The Battlers

by Kylie Tennant

  ‘He bit me!’ the woman screamed furiously. ‘You damned blasted mongrel of a dog!’

  At Snow’s voice Bluey laid down his head on his paws, his yellow eyes still jealously turned on the interloper. Viewing the teeth-marks on the leg held out for his inspection, Snow assured himself that the stranger was more frightened than hurt.

  ‘It’s just a nip,’ he told her. ‘Why’d you try to sneak away?’

  The woman ignored the question. ‘I ’ates damn dogs,’ she said sullenly.

  She was so small — merely a bag of bones; and as she shiveringly accepted the old coat Snow passed her, he asked curiously: ‘How old ’ud you be?’

  ‘Nineteen.’

  ‘You look more.’ She looked about sixty. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Dancy. And me married name’s Smif.’

  ‘Well, listen ’ere, Dancy Smith, or whoever you are. I’m a married man, and I’m making ’ome to me wife, so it ain’t no use you campin’ with me, see? But I wouldn’t turn a dog away if it was hungry.’

  The girl Dancy snarled at him. ‘Oo wants to camp wiv you? I ’ates men —’ ates the ’ole bloomin’ lot of ’em. Wot do they ever do but sit back and watch women work? I ain’t never seen a man yet what was any good. The whole schemin’, lyin’, crawlin’ lot of ’em. I ’ates ’em. And women, too,’ she added liberally. ‘Camp wiv you? Oo wants to camp wiv you?’

  Snow was frying the mutton, and she fell silent, watching it ravenously. Then she snivelled a little. ‘I’m that scared of the dark. Something went ‘Yow!’ ’ She imitated the sound.

  ‘That’d be a ’possum.’

  ‘I fought it was a ghost.’ She shuddered. ‘I got thinking of the time Dad come ’ome. Walked out of the asylum ’e did, wiv a coat over his asylum cloves. He come ’ome to the residential where Mum was stayin’ wiv me and the other kids. I was twelve. He come home on the Friday, and Saturday afternoon, when we was at the pi’tures, he cut her throat, and then he cut his own throat afterwards. The landlady made me go in wiv a mop and a bucket and clean up the floor. Bled to death he had, all over it. And me wringin’ out the mop wiv me own farver’s blood on it. The landlady said they was my parents and I had to do it.’

  With Snow’s repugnance there mingled a tiny strain of pity. He said nothing, but turned the meat on the fire.

  ‘Then me married sister took us. She ’ated the sight of me. Thought the day wasn’t lucky if she didn’t find somefing to frash me for. I’ll put you, she says, where they’ll make you sorry you was born. And she told all the lies in court!’ Dancy broke off. ‘Ain’t that meat done yet?’

  ‘Give it a chance. What happened then?’

  ‘I went to Parramatta. I was in an’ out up to the time I was eighteen. The other girls taught me plenty. A edjucation I ’ad.’

  Snow interestedly contemplated this visitation from another world as it rambled on in a smattering of filthy words and bitterness, discoursing of alley and slum and reformatory.

  ‘You ain’t had much of a fair go,’ he said slowly at last. ‘You’s what you might call a Stray.’

  The creature spat. ‘It’s men,’ she said. ‘Everywhere you go they’re runnin’ things. Tryin’ to down you. An’ women, too. All of ’em rotten.’

  Snow took the mutton from the frying-pan and gave it to her. She ate wolfishly, only interrupting the meal to remark that ‘the dog looked at her sumfin’ fierce’; so that Snow ordered Bluey away. The man could feel the protuberant eyes, with their red rims and pale lashes, inspecting him calculatingly. She looked, he thought, like a trapped, fierce little animal.

  ‘Where’s your teeth?’ he asked.

  ‘I broke ’em.’

  ‘You’d look a lot better with ’em than without.’

  ‘Well, who the hell d’you think’s got the money to go round buyin’ sets of teef?’

  This closed the conversation.

  Snow pondered. ‘I could go back through Belburra,’ he said aloud, ‘and leave you with Father Paul.’

  ‘One of them parsons?’

  ‘ ’E’s a priest.’

  ‘Ooh! Not one of them. I ’ates them.’ Something about Snow’s ugly, unshaven countenance seemed to have raised her spirits. ‘Ow’d you get here? You working?’

