‘Are they dreaming?’ recited Eddie. ‘Are they outta their minds, “is it hoarfrost on their lashes, are they seein’ things, is there really something there?”’
‘No, they’re not seeing things,’ answered Jack. ‘A little dot has appeared to them far, far away.’
Eddie grinned. ‘He’s the one to send for.’
‘Send for old Vaseline Tworkin!’ said Jack, parting the air with the Red salute. It was time for the State news, then, a tally of level-crossing accidents involving stalled cars dragged along railway lines by steam engines screaming with brakes locked. Then came the district forecasts and river heights. Afterwards Pamela moved to the bug-littered table with her sewing box and Jack swept the surface with his forearm, the gesture of a courtier making way for a queen.
Pamela opened her sewing box with a sharp snap. There was a reason for their fights but Eddie wasn’t going to know it if she could help it. Kingsley Colts, who found, cut, delivered and stacked firewood for school and residence, was paying attention to her, awakening a liking betrayed by a blush.
‘What’s wrong with being helpful? You make it sound like a crime,’ she said.
Pamela was making clothes for a needy family, the Maguires, a pair of khaki overalls with sharp, finger-cutting copper buttons. They were the same buttons she used on Eddie’s trousers and shirts, and he hated the way they wouldn’t ever properly fit and needed shoving in. Moving the lamp to one side Pamela leaned into a ring of light, sewing with quick strikes of the needle and snapping thread in her teeth. She had straight black hair cut short, shining dark eyes and a luminous pale forehead. Locals nicknamed her The Crow to disparage her disquieting beauty, which only looked fragile, as she went around relentlessly doing good among the most broken, hopeless and shocking cases. The little girl Maguire, when she came to school, had the mark of destitution and borderline starvation, threadbare outgrown clothing and nothing warm for winter. Jack sent her over to the house and Pamela darned her blouses. Rather than flatter more comfortable people with her friendship Pamela preferred driving down rutted tracks visiting these Maguires living in rags and scavenging at the dump. Then she would sit smoking and drinking tea with Colts, who appeared to have nothing better to do than drop by while Jack peered out the schoolroom window.
When Jack put his arm around her and kissed her on the back of the neck, she held still, then made a movement pushing him off.
‘Jack, for heaven’s sake.’
Jack went to the other end of the house and came back wearing his Harris tweed sportscoat, knotting a hairy tartan tie for his Parents and Citizens meeting at eight. He pinned on his Returned Soldiers’ League membership badge, and altogether it was what he described as his camouflage for getting by in the world he was born into – foiling accusations of disloyalty among the small-minded and guarding his innermost convictions. At cricket Jack came number two in the batting order after Randolph Knox and put more into district events than the local MP because there was nobody finer in public spirit, more principled or devoted than Jack Slim. Everyone knew it and some even said it – this while the Director General withheld the city school he craved, the tougher the better in a working-class suburb.
‘Time’s up,’ Jack said as headlights raked the windows and the firstcomer arrived to spread the supper table in the schoolroom adjoining the house. ‘Mrs Dalrymple is here. The others won’t be long. Got your tag written, Ed?’ he said over the boy’s shoulder.
‘Almost.’
Later Eddie would pin the bug to a card, or maybe not. It would certainly be Jack who wrote the Latin inscription, tired and watery-eyed after battling those who came to his meeting nights in confusion. Such fearful pioneers, he called them, and yet there was always one or a pair who made nights worthwhile. They were not always a couple – just the last time had been – one a man of the soil with strong ideas, the other a woman of passion who was invariably Pamela’s threat. Jack drew them out from whatever circumstance he happened to find himself in. More often than not they were insensibly left wing or Douglas Credit loonies, and he ran an impromptu Adult Education class for them. When he returned from his meeting later he might or might not be tipsy, having shared a flask with his closest confrères. He might or might not have lipstick on his mouth, a hurled clench from his lady crush. ‘I weaved and wove but Mrs Dalrymple got me, I couldn’t duck it,’ Jack might say. And Pamela, a little haughty, would almost certainly reply, ‘Jacko, how am I expected to feel?’ while Jack would respond with a standard materialist thrust: ‘Feelings don’t come into it, darling. Not of the finer sort when instincts raise their heads, ha ha.’
