The Haystack (12 page)

I
KNEW HIM BY HIS HAT
, when it bobbed past the kitchen window. “We set a place in case a starving traveller came to the door,” I told him. “And we did some extra spuds and peas, too.”

Mr Bluenose bowed and shook Aggie’s hand, and she smiled. He told Milly she’d grown and said, “Bagheera sent a dead rat as a Christmas present for Milly.

“I did not want to hurt his feelings by telling him it was an unsuitable Christmas present, so I hid it in the ditch by the hall.”

Mr Bluenose swung the sugarbag pikau off his back and took out three bottles. Two were beer, but the third was wrapped in brown paper. He held it sideways and unwrapped it carefully.

“Merry Christmas, Maggie, for all the help sorting apples, feeding the pigs, and for the time you taught Horse to push the wheelbarrow.”

This bottle was clear glass, a different shape to the beer bottles; inside it was a red ship with white sails, on rows of green waves.

“A cod-fishing schooner,” said Mr Bluenose. “The one I told you about.”

“But—”

“See the dories stacked on deck? The one on top is mine, the one I was lost in.”

“But—”

“See the captain who wanted to throw me over the side?”

“But—”

“And the mate at the wheel who said they would keep me for bait?”

“But how did the ship get inside the bottle? With all its sails, and masts, and ropes? And, look, I can see the anchor. And a little chimney with grey smoke coming out.”

“From the stove in the galley. The cook is busy inside. With one hand he is holding on; with the other, he is cooking Christmas dinner.”

“What are they going to have?”

“Boiled cod and dried peas.”

“Thank you for the schooner, Mr Bluenose, but how did it get inside the bottle?”

“Ah,” Mr Bluenose tapped his nose. “That is a great secret.”

I set the schooner inside the bottle in the middle of the table. “It’s the most beautiful ship. Is it really the one you were on?”

“The very same ship.”

Aggie and I sat on the bench behind the table, our backs to the wall, and stared as the schooner sailed on and on across the rows of green waves, in the smell of roast chook, fresh peas, new potatoes, and brown gravy.

“Children should be seen and not heard,” I told Aggie, who sat very straight, never put her elbows on the table, and spoke only when she was spoken to. She was dainty in her eating, took small mouthfuls, and nibbled like a lady. I had a wing, the neck, a slice of white meat off the breast, some new potatoes, green peas, and a big spoonful of stuffing, all runny with gravy.

“Look what I got!”

“You always get the wishbone,” Dad grumbled. “It’s not fair.”

“Don’t cry.” I knew he was just trying to get it off me, so I pulled the wishbone with Mr Bluenose and made a secret wish.

“What did you wish?” asked Dad. “You can tell me.”

“If I told you my wish, then it wouldn’t be a secret any longer. He always tries to get me to tell him,” I told Mr Bluenose.

“I once got the wishbone,” he shook his head, “then told somebody what I had wished, and the wish worked round
the wrong way. Seven years’ bad luck I had before my wishes started working again. So do not tell your father.”

Lifting the Christmas pudding out of the boiler, Dad pretended not to hear. “Can you look after the custard, Maggie?”

“You sit there and make polite conversation to Mr Bluenose,” I told Aggie.

“Any lumps,” Dad said, “and the person who made the custard has to eat them herself.” I stirred it very smooth.

“What about that?” Dad unwrapped the cloth, and put the smoking Christmas pudding on the table. “It weighs enough.”

“A noble plum-duff,” said Mr Bluenose. He and I stamped our feet, and Aggie clapped her hands.

“It looks like a very hot cannon ball,” I told Dad.

“Do you want to cut it?”

I stuck the carving knife in the middle, cut down, and the cannon ball gushed steam and smelled even better.

“Well cut,” Mr Bluenose clapped.

Dad served big slices. I passed Mr Bluenose the jug of custard and the cream Dad had brought home from work, and we ate our noble plum-duff. “Merry Christmas,” we told each other, and Dad and Mr Bluenose had a swig of beer.

“To absent friends,” said Mr Bluenose.

“Absent friends.” Dad raised his glass. They said nothing more but drank, and I watched them and
wondered who they were toasting.

I didn’t ask because I took the first mouthful of Christmas pudding, and my teeth grated on something so hard my head shivered. A threepence. Then I found two more, and a sixpence. Mr Bluenose got a threepence, and Dad coughed and spluttered and thought he’d swallowed something.

“It felt like a half-crown going down,” he said and rubbed his throat.

All through dinner, I never stopped looking at the red schooner sailing over the green sea, and wondering how it had sailed inside the bottle.

“Aggie wants to know something, Mr Bluenose, but she’s too shy to ask. If it’s the schooner you were on, why aren’t you inside the bottle, too?”

“Tell Aggie I climbed out the neck of the bottle, ran away, and got a job on a ship that brought me to New Zealand.”

I whispered in Aggie’s ear, put my own ear to her mouth and listened.

“Aggie says, you must have been skinny.”

