The Battlers

by Kylie Tennant

  ‘Look what I’ve got, Snow.’ The busker waved the bottle in which he was carefully carrying the rum.

  ‘Guh?’ Snow groaned; and even when the busker, word by word, repeated the long argument, the special pleading he had employed on the publican, before he had secured his treasure, Snow still did not seem to care. He just sank back on the tarpaulin and spat feebly at the fire. With his gaunt frame huddled in an old military overcoat, he looked like some half-starved sentry about to perish. The busker tended the rum with care. He stood it in a pannikin inside a billy of boiling water until he judged it really hot, then added the hot water, sugar and lemon.

  ‘It must be hot,’ he repeated to himself the publican’s words. Proudly carrying his brew over to Snow, he propped the invalid up. ‘Take a swig of this, old man,’ he commanded, holding it to Snow’s mouth.

  Snow swallowed obediently; then, as the burning liquid scorched his broken lips and swollen throat, he gave a yell of agony, and leapt up with a suddenness that sent the hard-won rum flying.

  ‘Oh Gord!’ he howled. ‘It’s red-hot.’ He clutched his mouth and rocked himself, trying to recover breath.

  The busker, ruefully eyeing the brown patch where the liquid had soaked into the grass, picked up the empty pannikin. ‘If I’d only tasted it,’ he said wistfully, ‘this wouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘Where you goin’?’ Snow croaked.

  ‘Back to get some more.’

  ‘He won’t give you any more.’

  ‘I’ll get it.’

  The busker turned heroically towards the road for the walk back to town. As he came up over the embankment on the roadside, he met the Stray returning with a bag of flour. She had, she declared, ‘ticked up the flour mill.’ ‘Where you goin’, Dukesy?’ This had been her name for him ever since she decided to be friendly with the busker.

  Duke explained what had happened. ‘I’m going back to battle for some more rum.’

  ‘You got a fat chance of gettin’ it.’ Dancy was tired and the thought of preparing tea and getting wood and water without Duke made her jeer a little.

  ‘What’ll you bet?’

  ‘Three smokes.’

  A comradeship had grown up between them, the outcome of that nightmare drive over the plains, one of those simple, easy friendships founded on mutual respect. They both looked up to Snow, although in Stray’s case her attitude was one of ownership both pompous and pathetic. She bullied Snow in his weakened state, persuading and commanding him to eat. If he swore at her irritably, she took no notice.

  ‘It’s a funny fing,’ Dancy confided to Duke, ‘I can bite anyone, go into places wiv dogs, ask in shops, do fings I’d never do for meself, jus’ for somebody else. Funny, ain’t it?’

  She protected Snow, wrapped him up, fussed over him, but he hardly noticed it, sitting in a sodden daze, staring for the most part into the fire, or listlessly trying to stumble about the camp.

  Miss Phipps was still busy with her stub of pencil and her scrap of wrapping-paper, as the Stray trotted back bemoaning her lack of success in ‘biting’ housewives. It was only dole-day, and those wise women knew that travellers could not be really destitute.

  ‘What you doing, Phippsy?’ she demanded, beginning to peel some potatoes.

  ‘Nothing you would understand, deah.’

  ‘Well, if it ain’t important, nick down to the creek and get some water.’

  Miss Phipps did not stir. She continued scribbling. ‘Regionalised, centracious control,’ she wrote. Then underneath: ‘Zoning for efficacy of metaphysical totality.’ Miss Phipps had just reorganised the government of the world under a powerful committee of women all very like herself. She had wiped out all men, small boys and women who did not fit in with her plans, and she was working out the perfect autocracy.

  ‘Rhythmic centralisation,’ she wrote; and the beauty of the long words acted like a tonic. The power of the creator was upon her. No one could possibly understand how important this plan would be in the future when she took control of the world and wiped out all the enemies who had conspired to leave her gracious and queenly person in rags and poverty. Miss Phipps never regarded herself in any other light than a queen in disguise.

  That was why she was able to bear with an unruffled smile the unkind things that venomous little creatures like Dancy Smith or Harley Duke might say about ‘fake society women.’ No, she was a queen of the Zenobia breed. Her word was law, and she moved through fabulous palaces in silks and satins. All the rulers of her far-stretching territories were women like herself, glorious, dignified, great ladies in their own right. She had organising ability, plus that capacity to plan every detail that made underlings worship her and depend on her.

