made his way back to where he’d left his clothes. He checked his legs for leeches, took a look down his drawers – he’d heard some gruesome tales about leeches getting down a bloke’s trousers – and he gave his trousers a good shaking; he didn’t need a bull ant bite on the backside either.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said to an emerging head. ‘You find me that handbag before Morgan gets here and I’ll give you a quid each.’
‘A pound each? Fair dinkum?’
‘You bring that bag to me and your two quid will be waiting for you.’ He used his shirt to wipe the last of the mud from his feet and dressed slowly, watching for those heads, watching them work their way out deeper as they followed that fallen tree, until another bunch of lads came yahooing down the track.
Tom, preparing to mount and push off, heard Mike call from the water. ‘Wait up a tick, Mr Thompson.’ He waited, one foot on the ground. ‘You’re not going to tell those other kids about the bag and the two quid for finding it, are you?’
‘You’ve got sole rights until sundown.’
‘Righto. So what’s the time now?’
‘Near three.’
‘Three? Already? We’ve got to get going, Billy.’
beribboned bouquet
Dave Kennedy picked his peaches by touch alone, barely seeing what he picked, but he was getting them in. If a man decided he was going to do something, then he could do it, and do it alone if he had to. What he couldn’t get off these top trees today would be too ripe tomorrow for the cannery, and that was life, man trying to defeat nature and nature putting the boot in every time.
He’d been down to the pickers’ camp and, like Tom, found no one home. He’d gone out to see Reg Curtin, who’d had five blokes working, plus himself, his missus and three kids. He’d stopped picking long enough to offer his condolences. His wife stopped long enough to run into the house and return with a cake they’d intended bringing around later on. They hadn’t offered any pickers.
Len Larkin would have lent a hand, in the singular, if he’d been at home to offer it. Tige would have been here, picking since daylight, if he’d been alive. Bazza, Maurie, Norm, Ken – they all would have been here, the whole bloody football team would have been here, if they’d been alive.
‘What was the use of it all, Tige? And what’s the bloody use of this?’ he asked the sky as disciplined fingers plucked peaches, placed them down.
Nicholas had been by, with Arthur. He hadn’t offered any of his Johnsons, so Dave hadn’t offered any tea and cake. He couldn’t start thinking about Nicholas Squire. Not today. He had to get these top trees stripped, get his peaches across to Willama tonight. By tomorrow the cannery would be picking and choosing.
Overhead an aeroplane buzzed across
the blue glare. It sounded like a blowfly. Where was it going, and why? How did it stay up there? How did it push itself through thin air – or did it pull itself through? Dave couldn’t answer that one. He didn’t know how they flew, didn’t know how the burning of kerosene down the bottom of a refrigerator made ice form up the top, didn’t know how a voice could move along a telephone line from Melbourne to Molliston, or how the wireless at the Melbourne hotel had picked up music and voices from the air and pushed them out through a wooden box. Some things you had to accept without question – because they were, and the why and the how were unimportant.
Some things were beyond acceptance. Letting Squire get his hands on the deeds to Kennedy land – that was beyond acceptance.
‘Don’t think about it,’ he warned. ‘Think about ice. Now, you put a block of ice up the top of your metal-lined ice chest and it cools down the bottom. That’s logical. That a man can understand. No ice in that chest today. I should have bought her some before I left Willama.’
He called in to the Willama iceworks regularly, always making sure there was plenty of ice for Nicholas Squire’s little German-loving slut. He’d crawled around her like a kelpie pup, waiting for a kick in the guts. Couldn’t think about her either. It made his head burn. Maybe it was the sun burning his head. So, what could he think of that might be safe. Sunburn? Sunstroke? That bloody sun was up there taunting him and ripening his peaches, telling him it had won the war.
He looked at his arms where the sun-bleached hairs showed white against red-brown skin. He looked at his hands, hard, calloused, and for a moment he thought he was looking at his father’s hands. They were better hands than his father’s. Right from when he was a kid, he’d given those hands a task and they’d found a way to do it. They’d learned how to crack lice and to throw bombs, they’d picked wild flowers, lifted corpses into shallow graves. They’d trembled too. When the shooting started, when those first shells exploded and bits of bodies started flying, when the boats started bringing in boatloads of the dead, those hands had trembled. World full of smoke and noise and death. Ocean full of blood. A hand reaching out to him from the mud – and no body attached to that hand. Whose hand had it been? A good hand, bigger than Dave’s but nothing to drive it, no brain attached.
Discipline had got him through those first days. A man was nothing without discipline. Then, somewhere along the line, he’d lost his fear and become a killing machine, a pair of eyes, two steady hands and hatred. Hate those bastards, sight unseen. Shoot the bastards, dodge their bullets. One more dead, one less to kill.
He couldn’t remember half of the places he’d been. All the same place. All smoke and stench and trenches full of bloody corpses and boys looking like walking corpses. He’d fought for towns he couldn’t name in countries he hadn’t seen. Just the guns and the lice and the mud and the blood while the bullets whizzed around him, getting the poor little bugger standing beside him, or behind. Dave Kennedy, the lucky bastard, the born leader of men. He’d been a hero in the army. Now he was no one. Nothing. All of his work here in vain, all of his dreams dead.
‘And that’s the trouble with chasing dreams, Tige. It’s better not to catch them, mate, better to let them stay green on the tree. Dreams are like peaches, they rot fast once you pick them, bruise them, hold them in your hand.’
