As doer of the morning’s work, Bert was known only to the three men attending – the gaol warden, Grainger; the police inspector, McHale; and the Christian vicar, Harris.
Even so, those who remembered Bert and his father as the Dutchies of the previous decade avoided him with feelings of distaste – they recalled that pair of foreigners carrying on with their jabber while they did their work of scavenging trackside coal, peeling dead wool from rotting sheep, cutting cattle from a steam engine’s cowcatcher or roping it free from a poor Irishman’s mob.
At Goldsborough Mort’s agency, Bert Shepherd was served by a young man with a cowhorn moustache, who, turning pale and then red with furious embarrassment, was one who remembered Bert from those earlier days – although was it likely, he asked himself, that the man would remember Kenneth Tarbett?
He’d been a mere boy back then, one of a scabby gang, the boldest of them hurling bottles at an old man riding a draught bullock – Kenneth Tarbett the boy who pissed in his pants when caught.
In the moment before Bert spoke, Tarbett felt his guts growl. ‘Sir?’
‘I’ve come from down south to look over your stores – Herefords, Durhams, Shorthorns, Anguses.’
‘I have your name here?’ Kenneth held his pencil and nipped the end questioningly with his rabbit teeth.
‘It is Shepherd, Bert.’
On ponies kept for the purpose, they rode out to look at the cattle, past scattered houses, piggeries and dairies. The day was bright and blinding. Words were a crust over the tarnished gold of feeling. Every stamp of a pony’s hoofs shattered a picture of events and created the next glassy image. In the lavatory cubicle the Reverend Harris vomited. Out into the courtyard, up the scaffold stairs and onto its platform floor Maguire and Herbert were trotted. Bert too threw his head back. The knot slammed home. Fragments of shattered stars came together unmutilated, inviolate, flawless.
‘That is where my father camped,’ said Bert, pointing to a line of trees in a hollow. ‘When we first come to this country.’
Kenneth remembered an old man boiling hoofs and horns in a cauldron, drawing off poverty soup, dribbling mess into his stupid old beard, a man in a woollen cap who spoke no English, with a leering son, this man here beside him.
Kenneth had been chased, caught – had his ear slammed against the bark of a tree.
The two of them rode on towards the stockyards. When they came over the hill and sighted the walls of the gaol, Kenneth Tarbett angled his hips in the saddle.
‘There is a feeling in this town that the hangman is one of us,’ Kenneth said. ‘It is a calling they reckon not so very different from the trades. You would have to want the job. Five guineas per man is the payment. There is a quarryman, a powder monkey, a bloody great ape. He killed a man in a fight, striking him down over a deaner. He’s my candidate at them rates.’
Bert Shepherd seemed to consider the possibility. ‘There is the dispassion of it, sonny, the righteous judgement slammed home. It bespeaks great authority. Though what man has that?’
‘Eh?’ croaked Tarbett, not understanding a word being said in this Dutchy vein.
‘One of your Christian ministers or priests could be the hangman, or in the parliaments that make the law, mightn’t there be one to take it on? Say the Premier of the State – wouldn’t he be a good choice to lead those lambs to the slaughter?’
‘Lambs to the slaughter – I don’t think. Them two knew what they caused.’
‘Then it might be you,’ said Bert with a deep, heaving sigh – like the start of a song, it was so deep and heaving – ‘if you have that conviction. Though you seem devoid of pity.’
‘I have no pity,’ agreed Kenneth Tarbett, fingering the droopy ends of his juvenile moustache and thereby revealing the face of the weakling boy, who, at the age of eight or nine, threw objects at a ludicrous, strange man – the father. Kenneth became aware, from the way he was examined, that he was remembered by Bert Shepherd exactly.
‘What was in them bottles?’ said Bert, seeming to look at a person from a long way back, and at the same time to knock his eyeballs out.
‘What bottles, sir?’ quailed Kenneth.
‘In the bottles you threw at my father on the bullock he rode, smashed to smithereens on his cart of hides – what was in them?’
‘I think you know, it was little boys’ piss,’ said Tarbett as he turned his pony past the stockyards uttering the truth, which he never could as a rule.
‘There’s that tune we all know, “Dear Henry”,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t shut us up:
Your dick in a bottle
You’d have to throttle
The neck of a bottle
To get your dick in.
