Illywhacker_ A Novel Part 6

I didn't smile, but it was an effort. I'd heard a lot about Stu O'Hagen on the Bacchus Marsh Road. It was said (although I found it hard to credit) that Stu came from behind a shop counter in Melbourne twenty years before. They said he wouldn't take advice from the first day he got there, that he went his own stubborn way and made his own stubborn mistakes. They said he would have spent his life inventing the wheel if one hadn't run over him one winter's morning in Ryrie Street and thus brought itself to his attention.

"Ploughing," he said, "is a different matter to motor cars, an entirely different matter."

I did not turn and look at the eroded hillside behind Stu's house which was easy to see from where we stood. I said not a word about the virtues of contour ploughing. It was not a subject on which Stu had shown himself to be able to benefit from advice.

"So you come to give us a hand, did you?" Stu said. He was being sly, but you couldn't call it nasty.

"Don't mind," I said.

"Use an axe?"

"After a fashion."

"Well," the old man said, handing me his axe, "plenty to use it on."

I was pleased to be using an axe.

22.

You can build a good hut with only an axe and not much else, so I had plenty of experience under my belt. My hands were a bit soft, but clearing scrub is a piece of cake in comparison with making a good slab hut and my eye was good and my rhythm perfect.

If the O'Hagens were surprised to find a salesman using an axe so well, they didn't say it. But when lunchtime came they shared a tin of bully beef with me and gave me a mug of sweet stewed tea.

There was bad weather in the south, so after lunch I walked back across the slippery paddocks and put up the side curtains on the car. When I came back Goog said, "You could have saved yourself the walk-that rain won't come here." He sat on a fallen trunk and a.s.sessed the weather with an expert eye.

"That a fact?" I said.

"It's called the Werribee Rain Shadow," Goog said, "so I'm told. It accounts for the lack of rain here."

Stu was driving his "Kelly" axe into the shuddering trunk of a blackwood wattle twenty yards away but his ears were as sensitive as their size suggested.

"Who told you that bulls.h.i.t?" he shouted.

Goog looked uneasy. He shaved some blond hairs from his arm with the axe. "In at the Marsh," he said at last, "at school."

The blackwood teetered on its wound and Goog looked at his father apprehensively.

"What would they know?" Stu said, stepping back from the tree to admire its fall. "Werribee Rain Shadow." He looked scornfully at the sky. "What sort of b.l.o.o.d.y shadow is that?"

The southerly caught the tree and tipped it. It fell with a crash, pinning a large brush-tailed possum to the ground.

They stopped work to examine the possum whose shoulder had been speared by a small broken branch. Stu tapped it with the flat of the axe. The possum quivered and a trickle of blood ran from its mouth.

"Rain Shadow," Stu said, "Christ Almighty!"

I am making Stu O'Hagen sound like a pig-ignorant b.a.s.t.a.r.d, and it is not fair to the man. If I look back on my life I can hear myself saying similar things every day. We all did it, and it has been our loss.

The Werribee Rain Shadow kept Stu amused for the last hour of the afternoon. He kept up a steady niggling stream of witticisms and the boy with the stolen ears worked silently with the colour slowly rising from beneath his frayed collar. It was not the son he was attacking. It was his wife's ears, I swear it, that drove him crazy.

When Goose decided to join in the baiting, Goog stood slowly and walked to where his brother was working. He waited for his brother to finish the sapling he was felling and then dropped the young boy with one round-house punch. Goog fell on top of him, pummelling him around the head. Stu walked over, watched them for a moment, and then kicked them until they stopped.

"All right," he yelled, "you can get off of him. Goose, you can do the chooks and pigs and when you're finished you can do the milking. Goog, you can prepare the meal."

Goog kicked a blunt boot sulkily into the broken soil. "How do you mean, prepare it?"

"G.o.d help me," his father yelled. "When they were telling you about shadows of rain, didn't they tell you what 'prepare' means? Prepare it. Prepare it."

"It means get ready," Goog said quietly, his face burning red. "I know that."

"Well, for Christ's sake, do it."

The two boys walked off, Goog in the rear, still red-faced, muttering threats at his brother who looked back continually over his shoulder. Stu and I watched them go down the eroded gully and climb the fence on the other side.

"They're good boys," Stu said.

Goose, seeing Goog was gaining on him, began to run towards the sheds and Goog, having half-heartedly thrown a rock in his direction, trudged unhappily towards the house with long ungainly stride, all boots and wobbly ankles.

"Wife's staying at her sister's," Stu said, looking at me carefully for any sign I might not believe him. His pale eyes looked frightened.

I tried to think of something comforting to say, but it evaded me.

"No dancing tonight," Stu said. His mouth quivered. He turned abruptly and began packing the thermos and files into a hessian bag. He picked up the axes, looked at the sky, and then put them down again. Then he fussed around covering them with bark.

"Might as well leave them," he said, but his accusing eyes were not concerned with either rain or axes.

"How about a run in the car," I said, "before tea?"

"Directly," he said, fussing about with the bark.

I was always offended by what I understood to be the Irish sense of the word "directly" which did not mean, as it appeared to, something that would be done in a direct manner, immediately, without delay, but rather the opposite-it would be done indirectly, after taking time, having a smoke, wandering about, having a p.i.s.s down the back and then approaching the object under discussion along a meandering sort of a path. It meant maybe. Or later.

But the meanders on this afternoon were shorter than I had feared and after Stu had satisfied himself that Goose was attending to the animals and after he had glanced with satisfaction at the eroded hillside in the south and the box-thorns in the east, we began to walk towards the T Model while the yellow dog threw itself hysterically against its chain.

As we pa.s.sed the crooked front fence of the little cottage, Goog came out, holding a leg of mutton like a club.

