The Haystack (3 page)

D
AD SWUNG THE SACK
of potatoes into the barrow, and we half-filled another before I remembered. A big cotton reel in the sewing basket still had a bit of white thread that I wound around my finger so it wasn’t wasted. It refused to go into a proper roll, but got itself knotted and mixed up in a little ball all grey from my hands. I threw it into the stove, then felt bad about being wasteful, because Mrs Dainty had told me we didn’t have much to come and go on.

“If Dad asks,” I told the little ball as it smoked and flamed, “I’ll say it was all your fault.”

The rims on both ends of the wooden reel stuck up pretty high, so it should make a good tractor. I sat at the table and cut out little Vs around one rim, making a circle of sharp teeth. Dad came in, had a look at what I was doing, and said they’d work all right.

“Always cut away from yourself; if the knife slips,
it can’t hurt you. You never see Mr Cleaver cutting towards himself.”

“Dad, Mr Cleaver drops the steel on its chain, so it swings. I like the way he does that. And he doesn’t look when he’s putting his knife into that box thing on his belt.”

“Scabbard. He’s done it so often, he doesn’t need to.”

“If I owned the butcher’s, I’d have sausages for tea every day. And for lunch, and breakfast.”

“You might get sick of them.”

“I’d never get sick of sausages.”

“What if you finished up looking like a sausage yourself?”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

“Mrs Dainty would say I wasn’t feeding you properly; nobody would buy Mr Cleaver’s sausages, in case their children turned into sausages, too; he’d have no job and become a swagger, and we’d have no butcher to buy our meat from. All because you ate sausages every day.”

While he was talking, Dad opened his pocket knife and finished the teeth around the other rim of the cotton reel, cutting away from himself. “There’s a length of inner tubing in the shed,” he said, “an old bike tube. It’ll be stronger than an ordinary rubber ring.”

He held the red inner tube while I got the scissors and cut a slice off the end. “It won’t be any use if it’s too strong. Try it anyway.”

“Dad! You came inside in your boots. Tramping dirt all over my polished lino!”

“I wiped them first. And I tiptoed.”

“All the same, you know very well you’re not supposed to. Is that why Mr Cleaver’s nose looks like a sausage?”

“What do you mean?”

“Because he eats so many.”

Dad grinned. “I think that nose comes out of a bottle.”

Through the middle of the cotton reel, I poked the strong rubber ring till a loop stuck out the other end. A short splinter of kindling through the loop stopped it pulling back.

The brass candlestick on the mantelpiece held a stub of candle. I bored a hole through it to take the other end of the ring. Just enough of the ring showed for me to poke a stump of pencil through. I wound the pencil and put my tractor on the table.

It tipped over and scrabbled sideways, the pencil stump shot round, striking the table and shouting “Hullabaloo! Hullabaloo!”

Dad had sneaked back inside, to see how I was getting on.

“It sounded like my blind going up.”

“That rubber band’s strong. What you need’s a full-length pencil, or a longer piece of wood.”

“I used a splinter of kindling to hold the other end.”

“Who wouldn’t light the copper because they’d have
to split the kindling, and now she’s using the kindling her poor old father had to go and split—to make her tractor?”

“I’ll chop some more tonight. Anyway, you’re wearing your boots inside again.”

“You make sure you do. Using all my good kindling…That’s all it needed; look at it climb.”

I ran along the street, but Freddy was hiding. Last time I asked if he could come out and play, Mrs Jones chased me, so I didn’t go in his gate. I wound up my tractor, and it drove itself across the footpath. When it came to the bike tracks, it stumbled, dug in its teeth, stood thinking to itself, then the powerful rubber band worked. My tractor shrugged and climbed the ridges up and down, up and down, no trouble.

“We’ll show Freddy Jones.” I smoothed the dirt, drew a morepork with big eyes, claws, and a savage beak, and ran home.

“Dad, Freddy Jones is hiding.”

“I don’t blame him.”

“I can’t beat him if he hides.”

“He’s sick of getting beaten. Change the ring on your tractor for one of those we keep for holding the cellophane on the jam jars. Freddy will come out and play then because his tractor has some show of winning.”

But I didn’t see why Freddy Jones’s tractor should beat mine. He could cut a ring off an old inner tube if he
wanted. I ran back, rubbed out the morepork, and drew one twice as savage, with a screaming boy in its beak.

“This’ll give him something to think about,” I said and wrote “F. J.”, with an arrow pointing at the screaming boy. Wandering home, pretending not to look around, I glanced sideways as I went in our gate. Freddy still hadn’t come out.

“One of the chooks is clucky,” I told Dad.

“You know what to do.”

“Plook! Plook!” She didn’t like me lifting her off the china egg. “Plook! Plook!” She sat on the ground when I put the box over her, and she didn’t like it when I called her Freddy Jones and tipped the water over her.

