Читать книгу Down a Country Lane - Gary Blinco - Страница 11

CHAPTER THREE

Happy the man, and happy he alone,

He, who can call today his own:

He who, secure within, can say,

Tomorrow do thy worst,

For I have lived today.

John Dryden

The small boy played contentedly on the bare, splintery floor with his collection of jam jar lids, seemingly oblivious to the flies that circled his head or the mud wasps that scooted around the house looking for suitable nest sites. Toys were scarce and the children learned to improvise early in their lives. Tin lids, hock-bones and knots of wood provided a readily available and inexpensive alternative to the toys the family could not afford to buy.

Norm came quietly into the house for his morning ‘smoko’ looking dark and perplexed with some secret thought. His face was a sheen of sweat and his shirt clung wetly to his back and shoulders. The little muscle in his temple pulsed and Grace took in his mood with practised ease. As he sat at the old table the child crawled over and pulled himself up on tiny unsteady legs against his father’s dirty trouser leg. Norm never wore short pants, even in the hottest weather. Grace could never remember seeing his bare legs, apart from in the bedroom. He ruffled the small boy’s uncombed locks in an absent- minded way. ‘What’s your name lad?’ He asked. He often asked one or other of his offspring the same question. Grace was never sure if he was joking or that he felt he had so many kids that he could not remember their names. Draped as usual in an apron and with her hands covered in flour as she made scones for morning tea, she smiled from the other end of the small kitchen. The house creaked and groaned as a passing cloud cast a shadow over the roof – cooling the iron and bringing a sudden rush of relief into the building.

‘What’s wrong love?’ Grace asked. ‘You look a bit down in the dumps.’ Norm swore as he cleared his throat. He brushed his long damp black hair from his eyes with his fingers and stubbed out his ever-present cigarette. He had been working from dawn until after dark for weeks without a break and his temper was wearing thin. ‘I’m startin’ to wonder if I’m ever gunna get anything useful to grow on this bloody place’, he complained. ‘And even if I do get a crop out, how the hell are we gunna get rid of it?’

Grace poured his tea thoughtfully. The first signs of his discontent had taken longer than she expected to appear, new projects usually died quickly with him. They had been through these questions before, when they were planning the purchase of the farm, and she was surprised to hear him bring them up again so far into the venture. ‘But I thought it was working out all right,’ she said. ‘That front patch looks ready to plant right now.’ She frowned; she had a more positive attitude than her husband did. He tended to dream a lot but not chase the dreams with any real effort, and then to blame the world for his lack of good fortune when his life remained fixed in the same rut for year after year.

Norm pounded the table with his hand as he often did when he was mad or frustrated. ‘It is ready to plant, but that’s not the bloody point, planting a crop is piss-easy.’ He said testily, his face a mask of hurt injustice like a chastened dog. ‘In fact I’m gunna plant it with beans and tomarters this arvo, I’ve got the seed. But I’m worried about afterwards. How will I irrigate it? I can’t risk losing the crop because I don’t have any more seed, and we can’t afford to buy any more. We need an engine of some kind to drive the pump.’ His long black hair fell forward into his eyes and he brushed it back again with his fingers.

He scratched his moist sweaty head anxiously, the good humour and positive dreams with which he had arrived a few weeks before momentarily forgotten as he glanced around the room like a man about to fight invaders from all sides. The boy sat quietly on the floor, looking from one parent to the other, his small brow creased with concern. The rest of the offspring’s were supposedly out working the farm, but were more likely wandering about in the scrub, feral now in familiar surroundings.

‘That bloody old horse is rooted,’ Norm went on. ‘It couldn’t pull the skin off one of your rice puddin’s, let alone a plough. That’s if I had a bloody plough, which I don’t by the way. And those kids of yours…’ He shook his head sadly.

‘They wouldn’t work in an iron lung with a bee up their arses, they keep pissin’ orf down the bloody creek after crabs.’

He took a breath at last to eat a scone and sip his tea. The kids always became ‘your kids’ when he was mad at them. He had a convenient gift of detaching himself from any problem when it suited him. Grace stifled a laugh and thought of how much she loved him in spite of his strange ways at times. None of these revelations were new to either of them, they came with the turf, but she decided this was not the best time to remind him of that. She let the silence soothe him and after a few minutes he continued, speaking through a mouthful of scone.

‘And in a coupla munce, if we ain’t all starved to death by then, when the stuff is ready to harvest and sell, where do I sell it? And how to I get it there?’ He grinned at her cheekily, his anger forgotten quickly as it usually was. ‘Or do you expect me to cart it to town on the end of me bloody doodle?’

Grace laughed, an image of his manhood leaping into her mind. ‘You could carry a fair bit of it that way, it must be good for some bloody thing apart from keeping me in the puddin’ club.’ She thought for a few minutes as he picked sullenly at his food. ‘Surely we can borrow a utility from somewhere until we get on our feet.’ She said at last. ‘Or we could use the horse and wagon to take the crop into Millmerran. The horse is not as buggered as you make out; it just needs a rest. ‘We could sell the stuff from door to door in town couldn’t we for Christ’s sake? It might be a bit of a novelty, selling vegetables from a horse and cart.’ She was not religious, but invoked Christ often as a measure of her feelings on a particular subject.

