Chapter Twenty-nine

How It Was All Due to Old Tip and Old Puckeroo

“I don’t believe it!” Mum said. “Mrs Burns told me your uncle’s farm and that place belonging to his neighbour, that –”

“Mr Henry?”

“That’s him. The one who traipsed into my house behind your uncle, the pair of them wearing their hobnailed boots, and without taking off their hats. I gave them a piece of my mind, I can tell you: all the way out the back door, down the path. And I gave your uncle’s lorry such a swipe with my umbrella. They won’t be marching uninvited back in here in a hurry, believe me.” Mum pressed her lips together. “Well, now Mrs Burns says their two farms have more grass than all the others down their road put together. How they do it, I’ve no idea, but they’re up to something shady, I’ll be bound.”

I told Uncle Trev what Mrs Burns had said to Mum.

“The feed’s come away good-oh.” Uncle Trev nodded. “Thanks to Old Tip and Old Puckeroo.”

“Old Tip and Old Puckeroo?”

“It began last century,” said Uncle Trev, “when Old Joe Froth took up the land. Bought it off the Maoris, he reckoned, though what he paid for it nobody seems to know. He clearfelled, burnt off, and pitsawed the timber to build a homestead. Without the bush to stop it, the wind off the Kaimais shifted the house on its piles, so he planted a shelter-belt and an orchard.

“Joe Froth went bankrupt, trying to grow wheat of all things. The bank took over the land and put in managers who had a go at running sheep and dry stock, and the shelter-belt kept growing. After the Great War, the government bought some of the estate and cut it up for returned men, and the shelter-belt kept growing.

“By the time Old Gotta and I got on to our blocks, Joe Froth’s shelter-belt was a tangle of eleagnus and grape vines sprawling over half the countryside, with a few poplars and macrocarpas poking their heads through. Nobody said anything to us about an old homestead.”

Uncle Trev looked at me and said, “You’re tired.”

“I’m listening with my eyes closed.”

“We put up our bell tent near the shelter-belt. I told you how we used to boil up a kerosene tin full of spuds and eggs to save us washing dishes.”

“Yes.”

“One day, Old Gotta collected a sugarbag of eggs and dropped them in the trough to see if any floated. The lot of them were rotten, so he pushed deeper into the shelter-belt, looking for nests. That night, I asked him why we didn’t have any boiled eggs to go with our spuds, and he rolled his eyes and told me, ‘I found a haunted house in the shelter-belt, Trev.’

“‘You’ve been been getting stuck into the Old Puckeroo again,’ I said.

“Old Gotta shook his head. ‘I told you I buried the last two batches and can’t remember where. No, I was hunting for chooks’ nests in the shelter-belt today, and I got lost and saw the door of an old house with leaves heaped against it. I give a bit of a yell, the door creaked open, and something groaned. I dropped me sugarbag full of eggs and scarpered.’

“‘It’ll be a bit of corrugated iron flapping in the wind, something like that,’ I told him. ‘We’ll have a look while it’s still light.’

“We searched the shelter-belt, pushing through undergrowth, dead leaves falling down our necks, eleagnus tripping our feet, till we came across an old orchard buried under grape vines, and there in the gloom was a door.

“‘Hello, the house,’ I yelled. The door creaked open, something groaned, and the two of us ran shrieking and didn’t stop till we found ourselves out in the open again.

“‘You’re a cowardly sort of a coot,’ I told Old Gotta, and we took our long-handled slashers and started whacking a six-foot track through the shelter-belt.

“We were working away and I let out a big groan, and Old Gotta took off. Then I got scared and took off after him. It was about three days before we started work on the track again. When I heard a groan I ran, but this time it was Old Gotta having me on.

“We cut that track straight through the middle of the shelter-belt and came out the other side without finding any door. ‘You were imagining things,’ I told Old Gotta. Then one day he was poking around on his own and he came shrieking out of the shelter-belt.

“‘I seen a ghost come out of that door, Trev. Moaning and dancing a jig.’

“I took my slasher and went back in to have another look. Old Gotta wouldn’t step a foot inside the shelter-belt, but halfway along the track I found a whisky bottle – empty. I went back and told Old Gotta, ‘No wonder you saw a ghost. You were shickered.’

“He sniffed the bottle. ‘It’s one of mine, all right,’ he said. ‘There’s the date I wrote in ink pencil on the cork. That’s the first batch I couldn’t find after I buried it. Somebody’s getting stuck into our Old Puckeroo, Trev.’

“Old Gotta strode off along the track through that tangle. ‘It must be about here,’ he said, and turned in to his right. A few yards and there was the door again. We gave a yell, there was a creak, and something in a dirty white sheet comes dancing out the door and groaning, ‘Whooo.’

“‘I know that voice,’ says Gotta. He jumps up the steps and pulls the dirty white sheet off the whiskery head of Twilight Harry.”

“Twilight Harry?”

“An old-timer from way back, a swagger. He knew about Joe Froth’s homestead in the shelter-belt and used to doss down in there whenever he was passing through.

“When he spotted Old Gotta burying his latest lot of Old Puckeroo, Twilight Harry dug it up and buried it somewhere else. Old Gotta couldn’t find it when we were in need of a drink, so he boiled up another lot of Old Puckeroo and buried that. And Twilight Harry dug up that batch and buried it somewhere else. All this time, he was drinking the first lot, digging up a bottle at a time. He was on to such a good thing, he pulled a faded old horse cover over his head and pretended to be a ghost.”

“What happened to him?”

“Twilight Harry died a few years ago in the TB shelters over at Waikato Hospital, so they said, but I reckon he died of the dts.”

“What’s dts?”

“Delirium tremens. It means having the shakes and seeing pink elephants from drinking too much. It was a lesson to Old Gotta and me.”

“Did you find where he’d hidden the rest of the Old Puckeroo?”

“Between digging for the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow, and digging for the Old Puckeroo that Twilight Harry dug up and buried again, we must have turned over half our farms. But there was more to it than that.

“You know how a dog watches you digging, and he thinks you must be burying some specially good bones so you can come back later, dig them up and have a chew at them? Well, Old Tip watched us doing all that digging, and decided he’d dig up our special bones and bury them somewhere else, much the same way Twilight Harry had dug up and reburied the Old Puckeroo. Old Tip got stuck in and dug up the other half of our two farms all on his own. Well, a dog’s a natural digger, isn’t he?

“Old Gotta and me, we never found the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow, nor the buried whisky. And Old Tip didn’t find the bones he was looking for either, but thanks to his hard work we levelled most of our paddocks, got rid of the stumps, re-sowed with good-quality seed, and finished up with some of the best pasture in the district. That’s why today we’ve got more feed than anyone else down our road. All due to Old Tip and Old Puckeroo.”

“Mrs Burns told Mum your farms are a credit to you and Mr Henry.”

Uncle Trev looked uneasy. “You’d better keep this under your hat, specially about the Old Puckeroo,” he said. “Your mother wouldn’t approve of Old Tip doing all the work. Nor of Old Puckeroo.”

I nodded, tapped my nose, and winked one eye. Uncle Trev knew his secret was safe with me.