Nugget came out with a first-aid kit. Without any attempt at asepsis, he fished a length of horse-hair from a metal box and threaded it into a small curved surgical needle, bent over the foot, saying, ‘Might hurt a bit . . . but you kundirra-feller, ain’t you?’ Prindy smiled. He winced only slightly as the needle pierced. ‘Properly kallum kundirra!’ said Nugget, tying the stitch off and snipping it. And going on to the next point, he asked, ‘You savvy that language?’ Prindy, biting his lip, watching the operation cloosely, shook his head. Nugget kept up the patter: ‘This country language . . . mean proper strong man. That you all right.’ He put in four stitches, then let go the ligature. Just a bubble or two of blood. Nugget said: ‘She’ll be right. Now we got ’o put sumpin on it . . . what’ll it be?’ He turned to the box, took out a bottle of iodoform.
Prindy was also not a koornung’s apprentice for nothing. He said: ‘Put him clee, more better.’
‘Clay, eh? Blackfeller fashion. That’s good, too. Got some pipe-clay out the back, from makin’ oven. I get some, wet him. Cover’m up first-time, though . . . don’ wan’ them flies gettin’ on it.’ He dropped a piece of gauze over it. Just then Queeny came up, and after greeting him, asked him for tobacco. He waved to a tin of it, with cigarette papers and matches, on a packing-case table. ‘Help yo’self,’ he said. He went out through the house.
‘Properly goot man,’ said Queeny. ‘You know dat two-feller, eh?’
Nell, also helping herself, said, ‘I been see long Beatrice.’
‘Goot man all right.’ Queeny peeped into the rooms. ‘Properly shop,’ she said to herself. For a couple of rooms held piles of stores and racks of hanging clothes, most likely stuff for paying the Aboriginal workers.
She took a peep out the back, where the verandah was semi-enclosed with iron and sacking, to make kitchen and dining-room.
Nugget was soon back, with chunks of white clay in a tin dish of water. He sat down to knead it into plasticity. He asked Prindy how he came to know blackfeller tricks: ‘You ain’t a blackfeller.’
‘Da’s right,’ said Nell quickly.
Prindy started to tell of his koornung friend; but she interrupted him to say that he’d been stolen away by Mad Old Bugger, now in jail. ‘Ah, yes,’ commented Nugget. ‘Saw it in paper.’
Prindy got in a word or two for Bobwirridirridi: ‘He too goot, dat-one old man . . . can fix him up anysing, sore leg, broke bone . . .’
‘He no goot bugger!’ snapped Nell.
Nugget chuckled. Then he asked did they want anything to eat, and being told yes, said apologetically that the bread was rather stale, that he was going to bake tonight; but there was beef, and butter and jam. Telling Prindy to stay where he was, he took the two women through to the kitchen. Getting food for them out of a home-made cupboard with legs standing in kerosene to beat the ants, he apologised again for the dry and doughy bread, saying he was no hand at making it, especially in this cool weather, and lifted a cloth off a dish on a case-made table near the stove containing sponge for breadmaking. He asked, ‘Know anything ’bout breadmakin’?’
Queeny whooped, ‘Dis-one number-one baker!’
He looked at Nell with sheer delight: ‘Are you, then? Well, how’s this sponge . . . any good?’
Nell sniffed it. ‘Gettin’ lil bits sour . . . you keep him too long. Bake him now all right. No goot by’n’bye.’
He asked eagerly, ‘If I make you up a fire’ll you make the batch for me?’
She nodded. He leapt to the stove, stirred up the fire, threw in the couple of pieces of wood in the box, said he’d have to get more in, went rushing out to the woodheap. Queeny giggled, ‘Dat man like him you, I reckon.’
Nell looked troubled. Queeny demanded, ‘Wha’s matter? He nice man, dat-one . . . young-feller, goot-lookin’ . . .’
