Music in it all to sing to: Click-clack-click-clack, boo-hoo-hoot, Old-Man Kangaroo, doin’ a scoot! . . . Roholing wheel, Sihilent night, All is fair, All is bright, Roholing whee-el, boo-hoot, a-click-clack . . . la-la-la-la-la-la-la, laha, la-la-lau!
Granite Springs was the first watering point on the run to Town. Nothing there but the big red tank into which the water spilled of itself the whole year round, a mere trickle in the Dry, but more than enough to meet the needs of the little traffic of this road, so that normally it overflowed into a grating that took it away somewhere amongst the rocks; but now a white waterfall leaping down the ferny wall and roaring away into some booming cavern; that and a small whitewashed shed and a rusty bit of loop-line. The engine drew up at the tank. The curve of the cutting made it impossible to see from the rear what was going on up front, at least on the right side travelling up, that on which the track hugged the almost sheer wall.
True to the decree of Station Master Collings, it was Hannaford up on the coal, filling the engine’s tank, and Porky Jones going over rods and links with the oil-can, when Sergeant Cahoon came loping along between the main line and the loop to take a look at his prisoners. Porky went round the other side, as if the sight offended him. But Pat, leaning against the gushing hydrant, stared rudely. Cahoon didn’t come right up to the door to look in at his prisoners, the door on that side being just behind the engine, but looked in through one of the wide spaces between the timbers. Surely he wouldn’t be intimidated by that rude staring. He stayed talking to the trackers riding with the prisoners, till the hydrant was swung back from the tender. Then he went loping back towards the coaches, perhaps thinking that those Commo types up front were not above starting without warning and leaving him flatfooted on the ground.
But the boys up front were in no such hurry. There were two ways to get down from the tender, the simpler one to walk over the coal and drop into the cab. The other was by steps onto the rear couplings and round and up. Pat Hannaford chose the longer, and soon showed why he did so, by producing a ball-peen hammer, and at the very moment that Porky chose to blow off steam with a mighty bellow, gave the pin in the coupling a couple of good seemingly soundless welts. The pin had a hinged end to facilitate its placing and prevent its pulling out. Pat drove the hinged part, which would be quite weak, in so that when the engine began to pull it would be taking the full weight of the train. He could not be seen from the stock waggon there, because the ends were not open like the sides. In a moment he was out and round on the blind side and climbing up into the cab. He winked at Porky, who immediately closed the blow-off cock and reached for the whistle. Pat stowed the hammer and took up his fireman’s position, from which he looked back for the guard’s signal. He got it, turned to Porky, who whistled again — Boo-hoot!
Pat was watching Porky cloosely as he eased off the brake, eased on the steam. Ever so gently she got away, to roll almost imperceptibly over the points of the loop. Then she was running smoothly in the narrowing walls of the cutting.
Thus for half a mile. Then out onto a green hillside, with the track sloping gently to a small trestle bridge from which as gently it climbed the other side. Red kangaroos went leaping off the track, but without interesting the engine crew — the one, Pat, keeping eyes fixed on the road ahead, the other with eyes on Pat. Halfway down the slope Pat signalled: Steam off. A slight jerk as the engine took the momentum of the train. Onto the bridge: Give it to her.
Puffa-puff, puffa-puff, puffa-puff!
Crack! It was more felt than heard.
Pat signalling: Easy.
Again the train shoving as they began to climb, but only for a moment. This time Pat shouted it, ‘Give her the gun!’
Porky pulled open the regulator . . . puffa-puff, puffa-puff, puffa-puff!
Bang! The engine leapt forward without load, went pounding up the hill. Pat signalled: Easy.
The train like a headless snake came blundering a short way up the slope, faltered, halted, then began to roll back slowly. Heads craning out of coaches and van, but not out of caboose, because the guard would be busy with his brake. His wide-awake appeared as she settled to a stop, straddling the bridge. Then Chas came leaping down, to trot along the cess. Another khaki figure jumped down to join him, to come loping, buttons glinting. Then passengers on their heels.
The engine looked remote, standing up there black against the green of the hill, smoke curling up slowly into the blue.
The two khaki figures running along the train stooped now and again, evidently looking for the pieces of the brake along the track, which for a certainty would be lying in the brawling creek beneath the bridge.
