This Is the Grass Page 5

  ‘He can’t stand Cedric Trueway, Tiny,’ Arthur went on.

  ‘Who’s he?’ I asked.

  ‘No, that’s right. You haven’t met him yet. He stops up here three or four days each week. He’s a bookmaker and is Flo Bronson’s fancy man. He stands behind doors and listens, then goes and tells Flo. If Tiny doesn’t flatten him one day I will. He’ll put your weights up as soon as look at you. He backs off in a row. When he gets wild he’s got eyes the size of a ferret’s.’

  I asked him about Violet who waited on the tables.

  ‘She’s Flo Bronson’s sister. I don’t know her much. She always looks like a woman wondering what words to say. She looks to that jockey boy friend of hers for a lead. His name is Pinks, Jimmy Pinks. He’s a cruel cow, one of those blokes who twist a woman’s arm up behind her back. He’s a squirt of a fellow, always going to punch someone. When he’s in a brawl he runs his head between the other bloke’s legs, then pitches him over his shoulder. He never waits for him to get up, of course.’

  ‘He sounds a bastard,’ I said.

  ‘He is a bastard,’ said Arthur.

  5

  Arthur’s revealing talks to me, even when they were continued over weeks, failed to establish the disreputable character of the hotel as an existing fact. I accepted without question his picture of it, yet could not guide my actions or thoughts on his premise.

  I knew his descriptions of the people who frequented the hotel were true, yet I continued to regard these people with the puzzlement of one to whom nothing had been revealed. I responded to the influences of my childhood in drawing conclusions.

  I was feeding the ducks in the hotel yard when a girl walked out of the back door and stood watching me. An hour before I had seen her arrive in a car with a heavy, well-dressed man about fifty years of age. He had booked a room for the night then settled down to some heavy drinking. I noticed he made no attempt to entertain the girl; he took her presence for granted.

  Now I observed her more closely. She looked about nineteen years of age but might have been older. She had fair, bobbed hair and was wearing a plain dress of blue linen. A necklace of a darker blue encircled her slender neck. The corners of her mouth were tilted upwards so that in repose she still appeared to smile. It was a young and fresh mouth from which one would expect happy laughter.

  ‘Hullo,’ she said brightly.

  ‘Hullo,’ I replied.

  She paused, waiting for me to continue, then when I was silent asked: ‘Are you the duck boy?’

  ‘No,’ I said, startled by the term. ‘I’m not. I’ve taken over feeding the ducks from Shep. He’s the yardman. I just like feeding them.’

  ‘What do you feed them on?’ she asked, coming close to me and peering into the bucket I held.

  ‘I mix up pollard and water. I break up all the stale bread and put it in too.’

  ‘Throw some out and let me see them eat it.’

  I threw handfuls of the mixture amongst the ducks who flung themselves into jostling groups, quacking and picking at each other. They scooped the pollard and bread up with their bills and swallowed it with convulsive jerks of the head. Those ejected from the group stumbled to the outskirts then waddled round to the other side to renew their attack.

  ‘They seem to be very hungry,’ said the girl. ‘How often do you feed them?’

  ‘Twice a day. They always eat like that.’

  She transferred her attention to me.

  ‘Do you work at the hotel?’

  ‘No. I’m a clerk in the Shire Office.’

  ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well . . .’ I hesitated, feeling it hard to answer this question. ‘It keeps you inside,’ I added lamely.

  ‘Don’t you like that?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  There was something in the tone of her voice that removed her from the other women who had spoken to me in this hotel. Her questions did not seek to penetrate a defence but to open a window and let in the sun.

  I suddenly felt a desire to protect her from association with the people I had been meeting, from influences I felt sure had never before been thrust upon her and to which, in her innocence, she was soon to be exposed.

  ‘I don’t think you should stop here tonight,’ I said, driven by an urgency, the need for which I did not understand. ‘The women here are not like you. They are bad. I mean . . . They are not all bad. It is what has happened to them that is bad. And it will happen to you if you stay. I can’t tell you what goes on here but it will be terrible for you to find out. You could say you wanted to go home.’

