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Mornings were spent mostly refilling the wash buckets from the pump, shovelling muck, wheeling it out to the dung heap from the calf sheds, or spreading it on the paddocks. And always the flies found you, every fly in Australia. They were all around you, in your eyes, in your hair, up your nose even, and they were biting ones too. And if you swallowed one – and you often did – you’d try to retch it up, but you never could. We couldn’t escape them any more than the animals could.
Lunch was soup and bread brought to our long trestle table in the dormitory and ladled out into our bowls by Mrs Bacon, who scarcely ever spoke to us. We lived on soup and bread in that place. Then in the afternoons we’d be set to clearing the paddocks of stones, or we’d be fetching and carrying water to the troughs, and blocks of salt too. These buckets almost pulled my arms out of my sockets they were so heavy. You had to fill them right up too, because if ever Piggy Bacon caught you carrying a half-empty bucket you were in big trouble, and trouble always meant the strap. So we filled them up full to the brim every time. And when all the water-carrying was done, we’d be digging up weeds or filling in potholes in the tracks, or pulling out tree roots, all of us straining together on the ropes.
Our hands blistered, our feet blistered. Bites and sores festered. None of that mattered to Piggy Bacon. Once one job was done there was always another waiting. We worked hard because he’d stop our food just like that if we didn’t. We worked hard because he’d strap us if we didn’t. We worked hard because if we didn’t he’d cancel our evening playtime and make us work an hour extra at the end of the day. I so longed for that hour off – we all did – and we hated to miss it. That promise of an hour’s playtime was what kept me going when every bone in my body ached with tiredness.
Feeding up the animals was the last task of the day, the only work I really enjoyed. Chickens, cows, pigs, horses – it didn’t matter – I loved to see them come running when they saw us with our sacks of feed. I loved to watch them loving it. But the milking I never liked. My fingers couldn’t cope. They swelled easily and I couldn’t sleep afterwards for the pain. Marty and I – we always tried to be in the same work party – would feed a few by hand if we could, if Piggy Bacon wasn’t around to catch us. The chickens tickled you when they pecked the corn out of your hand, and the horses’ noses felt warm and soft as they snuffled up their feed – you had to watch out in case they snuffled up your fingers as well.
There was one horse in particular Marty and I loved more than all the others. He was huge, a giant of a horse, shining black all over except for one white sock. Big Black Jack he was called, and whenever we were lucky enough to get to feed him, Marty and I made sure he had all the food and water he needed, and then some. I’d crouch there by his bucket, watching him drink deep, listening to his slurping, laughing at his dribbling when he lifted his head out of the bucket. I’d sing London Bridge is Falling Down to him, and he’d like that. He was Piggy Bacon’s plough-horse, and Piggy treated him just as he treated us, worked him to the bone, till his head hung down with exhaustion. Horses, I discovered, when they’re tired or sad, sigh just like people do. Big Black Jack used to do that often. We’d look one another in the eye and I’d know just how he felt and he’d know just how I felt too.
Whatever job we were doing, whenever we were out on the farm, we could be sure Piggy Bacon would turn up sooner or later. He would appear suddenly, out of nowhere. He only ever came for one reason, and that was to pick on someone for something. Each time I hoped and prayed it was someone else he’d pick on. But sooner or later my turn would come around. We either weren’t working fast enough, or hard enough. A water bucket wasn’t full enough, or he’d find a field stone we hadn’t picked up – any excuse would do. He wouldn’t strap us there and then. Instead he’d tell us how many whacks the particular crime merited and then give us all day to think about it. That was the torture of it, the waiting.
The punishment parade would take place in the evening outside the dormitory hut just before supper and before we were locked in for the night. He’d call you out in front of the others and then pronounce sentence on you just like a judge. And you’d stand there, hand outstretched, trembling and tearful. It happened to all of us, and often. No one escaped it. But Marty got it more than most, and you could see that when Piggy Bacon strapped Marty he did it with real venom. There was a good reason for that: Marty’s look.
It was the same look he’d used on that officious man on the dockside the first day we landed in Australia. The thing was that Marty would never be cowed. He would look Piggy Bacon straight in the eye, and that always set Piggy Bacon into one of his terrible rages. The rest of us kept our heads down, just tried to keep out of trouble. Marty fought back with silent defiance. And he didn’t cry out like I did, like the rest of us did, when we were strapped – he wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. He just stood there unflinching, his jaw set, his eyes stoney, no tears, no trembling. And to add insult to injury, he’d say thank you afterwards too, his voice as stony as his stare. I’d like to say we all took heart from that, but we didn’t. We admired him though – everyone did. But he wasn’t the only one who fought back. We soon had another hero to admire, a most unlikely hero too – Wes Snarkey.
Wes Snarkey’s Revenge (#ulink_5ee5edbf-e032-5e38-9834-9f35baee3ec3)
Neither Marty nor I had ever much liked Wes, and Wes made it quite obvious he didn’t much like us either. I could never forget how he and his cronies had tormented me almost every night on the ship, and I’m sure he could not forget how Marty had come to my defence and humiliated him on the deck that day. That must still have rankled with him. So the result was that we hardly ever spoke. In fact he hardly ever spoke to anyone during those first months at Cooper’s Station. In the dormitory, at the line of wash buckets on the verandah, eating at the long trestle table, out at work on the farm, he kept himself to himself. Even at evening playtime when we’d all be kicking a football around, he’d sit there on his own, gazing out at nothing. Of all of us Wes Snarkey was the only loner. But then one day I found out that he wasn’t really a loner at all. He had a friend – a best friend.
