Old Drumble (4 page)

Harry Jitters was coming out of his gate, and Minnie Mitchell was coming out of hers. As their mouths opened, Jack whistled, not a high, loud whistle like Andy’s, but still a whistle. He pointed to the side of the road, and an invisible handy dog ran to turn back several ewes. Jack whistled again, so the invisible dog barked noisily and drove them straight on up Ward Street.

“Better close your gates, unless you want sheep all through your garden!” Jack didn’t look at Minnie and Harry, but heard their gates slam shut.

“Townies!” Dancing between sheep muck like black currants scattered all over the road, whistling and waving and working his dogs. Jack drove his mob all the way back home—to the top end of Ward Street—and left them across by the hall, where they had something to eat, and his handy dog would hold them.

“Next time Andy brings a mob through, he says I can watch Old Drumble put them round the church corner and turn them right on to the main road,” Jack told his mother. “And the cup of tea was a life-saver, and I was to tell you he said your ginger-nuts are in a class of their own. Can I go down the church corner next time? Mum? Can I go down the church corner next time, Mum? Andy said I could. Mum?”

“Just look at those feet. You wash them under the outside tap before you even think of taking a step on my clean lino. This instant!”

“Oh, Mum!”

“Will you get out of my kitchen with your never-ending chatter and questions? And smart about it, or I’ll take the broom to you. We’ll see when the time comes. And once you’ve washed those feet, you can make yourself useful and chop me some kindling for the morning.”

“Gee, thanks, Mum!” Jack said.

“I haven’t said a word about the church corner. Don’t go thinking just because you’ve been allowed to go as far as the bottom of the street this once, that you can do it again. Out you go. Out. This moment!”

His mother banged the back door behind him, but Jack grinned. He scrubbed his feet, his legs, even his knees, under the outside tap. He lapped up a gutsful of water, barked twice, and made sure he didn’t leave the
tap dripping. And he chopped enough kindling to last his mother the rest of the week.

His mother heard his barks, then the sound of the tomahawk. She looked out the kitchen window and smiled. “I know what you’re up to, my boy!” she murmured. “Think you’re one jump ahead of your mother, do you? Well, you’ve got another think coming.”

N
EXT TIME
A
NDY THE
D
ROVER
came through Ward Street, it was from the northern end, and he was riding Nosy and running a Jersey bull up to the Matamata saleyards. The bull had a couple of steers for company, and Old Drumble, Old Nell, and Young Nugget kept them on the trot along Ward Street. Nobody wanted any trouble from a Jersey bull, so voices yelled from backyard to backyard, “There’s a bull coming! Is your front gate closed? Peter, run and close Mrs Harris’s gate.” Harry Jitters and Minnie Mitchell hid as the bull rolled by.

Jack Jackman was in the bamboo patch along the road, cutting himself a pea shooter, so he didn’t even know Andy had come through. His mother said she’d caught a glimpse of them, that was all.

“He’ll let them have a blow when he gets them past the last houses and on to the stock road up to Matamata.

“I’m surprised you didn’t hear them: what with Andy
cracking his whip, and his dogs barking, they made a hullabaloo, enough to raise the dead. Just as well, too, because I saw Mrs Dainty bolt back in her gate till they’d gone past. She’s been terrified of bulls ever since Mr Lewis’s broke through her fence, knocked down her clothes-line, and ran halfway out to the Kaimais with her nightie flapping on its horns.”

It was several days before Andy’s stained old hat came bobbing past the kitchen window. Jack’s mother was expecting him and had the teapot filled, the plateful of ginger-nuts on the table, and the cups, the milk, and the sugar set out and waiting before he could poke his head in the back door.

Jack wanted to run to where the mob was feeding, past the hall, and have a word with Old Drumble, but he tore out, patted Nosy, waved to Old Drumble, and tore back inside again so he wouldn’t miss anything. Besides, he had something he wanted to remind his mother about.

