Joe told me it meant Nellie was going to have a baby.
‘All girls have babies’, I said. I knew far more about girls than Joe.
‘Yes, but they’re not allowed to have them until they grow up’, Joe explained.
‘Nellie’s grown up—well, nearly’, I said. I was patient with Joe.
‘It’s hard to say’, said Joe.
Mr Thomas must have thought she wasn’t grown up, because he was terribly worried over her. He told the men who came into the blacksmith’s shop. He said, ‘If I could get my hands on the man who got her into trouble I’d murder him. To take advantage of an orphan is as low as you can get.’
When he said this he lifted the horse’s leg and shod it.
Everyone admired Mr Thomas. ‘You mightn’t like him’, I heard a man say, ‘but you’ve got to give him his due. He’s even offered to pay her expenses because she’s an orphan and he’s sorry for Mrs Frank.’
Mr Thomas went to see Mrs Frank. When she heard Nellie was going to have a baby she collapsed and had to go to bed, so Mr Thomas had to talk to her in bed.
‘Don’t you worry, Mrs Frank’, he told her. ‘I’il attend to the lot.’
‘After all I’ve done for her’, moaned Mrs Frank.
‘Yes, yes, I know’, murmured Mr Thomas.
‘I couldn’t possibly keep a girl like that around the place now all this has happened’, said Mrs Frank.
‘I agree, I agree’, said Mr Thomas, loosening the collar around his neck and grimacing. ‘There’s an orphanage at Ballarat that attends to such matters. I’ll. . .’
‘Will you?’ asked Mrs Frank with such relief that she sat up in her nightgown.
‘I will’, said Mr Thomas, lowering his eyes.
‘Oh, you’re a good man!’ sighed Mrs Frank. Her face took on an expression of distaste. ‘I’d like you to arrange everything with Nellie. I just can’t talk to her in my condition—with things being as they are—you know—it’s so sordid and everything.’
‘Leave it to me’, said Mr Thomas, feeling brighter.
Nellie wouldn’t tell who was the father of the child. She just looked at the people who asked her. They said she was stubborn as a mule. The ladies wanted to know more than the men, but they couldn’t break Nellie down. Nellie remained silent as a mourner.
Mr Thomas took her by train to Ballarat and we never heard of her again. She was ‘no good’, they said, but I had always liked her. She used to laugh a lot.
The Ostrich Man
The unknown frightens animals. When I was a boy a horse dropped dead in the shafts of a wagon standing in the Turalla railway yards. The long train carrying Wirths’ Menagerie and Circus had just drawn into the station and, as the elephants and camels walked down the ramp from their railway truck, the horses gathered in the yard panicked and fled, their carts leaping behind them.
Father explained that animals with weak hearts sometimes dropped dead with fright at the sight of strange objects. When the first cars and motorbikes appeared on the roads, horses bolted in terror and otherwise tranquil cows burst through fences in their efforts to escape from the reports of exhausts and the panting of motors.
But the horses and cows of Turalla had never experienced mass terror until the ostriches came. After that, ostriches paced through the nightmare-haunted nights of every cud-chewing road cow and deserted horse for months afterwards.
The coming of the ostriches was announced by Mr Goodman. He came before them and they called him The Ostrich Man’. Joe said to me, ‘He’s a marvel; he knows more about ostriches than your father knows about horses.’
‘You stupid bugger’, I said, ‘that’s impossible.’
‘Well, nearly as much.’ Joe always knew when he had gone too far.
Mr Goodman waited for the ostriches at the pub. While he waited he talked about them. He explained that it was the feathers on their wings that were worth money. In fact he seemed to think there was more money in plucking ostriches than in milking cows.
I explained to Joe that Mr Goodman didn’t know what he was talking about.
‘When does he pluck them!’ I exclaimed. ‘Every bloody night or what? The bastard’s mad.’
‘Listen!’ said Joe. ‘When it comes to money, you and I don’t know the time of the day. We reckon ten bob’s a fortune. Ten bob!! God Almighty!! Argh!’ Joe spat his contempt of such a paltry sum. I’d never seen him so contemptuous of money. Ten bob had suddenly been revealed to him as worthless.
