Red-Back Spiders

The Red-Backed Spiders - Orignial Short Story

I began to walk towards the sheds. The boy's father was coming across the yard to the dump.

"I told y' to keep out of that," he said. His voice was raised, but not as though suddenly, rather as if in a kind of constant irritability that was part of his make-up, like his features, or his quick, jerky walk.

"You get messing about in there and you'll find one of those red spiders bite you. I told you to keep away."

He grabbed the boy's arm and pulled him to his feet.

"One bite from those spiders and they'll kill you. I told y' that. Get out of that dump, keep over round the house. I catch y' here again I'll stop you wanting to come over here properly."

He pushed him so that the boy ran a few paces to keep his balance, and then began to walk over towards the house. He had not said anything. Around the house the ground was bare and dusty, swept clean and hard about the back door and the veranda near the door. His father came on across the yard to the sheds.

"All right?" he asked.

"Just about," I said.

"We want to be back by lunch-time."

It wouldn't be my fault if we weren't, but there was no need to tell him that. We drove out towards the back paddock where we were to pick up the load of wood, and cut a couple of saplings for rails. The horse went along slowly, the man jerking the reins impatiently until it broke into an awkward trot. The animal was not over-fond of work, and it gave an impression of the smallest action requiring an immense and pitiful labour. I looked at the man seated forward in the cart, staring ahead, his hands jerking the reins. But I was thinking of the boy rather than of him. And the way the boy had looked. He had that queer kind of expression as though he did not understand. It was not that he didn't know when he was doing something that was forbidden, but his face could take on a blankness as though he tried to keep the expression from it. And he was too young to do that deliberately, or so you would have thought. It was not the things around him, what he could and could not do, that he did not understand, and that bewildered him so that he was forced in on himself, but rather the people about him, the way they acted. He was trying to look into an adult world that simply did not hold meaning for him.

Looking at the man driving the cart, whose face seemed set with a kind of nervous tension, like that you could see in his quick, jerky walk and raised voice, I thought the boy had reason enough for his lack of understanding. When I had first come to the place there had been enough that I did not understand. And they were not things the boy would know, perhaps not things he would ever know. There seemed no bridge for him into that other world he stood at the edge of.

The woman and the girls left the man alone, retreating in a knowledge that had been gained in bitterness and perhaps defeat. But the boy wanted his father, and his world was so plainly incomplete without him. He would still go up to his father to talk to him, sometimes for the affection that seemed now inevitably denied, that perhaps had never been there, sometimes to ask the questions that his mind was filled with and that were reduced quickly to the man's ridicule. So that he was become now too quiet and solitary for a boy of his age.

And yet quite soon I had begun to feel sorry for the man. He had a kind of hatred that had turned against those who were around him, and against this place with its indifferent soil and slow yields, its quiet and total involvement that was imprisonment, but it was a hate that had turned, too, in against himself.

There was no point-perhaps even an impertinence in trying to apportion blame. In time one might have come close to understanding it all, and yet that same time would see one's own involvement. I was going when the digging season for the potatoes started, and I wanted only to be able to keep away from it. But it could break out suddenly into something you would be forced to interfere in, and that was useless, because nothing would be achieved, and you would have to go, and it would all go on afterwards, just the same, perhaps worse for your interference.