  She had listened to me, first with a look of surprise then with gentle attention, but between the surprise and the attention there passed over her face, like a shadow, a poignant appeal.

  She looked at the ground when I had finished, then raised her head. She reached out her hand and took mine firmly.

  ‘You are a good boy,’ she said earnestly. ‘Thank you. But, you see, I have been here before.’

  She turned away and left me, and I stood looking across the paddocks, clenching my hands and seeing nothing while surges of humiliation went through me, burning my face.

  That night I ate my tea in the kitchen, avoiding the lounge, and went early to bed.

  Not only was I incapable of adopting an attitude based on Arthur’s revelations; I was unable to comprehend the ambiguous terms used by men and women gripped by lustful aims.

  Rose Buckman always puzzled me.

  ‘A man should have powerful arms like a negro,’ she said to me once, and her eyes narrowed as she looked at me.

  I had a picture of a powerful man chopping down trees with the sun on his back and I started to tell her about Black Andy, a fabulous, outback character who featured in my father’s stories. He had lived at Wilcannia and cut firewood for the steamers that came up the river. His arms grew out of his chest like red-gum saplings, my father said.

  Rose wasn’t interested.

  ‘Tell that to Tiny,’ she said shortly.

  We were alone in the kitchen. She was preparing the evening meal and I was sitting at the table waiting for Arthur to come in.

  Rose was restless and irritable. The Council Dog Inspector and Poundkeeper, Ronald Hall, had been staying at the hotel for a week and had left that day to return to his home. He was a big, soft man, inoffensive and agreeable on the surface but subject to bursts of temper when his authority was questioned.

  ‘I might be an ignorant bugger,’ he had told me, ‘but I won’t be stood over. All I want is for people to come to me and ask me about their cattle on the roads, not to go to the councillors. I know all the law about it; they don’t. They should do what I say instead of questioning it.’

  He had a red face and a high-pitched voice and had a reputation for pounding cattle of those he disliked.

  ‘I’ll pound his cows,’ I heard a farmer boast to his friend when discussing Hall’s reputation.

  ‘He’ll pound yours,’ warned the friend.

  ‘He can’t pound mine; they’re always in the paddock.’

  ‘He’ll pound them if they’re in your bedroom.’

  Hall rode a chestnut horse on his rounds and used the hotel as headquarters when covering the surrounding district. He returned each night about five o’clock. If he was late Rose would go out to the front of the hotel and stand looking down the road, watched by Cedric Trueway from behind the door of the bar.

  ‘He’s only gone to the Two-mile; he ought to be back by this,’ he chanted one day as she was returning down the passage.

  ‘Go to hell!’ she snapped at him.

  When Hall returned and had stabled his horse he would poke his head through the kitchen doorway and whisper: ‘All right for after?’

  Rose would come close to him so that she could touch him, and say: ‘Yes, eight o’clock.’ She would then look up and down the passage and prod him in the ribs and say: ‘Keep yourself sober.’
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br />   After tea they disappeared together.

  Tonight he would not be there.

  ‘Do you like walking?’ she asked me.

  ‘Not much,’ I said. ‘I like walking in the bush if it’s fairly flat and open.’

  ‘How far can you walk?’

  ‘I walked four miles once, but it knocked me up.’

  ‘I go for a walk every night,’ she informed me. ‘I love it.’

  I was surprised. I had never associated her with a love of walking. It occurred to me that I might have misjudged her and that there lurked in her some love of the bush that I had not suspected.

  ‘I’d like to go for walks at night,’ I said with enthusiasm, ‘especially moonlight nights like this.’

  I was thinking of possums and wombats I might see, of standing silent amongst trees just listening.

  ‘I only walk as far as the blacksmith’s shop,’ she assured me.

