‘Aw, don’t be a …’ Dick struck him heartily between the shoulders. ‘Come and have a drink? Got any money, Ma?’ His mother eagerly, gladly, produced a few shillings, which Dick pocketed. ‘Come on, Dad. Let’s go and have one. So long, Ma.’
‘But Dick’ — his mother caught his sleeve — ‘you won’t go away again without …’
‘That’s all right. I’m coming back to the camp with Dad and Thirty-Bob. Been sleeping in a shed two nights. Gee, it nearly crawled away from me, the rats that was in it.’
The women found themselves standing alone on the pavement while the men pushed their way through the swing door.
‘And have something to eat,’ Dick called over his shoulder. ‘I could do with a bit of tucker. K-e-r-r-ist!’ he said with a sigh when they got their beer. ‘What with not being allowed to stouch any of the coves in charge of this turnout, and no pay, and no dole.’ He drew a long draught and wiped his mouth. ‘It’s tough, I tell you.’ But he was smiling delightedly at his own superiority.
‘You big, flaming mug!’ Thirty-Bob swore at him for a while, but in a friendlier tone than he had used for some time. ‘That’s all you’re good for,’ he ended up. ‘Just to be a home for bullets.’
Dick was inclined to be injured. ‘Ar, layoff,’ he pleaded. ‘I on’y get till tomorrow night. Fill ’em up again. Your shout, Dad.’
Deafy was reflecting his son’s glory. He had forgotten, almost, that lift under the lug which laid him out. He shook Dick’s hand after the third pot of beer. He patted him on the shoulder after the fourth. By the time they all piled into the cart and trotted back to camp, they were singing, the busker’s soulful yodel soaring up into the bright light of the later afternoon.
They ate, they went back to the hotel again, returning drunk and hilarious at midnight.
‘Well,’ Deafy defended himself from his wife’s reproaches, ‘it only happens once that the boy joins up.’
And Mrs Tyrell, despite the dwindling of her reserves, was overcome with the logic of this argument and her own affection.
‘He might as well have a good time while he can,’ she told the Stray. ‘Poor Dick! It’s only the other day, it seems, that he was a little feller selling with me round the houses and pinching fruit.’
It comforted her to feel that Dick was back again, if only for a few precious hours, demanding money from her in his old way, making her feel she had some share in him. Her heart overflowed with mingled grief to see him go, and pride in him, so big and strong and careless.
Dick was trying to persuade Thirty-Bob to enlist too. ‘Look at the time we could have. Why, there’s half a dozen of us got it all planned to meet that bastard of a lieutenant after dark and bash his face in.’
But even this lovely prospect failed to tempt Thirty-Bob. ‘Arr, it’s a mug’s game,’ he said over and over again; but each time with less conviction. The thought of Dick going off without him, seeing new things, getting into new brawls and beer-houses, with no Thirty-Bob to jeer and argue and lie their way out, was too much.
‘You need a flamin’ wet nurse,’ he said at last. ‘A man ought damn well go with you to see you don’t get into no trouble.’
Dick grinned. ‘C’mon.’ He seized Thirty-Bob by the elbow. ‘You’re yellow as …’ He made an unmentionable comparison.
Thirty-Bob pretended to be furious. ‘I’ll show you,’ he spat. ‘You bastard!’
Next morning they went off arm in arm to persuade the enlisting officer that Thirty-Bob was going with the squad to Sydney, if he had to ride the buffers.
The new excitement threw the camp into a flurry. Thirty-Bob wanted to sell his horse, the Apostle’s truck and Dick’s cart, and ‘make a clean-up’ before he went. Luckily he had to forgo any such idea, as the lure of the hotel was too strong, and he and Dick were constantly in and out providing against the horrors of a dry canteen when they should reach the city camp.
Thirty-Bob left the horse for Deafy to sell, with many injunctions not to part with it under a certain figure, and more advice about disguising its age.
It was almost a relief when the train pulled out with Thirty-Bob and Dick hanging out of the window, waving as though their lives depended on it. Mrs Tyrell cried all the way back to the camp.
