The Yield

by Tara June Winch

  yield, bend the feet, tread, as in walking, also long, tall – baayanha Yield itself is a funny word – yield in English is the reaping, the things that man can take from the land, the thing he’s waited for and gets to claim. A wheat yield. In my language it’s the things you give to, the movement, the space between things. It’s also the action made by Baiame because sorrow, old age and pain bend and yield. The bodies of the ones that had passed were buried with every joint bent, even if the bones had to be broken. I think it was a bend in humiliation just like we bend at our knees and bow our heads. Bend, yield – baayanha.

  younger sister – minhi I went mustering when the droughts hit again and again and the skeleton weed took two years of crops and there was no work on any station for us. I loved mustering, being high there in the saddle, wearing the ten-gallon stetson, relying on my stockhorse, leading the herd to water. They were fine years and I made friends for the first time in my life. There was so much I wanted to be talking about with people. I asked a roving man from our neck of the woods about his family, how his family were my relatives. He turned away threading the stirrups against his horse, sick and tired of my chit-chat. I learnt that a lot of men on the farm and out bush like to focus on an animal or an engine to hide their faces before they tell their truths. ‘The family trees of people like us are just bushes now, aren’t they?’ he said. ‘Someone has been trimming them good.’ I wouldn’t ever forget these words because they sounded like sad poems. And I guess that’s a true thing, because all the years I’ve lived I’ve lost so many parts of the people that make me up. My mummy, my daddy, my cousins, and my younger sister, my minhi. When I was little and in the Boys’ Home I never forgot our people on the river. It seemed every night the moon came to the dormitory window to remind me of my family. I’d think of my minhi across the country in the Girls’ Home and my urine would run like quicksilver over the hessian cots, onto the stone floors to wake my schoolmates. I was just three years old after all. I never forgot her. She was just a baby, Mary was, when we were both taken away; that’s a sad story with a happy ending because we found each other again. She is different from me, we don’t hug each other and be affectionate like I’d want to be. But we got to be brother and sister again, which is special. I got to be the older brother again, and she got to be my minhi.

  SIX

  August and Elsie couldn’t bring themselves to eat in the end, and Elsie, avoiding her marriage bed another night, had fallen asleep on the couch. August walked into the field and could see that the windows of the workers’ annexe were darkened. She thought about Saturday when they’d gather together, imagined the lights on again. After Jedda disappeared no workers came and stayed and the annexe doors had been closed since, lights dimmed. Elsie and Albert had also let the preaching and karate room in the front of the house turn quiet. All the photos of Jedda were taken down and wrapped in muslin and put away. And just like that the home became just a house, they never really talked about Jedda Gondiwindi again. In the beginning people had shaken their heads in the street, and mothers wept, and at afternoon tea the few people that came by wondered aloud how something so bad could happen. How puzzling it was – that she could disappear without a trace. There were murmurs and tears, but no-one had answers. After that, childhood wasn’t so carefree, it was risky. Kids got picked up from school, parent volunteers crossed names off lists and manned the bus stops, few were allowed to walk home alone, and playing on the street was mostly forbidden. In spring no-one sold purple bunches of Paterson’s curse to tourists by the side of the road. Though, the thing about a small town in a place like Massacre Plains is that they love their own. Or if they don’t love them, they at best stick by them; defend them against the outside world of troublemaking out-of-towners, tourists, big money. But the Gondiwindi weren’t their own. They never double-checked if they saw a Gondiwindi walking home alone. The newsreader said Jedda’s name and flashed the school portrait on the screen only twice over a pressure-cooked week, and Jedda, like the kids who went missing, the brown-skinned children like her, became a mystery manufactured to forget about.

  But the Gondiwindi (and the Coes, Gibsons, Grants and every other family like them) couldn’t forget. Almost every woman’s hair in the family then took a journey into silver and, by the next year, all August’s aunts looked old and grey on the tops of their heads. All the religion and the festivity of a full house became mute rooms, faded to white noise. That noise of the mind where all the questions restaged and all suspicion rehearsed. Over the once-comatose valley of town, their minds rattled with every combination. August, just nine years old – her heart stretched like bubblegum string until it snapped. And it stayed snapped.

  Once August had run away from Massacre Plains and made something resembling a life, when someone would ask her if she had siblings she’d tell them she had a sister but never said she was missing. August would furnish a space in the universe where she imagined she could have been; at twenty Jedda was at a faraway university, at thirty she was expecting her first child in the city. Or sometimes she’d just say she was dead. Life or death have finality, limbo doesn’t; no-one wants to hear about someone lost. Someone that just went and disappeared altogether.