He moaned, trying to force his mind and his hands back to those peaches. He had to keep going, keep picking those bastards and beat that sun. One less peach on that tree was one less he had to pick. Couldn’t make those hands reach out, though. Arms aching, leg, hip, back aching. No feeling in one foot. Maybe that numbness would creep up, kill all of his aches.
‘The battle of the orchard has been fought and lost. Fall back, chaps,’ he said, stepping back. ‘Fall back to yesterday, and we’ll try again tomorrow.’
And his leg went from beneath him, sitting him down hard in the dirt. And the tree mocked him, tossed down a peach to hit him in the groin. Tomorrow the ground would be littered with peaches. He couldn’t pick the lot, even if he did get up. And he didn’t want to get up, anyway. What was the use of getting up only to fall down again?
‘No bloody use at all. You knew that, Tige,’ he said.
He hadn’t slept last night. Hadn’t eaten anything solid today. And bloody Nicholas Squire with his beribboned bouquet, standing there, expecting him to stop his picking so he could go with him and place his bouquet in the dust.
Dave picked up the fallen peach and brushed it clean on his sleeve before biting into it, the juice, like warm blood, dripping between his fingers. ‘The peaches are rotting, your bouquet is wilting, your pretty little whore is dead, Nicholas, and that’s life. That’s life.’ He bit again, sucked on the seed, studied the seed, then pitched it at a cluster of peaches. They didn’t fall. His hand raised, his index finger pointing like a gun at the cluster, he sighted down the barrel of his finger. ‘Bang! Fall into that crate, you bastards. Pick your bloody selves.’ Still they clung there. He aimed his finger gun again, gave it three shots this time. The peaches refused to fall into his crate, so he turned his index finger to his head. ‘You’re a failure. You failed, Lieutenant Kennedy. Bang!’
And he fell onto his back, his arms outstretched in the dirt, and he laughed, laughed hard, because a soldier learned not to cry.
the cider pit
‘The city coppers’ car broke down, so Mr Thompson doesn’t know what time they’ll get here now,’ Mike Murphy said, passing on the latest police information to the widow Dolan.
Ten minutes after three and a few thirsty men had wandered down, sighted the widow sitting on her cane outdoor couch, and wandered away again.
She was still considering the situation and Mike wanted her to make up her mind so he could get back to the river. He couldn’t leave her in the lurch, though. Her rooster roster was steady work and he didn’t want to lose the job, but he wanted to find that handbag, and sitting here, waiting for her to decide what she was doing, was a waste of valuable diving time.
‘You know how I thought someone had pinched your bag and threw it in the river? Well, it’s turned out to be Rachael Squire’s, so if there’s not much chance of me working for you today, we’ll get back to the river.’
‘I’m thinking about it, Mike.’
She must have been someone’s daughter, though she’d given little thought to the woman who had dumped her on the steps of a Catholic church, thus subjecting the newborn to an early education in privation, purgatory and a hairshirt brown dress. Her first memory was of that brown dress and that itching, and of a black-clad nun holding her down in an iron barred cot while another tied her hands to those bars, determined to stop her scratching.
One black-clad old biddy had tried with religious fervour to belt that scratching out of little Kathleen. She may have earned her place in heaven for her diligence too, but within Kathleen there had been an embryonic will that would not submit to tyranny. She’d taken a run at the old biddy one evening, head-butted her in the middle, knocking the wind clean out of her sails. Close to her eleventh birthday at the time, she’d gone over the fence and run for freedom, soon learning that freedom wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
For a year or so she’d slept with the cats and urchins in the alleys, eating when, and what, and if she could. Maybe she’d been twelve the night Sam flattened her when he caught her ransacking the kitchen of his establishment, and pitching what she could find out the window to the others. They left her to her fate, and when she regained her senses, Sam and one of his women had given her a lump of bread and dripping, which she made the mistake of eating. She was tossed into a tub of cold water laced with phenol, scrubbed, deloused and, when judged clean enough, taught a thing or two by Sam.
After a week or so, little Kathleen learned enough to realise that a little girl had to do what pock-faced Sam told her to do if she didn’t want a beating and wanted to eat. So she’d done it, and he’d given her dresses that didn’t make her itch.
Pe
rhaps her forebears had been Irish. Some uncanny luck saved her from the rampant disease of that establishment, but too soon she’d grown tall, had rounded out, so Sam moved her to another of his establishments, closer in to the city.
Life. It’s just a series of accidental happenings, some good, some bad – like the night a dissatisfied customer blasted a hole through Sam with a shotgun. During the following melee, Kathleen grabbed what she could and took off, heading west.
Two days later, admiring the pies in a baker’s window and considering the possibility of getting off with one, she’d seen the sign in his window: Elderly gent requires Woman for cleaning, cooking, shopping. Must be of good character. Not yet fifteen, she couldn’t cook, knew little about cleaning, but could probably do the shopping. She’d given her face a lick and a promise, drawn her hair back tight and walked in.
The baker, not interested in her character, sent her to a crumbling house around the corner, where she met old Joe, an ancient Irish gent, blind, deaf, half crippled, living alone and no one to care if he lived or died – or not in Australia. He’d come of a good family and received a small annual income from them, so she remained with him, sleeping on the floor in the kitchen and caring for him in her own haphazard way while saving every penny he paid her, until the morning she cooked the porridge for his breakfast but wasn’t able to wake him up to eat it.