Jacko

Category C: Highly Commended (2025) Monash Short Story Writing Competition
Author: Lenette Griffin

The Census Collector.

The giant bay horse trotted easily along a sandy track, occasionally tossing his golden mane and snorting with impatience.  Accustomed to heavy loads of timber and hay or wool bales he effortlessly moved the sturdy cart and its driver through the dense jarrah forest towards their next destination, the 26-Mile Gully sawmill.

Gabe spied a swarm of bees around a rotting tree stump as he passed, making a mental note to bring a bucket when he came back in a fortnight to collect the Census papers he was distributing today. There would be some rich honey for the taking – a few stings would be a cheap price. He could smell it a quarter of a mile away, overpowering the scents of mimosa, wild honeysuckle and early gum blossom. No wonder the bees were busy collecting the bountiful harvest.

Only a dozen workers were employed at the mill these days. The manager, foreman and a couple of labourers, loaders, drivers, old Laurie, the machine man, and Big Fred, the sawman. A scruffy, dirty young fella who’d turned up at the mill about a year ago, Mason, he called himself, mostly kept the yards clean of fallen litter. A bushfire could easily spread if a single leaf ignited from the ever-smouldering carpet of sawdust but he was a lazy bugger. Spent most of the day leaning on his wide rake or rolling a loose-packed, skinny cigarette. Gabe didn’t fail to notice the smoking, charred remains of a deliberately kindled fire built on top of the sawdust – but what the hell! Every timber and mill worker had a healthy respect for the danger of fire. Some idiot should have been sacked for that.

The manager, Mr Bennett, and his plump, cheerful wife, had their own weatherboard house at the end of the narrow track and there were nine slightly smaller cottages in two rows bordering what could fancifully be called the street, a couple of others nearer to the trees. All their outer walls were painted black, all with corrugated iron roofs and rainwater tanks at the back, perched on raised wooden planks.

Each one was enclosed within sturdy mesh fences to keep out rabbits and ‘roos, and most boasted healthy vegetable gardens and a couple of fruit trees – the nearest small village being sixteen miles away.

With a gentle “Whoa,” to the horse, Gabe pulled to a stop under a sturdy wandoo tree which shaded one side of the mill’s office, hitched the reins lightly over a fence-post and loosened the harness to attach the horse’s nosebag of chaff. With his satchel of government forms under one arm, he called from the gateway just as Mr Bennett emerged onto the wide, shaded veranda.

“G’day Gabe, thought I’d be seeing you soon. C’mon in.” He offered his hand and led the way, pausing to move a heavy iron kettle from the hob, onto the stove. “We’ll have a brew going in just a tick, so grab a chair and tell us what’s new in town, although I just came back yesterday, meself. Had to take the wife in to hospital with a poisoned leg.”

“She alright now?” Gabe asked, concerned. It was mighty difficult to get medical help out here in the bush so folks mostly took care of their own accidents and illnesses unless they were serious.

“Coming good,” Mr Bennett replied. “She caught it on some rusty tin which was sticking out from the woodpile and it swelled up something awful. Turned red and nasty and the pain got pretty bad so we thought it might be tetanus and I got her into hospital real quick. They kept her in a week but she’s out now and staying with my sister for a while so I’ll be chief cook until she’s allowed back out here. I’m glad to be home though – I go mad just hanging around town with nothin’ to do and I don’t like being stuck under my sister’s feet all day. Dare say, she doesn’t like it much either,” he grinned.

‘Town’ was little more than a village and Gabe was a farmer in his everyday life so he understood. He stayed clear of town too, except when absolutely necessary. This contract to cover the outlying districts for the census gave him a much-valued opportunity to meet people who rarely left their lonely farms and settlements and, like a bee gathering pollen, each visit added to his personal collection of news and stories.

He handed over the bundle of mail he’d collected from the post office and meticulously counted out the number of forms which Mr Bennett would help his workers to fill out. Not many of them could read or write – not well enough to decipher the instructions, anyway. Only after the bit of business had been signed off and the satchel clipped shut, did Gabe sit back to stir condensed milk into his scalding ink-black tea and the two men settled into yarn-swapping.

Daylight was precious so he didn’t stay long. The manager knew his visitor would be eager to get finished and back to his animals and didn’t press for a delay although he looked forward to Gabe’s return in a fortnight.

Today, there were more visits to be made and miles to travel before he could make his bush camp for the night, the next a half-mile away to the old schoolmaster’s cottage where Mrs Kelly had taken up residence years before. Her alcoholic ‘husband’ (Gabe knew she’d never been  married) worked in the mill then, but he’d long ago vanished, and her daughter, ‘h-Eileen’ had moved to the city and married.