  The blacksmith’s shop stood at the foot of the hill. It was a decrepit building with a wide-open doorway and a dirt floor. Horseshoes hung on nails from its walls. A forge with a huge leather bellows stood beside an anvil. Steel tongs and heavy hammers lay scattered around them or rested against a barrel of water into which the blacksmith plunged the glowing shoes. Some bales of hay used to feed the horses left overnight were stacked at one end. At night it was deserted. It seemed a strange place to visit at night.

  ‘Why do you go there?’ I asked in surprise.

  ‘It’s quiet down there,’ she said, a soft, persuasive note in her voice.

  I could hear Arthur coming down the passage.

  ‘I’m going down there at eight o’clock tonight,’ she said hurriedly. ‘You ought to come.’

  ‘Blow going down there,’ I said.

  I followed Arthur into our room. He always had interesting stories to tell me about his passengers. I sat on my bed and watched him count his takings. It was all in silver and he dropped the coins into a metal cash-box he kept hidden beneath his clothes in the chest of drawers. Sometimes he tipped all the money on to his bed and counted it. When it amounted to ten pounds he banked it.

  ‘That Rose Buckman is a funny woman,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’ he asked, busy on some calculation.

  ‘She likes going for walks at night,’ I said. ‘You’d never think that about her, would you?’

  Arthur looked up, interested. ‘No, you wouldn’t. What did she say?’

  ‘Oh, she just told me she walks down to the blacksmith’s shop every night. I think she would have liked me to walk with her. It’s a break away from the pub for her.’

  ‘How did she put it, though? Did she ask you straight out to come?’

  ‘No. She just asked me if I liked walking.’

  ‘What did you say to that?’

  ‘I told her I didn’t.’

  ‘That’s right. Keep to that.’

  He appeared pleased with me.

  He left the dinner-table before me that night. He went into the kitchen and I felt sure he had gone in to tell Rose Buckman off because she had asked me to go for a walk. I was annoyed, feeling such an action suggested I was a child. Rose Buckman had gone up in my esteem and I didn’t want this better side of her character crushed by Arthur.

  At breakfast next morning she greeted me savagely: ‘When I talk to you, you keep your big mouth shut.’

  6

  The local men, wood-cutters, farm labourers and mill-hands who entered the bar each night for a drink, despised the city visitors who brought girls with them on drinking bouts. They despised them, yet they envied them their money and their women. They watched these racing men with their flash suits drinking themselves into a state of helplessness, hoping they would finally be incapable of talking to the girls who would then turn to them for amusement.

  Yet in conversation with these girls the wood-cutters and timber-mill men were awkward and embarrassed.

  ‘There’s nothing makes me more nervous than a pretty girl,’ a feller told me after an unsuccessful attempt to engage one of them in conversation. ‘I feel a fool if I tell them I love them and what the hell else is there to tell them?’

  These men never read books. Their conversation circled round good and bad jobs, rates of pay, the new pain that might keep them from work, the continual fight they had to earn enough to keep their wives and children. They had to solve the problem of living before they could be led to books.

  There was the elderly man with the wheeze in his voice: ‘It’s a funny thing; I can cut wood and it doesn’t affect me, but I can’t dig a post-hole.’

  The farm-hand comparing the hardship of his present job at a pound a week with the one he had a year before: ‘This man let me use the bathroom every Saturday. I never missed and he wouldn’t say a word. And I always ate with him and his wife and they let me sleep in the house.’

  I often wondered why they didn’t leave the jobs of which they complained, why they didn’t stand up on their feet and tell these men who imposed upon them so shamefully exactly what they thought of them. A thin mill worker with a tired face gave me the answer: ‘Yes, I’m a coward. And I’ll always be a coward until I get my family off my hands. Once my family are off my hands I’ll face anyone, I’ll be frightened of no one. You’re lucky: you’ve got no responsibilities.’

  In my search for a man who could discuss books I was told of a rabbiter who came to the hotel every Saturday.

  ‘He’s always talking about what he’s reading,’ Tiny Bourke assured me. ‘Get hold of him.’

