was sitting there, rocking back and forth in her chair by the stove, her dog on her lap. On the table near us by the window were all the Sunday cakes she’d made. She was trying to stop herself sobbing by singing. It was very soft, but we could hear it well enough to recognise it: What a friend we have in Jesus. Verse after verse she sang, but punctuated always by fits of sobbing that wracked her whole body. There was one moment when she lifted her eyes and cried out loud: “Why, sweet Jesus? Why? Please take this cup from me, Jesus. Please take it.” That was when I saw the purple bruise on her chin, the livid marks on her neck and some blood on her lip too. She was clasping her hands and praying. I remember thinking then that I wanted Piggy Bacon dead, that one day I would kill him. I never made actual plans to do it of course, but I felt like doing it, and so did Marty, and Wes too.
What he did next could so easily have made a murderer of me, if I’d had the means, if I’d had the courage, if circumstance hadn’t intervened.
It was Christmas time – our second Christmas on the farm – about eighteen months or so after we arrived at Cooper’s Station. For lunch on Christmas Day, Piggy Bacon and Mrs Piggy sat at opposite ends of our long trestle table and ate with us. We’d had the day off – in all we were given three days off in the year: Piggy Bacon’s birthday, Easter Sunday and Christmas Day. The morning had been all carols and prayers, and of course sermons too, just like a normal Sunday, except that I liked the carols a lot better than some of the dreary hymns we usually sang. We had sausages and mashed potatoes and gravy, and then jam roly-poly and custard afterwards, and all the lemonade we wanted. The best feast of my childhood; I’ve never forgotten it. With Piggy and Mrs Piggy there we none of us of said a word, of course, none of us dared. But I don’t think any one of us wanted to talk much anyway – we were all far too busy eating our fantastic feast to have any time at all for conversation. We were savouring every mouthful. Ever since that Christmas Day I’ve always loved sausages.
It happened after the meal. As usual one of us had to stand up and say grace, not just before but after each meal as well. It happened to be my turn that day, and Piggy Bacon made me say it all over again because I’d mumbled it. “Say it loud to the Lord,” he told me, “and he will hear you.” So I did. Then he stood up himself, cleared his throat and announced that they had decided to give us each a Christmas present, “A gift from the Lord,” he said, a gift that we could keep with us and treasure all our lives. Then he showed us what it was. Dangling there from his forefinger on a piece of cord was a small wooden cross. “From now on every one of you will wear this every day.
This is the badge of Jesus and you will wear it with pride,” he said.
One by one we were summoned up to receive our present. He hung a cross around each of our necks. We said thank you, shook his hand and went to sit down again. Except for the thank yous the whole ceremony was conducted in an awkward silence. Mrs Piggy, who was standing meekly at his side with a bunch of crosses hanging from her wrist, handed a cross to him as each of us came up. I noticed she kissed each one before she gave it to him. Then I was called up. I was standing there waiting for my cross, looking up into Piggy Bacon’s face, when suddenly his whole expression altered. “What’s this?” he roared, and lunging forward he grabbed my key from around my neck and with one violent pull jerked it off.
“That’s mine,” I cried, reaching out to grab it back. He held it out of my reach, examining it, puzzling over it.
“A key? What for? A key to what?”
“It’s my lucky key,” I told him. “Kitty gave it to me, my sister in England.”
“Luck!” Piggy Bacon thundered. “Luck is magic, and all magic is the devil’s work. There is no such thing as luck. It is God who makes all things happen, in this life and afterwards too.” I kept trying to jump up and snatch it from him, but he was still holding it too high. “It’s a lucky charm, which is devil’s magic, witchcraft, mumbo jumbo. You will wear a cross or nothing at all.”
“Then,” I said, surprised at my own sudden courage, “then I won’t wear anything at all.” And I turned and walked away. He strapped me that evening of course, and afterwards I had to bend my head in front of him as he put the cross around my neck. He said that if he ever saw me not wearing it, he’d strap me again. “What about my key?” I asked him.
“I’ve thrown it out,” he said. “It’s where all witchcraft belongs, in the rubbish.”
That night I cried myself to sleep. Neither Wes nor Marty could comfort me. My precious key was gone, gone for ever, and I felt utterly alone in the world without it, like my last roots had been ripped out. As I lay there that night in the darkness I had murder in my heart. And I don’t just mean I hated Piggy Bacon. I mean I really wanted to kill him. I might well have done it too. I had found the courage now – revenge and fury gives you powerful courage – but I just couldn’t think how to do it. I had no idea how I could murder him, not yet, but I was determined to find some way to do it and do it soon. Luckily for him, luckily for me too, it didn’t come to that. Luck intervened, or fate, or circumstance, call it what you like, and when it came, it came from a most welcome and unexpected source.
When I’d first come to Cooper’s Station I’d been terrified of snakes, and of spiders in particular. Every day we’d see all manner of strange and wonderful creatures out on the farm, from wallabies to wombats. But it was spiders and snakes I looked out for. We’d see them everywhere, snakes curled up under the dormitory block or slithering along between the boulders down by the creek. Spiders, we discovered, loved the toilet, which was a shed with a corrugated iron roof built on to the side of the dormitory block. It was baking hot in there and stank to high heaven, but it was the spiders I hated, the spiders I feared. I feared them so much that I tried not to go to the toilet. Whenever I could I would try to go outside to do my business. Sometimes though, I was in a hurry and the toilet was nearby and I’d risk it. But I’d do it quickly, as quickly as I could, trying not to breathe in, and trying not to look for spiders.
They say you never see the bullet that gets you. It’s the same with spiders. I was told later it was a redback spider. I was sitting there on the toilet. It happened when I stood up. I was pulling up my shorts and I felt it bite my foot, felt the stabbing surging pain of it, saw it scurrying away. I screamed then and ran out. I remember stumbling to my knees and Mrs Piggy running towards me.
I’ve no idea how long I lay in bed. Marty told me later that they all thought I was going to die. I do remember realising I wasn’t in my own bed, that there were curtains and pictures on the wall, and a big cupboard. I remember too Mrs Piggy coming in and sitting with me, and I felt hot and heavy all over as if I was weighted down somehow. And once when she came she wasn’t alone. She had an Aboriginal man with her, a bushman with white hair, and he looked into my eyes and felt my face and gave me a medicine to take and laid some kind of a poultice on my foot. The medicine tasted so bitter I could barely swallow it. But whatever it was that he put on my foot cooled it wonderfully.
As I got better Mrs Piggy would sit beside me playing her squeezy box and I loved that. All these memories may well not be memories at all. It was Mrs Piggy who told me afterwards when I was better, when I thanked her for looking after me, that it wasn’t her that had cured me at all,but a “black fellow” she’d called in. He’d saved my life, she said, not her. “And don’t say a word to Mr Bacon,” she said. “He wouldn’t like it. He doesn’t believe in their magic. But I do. There’s room for all sorts of magic and miracles in this world – that’s what I think.”
