***
Pastoral
I’d
wager my wooden leg that never, in the whole history of the Rutherford Lawn
Bowls Association or our local parish church St Marks, never in the whole
history of the township of Horowhenuapai and its outlying districts for that
matter, has there ever been a bloke quite as eccentric as Barry Drysdale. Of
course, we have our fair share of oddballs and crazies in Horowhenuapai – all
small towns do. And because
everyone knows everyone else, gossip travels fairly quickly. There was Agatha
Beumont, spinster and long since retired piano teacher, who collected cats and
whose death as the result of some strange flu-like illness was made known to
her neighbours by the cacophonous yowling of her dozen feline companions. There
was George Jameson who brained Patrick O’Hara with a wrench because he thought
O’Hara had tampered with his tractor. Stories like this got around. But for
sheer theatricality and ridiculousness, for sheer dramatic punch, there was no
beating Barry.
The
gent I’m yakking about ran a small sheep station up the valley. The land up
there is pretty unforgiving but Barry handled it competently enough, enough to
survive and probably put a little money aside into the bargain. Certainly, he
was no spendthrift. We almost never saw him town. He never drank at any of the
locals (such as the Queen Vic that I frequent), never had a flutter at the
racetrack, never played bowls although he was a member of the club. The only
time he came into town was when he needed to stock up on essentials like food and
whiskey. During shearing season and lambing season, he would hire a couple of
young lads as farm hands and put them up in the barn, but apart from Barry
himself there wasn’t a soul who ever saw the inside of his house, a big old
mansion he had inherited from his father. He rattled around it all on his
lonesome and your guess is as good as mine as to how he filled in the time when
he wasn’t looking after his sheep.
You
could probably describe Barry as a hermit and not be far wrong if it weren’t
for one thing: he was very litigious. He would seek to take legal action over
the most peculiar things. Now, the only solicitor in town is Geoffrey Dane, a
chap who happens to be a mate of mine. We meet up fairly regularly for a pint
and a natter at the Vic and, one time, he told me a tale about Barry. This
story isn’t actually the primary story I want to tell but it serves as a good
introduction to the man.
Apparently
Geoffrey was sitting at his desk invoicing a client when there was a knock at
his office door. Geoffrey doesn’t have a receptionist and so he has no idea who
the visitor is. He calls out “Come in!” In walks Barry, wearing a flannel
shirt, black shorts and a pair of gumboots.
“G’day,
Geoffrey,” he says curtly, “I need some help. I’ve got an action I want to
take.”
“G’day,
Barry. Sit down and tell me about it and I’ll see what I can do.”
Barry
sits on the other side of the desk across from Geoffrey and rests one gumboot
on his knee.
“I
wanna sue my neighbour, the one to the East. Robertson.”
“What’s
he done?”
“He
been stealing from me.”
“Stealing
from you? It sounds outside of my speciality, Barry. Generally I only handle
civil cases, not criminal ones. Why not go to the police?”
“I’ve
been talked to the police. They laughed me out of the room.” As he said this,
Barry seemed to jut out his jaw defiantly – it was a solid jaw and an excellent
foundation for his craggy face. It was as though he expected Geoffrey to laugh
as well.
“Did
they? That’s unfortunate. What precisely has you neighbour been stealing?”
“He’s
been stealing my rain.”
At
this point in the narrative, Geoffrey paused to wet his whistle with a long
gulp of beer. Then he went on.
“Well,
my first thought was that Robertson must have been stealing water from Barry’s
water tank. Perhaps the neighbour had run a hose from the tank to a barrel on
the back of a ute or something. Or maybe he’d diverted a stream that had run
into Barry’s property so that it was running into his instead. Both ideas seem
pretty far-fetched but I had no idea what else he might mean. I asked Barry if
that’s what he was saying: that his neighbour was siphoning water out of
Barry’s tank.
“
‘No,’ says Barry, ‘I mean, he be deliberately stealing my rain. The rain
showers only come down on his property and stop at the fence line’.
“This
left me a little nonplussed. I asked Barry how Robertson could go about
stealing his rain. Barry told me that he wasn’t sure but he had a couple of
ideas. Maybe Robertson was firing silver iodide or dry ice into the clouds to
seed them. Or perhaps he was covertly performing Native American rain dances in
the secrecy of his shed. However he was doing it, Barry felt sure that
Robertson was stealing his rain and wanted a court order issued to make him
cease and desist.
