Dolan of Sugar Hills (4 page)

CHAPTER SIX

Sheila had feared that because of the crocodile episode she would be forbidden the care of the children.

She was glad when this did not happen, for by now the self-imposed four families were not merely a way for Sheila to vindicate herself and her presence at Sugar Hills; she now had a personal interest in the lovable and very important little folk.

For Carlo she already had extravagant hopes; the lad was never floored. It did not matter what question the manual might ask. Carlo could find an answer. When Sheila read out to him: “What did Lord Forrest become?” he thought quickly, to no avail, remembered an illustration in one of the manual’s pages, then said with his usual bright cunning, “Please, a statue, Misshelley.”

“He’ll be a diplomat,” Sheila told his mother.

“Perhaps. Perhaps just a cane cutter like his papa; no matter so long as he is good.”

Small brother, Nino, however, was more rebel than diplomat. On the morning after Nino had disobediently carried home the baby crocodile, Sheila found the little boy digging hard in his garden. The garden even this soon had its own low croc fence, as would all the units; the barracks; and Cane, so Molly had told her, was even considering taking the precaution of enclosing the house, in spite of the fact that it already stood on piles.

“What are you doing, Nino?” Sheila asked.

Nino looked up resentfully. Evidently he had been well spanked for bringing back what he should not have brought back, for his little face was mutinous. “Planting an apple pip,” he gritted, “so I can climb up the tree when pop’s on the whack.”

Sheila was very careful with her charges that day, very careful on the days that followed. She felt rightly or wrongly that she had ground to make up.

Then something happened that prior to the crocodile incident she knew she never could have handled. When little Marty Jones called out, “Snake, Misshelley,” Sheila did not panic. She pushed the children promptly behind her, then grabbed a stout length of stick. With dead venomous taipans and adders in her mind, she prepared to strike with all her force. But, arm aloft, something—someone—caught her. Evidently one of the children had run and screamed an alarm, and now Cane Dolan took the stick from Sheila’s hand.

“A praiseworthy attempt,” he commended in his usual unhurried drawl, “and one certainly to the credit side for you at last, Miss Guthrie. Not sufficient to wipe out the crocodile debit, perhaps. But you’re learning quite nicely, child.”

“The—the snake,” Sheila shivered. “It’s escaping.”

“Certainly. It’s Cedric.”

“Cedric?”

“Our pet carpet snake. Strictly nonvenomous. He helps keep down the mice. If you had harmed Cedric, you would have been considered in the red, I’m afraid. However, you haven’t, fortunately, but you have established yourself as a trier if nothing else.”

“Thank you for the faint praise,” said Sheila, still shaking.

He grinned maddeningly back at her, but somehow for all the maddening grin Sheila felt that he had been pleased with her effort.

There were no more undertones that week, no innuendoes, no sudden silences, no breaking off of words, no striding out of the room. Sheila was almost persuaded that she had imagined what she had, that Cane Dolan and Molly Ferris were not concealing something, that everything was as bright as the bright days that seemed to come one after the other up here in latitude nineteen.

It was in this equable atmosphere that Cane Dolan suggested a trip to Mackay ... to Sugaropolis. He proposed to take Sheila and the older school-age children. “A firsthand project lesson,” he said. “We leave at daybreak, put up at a cane farm I know, and return the next day.”

The children were all eager; the mothers all agreeable.

On Cane’s instructions Sheila told the mothers to pack pajamas, towel and toothbrush only; to have the travelers ready by the first peep of dawn.

By five they were on the highway and heading south.

It was the same scenery as at Sugar Hills ... subtropical jungle where the cane fields had not traced in their mosaic pattern of plant and ratoon crops in varying stages of growth. There were also fields that looked like peas, and Sheila asked Cane about this.

“Quite right, they are peas, the Gambia pea. After the second ratoon the Gambia pea is grown and then plowed in to prevent the soil of fallowing fields from being washed away by our heavy tropical rain. Legumes also store nitrogen in their roots, so the Gambia pea provides a plant food as well.”

They spanned a little river, and there sailing gracefully across it was a slender black swan. “All our swans are black,” said Cane to Sheila.

At noon they pulled up by the road and opened a huge hamper that Molly had provided. There was a handy stream, and while Sheila superintended the washing of the girls’ hands, Cane took over the boys’.

“How far am I to wash?” grumbled Truda. “Above the tips of my fingers, Misshelley?”