Eddie put a box of matches and a torch in his haversack.
‘Going out?’
‘Down to Bonney’s.’
‘Take the star map,’ said Jack.
Eddie went to the drawer and fetched the folded chart of the heavens.
Pamela went to the pantry and found him an apple – ‘I don’t expect you’ve cleaned your teeth.’ She kissed the top of his head, tugged his hair, twisted his ear and gave him a hug.
‘Back by ten.’
‘Let go of me, comrade,’ squirmed Eddie. ‘Won’tcha for once?’
She loved that little tussle leaving her helpless with longing.
*
Closing the screen door behind him, Eddie crossed through the side gate and into the schoolyard past the flagpole where the school’s loyalty pledge was made; past the rainwater tank shining dull silver and heavy to the knock of knuckles; past the shelter shed of cream-painted tin where farm kids took their cold mutton chops and chunks of farm bread, their boiled eggs wrapped in newspaper and their salt and pepper in twists of greaseproof paper. The schoolyard felt alive to Eddie in the dark as he circled the big gum tree where he and Claude Bonney took their correspondence lessons and smoked cigarettes in school time. There was a low ding from the school bell as an insect struck – sometimes grasshoppers went loony in the dark or maybe it was a shell-backed beetle, hard as a pebble as it thrashed through the night towards the classroom windows where Mrs Dalrymple positioned the Tilley lamps. Eddie slipped closer and stood on a bench to see what the supper promised. Leftovers would be handed to Jack as of right and a portion brought home. The rest would provide school treats shared in the classroom until the last crumb was denied the hungriest mouse.
Mrs Dalrymple stood looking at her reflection in the windowpane, giving the neckline of her flowered dress a pluck and turning sideways to lift the back of her hair while moths pattered the glass. She was a sweet-smiling, plump-shouldered, soothing woman with blonde curls and blue eyes. She had large breasts (a ‘big front’, Jack called it) and wide hips but small wrists and fine hands, which she protected with leather gloves when driving and riding. Her husband, Oliver, was a thin, dark-browed farmer, an insistent bundle of nerves who consulted Jack with a sheaf of drawings about perpetual motion machines. Their son, Gilbert, freckled as a frog, skinny as a bean, was mad about aeroplanes and ran about the playground with his arms out stiff. Mrs Dalrymple, thrilled to escape such rattling inspirations for at least one night per month, had brought a plate of triangle-cut sandwiches and a tray of pikelets with jam and cream that were placed on the teacher’s desk at the front of the room. Quickly, before anyone came, she took a pikelet from the plate and slipped it down like an oyster, wiped cream from the corners of her smile with the tip of a finger while still watching herself. Jack always said Mrs Dalrymple’s bum was broad as a battleship – ‘I like a good bum,’ he said when Pamela raised an eyebrow. ‘More bounce,’ he winked at Eddie, ‘per ounce.’
Eddie dropped from sight when Jack’s footsteps sounded on the school verandah boards. Then he was out into the yard and into the open night, head tipped back and mouth open wide sucking oxygen. He ran along the ridge track with a pile of dark rocks outlined at the edges. ‘Oh, the crossing! Oh, the crossing!’
W
hen they first came there from Out West, the car so loaded with belongings it scraped gravel dips and threw sparks all the way, Eddie had run through dry grass up this hill, climbed in among these boulders and scrambled higher with the feeling of thistledown rising into the sky. A rock chimney made easy climbing. At the top wildflower seedlings grew.
There Eddie loved at first sight and forever the way the schoolhouse ridge dropped away to a sparkling creek, and how when he sped the full mile to the bottom there was the promise of getting back to the sky where the house parted the wind. The Dalrymple boy launched a glider, balsawood struts papered with tissue. It curved around, coming back into Eddie’s outstretched arms because he got there first. At night from his bedroom window he saw the headlamp of a train and watched it streaming across the plateau, the carriages lit from within as if by Chinese lanterns. The red glow of the firebox flared ahead and the shriek of the whistle floated back and there was nothing, nowhere, no time on earth imaginable to Eddie that defined happiness and full contentment so completely as then. He would steal, murder and destroy to keep this feeling whole: and his only mistake was in thinking he was right in that, and deserved it.
