I Can Jump Puddles by Alan Marshall

Author:Alan Marshall
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742535845
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

Next day Mr Tucker looked at my face then called me out and flogged me for fighting and he flogged Steve McIntyre, too, but I kept remembering that Father said I had the heart of a bullock and I didn’t cry out.

oe Carmichael lived quite close to our place. After school hours we were rarely apart. On Saturday afternoons we always went hunting together and on week nights we set traps which we visited early each morning. We knew the names of all the birds in the bush around our homes; we knew their habits, their nesting places, and each of us had a collection of eggs that we kept in cardboard boxes half full of pollard.

Joe had a fresh, ruddy face and a slow smile that made grown-ups like him. He raised his cap to women and would go messages for anyone. He never quarrelled but always clung stubbornly to an opinion even though he did not defend it.

Joe’s father worked for Mrs Carruthers, doing odd jobs round the station, and each morning in the dawn he rode past our gate on a pony called Tony. Each evening as darkness was falling he came riding home again. He had a sandy moustache and father said he was the most honest man in the district. Mrs Carruthers paid him twenty-five shillings a week but she took five shillings back for the rent of his house. His house was built on an acre of land and he kept a cow.

Mrs Carmichael was a thin, little woman with her hair drawn back in two tight wings above her ears. It was done up in a bun at the back. She washed clothes in round wooden troughs made from the halves of barrels and she always hummed a tune as she washed. The tune was always the same. It didn’t go high or low but remained on an even key like an expression of contentment. It moved out from the washhouse on the summer evenings and greeted me as I came through the trees to their place and I always stood still to listen to it.

She made ketchup from the mushrooms we gathered. She would place them evenly on a tray and sprinkle salt upon them and little pink beads of juice would gather on their gills and this was the beginning of the ketchup.

She kept fowls and ducks and geese and a pig. When the pig was big Mr Carmichael killed it and put it in a tub of hot water and scraped the hair off it, then he salted it and hung it in a little hut made of bags. He lit fires of green leaves on the floor of this hut and smoke came out everywhere. After he did this the pig was bacon and he gave Father some and Father said it was the best bacon he had ever tasted.

Mrs Carmichael always smiled at me when I came there and said, ‘Sure, it’s you again.’ Then she would say, ‘I will give you and Joe a piece of bread and jam in a minute an’ I will.

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