Birrung the Secret Friend by French Jackie

Author:French, Jackie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

CHAPTER 9

The Brother

The young man came to get Birrung a week later.

Heat sucked at the leaves of the lettuce and cucumber plants, row after row of them limp on the neatly turned soil. I’d been lugging buckets of water to the vegetables since dawn. Only the watermelons and the corn looked happy, over a hundred melons on the vines and more than an acre of corn, each plant with four to six fat cobs. The melons were bigger than my head. Later I’d have to go to the other plots to water the pumpkins and the fruit trees. No one had stolen anything from Mr Johnson’s gardens yet. Mr Johnson kept crops like corn and potatoes that were easy to steal near the house. The convicts couldn’t steal the fruit, because the trees were too small to give much yet, and a ripe pumpkin was too big for a man to carry away unnoticed, so it was safe to leave them unguarded.

Down at the other end of the garden Elsie picked beans and carrots and turnips for our dinner. The convict men, Old Tom and Scruggins, were off digging pails of pig manure to feed the garden. These were different convicts from the men we’d had before, because the others had kept on swearing in front of Mrs Johnson. Even when she warned they’d get no more corn and potatoes if they used bad language, they kept on swearing so much I wondered if they knew other words to say.

Pig manure stank. The garden would stink too, but Mr Johnson said that muck and manure grew good vegetables. Old Tom and Scruggins would stink as well, after getting the manure, but they stank anyway. I don’t think they’d ever had a bath in their lives, except when they’d been scrubbed when they came aboard the ships that brought us here.

Mr Johnson came out with Birrung. He said, ‘Abaroo says Mrs Johnson must have oysters to make her strong.’

Birrung laughed and nodded. I thought: Birrung wants to go down to the beach again. She wants to swim without any clothes on in the waves. I felt my face grow hot.

Elsie looked out the back door. Mr Johnson said, ‘We’re going oyster gathering. Will you come with us?’

Elsie looked at me. She looked at Birrung. She shook her head and went back inside.

We hadn’t even got past the garden though when Mr Johnson stopped. A black man was walking up the track, a real wild Indian. He didn’t even wear clothes like some natives did, including Bennelong, who was friends with the governor. There had been more of them around lately. They hadn’t all died in the plague except for Birrung and Nanberry, like we’d thought, just moved away for a while. This native carried two spears, with big sharp barbs.

‘Go inside,’ said Mr Johnson quietly to me and Birrung.

I turned to go. Birrung stayed where she was.

I hesitated.

‘Go,’ said Mr Johnson. I went, but just to the door. I peered outside.

The three of them talked, the Indian man and Mr Johnson and Birrung.

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