Mrs Kelly and her severely autistic son, Jacko, eked out an existence from his meagre disability pension and the vegetables she grew in her prolific, if unremarkable, garden of root vegetables and rows of peas and string beans propped up with weathered timber poles and coarse twine. That, and the few rabbits she caught in traps and made into stew. Occasionally, one of the workers would bring her a kangaroo tail if they’d been out spotlighting and a few times, Gabe had brought her a decent leg of mutton if he’d slaughtered a sheep before one of his rare visits.

Today, the pockets of his well-worn dungarees held a few tomato and pumpkin seeds for her which he’d carefully dried and selected from those he kept for his own garden. And a packet of rainbow-coloured boiled sweets, the same ones he always brought, for Jacko.

That poor little beggar had never had much colour in his short, confused life, spending his days huddled under a shabby knitted blanket in an equally shabby hessian chair beside the kitchen stove, rocking and crooning and mumbling to himself. His round, pink-cheeked face had never developed beyond early childhood, his fine, white-blond hair shone like that of an angel. But his startling blue eyes, large beneath their thick fringe of lashes, stared blankly at the world, unblinking. Funny thing was, he never stopped smiling, sometimes uttering a weird cackle of strangled laughter or a demonic shriek which could scare the living daylights out of anyone if they weren’t prepared for it. Perhaps he was happy in his strange, warped half-life – who could ever know?

Some days, when it was fine, he would hobble out to the garden on his withered, twisted legs to watch his mother while she dug and raked, supporting himself between the outhouse wall and his ancient walking cane. Jacko was somewhere between twenty and thirty although completely childlike, with the mental age of four or five and was frightened of any strangers who came near, especially men. He’d never mixed with other children – there hadn’t been a lot at the mill, for one thing. And those that lived at the mill for a while were not inclined to hang around once they discovered he was peculiar. For some reason though, the lad loved Gabe, perhaps because he always brought lollies? Or perhaps he sensed that Gabe was harmless, a friend. The alcoholic fella wasn’t Jacko’s father, that much Gabe knew, but the lad’s early years were clouded in obscurity. Perhaps his mother didn’t know either.

“G’day, Missus,” Gabe called loudly as he tethered his horse to a rickety fencepost. He didn’t bother with the nosebag. She was chopping firewood and tossing the bigger chunks onto an untidy pile near the netting-wire chook pen, the smaller, splintered kindling into a rusting wheelbarrow made entirely of metal. Gabe wondered if she had to go and collect her own wood from the mill now. Surely not? He would ask Mr Bennett next time. But there were two deep ruts in the sandy track outside her front gate from the sharp metal wheel where she’d brought something in. Or out.

She was dressed in her usual dark men’s pants, tied around the middle with a faded brown cord and a flowery navy shirt, her tiny, birdlike frame anchored in sturdy, brown leather boots.  No hat. Her long, iron-grey hair fell in disarray about her weathered face, limp and tangled. Gabe had never seen her any other way.

A shrunken, wiry little woman, who never stopped working from daylight to dusk, winter or summer, strong as an ox and bloody hell, she looked to be at least a hundred. She straightened and looked up as he neared, stretching her shoulders and propping the hefty axe against the barrow while her shrewd, round sparrow’s eyes squinted steadily back at him. Hadn’t even raised a sweat.

“G’day,” she nodded with her usual suspicious stare, “thought it sounded like your horse’s trot. What brings you out here this time?”

“Brought the Census forms from the Government again so you’ll need to go over to Mr Bennett’s office to put your mark on one when you’re ready. I’ll be back in a fortnight to collect them all again – gotta keep these Government fellas happy, eh? The garden looks good, still.”

“Thought you only brought those forms every few years?” She was more close-lipped than ever.

“Yeah, well, it’s five years since the last one.  How ‘ya gettin’ on, and how’s your boy, Jacko doin’?”

The old woman scuffed some dirt into the open hole of an ant’s nest with her boot, her eyes darting everywhere but straight at him. “I’m orright, same as always.”  She reached down and grabbed a clod of dirt to throw at a rooster about to venture near the cabbages, making it squawk and flap out of the way.

“Yeah, that’s good then.” Gabe knew she wouldn’t offer any encouragement to extend his visit. Poor old girl never had anything much to discuss. “And how’s Jacko? You still managing to look after him?”

There was a long pause.

“He’s gorn,” she mumbled eventually, looking at the ground and still scuffing her boot, “’e runned away!”

What?

“He runned aw- he ran away?” Gabe’s jaw dropped, “Where’d he go?”

She shrugged silently, her shoulders remaining up around her ears, still looking every which way but back at him. “Does Mr Bennett know? D’ya go and look for him?”

After a beat she nodded. Mr Bennett obviously did not know. It would have been the first thing they talked about.

As the silence lengthened, and she continued to fill in the ant hole with her boot, the hairs on the back of Gabe’s neck rose steadily. It took every ounce of will power not to turn around and run.

The boot, both boots, were dark with scorch marks.