‘Poor boy,’ she kept saying. ‘Why didn’t we tell that there enlisting man that he’s only eighteen?’ She was deciding to interview that officer the very next day, when the thought of Dick’s fury dissuaded her. Then she cheered up. ‘He’ll probably enjoy himself,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘After all, Bob’s with him.’
At the next town, the Apostle, as the person most likely to call at the post office for letters, found a telegram waiting. It read: ‘Don’t let Deafy sell horse. Coming back. Wait for me. Thirty-Bob.’
They waited, perplexed. They waited four days in all before a very tired, dirty Thirty-Bob arrived at the camp. All he wanted to do was to sleep off the effects of several days’ solid drinking. They pestered him with questions, and he answered as briefly as he could.
‘I got there all right, but they says I got flat feet. Wouldn’t have me at any price. Well, put me on a horse, I says. I never use me feet anyway, if I can help it. The cows just chucked me out with nothing but this here uniform and a return ticket. One poor cove what had a weak chest they did the same, and he’s sold his bike and his camping gear, and he’s back on the track with nothing but the uniform.’
‘How about Dick?’ his mother asked anxiously.
‘Oh, Dick’s all right,’ Thirty-Bob yawned. ‘He’s in clink already.’
He had had a good time in the city, seen all the sights, drunk all the drinks, free, fought three policemen and had been discharged sympathetically by a patriotic magistrate; then, becoming fed-up with the city, he had sold his return ticket and jumped the train back to his natural haunts.
The lurid pictures he drew of camp life deterred many a traveller from joining. ‘Four showers for two hundred of us; the food so putrid they had to chuck half of it away; raining all the time and water leaking through the holes in the roof. Half of them down with dysentery; no decent boots; no uniform; and the damned officers’ mess planting a rose-garden round their quarters because the place looked so bare.’
‘It serves Dick right.’ Deafy took on a paternal sternness. He had had time for the exhilaration of Dick’s send-off to wear away. ‘He needs a bit of straightening up.’
But Mrs Tyrell went out begging wool. Dick should not go overseas without enough socks. She sent off all the money she had to him at once, lest he should need anything.
One thing Thirty-Bob did not tell them. It was something so secret that he could not tell anyone. He was relieved, overwhelmed with gratitude to the kind fates that gave him flat feet. Not that Thirty-Bob was by any means a coward. He would have reached for the trap-setter and felled anyone who so much as hinted at such a thing. No, what he felt was that he had escaped as an animal might escape from a snare.
On his first night in camp he had been prowling about restlessly when he realised what was wrong. The camp was enclosed by six strands of barbed wire. He went up to it curiously, touched it with his hand, stood looking at it as though he had never seen it before; and the horrible realisation came over him that he was inside! A curious panic had seized him at that moment, a claustrophobia, a horror of being fenced in, unable to get out. He would be like this for years, cooped up under guard, ordered about, drilled, without a mind of his own or a way of his own. He could have blessed the doctor who refused him, he could have flung his arms about his neck and kissed him. Thank God for flat feet!
That night as he looked up at the kindly stars, glinting down at him through the frail, crooked twigs of stringybark, as he enjoyed the hard ground under him, and the freedom from walls, from ranks of snoring men, he felt such a love for this hard, hot country that he could have patted the very grass. If anyone wanted to fight for the place, he decided, they could come and fight him here, on his own ground. He’d fight;
no doubt about that, if he had to fight with his teeth. Sooner than give up one inch of the stretching plains and valleys, the high hills of the country he owned, he would die many times. But thank God for his flat feet!
II
They travelled slowly so that they would not ‘knock up’ the horses. Sometimes they would camp for a day or two where the grass was good. The country was better here; but the heat was not mitigated by furious winds, dusty and scorching, that flung dry leaves and dirt in their faces as they drove.
Always the waves of wheat flowed on, on either side of the road; and over the waves of wheat you could see the air shivering and blowing as though the wheat were on fire. To see the wind blow the hot air before it, as it quivered and shone, was a new thing for Dancy, and it frightened her a little. She had seen mirages on the plains, mirages that showed trees beside pools of clear water, but never the air afire, wavering like a curtain when the wind shook it.