  It was at this point that the piece of brown paper was torn from her hand and through the vapours of her kingdom appeared the face of the Stray, fiendish with rage.

  ‘If you don’t take that kerosene tin and fill it’ — Dancy was shaking with anger — ‘I’ll break every bone in your lazy, fat body, you …’ And the Stray added a string of epithets straight from the gutter.

  How would you behave if you were a queen subjected to such an outrage? The queenly thing seemed to be to walk off with the kerosene tin in a dignified and stately manner. No ruffled haste. That would be unseemly. The meditations on the World Feminised Rhythm Systems could be resumed on the creek bank, out of reach of that unworthy female who had just torn up the plans for the World State Organisation and was putting them in the fire.

  ‘She gives me a pain in the neck, she does that.’ Dancy placed another log on and resumed her potato-peeling. ‘You gotta drive ’er like that blasted ’Orehound all the time if you want anythin’ out of ’er.’

  Ruthlessness towards poor Miss Phipps had been the Stray’s most notable development of late. She had lost her first awe of long words and superior snubs, and with it the tolerance which all savages extend to lunatics. Dancy was now convinced that Miss Phipps was no more mad than she was, or than the Horehound. Since mastering that unknown quantity, she felt herself equal to anything. A new self-confidence radiated from her. She drove Miss Phipps and the horse, she was friends with the busker, she petted Snow. ‘The Centralised World Rulership of the First Feminine State’ would not have given Dancy half the satisfaction of her present powers and privileges.

  ‘How are y’ now, Snowy love?’ she asked gently.

  ‘I’m all right,’ that worthy croaked feebly. ‘And cut out the Snowy love.’

  ‘Snow,’ the Stray said fervently, ‘I didn’t mean to make no trouble wiv you and your old woman. I been that worried. Say the word and I’ll clear out, and let you go back to ’er.’

  Snow took no notice. He turned over and settled himself against a log, trying to find some position in which his bones would feel less as though they were being mashed between sharp stones.

  ‘What’d she say, Snow? You ain’t once told me what she said.’

  ‘Shut up. Give a man a bit of peace, can’t you?’

  The Stray was silent for fully half a minute.

  ‘But, Snow, you cud a always said it was on the level. I wasn’t tryin’ to pool you wiv her.’

  It did not hurt Snow to let the Stray think what she liked, and if the Stray chose to think he had left home on her account, he was too sick to care.

  ‘Did Duke see to the horses?’

  ‘No, ’e’s gone back to Logan.’

  ‘Well, go and look if they’re grazin’ up the lane. Did you hobble the Hore?’

  ‘Yeah. She’ll camp wiv Don. She’s always kept wiv him.’

  ‘I dunno. You go and take ’em for a drink.’

  The horses drank at a dam in a near-by farmer’s paddock; unknown to the farmer, they also spent the night there. The Stray went off on her errand, and a minute later she was hastening back in consternation.

  ‘The mare’s gone, Snow, but she can’t be far. She was croppin’ beside Don a while back.’

  Snow staggered up cursing. ‘If they po
und ’er, how the hell do you think we’ll get ’er out? I’ll go after ’er.’

  ‘No, Snow. Wait till Dukesy gets ’ere. He’ll go.’

  ‘That bloody cow of a mare can gallop in hobbles …’

  ‘Let me go after ’er.’

  ‘No, I’m all right. I’ll ride Don.’ He swayed as he stood. He could not trust his knees to carry him. ‘Pack o’ yapping women,’ he muttered. ‘Can’t even see to the horses.’ His weakness annoyed him.

  The Stray stood peering after him in the darkness that had muffled down like a grey blanket, hiding everything outside the friendly circle of the fire.

  ‘Pig-headed fool,’ she grumbled to Phippsy, who had returned because it was too cold to linger by the creek. ‘He can’t even see no tracks in this light.’

  Several times she lifted her head to listen for the sound of trotting hoofs that would tell that Snow was back. ‘If he only wouldn’t camp miles out of town,’ she grumbled. ‘If we was closer in I could battle a paddock for the ’orses, ’stead of lettin’ ’em graze about. He says there’s no feed on the river near the town, but there was lots of feed. I looked today. He just likes bein’ on ’is lonesome, away from everyone.’

