The Scarecrow (10 page)

‘And this is what comes about of playing ducks and drakes with the appointed and proper time for nourishment,’ cried Ma. ‘This is a judgment on all of us for sitting about, taking alcohol in a raw state on an empty stomach, while the poor boy stood there faint with hunger, watching people swallowing swords in front of his own fireplace, after a day of toil and nothing but a burnt chop for lunch.

‘To a great degree, I blame muh own brother for this cally-amity,’ continued Ma, ‘muh own brother, Athol Cudby, who for many years has styled himself as muh husband’s partner and accomplice genrilly speaking and yet, on account of his rupchuh, has been of no practical assistance to the firm of Dee-aitch Poindexter. Many’s the time when muh husband has fallen into bed exhausted from his labours and with muh own eyes I have seen muh own brother—yes it’s true, Athol, so shut yuh trap—muh own brother, as bright as a button, sally forth to spend what has been earned by the sweat of muh husband’s brow, in riotous living and raw alcohol until the crack uv dawn. And a fat lot you care, Athol Cudby, if now muh own son has fainted dead away from a strained heart and the shock of watching people yuh have brought into the house from the hotel at tea-time, swallowing swords right and left in front of his own fireplace.’

‘It may interest yuh to know, my dear Natalie,’ said Uncle Athol, who always appeared to be looking at someone else on account of his bung eye, ‘that I have this very day accepted employment with my dear friend, Mr Dabney. Mr Dabney has kindly offered me a position in the old-established firm of Dabney and Son, undertakers of taste and distinction.’

‘Calls for a drink, calls for a drink,’ exclaimed old Charlie.
‘Pass your glass to Charlie, thou good and faithful servant.’

‘Pychah,’ snorted Ma.

‘Right-hand man, absholooly. Regards, regards.’

‘Regards, Charlie.’

Charlie Dabney now leaned back and, holding up both hands, palms outwards, began to clench and unclench his fingers rhythmically.

‘What in the name of God Almighty are you supposed to be doing now?’ demanded Ma, hands on hips, as Uncle Athol started to do the very same thing.

‘Neon sign,’ explained Uncle Athol in an embarrassed aside. ‘Charlie’s getting one of these here new-fangled neon signs.’

‘Brainwave, brainwave,’ said Charlie, opening and shutting his hands. ‘
Cremations arranged. Cremations arrainsh.
’

‘
Cremations arrainsh
,’ chanted Uncle Athol, opening and shutting his hands. ‘
Cremations arrainsh.
’

‘Well now I am convinced beyond all doubt that I’m living in a bloody nuthouse,’ stormed Ma.

I looked to see whether Salter the Sensational thought so too, but he was draped over the mantelpiece and Prudence was looking up at him, fascinated, and holding out her hand. The lines around the wizard’s mouth were almost gullies, they were so deep. I had observed before that the deepening of those lines was the great man’s way of smiling. Slowly he withdrew the fearsome knife again and passed it to Prudence. She fingered the steel in awe. He retrieved it from her, but instead of returning it to its place of concealment under his coat, he pressed the hilt lightly against Prudence’s chin so that the blade glittered down between her breasts, reaching to the pit of her stomach.

‘Behold, my child,’ said Salter, ‘its length. Behold how far
that razor-sharp edge would sink into yer lush and virginal body.’

There was no disputing that this Salter was the real McCoy and it was without any doubt a great honour and a marvellous stroke of luck to have him under our roof all to ourselves; but right then I entertained a creepy feeling. Even if he had toured the world times without number, I felt convinced that there was something screwy about him.

Now he was balancing the knife on the palm of his hand, tip pointing at the roof. His eyes were glittering. Doggone it there
was
something screwy about him. As he lowered his head slowly floorwards his eyelids began to droop, hooding the crazy gleam I had glimpsed. Fascinated, Prudence’s eyes followed the descending tip of steel. The knife was trembling slightly and the light winked its way up and down the blade like a diamond. Salter now steadied the tip of the knife with his other hand and turned the edge a little so the light shone directly on Prudence’s staring eyes.