In the kitchen, Andy was taking a cylindrical bundle of tightly tied tea-tree brush out of his sugarbag, and undoing it. The bundle unrolled, opened, and there—lying in a green bed of watercress—was a smoked rainbow trout which had been kept airy and fresh, yet protected from flies by the mesh of twigs and tiny leaves.
Jack sniffed at the rich smell of tea-tree and smoked trout and felt his mouth fill with dribble.

“From Mrs Henry,” said Andy, and drank his tea. “Her husband caught a couple of good fish away up in the head of that little stream, the Waimakariri, the other side of Tirau.

“It was all I could do not to eat it, walking along and sniffing the smell of smoked trout,” he told Jack. “And Old Drumble, he kept dropping back and glancing up at the pikau. He knew what was in it.”

“Does Old Drumble like trout?”

“Like trout? If he had his way, he’d spend all day fishing for them, all night smoking them, and all the next day eating them.

“Of course, he’s not a dry fly man, Old Drumble. I’ve told him there’s more satisfaction fishing upstream, but there’s no talking to the old coot when he’s got a rod in his hand. He’s so keen to catch a fish and smoke it, he doesn’t hear a word you say. Besides, he reckons he gets more fun out of a wet fly, and I’ve got to admit, he catches more fish than I do.”

“Has he got a rod?” Jack asked.

“An old split cane rod of mine that I give him for a birthday present,” said Andy. “And I make sure he buys a licence each year. He got caught fishing without one, when he was just a pup, and the ranger took him to court, dragged him up in front of the beak. His lawyer pleaded
his youthfulness, but the magistrate said there was too much poaching going on, and Young Drumble had to cough up thirty bob.”

“Did he pay the fine?”

“Where was a young dog going to get thirty bob from? Young Drumble didn’t have two pennies to rub together, so the magistrate put him in the hinaki for a week. It taught him a lesson he’s never forgotten. Old Drumble doesn’t like being reminded of his time as a gaolbird, so I wouldn’t go saying anything about it to him, not if I was you, Jack.”

Mrs Jackman turned from hanging the smoked trout from a cuphook in the safe. “That’s such a lovely fish, Andy! We’ll have it for our tea, with a fresh lettuce out of the garden. When you’re coming back through Waharoa, I’ll give you some marmalade for Mrs Henry.”

Jack said nothing about Old Drumble’s fishing, because he knew his mother wouldn’t like it, specially not the bit about him going to gaol. He listened to Andy and Mum talking about how Mr Gaunt’s hay was doing, and how good the Arnolds’ big macrocarpa hedge was looking.

“Time was,” Andy said, “when every farm in the province had one along their road frontage. They used to say a macrocarpa hedge needs a whole family of boys to keep it in shape. That’s why a lot of them got out of hand during the Great War. Then families got smaller, and there weren’t the boys to do the clipping, so the cockies
started pulling them out. Let a macrocarpa hedge get away on you, and you can’t cut it back without getting those dead bits here and there that spoil the look.

“Mrs Charlie Ryan says to tell you her big hydrangea just up and died without warning—I think she’d like a cutting off that blue one of yours; and she said that Eileen MacLean’s getting on fine at Hinuera School. She straightened out those Tulloch scamps her first week, and hasn’t had a peep out of them since.”

As Andy loaded his sugarbag with bread and cakes and biscuits, and a jar of marmalade for old Mrs Gray, Jack said to his mother, “Can I go down to the church corner with Andy?”

“What’s this?”

“You promised, Mum!”

“I did nothing of the sort!”

“Aw!”

“Oh, well, I suppose you can go. But just as far as the church corner, and not a step further. No going out on the main road. And straight home. No stopping to play down the other end of Ward Street. You make sure you send him straight home, Andy.”

Before his mother had finished, before Andy could hide his amazing skull under his hat, Jack was streaking across the hall corner to help Old Drumble lead the sheep over the Turangaomoana road and down Ward Street.

As he fell to the back of the mob and walked beside
Andy and Nosy, Jack said, “I didn’t say anything to Old Drumble about being a gaolbird.” Andy nodded.

