The Battlers

by Kylie Tennant

  Many a time had the sergeant cursed the maternity ward attached to the Logan hospital. ‘Every thieving scoundrel in the country makes for this place!’ he would exclaim. ‘And they’re all here to get more kids. ’Tisn’t as though they hadn’t enough already. I know what I’d do to the whole boiling lot of them.’

  But it was not only the maternity ward which attracted travellers. The Logan camp was a green pleasance, with stretches of grassy swards between great river-gums that towered up, flexing huge muscles, their tattered rags of bark about their feet, and their great white trunks powerful as naked athletes, throwing protective shadow over the littleness of unrooted things. The she-oaks, with stiff, dark needles like long hairs, sighing and sheltering, crooked a comfortable bough here, inviting any small, grey-brown tent to use it as a ridge-pole. What more had a traveller ever asked than water, grass for horses and wood for his fire?

  Tradition had long ago marked out divisions of the bank. Dogger and Snake, dropping off a goods-train, camped beneath the railway bridge, where they had a rendezvous with Burning Angus and Uncle, who had push-bikes. Single bagmen made instinctively for the bachelor quarters beneath the bridge. There were twelve in all that dole-day, each with his separate little heap of belongings, but preserving a unity of ascetic disapproval towards the vans, three of them, plus a cart and a sulky resting beside Adelaide’s outpost, nearer to the huts on the river-bend.

  The brown van belonged to Sharkey Wilks, and his was the chestnut mare, now, to his sorrow, in foal. Sharkey, who had a wife and two daughters, had a prejudice against females, and he was willing to expound the reasons for it to anyone who would spare a blush. ‘If there’s one kind of horse I ain’t got no time for,’ he would remark bitterly, showing all his yellow teeth, ‘it’s a mare.’ His other horse had broken its leg and had to be shot; and, of course, he could not move, he explained to the sergeant, while the mare was in foal.

  A little farther down, under a group of she-oaks, was the van of no perceptible colour except mud belonging to the Dirty Joneses. They had been called the Dirty Joneses so long that they no longer resented the imputation. They always had a pack of children with running noses, and before you knew what had happened, they would be swarming into a newcomer’s camp, sniffing about, lifting small articles, and reappearing at intervals with messages: ‘Me muvver says can you lend her sixpence to buy the baby a dummy? Me muvver says have you got any tea you can spare?’ and they would snatch whatever they came for and make off without thanks.

  The Tyrells were different. Ma Tyrell and Deafy, her husband, were as well aware of it as anyone. They had a big marquee tent, they had a good van, and two horses, Deafy claiming that his was ‘the best turnout on the track bar-rr-r none.’ The Tyrells’ eldest son, Dick, travelled with them, driving his own cart and his own horse. They had two daughters respectably married to men with railway jobs in two different towns. They worked at such jobs as onion-planting, tomato-picking, prune-gathering, pea-picking — anything, in fact, where Deafy could hire out his family on contract work. They had formerly travelled in a big old sedan car which they would leave at some discreet distance when they went up in their oldest clothes to collect their dole.

  ‘All out of the kids,’ Deafy was wont to remark. ‘Them kids can pick like two men.’

  In between jobs picking, Mrs Tyrell, a big, amiable woman with a voice like that of a windjammer’s mate, from long years of shouting to Deafy, would be industriously whirring away at her little sewing-machine, turning out pot-holders, aprons and other articles made of hessian and edged with bright chintz, which the children sold from door to door.

  Beside the Tyrell camp, a small heap consisting of one tarpaulin, a tucker-box and an evil, buff-coloured, kangaroo dog called Rex, denoted the presence of the Tyrells’ friend, Thirty-Bob. Thirty-Bob’s sulky, with its shafts to earth, looking queerly like a kneeling camel, was cheek by jowl with the van and the cart; and his horse, a transient horse, which he was always swopping away for a new one, grazed with the Tyrell horses.

  Under a sky like steel wool, the Tyrell encampment still preserved a cheerful and welcoming aspect. A great black camp-oven, in the glowing embers of the fire like a half-burnt log, was a promise of plenty; and a blackened kerosene tin, hung from the hook of a tripod, contained Mrs Tyrell’s never-failing supply of hot water for the baby’s clothes.