“Very skinny, but for my age quite tall. And perhaps the bottle has shrunk,” said Mr Bluenose. “Perhaps it looks smaller because we are looking back down all those years to when I was a boy.”

Aggie nodded. She understood that, she told me.

Dad and Mr Bluenose finished their beer and talked
about the Depression and what sort of a summer it was for the farmers, and about Old Peter Rust who’d got the sack from Mr Hoe and gone on the swag. I opened my new paint tin, got a jar of water, and painted a red schooner on a piece of Mr Cleaver’s brown paper.

Aggie sat and watched, but Milly wanted to lick the paint, even though she’d had her Christmas dinner, then she sat on the paper and got some Crimson Lake on her tail. “Hoy, that’s my painting,” I told her, but she took no notice, so I did another which I gave to Mr Bluenose.

Boxing Day, Dad had to go to work. “At least I had Christmas Day off,” he said. “The trouble is, nobody told the cows what time of the year it is, so the milk keeps coming in.”

I was busy most of the morning, sewing Aggie a skirt out of an old dress. I didn’t know how to go about making a blouse, but a skirt wouldn’t be too much trouble. That’s what I thought, as I cut it out and fitted it. The sewing took ages, because Milly wanted to chase the end of the thread and, since I’d tied a knot in it, she got it between her claws, and when I tugged, her eyes grew big and she tugged back. She tugged so hard, she pulled the whole thread out of the needle and wouldn’t let me have it.

I tried the skirt on Aggie, but it was too tight, because sewing it together up the back had taken more material than I’d allowed for, and I had to start all over again.

“Lucky there’s lots of the old dress.” I said. Then,
instead of just hemming it round the top, I made a proper waistband, and that gave the second skirt a better shape, and it fitted Aggie better, even though it was still a bit on the tight side.

“You’ll just have to hold your breath and eat less noble plum-duff,” I told her. “And no cream.”

Jean Carter came along to show me what she’d got for Christmas: a golliwog with a big grin, lots of black, woolly hair, white teeth, a little knitted red jacket with white buttons, and white trousers.

I showed her my old golliwog who was pretty worn and faded from going to bed with me for years, and the time he was watching Dad doing the washing and fell in the copper and got boiled, and turned all our singlets and sheets streaky black and red, so for weeks we had to bleach them in the frosts on the back lawn.

I let Jean undress Aggie and put all her clothes back on again, but she still wasn’t too good at doing up buttons. I showed her the skirt I’d made Aggie.

“It took me ages,” I said. “My mother would have run it up in a few seconds on her machine. She was very clever with her hands; and she could do anything she liked with a needle and thread.”

“Y
OUR MUMMY’S DEAD
,” said Jean Carter. “My mother told me. Remember the time you chased us in the paddock? You made noises and scared me and Ken. I used to be frightened of you.”

“That was ages ago. I’m better now. Do you want one of these? I got them in my Christmas stocking.”

“I got some lollies, too, and some chocolates and nuts, and an orange. Maggie, do you think Santa Claus eats chocolates?”

“Dad told me Santa Claus licks the chocolates before he puts them in our stockings. He thought that’d put me off them, and I’d give all my chocolates to him.”

“Your father must be mean.”

“He’s not mean, but he loves chocolates. I think Santa probably has a box all to himself.”

“Did your daddy get anything from Santa Claus?”

“A pair of socks, and a scarf I knitted for him. He put
them on in bed, and said they fitted really well. Next year, I’m going to knit him the socks, but I’ve got to find somebody who can show me how to turn the heel. And I’ve promised Aggie I’ll knit her a peggy square blanket, like Milly’s.”

Ken came to tell Jean she had to go home for lunch, and I’d just got the cloth spread, the table set, and Dad was there. We ate some more of the chook, and Dad said it was even better cold. The stuffing was stodgy just the way he liked it.

“You mixed it really well. It’s all in the mixing.”

“I told Jean Carter you said Santa Claus licked all the chocolates before he put them in our stockings.”

“So that’s what it was about.”

“What?”

“I saw her just now, coming along Ward Street, and she took one look at me and ran screaming after her brother.

“What you need’s a pattern.” He was looking at the skirt I’d been sewing. “I’ll give you a hand after work. We’ll make one out of newspaper, try it on Aggie, get it the right size and shape. Allow a bit for the hem and where you’re going to sew it together, pin the pattern on some material, cut it out and sew it, and it’ll fit. That’s the way your mother would have done it, if I remember rightly.”

“I didn’t allow for the hem and where you sew it together.”

“The seam. Mr Hoe started mowing his hay this morning. He’ll be wanting to get it in while the weather holds, and he won’t have Mr Rust to help him this time.”

“Can I go and watch?”

“As long as you stick to the stile, and don’t go into the paddock.”

“I’ll take Aggie. She’s never seen hay being mown.”

Down the end of Ward Street, there was a plank across the ditch, and a stile over the fence. All afternoon, we sat and watched Sam Hoe, who’d just left school, circling the hay paddock on a tractor the same red as my schooner, rising and falling, disappearing and coming back into sight, sailing across the green swells of an ocean of grass. And every time it sailed past, Aggie waved and called out Sam’s name.

