I Can Jump Puddles, page 15
‘We’ll go,’ I said, after a silence. ‘It feels crook down here.’
I lowered myself on to the earth from the stone on which I had been sitting.
‘No one will ever believe I’ve been down here,’ I said.
‘It just shows what fools they are,’ said Joe.
I turned and began crawling back. In crawling up a steep slope the weight is thrown on to the knees and mine were already inflamed and tender. Coming down, my arms had taken my weight and no power had been demanded of my knees that merely supported me. Now I had to struggle with each yard I traversed and I quickly tired. I had to rest every few yards, sinking down with my face pressed to the ground and my arms lying limp beside me. In this position I could hear the beating of my heart coming from the earth.
When I rested Joe and Andy sat each side of me and talked but after a while we climbed and rested in silence, each occupied with his own problems. Joe had to help Andy, at the same time keeping pace with me.
I crawled on and on exhorting myself with silent commands to greater endeavour. ‘Now!’ ‘Again!’ ‘This time!’
High up on the crater’s side we stopped for one of our rests. I lay full length on the earth breathing deeply and from the ground against which my ear was pressed I heard two quick thuds. I looked up towards the top of the crater and there outlined against the sky were Skeeter and Steve and they were yelling in fear and waving their arms.
‘Look out! Look out!’
The stone that under a sudden impulse they had sent rolling down on us had not yet gathered speed. Joe saw it at the same time as I did.
‘The tree,’ he yelled. He grabbed Andy and the three of us floundered towards an old dead gum that towered from the crater’s side. We reached it just before the stone passed us with a shrill whistle and thuds that shook the ground. We watched it leaping wildly over ferns and logs, away below us and then heard the sharp crack as it struck the boulders hidden in bracken. It broke in half and the two pieces separated and shot away from each other at an angle.
Steve and Skeeter, frightened by what they had done, had turned and were running over the crest.
‘They’re gone!’ I said.
‘Cripes! Didja ever see the like!’ said Joe. ‘They mighta killed us.’
But we both felt pleased that this had happened to us.
‘Wait till we tell the kids at school,’ I said.
We began our climb again feeling a little better and talking about the speed of the stone but soon we were silent again and when I rested Joe and Andy just sat there looking back at the crater below us.
It seemed to me we were all struggling together and their silence, like mine, was that of exhaustion.
I began spelling more frequently and when the sun was beginning to set and the sky was flaming red behind the opposite crest I had to sink to the ground after each painful, forward heave.
When finally we reached the top I lay on the ground while all my flesh twitched like that of a kangaroo from which the hide had just been taken.
Joe sat beside me holding my crutches and in a little while he said, ‘I’m getting worried over those ducks.’
I rose to my feet, placed the crutches beneath my arms, and we set off down the mountain.
t troubled Father to see me returning exhausted from long walks in the bush. One day he said, ‘Don’t walk so far, Alan. Hunt in the bush round the house.’
‘There are no hares there,’ I said.
‘No.’ He stood looking at the ground and thinking.
‘You’ve got to hunt, have you?’ he asked me.
‘No,’ I said, ‘but I like going out hunting. All the boys go hunting. I like going out with Joe. He stops when I’m tired.’
‘Yes, Joe’s a good bloke,’ Father reflected.
‘Getting tired’s nothing,’ I said to him when he remained silent.
‘No, that’s true enough. I suppose you’ll have to have a crack at the lot. Anyway, toss it in and lie down when you’re done. You might have a champion horse but you’ve still got to spell him going up a long hill.’
He saved some money and began looking at the second- hand advertisements in the Age. One day he wrote a letter and a few weeks later he drove to Balunga and brought home an invalid chair that came up in the train.
It was standing in the yard when I came home from school and I stood looking at it in amazement. Father yelled out from the stockyard, ‘It’s yours. Hop into the saddle and give it a fly.’
