Owen Marshall Selected Stories (33 page)

‘They can't be regular partners,' says Dubois, as we watch the Sleaptite couple from the boiler room door. The moonlight and the frost grip ever tighter, and the world outside is motionless, except for Ransumeen and the Salvation man squeezing into the small security car. ‘There were some twenty-five thousand slaves entered in the Domesday Book,' says Dubois, ‘but the numbers gradually diminished.'

‘They joined the rank of the half-slaves, the villeins.'

‘The luck of birth meant more then.' He seems to have forgotten the posters, but when I remind him that we will be passing the cafeteria he waves a hand. ‘This is your last night as castellan,' he says. ‘Tomorrow we save the orphans.' So the orphans remain in the glare of the drip-feed, together with the jumble of samurai armour.

We decide to begin through the piece room, whose arched windows cast the dense, quiet light of the moon like cheeses on the concrete floor. ‘Did I tell you of Hugh the Brown, Lord of Lusignan?
A wonderful crusader who was victimised by King John,' I begin. Dubois does not answer me. He is lost for a moment behind the curtain of epilepsy. These petit mal attacks come only occasionally, then he picks up again without realising that he is ten seconds behind the rest of the world. Here is matter for metaphysical speculation: the brief loss of synchronisation might, in the puzzle of time and events, either kill or save him. I saw him have a more serious attack only once, after he came from fighting a schnauzer in the docks, and a fierce, spring hailstorm then blocked the gutterings so that the water banked up, flowed down the walls of the computer room and into the switchboard beneath. We were coming back through the nanny presses, having done what we could, when Dubois began soft noises which were no words, took with the urgency of a lover one of the press covers to lie on, as he felt the aura. He sat down and held up the palm of one hand as a sign to me that what was to happen would be over without harm, or revelation, without need of any intervention. Convulsive trembling, harsh breath, the glimpse of a parrot's head upon his shoulder, then calm in which his face was innocent. Soon he had been up again and taken up his command.

‘I find the guilds interesting,' says Dubois. He is bending at the grating of the ducts to check the air flow. ‘Furriers and glaziers, silversmiths and ironmongers, doublet and hose makers, glovers, cobblers. They were unions in their way.'

‘But including employers as well as workers. Setting up standards of the craft, as well as conditions. I suppose more like the Japanese
zaibatsu
than unions on a British model.'

‘A personal approach.'

‘Things suited the scale of commerce, the scale of population then. The people of London would come out to see their king, or a hanging, quite literally. In William the Conqueror's time London was the size of Oamaru.'

‘No,' says Dubois. He slows to consider it.

‘It's true. Much of England was forest, and wolves ran in packs
through Shropshire.'

‘Ah, I can see it,' says Dubois.

Our checks have led us outside again and our faces shrink in the cold. It seems that he is going to see the whole shift out with me. He flashes his torch behind the loading bay door handles. He has put some blacking there as a test of Ransumeen's efficiency. ‘That whining bastard's not done a check. I'll have him out.'

Dubois turns to look across the yard. He shows his teeth, and draws his breath deeply in defiance of the temperature. ‘This is my weather as a northerner,' he says. ‘A people get acclimatised over thousands of years, and function best that way. I can't stand too much heat. A cold day and a stiff wind makes something in me stir. I'm at my most alert and ready. I have this awareness of my origins.'

‘It's sound enough reasoning,' I say. ‘Clear genetic links with environment are proved. Look at those Andean Indians with special respiratory adaptations for altitude, and Kalahari bushmen who hardly sweat.'

‘In this weather my tribe stirs inside me.'

‘You might find that you suddenly come out with the words of a Frankish war cry,' I say. I wonder, however, how the boiler room fits Dubois' hypothesis.

‘I'm rusty on the Franks,' says Dubois, ‘except for Charlemagne. I remember that he could hardly write.'

‘Yet he spoke popular Latin as his mother tongue and was also fluent in German and classical Latin.'

