The Complete Stories of Alan Marshall

by Alan Marshall

  ‘East Driscoll is not the man he was’, said a farmer. ‘Half the time he’s not there. A bloody shame isn’t it?’

  Joe’s Home

  You passed into Joe’s backyard through a gap in a box-thorn hedge. The hedge was high and thick and surrounded the house with a barrier of thorns that in the spring were concealed beneath a cloak of red berries. If you squeezed one of these red berries its inside came out, a soft inside of yellow seeds.

  In this protected, sheltered yard were fowls and ducks and geese and a couple of turkeys, but a fox took the turkeys one night when they roosted too low on the grey box-tree. Joe reckoned the foxes jumped ten feet to get them, but I don’t. I think they scratched their way up the trunk and grabbed the turkeys by the necks then jumped down with them.

  The fowls were French fowls Joe’s mother told me. French fowls are different to all other fowls and are rare. They look as if they turned their backs to a strong wind and their feathers were blown backwards. I feel sorry for French fowls.

  You took a turn to walk behind the house after you passed through the opening in the box-thorn hedge. The eel post was sunk into the ground here. It was a post with the head of a big nail sticking out near the top and we used it for skinning the eels we caught in Emu Creek. We’d hang them on the nail by pushing the gash we had cut at the back of their neck around the head of the nail, then with a pocket knife we began to skin them.

  When you managed to lift the first quarter-inch of skin from the eel, you rubbed the palms of your hands in the dust so as to make them dry, then you grabbed the eel and began pulling downwards until the skin began to unroll from the body. You kept on until you pulled it down over its tail like a glove.

  We caught a lot of eels in the creek and often used the post. You gutted them after you skinned them and threw the guts to the ducks. Ducks will eat anything. We always kept the bladders which the eels use to keep them up in the water. We dried the bladders in the sun. They were hard to bust. You could squeeze them with your fingers but they still didn’t bust. You had to jump on them to bust them.

  Joe’s mother often watched us with her thin, sad face. She was a short, tired woman who sometimes lowered her head as if expecting a blow from God. She was always singing without words. She hummed as she washed in the tubs which were made of half a barrel. You left the suds in them so they wouldn’t shrink. When the suds were cold flies fell in them. Flies were everywhere. You couldn’t keep them off your face. I often looked down on the drowned flies. After they’d been drowned about two days their eyes went red.

  Joe and I would sometimes fish out a fly that had just drowned. We’d put it on a sheet of paper then cover it in dry salt. The salt would suck all the water out of it and it would come alive again. Joe reckoned it might be good to do that if one of us got drowned—that’s if we could get enough dry salt. I wouldn’t like to chance it. It would be too bloody risky.

  There was a lean-to at the back of the house. On one side was Joe’s and Andy’s room—he was Joe’s little brother—and on the other was where Bill slept. He was a big brother—he must easily have been twenty. You stepped up into the kitchen where everybody sat round the stove on a winter’s night. There was a kitchen table with a form along the wall where the kids sat.

  Mrs Carmichael was always working. In the mushroom season we would bring her buckets of mushrooms and she would spread them out on the table and sprinkle them with salt. In the morning beads of water would be sitting on the gills like pearls. She would boil them then and make mushroom ketchup.

  She had a Coolgardie safe out on the back porch and it kept the butter hard in the summer, but no matter what you did the meat often got blown. I’ve never seen a woman take meat out of a safe without smelling it all over. If it had just been blown there was a little pile of maggots and you could brush these off, but it was harder when they’d burrowed in. Most women used to wash the meat with vinegar to freshen it up. My mother didn’t like flies but Joe’s mother was used to them—the ducks and geese brought them.

  Flies were just as thick in the house as they were outside. Milk jugs were covered with a little net covering hung with beads to keep it in place. Flies fell into your cup of tea. You fished them out with your spoon and plonked them on the saucer. I hated drinking tea that flies had drowned in.

  Jam dishes were traps for flies and they got their legs stuck then crawled out covered in jam. We had net covers for every jam dish.

