Old Drumble (2 page)

Then he ran through the puddles again. He galloped through the shallow parts, but he had to slow down and wade through the deep parts. He stood on his right foot, pointed with his left hand, closed his right eye, and kicked with his left foot—all at the same time. It didn’t make much of a splash, so he tried kicking with both feet at once and sat down in the puddle.

Few cars or lorries came along Ward Street, so it was just a dirt road without any metal. If Jack’s friends Andy the Drover and Old Drumble had driven cattle along it, there were cow plops all over the place. If they’d driven sheep, there were thousands of little black bits of sheep dung like currants. Jack Jackman had once got Harry Jitters to eat a handful by telling him they were Smarter Pills. It was a story he’d heard his father tell Mr Murdoch, the carrier.

“You eat enough of them, and they’ll make you smarter,” Jack told Harry and pretended to swallow a handful himself.

Harry picked up a few, swallowed them, and looked thoughtful. “I don’t feel any different,” he complained.

“You’ve got to eat a decent handful for them to work.” Jack pretended to eat some more, and Harry had another go at them.

“I don’t think they’re Smarter Pills at all. I think they’re just sheep muck!” said Harry.

“Now you’re getting smarter!” Jack told him.

When he tried the Smarter Pills on Minnie Mitchell, she ran and told her mother. That was the time Jack tried pulling a face and saying “Unga-Yunga!” to Mrs Mitchell. And, soon after that, Mrs Dainty, from up the street past the hall, told Jack he was a dirty-minded little boy who would come to no good.

Every now and again, on Ward Street, there’d be the round balls of dung where Andy the Drover had led his horse, following the mobs. The dust, the plops, the dung, and the muck turned to liquid mud when it rained. Where Andy and Old Drumble had driven the last mob of cattle through, a week or so before, Jack could see the dirt poached with tracks, each now a little puddle of water.

Tramping and splashing along, putting his feet in their tracks, mooing, and shaking his head from side to side,
swinging his horns, and swishing his tail, Jack tried being a cattle beast. When he stamped, the muddy water shot up between his toes. From under his heels, it shot right up the back of his knees. If he stamped really hard, the muddy water shot up the legs of his shorts and felt funny, so he did that again. Again and again.

He was mooing, stamping, shaking his horns, and shooting the water right up the legs of his shorts, and wondering if he could get it to go so high that it would come out the neck of his shirt, when somebody swung him off his feet, ran him through his gate, inside the wash-house, stripped off his wet clothes, threw them to soak in one of the tubs, and told him to put on the dry clothes she had ready.

“And if I catch you thinking you’re a bull, mooing and stamping in those puddles again, my boy, I’ll give you something to moo about with the back of my hand,” his mother told him. “The idea! As if I haven’t enough to keep me busy, without having to soak your muddy clothes as well.”

W
ARM IN DRY CLOTHES
, Jack stood at the window. It had stopped raining and, because Waharoa had free-draining sand under the rich black soil on top, the puddles were already shrinking. Jack watched them getting smaller and said to his mother, “It’s a shame to waste them.”

“You keep out of those puddles,” said his mother, “or I’ll give you waste…”

“Mum,” said Jack. “If this is the top end of Ward Street, why doesn’t all the water run down the other end? If the other end’s the bottom end.”

“As if it’s not enough that I’ve got all this extra work you’ve made for me: traipsing water and mud all through the house! Do you think I’ve got time to worry about which way the water runs along Ward Street, and which end’s the bottom and which is the top? Ask your father, when he comes home. It’s just the silly sort of question he likes.”

While Jack waited for his father to come home, he
looked out the window again to see if the puddles ran away. As far as he could see, they just lay there, getting smaller. Already, the middle of the road was clear of water when Mr Kennedy drove past in his flash Plymouth and gave Jack a nod. Mr Kennedy’s car had mud splashed up the side, so he must have come through some pretty big puddles up the Matamata road, Jack thought, as he nodded back.

