Joe Wilson and His Mates [38]
--
The eldest girl at home was nine or ten, with a little old face
and lines across her forehead: she had an older expression than her mother.
Tommy went to Queensland, as I told you. The eldest son at home,
Bill (older than Tommy), was `a bit wild.'
I've passed the place in smothering hot mornings in December,
when the droppings about the cow-yard had crumpled to dust
that rose in the warm, sickly, sunrise wind, and seen that woman at work
in the cow-yard, `bailing up' and leg-roping cows, milking,
or hauling at a rope round the neck of a half-grown calf
that was too strong for her (and she was tough as fencing-wire),
or humping great buckets of sour milk to the pigs or the `poddies'
(hand-fed calves) in the pen. I'd get off the horse and give her
a hand sometimes with a young steer, or a cranky old cow
that wouldn't `bail-up' and threatened her with her horns. She'd say --
`Thenk yer, Mr Wilson. Do yer think we're ever goin' to have any rain?'
I've ridden past the place on bitter black rainy mornings in June or July,
and seen her trudging about the yard -- that was ankle-deep
in black liquid filth -- with an old pair of Blucher boots on,
and an old coat of her husband's, or maybe a three-bushel bag
over her shoulders. I've seen her climbing on the roof
by means of the water-cask at the corner, and trying to stop a leak
by shoving a piece of tin in under the bark. And when I'd fixed the leak --
`Thenk yer, Mr Wilson. This drop of rain's a blessin'!
Come in and have a dry at the fire and I'll make yer a cup of tea.'
And, if I was in a hurry, `Come in, man alive! Come in!
and dry yerself a bit till the rain holds up. Yer can't go home like this!
Yer'll git yer death o' cold.'
I've even seen her, in the terrible drought, climbing she-oaks and apple-trees
by a makeshift ladder, and awkwardly lopping off boughs
to feed the starving cattle.
`Jist tryin' ter keep the milkers alive till the rain comes.'
They said that when the pleuro-pneumonia was in the district
and amongst her cattle she bled and physicked them herself,
and fed those that were down with slices of half-ripe pumpkins
(from a crop that had failed).
`An', one day,' she told Mary, `there was a big barren heifer
(that we called Queen Elizabeth) that was down with the ploorer.
She'd been down for four days and hadn't moved, when one mornin'
I dumped some wheaten chaff -- we had a few bags that Spicer brought home --
I dumped it in front of her nose, an' -- would yer b'lieve me, Mrs Wilson? --
she stumbled onter her feet an' chased me all the way to the house!
I had to pick up me skirts an' run! Wasn't it redic'lus?'
They had a sense of the ridiculous, most of those poor sun-dried Bushwomen.
I fancy that that helped save them from madness.
`We lost nearly all our milkers,' she told Mary. `I remember one day
Tommy came running to the house and screamed: `Marther! [mother]
there's another milker down with the ploorer!' Jist as if it was great news.
Well, Mrs Wilson, I was dead-beat, an' I giv' in. I jist sat down
to have a good cry, and felt for my han'kerchief -- it WAS
a rag of a han'kerchief, full of holes (all me others was in the wash).
Without seein' what I was doin' I put me finger through one hole
in the han'kerchief an' me thumb through the other, and poked me fingers
into me eyes, instead of wipin' them. Then I had to laugh.'
There's a story that once, when the Bush, or rather grass, fires were out
all along the creek on Spicer's side, Wall's station hands
were up above our place, trying to keep the fire back from the boundary,
and towards evening one of the men happened to think of the Spicers:
they saw smoke down that way. Spicer was away from home,
and they had a small crop of wheat, nearly ripe, on the selection.
`My God! that poor devil of a woman will be burnt out, if she ain't already!'
shouted young Billy Wall. `Come along, three or four of you chaps' --
(it was shearing-time, and there were plenty of men on the station).
They raced down the creek