Men of Salt, Men of Earth
by Matt Lennox
The boar is a furious captive in the cage and the hounds
strain their leads and bay mournfully. When Ashley throws
open the cage door the boar charges free like some
coarsehaired black missile. Driven by the singleminded
purpose of a beast cornered and illtempered to begin with.
No calculation. The horseshoe of folks assembled in the yard
breaks into formlessness, scatters. The women shriek with
strange mirth. Now the hounds are let off their leads and
they explode with the simple fury of their youth. They must
be instructed, and blood is the price of their learning.
**
Afternoon quickened to evening over the Cooinda homeplace.
Alan Harvey followed Vic out of the bunkhouse and across the
turnaround and into the tractor shed. Creaking, vaulted.
Barnswallows flitting amidst the rafters.
On a crossbrace behind the drillpress Ben kept an old
single-shot .22 leaned against the stud. Vic took the rifle
down and pulled back the bolt to show the clear breach and
then handed it to Alan Harvey. Age had darkened the stock
and the steel parts were pitted and worn. REMINGTON stamped
into the barrel. The rifle was very light.
Vic looked at Alan Harvey speculatively. He was seventeen
but mostly deaf and so his words followed a slow and careful
tempo.
--It’s bolt action. You know how to use it?
--I’ve gone clayshooting with my uncle’s 4-10. It looked
like that. Like it had a bolt action I mean.
--4-10 is a shotgun. This is a rifle.
--I imagine I can figure it out.
They commenced from the tractor shed to Vic’s half-tonne
Kia
at its place in the turnaround. Abruptly Alan Harvey
stopped.
--Wait, wait. Would we eat it? If I got one?
--Nah mate. Mongrels is all wormy.
--Oh.
--But if that side of it worries you, the legs’ll go to
the
dogs. It’s good for em.
--Worms and all?
Vic pursed his lips and shrugged and so signified that this
consideration was outside of his concern.
A quarter of an hour later Alan Harvey was sitting on the
bed of the Kia with the .22 upright between his knees and a
pocket full of rounds. Greasy spanners bounced around him as
, hellbent, Vic careened his ute over the trenchant and
calcified mud ruts of the old drover’s track. From the cab
crackled 4-Z-R’s All-Country Hour, honkeytonk and steel
guitar.
Something absurd unfolded with this situation and Alan
Harvey had his trepidations about that act for which he was
preparing. A score of years he’d walked the earth and
never
shot a living thing. He was troubled to find himself excited
and groped for another word for how he felt but in honesty
there was no other word for it.
Yet the evening was fine and sweet, midwinter in these parts
an altogether milder consideration to what he’d known. But
for the drover’s track and the ute the bush looked devoid
of
human travails. A flock of gaylas wheeled overhead, cascades
of pink and gray, and emus strutted arrogantly in the
clearings. He leaned his back and watched rolled by the gum
trees and eucalypts and scrubby firs he didn’t know the
names of. Impulsively he laughed.
Then the Kia grated to a stop and Alan Harvey was barely
able to arrest his head from smacking hard against the
cab’s
rear window. He collected himself and turned his glaring eye
into the cab and saw Vic grinning maniacally and pointing
over the dashboard.
Into a wide meadow they’d come and not one hundred feet
away
three kangaroos watched, unmoving. Cast purple in this
day’s
last light.
--Jesus. Jesus.
His heart thundered. Hands atremble. He dug a round out of
his pocket and held it in his teeth and pulled the bolt
back. It did not slide for him near so smoothly as it had
for Vic. He fed the round into the breach and brought the
bolt home behind it and shouldered the .22 over the roof of
the cab. He sighted down the irons and found it almost
impossible to make the barrel stop describing shallow
semicircles.
Vic stuck his head out of the cab. Quietly he advised:
--Relax.
Alan Harvey blew out a ragged breath and brought the rifle
down. He counseled limpness into his thrumming muscles.
Reshouldered the stock. As if governed by this moment’s
will
the kangaroos remained motionless. Alan Harvey moved the
irons onto the tawny chest of the nearest of the three and
drew in a half breath and held it and squeezed the trigger.
The .22 made a clear snapping report like a bough breaking
and though he’d expected a recoil there was none. Then he
watched the three kangaroos quit the scene in loping bounds.
--Well. Shit.
Vic was hooting laughter.
--Lookit em mongrels go!
--Thanks. That’s what I’m doing.
Vic got out of the cab and came around to the bed. His eyes
streamed.
--The problem is this. You see?
Vic took the .22 and held it skyward and showed Alan Harvey
how the barrel was bent a few degrees off true in relation
to the stock. Alan Harvey felt his face colouring.
--You know you coulda showed me that before.
Vic shrugged his dismissive shrug.
