eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781775581727 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 244 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Butcher Shop
By Jean Devanny, Heather Roberts
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 1926 Estate of Patricia HurdAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-86940-650-9
CHAPTER 1
Barry Messenger drew rein upon a high ridge of land. He was "lambing." The day was Saturday, late afternoon, in August, the first month of New Zealand's spring, in the year 1924. Snow lay thickly about his horse's feet and stretched far on all sides in mighty undulations. His eyes, as he peered about on all sides, smarted with the cut of the raw wind, and he and his horse shivered as though one.
A plaintive blatting rose up from the valley to his left and immediately, without coercion, his horse turned round and downwards, slithering with stiff forefeet from tiny ledge to tiny ledge until the floor of the valley was reached. There the snow lay deep. Nearby lay the sheep from which the distressing cries had come. She was silent now except for heavy, painful breathing, and her legs moved jerkily back and forth as she rolled upon her side.
Messenger stiffly dismounted. His horse emitted a tremendous sigh and settled itself easily with rump to windward. The man moved to the stricken animal and gently, though firmly, handled it to ease the hard delivery.
Daybreak had found him at this work, and the intervening hours had given him no respite. A scanty lunch had been eaten upon horseback. Yet he showed no signs of fatigue as he patiently laboured with the animal. His oilskin coat, his hands, and even his face, were daubed with blood; his body was numb with the piercing cold of the upland winds, but in face of the travail of the dumb creatures he had been tending all day his discomfort claimed no thought.
The Southdown's head came round to him, her patient, foolish eyes carrying an appeal that made him swear aloud. She blatted again dolefully.
"All right, old lady, all right," he said, and bared his right arm to the elbow. But this time his ministrations were unsuccessful. Shortly the newborn lamb was in his arms, but almost as soon the mother was dead.
"The sixth today," he muttered. "An infernal lot this season." He regarded the lamb in his arms. "And you, you poor little devil, you'll have to go the way of the rest. Can't possibly take you. Won't be home till late now." He put the lamb upon its dead mother's body, drew a jack knife from his pocket and quickly cut the little one's throat. The skinning of the mother occupied him some time; then he threw the skin over his horse's rump in company with several others which hung there, remounted and proceeded along the valley.
This man, only twenty-two years of age, had, by the recent death of his father, been left sole owner of Maunganui Station, a vast tract of upland country comprising twenty thousand acres situated on the southern border of the King Country in the North Island of New Zealand.
His appearance betokened the very finest type of young manhood. He stood five feet ten inches high, broad of shoulder and narrow of hip. His feet were small and beautifully shaped; his hands not so small as they might have been for strict symmetry, but remarkably well kept considering his toilsome way of life; his small head was profusely covered with waving jet-black hair, and his face was ruggedly handsome. His deep-set, rather closely placed eyes were steady and stern looking and of the very deepest brown. His nose and mouth were ruggedly chiselled; his chin was square and decided.
He came of mixed English and French stock. His father, some thirty years before this time, had brought from English country life to New Zealand a little fortune and an indomitable will, and had builded Maunganui acre by acre, so to say. Barry's mother had been governess to a neighbouring station-owner's children. She had died when giving birth tothe boy, who had grown to manhood under the interested, if old-fashioned, guidance of his father and tended by a succession of white housekeepers and Maori maids.
He had few friends. Busy station life left little leisure for frivolities, nor did it encourage a desire for them. The township of Taihape lay at a distance of fourteen miles from the homestead, and divers pleasures were procurable in Taihape. It lay right on the borderline of the King Country, wherein prohibition reigned, and was the last "liquor" town until Taumaranui was reached some two hundred miles farther on. Therefore was Taihape a live town, of which, on occasion, noisome tales were bruited abroad. For sawmills, flaxmills, sheep-stations and cattle-runs encircled it in all directions, and gave it of their flavour. It was the hub of the bushman's wheel, the meeting-place of the shearing sheds, the temporary abode of the slaughtermen and freezers whose manner of life was not circumscribed by conventional restrictions nor ordained to curry favour with the scrupulous and orthodox.
Barry Messenger owned an automobile and a twelve horse-power Indian motor cycle, but his visits to Taihape were almost always on business. His father, the English country gentleman, had rigorously held the boy to the open-air life; had done his old-fashioned best to pass on to his son his own manly simplicity and steadfast habits. Young Messenger had responded nobly so far. Straight and reliable he had been; clean-living and hard-working.
The station was a goodly property; twenty thousand acres of uplands, some timbered, mostly cleared land, on which were grazed some fifty thousand sheep and varying numbers, from one thousand upwards, of "store" cattle. A wealthy property, despite the fact that Messenger had been hard hit during the slump years after the Great War. And yet Barry and his father had worked as hard and unceasingly as their shepherds and drovers, except for occasional visits to various parts of New Zealand. They were no exceptions to the general in this; they would have been exceptions had they not done so. The boy had revelled in the work, and the years had but drawn him closer to it. Some of it was vile, for sure; other of it was heartbreaking. For instance, the lambing season, when Nature, for no reason at all it seemed to the young man, not even in pursuance of her policy of the survival of the fittest, wreaked cruel vengeance on the patient, meek and helpless. It was all hard, back-breaking and soul-scarring. The dust of the yards in the dagging season, and other dreadful things — One could not free one's throat from it for weeks after. The clipping sheds in the shearing season — Ah! but there was fascinating toil, if one liked. Back-breaking, yes, but devil-may-care and free.
