Miss Armitage liked Mrs Robinson. ‘We have a lot in common’, she sometimes said.
When Mrs Robinson heard this remark she smiled at the one to whom it was addressed, a smile that admitted the claim while denying the equality it implied.
What they had in common was an interest they fed by opening and reading the most promising-looking letters they stacked in the pigeon-holes, an interest in the secret life of people.
A cast-iron kettle steaming on the stove in the kitchen behind the office supplied the means for lifting the envelope flap. When they read the letter they replaced it and pressed the still-moist flap back in position so that it was hard to tell that the envelope had been opened.
They did not read all the letter—well, not very often. There was so little time. They both suffered from a sense of guilt and this could be detected by the people coming for their mail at the little window beside the pigeon-holes. When they looked at people whose secret lives they knew, their glance was defensive. The people to whom they spoke felt this.
Confident with the information she had obtained from letters, Miss Armitage felt full of importance on her way home. She looked at the people she passed, feeling so superior in her new knowledge that she found it difficult to resist the temptation to make revealing remarks to them. She would not say anything to them about what she had learned in the letters—no, not her. She would merely cast a hint that in all probability Mary Grant was not the virtuous girl she was thought to be.
But she was very careful. Miss Armitage valued her good name. She would have betrayed or lied in order to preserve it.
I liked Miss Armitage, but I did not like Mrs Robinson. I did not know why this was so. Old Mrs Turner, now, there was a woman I liked. She made little pastry-men with currant eyes—she made them especially for me. I always ate the head last. Sometimes I carried them around with me wishing I didn’t have to eat them.
Mrs Turner had a daughter whose name was Gladys. She was about eighteen or something, but I didn’t talk to her much. She had no time for little boys. She liked big boys. I think she must have liked them too much because Mrs Turner told me, when I was sitting in her kitchen, ‘I wish she wasn’t so fond of boys—she’ll get into trouble if she’s not careful.’
I was sitting in her kitchen waiting for the little pastry-men to cook when she told me this.
‘Yes’, I said.
‘Well, it’s no use worrying’, she went on, rubbing her hand across her forehead so that it became marked with flour, ‘That’s what I always say. It’ll get you nowhere. Besides, it keeps you awake at night. There are nights when I don’t get a wink of sleep—well, not till Gladys gets in. Once I hear her safe inside, I’m all right.’
‘Yes’, I said.
I always found Mrs Turner very easy to talk to—that’s why I liked her.
One day, after I had said, ‘Hullo’, she said, ‘Have you heard anyone talking about Gladys down the street?’ Gladys had been away for a month on a holiday. She was staying on a farm and used to help the farmer feed the calves. When Mrs Turner asked me about Gladys, I tell you, I had to think quick. I couldn’t say, ‘They all reckon she’s gone away to have a baby.’ I couldn’t say that, because it’s not the sort of thing you say to anyone. It’s the sort of silly bloody thing Joe would say, but I wouldn’t. I get worried over things like that. Joe reckoned it all started from the Post Office. Miss Armitage opened letters, he reckoned. When you hear things like that it makes you look around to see if anyone’s about. I don’t like knowing it. I’d sooner not know anything like that. I said to Joe, ‘You want to shut up about things like that. You never know what might happen.’
‘What they are saying, Mrs Turner’, I said, ‘is that Gladys is stopping away longer than she should. You see, Mrs Turner’, I went on to explain, ‘they get worried over you, you being home on your own an’ that. They reckon she should be home here. I don’t say nothin’ about it, I don’t.’
‘People are cruel’, Mrs Turner said.
I suppose there are cruel people about. I’ve seen men belting calves with a whip, and once I saw Snarly Burns kick a cow in the guts that was having a calf. I’d have hit him if I’d been a man. When I grow up I’m going to hit him.
When Mrs Turner wrote to Gladys, Miss Armitage recognised her handwriting. She said to Mrs Robinson, as she held the letter in her hand, ‘Mrs Turner is writing to Gladys again—that’s twice this week.’
