This Is the Grass

by Alan Marshall

  I took the secretary’s letter from my pocket and unfolded it.

  ‘Mr R. J. Crowther,’ I said, reading the signature.

  ‘Hell!’ exclaimed Father, looking suddenly gloomy.

  Mr R. J. Crowther was a thick-set, powerful man with round shoulders and a jutting neck that held his head in advance of his body. He was the only man employed in the office, a brick building with two rooms, and I got the impression he disliked his job, was soured by it and would like to leave. He spoke gruffly, but I could see it was a gruffness born of his own discontent and not directed against me.

  ‘You can have the job if you want it,’ he said shortly. ‘There’s no future in it. It’s temporary. We’re behind in our rate notices and I need help.’

  His eyes were not registering details of my appearance. He was concerned with his own problems and I was an interruption.

  ‘You can start in the morning,’ he said, looking at the table as if pondering the effects of such promptness on himself.

  In a moment he raised his head and studied me. His eyes became interested and he asked: ‘Where will you board? Do you live near here?’

  ‘I am going to find out if I can board at the pub,’ I said. ‘Our home is too far away for me to come over every day.’

  He shook his head and compressed his lips. ‘It’s not a very nice place.’

  I thought he meant the meals were bad.

  ‘I don’t mind what I eat,’ I assured him.

  ‘No.’ He had smiled. ‘I suppose you’ll be all right. They might be stiff in their board, though. I don’t know.’

  ‘I’ll go in now and find out.’ The hotel was next door.

  ‘All right. Let me know how you get on before you leave.’ He changed his tone. ‘That’s your father outside, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let him deal with the pub. It would be just as well for you to remain outside, I think.’

  There were three men in the bar when Father entered. He shouted for them. I watched him through the open doorway from where I sat holding the horse.

  After a while he began talking to a woman wiping glasses behind the bar counter. She listened a moment, then glanced out at me and nodded her head in some confirmation. She began talking to him at length and I felt sure she was telling the usual story of a woman she knew who had a crippled son and how this woman had ‘tried everything’ and how she had begun feeding him on yeast or something and it ‘worked wonders’.

  Or maybe she rubbed him down with a dry towel stiffened through soaking in brine and this ‘worked wonders’. Or maybe the son took sea baths each day and in six months he was walking. Father had heard many such stories.

  When he came out he climbed into the gig beside me and said: ‘Well, you’re set. She’ll let you board there for twenty-two and six a week. She wanted the twenty-five bob you’re getting but I broke her down on that. I think she’s all right. We’ll give it a go anyway. What we’ll do—we’ll drive home now and get your things and come back this afternoon. You’ll have a clean start in the morning then.’

  We drove home along a road of trees and stony creek-beds and birds, which I had not seen on my way over. I felt elated, secure, and the world was full of enchantment. It did not matter that the job was temporary, had no future. It was a stepping-stone to becoming a writer.

  Though I was studying accountancy I never regarded it as my life work. It was a way of earning a living while I learned to write. The pieces of paper I carried in my pocket did not bear definitions of Bills of Lading or Promissory Notes; they contained descriptions of people, scraps of dialogue and ideas for short stories I would one day write.

  I saw myself sitting in my spacious hotel room writing when all others were asleep. It was this picture that was beautifying the world for me.

  The room, when I saw it, was like a box. Father had carried in my bag on our return in the afternoon, and had left me with a pat on the shoulder. I sat on the iron bedstead with its sagging mesh and thin, worn blankets and looked around me.

  The single bed almost filled the entire room. It stood against a side wall, its head beneath a dirty window. Through the window I could see a back veranda littered with an old stretcher, cases of empty beer-bottles, barrels, a rusty meat-safe and untidy heaps of straw.

  A stained pine wardrobe beside the bed partly obscured the window and filled the space between the head of the bed and the far wall. At the other end of the room a washstand was jammed against the end of the bed. A kerosene lamp with a smoked glass stood on the washstand beside a porcelain basin decorated with red roses.

  A tattered scrap of rug lay on the linoleum-covered floor. In front of the doorway the linoleum had worn away, uncovering a half moon of splintered floorboards to menace bare feet. The room was filled with the damp, mouldy smell of confinement and disuse.

  I could never write here. I felt depressed and stepped out into the passageway confronting my door and running the full length of the hotel. A number of doors opened off this passage. Those to the left led into bedrooms, those to the right to the hotel’s public rooms.

  The first one to the right opened into the kitchen from where I heard the sound of voices. A man and a woman were talking together.

  ‘If I’d known that before he’d never have touched me,’ the woman was saying.

  As I walked past the doorway the man hailed me. ‘Good day,’ he called.

  I turned and went into the room. A huge wood stove, upon which rested a number of saucepans, threw out heat from a brick-lined recess let into the wall. A table in the centre was covered with cooking utensils and vegetables awaiting attention. On the ceiling, dust and fluff sealed by smoke and steam formed a thin, dark fur that a finger could have grooved with a stroke. The air was heavy with the breath of a stock-pot steaming on the stove. High on one of the walls a picture of Carbine pleaded against obscurity behind a film of oily grime.