“Misshelley, if I had a thing in my hair when I washed my hair would it get soap in its eyes?” Marty inquired busily.

While Sheila sought a suitable answer she heard Hendrik complaining bitterly to Cane that boys ought to grow because they were always having water put on them. Evidently one boy was
not
having water put on him; young Noel had not come down to the stream with the rest, but was busy at the cooky jar that Molly had packed. “I’m just counting them, Cane,” he yelped when Cane Dolan ran up the slope, rescued the tin, and forced Noel down to wash with the others.

“Kids!” Cane groaned.

But it was pleasant sitting afterward in the sun in a big circle, watching the food disappear, laughing inwardly at things that were said.

“We’re your family today and tomorrow, aren’t we, Misshelley, yours and Cane’s,” beamed Marty.

“Yes, dear,” said Sheila hurriedly.

“You’re very young to have seven children,” persisted Marty in a grown-up conversation voice. “Are you married?”

Sheila looked desperately at Cane, but he only grinned maddeningly and unhelpfully back.

“Perhaps you are sometimes,” suggested Marty kindly, and Sheila left it at that.

They all got back into the station wagon, and after an hour’s traveling Cane pulled up again.

“I’m going to take you through a mill,” he said. “Years ago each plantation had its own small mill to crush out the cane juice. My grandfather crushed at Sugar Hills; all the farmers crushed in their ‘backyard factories.’ But it was crude and wasteful, and now we all truck it to large central mills like this one.”

The children and Sheila followed Cane into the mill. They watched the heavy cane stalks being fed to a steam engine with large rollers, the cane fiber coming out from one end, the sweet juice pouring out from another.

“Lime is added to the sweet juice,” said Cane, “and impurities settle out. The clear juice is boiled, and as water evaporates crystals of sugar form.”

They passed on to machines like finely-meshed colanders and saw syrup being flung off and crystals of raw sugar gathered up and dried.

“The next job is the refinery’s,” said Cane, “where this grayish-brown stuff is changed to sparkling white. It’s not done here; it goes to the big cities so it will be nearer its source of consumption, but you can say goodbye to some of this tomorrow at the bulk loading at Mackay. Ready now, nips?”

They drove on through the afternoon, the children singing, arguing, sometimes dozing.

“They’re getting tired,” whispered Sheila to Cane.

“Yes,” he nodded, “but we’re almost there.”

The plantation they stopped at was a large one, even larger than Sugar Hills.

“It’s run by a company,” explained Cane, “which explains the house, too, that will be available to us. The original owners are cooperative owners now and don’t live here any more.”

Sheila helped the children out and allotted them their bedrooms. “Early supper,” ordered Cane, “early bed, then early in the morning to see the bulk loading and get back up north again.” Marty, as eldest girl, helped Sheila prepare the meal.

“In Sydney,” she said smugly, “I had cooking lessons at my school. Can I make buttered toast?”

“Buttered toast will be nice, Marty. Does the school let you eat the things you make, dear?”

“They make us,” Marty replied mournfully.

The toast went off quite well, however, along with a big pie and plum cake.

The children were ready for bed soon afterward ... and soon afterward Sheila went, as well.

They were up at dawn again and in Sugaropolis an hour later. Sheila decided that Mackay was a very attractive, palm-lined city besides being the largest bulk sugar terminal in the world.

She stood beside the mountain of sugar. “Over a hundred thousand tons of sugar,” said Cane in the thousand-feet-long shed.

Beyond the shed the port, with its northern and southern breakwaters of rubble stone and concrete coping, sheltered three large cargo vessels waiting to be filled by the conveyer belt that ran from the sugar mountain to their holds.

“I can appreciate now,” murmured Sheila, humbled, “that there’s more in sugar than lots of spoonfuls for lots of cups of tea.”

“I could do with some tea at this moment,” said Cane, “then after that, if you’re agreeable, we’ll push off home.”

Home... With each mile back to latitude nineteen Sheila felt more and more that it was home to which she was returning. When they came at last that afternoon to the house on piles set in the terra-cotta earth she could almost have called out in pleasure the same as the children did.

Perhaps Cane sensed this. He gave her a quick intuitive look. He seemed pleased somehow.

One of the Dutch cutters, Hans, was at the house, and he came across and helped Sheila alight from the station wagon.

“You have a good time, Shelley?”

“Lovely, Hans, thank you.”

