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Watermelon
By J. B. Ringer
Nick's watermelon patch lay right beside the road. All that separated us from the fruit was a shallow ditch overhung by paspalum and three rusty strands of barbed wire. We looked at those melons longingly as we scuffed past each hot weekday afternoon. We yearned after them, Jack and I, until the whole summer's dust seemed to settle at the back of our throats. Only cool, stolen watermelon flesh could satisfy that kind of dryness.
The problem was, the field lay in full view of Nick's bach. And, as the melons ripened, Nick always seemed to be there. Every evening, every weekend, he was in his garden, carrying water, rustling through the corn to snap off ripened cobs, or bending over a hoe clearing the last crackling rows of peas.
If he wasn't in the garden itself, then Nick would be pottering about his bach, hammering away at something, scraping the weatherboards ready for painting, puttying a window or, more often, just sitting on the verandah steps sharpening tools. He had a lot of these: three or four each of spades, hoes and mattocks. He used to line them up on the verandah and sit there for hours sharpening them, using a file and a whetstone, rubbing at the steel with smooth, careful strokes.
Nick, everyone called him Nick. You couldn't pronounce his real name - or we didn't try to. Nick was Polish. He had fought in the war, Dad told us, first against the Russians, then against the Germans, and been a prisoner in between, and come to New Zealand afterwards. His part of Poland had gone to the Russians; I suppose he felt there was nothing left for him there. Nick had some medals, Dad said, but we never saw them. We made up stories about how he got them, killing Nazis, bloody stories, adding gory details every time we told them.
But we didn't talk much to Nick, no more than we could avoid. We didn't mind his accent, all hisses and splutters. That made us laugh behind his back. Out of his hearing, we'd imitate the way he spoke, spitting and chuckling.
It was his eyes that scared us, black and expressionless. There was a white scar too, that started half-way down his forehead, burrowed into the eye-socket at the corner of his left eye, and emerged to throw up a furrow across his cheekbone. Curiously, the eye itself was unmarked, but it was dead, I think. Nick never smiled, at least I never saw him smile - only once.
Jack and I used to raid the gardens and orchards of every farm within a mile of our place. We filled our bellies with green plums and peaches and nectarines, with sour apples, with gritty peas scooped from the pod with our teeth. If there was nothing else, we stole carrots, wiping the earth off roughly on our shirts. But we never touched anything belonging to Nick.
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