Pride's Harvest

by Jon Cleary

  “Where? Here? In town? Where?” Malone, for the first time, felt a tiny lift of excitement: maybe here was someone who, after all, would talk.

  Strayhorn tied his bootlaces, got slowly to his feet; his joints cracked and he grinned. “I’m not as spry as I used to be. I’m getting on . . . I was out at the Hardstaff place the morning it happened.”

  “You were working there?”

  “I’d been there a week. I was building a coupla dams for old Sir Chester.” He looked up at Carmody. “You remember him?”

  “Not very well. I met him a few times, but I didn’t like him. He reminded me of a few dictators I’d met, only on a smaller scale.”

  “He was an arrogant old bastard, worse than his son. And he’s bad enough.”

  Canned music came drifting across from the showground beside the racecourse: carnival music, all brass and oompahpah. It and Strayhorn’s harsh comment soured the morning air.

  “Did anyone question you about the murder?” said Malone.

  “Sure they did.” He took a comb, as gap-toothed as his own gums, from a pocket and ran it through his hair and beard; it was as if he were applying respectability to himself bit by bit. “But Chess Hardstaff, the young „un, that is, he vouched for me. He said I was out at the dam at the time of the murder, that he was there with me. The police let me go. I didn’t finish the dams. Old Sir Chester paid me off, gimme more than I was entitled to, and I left town next day.”

  “Why did he pay you more than you were entitled to?”

  Strayhorn picked up the two wine bottles and put them in a thin plastic bag that had been lying under one of them. “I’m not one of them new Greenies, I always cleaned up after me long before I knew what the environment meant. Any good swaggie did . . . He paid me because I was out at the dam the time of the murder and young Chess wasn’t.”

  He stood a moment looking hard at Malone; then he picked up his old jacket and hat and clambered up the bank. Malone didn’t move, just turned his head to stare up at Carmody.

  “Did you know that, Sean?”

  “No.” Carmody took his time before he went on: “But then I don’t think anyone knew much about it. The local police didn’t send for anyone down in Sydney, not as I remember, not like they’ve done with you and the Sagawa murder.”

  Strayhorn, two or three inches taller than Carmody and looking taller because of his thinness, looked at the other old man, then down at Malone. He gave the impression that he was a man who would take his time assessing other people, would never make a rushed judgement. “You’re on that one, too, Inspector?”

  “I’m on that one on its own. The Hardstaff case is closed.”

  “Then why are you so interested in me?”

  Malone climbed the bank, stood beside Strayhorn; they were virtually the same height, but again the old man looked the taller because of his thinness. “When did you get into town?”

  Strayhorn laughed, a surprisingly robust sound. “You think I might of killed the Jap? Nah. We come into town Wednesday afternoon. I joined the carnival over in Cawndilla. I been in my fair share of brawls and stoushes, but I’m not a murderer.”

  “You said you were born here. Why did you leave? You got any family still here?”

  “I think it’s time I went to work,” Strayhorn said abruptly and turned away.

  Malone put out a hand and held his arm. “Not yet, Fred. We’ll give you a lift over to the carnival. But first, I’d like to know a little more about you and the Hardstaffs.”

  “All right. Let go my arm.” He didn’t look at either of the two men, but gazed down at the river. “I used to swim here as a kid, right at this very spot. The Noongulli. It was a much bigger river than this, once. Not in my time, though. It ran all the way down to the Murrumbidgee. The first wool crops from around here used to go down the river by boat, back in the sixties and seventies. The eighteen-sixties and - seventies, that is,” he said with a smile to Malone. “I used to dream of them days when I’d sit here as a kid. There was plenty of time for dreaming when I was young. When you’re young and when you’re old, that’s the only time for dreaming.”

  Malone waited, knowing, in some odd way, that the old man was slowly working his way round to a confession of some sort. Across the river the music had changed: the brass band was waltzing its way along “The Sidewalks of New York.” “Are they still playing that?” said Carmody in genuine wonder. “They used to play that on the merry-go-round when I was a kid.”

