Lantana Lane (4 page)

This prospect of change and turmoil distressed him so much that the eyes he lifted as Amy Hawkins scrambled through the fence and came running towards him, were quite wild, and grew wilder when he noticed that she was jubilantly waving a slip of paper over her head. There! Hadn't he known it? Bits of paper always meant trouble. . . .

She called out breathlessly:

“Well, Herbie—at last! You've waited long enough!”

Speechless and stricken, he could only stare at her, and she gasped out chidingly as she came up to him:

“Why, what's the matter with you? Tommy told you, didn't he? You look like you'd lost five pounds instead of winning it!”

Five pounds? . . . He blinked. He breathed deeply. He smiled. He took the ticket and looked at it almost with affection. Five pounds needn't cause much disturbance. A man could take five pounds in his stride; that was what he called a real nice little amount of money. His smile broadened to a beam, but faded as he glanced up and saw that the cloud had already disintegrated into a few wisps. There's what money does, he thought bitterly; takes your mind off things for a while, and then they're gone, and you know you'll never get another chance to see them just that way again. . . . But he mustn't grouse. It had been a narrow shave. After all, the five pounds would just cover the rates nicely. But he wouldn't buy no more Casket tickets; it was too risky.

Tommy, who had scuttled down at his mother's heels, now proclaimed triumphantly: “See, Herbie, I never did get it wrong, did I? Mum, Herbie's going to buy a bulldozer! He's going to buy a bulldozer, and shift his groundsel!”

“Ah-ha!” cried Tommy's mother. “That'll be the day!”

T
HE
ERUDITION
of Dr. Johnson was such that we hesitate to contradict him, but our experience in the Lane seems to disprove his theory that none are happy but by anticipation of change. We must concede, perhaps, that a little change for the better in our financial affairs would make us even happier than we are, but on the whole we are pretty care-free, and the only thing which periodically afflicts us with uneasiness and despondency is precisely the anticipation of a certain change which threatens to overtake us at some future time. We do not exactly brood upon it, but every now and then something happens to recall it to our minds, and then we speak of it as The Deviation.

A few years ago it began to be rumoured that the Department of Main Roads was casting a critical eye upon our district, and particularly upon that part of the highway which lies between the Lane and the township of Tooloola. No one was at all surprised to hear it. The official definition of a perfect road is well known to be the same as Euclid's definition of a straight line, and this stretch of bitumen is so far from being the shortest distance between two points that it must cause acute shame and anguish in the Department. What more likely, we reflected, than that some road-planner, seated at a desk with a map in front of him, should suddenly have noted that if he laid one end of a ruler upon Dillillibill, and the other upon Tooloola, it would lie roughly along the Lantana Lane ridge? What more certain than that he should observe, further, another ridge running out from Tooloola upon approximately the same line? And after that, what more inevitable than that he should thump his desk, and cry loudly : “Eureka!”?

Looking more closely, he might of course regard it as unfortunate that there should be the gorge of Late Tucker Creek between the toes of these two ridges, and that half a mile upstream Hawkins' Falls should drop it perpendicularly about a hundred feet; but what, he would surely ask himself, is a little matter of a steep mile or so, with a few hairpin bends, and a bridge at the bottom? True, it would slightly mar the beautiful straight line, but would it not be far less damaging to the Department's prestige than the ridiculous, wide loop which, following the crest of the main ridge, at present links Tooloola with the Lane?

All this seemed so plausible that we never really doubted the truth of the rumour, even before Horrie Bates (who is on the Shire Council, and may be supposed to have inside information) assured us that a major reconstruction of the Tooloola-Dillillibill road was undoubtedly being considered. He added rather sourly that in his opinion it would go on being considered for the next thirty years; but we were inclined to dismiss this as wishful thinking. For if our road-planner had, indeed, drawn The Deviation with his ruler, he must have gone further and, with a fine abandon, scribbled out The Loop—thus relegating Horrie and others to what would then become a local road, dependent for its maintenance upon the Shire Council. And Horrie, as a Councillor, knows what that would mean.

But what would it mean to the Lane? . . . We weigh the pros and cons. We remember the squeaks, rattles and sagging springs of our long-suffering vehicles, and think of bitumen. We sigh over the scratches on their paint, and remind ourselves that on a main road we could meet the oncoming traffic without getting off into the lantana. On the other hand, we wonder whether they really know what Late Tucker Creek is like in a cyclone; and whether, even in the most halcyon conditions, The Deviation would serve us better than The Loop. One school of thought holds that it would save time, while the other argues that the steep grades and hairpin bends would cancel out the shorter distance—but this point is never debated with much heat, for, as Ken Mulliner so often says, what's the hurry? And in any case, we are well aware that when all this considering is going on, our convenience will not be a very weighty factor.