They passed siding after siding where mountains of bagged wheat awaited trucks. The paroquets fluttered about, making such a din that under the stacks a man had almost to shout to be heard. The sparrows in their thousands dug in their sharp beaks, boring holes in the bags so that the wheat would trickle out. Most of them were so fat they could hardly fly. Thirty-Bob declared that they must get away with at least a bushel a day between them, but as the wheat made up the weight absorbing moisture from the air, no one worried.
At Marellan, Thirty-Bob got the offer of some bag-sewing, and he managed to work Deafy and the busker into the team. It cheered Deafy not a little to find he could still outwork men younger than himself; and the other two accused him cheerfully of ‘pace-making’ and getting extra money from the boss for making them work harder. In a little over a week the job cut out and they went on again.
Now they were travelling through a patch of country where the road was only two sandy ruts running between walls of mallee scrub, so thick and black that alone the Stray would not have dared to drive through it. The strip of sky above the two black edges of the road narrowed to a ribbon; the air was stifling; and when they passed the mallee and came out where the wind met them in a roaring column of red dust, the Stray was relieved as though she had passed through some danger.
‘Last lap,’ Thirty-Bob said cheerfully, as they took the horses out at dusk. ‘We’ll be in Boswell tomorrow night.’
The day after tomorrow was dole-day, and whether they liked it or not, they must push on.
The wind, that raged so industriously by day, always downed at sunset, as abruptly as if it had heard a knock-off whistle blow, leaving the loneliness for the stars and the slow clouds travelling. Always at this time the Stray, amid the duties of making camp and getting food, thought of Snow caged like a tiger in his cell, sitting with the still patience of a brute, waiting and thinking — his thoughts pacing the prison of his head. This night she watched a frail crescent moon glowing with one star above the black hills; and as she bowed to it, the Apostle came up and paused to watch her. A girl had once told the Stray that you must bow seven times to a crescent moon to make a wish come true, and someone else had told her you must turn round three times. The Stray was doing both, just to be on the safe side.
‘What were you wishing, Dancy?’ the Apostle asked.
‘It don’t come true, Harry, if you tell.’ But she had been wishing that when Snow came out of gaol, he would settle down somewhere with her in a green place with a house to shelter them. It was such a fantastic wish that had there been three crescent moons in the sky, Dancy doubted whether their united strength could bring it about.
‘Harry,’ she asked, ‘how long is it now?’ The Stray had never learnt how to keep time. She was always pestering the Apostle to tell her how much more of Snow’s sentence there was still to run.
‘We’ve been travelling just over five weeks, Dancy. That makes it six weeks and three days.’
‘Harry?’
‘Yes, Dancy?’
‘I s’pose Snow ’ud want to go on travelling when he comes out. You don’t think he’d localise?’
The Apostle shook his head. ‘I don’t think he ever would. He’s been on the track so long, it’s in his blood.’
The Stray sighed. ‘I was just wondering. They say once you start on the track you die on it.’
The Apostle smiled at her. ‘There could be worse fates.’
Rising in the chill before dawn, the Stray doubted it. The wind was blowing again. It crept through the marrow of her bones, and she was glad that Duke had the job of putting the horse in the van while she packed the breakfast mugs away. Miss Phipps, who had been slightly less obnoxious, but was as helpless as ever, merely crouched over the fire until the last possible moment.
‘What’s the betting the truck breaks down?’ the busker asked sourly. He claimed he had ‘worked himself poor’ pushing that truck. Not but that he had great schemes for buying a half share in it from the Apostle on credit, so that his troupe might have transport, whenever he collected them. He was afraid the Apostle might any day feel a ‘pull’ and go off to some unheard-of place, but so far he had stayed with them, mainly as spiritual support for Mrs Tyrell and the Stray.
It was on the Apostle that Dancy and Mrs Tyrell relied in any perplexity, and so much did they value his company that on one occasion when the truck was out of petrol, and the Apostle announced that he would just camp where he was until he found means to go on, they had begged from every garage in the little town, returning in triumph with two gallons, after hours of pleading.