Time and again Piggy Bacon had strapped him for wandering away from his work. No one knew where he went and he didn’t tell anyone. One moment he’d be there digging a ditch alongside you, the next he’d be gone. Strapping Wes didn’t stop him from sneaking off, so I knew that whatever he was doing, wherever he was going, must have been really important to him. We were mucking out the pigs one day when I noticed he’d gone off again. I made quite sure Piggy Bacon wasn’t about, and went looking for him. I found him by Big Black Jack’s paddock. I crouched down behind the trunk of a fallen gum tree and watched him. He was standing by the fence, feeding Big Black Jack with some bread crusts, and he was talking to him as if he was a real person, not a horse at all. I was close enough to see everything, and to hear everything too.
Wes was telling him about a horse he’d known in England, in Leeds, a milkman’s horse, a piebald mare she was, and how every morning he’d sit on the wall of the orphanage in the early morning and wait for her to come, how he’d save his bread crusts to feed her, how one day the milkman had let him sit on her, and they’d gone off down the street, how it was the best day of his life. “Will you let me ride you one day, Jack?” he whispered, smoothing his neck. “Would you? I could ride you out of here and we’d never come back.”
I must have shifted then or maybe it was a gust of wind that rustled the pile of dead leaves where I was crouching. Whatever it was, Wes turned around and saw me there. We stared at one another, not speaking. I could see he had tears in his eyes, and on his face too. He brushed them away hurriedly with the back of his hand then ran off before I could say anything. And I was going to say something. I was going to say that I liked Big Black Jack too, that we could be friends now if he wanted.
As it happened it was only a few days later that Wes Snarkey became everyone’s friend, and that was on account of Piggy Bacon and his whip. Down near the creek, which was dried up for most of the year, there was an old tree stump we couldn’t pull out. We’d been digging around it, and trying to pull it out for a whole day. With all of us hauling on the ropes, and even with Piggy Bacon lending a hand himself – and that hardly ever happened – we still couldn’t shift it. So in the end Piggy Bacon harnessed up Big Black Jack and got him to do the job instead. But no matter how hard Jack strained at the ropes, the stump would not budge. Piggy Bacon shouted at him, but it did no good. Big Black Jack was doing all he could, we could see that. Piggy Bacon took a stick to him then, and whacked him again and again. He was bellowing at him.
“Useless bag of bones! Lazy devil! You good-for-nothing, you!” Then Piggy Bacon used his whip on him. In a frenzy of fury and frustration he whipped him till he bled. That was when Wes Snarkey went for Piggy Bacon.
He ran at him, screaming like a wild thing, head-butted him full in the belly, knocking the wind out of him and sending him sprawling in the dust. They rolled over and over with Wes ending up on top, sitting astride him and pounding him with his fists. And we were all cheering then and leaping up and down, until Mrs Bacon came running out from the house and pulled Wes off him, but not before the damage had been done, not before blood had been drawn.
Piggy Bacon was never quite as frightening to us again after that. His temper could still be terrifying, and we still hated him just as much. But we had seen the wicked giant felled. We’d seen his blood. He made Wes pay of course. He made us all pay. We had no playtime for a week, and no bread with our soup for a week either. Wes got twelve strokes of the strap that night and didn’t seem to mind a bit. He sat on his bunk nursing his hand afterwards grinning up at us, looking happy as Larry. He knew he’d made new friends of all of us, and he was happy. So were we. From that day on there was a solidarity among us. We smiled more. We joked more. All this had been Wes Snarkey’s doing. He’d had his revenge and it was sweet revenge for us all. He wasn’t just a friend now, he was our hero too.
Saints and Sinners (#ulink_b3dcfe38-d719-5050-a8a3-d8997286f90c)
Sunday at Cooper’s Station was the only day we didn’t have to work. We sang hymns and psalms, said our prayers and heard sermons instead. They went on all morning, outside the dormitory usually or inside if it was wet – which wasn’t often. Piggy would stand on a box and harangue us with his sermons in between the hymns. Mrs Piggy, as we’d all come to call her, standing dutifully at his side, her dog lying at her feet fast asleep and twitching in his dreams, which broke the monotony of it. It was a welcome distraction and gave us something to nudge one another and wink about.
Mrs Piggy would play the squeezy box to accompany the hymns, and would sing out, her voice surprisingly strong, leading us all, her eyes closed in fervent concentration. This was the only time you would ever see her confident and full of conviction. She seemed to be carried away on the wings of faith, lost absolutely in the spirit of the hymns. Her piping voice rang out passionate with belief. After every hymn, she would cry out at the top of her voice: “Alleluia! Praise the Lord!” Then she’d lower her head and at once shrink back inside her shell, inside the Mrs Piggy we all knew, timid and tired and terrified, as Piggy Bacon launched into yet another thunderous sermon about the saints above and the sinners below, by which he meant us, about devils and hellfire and damnation. Through it all the dog slept blissfully. We just wished we could do the same.
