Selected Stories (39 page)

So James rode across to Talbragar and drove a hard bargain with that unfortunate selector, and brought the sheep home. There were about two hundred, wethers and ewes, and they were young and looked a good breed too, but so poor they could scarcely travel; they soon picked up, though. The drought was blazing all round and out back, and I think that my corner of the ridges was the only place where there was any grass to speak of. We had another shower or two, and the grass held out. Chaps began to talk of “Joe Wilson’s luck”.

I would have liked to shear those sheep; but I hadn’t time to get a shed or anything ready—along towards Christmas there was a bit of a boom in the carrying line. Wethers in wool were going as high as thirteen to fifteen shillings at the Homebush yards at Sydney, so I arranged to truck the sheep down from the river, by rail, with another small lot that was going, and I started James off with them. He took the west road, and down Guntawang way a big farmer who saw James with the sheep (and who was speculating, or adding to his stock, or took a fancy to the wool) offered James as much for them as he reckoned I’d get in Sydney, after paying the carriage and the agents and the auctioneer. James put the sheep in a paddock and rode back to me. He was all there where riding was concerned. I told him to let the sheep go. James made a Greener shot-gun, and got his saddle done up, out of that job..

I took up a couple more forty-acre blocks—one in James’s name, to encourage him with the fencing. There was a good slice of land in an angle between the range and the creek, farther down, which everybody thought belonged to Wall, the squatter, but Mary got an idea, and went to the local land office and found out that it was “unoccupied Crown land”, and so I took it up on pastoral lease, and got a few more sheep—I’d saved some of the best-looking ewes from the last lot.

One evening—I was going down next day for a load of fencing-wire for myself—Mary said:

“Joe! do you know that the Matthews have got a new double buggy?”

The Matthews were a big family of cockatoos, along up the main road, and I didn’t think much of them. The sons were all “bad-eggs”, though the old woman and girls were right enough.

“Well, what of that?” I said. “They’re up to their neck in debt, and camping like blackfellows in a big bark humpy. They do well to go flashing round in a double buggy.”

“But that isn’t what I was going to say,” said Mary. “They want to sell their old single buggy, James says. I’m sure you could get it for six or seven pounds; and you could have it done up.”

“I wish James to the devil!” I said. “Can’t he find anything better to do than ride round after cock-and-bull yarns about buggies?”

“Well,” said Mary, “it was James who got the steers and the sheep.”

Well, one word led to another, and we said things we didn’t mean—but couldn’t forget in a hurry. I remember I said something about Mary always dragging me back just when I was getting my head above water and struggling to make a home for her and the children; and that hurt her, and she spoke of the “homes” she’d had since she was married. And that cut me deep.

It was about the worst quarrel we had. When she began to cry I got my hat and went out and walked up and down by the creek. I hated anything that looked like injustice—I was so sensitive about it that it made me unjust sometimes. I tried to think I was right, but I couldn’t—it wouldn’t have made me feel any better if I could have thought so. I got thinking of Mary’s first year on the selection and the life she’d had since we were married.

When I went in she’d cried herself to sleep. I bent over and, “Mary,” I whispered.

She seemed to wake up.

“Joe—Joe!” she said.

“What is it, Mary?” I said.

“I’m pretty well sure that old Spot’s calf isn’t in the pen. Make James go at once!”

Old Spot’s last calf was two years old now; so Mary was talking in her sleep, and dreaming she was back in her first year.

We both laughed when I told her about it afterwards; but I didn’t feel like laughing just then.

Later on in the night she called out in her sleep:

“ ‘Joe—Joe! Put that buggy in the shed, or the sun will blister the varnish!”

I wish I could say that that was the last time I ever spoke unkindly to Mary.

Next morning I got up early and fried the bacon and made the tea, and took Mary’s breakfast in to her—like I used to do, sometimes, when we were first married. She didn’t say anything—just pulled my head down and kissed me.

When I was ready to start Mary said:

“You’d better take the spring-cart in behind the dray and get the tyres cut and set. They’re ready to drop off, and James has been wedging them up till he’s tired of it. The last time I was out with the children I had to knock one of them back with a stone: there’ll be an accident yet.”

