Owen Marshall Selected Stories (11 page)

‘I'll have to go at six or seven. I don't want to have to hitch into Christchurch in the dark.'

‘Right. I'd take you in, but I've only got one helmet, and the lights on the bike aren't going.'

Raf seemed to have forgotten his disappointment about the goats and other things. His thin face was alive with speculative enterprise again. ‘What to have with the cabernet?' he said. ‘We can't drink a good wine with just anything.' The full sophistication of a mind which had achieved honours in economics was given to the problem, and while the world grappled with the exigencies concerning inflation, corruption, guerrilla warfare, spiritual degeneration and environmental pollution, Raf and I sat amidst his seventeen quiet hectares at West Melton, and discussed the entourage for our cabernet. My brother was a great believer in immediate things.

We had peas and baked potatoes, tinned red cabbage and corn. We ate it from plates on our knees, as we sat on the front step. Raf talked to me of his experiences on the continent, and how bad the vin ordinaire was in the south of France. He had some good wine glasses, and we raised them to the evening sun to admire the colour of the wine. Raf invited me to forget university, and join him on his goat and windmill farm. ‘Economics is a subject that destroys an appreciation of spiritual things,' said Raf.

‘Law. I'm doing law.'

‘Same thing,' said Raf. ‘Probably worse.' He became so carried away in trying to persuade me of the deadening nature of formal studies, that he absent-mindedly kept the last of the cabernet
sauvignon for himself, and so I fell back on beer. ‘If you'd seen some of the places I have — Bangkok, Glasgow, Nice — then the value of privacy would be clear to you. Space brings the individual dignity, Tony. Herd animals are always the least attractive. Have you noticed that? I think that's one of the main reasons I want to move from sheep to goats. Goats have individuality, it seems to me.'

‘A goat suits a name.'

‘That's my point.' Raf sat relaxed on the step, his shingle land spreading away before him.

Just on twilight Raf took me down to the West Melton corner on the Norton. He drove carefully, conscious of the drink we'd had. ‘Come out and see me soon,' he said. ‘I meant what I said about forgetting economics, and joining me here to live.' I watched him ride off, without lights, and cautious of the power of the motorbike. I could hear it long after he was out of sight, and I imagined my brother riding up his track, over the stones, towards his disreputable house. To resist the maudlin effects of the wine and the beer, I lay down in the long grass, out of sight of the road. I rested my head on my pack, and slept for an hour or so.

So I ended up hitchhiking into the city in the dark after all. I was lucky, though, for after walking a few minutes, I was picked up by a dentist and his daughter. Her name was Susan. We talked about cars, and I tried not to breathe on Susan, lest she think me a typical boozy student. The dentist said he'd been having trouble trying to get the wheels balanced on his Lancia. ‘Never underestimate the perversity of objects,' I said. The dentist liked that, and so did Susan. They had an appreciation for a turn of phrase. Raf would have enjoyed its reception. It isn't often that incantations are effective beyond the frontiers of their own kingdom.

T
here's some ugly country in New Zealand, don't let them tell you it's not so. Some of it is the country we are trying to form in our own image, perhaps. The Sinclair property was part of it. Bush had been taken off the slopes years before, and the soil was slumping into the gullies, the outwash spoiling what river flats there'd been. Eight and a half thousand hectares of land in an agony of transition. And Sinclair's place was only one of several just the same.

Sinclair had his priorities right. Money for super, then for his stock, then for his family. The country there just died without topdressing every other year. It was no use asking for anything to be done about the shearers' quarters. Over the four seasons that I could remember, nothing had been improved. The wall above the stove was still blistered bare of paint from the oven fire we had in the first year I went. The bunks had only slats, and palliasses with a smell of mildew and string. Under the bottom bunk by the door was a pile of
National Geographic
magazines with the covers torn off. I could look up from the glossy artificiality of winter in Vermont, or West Irian religious rites, and see the scoured track to the yard. Dog kennels with the beaten ground to the extension of the chains, and a tide mark beyond each of a hundred mutton bones. The bones stuck from the ground like defective teeth. No one ever came from the
National Geographic
to see it all, even when it was summer in Vermont.

I joined the others at Sinclair's. The gang didn't come up to full
strength until well into the summer. I spent several months on forestry work at Dargaville, and started shearing again when they moved up country. Cathro still ran things. We had a fresh roustabout, but Neddy was the only new shearer. Neddy was younger than the rest of us: all elbows, knees, and eyes of a level intensity if you bothered to notice. Neddy was a good shearer. Tall, so that he suffered in the back, but flowing in his style and with the ability to calm sheep with his grip. Top-class shearers have that. Others, like Norman and Speel Harrison, transfer their impatience so the sheep will struggle if they can. I've seen Speel brain them with the handpiece when his temper was up.