‘Cripes!’ Thirty-Bob had said with a yawn. ‘Is that all you get for a day’s outing?’
They had been speechless with rage at his lack of appreciation; but the Apostle had known what their efforts meant. He had appreciated them.
‘I bet the damn thing breaks down,’ the busker grouched. ‘It’s just the day for it.’
As the sun rose, the wind, which had been so cold, took on its load of heavy red dust and heavy heat, and came bowling along in a succession of willy-willys that, for the time of their passing, obliterated the road, so that only the plodding rump of the horse was visible. The stinging, blinding grit filled their mouths, ears, eyes, so that every now and then they would turn the horses aside from the full blast of it, and even debated camping in some sheltered place. But there were no sheltered places. The red sand flung itself over everything, and they might just as well endure it going on as sitting still. So they struggled on, and the hurricane would now ease off, now fling itself on them again with a fresh shriek and a heavier load of dirt.
Towards afternoon they came over a low rise, and the Stray, rubbing the grit from her eyes and peering ahead, saw a line of green. Not the dusty grey-green of the gums, but a clear, lovely colour of willows, a solid wall running for miles each way.
‘What’s that?’ she called to Thirty-Bob.
‘That’s the irrigation,’ Thirty-Bob responded. ‘We’ll be there in an hour.’
As they came to the first bridge, a flock of galahs rose in a pink-and-grey cloud, shrieking above the swift, green water. Grey ibis stalked through the now vivid green of the rice-fields covered with a shallow blue flood. Pink masses of cleaner blossom hung over the fence of a house, and a hundred flowers, blue, white, purple and rose, coloured the gardens. None of the travellers spoke. They let the horses stretch their lean necks to the deep green grass of the roadside, where tiny golden daisies shone. They devoured the soft green, with their eyes pleasuring in it, as the horses pleasured with their noses buried in tender shoots.
Behind them lay the hot, wind-swept plains. Only a mile back the land had been barren as the desert of Egypt. But here the water flowed through the deep channels and all was paradise. They rested a little, then went on past orchards, rice-fields, vineyards, vegetable gardens, acres of tomatoes, acres of grain. The Israelites must have felt much the same when they came to a land flowing with milk and honey.
The children gave little shouts of excitement to come suddenly on a man le
ading four camels, which he had brought to the town, he told them, ‘on spec,’ to make money giving rides.
Last year a farmer had let the Tyrells camp by his fence on the irrigation canal. Perhaps he might let them camp there this year. Mrs Tyrell was busy already with plans. But the Stray sat in a kind of dream. She had come to the promised land. Surely among all these riches there must be some place for her, for Jimmy, for Snow. Surely they could stay here forever among all these beautiful orchards and this cool water. How she loved water! She craved the sight of water, clear, green, flowing, as long as it was water. Surely Snow would stay here. Oh, he must! And the people they passed looked kind. The town of Boswell had a flourishing prosperity; a cleanliness; a trim, tree-planted, shady main street. If only she could stay, if only she could! She was enraptured with Boswell.
‘There’s the cannery,’ Betty said suddenly. She was riding beside the Stray.
A group of buildings, dull red, as though they were angry, imposed on the view. They sprawled from the main street to the railway line, rows of red buildings painted with big white letters, telling the world that this was the property of the Boswell Co-operative Fruit-Growers’ Society. There were sidings for the railway trucks everywhere, and trucks stood around like hens around a homestead doorstep.
They passed across the railway line; and Boswell ceased to be a neat, pretty township, and became sprawling and slatternly, a haggard stretch of goods yards, stock-yards, cannery yards, and bare, plain country beyond. Gone were the flower-gardens, the delicate trumpet vines, the glow of bougainvillaea, and green gloom of great trees. There remained only an arid stretch of bare, beaten, red earth with fences flung to mark a field from a road. And here the little company pulled their horses into a lane that formed the cross-bar of an H. On one side of them lay the stock-yard, on the other the foundations of an old store known to the bagmen who camped there as the Millions Club.
It was only a cement floor raised on pillars, but in the wet men could crawl under this shelter and stay dry; not that they needed to worry about shelter from anything except the dust.
The Battlers Page 38