THE DAY THE BULLDOG GOT BRUNO
[published in “Aust Short Stories” 1992]
Thinking on it now I guess this is really
about a sharefarmer and his wife, a couple I worked for a long way back when I
was no more than a sapling, green and soft and ready to be shaped by the things
of life. At the time I probably would’ve thought it was about Bruno.
Bruno was twenty, just a couple of years
older than me. He was good looking and muscular and fair and had an accent from
somewhere in Europe that all seemed designed just for the eyes and ears of
women. Which was just as well because Bruno's great ambition in life was to
visit the bed of every female between fifteen and fifty at least once.
Bruno's and my lives crossed for a short
time while working together on a farm a long way away from most places anyone
normally chose to go. It was a wild and lonely and windy place down south where
the hard working sharefarmer was trying to coax fat onto lean scrubby northern
store cattle by turning them loose onto some flood-irrigated pastures strung
with those wandering strands of eternally ticking electric fence.
The boss and his wife were nice enough
people, mid thirties, refugees from the swallowing up of the Baltic States
during the war. Some nights after supper we'd sit for a while sipping Tokay and
coffee and reflecting on things and every so often he'd let something slip
about their early days, caught between the -isms of the Communists and the
Nazis, and his wife or the old cook would give him a look that suggested it was
better to leave all that behind. But sometimes I think he just needed to
revisit some place in his head where he kept the distant images of their other
lives.
They had no kids, and once he suggested
that I ought to study to be a vet and set up in the district, because that's
what he would do if he had my chance. He had this way of trying to shape my
life for me and got a bit irritable when I wouldn't fit in.
The cook - she was about seventy but full
of that plodding energy that comes from working hard, carrying large burdens
and quietly accepting things you can't change. Once the boss implied she’d been
fairly wealthy, owned a couple of hotels that are lost somewhere in Greater
Russia now. They teamed up in an on-the-run refugee camp in Holland when the
old girl found the boss an orange so he would have something to give his new
bride on their wedding day amid the remnants and uncertainties of a displaced
Europe. He tried hard to make me understand what that orange meant but I was
eighteen and Aus was overflowing with oranges.
For about three months I was the only
other person on the farm. They treated me well and while I missed my girlfriend
and my own family a lot - they were about five bus hours away up in the city -
the long days and the hard simple labour and the cook's big feeds and the vast
solitude of the place helped shape the emerging man.
But then he put Bruno on. God only knows
why. Granted he was young and he was strong and he wanted the job for a while -
a bit of a rare combination back then - but he had no feel for the work or the
land or the life. He'd loaf if he had the chance, make private jokes about the
bosses probable love life and relate ad nauseum tales of his own sexual
olympics. And yes, I was a bit wary of him, as he had an odd intensity that
lurked behind his matey facade. I wasn't sorry at all the day that - but first
things first.
You have to grasp a few mechanical
principles to get the best out of this story because in the end it was
mechanical principle that was the downfall of Bruno.
The Rabbit Ripper.
A rabbit ripper, well the one the
sharefarmer had anyway, is a contraption that you pull along behind a tractor
and is designed to annoy the heck out of rabbits. It trundles along on two iron
wheels and has this three foot long reinforced steel claw that drops down into
the ground when you pull a rope that's attached to a restraining catch, and the
claw, because you’re usually straddling the tractor over a rabbit warren and
doing about ten miles an hour at the time, rearranges the warrens fairly
drastically - with them inside a lot of the time, which is a bit rough on the
rabbits but it sure makes the farmer feel better.
Actually we didn't have much bother with
rabbits, just a few spots up on some of the softer ridges, and the boss only
used the ripper to break up the sub-soil on all of the pastures. They'd packed
down so hard over the years that, when he started irrigating, most of the water
would just run off back into the channels and take the super with it. Made the
reeds in the channels grow like mad but didn't do much for the clover and the
rye grass.
The Bulldog.
The Lanz Bulldog was not just a tractor.
It was a tractor among tractors, the rugged individualist of the tractor world,
a wild and primitive beast designed in the thirties to test the patience and
perseverance of any farmer mad enough to believe that the sheer spartan-ness of
its appearance and oddity of its design would make it work magic on reluctant
paddocks. I've yet to meet a farmer with that much patience. Most Bulldogs finished
up as stationary engines in some distant corner field on flat rotten tyres
until the accountant said you could afford to put the mains power out to that
spot.
