Wednesday 3 June, 2015
So I found the story guys, yay!!
If you were wondering why things did or didn't happen in my draft and final, this is why ---
Written in 1958 by Peter Cowan
The Red-backed Spiders
IT had begun that morning, at breakfast, one of the interminable able disputes that arose from nothing, yet became suddenly sharp and fierce, exploding into the violence of words or force. At first I had thought the force was worse, but it burnt out in a kind of shock, whereas the words stayed bitterly so that even I, as an outsider, felt their pain. He had hit the girl abruptly with the flat of his hand, jerking her head back, and, her eyes dark with misery, she had gone from the room.
As he had done himself, almost before I realized it had happened, had jarred sharply to a focal point, and was past. For the woman, rising quickly, had said, "No, please it's not his fault-"
Nor was it perhaps anyone else's business. And I did not want it mine. I had known the first time I saw the house, standing by itself on the bare ground of the hillside, that this was no place where one would stay, and the time there had not changed that feeling.
I was going across after the meal from my room by the sheds to harness the horse when I saw the boy. The track passed the old jarrah by the fence of the house yard. The twisted trunk held a scarred hollow reaching up from the base, mark of a fire, the tree itself had been useless for timber or for sleepers even before it had been burnt. It was the only one in the yard, though in the paddocks numbers of them still stood.
Scattered across the ground between the fence and the tree, and about the base of the trunk, the rubbish of an old dump lay. The boy was playing in it. He was picking out the old jam tins and meat cans, spacing them in a kind of design, the jam tins going one way and the short, fat meat cans spaced out at an angle to them. The dump held bits of old machinery, old tyres, rusty kero tins, and the tins and bottles from the house. Near the tree lay an old stove and some rusted cream cans. From among it all the boy was picking out the small jam and meat tins, digging among the rest for them, and making his design on the ground.
I could see him as I crossed the yard, but he gave no sign, as though he had not noticed me, and I went over to the dump. I stood by the tree, looking down at him.
"What are you making?" I asked.
He did not look up. He had one of the jam tins in his hand, the top partly covered by his fingers.
"You'll rustle a snake out of there one day. And it'll be too bad if you both make for the house at the same time."
"There's not," the boy said. "Not in there."
"Well, you never know. And your father doesn't like you playing here. How about finding somewhere else for a while, eh?"
The boy made no move, but his hand shifted down away from the top of the tin so that he was grasping the round rusted surface of the can. I could see into the tin.
"You'd better chuck that one away," I said. "Look, there's a red-back in it. They won't hurt you unless you interfere with them, but that one's not going to like what you're doing to his tin. Throw it away."
I moved my hand to take the tin, but the boy held it tightly. I heard the door of the house slam and looked across the yard. It was too late then.
"Here's your father. He's not going to be too pleased finding you here. To say nothing of me being supposed to have the horse harnessed up. You come down to the shed with me and we'll harness up."
The boy might not have heard. He was sitting quite still, the rusty tin in his hand.
"Well, I'm going to get the horse in."
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.
It was in my mind as we worked in the back paddock during the morning. I was loading the cart while he went off to look for the saplings. There was not much of the fallen wood that needed cutting, so I had little to do but load it.
We came in again at midday and took the load off. He went over to the house while I took the horse out and gave it its feed. Then I went across towards the veranda. The yard was hot and without shade. I took the basin from the staging of the tank at the edge of the veranda and had a wash. I was drying myself slowly, standing in the sun, and I suppose looking along the veranda without seeing anything in particular, just feeling the heat of the sun and rubbing my neck and head with the towel. The veranda was partly shaded from the sun, and had two beds pulled lengthways along the wall, where the man and the boy slept. But I noticed suddenly two of the rusty jam tins on the floor under the boy's bed. I knew they hadn't been there at breakfast time, and so the boy must have been over to the dump again and brought them back. Strange they should seem to want things so much.
After lunch the boy came out with us as we left the house. He did not have his hat, he usually came out to see us off. The man would not let him work with us, even if we were to be near the house, he seemed to get on his father's nerves and it was a hell of a time for us all. I thought of the tins as we came out, but the boy did not look towards the beds, they might have gone completely from his mind. His father saw the tins on the veranda. He bent down and pulled them out from under the bed.
"I told you about those tins." His voice rose shrilly. "D'you want these spiders getting in your bed - how can you see them when you get in there in the dark? Haven't you got any sense at all? You just can't learn."
He threw the tins out towards the dump and went across the yard. The boy stayed by the veranda looking down at the hardswept earth that was hot under his bare feet.
We had yarded the cows the next afternoon for the milking and I was going over to the separator shed for the cans when I saw the boy playing in the dump. The shade from the old jarrah was drawn thinly across the ground that was still hot from the day. I looked at the boy playing with the rusty tins and the pieces of old iron. You do not know what things take possession of their minds and what they seem to have to do. I suppose it's too far back to that time in one's own life, too distant to such compulsions that held their own validity. It was as if he had never been told not to play there. Looking at him, I was going to go over and warn him when I saw that the man had seen him, too. He was striding quickly towards the dump. The boy did not hear him, he seemed totally absorbed in what he was doing among the tins and bits of iron. His face went suddenly white with fear and shock when the man pulled him up and he twisted round, looking up at his father. I saw with a strange irrelevant clarity that the boy had made a castle of the tins, a splendid thing, the high mass of the central building, the turrets and the walls. You no longer saw the parts, the rusty discarded tins, but only the whole that he had built, the compulsion that had been in his mind so that he had had to create its likeness.