  Around the domestic focus were grouped on boxes, or merely sprawling on the ground, the Tyrell family and Mr and Mrs Sharkey Wilks, who were passing the time in a yarn, while they awaited the return of their daughters, who had ‘taken out the port’ on a selling trip around the town. Mrs Sharkey, as though drawn by some primitive sympathy, had taken her seat by Deafy Tyrell. She was much deafer than he was, but she made up for it by talking all the time, whereas Deafy was a silent man. Thirty-Bob and young Dick Tyrell had promised the Apostle to ‘look over’ his car, and were lounging impatiently and cursing his non-arrival.

  ‘He’s probably put his nose into somebody’s business again and got it jammed there,’ Thirty-Bob suggested ungraciously. ‘Here’s Dick and me been sitting on our sterns all day waiting for the cow, and he don’t show up.’

  Sharkey Wilks made an unpleasant sound resembling a snarl. ‘Arr, that bastard, I ain’t got no time for him. Nasty, sneaking little rat, talkin’ that smooth you could knock his face in. He’d better not come round my camp, or I’ll lay him out with the trap-setter.’

  There was no real inducement for anyone to come round Mr Wilks’ camp. As a matter of fact, it was with the greatest strain on their politeness that the Tyrells were enduring his presence in their own. There are some men whose character advertises itself in every look and gesture, and the character of Sharkey Wilks was noisome.

  Mrs Tyrell glanced up from the sewing-machine where she had been paying little attention to the conversation until the name of the Apostle cropped up. In the brown of her face, carved and tanned by sun and wind, her eyes were a clear, blazing blue. It was like coming in sight of the sea round a rocky headland to have that startling, youthful gaze from a middle-aged woman. She very deliberately boomed at Sharkey Wilks:

  ‘I won’t have nothing said against Harry Postlewaite in my camp.’

  With this ultimatum she returned to her sewing, whirring away furiously, as though it was Sharkey she stitched under the needle-foot.

  ‘No offence, missus,’ Sharkey hastened to soothe her. ‘He may be all right. I ain’t saying he ain’t. Only let him keep out of my camp, that’s all.’ He leered round at the assembled company. ‘I’ve got young daughters to think of, that’s all. Gotta pertect them, ain’t I?’

  Sharkey Wilks’s women were notorious. His wife and elder daughter had a name that was bandied about in camps from Logan to Bourke. ‘The only decent one’s that little Betty,’ Mrs Tyrell had herself declared. ‘And I’m sorry for the poor little devil, I am that … in advance.’

  ‘The ’Postle picked up Snow Grimshaw on the road last night with his face kicked in,’ Dick Tyrell remarked. ‘You know Snow, Sharkey? Big, fair feller with a walk like a cattledog.’

  ‘Him? Why, he’d sneak the hay the cocky was sleeping on. I should say I know him. He’s been in for meat more times than I cud count.’

  Again Mrs Tyrell lifted her head and boomed. ‘Don’t say nothing against Snow Grimshaw, Sharkey. I won’t have it.’

  ‘Me? Why, I ain’t said nothing.’ Sharkey was injured. ‘A man can’t even open his mouth.’

  ‘I don’t say you were saying anything,’ Mrs Tyrell returned pontifically. ‘Just don’t, that’s all.’

  ‘Arr, what’s up with you, Ma? You got a bad liver,’ Sharkey glowered. ‘Snow’s got a little fair piece with him?’ he ventured presently.

  ‘How d’you know?’

  ‘Seen ’em up at the p’lice-station.’

  ‘It’s a funny thing,’ Deafy broke into the conversation, ‘how many women there are on the road nowadays. Why, you meet ’em every way you turn. I wonder why t
hat is?’

  ‘A woman can get more’n a man. You gotta’ — Sharkey considered judicially — ‘you gotta have a woman to bum for yer, just as you gotta have a dog to bark for yer.’

  ‘It’s different with a good turnout. But some of these poor things, they ain’t got a rag to cover them hardly. I never asked my wife to travel like that, just footing it.’

  Sharkey, as an authority on women, laid down the law. ‘Well, it stands to reason. A woman’s there to put up with things, ain’t she? Otherwise she wouldn’t a been born that way. A woman’s meant for the worst jobs. It’s a woman’s lot to bear, ain’t it? Well, let her put up with it. It gives her something to grouch about. Why, if a woman didn’t have nothing to moan for, she’d fall sick or something. Not that I stand any moaning from my mob. I’d take the hide off ’em with a belt if they started to whine to me. That’s the way to treat ’em.’