On a far warmer note of interest, we discuss resumption—for this pill is always followed by the sugar-plum of compensation. Everyone agrees that (at all events as far as Aub Dawson's place), there would be no real need to resume anything, for the poor visibility on our corners is due not to their sharpness, but to the encroaching lantana. We are not so naïve, however, as to imagine that a bend of any description would be tolerated if it could possibly be straightened, and the only way to straighten the Lane would be to shave bits off our properties. Not very big bits. Regarded as proportions of our acreage, they would hardly be missed. But the point which we are prepared to argue with force and eloquence is that they would be our best bits, our most level bits, our most accessible and easily worked bits—and therefore bits for which we may justly urge our claim to handsome compensation.

But towards its eastern end, the Lane veers slightly northward before fading out into a track, and the ridge descends through Aub Dawson's farm, and Dick Arnold's, to the creek. If our guesses are right, The Deviation will here call for resumption on a scale which implies most seductive compensation; Aub names a sum which makes our mouths water, and pugnaciously declares that if he doesn't get it they will have to build their ruddy road over his dead body; and Dick is hardly less truculent. You would think, to hear them, that they are panting for the action to begin. They even boast, with a great show of hardihood, that they will go down in history as the only blokes in the neighbourhood who ever made a nice little packet out of their farms.

This does not deceive anyone. They, like the rest of us, are grievously torn. Whatever Dr. Johnson may have said, anticipation of this change brings no gladness to any of our hearts. For the Tooloola-Dillillibill road is more than a link between two little towns; it is also one section of a north-south route which gathers in, at various points, the traffic from vast inland areas—and The Deviation would make us part of it. Do we really want to be part of anything so busy and important? Do we really want to find ourselves on all the maps? Should we really like being on the way from anywhere to anywhere else? Ah I These questions—which we never discuss at all—are the ones which give us pause; we know that if the Lane ever becomes a through road, it will be the Lane no longer—and somehow we like it as it is.

I
F
YOU
should ask the way to Lantana Lane, you will be told, most likely, to drive along the Tooloola-Dillillibill road, and turn off when you come to a green ute. This form of direction is, admittedly, a little less than foolproof, for occasionally the ute is not there. But it nearly always is. Joe Hardy only uses it once a week on the farm, and hardly ever drives it on the roads, so the residents—quite reasonably taking the view that a green ute is more easily spotted than an inconspicuous, lantana-shrouded turning—customarily proffer it as a landmark.

Joe is a gangling, taciturn, middle-aged bachelor; rather a villainous looking person, if the truth must be told, for he has a broken nose, and a long scar running down the left side of his face from the corner of his eye to the corner of his mouth; this distorts his features, and gives him an evil leer which is gravely misleading. His left shoulder is higher than his right, and his left arm—not much use to him now—ends in a hand from which three fingers are missing; he also limps badly. When Heather Arnold's sister came to the Lane once for a fortnight's visit, she was frankly terrified of him, and could only with great difficulty be convinced that his favourite relaxation is neither murder, arson, blackmail, rape, nor even drink—but draughts. He is a notable draughts player, but since no one in the Lane was, until a few years ago, proficient enough to sit at the same board with him, he used to have a standing appointment with an old lady in Dillillibill on Sunday afternoons. He lives with his Uncle Cuth and his black kelpie, Butch, in a corrugated iron shack on the corner; he had a house once, but it was blown down in a cyclone, as we shall relate, and he has never got around to rebuilding it.

In these parts most houses stand up on stumps high enough to provide room beneath the floorboards for innumerable things, including, of course, the family's motor vehicle—be it car, truck, ute, tractor, jeep or jalopy. Joe's house, however, had been erected, for some inscrutable reason, upon stumps a bare four feet high. The construction of a shed, and access thereto would have been not only costly in time and money, but a waste of good pineapple land, so Joe merely brushed a bay in the lantana outside his fence, and parked the ute there. In those days—what with driving in to the store a couple of times a week, and taking a day off now and then to go fishing, and attending the pictures on Saturday nights, and keeping his draughts appointment in Dillillibill every Sunday—Joe had the ute out pretty frequently, and it had not yet begun to serve as a substitute for a signpost. This came later, and was due to his Uncle Cuth.