But we weren’t the only ones at the Sunday services. This was the only day the Aboriginal people, who lived in the country round about and who sometimes came to work on the farm – the “black fellows” Piggy called them – were allowed to come near the house. We’d see them often enough, the children mostly, when we were out on the farm, just crouching there in the distance watching us. Or sometimes we’d catch sight of a group of them moving through a heat haze on the horizon, not walking at all, it seemed to me, but rather floating over the ground. If ever they wandered in too close Piggy Bacon would go after them on his horse and drive them away with his whip, calling them all thieves and drunkards. But on Sundays Mrs Piggy invited them in for cakes and prayers. Even then they didn’t like to come too close, but they’d squat down at a safe distance from us to listen to the hymns and sermons.
Afterwards Mrs Piggy would go over to them carrying a tray of cakes and lemonade, and she’d make the sign of the cross on their foreheads and bless them. None of us had seen that many black faces before, just an occasional one passing by in a London street perhaps, and I’d noticed one or two black American GIs in uniform driving around in jeeps back home. These people went barefoot in ragged clothes and their children ran about naked, and they made you feel uncomfortable because they seemed always so still as they squatted there scrutinising you, their dark eyes looking right into yours. They stared. We stared. But we hardly ever spoke. You could never tell what they were thinking. But I liked having them there. They were company. And in this desolate place of wide skies and wide horizons, where we saw so few people, just their presence was a comfort.
Hardly anyone besides them ever came to Cooper’s Station. A truck coming down the long farm track was a real event for us, because it was that rare, maybe one or two a week, that’s all – delivering animal feed, or fencing wire, or seed perhaps. The drivers often sat on the verandah and drank lemonade with Piggy and Mrs Piggy. They had cakes too. We got cakes and lemonade only on Sundays, our big treat of the week, one each with a cherry on the top. We’d line up and Mrs Piggy handed one to each of us. She’d bless us and sign a cross on our forehead too. I liked that. It was the only time she ever touched us. I always took the cherry off my cake, put in my pocket and kept it till last. Sometimes I’d keep it until I was in bed, and I’d lie there letting it melt slowly in my mouth, my hand grasping my lucky key all the time.
They tried to make us say our prayers at night. We’d all have to kneel there for ten minutes in silence. I never prayed, but I did wish. Every night, clutching the key around my neck, I wished myself out of there, wished myself back home in England, back with Kitty.
In that first year, like everyone else, I almost found myself liking Mrs Piggy, and not just because of her Sunday cakes either – though that certainly had something to do with it. The truth was I felt sorry for her, we all did. And in a way I suppose she had our respect too. Unlike Piggy Bacon himself, she worked as hard out on the farm as we did. She milked the cows with us in the morning and evening, and she made all our meals too. The porridge and the soup and bread and the milky puddings may have been repetitious and tedious, but it was hot and it was regular. And Mrs Piggy did it all.
Then there were the good days, the only good days, when Piggy Bacon drove off in his truck into town, and we’d be left alone on the farm just with her. We still had our work to do, but she’d do it with us. And on these rare and happy days you’d see all the tension and the exhaustion lift from her shoulders, and even hear her laugh sometimes. We were the same. Without Piggy Bacon there, we could fool around, have fun! On those days she was a different person.
But every time it would be over all too soon. Unlike her there was some refuge for us, together in our locked dormitory at night. We had each other too. She still had Piggy Bacon. Sometimes, the worse for drink, he’d throw things at her – you could hear the sound of smashing crockery in the farmhouse. You’d hear him shouting at her, hitting her too, beating her. I never saw it happen, but we heard it.
“Don’t you dare tell me how to treat them! I’ll do what I like and how I like, you hear me woman?” He’d go on and on at her.
We’d lie there listening, and the next morning we’d see the bruises. So in time we began to feel she was one of us, just as much Piggy Bacon’s slave as we all were. I’ve often wondered why she endured it, why she stayed with him. There’s really only one answer that makes any sense at all: for the love of God, for Jesus’ sake. I never knew a more devout woman than Piggy Bacon’s wife. She was married to him in the eyes of the Lord, so she could never leave him. As we were to discover, she was a woman who didn’t just believe, she really lived her faith, and she suffered for it too.
I only once caught a glimpse of the depth of her suffering. Marty and Wes and I had been told by Piggy to go and dig over their vegetable patch behind the farmhouse. It was a hot and humid afternoon. The flies were out and at us, and the soil was dried hard and unyielding. We’d been at it for hours, and we’d had enough. It was Marty’s idea to have a rest and get ourselves a drink. Marty’s ideas were often dangerous. But by now we were beyond caring, and anyway Piggy Bacon had just been round on one of his random patrols. We thought Mrs Piggy was out working on the farm somewhere. We dropped our forks and ran to the water pump outside the backdoor of the farmhouse. We pumped out the water for each other, all of us taking our turns to lie on the ground underneath, letting it splash all over our faces, drinking our fill. I was just having my turn, revelling in the coolness of it, when Marty and Wes stopped pumping. When I protested they shushed me, and then crept off, doubled up, along the side of the farmhouse. I could hear Mrs Piggy now, she was crying her heart out. I followed them. When they stood up to peek in at the window I did too. Standing on tip-toe I could only just see.
