Aunt Effie's Ark, page 8
“I think I know what’s happening,” Peter said. We ran to the barn to make sure the stock were all right. We ran back to Aunt Effie’s bedroom.
Peter checked up the chimney with his mirror on a stick. Marie looked through the peep-hole. “No sign of the Tattooed Wolf,” they both said. They threw open the steel shutters, and we leaned out the window of Aunt Effie’s bedroom. A lake stretched twenty miles from the door of the house to the foot of Mount Te Aroha. We could hear the roar of the Waikato River thirty miles away to the west. East we heard the thunder of a thousand waterfalls tumbling off the Kaimais, into the Waihou River, and flooding the Hauraki Plains.
“So that’s why Aunt Effie told us to caulk and tar and felt and schenam and sheathe the house and barn,” said Peter. “We’re afloat!”
Chapter Ten
Keeping Our Fingers Crossed
Aunt Effie’s house had turned into a huge ship so the barn was now the ship’s hold. The wild animals were delighted to find they were on a higher deck than the farm stock. They liked to look down on them and spoke of them as “lower deck types” or “steerage people”.
“Do you want to hurt Hubert’s feelings,” Marie asked the snobbish kudu, “and Blossom’s, and Rosie’s?”
“Yes, we do! Our sense of self-worth depends on having someone to look down upon.” With an offensive little laugh, “Heh! Heh! Heh!” the kudu stuck her high-bridged nose in the air. “We,” she smiled, “are upper deck people!”
“Heh! Heh! Heh!” went Alwyn. “Then how do you like having a cabinful of gorillas on the deck above you?” But the kudu and the other wild animals glazed their eyes and turned into lifeless stuffed heads. Even Mr Bulawayo pretended not to hear.
On the deck above the hold, what used to be the kitchen was now called the galley. It still had its huge fireplace with the maire backlog that never went out, but our bunks were now berths built into the bulkheads. Aunt Effie’s cabin was on the next deck with the stuffed heads hanging on her bulkheads. Not only was there a cabinful of gorillas above the stuffed heads, but up more companionways we kept finding more decks with more creatures that might have drowned if somebody hadn’t provided a dry place.
Alwyn had the time of his life. He meowed at a cabin filled with tigers till they chased him. Peter pulled him out the door just in time, so all Alwyn got was a scratched thumb. He played a tin whistle to a cabinful of rattlesnakes, to make them dance. The rattlesnakes weren’t amused and surrounded him with darting tongues, venomous fangs, and rattling tails. Alwyn had to apologise before they would let him go. But he went straight away and pulled faces at the monkeys until they held him down, tickled him till he cried, and tied his hair in knots.
Peter and Marie made him promise to stop teasing the animals, but he couldn’t help it. The strange thing was – the tigers asked Alwyn to come back and play with them. Then the rattlesnakes begged him to come and play his tin whistle. As for the monkeys, they saved up handfuls of peanuts for him. We couldn’t understand that.
Our caulking, felting, schenamming, sheathing, and tarring worked pretty well, but a few leaks came in where somebody whose name we didn’t like to say aloud had fired a blunderbuss at the door. Peter melted a billy of tar over the fire, and we teased out some old plough-line, hammered it into the holes made by the nikau berries, and tarred it. We split open kerosene tins, and tacked them over the caulking to hold it in place.
“A bit of of a mongrel way to caulk,” said Peter, “from the inside out, but she’ll be right!”
“We’ll have to give her a name,” said Marie. “Aunt Effie reckons a ship’s nothing till she’s got a name.”
“Mrs Chapman told us a story at Sunday school,” said Peter. “About an old man with a beard, Mr Noah, who saved all the animals from a flood in a ship called the Ark.” We thought we remembered the story, and the name sounded all right to us – except for Daisy.
“I’m almost certain Mr Noah turned his wife to a pillar of salt,” she said. “And then he went on the ran-tan in a town called Sodom or Gomorrah. A nice example to set the little ones!”
“I think you’re mixing up Mr Noah with a lot of other people,” said Peter. “The dictionary says an ark is a covered ship for sheltering people and animals during a flood.”
