The Complete Stories of Alan Marshall

by Alan Marshall

  ‘“Listen, you bloody fat bastard”, I yelled at him, “I’m sober now. Come out here on the grass and let me cut you down to size.”

  ‘“Not me, not me, Peter. I’m not that bloody stupid. You’d paste hell out of me when you’re sober. I’d never fight you when you’re sober.”

  ‘“Look here”, I said. “You fought me down at the pub when I could hardly stand on my feet. Come out here now, you mongrel.”

  ‘“Look, Peter. I fought you because you were drunk. I’m not bloody well mad. If I came out there you’d give me a hiding. What sort of bloody fool do you think I am? No! I’d only fight you when you’re drunk. I’ve got a chance then. But anyone who takes you on sober—well—he’s asking for trouble. Let’s forget it.”

  ‘“Well, I’ll go to buggery!”

  ‘“You can go there too, but by hell you’re not taking me with you. I’m stopping here.”

  ‘“You haven’t got the guts of a louse”, I said to him. “You’re a cowardly bastard.”

  ‘“Yes, that’s right. I’m a cowardly bastard when it comes to fighting you sober.”

  ‘Well, what could I do. There he was amongst his cows; I’d have to wade through a foot of cow shit to get at him.’

  ‘“Where did you pick up that white horse down the paddock?” I asked him.

  ‘“I bought him at the sale last week. I gave a fiver for him.”

  ‘“What’s he like as a hack?”

  ‘“Never had better. I tell you, I’ve never had better. You never move in the saddle. He’s like a rocking horse.”

  ‘“I’m looking for a hack like that. Is he quiet?”

  ‘“Like a lamb, that’s what he is. Like a lamb.”

  ‘“What’ll you take for him?” I asked.

  ‘“Look, Peter, seein’ as how I should never have hopped into you while you were drunk, you can have him for what I gave for him—a fiver—an’ that’s dirt cheap.”

  ‘So he came out and caught him, and threw in a halter, and I paid him and led him home. I haven’t had a proper look at him yet. I’ve just run him in.’

  We sat in silence looking at the white horse tethered to the fence.

  ‘Did you look at his mouth?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. He’s rising five.’

  ‘He’ll never see five again, Mr McLeod’, I said, then I added, ‘I don’t think he’s much of a horse.’

  ‘Why, what’s wrong with him?’ asked Peter aggressively.

  ‘Well, he’s down in the hocks, he’s hollow backed and he’s got a ewe neck.’

  ‘That’s enough’, roared Peter with sudden anger. ‘Shut up, will ya.’

  I shut up.

  After a while Peter got up and walked round the horse. He spat on the ground, then leant on its rump while he scratched his beard.

  ‘Of course’, he said. ‘I hadn’t sobered up properly when I left the pub. I wasn’t quite right in the head. That bastard, Charlie, belted me when I was drunk and then ends up by robbing me when I’m sober. I tell you this. That bastard is a proper bastard.’

  He paused a moment. ‘Now get to hell out of here.’

  Jimmy Virtue

  I wasn’t allowed to go near the pub. I didn’t know why. I was five and I knew a lot about pubs. Father had told me stories of outback pubs where men wearing white moleskin trousers and riding boots would come out of the bar singing, and jump on horses that bucked all over the place. I often thought of these men. They yelled out ‘Wild Cattle’ while their horses were bucking and they could all fight like threshing machines. I wanted to be like them when I grew up.

  Jimmy Virtue didn’t ride bucking horses. But that didn’t matter with him. I liked him because he could climb trees better than any other man. I knew this because Mr Smith told me. Mr Smith lived in a wheelchair and he was all twisted. His hands curved round until the fingers were hooked like soft claws, and he would never be able to straighten them again in all his life. I couldn’t see his legs because he had a possum-skin rug over them but he could tell stories just as good as my father.

  He would throw back his head and laugh at his stories, but his teeth needed cleaning. He wrote articles about birds for the papers. He used to teach me about birds, but he was no good on horses.