“It must be a long time ago now,” said Jack. “Do you think he still remembers?”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Andy, “that dog’s got a better memory than most people.”

“Really?”

Andy nodded. “Old Drumble’s got what you call a photographic memory. He could have had a career as a detective. Never forgets a face.

“Years ago, I was taking a mob of steers through the back road, out Okauia, taking them to Old Man Parson’s place. Hot day, dry dirt road: a man was eating dust. Just before the bridge, Nosy shies a bit, to let me know there’s something going on, and I looks down and sees this swagger lying back with his bare feet in the creek: smoke drifting up from the embers where he’s boiled his billy, hat pulled over his face, having forty winks. I looks at the cool water and thinks to myself: ‘I wouldn’t mind swapping places with you, mate,’ but just then Old Drumble comes padding up beside me and tries to catch me eye.

“I don’t take any notice of Old Drumble, just watch that none of them cattle try to shoot off down the side of the bridge—it’s a favourite trick of theirs. They know you’ve got to send a dog after them, then they get themselves penned into a corner, and you finish up going
down yourself and working them out and up on to the road again. And then, nine times out of ten, they take off up the road the way you’ve just come, and you’ve got to send somebody to turn them back.

“Well, Old Drumble gives a bit of a whine. Next thing he jumps down, takes the swagger by the shoulder, gives him a good shake, and wakes him with a bark fair in the earhole. It must have been enough to wake the dead.”

“Enough to wake the dead,” Jack thought to himself and wondered what on earth Andy meant.

“W
AS THE SWAGGER DEAD
?” asked Jack. “Is that why Old Drumble barked in his earhole?”

Andy shook his head. “Not on your Nelly! He was just out the monk, having a moe, but he comes to pretty smartly with that thundering bark in his ear.

“He reaches out for his hat that Old Drumble had sent flying with a wag of his tail, jumps to his feet, and looks straight up into me eyes where a man’s standing on the sill of the bridge, looking down at him.

“‘Andy!’ the swagger calls up to me. ‘It’s been a few years since I seen you, and I reckon your old dog knows me better than you do.’

“It’s only then that I recognise him—Old Tuppenny Bill who used to do a bit of post-splitting over Putaruru way.

“‘G’day, Tuppenny!’ I says to him, and he says again, ‘You wouldn’t have known me but for Old Drumble.’

“Anyway,” Andy said to Jack, “Tuppenny Bill puts his hat back on, kicks his fire together and swings the billy.
The cattle graze along the side of the road, and we have a brew and yarn about old times.

“‘Last time I heard of you,’ I says to Tuppenny Bill, ‘somebody told me you’d had a run-in with the Rawleighs Man up Putaruru.’

“‘It’s true,’ says Tuppenny Bill. “‘Me old woman give me a hiding, and run away with the Rawleighs Man. I was that pleased to see the back of her, and I hadn’t had so much as a day off from the post-splitting for years, so I thought of going on the swag. Just for a change, like. It’s been a bit of all right, too.

“‘Mind you,’ Old Tuppenny says to me, ‘there hasn’t been much rain this season, so a man’s slept pretty comfy. It’s not a bad life, you know, on the swag!’

“ ‘Not a bad life on the swag!’” Andy repeated to Jack. “‘Sleeping comfy!’ I knew Tuppenny Bill was on the swag because he didn’t have any work. He’d lost his contract post-splitting ’cause he hit the turps when his wife ran off, but he wasn’t going to say so. A man’s got his pride after all.

“Moving round the country as I do, I’d heard of a job going on an orchard near Gate Pa, over at Tauranga, and I put old Tuppenny Bill on to it.

“He hoofed it over the Kaimais, got the job, and he’s been there ever since; matter of fact, he finished up marrying the widow who owned the orchard. So he come out of it all right.”

“What about his first wife, the one who ran away with the Rawleighs Man?”

“Oh, that wasn’t a proper marriage. You know, they just jumped the broomstick.”

“Jumped the broomstick?” Jack thought to himself, but Andy was still talking.