Oddfellows Read online

  They made a strange contrast in the starlight. The old man, short and fat, sitting with his arms folded; the younger, slim, also clean-shaven but taller, slapping the reins. And above them, the pyramidical shape of the mullock.

  The configurations of the night were inexplicable as her sister’s madness. The old man seemed to have twinkling rings on his fingers and toes.

  As if Rosalind had murmured ‘Stop!’ the horse pulled over and started drinking from the water trough opposite. Only then did she recognise the younger man – Gül Mehmet. She had never seen Gül in a turban.

  The portly old man seemed familiar, too, except that he had shaved off the grey forked beard which she recalled scrolling over his pot-belly.

  Rosalind tilted her head. But their conversation was inaudible above whatever Lizzie was now tittering about in her sleep, like the giggles that other children burst into on seeing her.

  With reluctance, Rosalind turned from the window. She would have to wake up her sister so that she didn’t wet her bed.

  The two men had ridden out that morning from the North Camel Camp at the extreme end of Williams Street. The camp consisted of a few galvanised sheds surrounded by a loose wire fence. There was a small brick building with a tin roof that served as a mosque, and two struggling rows of date palms. Here lived thirty or so camel drivers, mostly Afghans and Indians, with their families and animals.

  The settlement had been there since 1890 and was resented by a minority in Broken Hill, who nicknamed it ‘Ghantown’. Their prejudice found its mouthpiece in a former editor of the Barrier Miner, Ralph Axtell, who though living for some years in Melbourne had returned to Broken Hill a fortnight before to visit a sick cousin. The Benevolent Society, on hearing that Axtell planned to remain in town until after Christmas, had invited him to give an end-of-the-year address. This had taken place the previous evening at the Trades Hall on Blende Street.

  Being New Year’s Eve, many Benelovent Society members chose to remain at home with their families. But the poor size of the audience, patchily spread out over the three front rows, failed to douse Axtell or the fervour of his delivery. Those who attended his talk, including a reporter from his old newspaper, listened intently to what he had to say.

  A nuggety socialist with a high forehead and a thick ginger moustache, Axtell transformed when on stage into a dynamic orator. He was a skilled agitator against Afghans and other ‘Turkey lollies’, as he called them. His fiery lecture was a get-together of his old saws, and calculated to fan the anti-Turk feeling which had re-emerged since the outbreak of war. The target of his scorn was the posturing German Kaiser, but Axtell went further to include the Ottoman Sultan and Caliph, Mehmet V, who that summer had signed a treaty with the Germans; then to encompass all Muslims, who were said to regard the Sultan as their leader; before homing in on those who lived just up the road, ‘in that smellful spot known as Ghantown’.

  Axtell reminded his listeners that he had nothing against the foreigner – provided he joined a union and was a white man. Axtell’s particular gripe was with the Afghans, as many in the room might recall. Ten years earlier he had stood in this very hall and warned that if the citizens of Broken Hill did not crush the Afghan, the Afghan would crush them. Nothing since had induced Axtell to alter his opinion. These ‘Ram Chundahs’ and ‘Hooshtas’ were dangerous. They were bound by their faith to respond to the call to jihad that the Sultan had announced in November – being sympathetically disposed towards those whom Broken Hill’s sons, husbands and brothers were, he said, ‘even at this moment battling with their lives’.

  Axtell looked around. He saw a history of fear overlaid with hate in the faces below. Gazing up at him were snow-bearded veterans who had fought in the Boer War, as well as anti-war miners who marched in protest to the Sulphide Street station, their band playing ‘The Internationale’ while they themselves hooted and booed recruits departing for the Ascot Park training camp in Adelaide.

  In a quiet, suddenly insinuating voice, Axtell reassured his small audience: ‘Self-preservation is the first law of nature.’ Whatever one’s opinions on the conflict in Europe – as a good socialist Axtell had plenty – the entire sympathy of the nation ought to be with the White Australia policy.

  At this, several aldermen in the front row muttered ‘Hear, hear’, and Clarence Dowter, seated beside his nephew, began nodding.