He stopped the tractor near us, tilted the mower and did something with a spanner. He lowered it and drove past so close, Aggie heard the sickle bar—Click! Click!—and saw the green wave tumble and lie in a smooth swathe behind.

Ken and Jean Carter joined me on the stile, then Freddy Jones, but he had to show off and run out on the paddock.

Somebody yelled, “Bah!” Freddy bolted back; and I told him, “Humbug!”

The air smelled green and rich. “The long grass is turning into an island,” I told Aggie. The red schooner
sailed round and round, and the island grew smaller and smaller.

“That patch left in the middle,” said Freddy Jones, “it’s full of rabbits and hares and pheasants and wild ducks and pukekos. And the mower’s going to chop off all their legs.”

“Don’t listen to him,” I told Aggie and Jean Carter, but though we watched the last grass fall, nothing flew or ran away.

“See,” said Freddy Jones.

“There wasn’t nothing there,” Jean was crying as we walked home.

“There was so, but they’re all chopped to bits.”

“The pheasants and ducks and pukekos flew away this morning,” I told Jean. “The rabbits hid in their burrows, and the hares hid under the hedge. I saw them before. So there!” I said to Freddy Jones.

When Dad came home from work, he said, “Crikey, but the air smelled good, coming past the hay paddock. It reminded me of something in a book about a sailing ship off the coast of South America, and how the sailors smelled new-mown hay.”

“Away out at sea?” I asked.

Dad thought for a moment and said: “‘They have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay.’”

My back wriggled all by itself. “It sounds like poetry.”

“It’s poetry all right.”

“What’s the Andes?”

“Mountains.”

“Who’s Starbuck?”

“The ship’s mate.”

“Do you think Mr Bluenose smelled the hay, when he was on the cod schooner?”

“Fish smells a lot stronger than new-mown hay.” Dad shook his head. “Mind you, those men smelling the hay out at sea, they were whalers, and whale ships pong, so the wind must have been coming off the land, carrying away the stink, and bringing the clean smell of hay.”

That night, I lay in bed with the windows open, and told Aggie and Milly we were sleeping on the slopes of the Andes, among the new-mown hay. I sniffed and said, “Smell it?”, but Aggie was far too ladylike to be seen sniffing, and Milly just closed her eyes. “You’d sniff if it was a rat,” I said, but she took no notice. “You’re not a reliable cat,” I told her.

Aggie had a sunburnt nose next morning, so I left her at home. Jerry, Sam’s older brother, and Mr Hoe were working along a row, turning the hay with pitchforks, when Sam drove a horse into the paddock. He sat high up on a machine with long wires that rose and fell on crooked wheels, picking up the hay, tossing and turning it much faster than Jerry and Mr Hoe.

“It’s a tedder,” said Freddy Jones.

“How do you know?”

“My father told me. They’re new.”

“Why isn’t Sam pulling it with the tractor?” asked Ken.

“They only borrowed the tractor for the mowing. My father says Old Man Hoe doesn’t like new things on his farm. He said Old Man Hoe’s going to miss having Old Peter Rust there to build the stack.”

I asked Dad that night, and he said, “Freddy’s right. The machine’s much faster than tedding by hand, and it’s true, Mr Hoe doesn’t like tractors. He used to mow his hay with horses. It took longer, but a lot of the older cockies reckoned it made better hay.

“I’ve heard men talk of when they used to scythe the hay in the Old Country. And all the women and children coming behind the line of men, raking and tedding by hand. I’ll bet people said that made better hay, too.”

“What did Freddy Jones’s father mean about building the stack?”

“There’s an art to building a good haystack. A poorly built one can get a lean on it and have to be propped. Mr Rust was a natural; he had an eye for it. Mind you, Mr Hoe’s been at it long enough to do it himself.”

We were watching the following morning, when Mr Hoe walked around the paddock, picking up bits of the drying grass, feeling, sniffing, even biting it. Jerry
was driving the tedder, turning the hay, and Sam was sitting on a rake behind another horse. The long curved tines of the rake dragged a heap of dry hay towards the end of a long row; Sam leaned forward and pulled a lever, the tines lifted, and the heap was left behind. Sam dropped the tines again—Clang!—and raked more hay into more long rows, what Freddy Jones said were called windrows.

“Why?”

“‘Cause the wind blows between the rows and dries the hay. My dad said.”

In the middle of the paddock, Mr Hoe tossed hay into heaps with his pitchfork. A heavy lorry drove between the windrows and stopped on the clearing he’d made.

“Ellery Transport’s big sweep-rake stacker from Matamata,” said Ken. “Mr Hoe always gets it.”

“Yeah,” said Freddy Jones. “Mr Hoe always gets it.”

“Huh,” I told him, and we watched the men bolt together the pieces off the back of the lorry till the stacker stood like a red, wooden giraffe, tall and silent in the middle of the paddock.

“They’ll start bringing in the hay tomorrow,” Dad told me that night.