  ‘It’s a good thing your missus is that deaf she can’t hear you,’ Thirty-Bob suggested.

  But Mrs Wilks always knew when anyone was talking about her. She would suddenly hear a scrap of conversation just because no one wanted her to, though she could be deaf enough on other occasions.

  ‘I can hear you, Thirty-Bob,’ she screamed suddenly. ‘Don’t think I can’t.’

  There had been a lull for a few minutes in the eternal monologue that Mrs Wilks carried on to herself in a high, monotonous chant, breaking every now and then into a shriek. She was no pleasanter companion than her husband, but whereas he had something snakish in his narrow head and long body, his wife ran to fat. Her face was bloated and wrinkled like sour cream, folds of yellow fat rolling down to the dirty edge of camisole that showed above a black silk dress; a silk dress sleeked tight over great bulges of flesh and hanging drunkenly around Mrs Wilks’s pillar-like bare legs. She bore, besides other imputations, the title of the worst-tongued woman on the road and it was unwise to show her any unfriendliness, lest she blacken your character in every camp in the State. That was why the Tyrells were enduring this visit. They knew better than to offend the Wilkses.

  ‘Him!’ she screamed, pointing to her husband. ‘What does he ever do? Loafs about, eating, sleeping …’ She made an obscene gesture. ‘That’s all he’s good for. Lets me and the girls go out selling. That there van we wouldn’t a got but for the girls. What happens when the horse breaks its leg and has to be shot? It’s me … me … me, that has to go begging and praying and searching for another. Oh … !’ she shrieked. ‘Don’t talk to me about men. Loafers all of them, and me married to the worst.’

  ‘Sharkey ain’t so bad,’ Dick bawled in her ear to provoke her. He enjoyed the fun of teasing Mrs Wilks. She only half heard.

  ‘He’s bad all right.’ She shook her great bloated cheeks with conviction. ‘All men, all bad, bad, bad. Oh, don’t talk to me!’

  ‘Now then, Mrs Wilks,’ Thirty-Bob put in, his ugly face split in a persuasive grin, ‘don’t you say that.’ He winked. ‘You gotta admit there’s some things men are good for.’

  A chuckle went round the circle.

  ‘What’s he say?’ Mrs Wilks demanded, and when the remark was bawled in her ear, she began to laugh so heartily that her great bulk nearly toppled from the stool. ‘He! he! You’re worse than any of them.’ She slapped Thirty-Bob on the back so heartily that he swore.

  ‘Tell her that if she’ll meet me some night when her old man ain’t home, I’ll show her she’s wrong,’ Thirty-Bob shouted.

  On this fresh sally being translated, Mrs Wilks broke into a fresh fit of laughter. ‘You better not let Sharkey hear you, Thirty-Bob. You better not let him hear you.’

  Further courtesies were prevented by the arrival of the Apostle’s truck, which came bumping cautiously down a set of ruts that skirted the Chinamen’s fence. Behind him lurched the van with the busker in the driver’s seat, and, last of all, the Stray grim-lipped in the sulky.

  With a sigh of thankfulness the wanderers tilted down a thistle-covered incline, skirted a patch of blackberry bush, and drew up on the very lip of the stream next to the Tyrell camp.

  ‘I could stay here,’ the Stray declared fervently — ‘I could stay here for years and years, for ever if you like.’

  Here, on this stretch of sheltered green, they could rest, feel firm ground under their feet after the joltings of so many hundred miles, and revel in the company of their kind. Even the busker, surveying the staid domesticity of the river-bank, could not help agreeing.

  ‘Christ, Harry!’ Thirty-Bob hailed the Apostle, ‘where the hell you been? Don’t think we can fix that Liz of yours in the dark, do you?’

  The Apostle was apologising, explaining that had it not been for the busker pushing the truck to start it, they would not be there yet. But Thirty-Bob was not listening. Sharp as a bit of barbed wire, he had already cast an acquisitive eye on the Horehound. He walked round her solemnly and inspected her teeth.

  ‘Eight if she’s a day.’ He made it sound like a major crime.

  Dealing horses Thirty-Bob had earned his nickname. He always tried to get ‘thirty-bob to boot’ on each deal; and rumour unkindly and untruthfully credited him with swopping away his mother.

  Deafy, his son Dick, Sharkey Wilks, and even stuttering little Jake Tyrell, who was only fourteen, assumed a knowledgeable air and closed in a circle around the Horehound.

