‘Listen,’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s the busker and Phippsy. I wonder how the hell they got here?’
‘Maybe they just came.’ Mary was not interested. ‘There’s a lot of people from other sheds.’
‘We camped near them in Logan. Gee! Wouldn’t Dancy run a mile! She’s scared to death the fat piece will catch up with her again.’ Dick jumped to his feet, and without waiting for Mary, he was making his way over to the group round the busker.
‘Well, well,’ Miss Phipps replied to his greeting. ‘It’s the young man Dick, isn’t it? Ah! yes.’ Anyone would have thought Dick was asking the favour of her notice.
‘How’s it, Dick?’ The busker beamed at him. ‘Good to see you. How’s the rest of the gang? Seen old Snow lately? Out at the Three-Mile, are they? Good! I’ll be out there one night.’ He took up his interrupted strumming. ‘We’ll have a night together,’ he called, as Dick retreated. ‘Just the old gang, huh?’
The old gang, Dick thought. Yes, that would be better than this confused and savourless gathering that tasted, as the ox had, of grit and ashes. He looked round for Mary, and saw her talking and laughing with a woman who seemed to him vaguely familiar. Then, as the strange woman scowled, he recognised her as Mrs Little. It gave him a shock to see her there. With a vague mumble he passed on and waited until Mary came strolling towards him.
‘Know who that was?’ he asked in a low tone.
Mary glanced at him, surprised. ‘I ought to,’ she retorted. ‘That’s my auntie.’ Dick recoiled.
‘What’s up?’ the girl asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘Can’t I even say Hello to Dad’s sister?’
‘They’re a rotten lot,’ Dick burst out. ‘Sam Little poisoned my dog.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘He did, I tell you. You ask any of our mob what the Littles did at Logan. They’re dead copper-narks, the lot of them.’ He could not see Mary’s face in the shadow, and foolishly went on justifying himself. ‘Why, Thirty-Bob and Sam Little nearly murdered each other a week ago over what happened in Logan. See that?’ He attempted to display a scar over his ear. ‘Well, that was your flamin’ uncle’s boot.’ He seized her hand to guide it to the spot, but Mary snatched it away. ‘Don’t you have nothing to do with them,’ Dick ordered. ‘Not while you’re going round with me, at any rate.’
Mary moved out of the shadow, and at the look on her face he blinked. ‘You!’ she hissed at him. ‘You ordering me about! Who d’you think you are? You think you’re the salt of the earth, don’t you? Why, you poor scum! Get back to your lovely gang of thieves. Get back to your own mob, or to hell, or to gaol. Don’t you come near me again.’
She turned and was gone before he could speak. She fled to her brother, demanding to be taken home. She was crying, and he wanted to know why, but she could only shake her head. How could she tell her brother of the undertone of contempt in the boy’s voice when he spoke of the Littles? How explain the peremptory way he had commanded her to keep away from her uncle and aunt? ‘I hate him,’ she raged. ‘I hate him.’ She had been a fool to set her heart on Dick because he was big and fair and had blue eyes. Never, never again. It wasn’t what he said, but his tone, that had been like a blow. Why, oh why, hadn’t she kept to Dad’s people, who didn’t fling stones with their voices and hurt you, who were kind and happy and easygoing? Never again.
Dick stood staring after her stupidly. What a way to behave! Why, he hadn’t said anything! He’d only asked her, in the politest sort of way, to keep off the Littles. What was there in that to make her turn on a chap? Oh, tonight he didn’t seem able to do anything right. Savage with disappointment, he went back to the gang of pickers with whom he had been making friends.
‘Where’s the girl friend?’ one of them asked.
‘Shut up!’ Dick snarled. He settled down to a steady course of what Waldo called sherry. It might have been arsenic for all Dick cared. It was soon plain enough that he was looking for a fight, and he observed, with the sharp clarity that falls in certain phases of drunkenness, that people were avoiding him. No one liked him. He could have wept for his pitiful fate.
Finally he fell over a log and lay there asleep. The sons of Waldo, clearing away the last of the guests with remarkable despatch, missed him in the shadow of the log, and there he lay until the early light and the fiendish efforts of the flies to penetrate his eyes, nostrils and ears wakened him to his surroundings. He sat up with a groan and considered the blackened embers of the fire which had roasted the bullock, the embers of other similar fires, some empty bottles, and a scattering of papers and cans and bread-crusts and bits of meat over which the flies were crawling in a black welter.
