Pearl in a Cage (29 page)

The butcher had a sign up on his door:
Cash sales only
. A lot of kids couldn't read.

‘Mum said please can she have half a pound of sausage meat, please, and she promises she'll pay you as soon as things get betterer, please.'

The Duffy family were the first to apply for susso, though they weren't on their own for long. The government, struggling to supply some form of relief to the starving, the homeless, were not doing much of a job of it, and that bloody pig-faced officious bastard of a Denham wasn't making it easier for those in need to ask for help.

Don Roberts and his family were starving, but he was too proud to go to the police station to register for relief, to sign that statutory declaration stating that he was a useless bastard who couldn't keep food in the mouths of his kids. Then the saddlery closed its doors. The Abbots went on susso.

‘You've got to do something,' Lenny Abbot said. ‘Something's got to be done.'

George and Vern did what they could. Every couple of weeks, one mill or the other was started up. They cut up stockpiled timber for firewood. A bit of money in one family helped a lot of families in this town.

Kids were dying of starvation in the cities. Proud folk were being buried by the coppers, laid side by side with strangers in communal graves. If a man couldn't afford to eat, he sure as hell couldn't raise the few quid necessary for a funeral.

Vern had been down there looking for buyers for his stockpiled wood. No one was buying, and when he walked some of the streets, he knew why. The city shops were open and women were still shopping in their fur coats, but out in the back streets, he saw it, he smelled the destitution. He stood and watched
hundreds — men, women and their kids — queuing up for a tin mug of weak soup. Winter was coming. How were they going to survive through winter? He stood out front of some place handing out clothes, handing out old army coats dyed black, preparing the homeless for a long, cold winter. He came home depressed to sit in Gertrude's kitchen, pouring out what he'd seen.

‘How can a country turn bad so fast? What the hell were we doing? Why didn't we see it coming, Trude?'

‘How is she living through this, Vern?' She, Amber, that girl Gertrude had lived for, dreamed for. ‘Is she queuing up with the hundreds?'

‘All I know is she had a good husband prepared to feed her, and two kids she left motherless. All I know is, whatever she's doing, she's thinking of herself, not you.'

‘She was a good kid until that sod came up here and filled her head with his lies.'

‘Oh, I meant to tell you a while back, Monk reckons he's dead.'

‘Archie?'

‘So he said. Lost in Egypt somewhere.'

‘I'll believe it when I see it.'

‘He was saying that they tracked him there when his old man died. He was left money in the will. He would have been back for it if he was alive.'

‘I won't believe he's dead until I see his name on a tombstone — and I mightn't even then, Vern.'

 

The depression had little effect on Gertrude's way of life. Eggs were her money; she had no less of them now than she'd had before. She had her goats, her garden. She made her jams in season, stored her apples and potatoes in her shed. Nothing changed at Gertrude's house.

The town still called on her, and the calls still came in cycles. Fewer babies were born in Woody Creek but she delivered more. Husbands who could previously afford to get their wives down to the hospital for the birth now came knocking on her
door. She went when she was called. She gave what she had to give.

On a Friday afternoon, she pulled her cart into the shade beside the town hall where she set about unloading a box of apples, a few dozen spare eggs and a couple of pumpkins. The ladies relief committee handed out her donations to those in need — and to a few who weren't yet in real need but held out their hands anyway.

Denham was there, sticking his nose in where it wasn't wanted.

‘Let me help you there, Mrs Foote,' he said, attempted to take the crate of apples.

She pushed by him, got him in the shoulder with the crate, made no acknowledgment of him. She hadn't spoken to him since the day of the broken eggs and didn't plan to speak to him. Maybe there was a bit of the Hoopers' grudge-holding blood running in her veins, but it had taken him to point out to Joey that his skin made him different to the other kids'. Joey knew now, and no longer wanted to go to school, no longer wanted to drive into town with her. She'd never forgive Denham for that. She hated him for that.