  ‘The Afghans have taken our jobs,’ Axtell went on. They were brutal and depraved. And filthy in their daily habits. Even the Aboriginals found them unacceptable! In only the short time that Axtell had been back in Broken Hill, he had learned that it was almost impossible for residents to live near the camel camp, due to the nauseating stench from the decomposing entrails of dead animals thrown out by the inhabitants.

  Axtell concluded by suggesting that the time had come to expel the Afghans and that a new Citizen Vigilance Committee be formed against this Asiatic canker, of which the Afghan presented the most visible sign – ‘with that diabolical grin of dissimulation which of all people he possesses to perfection’. He called for a show of hands.

  Next to Oliver, his uncle’s arm flew up, as did the arms of Oliver’s mates in the rifle club – young men like Roy Sleath, the policeman’s son; Alf Fiddaman, the grocer; and Tom Blows, a friendly, round-faced lad with jug ears who worked for the Water Pipe Company. Even old Ern Pilkinghorne, though deaf, raised his hand after a moment. Eyes sunk in his narrow head, and with his white beard neatly trimmed, Ern had not heard a word, but he liked to attend these meetings; the sight of so many enthralled faces was a solace.

  Emboldened by their example, Oliver, who had come here at the last moment at Tom Blows’s request, lifted his hand into the air. Even so, Axtell’s speech made him uncomfortable. It untethered emotions, suspicions and latent jealousies which he would have preferred to stay unaroused.

  To meet the cost of his engagement ring, Oliver had put his name down for the half-shift on New Year’s Eve; he was not due at the mine until 10 pm. Instead of going back to Cobalt Street with Tom Blows, who wanted him to take a look at his motorbike – he complained it was back-firing – Oliver had called at Rosalind’s house. He had decided to ask her to marry him at the Oddfellows’ picnic next day. But time was running out. Before he could propose, he first needed to secure Mr Filwell’s permission – something that Oliver had been planning to do earlier in the week, until some camels intervened.

  The light was growing stale in the sky, the last sunset of the year. Oliver walked in a loping gait up Blende Street and slowed as he approached the Filwell bungalow. Perhaps to calm himself, he started singing a music hall song that he had learned from William.

  Rosalind was with her mother in the kitchen, slicing tomatoes, when she heard him.

  ‘Listen …’ said her mother, straightening her matronly body. She was still waiting for William to return, and he didn’t.

  Instead, it was Oliver’s baritone which competed with the chop of steel on wood.

  In her little handsome bonnet, and her cotton dress,

  She’s as fine as any lass of high degree …

  From his chair in the green-papered living room, her father called out, ‘Open the door for Ollie.’ His voice travelled easily through the house.

  A pink-faced man with a grey moustache, Albert Filwell always looked stern and angry, even when he was laughing. Yet William’s death had crushed him. Soon after his son’s accident, he had given up mines for cows; and twice a week he taught the Broken Hill Brigade boys how to shoot. But his self-esteem had rotted.

  Towards Oliver, he behaved with a complicated hostility. He knew that he should support the young man’s courtship of his daughter. It was a link to his son, like the song.

  Rosalind wiped her hands on her apron and went to let Oliver in.

  ‘Get us something to drink, would you, Ros?’ her father said, after she had ushered Oliver into the living room.

  She brought in two glasses and a bottle of ginger beer, and returned to t
he kitchen, promising to be back once she’d finished preparing the picnic. She and her mother were making mutton sandwiches with tomatoes and lettuce, and a lamington cake. Oliver had already volunteered to bring fruit.

  With exaggerated care, Oliver poured out the ginger beer. He felt doubly grateful to be left alone with Rosalind’s father. Quite apart from the matter they needed to discuss, Albert Filwell would be a dependable sounding board for the turbulent feelings that Ralph Axtell had stirred up.

  Filwell winced as he raised his elbow to take the glass. ‘Rosalind tell you what happened?’

  Oliver sat down and slapped his pockets for his pipe. ‘Your horse went berserk, right?’

  ‘I’ll say she did.’

  His right arm swaying in a sling, Filwell was eager to go over it again, how his horse broke its tackling when it encountered a camel-string heading towards Ghantown. His milk buggy – damaged beyond even Oliver’s capacity to repair it – had overturned, and he was jolted from his seat, falling heavily to the ground.

  Through the thin partition, Rosalind could hear him saying, ‘I was howling the place down, I tell you. I was groaning worse than a foundered mule. Dr Large sent me off to the bloody hospital. On Boxing Day!’

