by Jim Haynes
She has an eye on the corner, and a green sapling club laid in readiness on the dresser by her side; also her sewing basket and a copy of The Young Ladies’ Journal. She has brought the dog into the room.
Tommy turns in, under protest, but says he’ll lie awake all night and smash that blinded snake.
His mother asks him how many times she has told him not to swear.
He has his club with him under the bedclothes, and Jacky protests:
‘Mummy! Tommy’s skinnin’ me alive wif his club. Make him take it out.’
Tommy: ‘Shet up, you little . . . ! D’yer want to be bit with the snake?’
Jacky shuts up.
‘If yer bit,’ says Tommy, after a pause, ‘you’ll swell up, an’ smell, an’ turn red an’ green an’ blue all over till yer bust. Won’t he, mother?’
‘Now then, don’t frighten the child. Go to sleep,’ she says.
The two younger children go to sleep, and now and then Jacky complains of being ‘skeezed’. More room is made for him. Presently Tommy says: ‘Mother! Listen to them (adjective) little possums. I’d like to screw their blanky necks.’
And Jacky protests drowsily:
‘But they don’t hurt us, the little blanks!’
Mother: ‘There, I told you you’d teach Jacky to swear.’ But the remark makes her smile. Jacky goes to sleep. Presently Tommy asks:
‘Mother! Do you think they’ll ever extricate the (adjective) kangaroo?’
‘Lord! How am I to know, child? Go to sleep.’
‘Will you wake me if the snake comes out?’
‘Yes. Go to sleep.’
Near midnight. The children are all asleep and she sits there still, sewing and reading by turns. From time to time she glances round the floor and wallplate, and, whenever she hears a noise, she reaches for the stick. The thunderstorm comes on, and the wind, rushing through the cracks in the slab wall, threatens to blow out her candle. She places it on a sheltered part of the dresser and fixes up a newspaper to protect it. At every flash of lightning, the cracks between the slabs gleam like polished silver. The thunder rolls, and the rain comes down in torrents.
Alligator lies at full length on the floor, with his eyes turned towards the partition. She knows by this that the snake is there. There are large cracks in that wall opening under the floor of the dwelling-house.
She is not a coward, but recent events have shaken her nerves. A little son of her brother-in-law was lately bitten by a snake, and died. Besides, she has not heard from her husband for six months, and is anxious about him.
He was a drover, and started squatting here when they were married. The drought ruined him. He had to sacrifice the remnant of his flock and go droving again. He intends to move his family into the nearest town when he comes back, and, in the meantime, his brother, who keeps a shanty on the main road, comes over about once a month with provisions. The wife has still a couple of cows, one horse, and a few sheep. The brother-in-law kills one of the latter occasionally, gives her what she needs of it, and takes the rest in return for other provisions. She is used to being left alone. She once lived like this for eighteen months. As a girl she built the usual castles in the air; but all her girlish hopes and aspirations have long been dead. She finds all the excitement and recreation she needs in The Young Ladies’ Journal, and Heaven help her! takes a pleasure in the fashion-plates.
Her husband is an Australian, and so is she. He is careless, but a good enough husband. If he had the means he would take her to the city and keep her there like a princess. They are used to being apart, or at least she is. ‘No use fretting,’ she says. He may forget sometimes that he is married; but if he has a good cheque when he comes back he will give most of it to her. When he had money he took her to the city several times, hired a railway sleeping compartment, and put up at the best hotels. He also bought her a buggy, but they had to sacrifice that along with the rest.
The last two children were born in the bush—one while her husband was bringing a drunken doctor, by force, to attend to her. She was alone on this occasion, and very weak. She had been ill with a fever. She prayed to God to send her assistance. God sent Black Mary, the ‘whitest’ gin in all the land. Or, at least, God sent King Jimmy first, and he sent Black Mary. He put his black face round the door post, took in the situation at a glance, and said cheerfully: ‘All right, missus, I bring my old woman, she down alonga creek.’
One of the children died while she was here alone. She rode nineteen miles for assistance, carrying the dead child.