He was the cause of her first disagreement with Vern's daughters. The Denham family went to the Methodist church and Vern's daughters considered the constable's sourpuss wife to be one of the few civil women in town. She received regular invitations to afternoon tea. Gertrude walked in on them one Friday, and the three eyed her trousered outfit as they might have eyed a man from Mars clad in a kilt. Bell-ringing bum-sitters Lorna and Margaret, ringing their little brass bell for Vern's housekeeper to fetch them hot water for their teapot, treating her as the paid help. She'd been with Joanne in Melbourne, had come up here with her, and when Joanne died, she'd stayed on to look after Vern. She was Gertrude's age, a decent, caring woman who deserved better than two bum-sitting girls ordering her about.

‘Get off your backside and fetch your own water,' Gertrude said. She hadn't been to the house since.

She wouldn't have driven out to Monk's auction with Vern had she known those girls would be going. Nancy and Lonnie Bryant were out there so she left Vern with his family and made a beeline for the Bryants' gig.

Carts, drays, motor cars were all looking for space in the shade; a lot of folk from town had come out on Mick Boyle's dray. He'd gone into the carrying business, be it people or goods he wasn't fussy. Property owners from further out were there, a few city agents had come in on the train. You could always recognise a city man. Monk's better furniture and his few good paintings had been sent down to the city to big auction houses. The rest was set out on wide verandahs. Gertrude was in the market for buckets, dishes and a single bed for Joey, if she could get one for her price. Monk had a few old iron beds, a few bundles of bedding.

Lonnie wanted the disc plough and Monk's forge. He missed out on the plough but got the forge. Lorna wanted two crates of books. Vern's bid was the only one. Margaret wanted a music box, as did Horrie Bull's wife. Margaret missed out. Gertrude bid on a mess of buckets and tin dishes. She got them, along with a bundle of shovels and spades she hadn't realised were part of the same lot. She made a bid on the second bed, but Horrie, feeling guilty about getting the music box, told her he had two better beds rotting in his shed and she could have both for the price of the carrying. He'd get Mick Boyle to bring them down.

They auctioned the property late in the afternoon. The crowd had cleared, only the diehards remained. Vern wasn't interested in more land. He'd only hung around to see what it made and to get an idea of what his own land was worth. He'd had no intention of putting in a bid — or not until the auctioneer was about to knock it down to a bloke wearing a suit and for a pittance. He upped the bid, determined that land wasn't going to some city bank manager for a song. The agent went over him, so just to be ornery, Vern went up again. Gertrude elbowed him this time and told him not to be a fool. He moved away from her, and it was on. Eight times the agent came back at him, but he must have
had a limit, must have reached it. The property was knocked down to Vern.

‘You're a pig-headed fool of a man, Vern Hooper. What do you need with more land at this time of your life?' Gertrude said. ‘You should be hanging on to your money. Who knows how long this will last?'

‘Land lasts,' he said, doing his best to hide his shell shock. He'd expected the coot to make one last bid. ‘Grandpop would have approved. He kicked himself until his dying day that he hadn't spent up big during the last depression. And he always resented Monk having a finer house anyway. Now he owns it.'

‘He's dead, you fool.'

‘Well, he can haunt it at night.'

Margaret and Jimmy were impressed with the house they now owned. They spent half an hour roaming their father's new acquisition, climbing down to Monk's cave of a root cellar. Lorna was more impressed when a few months later Vern bought a house in Balwyn. It was next door to his half-brother's house and he got it for a song. Certain that it was her father's intention for her and Margaret to live in that house, chaperoned by their uncle next door, Lorna was not pleased when Vern left the previous owners in as caretakers.

He'd been a young bloke during the depression of the nineties. He couldn't remember much about it, other than listening to his grandfather lamenting the fact that he'd sat on his money instead of buying while prices were low. Joanne had left Vern a small fortune, which he considered to be safer in land than in the banks right now. He had five hundred a year still coming in from his first wife, money sitting in banks bringing in little interest. Property was easier to keep track of. It was there. You could walk on it, pick up handfuls of it. He bought old lady Wilson's house when she moved down to Willama to live with her daughter. He bought the paddock next door to his mill. He went property mad while his mill lay idle one week out of two.