‘Watch the lights dancing,’ he said softly. ‘The dancing lights. The lights dancing. Dancing and dreaming. See how they dance and dream, mer darling.’ One of his eyes, just in one corner, moved and took me in, standing close to them and I felt this man’s hatred for my presence come out of him like a wave. And now I hated him too. Hated and feared him.

‘The dreaming lights,’ he whispered.

To do what I did, I had to remind myself that this was our own kitchen, that Ma was in the pantry, that Pop, Uncle Athol and Charlie Dabney were guzzling grog at the table just behind me; but I did it, and I am glad and proud. I coughed, and the evil spell he was weaving shattered like a dropped electric
light bulb. Prudence turned her head towards me. She looked bewildered.

‘Wait, wait,’ said Salter urgently. The sweat was pouring out of him now, glistening on his big, jutting beak of a nose. The corner of an eye that he spared for me twitched in my direction again, and again I felt the wave of hatred for me he exuded. It was as real as an octopus squirting its inky fluid.

‘Wait, wait,’ he repeated. He laid the knife flat against Prudence, this time with the hilt down against her stomach, the contour of which was so plainly etched against her knitted frock that I could almost see the fish and chips. Now the blade pointed upwards between her breasts. ‘See, see,’ he said. ‘See how long it is, mer dear, and how far up into yer lovely young body it reaches.’

One thing I could see anyway and that was, holding the hilt of the knife against her stomach the way he was, he had the tips of his fingers pressing hard up between her legs. Prudence turned away from him with a jerk as if she were only just capable of wrenching herself free from his spell. Feet apart, she stood still between Salter and me. Her hair had fallen over one eye again. Salter gave me a cold, evil look. His eyes lost their gleam and became muddled and murky as he looked at me. I wondered how drunk he was. He put the knife away and I glimpsed a long sheath under his armpit. He ran the sleeve of his coat quickly across his sweat-drenched face. As he did this, one end of the bow tie came loose from his collar and hung down on his dirty shirtfront like a dead beetle. His elbow had caught the bow tie and snapped the ancient ribbon. Now, instead of being impressive, the bow tie only looked absurd. It was a slender thread for a complete aura of mastery and
mystery to hang by, and it had snapped. I am unable to say whether it was seeing the bow tie hanging like that, or whether it was just the abrupt easing of tension, but suddenly Prudence laughed her high-pitched, girlish laugh. There could be no mistaking the fact that she was laughing at Salter. It was very rude of her, but next thing I realised I was laughing at Salter too. The two of us stood looking up at the gaunt, lined, evil face with its great nose and we laughed and laughed.

Salter stared at us uncomprehendingly, despairingly, and then suddenly his hand flew to his throat. Our laughter died away. His face worked as if he were in pain. He tore the tie away from his neck savagely, so savagely the top button of his dirty white shirt popped off and fell to the floor at his feet. He held the tie swallowed up by his clenched fist in front of him. I had never seen anyone so blind and shaking with anger. I had seen people go white and sometimes red with anger, but never black, really black. Prudence and I were frozen. His blood was black! The blood of Salter the Sensational could turn black. He walked with great, slow, unsteady strides across the room to the door. He opened the door and then wheeled around to face the room again. His mouth was dragged down like a bloodhound’s. A clawlike hand reached over the unsuspecting and nodding head of Charlie Dabney and seized the bottle of Hennessey’s Three Star Brandy. For a lingering, menacing second his gaze sought us out and then he was gone.

Prudence looked at me wide-eyed. There was a lot of talk and expostulating going on around the kitchen table, but Prudence and I were in a little sound-proofed compartment of our own.

‘We shouldn’t have laughed,’ Pru whispered. ‘I’m frightened
now, Neddy. We shouldn’t have laughed at him.’

‘Where’s my brandy?’ Charlie Dabney was demanding querulously. ‘Where’s my brandy gone? What scoundrel decamped with my bottle of Hennessey’s Three Star Brandy?’

Then we heard the heavy footsteps coming up the steps. The loose board creaked. Thinking of Salter, his great height, the vulture-like face, the strange eyes and the long knife, Prudence and I clung to each other in terror. Prudence turned away and stumbled over to the mantelpiece with a giant sigh, her relief was so great when the doorway framed the fat figure and inane, ingratiating smile of Chester Montgomery.