We hung Casey, Lizzie, Jared, and Jessie over the front of the ship by their ankles. They swung a bottle of Aunt Effie’s best champagne and smashed it on what we now called the bows.
“We name you Aunt Effie’s Ark!” they chorused.
We pulled them back on deck, brushed some broken glass out of their hair, and Daisy told them not to lick their lips.
“If you once acquire the taste for champagne, there’s no knowing to what depths you will sink!” she told them. And before we had a feast to celebrate the naming of the ship, Daisy insisted they sing her favourite temperance song:
Away, away with rum by gum,
With rum by gum with rum by gum!
Away, away with rum, by gum!
That’s the song of the Salvation Army!
The little ones chirped the song while Daisy danced, twirled, and smacked her tambourine so hard all the bells fell off, and she burst into tears.
Marie helped Daisy into her bunk. “Here’s a nice cup of tea. Now, you have a good lie down.” And she told the little ones, “It’s all right, Daisy just got too excited.”
We were grateful now for the haystacks Aunt Effie had insisted we sledge into the barn, and for the crops we’d stored: turnips, swedes, spuds, carrots, parsnips, pumpkins, poorman’s oranges, lemons, apples, pears, dried figs and grapes, quinces, almonds, walnuts, chestnuts, dried mushrooms, onions, sides of bacon and ham, barrels of salt beef and pork, and smoked mutton carcasses. We had tier upon tier of barrels of pigeons, pheasants, quail, ducks, black swans, wild geese, pukekos, wekas, and eels – all preserved in their own fat. We had sacks and crates and bins of wheat, maize, barley, oats, lentils, artichokes, dried beans, and split peas. We had lockers filled with jars of marmalade, gooseberry, and strawberry jam. There were more lockers filled with peaches, nectarines, and pears preserved in Agee jars. And whenever we wanted honey, we just went to the beehive in what used to be the wall of the barn but was now the hull of Aunt Effie’s Ark. We had a continent of tucker, and we were going to need it!
We had several hundred great barrels of cider. There were also Aunt Effie’s hogsheads of wine, rum, whisky, and brandy, as well as her cellar of wines and champagne. We tried them but screwed up our noses. The little ones spat it out. Daisy wouldn’t try any of it and said, “I’ll tell Aunt Effie, as soon as she wakes up, if I see a single one of you under the influence!”
At once, Alwyn hiccuped, crossed his eyes, sang, burped, and fell over. Daisy stared at him and wrote something in her diary. That night, she wrote a couple more sentences in her diary as he tried to sing but got the words twisted around his tongue, as if it was too thick for his mouth. When he fell out of his berth, Daisy wrote a couple more sentences. By the time he lay snoring on the deck, Daisy had written several pages to show Aunt Effie. But, as she closed her diary, Alwyn sprang up, huffed over Daisy, blew out her candle – and all she could smell on his breath was the lemonade we’d had after tea.
“Do you mind!” she said.
“Mind you do!” Alwyn replied. That was another of his exasperating tricks, repeating backwards whatever you said.
At first the keel scraped and bumped against trees, fence posts, and the hill between us and the school. As the flood deepened, we drifted in a circle over Walton, Morrinsville, Ngatea, Thames, and Paeroa. At night, we looked down through the water and saw the streetlights still burning, and people sitting at the table, having tea in their kitchens. We collided with Mount Te Aroha, shoved off with long poles, and the wind blew us south. We could see people stranded in cars and buses, waiting for the floods to go down.
“I hope they’ve got plenty to eat with them,” said Ann.
“The police will organise something,” Marie said.
At Hinuera, halfway between Matamata and Tirau, we floated over the Rotorua Express stopped on the railway lines. No smoke was coming out of its funnel. We looked down through a couple of hundred feet of water and saw the lights still on in the carriages, and the passengers reading papers and playing cards. The guard got wet through every time he ducked from one carriage to another.
“At least he gets a chance to dry out,” said Marie. “It’s the driver and the stoker I’m sorry for. See them in the cab? On the footplate? Holding their breath till the flood goes down.”
“How do they go to the dunny?” asked Jared.
“I suppose it’s pretty easy,” said Jazz. We looked at each other and laughed, and Daisy went, “Tsk! Tsk! Tsk!”