**
A slobbering and growling trifurcate of living flesh,
rolling in the red dust. The hounds are driven to attack on
an oblique trajectory, seek out the ears. And when they
catch the boar’s flopping ears in their grinding teeth,
the
boar voices a keening screech. But even pained the boar is
nevertheless weathered and battlescarred, utterly full of
meanness. With its tusks it lays open the foreshoulder of
one of the hounds and sends her flying and when she regains
her feet, her will to fight has been knocked purely clear.
She limps to Tezza’s side.
**
It was full dark when Vic pulled the Kia off the drover’s
track and onto the spit of clearing over the river. Alan
Harvey hopped off the bed. Above the sky was cold and clear
and profuse with the constellations of these climes. The
southern cross and others unknown to him. The encircling
bush a deeper black. John Larkin and his mate Tim came to
meet them and lead them to the sandbar.
The river was low and sluggish this time of year and the
sandbar thrust itself like a broad tortoiseshell out of the
water. Two sleeping bags were rolled out on army cots and a
number of folding chairs and deadfall were pulled around a
cookfire. The flames licked high and by their light invited
and thickened the dark around.
In attendance were John’s cousins. Jeremiah plucked away
at
a guitar. The twins were present, dumpy and bespectacled,
Esther and Margot. Lastly there was someone in one of the
folding chairs turned away from the newcomers and as they
approached the head turned and a ponytail swung and Alan
Harvey saw it was Jaye. She regarded them and smiled coolly
and turned back to the fire. He hadn’t seen her since the
wool show in Boolba.
Jeremiah got up and offered his hand:
--I see ya brought the Canada. How ya going Alan?
--Not bad brother.
Grinning affably, all teeth and eyes flashing with firelight
and with Alan Harvey’s own reflection:
--Survived the ride then?
--More or less. Bit bumpy out there. But nothin I couldn’t
handle.
--We heard yous comin!
Esther or Margot. Alan Harvey couldn’t tell them apart.
--We heard shootin.
--Well. What you heard was missing.
Tim offered up stubbies cold and dripping from the river.
Ghastly Four X but good to have a beer regardless. Supper
was laid out. A catch of yellowbelly and Murray cod and
massive crayfish. Cabbage salad and bread rolls.
John leaned on his heels and scratched his chin.
--Hmm … well she just doesn’t seem right, does she?
Tim squatted down beside him.
--I shouldn’t worry mate. Such a mean table as this.
--Mean table or not it’s still the Lord’s.
Esther and Margot murmured assent and Jeremiah cut it out
with the guitar. Jaye studied the fire as if judgment on
this matter was written in the embers. John clasped his
hands together.
--Yeah good. Just quickly.
Everyone stood up in a loose circle and joined hands. Alan
Harvey had Esther or Margots’ small and sweaty palm
tightly
against his right and Vic’s callused fingers reluctantly
clasped to his left. He caught a flash of Jaye’s hand
disappearing into Tim’s. Lean and pale and tapering with
sensible and undecorous nails. He stirred with the knowing
that praying was not the only travail for which those hands
had a talent.
And in staccato rote John offered:
--Heavenly Father bless this food to its intended use
through Jesus’s name we ask amen.
Alan Harvey filled his plate twice. He liked the crayfish
best though there was scant meat to be extracted from the
carapace. Following the meal they chummed around, told
stories. Jeremiah played the guitar and they all sang
rambling folk ballads in which Jesus featured prominently.
All but Vic who was mostly unable to hear the songs and Alan
Harvey who didn’t know the words. He found it difficult to
not look at Jaye. At no time did she betray any reflection
on that event that had passed between the two of them at the
wool show.
Eventually the question came. Esther or Margot was the asker
of that question Alan Harvey had expected but was further
surprised to find he had been waiting for. Yet put to him he
struggled still. How to tell you people? The notion of one
in search of something and maybe in search of searching
itself. There were no words to simplify it or none that he
knew. A long pause elapsed.
--My dad knew Ben from a long time ago. So that’s how I
scored the job. But the rest of it?
He spread his hands in aspect of helplessness.
--To tell the truth I don’t know. I don’t know why I
came.
John Larkin smiled.
--Yeah good. You don’t need to. Each to his purpose,
guided
by the Lord.
**
Sunday came and he and Vic went to the service at the
Uniting Church in Galway. As usual Alan Harvey was unable to
join in the raised hands or unintelligible moans of divine
transport. He wondered absently if he carried in his heart
an incompleteness, that in witnessing these devotions he
felt no touch of grace but rather a crawling sensation that
was akin to seeing your sister naked. Following the service
they had lunch at the RSL and then returned to Cooinda. In
the middle of the afternoon, Jackson’s foreman Tezza
called
the homeplace and invited them over and said that he and his
mate Ashley had trapped a pig.