After Easter we began to count the days to the May holidays.

The new serial was called ‘The Fire God’s Treasure’ and it was turning out better than we expected, although I still preferred ambushes with tommyguns to drama on jungle trails, rakish touring cars to pith helmets.

Len Ramsbottom, I was now forced to admit, was a better typist than he had appeared to be while taking our statements. He could still head Prudence off and she was getting pretty slick.

Uncle Athol had a job driving the hearse. Presumably he had other duties, but what they could be had me beaten.

Herbert went out with Pop in the Dennis by day and marked in the pool-room in the evening.

Josephine McClinton was wearing longer frocks, the meanie.

Les did not really believe me about Salter the Sensational, but he entered into the spirit of it and we tried it out with the
kitchen knife. We tried to make things disappear by waving our arms around and saying ‘
mistykeist
’, but the spell neglected to work.

We stole a bottle of applejack from a drunken woman sitting in the gutter and we took it to Fitzherbert’s shed. We drank it and sang and fell over and then we tried out what the Lynchites must be doing with Peachy, but it did not work either. We didn’t try saying ‘
mistykeist
’. We never admitted even vaguely remembering the episode again. I guess we were pretty ashamed all right.

We were so ashamed that we will never mention what happened in the shed that gloomy afternoon as long as we live. I was worse than Les that day. My legs were heavy and my head spun. When I reached home I was sick with desire for a girl. In my bedroom, thinking feverishly about Josephine McClinton and heaven knows how many other girls and even grown women I had seen about the town, a sudden twist in my applejack-clouded mental processes set me shaking all over. Ousting every favourite erotic image from my mind was now the vivid picture of Prudence, in her tight and skimpy black knickers, swinging from the beam in the twilit, musky-smelling shed. I was obsessed with the recollection of her legs and the coppery glow beneath the soft skin. I shook from head to toe with a delicious desire. I was powerless in the grip of that desire. I hung around the washhouse waiting for Prudence, listening, above my hammering blood, for her footfalls, and planning for her to catch me exposed, so that her blood would race as mysteriously as mine. What Prudence actually did see when at last she came was her worthless brother vomiting his vile applejack-soaked heart down the W.C.

‘Crikey,’ she said. ‘You, too. Don’t tell me yuh bin on the booze too like Pop and Uncle Athol. Don’t tell me that, Eddy.’

After Easter the weather was colder and the house damper. When the fire went out in the kitchen the only place to be was in bed with the blankets pulled up.

The golden nuts on the karaka tree were beginning to shrivel and fall. They were all over the narrow footpath along Smythe Street and out on the road too.

We put a lot of tins up on top of the ceiling to catch the leaks.

For three blissful days I was a dog owner. It was the skinniest, most miserable, all-night-long-yelpingest, face-lickingest creature that ever limped into Klynham from God knows where, but I loved every scraggy, fleabitten inch of it. Ma and Prudence pointed the finger of scorn and complained bitterly, but behind my back they fed it like cannibals with a missionary. One grey dawn it limped on its way again and left me desolate.

About the time I had the dog I was thoroughly wretched, but I recall that period of my boyhood with tenderness. Suddenly, overnight it seemed, I had become ashamed of our tumbledown house with its broken windows, littered yard, and collapsed fence; ashamed of Uncle Athol, ashamed of Pop going around making himself a laughing-stock by calling himself things like ‘valuer’ and ‘antique dealer’ when, all the time, everyone knew he was only a boozy junk collector. Maybe he did draw the line at bones, but did that make him a ‘valuer’ or ‘antique dealer’? Les Wilson was lucky having a merchant for a father. I would have died, I think, if he had told me he was going to join the dancing class Josephine McClinton attended, but the idea never crossed his head. I had found out that quite a few of my
contemporaries were attending this dancing class. It was held upstairs over a garage (a firm which finally headed Charlie Dabney off to getting the first neon sign in Klynham) and I used to slink past at night and hear the stamp of feet doing a palais glide to ‘Ten Pretty Girls’, or a foxtrot to ‘Roll Along Covered Wagon, Roll Along’. This was the greatest piece of music ever written, I believed, in addition to being the only one I could whistle, and down in the dark street listening to that happy, secret world, I thought my heart would burst. ‘Anyway, you love me, don’t yuh, ole pal?’ I said to the dog. ‘Yuh don’t care if I’m a Poindexter, do yuh, old pal? and I’ll tell yuh this, pup, in these parts the Poindexters are just so much riff-raff.’

