The Battlers

by Kylie Tennant

  ‘He’ll be all right when his face is stitched,’ the stranger said decidedly. ‘You stay here, my child,’ he patted the Stray kindly. ‘Mr … ?’ He beckoned the busker.

  ‘Duke,’ the busker said.

  ‘Mr Duke will come with me. Bryson’ — he turned to the elder of the two small boys — ‘you go back for those two horses.’

  They drove off before the open-mouthed Stray had time to wail a protest. She turned to the infant Bryson, who was preparing to depart. ‘You can’t go all by yourself.’ The Stray looked at Bryson’s mother. ‘Can ’e?’

  ‘He’s a good boy.’ Bryson’s mother, a thin, quiet woman, was busy with the baby. ‘You had better tie up that grey horse for the night, Bryson, when you bring it back.’

  ‘Right-o, Mum.’

  The self-possessed Bryson trotted off.

  Miss Phipps, who had regarded the invasion coldly, was impressed with the accent of the new arrivals. So much so that she put on more firewood and dipped out a billy of water for tea without being told.

  ‘Might I ask your name?’ she asked very grandly. ‘Mine is Miss Phipps. Dora Chester-Phipps.’

  ‘Mrs Postlewaite,’ the quiet, sandy-haired woman replied. She was sitting on a log nursing the baby, who had awakened and begun to cry.

  The Stray regarded her with interest. ‘Geeze,’ she exclaimed. ‘Ain’t your husband the one they call the ’Postle? Always preaching about not boozin’ an’ beatin’ ’orses? A parson, he is, ain’t he, missus?’

  Over the face of the woman nursing the baby a frightened look passed quickly.

  ‘He has no connection,’ she said mechanically, as if she were denying some indictment, ‘with any church. None whatever.’

  II

  ‘It was my nervous breakdown,’ the Apostle was saying to Harley Duke as the little truck made its palsied way back from the hospital. ‘It was my nervous breakdown that showed me the way.’ He put the truck into second gear as they laboured up a hill. ‘One could not blame the bishop. He was a kind, just man, and the Church authorities were very good — I have a small pension — but after my nervous breakdown …’ He broke off and peered anxiously ahead. ‘I wonder if you would mind if I stopped at the bridge to ask if the Tyrells are camped there. They always camp near the bridge if they are in Logan. I particularly want to have a word with Deafy Tyrell.’

  The driving in the cold air had restored the busker. He found he could focus on an object without feeling too much as though his eyes were propped open. He was still drowsy, however, and he sat nodding as the Apostle climbed out and walked towards the red, blinking smudges of camp-fires. There was a barking of dogs and then a welcoming roar of voices. The shape of a big woman was outlined between the fire and the glow of a lamp in a tent. She seemed to be conducting with a spoon an orchestra of rough voices that her own screaming dominated.

  Presently the Apostle climbed back. ‘There’s a crowd of them,’ he declared. ‘The Tyrell family and Sharkey Wilks and his wife and the Dirty Jones’s and Thirty-Bob Collins.’ He started the truck again. ‘I think I’ll move into the river camp tomorrow. Why don’t you come, too? It would be closer to the hospital.’

  Duke, throwing over all Snow’s prejudices against camping with a ‘big mob,’ agreed at once. It would be company for the Stray and Phippsy. Snow would be in hospital for a few weeks at least, and the busker felt he could not endure being alone with the two women. He was curious to know more about the Apostle. The small man, with his extraordinary mixture of decision and timidity, had aroused Duke’s interest.

  As the Apostle bent in the glow of the one headlight to crank the truck, Duke studied the man shrewdly. The Apostle had one of those noble brows, serene and lofty, crowned by a mop of grey curls, a brow and head for any sculptor. Under that tremendous brow his face, with its peaked, small nose, tight thin mouth, and square chin, seemed curiously dwarfed. He looked like a child or an escaped cherub in disguise as an ageing man. That manner he had of almost apologising for his existence while he took command, his shabby clothes and cultured voice, the slim hands with dirty nails, the hands of a rector turned amateur mechanic, all these interested the busker.

  ‘We were making for the town camp when we met your little friend,’ the Apostle explained. In the short drive to the hospital he had found out all about Snow and Phippsy and the Stray and the busker himself, in the most courteous, skilful, and apologetic way possible.