‘Tell me something else.'

‘The Basques had a rare victory over him at the Roncevalles Pass. About 780 — no, I can't remember. Anyway that's where the epic hero Roland died.'

This is the trivial way I can be of help to Dubois, some recompense for lacking the skills of a handyman. I owe my job at Statsfact Polling Agency to the Acme Textiles testimonial Dubois provided. The managing director's stationery was from Jim Simm's office, and
Dubois asked Noreen to do the typing. Noreen was a cleaner, but had been a secretary before she started having children. Dubois suggested the sentiments and in-house detail, Noreen the authenticity of phrase — such as, throughout his successful time with us, and, it is with pleasure and no hesitation that I recommend. I like best of all the part referring to my grasp of corporate sales strategy and my progress in the fast track executive promotion scheme.

‘When he was old and sick, he had to campaign against King Godfrid of the Danes and, as the Franks marched north through Saxony, the Emperor's pet elephant, Abbul Abbas, died. It was seen as a terrible omen,' I tell Dubois.

‘Abbul Abbas,' says Dubois meditatively.

On our way back to the boiler room, Dubois detours through his maintenance workshop, where his tools line the walls. All have blue paint on their handles and are stamped with the letters VD to lessen the likelihood of theft. I have accustomed myself not to smile, or pass any comment. Through the cavernous main factory we walk and Dubois is contentedly imagining his poison at work above us. ‘Rat, rat,' he says, ‘you begin to feel the thirst of death.' So might we all in time, of course.

Furnace light flickers on Dubois' clothes strung to dry and the orphans who still await a home. The great pipes rumble in this engine-room which powers Acme Textiles through the night. It is like this with heaven and hell perhaps; no spatial difference, just that Lucifer leads the night shift and employs the same means to different ends. Dubois untucks the muslin from his neck, allowing it to hang as a scarf. ‘We'll have a last cuppa, then you might as well go. No sense in two of us hanging on till the last.' Not once during this last night has Dubois said that we might meet again, that any possibility for the continuation of our acquaintanceship exists. He is too honest and too worldly, understanding the contacts of labour. We have spoken more of manors and garderobes than our own lives, but then who wishes to be told the details of other people's problems. It is
sufficient comfort merely to know that they have them.

Dubois comes out to see me leave. He challenges the winter air with Merovingian equanimity, and shows the white of his eyes at the offensive sound of a dog somewhere beyond the engineering works. His hair is greying, but only at the edges so that it appears frosted like all else around us. Even the flat surfaces of tin or wood have fine hachures of frost, not shiny at all, but feathered almost, grey-white in the moon and security light like a blossoming mildew. The puddles by the freight entrance, though, do have a crystal surface, and creak beneath our feet. From illogical habit we stand out from the shadow of the factory, although the lighted yard will be no warmer. ‘Things will go all right for you,' and Dubois takes a hand from his pocket to shake with. There is music for this white winter night. Pongo is playing his mouth organ. No doubt he has been kept awake by the comings and goings of this last voyage.

For every place there is the official and accredited view, and for every place there is a reverse of which only intimacy allows knowledge. From our lives we can all demonstrate the truth of that. So at Acme Textiles I leave a population known only by those who must board each night. And Vincenze Dubois is its strange captain.

M
y older brother arranged a job for me as a fish splitter in Nelson and I travelled up to Blenheim by train and then to Nelson by bus the next day. In the Rai Valley an old Bedford truck loaded with pumpkins had run off the road and lay overturned like a beetle amidst the pig fern, with the brilliant orange and yellow pumpkins scattered alongside.

We were the first to come across it and the bus driver posted people to warn traffic, then he and a thickset woman who said she was a physical education specialist decided to comfort the truck driver, who had a broken wrist. The rest of us stood around to appreciate the novelty of it. The truck driver was quiet and self-reliant. I think that having a busload of gawpers at his mishap was the worst thing about it as far as he was concerned.