  One of the things we used to catch flies was a sticky sheet called tanglefoot. The sheets came stuck together so you could buy them without making your hands sticky, but when you pulled them apart they were held together for a while by long strands of stuff like cobwebs that kept breaking until the two sheets were free and then you had two sheets of tanglefoot. You laid them flat on the dresser or the table or on top of the safe, but you were never to put them on a chair. Flies used to land on them and buzz themselves to death. When the sheets became so thick with flies and seemed alive with buzzing wings, they were finished. Then you burnt them. If you wanted to catch fleas with tanglefoot, you spread sheets under your bed and fleas used to hop on to them and get stuck there.

  Sometimes the cat jumped on to the table and landed in the middle of the tanglefoot. When it did this it never waited to have a look around to see what had happened, but it took off like a cracker. But the sheets held its feet and it used to land skew-whiff on the floor and skid and fall on the bloody stuff. Then it turned some somersaults and made out through the door with the tanglefoot wrapped around it. There was always hell to pay when a cat got stuck. The more she tried to tear herself loose, the worse she made herself. The only way to remove the sheets was to run out after her and throw a bag over her. Then you grabbed the bag and sat on the end of it. You unfolded it gradually until you could see a bit of fur, then you would clip her with a pair of horse clippers while you held her down. Afterwards she would dart away and hide under the marshmallows and we wouldn’t see her for a couple of days. Anyway, I didn’t like looking at her after that. She always looked horrible. Cats were never made to be clipped.

  Joe’s father, Tom Carmichael, was a short man with a sandy moustache. He rode every morning to Mrs Carruthers’s place where he worked. Every autumn he joined up with Mick Hanrahan and the two of them put in and bought a pig—there were no flies about then. It was never a very big pig, but it died just as horribly as a gigantic pig. They bought it to kill to turn into bacon.

  There was something about seeing a pig being killed that made you feel like a rabbit must feel when a snake sways in front of it. You wanted to bolt away and hide in long, quiet grass. But you couldn’t; you stayed and watched every horrible detail and for ever afterwards you never forgot them.

  Joe reckoned that since we didn’t become friends with the pig it made it easier to see it die, but I don’t think it made any difference at all.

  They began preparing for the killing a week or so before. In the backyard they put a couple of iron rails on supports of bricks and cut enough wood to be able to keep a fire going for a few hours. Everyone had kerosene buckets in those days. They cut the top off a kerosene tin, then punched two holes—one on each side but dead centre—through which they hooked some wire and curved it to make a handle. Each kerosene tin bucket held four gallons of water. There was room on these iron railings to place four of these buckets side by side, and early one Saturday morning in the autumn, when the weather was cool, they built the fire and filled the tins with water. It took some time to get them all boiling.

  They had been feeding the pig up for a couple of days and it always looked fat and healthy.

  While the four-gallon kerosene tins were heating up to the boil, attended by Mrs Carmichael and Mrs Hanrahan, Tom Carmichael had made the scrapers from pieces of hoop iron. These were curved with a piece of bagging tied at each end to give a firm grip and everything was ready for the big scrape.

  Joe’s father used to say that to make good bacon a pig must be properly bled. To
do this they ‘stick’ it with a long knife and its heart would then pump all the blood out of it. The pig didn’t make any fuss after it had been ‘stuck’.

  Since neither Mick Hanrahan nor Tom Carmichael had a tub big enough in which to scald a pig, they had a strong kitchen table standing near the boiling water. Mick Hanrahan would loop the thin rope round the pig’s hind leg, just above the hock. Then the Hanrahan kids, Joe, Andy and me would haul on the rope like sailors and drag the pig up to the feet of Mick Hanrahan standing with his axe.

  The screams of the pig as it was dragged up to be killed were terrible to hear. I used to think they knew, but Dad told me they didn’t.