Nugget was coming running back with an armful of wood. With the fire roaring and the kettle boiling, he suggested biscuits and cheese for the time being, and a grand supper tonight. They’d shot a buffalo yesterday, he said, and had some nice rib-roast stuff hanging in the meat-house. They had sweet potatoes, canned peas, canned everything, dried fruit. Would Nell cook supper for them? What about new dresses for both of them? Not such hot stuff, bought for the working-boys’ lubras — but better than those terrible things. ‘What you been doin’ with yo’selves to get like that?’ But he wasn’t prying, wasn’t doing more than talk to cover excitement. He took them inside and told them to pick dresses, and something for the boy. Then he got Prindy and carried him out to the kitchen, seating him so as to keep his leg up. When the women came out, carrying dresses, he said, ‘Put ’em on.’ But Nell said not until she had made the bread and put the dinner on. Queeny said they’d have to bogey first.
He showed them where the shower was, over underneath the tank.
They were seated at the table, drinking tea and eating biscuits, when there was a thud of bare feet coming through the house, and they looked up to see Knobby appear. He grinned, but rather crookedly, saying, ‘Well . . . I like this . . . and me doin’ a perish for smoke-o!’
Nugget reddened, said hastily, ‘Sorry, Knob . . . forgot about you . . . sit down.’
Knobby leered as he took a seat: ‘Thought yo’ might be layin’ off or sumpin . . . ha-ha!’
Still in the hasty tone, Nugget said, ‘Found out Nelly ’ere can bake bread. Good cook too. Was cookin’ the Compound . . . cakes, puddin’s ev’thing. She can do our cookin’ while the boy’s laid up.’
Again the leer: ‘That all?’ His eyes were on Nell.
Nell avoided the look, said, ‘Better I start bakin’.’ She got up, went to the sponge. Nugget leapt up, saying he’d get the flour for her, the salt. Knobby’s leer widened, and catching Queeny’s eye he winked. Queeny giggled.
Knobby tried to get Prindy to talk, but without the slightest success. Queeny put him off quizzing by saying that they’d all been hunted out of Town by McCusky pending the building of the new Settlement and were simply having a walkabout, but had lost their swags when George’s boat was wrecked. Evidently the Knowleses knew of the enforced exodus and had some of the ex-Compound residents there with them. But obviously Knobby was quizzing only for the sake of it. He scarcely took his eyes off Nell while she worked at the bread.
After a while Nugget said, ‘You left the pump runnin’.’
‘Came up see what you’s doing’.’
‘You know they won’t do anything unless one o’ us there.’
‘Wanted me smoke-o.’
‘Better get back, eh?’
‘Wha’ ’bout you?’
‘I wan’ ’o do some butcherin’ . . . big supper tonight.’
Knobby leered: ‘Thought it’s bakin’ you’s in’stead in.’
‘Might pick up some hints.’
‘Might pick up anything.’
Nugget shot him a sharp look. The leer faded. Nugget said shortly, ‘Better get back, eh? Take a billy o’ tea and a bit o’ bread and jam down to ’em.’
Knobby sighed heavily, muttered, ‘Okay, chief.’ Given the provender, he went slouching out the way he had come in. They heard the truck start up and go.
Nugget said to Prindy, ‘Well, young feller, I’ll take you back to the front verandah. Fix you a bed up out there later. Got ’o get this butcherin’ done now.’ He picked him up. Setting him down in the deck-chair again, he said, ‘There’s some readin’ matter.’ He got him an armful of catalogues, left him. Prindy glanced at some pictures, then took to staring at the radio and hummed to himself, bits of those musics he had learnt from Miss Kitty Wyndeyer.
When Nugget appeared again on the verandah it wasn’t all bloody from butchering, but shaved and scrubbed. He said, ‘Come and let me give you a bit of a bogey . . . and then you can put on new clothes . . . right?’
Prindy rode out on the man’s back. The bathroom was simply the bottom of the tank-stand screened with sewn sacks with a floor of the same material over antbed. There was a sack-screened privy close by,
to which Nugget said he would carry Prindy whenever he wanted to go. Smilingly, Prindy let Nugget wash him, with the foot kept well out of the water. Nugget looked the golden little figure over with frank admiration: ‘You’s a real well-set-up young feller, ain’t you. But you got a well-set-up Mumma, too.’ Nugget had clean clothes for himself as well. Back in the house he himself put on new elastic sides and polished them.
When, at somewhere round five, Knobby came back with the truck, in which the blacks were also riding, alighting and setting eyes on his brother, he chuckled, ‘Shows what havin’ women round the ’ouse ’ll do, eh . . . even yeller ones.’