The truly unique feature of the Lanz was
its engine. It was powered by just one enormous cylinder that laid long and fat
between its big teutonic iron frame, something akin to the thing that hangs on
the side of a steam loco, but driving a giant's pair of flywheels - it looked
absolutely phallic. And the Bulldog ran on damn near anything that was runny
and would burn, from old sump oil through to kero or any combinations thereof.
And the engine was just as happy running backwards as forwards, simply because
it was a two stoke diesel that was fired by a glow plug up the front where the
crank handle would have been if it was your average tractor. Anyway, if you're
not terribly nuts and bolts inclined don't stop here - suffice to say that the
Lanz was a fraction unusual.
Now Bruno had no feel at all for anything
mechanical. He did however, and not surprisingly, have this terrible need to
continuously reassure himself that he had all the equipment that a REAL man
should have, and he was forever reminding me that I was built like five feet of
pump water (which was entirely unfair because I was at least five feet seven)
and that I couldn't hump a full bag of feed barley up on my back from a
standing start. This was true but I didn't need to be reminded three times a
week, and I surely didn't need him pointing that out to my girlfriend when she
came down from the city on the long weekends, who incidentally told me years
later that Bruno had tried to feel her up under the dinner table twice but she
was scared to tell me in case I had a go at the creep and he broke me in
halves.
Anyway, what Bruno definitely did NOT have
was the slightest idea about machinery. Back in Wherever He Came From he didn't
need to know why the two round things up the front of a vehicle moved side to
side when you turned the other round thing in front of the seat, or why it all
made a louder sound and went quicker if you stepped on one pedal yet stopped if
you stood on another and went silent with a strangled lurch if you forgot to
step on the thing called the clutch while doing it. Back in Wherever in 1952
apparently none of the bucks had to know these things to compete.
But this was Aus, and in Aus he soon
realised that without a half reasonable understanding of why gears went grind
and how engines went vrooom, a young fella was sometimes made to feel something
a little less than a complete man. So engineering was a bit of a sensitive
subject.
Now I hadn't seen much of my dad as a kid
but somehow some of his genius with a spanner had managed to get passed on
down. I wasn't the genuine old-time mechanic that he was - he once said to me
that an Engineer is someone who can make something for two bob that any damn
fool can make for a quid - and HE was surely an Engineer. Anyway, as great as
my old dad as I wasn't, I still had a reasonably good feel for machinery all
the same, which the sharefarmer must have quickly realised because I'm sure it
wasn't my muscles or my enthusiasm for milking his cows that kept me on - he
was only a couple of strides ahead of Bruno himself when it came to pumps and
chaffcutters and reluctant windmills.
One day the sharefarmer went to a
clearance sale and brought back the Bulldog. We already had a perky little grey
Massey-Ferguson that did all the light fast work, and we had a middle-aged
Chamberlain that more or less coped with the hard grunting stuff. What he wanted
was something he could hook up to a new bore in a distant corner till the
accountant said he could afford to put the power out to it. So he bought the
Bulldog, and for about two bars less than a song because at full throttle it
wouldn't pull you're hat off. But the auctioneer had convinced him it was just
what he needed to pump water out of the ground.
I'd never run into one of these eccentric
tractors before but something about it got to me, like it was some lame green
elephant that was going to be chained to a whim for the rest of it's days. And
it had a sad dignity about it as the Fergy growled and tugged and fox-terrier-ed
it off the back of the truck and down the loading ramp, and as it wobbled
backwards on its flabby tyres, it's proud and ancient spirit called out to me,
something like - hey Skinny, are you going to let these schmucks use me as a
windmill?
Now I'd never been any closer to this old
fella's European homeland than Dubbo so I wasn't too sure what a shmuck was but
I realised that it wasn't much of a compliment, and anyway the thing sure
looked to me like it was capable of something fairly inspiring so I suggested
to the boss that I give it a physical, which was okay by him as long as I did
it on Sunday.
The operating instructions that came with
the Bulldog were a few blunt statements scribbled with an even blunter pencil
and with great relief on the back of the receipt by the outgoing owner. It read
–
Stick the blowlamp under the glowplug for
about ten minutes
Stick the steering wheel in the side of the
left flywheel
Pump the hand throttle about three times
Swing the flywheel over with the steering
wheel against the
compression - it ought to fire but it
could run backwards
Don't forget to take the steering wheel out
straight away or
you can't and you might need it if
you're going to drive
her around.
