Best Australian Short Stories (40 page)

“Three quid,” says Joe. “Three jolly old quid the lot.”

Mr Hardcastle pays him. “I’ll tell you what,” he says, “that damned old foxskin won’t be worth a cracker to you, anyhow. You saw the holes where the ticks had got into it.”

“Never mind about that,” says Joe. “We’ll find a use for him somehow. He was a good fox in his day. Good-bye Mr Hardcastle.”

As Mr Hardcastle drives off Joe Packet waves, and the red fox, on the garage door, is grinning.

“I thought we’d never get away,” says Mrs Hardcastle, looking back from the bend in the road at the store by Fat Chow Creek. “Those awful people. They robbed us.”

“I told you they’d do pretty well there,” Mr Hardcastle answers. “Three quid they got out of me. Well, it was worth it.”

“What
was?” asks the brand-new Mrs Hardcastle. “Three pounds just for that box of groceries.”

“Ten bob of it was for the breakfasts,” says Mr Hardcastle. “But I paid them for the breakfasts!”

“Damn it, I did!”

“We both paid!” Mrs Hardcastle is aghast. “We’ve paid them twice for it. Oh!”

“Ha!” laughs Mr Hardcastle, placing his hand on her knee as, doubtless in error for the gearlever, he so often does. “Diddled us, diddled us properly.”

“We’ll put the police on to them!” says Mrs Hardcastle.

“No,” her big husband scorns her. “I can afford it. Let ’em go.”

“I think you should drive straight back to that shop and demand your money back. You must have gone absolutely mad to take it so calmly. Laughing.”

“I like to see it!” Mr Hardcastle shouts with his bark of laughter. “The old fox and the vixen! They’ll do all right, that pair. They’ll make money. I’d like to have that old fox on my sales staff.”

“You’re a bit of a fox yourself,” says Mrs Hardcastle softly. She looks at him archly, over the rims of her glasses. “But you want to look out, you know. More than one old fox has put his foot right into a rabbit-trap. And that was the end of him.” Her wedding-bells peal and peal.

Mr Hardcastle begins to laugh, then does not. He stares at his brand-new wife. There is something strangely steel-like in Mrs Hardcastle’s appearance. Bones, wires, those hornrimmed, glasses, that frizz of springs on her head, those enormous teeth. And the old fox in a trap. He stamps his foot on the accelerator.

MY father often spoke about the pepper-tree when we were kids and it was clear it had meant a lot to him. It stood for something— like the Rolls Royce he was always going to buy. It wasn’t what he said about the pepper-tree—my father had no great gift for words—but
how
he said it that counted. When he spoke of the pepper-tree at Tullama where he had been brought up you saw it very clearly, with its giant branches draped with their long shawls of olive-green leaves in the backyard of my father’s boyhood home. “A big, large backyard—none of your city pocket-handkerchief lots,” my father said. There were berries on the tree that turned from green to pink with waxlike covers that you could unpick and get the sticky smell of them all over your fingers. In this spanking giant of a tree in its generous country backyard there was always, too, a noisy traffic of sparrows and starlings fluttering and hopping from branch to branch.

When we were living at Newtown I used to look for pepper-trees when my father took me for a walk on Sunday afternoons. “Look, there’s a pepper-tree,” I’d say to him when I saw one with its herringbone leaves.

“By golly, boy, that’s only a little runt of a tree,” my old man would say. “They don’t do well in the city. Too much smoke, by golly. You ought to see them out west where I come from.”

My father was a tall thin man with melancholy brown eyes and the soul of a poet. It was the poet in him that wanted to own a Rolls Royce one day.

“First our own house and then some day when my ship comes home I’ll buy a Rolls Royce,” he’d say.

Some of his friends thought my old man was a little crazy to have such an ambition.

“What would you do with one of those flash cars, Peter?” they’d tease him. “Go and live among the swells?”

My father would stroke his long brown moustache, which had only a few bits of white in it, and try to explain, but he couldn’t make them understand. He couldn’t even get his ideas across to my mother. Only now do I think I understand what a Rolls Royce meant to him.

“I don’t want to swank it as you put it, Emily,” he’d say to my mother. “No, by golly. I want to own a Rolls Royce because it is the most perfect piece of machinery made in this world. Why, a Rolls Royce—”

And then he’d stop and you could feel him groping for the right words to describe what he felt, and then go on blunderingly with the caress of a lover in his voice, talking about how beautiful the engine was...

“What would a garage mechanic do with a Rolls Royce, I ask you?” my mother would say. “I’d feel silly sitting up in it.” At such times my mother would give the wood stove in the kitchen a good shove with the poker or swish her broom vigorously. My mother was a small plump woman with brown hair which she wore drawn tight back from her forehead.

Like the pepper-tree, the Rolls Royce symbolized something for my father. He had been born in Tullama in the mallee. His father was a bricklayer and wanted his son to follow him. But my father had had his mind set on becoming an engineer. When he was eighteen he had left Tullama and come to the city and got himself apprenticed to a mechanical engineer. He went to technical classes in the evening. After two years his eyes had given out on him.

“If I had had some money things might have been different, by golly,” my father told me once. “I could have gone to the University and learnt things properly. I could have become a real engineer. I didn’t give my eyes a fair go—I went to classes five nights a week and studied after I came home.”

After his eyes went my father had to take unskilled jobs but always near machinery. “I liked tinkering but I had no proper schooling,” he said once.

He knew a lot and in spite of his eyes he could only have learnt most of it from books. He knew all about rocks and how they were formed. He could talk for hours, if you got him started, about fossils and the story of evolution. My mother didn’t like to hear him talking about such things because she thought such talk was irreligious. Looking back now I’d say that in spite of his lack of orthodox schooling my father was a learned man. He taught me more than all the teachers I ever had at high school. He was a keen naturalist, too.

