Illywhacker Read online

  "You cow," I said. I could have cried.

  I sat there for a minute. When I jumped down I nearly landed on a snake. He was a long king brown, sliding through the grass as silky as 50 SAE motor oil as it pours from the can.

  The snake was lucky, and I don't mean that in the sense that snakes are said to be symbols of good fortune. I didn't even know what a symbol was. It was lucky because it was worth five bob to Mr Chin – who rightly belongs in a later part of the story – he was a herbalist with a practice in Exhibition Street, Melbourne.

  The snake stopped. It felt my admiration. It raised its head to look around and I stood stock still. Just as it lowered its head again, I pounced. I never picked up a snake the correct way. I always did it wrong. But I was fast. I fancied I was as fast as any snake. I grabbed him behind the head and held him tight and before Mr Joe Blake knew what was what, I was carrying him back to the plane where I had some hessian bags I used as cushions for my passengers.

  Two different sets of eyes were already looking at me.

  7

  Phoebe did not stop to read the "Kaiser Bill" sign, but the heady scent of turpentine rose from the hot bitumen where Ernie Vogelnest had been battling with the insult. She stood in the middle of the Bacchus Marsh-Geelong Road enveloped in a shimmer of turps, her feet bridging "Kaiser" and "Bill" as I jumped from the cockpit.

  She could hear me breathing as I concentrated on the snake. She could hear her mother crying.

  As I walked back to find a hessian bag with no holes in it, she was climbing the fence.

  I heard the twang of wire and turned.

  I saw the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life. She was sailing through the air about level with the top wire of the fence.

  Phoebe landed lightly on the summer-hard ground (only when darkness came did she realize she had twisted her ankle) and smiled.

  Herbert Badgery stood there staring at her. I can see him. He is almost as much a stranger to me as he is to her. He is tall, slim-hipped, broad-shouldered. He has bowed legs which he is ashamed of and which she finds attractive. He has an Irish mouth, like a squiggle of a pen, which is sensuous and attractive. He has all his teeth and the skin that will later become as fragile and powdery as an old kerosene-lamp mantle, is brown and smooth. He has taken off his leather helmet and goggles and there are marks around his eyes: The eyes are stunning. They are the clearest, coldest blue.

  Later, when she was in a different frame of mind, she said the eyes made her shiver. A lie. She also, later still, told her son that I had used the eyes to hypnotize the snake. If you could see the eyes you might grant it possible.

  She was close to the Farman. She could smell the oil and petrol. The smell would always, from that day, be a perfume to her as heady as musk. This weakness would be used against her, later, later.

  She did not see the man as good-looking, or handsome, but something better. She saw the strength and smelt the oil. She longed to make him smile. "Like hard woody cases ofeucalypts", she wrote, "that burst open to reveal the most delicate flowers."

  No one noticed little Ernie Vogelnest who was nervously hovering around the edge of his front paddock.

  "What's the snake for?" Phoebe said.

  The tin flapped again. The ewe resumed its bleating.

  "It's a pet,"' I said. I did not wish to admit I needed the five bob so badly. In any case, it was no trouble to lie. I always lied about snakes. I always lied about women. It was a habit. I did it, in both cases, charmingly. I was so enthusiastic that I could convince myself in half a sentence.

  "Did your plane crash?"

  "No," I said. "It didn't. I am surveying." I paused. "For airstrips."

  "This will not be suitable then?" She smiled.

  "No," I said.

  "Is he really your pet?"

  "Yes. He escaped when I landed. He bounced out of the cockpit."

  "Isn't he dangerous?"

  There is no doubting the power of a snake, which is something I've proved time and time again. "Not if you know how to handle him," I said. "A snake can smell your fear. If you feel fear it will attack you. If you show no fear you can be its friend and it will protect you", I said, "from enemies."

  Listen to the bullshitter. If snakes could smell fear this one would know that I was soaked with it. I wasn't thinking about what I was saying. The snake and girl both demanded my attention. The nor'easterly blew against her and pressed her extraordinary dress against her legs. It was a "flapper's" dress, made far away from Balliang East. I had never seen such skin, such creamy skin. I spewed out words about snakes, like muslin out of a medium's mouth, but all my thoughts were full of Phoebe's skin. I wondered if she thought I was old.

