Old Drumble

by Jack Lasenby

  The dry pine cones were bigger and lighter, because their wooden petals were open, so the sack filled quickly. The green cones were closed tight, and heavy. When he twisted one, to get it off the branch, it tore a blister open. Watery fluid gushed, and Jack looked at the pink skin inside the blister and didn’t like it. Blowing on it made it sore, so he went over to the drain. It had been cleaned, the weeds thrown on the banks, and he couldn’t see any eels. A couple of pukekos stalked between clumps of reeds, the other side of the drain, flicking their white patches.

  When the pooks vanished, Jack wandered back, listening to the thump! thump! of the maul, and boiled the billy for lunch.

  They’d eaten their sandwiches, and his father was doing some more splitting, when Jack looked across the paddock to the road and saw somebody trotting towards the Kaimais. It was Andy on Nosy, with Old Drumble leading, Young Nugget and Old Nell behind. Jack climbed on a stump and waved and yelled till they went out of sight behind a hedge, but they hadn’t looked his way.

  “You might not be seeing so much of Andy in future,” said his father. “Put those lengths on the stack. You’ll need a good bath tonight, to get all the pine gum off your elbows and knees, and I don’t know what your mother’s going to say about getting it all over your clobber.”

  “Mum said it didn’t matter, ’cause these are old. ‘Just don’t you dare go getting it in your hair,’ she said, ‘or I’ll have to snip it off with the scissors,’ and she said did I want to look piebald for when school starts.”

  His father grinned. “I could shave your head all over, with my cut-throat razor.”

  “Harry Jitters would bark and say I looked like a sheep. I should never have told him about how huntaways bark. And Minnie Mitchell wouldn’t talk to me, if I was bald.

  “Dad, do you think Mum will let me go droving with Andy next holidays?” Jack watched his father bring down the axe exactly, so the length of pine sprang into clean billets. He sniffed the sharp smell of the fresh-faced wood and said, “I wish I could chop where I mean to.”

  “It’s like using a bat—and keeping your eye on the ball: you keep your eye on the spot you want to hit, Jack, and the axe does the rest.” Whack! Another piece leapt off. “Look for the grain, and split with it. See! And always split down the middle of a knot, with its grain—never across it.” Whack!

  “I don’t know about droving with Andy, next holidays,” said Mr Jackman. “That’s what I meant about not seeing so much of him in future.

  “Andy’s getting a bit long in the tooth; he’s been at it a few years now, you know.”

  “What’s he going to do?”

  “Everyone’s got to give up, sooner or later, and Andy’s had a pretty good innings. He picked up the job from Smoky Rawiri, and he’s been dead half a lifetime. Andy had already been droving for years, when your mother was just a girl. It’s not the easiest of lives, outside in all weather, handling half-wild steers, nasty-tempered Jersey bulls, and sheep that don’t know which way they want to go.”

  “They do when Old Drumble leads them.”

  “True!” His father was putting his wedges in the sack and stowing them under a log. He wiped the saw—especially the teeth—with the oily rag. “So it doesn’t rust,” he said. “A rusty saw makes the job harder.” He rolled the triangular file in the rag and stowed it away with the cross-cut and the axe.

  They finished stacking the split firewood, emptied the billy on the ashes, and put it away upside-down in a dry spot under a stump, with the mugs, the tin of tea leaves and the sugar jar.

  “Drink what’s left of the milk, and put the bottle in the pikau.” His father was putting away a handful of twigs and some cones for lighting the fire next time, stuffing with them the newspaper that had wrapped their sandwiches.

  “We don’t want to leave a mess, not when Mr Barker’s doing us a good turn. Your behind’s going to be sore, sitting on the bar all the way into Waharoa.”

  “I don’t mind, Dad. It’s good fun.”

  Down the drive, Jack looked at some pellets of sheep shit and said, “I told Harry Jitters they were Smarter Pills, and he ate a handful and said he wasn’t any smarter, and I told him, ‘Now you’re a-gettin’ smarter!’”

  Mr Jackman snorted. “Where did you hear that?”

  “You said it to Mr Murdoch,” said Jack, “and you both laughed, so I thought I’d try it on Harry.”