Sometimes I think I walked the legs off my dog and that is the reason it cleared out. I fail to see why it should have found the going too tough as my feet were bare too and it had four to my two, well, three counting out the gimpy one. Perhaps my bitter reflections acted as fuel and the dog did not have anything of that nature to fall back on. I must have walked hundreds of miles. A love for a place that one can never lose can strike up through the soles of one’s bare feet, I am sure. No matter how unhappy one may be, the love for the earth itself fairly soaks up through the soles of a person’s bare feet until it reaches the heart. Around and about the weed-pierced footpaths of every back street we padded, generally ending up for a short spell under a certain macrocarpa tree from whence it was possible to discern the glimmering white outline of the McClinton residence nestling in the heart of a well-attended shrubbery. Some nights I even set out along the beach road, as it was called, a quite erroneous name because there was no beach but only great,
precipitous cliffs and, anyway, the road petered out into the sandhills miles before that. Out here the wind soughed in the wires and I could hear the sea, and this elemental atmosphere suited my mood. Out here the only lights were lanterns in Maori whares, set away back in the sandhills among the acres of lupin and the kumara gardens.

After Easter and the first deep frosts, the days were clear and cold as a mountain stream, and the distant scream of the big saw at the mill became a part of our lives. Otherwise the town dreamed on in silence. The clouds were acoustic tiles. When a train shuffled through, its whistle was the howl of a blues trumpet.

Uncle Athol told us for the five-hundredth time he was going to borrow a hammer and nails and fix the loose board on the verandah before someone broke their neck.

Pop said he found a new battery for the Dennis at the rubbish tip, but I saw an advertisement in the paper for a battery that had been left at the bus depot and had been taken by mistake, the ad hinted politely. I saw Pop reading the paper and then he went out with it to the washhouse. I was beginning to have my doubts about Pop.

But I loved Ma. One afternoon I found Ma sitting in Prudence’s room. She was sitting on the floor. The wallpaper was hanging down on three of the walls and when I say hanging down I mean really hanging down, in great, mouldy folds. I went in because I thought I had heard a sound, and it was Ma crying. She was sitting on the bare floor, crying.

‘The poor girl, Eddy,’ she said. ‘Oh, the poor girl. Just look at it.’

I went and sat on the floor too and that was the closest we
had ever been, I guess, since she breast-fed me. It was a rainy, dark afternoon. We sat on the bare floor without speaking for some time. I felt older after that.

I started the worrying habit after that too. This was a real bad habit to get into. (Uncle Athol did not believe in worrying about anything. He was dead against worry. ‘Why worry?’ he used to say. ‘Why worry and get thin legs?’)

Now I knew why Prudence kept her door shut and the curtains across the window. She was ashamed. She had not used to care. Working in a wealthy home like Quin’s had opened her eyes, I suppose; but she never complained or anything like that. One day I sneaked into her room and she had hung a little picture on the one intact wall. I saw her few possessions on the worm-eaten dressing-table. I could have sat down and howled myself.

Prudence may not have had a bedroom like Josephine McClinton had—not that I have ever seen Josephine’s or was ever likely to—but one thing was for sure, she had admirers. A little chap in a college blazer, who threw his head back when he laughed, had joined the line-up by this time. It turned out he was the pride and hope of the Quins. This must have been getting near the May holidays. The school Tony Quin attended broke up for vacation earlier than our plebeian institution. Except for Len Ramsbottom and, of course, old Les, all Prudence’s conquests seemed to be made at Quin’s place and, except for young Tony Quin himself, made on the back doorstep. It was there that Chester Montgomery had lost his heart; it was there Cupid’s dart connected amidships with the butcher boy (what a goof) and on the same hallowed spot the representative of Waller’s Household Remedies and the ditto of
the Climax Insurance Company went head over heels. The household remedy man had a bald spot and the insurance man a toothbrush moustache. Les reckoned the insurance man used to bite his nails and then give them a quick scrub in the brisk little moustache. Les was becoming embittered. He had found and wore a pith helmet (well, most of a pith helmet) like the hero of ‘The Fire God’s Treasure’, but he was still cutting no ice with Prudence.