  "You hold that snake", she said, hardly moving her lovely lips, "as if you are frightened it will bite you. I don't think", she smiled, "that it is a pet at all."

  In those days I would have done anything to get written up in the papers and anything for the admiration of a woman. If it hadn't have been for those two factors I would probably, by 1919, have been the Summit agent in Ballarat. I would have had a lot more than four and tuppence ha'penny in my pocket.

  "Not a pet?" I raised my eyebrows.

  "Is it?"

  Look at the fool! I shudder to think of the risk I'm taking. The king brown snake is cranky and cantankerous. It can kill with a single strike. That dull Mr-Smith-type name is an alibi for a snake almost as deadly as a taipan. But Herbert Badgery will do anything to insist his lie is true -I let the snake run down my arm, across my trousers, to the ground.

  And there it should have ended, with the five bob slinking off through the grass. The pet declared free. A good deed done, etc. But Phoebe came forward and picked the damn thing up herself. She held the writhing, deadly twisting rope out to me. My throat was so dry I could not speak. I took it with a shudder and got it into the hessian bag and tied the top with binding twine. I had to shove my hands into my leather jacket when I'd finished. They were trembling.

  It was then that Ernest Vogelnest chose to make his entry, scuttling crab-style round the end of the good lower wing. He didn't beat around. He launched into his conversation before I saw him.

  "How fast does it fly?" he said.

  He made me jump, speaking up like that.

  "Sorry," he said. He was a funny-looking little coot. He had thin wiry arms, a red face with a walrus moustache that was far too big for it. He wore his moleskins with foreign-looking leggings. He smiled and ducked his head.

  "A very nice aeroplane, sir," said Ernest Vogelnest, nodding his head to the young lady. "Very nice…"

  "I apologize", I began… "No, no, no. It is very interesting." He patted the air in front of my chest with the palms of his hands. There was so little of him. What there was was held together by dirt and sinew.

  "Where will you go now?" He patted the nose cowling like a man admiring a neighbour's horse.

  "Nowhere," I smiled. "It's no good. Broken. Kaput."

  As it turned out we had quite different ideas about the aeroplane. From the corner of his eye Ernest Vogelnest saw his wife come out of the shed with a shovel. She carried the shovel to the fence and waited. A shovel was not such a wonderful weapon. He should, perhaps, have told her to bring the fork, but it was too late now.

  "Kaput," I said.

  "Oh no," Ernest Vogelnest said firmly. "Where to next?"

  "We stay here," I said.

  But Ernest did not want anything as strange as an aeroplane in his front paddock. It would bring crowds of people who would stare at him. He rubbed his papery hands together and saw them, in their teaming thousands, writing things on the road. They would think the plane was his. They would decide he was a spy. God knows what they would do to him.

  I misunderstood him. I offered to pay.

  "No, no," he rolled his eyes in despair. "No, no money."

  "I will pay three shillings."

  "I will pay more," Ernest Vogelnest said desperately, smiling and ducking his head
. "Much more."

  "He doesn't understand," Phoebe said.

  Vogelnest ignored her. "I will pay you, sir, one pound, if you push your aero across the road," he smiled slyly, "into O'Hagen's."

  We shook on it. I had made a total of one pound and five shillings since arriving in Balliang East. My gross assets were now one pound nine shillings and tuppence ha'penny.

  Success always went to my head. I got too excited. I went from despair to optimism in a flash. And my day was only starting, because a dangerous meeting was about to take place.

  I. e.: Jack.

  There was nothing to protect us from each other. We were elements like phosphorus and air which should always be kept apart. But he was already standing up from his picnic and picking pine needles from his trouser cuffs, but even if Molly had somehow known, had seen the result of that fifty-yard walk across the road, what could she have done?

  Jack McGrath was a man with an obsession, about transportation. He could discuss the wheel as a wonder, and he could talk about it for hours in relationship to the bullock team, the horse and jinker, the dray, the cart, the T Model, the Stanley Steamer. He could talk about it in relationship to Australia and its distances. He never got sick of it.