The tins rattled from the man's foot out towards the dump, scattered, incongruous. He hit the boy across the head so that he stumbled, and then kicked him. I knew then there was no help for it, and this was what all along I had been afraid of. I had seen him try to do that to the older girl. But she had some chance of looking after herself and could get away. Like that he was beyond reason or thinking. If an animal went like that you would shoot it. I started towards the dump, beginning to run. Then suddenly the man stopped and turned away and went off towards the sheds with his quick, jerky walk. He was talking and moving his hands as though making gestures to someone.
It was getting dark and I had washed the milk buckets and finished in the dairy. In the window of the house the light had begun to take on distinctness. At first I thought one of the calves had got into the yard and had been rummaging round the dum and made off as it heard me coming. Then I saw the small upright shape of the boy walking across towards the veranda and there was something in his hands. It was too dark to see clearly. But I had no doubt then that it was the boy and that he was carrying something. The rest were inside busy with the tea and they did not miss him. He came in for his tea. I thought I would see if the tin had been left on the veranda when I came out afterwards, and shift it if it had, to save any more trouble. And yet, inside, in the lighted kitchen, it seemed remote, unreal, and I did not really believe that it could have been the boy, that he would have gone over there again. So that when, afterwards, in the darkness, I could find nothing on the veranda, I thought I had imagined it, in the dark of the yard I could have been mistaken. Inside I could hear the man saying something, his voice raised as though in argument, and I did not stay.
Someone knocking suddenly on the door of the small room by the sheds where I slept woke me. For a moment I wondered if I had overslept, and I imagined the man's voice, querulous, sarcastic. Then I knew it was not that and I could hear the girl saying something, and I pushed the door open, looking out. The girl said something confused about her father being sick. I pulled my coat and trousers on and went across to the house with her, and she told me they did not know what was the matter with the man, they thought at first he had been bitten by a snake, but it was not that, and they must get him into town.
The woman and the other girl were in the kitchen. The man was sitting on one of the plain hard chairs, pulled up at the table, himself slumped across the table. I took him across to the truck, and the woman got up in the cab beside him. We drove down the track, in the darkness, to the road. I took the truck along fast, watching the road that wound and was hard to see in the darkness, all my attention concentrated so that I was scarcely aware of the others, themselves the reason for this. On the straight portion, near the town, I could look across at the man and I saw that the woman had put his head down against her shoulder, and that he was lying against her, quite still, in that position. And it was like watching something I should not have seen.
The woman stayed in town and I drove back by myself to the farm. It was beginning to get light, the sky becoming pale and the bands of long thin cloud streamers close above the horizon taking on colour, changing from dull grey to long crimson bands, the yellow of the light behind them. And driving I thought of the difference from the way we had come in, with the hurry and urgency, and I thought of the strange fatalistic fear of the woman, as though she knew it had all concentrated here, drawn in to this, and knew the briefness of what was ahead, like a contrast to the resignation that was perhaps indifference in the man. And it was an indifference that made him as a stranger, the constant edge of temper gone, the querulousness, the seeking for something to make discord from. And as I watched the road in the gaining light I thought that perhaps that was what he had been, a stranger, and as much to those he had lived with as to one outside, like myself. Because we had accepted that exterior of irritability and harshness. It had seemed all there was. And soon one did not look for anything else. So that it was with a sense of shock and uneasiness you realized it had not always been like that, as I had realized when I saw them in the cab of the truck as we drove in, as though the two of them had been alone there and I had had no existence. Perhaps some of that other time had come back for them then, deep buried though it must have been, with the kind of angry aloofness and separation of the man gone.
His health had never been anything but poor, and it seemed he had been bitten more than once, from what I gathered briefly before I left the hospital, but I thought it must have been his own state of health, because I had never really believed any of those spiders had a fatal bite, despite the stories you always heard, and how they were held so dangerous. But I could not forget the change in the man, the way he seemed to have let go, as though he no longer cared about anything. He had not wanted to be taken in to hospital, and he would not wake the boy. He seemed afraid we would make a noise and wake the boy.
And then suddenly it seemed to come together in my mind, and I realized how it must have come to the man, how he must have seen it all then with a sudden clearness, how this had happened, and beyond this, to the way it had all become set so there was no changing of anything, and he had had no strength and knew it was no use to go on. But I thought that was only a guess, no one will know. It might not have been like that. And I thought how the man could not have seen, as I had, the boy just before tea as the darkness came about the house and the yards and the dump. And as I turned the truck off the road along the track towards the house, now, in the growing light, that seemed unreal again, too, as though I had imagined it.