Nugget said shortly, ‘Better go and wash yo’self.’
‘Sure,’ said Knobby. ‘Think I’m goin’ leave the lairin’ up all to you?’
His brother’s eyes snapped at him again as in the kitchen, and Knobby looked quickly away. He went in through the house, while the blacks went round to the back, King George amongst them. In the kitchen he paused, to leer at the females, done up in new floral dresses now. ‘Lookin’ real pretty, eh!’ Then, sniffing at the odours of new bread and roasting beef, he added, ‘Jees . . . that smells good!’ Then he went out and across to the shower.
Nugget came out to give the blacks beef and bread and tobacco, with which they went off to their camp. Then he fed the three dogs, one of them Mungus.
Knobby reappeared looking even smarter than his brother, being a dressier type, and even smelling of hair oil. Nugget again looked at him sharply, but made no comment on his appearance. In fact they hardly spoke, and then only of their mining, while they set up beds for the newcomers, two camp stretchers in one of the rooms off the back, and on the front verandah a small one of kerosene cases and sacks and blankets for Prindy. After that, Knobby opened up the gramophone and put on a record: Give Ale My Boots and Saddle, and grinned and winked at Prindy and tapped to the tune with a toe of his boot, while Nugget fiddled with the radio.
Then Queeny came tapping through the house, to announce in that rich contralto, ‘Supper ready.’
Nugget caught Prindy up to carry him out, telling as they went that tomorrow he would make him a pair of crutches. They reached the kitchen to find the table set for only three. ‘Wha’s this?’ demanded Nugget. The women were only waiting to be asked, but would not sit as Nugget tried to arrange it. They had set for the three males at the end remote from the stove, and now drew up cases for themselves at the other end — ‘Handy gitchim anysing,’ as Nell said. However, the gap of shyness was made up for by what was probably mostly responsible for it, Nugget’s boyish exuberance. He talked all the while, even vociferated, but with no less appreciation of the good food, evident enough from his gorging and his ceaseless reference to it: ‘Best cookin’ I ever tasted . . . dinkum! Now, ain’t that right, Knob?’ Knobby, who seemed mostly amused by the situation, judging by his constant grinning and frequent winking at the newcomers, had to agree. It certainly was a good meal. Besides two large roasts of buffalo with trimmings, there was a pie made with canned apricots, the pastry of which would do credit to a professional.
Apart from the food, talk of which included descriptions of special dishes that Nugget had tried his hand at in desperation for variety only to end up dished himself, which produced loud guffaws from his brother and giggles from the others, the subject was the Beatrice River Races, as much the central point of the lives of these two young whitemen as of Nell and Prindy: the equine champions of the years, the outstanding events, comic and tragic, the wags. Queeny had never seen the Races, having come originally from a district too remote, and ever since the Alice River affair not having been away from Port Palmeston. She showed great interest in what was said of Barbu’s business there, as if she would like to do something in the way of it herself. Also Nugget, as if talking to equals, told something of the business of himself and his brother here; or more truly his own business, since Knobby seemed to treat that as a bit of a joke as well, as indeed it might be judged. They were working a deposit of alluvial tin evidently passed over as too low-grade by former miners, but with the advantage over their predecessors of financial assistance from the Government, and the ulterior motive of founding a stock-run. This was not cattle country, at least not as a whole; but stock from the big stations further South wandered into it. The Knowleses were doing something like what the first generation of Delacys had done on the country the Knowleses’ own grandfather had been fool enough to abandon. Having a homestead lease included in their mining rights, they were collecting clean-skin beasts and branding them as their own, and getting together the makings of a herd. Not that stock was worth much at the moment. But Nugget was of the opinion that another great war was about to break out and that when it did, Vaiseys would reopen their long-closed meatworks; and of course the price of tin would rise. ‘We’ll be wantin’ staff then,’ said Nugget. ‘We’ll certainly be wantin’ a cook . . . and we’ll pay well.’ He was looking at Nell, who dropped her eyes, surely because it wasn’t as a cook he was seeing her with those wide blue ones of his. ‘That right, eh, Knob?’ Knobby answered with a nod and a leer that suggested that if he weren’t as bright as his brother in conversation business, he was more aware of the immediate facts of life.