She was sitting there, rocking back and forth in her chair by the stove, her dog on her lap. On the table near us by the window were all the Sunday cakes she’d made. She was trying to stop herself sobbing by singing. It was very soft, but we could hear it well enough to recognise it: What a friend we have in Jesus. Verse after verse she sang, but punctuated always by fits of sobbing that wracked her whole body. There was one moment when she lifted her eyes and cried out loud: “Why, sweet Jesus? Why? Please take this cup from me, Jesus. Please take it.” That was when I saw the purple bruise on her chin, the livid marks on her neck and some blood on her lip too. She was clasping her hands and praying. I remember thinking then that I wanted Piggy Bacon dead, that one day I would kill him. I never made actual plans to do it of course, but I felt like doing it, and so did Marty, and Wes too.
What he did next could so easily have made a murderer of me, if I’d had the means, if I’d had the courage, if circumstance hadn’t intervened.
Mrs Piggy to Ida (#ulink_8d4a5959-0ec3-5fa9-a3dc-de779331deac)
It was Christmas time – our second Christmas on the farm – about eighteen months or so after we arrived at Cooper’s Station. For lunch on Christmas Day, Piggy Bacon and Mrs Piggy sat at opposite ends of our long trestle table and ate with us. We’d had the day off – in all we were given three days off in the year: Piggy Bacon’s birthday, Easter Sunday and Christmas Day. The morning had been all carols and prayers, and of course sermons too, just like a normal Sunday, except that I liked the carols a lot better than some of the dreary hymns we usually sang. We had sausages and mashed potatoes and gravy, and then jam roly-poly and custard afterwards, and all the lemonade we wanted. The best feast of my childhood; I’ve never forgotten it. With Piggy and Mrs Piggy there we none of us of said a word, of course, none of us dared. But I don’t think any one of us wanted to talk much anyway – we were all far too busy eating our fantastic feast to have any time at all for conversation. We were savouring every mouthful. Ever since that Christmas Day I’ve always loved sausages.
It happened after the meal. As usual one of us had to stand up and say grace, not just before but after each meal as well. It happened to be my turn that day, and Piggy Bacon made me say it all over again because I’d mumbled it. “Say it loud to the Lord,” he told me, “and he will hear you.” So I did. Then he stood up himself, cleared his throat and announced that they had decided to give us each a Christmas present, “A gift from the Lord,” he said, a gift that we could keep with us and treasure all our lives. Then he showed us what it was. Dangling there from his forefinger on a piece of cord was a small wooden cross. “From now on every one of you will wear this every day.
This is the badge of Jesus and you will wear it with pride,” he said.
One by one we were summoned up to receive our present. He hung a cross around each of our necks. We said thank you, shook his hand and went to sit down again. Except for the thank yous the whole ceremony was conducted in an awkward silence. Mrs Piggy, who was standing meekly at his side with a bunch of crosses hanging from her wrist, handed a cross to him as each of us came up. I noticed she kissed each one before she gave it to him. Then I was called up. I was standing there waiting for my cross, looking up into Piggy Bacon’s face, when suddenly his whole expression altered. “What’s this?” he roared, and lunging forward he grabbed my key from around my neck and with one violent pull jerked it off.
“That’s mine,” I cried, reaching out to grab it back. He held it out of my reach, examining it, puzzling over it.
“A key? What for? A key to what?”
“It’s my lucky key,” I told him. “Kitty gave it to me, my sister in England.”
“Luck!” Piggy Bacon thundered. “Luck is magic, and all magic is the devil’s work. There is no such thing as luck. It is God who makes all things happen, in this life and afterwards too.” I kept trying to jump up and snatch it from him, but he was still holding it too high. “It’s a lucky charm, which is devil’s magic, witchcraft, mumbo jumbo. You will wear a cross or nothing at all.”
“Then,” I said, surprised at my own sudden courage, “then I won’t wear anything at all.” And I turned and walked away. He strapped me that evening of course, and afterwards I had to bend my head in front of him as he put the cross around my neck. He said that if he ever saw me not wearing it, he’d strap me again. “What about my key?” I asked him.
“I’ve thrown it out,” he said. “It’s where all witchcraft belongs, in the rubbish.”
That night I cried myself to sleep. Neither Wes nor Marty could comfort me. My precious key was gone, gone for ever, and I felt utterly alone in the world without it, like my last roots had been ripped out. As I lay there that night in the darkness I had murder in my heart. And I don’t just mean I hated Piggy Bacon. I mean I really wanted to kill him. I might well have done it too. I had found the courage now – revenge and fury gives you powerful courage – but I just couldn’t think how to do it. I had no idea how I could murder him, not yet, but I was determined to find some way to do it and do it soon. Luckily for him, luckily for me too, it didn’t come to that. Luck intervened, or fate, or circumstance, call it what you like, and when it came, it came from a most welcome and unexpected source.
When I’d first come to Cooper’s Station I’d been terrified of snakes, and of spiders in particular. Every day we’d see all manner of strange and wonderful creatures out on the farm, from wallabies to wombats. But it was spiders and snakes I looked out for. We’d see them everywhere, snakes curled up under the dormitory block or slithering along between the boulders down by the creek. Spiders, we discovered, loved the toilet, which was a shed with a corrugated iron roof built on to the side of the dormitory block. It was baking hot in there and stank to high heaven, but it was the spiders I hated, the spiders I feared. I feared them so much that I tried not to go to the toilet. Whenever I could I would try to go outside to do my business. Sometimes though, I was in a hurry and the toilet was nearby and I’d risk it. But I’d do it quickly, as quickly as I could, trying not to breathe in, and trying not to look for spiders.