  He had money in the bank. He owned a Hispano Suiza, a fleet of taxis, a racehorse, but none of those things made him happy. What he liked to do was talk. And when the house was empty of guests he'd put on his hat and walk three miles down to Corio Quay where he could still find, in 1919, bullock wagons unloading wool. He could yarn with the bullockies for hours. They talked record hauls. They boasted. Jack told them how he'd got the boiler into Point's Point in 1910. He advised them to move into trucks. He spoke enthusiastically about the future of the automobile but he looked with envy on their teams: Redman, Tiger, Lofty, Yallarman, he knew the beasts almost as well as he knew the men. He shouted them "Gentleman's grog" and, in his cups, made plans to go back on the track. When Lauchie Barr's team brought thirty-two tons of bagged wheat in from Colac and broke the Australian record, Jack brought him to dinner and presented him with a handsome cup with a silver cricketer standing on its lid.

  He was exactly the sort of man I had wished to land on: enthusiastic, willing, and impressed with the idea of an aeroplane. But when I saw him stride across the road in his expensive suit I didn't realize what was coming. I saw a rich man. I was never good with rich men. They made my hackles rise.

  This false impression didn't last a minute. Jack whipped off his jacket and ripped off his tie. He lost his collar studs in the grass. He collected his cufflinks and rolled up his sleeves while his wife, a pretty ginger cat in fluffy white, watched from the safety of the road.

  To get the craft into O'Hagen's it was necessary to remove a few fence posts. Jack picked up a crowbar and set to it like a fellow who is starved of work. He raised the crowbar and sank it into the red earth. "That's the go," he said. "That's the go." He did not mean to overpower Ernest Vogelnest or snatch tools from his hand. He was being polite, useful, and although he was bursting with curiosity about the plane, he did not say a word that could be considered nosey. He gave himself wholly to the task at hand, to remove those four posts, replace them, get the plane through O'Hagen's broken fence, and hide it behind the hall.

  The posts were out in a moment. Jack stacked them neatly and then I explained to them where they could push or lift and where they couldn't. You have to be careful with a plane like a Farman -you lift under a strut, never between. When I was sure they understood the requirements, I ordered a start, but although the farmer was quick to get his back under a strut, Jack McGrath would not have a bar of it.

  It was all very well, he said, to rush into digging out a fence or putting one back in, but only a fool rushed into pushing anything, whether it was a dray or an auto or an aeroplane, without first looking over the ground and assessing the problems. He knew this from all his years with bullock teams. The secret of his success had not just been, as everyone thought, that he knew his beasts, each individual, like you might know a man or woman, each one with their strengths, their weaknesses, their little quirks. His success had been sealed on all the nights he had gone to sleep thinking out a problem. The way he got that boiler into Point's Point is the most famous example, but he would approach a difficult log in the same way. His success had been in thinking it out, and often when he met someone on the track, bogged to the axles under ten tons of wool, or in trouble on a pinch, he would see that they were only in strife because they had not stopped long enough to think. So at Balliang East he walked with me over to O'Hagen's, and unearthed a nasty hollow and a tangle of barbed wire which had been hidden in the dry summer grass.

  When we had cleared the wire away, we came back across the road to the craft and, seeing the daughter occupied the front cockpit, I enquired whether the mother might not like a ride in the back.

  Jack was surprised to see her accept- she was always so nervous -but he didn't reckon on my eyes. I took her hand and helped her up. She giggled like a young girl and her daughter was nice enough to say nothing of the third passenger: the king brown snake beneath her mother's seat.

  When the Farman was safely behind the hall, I tied it to the fence on one side and lashed it to some heavy rocks on the other. The women stayed seated in the cockpit. Vogelnest edged towards the road, but seemed reluctant to make the journey alone. Jack wanted to talk about knots. When he began, tucking in his shirt over his strong man's belly, I thought he was criticizing the knots I had tied. I missed the point -Jack liked the "idea" of a knot.