It must be near one or two o’clock. The fire is burning low. Alligator lies with his head resting on his paws, and watches the wall. He is not a very beautiful dog, and the light shows numerous old wounds where the hair will not grow. He is afraid of nothing on the face of the earth or under it. He will tackle a bullock as readily as he will tackle a flea. He hates all other dogs—except kangaroo-dogs—and has a marked dislike to friends or relations of the family. They seldom call, however. He sometimes makes friends with strangers. He hates snakes and has killed many, but he will be bitten some day and die; most snake-dogs end that way.
Now and then the bushwoman lays down her work and watches, and listens, and thinks. She thinks of things in her own life, for there is little else to think about.
The rain will make the grass grow, and this reminds her how she fought a bush fire once while her husband was away. The grass was long, and very dry, and the fire threatened to burn her out. She put on an old pair of her husband’s trousers and beat out the flames with a green bough, till great drops of sooty perspiration stood out on her forehead and ran in streaks down her blackened arms. The sight of his mother in trousers greatly amused Tommy, who worked like a little hero by her side, but the terrified baby howled lustily for his ‘mummy’. The fire would have mastered her but for four excited bushmen who arrived in the nick of time. It was a mixed-up affair all round; when she went to take up the baby he screamed and struggled convulsively, thinking it was a ‘blackman;’ and Alligator, trusting more to the child’s sense than his own instinct, charged furiously, and (being old and slightly deaf) did not in his excitement at first recognise his mistress’s voice, but continued to hang on to the moleskins until choked off by Tommy with a saddle-strap. The dog’s sorrow for his blunder, and his anxiety to let it be known that it was all a mistake, was as evident as his ragged tail and a twelve-inch grin could make it. It was a glorious time for the boys; a day to look back to, and talk about, and laugh over for many years.
She thinks how she fought a flood during her husband’s absence. She stood for hours in the drenching downpour, and dug an overflow gutter to save the dam across the creek. But she could not save it. There are things that a bushwoman cannot do. Next morning the dam was broken, and her heart was nearly broken too, for she thought how her husband would feel when he came home and saw the result of years of labour swept away. She cried then.
She also fought the pleuro-pneumonia, dosed and bled the few remaining cattle, and wept again when her two best cows died.
Again, she fought a mad bullock that besieged the house for a day. She made bullets and fired at him through cracks in the slabs with an old shotgun. He was dead in the morning. She skinned him and got seventeen-and-sixpence for the hide.
She also fights the crows and eagles that have designs on her chickens. Her plan of campaign is very original. The children cry, ‘Crows, Mother!’ and she rushes out and aims a broomstick at the birds as though it were a gun, and says ‘Bung!’ The crows leave in a hurry; they are cunning, but a woman’s cunning is greater.
Occasionally a bushman in the horrors, or a villainous-looking sundowner, comes and nearly scares the life out of her. She generally tells the suspicious-looking stranger that her husband and two sons are at work below the dam, or over at the yard, for he always cunningly inquires for the boss.
Only last week a gallows-faced swagman, having satisfied himself that there were no men on the place, threw his swag down
on the verandah, and demanded tucker. She gave him something to eat; then he expressed his intention of staying for the night. It was sundown then. She got a batten from the sofa, loosened the dog, and confronted the stranger, holding the batten in one hand and the dog’s collar with the other. ‘Now you go!’ she said. He looked at her and at the dog, said, ‘All right, mum,’ in a cringing tone, and left. She was a determined-looking woman, and Alligator’s yellow eyes glared unpleasantly; besides, the dog’s chawing-up apparatus greatly resembled that of the reptile he was named after.
She has few pleasures to think of as she sits here alone by the fire, on guard against a snake. All days are much the same to her; but on Sunday afternoon she dresses herself, tidies the children, smartens up baby, and goes for a lonely walk along the bush track, pushing an old perambulator in front of her. She does this every Sunday. She takes as much care to make herself and the children look smart as she would if she were going to do the block in the city. There is nothing to see, however, and not a soul to meet. You might walk for twenty miles along this track without being able to fix a point in your mind, unless you are a bushman. This is because of the everlasting, maddening sameness of the stunted trees, that monotony which makes a man long to break away and travel as far as trains can go, and sail as far as ship can sail, and farther.