  “You’ll get me into trouble yet,” chuckled his father. “Look out! What are you up to?” They were turning out on to the road.

  “I was trying to see if I could spot Andy and Old Drumble.”

  “They were going out to pick up some steers off Brooks’s place, out under the Kaimais,” his father told him. “By now they should be on their way back, heading for the Gordon bridge. Andy’s driving the steers over to the works at Horotiu.”

  “He used to take steers from up the Tapu Valley, and from down Opotiki, and Poverty Bay, and graze them along the side of the road, all the way up to the Auckland sales,” Jack said. “He told me stories about them.”

  “I’ll bet he did…”

  “He told me about where the old drovers go to die.”

  “I haven’t heard that one.” They were passing the Wardville school, and Mick O’Halloran’s whare where two herring-gutted dogs leapt and barked on their chains.

  “Andy says there’s a floating island that was born out in the Hauraki Gulf or the Firth of Thames, and it drifts up and down the Waihou River, up past Okauia Springs as far as the falls at Okoroire, and then down again.”

  “Go on,” said his father.

  Chapter Thirty

  Rump Steak and the Knife and

  Steel Dance, Some Day When We’re Rich,

  and Why Jack’s Mother Asked if Her

  Ears Were Deceiving Her.

  “SOMETIMES,” SAID JACK, “the floating island’s just a patch of flax and raupo, sometimes it’s a huge island with lots of bush and grassy clearings, mountains, hills, beaches, its own rivers and creeks, even a couple of lakes. Andy says it even has its own weather.

  “Sometimes it comes aground in the Waihou out at the Gordon, and Smoky Rawiri used to use it as a bridge to drive steers and sheep across, but mostly they had to put them across at the ford. That was when Andy was a little boy and ran away from home to become a drover.

  “Once, they put a mob of steers on to the island, and it drifted off downstream before they could get the dogs and horses on board. It didn’t stop till it had floated out past Thames, across the Firth, up past Waiheke and Brown’s Island, and into Auckland, where it came aground in Mechanics Bay, and they ran the steers ashore, and drove them out down the Great South Road, for the sales.”

  “That must have been handy,” said Mr Jackman.

  “Yes, but Smoky and Andy had to do the barking and chase the steers themselves, then walk all the way back over the Bombay Hills and across the Hauraki Plain up to the Gordon, to collect their dogs and horses. Andy said Old Drumble and Nosy thought it was a great joke.”

  Jack felt his father laughing to himself, and he thought he liked being doubled on the bike, his father’s arms around him. He looked at the top of the front tyre, how it kept coming out from under the mudguard and disappearing, yet it never stopped.

  “They got the top price at the sales,” he said, “because the steers had eaten everything green on the island and put on a fair bit of weight. They even stripped the branches of the pussy willows. And, not having done much walking, they were in prime condition.”

  “Crikey!” said his father.

  “Dad, am I in prime condition?”

  “I reckon,” said Mr Jackman, “if I was to double you all the way up to the Auckland sales and sell you there, you’d bring the top price. You weigh enough, so you must be in prime condition.” He puffed noisily and pedalled as if it was hard going.

  “Do you want me to ride, and give you a dub? ”

  “I don’t know if your legs are long enough to reach the pe
dals yet. What else did Andy tell you about the old drovers’ cemetery? ”

  “The floating island, it’s still there, drifting up and down the Waihou, and round the Hauraki Gulf, only you’ve got to believe in it to be able to see it. Andy said it’s where Smoky Rawiri went after he died, and all the other old drovers. And their horses and dogs.

  “I don’t think Mum could see the floating island, Dad, because she wouldn’t believe in it, would she?”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Andy said all the old drovers and their old horses and dogs never have to do any droving again. They spend their days fishing and swimming, pig hunting and collecting driftwood, and each night they light a big campfire, and sit around grilling the best cuts of rump steak on sticks in front of the embers, singing, drinking whisky, and telling yarns. And one night each year, they do the knife and steel dance.”

  “The knife and steel dance?”