  In the field now her skin prickled, that big organ remembering everything that happened before. She thought about what her nana mentioned – of losing the house, of all the Gondiwindi leaving here forever, and even though the bad memories were beginning to seep back into her skin, it still didn’t seem right to her to be forced off that place. Not, she thought, if they go all the way back to the banks of the river and further, like her poppy had always said. The air changed, a breeze pulled at the trees and August looked up from that dark field where stars were hidden. The possibility of rain was a simple smell, a good taste. She slipped off her shoes and within seconds the dirt that stretched out around her was covered in fresh scars from the sudden, heavy rain. It was a single burst. A thermal updraft but not enough to break the hard topsoil. August thought about what her poppy used to say, that rainfall after a dry spell is the perfect condition for good wheat yields and also, the perfect condition for locust outbreaks. Simply put, he’d say, sometimes there isn’t a silver lining at all.

  In the walls of her former bedroom she smoked out the louvre window, fingering the packet of cigarettes. Her mouth ached for something more, wanted some unknown balm, not a kiss, or a meal, or a drink, but something long denied. Since she was a girl the ache had scratched further inside her, for something complete to rest at her tongue, her throat. The feeling that nothing was ever properly said, that she’d existed in a foreign land of herself. How she saw home through the eyes of everyone else but her. The feeling had begun before Jedda vanished.

  She stubbed the cigarette out, looked at the block of telly rehomed in the corner of the room. On the same telly, that was once downstairs, the newsreader had initially encouraged people to search their properties, dams, silos and abandoned wells. Some people searched with dogs. August had wandered down to the flats of the Poisoned Waterhole Creek and ate roots and tubers for the first weeks without a sister. She’d taken slices of stringybark gum and let the paper melt on her tongue. Sucked at the bulrush reeds. She’d been compelled to eat the earth, become immune to it so it didn’t hurt, eat up the whole place where Jedda was lost. Forever? If she could eat the entire earth, be of the earth, she thought she too wouldn’t disappear that way. A month later when Jedda was still missing Albert baptised August himself in the field under the hot cracked sun while she cried. Everyone was gathered and talking about the sanctity of childhood, the kids they kept saying, and then her poppy poured water over her head and recited the absolution of the dead:

  ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. For unto Thee are due all glory, honour and worship, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.’

  He told August that it was to protect her, and she, feeling all the weight of blood
rushing to her head in his hands, saw the world as she always felt it was – turned, upside-down.

  SEVEN

  war –nadhadirrambanhi There was a big one here, that’s how the town got its name in the end. The war lasted one hundred years. Everyone was fighting that war, even the Ghan cameleers and train-track fettlers were there and fighting alongside the Gondiwindi. It all started when the Gondiwindi were sick of the settlers taking over their land, digging up their tubers, ruining the grazing work they’d done forever. The Gondiwindi were farmers see, farmers and fishermen and they cultivated the land here long before, they stayed even through the rare winters. They’d keep warm by turning their possum-skin cloaks inside out and rubbing the fat of the pelican on their skin.

  So when the Gondiwindi were fed up, and hungry because their kangaroo wasn’t coming in their hunting ground anymore and because their lore said that even during change, the land still owned them. That they could use the land how they needed – they got into the cattle then. They rounded them up with their mutts and dingoes and chased the heifers until they became tired, until it became a hunt and they’d spear them. Must’ve been frightened, those cows, so it was a good thing they never ate the meat – would’ve been tough as a chop from the Boys’ Home. They ate the fat, and the liver and the marrow. The settlers got mighty angry that the wild Gondiwindi didn’t respect their new fences. Then came retaliation. Thousands died, even the Gondiwindi babies too. Well, the river ran with blood then, and the dirt turned forever from yellow to pink. Massacre Plains had been born and the Gondiwindi, looking down the eye of a gun’s barrel, were scared.

  water – galing, guugu, ngadyang The Reverend wrote it in his journals as culleen – he was listening that fella, listening as close as he could. All my life I’ve been near the water, and we come from the water too, us people. First we were born from quartz crystal – that’s hard water, we are kin of the platypus, that’s the animal of the water, and then, my wife Elsie and I made Missy and Jolene and Nicki, born on the banks of the water, the Big Water – Murrumby.

  a large waterhole, a watercourse downhill – nguluman There’s one near the property, just there at the corner of the wheatfield, a little shoot off the Murrumby. The waterhole never fills all the way anymore. If the river ever gets going, it’s only running a little, and the whole thing is never deep enough to fill the wetland and then trickle into the waterhole. They call that one Poisoned Waterhole Creek.

  wattle flower, acacia tree – yulumbang The ancestors told me about all the plants and trees and how to use them. They told me that the plants were pregnant with seeds, that the plants were our mothers and so I was only to use them for the Gondiwindi, not for selling, just for living. Remember that, wherever you go and touch the trees and plants, they are sacred. The yulumbang is a great plant for lots of things, the green seeds can be roasted in their pods on the fire, then you eat them like you eat peas. If you roast them and make a paste it tastes like peanut butter. The light-coloured gum from the yulumbang can be sucked like a lollipop, but not the dark-coloured gum – that one is too bitter. The gum is called mawa.