But Jack’s nod wasn’t the sort of nod Mr Kennedy had given him. When his father and Mr Kennedy and all the other men nodded, the top of their heads went one way, and their chins swung the other way. Sometimes, just as they finished the nod, they winked one eye, and sometimes they screwed up the corner of their mouths and made a click. Andy the Drover did it all the time.

Jack had practised it in the bathroom mirror, but he couldn’t seem to get it right. When he did the nod, he forgot to close one eye, or his head went up and down instead of sideways. He went out to the wash-house now, stood on a box so he could look in the mirror over the hand basin, and nodded at himself. His eye didn’t close, and his chin didn’t seem to swing to one side, not the way Andy’s did. And he couldn’t get the click right. It didn’t sound like “Click!,” it didn’t come at the right time, and he thought he looked silly, so he poked out his tongue, tried to say, “Unga-Yunga!” to it, and bit it.

He tried several more times and was just thinking
he’d got it right, nodding his head, winking one eye, and clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth, when his mother’s voice said, “What on earth are you up to now? Shaking your head, blinking into the mirror, and making that noise. Get off that box at once, and find yourself something useful to do.

“Anyway, what are you doing inside, getting under my feet and upsetting my house? Why aren’t you outside, running around and making the most of it while the rain’s stopped?”

Jack didn’t remind his mother that she’d ordered him to keep inside out of the puddles and mud. He shot out the door before she changed her mind again, galloped through the water that was left, and made channels in the mud with his heel so one puddle could run into the next along the side of the road and help him make up his mind which end of Ward Street was up and which was down. Away down the other end of Ward Street, Harry Jitters was doing the same thing, but it was too far for Jack to see whether he was still holding his head well back.

Jack found he could get the water to run from one puddle into another, all right, but sometimes it emptied out of a puddle towards his end of Ward Street, and sometimes it emptied towards the other end. He was still trying to work out which was the top and which was the bottom when he heard the voice he’d been waiting for.

“You’ll catch it from your mother, splashing around
in the mud, getting your clothes wet. Here, jump up and I’ll give you a dub home.”

Jack put one foot on top of his father’s boot on the pedal, climbed on the bar, rang the bell, and asked, “Dad, which is the top end of Ward Street?”

His father whistled. “Now that’s an interesting question!” Jack thought of what his mother had said and grinned over the handlebars at the front mudguard. “We call this the top end, because we live up here,” said his father. “Down where Harry Jitters lives, that’s the other end to us, so we call it the bottom end.”

“But Harry reckons his is the top end and ours is the bottom end.”

“That’s how it looks to him,” said Jack’s father. “But from up our end, he’s down the bottom end. We go down to his end, but he comes up to our end.

“When I think of it,” he told Jack, “I have to pedal to get up to our end, from down Harry’s end. But I have to pedal to get down his end from up our end as well. You realise what that means?”

“Does it mean that Ward Street goes down in the middle?”

“Maybe.” Jack felt his father shake his head as he pedalled in their gate, around the back of the house, and said, “I suppose you realise it could mean that Ward Street’s flat.”

J
ACK WASN’T SURE
that he wanted Ward Street to be flat. He rang the bell again and said, “I thought if the puddles ran away down the street to Harry’s end, that would make our end the top end.”

“And did they?”

“They just ran into each other and soaked away.” With his big toe, Jack felt for his father’s boot, curved his foot to fit it, and slipped off the bar.

“We’re on pretty free-draining soil, you know. And there’s the big drains all round Waharoa for the water to soak into. This district was all swamp in the old days, so they dug the drains and dried it out to turn it into farms, but the water still runs in the drains okay, because they were dug with a fall in them.” His father leaned his bike against the shed.

“What’s a fall?”

“They dug the drains deeper at one end than the other,
with a fall, a slope, so the water runs along them. They all run into the creek that comes down through the Domain and winds through Mr Weeks’s bush and Mr Hawe’s, then out through Wardville and into the Waihou River downstream of the Gordon bridge.”

“Has the Waihou got a fall in it?”

“That’s why it runs downstream. And up near Okoroire, it’s got waterfalls in it as well!”