The pumpkin crash meant that we were late into Nelson and if there had been anyone to meet me, there wasn't any longer. I left my bag and walked down to Golden Seafoods on the waterfront. There was a blue sky, but also a strong wind that put grit in your face and stirred up the shallow water to make a dirty mix which slapped among the jetty piles and broke along the sea wall of the road to Tahunanui.

Golden Seafoods (1974 Ltd), it said on the wooden sign, and there was a picture newly glossed of a crab with its pincers up and what looked like a groper. I went past the small window of the direct to the public sales and further down to the large sliding door of the factory
where I got a good whiff of the fish, rubber and damp clothes that made the atmosphere of the place. A small man, with blue gumboots and hair like a dunny brush, was hosing out the place with such force that tides of water washed through the door and ruffled there in the wind. I stepped on a pallet to keep dry till he saw me. He raised a hand to show that he had, then finished off the job.

‘Just having a good swill out for the day,' he said. ‘This chop has meant there's not much coming in and gives me a chance to catch up. I guess you're another McGarry. You've got the look of your brother.' He spoke loudly into the wind, but the stiff, white crest of his hair moved not a bit with the force of it. ‘Another soft-palmed varsity wallah is all we need,' he said with a grin as we went into the big shed of the factory. ‘You fixed up for somewhere to stay?'

I knew this must be Mr Trubb, who was Golden Seafoods. I knew that he had five boats and the factory, three retail outlets, some big contracts, a stake in a helicopter safari business on the Coast, and that he expected all his employees to work hard and toiled more than any of them himself. ‘I haven't got anything fixed up,' I said. ‘I've just got in and my bag's still at the depot, but I don't want to be any trouble.'

Of course I was happy to have his help, so I ended up sitting in the factory to escape the wind, with the concrete floor a glistening shadow, while Mr Trubb finished his cleaning. All the factory staff had gone early, because there wasn't much catch in and he saw the opportunity to have a good dung out. When he'd finished with the water hose he did some of the plant with superheated steam. A nasty way to have an accident, it seemed to me. I did offer to help, but Mr Trubb said I'd have the chance soon enough. He shouted through the steam that my brother used to put in a fair day's work for a fair day's pay and I could see that some sort of benchmark was expected of me. There were stainless steel-rimmed tables, drip trays, trolleys, plastic and waxed boxes, a line of freezers and a rack of rubber aprons like new pelts. I guessed that it would all dwindle to the apparatus of
monotony soon enough.

Mr Trubb had the build of a sixteen-year-old and the full head of hair, though grey, added to the impression of youthfulness at a distance. But not so nimble anymore, and close up you saw how lined and worn was his dark skin and how the veins stood out over his arms and neck. He had a green 4.2 Jaguar, and he said that he'd pick up my gear if I liked and take me to Chandler's where several of his casuals stayed. First he had three boxes of fillets to deliver to the Brightwater Hotel, and as we drove he told me that he'd lived all his life in Nelson; left school at fourteen to begin nailing apple boxes and by eighteen had his own truck, which he drove between Nelson and Blenheim most of the day and night. ‘You can't do that sort of thing now,' he said.

As an ex-truck driver, Mr Trubb was interested in my story of the Bedford and the pumpkins in the Rai Valley. He thought probably a blowout caused the load to shift. There's a knack to loading a truck, just as there's a knack to building a haystack. Mr Trubb told me a good deal of the way he'd become established in the world. It didn't seem to be so much boastfulness as a wish to show the rest of us what hard slog leads to. He saw himself as no different from anyone else and wanted others to have the satisfaction of getting on through hard yakker. He seemed rather surprised when I told him that my brother had gone overseas for a spell.