  “You have to dance around the fire, sharpening your skinning knife on the steel with your eyes closed and not cutting yourself, and you jump backwards and forwards through the flames, balancing the tip of your skinning knife on your nose. Andy said it’s a very old drover’s dance. The best dancer and storyteller wins a barrel of whisky.”

  “What if it’s a horse or a dog? The winner I mean.”

  “They get the barrel of whisky, just like anyone else. Dogs and horses love whisky, Andy said. Remember Old Drumble’s kennel?”

  “I haven’t forgotten Old Drumble’s kennel; nor has your mother. I don’t think she’ll ever look on Old Drumble in quite the same way. You’re probably better keeping it to yourself: the floating island, and the barrel of whisky for a prize. There are some things it’s best not to tell Mum.”

  “But that wouldn’t be honest, would it, Dad?”

  His father pedalled a couple of chains before he replied. “It’s pretty tricky I know but, as you get older, you learn when to say things, and when not to. Tell Mum your stories, by all means, but she doesn’t want to know about Old Drumble’s boozing, not really. And I’d be a bit chary about the knife and steel dance, too. I don’t think she’d like that.”

  They biked past the Te Aroha turn-off, Jack staring at the yellow A.A. signpost. “I’ve never been to Te Aroha,” he sighed.

  “Some day when we’ve paid off the mortgage on the house, we’ll buy a car and drive over to Te Aroha, Mum and me in the front, and you in the dicky seat, and we’ll stop in the middle of the bridge, and see if we can spot Andy’s floating island in the Waihou.”

  “Andy said old Henry Rawiri called the floating island a motu tapu,” Jack told his father.

  “A sacred island,” said Mr Jackman. “There’s a big island in the Gulf by that name: Motutapu. Only Aucklanders call it Motor-tap.”

  Jack laughed. “Motor-tap!” he said. “Dad, when I grow up, will I be able to drive cattle from down past Opotiki all the way up to Auckland for the sales?”

  “I don’t know how long they’ll keep up those big drives,” Mr Jackman told Jack, “fattening them on the long acre. Somebody said one day they’re going to build lorries big enough just for carrying stock. And more and more of them go by train these days. The drover’s life will come to an end.”

  “Is Andy going to die?”

  “I just mean things are changing,” said Jack’s father. “There’ll always be the local drives, so long as there’s the weekly sales at Matamata and Morrinsville, and sharemilkers shifting their herds from farm to farm on Gypsy Day. But the big drives, nobody can tell how long they’ll last. When I was a boy, the old drovers used to talk of driving mobs from one end of the North Island to the other, taking up land. And the same down south.”

  Jack tried to think of the roads without Andy driving sheep and cattle along them, without Old Drumble trotting ahead, tail waving like a black and white flag. “If there isn’t going to be any droving, then Old Drumble can become a pisshead,” he said. “It won’t matter, so long as he’s not on the road. Andy told me.”

  “You might say that to me,” said his father, “but I’d shy off saying it to your mother; I certainly wouldn’t go saying ‘pisshead’ in her hearing. Andy and Old Drumble wouldn’t want you getting into trouble on their account.”

  “I suppose not,” Jack agreed.

  He shifted his behind on the bar, and remembered not to grab at the handlebars. “Are we coming out to cut firewood next weekend?”

  “I hope to,” said his father. “Maybe we can get a lift both ways with Bob Murdoch, then Harry could come along, too. He’d be company for you.”

  “I wouldn’t mind that,” said Jack. “It’d be good if we could have Andy and Old Drumble for company, too, and Mum, of course. She’s company, even if she does strong-eye me sometimes and makes me tell her all Andy’s stories about Old Drumble and Nosy.

  “I don’t suppose Minnie Mitchell would want to come cutting firewood,” Jack said. “Girls aren’t interested in learning how to use a cross-cut and split with the grain, things like that.”

  “It’s not the sort of thing girls do.”

  “Mum can. She reckons it’s just as well she knows how to use an axe,” Jack told his father. “When I forget to chop the kindling, or break up a butter box for her to burn under the copper, she says it’s quicker to do it herself than wait for me to remember. That’s when she says, ‘If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.’”

  “I’ve heard her say that on occasion.”

