Selected Stories (36 page)

And I’ll bet he got there. But I’m doubtful if the old horse did.

Mary gave the boy five shillings, and I don’t think he had anything more except a clean shirt and an extra pair of white cotton socks.

“Spicer’s farm” was a big bark humpy on a patchy clearing in the native apple-tree scrub. The clearing was fenced in by a light “dog-legged” fence (a fence of sapling poles resting on forks and X-shaped uprights), and the dusty ground round the house was almost entirely covered with cattle-dung. There was no attempt at cultivation when I came to live on the creek; but there were old furrow-marks amongst the stumps of another shapeless patch in the scrub near the hut. There was a wretched sapling cow-yard and calf-pen, and a cow-bail with one sheet of bark over it for shelter. There was no dairy to be seen, and I suppose the milk was set in one of the two skillion rooms, or lean-to’s, behind the hut—the other was “the boys’ bedroom”. The Spicers kept a few cows and steers, and had thirty or forty sheep. Mrs Spicer used to drive down the creek once a week, in her rickety old spring-cart, to Cobborah, with butter and eggs. The hut was nearly as bare inside as it was out—just a frame of “round-timber” (sapling poles) covered with bark. The furniture was permanent (unless you rooted it up), like in our kitchen: a rough slab table on stakes driven into the ground and seats made the same way. Mary told me afterwards that the beds in the bag-and-bark partitioned-off room (“mother’s bedroom”) were simply poles laid side by side on cross-pieces supported by stakes driven into the ground, with straw mattresses and some worn-out bed-clothes. Mrs Spicer had
an old patchwork quilt, in rags, and the remains of a white one, and Mary said it was pitiful to see how these things would be spread over the beds—to hide them as much as possible—when she went down there. Apacking-case, with something like an old print skirt draped round it, and a cracked looking-glass (without a frame) on top, was the dressing-table. There were a couple of gin-c ases for a wardrobe. The boys’ beds were three-bushel bags stretched between poles fastened to uprights. The floor was the original surface, tramped hard, worn uneven with much sweeping and with puddles in rainy weather where the roof leaked. Mrs Spicer used to stand old tins, dishes, and buckets under as many of the leaks as she could. The saucepans, kettles, and boilers were old kerosene-tins and billies. They used kerosene-tins, too, cut longways in halves, for setting the milk in. The plates and cups were of tin; there were two or three cups without saucers, and a crockery plate or two—also two mugs, cracked and without handles, one with “For a Good Boy” and the other with “For a Good Girl” on it; but all these were kept on the mantelshelf for ornament and for company. They were the only ornaments in the house, save a little wooden clock that hadn’t gone for years. Mrs Spicer had a superstition that she had “some things packed away from the children”.

The pictures were cut from old copies of the
Illustrated Sydney News
and pasted on to the bark. I remember this, because I remembered, long ago, the Spencers, who were our neighbours when I was a boy, had the walls of their bedroom covered with illustrations of the American Civil War, cut from illustrated London papers, and I used to “sneak” into “mother’s bedroom” with Fred Spencer whenever we got the chance, and gloat over the prints. I gave him a blade of a pocket-knife once, for taking me in there.

I saw very little of Spicer. He was a big, dark, dark-haired and whiskered man. I had an idea that he wasn’t a selector at all, only a “dummy” for the squatter of the Cobborah run. You see, selectors were allowed to take up land on runs, or pastoral leases. The squatters kept them off as much as possible, by all manner of dodges and paltry persecution. The squatter would get as much
freehold as he could afford, “select” as much land as the law allowed one man to take up, and then employ dummies (dummy selectors) to take up bits of land that he fancied about his run, and hold them for him.

Spicer seemed gloomy and unsociable. He was seldom at home. He was generally supposed to be away shearin’, or fencin’, or workin’ on somebody’s station. It turned out that the last six months he was away it was on the evidence of a cask of beef and a hide with the brand cut out, found in his camp on a fencing contract up-country, and which he and his mates couldn’t account for satisfactorily, while the squatter could. Then the family lived mostly on bread and honey, or bread and treacle, or bread and dripping, and tea. Every ounce of butter and every egg was needed for the market, to keep them in flour, tea, and sugar. Mary found that out, but couldn’t help them much—except by “stuffing” the children with bread and meat or bread and jam whenever they came up to our place—for Mrs Spicer was proud with the pride that lies down in the end and turns its face to the wall and dies.