In Tezza’s yard were his and Ashleys’ ragged broods.
Tezza’s
woman Dolly flashed her lustful looks and squeezed their
docile baby to her hip. Ashley was a small man, whipcorded
with muscle and flesh blue with homedrawn tattoos. His hair
hung long and his eyes were wild. His wife was a stout and
foulmouthed apparition who jawed ceaselessly at her son, a
boy of perhaps eleven years. He was peculiarly angelic
looking and generally quiet and serious. As of yet lacking
that set to his features that marked his folks, that look of
one who survives by means fair or foul.
Ashley and Tezza each had a big shovel-headed pigging hound
on a lead and these beasts were visibly agitated. They were
almost fullgrown but yet unblooded. For a little while
everyone milled in Tezza’s dooryard drinking beer. They
dug
their toes into the earth and threw stones and talked about
work and utes and State Of Origin Football. Tezza had a .303
and proudly showed it off to Alan Harvey and Vic, the
chromed steel and polished walnut.
Then Ashley assumed a spreadeagled stance and spat into the
ground and with a gesture like that of some carnival showman
, he turned to them and asked were they ready for it. He led
them all in back of Tezza’s house to a corrugated metal
lean-to beside the Bushman water tank. In this shadowed
territory there was a cage and on their approach the
darkened captive within smashed itself against the
heavy-gauge mesh. Alan Harvey sucked in a breath.
**
These beasts are exhausted but their primal sense disallows
compromise. They square off, skirmish brutally, back away,
square off. The wounded hound cannot be made to fight
anymore. She lays licking the jagged pink rent in her
foreshoulder, occasionally whining at Tezza. The fighting
hound is scored with shallower wounds and slobber hangs in
gleaming ropes from her jaw and lolling tongue. The boar’s
ears have been almost completely torn off. They hang in
bleeding strings, enwreathing the coalblack eyes.
**
The end came with Ashley’s intervention. The fighting
hound
had the boar subdued by the unraveled ear. With lithe and
unexpected grace Ashley descended on the boar’s back and
flipped it and while it thrashed and shrieked Ashley hogtied
it with coarse twine. The fighting hound leapt around its
fallen enemy, snapping and tormenting. Tezza gave his .303
to Ashley’s son and the boy came forward. Grave and
surefooted. In his small hands the rifle was much outsized
but with an easy familiarity he cocked the action. The boar
meanwhile had managed to roll onto its side and was madly
trying to right itself. Ashley kicked the fighting hound
away and then Ashley’s son put the muzzle of the .303
behind
the boar’s flayed ear and Alan Harvey never had a moment
to
look away. The rifle reported hugely and terribly and
echoed back over the flat surrounds. Blood and bonemeal
cascaded across the dirt. The boar stiffened and twitched
and repeated these kinetics, perhaps a dozen times, and then
fell still.
The rifle report had freshly excited both hounds and they
seemed to be trying to outsound each other. Ashley and Tezza
together hefted the boar and hung it upside-down on hooks
welded to the steel frame on the back of Tezza’s Land
Cruiser. They worked with shit-smelling handrolled
cigarettes in their mouth, and when the boar had stopped its
pendulous swinging, Tezza took a long knife and slashed its
throat and gutted it. Blood pooled in the dust below,
thickened and beaded. Cast out to the grass the guts worked
yet, operating by the echoed compulsion of a life gone to
shadow. The hounds appeared to have gone insane.
Tezza finally turned away, hands clutching and clabbered
with gore. He scrubbed sweat from his forehead with one
forearm.
--Dolly get me a stubby and for Chrissake see to that fuckin
dog!
**
With a few more beers Alan Harvey found that he remained
curiously dry-mouthed. After sunset they returned to
Cooinda. Later in the night Alan Harvey lay in his narrow
bed and stared out the window. In the incomplete dark his
mind projected a series of images: Tezza and Ashley and
Ashley’s children. The girl Jaye. The kangaroos loping
from
the meadow, the boar sprawled on the ground, head shattered.
He thought how an abstraction of fourteen hours divided him
from home and those folks who peopled what seemed a
different life entire. He wondered what he’d chased.
In the moments before sleep his last thought was of the old
.22. The barrel bent a few degrees off true. He found he was
glad for it.
Matt Lennox
writes: "20 years of schooling and they put you on the dayshift ... " Bob Dylan sums it up for me. After graduating university two years ago, I have found myself, at 25, somewhat lost. I am currently pursuing an application for full time service in the Canadian Forces; in the meantime I put bread on the table by means of driving of truck in the city of Toronto. Although The Danforth Review will be my first time in publication, writing has always been an important part of my life. 'Men Of Salt, Men Of Earth' was inspired by travel and work misadventures in rural Queensland, Australia, in the summer of 2000.
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