They were still at the table when it was dark enough to make Nugget think of lighting the acetylene lamp; dark enough inside, that is, because it was bright moonlight out. He was for leaving the dishes, enamel and tin, for later, while the whole company adjourned to the front verandah to listen to the evening news and afterwards have some music. The women wouldn’t hear of it, nor of being helped. Nugget picked Prindy up again; and the three males went out to the moonlit verandah.
The radio came in with a twittering of static, which Nugget told Prindy was the voices of debil-debils flying about the sky. Prindy took it seriously, the way he quickly glanced up at Igulgul, peeping through a big woolly-butt tree just off the verandah. Then Chinese voices came in. Nugget mimicked them, causing Prindy to smile now. Nugget tuned, and got Radio Batavia and a Dutchman whom he also imitated, saying, ‘I savvy plen’y language, see.’ The Dutchman was announcing a high-class musical session. The opening bars of Wagner’s Prelude to Act 3 of Lohengrin came in.
Prindy started forward in his deck-chair with obvious interest. But Nugget said, ‘Bugger that stuff,’ and tuned it out.
A Japanese voice came in, speaking English, talking of the China Incident and the success of what he called Grorious Imperiya Japanese Army Soraja. Nugget switched him off, saying, ‘Slant-eyed bastards . . . not goin’ ’o waste the battery on them. Somebody ought ’o stop them bloody Japs. If they don’t, we’re goin’ ’o have to. We’ll wait for the news from the ABC.’ He pointed to the Evening Star, probably Venus from its brightness so near the Moon, asking, ‘Know the name that big star there?’
Prindy answered promptly, ‘Minaji.’
Nugget chuckled: ‘Real lil blackfeller, ain’t you! Ain’t nobody ever learnt you whitefeller way?’
Prindy just stared at him.
‘Never mind,’ said Nugget. ‘You stay here with yo’ Mumma, and I’ll learn you everything. We call that star the Drover’s Star. When that one goes down, you can stand camp-watch with one rider. You’re a good rider, ain’t you? I’ll make a crackerjack stockman out o’ you.’
Nugget switched on the radio again, this time to catch the marching tune, The British Grenadiers, which surely no one but an Australian would accept for what it was intended as, announcement of what the Australian Broadcasting Commission called the National News.
There was little that was national about the news, but much of international, and mostly concerned with intolerance and violence, the fratricidal war in Spain, the rape of China by the Japanese, bloody strife in Eastern Europe between Fascist and Communist, hints of terrible things happening to Jews, hatred and murder everywhere, for the betterment of the world, so each side said — the only Australian item of any interest being the statement by one of the leaders of the Commonwealt
h Government, just back from a visit to Europe and a meeting with Adolf Hitler, that he (Adolf) was truly a Great Man, the kind of man Australia needed to deal with the type calling the Great Man a Certifiable Lunatic.
‘Understand any of that?’ asked Nugget when it was over. ‘Buggered if I did. Whiteman gone proper jitty by the sound of it.’
A News Commentary was to follow, but meantime music intervened: Fantaisie Impromptu, of Chopin. Nugget was about to switch off again, when he noticed the eager leaning forward again, and stayed his hand, asking, ‘You like that kind o’ music, eh?’ Prindy was listening only to the music.
When it was over, Prindy sighed. So did the other two, but doubtless with relief, because when Nugget switched off the commentary by a man with a thick German accent, he said with enthusiasm, ‘We’ll get the gramphone goin’. We got a beaut lot o’ records.’ And Knobby fairly leapt up to get the records out of a tin trunk.
The first record was The Man on the Flying Trapeze. Nugget whistled it, while Knobby sang bits of it, both of them offbeat, but keeping time with tapping boots. ‘Like that?’ Nugget asked Prindy afterwards. Prindy was saved from answering, or not, by the arrival of his mother and Queeny. The brothers leapt up to receive them, or rather Nell, whom they ushered to a deck-chair, leaving Queeny to find a kerosene case, on which she sat with back to wall. Then Nugget put The Man on the Flying Trapeze on again. Queeny got into it now by singing it, so well that they clapped her. She said she’d had a gramophone and a lot of records, but had had to leave them behind: ‘’Cause dat bloody bastard Mick Cusky!’
Poor Fellow My Country Page 69