  When the pig was in the right position, Mick Hanrahan would bring the back of the axe down on the centre of its forehead and it would fall stunned to the ground. As soon as he did this, Tom Carmichael would leap forward with his ‘Sticking’ knife and ‘stick’ the knife into its heart just in front of the brisket bone. He had to be quick before the pig recovered its senses. Then it would shake its head, get to its feet, give a puzzled grunt, then walk round while great spurts of blood came forth to the rhythm of a heart beat from the small hole in its lower neck. If it wasn’t well bled, the meat wouldn’t keep.

  After a while the pig stopped walking and stood a moment looking at the world. Then it staggered—the blood was not coming so fast now. Then it suddenly fell to its side, gave a few convulsive kicks, then lay still. The two men would go down and grab a hind leg each and drag it back to the table where they lifted it on to the table, lying on its side. It was the women’s job to pour the boiling water on to the pig. It had to be scalded before it could be scraped.

  Mrs Hanrahan, who was a big woman, took the first lift of the boiling water, but they had to be very careful they did not spill it on anyone. She poured the scalding water over the carcass and handed the half bucket to Mrs Carmichael while she walked over to the fire to get another one.

  When the pig was drenched by the scalding water, Mick Hanrahan and Tom Carmichael drew the scrapers against the lean of the hair and the hair came away from the skin. They scraped without ceasing. There was no part they missed. More boiling water was poured and the scraping continued. Mrs Carmichael would keep filling the buckets from the tank and carry them to the fire which they kept supplied with wood. As soon as the bucket began to boil it was poured over the pig.

  After one side was complete, they turned the pig over and continued their scrape on the other side. There was nothing they missed. They scraped the pig’s head. They scraped its feet which they turned into pig’s trotters. When the pig was completely naked, they cut off its hind legs, put hooks behind its hocks and attached the carcass to a rope and pulley on the high limb of the grey box-tree and they raised the carcass till it swung a man’s height above the ground. They then gutted it. All the entrails were dropped into one of the kerosene tin buckets and Mrs Carmichael added water to them and put them on to the fire to boil up for the ducks’ food. They wrapped up the liver and the heart in paper and took them into the kitchen to put in the Coolgardie safe from where Mrs Hanrahan would get them to take home.

  Mr Carmichael had spent the previous week building a small smoke shed, like a dunny, in the yard. It had a crossbar high up inside from which the pig would hang and a place down below for green leaves and wood to make a fire. The fire was surrounded by sheets of galvanised iron, backed by earth so as to hold it secure. This would be used in a few weeks’ time.

  Tom Carmichael had made a mixture of brine with some herbs in it known only to himself. When the pig had been gutted, it was pulled up high over the heads of us all to set in the cool night air. Its carcass hung up there without a head, without legs, swaying just a little in the breeze. They had scraped all the hair from the head and now they split it into two and Mrs Hanrahan took half which she added to the liver and the heart in the Coolgardie safe.

  In the morning when the flesh of the carcass had set, they lowered it from the tree and split it in half with an axe. They took the two halves and lowered them into a barrel almost full of the brine Tom Carmichael had prepared. Joe’s father left a broom handle beside the barrel and we were told that each time we passed the barrel we had to stop and give the brine a stir. It must never be left to settle or it wouldn’t cure the pig evenly.

  We lived with that pig in the barrel for three weeks. I heard its screams in my sleep. The screams followed me into sleep and I would wake and sit up sweating. Then I would bury my face in the pillow and sob, ‘Oh pig! pig! pig!’ a call that I had made to horses once when I was little to help me bear pain, but now this cry wasn’t like that. I wasn’t even calling pigs to a meal; I was crying for pardon to my damp pillow, pardon from one solitary pig for the part I had played in murdering him.

  After the pig had been pickled, the two halves were lifted from the brine and hung in the smoke shed Tom Carmichael had built and they started to make it into bacon. You could flavour the bacon by burning different leaves—some people burnt the limbs of orange trees or lemon trees. They made a great smoke when they were green. Tom Carmichael liked the flavour of the gum leaves, so he dragged in piles of leaves from the gum-trees and set fire to them between the sheets of galvanised iron and piled on more green leaves till the thick, heavy smoke moved up and filled the little hessian hut and the smoke came through the hessian like the breath of the bush itself. And Joe and I had to keep that fire going for a week. We would pull in the leaves and pile them up and the smoke oozed out all around the little hut and the smell of eucalyptus was everywhere. Joe’s mother told us that we were good boys and because we did all this work she promised us that we would never get another cold for two years. And she was right, too, because we didn’t.

