“Ten bags yesterday. Six bags this morning.”
“Ten!” shouted Red Kelly. “Ye’ll starve to death at that rate. Ye haven’t the way of it. I’ll show you.”
Like a tank, he strode purposefully to the digging fork and snatching it from the ground he waved it like a sword. Bony had worked methodically. He had faced the potato row. He had placed the points of the fork in the ground, driven the tines deep with the pressure of a foot, levered the fork backward and so raised the earth containing the tubers and brought them to the surface. Red Kelly bestrode the potato row. He crouched over it like a crab. With both hands he swung the fork in an arc down from the level of his left shoulder. The impetus drove the tool deep into the ground, and the movement continued in its arc and scooped earth and tubers up and free. All in one continuous movement. As the fork was swung back to the original position, the great feet took Red onward nine inches and the curving stroke was repeated again and again until he was at the far end of the row. There had been not one unnecessary action.
There are tricks and knacks in every trade, and Bony learned many in the trade of digging potatoes, especially those used by men weighing seventeen stone and having the strength of two Bonys. It had taken him forty minutes to fill a bag. He estimated it took Kelly a bare seven minutes. He had to drag the filled bag to the stack; Red Kelly carried his bag as he had held the boulder, like a minister holding a baby at a christening.
“That’ll make up the time wasted gossiping. Nat,” he shouted. He gazed about the scene and sought sight of the sunlight reflected by Mrs Conway’s telescope. “Ha! I’d better be off. I’m in a furrin’ country. Good day to you, Nat, me lad. I’ll be wantin’ you to work for me some time. And don’t you ever forget that Ned Kelly was a gintleman, and dinkum Irish at that. You spoke a true word, Nat. Dinkum Irish, it is.”
Waving a fist almost gallantly, Red Kelly retrieved his pipe and leaped to the summit of the wall. He waved again and jumped down from it to his own land, and as Bony watched him striding towards his ancestral home, he wondered if he had really discovered the secret of these people of Cork Valley.
Chapter Eight
The Day Old Frosty Came
BONY TRIED Red Kelly’s method of digging potatoes but quickly returned to his own pedestrian way of working with a fork. His business was, indeed, concerned with homicide. He worked methodically, his mind occupied by cabbages and kings rather than spuds. An hour after the departure of Red Kelly he was momentarily startled by a gunshot which came from the direction of the meandering river and was too booming to be anything else but the discharge of a twelve-bore shot-gun. Half an hour after that he was startled by hearing the voice of Joseph Flanagan.
“Day to you!”
The shot-gun under Joe’s left arm, and the rabbit dangling from his right hand were proof of the way he was spending the afternoon. Here was another character who had defeated Time. He wore cord trousers tucked into rubber boots. About his rangy torso hung a gamekeeper’s coat with a pocket capacity for a dozen rabbits and half a dozen pheasants. On his head was a felt hat with the brim cut away except at the front where it formed a kind of sun visor.
Bony called a goodday, and Joe leaned the gun against the potato stack, went to where Bony was working, squatted on his heels and loaded a briar pipe. With the skirt of the coat resting on the earth about him, he looked not unlike a sick emu.
“Nice day, Nat. How’s the spuds coming along?” he asked, the leathery face at odds with the gentle accentless voice.
“Pretty good, Joe.”
“Heard you had some help a while back.”
“That’s so,” agreed Bony. “Red Kelly came over for a yarn and he showed me how to lift spuds. Mrs Conway tell you about it?”
“Yes. Got quite worried about you. Asked me to work up a hare or two over this way. Seen any about?”
“Two between here and the river yesterday morning. You having the day off?”
“I have lots of days off, Nat, lots of days. Nothing much goes wrong with my installations. Good life, you know. Not much work and plenty of grub, with a nip or two tossed in to keep the flies away. What about a nip now?”
Joe removed from his coat a quart bottle. Bony shook his head; Joe unscrewed the plastic cap, and vapour appeared in the sunlight. He winked, tilted the bottle to his mouth and swallowed twice without winking.