  Snow gave the hard, dry croak that served him for a laugh. ‘Work, eh?’ he said. ‘It’s funny about work.’ This novel situation had loosened his tongue. ‘I got a sickener of it when I was a kid. My father was one of them half-starved wheat-cockies out from Temora. Graft! He grafted like a team of bullocks, and when I wasn’t knee-high to a grasshopper he had me out ploughing and clearing and fencing.’ He fell silent contemplating that never-ending work. ‘It was: ‘Theodore, go harness them horses,’ or, ‘Theodore, haul the timber,’ and me managing great big Clydesdales with tempers just like his (an’ his temper was something fierce). Why, I didn’t come up as high as the horses’ belly! Geeze! I had enough of work to last me a lifetime when I was a kid. Then I married, and a married man, when he can get work, he’s got to take it. It’s different when you’re single. I been workin’ on and off ever since.’

  These were more words than he had spoken for weeks, and he paused, surprised at himself. Then he rose yawning. ‘Well, I’ll give you a lift to Currawong tomorrow, and you can make your way back to Sydney from there.’

  He was sorting his blankets into two heaps. ‘There’s yours. And if you try to sneak away, the dog’ll get you. Understand?’

  He rolled himself a last cigarette before turning in, and then tossed the tobacco and papers across to his guest. She caught them eagerly. Then, looking up from licking the cigarette into shape, she remarked:

  ‘You think you’ll be well rid of me, don’t you?’

  There was something in her tone that aroused in Snow a faint feeling of alarm. Rolling up in his blankets, he comforted himself with the thought that no creature as little and skinny as that girl could worry him. He travelled alone.

  ‘G’night, Stray,’ he said austerely, tilting his hat over his eyes. He did not trouble to remove his boots. He might need to get up in the night to put wood on the fire.

  After the camp had sunk into a silence punctuated by the heavy bass snore of Snow and the treble snore of the intruder, Bluey lay with one eye cocked suspiciously at the bundle of bedding that represented, in his canine view, a new and hateful complication to life. If Snow could not see trouble ahead, Bluey could.

  2

  Towards morning a cold, drizzling rain began to fall. Snow was not at all disturbed. He would have pulled his hat farther over his eyes and slept on, had it not been for the restless stirrings and mumblings of his guest.

  ‘What’s up?’ he demanded.

  ‘It’s raining.’

  ‘Well, if you don’t like it, hop up in the van. Get back there, Bluey.’ He aimed a rock at his faithful hound, who had approached with the intention of guarding the van from all marauders. Bluey fled with a yelp, and Snow relapsed peacefully into his dreams again.

  The rain was coming down in earnest when he awoke, but there was still a red ember glowing under the big log he had dragged across the fire. It had been his intention to stay quietly in camp all day and eat mutton; but the rain, falling with the heavy deliberation of an after-dinner speech, reminded him that there was a deserted church a few miles along the road. One of his reasons for coming through Currawong had been to remove that church door and fashion from it an upper decking for his waggon. Snow was nothing if not a handy man.

  He decided to move on to the church, camp there and eat mutton until the rain stopped, remove the door for his waggon decking and then jog pleasantly on. After all, there was no hurry, and he did not like the idea of turning the Stray, as he privately termed her, away in the rain. Courtesy to women had once been thrashed into him with a leather strap, and some of the scars still remained.

  The Stray slid out of the van just as he came to this decision.

  She rubbed her fists into her eyes, swore, and
lounged over to inspect the chops Snow was preparing for breakfast.

  ‘You cud do with more fat,’ she observed.

  If there was one thing Snow disliked, it was interference with his cooking.

  ‘You could do with a wash,’ he retorted. ‘There’s the soap and towel.’

  The Stray was about to point out that it was raining. There was a reproachful look in her eye; but she trotted away obediently, and returned with part of the surface soil removed from a countenance that was by daylight worse, if anything, than the night before. In more fortunate circumstances, Dancy Smith might have had a delicate pink-and-white complexion, but it was the type of complexion that will not brown, but turns the colour of beetroot, then blisters. Her nose was peeling, and the deep red sunburn made her look, as Snow put it, as though ‘she had been on the beer.’ Her lips were cracked and sore. There were deep wrinkles at the corners of her eyes.

  Snow eyed her furtively as she ate and, glancing up suddenly, she caught him.

  ‘Who yer staring at?’ she asked dangerously.

