The Complete Stories of Alan Marshall

by Alan Marshall

  Peter swung him round. Now he was behind the mares and he gathered himself and reared, striking with his forelegs. He sat back on his flexing legs and unsheathed his huge black penis. He came forward on his back legs, balancing with power.

  Joe had never seen this before. ‘Jesus!’ he exclaimed in sudden fear, and glanced quickly round as if seeking a way of escape.

  ‘Jesus’ was a bad swear and Joe would never use it unless he was afraid.

  Nero’s forelegs were coming down each side of the chestnut mare Joe was holding, but Peter suddenly heaved on the lead and slewed the stallion away from her so that he came down on the rump of ‘Miss McAlister’. She gasped and braced herself for the weight. I hung on to her with my eyes tight closed. One of Nero’s swinging hooves went past me and I felt the shuddering of ‘Miss McAlister’s’ old body as she answered his command. I saw Nero’s teeth clasp her neck. There was a minute of silent shouts and screams, then Nero suddenly drew back and slid off her rump. Maybe it was only then he realised he had been had. He wheeled in rage, dropped his head and brought both legs up in a vicious, pig-rooting lash backwards. His broad hooves smacked against ‘Miss McAlister’s’ ribs and she staggered sideways with a grunt, jerking me off my feet so that I fell to the ground.

  I quickly grabbed my crutches and got to my feet. Peter had pulled Nero away and was now swearing at the stallion.

  ‘The curse of Kishogue on ya!’ he yelled, then, suddenly becoming concerned at my welfare, he stopped and looked at me.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes’, I said. ‘I’m good.’

  He grunted and guided Nero to the stable.

  Joe had led his mare to the fence where he tied her up with the halter, then came running over to me and said breathlessly, ‘By hell, that’s bloody dangerous, I’m tellin’ ya. Nobody should be around when he’s doing that. It’s stupid. How do brumbies get on! They don’t have to be led up to a mare. One of us is going to get himself kilt one of these days. It’s a terrible thing to see those hooves coming down and no way of dodging them.’

  ‘I liked watching them’, I said defensively.

  ‘That was the bad coming out in ya’, said Joe. ‘You want to keep holt of yourself. It can get a holt of you. Father Guiness told us looking at carnal things poisons the mind.’

  ‘Struth!’ I exclaimed. ‘What do ya know about that.’ Then asked, ‘What’s “carnal”?’

  ‘It’s what Nero was doing to “Miss McAlister”.’

  I was worried for a few days, then I forgot it.

  A couple of months later I was talking to Splinter outside the church on Sunday morning. Mum had told me to keep the fire going in the stove so that the roast would be ready when church came out, so I had to dash home once or twice to look at it.

  ‘You can’t beat a roast a bit overdone’, said Splinter, then went on to tell me about the mare. It turned out that she wasn’t in foal. Splinter reckoned Nero was no good. He said Maggie McAlister was disappointed but told Splinter that the mare’s time for foal bearing had passed. ‘We’ll leave her in peace now’, she said to Splinter.

  I thought to myself that the mare would have been more at peace if she had had a foal, but I wasn’t sure so I didn’t say it.

  The next day the most terrible thing I’ve ever heard of happened. I heard about it outside the pub. A lot of blokes were talking about it. They said that Grace McAlister went into the gun room at Barji, took down her Dad’s double-barrel gun, then blew half her head off.

  It was a few weeks before I could hear what happened from Splinter. ‘That wool-classer you saw her galloping with: well, he put her in foal. She couldn’t face the disgrace of it, so she shot herself.’

  ‘You see’, said Splinter, ‘she was young and longed to have a baby, but she couldn’t wait till she was married. Then, when he foaled her and left her, she couldn’t face it alone with all her friends against her. That’s what my Missus reckons and, remember, I’ve got five kids.’

  Miss Barlow

  When I was about fifteen Mrs Thomas died. She accepted death without protest. To her it was like going to church and not coming out, but it was a blow to Mr Thomas. She would not follow him anymore. Now, when he opened the church gate, he did not have to stand aside; he stepped through alone.