“Not as mellow as Mike’s dinner wine,” he remarked, replacing the bottle. “Comes from over the hills and far away. Nat. They haven’t the knack of it. One of these dark nights they’ll blow themselves up. Still, there must be a good trade for it. With the taxes off, it comes reasonable in price. Red Kelly’s in a bad temper, they say.”
There was the invitation, and Bony knew it would be unwise to evade it. He described the boulder dropping incident, and how he had managed to get himself “out from under”.
“The old lady saw it all,” contributed Joe. “Tried to warn you with her glass that Red was creeping up on you. If you see her glass blinking and going on, accept them flashes as a warning, and go to ground. You liking it around here?”
“Could do when I get to understand the people.”
Joe drew at the pipe, flopped to relieve the pressure of his heels under his posterior, and for a few moments watched the tubers appearing above Bony’s fork before saying:
“Depends a lot on yourself, Nat. I been here eleven years. Took me a year to understand ’em. Very clannish even for us Irish. Don’t take to strangers too easily, but warm enough when they do. Anyway, you’ve got on fast with the Conways, especially with the old lady. You could dig in with them for the rest of your life if you wanted to.”
“I don’t want to dig spuds for the rest of my life, Joe.”
“Don’t have to. Plenty of easier ways of getting on in Cork Valley. Anyway, a feller ought to push his roots down somewhere.” Joe squinted his eyes. “Ah, there’s Old Frosty. As I was saying. Nat, the Conways have sort of taken to you, but the main thing is to be satisfied with simple things. I stay on here for a full year, and at the end of it I’ve got enough money to take a trip. Went to Europe last year. Went to the States the year before. I’m planning to trip over to South America next year.” Joe stood. “Well, I’d better put up a hare if there’s one to be got. Mate Conway can jug a hare better than anyone I know.”
“Then you get that hare,” Bony urged. “Who’s Old Frosty?”
“Old Frosty? Why, that cloud over to the south. Sure sign of coming frosts and fogs. The fogs hang around for days. So long, Nat. See you at dinner.”
Joe Flanagan gathered his gun, stuffed the rabbit into a pocket and ambled across the green fields. Old Frosty was long and narrow and wafer-like, and Bony was reminded of Casement saying: “What goes on down in those valleys when the fog is thick and continuous is anybody’s business.”
Old Frosty came, moving grandly from the south, and the wild west wind died away. Joe Flanagan fired both barrels of his gun, but Bony couldn’t see him as he was in a fold of the ground. Bony knew that he hadn’t just chanced to come this way, that Mrs Conway had sent him to ease her curiosity, and he wondered if Mike Conway had supplemented the errand by having Joe probe a little, and to offer him inducement to become a man of Cork Valley. Certainly no man on wages, or even contract, could afford to travel across the world every year, and Joe Flanagan was only a tradesman electrician. Was he a ferret who had learned to live with foxes?
Joe Flanagan’s way of life had much to commend it. A man isn’t mentally defective to work on an outback station for twelve months. With the money saved he lives like a millionaire for a fortnight or three weeks in a city. However, he would need to be richer than a fortnight-millionaire to travel round the world every year. A Red Kelly might make enough digging potatoes on contract to do it, but not a Nat Bonnay, and not a Joe Flanagan, from superficial observation.
Joe’s conversation had certainly hinted at an invitation to become closer to these people of Cork V
alley, and this had followed the veiled acceptance of Nat Bonnay as one of the Conways, and, therefore, with the people of Cork Valley in general. The purpose of the approach was far from clear, and Bony was sure that, if he proceeded along the line he had adopted, it would eventually be made clear. It was certain that he was accepted in this valley because he was a horse-thief, because he was wanted by the police and was at war with them and because all these reasons supported his assumed character plus the accident of his birth.