“At least they’ll be warm,” said David.
“No, they’ll be cold,” Ann told him. “They’ll have to shovel out the wet ashes and light the fire all over again to get up steam, once the water goes down.”
“Listen everyone,” said Peter. “Marie and I’ve had a talk about You Know Who.” We all knew whom Peter meant by You Know Who. “We haven’t seen him since the day he ate our snowman.”
“Poor snowman!” said Casey, and the little ones burst into tears.
“Marie and I think it would be a good idea if we never say You Know Who’s name aloud, if we pretend we never saw him, and if we keep our fingers crossed.”
“What about that cabin?” asked Lizzie. “The one Alwyn howled at, and something howled back, ‘Ooowhooooo!’ from behind the door.”
“I had a look this morning,” said Marie. “They’re just ordinary timber-wolves in there. Quite friendly, really. And they brought their own food; they showed me. They eat only timber, so there’s no need to be afraid of them!
“Peter and I think You Know Who probably drowned in the flood. Don’t say his name aloud. Keep your fingers crossed. And pretend you never saw him. That way, he might never come back.”
We all nodded. It was hard, at first, doing up our buttons and brushing our teeth with our fingers crossed, but Marie said we’d get used to it.
When the wind changed, and we drifted north again, Peter said, “We’re just getting blown this way and that. We need tools to make masts and sails.”
The little ones had explored more of the ship than the rest of us. They led Peter to the ship’s workshop. It had a carpenter’s bench and vice, and a blacksmith’s forge and anvil. All the tools including cross-cut saws, scissors, pit-saws, pins, marlinspikes, a pedal-driven Singer sewing machine, ropes, fids, blocks, thimbles, timber-jacks, gluts, mauls, sailmaker’s palms and needles, all the gear necessary to rig and run a ship hung around the bulkheads. Still keeping their fingers crossed, Peter and Marie sewed a net that we cast over the stern and caught a kauri log floating by.
We hoisted it, using ropes and blocks from the workshop. We built a frame, jacked the log across, and pit-sawed it into planks. It was like being back in the bush again, working the kauri, only we sawed some planks a bit crooked because of our fingers being crossed.
We steamed the planks, chamfered, overlapped, and clenched them with copper rivets and washers, and made a clinker-built dinghy. We broke another bottle of Aunt Effie’s champagne over its bow and named it The Dog’s Hind Leg because of the crooked planks, and because somebody who wouldn’t own up put in a couple of ribs upside down. Putting in ribs isn’t easy when your fingers are crossed.
We hoisted some long logs on deck, and adzed them into shape for the masts, spars, yards, and booms. It was difficult, but we managed to do it with our fingers crossed.
We remembered how to rig sheerlegs, raised the mizzen-mast towards the stern, and lowered it through holes cut in all the decks till its heel rested on a broad step. We adzed a bowsprit, capped it with greenheart, gammoned and frapped it to the stem with chains and lashings, and snugged it home with a wrapping of cow hides so it wouldn’t work and let water into the fo’c’sle.
“Why does it stick up so high?” asked Lizzie.
“That angle’s called the steeve. It keeps the headsails and gear out of the water when the ship pitches,” said Peter. “And it gives the jib more lift.”
We rigged a capstan for’ard, ran a wire rope from it through a snatch-block out on the bowsprit, and back to the top of the mainmast.
Ann and Becky had made friends with the cabinful of powerful gorillas. With their help, and the little ones singing a shanty to give us the time, we heaved on the capstan bars. Down in the bilges, Peter knelt to slip a gold sovereign under the mainmast. The ship rolled over to one side, the mast slipped, and water rushed in. His hand trapped under the mast, Peter was unable to stand as the water rose towards his mouth.
And just at that moment, Ann screamed, “Something’s sucked all the blood out of one of the sheep!”
Chapter Eleven
Rigging Aunt Effie’s Ark
Even the powerful gorillas couldn’t lift the foot of the mast off Peter’s hand. The elephant tried, but shook his head. The ship lay on her starboard side, the mast askew. Down in the bilges, the water kept rising towards Peter’s mouth.