  For the first few weeks the obligations of a bereavement and the necessity of observing a code of behaviour acceptable to the members of the church as suitable for the loss of a wife, guided Mr Thomas in everything he did. He walked to church with measured stride and lowered head. He refrained from smiling at women. Instead he looked into their eyes with a silent appeal for comfort. It inspired in the devout a desire to pray for him; in the not so devout the memory of Nellie Bolster.

  In a few months Mr Thomas was smiling and bowing to the women of the churchyard but his warmest smile, his most gracious greeting, was reserved for Miss Prudence Barlow.

  Miss Barlow was like a slender plant with a frail blossom that grew in poor soil. She needed water to nourish the blossom but there was little water in Miss Barlow’s life.

  She was an old maid. I never liked to hear a woman called an old maid but I didn’t know why. It was just wrong, I thought.

  Circumstances had compressed Miss Barlow until, from a young and pretty girl, she had emerged an angular and severe woman. Yet . . . I don’t know; there were moments when that young girl looked at you with her eyes.

  Miss Barlow’s father and mother were dead. They were once farmers, but Miss Barlow sold the farm when they died, only retaining the house which sat in a small garden surrounded by a picket fence. This little square of flowering shrubs and wattle trees reposed in a green paddock, ten acres in area, across which wound a dirt track leading from the picket fence to the road gate.

  Miss Barlow drove down this winding track each Sunday on her way to church. She owned a grey horse and an Abbot buggy and she sat upright in the centre of the seat holding a long buggy whip in her right hand. She never struck the grey horse with the whip, but carrying a buggy whip was the right thing to do.

  When she reached the church Mr Thomas would step forward from amongst the women and take the horse out of the buggy and tie it to the fence with a halter. Then he would join the women and walk into church with them.

  The women talked about Mr Thomas and Miss Barlow when they weren’t around but, as I heard Miss McPherson say, ‘One needs much more evidence than that.’

  I had evidence enough. Three evenings a week I rode past Miss Barlow’s on my way to the Mechanics’ Institute where a church club used to meet. It was known as ‘The Guild’. I was a member of the Guild.

  I rode home late at night and always passed Miss Barlow’s house at half past eleven. The Guild closed at eleven.

  I cantered most of the way home but I left it to Hairy Legs to make his own pace. Poised in darkness, rising and falling upon a saddle moving to the swing of a horse I could not see, I felt I was being carried forward into a sea of darkness that broke upon my face and glided past in soundless waves of black.

  The track past Miss Barlow’s was littered with stones and pitted with potholes. When Hairy Legs came to this stretch he would slow to a walk and I would relax. I would sit loosely in the saddle and wonder about people and of how they left their homes at night and went visiting and no one knew anything about their lives at all except in the daylight.

  Hairy Legs stopped when he was opposite Miss Barlow’s house. He did it because I would have stopped him if he hadn’t. It was half past eleven and something beautiful always happened then.

  After a little while the door of the house opened and an upright oblong of light appeared in the darkness. Against this light I could see the silhouette of Mr Thomas. His arm like a long shadow reached out and held the hand of Miss Barlow. They stepped out of the doorway together and Mr Thomas closed the door behind him.

  I couldn’t see them now but I could hear them walking through the little garden to the gate in the picket fence. It crea
ked when it was opened and then they were in the paddock. It was not far now to where the horse and his jinker were tied to the fence.

  Miss Barlow stopped near the jinker step. I couldn’t hear her footsteps any longer. I heard Mr Thomas walk to his horse’s head and I knew he was untying the halter from the post and knotting it around his horse’s neck. He then stepped back and pulled the looped reins from the ring in the hames and hung it over the dashboard. Now he would be standing quite near Miss Barlow. He struck a match, pulled open the front of the gig lamp and held the match to the candle. The wick took the yellow flame, but it was a while before the wax melted. The pointed flame grew upwards sending out a steady, gentle light that illuminated the two faces each side of it.

  I could see their faces quite clearly. All around them was a thick, impenetrable darkness. They stood there looking at each other, united by the light of a candle.

  I lifted my horse’s reins and rode away.

