24: AIN’T GONNA WORK ON MCINNES’S FARM NO MORE
I know that the name Frizzell comes from the Fraser clan, so maybe that had some part in how Dad linked up with a dour and irascible Scotsman called Jock McInnes, who managed Kereru Station, a huge farm up in the foothills of the Ruahines west of Hastings. This spread was so big that it was like a separate country — well, maybe not separate so much as all the country. You couldn’t see it for country.
Between the picnics and the rabbit shooting we saw a lot of it. As Dad drove the Austin over primitive tracks out to the mighty Mohaka River to picnic on the gravel banks beneath huge pumice cliffs, I remember thinking, ‘Are we still on the farm? Can you have such a vast geological thing on your own property?’ Because our little gatherings were indeed dwarfed by these white formations, with the swimming hole beneath scoured out deep and blue by the mountain range upstream.
When I went rabbit shooting with Dad we explored a lot of country, ranging far and wide, over gully and knoll, dragging that bloody bag of beer bottles or rabbits all the way. I suspect it was the rabbit shooting that got Dad up there in the first place. We never hung out at the farmhouse and certainly never saw the McInnes family at our place in town. But one year I found myself up there working in the school term holidays.
Whose idea was it? Did I volunteer or did Mum and Dad think it’d be good for me? A special mission to toughen up that dreamy little bugger? With a fabulously beaten-up old trilby given to me by one of my ‘uncles’, I packed up my sugarbag, tucked my baggy daks into my socks and we were away. I was happy enough to go; I just didn’t know what I was letting myself in for.
The house was up on a rise looking out at the mountains. It was an extended bungalow, with lots of add-ons and extras at the rear: mudroom, washhouse, woodshed, etc. The usual assortment of sheds, kennels and garages rolled out along the driveway that led up to a roughly defined turning area. I remember a horse looking over the fence by the clothesline with its fork-tipped mānuka centre pole.
There was a Mrs McInnes, and a daughter, Heather, about my age. The horse down by the clothesline was hers and she let me ride around the house paddock in the first few days of my stay. I can’t remember Mrs McInnes saying a word to me after the initial greeting and Heather wasn’t a great talker herself. McInnes himself might have had something to do with that. With his shaggy eyebrows and whiskery chin jutting out aggressively under a lipless mouth he was an intimidating sight. He obviously wasn’t one to brook any denial. I never saw his hair: he always wore a huge tam o’ shanter, big as a preserving pan lid, complete with pom-pom.
For the first couple of nights I bunked down in the spare room in the main house. But listening to McInnes play his awful Kenneth McKellar records, ridiculously loudly, was way too much: ‘Roamin’ in the Gloamin’’ for breakfast. And the salt — I’d never seen anyone use salt like Jock did. He even poured — ‘sprinkled’ would be totally inadequate in this instance — it on his porridge. This seemed to me about the last thing you’d use, but at his insistent Scottish urging I gave it a go and was stunned to find it entirely appropriate.
Mind you, even the porridge itself was something else. I don’t know what was in it but it certainly had a completely different texture to the rubbery frisbee of spinning-in-the-milk grimness that Mum served up. Coarse and friable, McInnes porridge fell from the saucepan like cowflop, maintaining a rough ziggurat of concentric circles that sucked up the full-cream milk like a volcano in reverse. And then you poured salt all over it. Creamoata was never going to be the same again.
After one of these hearty sessions of bagpipes and salt, McInnes took me down to the stables and gave me a horse, my ride for the duration — a huge, black, uninterested beast called Trigger. Standing next to him was like standing next to a truck. His back was as wide as a chesterfield. I had always imagined that sitting on a horse would be a bit like sitting on a motorbike. I hadn’t anticipated such crotch-stretching width. Was Jock being slightly mischievous partnering me up with this monster? Probably.
He taught me how to saddle up. I couldn’t possibly have thrown the saddle over the back of this great barn of a thing, but I distinctly remember the lecture about the cinch, how it had to go around forward of the full width of the belly and up into the ‘armpits’ of the front legs so it wouldn’t work loose as you rode. He forgot to tell me that this bastard equine would puff his evil black stomach out as you tightened it so that the cinch felt more comfortable when he exhaled.