All he wanted was to get back to the Three-Mile camp. If only he could bury his face in a pile of bedding in the shade of the big cool tent. Just to get out of this blinding sun and sleep was all Dick asked. He would have to walk, and across country at that. He had come over the night before in the Burns’s sulky, and not until he started back on foot did he realise what a formidable distance the Three-Mile camp was from Waldo’s orchard. Orion was a jig-saw puzzle of roads, but if he kept ploughing due north he would emerge on the reserve or the road that led to it. The trouble was that high walls, houses, barbed-wire fences, dogs and suspicious farmers all seemed to gather in his path. Turning aside to avoid a house, he would find himself in a ploughed field where it was less trouble to skirt round than to tramp across. Even the landscape seemed to be playing vindictive tricks, as though it knew the headache that shot darts at his eyeballs almost blinded him. He was the butt of the sun, and it played with him as a cat might play with a mouse. Fences tore at him; unseen stump-holes tripped him; and the very crows, as they flapped heavily up to sit on the trees and watch him pass, made coarse, disparaging remarks.
It seemed that he had been walking for hours, and the sweat glued his shirt to his skin. All the creek-beds were dry-baked sand and an ever-renewing disappointment. Any thin, muddy trickle would at least have moistened his parched throat. Dick tramped sullenly on, head down, switching the flies with a green branch as a bull lashes with its tail. He could have whimpered in a kind of panic. Up over the hill, and there was another hill in front. He must have lost his sense of direction. Surely it could not be so far. Then he came out on the familiar road, and his pace quickened. Only half a mile from the camp. Soon he would know the blessed relief of oblivion, the comfort of that familiar tent, never before so welcome.
First, some tea. He felt it would be just too much to bear if he had to go and get water. He would bribe one of his young brothers. But there was sure to be tea, black, perhaps, but all the better for that, in a big billy-can beside the fire. His mother would be full of dramatic reproaches, but there was even a homely comfort at the thought of Ma ‘going off the handle.’ He was used to it, and he never listened or took much notice. He would just growl and roll into the tent and sleep.
Sick and stupid as he was, Dick noticed that Thirty-Bob’s sulky was gone. He stamped into the deserted camp and took a long draught of bitter cold tea on which floated an iridescent surface that advertised its strength. That was better. He rubbed his bloodshot eyes. Here came his mother and Deafy. They had been sitting in Snow’s camp across the reserve talking to Dancy. It was not until they were quite close that Dick noticed something ominous about their silence. They walked together in step, deadly and purposeful as a regiment charging the guns.
‘ ’Lo, Ma,’ Dick attempted his usual careless bluster. ‘Don’t I get anything to eat?’ Not that he wanted anything, but he had learnt that attack was the best form of defence.
His mother said nothing, which was in itself unusual. It was Deafy who spoke.
‘You!’ he said, as though the word burst from him. ‘You low-down mongrel!’
‘Ar,’ Dick snarled. ‘Give a chap a bit of peace, can’t you? I don’t want you nagging at me.’
The set expression of his father’s face was as hard as judgment. On Dick
’s head he poured the wealth of language that life on the road had stored for him, life in a construction camp, life with railway gangs, and there was a touch of the bullock-driver’s raw force in it. Even Dick could not help wincing.
‘I wouldn’t want to call you a son of mine,’ Deafy conluded, shaking his head in grief. ‘I’d sooner think your mother had you …’
‘Shut up,’ Dick yelled at him. ‘Let me alone, damn you.’
‘It wasn’t Dick’s fault, Tom,’ Mrs Tyrell pleaded, feeling her husband had gone too far. ‘Let the boy be.’ She turned almost pleadingly to Dick. ‘Now don’t go against your father, boy. Snow’s been pinched.’
‘Snow?’