  They came round the Wardville turn-off on to the main road, and the dairy factory was in sight. Jack looked for the top of the brick chimney sticking above the roofs at the far end.

  “And she says, ‘If I waited for you and your father to keep me in kindling wood, I’d still be waiting in another hundred years.’”

  “Your mother’s a redoubtable woman, but don’t go telling her I said that.” Mr Jackman grunted and shoved on the pedals. “I didn’t know there was a hill here.” They came up the slight rise past Caseys’ place, where Jack looked at the big trees.

  “I like walnuts,” he said.

  “It’ll be months before they’re ripe. Almost home now.”

  Around the church corner, past Harry’s and Minnie’s, past the pig-fern and the bamboo, up the top end of Ward Street, and in the gate.

  “Mum!” Jack yelled. “We’re home! Did you know Old Drumble’s going to give up droving and become a pisshead?”

  “Are my ears deceiving me?” said his mother.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Something I Can Eat in My Hand,

  Trouble With Willows, and

  Never the Same Again.

  “I TOLD YOU TO SHUT UP about that,” Jack’s father muttered, then gabbled: “Hello, dear! We got a good lot of firewood sawn and split, and the boy was a great help. By Jove, he’s getting to be a weight, doubling him on the bike.”

  “My behind’s sore.” Jack felt for his father’s foot, slid off the bar, and rubbed himself.

  “It’s going to be a sight sorer, if I hear you using language like that, my boy—oh, that’ll be the telephone! Answer it for me. Why it always chooses to ring, just when I’m about to put tea on the table…”

  Jack pushed the stool to the wall, stood on it so he could reach to speak into the mouthpiece, and held the receiver on its cord to his ear.

  “Nine K!”

  “Is your dad there?”

  “Dad, it’s for you.”

  “Are you there? Oh, it’s you, Bob…Why, what’s up?”

  Mrs Jackman stopped whisking the mashed potatoes around with a fork and turned and stared at Jack’s father.

  “What do you mean ‘gone’?” Mr Jackman said into the telephone and listened. “I’ll be ready by the time you get here. See you.” He hung up the earpiece and turned the little handle to ring off.

  “What’s happened?” asked Mrs Jackman.

  Jack felt uneasy at the way his mother was standing, at the way she and his father were looking at each other. Had he done something
wrong?

  “Old Andy. They found his horse out at the Gordon, on the shingle downstream of the bridge.”

  “Nosy,” said Jack.

  “No sign of him. Steers up and down the river-bed and all over the road. We’re going to give a hand to search the river. The trouble is all those willows.”

  “You get some food inside you before you go.”

  “Give me something I can eat in my hand.” Mr Jackman was already chewing a chop as he talked, shoving his boots back on, helping himself to a mouthful of mashed potato, another chop, doing up his laces. Mrs Jackman was pouring boiling water from the kettle on the stove into the teapot and saying, “Jack, pop out and ask Mr Murdoch to come in and have a cup of tea, while your father has a bite to eat.

  “You can’t go back all the way out there, searching into the night, with nothing in your stomach. And you see you take care among those willows. Treacherous things. I don’t know why the County Council doesn’t get rid of them, growing their roots into the river, causing floods.

  “It’s quite all right, Jack, you sit down and get on with your tea. Hello, Mr Murdoch. Here’s a sad thing, by the sound of it.”

  Again, it was something not just in their voices, but in the silences between them, their glances.

  “What’s wrong?” Jack’s own voice was uncertain.

  “Nothing’s wrong. Well, nothing that we know of yet. You just get on with your tea.” His mother pushed him down into his chair. “Take care now. It’ll be dark before you know where you are,” and she was standing at the door, bunching her apron in her left hand, holding the teapot in her right, watching his father and Mr Murdoch go out to the lorry, listening to it drive away towards the bottom end of Ward Street.

  “What’s happened to Andy, Mum?”

  “Far too old to be droving still, a man of his years!”

  “Is he all right?”

  “Nobody knows anything yet. It could all be a false alarm. We’ll find out soon enough.”

  Jack would have liked to chew his chop in his hand, too, but he cut around the meat on the inside of the bone, cut a small slice off that, and jabbed his fork into it. “What about Old Drumble?” he asked.