They say you never see the bullet that gets you. It’s the same with spiders. I was told later it was a redback spider. I was sitting there on the toilet. It happened when I stood up. I was pulling up my shorts and I felt it bite my foot, felt the stabbing surging pain of it, saw it scurrying away. I screamed then and ran out. I remember stumbling to my knees and Mrs Piggy running towards me.
I’ve no idea how long I lay in bed. Marty told me later that they all thought I was going to die. I do remember realising I wasn’t in my own bed, that there were curtains and pictures on the wall, and a big cupboard. I remember too Mrs Piggy coming in and sitting with me, and I felt hot and heavy all over as if I was weighted down somehow. And once when she came she wasn’t alone. She had an Aboriginal man with her, a bushman with white hair, and he looked into my eyes and felt my face and gave me a medicine to take and laid some kind of a poultice on my foot. The medicine tasted so bitter I could barely swallow it. But whatever it was that he put on my foot cooled it wonderfully.
As I got better Mrs Piggy would sit beside me playing her squeezy box and I loved that. All these memories may well not be memories at all. It was Mrs Piggy who told me afterwards when I was better, when I thanked her for looking after me, that it wasn’t her that had cured me at all,but a “black fellow” she’d called in. He’d saved my life, she said, not her. “And don’t say a word to Mr Bacon,” she said. “He wouldn’t like it. He doesn’t believe in their magic. But I do. There’s room for all sorts of magic and miracles in this world – that’s what I think.”
I’d spent the best part of a month in my sick bed in the farmhouse, so Marty told me later. He said that both Wes and he had agreed it would be almost worth a spider bite or a snake bite if it got you a month’s holiday in the farmhouse. I told them everything, about how well I’d been fed and looked after, about Mrs Piggy nursing me and how kind she’d been, and all about the bushman who’d saved my life with his magical medicine. And I told them too about the last thing Mrs Piggy had done the morning I was to leave the farmhouse. She came up to my room. I was sitting on the bed buttoning my shirt.
“Here,” she said. “This is yours, I think.” And she handed me a tiny box, like a pill box. I opened it, and there was my key lying in a bed of cotton wool. “Hide it,” she told me. “And hide it well.” She said nothing more, and was gone out of the room before I could even thank her.
I never referred to her after that as Mrs Piggy, nor did anyone else because very soon everyone knew how good a person she really was, how she’d found my key, looked after it, and given it back to me. She was Ida after that, Ida to all of us. We all knew from then on that we had in her a true friend, but we didn’t know just how good a friend, just how important a friend she was to be to us. We had many more gruelling months to endure before we were to find that out. And now I had my key back I forgot all about killing Piggy Bacon. So I suppose you could say Ida didn’t just save my life, she saved his. Much good did it do her.
As for my key, I did as Ida had told me, I hid it well. But I kept it close too. Right above my bed there was a window, and above it a wooden lintel with a narrow split at one end, but it was just wide enough. I pushed my key in deep, so it couldn’t be seen, making quite sure Piggy could never find it, and left it there. But it never left my thoughts. Every night before I got into bed I’d look up at my secret place. I told Marty – no one else.
“Only One Way Out” (#ulink_1e64e8a4-9dc2-5b0b-b4dd-77ce0248f13f)
We could see it happening right in front of our eyes, every day, every night. And we didn’t do nearly enough to prevent it. There’s a lot in my life I regret, a lot to feel guilty about – too much. But I don’t think anything troubles me more than what happened to Wes Snarkey at Cooper’s Station. I still have dreams about it, and about him, all these years later. I should have seen it coming. I should have had the courage to stand beside him, but I didn’t. Nor did Marty, and nor did any of us, except Ida. At least Ida tried.
It all went back, I’m sure, to that glorious day when Wes knocked Piggy Bacon down in the yard, then sat on him and clobbered him. Wes became our hero that day, but he also replaced Marty as Piggy’s favourite victim. He would bawl him out all the time, pick on him at every opportunity. Wes found himself chosen for the worst jobs, the ones we all dreaded, the dirtiest, the heaviest, the smelliest: cleaning out the latrine, digging ditches, carting stones. And Piggy was as clever about it as he was vicious. He knew how Wes loved to work near Big Black Jack in the stables. Everyone knew it. Wes had made no secret of his love for the horse, so Piggy deliberately saw to it that he was never anywhere near his paddock or the stable. And he made sure as well that Wes worked mainly on his own. He deliberately set out to isolate him from the rest of us.
Hardly a day went by when Wes wasn’t hauled out in front of all of us at evening punishment parade. Sometimes Piggy would just bellow at him. Sometimes he would take the strap to him and give him a hiding. He’d always find some excuse, any excuse to punish him. We could all see Wes was getting it a lot harder then the rest of us. And Piggy was enjoying it too – I saw it in his face. When he whacked Wes it was always done with more venom, more violence. Thinking back, I’m ashamed to say there was even a sense in which I felt a little relieved because while Wes was on the receiving end, then at least I wasn’t.