“It’s for your own good,” I told her. “It’ll give you something to think about, and it’ll take you off the cluck.”

It’s no use trying to explain things to chooks. They don’t take any notice of anything I say, except when they’re hungry.

After lunch, I’d put on my shoes and was walking round and round my room. Dad was still sitting at the table, and he could see me.

“Those shoes look a bit tight.”

“I’m practising limping.”

“Why on earth…?”

“Colleen Porter had the infantile, and she still limps. She’s nice, Colleen.”

“Well, don’t let her see you doing it. Put your foot up here.” Dad pushed on the toes and poked his finger down the side of my shoes. “They’re not bad for room, but you’re going to need something a bit warmer for winter.”

“We’re learning a poem—about buying new shoes.”

“How does it go?”

“I don’t think you’ll like it…”

“Let’s hear it.”

I stood up straight, as Mr Strap taught us when we were doing Choral Speaking, stretched my lips back and smiled, as Mr Strap taught us, and said, “‘Choosing Shoes’ by Frida Wolfe.

“‘Choosing Shoes’ is the name of the poem, and Frida Wolfe’s the person who wrote it,” I told Dad. “We have to poke out our lips when we say ‘ch’ and ‘sh’.”

“Why?”

“Mr Strap says so.”

“Go on.”

I shut my eyes, thought of how to hold my lips, and recited:

Choosing Shoes

by Frida Wolfe

New shoes, new shoes,

Red and pink and blue shoes.

Tell me, what would you choose,

If they’d let us buy?

Buckle shoes, bow shoes,

Pretty pointy-toe shoes,

Strappy, cappy low shoes;

Let’s have some to try.

Bright shoes, white shoes,

Dandy-dance-by-night shoes,

Perhaps-a-little-tight shoes,

Like some? So would I.

BUT

Flat shoes, fat shoes,

Stump-along-like-that shoes,

Wipe-them-on-the-mat shoes,

That’s the sort they’ll buy.

Dad laughed till he dropped the paper and fell off his chair. I had to help him up.

“I haven’t heard such a good poem for ages.” He wiped his eyes. “I like the way you push out your lips and make your mouth round. Why do you close your eyes?”

“It helps me remember.”

“Fancy Mr Strap teaching you that one.”

“Do you know it?”

“The girls had to learn it when I was at school, and the boys had to learn ‘Young Lochinvar’, but we didn’t know about pushing out our lips and making our mouths round. That poem’s given me an idea.”

“Are you going to buy me some ‘pretty pointy-toe shoes’?”

“Not on your Nelly. ‘Flat shoes, fat shoes, stump-along-like-that shoes.’”

“‘Wipe-them-on-the-mat shoes,’” I said.

“‘That’s the sort they’ll buy,’” we said together.

Dad wiped his eyes again, and said, “We’ll see, next time we go up to Matamata.” I had to be satisfied with that.

A
LOT OF KIDS GO BAREFOOT
all winter. On frosty mornings, Mr Strap says, “You look as if you need warming up,” and takes us outside. “Ready—Steady—Go!” The winner’s whoever gets round the school first. If you slide over on the corners, everyone piles on top: “Sacks on the mill. More on still.” You take the skin off your knees on the tarseal, and that hurts.

Some kids limp along; some don’t run, and Mr Strap doesn’t make them. The ones who look the coldest, a girl in my class and her brother in standard two, stand and watch the rest of us running and yelling. At lunch-time, they sit alone on the seats under the windows, a long way apart. They don’t even talk to each other. Dad says you should be kind to people like that, but it isn’t easy to be kind to Flora Guy.

On Monday, I showed her my cotton-reel tractor. “Look, it can climb up a book.”

“My father’s got a real tractor that climbs up hills,”
said Flora Guy, “and it can go through water over its front wheels.”

As if it heard her, my cotton-reel tractor fell over, the long bit of kindling wood shot round and round as the rubber ring unwound, and the tractor looked silly lying on its side. I could tell what Flora Guy was thinking.

“Come on,” I put it in my pocket. “I’m going to do some skipping.” Flora Guy looked away and said nothing, so I ran and joined the others.

We took turns running in sideways, skipping once, and running out the other side; then we tried Double Dutch with two ropes, one swinging this way, one that, and we all got tangled and the big girls got mixed up with the ropes; then we saw how fast we could go with one rope, the big girls trying to catch our feet: “Salt, mustard, vinegar, pepper!” and we all joined in and screamed and fell over in a big heap.

Flora Guy was still sitting over under the windows when the bell rang, and we ran to line up.

Dad wouldn’t be home till five o’clock, so I went down to Mr Bluenose’s after school. I wanted to ask him something. He was sorting cookers in his shed built out of flattened kerosene tins, but he gave me a ripe Golden Delicious and said he was pleased to see me. I told him about Flora Guy.