  When the pig had become bacon, Tom Carmichael cut rashers from the carcass and gave me a big parcel to take home with me. Mother fried it up with yellow eggs and she made the bacon crisp and it was beautiful. I never associated the bacon with the live pig. It seemed so long ago because that bacon lasted over a year in Joe’s house. He often talked about it.

  That was life with Joe’s family. It was hard for them to live without getting any dirt on the floor, because in the winter Joe and Andy and Bill would bring mud in on their boots. But all the kitchens of the houses in Turalla shone with polish. Each morning you had to blacken your boots; the stoves were covered in Zebra stove polish and polished with a brush until the black iron sent out gleams from its surface. If there was only a board floor with no linoleum, the boards were white and clean. My mother told me that when she was a little girl, she used to crawl round the floor on her hands and knees remembering the heroine of a book she had read who always polished the heads of the nails on the floor; and my mother did that when she was little.

  Old Mrs Bilson

  Sometimes when Joe and I were out rabbiting beyond McLeod’s we would see old Mrs Bilson standing upright in the rye grass. Around her were the open paddocks and the sky. Beyond her, on the top of a rise, a tiny fence was a tripwire for the clouds racing ahead of the pursuing wind. Their shadows passed over Mrs Bilson, then went on. After a while she would walk over to the haystack near the bottom fence and stand behind it amongst the half-dozen fowls that made it their home.

  She was old and thin and straight and grey like a post.

  ‘People say she is mad’, I said to Joe. ‘That’s what they say. What do you reckon?’

  Joe was sitting on the grass pulling burrs out of his socks. He stopped to consider this. ‘She’s not as mad as they think’, he said finally. ‘That’s what I reckon. You just watch her. Her trouble is she can’t remember nothing. But that’s not being mad.’

  ‘No’, I said. ‘That’s not being mad.’ I often forgot things.

  We sometimes called in at the house where Mrs Bilson lived with her daughter and a bloke by the name of ‘Pudden’ Sampson who did all the work round the place. He could play ‘Home Sweet Home’ and ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ on the mouth organ as good as any bloke I’ve ever heard,
but he always seemed to be itchy and used to scratch himself against the post like a horse. He blamed the flannels he wore.

  ‘New flannels give you the itch’, he told Joe and me one day, ‘but not “Doctor” flannel. “Doctor” flannel soaks up the sweat on ya and you don’t get a cold or nothin’.’ After that Joe and I were authorities on flannels. We’d say to anyone who mentioned flannels to us, ‘You can’t beat “Doctor” flannel—they never gives you colds or nothin’ when you wear ’em.’

  Why ‘Pudden’ Sampson worked for Mrs Herbert was because you could work for years for her without working. She only milked six cows. She kept a couple of sows he had to feed. Sometimes Joe and I helped him to feed them, so we got on all right with him.

  Mrs Herbert lived in an old place that crouched like a hen in a nest of box-thorn. We’d just drop in when we were going hunting round the paddock and we would say, ‘How are ya goin’ ’, or something like that, to Mrs Herbert. It was just by way of being friendly. We meant nothing. As Joe said, it cost nothing to be polite and Mrs Herbert was often good for a couple of scones. It didn’t take much to get Joe and me into the kitchen table for half an hour or so.

  If we stayed at the table for long, Mrs Bilson would come out of the back room. She was Mrs Herbert’s mother and that’s where she lived. The two of them lived with ‘Pudden’ Sampson, but he lived in a room built on the end of the buggy shed and only came inside to eat, which he was pretty good at.

  I think there must have been a time before old Herbert died when Mrs Herberts family had lived there too. But they seemed to have all shot through for some reason or other and Mrs Herbert was left with her mother.