Wes grew in stature in our eyes with every whack of Piggy’s belt. He never once flinched, never once complained, and so far as we knew he never even cried. For long weeks and months, it was his resistance and his defiance in the face of our hated enemy that kept us going and gave us all hope. I longed for the day that he’d have a go at Piggy again. I was sure he would. I thought, and Marty did too, that Wes was just biding his time, picking the right moment.
Then I began to notice that Wes was becoming more and more silent, more withdrawn, even with Marty and me, and we were his best friends. It happened slowly, so slowly that it was difficult at first to believe it was really happening. To start with I thought it was just because he was never allowed to be in the same working party as Marty and me, so we were simply seeing less of him. He often wasn’t with us during playtime either – Piggy regularly made him work on longer than the rest of us. And even when we were together, in the dormitory, Wes seemed to be shutting himself off from us. We’d been a threesome, all pals together, but now however much Marty and I tried to include him – and we did – we could both feel him slipping away from us and turning in on himself.
In time he became almost a stranger to us, a loner, just as he’d been before during those first months at Cooper’s Station. We wanted him to be one of us again because we liked him, and also because we admired him for how he was facing down the loathsome Piggy Bacon, and humiliating him every day on our behalf. I thought maybe he was dealing with it in his own way, bearing it stoically and in silence. I thought he could take it. I was wrong.
One morning Wes wouldn’t get up for roll call. He lay in his bed and wouldn’t move. Marty and I tried to persuade him, but he ignored us. He just turned his face away from us. We knew what would happen. Later after roll call, we were all standing out there in the cold of dawn, listening to Piggy inside the dormitory doing his worst. We heard him whacking Wes, yelling at him. “You asked for it, you little devil! I’ll teach you. If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll teach you. No work, no food. See how you like that!” Every phrase was punctuated by the swish and whack of his stick. He was giving Wes a real pasting, and to our shame we just stood there and let it happen.
Then we heard Wes talking back, a steely calm in his voice. “I won’t work for you, not ever again. And I won’t eat your rotten food either. You can keep it.” Moments later Piggy came storming out of the dormitory hut on to the verandah. He stood there surveying us all breathlessly, his face a beacon of rage.
For days Wes lay there refusing to get up, and every morning Piggy would go in and beat him, and every day he stopped his food too. To begin with Marty and I tried to squirrel away something for him, bread crusts perhaps. But Wes just shook his head. He wouldn’t touch anything. He told us we shouldn’t do it because we’d only get into trouble ourselves. And anyway, he said, there was no point, because he meant what he’d said: he wouldn’t touch Piggy’s food, even if it came secretly from us. He would stay on hunger strike, he said, until Piggy Bacon treated us properly and stopped beating us. He would drink water though. So we’d bring him that as often as we could. We kept bringing food too but it was no use. He’d made up his mind, he said, and nothing would change it. He would sometimes smile at us, but weakly now as if we were kind strangers.
He would say very little, and as he weakened he said less and less. But he did say something one evening when we were all three there together, Marty and I sitting on his bed. He said, and I’ve never forgotten his words: “You know what I think. I think there’s only one way out of this place, and I’ve found it.” Marty asked him what he meant, but he wouldn’t say. We both of us tried again and again to talk him out of his hunger strike, but he was dead set on it. He wouldn’t listen. I know now we should have tried harder. We should have tried much harder.
“Did We Have the Children Here for This?” (#ulink_b0138935-30a5-5582-a285-29ea27a858c9)
In the end we went to the only person we thought might help. We went to the farmhouse to see Ida. We told her everything: how Wes was beaten each morning, how he was on hunger strike, how he could die if something wasn’t done soon. Even while she was listening to us, she was looking around nervously. I could tell she just wanted us gone. And I could tell too that she already knew everything we’d been telling her. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said when we’d finished. “Go now, go quickly, before someone sees you. I’ll see what I can do.” And she closed the door and went back inside, leaving us standing there. I told Marty that I was sure she’d find a way to help Wes somehow.
“She’d better,” he said, “or else he’ll be a gonner, that’s for sure.”
That same night after lock-up, Ida came to the dormitory. It was the first time she’d ever come inside at night. We heard the door unlock, saw the dancing light of her torch. All of us expected it to be Piggy Bacon on one of his occasional late-night patrols so we lay doggo, feigning sleep. “I’ve come to see Wes,” she whispered. “Which bed?”
When we heard who it was we all sat up. I took her there and showed her. She sat down on his bed and tried to talk to him. Wes didn’t respond at all, not at first. He wouldn’t even turn over and look at her. Everyone was there by now, gathered round his bed.
Ida put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ve brought you some cakes, Wes, and some milk,” she said. “Please, you must eat.” And she opened up the cake tin on her lap. “I’ve put a cherry on each one for you. You’ll like them.” Wes turned over then and looked up at her.
“I can’t,” he said. “If I eat, he’ll make me work. And I won’t work for him. Never again. Not ever.”
She tried. For an hour or more she did all she could to tempt him, to persuade him. She told him that God helped those who helped themselves, how she understood his suffering. “And I know that God does too,” she said, “because he has told me so. I prayed. I asked him what to do, and he said I must come to you and feed you. God loves us all, Wes. In our suffering, we must always remember that.”