‘Look at the silly bastards!’ chuckled Hannaford.
There was no crossing the bridge with the train on it. Chas Chase climbed into a hopper to cross from one to another. Cahoon disappeared down into the bed of the creek. Only half a dozen passengers followed by one way or the other. Then there were Chase and Cahoon together again, the sergeant with legs wet to the knees and a coupling hook in his hand. They both stood to examine the snapped safety chains.
‘Right,’ said Hannaford. ‘Reckon you can handle it, mate?’
Sweat was streaming down Jones’s fat face and his voice somewhat husky, but his answer brave enough: ‘She’s right!’
‘Just remember you’ve got to get stuck right into ’em. Don’t give ’em a chance to get a word in. Blame Chas for havin’ his brake on. Demand to have everything put in writin’ on Form B-Seventeen. Ignore the copper. I can deal with him. They can’t beat us. We got the regulations on our side. Either the train goes back to Granite Springs and that waggon’s shunted off . . . or we refuse duty under protest, and everybody’s stranded. Right?’
Porky said grimly, ‘I said she’s right, mate.’
‘Right . . . let her go.’
The engine came rolling back down to the two khaki figures standing now with arms folded, authority waiting for delinquency that must come to them for punishment. But obviously they hadn’t counted on the astuteness of the delinquents. Stopping within a dozen feet of them, Porky leapt down, came back roaring about the brake in the van: ‘Silly bastard!’ Chas Chase was at a loss, driven to protest when he should have been accusing.
Cahoon tried to be the accuser, only to be silenced immediately by Hannaford, yelling at him to mind his own bloody business: ‘This’s a railway matter, copper. Keep your long nose out of it.’ No matter Cahoon’s trying to tell Chase that he was being taken for a ride by two Communist smart alecs who’d done this deliberately to beat himself. Chas said feebly that it was against regulations to do more than take the waggon to the nearest siding and shunt it off. As to the charge of doing it deliberately, Hannaford demanded that the sergeant put it in writing and sign it and it be attached to Form B-Seventeen. The sergeant refused, whereupon Pat yelled at him, ‘Then, shut your bloody trap!’
So Chas Chase had to go back to his van and take the brake off while the others trailed behind him, one breathing vengeance, most of the others grinning privily, and the engine crew, back on their foot-plate, embraced each other shaking with suppressed laughter. Then at a signal from Chas the engine gave the loudest and longest Boo-hoo-hoot! so far and began to push the train back up the hill and along through the cutting to Granite Springs again. They didn’t wait for the guard to come along to uncouple the stock waggon. Pat did it, and hooked one of the stout engine chains to the intact buffer pin of the waggon to pull it clear of the train, and stood on the brake of the waggon as Porky shunted it on wheels squealing like stuck pigs round the rusty loop and up to the van.
The engine need not have stayed there while the prisoners were being transferred to the baggage compartment of the brake-van, out of which a bunch of drunken navvies and their swags had been cleared; but it did, while its crew, in full voice sang The Red Flag. The navvies took up the song. Soon half the train was bawling it:
The workers’ Flag is deepest red, its dye the blood of martyred dead.
So lift the Scarlet Banner high, beneath its folds we’ll live and die.
Though cowards cringe and traitors sneer, we’ll keep the Red Flag flying here.
The best part of it all was Dinny Cahoon’s expression. Those who saw it and were out of sight of those sharp green eyes, howled over it with mirth.
Boo-hoot! The engine was back on the train again. The train was moving again. The engine was cock-a-doodling. Boot-a-hoot-a-hoooooot!
Though cowards cringe, and traitors sneer, we’ll keep the Red Flag flying here.
Prindy sang it softly to himself, not the words, but the lilt of it! La-la-l’-la, la-la-l’-la, la-la-la-la-la-la-l’-la, as he knelt staring out on the miles of sweet pickin’ where the kangaroos, blue now, and some emus, and Lord Vaisey’s bulls and cows and calves, and a small herd of buffalo, went racing from this hooting puffing smoking disturbing element of man the dangerous-most of all creation — Boo-hoo-hoot! — and the swamps shadowed by bird-clouds — blue hills in far distance, sudden silver curtains of rain — La-la-l’-la, la-la-l’-la!