Neddy wasn't disliked, and his shearing ability was recognised. He was easy and without malice. His laugh and brief replies were at once obliging and dismissive. He never drew close into the group. Perhaps it was his subtle lack of deference, or a companion's realisation, after a time with Neddy, that he considered one person very much like another and placed no great store on any, least of all himself.

Neddy was the one we called Prince Valiant, because of his car. It was a Chrysler Charger. He had it resprayed while they were working at the place before Sinclair's. A metallic green of gloss and iridescence. For some reason he'd never replaced the bumpers, and the brackets stuck out like small antlers at the charge. In scroll work on each side were the words Prince Valiant. The letters were chrome yellow with black edging, and a lance was the underline, piercing the letters.

So he was Prince Valiant, you see. At times there was something of a sneer in its use. The car was thought a pretension by the Harrisons and Sinclair. Neddy didn't seem to mind. He spent a lot of time on his car. He had twin speakers mounted by the back window, and a line of clammy little monsters hanging suspended there. They were green and purple, the colours of cloudy jellies. He had a file box in the front passenger's footwell, and he kept all his country and western tapes there. People like Willie Nelson and Whitey Schaeffer, Efram Nathan and Webb Pierce. Often during breaks, or after lunch, 
Neddy would go and sit in his car with the door open. He'd play his tapes, drink beer and gaze over Sinclair's raddled land.

Neddy talked to me only once about the car. I was sorting and oiling some combs, and he was making himself new sack slippers. A few deft tucks, and some stitches with the bag needle. ‘I like to drive,' he said. ‘I like to drive at night. Close everything up, turn on the music, and drive. At night what's outside could be anywhere. It just falls away behind. The music and me in there driving. It's a whole world.' He looked at me quickly with intent eyes. The laugh he gave disparaged himself, lest my reply should do it. Neddy had been expelled from school. He couldn't get the hang of it, he told me. All the time he was at school, Neddy felt he was getting pushed around and, having no sense of the existence of other people, he couldn't see any reason for being pushed around. Neddy's family hadn't done much by him, I gather. Cathro knew a bit about it. All I ever heard from Neddy was a comment in the shed when the Harrisons used the bale stencil to brand the roustabout's backside. He said his father had used a hot clothes iron on his mother.

Another thing which kept Neddy a bit apart was the intensity of his interest in a girl in Te Tarehi. It had been going on most of the summer, Cathro said. No matter where they were working, every second or third night Neddy went all the way down to Te Tarehi to see his girlfriend. He'd put on his blue slacks and stock boots after tea, and that would be the last of him until the Charger came rumbling back up the track. Norman and Speel complained about being woken up when Neddy came into the quarters late, so several times when Neddy had had more beer than usual, he just switched off the car, and slept right there. I've come out before breakfast and seen him lying asleep, his polished stock boots dangling from his ankles, and his face pressed into the crease at the back of the seat.

Neddy's girlfriend was a source of undeclared envy. Speel and I resented being left with a pile of
National Geographics
without covers, and a monologue from his brother about the Social Credit
philosophy. Speel tried to convince himself that Neddy's girlfriend in Te Tarehi wasn't worth it. He said he'd met someone who knew her: that she was flat-chested and the town bike. Neddy would carry on getting ready, waxing his stock boots, or taking his blue slacks from the newspaper underneath his palliasse. ‘Bite your arse,' he'd say with a smile. The less Neddy said about his girl in Te Tarehi, the more desirable she became.

We were due to finish the last mob at Sinclair's on a Friday. On Thursday evening Neddy came out again ready for town. The ends of his hair were wet because he'd been cleaning his face. His blue slacks had pewter buttons on the back. In one hand he held three beer bottles by their necks like chickens. He laid them along the bench seat on the passenger's side. Sinclair had come down to catch him. ‘You could do a job for me, Prince Valiant,' he said. Sinclair was pleased to demonstrate his familiarity with the joke. ‘If you can get your mind off shagging, that is.' Sinclair tried to take some paper from his trouser pocket, but the trousers were too tight, and the pocket opening was pressed flat. ‘It's a note for the Wrightson's agent.' Sinclair squirmed and swore. ‘You'll need to go to his house. The office will be shut.'

‘I won't be going that way'

‘There's only one way to Te Tarehi, for God's sake!' Sinclair gave a burst of laughter, drawing the others into laughter too. Neddy made himself comfortable in his car. He switched on a tape. Sinclair had the folded sheet at last from his pocket, and he came confidently towards Neddy's open window.