The whys were many. Why had he been offered the contract to lift potatoes when there were at the settlement, as at the Kelly’s farm, men who appeared merely to be pottering around doing light work? In view of the richness of the land, the number of cows being milked, the obvious prosperity of the people, why did they refuse to pay television licences, and go to the trouble and expense of constructing telescoping antennas? Why, when the Education Department offered to provide a school bus to convey the children to the school at Bowral, had the service been obstructed, until the Department had finally agreed to the school at the settlement, and the teacher to be a Conway. And why had the settlement people declined a Catholic Church school in lieu of the state school? There was the answer to these whys somewhere, and in these answers might well lie the solution of a murder he had been assigned to investigate.
Bony was still teasing these matters when he left his work for ‘home’ and dinner. He swung down the slope, over the paddocks and so to the wider track in the lane skirting the river. He had not prospected this lane from end to end but guessed that it gave access to Red Kelly’s farm from the settlement and thus from the road into the valley. The surface was of fine chocolate dust and here he saw his own tracks and those of Joe Flanagan, overlaying horse tracks and the tracks of a cow and her calf.
He heard the calf before he saw it, and also the low voice of the mother. He came on the calf standing on the stony bed of the river, now but a stream, with the cow on the bank. The calf had attempted to cross, slipped, and had a foot caught between two boulders. Just beyond it was the bridge, and beyond the bridge the thick scrub extending to the settlement road.
Bony sat on the edge of the low bridge and removed his boots and socks. Gingerly he walked to the calf, and after slight effort freed its foot and managed to help it to the bank. It was uninjured, and gave no evidence of having been trapped for more than an hour or two, certainly not prior to the passing of Joe Flanagan.
Sitting again on the edge of the bridge, he washed his muddy feet in the slow moving stream and put on his socks. Then he saw a bright object settled among the stones under the surface. The surface was rippled and the object looked not unlike a stiletto; he removed his socks again, and retrieved it and so discovered a metal screwdriver. It was no larger than the tool found in the kit of a woman’s sewing machine.
Peculiar place to find a screwdriver from a sewing machine kit.
Having put on socks and boots, Bony returned to the cow and her calf. He pretended to assure himself that the calf was undamaged, and, on again approaching the bridge, his eyes missed nothing of the tracks coming from and to it. He neither paused nor deviated, there being ample cover for a possible watcher, but he did note without difficulty that Joe Flanagan had stopped there. Instead of sitting on the edge of the bridge, he had sat on the soft low bank of the river.
On his way through the scrub, Bony wondered why Joe had sat on the bank. He had shot a rabbit at some point, but he would not have had to step across the stream to pick it up because there was the bridge. It hadn’t been the misadventure of the calf, otherwise he would have freed it as easily as Bony had done. Had he been looking for the screwdriver which could well be his? It was the only plausible solution of a little mystery which was merely of passing interest.
Flanagan was already in the dining-room when Bony entered, and he had to give a report on the Red Kelly visit.
“I watched him creeping up on you,” Grandma said severely. “I signalled all I knew how. In future, Nat, you keep one eye on this window and if you see my glass signalling back the sunlight, you look for trouble. The big, hulking, red blackguard could have murdered you.”
“I spoke soft words to him, Mrs Conway,” Bony said, smiling slightly, and the old woman regarded him warmly, saying:
“Indeed you should have been an Irishman, Nat. You’ve all the blarney in Cork Valley.”
He was again sitting at the lower end of the great table with Flanagan on his right and Rosalie Conway on his left. To his surprise and delight they were all served with oysters in the shell, and subsequently with schnapper cutlets garnished with a white sauce which determined him to lay on the blarney with Mate Conway just to coax the recipe from her for his own Marie at home in Queensland.
The women and children having left table, Mike Conway served the white ‘wine’ in china cups. Flanagan spoke of seeing Old Frosty, and the other men nodded.
“The fogs here are really something,” Mike Conway told Bony. “D’you have fogs at Tenterfield?”
“Ground mist in the mornings. It would seem they’re pretty thick here though.”
“What about going to work and coming home, Nat? Think you could find your way?”
“The fog couldn’t be so thick that I couldn’t see the ground,” Bony claimed. “Follow my own tracks across the paddocks.”