Uncle Cuth, who first made his appearance in the Lane a few months before the particular cyclone which we have mentioned, is a wiry, bow-legged little man with a shock of grey hair and a drooping grey moustache. He is to be seen in all seasons wearing an earth-coloured flannel shirt, patched khaki trousers precariously supported by a length of string, sandshoes which were once white, and a sailor's cap. (Since he has never been to sea, and has, in fact, spent the greater part of his life well west of the Dividing Range, no one is able to account for the cap; but there it is.) His main preoccupation is food, and his favourite comestible eggs—-because, as he says, they go down easy, and don't give you no trouble when they're there. He has so passionate an aversion to water that he cannot bear it to touch either his person or his garments, and will not stir out of doors in even the lightest shower of rain. He is enveloped, consequently, in a strong, goat-like odour, reinforced by the fumes from a noisome pipe which juts aggressively from his mouth throughout his waking hours.

His arrival in the Lane provoked much comment (for Joe had always lived by himself, and was known to prefer solitude), but by now he is as familiar, and as permanent a feature of the landscape as the lantana. He simply turned up one morning and announced that fifty years of matrimony was as much as any man could be expected to stomach, particularly now that eggs were sixpence each down in Sydney, and his old woman rationed him to one a day. Having inspected Joe's fowlyard, and counted his Australorps, he declared his intention of living henceforward as a bachelor with his bachelor nephew; so long as the tucker was good, he observed tolerantly, he would not complain.

Joe's house had three rooms not counting the kitchen, and a verandah as well, so he said he reckoned that would be all right. They needn't get in each other's way, and Uncle Cuth could look after the fowls, and take a turn at cooking the meals, and lend a hand in the pines now and then. At this Uncle Cuth became extremely angry, asserting that he did not propose to exchange one slavery for another, and Joe heard for the first time a phrase with which everyone in the Lane has since become familiar. “Exploitin' an old man!”cried Uncle Cuth indignantly. “Y'orter be ashamed!”With these words he took to his bed—or, more accurately, to Joe's bed—and stayed there.

Joe scratched his head, shrugged, and went about his business. A few days later he thought he would have a word with Jack Hawkins, so he strolled across the Lane and found Jack mixing spray in his shed. Joe, as courtesy demanded, conversed for some minutes about the weather, and then came to the point.

“Got me old Uncle Cuth over there,” he began. Now of course Jack—and everyone else, for that matter—knew perfectly well that there was an old bloke staying with Joe Hardy True, Uncle Cuth had retired to bed within a few hours of his arrival, and remained invisible ever since, but his presence was no secret all the same. There are no secrets in the Lane. There are conventions, however, one of which is that you do not appear to know your neighbours' business, but civilly wait until they see fit to inform you of it, and Jack therefore responded, on a delicate note of surprise:

“That so?”

“Come to stop, he says.”

“Go on!”

“Lives down near Sydney, but he's shot through.”

“What's the idea?”

“Couldn't stick his wife no longer.”

Jack fell silent. He is a good husband, and a contented one, but the married man does not exist who could hear such words without a faint thrill of sympathy, or contemplate without a guilty twinge of admiration a fellow-husband who has shot through. Joe, as a bachelor, strongly disapproved in principle; but he knew his uncle's wife.

“Wouldn't say I blame the old sod,” he conceded. “Wouldn't mind havin' him around the place if he'd do a bit here and there to earn his tucker. But he stays in bed.”

“What's wrong with him?” asked Jack staring. Joe looked baffled.

“Nothin' I can see. He et five eggs for breakfast. When I tells him if he can sink 'em at that rate he orter feed the chooks at least, he goes crook and says I'm exploitin' an old man. ‘Me exploitin'?' I says to him. ‘ Break it down! ' I says.” Joe's face assumed an expression of injured bewilderment. “What's he think I am,” he demanded, “a bloody capitalist?”

“How old is he?” inquired Jack. Joe ruminated for a moment and then replied : “Depends.”

“What d'you mean-—depends? He must be
some
age.”

“Well, when he gets to skitin' how his wife was jealous on account of him jokin' over the fence with the lady next door, he reckons he's sixty-seven, but when I says anythin' about work, he says he's seventy-nine or eighty-two. All I know, he eats like he was seventeen, and he gets through more terbacca than I do meself. Boosts me store bill, I can tell y'.”

“Doesn't he get an old age pension?”

“Too right, he does. But he reckons he's got to put by for a rainy day. I asks him what about
my
rainy day, but all he says is young fellers like me don't have no sympathy with the problems of old age.” Joe looked anxious. “D'you reckon that's right, Jack?”

Jack shook his head in a troubled way. His own old mother more than pulls her weight in the family, and can milk a cow or pack a case of citrus with the best of us; but she was probably in his mind as he said slowly:

“I wouldn't like to say, Joe . . . they do have their problems, the old ones. Seems a bit hard to turn him out. . . .”

“I never meant to turn him
out,”
Joe protested. “I was just thinkin' he orter . . . well. . . lend a hand, like. S'pose he might, after he's settled down a bit? . . .”