That was it. No suggestion about remedying
the slight problem of what to do if you had a large green tractor that went
very slowly forward in one gear only but could go backwards rapidly in three
different ratios. Or even how to turn it off at night. Or how to retrieve a
very rapidly revolving steering wheel hanging out the side of a particularly
intimidating flywheel if you actually DIDN'T get it out straight away and you
really DID want to point it into a new direction. Obviously the last bloke had
a sense of humour. Not to mention the designer.
So Sunday I blew up the tyres and washed
off the chook crap, gave the front end a good grease and topped up the oil in
the gearbox, while Bruno hung about suggesting that I should leave the old load
of junk alone if I didn't know what I was doing. The sharefarmer suggested that
he should piss off if he wasn't going to give me a hand - the sharefarmer by
this time didn't like Bruno much for some reason of his own but six-day-a-week
labourers were hard to find - then HE asked me if I knew what I was doing. But
he smiled and said it differently.
By morning tea time I'd worked out how to
get that lumbering great thing started and drove it around the bosses new
implement shed with steering wheel in place and the engine going the right way.
I was in love. That beast was like nothing else. It was just so - imposing. The
boss's wife gave a little round of applause from the back step of the house as
I went by. I felt like Hannibal crossing the Alps.
Yet the poor old heap could barely pull
its own weight and Bruno jeered quietly from the sidelines and the boss spoke
like it was time to put it down. But after a cup of tea and some fresh scones I
pulled the fuel injection pump to bits and found a few seized valves and with a
bit of emery paper and some TLC soon had it as good as new.
My God did that tractor come alive. The
previous tentative whuzz whuzz whuzz whuzz of its ailing heart as it
geriatricked around the shed gave way to a booming WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP as
it rose up and beat it's chest like King Kong on heat.
The sharefarmer was cautiously interested.
Bruno was shitty. The boss's wife and the old cook came down to the shed
together to see what the strange new noise was and the dogs all started
barking. It was marvellous. I shouted to the boss that it felt like it'd pull
battleships up a brick wall and he looked skeptical and Bruno scoffed. So I
backed it up to the rabbit ripper and hooked it on and headed for the old cow
pasture flats by the milking sheds, the boss jumping on the footplate as I went
by, but Bruno stayed close to the women, watching proceedings from the yard
rails, closer to the boss's wife than the cook.
I ran the Bulldog up and back once to make
sure it was really perking, but making out I was checking the steering and the
brakes, then I lined it up, opened the throttle to full bore and pulled the
rope.
Now that old pasture had seen a lot of
hooves for a lot of years and she was harder than a drover's bed but the
further that claw went down the harder the Bulldog grunted - WUMP! WUMP! WUMP!
WUMP! - it didn't ever change pace, I think it was enjoying itself. Showing
off. The boss was suitably impressed. No way would the Chamberlain have even looked
at it. He yelled in my ear that we might as well do the rest of the paddock
while we were at it - the boss never missed a chance to get some work done in
the name of enjoyment - he always said all work should be seen as recreation. I
didn't mind, this time he was right.
We ran the tractor back to the shed after
and I left the ripper attached and asked the boss could I use it to do the
south pastures tomorrow instead of the Chamberlain to really try it out. He was
going to be away at the sales so he said okay but to keep Bruno away from it as
he might run over his own foot. The sharefarmer wasn't malicious but every now
and then he seemed to need to give Bruno one of these little digs, to keep him
in his place or something. The cook smiled but the boss's wife just gave him a
funny little exasperated look. Bruno went a bit red and was clearly less than
pleased at this slight to his masculinity.
Monday morning was crisp and clean and
smelled like a farm should, of damp hay and chooks and old dogs and bacon and
eggs and fried bread dipped in milk. Bruno and me shared a room built into the
end of the new implement shed which had the chill-room attached where we got
the milk ready for the tanker. About five thirty the boss would be in there
getting things set and do his alarm clock trick by belting the partition wall
with a large and resounding piece of the chiller, right by Bruno's head. I was
always ready for it but Bruno never did get adjusted to farm time and would
make about three inches of daylight between himself and the mattress, and on
landing grunt quiet questions about the boss's sexuality, his anatomy and his
parentage.