  ‘You were telling me about the bishop,’ the busker hinted.

  ‘Yes, yes. A good, kindly man, but without vision. Not that I would condemn …’ He broke off nervously. ‘It was the sermon I preached on The Blood.’ The truck took a sudden swerve towards the roadside, and the busker nervously gripped the wheel, then apologised. ‘Not at all. I should pay more attention to my driving. Do you ever think, my good people, I said, that we are all part of The Blood?’ His voice had risen. ‘That the worlds and the universes as they move are but corpuscles circulating in that great stream of life that flows and flows from the body of our Lord. That we are but cells in that celestial stream, unescapably a part …’ He broke off again in his abrupt way, as though to take a grip of himself. ‘Something in what I said offended them. I can quite understand that. And then there was my nervous breakdown. But that wouldn’t interest you.’

  The busker protested that it would, but the Reverend Harold Postlewaite was silent for a space of two farms.

  ‘I had always admired the preaching friars,’ he said suddenly, just as the busker was nodding again. ‘As a young man I had been fired by the idea of a new order of society, or at least a new order of such friars, who would travel the country and preach in the market-places, the public squares. And then, of course, I married.’ He sighed, and his mind darted off on another track. ‘So after my breakdown, when there was obviously nothing for me — no parish — I bought this little truck. I was cheated, of course. Not that I blame the man.’ He smiled in the dark. ‘I was a mug, and mugs are made to be taken down. But my wife insisted on coming and bringing the children. She agreed that the open-air life would do me good.’ He sighed again. ‘It is a little difficult to explain that friars are celibate, and perhaps not quite fair to a woman. She was so eager to come, and the matter of celibacy has remained in abeyance.

  ‘They call me Looney Harry or the ’Postle,’ he went on. ‘Short for Apostle. So you see,’ he brightened up, ‘I have a roving commission in Hell.’

  There was something in his voice that startled the busker awake.

  ‘Hey,’ he said loudly. ‘What do you mean, Hell?’

  ‘Well, isn’t it?’ the little man said quietly. ‘The life of the people on the track is something that Hell must shiver to see.’ He insisted: ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s not so bad,’ the busker said slowly. ‘If you strike a good town.’

  ‘You’re young,’ the Apostle commented quietly. ‘But when you’re old, when you’re on a hungry track, without food or water, and sick, and lonely … There’s no Hell worse than loneliness.’

  The busker was silenced. ‘Thasso,’ he admitted. ‘But I won’t be on the track when I’m old. I’m going to get back to the city and get a job.’ He wondered why he had not thought of it before.

  ‘You might,’ the Apostle agreed. ‘But, then, you’re not a workman tramping looking for work. With your guitar you can make more money in an afternoon than bagmen would see in a month. I know. Of course, I don’t do any real good,’ he admitted impartially; then he brightened again. ‘But being mad on the track doesn’t matter so much. There’s so much madness on the track. Everyone you meet is mad in some way, and my ideas, I comfort myself, are no madder than most.’

  The truck bumped suddenly off the road towards the camp, and just as suddenly the Apostle reverted to a tone so normal that the busker could hardly believe it was the same man who had been talking before. ‘Bryson will have brought back the horses,’ he said. ‘He’s a dependable boy — very dependable. He’s only eleven and he
drives better than I do.’

  This, the busker considered, would not be difficult, even for a boy of eleven.

  Bryson, with his younger brother, Whitefield, Phippsy, Mrs Postlewaite and the Stray were sitting round the fire waiting for news. The news was reassuring enough to cheer even the Stray. The gash had been stitched, but the doctor declared that Snow’s general debility was such that he was lucky to escape pneumonia.

  ‘I thought maybe ’e’d get tubey-galoshes,’ Dancy declared. ‘I knew a bloke that got tubey-galoshes.’

  She would go up to the hospital tomorrow with a bunch of flowers. Even if she was not let in — and she probably would not be — she could leave the flowers. It would be simple to pick a nosegay over the front fences of houses in the town.