  weak, hungry, depressed – ngarran You should never say this word too loud because it’ll catch you hard. When you say the thing, sometimes you become the thing. August, when she arrived to live with us, would scream and weep, and yell out ‘I’m hungry’, but she was ngarran, she was all those things. I knew she had ngarran from this life and the past too. We’d say, Close the voice, because it’s telling you wrong. Anyone can say that, I’m not ngarran, because I’m in control – I can make it small and put it into the palm of my hand. I don’t think it always works, but it gives the spirit a chance to rest. In the end, ngarran is part of life – we can’t make it disappear, it doesn’t vanish overnight, but we can tell it to shush in the meantime.

  well/to make well, to make good – maranirra If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to drop one. Mistakes were made and I want to make maranirra now. We should all make maranirra.

  wheat – yura My entire life has been galing and yura. Even in the Boys’ Home we used to have to bless our meals, mostly served with johnnycakes, or dense bread. We’d recite ‘Blessed by God who is our bread, may all the world be clothed and fed’. I quite liked saying that aloud. Many people know the wheat firsthand, not just in this country. Every person knows bread one way or another. The Gondiwindi had their own flours, and they were meant especially for the body of the Gondiwindi. We have always worked in the wheatfields too, my daddy did, and his daddy too, and if the world ever stopped turning it’d be the last grain on earth, I reckon. Prosperous acres were fertile for the most part and although us mob lived on rich land – we never became rich.

  where is your country? – dhaganhu ngurambang The question is not really about a place on the map. When our people say Where is your country they are asking something deeper. Who is your family? Who are you related to? Are we related? There’s a story I read about someone who wanted to build a map that was the scale 1:1 so that the map covered all the oceans and all the mountains and land at its true size. That made the girls laugh when I told them – imagine walking underneath and holding the thing above your head in the dark? That’s a little what a map does, takes the light out so you can’t see. The map isn’t the thing, this country is made of impossible distances, places you can only reach by time travel. By speaking our language, by singing the mountains into existence.

  wooden dugout, or bark container or dish – guluman Elsie and me – we celebrated our marriage anniversary when the grandkids were little, Mary babysat. We took the Greyhound bus like they did in American blues songs. We went all the way to Alice Springs and then to Uluru – right in the middle of the country. We met some proper blackfellas out there, and there were women that were making their own guluman there too, and we bought one to bring home. It made me want to do things like that back at Prosperous. The guluman we brought back reminded me what the ancestors showed me and said, that our family had our own, used to carry fish to waterholes. Our people used to farm fish too! And after that trip, the guluman was a reminder of a bigger story of our people – how far we’d come that we could revisit ourselves, be proud of our culture again.

  world, all over the world, everyplace – bangal-ngaara-ngaara Once, the ghosts came when I was meant to be doing chores, and away we went to shake a leg. I had never been to a dance in my life, I must have been about thirteen years old. All my family was at the corroboree and there they showed me the dance of the crow. We all danced and while we were dancing we flew into the sky, doing things that humans can’t do. We went bangal-ngaara-ngaara and the ancestor, my great-great-great-nanny was there, and she was teaching me about dying. We were flying and she said, ‘No-one ever dies.’ I said, ‘I’m sure they do because my daddy died.’ She took her claw then and ripped a feather off my wing and she said, ‘This is not you. If I rip all the feathers off you, it is not you.’ ‘What is me?’ I said, and she said, ‘You is only electricity and electricity cannot die. You go somewhere else, but your feather is not you.’ We went to a thousand and one places in our dance and she showed me that dust to dust is just where we are resting – in the ground some places, in the water other places, burnt in ashes other places – she just said, ‘They now soil, they now water, they now lightning.’ Afterwards we flew back to the fire. All my ancestors danced through night and we ate quandong fruit by the fire. It was sweet and I stayed awake a long time after dessert. But then it was time for bed and they took me back to the Boys’ Home. When I lay in bed that night I was very scared that I was going to die, that they showed me dying for a reason. But I didn’t die that night, I think they just wanted to tell me things, but not always in the way I thought. I realised I was just learning, it didn’t need to be in a special order, they just had me learn what I needed for all the days, not just the one I feared.

  EIGHT

  August’s compulsion to eat began before she came to live at her nana and poppy’s. At her
parents’ home there wasn’t much edible to a child, only devon meat if they were lucky, white-bread loaves gone too fast, fruit that was too old and destined to be thrown away, and food-bank goods that needed to be worked into something else. Jedda and August both used to snack on uncooked sticks of spaghetti, dipping the ends into the sugarbag. Chewing them to a paste. Every now and then, though, once every few months, cheese would appear. A large block of cheddar wrapped in thin aluminium foil and soft blue cardboard. August would wait it out until her parents had settled in front of the TV and slip herself along the floor to the fridge. She’d jemmy the electrical plug first from the wall, slide around to the door, gently pop the seal open without the fear of the light coming on. Then she would bite hunks and hunks of cheese until it had gone and she was on the verge of tears from the ecstasy of it all.