‘It’s words by Bounder Morrison, wouldn’t you know it, our greatest poet – his dirty side and we love him for it.’
‘You must,’ said Bert.
‘He’s the one writes rhyming “bayonet”, “grind it” and “flinging it orf of it”, all relating to cutting a Boche into strips.’
Kenneth Tarbett expected a blow, a sideswipe from that Boche’s paw holding the reins. But the logic of plain dislike seemed to satisfy Bert Shepherd more than any act of feigned contrition. He sighed, and Kenneth Tarbett felt a satisfaction come over him at the stirring sound of the sigh, that was like the beginning of a song.
The stockyard ponies were undersized for the lanky youth and the hefty man who rode them. They maintained a lurching walk down the side of a post-and-rail fence and were urged past a water trough by willow switches.
‘Ain’t those my cattle?’ said the butcher, peering back over the stockyards to where a mob of gaunt mixed breeds stood on bare earth with shreds of hay in their horns. ‘If they are mine, shame on you, mate. They are worthless for the road.’
Kenneth Tarbett replied, and without knowing why, ‘I had them in mind, but look. There is a paddock of colossal mammoths a bit farther on. They are Red Devons bred from draught animals. One of them, with a ring in his nose, is like the one your old man rode. When they throw a calf, you can sell that calf at a weight equal to a grown one of another sort.’
It startled young Tarbett to hear the words of contrition coming out of his mouth – at the same time making a grandiose gesture, all noise – as the cattle were not his to sell – not quite. They were pledged to his own father, Warner Tarbett, on grounds argued between them that a herd bought cheap by Kenneth the father would drove inland, looking for feed and breeding grounds where the pink-legged brolga danced. North of Warren they would go, up near the Queensland border to Inverarity Station, where it was rumoured flood-green at last. There old Warner would move with his droving plant to Inverarity Swamp, taking those red cattle with him, packhorses and horsetailers, cooks, quart pots, camp ovens and billy cans all a-rattle. He was a simple man, honest and true, and Kenneth, who was ashamed of him, would address the imbalance in time and name a son after him, registering the birth as Warner Tarbett II.
Through a gate into a paddock of trees, Kenneth and the butcher came to their view of the cattle. Each had a glowing face framed by a pair of white horns. Anvil heads turned following the ponies’ movements. Except they were drought-starved and off condition, they were animals you could believe kneeling down before and flourishing a sword and waving a red cape towards. Kenneth was advised against them by Sir Don McIver when he went to sign for them after they were overlooked at auction. He ignored that advice, with a toss of his blond thatch, which had softened old Don, not enraged him. It was in a dry corner of the state up Coolah way, where the banks were pressing hard. They were great, old-fashioned creatures and appealed to Kenneth against reason. Now he was proposing to give them away.
Bert Shepherd dismounted by dropping one foot to the ground and raising his other leg to allow the pony to slip out from under him. He climbed through the fence and walked towards the beasts as Kenneth followed.
The lead bullock was the one with the brass ring in its nose. Instead of standing back, Bert walked right up to it, took its head in his hands and slobbered his face in its wet, hairy nostrils. Then, smacking its flanks with the flat of his hand, he walked all around the beast, deriding the tough cuts of meat it would give, once it put on some condition.
‘Oh, but I’ll take them,’ he said.
On their ride back to town Bert instructed Kenneth to make arrangements with a train drover: one hundred head of cattle, two hundred miles, to be railed to the lucerne flats of the southern parts.
Then they said goodbye and Bert walked back into town. Kenneth stabled the ponies and returned to Goldsborough Mort’s. He went to his desk. For some minutes he fiddled with items there, playing with ink bottle, nib, penholder, blotter and ledger book. He sat in thought, chewing the wooden end of his penholder, reducing it to a fibrous wick. The office women peered at him from behind their fingers, with his long teeth, long face, long ears and long, pale, flattened locks. He flashed a toothy smile. You had to love the way he loved himself – it was enviable. Using careful strokes with huge initial capitals, he wrote up a record of arrangements for the sale of the Coolah Red Devons to Bert Shepherd, Wholesale Butcher, of Murrumburrah-Harden.
Then he sat back and stabbed his nib in the ink-stained kauri pine of his desktop.