  Snow chuckled. ‘Your nose is peelin’,’ he observed. ‘You ought to put a bit of fat on it and that ’ud cook it proper.’

  When breakfast was over, he wrapped away in clean flourbags those portions of the sheep which he intended to take with him. The Stray washed the dishes and dried them and helped break camp. She seemed dejected, and finally remarked:

  ‘Well, I guess I’ll be getting along.’

  Snow looked surprised. ‘I said I’d give you a lift into Currawong, didn’t I?’

  ‘You’d sooner get rid of me.’

  This was so true that Snow felt in honour bound to deny it.

  ‘Arr. The horse don’t mind a bit extra. You ain’t that heavy. Hop in the van and don’t let’s hear no more about it.’

  The Stray climbed up into the van. She was still wearing Snow’s old coat, and as she crouched down beside him, a small bundle of bones, clothing, and dejection, Snow set himself to cheer her up.

  ‘I been thinkin’ of goin’ down into Victoria to cy’nide some ’possums,’ he said chattily. ‘There’s more of them down there than here in New South.’

  His guest did not bite noticeably at this conversational bait.

  ‘Of course,’ Snow continued, ‘there’s always some cocky’s son who wants to buy the skins off you at sixpence each and sell them at three bob himself, and if you won’t give them to him, he’s likely to top you off to the police. But there’s risks to everything.’

  ‘You can be put in gaol for catching ’possums,’ the Stray said lugubriously.

  Snow nodded. ‘Well, the way I look at it is this: You can be put in gaol for almost anything, if you ain’t got no money. And why? ’Cos it’s a crime to have no money. That’s why. I thought it out.’ He nodded again deliberately. ‘No vis’ble means of support. You go in for it, see?’

  ‘I been vagged,’ the Stray mentioned.

  ‘Oh! you have? Well, there you are. If you ain’t got any money, they run you in, and if you try to get any, they run you in. It ain’t safe to be poor in this country. That’s why I work if I can get a job.’

  ‘What do you do?’ the Stray asked, her curiosity aroused.

  ‘Anythin’,’ Snow answered, gratified to see that she was interested. ‘Anythin’ I can get: relief work, droving, fencing, clearing.’

  They had been plodding along, Don splashing sturdily through the puddles, the rain running down his coat in dark trickles. It beat in on the man and woman in the van, but with the tarpaulin across their knees they were well enough protected.

  On either side were fields rolling mile after mile in a wandering maze of fences, with here and there an erupted red-roofed farm, its windmill like a steel rosette pinned to the patchwork country that was squared into dun-coloured paddocks newly ploughed, the grey-yellow of stubble, or the vivid green of young oats. In stretches of half-cleared pasture ring-barked trees reared their twisted grey skeletons, and the black stumps showed as dark toadstool tops in the tufted, grey-brown grass. Hollow burnt logs, patched white and black like a magpie’s wing, lay as runways for rabbits whose warrens, with their sandy beaten patch about the holes, gave promise, to Snow’s eye, of good trapping. A line of green willows at the foot of a slope marked the bed of a creek, willows bitten neatly off at the height an old ram could stretch his sharp teeth. The dripping of the thin trees was music to a man who had grown up from harvest to harvest, and Snow took in the fields with the eye of a farmer. The rain was coming just when it was most needed. It would be a good year here — perhaps.

  They had come round yet another bend in a road that could not have gone straight if the whole Salvation Army reformed it. Its six-inch-deep ruts had become rivers of red mud that churned under the wheels like butter.

  ‘Mi-Gord!’ Snow exclaimed. He had lifted his eyes casually from Don’s rump to the road along which they travelled.

  ‘What’s up?’ the Stray asked.

  Snow pointed dramatically to a figure in the distance. ‘Damned if the road ain’t lousy with wimmen,’ he exclaimed. ‘I didn’t see her go past the reserve.’

  The Stray screwed up her eyes and peered forward. ‘How d’you know it’s a woman?’ she demanded.

  ‘Look at the way she walks,’ Snow said, disgusted. ‘Dunno what things is comin’ to when the road’s all littered up with wimmen.’

  Sure enough, as they began to overtake the moving figure, it resolved itself into the shape of a fat, lumpy female, waddling along. In one hand she carried a small, blackened billy-can, in the other a sugar-bag. She was clad in a black coat edged with draggled brown fur, and her brown stockings sagged into deplorable sandshoes. A yellow straw hat drooped over her face and shoulders.