“Well,
I thought about it for a moment and then told Barry that the problem, from a
legal perspective, was that Robertson couldn’t literally be ‘stealing’ his rain
because the water didn’t belong to Barry until it had arrived in his property
and made contact with the ground. In fact, I’m not sure if it even belonged to
him then. In the U.S, apparently, local governments own the rainwater and there
are laws against homeowners ‘diverting’ it for personal use. I wasn’t sure
about here in New Zealand and I’m still not. At any rate, I told Barry, even if
there were legal grounds upon which Barry could argue that Robertson was
illegally diverting water meant for him, it would be a challenge to convince a
judge that Robertson was carrying out the diversion by means of Native American
rain dances.”
“So
what the heck ‘m I sposed to do?”
“I
don’t know, Barry. Perhaps you could speak to Robertson and ask him to stop.
Or, if you still want to take legal action, you could see Fred Baggage in
Maungakerikeri.”
At
this point, Barry springs to his feet and, jutting out his chin again, says,
“Maybe I’ll do just that,” leaving the room without a backward glance and with
the air of someone who felt that his dignity had been affronted.
When Geoffey had finished telling
me this story (it was about three months afterwards that he got around to it),
I asked him if he’d ever heard any more about Barry, Robertson and the
purloined rain since.
“No,”
said Geoffrey. “I asked Fred about it once, and he said he’d never heard from
Barry. I guess Barry just decided it wasn’t worth the bother pursuing.”
Now,
like I say, this isn’t the primary story I wanted to tell about Barry but,
before I get on to this main story, I should mention that the tale of the
diverted rain has an interesting postscript. I’m also mates with a bloke called
Simon Bragg, chap who ran for town council a little while ago, and he told me a
tale about one time he was doorknocking for the election and had driven out to
Barry’s place in his rusty Corolla. As he was driving up the road that lead to
Barry’s house, he had found himself in the middle of a sudden vicious
rainstorm. The rain was, in his words, “veritably pissing down” but, when he
turned up Barry’s drive, it suddenly stopped. He pulled over to walk the last
hundred yards to Barry’s house and, looking about him, noticed something odd.
The Robertson property lies pretty close to the Drysdale property about this
point and what Simon noticed was that it was raining in the Robertson property
but not in the Drysdale property. In fact, the rain stopped completely and
precisely at the fence-line of No.9 wire that divided the two homesteads. It
was dry as a drought on this side and bucketing down on the other. “Damndest
thing I ever saw,” Simon told me later.
Anyway,
I’ll carry on with the principal story I want to tell now.
Although
Horowhenuapai can nowise be described as a thriving metropolis, we are lucky
enough to have a registry office, on the second floor above the courthouse. My
nephew’s wife works there behind the counter. One day, she’s behind the glass
screen that separates the employees from the punters when she sees Barry stride
in through the doorway. He’s wearing his flannel shirt, shorts and gumboots and
has a sheep with him, on a leash, as though it’s a dog. My niece calls out:
“Excuse
me, sir, you can’t bring animals into the courthouse!”
“I’ll
do whatever the bloody hell I want,” replies Barry.
The
niece hesitates, considers forcing the issue and then decides it’s not worth
kicking up a fuss. Barry walks over to the counter, leans over it and says:
“I
want to get a marriage license.”
“Certainly,
sir,” says the niece. “You’ll need to fill in this form, a Notice of Intended
Marriage.”
The
sheep drops a few pellets on the linoleum. My niece takes the appropriate
form from its tray and passes it to Barry, who starts
filling it in at the counter.
“You’ll
need to arrange for a marriage celebrant to officiate at the ceremony,” says
the niece, trying to be helpful and ignoring the bleating of the sheep. “And
you’ll need two witnesses as well.”
Barry
is struggling to fill in the form, holding the pen in his thick fingers
clumsily as though it’s a screwdriver. After a couple of minutes, he pauses.
“What
if I don’t know the bride’s surname?”
“You
don’t know her surname?” asks the niece uncertainly. “Have you asked her?”
“Even
if I asked her, she wouldn’t be able to tell me.”
“Could
she write it down..? I’m sorry, sir, but how can you not know the surname of
the woman you want to marry?”
“I
don’t think she has a surname.” Barry waves his hand at the sheep. “This is her
here. This is my fiance.”
The
niece, as you might have guessed, is fairly genial and easy going, perhaps even
a little conflict-averse to tell the truth, but, nevertheless, this takes her
by surprise. For a moment she thinks he must be joking; then, in a flash of
horrible insight, realized that he’s not.
“You
want – to marry – that sheep.”
“That’s
right. Her name’s Polly.”
The niece makes a sudden decision. She
isn’t going to tolerate this type of carry-on happening during her shift. She
grabs the near end of the form and tries to pull it out of Barry’s hands. Barry
reacts by gripping the other edge more tightly.