  “Rock’n’roll don’t sound the same on a merry-go-round,” said Strayhorn, and for a moment Malone felt outside the circle of the two old men. “There was a circus and carnival here in Collamundra the day they kicked us outa town. Only they were both closed for the day because in them days the wowsers wouldn’t let anything open on a Sunday.”

  They had now walked across to the Volvo. “They kicked you out of town?” said Malone. “Who were they?”

  “The Old Guard. Before your time, son. But you’d remember them, wouldn’t you, Mr. Carmody?”

  Carmody nodded, but a little doubtfully. “I remember the New Guard. It was one of them, a Captain de Groot, who opened the Sydney Harbour Bridge—unofficially. He was in uniform and he rode up on his horse and slashed the ribbon with his sword before Jack Lang, the Premier, had a chance to cut it with his scissors. I was nineteen then, droving sheep with my mum and dad somewhere up near Walgett, so I only read about it. It was a big story,” he said almost wistfully, as if he wished he had covered it. All his reporting experience had been overseas, he had never filed a story on an Australian event.

  “I remember de Groot,” said Strayhorn.

  The two old men were locked for a moment in a common memory and once again Malone was outside their circle.

  “That happened in March nineteen-thirty-two,” Strayhorn went on. “The Depression. Christ, them was hard times! But I’m talking about the Old Guard. The New Guard got all the publicity, they were a flash lotta fascists, but the Old Guard was the real danger. They stayed outa the papers, but they had more big names than the New Guard ever did. Plenty of knights—Sir This, Sir That. They had the money and the power and they were shit-scared they were gunna lose it!” For the first time he was showing some passion, his voice taking on an edge. “Colonial Sugar had some of their top men in it, the Bank of New South Wales lent it money, the Veterans Legion was behind it . . . Christ!” He had to stop, spittle suddenly showing on his beard round his mouth.

  Carmody looked at Malone. “Your generation probably will never understand how much fear there was of socialism and communism.”

  Strayhorn stiffened, his head coming forward on his neck, his eyes sharp with suspicion. “You didn’t feel that way, did you?”

  “Fred,” said Carmody patiently, “four years later I went to Spain to fight for the Republicans. Franco would have had me shot against a wall if I’d been captured.”

  Strayhorn stared at him, as if trying to see in this image of a wealthy squatter another, dimmer image: that of a young rebel who had fought for the socialist cause in another land. Then he nodded. “You’ll do . . . My old man was a Commo. He worked on the railways out here as a ganger and he thought Karl Marx and Lenin were direct descendants of Jesus Christ. There was him and three other railway blokes, all Communists. The Collamundra Communist Party, four men and my old man’s red kelpie. A real bloody menace to democracy, four men and a dog!” He laughed. “I was only fourteen years old then and all I can remember them doing was talk.”

  “Go on,” said Malone.

  “The Old Guard was dead scared there was gunna be a socialist revolution, especially if Jack Lang stayed in power as the Labour Premier. He was a fiery old bugger, a real autocrat, but he was for the workers. The Old Guard set up command posts all over the bush. Up in Scone, Molong, Parkes, all over the place. They had one here in Collamundra and Old Man Hardstaff—he wasn’t Sir Chester then—he was the leader. They held a meeting one Sunday in the old Legion hall, they must of got two hun
dred to it. They come into town with their guns—you’d of thought the bloody Yellow Peril was just a coupla miles out there in the mulga. It never occurred to me they was afraid of my dad and his mates, the all-mighty Collamundra Communist Party! I remember my dad reading out something to my mum from the Chronicle that week—it didn’t name Dad and his mates, but it said something about, I’ve never forgotten it, „parasites and pariahs, the scummunists.’ My old man a parasite and a pariah! Christ, nobody worked harder than a railway ganger in them days! There was none of this sharing the work like you see now, one bloke working and four overseeing him.”

  “Nobody works today,” said Carmody, another voice from the past.

  Malone, one of today’s workers, held his peace.