This particular morning he wasn't talking
much, except as he pulled on his rubber boots he made some comment half to
himself that today was the day he was going to finally wear down the boss's
wife while the smartarse was at the sales. He confided to me with a funny sort
of sideways smile that he'd been working on her and she was coming good and it
was time to move in for the kill.
Well I was as innocent as two virgins and
it seemed like it was none of my business if he wanted to try and squeeze an
extra few quid a week out of the boss by asking through his wife - maybe it
made some sense but I was full of the anticipation of a day out with my new
mechanical mate and the big sky and no people.
The boss was gone and we'd finished the
cows and a killer of a breakfast. I had the blowlamp under the nose of the
Lanz, the old dog that had adopted me was waiting tongue-hanging patient, the
flies were droning, the clacker for the electric fence was sending endless
clacks of instant cattle prod out on the wire, a quartet of magpies were
yodelling up a gum tree, and Bruno was in the chill-room in quiet conversation
with Mrs Sharefarmer. It was good to be alive.
Suddenly she let out a ripple of a laugh,
a don't be bloody stupid or a wake up to yourself sonny or a not in a million
years sort of laugh as she went on washing down the gear and it was clear that
Bruno wasn't going to get his raise. But just as I put the steering wheel in
the side of the flywheel and was about to put a rock under the wheel so I could
knock it out of bottom gear - I hadn't fixed the brake lock yet - Bruno came
stumping out with a REALLY red face and the boss's wife still giggling and
watching him go.
He got halfway out the shed, changed his
mind, came back and suddenly gave me a Godalmighty shove that landed me on my
bum, shouting in hot broken European that he could do anything that a skinny
little prick like me could do and HE was taking this heap of shit out today and
I could play with the Fergy like a good little boy!
Geez was he ticking over. He gave that
throttle a couple of good pumps and before I could think what was going on he
swung the flywheel over and the old green elephant let out a rousing gurgle and
backed it's front wheel up on his foot. He let out a howl of pain and rage and
slammed the throttle shut - but forgot to let go. As the mighty piston inside
that mountain of cast iron punched back off compression it eased off his foot
okay but as he yoiked it out from under he pulled the throttle wide open as his
weight shifted. The Bulldog gave a WHUMP of delight that its engine was now
rolling in the right direction - and headed in for the back wall of the boss's
new shed!
Bruno went pale. The boss's wife gave one
classic adrenalin pumping scream which galvanised him into mindless action and
he scrambled onto the footplate with very little plan in mind, swinging himself
up by the rope to the ripper, now gathering speed behind, and with a
businesslike KERLUNK! the claw went down to the hilt in the dirt outside the
shed and the Bulldog took up the strain without breaking stride.
Bruno didn't know what to grab first.
He knew he was in the right place to take
charge of the rapidly disintegrating situation but the sudden realisation that
there was a big empty space where the steering wheel aught to have been - it
was by now doing a goodly rate of revs hanging very ungainly out the side of
the flywheel - left him more than a little confused. He had always equated
working the pedals on the floor with hanging onto the steering wheel as if
their operation were somehow irrevocably connected, and the throttle lever was
by now apparently not on his priority list at all.
Deciding to deal only with the things he
understood he ignored the rapidly approaching back wall and yanked the rope
again just as the whole thing had rolled far enough into the shed to start
rearranging the front edge of the concrete floor. With the wisdom of hindsight
it's a 50/50 chance that in fact the rabbit ripper and six inches of reinforced
slab just might have been a match for the Bulldog's prussian will and would
have stalled the whole travelling circus just short of absolute disaster, but
by now it all had a life of its own and up came the claw - bringing the two
inch water main with it.
By the time water gallops several furlongs
down hill from a very large squatters tank it tends to arrive with some
pressure and as the busted pipe came up the jet first caught me in the side of
the head, which was no fun at all, then was swung round by the claw to get the
boss's wife square in the tits, which was a bit more amusing, then as the
ripper let it go it shot straight up Bruno's arse. He let out a howl of total confusion,
grabbed the steel mudguards, put his head down and rode the Bulldog clean
through the shed wall.
My God did it make a truly terrible groan.