  Miss McPherson

  I was always sure that Miss McPherson was very beautiful underneath her bandage. It was a large white bandage, tied securely round her face so that one saw only that part of her face above her mouth. But her eyes made you want to keep looking at her. They were brown and large and gazed gently at you. But the trouble was, that’s all you could see. I wished I could see the rest of her face.

  She had white hair that didn’t make her look as old as it should. It was not white hair like what you see on the old people with wrinkled faces, but white hair what you’d see on people who loved you and were worried about you from when you were little. Like my mother’s hair, only whiter.

  ‘It’s the white hair of suffering’, my sister once said when I asked her what made Miss McPherson’s hair white, but she didn’t say what she was suffering from.

  Joe was a bit frightened of her, but it was a funny thing; I never was. All my life I’d been like that. It is a funny thing.

  I liked talking to Miss McPherson because she always said nice things. Like she’d say—— ‘You look quite smart in that cap, Alan.’ It’s good to hear people say things like that.

  Joe and I used to hunt hares in the paddocks round her house. She never minded us doing it at all. All she said once was, ‘Don’t take your dog into the sheep paddock, will you. They’re lambing.’

  When she said that, Joe and I wouldn’t let Dummy go near the sheep paddock. We shouted at him and made him walk close to us. Anyway, the best paddock to raise a hare was just behind her house.

  When we’d coursed hell out of the hares in this paddock, I’d go over to the house and knock at the back door. Joe wouldn’t let me knock at the front door because he said it would frighten shit out of her. ‘When Mum hears a knock at the front door she nearly takes a fit’, he explained. ‘She thinks it’s coppers. The front door’s never to knock at unless you’re somebody.’

  Joe’s got a lot of brains about things like that.

  When I knocked at Miss McPherson’s back door Joe stood behind the fence. When Miss McPherson opened the door I’d say, ‘Thank you for letting us hunt in the back paddock, Miss McPherson. We didn’t go near the sheep paddock.’

  She’d smile at me then. It was a lovely smile, but you couldn’t see it: you could tell by her eyes it was beautiful.

  I said to Joe once, ‘If ever I have a buster and hurt my back or something and we’re near Miss McPherson’s, get her. Don’t get anyone else.’

  ‘Righto’, Joe said, then added, ‘anyway there are no stones in her paddock to land on. I wouldn’t take you where there are stones because your old man told me not to.’

  When we were on our way home we often talked about Miss McPherson’s face. Joe thought that maybe her teeth were so bad she had to hide them, but I didn’t think so.

  ‘No matter how bad they are they couldn’t be that bad’, I said. ‘I think her face must be all out of shape below the nose. Say a horse kicked you on the face. Now, say it did that.’

  ‘A draught horse?’ asked Joe.

  ‘No’, I said. ‘Not heavy like that. Say about a twelve hands pony, a well-bred sort of pony.’

  ‘Shod?’ asked Joe.

  ‘Not just out of the blacksmith’s’, I said. ‘He’s been shod about a month say. They’re a bit worn like.’

  Joe considered this for a moment, his face screwed up and turned to the sky.

  ‘I’d be buggered’, he said at last.

  ‘Well, I don’t know’, I argued. ‘You’d be alive but your face would be out of shape, that’s what would happen.’

  ‘All right then’, argued Joe. ‘Do you think she’s been kicked by a pony?’

  ‘I just don’t know.’

  ‘You know what I think’, Joe went on. ‘I think she’s been born deformed.’

  ‘Deformed?’ I was a bit puzzled.

  ‘You know—born without a jaw or something.’

  ‘That’s terrible’, I said.

  ‘Yes it is, isn’t it’, said Joe. ‘That’s why I don’t like going near her. I can’t stand deformed people. They make me feel crook.’

  ‘Yes. That’s right. Funny thing that; they make me feel crook too. I dodge them if I can.’ I agreed with Joe.

  We had reached a fence topped by two strands of barbed wire.

  ‘How the hell are you going to get over this’, Joe said thoughtfully as if talking to himself.

  ‘It’s a bad fence’, I said, ‘but I’ll get over it all right; don’t worry!’

  ‘I think I’d better lift you on to a post and you can hang across it sort of till I get over and grab you. You’ll have to lift your right leg with your hand so that it won’t tear on the barb.’