  He used to go for drives in a phaeton. They wheeled his chair up the back, and he would sit in it all the day. Jimmy Virtue pushed his chair into the phaeton and then he would drive him where he wanted to go.

  They used to look for parrots’ and owls’ nests in hollow limbs so high up it made you giddy to look down. But Jimmy Virtue could climb up to them. He climbed up on a rope and put his hand down the hollow limbs and pulled out eggs to show to Mr Smith, then he would put them back again.

  Mr Smith told me Jimmy never broke an egg, and when he pulled out baby parrots he held them the right way, and he would never crush them by holding them tight. He was a good man, and Mr Smith liked him, and so did I.

  I was standing near our fence one day, and Jimmy Virtue came walking towards me. He nearly fell over several times. His legs didn’t work properly. They carried him from one side of the path to the other. He stopped near me and hung over the fence. He vomited. His face was twisted. He looked as if he was going to cry. He suddenly flung back his head and cried out, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no! . . .’

  I fled inside to my mother and hid my face in her black apron. I lifted my face to her and sobbed, ‘Jimmy Virtue can’t walk straight and he’s hanging on our fence calling out No, no, no, no.’

  Mother looked out the window while she held me against her.

  ‘Poor Jimmy Virtue’s sick’, she said.

  ‘Why don’t you bring him inside and put him to bed?’ I pleaded.

  ‘He’ll get better soon. Don’t think about it.’

  You told me not to think about it, mother.

  Why then does Jimmy Virtue come to my room now that I am old? Why does he stagger in the dark, a symbol of all sickness, echoing my own thoughts with his terrible No, no, no, no. There is no black apron to shield me now.

  Elsie

  My sister, Elsie, was very beautiful. There were always stars in her sky but she never noticed them; the sun under which she walked was too bright.

  She knew all about poetry but bugger-all about horses. If I said to her, ‘That horse has greasy heels’, she would say, ‘Yes’, and that was the end of it. When it came to horses she was as dumb as they come, but as Joe said, ‘You can’t have everything.’

  Joe pumped the church organ for her when she was practising. She liked playing the pipe organ. The handle at the back of the organ was like that on a blacksmith’s forge and Joe lent his elbow on it and pushed it up and down like Mr Thomas.

  He told me once he would only do it for Elsie and for no one else.

  ‘You see, I am a Catholic’, he explained, ‘and I’d get into a power of trouble if Father Guiness heard about it.’

  ‘To hell with Father Guiness!’ I exclaimed.

  Joe shied away from me when I cursed priests. He thought he’d be struck by a bolt from heaven or something, standing close to me like that.

  Joe was strong on righteousness. He liked Elsie but he thought Jeanie McLean had gone too far when she had a miscarriage after having had two babies to other men.

  I was a bit vague about the miscarriage business. Anything to do with carriages always suggested horses to me, but I did know Jeanie McLean was a bad girl. Everybody said that.

  She used to come to our place once a week with a lot of others from the church to practise songs for a church concert. Elsie used to play the piano and they would all gather round it. There was Fred and George Black, Minnie Sturgess, Ida Foster, Bill Atkins, Robert Barnes and three other girls who were members of the church choir.

  They must have been pretty good because, once when they were singing Irish songs, Paddy Flynn, he was an Irish man and he was sitting in the kitchen with Dad listening to the singing from the front room, he said—and I heard him myself—‘I tell ye, Bill, it
tears the heart out of me to hear the voices of them. They sing like bloody angels; by hell they do.’

  I think it was Jeanie McLean whose voice tore the heart out of him because she was a hell of a good singer. Her voice was soft and gentle but you could always hear it somehow.

  One night I was sitting in the front room listening to them singing when Jeanie suddenly knocked off and sat down. Later on she took Elsie aside and said, ‘I don’t feel very well, Elsie. I’ve pains in the stomach. I think I’ll have to go home.’

  Elsie was concerned. ‘Wait until I get you a cup of tea, Jeanie. I won’t be a minute.’

  Jeanie followed her into the kitchen and drank it out there while Elsie stood watching her with a troubled face. When she had gone Elsie said to mother, ‘I hope she’s all right.’