  She watched curiously the way the Apostle bowed his head and muttered over his food. Duke had already started in on a large slab of bread and a plate of stew; and he dropped his spoon and fumbled for it in confusion. Parsons, he supposed, should be allowed a certain licence, but saying grace and embarrassing people was a bit over the odds. The Apostle’s tea did not seem to be anything to arouse fervent thanks. A small piece of cheese and some kind of green weed with a brown-looking damper, very different from ordinary damper, was all he had.

  ‘Hey, there’s plenty o’ stoo,’ the Stray offered bountifully. ‘Bog in for all you’re worth. We got our dole today.’

  ‘Thank you all the same,’ the Apostle replied, ‘but I don’t eat meat.’

  ‘Not eat meat!’ The Stray exchanged glances with the busker. She inspected the Apostle’s food curiously. ‘What’s that green stuff, mister?’

  ‘Watercress.’ The Apostle munched it cheerfully. ‘We found some in a little creek as we came along.’ He launched out into an enthusiastic dissertation on the native spinach around Moree, on the food value of nettles and other plants that the audience had considered mere weeds. The Apostle, they were to discover later, was always testing out strange herbage on his unsuspecting family. He had a theory that what a bird or a horse could eat, a human being could eat. That was all very well for the Apostle, who had the digestion of a billygoat and the fortitude to endure his occasional mistakes in silence. But his family had grown more cautious. When Mrs Postlewaite saw her husband plucking a more than usually curious and suspicious bit of greenery, or pounding seeds to discover if they had food value, she would give the children a warning glance that confined them to bread and cheese.

  ‘When men eat the flesh of animals,’ the Apostle declared, ‘they are eating grass and plants at one remove. Isn’t it better to eat the plants themselves?’ There was a silence that might have meant consent. He finished his watercress, then looked round expectantly. ‘We usually have family prayers immediately after tea. Perhaps you would care to join us?’

  This, at their own fireside, struck Duke and Dancy as very unfair; but they mumbled a half-hearted agreement. Miss Phipps, in her most unpleasant voice, declared that she had no intention whatever of ‘taking part in any such mumbo-jumbo. Utterly ridiculous and absurd!’ she exclaimed scornfully.

  Immediately the other two, their hospitality outraged, turned on her ferociously.

  ‘If you don’t like it,’ the busker said sternly, ‘just shut up. Nobody cares what you think, anyway.’

  ‘Don’t take any notice of her, mister,’ the Stray encouraged warmly. ‘She can get to hell outta ’ere if she don’t want to listen. Go ahead. Me an’ Dooksie don’t mind. I’ve ’ad a hell of a lot more religion shoved into me than her, and if I can stand it, she can.’

  With this noble and generous sentiment, the Stray composed herself on a log with the resigned look of Bluey chained under the cart. Outvoted as usual, Miss Phipps sulked. The Apostle apologised and offered to retire behind his motor-truck out of hearing. His hosts, with renewed glares at the recalcitrant Phippsy, insisted he was not to leave the fire. So finally Miss Phipps, who was stubbornly determined not to retire herself, had to sit scornfully through the Apostle’s prayers, which included everything from Snow’s accident to the rain which seemed to be impending.

  When the Postlewaites had retired, and Miss Phipps, feeling that she had outlasted the enemy, also strolled away to the van, Duke and Dancy sat discussing the new arrivals.

  ‘D’you s’pose he’s always like that?’ the Stray asked.

  ‘I s’pose so,’ Duke answered doubtfully. ‘I’ve heard about him in camps here and there, but they didn’t say he was as bad as this.’ Then he added hastily: ‘Decent enough bloke in other ways, though.’

  ‘We don’t need to camp too near him,’ the Stray remarked after a lengthy silence. ‘And anyway’ — she eyed Duke as though daring him to contradict her — ‘after what I’ve been froo, what wiv the Salvation Army once half-starvin’ me in one of them hostels, it rolls off me like water off a duck’s back, that prayin’ does.’

  ‘Me, too,’ the busker agreed heartily.

  With this comforting assurance they retired to bed.