The three by two oregons split and the Bulldog leant into the task of pushing
the corrugated iron into the shape of its front end, taking the electric
fence’s sender-wire with it which was stapled under one of the timber rails.
The old green and very all-steel tractor got hold of that ticking wire in its
teeth and Bruno came alive all over again, yelling in convulsive shock every
second on the second as the pulse shot up his very wet arms into his very soggy
body. Then the back of the shed gave up and began descending around his ears.
The boss's wife was yelling extremely
useful instructions like Watch out for the wall! and Stop you silly bastard!
while she dithered back and forwards with a sort of Buster Keaton action. Bruno
clearly wasn't listening. I never was the fastest thinker in the world and
besides, I was temporarily distracted by the small creek in my earhole, but I
gathered myself up and, realising that it was probably better to be outside
than inside at that point in time, I scampered off to meet the whole
catastrophe as it came out the other side, the Bulldog going WUMP! WUMP! WUMP!
and Bruno going YAH! YAH! YAH! with his eyes shut grimace tight and still
hanging onto those mudguards like he was trying to tear them off, the electric
fence wire now trailing behind ready to pull the sender out of it's socket when
the slack was taken up. The dogs were all barking, the pigsty in the distance
was a cacophony of squealing, sheets of iron were cascading and the cook came
bundling out accompanied by a very large saucepan just in time to see the
Bulldog take down her rotary clothes line and munch it underfoot along with
half of her Monday morning wash already freshly pegged out. And now heading for
her vegie garden.
By now Mrs Sharefarmer was incoherent but
kept on shouting whatever she was shouting through the new exit in the shed
wall and the cook was making very clear gestures with the saucepan,
demonstrating what she would do to Bruno if he touched her triambles by
thumping the advancing front tyre of the totally unconcerned tractor and all
the while swearing in Ukrainian. It was all too much for me. I started to laugh.
And to this day I'll never know whether I was unconsciously waiting those extra
few seconds for the Bulldog to get right into the vegie patch and totally seal
Bruno's fate or if I really couldn't get my act together quick enough.
The sender wire finally tore the unit
apart and one torment was over. I jumped the garden fence and hit the throttle
lever just as my old green mate finished popping the pumpkins underfoot and was
settling into the tomatoes. The whole show heaved a shuddering sigh and finally
stalled into silence. For about one and a half seconds. Then the women started
on Bruno afresh.
He staggered down from the footplate with
his eyes glazed over. The cook gave forth one last burst of invective and
belted him right on the bicep with the saucepan in an impressive two-handed
swing that Don Bradman would have been proud of. Bruno didn't even flinch, just
wobbled off towards our quarters as if there was something he'd forgotten to do
but he couldn't remember what, while the boss's wife was heatedly pointing out
some fairly obvious facts of life to him about the condition of the shed, the
clothes line, the washing, the vegie patch, her very wet self and the water
main.
The water main!
By the time I got up to the squatters tank
and back the implement shed and everything in it had been well and truly
drowned. Every truss and frame was dripping like a rain forest, about a hundred
bags of super in the corner looked decidedly damp and there was a brand new
creek wandering off down towards the calf pens. But at least the farm had
regained most of it's composure. The dogs and pigs had settled down and you
could hear the magpies chortling again. At the scene the women were holding an
inquest over the marrows.
No-one saw Bruno leave. He must have just
packed his gear and headed for civilisation. The boss got a letter a couple of
weeks later suggesting that if there was any outstanding pay it could be
forwarded along with his tax certificate to the attached box number. The boss
suggested that the rather unnecessary rearrangement of his farmyard tended to
negate any wages or accrued annual leave due. But he said it a bit differently.
I didn't stay long after that myself. The
boss seemed to change somehow. He was quieter and less approachable and he didn't
put anyone else on, just worked himself and the rest of us that much harder.
Then after a few weeks, once I had all the old pastures ripped, he said that he
was going to put the Bulldog on the West 7 pump like he first intended and no
amount of arguing was going to change his mind.
There was a sense of something ending.
Alone at night in my small room drifting into dreaming I missed my girl and my
family more than ever. And somewhere in the distant dark there was a sad and
captive whumping. I'd hold onto those last few fading moments of life listening
to a giant heart beating out there on those lonely flats with only the heron
and the plover's cry for company and catch myself wondering what an old green
elephant thinks about.
©
T. R. Edmonds 1992
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