But no amount of gentle persuasion would change his mind. Even her tears didn’t seem to move him. We could hear the tears in her voice as she pleaded with him, smoothing his hair all the while. Nothing she said or did made any difference. In the end she simply had to give up, just as we had before her.
We had often heard the sound of fury from the farmhouse late at night, but until now it had always been a one-sided battle, with only Piggy Bacon’s voice raging and roaring, then afterwards the sound of Ida sobbing and the dog whining. This time there were two voices raised, hers as loud and as angry as his. For the first time, Ida was giving as good as she got. We could hear her every word. “The boy will die!” she cried. “Do you want that? Did we have these children here for this?” I wasn’t the only one who felt like cheering her on.
“All children are sinful, born sinful,” Piggy railed back, “and these are more sinful than most. My task is to cleanse them of sin, to prepare them for heaven. I won’t spare the rod, because it is the only way they will learn. And the boy has to learn who is master here.”
“I thought Jesus was master here,” she argued. “Or did you forget that? You punish the boy only out of pride, and you know it.” And so it went on. Sadly though, it ended as it so often ended, with the sound of smashing crockery, of blows, and Ida’s sharp cries of pain and the dog yelping and whining. We knew Piggy was kicking him. Then silence, and sobbing.
Marty began the chorus, and raised to sudden courage we all joined in: “For she’s a jolly good fellow, for she’s a jolly good fellow, for she’s a jolly good fellow, and so say all of us.” We sang it out loud, again and again, at the top of our voices to be sure that Piggy could hear us. He heard all right. He came out of the farmhouse and bellowed at us to stop or he’d come over and whip the lot of us. So, cowed once more, we stopped. I felt even then that our silence was a betrayal. The shame of betrayal is something that never leaves you.
All of us knew that Ida had done battle for Wes and for all of us that night. None of us knew that although she may have lost the battle, she had not yet given up the fight. Wes didn’t know it either, of course, which is why, I suspect, he decided to do what he did.
He disappeared the next morning, but he didn’t go alone. We came back from work for our soup and bread at lunchtime as usual, and found his bed was empty. I immediately supposed that maybe Ida had come over and taken him back to the farmhouse to nurse him and look after him. So I ran over and found her at the back, digging in her vegetable garden. She hadn’t seen him, she said. She left her digging and joined in the search. Everyone was looking for him now, including Piggy Bacon, who was stomping about the farm, shouting at us to look here and look there, and ranting on about how, if Wes had run off, he was going to find him and thrash the living daylights out of him. Then he discovered, or someone did, that Big Black Jack was missing too. Now he went really berserk, volcanic. I’ve never seen anger like it. This man of God let out a seemingly inexhaustible explosion of expletives, spat and spewed them out, all the swear words he must have been bottling up inside himself all his life.
It was quite a show, and we loved it, every moment of it. We kept our distance, of course, each of us secretly savouring the futility of his fury, celebrating his impotence. Wes had done it. He’d escaped. This was what he had been talking about to Marty and me that night on his bed, this was his “only way out”. Wes had gone walkabout with Big Black Jack, and he wasn’t coming back. We were all willing him to make it. I think that maybe I even prayed for it.
Piggy went after him of course. He rode out on one of the other horses, and we scanned the horizon all day hoping he wouldn’t come back with Wes, but fearing the worst all the time. That evening we looked out of the windows of the dormitory hut and saw Piggy come riding in, slumped in his saddle, his face covered in dust, his lips cracked – and he was alone. He hadn’t found him. Wes was still on the run. We all jumped up and down in the dormitory, clapping one another on the back, ecstatic in our triumph, not just because Wes had succeeded yet again in humbling Piggy Bacon, but also because we all of us suddenly believed that where Wes could go, we could go too. One day, somehow, we could do the same.
There was another raging row that night in the farmhouse, with Piggy calling Wes “a stinking, ungrateful little horse thief”. And we heard Ida standing up to him again.
“What did you expect, treating him like you did?”
It cheered our hearts to hear her fighting back, and our response was quite spontaneous. We burst into another chorus of For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow, and this time Piggy didn’t come out to silence us. We had silenced him. Our triumph was complete, we thought. But then we heard the dingo dogs calling. We’d heard them often enough before at Cooper’s Station, seen them loping about in the distance, seen one or two lying dead out in the paddock, shot by Piggy Bacon, and left there he told us as a warning to the others. We were used enough to dingoes by now. But on this night their cries struck a terrible fear in my heart. It was an omen of something, I was sure of it.
Next morning we’d had roll call and breakfast, and were just about to go out to work when we saw Big Black Jack. He was a long way off, but it was definitely him. He wasn’t alone. There were a dozen or more bushmen alongside him.
With sinking hearts we looked for Wes. It wasn’t until they came close that we saw him. One of the bushmen was carrying him in his arms. But Wes wasn’t clinging on round his neck. His arms were hanging down. He was limp, and I knew at once he was lifeless.
“Just Watch Me” (#ulink_ccc962d4-f2af-5cd9-bb64-c9db223b915c)
I’ve seen several dead people in my lifetime, but Wes Snarkey was the first. You don’t forget the first. I thought I’d be frightened to look at him, but when it came to it, I wasn’t. He was laid out on the long trestle table in the middle of our dormitory, and we stood all around in silence gazing down at him. When I first saw him I was too angry to be sad, and I was angry for all the wrong reasons. I was angry because Wes hadn’t made it, angry that he’d ended our dream this way, taken away all the hope we’d vested in him. I wasn’t angry at Piggy Bacon, not yet.