The chair was a heavy, cumbersome affair built with no regard to saving weight. It had two over-size bicycle wheels at the back and a small wheel in the front attached to the frame by a cast goose-neck. Two long handles, one each side of the seat, were attached to rods that were fitted to cranks on the axle. The handles were worked to and fro, one going forward as the other came back. The right handle had a swivel attachment that enabled the rider to turn the front wheel to the right or left.
It took a heavy pull to start it moving but once it was in motion it could be kept moving by a rhythmic working of the arms.
I climbed into it and rode it round the yard in a series of jerky, forward movements, but after a while I learned to relax momentarily at the end of each sweep so that it ran smoothly along like a bicycle.
After a few days I could race it up the road, my arms working like pistons. I rode it to school and became the envy of my mates who climbed aboard with me, either sitting on my knee or facing one another sitting on the goose-neck. The one in front could grasp the handles lower down than my grip and help work them to and fro. We called it ‘working your passage’ and I would give anybody a lift who worked his passage.
However, those who sat in front, not having arms trained to thrusting on crutches, soon tired and I was left to work the handles without help.
The invalid chair extended my range of movement and brought the creek within reach. Turalla Creek was three miles away from our home and I only saw it on Sunday School picnic days or when father drove that way in the brake.
Joe often walked to the creek to fish for eels and now I could accompany him. We tied our two bamboo rods beside the seat, placed a sugar bag on the footboard for carrying the eels, and set off with Joe sitting in front working his arms with short, swift strokes while high up on the handles my arms worked with longer sweeps.
Saturday night was our fishing night and we always left home in the late afternoon, arriving at McCallum’s Hole before the sun set. McCallum’s Hole was a long, dark stretch of water, deep and still. Redgums lined its banks and threw powerful limbs across the water. Their trunks were gnarled and twisted, charred by bush fires or bearing the long, leaf-like scar left by a Blackfellow after he had removed the bark for a canoe.
Joe and I fashioned stories around these canoe trees which we examined eagerly, looking for the marks of the stone axe that had been used to cut the bark from the trunk. Some of the scars were small, no longer than a child, and we knew the bark from these had been used to fashion coolamons, the shallow dish in which the lubras placed their piccaninnies to sleep or in which they carried the vegetable food they gathered.
One such tree grew with its huge, coiling roots touched by the water of McCallum’s Hole. On still nights when our floaters sat motionlessly in a moonlight path on the water, the dark surface at our feet would glitter with ripples then break and for a moment a platypus would be floating there, watching us with sharp eyes before it curved its body and returned to its burrow amongst the submerged roots of the old tree.
They used to swim upriver against the current then float back, their heads still facing the stream as they searched for worms and grubs the current was carrying. Sometimes we thought they were fish as they floated by with only their curved backs above the surface and we would cast our lines towards them. If one took the bait we pulled it out on to the bank where we touched its fur and talked about how we would like to keep it, before we let it go.
Water rats also lived in holes beneath the tree. They brought up mussels from the mud below and broke the shells on the flat surface of one huge root from where we gathered the pieces and put them in a bag to bring home to the fowls.
‘It’s the best shell grit you can get,’ Joe told me, but Joe always dealt in superlatives. He described my invalid chair as ‘the best made thing he had ever seen’ and wondered why they never had races for them.
‘You’d be a champion, easy,’ Joe assured me. ‘Now, say you were on scratch . . . Well, that wouldn’t matter a beggar. No other bloke’s got arms like you. You’d romp it in.’
He talked like this while we sat facing each other on the chair, our arms moving rhythmically to and fro as we made for the creek. We both felt very happy on this night for we had made a ‘bob.’
Catching eels with a hook can be exciting but with a bob the excitement is continuous and the catch much bigger.
A bob is made by threading worms on to a strand of wool till you have one tremendous worm several yards long.
This heavy worm-string is then looped into a drooping bunch to which the line is tied. It is not used with a float. It is cast into the water as it is, where it sinks to the bottom and is almost immediately seized by an eel whose file-like teeth get caught in the wool.
