A Kindness Cup Read Free

father,’ Buckmaster pressed on, gulping some ferocious indigo liquid that always failed to make him feel better, and swinging on young Jenner, ‘is a step beyond my reasoning. The biggest property in the district. Two score of Kanaks hauling in his profits. What does it matter what his soft-haired boy does, eh? What the hell does it matter? You’ll sleep sweet on a sugar-bed as long as you live and you can take this fancy education fromthat snot-nosed teacher of yours and whatever it does for you, for it won’t do much but make you useless when it comes to dealing with men.’ (He was fond of dealing with men, was Buckmaster, and could handle women in much the same way.) ‘So I’d thank you to keep your privileged presence and fancy ideas’—the chessboard was scattered at this point across the veranda flooring—‘to yourself.’
    In protest Jenner cried out, ‘But it was for Mrs Buckmaster I called. My mother sent over a book she had asked for.’
    Mr Buckmaster, slowed by wine, thought this one over.
    â€˜Sewing, you said?’ His son nodded sullenly. ‘Not reading? Not wasting the light?’ He mumbled into his glass some winey incantations and, as on cue, his wife came through suddenly from the front of the house to ignore her son’s bloodied face and begin stoking up the last of the fire to make tea. She was forty and ruined, not so much by her husband as by the country and the tyranny of it.
    A strange woman, the neighbours said, and would continue to say for her resistance both to them and to her husband who had used her as an incubator to breed sons but extracted only daughters except for this youngest, gulping mucus and tears. She continued to read—it seemed to her husband to be a sickness with her—despite him during those hours he was away being a man among men. For his part, he respected and almost feared those sinews of character she retained, but resented them. ‘My wife’s a great reader,’ he would boom among the husbands of cake-makers. It gave him cachet, he suspected, and somehow atoned for those moments when, with him biblically ranting, Old Testament sexually referring, she would laugh at him. He was a violent man, butimposed restraints that threatened to burst the blood out of his facial skin.
    Jenner, who at sixteen should not have understood but nevertheless did, handed him his cup of tea and sat sipping and watching from behind the light of the lamp.
    Young Fred was still sulking. He could wait till death for a formal apology from his father, who was sorry but could not say so, offering instead a kind of blessing with a supper hunk of bread and cheese. Fred took slow bites before deciding on speech. Finally: ‘Jilly Sweetman tells me there’s government troops coming up this way to flush out the blacks.’
    His father, who had known about this for some weeks, who had privately and quietly officially requested, said, ‘Now there’s a man’s job for you instead of this rubbishing school. They’re going to clear out the lot who’ve been raiding the coast farms. Drive them back north and west where they come from. Shoot the thieving bastards if they catch them at it.’
    â€˜They’re still around,’ Fred said, trying eagerly for paternal favour. ‘The fellows have seen them out near Dorahy’s place. He encourages them, he does.’ Oh, the lad could spill the sins of others with horrible readiness. ‘And old Charlie Lunt’s as well. Sugar and flour and things. Tobacco. They give them, I mean.’
    â€˜Do they indeed?’ asked his father, who knew.
    His wife was silently stirring knowledge in with sugar and tea.
    â€˜Gin lovers?’ Mr Buckmaster asked shockingly of no one in particular; but his wife who could have endured any kind of lover at all said mildly, ‘They’re kind to them. They think they’re