“He might, too,” agreed Jack, relieved. Joe sighed.

“Thought I'd ask if I can take that old stretcher you threw down in the lantanna last year? . . .”

“Stone the crows, Joe, it's got one leg broken, and the wire mattress was all holes when I threw it out—it'll be rusted clean away by now.”

“I can prop it up on a crate, and nail a few planks across—or a sack or two, p'r'aps.”

Jack looked rather shocked.

“You're welcome, of course, Joe,” he said with slight reserve, “but it's not going to be much of a bed for the old chap.”

“It ain't for him,” Joe said, surprised. “It's for me.”

When the cyclone hit the Lane the roof of Joe's fowlhouse began to flap up and down, and Joe went out to fix it. That sentence, with a different name substituted for Joe's might be included in any account of any cyclone; someone's fowlhouse roof always begins to flap, someone always goes out to fix it, and the result is very frequently disastrous. It is well known that during such climatic disturbances the air is apt to be full of solid bodies flying with great velocity in different directions, and that a wise man, consequently, remains indoors. Nevertheless, when his fowlhouse roof begins to flap, wisdom forsakes him, and out he goes.

In this case, however, it appears that Joe acted not entirely upon his own initiative. Certainly Uncle Cuth urged him forth, excitedly declaring that if the roof went, the fowls would surely succumb to the fury of the wind and rain, and the egg supply would be indefinitely interrupted. Joe, who knew the age, condition and holding-power of every nail on his property, assured his uncle that if the roof went, the sides would go too, and the fowls, thus released, would find shelter under the house. Uncle Cuth derided this theory, pointing out that fowls were the stupidest of all created things, not even excluding sheep, and this Joe was compelled to admit, though he continued to insist that they had at least enough sense to come in out of the rain.

“Heartless, that's what y'are!”shrieked Uncle Cuth above the increasing roar of the gale. “Never a blinkin' thought fer the weak and helpless, whether it's fowls or old men! You get out there and nail that roof down, quick and lively! I ain't one to stand by and see dumb creatures suffer, I tell y' straight!”

It appeared to Joe, after he had pondered this for a moment, that standing by was precisely the programme which Uncle Cuth envisaged for himself in this crisis, and he therefore retorted with some asperity:

“Why don't y' get out and nail it down y'self, then?”

This threw Uncle Cuth into an alarming paroxysm of rage.

“Tryin' to murder me now, eh? Tryin' to get rid of me! Not enough to go exploitin' an old man that never did y' no harm, y' want to be the death of him too! That's what a bloke gets from his own fleshanblood when he's old and wore out, and don't ask no more'n a quiet corner to die peaceful in! Yeller, that's what y'are! Call this a cyclone—why, blast me buttons, I been out sailin' on Sydney Harbour in worse blows than this 'ere! No guts, the young ones haven't got nowadays—yeller, the whole flamin' lot of 'em! Yeller!”

Joe reached for his old oilskin. “Aw, shut y' trap!”he said surlily, and opened the door. The blast made him stagger, and flung Uncle Cuth backward on to a sack of potatoes. “What the hell y' think y' doin'?” he screeched furiously. “Give me me death, lettin' in the rain like that! . . .” But Joe was gone, having—with great difficulty—dragged the door shut behind him.

A spinning sheet of corrugated iron, borne along about five feet above the ground by an eighty-mile-an-hour gale is a fairly lethal object, and Joe—as everyone agreed later—was extremely lucky not to be decapitated. He was knocked out cold, though, and the damage he sustained accounts for the peculiarities of his present appearance which we have already described. Uncle Cuth, who was watching from the window, became more enraged than ever, for Joe's prophecy concerning the fowlhouse was fulfilled, and the hens, suddenly exposed to the full fury of the elements, were scattering in all directions. Even as he watched—shaking his fist at the prone figure of his nephew, and shouting imprecations the while—two of them became airborne and passed overhead at a great altitude, taking with them an incalculable number of his potential breakfasts. And there, to his gibbering indignation, Joe continued to lie, quite disregarding, with characteristic selfishness, the threat to his aged relative's nourishment.

But Uncle Cuth's attention was now abruptly deflected, for at this moment the roof blew off the house too, and he was hardly able to get himself across the Lane to the Hawkins', where he arrived, half-drowned and chattering with wrath, to inform Jack and Amy that it fair beat him what the world was coming to when an old man rising ninety was left to fend for himself in a bloody cyclone. Jack and his eighteen-year-old nephew, Bill, went out and brought Joe in; they reported that there was not much left of the house, but the fowls had established themselves beneath what there was. They expressed the fear, as they laid Joe on a bed, that there was not much left of him, either.