  ‘Yes, that would be the best way’, I said. ‘Bend down till I get a proper holt of you.’

  ‘Right’, said Joe. ‘Now put your arm round my neck. Now lift your bloody leg. Pull your back in, damn you’, he suddenly shouted. ‘You’ll catch it on the bloody barbs. God Almighty! Don’t move. We’re going to fall arse over head. Hold on to that bloody post. Grab the barb wire. Let go of it or you’ll cut your hand. What the hell . . .! O, shit!’

  He staggered with my weight. I let go the barbed wire and clutched the post.

  ‘It’s all right!’ I exclaimed. ‘I’ve got a grip on the post now. I’m set. Lever me over a bit. Now ease off. Steady me a bit. I’m right. I could stay here a week. She’s jake.’

  Joe wiped his nose with the back of his hand, then stepped back and looked at me hanging across the post. ‘Couldn’t be better. Now I’ll get your crutches. Don’t move. I’m coming.’

  He climbed swiftly through the fence carrying my crutches, then dropped them to the ground.

  ‘Now!’

  I put my arm round his neck and he lowered me till I stood beside the fence. He then picked up my crutches and I put them under my arms.

  ‘The worst thing about walking on crutches is the crutches’, he said by way of a final summary.

  ‘They do slow you down a bit’, I said.

  ‘It’s a good job we’re not in a hurry’, said Joe. ‘All I’ve got to do is feed the ducks when we get home.’ He thought a while, then said, ‘Ask Elsie about Miss McPherson’s face. She’ll know. She goes up to see her sometimes. Ask her.’

  ‘I will’, I said with sudden decision. ‘I’ll ask her tonight. When we know what’s wrong with her we won’t have to worry over it. Anyway, I don’t care what’s wrong with her. I’m still going to like her.’

  ‘I will too’, said Joe. ‘Once I know, I won’t be frightened of her.’

  I asked my sister that night. She was washing up and she stopped and said:

  ‘It’s a sort of secret, but I’ll tell you because you love her. You told me you did.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘All her face is covered with white hair like a beard’, she said. ‘She has worn that bandage on her face for forty years to hide it from people. It’s sad.’

  I was horrified. I felt like I was hit by something. It seemed so easy a thing to ge
t rid of.

  ‘Why doesn’t she shave?’ I asked my sister.

  ‘I asked her that’, said Elsie. ‘I asked her why she had wasted all those years when she could so easily have shaved it all off.’

  ‘What did she say to that?’

  ‘She said, “It was sent to me by God. Who am I to question it! It’s a Cross I just have to bear.” ’

  The Catholic Ball

  The Turalla Mechanics’ Institute was a weatherboard hall built in the form of a ‘T’. The top arm of the ‘T’ housed the stage and ante-room, and the stem was where the people sat. Two little stairways, one at each end of the platform, supplied a means of climbing on to the stage. A door at the back of the stage led down some steps into the ante-room. I’ll never know why it was called the ante-room.

  They held dances and concerts in the hall and then the caretaker, old Mr Thomas, the father of the blacksmith, would light the huge Miller kerosene lamps hanging from the ceiling and the place was ready except for the floor. They had to grease it first. The secretary of the dance, or whatever it was, came with a few blokes and they walked round the hall scraping curled shavings of grease off the sides of candles. When they did this they would sit Joe and me or some other kid on a potato bag and drag us round the floor as if we were on a sledge. They swung us round at the curves and it was good fun. If your backside slipped off the bag, it would become caked in candle grease and then you got into a row when you got home.

  On the night of a big dance a number of the blokes that came used to sit in the ante-room and play poker for money. Joe and I watched them sometimes.. On the table were a lot of Fields and Country Life and other English magazines, because the ante-room was also a reading room. There was a library, that’s what they called it, in a room at the end of the ante-room, but the books in it were all knocked about. They had names like Jessica’s First Prayer, Queechy and East Lynne, but I found one called The Broad Highway by Jeffrey Farnol, where this bloke Farnol described sitting under a hedge eating crisp fried bacon with a Tinker. I’d never thought of having bacon crisp before, but whenever I had it after that I used to ask mother to make it crisp the way Jeffrey Farnol liked it.