‘Anything wrong?’ asked Mrs Robinson, turning from the letters she was sorting. Her face was expectant, the eyebrows slightly raised, a pointer dog suspecting game.
‘You just don’t know’, said Miss Armitage, while looking at the letter she held. She turned it over and looked at the flap.
‘Take a quick look; see if what they are saying is true’, said Mrs Robinson, then turned swiftly away as if the movement released her from collaboration.
I met Miss Armitage going home from the Post Office while I was looking for fleas in my dog. I was eating one of Mrs Turner’s little men at the time.
‘What have you got there, Alan?’ she asked me.
‘A little man with currant eyes that Mrs Turner made.’
‘She is very good to you, isn’t she!’
‘Yes’, I said.
‘She must be a very worried woman’, she said.
‘Mrs Turner’s not worried over anything’, I said firmly.
‘Isn’t she worried over Gladys?’
‘No’, I said. ‘Gladys is having a holiday. Gladys is a lovely girl’, I added. I thought to myself, well bugger Miss Armitage anyway. ‘She’s one of the nicest girls in Turalla’, I went on.
‘I’m glad you think so’, said Miss Armitage. ‘Other people think differently.’
I didn’t know what to say to that.
‘Miss Armitage came to see me’, Mrs Turner told me when I called on her a week later.
I was surprised. ‘She’d be after one of those little men’, I said. ‘She saw me eating one. She’s a hell of a big eater Miss Armitage.’
‘No, she didn’t come for anything. She brought me that fruit cake she made herself.’ She looked at the cake resting on the table and smiled gently at it. ‘She told me she had heard what the people are saying down the street and she put her arm round me and kissed me.’ She thought a moment, then continued, ‘I have been unjust to that good woman.’
She sat down and lowered her head on to her arms. I think she was crying, but I don’t like looking at people when they are sad like that.
I went away.
Pat Corrigan
When the morning sun was lying on the top of the grass and shadows were lingering behind the tall gums of the paddock, the milk carts started coming into the butter factory. The young sons of farmers, with their school days still loitering on their faces, sat on the dashboards of wagons laden with cans in which milk slopped and gurgled and squeezed through tight-fitting lids.
The horses they drove were half-draughts with mud-caked legs and hairy throats. Their harness was often held together by wire. The boys wore dungarees patterned with milk stains and patched on the back-seat with squares of new denim. The boots on their feet, stiffened by age and the mud of cowyards, were studded with hob-nails and heeled with iron the shape of horseshoes.
The many roads leading to the township converged at a junction near the blacksmith’s shop. Down these roads came the hurrying milk wagons, anxious to be first on to that narrow track, the final stretch to the butter factory where the drivers were forced to follow the wagons ahead of them.
Most of the wagons pulled up at this junction and hurriedly unloaded children with school bags fat with lunches hanging between their shoulders. The children sped away from the carts at a run, making for the school-ground where the shouts of their mates could be heard before they filed into school.
The wagons only stopped long enough for the child to jump to the ground before hurrying on. The drivers slapped their horses with a loose rein, jerked at the bit a
nd urged them to a fast trot.
One section of the butter factory projected from the main building high above the ground. It formed a square archway under which the wagons stopped to unload their milk. When they moved on, others took their place so a continuous procession of wagons passed beneath this raised building, sometimes banking up one behind the other in a long line when there was a delay under the hoist.
The hoist was worked by men in the raised building who looked down on the stationary wagon through an opening in the floorway. They lowered hooked chains which the farmers attached to the handles of each can before jerking off the tight-fitting lid. They stood back while the can rose in the air, hung dangling, then disappeared into the shadowed opening, where hands grabbed it and emptied its contents into a vat. In a moment it appeared again, descending rapidly, free of its load. Another full one took its place.
When the unloading of the milk was finished, the wagon was driven to an open structure where there was a large trough full of hot water. Through a bench connected with it steam jets thrust their noses. Here the cans were scrubbed then placed with their mouths over the jets. Triggered by their weight, the jets hissed clouds of steam that scalded the cans and made them vibrate and rattle.