  Having picked up one woman, Snow decided he might as well go on as he had begun.

  ‘Give y’ a lift, missus?’ he hailed reluctantly, as the van overtook the slow-moving figure.

  The woman regarded him with small, beady, black eyes from a pasty, fat face. ‘Don’t presume to address your betters, my man,’ she responded. ‘Get along with you.’

  Snow nearly fell out of the van with astonishment. He hastily clicked to Don, and the van lumbered away. ‘Mi-Gord!’ Snow turned to the no less astonished Stray. ‘There’s a way to refuse a lift!’

  The Stray was peering out of the back of the van at the strange creature, who had stopped in the middle of the road and was solemnly dancing, capering this way and that, waving and jerking her arms.

  ‘She’s bats.’ The Stray tapped her forehead. ‘Looney, like farver was.’ She added hopefully: ‘Maybe she’s escaped from a ’sylum and ’ull cut her froat.’

  Snow urged Don on. A man, he reflected, could go for weeks on the track and have nothing more occur than his horse getting a flint in its shoe, and then a run of extraordinary happenings would whirl him along as a piece of paper is whirled down a street. He began to feel that he should have parted with the Stray at the camp. She seemed to bring strange luck. It was like seeing one white horse. You’d be sure to see another before the day was out. He’d met one woman carrying her swag, then sure enough he’d met another.

  ‘It repeats,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Like an onion.’

  He was relieved when the dreary, weatherboard shape of the church showed across the sodden fields and dripping, ragged trees. He was even better pleased to discover that there was only one other occupant of the church, and that a man.

  The stranger greeted them in a friendly enough way. He was a weedy youth with a mop of brown hair flopped over his forehead and an air of impudent self-assurance. He seemed to have shaved with a hoe, and between the gashes and raw, scraped patches a crop of black bristles fought for ascendancy over some flourishing pimples.

  ‘How’s it, sport?’ he called to Snow, and addressing the Stray by the honorific of the track, ‘Take a seat, missus.’

  He indicated a kerosene tin beside the fire he had lit on a sheet of corrugated iron. Having thus discharged th
e duties of host, he fell to re-stringing a battered guitar.

  ‘We saw a mad woman down the road,’ Dancy volunteered. ‘She was dancing and screaming and throwing stones after us and rolling in the mud; wasn’t she, Snow?’

  This was Snow’s first introduction to the Stray’s talent for ekeing out the bare bones of truth into a tasty stew.

  ‘It must be Phippsy,’ the youth said, unimpressed. ‘Some of the chaps were talking about her at Belburra. Dora Phipps, that’s her name. She’s eccentric, that’s all.’

  Snow and Stray glanced at each other uneasily. But their companion, dismissing the subject from his mind, launched out on a recital of his troubles. His track name was Duke, and he had been ‘busking’ — singing his way from town to town. He had had a mate, a jockey, who had left Melbourne under a cloud and in the guard’s van of a goods train where the busker was also travelling north. They had sworn eternal friendship until a disagreement resulted in the hurried departure of the jockey and left the busker only a large, discoloured bruise upon his cheekbone, sole token of deathless friendship.

  ‘Jealousy,’ the busker said darkly. ‘That was his trouble. What with my guitar and my songs and, as you might put it, my personality, he gets fed up with having nothing to do but look after the camp and take round the hat. Anyway, he’s done himself a bad turn, and he knows it. A mate like me isn’t to be picked up under every bridge.’

  They gathered that Duke was ‘making down’ to Logan, where he intended to honour a travelling tent show with his presence.

  ‘As soon as I get to Currawong,’ he explained, ‘I’ll do a quickie round the pubs and then board the 10.25 goods tonight for Logan.’

  ‘How about your rations?’ Snow asked. For tomorrow was Thursday; and Thursday all over the West is dole day, when the track men come in to have their cards stamped at the police-station and get their rations to carry them to the next ‘dole town.’

  The busker laughed. ‘Me? Why, a chap that can make fifteen bob in an hour on Saturday afternoon would be a mug to hang round waiting for a copper to stamp his card and order him a few bobs’ worth of groceries. One Saturday I made thirty bob before the Johns warned me off. Rations?’ He waved the suggestion away. ‘Not while I have my guitar.’