Cahoon coming through to take a look at his prisoners, as he did every now and then, for all that they were chained to every ring and staple in the van and Cock-Eye Bob also to his stretcher, happened to stop behind the fair head and before reaching to tousle it as usual, heard the singing, listened, then said, ‘Hey . . . stop that! That no-good song, belong to no-good man. I belt him you I hear you singin’ that again.’ Then the tousle and the grin that meant Old Coon-Coon couldn’t belt his Sonny Boy. As soon as he disappeared, Sonny Boy started in to sing again — and a couple of the pack of drunks in the compartment who’d heard the injunction joined in:
The Copper Class may kiss me arse
We’ll keep the Red Flag flyin’ . . .
Next stop was Alice River, to take water again, and to set down those of the local fettlers who had been in the repair gang, the drunkest of the lot because this would be the end of their drinking for a while. Here was nothing but the water-tank, the half-dozen fettlers’ cottages, the pump-house beside the shallow roaring river, a big iron shed that was the storage depot for Alice Downs Station, some fifty miles away westward where the Alice joined her royal sister Beatrice. The drunken hilarity of the muddy homecomers to their peeping black mistresses was suddenly silenced by a procession coming from the Alice Station Depot: four men in stockmen’s outfits, one white, three black, bearing between them an ambulance stretcher on which beneath a blanket a bulk that surely needed four men to take the weight of it: ‘Piggy Trotters . . . he’s dyin’ . . . he’s dead . . . boozed himself to death durin’ the rain . . .’ so ran the news through the crowd, through the train.
Piggy wasn’t dead — not quite. Chas Chase, who had an ambulance certificate, gave the prognosis that replaced The Red Flag as the theme of the wheels when again they got rolling: ‘Poor old Piggy . . . he won’t see the New Year in . . . won’t see the New Year in . . . won’t see the New Year in.’
It seemed that Piggy should have gone to Town aboard the Christmas Eve train to join his lady wife there. But they’d got it on the Flying Doctor Network, so Piggy’s head stockman said, that there’d be no such train. So Piggy, who’d been holding himself in on a promise to his missus, hit the bottle, O.P. rum. He hadn’t been taken with the ding-bats, but with a stroke or something. ‘Coma,’ said Chas Chase. ‘Alcoholic Poisoning.’
Piggy’s face, mostly purple before, with grog and the exertion needed to move his bulk about, lay grey-faced, with slaty eyes half-open, scarcely breathing, in the back section of the rear car on the stretcher on the floor between the seats. He had only two fellow passengers, because with the easing of accommodation pressure all the others moved in elsewhere, it being no place to wish each other happy New Year, pledging with tilted bottles, over one who was not going to see the old year out. Cahoon doing his rounds asked the pair left behind if they knew who he was there lying at their feet. They nodded. Didn’t everybody know Piggy Trotters? But did they know who he was in respect to themselves? Evidently Nell knew that Piggy was her father, whatever that might mean to her semi-savage understanding. Obviously it meant nothing to her emotionally. Prindy, on being told that it was his grandfather, gave his Daddy-o one of those blank grey glances that to one more intelligent would surely have been interpreted as: I don’t know what you’re talking about, nor want to know, but have to pretend to listen to you. Cahoon just rumpled the fair hair. Prindy turned back to watch the flying world, the corroboree of trees and rocks dancing to the minga-minga music of the wheels, and the now-brown waters still rushing westward.
Then suddenly the water was flowing eastward and the train labouring through walls of quartz, to emerge at last into a torn land, a land torn by the kuttabah and the Chinee-man, no soil left on which sweet pickin’ might ever grow again, scarcely a tree worth the name, only scattered sheets of rusting iron, old boilers, funnels, trommels, busted piped, heaps of cans, of broken bottles with here and there leaning baulks of timber, rotting in the weather because even the termites were gone. The old Caroline Goldfield, Cahoon explained in passing. He wouldn’t be able to explain what it had looked like in its pristine state. Perhaps no one was left who could do that, not even some old blackfellow singing his last days out under a sheet of tin on the outskirts of the tumbledown tin township soon looming up amidst the waste because it would mostly have been blasted from his memory with the dynamite they’d used, leached and bleached out of his soul with the grog and the opium he had got for the sale of his womenfolk.