The farmers, now freed of the need to hurry, talked as they washed the cans. They swapped gossip and complained about the dry weather, the need for rain, the price of cattle. It was a releasing period of communication and they loitered, reluctant to begin the drive home where the obligations of farm life were awaiting them.
To be first to the factory in the morning was regarded by these men as an achievement. It was a reason for boasting. It carried a suggestion that this evidence of early rising was proof of a hard worker.
Pat Corrigan was always first. It was no use trying to beat him. Everyone recognised this. ‘To beat Pat to the factory you’d have to bring in the cows before the dog was awake’, a farmer once said.
Sometimes in the summer when the carolling of awakening magpies brought me blinking from my bed, I watched the long sun stretching its arms across the grass and I felt I was the first up in all the world. It was an exalting experience. Then, across the paddock, I would hear the grating of brimming milk cans being pushed on to a wagon and Pat’s shout to a reluctant horse, ‘Hold up there.’ I didn’t mind sharing the first of the morning with him. He owned it.
There were times on such mornings when I hurried through the feeding of my pets with still an hour to go before breakfast. When this happened I would bound out on to the roadway and wait until Pat’s wagon came over the rise, pulled by old Meg, the half-draught horse with the wall-eye and the dragging hooves. Pat had had her shoes tipped with steel to counter the wear of her tired gait, but she wore the toes flat just the same.
When Pat saw me standing there waiting for him he pulled up.
‘Good morning, Mr Corrigan.’
‘No time for talking. Hop up now. What are you doin’ up and about at this hour?’
‘I wanted to go with you.’
I think he liked me saying that. If he were in a bad mood it took him out of it and he would smile. I’d sit beside him on the dashboard and, if he was running early, he would take out a plug of tobacco and shave a pipeful on to his palm while Meg stood with drooping head waiting. When he rubbed his hands together to shred the tobacco you could hear the rasping of his palms.
‘Plenty of time this morning, Mr Corrigan’, I said.
‘Time enough’, he said shortly. ‘None of them have a dog’s chance of beating me. There’s only one bloke I’ve got to watch and that’s Conneady. He told Bill Young that he’d beat me to the hoist one of these mornings.’
He lit his pipe and drew on it with swift puffs as if mention of Conneady had made him aware that he was wasting time.
‘Come on now.’ He slapped Meg’s rump with the loose reins and she moved into a trot.
It was good listening to the farmers talking while they unloaded the milk and washed the cans. Pat just stood around after the carts started coming in. His cans were emptied, washed and stacked in the wagon. All his morning’s work was behind him. He stood there enjoying a situation that brought attention upon him and I stood behind him enjoying it too.
He chipped the blokes coming in late: ‘Sleep in this morning, Harry?’ It made me feel good somehow. I liked being first at the factory better than anything.
One fine morning I stood by the side of the road waiting for Pat to come over the rise. He was late. I kept looking up the road towards the factory to see if any wagons were ahead of him. I’d never known Pat to be so late. At last he appeared, urging Meg along at her fastest trot. He kept looking anxiously up the road along which Conneady would be travelling. He pulled Meg back on her haunches beside me and exclaimed urgently, ‘Hop up, now, I’m late. Hurry up.’
I clambered up on to the dashboard beside him and hung on. Meg was prancing like a three-year-old and she jumped forward with a jerk when he loosened the rein.
‘Bloody bastard!’ he kept repeating. ‘I oughta bloodywell be shot. It’s a bloody bastard!’
He lashed Meg with a switch he had cut from the hedge. I clung to the dashboard which bucked under us like a young horse. We bounced along the track, the cans rattling.
‘What’s a bloody bastard, Mr Corrigan?’ I gasped at last.
‘Cut out that bloody swearing’, snapped Pat angrily. ‘A kid like you shouldn’t be swearing like a bloke twice his age. What you want’s a good clip on the ear’, and then turned to his own worries, ‘It’s a bastard, I say!’
‘I don’t usually say “bloody bastard”, Mr Corrigan’, I explained.