During the wool-clipping Barry Messenger invariably became uneasy. Sometimes the crying of the young lambs temporarily separated from their mothers would wake a strange emotion in his breast. He would catch his breath sharply, and the hand holding the clippers would shake. Then he would wonder why this should be so. The golden wool falling away from the naked Southdowns never ceased to fascinate him, and at the finish of the day he always stood awhile beside the classers' benches to glory in the amber piles reaching high.
True, there were hateful things about the shearing sheds. The vile oaths of the men, the continual racket and banging of doors, the plunging of the terrified young sheep (he could never use himself to the torment of the animals). But the wonder of the wool, dripping as though with honey, was always there; the naked feet of the brown women "picking up" from the shining greasy floor, just a trifle browner than the wool, always carried compensation and more.
Speaking of women, Barry Messenger had not yet desired their company. Once, when he was eighteen — But hardly worth mentioning. A brief interlude: a brown maiden, visiting at the home of one of his father's men, exercising all of her coy and not unsubstantial fascinations. She the pursuer, as the traditions of her race gave her the right to be, he the half-willing and troubled pursued. Nothing really, just a "might-have-been" if Messenger senior had not seen and whisked the lass out of harm's way. Many brown girls were about the station, but his Dad's warning, allied to his own clean racial sentiment and the profound respect he had for that grand race his own had dispossessed, had preserved him.
He knew plenty of white girls, of course. How otherwise, when the district knew no better "catch"? Handsome, clean and wealthy — fathers respected and liked him, mothers appreciated and girls adored. It was his unsullied blood, his quiet, lonesome turn of mind and his hard work that saved him from spoliation.
No white girl had yet interested him sufficiently to cause a quickened pulse. At least not until this narrative takes up the thread of his life.
His most intimate friend was Jimmy Tutaki, the son of old Chief Tutaki, who each year contracted with Messenger for the wool-clip. Old Tutaki occupied the house nearest to the Messenger homestead. Each year he found the labour for the shearing sheds, mostly Maoris. He was a character, this Chief, known far and wide. He was rumoured by the old identities of the district to be over eighty, though appearance indicated him to be on the healthy side of sixty. Over six feet high, though slightly stooped, virile enough to be still begetting children by his last young wife, his venerable, hoary head, strangely offsetting his unusually dark face, was revered for the wisdom it contained by all who knew of him. He was an old-time Maori, retaining the wild look and the ancient prejudices of his tribe. He looked to his sons for the old-time implicit obedience, refusing to pander to pakeha influences on his own, though reasonably acknowledging and respecting the customs of the whites for whites. Many sons he had, ranging from ages of thirty odd down to infancy, and quarrels were frequent between him and the older ones, in whom allegiance to the ancient laws was wearing thin.
Jimmy Tutaki was twenty-four years old. He was tall, slight and extremely gay of disposition, though also, paradoxically enough, a fine lover of books. Among a people noted for the beauty of its men as is the Maori race he counted as ugly, though the good humour reflected in his continual smile and merry ways made him a great favourite. He was Messenger's head shepherd, at the time our story opens, and was marvelloussly adept at dog training. He had accompanied Barry to college, though two years the latter's senior, and there their childhood's friendship had been cemented.
Old Tutaki had been living on Maunganui when it had been staked out.
In truth, Barry's motor cycle was guided more often to Taihape by his dusky friend than by himself. The broad nose, thick lips and shining black eyes of Jim Tutaki were heartily welcomed everywhere when jollity reigned among the common people. He danced divinely, and sang the songs of his race in deep and mellow tones.
Also he could make the white pine chips fly. To the city dweller of far lands a man's proficiency with an axe may smack of little merit, but in New Zealand — The quickest time through a two-foot upright or an underhand cut carried weighty honours. Jimmy Tutaki, though a shepherd, had wielded the blade to such good end that no bushman in the King Country, the land of sawmills, could successfully compete with him. Certainly he had to surrender the honours to certain of the South Island visitors on Taihape's two consecutive annual sports days, and Dave Pyrett's world's record made his look faint, but locally he was the "champ". How he found time to read always puzzled Barry Messenger, but find time he certainly did, for the room he shared with three of his brothers was cluttered up with his books. He slept little.
He was of the type that assimilates quickly, that remembers, that learns without effort, that lives every minute of life. He was the antithesis of Messenger, who preferred his own thoughts to those of others, and with whom frivolities counted little.