Their use of the old horse and wagon showed how far they were behind the times. In 1948 few people still relied on horsepower for anything except mustering stock. ‘Pig’s arse!’ Norm exploded, the redness suddenly back in his face.

‘Novelty be buggered, what am I, a friggin’ Gipsy? We might as well eat the bloody stuff ourselves and be done with it. And who’d lend me anything? The cockies around here are so tight they wouldn’t give you the wind off their farts to cool your soup. Besides, I don’t know them yet.’

Grace was thoughtful again for a moment, staring at her suddenly unhappy husband over the rim of her teacup. ‘If you haven’t met them, how do you know?’ She said reasonably. ‘They would probably give you their arses and shit through their ribs if the truth’s known.’ They both had a colourful turn of phrase at times. ‘Anyhow’, she continued. ‘At least you’ll get a crop in today, and if we get rain you won’t need to irrigate at all, so don’t be such a pessimist, the other farmers are planting crops.’

Norm looked at her and shook his head in mock sympathy. ‘I know the bastards are planting crops. They have the dough to buy more seed if the crops fail but I don’t. I’m rooted if we don’t get rain. The bloody creek’s full of water for irrigation but I can’t use it effectively, not in the volumes we need for commercial farming. If only we had some kind of engine I wouldn’t care so much about the bloody weather.’

‘Well it’s no good just wishing’, Grace scolded. ‘My father used to say if you wish in one hand and shit in the other there’s no doubt about which one will fill up first.’ Norm grinned in spite of himself. ‘Your father the wise old philosopher,’ he scoffed. ‘Why don’t you ask the old witch doctor if it will rain? It might save me some work.’

His wife swiped at him with the tea towel. ‘Don’t be a smart arse’ she laughed. ‘Just get your mind off your tool for a change and get to work. Let’s get the stuff planted and plan from there. I mean, what else can we do? Surely you don’t want to throw the bloody towel in already.’

Norm sulked quietly - he knew she was right as usual. She rose from the table and stood behind him, rubbing his neck gently, to the amusement of the child who had sensed the change in their mood and again clung to his father’s trouser leg. ‘I’ll help you this afternoon, and the older kids can too. I’ll keep the little buggers on the job. George can play on a blanket.’ She smiled at the grinning urchin who looked up at them as he rocked against his father’s leg. For some unknown reason, while they had christened their youngest child Gary, they always called him George. Norm sighed resignedly as he patted the baby’s head. Then he picked up his old felt hat and rammed it on his own head.

‘All right, you’re the boss’ he agreed, suddenly glad of the company and the promised help. ‘But don’t blame me if we lose the seed and you have to go on the game to buy more. And mind the bloody green ants don’t get that poor little bastard like they did last time.’ She laughed again, remembering how the green ants had attacked the child as he played on the lawn a week before, leaving him swollen with painful bites and sick for two days.

‘I’ll watch George’, she assured him. ‘And tomorrow I think we should go into Millmerran. Even if the old horse is rooted, it must be good for one more trip at least. The child endowment is due and I have an idea about how we might be able to get a Tilly.’ She used the popular abbreviation for utility, of ‘Tilly’. Norm looked at her and shook his head. He knew when it was best to keep quiet. His wife had adopted her, ‘That’s the end of the discussion tone’, and he retreated, conquered for the time being, to the garden.

All that crisp, sunny afternoon, the baby played on an old blanket and watched as they cut long rows in the fine black soil. Under Norm’s direction the children used a pointed stick to cut the furrows and Grace followed, shaking the bean seed evenly into the drills. Norm covered the seed with soil and patted the ground firmly with a long flat board. The baby often strayed from the blanket, crawling eagerly to get closer to the action. Then a firm yell from his mother would send him scurrying back to the blanket with a giggle.

It became a game that afforded the child a little attention, neglected as he was sitting on the blanket alone. As they worked on the planting they listened to the sounds of the bush and the whisper of the low breeze in the gums along the creek. Some colourful parrots, Norm called them Galahs, came to sit on the irrigation spray lines. The birds watched the planting process with interest. ‘You bastards dig up these seeds, and it’s galah stew tomorrow.’ Norm yelled, his good humour returning momentarily.

The sun had slipped low in the sky, the baby’s eyes were getting heavy and it was rapidly growing cold when Grace collected him from the blanket to take him to the house. There was the old wood stove to light, the kerosene lamp to fill, and the supper to cook. Supper would be fried scones and onion gravy again for sure, she had been too busy in the garden to cook anything else. Norm continued to work in the garden until well after dark. He baled water from the creek in buckets made from kerosene tins. Then he used a battered old watering can to wet down the long rows of newly sown tomato and bean seeds to help them germinate.

The next morning, very early, the children went down to inspect the garden to view their handiwork. They were filled with disgust when no plants had appeared. They were even more dismayed, when their father told them that it would be four to six weeks before they had beans. And that it would take even longer for the tomatoes to be ready to eat.