‘I tell you. Ten bob wouldn’t buy a feather off an ostrich’s arse. Do you know what ostrich feathers cost?’ This rhetorical question seemed to demand an answer, judging by Joe’s expectant eyes. I had nothing to say so Joe supplied the answer.
‘Ask Miss Tittell Brune’, he announced to the paddocks around us, making them a party to the discussion by a wave of his hand. ‘Ask her. She’d know what ostrich feathers cost if ever anyone knew.’
I doubted Joe’s knowledge of ostrich feathers.
‘I’ll ask Mr Goodman’, I said.
Mr Goodman would only talk to me when he was drunk so I had to wait till he was well pissed before I asked him.
Joe’s faith in Miss Tittell Brune arose from the fact that we both saved cigarette cards and Joe had twenty ‘Gold Girls’. You got them out of Milo cigarettes. They were pictures of beautiful women and all around them was gold. The women were all actresses and one of them was Miss Tittell Brune. Joe was in love with Miss Tittell Brune. In the card he had of her she was looking down, but her eyes were looking up. You couldn’t see anything of her except a pug dog which she held against her bosom. In front of the lot she held an ostrich feather fan.
Joe said she held the fan in front of her to hide her bosom, but I think she was trying to hide the pug dog. But she didn’t hide it because you could see its head sticking out from the feathers. Joe reckoned the fan was worth a tenner. I wouldn’t have given a quid for it—but I would have given anything for the pug dog.
I stopped Mr Goodman on his way home from the pub.
‘Mr Goodman’, I said, ‘how much would that there fan cost that Miss Tittell Brune is holding in front of her bosom?’—and I handed him the card.
He held it away from him the length of his arm, and held his head back the length of his neck, then he half-closed his eyes and said, ‘That fan would knock her back a fiver, maybe more.’ Mr Goodman then dropped the card on to the ground and held on to the fence.
Joe was standing well back. He was wary of drunks.
‘A fiver’, I told him when I came up.
‘Didn’t I tell you?’
‘No. You said a tenner.’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘A fiver’, I said. I was pretty good at figures.
The ostriches came to Turalla because of Mrs Carruthers. She was the wife of the local squatter, an extremely wealthy man who, after taking up land at Turalla in the early days, had increased his holdings by shrewd speculations until most of the farmers in the district were now either his tenants or his debtors.
He bought a car, employed a chauffeur and sat back to enjoy his wealth in a home that towered above the garden of English trees like an English mansion.
Mrs Carruthers was his suitable wife. She patronised the church, the peacocks in the garden, the people of Turalla and all the forelock-pulling farmers that milked her husband’s cows.
She loved obsequiousness and servility and looked with suspicion on independence and courage.
She frightened hell out of Joe and me. Not that she was aware of us; we were always hidden in the dust of her passing car.
Mrs Carruthers had been to South Africa on a holiday and when she came back she brought the ostriches with her. They must have been good ostriches or Mrs Carruthers wouldn’t have bought them. She brought Mr Goodman with the ostriches. She was going to start an ostrich farm—anyway that’s what they said at the pub. Mr Goodman told them.
They had left the ostriches in Melbourne or somewhere and
Mr Goodman had to wait for them at Turalla. He used to describe to those who paid for his drinks how he was going to bring the ostriches to Turalla.
‘I’ll drive them from Boorcan’, he said. ‘I want four well-mounted blokes who can head them off at side roads and keep them moving.’
Now this sounds a stupid thing, but that is what the ostrich man said.
I said to Joe, ‘Have you ever heard of a horse that can head an ostrich?’
Joe considered this. ‘Carbine could’, he said.
‘Well, nobody’s going to ride Carbine’, I said.
‘You never know what the ostrich man’s got up his sleeve’, reflected Joe.
Boorcan was a railway siding eight miles from Turalla. A three-chain road joined Turalla with Boorcan, and along this wide roadway, now thick with grass, the road cattle and horses used to graze. These were the cattle and horses that farmers turned loose to save the grass in their own paddocks. Sometimes a man working in the district kept a cow on the roads. He would run it in and milk it after he knocked off work. It kept his family in milk.