On this Saturday in August, 1924, Tutaki and the half-dozen shepherds under him were also out "lambing." Like Messenger, they began their work at daybreak and carried on untiringly throughout the day. However, unlike Messenger, they were not all conscientious, nor did one or two of them feel, as he did, the pangs of the silly sheep to be of such moment as their own comfort. Sometimes Messenger and Tutaki came across obvious cases of neglect, and at such times their blood would run high.
We shall return and move along the valley with Barry. The deep snow detained him. The dusk came down quickly; the fury of the wind increased. Compassion moved him as he thought of hapless patient mothers. But in the dark he could do little. By sound only could he be guided, and, besides, the work was too dangerous even for his hardihood on those rugged hills, reticulated with narrow sheep-track ledges. He had decided that he had better make tracks for home when his horse stumbled upon a carcase almost buried in the snow. He dismounted and, finding that the animal had been dead some days, straightway commenced plucking the wool from it, filling it into a haversack carried for the purpose. The job nauseated him, but it was soon done. He climbed into the saddle again and made for home, at a distance of some miles. Up hill and down dale his horse jerked its way, left entirely, as always in the dark, to its own resources.
The dull plodding of another horse came to Messenger's ears. At once he shouted: "Ho-o!"
"Ho-o!" came back to him from close range in Jimmy Tutaki's voice, and the horses, without compulsion, veered towards each other.
The two men rode along silently together for some time, and then Messenger asked: "What luck?"
"Not bad. Only two dead mothers to-day. Not bad, considering the rotten weather."
"I've had six."
Nothing more for some time, and then Tutaki said: "Tell you what. We should have had them drafted into the home paddocks for the 'lambing.'"
Messenger thought, then said: "Question of food, I think. Might try it, though." They shortly came to the boundary fence of the station, and slipped through a gate on to the public road. Here they set their horses at a canter, and in ten minutes were ambling up the long avenue leading to the homestead.
They were the first shepherds to reach home. A tumult from kennelwards greeted the clatter of their horses' feet on the rough cobblestones of the stable yard. They passed the animals into the stable-boy's care and hurried to the detached bathroom, a long, narrow room furnished with six shower baths especially for the men's use. They revelled in the hot water pouring down their sleek bodies. Beautiful they were, the pair of them, their forms from the shoulders down bearing a remarkable resemblance except that the white's leg tapered uniformly from the knee down, and the brown man's was almost straight from knee to ankle on the inside and carried the bulge of his calf on the outside. In pre-pakeha days Tutaki's leg would have caused his fellow-tribesmen much envy. Messenger's skin was white almost as the snow outside, but not more beautiful than the luscious gold of his friend's body, which shone as though burnished in the strong electric light. (Messenger's first action after his father's death had been to bring electricity from the plant ten miles away to his home. This had cost him a large sum, but he considered the money well spent.) The hot water revived Tutaki, and he sang as he towelled himself vigorously.
The other six shepherds trooped in one by one, all dog-tired.
"Aw, shut yer row!" snapped one, and flung a boot at Tutaki, who deftly dodged and ignored the remark. But as the thick steam loosened tired muscles, tongues also were unleashed, and very soon the usual badinage flung back and forth. Soon Messenger and Tutaki passed to the men's quarters where dinner was awaiting them.
These quarters consisted of a long dining-room and kitchen all in one, which opened into a passage leading to the "big house," as the homestead is generally called. Small bedrooms, each accommodating two men, opened off the dining-room. Here were domiciled those "hands" who were unmarried, or, though married, had not their homes on the station. Jimmy Tutaki slept at his father's house, but latterly had taken to eating in the communal dining-room. Several other "hands," boys and men, were seated around the huge log fire when Messenger and the Maori entered. These were drovers, fence hands and general workers.
The cook came from the kitchen and swore belligerently at the lateness of the shepherds' arrival, but no one took any notice of him beyond Tutaki's order to "Hurry up with the scran. A chap's belly is like a concertina."
Messenger always ate with his men on weekdays. On Sundays, following his father's custom, he took his meals with his housekeeper in the dining-room of the big house. Lately he had had Tutaki to these meals with him, an arrangement which had at first been viewed with disfavour by the lady, who, being but a recent arrival from home, had not then learned that between Hawaiki's brown sons and the white there was no room for line of demarcation. A few curt words from Messenger had, however, silenced her comments. She had sat at table amazed, that first day, at the cultured table manners and undeniable mental superiority of the Maori. "Why," she had exclaimed to Barry afterwards, "he is a gentleman, like yourself!"
And Barry had laughed at her and replied: "Sure. Why not?"
However, the "gentleman" in both Messenger and Tutaki was not at all to the fore when they came to the table ravenous after a day's awful toil. To eat! To demolish that steaming pile of roast mutton, potatoes and cabbage, to drain the mugs of strong tea and fill the crannies left with the rich plum pudding or pie, their one thought.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Butcher Shop by Jean Devanny, Heather Roberts. Copyright © 1926 Estate of Patricia Hurd. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction Heather Roberts,The Butcher Shop,
The Banning of The Butcher Shop Bill Pearson,
Notes,
Jean Devanny's Published Work,