On Sunday mornings, about 10.30, there were always a few people getting out of cars and standing in groups outside the Temple of the Brethren of the Lamb, which is opposite our place but facing Winchester Street. There was a Hammond organ in the Temple and whoever played it was a marvellous musician. I nearly used to break down when I heard those thrilling tones. I do not know who played that organ, but they were wasting their time in Klynham. They could have toured the world like Salter the Sensational. The music used to give me goose pimples and make me more determined than ever to reform and never imagine Josephine McClinton lying in the lucerne hay, full of applejack with her pants off, ever again. It was a little quicker to cut down Winchester Street to get to the town from our place but lately, Sunday mornings, I had got into the habit of using Smythe Street, so that I would not hear the Hammond organ, it upset me so.

I forgot this particular Sunday and I was heading around the corner of the Temple of the Brethren of the Lamb when I saw a group of people who were so far gone that the strains of the organ meant nothing to them. They would not have heard it if it had started playing ‘Hold That Tiger’. They were standing across the street outside the Sorensons’ higgledy-piggledy picket
fence, eight of them, not counting two diminutive, sexless, finger-sucking, little upstarts wearing only singlets. Jim Sorenson had married a girl with Maori blood in her, almost white herself, but she had borne children the same military-tan shade as Dr Mahoney’s shoes.

I could not believe it was Prudence in the centre of the group because she looked such a hussy. She was wearing a dress she would have had trouble getting into when she was ten years old and would not have been in now if it had not been split up the side like a sausage dumped in hot fat. My own sister, and I had to find out in the street she had hair under her arms. That is the sort of sleeveless jumper she was wearing over that old dress. Out in the street, across the road from the Temple of the Brethren of the Lamb! With the organ playing! It was almost too much. The organ played one of those soft, quivering chords and I could feel my eyelids flickering and my eyeballs receding as I tried to cope.

The whole lot of them were around her, even Len Ramsbottom, who was on duty and wearing a helmet and everything. The butcher boy was there without his blue apron, but it was impossible to mistake him with those bumps on his forehead and the way he kept jumping up in the air and slapping his knees together. Chester Montgomery was there hanging on to everybody’s word and occasionally scratching his behind. Among those present was that little squirt, Tony Quin, with his hands in his college blazer, laughing and throwing his head back regular as clockwork, the Waller’s Household Remedy man whose van was parked handy, and the insurance bloke who was talking nineteen to the dozen. He gave Prudence a cigarette and lit it for her. There was a white open sports-car parked at the
kerb. I do not know whether the car belonged to Tony Quin or the insurance bloke. It was hardly the sort of car to be owned by a Brethren of the Lamb, not with the exhaust hoses sweeping back outside the bonnet. Last of all I saw poor Angela Potroz leaning up against the lamp-post and smiling as was her wont, but obviously jealous and miserable.

Prudence kept on putting a hand on one hip, waggling herself around, and tossing the bang of hair out of her eye. The butcher boy was jumping higher all the time and I could hear his knees bang together in mid-air, even from where I was across the street. The insurance bloke was still holding forth and eloquence must have won the day because Prudence made a sudden dash for the sports-car. Showing off as was to be expected, he did not open his cutaway door, but just jumped over behind the wheel. Prudence swung her legs over too and my eyelids went on the flicker again.

The motor snarled into action. I heard Prudence yell out to the others ‘C’mon, c’mon.’ It was only a two-seater, so the slow reaction of her audience is understandable. I have to hand it to young Quin. He landed on the boat-tail of the machine as it moved away and scrambled to safety on the shoulders of the occupants, his arms around both their necks. They departed with an exhaust blast that nearly blew Constable Ramsbottom’s helmet off.

By three o’clock that afternoon they were still not home. Angela Potroz and I were bound together by a common loyalty in silence. We told Ma that Prudence had gone for a drive with the insurance bloke, whose name, Norman Bryant, Angela surprisingly supplied; but of the mad circumstances and the type of car we said nothing.