Someone began to whimper then, a stifled sobbing that soon spread among us all. Tears seemed to fill my entire head. One by one, unable to bear it any longer, they turned away and went outside, until Marty and I were left alone with Wes. Death, I discovered that day, is not frightening, because it is utterly still. And it is still because death, when it comes, is always over. There’s only terror in it if you fear it, and ever since my first death, Wes’ death, I have never feared it. It is simply the end of a story, and if you’ve loved the story then it is sad. And sometimes, as it was with Wes, it is an agony of sadness.
Wes did not look as if he was asleep. He did not look at peace. He was too still for that, and too pale. He was somehow smaller too, I remember that. He was cold when I touched his hand. There was a bruise on the side of his face, and cuts too. My thoughts turned then to Piggy Bacon, who we all knew had killed Wes as surely as if he had put a bullet in him. Beside me Marty echoed the hatred now burning in my heart. “Bastard!” he said, almost whispering it at first. Then he was shouting it out loud: “Bastard! Bastard!” And that was the moment we saw Piggy Bacon standing at the door of the hut. Marty looked him straight in the eye and said it again, as good as spat it at him. “Bastard!”
Piggy seemed too stunned to hear him. He was staring down at Wes.
“Happy now?” said Marty.
This time Piggy Bacon did take in what Marty had said. I saw vengeance in his eyes, and I knew then Marty would be his next target. Ida came hurrying in then, and saw Wes lying there. For a few moments she stood there motionless, her whole face frozen. Then she walked towards the table, bent over, and kissed Wes on the forehead. She picked up his hands and arranged them, one on top of the other, and touched his bruised cheek tenderly with the back of her hand. She straightened up then, looked long and hard at Piggy Bacon, then pushed past him and went out of the door.
A doctor came, the police came. More cars up and down the farm track that day than I’d seen in all my time at Cooper’s Station. They carried Wes out on a stretcher, a blanket covering him, and put him in the back of an ambulance. We stood there watching the ambulance until it disappeared in a cloud of its own dust. That was the last we ever saw of Wes Snarkey. To this day I don’t know where they buried him. The bushmen stayed all that day until dusk, gathered down by the creek, crouching there unmoving, their own kind of vigil.
Ida told us later how the doctors thought Wes had died. He’d broken his neck. She thought he must have been too weak to sit on the horse through the heat of the day, that he’d probably lost consciousness and fallen off. He wouldn’t have suffered, she said. It would all have been very quick. Questions were asked afterwards. Lots of official-looking people in suits and dog collars and hats came and went, in and out of the farmhouse. One or two even came over to inspect our dormitory block, and to watch us at work out on the farm. Not one of them ever talked to us. They just looked at us and made notes.
For us Wes’ death changed absolutely nothing, except that we had lost our hero, and without him felt more vulnerable than ever. Piggy Bacon strutted about the place as usual, as if nothing had happened. He mentioned Wes’ death only once, used it during one of his Sunday sermons. It was a favourite sermon of his, about the Ten Commandments. One Sunday he added this, to make his point: “I want you all to remember,” he said, “that the last thing that boy ever did was to steal a horse, my horse. And look what happened to him. It was his fault, no one else’s. He’s only got himself to blame. ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ Disobey the Ten Commandments, and that’s what happens to you. Let it be a lesson to you, a lesson you’ll never forget.”
In the days and weeks after Wes died, we saw almost nothing of Ida. She’d bring us our food, but she’d never say anything, not a word. She’d never once look at us. We never saw her out on the farm either. She didn’t even appear at Piggy’s side any more at Sunday services. So we had to sing our hymns unaccompanied – no squeezy box to lead us, just Piggy Bacon’s trumpeting, tuneless voice. We did see her occasionally hanging out her washing on the line, and sometimes in the evening sitting alone out on the verandah of the farmhouse, her dog at her feet. But even then she seemed not to be noticing what was going on around her any more. If ever I spoke to her, she wouldn’t answer me. She’d simply stare straight ahead of her as if she hadn’t heard me at all. It was almost as if she was in a kind of trance. She must have been like it inside the house, too, because there were no more rows, and she played no more music on her squeezy box.
*
Ida chose a Sunday to do it. We were all standing out in the heat in front of the dormitory, Piggy up there in the shade of the verandah in his preacher’s black suit, clutching his Bible. We were singing What a friend we have in Jesus again.
We noticed her before he did. She was telling her dog to stay where he was. He sat down, then lay down, his head on his paws. She came down the steps of the farmhouse in her apron, striding purposefully towards us – not at all how she usually walked. And she was carrying a shotgun. Suddenly no one was singing any more. Ida was standing right beside me now, and she was pointing the shotgun, levelling it at Piggy Bacon’s chest.
“Children, go inside and collect your things,” she said, and she said it without once taking her eyes off Piggy Bacon’s face. “Quickly now, children. Quickly now.” We were rooted to the spot. Not one of us moved. But Piggy did. He made to come towards her, to step down off the verandah. Ida’s voice was ice-cold. “Don’t think I won’t use this if I have to,” she said. And then to us, “Hurry children. Bring everything you need. You won’t be coming back.”