Jack tried to follow the drains and creeks in his mind. It was like making a map inside his head, he thought. At the same time, he tried to think about falling all the way from Ward Street into the Waihou River, until he felt dizzy.

“Has that boy been playing in the puddles again? Just look at the state of him! He’s had one change already this afternoon. Oh, what’s the use of trying to keep him presentable when he goes straight out and gets covered in mud again?”

“It’s my fault, dear,” said Mr Jackman. “I rode through a puddle, and the mud and water shot up all over him. Still he saved me getting it all over my trousers.” He nodded at Jack, that peculiar shake of his head. The top of his head went one way, his chin went the other, one eye winked, his mouth screwed up and the corner of his mouth went “Click!”

Jack tried to do it back, but his wink went wrong, both eyes closed, and he didn’t get a click.

His father looked solemn. “People see things differently,” he told Jack. “From Harry’s place, we look down the bottom end, and from our place, he looks down the bottom end. It depends where you’re looking from.”

“I thought I made it perfectly clear,” Jack’s mum told them both. “Ours is the top end of Ward Street. Now wash your hands and get yourselves ready for your tea, the pair of you.”

“People see things differently,” Jack said to himself as he washed the mud off his legs and feet under the outside tap. He was nodding to himself and winking one eye when his mother called, “Will you stop wasting that water? The rain just filled the tanks, but they’ll be half empty by the time you’ve finished. Your tea’s on the table, and your father’s waiting to start his. Now come inside at once, or everything’ll be cold. I don’t know, what’s the point of going to all that trouble, heating the plates, when nobody can be bothered getting to the table on time?”

“Dad?” said Jack, feeling the backs of his legs wet against the chair. “You know when you nod, how the top of your head sort of goes this way, and your chin goes that way, and you wink, and you screw up that corner of your mouth, and you make a click?”

His father took a forkful of mashed potato, looked at Jack, and nodded straight up and down.

“Well, do you make the click with the corner of your mouth, or do you make it with your tongue?”

Jack’s dad nodded so the left top of his head went one way, his chin went the other, his left eye winked, and the right side of his mouth screwed up and went “Click!”

“I think I clicked with the corner of my mouth,” he said. “Hold on, I’ll just swallow this mouthful of mashed potato and try it again.” He tried, but no click came this time. “It’s not the sort of thing you want to think about doing.”

Jack stared.

“Think about it and it doesn’t work.”

“I had trouble, too!” Jack said. “I can’t get my eye to wink, and the click won’t come. I tried it with my tongue and with the corner of my mouth, but it didn’t work either way.”

“I’ll try nodding it to the other side,” said his father. He laid down his knife and fork and nodded the top of his head to the right and his chin to the left, and the left corner of his mouth screwed up and a click came out of it. A good one. “I don’t think I used my tongue at all,” he said. “Besides, there wasn’t any mashed potato to get in the way.”

Jack tried to copy him. They tried nodding this way, and they tried nodding that way; and they both had trouble remembering to wink their eyes and make the clicks because they were thinking about it. Jack’s dad was better at it, but even he got mixed up sometimes, and Jack didn’t seem able to get the wink right at all.
Not if he clicked. And he couldn’t get the click going if he winked.

They were clicking and winking and nodding when Jack’s mum turned from the stove.

“I thought so!” she said. “Pulling faces and winking at each other behind my back. That’s all the gratitude I get for spending the afternoon bent over a hot stove getting tea ready for the pair of you. All you can think to do is to make a mockery of me!” She slammed her plate down on the table, slumped into her chair, threw her apron over her head, and burst into tears.

“Mum!” Jack shouted as he leapt up. “We weren’t making a mockery out of you! Honest!” But he sat down again when he saw his mother grinning under her apron. She was having him on.

“Now get on with your tea, and we’ll have no more of this clicking and winking and nodding. As for you, you’d think a grown man would know better than to go teaching the boy a lot of silly nonsense when he should be eating his tea.” Without stopping for breath, his mother said, “Next time Andy the Drover comes through, why don’t you ask him to teach you how to nod and wink and click the corner of your mouth? He’s better at such things than your father. He’s been doing it twice as long.