In the Wet (3 page)

I glanced at Jim Maclaren, and we were both smiling. “Who’s he?” I asked.

“Stevie? Oh, he’s always about. Lives with a Chinaman about ten miles out. He don’t do nothing now—he’s too old. Used to be a good man once, they tell me. I did hear
he was manager of Wonamboola, years ago.” He hesitated, and glanced at me. “Bit of a nuisance, now and then.”

I turned and looked at the tote board behind us; up till then only one punter had fancied Black Joke. “What about Black Joke?” I asked.

“He’s a joke all right,” said Jim. “You stay on Frenzy, Mr. Hargreaves.”

I wandered away just before the race and had a look at the horses as they cantered down to the start. Frenzy was the only one with any breeding; Black Joke was a thin, starved looking animal with a big head and a small rump. I strolled towards the tote and there was still only one backer for Stevie’s fancy, against over forty on Frenzy. The dividend, if certain, would be very small. I thought of old Stevie, whom I was sure to meet again, and who was sure to ask me what I had backed, and I put my two bob on Black Joke.

I sometimes think that Ascot misses something that places like Landsborough have got. Tommy Ford was riding Frenzy, and Tommy was resolved to win that race; he came surging forward at each start and spoiled six starts in quick succession. By that time every horse was dancing on its toes and practically out of control, and the starter had a rock in his hand. On the seventh start he flung this stone at Tommy’s head and checked his rush as the two-pound rock whizzed by within an inch of his ear. One of the other horses spoiled that start. On the eighth start Tommy came surging forward again and the starter flung another rock which ricocheted off Frenzy’s head between the ears and hit Tommy fair and square in the chest. Frenzy, startled by the blow upon his head and the yank on his mouth, went bush; the start was a good one but fifty yards down the course Frenzy crossed the field, barging against Daisy Bell, who fell, and Coral Sea, who sat down on his haunches for a rest, while Frenzy jumped the low rail and made off into the gum
trees with Tommy standing in the stirrups sawing at his mouth and cursing. Black Joke was left to race against a poor little mare called Cleopatra, and won by a length. I collected two pounds seventeen and sixpence from the tote.

I looked around for Stevie, but he was nowhere to be seen. I was rather glad of that, because if I had seen him then I could hardly have avoided standing him a beer, and he had had quite enough. Jim told me later that he had gone to sleep in one of the horse stalls, on the ground, where there was a patch of shade. Most of the horses stayed out at the racecourse for the night with a few of the black stockmen to look after them. When Stevie woke up it was dark and starry, one of the magnificent Queensland winter nights, cool and balmy, when the stars burn right down to the horizon and it is a pleasure to sleep out on the bare earth. The black boys had built a fire to boil up and they were sitting around and yarning. They gave Stevie a mug of tea out of their billy and a tin plate of meat, and presently he left them and started on the mile and a half walk into town, to the bar.

I did not see Stevie again that night. I had my tea at the hotel and helped them with the washing up. Then I made off towards my vicarage, but Jim Maclaren saw me as I passed by the bar out in the street and I had to go in and have a drink with them, and shout one in return out of my winnings. I found that my bet was the main topic of the evening; not only was the whole of the last race an interest and an amusement to the men who thronged the bar, including Tommy Ford, but they all showed genuine and unaffected pleasure in the fact that the parson had won two pounds seventeen and sixpence on a long shot. North Queensland is a rewarding place to work in.

I tried to find out a little more about Stevie in the half
hour that I was in the bar before I could withdraw without offence, but I did not get very far. He was much older than most of the men present, and he had been in the Gulf Country for as long as they could remember. There was a tradition, backed by the pilot of the air ambulance, that Stevie had served in the Royal Flying Corps in the 1914–1918 war, and that he had been a pilot. He was known to have been manager of Wonamboola station some time in the Twenties, probably soon after that war, but nobody was old enough to remember that time personally. Since then he had gone steadily downhill. He had worked as a saddler and as a cook on various stations at various times; nobody in the bar that night knew his surname and nobody knew of any relatives that he might have. He was now unemployable, but he had a pension of some kind that he drew from the post office. He lived with an old Chinaman called Liang Shih who ran a market garden ten or twelve miles out of town, and he helped in the garden in return for his keep. These two men lived alone. Stevie never had any money in his pocket because his habit was to go straight from the post office to the hotel and drink his pension before going home, but when his clothes became indecent Sergeant Donovan of the mounted police would wait for him outside the post office and take him to the store and make him buy a new pair of pants before releasing him to the bar.