"Dad."

Stu sighed. "Have you prepared that yet?"

"I dunno," said Goog.

In four angry strides Stu was through the front gate and on to the veranda. He s.n.a.t.c.hed the leg of lamb from his cringing son. He swung it in the air and belted it so hard against the veranda post that the whole house shook and a wooden bench, heavily loaded with lifeless flower pots, collapsed and spilt dry red earth and dead vegetation at his feet.

He swung the mutton again, and again. The veranda post quivered and then fell. It landed on the ground at my feet with a single rusty six-inch nail pointing at the sky.

"There," Stu said, handing the leg of mutton back to his son, "it's prepared."

A hundred evicted maggots writhed amongst the dry red earth on the veranda floor. Stu stomped on them with his boot and made a half-hearted attempt to kick them off the veranda.

"Now," he said, "cut up the spuds."

I was never a fussy eater, but I did not care for maggots. I took a few steps towards the car and spat. It felt like I had a maggot stuck in my throat.

"You're staying for a feed," Stu said as we resumed our walk towards the car. "I've got a few bottles in the house."

"Kind of you," I said.

The storm was coming down like a boarding-house shower: water all round the hills on the edges and dry in the middle. I was inclined to grant Goog some credit for his Rain Shadow, and saw that I would be able to do my demonstration in the dry.

"Now," I said, "you'll be wanting a drive. Have you ever driven an auto before?" The biggest job was always to persuade a farmer that he actually needed a car, but once that was done he would normally buy the car he drove first. (I wasn't too worried about his remarks about the Dodge which cost two hundred pounds more than the T Model.) So I did not do what the Yanks at Ford said you should do which was to go round the car, starting with the radiator, and point out the features in a methodical way. My first objective was to get the customer behind the wheel.

Stu, however, did not appear to be listening. He was looking back over his shoulder where he found, as he'd suspected, that his son's attention was taken up with the car and not the spuds. Goog stood on the veranda with the leg of mutton still grasped in his bony hand.

"Go on," the father bellowed, "get on with it before I come and give you a clout across the ear-hole."

Goog disappeared into the house.

"Have you driven an auto before?" I asked.

"They're good boys," Stu said, "but they never batched before."

"Have you ever driven an auto before?"

"Not a lot in it, is there?" he said, not wanting to look at me.

"You'd need a few lessons."

"Lessons. Everybody wants me to have b.l.o.o.d.y lessons," Stu said and I did not ask him whether it was dancing lessons that he had on his mind. "Patrick Hare tells me there's nothing to it. I'm not a boy. I'll get the hang of it without any lessons. You charge for them, do you?"

"Only three pounds."

Stu nodded bitterly. "That's right," he said.

We were now circling the car, but not in the manner recommended by Ford.

"That's three quid I wouldn't consider," he said, scratching his b.a.l.l.s, "if I was going to consider making a purchase at all," he paused, "of a Ford."

"It's a useful machine," I said, "and very reliable."

Now we were back at the radiator and Stu was nodding his head towards the car. It took me a moment to realize that my customer wanted to see the contents of the engine compartment.

"Show us its innards," he said.

"I think you'd be making a mistake," I said, "to skimp on the lessons." But I did what he asked me and opened it up.

He looked over the engine like a man checking something as familiar as the contents of his own suitcase: toothbrush, trousers, two shirts, etc. It was O'Hagen's weakness that he could not stand to make a fool of himself so he tried to give the impression that he knew what was what with a motor and was suspicious that some vital part might be missing.

When he let me know he was satisfied I closed the compartment.

"All right," he said. He took in his belt a notch and jutted his chin. "Start her up."

The sun emerged from a keyhole in the clouds and bathed the weathered whiskered face. Goog and Goose came out on to the veranda where they stood, silently, side by side, staring at the gleaming car whose radiator was suddenly full of golden light.

By 1919 the Ford had a starter motor. No crank was needed. I simply turned it on and the engine caught first time.

"Hop in," I said.

O'Hagen shook his head and plunged his hands deep into his pockets.

"No," he said, "I want to watch it go."

I did as I was commanded. I drove around the house, pa.s.sed in front of the imprisoned dog, and heard, above the noise of the engine, the clumping boots of Goose and Goog as they ran from one side of the house to the other.

I was a ballerina on a show pony. It seemed a d.a.m.n fool way to make a living.

23.

Goog was wide awake. He lay amongst his bundle of grey blankets and listened to the noise of drinking. The drinking was a new thing. He didn't know what to do about it. Goose was no help. Goose was asleep and nothing would wake him. Goose had slept all last night while their father chopped up dinner plates outside the window. It was Goog who had put their weeping father to bed. It was Goog who lay sleepless while his father vomited in the kitchen sink.

He could hear the voices clearly and if he sat up he could see, through a c.h.i.n.k in the shrunken wallboards, his father pouring sweet wine from a demijohn into Herbert Badgery's gla.s.s.

"To life," Stu O'Hagen said.

"To life," said Herbert Badgery.

"I'm not a drinking man," Stu said, "but by G.o.d it warms you."

There was a pause. Stu traced unstable patterns in the spilt wine on the oilcloth.

"I never liked the idea of lessons," he said. "I never took a lesson in anything."

"You've done well."

Stu tilted back in his chair and surveyed the room. He picked up the kerosene light and held it above his head.

"I built it myself. I was working for a real estate agent, selling blocks of land in Melbourne. I was doing well. They wanted to promote me. But I had it in my head I wanted to make something myself. You could say I had tickets on myself, but I wanted to make make something, not just sell things. So I bought this land and I didn't know a sheep's head from its a.r.s.e." something, not just sell things. So I bought this land and I didn't know a sheep's head from its a.r.s.e."