“Sir,”
says the niece, “I can’t allow this. It’s not moral. And it’s certainly not
legal. You can’t want to marry a sheep!”
“I’ll
do whatever the bloody hell I like!” cries Barry again. The notice tears in
half and Barry falls backwards a step. The security guard, who had been dozing
by the door, now well and truly woken up by the commotion takes a few steps
towards them.
“Sir,”
says the niece, “I’m going to have to ask you and your – your animal to leave
the building.” She gestures towards the exit. Opting to leave quietly rather
deal with security, Barry marches towards the door, dragging Polly with him.
The niece calls out after him.
“It’s
not natural!”
At
the door, Barry wheels around.
“I’ll
be seeing my lawyer about this!” he says.
Now,
like I say, gossip gets around and it doesn’t take very long for people to work
out that the deviant in the registry office must be one and the same man as the
farmer Barry Drysdale, confirmed recluse from up the valley. Word even reached
Geoffrey and so, when there was a knock at his office door and Barry stomped
in, Geoffrey had a fair idea what Barry was coming to see him about. Still he
feigned ignorance, asking, “What can I help you with today?”
Barry
tells him about his intention to marry Polly the sheep, the ruckus at the
registry office and how he has spent the last week enquiring after marriage celebrants
by phoning up all the local Justices of the Peace that he can find in the phone
book, without success. “They either think that I’m a hoax caller or they just
hang up on me. I feel like I’m being discriminated against!”
Geoffrey
is familiar with Barry’s brand of paranoia and chooses his words carefully.
“I’ve
been thinking about your situation,” he admits. “According to the Marriage
Amendment Act of last year, marriage is defined as the union of two people,
regardless of their sex, sexual orientation or gender identity. So anyone can
marry anyone. So long as the parties are over the age of consent and the
relationship is not incestuous. And so long as both parties are people. And
that’s your problem you see Barry. Legally, Polly isn’t a person.”
“To
me, Polly’s a person,” says Barry truculently.
“Well,
yes, to you she might be a person but, from a legal perspective, only human
being beings are people. In fact,” Geoffrey paused to ruminate to himself,
“that’s not completely true. From a legal perspective, a corporation can be
considered a person. I guess that means a man can be legally married to his
work. But that’s by the by. What’s for sure is that sheep aren’t people.”
“Why
not? Why shouldn’t Polly be considered a person?”
“I
bet a lot of tree huggers would agree with you. I guess it’s just the result of
an entrenched history of anthropocentrism and xenophobia.”
The
meeting ended inconclusively shortly afterwards with Barry saying that he
needed to get back to the farm but intimating that he hadn’t given up and
intended to return.
A
couple of days after Barry’s first meeting with Geoffrey, an incident occurred
at the Rutherford Lawn Bowls Association that involved Barry, caused quite a
stir and is worth mentioning. The wife of a mate of mine works behind the bar
there and she described what occurred in detail to me. It was a Sunday. The
retired landed gentry of Horowhenuapai were out on the green in their whites
enjoying a spot of physical exercise in the sun. In the tenebrous gloom of the
saloon, off-duty players were cooling their palates with pints of frosty cold
lager. Suddenly, Barry appears at the entrance in his flannel shirt and
gumboots and with Polly the sheep with him, again on a leash. Although Barry
was a member, it was the first time in living memory anyone in the club had
ever observed his shadow darken the door. Nervously, one of the bar staff
approaches him.
“Barry Drysdale?” she says. “I’m sorry.
It’s against club rules to bring livestock into the clubrooms.”
“Polly ain’t livestock,” he replies. “She’s my fiancé!”
“Polly ain’t livestock,” he replies. “She’s my fiancé!”
Feeling
increasingly anxious but still sticking to her guns, the barmaid speaks
quietly, hoping not enflame the situation.
“Well,
whatever else she is, she’s still a sheep. And the club has clear rules about
animals on the premises.”
“I
know my rights,” says Barry. “According to the rules, membership of the
Rutherford Lawn Bowls Association extends to spouses. And Polly is my spouse!”
Still
trying her best to conceal her agitation, the barmaid says, “That may be so,
sir, but even if she is your spouse, club regulations state that no one can
bring animals onto the grounds without formal permission, and I believe that
rule takes priority over the extension of membership to spouses.”
Barry
juts out his chin, plainly intending to argue the point, but, after a moment of
silent struggle, decides against it. Dragging Polly with him, he stomps out the
door, although not without the parting shot:
“I know my rights!”
“I know my rights!”