When the one holding the line feels the tug he jerks the eel from the water and it falls with the bob on to the bank beside him. He then has to seize it before it escapes back into the water, cut through the back of its neck with a knife and thrust it into his bag.
Eels are slimy and are hard to hold and sometimes two would be jerked to the bank at once and Joe and I would dive after them, grabbing them and losing them, then flinging ourselves upon them again. While we were waiting for a bite we rubbed the palms of our hands on the dry earth so that the dust adhering there would prevent our grip from slipping. The slime from the eels caked this dirt and after a while we had to wash it off then rub them in the dust again.
We lit a campfire when we reached the old tree and boiled the billy into which Mother had already placed the tea and sugar. We watched flocks of ducks come swiftly up the creek, following each bend and rising steeply when they saw us.
‘There’s a power of ducks on this creek,’ Joe said munching a thick corned beef sandwich. ‘I’d like a penny for every duck, say, from here to Turalla.’
‘How much do you reckon you’d have?’ I asked him.
‘A hundred pound, easy,’ said Joe who always argued in round figures.
Joe regarded a hundred pounds as a fortune. ‘You never know what you could do with a hundred quid,’ he told me.
‘You could do anything.’
This was an absorbing subject.
‘You could buy any pony you wanted,’ I said. ‘Buck-jump saddles! – Cripes! Say you wanted to buy a book, now . . . Well, you could get it and if you lent it to anybody and they wouldn’t give it back, it wouldn’t matter.’
‘Aw, you’d easy get it back,’ Joe said. ‘You’d know who had it.’
‘You mightn’t,’ I insisted. ‘No one remembers who they lend books to.’
I threw my crusts into the river and Joe said, ‘Don’t frighten hell outa the eels. Eels is terrible nervous and, what’s more, there’s an east wind tonight and they won’t bite with an east wind.’
He stood up and wet his finger by thrusting it into his mouth. He held it upright in the still air and waited a moment.
‘Yes, it’s east all right. It feels cold on the east side.’
But the eels bit better than Joe anticipated. I had no sooner lifted the bob from the grass-lined tin in which we kept it and cast it into the water than I felt a bite on the line. I jerked the rod upwards and flung the bob with an eel attached on to the bank. The eel floundered on the grass then wriggled towards the water like a snake.
‘Grab it!’ I yelled.
Joe grabbed it and held it squirming in his hands while I opened the pocket knife. I severed its backbone behind its neck and we placed it in the sugar bag which we put down beside the fire.
‘That’s one,’ said Joe with satisfaction. ‘The east wind musta died down – a good job, too. We’ll get a lot tonight.’
By eleven o’clock we had eight eels, but Joe wanted ten. ‘When ya got ten it makes out ya good,’ he reasoned. ‘It’s better to say, “we got ten last night” than to say “we got eight”.’
We decided to stay till twelve o’clock. The moon had risen and there was plenty of light to see our way home. Joe gathered more wood for the fire. It was cold and we were thinly clad.
‘You can’t beat a good fire,’ I said, throwing dry gum branches into the flames till they billowed up higher than our heads.
Joe dropped an armful of wood and ran to grab the rod that had moved to the tug of an eel. He flung the eel out onto the bank where it fell near the fire, glittering with black and silver as it writhed away from the heat.
It was the biggest eel we had caught and I flung myself at it eagerly. It slipped from my grasp and slithered towards the water. I rubbed my hands desperately on the ground and crawled after it but Joe had dropped the rod and had seized it near the edge of the water. It wriggled in his hands, threshing its head and tail. Joe gripped it tenaciously but it squeezed through his hands and fell to the ground. He dived at it again as it was entering the water but he slipped on the mud and went into the creek up to his waist.
Joe never swore much but he swore now. It was funny to see him in the water but I didn’t laugh. He crawled out on to the bank and stood up, his arms curved away from his sides as he looked down at the pool of water gathering at his feet.