‘Bite your arse,' said Neddy gently, and the Charger moved away. The misshapen creatures jiggled in the back window, the posts of the yards made a pattern of reflections in the green, metallic paint.

‘Bastard,' said Sinclair. He went into the quarters to find Cathro and complain. ‘Cathro, Cathro,' he called.

The Charger didn't come back during the night. Before we started next morning Cathro rang the two other homesteads in the district,
in case Neddy had broken down, but they knew nothing. Then, after ten, Mr Beaven rang back. Neddy's car had been seen in a gully on the Ypres Creek turn-off, and Neddy was dead.

Cathro and I drove up. Mr Beaven and his head shepherd were there. They were waiting for the constable from Te Tarehi. The car had missed the corner and struck the yellow creek bank. From the road there seemed to be no damage. The metallic paint was untouched beneath the fine dust that the dew had set. But when we climbed down we found the Charger had struck with force. Mr Beaven and his man had covered Neddy and the dash with a rug from the back seat. His legs lay in a restful pose partly out of the door. I could see from the soles of his stock boots, how little wear they'd had. The flaccid monsters hanging in the back window jostled each other in the wind.

It was an intrusion to wait alongside the car. We went back up to the road and waited for the police. We leant on Mr Beaven's car and talked. ‘He's been driving around here night after night,' said Mr Beaven. ‘We keep seeing the lights from the homestead, along Kelly's Cut, the through road, and here as well. At times we've passed him on the road coming up. A green Chrysler without bumpers. He must have been covering a hundred miles or more a night, just cruising round.'

‘Listening to his music,' said Cathro. ‘Neddy loved to be by himself, listening to his music as he drove. The boys called him Prince Valiant.'

‘I saw that on the car,' said Mr Beaven. ‘All doo-dahed up all right.' Cathro didn't say anything about Neddy girlfriend in town, the girl that each of us had imagined according to his own expectation, and who had no other life.

Those nights Neddy had left us, he'd fired up on beer and music, driving along the top roads. It didn't say much for our company, but then ugly country breeds ugly people, I suppose. Even so, the death of someone you don't know well can have its acid, for without
the protection of emotion there's a clarity in what is bleak and random. As we sat and waited in the morning, I thought of Neddy driving alone, with his dashlights, the monsters, the songs of Whitey Schaeffer and Webb Pierce. And, in the darkness, that poor country slipping by.

‘
Y
ou don't much care for pets, I know,' says my neighbour. She smiles bleakly across the patio, and sips my Christmas sherry. She is pleased to be able to categorise me so utterly. It won't do to try to tell her of Bagheera, though what she says brings him back to me.

The cat was not even mine, but had been bought for my younger sisters. They soon excluded him from their affections, however. My sisters preferred those possessions which could be dominated. Compliant dolls who would accept the twisting of their arms and legs, and easily cleaned bright, plastic toys. The cat went away a lot, and had for them a disconcerting smell of life and muscle.

My father named the cat Bagheera. My father had a predilection for literary allusion, to use his own phrase. Not that I heard him use it about himself. He was referring to Mr McIntyre, his deputy. I remember my father talking about Mr McIntyre to Mum; pausing to preface his remarks with a disparaging smile, and saying that Mr McIntyre had a predilection for literary allusion. I caught the tone although I couldn't understand the words. There was blossom on the ground that evening, for as he said it I looked out to the fruit trees, and saw the blossom blowing on the ground. Pink, apricot blossom, some lying amid the gravel of the drive, a fading tint towards the garage.

In the evening Bagheera and I would go for a walk. We agreed on equality in our friendship. We would maintain a general direction, but take our individual digressions. In the jungle of the potato rows
or sweet corn I would hide, waiting for him to find me, and rub his round head against my face.

The cat brought trophies to the broad window sill of my bedroom. Thrush wings, fledglings, mice and once a pukeko chick. My father hated the mess. He always drove the cat from the window when he saw it there. Yet often at night, waking briefly, I would look to the window and Bagheera would be there, a darker shape against the sky, his eyes at full stretch in the dusk. I was the only one in the family who could whistle him. It was a loyalty I would sometimes abuse just to impress my friends. Within a minute or two he would appear, springing suddenly from the roof of the sheds, or gliding from beneath the red currant bushes at the bottom of the garden. Beauty is not as common in this world as the claims that are made for it. But Bagheera's black hide flowed like deep water, and his indolent grace masked speed and strength. At times I would put my face right up to him to destroy perspective, and imagine him a full-size panther, see the broad expanse of his velvet nose, and his awesome Colgate smile.