“You are tired?”

“No, we had an early bed last night. I feel quite fresh.”

“Good, then you come to the dance with me tonight, is that okay?”

“Tonight?”

“Yes, you say you are not tired.”

“I’m not tired, Hans, but—”

“Then it is okay, Shelley. I am unmarried cane cutter, so it is okay I take a girl to the dance.”

“Of course, Hans, but—”

Sheila looked appealingly to Dolan and he asked of her, “Would you care to go dancing tonight?”

“Oh, yes, though not with anyone special. I really mean—”

“She means, Hans,” deciphered Cane, still dryly, “that she’ll dance with you but not go with you, not go with anyone. In other words, Miss Shelley is not shopping. Understand?”

“Shopping, Cane?” frowned the Dutchman.

“She is not after a boyfriend; she doesn’t want to be tied. Remarkable, really, in one of the female species, but—”

“Keep in mind,” interrupted Sheila smoothly, “that I don’t need to be after one, that I’m not required to ‘shop,’ not in this man’s state. The numbers are on my side.”

Hans was looking from Sheila to Cane in unconcealed puzzlement. When Cane said, “Clear out now, Hans, or none of us will be ready to go to the dance tonight,” he went.

Sheila was a little surprised at Cane’s words. Somehow she had not coupled Cane Dolan with dancing, but as Molly served dinner that night she gathered the impression that everyone attended. Molly evidently was going, as she had on a black taffeta skirt and an embroidered blouse. Sheila mentally went through her own wardrobe and decided on a buttercup cotton with a matching fringed stole.

At eight o’clock Molly and Sheila climbed into the wagon beside Cane, and he drove the short distance down to the barracks, where a common room that served the purpose of recreation, meeting and church hall was decorated with banana palms and paper streamers, and was already full of cigarette smoke, laughter, bobbing balloons and the strains of a three-piece band.

The bobbing balloons particularly attracted Sheila because they were held by all the Sugar Hills young fry. Cane noticed her surprised glance and said, “They all come, regardless of age. Do you object?”

At that moment a shrill little voice that Sheila recognized as Hendrik’s reported clearly, “Pop’s dancing with a lady, mom.”

Mrs. Scheerer, setting a toddler to sleep, called back, “That’s all right, son.”

“It’s all right, pop,” approved Hendrik still loudly, “mom says you can dance with her.”

In the laughter that followed his assurance, Sheila submitted with a smile, “No, I don’t object.”

The band struck up another number, and Cane whirled Molly around the hall.

Instantly Sheila found herself circled by a dozen men. Graciously she gave the dance to Hans, promising to get around to the others later in the night.

But Sheila did not get around to them.

When the next dance began, Cane Dolan crossed to her. Perhaps he asked her to dance with him, Sheila afterward could not remember, she could not remember whether he actually asked her at any time ... or whether he simply gathered her up in those big strong arms of his and moved her in rhythm to the music, dance after dance, the entire program of the entire night.

What did she feel in those arms, what did she feel as the music stole around her, stole around them both until it seemed that there were only the two of them swaying together in the barracks hall?

Sheila could not have said. She remembered a first passing surprise that such a large man could dance so smoothly ... but after that she was only conscious of strong encompassing arms, of dark eyes only a few inches away, of a face only a breath away, of encircling music ... of a feeling she could not have explained, that she had never known before.

At midnight the dance ended. The three of them climbed into the wagon and drove back in replete silence. Sheila still felt herself floating in that curious, unexplainable daze.

She murmured “Good night” and went along the corridor to her room. It had been a long day and she should have felt weary, but there was an excitement within her, and instead of going straight to bed she went and stood at the window as she had stood on her first night here at Sugar Hills.

Almost two weeks ago, she thought. The days had raced, and yet in some odd way the hours seemed to have stood still. She could not explain it really, unless she called it timeless. Yes, timeless, she thought. As though time was enchanted into immobility for all the pulsing movement and the virile activity of this latitude nineteen.

Sheila gave her head a little shake.
I
’
m getting involved,
she thought,
I
’
ll never sleep.

She decided to steal out to the kitchen and warm up some milk. If she did it carefully and quietly she should not disturb anyone.

She slipped off her shoes and tiptoed down the corridor. At first she did not see the light still on and would have entered the room had not Cane’s voice cut sharply across her unawareness and stopped her—her hand to open the door still raised—where she stood.