Once, when Mary asked Annie, the eldest girl at home, if she was hungry, she denied it—but she looked it. Aragged mite she had with her explained things. The little fellow said:

“Mother told Annie not to say we was hungry if yer asked; but if yer give us anythink to eat, we was to take it an’ say thenk yer, Mrs Wilson.”

“I wouldn’t ’a’ told yer a lie; but I thought Jimmy would split on me, Mrs Wilson,” said Annie. “Thenk yer, Mrs Wilson.”

She was not a big woman. She was gaunt and flat-chested, and her face was “burnt to a brick”, as they say out there. She had brown eyes, nearly red, and a little wild-looking at times, and a sharp face—ground sharp by hardship—the cheeks drawn in. She had an expression like—well, like a woman who had been very curious and suspicious at one time, and wanted to know everybody’s business and hear everything, and had lost all her curiosity, without losing the expression or the quick suspicious movements of the head. I don’t suppose you understand. I can’t explain it any other way. She was not more than forty.

I remember the first morning I saw her. I was going up the creek to look at the selection for the first time, and called at the hut to see if she had a bit of fresh mutton, as I had none and was sick of “corned beef”.

“Yes—of—course,” she said, in a sharp nasty tone, as if to say, “Is there anything more you want while the shop’s open?” I’d met just the same sort of woman years before while I was carrying swag between the shearing-sheds in the awful scrubs out west of the Darling River, so I didn’t turn on my heels and walk away. I waited for her to speak again.

“Come—inside,” she said, “and sit down. I see you’ve got the waggon outside. I s’pose your name’s Wilson, ain’t it? You’re thinkin’ about takin’ on Harry Marshfield’s selection up the creek, so I heard. Wait till I fry you a chop and boil the billy.”

Her voice sounded, more than anything else, like a voice coming out of a phonograph—I heard one in Sydney the other day—and not like a voice coming out of her. But sometimes when she got outside her everyday life on this selection she spoke in a sort of—in a sort of lost groping-in-the-dark kind of voice.

She didn’t talk much this time—just spoke in a mechanical way of the drought, and the hard times, “an’ butter ’n’ eggs bein’ down, an’ her husban’ an’ eldest son bein’ away, an’ that makin’ it so hard for her.”

I don’t know how many children she had. I never got a chance to count them, for they were nearly all small, and shy as piccaninnies, and used to run and hide when anybody came. They were mostly nearly as black as piccaninnies too. She must have averaged a baby a year for years and God only knows how she got over her confinements! Once, they said, she only had a black gin with her. She had an elder boy and girl, but she seldom spoke of them. The girl, “Liza”, was “in service in Sydney”. I’m afraid I knew what that meant. The elder son was “away”. He had been a bit of a favourite round there, it seemed.

Someone might ask her: “How’s your son Jack, Mrs Spicer?” or “Heard of Jack lately? and where is he now?”

“Oh, he’s somewheres up country,” she’d say in the “groping” voice, or “He’s drovin’ in Queenslan’,” or “Shearin’ on the
Darlin’ the last time I heerd from him. We ain’t had a line from him since—le’s see—since Chris’mas ’fore last.”

And she’d turn her haggard eyes in a helpless, hopeless sort of way towards the west—towards “up-country” and “out back”.
³

The eldest girl at home was nine or ten, with a little old face and lines across her forehead: she had an older expression than her mother. Tommy went to Queensland, as I told you. The eldest son at home, Bill (older than Tommy) was “a bit wild”.

I’ve passed the place in smothering hot mornings in December, when the droppings about the cow-yard had crumpled to dust that rose in the warm, sickly, sunrise wind, and seen that woman at work in the cow-yard, “bailing up” and leg-roping cows, milking, or hauling at a rope round the neck of a half-grown calf that was too strong for her (and she was tough as fencing-wire), or humping great buckets of sour milk to the pigs or the “poddies” (hand-fed calves) in the pen. I’d get off the horse and give her a hand sometimes with a young steer or a cranky old cow that wouldn’t “bail-up” and threatened her with her horns. She’d say:

“Thenk yer, Mr Wilson. Do yer think we’re ever goin’ to have any rain?”

I’ve ridden past the place on bitter black rainy mornings in June or July, and seen her trudging about the yard—that was ankle-deep in black liquid filth—with an old pair of Blucher boots on, and an old coat of her husband’s, or maybe a three-bushel bag over her shoulders. I’ve seen her climbing on the roof by means of the water-cask at the corner, and trying to stop a leak by shoving a piece of tin in under the bark. And when I’d fixed the leak:

“Thenk yer, Mr Wilson. This drop of rain’s a blessin’! Come in and have a dry at the fire and I’ll make yer a cup of tea.” And, if I was in a hurry, “Come in, man alive! Come in! and dry yerself a bit till the rain holds up. Yer can’t go home like this! Yer’ll git yer death o’ cold.”