In
this way, Barry Drysdale continued his single-minded campaign to bring sexual
equality to the backblocks of rural Taranaki.
As
previously signalled, a couple of days later Barry returned to Geoffrey’s
office. He was still stubbornly determined that his romantic relationship with
Polly be officially recognized and felt convinced that he could force the issue
successfully through the courts. He told Geoffrey about the fracas at the
Rutherford Lawn Bowls Association and repeated his request for legal
representation.
“To
be frank,” says Geoffrey, “I simply don’t think I can help you. There isn’t a
judge in the county who would ever seriously countenance a case like this being
brought before him. The law is quite clear about it. Humans can’t marry
animals. If you want to marry Polly, you’ll need to petition parliament and ask
them to change the Marriage Act, again. And persuading them to do that seems
quite unlikely.”
“What
about natural justice?” cries Barry. ”This whole situation is a violation of my
basic human rights. I’m sticking up for a persecuted minority, fighting against
oppression for the freedoms of the little guy. I’m just like Nelson Mandala or
Martin Luther King!”
This
comparison makes even my mate Geoffrey wince.
“Listen
Barry, you need to face facts. You don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of
getting the state to permit you to marry a sheep. But, more than that Barry, I
feel I must warn you. You’re running the serious risk of being arrested for
criminal indecency. Bestiality is still a crime in this country. Listen Barry –
I know it gets cold at night up there in the valley but is a moment of fleecy
delight worth seven years in the clink?”
This
remark appears to strike home. Barry leans back with a frown and then leans
forward again.
“I
don’t know anything about that,” he says. “All I know is that I’m being the
victim of prejudice. I’m being unfairly discriminated against as a consequence
of my sexual orientation.”
This
second meeting between Barry and Geoffrey on this matter proved to be the last
but the story of Barry and his forbidden passion for Polly the sheep doesn’t
quite end there. Even Barry, obstinate as he was, could recognize when he was
fighting for a losing cause and he stopped bringing Polly into town, becoming,
if anything, even more reclusive than before. Presumably his relationship with
Polly still continued at his farm up the valley but he had stopped offending
the townsfolk by shoving it down their throats and the rumour of it persisted
among the townsfolk only in the form of gossip and off-colour jokes. Yet, in a
way, the damage had already been done. His meetings with Barry had wormed their
way into Geoffey’s subconscious mind where, like a festering infection, they
resulted in broken sleep and bad dreams. One day, at the Vic over a pint,
Geoffrey told me about one of them.
“I
dreamt that I had decided to take on Barry’s case. We were in the Horowhenuapai
District Court and I was delivering an address on the rights of anyone to marry
anything.”
In
the dream, the courthouse was full. The jury consisted of Berkshire pigs, the
judge was a horse and the bailiff was a bullmasiff. The opposing counsel was a
rooster. In the dream, Geoffrey stepped forward into the well to deliver his
speech.
“What
is the most important thing in the world?” began Geoffrey. “Love. Love is what
animates all the greatest works of literature, of Shakespeare, Goethe and
Dante, the Song of Solomon, all serious literary endeavours. Love is the goal
towards which all people strive, the home they make if they lucky enough to
find it. Love is the lighthouse
glimpsed during a storm at sea. Love lifts us, ennobles us, elevates us. Love
is a transcendence of the petty self, a turning towards the other. Love is the
apogee of all that is good; love cannot ever go wrong. And the truest
expression of love is marriage. Who are we to say whom a person can love or can
marry? Who are we to say that some kinds of love are wrong? To deny that a
person loves is to deny who they are. I have a fountain pen with a titanium nib
and diamond studs. It was given to me by my sister. I love that pen very much
and, I think, that if I want to marry it, I should be permitted to.”
The
judge peered gravely down his equine nose at Geoffrey.
“Neigh,” he said. “What about natural
justice? And by that I mean the lawful order of the natural world?”
“Love
trumps nature,” replied Geoffrey wearily, sensing defeat. “Love is higher than
truth. Nature is all ugliness and brutality.”
It
was, you have to concede, a pretty bloody odd dream and I told Geoffrey that.
He conceded its bloody oddness himself. But that’s Horowhenuapai for you.
Crackpots everywhere. I asked Geoffrey if he had seen Barry recently and
Geoffrey said no.
Sometimes
I imagine Barry in the living room of his mansion up the valley. He’s sitting
by the fire on a worn sofa. Polly is standing opposite him on a rug. Geoffrey
is drinking whiskey from a tumbler and, after a moment, he raises it towards
her in a toast.
“I
love ewe, Polly,” I imagine him saying.
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