But this bushwoman is used to the loneliness of it. As a girl-wife she hated it, but now she would feel strange away from it.
She is glad when her husband returns, but she does not gush or make a fuss about it. She gets him something good to eat, and tidies up the children.
She seems contented with her lot. She loves her children, but has no time to show it. She seems harsh to them. Her surroundings are not favourable to the development of the ‘womanly’ or sentimental side of nature.
It must be near morning now; but the clock is in the dwelling-house. Her candle is nearly done; she forgot that she was out of candles. Some more wood must be got to keep the fire up, and so she shuts the dog inside and hurries round to the wood heap. The rain has cleared off. She seizes a stick, pulls it out, and, crash! The whole pile collapses.
Yesterday she bargained with a stray blackfellow to bring her some wood, and while he was at work she went in search of a missing cow. She was absent an hour or so, and the native black made good use of his time. On her return she was so astonished to see a good heap of wood by the chimney, that she gave him an extra fig of tobacco, and praised him for not being lazy. He thanked her, and left with head erect and chest well out. He was the last of his tribe and a King; but he had built that wood heap hollow.
She is hurt now, and tears spring to her eyes as she sits down again by the table. She takes up a handkerchief to wipe the tears away, but pokes her eyes with her bare fingers instead. The handkerchief is full of holes, and she finds that she has put her thumb through one, and her forefinger through another. This makes her laugh, to the surprise of the dog. She has a keen, very keen, sense of the ridiculous; and some time or other she will amuse bushmen with the story.
She had been amused before like that. One day she sat down ‘to have a good cry’, as she said, and the old cat rubbed against her dress and ‘cried too’. Then she had to laugh.
It must be near daylight now. The room is very close and hot because of the fire. Alligator still watches the wall from time to time. Suddenly he becomes greatly interested; he draws himself a few inches nearer the partition, and a thrill runs through his body. The hair on the back of his neck begins to bristle, and the battle-light is in his yellow eyes. She knows what this means, and lays her hand on the stick. The lower end of one of the partition slabs has a large crack on both sides. An evil pair of small, bright bead-like eyes glisten at one of these holes. The snake, a black one, comes slowly out, about a foot, and moves its head up and down. The dog lies still, and the woman sits as one fascinated.
The snake comes out a foot farther. She lifts her stick, and the reptile, as though suddenly aware of danger, sticks his head in through the crack on the other side of the slab, and hurries to get his tail round after him. Alligator springs, and his jaws come together with a snap. He misses, for his nose is large, and the snake’s body close down in the angle formed by the slabs and the floor. He snaps again as the tail comes round. He has the snake now, and tugs it out eighteen inches. Thud, thud comes the woman’s club on the ground. Alligator pulls again. Thud, thud. Alligator gives another pull and he has the snake out, a black brute, five feet long. The head rises to dart about, but the dog has the enemy close to the neck. He is a big, heavy dog, but quick as a terrier. He shakes the snake as though he felt the original curse in common with mankind. The eldest boy wakes up, seizes his stick, and tries to get out of bed, but his mother forces him back with a grip of iron. Thud, thud, the snake’s back is broken in several places. Thud, thud, its head is crushed, and Alligator’s nose skinned again.
She lifts the mangled reptile on the point of her stick, carries it to the fire, and throws it in; then piles on the wood and watches the snake burn. The boy and dog watch too. She lays her hand on the dog’s head, and all the fierce, angry light dies out of his yellow eyes. The younger children are quieted, and presently go to sleep. The dirty-legged boy stands for a moment in his shirt, watching the fire. Presently he looks up at her, sees the tears in her eyes, and, throwing his arms round her neck exclaims:
‘Mother, I won’t never go drovin’; blarst me if I do!’ And she hugs him to her worn-out breast and kisses him; and they sit thus together while the sickly daylight breaks over the bush.