  She opened the oven and peered in at the sponge. Her father never talked to her like this. Her thoughts were to be confined to the kitchen, patted and kneaded into the same standard shapes, and put into the oven and baked.

  In the next room, Filwell continued to air his grievance. His mare had every right to go berserk. Camels were evil creatures, with their agonising bray. Eating the bush and polluting the water-holes. ‘I’d like to put a bullet in the lot of them!’

  Rosalind took this in, grimly, as she pressed into the sponge to see if it would spring back: a horse goes berserk at the sight of a camel. A camel goes berserk at the sound of a cockatoo. We all go mad at something, and slid back the pan. Even a rabbit bouncing past can start off the cows.

  ‘Now, Rosalind, a kitchen isn’t for standing in.’ Grief had made her mother snappy. She held her dimpled arms around a bundle of clothes. ‘Why don’t you wash that lettuce while you’re waiting?’ and opened the door and went out.

  Oliver’s voice came through the wall. She could hear every word. ‘Do you know the owner?’

  ‘Oh, I reckon,’ said Rosalind’s father. The chair creaked as he rocked back. ‘It’s that butcher fella. The one your uncle keeps taking to court.’

  ‘Those Afghans and their bloody oonts.’

  And Rosalind pictured Oliver scowling as he excavated with a thick index finger the scorched bowl of his pipe.

  Before he found work in the South Mine, Oliver had earned his living as a woodcutter. Then the Afghans had arrived and raided all the firewood for fifty miles around. Just as they’d moved in on the striking shearers and displaced the bullock and horse teamsters. If his uncle didn’t make a stand to defend the butchers, it wouldn’t be long before the Afghans took all the butchers’ jobs too.

  ‘You know what the trouble is, Mr Filwell?’ For a moment, Oliver assumed the union-leader’s tone of his uncle. ‘People don’t speak up. When I don’t like someone, I say what I think, and I don’t like the Afghans.’ He read the papers, but he never read anything that had an explanation for why they should be here. ‘All I know is that I don’t cadge, Mr Filwell. And I claim the right to object to cadgers in any shape.’

  Rosalind’s father tilted forward on the chair-scratched lino, fighting his slight aversion to Oliver. ‘I’m with you there,’ raising his glass with his unaffected arm. His lips clamped down on his mouthful of ginger beer, and there was a loud noise as he swallowed it.

  To Rosalind, all her father’s restraint and fortitude seemed to have disappeared at the memory of his collision with Molla Abdullah’s camel-train – Oliver’s as well. She had never before heard Oliver speak with such spite. Was this what he believed in his heart? She picked up the lettuce that Alf Fiddaman had let her have cheap, and peered at it for dirt.

  But Oliver had not finished. What upset him more was the way that Afghans looked at white women. Exactly as Afghan competition had killed off the woodcutters, the teamsters and other white jobs, so were white women in danger, Oliver believed.

  Rosalind felt her heart speed up. A slug was wiggling its way deep into the lettuce. She picked it out and flicked it into the sink – only to be trapped by a recent memory of looking on hypnotised at Oliver’s big, stumpy, confident hands as he sorted out the blockage in the pipe beneath.

  ‘I’m not just talking about Sukey.’

  Rosalind inclined her head until it touched the weatherboard partition. Mary Brodribb, back in January, had told her about Sukey, a tall, bony girl who rode in on a grey horse and charged ten shillings for twenty minutes behind a blanket that she draped over a branch.

  ‘Other white women, too, get involved with them.’

  Did Oliver have Gül in mind? Did he have her in mind? She wondered with panic if Mary might have spoken to him.

  Oliver laid it out like Axtell. Young Australian women who should know better stood hanging about the camel camp. Something attracted them. And some could end up getting into trouble, married even …

  So Oliver and her father peddled stories of disease, dirt and depravity. To Rosalind, overhearing and unable to pull herself away, it was dreadful what they said in their low ridiculing voices. It was as if something about the uncivilised and disgusting Afghan provoked a fear that ran deeper than any shaft in the South Mine. She wished they’d stop it.

  Through the partition, she listened as Oliver said in a different voice, ‘Something else I’d like to talk to you about.’