  She had looked wistfully at the turnouts settled on the reserve down by the river. There had been a woman with a clutch of children hanging out washing, and another woman sitting in the sun outside a tin hut. They would have been good to talk to after the boring monotony of Miss Phipps, who was no company at all, who did not even answer when you spoke.

  The winter darkness closed down like a boy’s hand over a lame bird; and still there was no cheery ‘Yodel-eh-hey-yo’ from the busker coming up the road. The Stray moved restlessly about the camp, nagging at Miss Phipps in a preoccupied way. She made several trips to the road to see if Duke was coming or if there was any sign of Snow.

  ‘If on’y one of ’em ’ud come back,’ she worried. Now that the dusk, in which the trees showed like black veins drawing the blood from the sky, had thickened to a clotted darkness, the two women seemed to be tethered in the radius of the fire. They were held by the dancing light that gathered them to itself in the glow under the dim trees.

  The Stray reached for Snow’s old coat. ‘I’m goin’ to look for him,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, trust these men to take good care of themselves,’ Miss Phipps yawned.

  Outside the circle of the firelight was another world; and to leave the fire was to walk through an unseen wall where the light ended and the darkness began. Once your eyes were accustomed to the bulks and pits of it, there were degrees of shadow, and the road was a dim greyness. The Stray, stumbling along through the ruts and stones, had only one idea: to walk until she met Snow. She was so afraid of the dark that her teeth chattered. ‘Things’ might grab at her. It wasn’t the darkness she feared as much as the fact that it gave cover for supernatural monsters covered with fur and fangs and claws, for creepy, loathsome horrors, who might breathe on you as you passed, or reach out to clutch you. When a stone rolled under her foot and she stumbled, there was a breathless moment while she half decided to hurry back within the comfortable walls the firelight flung up against the tree-trunks.

  The light of a farmhouse showed yellow down a dip in the road, and that comforted her. You could always run to the house and beat on the door and scream to be let in. No ghost would chase you to a house. She trudged on, peering ahead, stopping to listen for the sound of hoof-beats. A car whizzed past her, boring a tunnel of light towards the town and leaving the darkness behind more blinding than before, until the little red tail-light winked over a rise; then night seemed to get its breath and tidy its trees and settle the silence into place again.

  A dog barked insistently from the homestead that was behind her now, and as she trudged down into the next hollow, there came a racket and cricketing of frogs. Here, at the bottom of the hill, the fences had been pushed back from their flanking of road to allow a stretch of grassy flat for travelling stock. Dancy recognised it as the place where the busker had wanted to camp because the feed and water were good. She had complained that it was too far out of town, and Snow had croaked weakly that there was a better camp farther on.

  Something black detached itself from the roadside and came towards her. Undecided whether to scream or run, the Stray found herself being licked by Bluey; an unusually friendly, tail-wagging, whining Bluey. She gave a yell: ‘Sn-oo-ow!’

  There was no answer, but from a black patch of trees there came the snort of a horse, and a grey blur showed where the Horehound moved near a fence inside which some big draught horses were grazing. The Stray turned off the road and plunged into the gloom of the trees, making in a direct line for the Horehound. She fell into a pothole, thrashed through a drift of dead leaves and twigs that snapped and crackled underfoot, and so found the faint trace of a track. Fifty yards from the road, in a patch of dry creek-bed tangled with briar bushes, she almost tripped over the body of Snow. Her teeth chattering, she fumbled for the matches with numbed fingers.

  ‘Are you all right, Snow love? Hey, Snow, what is it?’ she gulped.

  The man gave a groan and stirred. This heartened her. In the flame of the match his face showed as a horrible mess of bloodstains. The flesh had been pulped below his eye where the Horehound had kicked him when he stooped to take a flint out of her shoe. He was conscious, but he could not speak, and as the Stray bent over him, he tried to stir, then collapsed again.