  7

  The Gunnar River curved sickle-wise round the town of Logan, holding it on a green plate of lucerne flats from which the roofs heaped up about a rise of land crowned by a grey water-tower. It was a rich, proud town, proud like a sore that had swelled itself from the farmlands about it, drawing their richness into its shops, their money into its banks. There was a well-equipped high school from which the brightest boys were taken away because their parents must send them out as labourers; a magnificent cinema with weak projection and worse sound; well-built churches with a few elderly women for congregations; and a town park in which a group of portly dowager palm trees flanked a war memorial and a machine-gun.

  Just as the town dumped its rubbish on the river-bend, so it dumped those human oddments for which it saw no use nor excuse. The coloured people, the old-age pensioners, lived beside the garbage-tip in little humpies made of bits of old bags, kerosene tins, rusty iron or boughs. No one wanted this flat because it was liable to flood; only the Chinamen laboured there among their rows of green vegetables guarded by high thorn hedges and a ferocious pack of dogs.

  Beside the Chinamen’s fence a row of little shanties had their place. These were occupied by the élite of river-bank society, travelling families for the most part, who had tenaciously clenched to a foothold in the town — people such as Mrs Flaherty, who sent off five children shining clean every morning to the convent school and had her two elder daughters working in the town, one as a waitress, and one as a maid. They had augmented their original tent by a one-room shack built by Mr Flaherty, who was also responsible for the well and the little fenced-in vegetable patch. The Flahertys owned a radio set and in the tent which served as the girls’ bedroom there was a new bedroom suite for which they were still paying. But the Flahertys knew they were a cut above the other dwellers on the river-bank. They never spoke to travellers, and seldom even to Old Jim, who had a little tin humpy just next door to them.

  On the far side of the garbage-tip the dark people had their settlement, a group of tin-and-bag residences in various stages of decadence. No one mixed with them except, sometimes, the travellers. The Littles, the Murrays, were left very much alone, partly from the prejudice which accuses dark people of never understanding the etiquette of a fight, and again because, so the whites said, the black people ‘smelt.’ This was an accusation which might with justice have been levelled at many of the white campers; but grumblers insisted that the blacks smelt different.

  The travellers camped between the outcast Murrays and the aristocratic Flahertys, and up-wind from the Murrays. There was, of course, a ‘Camping Prohibited’ notice on this favoured spot, just as there were Camping Prohibited notices anywhere along the river-bank; but they gave handy support for an over-night shelter, and usually had bits of tin propped against them, and at their foot a bed of boughs with a blackened ring where a campfire had been.

  The willows were stripped of their last gold leaf, but down in the Chinamen’s gardens the quince trees,
in which the parrots were busy, still burned with gold and orange and scarlet, and the cedar trees were laden with berries the colour of old cream. Across the vivid green felt of the lucerne flats, the rising ground, where the town stood, showed only as a confusion of fences, out-houses and old sheds. The town had its back to the river-bend, and might safely be disregarded by anyone camped just on that stretch between the railway bridge and the road bridge. And disregarded it was, except when a police visit made the huts and camps aware of the town’s existence.

  The settlement of human odds and ends on the river-bank led their own lives, fought out their own quarrels, upheld their own standards. There, as in any proper camp, the young bagmen on foot or with bicycles did not mix with the men with families and sulkies; and the families spoke only to other families. Caste was caste, and the nice distinctions must be preserved between the settler in a hut and the temporary occupants of a tent.

  Of course there were problems in this class distinction: Adelaide, for instance. Adelaide was so called because he had set out from that distant bourne with two horses, a waggon, and a harness made of fencing-wire. He told everyone there was a job waiting for him in Newcastle, but he did not seem in any hurry to get there. He had been so long in Logan that the grass was growing about the wheels of the waggon, in which and under which his numerous family slept. He had even tied wires from one tree to another to form a corral to keep his horses from straying. Some of the travellers resented this enclosure; but Adelaide was a fair, glib, cheerful man who always had an answer. First, he could not move on, under the pressing invitation of the sergeant, because his black mare had split her hoof. Then he could not move on because his wife was expecting a baby. Then his eldest boy broke his arm. Adelaide rated both as a settler and a traveller, and he talked to whoever would listen. He had been caught red-handed trapping ’possums and had wriggled out on the plea of his large family and his wife’s condition. As his wife was almost permanently expecting an infant, it came as a handy excuse on more than one occasion.