‘What have I done?’ Kenneth said. ‘Did I outright say they were his? They are my father’s mob, Warner Tarbett the First’s, I will call him, when I get my family tree, my family’s lot – and I seem to have given them away. I must have done. I have. They are gone. I feel a big life ahead of me. On to the rail yards they go. Here is the proof of it, in my own writing, ready to be signed by Sir Donny boy, who advised me don’t take them. Something’s got into my head. Nothing’s the same in the air, and I know why.
‘It’s them string-ups. It’s when we saw the prison that I said he could buy them. Why does that make me glad? What have I done to be glad, except lived a bit longer than blokes my own age choked in Bathurst Gaol or shot in Belgium wearing khaki?’
He went on in this vein of resentment, surprise, humility, fear and amazement. Three stock and station boys had gone to the war, leaving Kenneth Tarbett at home to be advanced in the agency. One lay dead at Suvla Bay, one was in Palestine with horses, and the third, Duncan McIver, was missing in action in France. Goldsborough Mort’s was seen as doing its part and Kenneth – of serving age and fitness – was so far safe from a coward’s white feathers in the post or slipped under the doormat of the boarding house where he lodged. Indeed, he was safer than that as a pampered pet of Sir Don and Lady Penelope McIver, grieving for their son.
Safe from accusing righteousness, but not from that man, Bert Shepherd, who roused a bloke’s spirit and made him wonder at the bigness of things attempted, and try them.
So Kenneth decided: he would be the train drover himself and get the stock delivered. And after that life would become larger.
When the clock came around to dinnertime he snorted, threw down his pen like a twanging dart and set off back through the town to find the butcher, to tell him he was in his care.
W
HEN
M
ARCUS
F
RIENDLY CALLED AT
The Whistle
that day, the editor looked up from his desk in his small glassed room and nodded a greeting – whatever the needs of the paper, they could wait.
Tim Atkinson stood up from his line-caster, leaving the oily black machine to sullenly tremble and creak back to stillness.
‘Take over, Spotty,’ he said to the apprentice, grabbing his crutches while the proofreader predicted the mistakes that would flow from a tyro at the keys.
The two friends sat on a public bench in the municipal rose gardens.
‘The hangman must still be in town,’ said Marcus, ‘as there hasn’t been a train left since nine. I’d like to look him in the eye. Hear what he has to say.’
‘Struth, brother,’ said Tim, peering around in case they were being overheard, though they had only sparrows and wilting red roses for company, and the sight of a leering youth with rabbit teeth, Kenneth Tarbett, passing along the street in a white sweat. ‘Is that wise? You want to be careful what you think, now, Marcus. It’s work that’s been done.’
It did not matter to Tim, who did not work for the Railways, but surely it mattered to Marcus that the Railways’ Commissioner, Fraser, was on a hunt for Wobblies on the Railways’ payroll.
Any man under least suspicion of being a Wobbly was fingered. You could hate Wobblies, as Marcus and Tim did, but it was easy now, if you were some sort of streak of workers’ political enthusiast, as Marcus and Tim were, to be seen as dangerous, if not a Wobbly yourself as few actually were, then stained with a spread of outrageous idealism.
For this was an era with madness thrust into every man’s heart and hearth, while the country sang battle hymns and marched to troopships in parades. It was a time when boys and men fell over themselves to wear the khaki until just lately there were not enough volunteering to satisfy the need. Voters were asked to send more in the next conscription referendum. They would be made to go. The answer in October had been ‘No’.
The question was to be put again in another referendum in the New Year. Peacemakers were turned warmongers in pulpits and parliaments. Matters of principle held over from before the war were derided as lacking in general truth. Morality was set aside except by white-anters of the public good.
These two men sitting on a park bench, Marcus Friendly and Tim Atkinson, were white-anters of the public good one minute, fine citizens the next.
Did all men feel this as they grew older, changed from youth to deciders and getting their say pushed through? In their consciences Tim and Marcus made daily decisions about where they stood in relation to forces of iniquity, just as Maguire and Herbert had done. They had not paid any great price for it, but if a government would not take ‘No’ for an answer, what might a government do? It had a reach coming down to the workingman, who put them where they were, via their union membership, their party factions and their vote. Government was the workingman himself in its incarnation of the workingman’s strength under the banner of democratic socialism in state parliament.