‘The p’lice grabbed him just as he was coming back with a bit of meat.’ Mrs Tyrell this morning looked very old. All her dominance and energy had been wiped away, leaving only a haggard woman worn with too much hard work. ‘Your father’s been going on about the disgrace of it. To think we was going to share and Snow’s got to take all the trouble. And poor Dancy …’
Dick clasped his head with his hands. ‘Where’s Thirty-Bob?’ He hoped Thirty-Bob would be a long way away. He could not bear Thirty-Bob as well.
‘I don’t know. He went into town.’
Probably to get drunk, Dick thought. As a matter of fact, Thirty-Bob was selling his sulky. Someone ought to raise money for a lawyer, he considered.
‘Thirty-Bob felt it, I can tell you. He tried to get taken with Snow. But they didn’t seem to want him.’
Thirty-Bob felt humiliated, just as Deafy did, that there were two men letting a third take the blame for a sheep that they were all going to share. Once before, Dick remembered, Thirty-Bob had stepped forward and claimed a sheep that another man had killed. ‘Well, how could I let him go to quod?’ he had said. ‘He’s got a missus and three kids to look after.’
Deafy was still giving his son a considered opinion of his conduct. ‘To think that a son of mine would go staying all night with a black whore while his own family …’
The injustice of it stung Dick. ‘What could I have done?’ he shouted. ‘It wasn’t my fault.’ But even as he shouted, he knew that was not true. If he had not broken that solid little circle, Snow might not have taken such a risk. It was not like Snow to be so incautious. Dick had talked about this ox-roasting, he had insisted on going to it. Snow had wanted to entice him away to a little feast of their own.
‘You could have been here,’ his mother said in a low voice. ‘You could have been with us when it happened.’
Dick did not answer. What was there to say, anyway? If they were going to hold him responsible just because Snow had been caught with a sheep … Good God! what wouldn’t they hold him responsible for? ‘Oh, shut up,’ he said wearily. His father was still standing there raging at him. ‘Will you shut up?’ he repeated again threateningly. It seemed to him that his brain was on fire.
‘It’s this life on the road that’s rotted you,’ Deafy was saying. ‘At your age I was slogging in a construction camp, working as you’ve never worked in your life. You’re a loafer and a waster. At your age I was making a home and rearing a family … And you …’
‘Not if I know it,’ Dick raged. ‘D’you think I’d drag a woman and kids all round the country when I lost me job or they chucked me out? D’you think I’d give any kid of mine the life you’ve given me, you old bastard?’
‘Dick’ — his mother tried to deflect his mounting rage — ‘don’t speak to your Dad like that, boy. He’s been a good father to you.’
‘Oh, he has, has he? What kind of a life has he led you, never a roof over your head.’
Deafy drew himself up. ‘We’ve been married twenty-five years, and never once has your mother had to complain of me looking even sideways at a woman, and as for spending a night away from camp with a black slut …’
Dick crashed his fist into his father’s face. It was the first time he had ever even thought of hitting his father. He might have answered him savagely or cursed back when his father was annoyed, but to strike him was a different matter. He stood stupidly trying to take in the implications of what he had done.
Deafy got slowly to his feet. There was only one thing now. He must thrash Dick, or Dick would be unbearable, and he must settle this matter once for all. He came at Dick dangerously, heavily. Deafy was as hard as iron, and for all that Dick was so big, Deafy had the endurance, the toughness, the experience, and Dick was not in his best form.
‘I’ll teach you,’ Deafy grunted. ‘Striking your father.’
But if Dick was angry before, he was mad now. He did not care, he told himself, what happened. Everything was spoilt, ruined. It could never be the same. A dreadful desire to smash his father into a bleeding pulp obsessed him. He was through with this life for good. The old man had jeered at him for not making a life of his own. All right, he would. But first he must destroy every vestige of the old. His fist shot out in a blow he had used with dire effect before now. It caught his father on the side of his jaw just under the ear, and he dropped as though he had been hit with a mallet.
‘Dick!’ His mother was hanging on his arm. ‘Dick, don’t, don’t!’
He sent her reeling. ‘Get away from me,’ he shouted. ‘I’m through. I’ll teach him. Damn him!’