All the road stock had a council tag attached to a chain around their necks. This enabled the pound-keeper to recognise privileged cows and horses at a glance and he wouldn’t impound them.
Since the only traffic on the roads round Turalla were horse-drawn vehicles, wandering stock was in no danger of being struck by speeding cars. Mrs Carruthers wouldn’t allow her chauffeur to drive very fast. If he saw a cow ahead of him asleep on the road, he would honk his horn and the cow would rise heavily to her feet and trot off the road, her udder swinging.
On the day the ostriches were to arrive at Turalla, Joe and I sat on the top rail of a plantation fence from where we would have a good view of them coming up the Boorcan road. We were excited. There was a straight stretch of about a quarter of a mile to where the road dropped down a hill and disappeared from sight. It was from behind this hill the ostriches would first appear, all pacing evenly side by side, so we imagined, while horsemen with cracking whips, their bodies swaying from side to side with every swing of the horses, held them together in a swift-moving mob.
Joe and I waited impatiently. ‘Do you reckon an ostrich could break two minutes for a mile?’ I asked him. I had never seen an ostrich.
‘It wouldn’t have a dog’s chance’, said Joe. ‘It’d break under pressure.’
I was trying to work out how an ostrich could break, when Joe suddenly exclaimed—‘Listen! I can hear horses galloping!’ We gripped the rail and looked towards the crest of the rise, our eyes wide with a sudden disquiet.
We saw Peter McLeod first. His big grey came over that rise as if tossed into sight by an explosion, Peter was standing upright in the stirrups, his beard divided by the wind of his speed, each half whipping a cheek as he fought to control his horse. He went past us at a mad gallop, his eyes standing out like organ stops.
‘What’s happened to his bloody horse?’ I yelled at Joe. ‘It’s got the bit in its teeth. That grey never bolts like that.’
Like Paul Revere, Peter shouted something as he passed, but what he bloody-well said God knows. Joe reckoned he yelled something about mad emus over his shoulder before he was carried away, riding a roll of dust. His frantic horse went round the store corner and disappeared.
‘What the hell’s happened!’ exclaimed Joe. ‘Something terrible has happened.’
‘Hell, look!’ I shouted.
Over the crest of the hill came the road horses led by a terrified mare with a yearling colt at her flank. She was followed by an avalanche of horses. There were draughts and ponies and gaunt brood mares with foals at foot. They were all jammed together in a tossing mass of horses. They galloped wildly, colliding, propping, their heads pushed upwards by the rumps of those in front. They bore down on the township. They took four panels out of the post and rail fence that slewed away from the pub; they leapt garden fences, sought escape through open gates. They milled in backyards, knocking over buckets and shying from prams in which squalling babies jerked rattles that brought mothers leaping through back doors squawking like hens.
On the street the horses tied to the pub hitching-posts pulled back in terror and joined in the rush, their broken reins swinging from the bits.
Old Jim Sullivan’s half-draught, pulling his milk wagon home at a slow jog-trot, whipped round like a stock pony and joined in the mad gallop. Old Jim grabbed desperately at the reins, then toppled over backwards to the floor of the wagon, wondering what the hell was happening.
The street was as clean as a whistle once they passed. Not a wagon or a gig or a tethered horse remained.
‘May God have mercy on us!’ Joe exclaimed.
I was considering Joe’s appeal to God with a feeling of bewilderment, when I was startled by what I thought was the sound of distant thunder.
‘Hell!’ I shouted. ‘Here come the bloody cows!’
The cows, following the horses, had come over the rise at a lumbering gallop, many of them with salivary mouths and swaying with exhaustion. The calves held their tails in the air and let out frightened bellows as they galloped close to their mothers. There were cows heavy in calf, steers with glossy hides. There were Ayrshires, Red Polls, Herefords and retired bulls turned out to die. They went through fences as if they weren’t there, stood panting in yards and ran into fowl houses.
At these scenes of destruction Joe’s nerve left him. ‘I’m getting to hell out of here’, he yelled at me, and prepared to jump.
‘You’ll be run over by a cow’, I shouted at him, but Joe was at home with cows. He launched himself off the fence and was swept away with an arm round the neck of an Ayrshire. I have never seen him run so fast. He took great bounds beside the speeding cow, then landed and took off again.