The elephant hung on to the bulwark with his trunk and leaned out to port to try and bring the ship back. We ran around the deck screaming and getting in each other’s way.
“Man the pumps!” Marie shouted to the gorillas. “Rig sheerlegs!” she ordered us.
From down in the bilges, Peter yelled, “Keep your fingers crossed!” The water was rising over his mouth so we only heard, “Bubble bubble bubble!”
The gorillas pumped manfully so water squirted over the sides, but down in the bilges it kept rising. Peter had to close his mouth and breathe through his nose.
“I know what the trouble is!” said Daisy and ran into the hold.
The rest of us screamed, tripped over each other, and hung a block from the sheerlegs. Our fingers were all crossed thumbs as we reeved a wire rope through the block and took a turn around the capstan. Casey and Jared ran down below. Casey held Peter’s nose closed as the water rose over it, and Jared stuck a straw in his mouth so he could breathe. It worked, but the water kept rising towards his eyes.
“Bring a longer straw!” Casey yelled. And just then the ship rolled back to port, and settled on an even keel. The elephant let go with his trunk so he could squeal and fell into the sea. “Help!” he trumpeted. “Elephant overboard!”
Down below, Peter cheered as the heel of the mast lifted long enough for him to pull out his squashed right hand and slip in the sovereign with his left. We heard the satisfying snick as the mast slid into position, and the keel took the strain. Peter came on deck spluttering. When he’d opened his mouth to cheer, the water had rushed inside and gone down the wrong way. We patted him on his back, and it spurted out of his mouth again.
“I’ll bet your sovereign’s squashed flat!” Jazz said.
“So’s my right hand.” We stared at his flattened right hand and lined up to take turns shaking it and measuring it against our own. Peter always had to buy two pairs of gloves after that. So he could get an ordinary glove for the left hand, and an enormous one for the right hand.
“Man overboard!”
“We forgot the elephant!” we screamed. Our sheerlegs turned out handy after all. We passed a broad strop under the elephant’s belly and swung him aboard. He shook himself so water showered over us.
“It’s not fair,” he said. “You took no notice when I shouted, ‘Elephant overboard!’ but you came running when I called, ‘Man overboard!’ It’s not fair!” he said again. We hung our heads and drew circles on the deck with our toes.
“We’re sorry,” we whispered.
“I forgive you!” said the elephant who had a generous nature. He emptied the water out of his trunk and we found he’d caught enough fish to feed everyone aboard.
After a good meal, Peter said, “We still don’t know what put the ship over on her side. Let’s find the leak!” He led us down to the hold where Daisy was still giving the gander a piece of her mind.
She had caught him chasing the cows from one side to the other. That’s what had made the ship roll, and the mast slip. Daisy had got the cows back amidships so the ship settled on an even keel, and the mast rolled off Peter’s hand. But Blossom and Rosie had run into the side of the hull so hard, their horns stuck right through the planks. Blossom’s horns had broken off and plugged their holes. One of Rosie’s, though, had punched a hole then pulled out again. That’s where the water was gushing in.
Daisy gave the gander a good shake. “Hold your breath!” she ordered, and stuck his head into the hole. Peter filled Blossom’s broken-off horns with caulking and tar. He found a wooden plug and wrapped it with tarred felt. “Now!” he said. Daisy pulled out the gander’s head, and Peter hammered the plug home with a mallet. A drop of water squeezed through. Peter hammered the plug again, and the leak stopped.
“You can lay off the gander, Daisy,” Peter said. “He won’t cause any more trouble.”
The gander nodded gratefully. He had tears in his eyes from being shaken silly, getting a piece of Daisy’s mind, and having his head stuck into the hole. We all felt sorry for him, but we said Daisy had acted decisively and saved Peter from drowning.
Marie rasped smooth the stumps of Blossom’s horns. Fortunately they didn’t bleed much, and Blossom said it didn’t hurt except for a slight headache. For a while she looked funny without her horns, then it became fashionable, and all the other cows wanted their horns cut off, too.
“Why is Ann crying?” asked Peter. “What’s the matter?”
“I told you, but you were busy drowning in the bilges, and nobody else would listen to me,” Ann wept. “Something’s sucked all the blood out of this sheep!”