  "It is a great thing, the knot," he said. "A great thing."

  Vogelnest seemed to understand more than I did. He squatted on the ground and surveyed O'Hagen's paddocks with a critical eye. As Jack continued the light grew mellow and the colour started to come back into the landscape.

  "What sort of fellow," he said, "would invent the Donaldson lash?"

  "A fellow called Donaldson," I suggested.

  "An astonishing man," said Jack, mentally picturing the unsung Donaldson in some draughty shed alone with his ropes. "What a grasp he had of the principles. And what a memory. Two over, then back, down, hitch, double hitch and through. It's a knot you need to practise for a week before you get the hang of it."

  I never heard of the Donaldson lash before or since, or half the other knots I heard celebrated that afternoon while the sky lost its intense cobalt and went powdery and soft, and the grasses that had looked so bleached and lifeless now turned dun and gold, pale green and russet.

  Jack wondered out loud about the saddler's bow and argued the comparative merits of the reef and the double latch. Phoebe stayed in the front cockpit with her hands folded in her lap. The late sun set her hair afire. Vogelnest saw me looking at her and smiled and ducked his head.

  "Ah," said Jack who seemed, at last to have exhausted his subject, "I do like a good knot."

  Everybody started to move like they do in a church when the bridal party has gone out to sign the registry. Phoebe yawned and stretched. Vogelnest stood and brushed his knees. Molly declared herself frightened of snakes and would not walk back through the long grass. Jack picked her up like a bride and carried here across the paddock and when they arrived, laughing, on the roadway, he refused to put her down.

  Molly squealed like a young girl and Mrs Vogelnest, still standing guard at the fence with the long-handled shovel, allowed a small smile to break up the unhappy lines Jeparit had engraved on her tiny clenched-up face.

  8

  Ernest Vogelnest sat in his kitchen. His wife was in bed, asleep. He was finishing the last of the schnapps. He had been keeping the schnapps for five years and tonight had been the right time to drink it.

  He could hear the music, the piano accordion and the young girl's voice. It drifted across the desolate paddocks from O'Hagen's where the aviator and the picnickers had gone to explain the aeroplane. It was a party. He guessed, quite correctly, that there was dancing. He raised his glass towards the house wh
ere Herbert Badgery and Mrs O'Hagen were doing an Irish jig.

  Ernest Vogelnest had spent his pound well. He was not merely happy, he was overwhelmed by the niceness of people, the blissful absence of the aeroplane. It had been a quid well spent. When he saw the lights of the Hispano Suiza come bumping down the long dirt road from O'Hagen's he extinguished his hurricane lamp and watched the car pass by his darkened window. He thought he saw the aviator in the driver's seat, his face reflected in the glow of the instruments, and he raised his glass to him, wishing him well.

  9

  I always had an aversion to hotel rooms, guest houses, boarding houses or anywhere else where a man was forced into giving up money for a place to stay. I always built a place of my own when I could. I built from mud and wire netting (which is better than it sounds and more comfortable than the girl from Bacchus Marsh had realized). I was also a dab hand at a slab hut, a skill that has now died out, but which made a very satisfactory house, one that'd last a hundred years. I made houses from the wooden crates they shipped the T Models in. I made houses from galvanized iron (from rainwater tanks on one occasion). I even spent one summer in the Mallee living in a hole in the ground. It was cool and comfortable in that hot climate and I would have got married but a poddy calf fell in on top of us one night and broke the woman's arm. You can call that bad luck, but it was my stupidity. I should have fenced it.

  You could say I was obsessed with houses, but I was not abnormal. My only abnormality was that I did not have one. I had been forced to leave my houses behind me, evicted from them, disappointed in them, fleeing them because of various events. I left them to rot and rust and be shat on by cattle on the land of the so-called legal owners who were called squatters because they'd done exactly what I'd done.

  While a house was always my aim, it wasn't always possible in the short term. I was an expert, however, at getting "put up". I was not just an expert. I was an ace. I never had to be formally invited and I always left them before my welcome was worn out. Don't think I cheated the legal owners, because I never did. I delivered value in whatever way it was required.