In December Bagheera got sick. For three days he didn't come despite my whistling. We were having an end-of-term pageant at school and I was a wise man from the east, so I didn't have much time to look for him. But the day after we broke up, I heard Bagheera under the house. I talked to him for more than an hour, and he crawled bit by bit towards me, yet not close enough to touch. I hated to see him. He had scabs along his chin, his breathing made a sound like the sucking of a straw at the bottom of a fizz bottle. He wouldn't eat anything and just lapped weakly at the water I brought, before he backed laboriously again into the darkness under the house.

Each time I looked, his eyes would be blazing there, more fiery as his sickness grew, as if they consumed his substance.

My father decided to take Bagheera to the vet. He brought out Grandad's walking stick and said that he'd hook the cat out when I called him within reach. How easily the cat would normally have
avoided such a plan. My father pinned Bagheera down, and tried to drag him closer. Bagheera rolled and gasped before he managed to free himself and creep back among the low piles. He knocked an empty tin as he went. It was the tin from the pears I had stolen after being strapped by my father for fishing in my best clothes. When the walking stick failed my father lost interest in the cat.

He had given him his chance and after that he put the matter out of his mind. My father possessed a very disciplined mind. I couldn't forget, though, for Bagheera had become my cat. At night I would look sometimes to the window, but his calm presence was never there, and instead I kept thinking of his eyes in the perpetual darkness beneath the house. Beseeching eyes that waited for me to fulfil the obligation of our friendship.

I asked my father to shoot Bagheera. To put him out of his misery, I said. It was a common enough expression, but my father had no conception of misery in others. I imagine he saw it, in regard to people at least, as the result of incompetence, or lack of drive. But I kept on at him. I said that Bagheera might spread infection to my sisters, or die under the house and cause a smell in the guest rooms. These considerations, which required no empathy, seemed to impress my father. He refused to fire under the house, though, he said. I'd have to coax Bagheera out where he could get a safe shot. He wasn't supposed to shoot at all within the borough limits, he said. At the time I didn't fully realise the irony of needing my father to kill Bagheera. I was the only possible go-between.

My father came out late in the afternoon, and stood with the rifle in the shade of the grapevine trellis, waiting for me to call Bagheera out. I felt the hot sun, unaccustomed on the back of my knees as I lay down. It was about the time that Bagheera and I would often take our walk, and I called him with all the urgency and need that I could gather. Even the pet names I used, even those, with the sensitivity of boyhood and my father standing there, for I would spare nothing in my friendship. Bagheera came gradually, his black fur dingy with the
dust of the foundations, and the corruption within himself. I could hear his breathing, the straw sucking and spluttering, I could see his blazing eyes level with my own. To get him to quit the piles, and move into the light, was the hardest thing. I was aware of my father's impatience and adult discomfort with the situation.

‘Move away from it,' he said, when Bagheera was at the veranda steps and trembling by the saucer of water. My father raised the.22, with which he never missed. No Poona colonel could have shown a greater sureness of aim. My sisters grouped at the study window to watch, their interest in the cat temporarily renewed by the oddity of his death.

The shot was not loud, a compressed, hissing sound. Bagheera arched into the air, grace and panther for a last time, and sped away across the lawn into the garden. Just for one moment he raced ahead of death, just for one moment left death behind, with a defiance that stopped my breathing with its triumph. ‘I wouldn't think anyone heard the shot at all,' said my father with satisfaction. The saucer lay undisturbed, and beside it one gout of purple blood. Don't tell me it wasn't purple, for I see it still, opalescent blood beside the freshly torn white wood the bullet dug in the veranda boards.

I didn't go to find the body among the currant bushes. Instead I went and lay hidden in the old compost heap, with the large, rasping pumpkin leaves to shade me, and the slaters questing back and forth, wondering why they'd been disturbed. My father and mother walked down by the hedge and I heard my father talking of Bagheera and me. ‘I find it hard to understand,' he said. ‘He seemed determined to have it shot. Sat there for ages cajoling it out to be shot. And after the attachment he seemed to have for it, too. He's a funny lad, Mary. Why couldn't he leave the wretched thing alone?' My father's voice had a tone of mixed indignation and revulsion, as if someone had been sick on the car seat, or one of his employees had broken down and cried. But I remembered Bagheera's release across the lawn, and thought it all worthwhile. He'd done his dash all right.

I lay in the evening warmth, and watched a pumpkin flower only inches from my face. The image of the pumpkin flower was distorted in the flickering light and shade beneath the leaves. The gaping, yellow mouth and slender stamen nodded and rolled like a processional Chinese dragon: the ones they have at weddings, and funerals.