While they were still Out West chewing sand and got the news of the transfer, Jack had talked of the drives they would take when they got to the Isabel. It was months before they’d made one. Maps showed the coast only fifty miles away but to get there and cast a line meant descending a maze of hairpin bends and driving back up to the cold country well after midnight. What Eddie liked on that drive was not the South Coast itself so much as the Isabel River going down. It had shallow stones of blue and rust, and high, steep sides, forest-edged cliffs with exposed tree roots dangling and goannas clinging to tree trunks with ribbons of bark stretching to ground level from big, white branches. This was the Isabel after it broke from the high plateau through a cleft in the ranges and came over waterfalls and through orange rock gorges sheltered by tree ferns. They stopped the car and Eddie threw stones at reptiles while Jack kept score, promising a penny per strike. When Eddie reached up to feel a sandpapery tail a goanna swayed out of reach, waddling vertically in defiance of gravity, angling its wrinkled neck and looking down at the boy from dragon eyes.
What Eddie wanted was to go back down there and walk along the riverbed, camping on sandy bends, and Jack promised they would. ‘We can go anywhere we like, do anything we want, because we have only one bite of the pineapple, compadre, and if anyone tells us otherwise they can pull their heads in.’
Down at the coast they’d visited the man Jack said he liked telling to pull his head in most, Major Buckler.
‘My fascist mate,’ he called him, with puzzling affection for one so bent. Buckler lived in a small, pink, plywood caravan at the back of the house where his wife Veronica lived. ‘She keeps him on a leash,’ said Jack. ‘Poor, sorry old bugger he strayed but she reeled him back in.’
Guarding Buckler’s van, equipment, tools, generator set, water tanks and five-ton Bedford truck was the ugliest most ill-formed dog Eddie had ever seen. Patches of hair worn from its rump left bare, scabby skin. The Grabber was the name of the pooch. He was bred by a buffalo shooter, Hammond Pringle, said Buckler, whose Arnhem Land camp was described by no less an author than Ion L. Idriess and whose father was Buckler’s First War mate, Birdy Pringle, made famous by broadcast interviews on the ABC, recorded on wire recording machines in the paperbark swamps.
A croc was the only known enemy of such a cur as The Grabber. It would scale a croc’s tongue, said Buckler, run down its throat barking at tonsils swinging like the bells of St Mary’s. Solid from a diet of stewing beef and stale bread soaked in milk, The Grabber’s diamond-shaped head appeared to Eddie like part of its neck. The Grabber had a mean, sour, dusty smell and walked gingerly, as if stung. When he lay his head on Eddie’s knee and his scalded eyes drooped, Eddie loved him.
The Slims went inside for afternoon tea but Buckler didn’t join them. Through the screened kitchen door they could see him standing in the yard, smoking his pipe. Eddie was sent out with a mug of sweet black tea and a slice of fruit cake. Inside, Jack exchanged a few pleasantries with Veronica and then as soon as he could took his mug out the back, where Buckler filled it with rum.
The house had the clean, thick smell of oil paints and later, excited and putting their heads together about what money they had, Jack and Pamela made a choice from among a few small pictures. They reverenced the artistic vocation and would go without much to buy an oil painting by a name such as Veronica’s was now becoming among select connoisseurs (or any old linocut by a CPA member).
A brackish arm of the Isabel River came up to a white beach at the foot of the garden forming a placid, tea-tree-stained backwater. Before dark Eddie swam there with The Grabber patrolling his elbow until moonrise hinted it was time to go.
Cars were bringing lastcomers to Jack’s meeting. Headlights flickered and flashed closer. Where the road dropped, Eddie started running and tried to beat past them. At each cornerpost of paddock he paused and listened to the thump of his heartbeat and the chorus of frogs. When he reached the railway line the car lights were closer but sank from view in a ripple of dark. Eddie climbed through a barbed-wire fence, scrambled the embankment and made a right-angled turn, walking along the line to get to Bonney’s. The headlights re-emerged and the glint of their lamps swept along the rails; Eddie slowed to a rolling gait on the raised railbed and saw the curving tracks illuminate towards him. At the last moment, as the cars came trundling past, he lay down to break his silhouette in case Jack was told. Then the cars went grinding up the ridge towards the school and he stood and kept walking.