Just before the depression came when we were living at Newtown my father had paid one hundred pounds off the house. He was forty-seven years old then. I was twelve.

“By golly, we’ll own the house before we know where we are,” he said.

“Will we?” said my mother. “At a pound a week we have twelve years to go—unless we win Tatts.”

“You never know what may turn up,” said my old man cheerfully.

“I have a good idea, what with people losing their jobs every day.”

“I haven’t lost mine,” my father said, “and what’s more, I have a way of making some money if I do.”

“I suppose it’s another of your inventions, Peter? What is it this time, I ask you?”

“Never you mind,” said my father. But he said it gently.

One of my mother’s complaints was that my father was always losing money on the things he tried to invent. Another was that he was always filling the backyard up with junk.

“What can you do with these pocket-handkerchief lots?” my father would say. “Now, when I was a nipper at Tullama we had a decent backyard—why it was immense—it was as big—”

He’d stop there, not being able to get the right word.

Auction sales, according to my mother, were one of my father’s weaknesses. He could never resist anything if it looked cheap, even if he had no use for it, she’d say. Soon after my old man had told my mother he had something in mind to make some money he went away early one Sunday morning. He came back about lunch-time in a motor lorry. On the back of the Ford was a two-stroke kerosene engine. I came running out.

“I’ve bought it, Joe, by golly,” he told me.

He had, too. Both engine and lorry.

“Dirt cheap. Forty quid the lot,” he said. “Ten quid down boy, and ten bob a week.”

My mother cut up when she heard.

“Wasting money when it could have gone into the house, Peter.”

“This’ll pay the house off in no time, by golly,” my father said. “And buy a lot of other things, too.”

I knew by the way he looked up and over my mother’s head he was thinking of the Rolls Royce which to him was like a fine poem or a great symphony of Beethoven.

All that day he was very excited, walking round the engine, standing back to admire it, and then peering closely at it. He started it running and stopped it continually all the afternoon. Every night when he came home from the garage during the next weeks he’d go first thing and look at the engine. He had some plan in his mind but wouldn’t say what it was at first.

“Wait and see, Joe,” he’d say. “You’ll see all right.”

He didn’t let me into his secret for over a week though I knew he was bursting to tell someone. In the end, he drew me aside mysteriously in the kitchen one night, when my mother was in the bedroom, and whispered, “It’s an invention for cleaning out underground wells, boy.”

“For cleaning out wells ?”

“Underground wells.”

He listened to hear if my mother was coming back.

“I’m rigging a light out there tonight, boy,” he whispered. “Come out later and I’ll show you.”

My father’s idea, he explained later, was to clean underground wells in country towns by suction. You pushed a stiff brush on the end of the pipe down the sides and along the bottom of underground wells. The pipe sucked up the silt and you didn’t lose much water from the well.

“Every country town has half a dozen underground wells, boy,” he said. “The banks and one or two of the wealthier blokes in the town. Just like it was in Tullama. There’s money in it because you can clean the well out without losing too much water. It’s a goldmine.” It sounded good to me.

“When do you start ?” I asked.

“Soon, by golly,” he said. “The job at the garage won’t spin out much longer.”

He was right about that, but until the day she died my mother always had a sneaking idea that the old man had helped to give himself the sack. It was early in 1930 when the old man set out in the lorry, heading out west.

“You’ve got to go to the low rainfall districts,” he said.

“Like Tullama?” I said.

“Yes, like Tullama, by golly.”

I started thinking of the pepper-tree then.

“Will you go to Tullama and see the pepper-tree?”

My father stroked his long straggling moustache. Into his eyes came that look like when he was thinking or talking about the Rolls. He didn’t answer me for a bit.

“By golly, yes, boy, if I go there.”

Soon after this he started off. Every week brought a letter from him. He did well, too. He was heading almost due west from Sydney and I followed the towns he spoke of in my school atlas. It took him nearly a day on a well so in the larger towns he might stay over a week, in the smaller a day or a day and a half.

After he had been away for two months he still had a good few wells to go before he reached Tullama. You could see he was heading that way.

“Him and that silly pepper-tree!” said my mother, but she didn’t say it angrily. My father was sending her as much money as he used to bring home when he worked at the garage.

But in spite of what my mother said about the pepper-tree she became a bit keen as my father got only two weeks off Tullama. She made a small pin-flag for me to stick on the map. About this time a change came in the old man’s letters home. At first they had been elated but now they were quieter. He didn’t boast so much about the money he was making or say anything about the Rolls. Perhaps excitement was making him quieter as he got nearer to the pepper-tree, I thought.

“I know what it is,” my mother said. “He’s not getting his proper meals. He’s too old to be gallivanting off on his own. I bet he’s not cooking proper meals for himself. And without a decent bed to sleep in—only the back of that lorry.”

I thought the day would never come but soon enough my dad had only one town to do before he would reach Tullama. His letters usually arrived on a Tuesday—he wrote home on Sundays—but round this time I watched for the mail every day and was late for school three mornings running. When a letter did come I grabbed it from the postman’s hand and hurried inside with it, reading the postmark on the run. It was from Tullama.

“All right, all right, don’t rush me, Joe,” my mother said. “You and your pepper-tree.”

I read over her elbow. There was only one page. There was nothing about the pepper-tree. Dad was well and making money but he was thinking of returning soon. Only a few lines.

I couldn’t understand it.

On the next Tuesday there was no letter. Nor on the Wednesday. On the Thursday my father came home. He turned up at breakfast-time. He gave us a surprise walking in like that. He said that he had sold the truck and engine and come home by train. He looked tired and shamefaced and somehow a lot older. I saw a lot more white in his mo.