I knew a little bit about Liang Shih, because he was the only source of fresh vegetables in Landsborough. At that time I had not seen his house, though I saw plenty of it later on. He had his garden between two long waterholes on rather a remote part of Dorset Downs station, about fifteen miles from the homestead. The waterholes were really part of a river that ran only in the wet season and joined the Dorset River lower down; in the dry the land between these waterholes was very fertile and adjacent to permanent
water for irrigation. Here Liang Shih cultivated two or three acres of land and on it he grew every kind of vegetable in great profusion; he had an old iron windmill to pump water, and he worked from dawn till dark. He had a house built on a little rising knoll of ground near by, above the level of the floods. Twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, he would drive into town in a two wheeled cart drawn by an old horse to sell his vegetables, and then he would go straight back home. He did not drink at all.

I met Stevie next morning in the street as I was on my way to the hospital. The bar did not open until ten o’clock, and he was looking pretty bad; his hair was matted, his eyes bloodshot, and his hand shaking. Clearly he had slept out somewhere, because his shirt and trousers were dirty with earth, and there was a little hen manure on his left shoulder.

I stopped by him, and said, “I got on Black Joke, like you told me to.”

He mouthed his dry lips, and said, “Good on you. They told me last night in the hotel. You’re Roger, aren’t you?”

“That’s right,” I assured him. “I’m Roger, and you’re Stevie.”

“Got a drink in your place, cobber?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t,” I said. “I don’t keep it in the vicarage.” I paused, and then I said, because his distress was evident, “The bar opens at ten.”

“Too long,” he muttered. “The last one, he was better than this bloody chap. He’d give you a drink any time. This mugger, he’s scared of the bloody policeman.”

“I tell you what,” I said. “Go up to my place, the first house this side of the church, and have a shower and wash your shirt and pants. They’ll be dry before ten, and it’ll pass the time. I’ve got to go up to the hospital, but I’ll be back by then, and I’ll shout you a drink for Black Joke.”

“It might pass the time, at that,” he said. “Up by the church?”

“That’s right,” I said. “You’ll find soap and everything up there. A razor, if you want to use it. I’ll be back before ten, and then we’ll come back here and have a beer.”

I went up to the hospital—I forget what for, or who the patients were. I didn’t stay long in the wards; I call them wards for courtesy, though they were no more than three bedrooms with two beds in each. When I was ready to go Sister Finlay asked me to stay for a cup of tea; they usually gave me morning tea when I went to the hospital.

I went into the sitting room, where Nurse Templeton was pouring out. There were only the two of them to staff the little place. “I mustn’t stay long,” I said. “I’ve got Stevie up in my house waiting for me.”

“For Heaven’s sake!” said Sister Finlay. “What’s he doing there?”

“Having a bath,” I replied.

Nurse Templeton looked up, giggling. “He usually has that here.”

“Do you see a lot of him?” I asked.

“Do we not!” said Sister Finlay, sighing a little. “He’s a horrible old man. He gets drunk or gets in a fight, or just falls down and hurts himself, and then he comes to us and we have to patch him up. Last time he went to sleep in Jeff Cumming’s yard behind the house, and Jeff’s dog came and bit him in the arm.”

“Sister would have bitten him herself, only he smelt too bad,” said Templeton. “Here’s your tea, Mr. Hargreaves.”

“I made him go and have a bath before I dressed his arm,” the sister said. “Templeton washed his clothes and turned him out spruce as a soldier. But he didn’t stay that way.”

“He’s a bit of a nuisance, is he?”

She nodded. “He’d be all right if it wasn’t for the drink. It’s not as if he was a vicious man. But the drink’s got him now, and he’s got to have it. That, or something else.”

“Something else?”

She said, “He lives out in the bush, with that Chinaman who brings in vegetables. Out on Dorset Downs.”

“I know. I ought to go out there some time and visit them.”