On my first outing, with Jock and everyone within a 100-mile radius watching, I set off at a lumbering trot down to the end of the house paddock. Just before we ran into the bottom fence Trigger turned, unbidden, and headed for home. As I jiggled and bounced in the saddle, the world before me began to cant alarmingly to one side as my badly cinched saddle slowly slipped sideways around Trigger’s mighty flank until I was riding along like an Apache closing in on a defensive covered-wagon circle. I let go just before my point of view was completely inverted.
But I persisted with Trigger — I had no choice — and quickly learnt that if you slapped and punched his heaving ribs determinedly enough as you tugged on the straps you could stop the slippage. The only way I could get up into the saddle was to get him over to a fence and use the rails or the wires as a ladder. He farted a lot in merry syncopation as he trotted along: trot-fart, trot- fart, trot-fart. He very rarely responded to the gallop command, no matter how hard I heeled him in the ribs, but when you got within coo-ee of the barn he needed no second bidding and just took off, possibly even reaching something approaching a canter, and all I had to do was hang on.
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Now that I was a ‘farmhand’, one of the first of my rural chores was to bundle up my stuff and move down to the workers’ accommodation, known as the whares.
I left a relatively comfortable spare bedroom with an eiderdown and floral wallpaper for a creaky row of attached cribs that looked like a sad motel built by colonial settlers. They looked more like stables or kennels except for the four-panelled doors, the sash windows and the long verandah down the front. Only one of these shabby units looked lived in, which meant a rough pathway had been worn up the steps and over the verandah, through the cowpats, horse apples and windblown pine needles and dirt, to the door.
I followed the track with my swag over my shoulder, opened the door and there, sitting at the table rolling a cigarette, was the occupier, Eric. What a rough-looking bastard he was: unkempt red hair, freckles, goofy overbite, big bony shoulders — none of his grubby cuffs reached his wrists or ankles. ‘G’day!’ he said, as if I’d just popped out for five minutes and had returned with the milk.
One square room, two beds, one on either side. One table, two chairs, a chest of drawers and a short length of kitchen bench. A build-up of dust and dirt accumulated around the skirting boards. Eric’s shitty boots sat at the end of what was obviously his bed — and the word ‘bed’ implies a false degree of civilisation.
I plonked my stuff onto my barely upholstered wire-wove and sat down at the table opposite Eric. What did we eat? Where did we wash? If this was a cowboy movie there would have been a horse trough out front where we washed our faces in a manly manner, but if there was one I must have blotted it from my memory.
I’ll never forget Eric, though. Eric and his non-stop porn commentaries, his sexual conquests: fanciful versions of such borrowed scenarios as the pool cleaner entertaining the lady of the house, in which he creatively made himself the star. So far in these stories I haven’t used the word ‘masturbation’ once, but the time might have arrived where I have no choice but to deploy it. There is no euphemism I can conjure to describe Eric’s dedication to the custom. Lying there in the dark on my mouldering cot, I’d listen to Eric work himself up with another of his nymphomaniac widow stories and then proceed to vigorously capitalise on the self- induced excitement.
As if working on a farm wasn’t bewilderingly fecund enough. Everywhere you turned, some fearsome act of reproduction would be on display. Watching the bulls at work was an eye-popping experience. Why were their bright red penises so long? Couldn’t they just get a bit closer? Maybe if the startled-looking cows would just stay put for a spell the bulls wouldn’t need such extravagant apparatus?
All this was going on as I ambled past, sitting up high on Trigger, both of us out on one of my wool-plucking missions, life and death allegories at every turn. I’d roam around a likely ex-grazing paddock until I found a dead ewe, and my job was to get down and pluck the wool off the rotting carcass. This was a revolting and weirdly satisfying experience. If the bloated animal was at the right stage of decomposition the wool would just roll away like peeling the icing off a stale lamington. Sometimes the sheep would look as if it was still breathing, such was the great mass of maggots seething away inside it.
