The Beaufort Sisters. Jon Cleary
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looked at his watch. ‘It gonna start, it already started. I talked to Mister Tim this morning when he come to get his car. He told me about them scabs coming in. You gonna drive or you want me to?’
She argued no further. It took them twenty-five minutes to get to the stockyards, caught as they were in the morning peak-hour traffic. One or two of Nina’s friends saw them, waved cheerfully; they had no problems, none of them had a husband on his way to do battle, scabs, scabs. The morning was already hot, the eye-scalding sunlight an omen in itself. As they drove down towards the yards the smell of livestock hit them suddenly, as if they had driven through an invisible gate into another atmosphere. Police cars blocked the roadway up ahead and beyond the cars they could see trucks and a crowd of men. Nina parked the car, switched off the engine and at once they heard the shouts and booing of the men above the bellowing of the cattle in the yards.
George Biff put a hand on Nina’s arm as she started to get out of the car, but she took his hand by the wrist and dropped it back on his knee. ‘I’m going up there, George, so don’t try and stop me. I want to know what’s happening.’
‘I can find out – ’
She relented. ‘We’ll find out together. Come on.’
As they got to the line of police cars a sergeant blocked their way. ‘Okay, you two, this is no place for you. You with the lady, boy?’
‘He’s with me, yes,’ said Nina, squarely facing the thickset, overweight officer. He had a Southern accent and she resented his calling George ‘boy’. She wondered what his attitude was towards the strikers. ‘My name is Davoren – my father owns the Beaufort Cattle Company, where all the trouble is.’
‘You can say that again, there’s trouble, all right.’ The sergeant’s tone hadn’t altered. He knew who she was, even if he hadn’t seen her before; but he wasn’t impressed by rich girls who took niggers driving with them in imported sports cars. ‘That’s why you better turn round and go back home. We’ll take care of the trouble if it gets any worse.’
A young policeman came running down from the trucks, looking hot, angry and as if wishing he were somewhere else. ‘Sarge, you better come on up there. Those pickets, they’re not gonna let the trucks through. It’s getting rough.’
‘You buzz off, you understand?’ the sergeant said to Nina, then he lumbered up the road after the young officer.
‘We better do what he says,’ said George, sweat beginning to glisten on his dark face. ‘Looks like it gonna get pretty bad in a minute.’
The yelling had increased and the horns of the trucks had begun to blare; strident echoes rang in Nina’s ears, Frankfurt and Kansas City merged, she was suddenly as afraid of the past as of the present. She started to run towards the disturbance, but George grabbed her arm, held her back. Utterly distraught now, as if the yelling and the truck horns blaring were an omen, she struggled against his grip. The cattle in the yards on either side of them began to mill, bellowing loudly, raising dust that blew up and floated across the road like the smoke of an explosion. Down here on the flats beside the river the sun bounced back from the roadway, splintered itself on the windshields of the police cars. The stockyards became a cauldron of heat and dust and panic and anger.
‘Stay here! Don’t come any closer – you hear me? Stay here!’
George pushed her back towards the MG, then turned and ran up towards the trucks and the yelling crowd.
In the front line of the crowd Tim was struggling to edge towards the side. He had no desire to be a ring-leader in what was going to be an ugly encounter. He had been standing talking to Bumper Cassidy, both of them watching the blocked trucks carrying the scab labour, when suddenly the situation had got out of hand. The pickets had been rocking the trucks, trying to force the drivers to reverse; one of the drivers lost his head, threw a wrench and a picket went down with blood gushing from his face. Next moment the whole mob had surged forward, pickets clambering to get up at the men in the trucks like pirates boarding a convoy of galleons. Whistles blew and the police came in at the mob of strikers from the other side of the trucks.
Tim knew he was in danger. Mob mindlessness had taken over; if there was a cool head among the three or four hundred men it was having no effect. Bumper Cassidy, beside Tim, had responded to the uproar with a reflex action; he was a big, bald-headed man who, if he was lost for words, was never lost for fists. A man fell out of a truck and Bumper hit him on the way down, stopping him for a moment in mid-air as if the blow from his fist was stronger than the pull of gravity. Then a police baton hit Bumper on the side of the head and he fell sideways against Tim, who went down in the stampede.
Tim fought his way to his feet, hitting out indiscriminately; a man he worked with every day, blind with rage, threw a punch at him and he just managed to duck under it. Choked with dust, blinded by sweat, gasping for breath in the stifling heat, he found himself being swept round in the mob as in a whirlpool. Suddenly he was on the edge of the big melée, but in a worse position; he thudded up against the railings of a yard, felt a searing pain across his belly as a steer’s horn swept by. He was spreadeagled against the fence, the fighting crowd behind him hammering him there; right in front of him the stampeding cattle thundered by, eyes white-wild, their bellowing as brutally bruising as if they were running him down. Their horns went dangerously close as some of them thudded into the fence; he fought to push himself away from the railings but the crowd threw its weight against him, unaware of him. For a moment he thought of trying to climb over the fence, but knew at once that that would mean almost certain death.
He began to fight his way along the fence, punching and swiping at everyone in his way. He had almost reached the edge of the crowd when something hit him behind the ear; he went down, dazed, had no strength to pull himself up again. Then he felt someone lifting him, a black man who was faintly familiar; he clung to the man as the latter began to drag him out of the riot. He was dimly aware of a policeman appearing out of nowhere, baton raised; the black man let go of Tim with one hand, swung at the policeman and the latter went down. Tim was dragged over the fallen officer, then the black man picked him up in a fireman’s lift and carried him out of the yelling, struggling crush and down the road. He was dumped into the seat of a car that was also vaguely familiar, he felt someone kiss him, then he passed out.
‘Get going, Miz Nina!’
Nina swung the MG round, ignoring the shouts of the police sergeant as he ran down towards them, and took the car down the road with a screech of tyres.
9
‘Disgraceful!’ Lucas looked as if his bones wanted to blow him apart; all arms and legs and rigid body, he stalked up and down his study. ‘The papers have got on to the story! The two of you down there like damned agitators. And George hitting that policeman – Goddam it, what got into you?’
‘You can’t blame George for anything he did – he was just trying to rescue Tim.’
Nina had never seen her father so angry; but she was surprised at her own total unconcern for his reaction. All she cared about at the moment was Tim, lying in their bedroom in the house across the lawns with twelve stitches in the wound in his belly, two broken ribs and a slight concussion. She was off-balance emotionally, as if there had been a subsidence within her, a breaking-up of levels that had sustained her all her life up till now. There had been worries and doubts in the sixteen months she had been married to Tim, all brought on by Tim’s sometimes prickly attitude towards her father: there had never been any open quarrel but at best his attitude had always been one of guarded geniality, his smile not hypocritical but a defence that neither of her parents had recognized as such and had never penetrated. The evidence had been growing in her mind for months, but only today had it all suddenly formed itself into a pattern that she acknowledged. It was no news to her that Tim had never really accepted her father, but it had come as a shock to learn that her father returned the attitude.
‘I’ve had to talk to the chief of police, get him to drop the charge against George. Damn it, you know what they could do to him – a Negro hitting a