I’ve even seen her, in the terrible drought, climbing she-oaks and apple-trees by a makeshift ladder, and awkwardly lopping off boughs to feed the starving cattle.

“Jist tryin’ ter keep the milkers alive till the rain comes.”

They said that when the pleuro-pneumonia was in the district and amongst her cattle she bled and physicked them herself, and fed those that were down with slices of half-ripe pumpkin (from a crop that had failed).

“An’, one day,” she told Mary, “there was a big barren heifer (that we called Queen Elizabeth) that was down with the ploorer. She’d been down for four days and hadn’t moved, when one mornin’ I dumped some wheaten chaff—we had a few bags that Spicer brought home—I dumped it in front of her nose, an’—would yer b’lieve me, Mrs Wilson?—she stumbled onter her feet an’ chased me all the way to the house! I had to pick up me skirts an’ run! Wasn’t it redic’lus?”

They had a sense of the ridiculous, most of those poor sun-dried Bushwomen. I fancy that that helped save them from madness.

“We nearly lost all our milkers,” she told Mary. “I remember one day Tommy came running to the house and screamed: ‘Marther! [mother] there’s another milker down with the ploorer!’ Jist as if it was great news. Well, Mrs Wilson, I was dead-beat, an’ I giv’ in. I jist sat down to have a good cry, and felt for my han’kerchief—it was a rag of a han’kerchief, full of holes (all me others was in the wash). Without seein’ what I was doin’ I put me finger through one hole in the han’kerchief an’ me thumb through the other, and poked me fingers into me eyes, instead of wipin’ them. Then I had to laugh.”

There’s a story that once, when the Bush, or rather grass, fires were out all along the creek on Spicer’s side, Wall’s station hands were up above our place, trying to keep the fire back from the boundary, and towards evening one of the men happened to think of the Spicers: they saw smoke down that way. Spicer was away from home, and they had a small crop of wheat, nearly ripe, on the selection.

“My God! that poor devil of a woman will be burnt out, if she ain’t already!” shouted young Billy Wall. “Come along, three or four of you chaps”—(it was shearing time, and there were plenty of men on the station).

They raced down the creek to Spicer’s, and were just in time to save the wheat. She had her sleeves tucked up, and was beating out the burning grass with a bough. She’d been at it for an hour, and was as black as a gin, they said. She only said when they’d turned the fire: “Thenk yer! Wait an’ I’ll make some tea.”

After tea the first Sunday she came to see us, Mary asked:

“Don’t you feel lonely, Mrs Spicer, when your husband goes away?”

“Well—no, Mrs Wilson,” she said in the groping sort of voice. “I uster, once. I remember, when we lived on the Cudgegong River—we lived in a brick house then—the first time Spicer had to go away from home I nearly fretted my eyes out. And he was only goin’ shearin’ for a month. I muster bin a fool; but then we were only jist married a little while. He’s been away drovin’ in Queenslan’ as long as eighteen months at a time since then. But” (her voice seemed to grope in the dark more than ever) “I don’t mind—I somehow seem to have got past carin’. Besides—besides, Spicer was a very different man then to what he is now. He’s got so moody and gloomy at home, he hardly ever speaks.”

Mary sat silent for a minute thinking. Then Mrs Spicer roused herself:

“Oh, I don’t know what I’m talkin’ about! You mustn’t take any notice of me, Mrs Wilson—I don’t often go on like this. I do believe I’m gittin’ a bit ratty at times. It must be the heat and the dullness.”

But once or twice afterwards she referred to a time “when Spicer was a different man to what he was now.”

I walked home with her a piece along the creek. She said nothing for a long time, and seemed to be thinking in a puzzled way. Then she said suddenly:

“What-did-you-bring-her-here-for? She’s only a girl.”

“I beg pardon, Mrs Spicer?”

“Oh, I don’t know what I’m talkin’ about! I b’lieve I’m gittin’ ratty. You mustn’t take any notice of me, Mr Wilson.”

She wasn’t much company for Mary; and often, when she had a child with her, she’d start taking notice of the baby while Mary was talking, which used to exasperate Mary. But poor Mrs Spicer couldn’t help it, and she seemed to hear all the same.