MALLEE
ROYAL BRIDGES
HE RODE THE LEAN mare up the sandy track. The sun burnt his eyes and the black flies clouded about him. The sand clogged the mare’s hooves as she bore him up the ridge; and to give her breath he paused upon the top.
The road went down the ridge like a ribbon of fire. The sandy paddocks, where the wheat had died in the spring, rolled mile beyond mile brick-red to the black pine clumps against the sky. At every swirl of hot wind the sand was blown up in yellow spirals merging into one ochre-coloured cloud, which crept down into the road.
But he saw none of this, taking in the mere impression of the Mallee around him, for his mind was elsewhere, visualising the lettering on the poster he had inspected back in town. Men needed for service overseas. Twenty thousand promised by the Commonwealth Government to England.
In a good spring the wheat should have rolled miles out as a sea of green and gold under the sun. On the Mallee fringe the sheep would have cropped the grass. Now sand, shaped like the oncoming waves of the sea, made great banks where it met the scrub. The sand leaked through wire fences into the tracks like iron-coloured water. When the wind died the mirage appeared, a flickering fantasy to right and left with lagoons of silver merging into the grey smudges of pine and eucalypt, shadowy and mystical.
He was thinking of fellows he knew, excited, gathered in knots at the railway station, at the post office, before the pub. Recalling the khaki-clad figure of one chap on leave from Broadmeadows—the popular hero, one who had been previously known through the district as a waster, now straight and clean, slouching no longer. The same chap telling him he ought to go!
And he was going. He was sick of the Mallee. Only he knew the Old Man would not let him go; and he couldn’t stand up to the Old Man. Never had been able to; couldn’t now. He’d stop him from enlisting if he could. There was something about the Old Man!
He spurred the mare on down the track. He passed the old Cocky’s shack. Mud brick and a shingle roof. The chap had got some straw left still; but his dam was drying. He was reduced to dipping the water into a bucket, and carrying it up to a rusty pot where a few fowls drank. Full of news of the war, he would have pulled in for a yarn.
The Cocky’s son was in khaki; and he wanted to know what his Old Man had thought, maybe get a hint from him how to deal with his own Old Man. But the black flies swarmed and a stinger shimmered, silver-winged, and the mare wouldn’t sta
nd, so he rode on.
Mum might work it; but then Mum wouldn’t want him to go.
He pulled in by the gate a mile down. Leaning from the saddle, he pulled up the wire loop from the post, and dragged back the gate, two props and a few strands of barbed wire. He rode through and down the track between the dwarf gums and myall. Not a blade of grass, not a cicada piping, not a parrot chattering. Only the hard trees, a green mass above the brick-red sand.
The house lay a quarter of a mile back from the road. In 1911, the last good year, the Old Man had put up a new place, a weatherboard cottage, the paint now blistering pink upon it, iron roofs, with a couple of tanks under the chimney.
The black mud-brick house, where they had lived before, stood a bit to the left. A few sugar-gums shaded the yard. The garden had burnt up for want of water. The dam was holding out; but it was all wanted for the stock. Dead sticks and sand now—sand that drifted to the doors, and leaked inside.
Mum was standing out the front in the sun in her old blue print gown, print sunbonnet, and white apron. He pulled up by the gate as she came down to meet him, smiling to her smile. Mum might work it for him; but it would be horribly rough on her. She wouldn’t want him to go any more than she had wanted him to go to town for a job. Though she had tried her hardest with the Old Man, and failed.
‘Any mail?’ she asked, smiling up at him.
‘Only the paper,’ he answered. ‘Them Germans have cut the British up a bit—and Antwerp’s gone. There weren’t any letters. Where’s Dad?’
‘Cutting chaff,’ she said, taking the paper. ‘Put the mare in, and come for a cup of tea. Tell Dad! See anyone in the township?’
‘Young Banks, that’s all. Fancies himself no end! He’s in khaki—up on leave.’
She caught the bitter inflection; she gave him a look of apprehension, noting the discontent black on his face. She ventured: ‘It’ll make a man of him.’
‘It’s more’n I can stand,’ he muttered, flicking off flies. ‘To see that chap. War news is pretty bad, Mum . . .’ breaking off.