‘Stop it, Vern,' Gertrude said. ‘People are talking about you.'

When a man has work and money enough to live on, there is little envy. When a man starts flashing his money around
while others can't find coin enough for a beer, that's when envy grows and memories of worthy deeds grow short. When you sit all day watching your wife unpicking the seams of her best dress then stitching it back together, its unfaded inside now on the outside, what else can you do but envy that pair of stuck-up Hooper bitches walking out to do their shopping in fancy city suits. Envy of his neighbour can eat into a man's heart.

Vern paid his skeleton crew of mill workers to cut a few railway truckloads of firewood he freighted down to Melbourne marked
For Relief
. The railways carried it free if marked
For Relief
. The Methodist mission handed it out to those in the greatest need.

‘There's folk in town who could use a load of wood,' people said. ‘And he sends it down to bloody strangers in Melbourne.'

 

Lonnie and Nancy Bryant's city son and his family had moved back home. Horrie Bull had his sister and her husband living in one of the pub's sleep-outs. Melbourne's population decreased during the worst years of the depression as those who could, fled from its destitution to rural areas. Twelve squeezed into houses hard pushed to hold six. Sheds in backyards were made habitable.

‘The city's no place to be if you can't find work,' they said.

‘There's wood for the taking up here. A kid can drag his billycart down to the bridge and pick up a load in five minutes.'

‘A man can trap a rabbit, toss a line in the creek, fire his shotgun into a flock of galahs and bring down enough for a stew . . . and there's nothing wrong with parrot stew either, if you can find an onion.'

‘You need to live in that city to know what it's like down there. It's all right for them with money. They're still trotting off to their theatres, still driving their fancy cars and turning their eyes away so they don't see their starving neighbours.'

No one starved in Woody Creek. But a split had opened up in the fabric of the town, separating those who had from those
who had not, drawing a heavy line between complaining bludger and silent battler.

The strong men, the proud, could still make a few bob felling trees, splitting logs with metal wedge and axe, hand-cutting sleepers for the railways. They could cut foot blocks to freight down to those who could afford to buy wood in Melbourne. The strong men and the proud worked from daylight to dark, determined to keep their families off relief.

Big Henry King, father of stuttering Ray, champion drinker and wood cutter, was one of the biggest, the strongest of men, proud of his strength too — until the forest turned on him one day and felled him. Gum tree branches can be snappy bastards; they'll kill you when you're least expecting it. That branch didn't do the decent thing by Big Henry; it didn't kill him outright. Vern drove Gertrude and Constable Denham out to the accident site. Gertrude sat beside Vern. Denham sat in the rear seat. They spoke only to Vern. But the three worked together to get Henry out of the bush, to get him down to the hospital.

‘You couldn't kill that big bastard with a ton of bricks,' the drinkers said that night in the pub's back room. ‘He'll pull through all right,' they said.

Big Henry spent three months in hospital and returned to Woody Creek a cripple with the use of one arm. He was a strong man. He might have lived that way for years, but a month of his wife's derision was enough. He told his boy to bring him a basin of water and his razor, that he wanted to clean himself up for Sunday. He didn't waste the water, and he didn't see Sunday. His one good arm was strong enough to do what it had to do.

He was Woody Creek's first suicide, though no one saw it as such, and not a soul blamed him. The timber men made him a red gum coffin and gave him a send-off the likes of which hadn't been seen in many a year. He ended up two rows down from J.C., the stranger who had come to Woody Creek and remained. Ten days later, they opened up his grave and put his nasty bitch of a wife in with him. No one believed she'd died of a broken heart. That woman had never had a heart to break.

Then Ray, that hulking great stuttering boy with his big brown innocent lamb's eyes, disappeared.

For a week the men had something to do. For a week they felt like men again. They combed the forest calling to Ray; they dragged the creek for his body. They didn't find him. Eventually they gave up looking, and a few more men gave up being men and went on susso. What gain was there in fighting it? The life they'd known was gone and Big Henry lucky to be out of it.