He snatched up the axe. Mrs Tyrell with a scream flung herself on Deafy’s still body. He could see the terror in her eyes, but he made no further move against his father. There were little flecks of foam at the corner of the boy’s mouth. His face was distorted with fear. Clinging to the still body of Deafy, Mrs Tyrell watched speechless with horror the wreckage Dick was making of the camp. Her little table, the chairs, the treasured sewing-machine; he battered them scientifically into matchwood. He smashed the crockery to the ground and jumped on it. ‘I’ll show him, I’ll show him,’ he kept repeating. The kerosene tin of water went over with a clang as Dick’s boot struck it sending a stream of brown water with a hiss into the fire. On top of what fire remained he threw the mattress and all the bedding he could find.
‘Dancy!’ Mrs Tyrell screamed, but Dancy was already running towards her, weak and unsteady, but still ready to face this destructive madman who had been her big, good-natured friend.
Two bagmen, camped at a distance, who ‘hadn’t liked to interfere in no one’s rows,’ as they said later, were slowly following her.
‘You try and stop me,’ Dick roared, ‘and I’ll brain the lot of you.’ The tent came down and he started on that with the axe. But his first fury had worn off. ‘So long, Ma,’ he shouted, and without one backward glance, he was off to catch his horse. ‘It’s my horse,’ he repeated to himself. ‘It’s my horse.’
The greyhound he would have to leave behind. He felt no compunction for what he had done, only a cool satisfaction, an access of strength and clarity such as he had never felt before. One minute he almost turned, but then he had fastened the rope bridle, leapt on the horse’s back, and was off.
‘Oh, Dick!’ Mrs Tyrell sobbed, distractedly trying to raise her husband and to salvage the bedding, which was smouldering unpleasantly. ‘Oh! Dick! My God! he’s gone!’
Dick did not even turn his head when he reached the road. He was off at a gallop, riding as well as he ever rode, his head high, a half-smile on his face. He vanished round a curve of the road as completely as if he had never been there. As he clattered furiously away, the idea that had been forming in his mind became more and more a certain goal. He decided that he would be much happier overseas fighting for home and country.
23
The Apostle never believed in chance. In fact, his whole life was devoted towards combating that heresy which allows that there is no good reason why things happen or that they happen in a sequence. He would have explained that it was the nature of the stream of life to swirl past a Pharisee and a priest so that the Samaritan could demonstrate his superior kindliness to the man stripped by thieves. He was so firmly convinced of this predestination of events that he would loa
f around for days waiting, as he said, for a ‘pull’ in one direction or another. How could you waste time, he protested, when there was eternity before you?
He had been idling so beside the Lachlan when he suddenly started up and said: ‘We’re going to Orion, Millie,’ and to Orion they went. The Apostle was pleased to observe that the truck, under the guidance of some Divine purpose with a better skill than the Apostle’s, neither broke down nor ran out of anything. He took this surprising conjunction of circumstances as an omen.
There was no doubt that the Apostle’s arrival was very opportune for the little group at the Three-Mile; and no one welcomed him more fervently than Thirty-Bob, who was accustomed to sneer at the Apostle’s habit of ‘sticking his beak into other people’s business.’ Thirty-Bob had his hands full, with Dancy sick and Mrs Tyrell weeping silently, Deafy nursing his jaw in sullen despondency and Snow in gaol. The Apostle in his rickety little truck looked to him, for the first time, like a heavenly messenger.
The Apostle’s first good deed was to take the bottle of medicine which the chemist had supplied and which Dancy was dutifully swallowing thrice a day, and fling it into a clump of bushes. He asked a few shrewd questions, then prepared a brew of his own which tasted twice as nasty, but which Dancy declared made her feel much better. Perhaps it was merely her faith in the Apostle, or that the sickness had run its course, but she certainly did improve.
To Mrs Tyrell the Apostle listened in sympathetic silence. He heard her version of Dick’s behaviour about four separate times, and Deafy’s twice.
‘How would you like it if it was your boy?’ Mrs Tyrell demanded, woefully turning to Mrs Postlewaite. ‘You may think you can keep a family decent on the track, but I tell you, woman, sometime, sooner or later, I knew this would happen. I’ve dreaded it for years, ever since Dick began to grow up. It’s all very well while they’re little, but you’ll see. Oh, you’ll see how hard it is when a boy begins to drift off on his own. Oh!’ she broke off bitterly. ‘I want my boy. If I only knew where he was …’
The Battlers Page 33