“When you are sick or miserable, you might want to blame everyone else for the way you feel,” Mr Bluenose
said. “That may be why the girl is difficult and sits on her own.”

We took a kerosene tin of apples with bad in them up to the pigs, who stood on each other and squealed.

“They are pleased to see you. Always they are oinking, ‘When is Maggie coming to give us apples and scratch our backs?’ And, look who is standing with his head over the gate, waiting for you to say hello and give him an apple.”

“I kept the best one for you,” I told Horse, who snorted, nudged the apple off my hand, crunched it noisily, and dribbled a few bits.

“If I make a mess all down my front like that, Dad says he’ll put me down in the chook run,” I told Horse. “He says I can eat with them, and fly up and roost with them at night.”

Horse stuck his head down to be scratched.

“I told Dad I’d like to be a chook, and he wished he’d never mentioned it. You’d look a bit funny, perching in the middle of a row of chooks, Horse. Remember the time I taught you to push the wheelbarrow? And the time you pinched the apple and ate the boiled lolly, and my hanky, too?” But Horse just shook his head and whuffled through his big nostrils. He’s not all that good at remembering things when he doesn’t want to.

I ran between the rows of apple trees. Most had been picked, and the orchard was looking tired: yellow and
brown leaves letting go of the branches, and slipping sideways to the ground.

“Soon winter will come,” said Mr Bluenose. “Much to be done: lifting the last potatoes and putting them into a clamp; turning the soil over, so the frost can break it up and kill all the bugs; pruning fruit trees; cutting hedges.”

“You’ve still got a lot of vegies growing.”

“Cabbages, caulis, carrots, parsnips, swedes, Brussel sprouts, silver beet, celery: there are some vegetables that will keep in the ground. People still have to eat.”

“I hate winter.”

“Sitting in front of the warm stove, eating your father’s good soups and stews and roast dinners?”

“Oh, I like all that. We roasted a leg of wether on Sunday, and we’re still eating it. Dad said we’d mince up what’s left and make a shepherd’s pie for tea. I love shepherd’s pie, Mr Bluenose.”

“Have you a cat, Maggie?”

“No.”

“Watching a cat will teach you how to enjoy winter.”

“What does Horse do in the cold?”

“He is growing his coat long, to keep him warm. He has plenty of hay. I will put on his cover and, when it is a very hard frost, he will go into his shed at night. Horse likes living in the orchard. He will be comfortable in winter.”

“Remember you told me about how you ran away to sea, Mr Bluenose? And then you were so seasick, you
ran away from your ship in Auckland and tramped all the way to Waharoa.”

“So I did.”

“Were you a swagger, Mr Bluenose?”

“I tramped the roads, but I did not carry a swag.”

“What did you eat?”

“On farms, I worked a day here, a day there, and people fed me, and gave me a place to sleep in a shed. I was just a boy, and people were kind. One farmer gave me an old pair of boots, another an old coat. Why did you want to know, Maggie, if I was a swagger?”

“I thought of Mr Rust going on the swag. Where do swaggers sleep on cold nights, Mr Bluenose?”

“Mr Rust who works for Mr Hoe?”

“Mr Hoe gave him the sack for getting drunk and setting fire to his bed. Mr Cleaver told Dad somebody saw him carrying his swag up the stock road towards Matamata and gave him a ride to Te Poi.”

“Mr Rust drinks, not often, but once or twice a year, and Mr Hoe does not approve. But Mr Rust is such a good worker, and he has worked on the farm so long, Mr Hoe will be sorry to lose him.

“These are hard days for anyone without a job. No work, no money; no money, no food and nowhere to sleep.”

“But they must sleep somewhere. You just said Horse has his cover, and his shed.”

“I meant no bed to sleep in. Swaggers sleep where
they can: in barns, under bridges. It is cold in winter, but it is dry.”

“Did you sleep under bridges when you walked from Auckland?”

“Yes, and one night under a haystack.”

“Under a haystack?”

“Under a haystack is warm. Sometimes prickly, but also soft and warm. Only you must not smoke, because hay catches fire and burns quickly. It is very hard to put out a fire once it is alight in its heart, the haystack. But yes, warm for sleeping, the hay.”

I liked the way Mr Bluenose’s voice said things differently to everyone else’s.

“Mr Rust’s mattress was smouldering when the Hoe boys pulled him outside.”

“The smoke could have killed him. There are many young men without jobs. That will make it harder for Mr Rust to get one. It is what they call the Depression, Maggie.”

As I ran home, I remembered I was going to ask Mr Bluenose if Horse lay down to sleep or if he stood up all night. Freddy Jones reckoned that horses sleep standing up, but I tried it and fell over when I closed my eyes. Dad said it might be different if you have four legs, but I still fell over. I stopped now and tried standing on one leg, but I thought Horse wouldn’t do that and ran on.