The engine, Boo-hooting, pulled into Caroline River siding, while the dozen or so whites of the populace and the dookyangana and the thousand goats came rushing down to greet her, to grasp the hands of those who fell off to meet them, and pound backs and cry: Happy New Year . . . Happy New Year!
The whites came trooping through to take a look at the three passengers in the last compartment and take up the theme: ‘Poor old Piggy . . . he won’t see the New Year in.’ Then they and all the others went rushing up to the sagging white building with its sign Hotel Croesus.
The blacks stood off in a close-packed ragged mob staring into the van through its big wide-open sliding door, well off, because it was known that one of those in there on the chain was Cock-Eye Bob the koornung, and only too well known that one of the hard-staring trackers was that most dingo-doggedest of all his kind, Jinbul.
Then the engine was yelling to those rocking the Hotel Croesus with their alcoholic goodwill. The mob came running, lurching, some to fall and have to be gone back for and dragged the rest of the way and heaved into that back coach where even a man’s dying could not disturb their slumbering. Boo-hoot! And away again.
The murdered country fell behind. The drunks snored. Grandfather Trotters stared and stared at his first glimpse of eternity. All water now ran eastward. Prindy shifted to that side to watch it vanish like swift-moving snakes into the greenery. Now he was singing to the song of the wheels: He won’t see the New Year in.
There were other bits of murdered landscape with shanty towns sitting in the midst of them, each with its sagging-verandahed pub to which these passengers still with use of legs went lurching. At one, Golden Grove, Daddy-o Cahoon brought beef sandwiches and lolly-water to his Sonny Boy and she he used to call My Girl but now only looked at with a tightening of eyes and lips that made her droop. More people came to look at Piggy and pronounce the inevitable that made the song of the unconcerned unknowing grandson.
It came on to rain, so that they drove through a silver tunnel with everything obliterated but the gouting silver underneath vanishing eastward. Prindy lay down on the seat beside his dying grandsire and slept. He woke to the clatter of points and Boo-hooting. They were at Helena River. Again Cahoon came with sandwiches and lemonade, and this time noting that Piggy’s complexion had changed from grey to yellow and his eyes widened to full revelation of the unknown,
he bent and pulled the blanket over the baldy head, saying, ‘He’s dead, Sonny Boy . . . you’re Gran’pa’s dead!’
The grey eyes, squinting down past the neck of the upturned bottle, looked interested at last. A dead Granny was something to stare at. Likewise a dead pal, all blanketed up so that you couldn’t see him, was evidently more interesting than one staring at you without knowing you but still with the capacity for knowing, to judge by the way the file of all those who came to look, just about everybody but those who were chained up next door, lingered as they hadn’t before, saying, ‘Poor old Piggy . . . just missed seein’ New Year in.’
It was getting dark. The guard came along with lighted hurricane lamps to hang one in each compartment. A swarm of flying ants followed him, settled on the lamp hanging above the bulbous remains of Piggy Trotters, and shed their gossamer wings so that they fell like tears.
Boo-hoot! And they were on the way again — a funeral-train now as well as a prison-train. Boo-hoo-hoot! Over the Helena River, as she went brawling underneath, not to meet a royal sister, for all her being made regal by the sycophants who had stolen her from the simpletons who’d owned her — Princess Helena, another of Queen Victoria’s brood — but to the king of all waters, the sea, just a short way down there through the showery darkness, and the jungles and the swamps. Boo-hoot! — with the headlight slicing the forest down on the curves. Twice they stopped, where there were little lights in tiny houses and pale faces and dark faces looking up at the windows and calling Happy New Year. And again Click-a-click-click to the music of the wheels and the soft singing from the eastern window — till the fair head drooped to the breast ever ready for it, not to suck any more, because only little boys suck, not young men, but just in sleep.
Again a clattering of points — more points than ever this time — and lights, many lights, electric lights strung on poles, sheds and railway waggons, and white faces by the track. It was the loco siding just outside of Town. While Pat Hannaford and Porky and Chas Chase were getting rid of the ballast hoppers, people crowded aboard to take a look at poor old Piggy under his blanket and scattering of frozen tears — and said it. But it was not only on account of dead Piggy that they came. They were travelling to Town to the several parties that were being held tonight. In the midst of death we are in life.
Poor Fellow My Country Page 38