  ‘Hell of a temper,’ Thirty-Bob continued. ‘She’s got jib’s ears. See how she lays ’em back.’

  Duke had no intention of dealing, swapping or otherwise disposing of the Horehound, but he felt there was no reason to decry her.

  ‘Why, that horse, sport’ — in his tone was reproof — ‘she’s as quiet as a lamb. Why, a child could drive her. Look here, Dancy, didn’t you drive the Horehound all the way from Blimdagery?’

  But both Dancy and Miss Phipps had strolled away. As far as they were concerned Horehound could pass out of their lives without their shedding a tear. Miss Phipps left this clutter of strange men with the air of a woman who always delegates such unpleasant jobs as wood-and-water-getting to the underlings. She rolled a cigarette of Snow’s tobacco, inserted it in a long, imitation amber holder, clamped this between her teeth, and wiggled it thoughtfully like some weird proboscis, as she favoured the river-bank with a long, patronising inspection.

  ‘Where every prospect pleases,’ she said aloud, ‘and, of course, the usual vilaciously vile men.’

  Disregarding these, as was her wont, she began to practise her dance-steps, finishing with a few bending exercises guaranteed to improve the figure. The vile men regarded her with a wonder not unmixed with joy, for she was trespassing on the single men’s camp by the railway bridge.

  ‘By cripes!’ One of the bagmen, who had been peacefully washing his shirt, pointed her out to his mate. ‘Take a squiz at that, Jim.’ He whistled tentatively at Miss Phipps, who proceeded with her exercises in noble scorn, taking no notice of him.

  ‘She must be dippy,’ the bagman exclaimed at this fresh proof. ‘But even so’ — his tone was that of one making the best of a bad job — ‘a man might do a line with her, dippy or not.’

  His mate, whose interests were political and liquid, snorted in a censorious manner. ‘I’d be a bit fussy if I were you,’ he grunted.

  The Stray had struck down the river-bank in the opposite direction in search of feminine society; the Tyrell two-year-old, Shirley, held out in her arms as an introduction.

  ‘I brought yer little girl back, missus,’ she called to Mrs Tyrell. ‘She was getting too close to the horses.’

  ‘Siddown, woman.’ Mrs Tyrell welcomed her all the more cheerfully because at her approach Mrs Wilks had scornfully retired to her own camp, saying that it would soon be dark and she had no tea ready.

  The Stray accepted her stool, and sat contentedly cuddling the baby. Mrs Tyrell asked after Snow, to whom the Stray referred as ‘me old man in hospital,’ and was given a lurid description of the accident. Every time the Stray told the story it grew more exciting.
At this stage, Snow would have sustained less injury under the tramplings of a herd of elephants.

  ‘You ain’t got no fam’ly?’ Mrs Tyrell’s question recalled Dancy to the necessity for caution.

  ‘Freddie and Brian and Jimmy.’ The Stray had Snow’s family off by heart. ‘They been left with their grandma.’

  Mrs Tyrell was too courteous to show she knew the Stray was lying, but she could not resist one quiet dig.

  ‘Seeing you’re so fond of children, woman, I wonder you didn’t bring your family with you.’

  ‘I didn’t have no choice,’ the Stray retorted, which was perfectly true. The Child Welfare Department had swooped down on her baby when it was a few months old.

  She enquired of Mrs Tyrell’s family, and heard all about them, from the two married daughters and their husbands, Dick the eldest boy, Jake (‘We dunno what to do about that stutter of his’), Evie, a solemn, shrewd little girl who stood by with the air of one from whom few secrets are hid, Johnnie (and his habit of bed-wetting), Alfie and Joan, the twins, Shirley, aged two, and the baby. Two more children, the Stray learnt, had been left behind with the married daughters. When Mrs Tyrell said proudly that there were ‘thirteen in the family,’ she was counting in the baby whose arrival they had come to Logan to await.

  At the point when the conversation began to be very interesting to feminine ears, the busker yelled: ‘Hey, Dancy!’ and the Stray was forced to hurry back to her camp.

  ‘Come up again,’ Mrs Tyrell called; and under her breath she muttered: ‘I’m sorry for that poor little devil.’

  The Stray’s kindness to children was no sham, whatever her other pretensions, and Mrs Tyrell liked her for that. On many an occasion the Stray would have cause to value Mrs Tyrell’s friendship in the long time their wanderings lay together.