So I lashed the shafts of the cart under the tail of the waggon, and mean and ridiculous enough the cart looked, going along that way. It suggested a man stooping along handcuffed, with his arms held out and down in front of him.

It was dull weather, and the scrubs looked extra dreary and endless—and I got thinking of old things.. Everything was going all right with me, but that didn’t keep me from brooding sometimes—trying to hatch out stones, like an old hen we had at home. I think, taking it all round, I used to be happier when I was mostly hard-up—and more generous. When I had ten pounds I was more likely to listen to a chap who said, “Lend me a pound-note, Joe,” than when I had fifty;
then
I fought shy of careless chaps—and lost mates that I wanted afterwards—and got the name of being mean. When I got a good cheque I’d be as miserable as a miser over the first ten pounds I spent; but when I got down to the last I’d buy things for the house. And now that I was getting on, I hated to spend a pound on anything. But then, the farther I got away from poverty the greater the fear I had of
it—and, besides, there was always before us all the thought of the terrible drought, with blazing runs as bare and dusty as the road, and dead stock rotting every yard, all along the barren creeks.

I had a long yarn with Mary’s sister and her husband that night in Gulgong, and it brightened me up. I had a fancy that that sort of a brother-in-law made a better mate than a nearer one; Tom Tarrant had one, and he said it was sympathy. But while we were yarning I couldn’t help thinking of Mary, out there in the hut on the Creek, with no one to talk to but the children, or James, who was sulky at home, or Black Mary or Black Jimmy (our black boy’s father and mother), who weren’t over-sentimental. Or maybe a selector’s wife (the nearest was five miles away), who could talk only of two or three things—“lambin’” and “shearin’” and “cookin’ for the men”, and what she said to her old man, and what he said to her—and her own ailments—over and over again.

It’s a wonder it didn’t drive Mary mad!—I know I could never listen to that woman more than an hour. Mary’s sister said:

“Now if Mary had a comfortable buggy, she could drive in with the children oftener. Then she wouldn’t feel the loneliness so much.”

I said “Good night” then and turned in. There was no getting away from that buggy. Whenever Mary’s sister started hinting about a buggy, I reckoned it was a put-up job between them.

WHEN I got to Cudgegong I stopped at Galletly’s coach-shop to leave the cart. The Galletlys were good fellows: there were two brothers—one was a saddler and harness-maker. Big brown-bearded men—the biggest men in the district, ’twas said.

Their old man had died lately and left them some money; they had men, and only worked in their shops when they felt inclined, or there was a special work to do; they were both first-class tradesmen. I went into the painter’s shop to have a look at a
double buggy that Galletly had built for a man who couldn’t pay cash for it when it was finished—and Galletly wouldn’t trust him.

There it stood, behind a calico screen that the coach-painters used to keep out the dust when they were varnishing. It was a first-class piece of work—pole, shafts, cushions, whip, lamps, and all complete. If you only wanted to drive one horse you could take out the pole and put in the shafts, and there you were. There was a tilt over the front seat; if you only wanted the buggy to carry two, you could fold down the back seat, and there you had a handsome, roomy, single buggy. It would go near fifty pounds.

While I was looking at it, Bill Galletly came in, and slapped me on the back.

“Now, there’s a chance for you, Joe!” he said. “I saw you rubbing your head round that buggy the last time you were in. You wouldn’t get a better one in the colonies, and you won’t see another like it in the district again in a hurry—for it doesn’t pay to build ’em. Now you’re a full-blown squatter, and it’s time you took little Mary for a fly round in her own buggy now and then, instead of having her stuck out there in the scrub, or jolting through the dust in a cart like some old Mother Flourbag.”

He called her “little Mary” because the Galletly family had known her when she was a girl.

I rubbed my head and looked at the buggy again. It was a great temptation.

“Look here, Joe,” said Bill Galletly in a quieter tone. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll let
you
have the buggy. You can take it out and send along a bit of a cheque when you feel you can manage it, and the rest later on—a year will do, or even two years. You’ve had a hard pull, and I’m not likely to be hard up for money in a hurry.”

They were good fellows, the Galletlys, but they knew their men. I happened to know that Bill Galletly wouldn’t let the man he built the buggy for take it out of the shop without cash down, though he was a big-bug round there. But that didn’t make it easier for me.