At the Brightwater Hotel I helped to carry in the big cartons. ‘Duck under a load,' said Mr Trubb, ‘rather than lifting it to your own height. It's a good lesson, that.' Mr Trubb was paid in cash and he shouted beer, which we drank inside because of the wind, and when he realised I hadn't had any lunch, he bought chips and pan-fried fish — his own, I guess. ‘Go on, go on,' he said. ‘We'll sweat it out of you tomorrow. One thing I've learnt is that you've got to eat well to work well. You ever done any real farm work? You can judge a farmer's savvy by the meals he gives his shearers and musterers.'

Mr Trubb had a packet of cheroots, thin and dark like himself,
and he'd smoked two of them and eaten his food before I'd finished my fish. ‘If you don't mind,' he said, ‘we'll just drive a few miles up the Lee Valley. There's this hill property that I might be interested in, though not at the money that's being talked at the moment.'

It was lovely, quiet, up the Lee. The river itself was small and clear in a rock bed, and the hills were being greened up with pine plantings. The no exit road wasn't much wider than the Jaguar and on the small river flats the wind showed itself as muted flurries in the long grass. Mr Trubb stopped the Jaguar in a paddock gateway that had a bit of height over the property he was interested in: quite steep country and some of it gorsed, but with the Lee Stream in a series of small cascades below. ‘I reckon there's a different sort of tourism coming,' he told me. ‘More people want to stay in the country, not city hotels.'

He had this idea for a lodge above the river and the whole farm around it for privacy — hundreds of hectares. He didn't want to let on to the owners about those plans, of course. ‘Keep it under your hat,' said Mr Trubb with easy familiarity, as if I was someone he'd relied on for years. The late afternoon sun slanted down the valley and we went out into the wind and looked across to the terrace where Mr Trubb thought he'd build the lodge, long and single-storeyed to be in keeping. ‘What do you think?' he said, and I was close enough to see the veins standing out from his neck and the small skin cancers on his face and arms from years of sweat in the Nelson sun.

I appreciated being treated as an equal, as if I had already proved myself a toiler at Golden Seafoods, but I didn't want to presume. If he had to come into the factory in a day or two and give me a rocket over something then it would make it more embarrassing. ‘The Asians,' said Mr Trubb, ‘they jump at anything like this. We don't realise how lucky we are to live here. The best air and water in the world.' At the head of the valley was the sheen of old serpentine workings and there was a scattered mob of Hereford steers on the river flat. Among the green of the young pines on the far slope were
the rust-coloured branches from the last pruning. There were briars close to us on the roadside and the berries had a summer burnish. Not one vehicle had passed us since we arrived, yet we must have been within half an hour of the city.

Mr Trubb walked back to the Jaguar and stood by the door for a moment. Then he leant forward and said something I didn't catch, before he slipped to his left along the flank of the car, which partly supported him. His body slid, taking the fine dust from the polished paintwork beneath. He lay in the grass by the car, and when I knelt down I could hear his altered breathing, which was oddly similar to the noise that the wind was making in the wheel arch of the car. One of his eyelids was almost closed and a trouser leg snagged on a briar as I lifted him. The suddenness of it made me swear a good deal for relief.

There was a moment, with Mr Trubb belted in the front seat and the Jaguar's automatic roughly sorted out to get me to Brightwater, when I had a sudden, passing amazement that everything in the valley was just the same. The green and brown of the pines unaltered, the steers still filling their guts, the cascade of the Lee, the utterly indifferent whine and pulse of the wind.

A stroke rather than a heart attack, so I was told, and Mr Trubb died a few days afterwards, despite putting in some hard work to stay alive. I couldn't settle at Golden Seafoods, and for the rest of the vacation dug potters' clay at Mapua and then did some fruit picking in the Upper Moutere. When the new term started I was lucky to get offered a ride from Nelson down through the Lewis, and we passed the turn-off to the Lee Valley on the way. I had a glimpse of the Brightwater pub again. I'd been a couple of months in the Nelson district and yet afterwards I always associated the whole time with three things from that very first day — the pumpkin smash in the Rai Valley, Mr Trubb and his vision of the lodge, and that damn, persistent wind.