  Her pulse was beating as she angled her ear against the wall to hear more, but her mother was calling from the yard for Rosalind to take the sponge out of the oven.

  Making cakes was all her mother knew how to do after William died, and she had not discovered how to stop. William had appreciated her cakes – more so than Rosalind. Of his sisters, only Lizzie shared his sweet tooth.

  The door opened.

  ‘Should I use jam for the icing?’ Her mother in a clay-coloured cardigan stood staring at Rosalind.

  ‘You know I don’t like jam,’ said Rosalind. ‘Or cake.’

  ‘This cake isn’t for you.’

  ‘Who’s it for, then?’

  Stout with depression and with shoulders sunk, her mother walked across the floor of the kitchen to the cupboard, holding her arms away from her side, as if carrying two heavy metal pails filled with the washing that she took in to earn extra money.

  Suddenly, Rosalind was all directness. ‘It’s not going to bring him back, mother. He’s gone. He’ll never eat another of your cakes.’

  ‘Well, Ollie likes jam.’ Her face defiant.

  Rosalind gave a harsh laugh. ‘He’s called Oliver. You’re not his mother. You’re not his mother-in-law, either,’ and untied her apron and flung it onto the kitchen table.

  Seconds later, Rosalind strode into the living room. ‘What have you two been gabbing about?’ looking from her father, who had a strange embarrassed expression as if he wanted to let her into a secret, to Oliver, who stood with his back to the fireplace, smiling.

  ‘If it’s not Rosalind,’ said Oliver, concentrating on his pipe, as on the occasion when he came home late with William, eyes not meeting hers, but proud of something he had seen or done. (It turned out he’d been scrawling ‘scab’ on a grave.)

  She crossed the room in a perversely springy walk and spread her hands on the back of her father’s chair. She breathed heavily. ‘Aren’t you going to tell me?’

  In the kitchen, the jam cupboard opened and closed. Her father seemed compressed into his twitching arm. The only sound, the helpless clock on the papered wall.

  Oliver tapped out his pipe against the empty hearth. ‘Well, goodnight, Mr Filwell. I’m pleased we’ve got that sorted. I’d better get down to the poppet head.’ And in the hallway, ‘Goodnight, Mrs Filwell! I hope
that sink’s still behaving itself!’ And in a voice that he tried to make softer to Rosalind, who had opened the front door for him, ‘Goodnight, you.’

  He stood under the fluted glass lily shade and looked into her eyes, as if she was now available to him and he had some sway over her. ‘I’ll see you at the train station at ten, then,’ touching her arm. ‘Tom’s asked me to take a squiz at his motorbike. If I’m late …’

  Rosalind found her smile and kissed him quickly on the cheek. ‘I’ll keep a place for you.’ Her arm was all tense, waiting for him to leave.

  He tried to slam the door shut from the outside, but she was still holding the handle.

  Rosalind listened to him walking off. He was singing to himself, the only song he knew.

  She’s a pretty liddle girl from nowhere …

  One slow step at a time, she made her way back to the living room. Her father sat looking at her.

  She brushed a grey wisp of hair away from his ears. Picked up the bottle. ‘More?’

  ‘I’m doing very well,’ draining his glass and handing it to her.

  She held the empty glass against her chest.

  His face had taken on a weight, as if charged with some mineral. ‘You been arguing with your mother again?’ And when she didn’t reply, ‘Ros … I don’t … Is something wrong?’ suddenly intimate, as though he had a vision of Oliver Goodmore prising the glass from her fingers. Then of Oliver unbuttoning her pale blue blouse. Touching her high young breasts …

  He raised his injured arm, and stretched out to Rosalind, so that she smelled the Chamberlain’s Pain Balm which she had rubbed into his bruised elbow two hours earlier.

  His sling was beginning to smell, too.

  ‘I can’t describe it,’ she said, resisting his invitation to hug her. ‘It’s just …’ And wriggled her shoulders as if something was crawling there.

  Opposite Rosalind’s window, the horse finished drinking. The cart clopped on, following the railway line towards the Picton sale-yard. She could see the two men still engaged in conversation. They must be up this early in order to reach Silverton in time for the picnic. Gül would need to be selling his ice-creams before the sun grew too angry.