Splitting With the Grain, What the
Oily Rag Was For, and the Story of the
Floating Island That Drifts Up and Down
the Waihou River.
MR JACKMAN STOOD ONE SIDE of the log, Jack the other, the cross-cut balanced on its teeth in the nick taken out with the axe.
“Let it run back and forwards,” his father told Jack a few minutes later, “so the saw does the cutting itself. If there’s a secret to using a cross-cut, that’s it.”
Letting the saw cut by itself was a hard lesson. They made a couple of cuts through the pine, then Jack was happy to take his handle out of the end of the cross-cut and let his father saw by himself, while he filled the billy at a trough.
Jack took care not to get any water out of the trough into the billy, because you never knew what bugs there might be in that stuff. There was just room to get the billy under the dribble of water coming from the pipe at the ball cock. As he walked back across the paddock, the wire handle hurt him, and he looked and saw a raised blister on the palm of that hand, and one on the other. He pushed one, then the other, and they looked full of whitish watery stuff.
He collected a few pine cones, and built a tiny stack of splinters from dry sticks he’d found under the shelter-belt. His father tossed him his tin of wax matches, and Jack scratched one on the bottom, got the splinters going, and fed twigs into the flames till they caught fire, and he could put on the cones. He couldn’t get a stick deep enough in the ground, so his father belted one in with the back of his axe, and Jack hung the billy off a notch.
Mr Barker came across for a yarn, and had a mug of tea with them. His cattle dog sat and watched from a distance. Although Jack looked, it didn’t look back at him.
“You can stack the pine along the fence; it’ll dry out good-oh,” Mr Barker said. “There’s always a draught under a shelter-belt. How are your hands?” he asked Jack.
Jack showed him. “They say there’s only one thing to fix blisters,” Mr Barker said. “Keep sawing so they burst and form scabs. Once your hands are hard enough, you don’t get any more.”
“Doesn’t it hurt?”
“You bet! Some men piss on their hands, saying it stops the blisters. Some reckon that meths will harden your hands, too, but there’s always the danger you’ll start drinking it.” Mr Barker laughed and strode away, his dog slipping behind him.
“I’ll finish this cut and do some splitting. How about filling a sack with cones? That won’t hurt your hands, and then you could have a look in the drain. You might spot an eel.”
The dry pine cones were bigger and lighter, because their wooden petals were open, so the sack filled quickly. The green cones were closed tight, and heavy. When he twisted one, to get it off the branch, it tore a blister open. Watery fluid gushed, and Jack looked at the pink skin inside the blister and didn’t like it. Blowing on it made it sore, so he went over to the drain. It had been cleaned, the weeds thrown on the banks, and he couldn’t see any eels. A couple of pukekos stalked between clumps of reeds, the other side of the drain, flicking their white patches.
When the pooks vanished, Jack wandered back, listening to the thump! thump! of the maul, and boiled the billy for lunch.
They’d eaten their sandwiches, and his father was doing some more splitting, when Jack looked across the paddock to the road and saw somebody trotting towards the Kaimais. It was Andy on Nosy, with Old Drumble leading, Young Nugget and Old Nell behind. Jack climbed on a stump and waved and yelled till they went out of sight behind a hedge, but they hadn’t looked his way.
“You might not be seeing so much of Andy in future,” said his father. “Put those lengths on the stack. You’ll need a good bath tonight, to get all the pine gum off your elbows and knees, and I don’t know what your mother’s going to say about getting it all over your clobber.”
“Mum said it didn’t matter, ’cause these are old. ‘Just don’t you dare go getting it in your hair,’ she said, ‘or I’ll have to snip it off with the scissors,’ and she said did I want to look piebald for when school starts.”
His father grinned. “I could shave your head all over, with my cut-throat razor.”
“Harry Jitters would bark and say I looked like a sheep. I should never have told him about how huntaways bark. And Minnie Mitchell wouldn’t talk to me, if I was bald.
“Dad, do you think Mum will let me go droving with Andy next holidays?” Jack watched his father bring down the axe exactly, so the length of pine sprang into clean billets. He sniffed the sharp smell of the fresh-faced wood and said, “I wish I could chop where I mean to.”
“It’s like using a bat—and keeping your eye on the ball: you keep your eye on the spot you want to hit, Jack, and the axe does the rest.” Whack! Another piece leapt off. “Look for the grain, and split with it. See! And always split down the middle of a knot, with its grain—never across it.” Whack!
“I don’t know about droving with Andy, next holidays,” said Mr Jackman. “That’s what I meant about not seeing so much of him in future.
“Andy’s getting a bit long in the tooth; he’s been at it a few years now, you know.”
“What’s he going to do?”
“Everyone’s got to give up, sooner or later, and Andy’s had a pretty good innings. He picked up the job from Smoky Rawiri, and he’s been dead half a lifetime. Andy had already been droving for years, when your mother was just a girl. It’s not the easiest of lives, outside in all weather, handling half-wild steers, nasty-tempered Jersey bulls, and sheep that don’t know which way they want to go.”
“They do when Old Drumble leads them.”
“True!” His father was putting his wedges in the sack and stowing them under a log. He wiped the saw—especially the teeth—with the oily rag. “So it doesn’t rust,” he said. “A rusty saw makes the job harder.” He rolled the triangular file in the rag and stowed it away with the cross-cut and the axe.
They finished stacking the split firewood, emptied the billy on the ashes, and put it away upside-down in a dry spot under a stump, with the mugs, the tin of tea leaves and the sugar jar.
“Drink what’s left of the milk, and put the bottle in the pikau.” His father was putting away a handful of twigs and some cones for lighting the fire next time, stuffing with them the newspaper that had wrapped their sandwiches.
“We don’t want to leave a mess, not when Mr Barker’s doing us a good turn. Your behind’s going to be sore, sitting on the bar all the way into Waharoa.”
“I don’t mind, Dad. It’s good fun.”
Down the drive, Jack looked at some pellets of sheep shit and said, “I told Harry Jitters they were Smarter Pills, and he ate a handful and said he wasn’t any smarter, and I told him, ‘Now you’re a-gettin’ smarter!’”
Mr Jackman snorted. “Where did you hear that?”
“You said it to Mr Murdoch,” said Jack, “and you both laughed, so I thought I’d try it on Harry.”
“You’ll get me into trouble yet,” chuckled his father. “Look out! What are you up to?” They were turning out on to the road.
“I was trying to see if I could spot Andy and Old Drumble.”
“They were going out to pick up some steers off Brooks’s place, out under the Kaimais,” his father told him. “By now they should be on their way back, heading for the Gordon bridge. Andy’s driving the steers over to the works at Horotiu.”
“He used to take steers from up the Tapu Valley, and from down Opotiki, and Poverty Bay, and graze them along the side of the road, all the way up to the Auckland sales,” Jack said. “He told me stories about them.”
“He told me about where the old drovers go to die.”
“I haven’t heard that one.” They were passing the Wardville school, and Mick O’Halloran’s whare where two herring-gutted dogs leapt and barked on their chains.
“Andy says there’s a floating island that was born out in the Hauraki Gulf or the Firth of Thames, and it drifts up and down the Waihou River, up past Okauia Springs as far as the falls at Okoroire, and then down again.”
“Go on,” said his father.