She glanced at me, and hesitated. “I don’t know that they’re very Christian, Mr. Hargreaves,” she said at last. “I think you ought to know that, if you’re thinking of going there. I don’t know about Stevie, but Liang Shih’s a Hindoo or a Buddhist or something, and there’s an idol stuck up in a sort of niche in the wall.” She hesitated again. “It’s none of my business, but I wouldn’t like you to get a surprise.”

I smiled. “Thanks for the tip. Is Stevie a Buddhist, too?”

She laughed. “Oh—him! I shouldn’t think he’s anything, except a Beerist.” She paused, and then she said, “Sergeant Donovan took me out there with a party one day when they were shooting duck on the waterholes, and we looked in and called on them. Stevie was sober, and he looked ever so much better—quite respectable. The Sergeant says it’s only when he gets some money and comes into town he gets like this. He’s all right living with Liang Shih out in the bush.”

I left the hospital soon after that and went back to the vicarage. Stevie had washed himself and he had made an attempt to shave, but he had cut himself and given it up; he was now sitting on the rotten verandah steps with my towel around his waist while his shirt and trousers, newly washed, hung in the sun over the rail. Clothes dry in ten minutes in North Queensland, in the dry.

“I had a shower,” he said. “My word, I’m crook today.” He licked his dry lips. “You got a whiskey, cobber?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t,” I replied. “I don’t keep anything up here. The hotel will be open in ten minutes.” I paused. “Going out to the track today?”

“Suppose so,” he said listlessly. “I done my money, so I won’t be betting.” He reached for his shirt and trousers and began to clothe his skinny, scarred body.

“That was a good tip you gave me yesterday,” I remarked. “What made you think that Black Joke was in the running against Frenzy?”

“Aw, something was bound to happen in the last race,” he said. “Nothing hadn’t happened up till then, but something was bound to happen. I knew that three nights ago, out in the bush. I know when something’s going to happen—I do, cobber.” He rambled on as he pulled his dirty boots on his bare feet. “Pisspot Stevie,” he said resentfully. “That’s what they call me. But I know more’n any of them. I’ll show them all one day. I know more than any of them. Mark my words.”

“Of course you do,” I said. “Come on down to the hotel and I’ll shout a beer, if it’ll clear your head.”

He came forward with alacrity, buttoning his trousers as he came. “I done my money,” he explained ingenuously. “I got to wait now till some other bastard shouts.”

“They tell me you were in the Flying Corps in the first war,” I remarked. “Is that right?”

“Ninth Batt. and R.F.C.,” he told me. “That’s what I was. Sergeant Pilot, maternity jacket ’n all, ’n wings on it, flying R.E.8s artillery spotting. Armentears, St. Omer, Bethune—I know all them places, ’n what they look like from on top. I know more than any of them, cobber. Pisspot Stevie!”

He walked down to the hotel. “I’ll stand you one beer
and then I’ll have to go,” I told him. “If you’ll take my advice, you’ll go, too.” He did not answer that, and when I left the bar he was deeply involved in rounds of drinks, and looking a lot better, I must say.

I did not see him that day at the races. He was in the bar at tea time, rather drunk, but I avoided getting drawn into the bar that night. I went to the dance later on to put in an appearance for half an hour. The Ladies’ Committee had done their best to decorate our rather sombre Shire Hall, and they managed to produce an orchestra composed of Mrs. Fraser at the piano, the half caste Miss O’Brian with her violin, and Peter Collins with his cornet. Everybody seemed to be having a good time and I stayed there till about eleven o’clock, when the fight took place.

It happened on the verandah outside the bar of the Post Office Hotel. When I heard about it and got out into the street to try and stop it, it was all over. The police were marching Ted Lawson off to spend the night in the cooler, one on each side of him dragging him along and standing no nonsense; the crowd were putting Stevie, streaming blood, into a utility to take him to the hospital. It seemed that Ted had been very rude to Stevie, calling him Pisspot, and Stevie, very drunk, had hit out at Ted and by a most incredible fluke had knocked him down. Ted was a man of about twenty-five, a ringer on Helena Waters station, too young by far to hit such an old man. However, they fought on the verandah, and with the first blow Ted knocked Stevie out; as he fell he caught his left ear on the edge of the verandah or against a post and tore it half off, which made another job for Sister Finlay. There was nothing much that the parson could do about it till the morning, so I went back to the vicarage and said a prayer before I went to bed for wandering, foolish men.