I watched Joe with wonder. The length of his bounds and the grace of his movements staggered me. I had never realised what Joe was capable of once he had his arm locked round a cow’s neck while hooves pounded all around him.
At the store corner, Mrs Carruthers’s car swept into sight. The car and Joe’s cow swerved simultaneously. Joe was carried on by his Ayrshire, but the car swerved drunkenly and met the deluge of road cattle head-on.
In the car was Mrs Carruthers, gossamer-bound, cushion-propped, adventuring forth to see for herself the effect of her efforts to supply Turalla with wings of ostrich feathers.
Sitting beside her on the back seat was Lady Grassmere, a visitor from Melbourne specially invited for the occasion. Lady Grassmere resembled Mrs Carruthers except for the size of her bust which knocked Miss Tittell Brune rotten and left Mrs Carruthers prancing at the post.
In the front seat the chauffeur sat stiffly erect, clean as laundry, but by God, he was a Man! He stuck to his post.
After that first desperate swerve, the meeting of car and cattle was a sight to behold. Oldtimers had never seen the like. There was an instantaneous eruption of legs, horns, whipping tails, brass lamps and cow shit. An arse-up cow shot across the bonnet. The bloody car was covered in cows. From underneath this convulsion of udders the brass horn kept up a desperate honking. There were moans of anguish from shitting cows and ladylike exclamations of alarm from Mrs Carruthers, sounds lost in the deep bellow of a bull with a brass lamp caught up in his balls.
The car emerged lurching as if drunk and shaking in a frenzy from a racing engine. The anguished chauffeur, already sensing a reduction in salary, clutched the steering wheel as if it were a life belt. I couldn’t see Lady Grassmere and Mrs Carruthers because the windows were covered with cow shit. The car moved blindly forward and finally found refuge in the churchyard.
I was determined to stick to my rail until the ostriches appeared. They came at last. Their long necks, like masts of distant sailing ships, shot over the horizon in silence. There were ten of them. They were all running strongly but erratically. There seemed to be no purpose behind their running. They veered from one side of the three-chain road to the other. They turned and tried to run back. They step
ped high, darting in swift spurts then stopping in bewilderment. Behind them horsemen barred the way. They had to follow the road, but the surroundings confused them. They sometimes collided then sped away from other other. They passed me with their small wings lifted, their naked thighs displayed like girls with their skirts up. I was amazed at the lightness of their tread, their sudden speedy shying away from danger. They could move from a slow gait into rapid movement without pause.
Where the roads converged at the blacksmith’s corner, they became confused and slowed down. The horsemen that had been following close behind them all the way from Boorcan circled them on their sweating horses, seeking to drive them up the road leading to the special paddock reserved behind Mrs Carruthers’s impressive gateway. The paddock, enclosed by a high cyclone fence behind which they would live, was about a mile away and to reach it the birds had to be turned and taken up a narrow roadway past the church.
Then stupid Johnny Melford must appear. Mrs Carruthers had the only car in the district, but Johnny had the only motorbike. The motorbike was a BSA with a rubber-belt drive clasping the back wheel. Its speed was controlled by two small levers at the end of a Bowden cable attached to the handlebars. It was started by running desperately beside it until its exhaust burst into life and it took off with the rider hanging on to the handlebars.
At this stage the rider’s only connection with the earth was through his hands, since with wide-spread legs he floated above the roaring bike until he could land on the saddle. A few yards of wobbling and he was secure.
Johnny shot amongst the ostriches and panicked them. Though his education embraced a great deal of knowledge about cows and horses, it did not include ostriches. I doubt whether he had ever seen a picture of an ostrich. But here he was in the midst of giant birds flaunting naked thighs underneath his very nose.
Johnny’s feet and hands worked very swiftly doing everything necessary to bring a tremendous burst of speed from his bike. His sudden acceleration was a credit to BSA engineers, while the ostriches’ acceleration could only be attributed to God. But Johnny challenged the Almighty and crouched low on his seat, linked to the handles by curved arms.
The Complete Stories of Alan Marshall Page 38