Just then Robert Galletly came into the shop. He was rather quieter than his brother, but the two were very much alike.

“Look here, Bob,” said Bill; “here’s a chance for you to get rid of your harness. Joe Wilson’s going to take that buggy off my hands.”

Bob Galletly put his foot up on a saw-stool, took one hand out of his pockets, rested his elbow on his knee and his chin on the palm of his hand, and bunched up his big beard with his fingers, as he always did when he was thinking. Presently he took his foot down, put his hand back in his pocket, and said to me, “Well, Joe, I’ve got a double set of harness made for the man who ordered that damned buggy, and if you like I’ll let you have it. I suppose when Bill there has squeezed all he can out of you I’ll stand a show of getting something. He’s a regular Shylock, he is.”

I pushed my hat forward and rubbed the back of my head and stared at the buggy.

“Come across to the Royal, Joe,” said Bob.

But I knew that a beer would settle the business, so I said I’d get the wool up to the station first and think it over, and have a drink when I came back.

I thought it over on the way to the station, but it didn’t seem good enough. I wanted to get some more sheep, and there was the new run to be fenced in, and the instalments on the selections. I wanted lots of things that I couldn’t well do without. Then, again, the farther I got away from debt and hard-upedness the greater the horror I had of it. I had two horses that would do; but I’d have to get another later on, and altogether the buggy would run me nearer a hundred than fifty pounds. Supposing a dry season threw me back with that buggy on my hands. Besides, I wanted a spell. If I got the buggy it would only mean an extra turn of hard graft for me. No, I’d take Mary for a trip to Sydney, and she’d have to be satisfied with that.

I’d got it settled, and was just turning in through the big white gates to the goods-shed when young Black, the squatter, dashed past to the station in his big new waggonette, with his wife and a driver and a lot of portmanteaus and rugs and things. They were
going to do the grand in Sydney over Christmas. Now it was young Black who was so shook after Mary when she was in service with the Blacks before the old man died, and if I hadn’t come along—and if girls never cared for vagabonds—Mary would have been mistress of Haviland homestead, with servants to wait on her; and she was far better fitted for it than the one that was there. She would have been going to Sydney every holiday and putting up at the old Royal, with every comfort that a woman could ask for, and seeing a play every night. And I’d have been knocking around amongst the big stations out back, or maybe drinking myself to death at the shanties.

The Blacks didn’t see me as I went by, ragged and dusty, and with an old, nearly black, cabbage-tree hat drawn over my eyes. I didn’t care a damn for them, or anyone else, at most times, but I had moods when I felt things.

One of Black’s big wool teams was just coming away from the shed, and the driver, a big, dark, rough fellow, with some foreign blood in him, didn’t seem inclined to wheel his team an inch out of the middle of the road. I stopped my horses and waited. He looked at me and I looked at him—hard. Then he wheeled off, scowling, and swearing at his horses. I’d given him a hiding, six or seven years before, and he hadn’t forgotten it. And I felt then as if I wouldn’t mind trying got to give someone a hiding.

The goods clerk must have thought that Joe Wilson was pretty grumpy that day. I was thinking of Mary, out there in the lonely hut on a barren creek in the Bush—for it was little better—with no one to speak to except a haggard, worn-out Bushwoman or two, that came to see her on Sunday. I thought of the hardships she went through in the first year—that I haven’t told you about yet; of the time she was ill, and I away, and no one to understand; of the time she was alone with James and Jim sick; and of the loneliness she fought through out there. I thought of Mary, outside in the blazing heat, with an old-print dress and a felt hat, and pair of ’lastic-sides of mine on, doing the work of a station manager as well as that of a housewife and mother. And her cheeks were getting thin, and her colour was going: I thought of the gaunt,
brick-brown, saw-file voiced, hopeless and spiritless Bushwomen I knew—and some of them not much older than Mary.

When I went back into the town I had a drink with Bill Galletly at the Royal, and that settled the buggy; then Bob shouted, and I took the harness. Then I shouted, to wet the bargain. When I was going, Bob said, “Send in that young scamp of a brother of Mary’s with the horses: if the collars don’t fit I’ll fix up a pair of makeshifts, and alter the others.” I thought they both gripped my hand harder than usual, but that might have been the beer.