Frogs. Crickets. Water. The railway trestle spanned clear reed-lined pools. In the hot, dry summer Jack walked Eddie down there after school, reached in among the stones demanding quiet and tickled a trout. The two of them went climbing the hill with fish in a wet sack while Jack told his stories of being on the wallaby when he was Eddie’s age, living off the beauty of the land and suffering people’s hard charity, tramping from place to place eating rabbit stew and making johnnycakes and staying ahead of the wallopers. That was when Jack saw places he’d never dreamed he would see, taking him to the heights; when he’d had experiences no boy should ever have, plunging him to the depths; when he got the idea that hunger and hardship, as he liked to say, had something to do with the country’s wealth, and he joined the Unemployed Workers’ Movement in Bourke, and was caught on the riverbank by vigilantes and sent packing. From conversations of the kind, Eddie developed not so much similar sympathies as a desire to grab experience by the throat and not miss anything to be had. This came out as mean greed in childhood play. At best, it came with a sense of limitless ambition, which Jack and Pamela liked hearing about, except they wondered: what sort of dreamer was he, with an account book for a heart, always wanting, but with a motive of resentment?
As Eddie worked his rhythm of stepping along the sleepers a song filled his head, saxophone wails, ripples of jazz and blues. His mind rang with the gramophone records Jack played on card nights – Leadbelly, Bessie Smith and the slave songs, the railway songs performed by venerable Negroes while Jack silenced the room with upraised fingers holding a cigarette between them and jerked his hand in time, conducting. The music was grooved in Eddie’s memory but not to his liking: Jack shamed him, and to fight that shame, Eddie would shame Jack.
The shape of a low hill loomed ahead. From the angle Eddie looked it seemed the line buried itself, but then the hill broke open to reveal the high-sided railway cutting, leading through. Closer to the river bridge he put his ear to the rails, heard nothing but cold silence and knew it was safe to cross. Almost his favourite action, he’d found, was going across that railway bridge, slapping his hands from girder to girder. The river shone black with flecks of white current around rocks. Water, water in a dry year coming down from hills dense with timber, wrapped in mist, the home of black cockatoos
and powdery snowfalls in winter. Eddie could never get over the enchantment of cold, clean water, and every creek he found he wanted to get up higher and find the rock where the first spring began and where the mud it oozed from led. Against the bank of a stream he imagined pitching his camp, pegging a claim and digging for gold. He would bathe in gold like Scrooge McDuck if he could.
The gatekeeper’s house was on the other side of the bridge guarding the level crossing. It was where Claude Bonney slept on a verandah on a lumpy kapok mattress. When the night mail came through Claude blinked an eye, raised himself on an elbow and watched his father, Phil, walk to the old white gates and shoulder them closed. There was never any road traffic at that hour, and rarely at any other time either, and Bonney could be sure his father would stand to his post reliably. Yet he still watched over him. That was Claude.
Eddie gave out a whistle, scooped a handful of track-ballast and heard it rattling the verandah boards like nails. He shone the torch down the bank and saw his friend sit up.
‘Claude, they’ve done for Uncle Joe!’
They sat on the embankment feeling in their empty pockets for tobacco.
‘I heard,’ said Claude.
‘There’s a handover,’ said Eddie. ‘A leader is just the voice of the masses, one’s as good as another, but what’s his name again?’
‘Malenkov. Goodbye, Big Moustache. It’s like the attention of a finger has wandered,’ said Claude, ‘and no-one’s left to point.’
Claude Bonney was a big-headed, brainy boy with a thick-nosed look of inquiry and large hands that were always ready to fix Eddie’s bike when it threw a chain and quick to mend a puncture. When Eddie sat under the schoolyard tree struggling with his algebra those same hands took up a pencil, reached across and corrected his mistakes. Jack, checking Eddie’s work before it was posted off to the Correspondence High School, saw what happened but said little. It was another teacher’s concern to bring his boy to the start line now. The Anglican vicar, Vince Powell, a former chemistry teacher, coached Claude and Eddie’s science ahead of their grade. Next year Isabel Primary would be upped to an Intermediate High and Eddie wanted to stay on and go there and be with Claude.
When Colts Ran Page 11