‘I’ll get into a row over this,’ he said in a tone of concern. ‘By hell, I will! I’ll have to dry my pants if it’s the last thing I do.’
‘Take ’em off and dry ’em at the fire,’ I suggested. ‘They won’t take long. How did he get away from you?’
Joe looked back at the creek. ‘That eel was the biggest eel I’ve ever seen in me life,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t get me hands round it. And heavy! – Cripes, it was heavy! Did ya feel the weight of it?’
Here was a wonderful opportunity for creating an experience that could never be checked and Joe and I revelled in it.
‘It felt like a ton,’ I said.
‘Easy,’ Joe reckoned.
‘What about the way it lashed round,’ I exclaimed. ‘You could feel it fighting like a snake.’
‘It got round me arm,’ said Joe, ‘and I thought it was broke.’ He paused then began taking off his trousers with great speed as if a bull ant had gone up his leg. ‘I gotta get these dry.’
I thrust the end of a forked stick into the ground so that it leant almost over the fire where his trousers would dry quickly in the rising heat.
Joe took a piece of sodden string, a brass door knob and some marbles from his pocket and placed them on the ground, then he hung his trousers on the stick and began dancing up and down before the fire to keep warm.
I flung the bob back into the creek, hoping to catch the eel we had lost and when I finally felt a bite I jerked the rod with the power of one about to lift a heavy weight.
A wriggling eel, clinging to the bob, flashed high in the air above my head, came down in a curve behind me, and crashed into the stick holding Joe’s trousers. The trousers fell into the fire.
Joe dived towards the fire then backed precipitately as a flare of heat burst against his face. He raised one hand to shield his face and tried to reach his trousers with the other. He suddenly raced round the fire swearing in an anguished fashion then grabbed the rod from my hands and poked at his flaming trousers in an effort to hook them and jerk them out. When at length he got the end of the rod beneath them, he was desperate for time and he gave such a tremendous heave on the rod that the trousers leaped upwards from the flames and described a rainbow of fire against the night before sailing on free of the rod and dropping with a sizzle and a puff of steam into the waters of the creek.
As the flames were extinguished a great darkness came upon Joe. The black patch of his sinking trousers could be seen against the gleam of the moving water before they disappeared, and he watched this patch, bending out over the water with his hands on his knees and the glow of the fire painting his bare behind a rosy pink.
‘My God!’ he said.
When he had recovered sufficiently to discuss his predicament he announced that we must get home quickly. He had lost interest in catching ten eels and was concerned over being seen without trousers.
‘It’s agin the law to leave your pants off,’ he told me earnestly. ‘If any bloke seen me without pants I’d be done. You can do a stretch quick and lively if you’re caught without pants. Old Dobson,’ Joe was referring to a local racing cyclist who had recently gone off his head, ‘went to Melbourne and ran clean through it without pants an’ they jailed him for hell only knows how long. We gotta get going. I wish it wasn’t a full moon.’
We hurriedly tied our rods to the side of the chair, placed the bag of eels on the footboard and set off, Joe sitting on my knee in gloomy silence.
I had a heavy load and when we came to a hill Joe had to get out and push. But there were not many hills and I got slower and slower.
Joe complained of the cold. My exertions on the handles kept me warm and I was protected from the breeze of our passage by Joe who kept slapping his bare thighs to warm them.
Far ahead of us, on a long, straight stretch of road, we saw the lights of a buggy approaching us. We could hear the clock-clock of a jogging horse and I said, ‘That sounds like old O’Connors’s grey.’
‘That’ll be him,’ said Joe. ‘Pull up! You never know who’ll be with him. Let me off. I’ll hide behind the trees over there. He’ll think you’re on your own.’
I stopped the chair on the side of the road and Joe ran across the grass and disappeared into a dark clump of trees.
I sat there watching the approaching buggy, glad of the rest, and thinking of each section of the road ahead of me – the easy parts, the long rises, our lane and the last pull home.