  The rabbiter’s name was Tom and when I mentioned reading to him he smiled happily.

  ‘I couldn’t live without readin’,’ he said. ‘It was the same with me old man and with his old man before him, he reckons. I only read true things. No lies for me. I’m after the truth.’

  Tiny had described him as having a face as wrinkled as a boarding-house pudding. It seemed to me more like a walnut. It was a compressed, brown face into which two little black eyes like beads had been pushed. He was eagerly loquacious, often the sign of a man who spends his day alone.

  He chewed tobacco and for some reason or other always left his chew on the gate-post when he took one of his frequent trips to the lavatory. He spat through the side of his mouth and could kill a fly on the bar counter in one shot if he liked, but ‘they don’t like you doing that in this pub’.

  I was interested in his love of truth and asked him what he read.

  ‘The True Detective Magazine,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘I get it regular.’

  ‘What sort of magazine is it?’ I asked, feeling let down.

  ‘The best magazine ever printed,’ he pronounced authoritatively. ‘They print nothing but the truth—what you never read in the papers.

  ‘Like the last copy I got . . . There’s a story in it about a girl—in America, it was—and some dirty sod took her out in a car and raped her. It’s all there in the story.

  ‘Then he brings her back to the township and she goes and tells the true detective fellows. They pick up a bloke in a few days and she takes one look at him and says: “That’s the chap.”

  ‘But no matter what the coppers did to this bloke he keeps saying he didn’t do it. They put the third degree on him but no, he reckons it wasn’t him.

  ‘But you oughter read what the judge said about him—called him everything he could lay his hands on then gave him ten years.

  ‘But some of the detectives have doubts whether he did it, see? They look round and a year later they arrest a bloke, and this bloke is the living image of the bloke in gaol. You’d think they were twins.

  ‘Well, they had a hard job to trace the girl but they did and then they show her this new bloke. As soon as she sees him she says: “Have you been let out of gaol?”

  ‘ “This is another man,” the true detective tells her, and you could have knocked her over with a feather.

  ‘Anyway they shove this fellow in and let the other fellow out. There’s a photo there showing the girl s
haking hands with the bloke that’s let out. She said to him—it’s all under the photo—”I accused you publicly of raping me, and now I publicly say you didn’t.” Tears were streaming down her face, it said, but you couldn’t see them in the photo.

  ‘The coppers said how sorry they were he was gaoled. They shook hands with him then. It’s all in the photos. The girl was wonderful. She said she could tell after she met this bloke that he would never have raped her. They were shaking hands there. It was all in the photos.’

  My conversations with these local men gave me glimpses of lives distorted by deprivations. They were deprived of security, culture, purpose. I knew no answer to their conditions; I was like them.

  I increasingly sought their company, our kindred problems forming a bond between us. They supplied part of my need even though I felt dissatisfied and restless when I left them. I liked them and often admired them, but they offered no escape from my prison, no escape from their own prison.

  I wanted conversation, enlightenment that in some way would reveal a road out of all this. Within me, compressed and bound and chained, were longings and hopes, poetry and stories, formless yet waiting the release of an understanding listener to crystallise them into words. I wanted to leap forth from my surroundings fully clad as a writer, armed by my experiences, not defeated by them.

  Some of my experiences were thrusting me farther away from the release I sought.

  Sometimes I was almost pulled into the bar by men released by drink from their normal diffidence and impelled to proclaim the wonderful friendship of which they were capable. Drink in these men brought out a desire to embrace the world. They always insisted I drink with them. They generally stood before the bar counter with an arm around my shoulder while they informed the barmaid, pushing two full glasses towards them, what a wonderful fellow I was.

  ‘I’ve got a lot of time for this bloke, Missus. He’ll get on. You wait and see.’

  One such man, escaping from a bleak life on a pay-day spree, held me captive against the bar counter while he told me about the horse he had tethered outside the hotel: ‘I used to give the old fella a good slug of whisky, not because he needed it but because he was such a good old fella. He loved it. He licked the bottle.’