  I thought she looked all right. Elsie used to worry over nothing. Next day mother told Elsie that Jeanie had had a baby that night. The doctor drove four miles in the middle of the night to help her have it—the doctor’s horse is a bay with white points—but she didn’t really have a baby at all; she had a miscarriage, which is quite different according to Joe who had heard his mother talking about it. With a miscarriage you are the same as you were before although you feel crook.

  Elsie got a letter next day. It was delivered by Jeanie’s brother, a little bloke with a tooth out in the front. He delivered it because if it had gone through the Post Office Miss Armitage would have opened and read it. Miss Armitage was like that.

  When Elsie read Jeanie’s letter it said, ‘Would you come and see me. I’d love to talk to you.’

  Elsie didn’t want to go; she was afraid. She’d heard someone say that Jeanie McLean had had a baby but it died. Mother thought she ought to go. ‘She is a sad girl’, mother said.

  So Elsie walked to Jeanie’s place and knocked at the door. Mr McLean opened it. He was a thin man like a drover’s dog, but he had a face that had been out in the wind and rain a lot. It was a good face. Elsie told him she had come to see Jeanie.

  ‘Yes, yes’, he said. ‘She’s in the bedroom. Go in to her.’

  Elsie walked down the passage and went into a little bedroom like a box. It was lined with tongued and grooved boards, and the bed nearly filled it. But there was a chair there. Jeanie was sitting on the edge of the bed with a dressing-gown on.

  ‘I’m glad you came’, she said to Elsie. Elsie sat down on the chair. ‘I suppose you’ve heard about me’, Jeanie said.

  Elsie said something but Jeanie went on. ‘I wanted to talk to you, Elsie, because Johnnie McPhee told me you had gone through the same experience. You went away for a holiday, didn’t you?—You know, about three months ago. When Hughie James came to see me, he told me he’d heard about it.’ Elsie stood up. She couldn’t think clearly. She kept saying, ‘It’s a lie, it’s a lie!’

  Jeanie stopped when she saw her face and she talked about something else. But it was too late to do anything about Elsie.

  East Driscoll

  Sometimes in the dead of night I would awake to the sound of horse’s hooves pounding the roadway past our home. I would sit up in bed and look hurriedly out of the window and wait for the yells that always heralded this rider’s passing. The yells were an accompaniment to the hoof beats, the trumpet calls above the roll of drums. They laced the sound into one wild melody, the untamed cry of a moonlit night.

  It was a sound that quickened the heart beats of people in sleeping houses and goaded the village dogs into a frenzied barking.

  ‘Yah-hoo-oo-oo-oo-oo. Ho, ho, ho, ho. Whoo-oo-oo-oo-oo!’

  Some awakened husband would mutter to his wife, ‘East Driscoll’s on the booze again’, then turn over and return to sleep. The wives remained awake staring into the dark while they remembered his provocative eyes, his grin, his lithe flexible body and his swagger. He had flashed messages past their husbands’ heads to all of them at one time or another.

  Dad once said to me, though I didn’t understand what he meant until years later, ‘A good rider on a good horse takes from the horse the virility and vigour of the animal and makes it his own. A man riding easily on a free-striding horse is a bigger man than when he is on the ground. Women think that he is all they have missed.’

  East Driscoll was the local horse-breaker. He dressed in white corduroy riding trousers, held in place with a broad leather belt fastened by a buckle of silver in the form of a horse-shoe framing a horse’s head. He wore Gillespie’s Elastic Sided Boots and a white shirt and had a red cotton handkerchief knotted around his neck. His hat had a broad brim and he wore it pulled to one side. His eyes were bright and eager and laughter lurked in them. The women thought he was handsome and when he rode past them, sitting loosely and easily to the movements of a horse walking proudly, the women dropped their eyes before his glance.

  But he was a larrikin. He obeyed no rules. He had a contempt for authority and went on wild benders when he felt like it.