  ‘How’re ya goin’?’ I greeted the man.

  ‘Not bad,’ he grinned. ‘Can’t complain.’

  He was standing at the table peeling potatoes. He was a short, swarthy man with bright, interested eyes, and would have been about twenty-five years of age. His black hair was unbrushed. He had no teeth and his lips sloped back into his mouth. His nose hung down over his upper lip, forming with his jutting chin a pair of soft mandibles.

  The striped, cotton shirt he wore was opened to the waist revealing a hairy, brown chest beaded with sweat. He did not wear a singlet. His trousers hung precariously from the loose, leather belt around his waist. Their tattered cuffs had slipped over the backs of his boots to the floor so that he trod on them with his heels every step he took.

  In the months that followed I got to know him well. His name was ‘Gunner’ Harris. He was a petty thief from Melbourne, a pickpocket, who, between periods in the hands of the police, worked on a pie-cart that stood on the corner of Elizabeth and Flinders Streets.

  ‘The coppers picked me up and gave me twenty-four hours to get out,’ he explained to me once. ‘That’s why I’ve buried myself in this joint.’

  He had lost his false teeth a few weeks before my arrival.

  ‘I was a couple of days on the grog and I threw them up on the grass somewhere out in the paddock at the back. Now I can’t find the place. Funny . . . You’d think a bloke could go straight to them.’

  This first meeting with him gave me the impression of a different type of man to the man he was. The picture I had of a pickpocket presented a well-dressed, sharp-faced man with the hands of a pianist. Gunner’s hands were not slender; they were square, the fingers wide apart.

  I concluded as I looked at him that he was a simple, kindly fellow born in some poor Melbourne suburb and driven out here through lack of work.

  The woman had been watching me with eyes that must have looked with such appraisal at scores of men. They missed nothing, understood everything.

  She was about forty with a full, rich figure that provocatively resisted the confin
ement of her tight cotton frock. Her eyes were steady and speculative. They contained no warmth. How many betrayals had hardened them? What had they seen in the faces of men that gave them the wariness of a creature about to pounce on food?

  Yet she was pretty. Her smile was attractive.

  She was the cook and her name was Rose Buckman. Her husband had left her. (‘You can’t hold a man in his forties unless he’s frightened of you.’)

  ‘You’re the chap that’s going to work next door, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Born in the bush?’

  ‘Yes.’ I smiled at that.

  ‘Well, I suppose you’ve got to come out some time.’ She cut the pastry hanging over the edge of the pie-dish with quick hands and put the dish into the oven.

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked Gunner.

  I told him.

  ‘How are you on the grog?’ he asked, grinning at me. He threw back his head, raised his hand and emptied an imaginary glass of beer down his throat.

  ‘I don’t come at it,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll soon fix that here,’ he said. He lifted a dish of peeled potatoes and walked over to the sink to wash them. He turned on the tap and looked back at me while he waited. ‘We’ll soon fix that here, lad.’

  ‘What about girls?’ asked Rose, returning to the table. ‘Have you got a girl?’

  The question confused me. My cheeks grew hot and I looked away from her.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘I think we’ll put him on to Maisie,’ she said to Gunner. They laughed together in some secret enjoyment.

  Their interest turned to the girl. ‘When is she coming up again, do you know?’ she asked Gunner.

  ‘On Friday, she told me. Another bunny this time.’

  ‘That’s Maisie. . . . She never knows when she’s on a good thing.’

  I left them and walked down the passage towards the front, passing the dining-room, the lounge with its voices and laughter, and finally the bar. The floor of the passage was uneven and in places gave to my tread as if the supports below had long rotted away.

  Outside, a veranda extended the width of the wooden building and here, too, the floorboards were uneven and decayed. The veranda windows were painted green with the word ‘Bar’ upon them in gold. Men were sitting on the two benches beneath the windows. They were resting between drinks while waiting for the arrival of someone who would shout for them. A couple of dogs lay at their feet. Through the doorway of the bar came a babble of men’s voices.

  A couple of gigs, some wood-drays and wagons and a buggy stood on the gravelled area in front of the hotel. The horses in their shafts stood with drooping heads and half-closed eyes in the summer sun. Some cars had nosed in amongst them and came to rest with their radiators facing the veranda. Beside one of the cars a saddled horse was tethered to the post.

  To the side of the veranda was a gateway into the hotel yard. The gate, weatherbeaten and broken, had been pushed open and was lying half on its side, one hinge still leg-roping it to the post. Long, dry grass concealed its bottom rail, leaning over and covering it protectively from the sun and rain.

  A number of Muscovy ducks lived in the yard. They watched me walk through the gateway, thrusting their heads forward and back in a jerking fashion as they moved away from me. Fowls pecked at the straw and the dry cow-dung littering the yard.

  A long, thatched stable barred the way to the paddocks beyond. It was built of upright slabs hewn with a broadaxe from the huge trees that once had grown where it now stood. The squared supporting beams rested on the forks of thick, sapling trunks sunk into the ground. Time had weakened their grip on the earth so that they all leaned drunkenly to one side away from the prevailing winds. The whole structure seemed about to collapse with the weight of its thatch, from which grass had grown, seeded and died. A cow stood chewing its cud in front of the divided stable door, the top half of which was open. From inside I could hear the munching of horses.