“Yes, of course.” Conway’s dark expressionless eyes came down the length of the table as a graphite pencil mark on white cloth. Flanagan was concentrating on loading his pipe. Mrs Conway was gazing disappointedly into her empty cup. She said:
“Nat could see his way in the dark over the paddocks, up the cliffs, over the peaks and all the way back. I’ve read about the aborigines. Nat is one of them. He told us so.”
“All right, Grandma, all right,” Mike said impatiently. “I was only testing Nat so that we need not have to go out looking for him if the fog comes down when he’s spud digging.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Bony told them.
Grandma Conway looked from her cup to him. She said:
“That’s my boy. I’m backing you, Nat.”
Chapter Nine
One of the Conways
THE DAYS following the appearance of Old Frosty indicated that he was a false prophet. They continued as before, sunlit and softly warm; the evenings painting the valley in pastel colours, and the nights cool and quiet. Day by day, the man who had inherited a patience unknown to any race other than the Australian aborigines, worked at his potato lifting and waited in the sure belief that the Mountain did come to Mahomet.
The day after Old Frosty drifted benignly across the sky, two of the Conways came with a truck and removed Bony’s stacked bags of potatoes to the piggery which, as previously stated, was farthest from the settlement, beyond the butter and cheese factory. They did not unload during the daylight hours, and the next morning the empty truck was standing outside one of the houses. Then the great heap of pie melons in the shed above Bony’s cellar room disappeared while he was at work.
The children were given their end-of-term holidays, and nearly all of them now brought in the cows and pastured them after the milking, and the elder children worked about the factory buildings. Three men, including Joe Flanagan who ate with the Conways, did not appear at dinner on the third night, and on the fifth night, following Old Frosty’s appearance, Mate Conway served her jugged hare garnished with blackcurrent jelly. Bony decided that this was the life for him.
On May 10 frost did indeed touch the higher paddocks, and as Bony walked to the potato field, his breath was misty and his face and hands tingled. But of fog there was no sign. The sun dispelled the frost and gave warmth very early and the wind came fitfully from the west and brought with it the scent of burning wheat stubble from the far distant farms where preparations were being made for fallowing.
Here in Cork Valley, there was a change. Where four horses belonging to Red Kelly had grazed, there were now eleven. Although the paddock where they cropped
was not less than half a mile away, Bony could recognise Red Kelly’s grey mare and the roan gelding usually ridden by Brian Kelly, as well as two other animals he had previously seen on the Kelly side of the wall. He had never seen the remaining seven horses before.
Not only would it require good eyesight to pick out the seven strange horses, but it would need, further, a good eye for a horse. Those four Bony had seen previously were big boned, grass fed and in excellent condition, in spite of the hard work. The seven strangers were all much smaller, and lean and hard.
The obvious explanation was that they had been brought in from an outlying area where the ground feed at the end of summer had given out, but Bony’s curiosity was aroused by the uniformity of their physical appearance and the fact that they were a different breed from those already on Kelly’s property. Another point about them teased Bony but he failed to determine what it was, the distance defying him.
Later in the morning, Brian Kelly appeared on foot, and the horses stood with raised heads watching his approach. He carried a bridle, and he walked straight to the horse he had ridden the day of the brawl, slipped the bridle about its head, and mounted it bareback. Then he rounded up the mob and drove them from the paddock towards the house, where they could no longer be seen.
Accepting the probability that he was customarily under Grandma Conway’s surveillance, Bony was careful not to betray any interest, and he continued his work as though engrossed by the urge to increase his daily tally of spuds.
There was another unusual intrusion into Cork Valley in the mid-afternoon. Old Mrs Conway began to signal. Bony straightened, casually looked about, and saw two men approaching from the west. They were less than a quarter-mile from the wall, and both bore the heavy loads of bush-walkers. Both wore the tough clothes and boots associated with these people who delight in tramping over mountainous country. And mounted on his grey mare, Red Kelly was riding furiously to cut them off.
Bony - 25 - Bony and The Kelly Gang Page 6