  He had a stockyard with an eight-foot high post and rail fence beside his house on the outskirts of Turalla. I would climb up on this fence and sit on the top rail and watch him breaking in horses brought to him by farmers who had neither the time nor the skill to break them in themselves.

  To me he represented freedom and I always looked at him with a feeling of admiration. Elsie thought he looked like a God with the spirit of a horse.

  ‘He’s not only a good rider’, Dad said. ‘He’s a good horseman, and that is rare.’

  I often sat on the fence and watched him handling a horse on a lunging rein. He always talked to the horse he was handling. ‘Steady, old boy, steady. Easy does it. Lift those legs. Hup! Hup! Steady, steady.’

  Father once told me a well-handled horse never bucks, but there were times when East felt a need to display his skill as a rider. Then he would mount a horse not quite prepared for it. He was a balance rider, pivoting in the stirrups while the horse bucked beneath him. He never lost control of his head. It moved easily above him, never jerking free from his hold. He anticipated every buck before it happened and met it with responses from his body that went with the horse in every violent, grunting effort to unseat him.

  Dust would rise from the hooves of the plunging horse. Men, driving milk carts laden with cans, would pull up on the roadway and yell encouragement from their milk-stained seat on the dashboard of the wagon. ‘Into him, East. Stick to him. You got him.’

  Dad told me that this was East Driscoll’s one weakness. ‘He sometimes rides for the gallery and never thinks of the horse. He’s building up his reputation at the expense of the horse, but he’s pretty to watch isn’t he?’

  When East Driscoll went on a bender he always dressed up for the occasion. His white trousers were freshly washed; his boots shone with polish. His shirt was ironed and clean and his red handkerchief was perfectly knotted. He rode the best horse amongst those he was breaking and he rode through the village on his way to the pub at Turalla, acknowledging with a wave of his hand the greetings of all those he met. I would climb on to our gate while Elsie stood behind me to watch him pass.

  Ah! Those eyes, that cheeky grin that promised quick kisses in the grip of powerful arms!

  One afternoon he was riding a half-broken colt with a wicked eye and a nervous temperament. It veered sideways; it propped and snorted at a limb on the road or sprang sideways like a cat. It walked uncertainly, reefing at the bit, and lowering its head to snort at shadows on the road.

  ‘A dangerous horse to go drinking on’, father said.

  That night I lay in bed awake and looked out into the moonlight and watched the trees thrash in the rising wind. It was a restless, unsettled night, with gusts of wind that lifted the dust beyond my window and sent dead gum leaves hurrying like demented little people along the road. I was lying awake waiting for the sound of hooves and the wild yells of East returning to his home; but I fell asleep before he passed.

  He didn’t pass at all that night. Early next morning a farmer, driving cattle along the road in the h
alf-dark, saw a riderless horse grazing by the side of the road. He could just see something hanging in the stirrup leather. He hurried over to the horse, then approached it quietly and held its head. East Driscoll’s foot was caught in the stirrup and he hung downwards like a bloody rag with his head and shoulders on the ground. His face and head were badly battered. The white shirt was half torn from his body. He was limp, loose, his legs bent unnaturally, one arm flayed from the grind of metal. The farmer carried him to his wagon and took him to the hospital. He was unconscious for three weeks. One of his legs was pulled out of joint; one of his arms was broken; he had a fractured skull; his face was torn; his teeth broken; his mouth out of shape.

  He had left the pub about midnight, they said. He took a long while to mount his horse, but men helped him on to the saddle and he lurched away into the night singing ‘There is a tavern in the town.’ They heard him urge the horse into a gallop, then the night closed round him. Somewhere along the road he was thrown and his foot caught in the stirrup. What happened in the mad gallop that followed no one knew, but he had been dragged for hours until the exhausted horse stopped and began grazing on the long grass near the Pejark Creek.

  For the next month everyone fought beside him for his life. They suffered with him. He survived, and I saw him walking round his stockyard again; but he did not laugh or joke anymore. He sometimes looked round vaguely as if striving to remember. There was no spring in his walk; though he continued riding horses he sat heavily upon them.