  Strayhorn leaned on the roof of the Volvo, as if the strength had started to leak out of him with his venom. For a moment it looked as if he was not going to say any more; then he went on, speaking more quietly now, “Anyhow, they come down, all two hundred of „em, marching down the street to the beat of a drum, to the four railway cottages down by the line. I remember the Cawndilla Mail went through, it didn’t stop here on Sundays, and the passengers leaned outa the windows and waved to those bastards with their guns. You’d of thought they were cheering off another lot of Anzacs to another war. Then Old Man Hard-staff come up to our front door, knocked on it and when my dad answered it, he told him we had ten minutes to pack everything and get outa town and never come back.”

  Malone could taste the bitterness of all those years ago. “Where were the wowsers, the ones who wouldn’t let the carnival be open on a Sunday?”

  “Most of „em, the men anyway, were there in the mob with their guns.”

  “What did you do?” asked Carmody.

  “What could we do? We packed what we could—we didn’t have much. A ganger’s wages was rock-bottom, but at least Dad had a job and we had a roof over our heads. We didn’t have much, like I said, but have you ever tried to pack up your life in ten minutes and leave the place where you were born and you’d lived all your life and never come back? My dad come from Narrabri, but my mother was born and bred in Collamundra. She never got over it. Some of the more decent blokes helped us carry what we took with us over to the line and put it on a trike, one of the hand-trolleys we used to ride on. There were three of „em and four families somehow squeezed on to „em and I stood up with my father and we worked the levers up and down and that’s how we left Collamundra. As we did, the drummer and some fellers with bugles began to play „God Save The King.’ And „Advance Australia Fair.’ Dad looked back and said, „There they go with their tunes of glory,’ and when he looked back at me he was crying, the only time in all my life I ever saw him do that.”

  He paused, tears in his own rheumy blue eyes, and the other two men stood silent while far across the river the band played a meaningless song, one that was faintly familiar to Malone but the name of which he couldn’t recall.

  After a moment he said, “What happened then?”

  Strayhorn recovered. “We went all the way down to Cawndilla. I dunno what happened to the other families, they just stopped there. Maybe they finished up down in Sydney. Commos weren’t exactly popular down there, either, but there was more of „em and nobody tried to drive them outa town.”

  “Where did you go from Cawndilla?”

  “We just went on, switching lines, and finally we finished up down in Wagga. Down there the police come and tried to arrest Dad for stealing the trike and he stood there in front of me, there was just me and him, Mum wasn’t there, and he was holding a cut-throat razor—he’d been shaving when the police come. And he said if they laid a hand on him, he’d cut his throat. And he would of, too. He’d reached the end of his tether by then. The revolution, for what it was worth, was over.”

  Malone and Carmody looked at each other, both of them with the Irish imagination for the melancholy. They saw the Strayhorns, a man and a woman and a boy, on that small railway trolley, the man and the boy working the levers up and down, the woman sitting, wrapped in misery, on their miserable belongings, travelling along the never-ending glittering tracks under the high uncaring sky, a tiny tragedy in the vast flat and pitiless landscape.

  Malone said, “What would your father think of today, in Europe and Russia?”

  Strayhorn shook his head, smiled through his beard and his memories. “I dunno. I think he’s in the best place for idealists to be—dead. We buried Dad’s illusions with him.”

  Malone, with a conscious effort, forced pity out of his mind. “Why did you take Old Man Hardstaff’s money and not tell the police the truth about where Chess was?”

  “I didn’t know where Chess was. He just didn’t turn up at the dam site to meet me, like he was supposed to. I wasn’t gunna point the finger at him.”

  “Would you now?”

  Strayhorn was suddenly cautious. “I’d have to think about it.”

  “Was Chess there that Sunday afternoon you were run out of town?”

  “Yeah, he was there. He wasn’t very old, maybe eighteen or so, I dunno, but he was there, all right. His old man told him to help us carry our things outa the house, but he made out he didn’t hear him and he walked away. He was arrogant even then.”

  “Did he recognize you when you came back to work on the dam site?”