‘Shut up!’
The cans seemed to be rattling more than usual and I turned to look at them. No milk was splashing from beneath their lids.
‘Hey, Mr Corrigan!’ I said in astonishment. ‘You’ve forgot your bloody milk.’
‘What the hell are you talking about’, he shouted. ‘Shut up and stop that bloody swearing or Pll kick your bloody arse, crippled and all as you are.’
I was silenced as if a trusted horse had lashed out at me. I wanted to think about it.
By the time we were trotting beneath the hoist I had concluded Pat was touchy about the quantity of milk he was getting and that the cans were probably only half full.
Beneath the hoist Pat stood up in the wagon and shouted at one of the men looking down through the square opening above him.
‘Has Conneady been here yet?’
‘No one’s been here yet’, said the man, ‘but you certainly cut it fine this morning, Pat. Hook ’em on before the next cart gets here.’
Pat was suddenly confused. ‘I just ran down the same as usual, so mark me up as first here and that’ll do for the time being. I’ll be back later with the milk. I’ve got a few jobs I want to do first.’
‘No bloody milk!’ exclaimed the man. ‘Well, I’ll go to buggery!’
‘Right, but don’t forget I’m first here’, said Pat. ‘Make a note of that now.’
‘You are first here all right,’ said the man, ‘but . . .’
‘Good’, said Pat. ‘Now I’ll go and get the milk.’
He gathered in the reins and stirred old Meg into a walk for the return home. I sat beside him wondering about the strangeness of grown-ups.
Pat was in no hurry. He took his plug of tobacco from his pocket and began cutting slices from the side where pale inner leaves were visible.
‘It’s this way’, he said to me, feeling some explanation was necessary. ‘I was down at the pub last night and got stuck into it. I was out to it till about an hour ago.’
He looked at me, but I just had nothing to say.
‘Thanks for taking me to the factory, Mr Corrigan’, I said when we reached our gate. ‘I think you’d better let me off here. This’ll do.’
He pulled up and I climbed down to the ground.
‘Get home now and hop into some breakfast’, he said, ‘and cut out that bloody swearing. It’
s not for the likes of you.’
‘All right, Mr Corrigan. Now I’d better be going I think.’
‘You know’, said Pat, bending down from the dashboard and looking at me, ‘I think that leg of yours is getting a bit better. Giddup Meg.’ He hit the old mare with a switch and she moved off at a trot.
Mr Thomas
Bill Thomas was the local blacksmith. He was also an Elder of the Presbyterian church. His face had been the battlefield of many an emotional conflict and the blows of defeat had left lines of tension engraved upon it.
He must have thought a lot about sex. His gaze did not linger upon women—Elders of the church were free of lust—but even his averted gaze carried the knowledge of what a brief glance had suggested. He leant towards you as he spoke, smiling ingratiatingly and displaying teeth as strong as anvils.
He dressed in black when going to church on Sunday mornings. He walked ahead of his wife who followed like a conscience. She was a little woman. She was short and thin, but she smiled at me sometimes. ‘She has a sweet face’, somebody said. I thought she had.
When they reached the church he stood aside for her to enter first; he was always courteous to women. He bowed and spoke to them all. He didn’t do this to the husbands.
There was a girl he spoke to. Her name was Nellie Bolster. She was an orphan from a Home and had come to Turalla to live with Mrs Frank who was always ill. Now Mrs Frank didn’t have to do any work at all; Nellie did it.
Nellie used to call in at the blacksmith’s shop and talk to Mr Thomas. She would sit on the anvil but before she sat on it Mr Thomas would wipe it clean with a piece of cotton waste. He was a clean man and didn’t want her to dirty her frock. He helped her to sit down and while he helped her his hands escaped him and moved over her thighs and bottom. Nellie didn’t mind.
One day a kid at school told me that Nellie was up the duff. I didn’t know what this meant but I knew it must be pretty terrible because this kid heard his mother telling someone and when she discovered him listening she roared hell out of him.
The Complete Stories of Alan Marshall Page 37