  She must go for help; but first what was that she had heard about bringing water in your hat? Sliding and scrambling towards the trickle of water, she mechanically dipped her only hat into it. The hat did not hold water very well. Then she decided that Snow could not possibly drink water with his face in that condition, and it would be cruel to dash it over him, so she dropped the hat with the water in it, tenderly laid the coat she wore over Snow, and hurried back towards the road. Dancy was no longer afraid of the darkness. She did not cry. Her mouth was set in a grim line. As she neared the road, she broke into a stumbling run. There was a car coming along the road towards the town. If she could only get to the road in time, she could stop it. She rushed out on the road, waving her arms, too breathless to shout.

  The truck was approaching very slowly because it had only one dim headlight. It was as well that the Stray had time to draw breath before it reached her and scream to the driver, or she might have been run down. Obligingly the truck roared and panted to a standstill, and the Stray poured out her incoherent story.

  ‘He came after the horses with ’flu, and the Hore kicked ’im and ’e’s lyin’ way off the road there, mister. Oh … if only Dukesy ’ad stayed ’stead of goin’ to town … Mister, see to ’im, will yuh? I can’t lift ’im and the two horses are there …’ she babbled.

  The little man in the cloth cap who was driving had a woman sitting beside him with a baby in her arms. He unpacked the woman, the baby, and two small boys by the road and told them to hold up any car that came past.

  ‘Now, my girl,’ he said mildly, ‘calm down. I’ll take the truck in as far as I can, then there will not be such a distance to carry him.’ His voice was unusual in a truck-driver, particularly the driver of a shabby little old truck that had been converted into a caravan and was filled with bundles of bedding and household odds and ends. The Stray, even in her distracted state, wondered dimly at the apparition.

  ‘You’ve missed your dole, mister,’ she advised, as the truck swung off the road and lurched over a gutter.

  ‘I don’t get any dole,’ the driver answered. He concentrated on his driving. The truck’s steering-gear was loose and the truck wobbled along drunkenly, escaping disaster in the form of gilgais and hidden logs only by a hair’s breadth. The driver spun the wheel as though he were on the bridge of a ship. ‘This is as far as we can go,’ he said calmly. ‘I know the place well.’

  Ahead of the one dim car-light the grey bulk of the Horehound moved away, stopping to graze when the car stopped. The faint chink of her hobb
les came as insolently to the Stray’s ears as if the Horehound were Salome dancing in triumph with tinkling feet. The girl’s hatred of the horse flamed up in a bitter anger.

  ‘I’ll beat the life out of that there mare,’ she breathed. ‘I’ll cut ’er to ribbons.’

  ‘You take his feet,’ the truck-driver ordered. ‘Careful now.’

  He was a small man, but he managed Snowy very skilfully. He had him in the truck and laid out on the bundles of bedding while the Stray fussed about unhandily tugging at one of Snow’s boots, then the other.

  The shivering little group of children and their mother greeted them as they rejoined the road. No car had come past.

  ‘There never is anyone happen when you want ’em,’ the Stray said bitterly.

  ‘We happened,’ the man replied calmly. ‘Climb in, Milly,’ he addressed his wife. ‘We’ll get this poor chap to hospital before we make camp.’

  It was a tight squeeze with the children and their mother, Snow, the Stray, and the driver. The old truck bucketed noisily along the road, shaking and trembling as if with cold. The Stray made her first useful contribution to the conversation.

  ‘Your missus could stay at our camp wiv the kids and my mate,’ she suggested, ‘while we drives to ’ospital wiv Snow.’

  ‘Good,’ the driver said.

  ‘The camp’s jus’ back along the road a way.’

  The driver nodded. He was driving at what was for the truck a furious pace, fully thirty-five miles an hour. It took him all his time to hold the road at that devilish speed. The dim embers of the camp-fire showed off on the left-hand side, and the man at the wheel swung his truck along the branching track towards it. He unloaded his wife and children swiftly and competently, also some encumbering boxes, so that Snow would have more room. Meanwhile the Stray, in a volley of curses, was telling the busker what she thought of him. The busker swayed slightly as he stood; and although somewhat sobered by the news of Snow’s accident, he could do with a deal more sobering. He had sung and played his best for that second lot of rum, and since it was a cold night, he had thought no harm to bring home his share inside him. He was in favour of forcing the rum between Snow’s teeth, and only the firmness of the truck-driver restrained him from carrying out his intentions.