  “No. Forty-two years had gone by. His father, he was Sir Chester by then, he had one foot in the grave. Each time I come back here, after the war, in the fifties, then again in the sixties and then in nineteen seventy-three, I never used my real name—it was too unusual, someone would of recognized it. As it was, they didn’t know me from Adam.”

  “Would anyone recognize you now?”

  “No, I’ve grown this beard in the last four or five years.”

  “So what are you planning to do?”

  “I thought I might try and bump into Chess this afternoon and tell him who I really am. It might scare the shit outa him.” He smiled at the thought, the beard opening up like a nest out of which a bird might fly at any moment, one with a sharp attacking beak. “I’ve always wondered if he knew who killed his wife.”

  “Who do you think killed her?” Malone avoided looking at Carmody.

  Strayhorn shrugged his bony shoulders. “Who knows? It might of been the bloke she was having an affair with—they said there was another man in her bed. Or there had been. Maybe both Chess and his old man knew who killed her, but they were more afraid of the scandal than they were upset by the wife’s murder. I never seen two men so wrapped up in themselves. Like father, like son. Now how about giving me that lift you promised? I better go and do some work or I’m gunna look like a modern bludger. I’m always telling the young coves over at the carnival they dunno what real work is. They don’t, do they, Mr. Carmody?”

  “It’s another world,” said Carmody, who had seen more worlds than most men but somehow didn’t look or sound totally disillusioned: he wouldn’t want his illusions buried with him. Meeting men like him, thought Malone, gives me hope.

  They got into the Volvo, Carmody swung it round and they drove back along the river track, past the blacks’ settlement where the men and women had now gathered into one large group. The young man still stood in the centre of the circle, no longer haranguing but asking questions. Beyond the adults the children were dancing to a quickstep drifting on the still air from the showground, their spindly legs shimmering like black drumsticks as they created their own dance.

  “There’ll be trouble tonight,” Carmody said again.

  Malone, turned halfway round in the front seat, noticed that Strayhorn, who had become very quiet since getting into the car, hadn’t even glanced at the settlement. He wondered if the old man now regretted having told as much as he had.

  They dropped him at the entrance to the showground. Malone said, “When does the carnival and circus leave town?”

  “We pack up Monday morning.”

  “You thinking of leaving before then?”

>   “That’d look like I’m running away, wouldn’t it?” Strayhorn’s mocking grin was evident even through his beard. “Don’t worry, Mr. Malone. I’ll be here for the rest of the weekend. Unless Chess Hardstaff runs me outa town again when I tell him who I am.”

  I’d like to be there, thought Malone. But the Hardstaff case wasn’t his concern: he had to forget it. “Take care. And stay off the grog. The lock-up is going to be full enough tonight.”

  Strayhorn tipped his hat to both of them, an old-fashioned gesture that surprised them, and went into the showground. He paused and dropped his plastic bag with its contents into an empty oil drum that doubled as a refuse bin, took off his hat to a young girl who passed him leading an elephant, and disappeared behind one of the carnival tents.

  “A dying breed,” said Sean Carmody. “My father would have finished up like that if my mother hadn’t scrimped and saved and bought some land and made him settle down.”

  “Was your dad happy when he died? Did they bury his illusions with him?”

  “I don’t know,” said Carmody, somehow not surprised at the question. “I wasn’t there to ask him. He died in November nineteen sixty-three. I was in Dallas then. You’d have been very young when Kennedy died.”

  “I was old enough to come pretty close to tears. A lot of very young people did.”

  “I cried,” said Carmody without embarrassment. “But not for Jack Kennedy, though that was sad enough. For my father. He had a dream, but I don’t think he even knew what it was. Not clearly, anyway. He envied me, I think. He was a wanderer and I got to wander much further and wider than he had ever dreamed about.”

  “A free spirit?”

  “I was never that. And I don’t think Fred Strayhorn is. He will always remember what happened to his mother and father here in Collamundra.”

  “I just wonder why he didn’t point the finger at Chess Hardstaff when he had the chance.”

  “Maybe we’ll never know how much pressure was applied to him.”