On any big station, the best fun can be the long days when people come from miles away to help with the big stuff, like shearing or docking. In this instance, dipping seemed to be in season, and what a mad and primitive ritual it was. Sheep, dust, dogs, men, women, me, all milling about in an insane racket of shouting, bleating, barking, whistling and sheep-race banging.
The freaked-out sheep were herded through the clattering, neck-jamming races to a short ditch full of evil-looking viscous muck where they slipped and stuttered down a short ramp until they were submerged up to their desperately extended necks. They then began to paddle frantically, eyes wide open and lips peeled back, down to the deep end, where some sadistic bastard, like me, had to plunge their heads under by pushing at the base of their necks with a long-handled tool that resembled a toothless rake.
This evil routine would ensure that the whole beast was dipped, but it also told you instantly which of these wretched animals was suffering with facial eczema. If the poor creatures were frantic with suspicion and dread before they went into the trench, by this time they were completely out of their minds and anyone down the business end of the trench got the blowback. This chaos went on all day, Eric spelling me on the plunging. We went to bed exhausted and reeking of sheep dip. Even Eric collapsed without his usual bedtime stories.
Sometimes Eric and I headed out together as a team. We’d trudge up to the implement shed, load up the tractor and trailer with posts, wire and staples and head for the hills. At some abstract triangulation known only to Eric we’d stop, unload and start fencing, obviously taking the lead from some existing point, though to me it seemed as if we’d decided to dig random holes in the middle of nowhere.
To say that Eric was lazy would have been to miss the point entirely. He just didn’t seem to engage on any level, and when he did it was unhelpful. But things seemed to happen. We dug, pounded, stretched and nailed, and a fence of some sort would emerge from the tundra. And then McInnes turned up, took one look at our handiwork and went berserk. To this day I have no idea what we’d done, or hadn’t done, but the frothing Scotsman grabbed one of the battens off the trailer and went at Eric like a Glasgow gangster. I just stood there in shock as Eric tripped, rolled and fended while the farmer whaled away until he was spent. It was a horrible thing to watch.
But when McInnes finally threw down the batten and stormed off, Eric got to his feet and rolled himself a cigarette, leaning against the trailer as if these mad dramas happened every day as regular as smoko. What a strange boy. I had begun to realise that he couldn’t have been much older than me — just old enough to have left school and gone out into the workforce. Along with the dawning of this revelation came the parallel observation that Eric didn’t like me very much. Did he think I was McInnes’s pet? He certainly never saw him go at me with handy lengths of lumber and I suspect he had also figured out that I didn’t really need to be working there and that this was only a soft sort of school holiday gig.
So he started to take out his rural revenge on me. All of a sudden I was the one stuffing up all the time. He went from passive to passive aggressive; nothing I could do was right. On one memorable occasion we were sent up a ladder with paint and brushes and instructions to paint the roof of the implement shed: a vast, flat, gently sloping plane of corrugated iron. Perhaps we should have started at different ends of the roof, but for some reason we began in tandem, moving back and forth in parallel lines. I have no idea what I did — maybe I was going at it too enthusiastically and forcing the pace a bit — but Eric got more and more irritated, needling me with snide comments and observations until he cracked and ‘accidentally’ painted right over my jandalled foot with an exaggerated swipe, then stood there with a sneer on his face.
To my absolute amazement, I dropped my brush and squared up to him. Now it was his turn to be dumbfounded. I stepped forward, and with one foot sliding about in its painted jandal, I wound up and unleashed a mighty roundhouse at his gormless head. And missed. I had another go with the other fist, and missed again. I was so wound up that I couldn’t seem to get there. The muscles in my arms were locked in a mad akimbo rigor that inhibited any attempt at accuracy. But the general effect was dramatic. I must have looked madder than McInnes. Eric was certainly impressed. He even went off and found me a turpsy rag. He never said another word, just picked up his brush and got on with it.
We finished the job, and I finished up. School holidays were over. Dad came out and picked me up — from the house, not the whares — and drove me home. He quizzed me on the way down through the foothills, asked me about the silver paint between my toes. I didn’t say much: told him about Trigger, and the salt. Never mentioned Eric.