  Beside the stable an enclosure of rusty iron bore the word ‘Gentlemen’ painted in white on its side.

  All that I was seeing was strange and new. It was intensely interesting, like the opening pages of a history book that hinted at adventure in unexplored country.

  And yet the bush in which I spent my childhood was to me the natural beginning of a future; here was the unworthy end of a past.

  The people in the hotel had reached an end, too, I thought, just as unworthy as these neglected, decaying buildings. Yet it was the setting that had the voice I wished to hear, not the people, to whom I was still alien. The conversation in the kitchen had been held across a fence, and I had no desire to cross it and enter their bare, muddy paddock.

  I felt happy out here with the ducks and the horses that had always been part of my life. I felt a reluctance to return to the hotel.

  I took out my note-book and pencil and sat on the ground to write, but I became lost in mind-created stories I couldn’t put down, and when I rose to go in to tea there were only two sentences added to my notes:

  ‘The Muscovy ducks were white as snow. Dirt never clings to the wings of birds.’

  3

  I walked to the front of the hotel where the coach from Morella had just arrived. Morella was a township eight miles away, the nearest railhead to Wallaby Creek and the terminus for the coach that carried passengers down to the train each day from its base at the hotel. It returned in the evening, its passengers laden with parcels they had purchased in Melbourne.

  It was a weather-beaten vehicle full of protesting creaks and knocks, and carried eight passengers, two of whom sat beside the driver on the front seat. It was drawn by two horses and it was these that interested me as they stood with their flanks heaving from the heavy pulling of the journey. There were a number of steep hills between Wallaby Creek and Morella, and I decided these horses were too light for the task. I walked round them. They were sweating heavily and the sweat was running down their sides and collecting in rows of black drops along their bellies. The ground beneath them was spattered with their sweat.

  One of the horses had struck itself and was bleeding from the fetlock. ‘Badly shod,’ I thought. ‘The blacksmith round here doesn’t study a horse.’ The other horse had poor shoulders and was far too leggy. It was blowing through distended nostrils and its head was down. They were each resting a back leg.

  I wished Father were with me to discuss them. My mind was already constructing a description of them for his benefit and I thought: ‘I must get home as often as I can.’

  The driver was saying good-bye to his passengers, farmers’ wives mostly, who set off walking down the road towards their homes. They all seemed to like him. They smiled, and waved and called out: ‘Good-bye, Arthur.’ He looked after them and I felt he was worried over the weight of the parcels they carried.

  He was like a whip—long and flexible and tough. He had thick, wiry hair, heavy eyebrows, and walked like my father, lightly, with erect back and short, quick steps. He turned and looked at me, but didn’t speak, though he hesitated a moment before climbing on to the box-seat. I watched him drive into the hotel yard, where he stabled his horses, then went into the hotel.

  The passageway was blocked. Four people, two men and two girls, were standing before the narrow table that stood pushed against the passage wall near the lounge door. The men were signing a book that lay on the table. I stood and waited. The proprietress of the hotel, Flo Bronson, whom I had not yet met, was asking them the set question she put to all her visitors arriving after hours:

  ‘Have you travelled over twenty miles from where you slept last night?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied the man signing the book, ‘I have but I can’t say I slept very well. Here, George . . .” he turned to his companion, ‘put your name on the dotty line and let’s go get a drink. You sign too,’ he said to the girls.

  The two girls were facing each other exchanging meaningless remarks to cover some excitement they were sharing. The
y took the pen and wrote their names in the book.

  The popularity of the hotel was due to the fact that it was twenty-eight miles from Melbourne and drink could be served to any city visitor provided he signed a book certifying he was a bona fide traveller and had come over twenty miles from his last sleeping place.

  The four visitors walked into the lounge and I was left with Flo Bronson. She was a stout woman who gurgled with laughter even while discussing serious things. As I got to know her I learned her laughter had little to do with happiness. Once she had been wealthy, owned a big hotel at Bendigo, had shares in a racehorse and travelled round in a car to all the big race-meetings.

  This period still existed as a reality to her and it was the laughter born then that remained with her now. Aimed at giving an impression of gaiety and vivacity in the days when she was young and men attainable, it accompanied her into middle age, a habit that might once have charmed but now left men unmoved. The showy rings upon her fingers, the clothes more suitable to youth, the bleached hair—these remained as denials of her decline.

  She was a gambler and drank heavily. When she was drunk, some vicious temper in her began to simmer and simmer beneath her smiles. It rose slowly as she drank, flushing her face, then showing in her eyes that began to look with suspicion on all who spoke to her, seeing insults and contempt where none existed. When she felt she had found the barbed thrust which she had been seeking, her face switched instantaneously from the soft lines of laughter to a hard, bitter inflexibility.

  Even now, confronting her smiles and her warm, brown eyes, I sensed the bitterness behind them.

  “Well!’ she said. ‘How do you like your new job? No, of course—what am I saying . . .? You haven’t started yet, have you?’