Elise didn’t know anything about obstinate, insurgent land when she met Bill, though. Because she was not a Mallee girl. She had met Bill in the city.
*
‘Do your best, son,’ said his mother. ‘Send money when you can.’
Bill was standing there at the dusty Mallee railway station with his old and scratched brown cardboard suitcase at his side and a wheat bag full of fear and responsibility on his shoulders. Watched over by one crumpled stationmaster, four resolute geraniums in tins and a couple of peppercorn trees. He stood there, waiting to be waved off by his two younger sisters with their anxious, damp eyes and their unsteady mouths; and his worn weary parents, dressed in the best they could manage and squinting into the glare from the dazzling crushed-quartz platform as they battled to save the farm. He bent and gave his mother and his sisters a quick peck on the cheek.
‘You do your bit down there, you hear? We all have a job to do if we want to keep the farm,’ his father had said. ‘I’m buggered if I’m going to walk off. Not like the rest of them are doing around here. I’ve been on the land for too long. I’m not about to give up on it now. Things will come good directly. And then you can come home.’ Bill’s father stopped. He was tired now and fidgety from all that talking. Because that was an excessive amount of words for a Mallee farmer to produce at any one time. He squared his shoulders and glared at his son. Bill nodded. He shook his father’s hand, picked up the suitcase and climbed onto the waiting train.
Bill sat solitary then in a carriage, staring out a grimy train window at his fretting, receding parents until their tiny standing selves were swallowed by the silent, resentful Mallee scrub. He sat there, lonely and tired, wishing for all the world for a mother’s cup of hot black tea while the carriage rattled and swayed and the miles of Mallee scrub lumbered past the window. Sitting there worrying about what living in the city would mean, or what would happen tomorrow or the next day, and whether the farm would be saved, or how a job would be got.
That train his parents had put him on puffed and clunked down the dusty lines for at least a day before disgorging him in the city to do his best at Aunty Agnes’s place. A city strange and alien, with strange, outlandish gods. A place where people didn’t bless rain.
‘Beautiful day today,’ his workmates would say as they smiled into one more of the endless days of blue above.
‘It’s too dry; the autumn rains are late,’ Bill would reply. And he would shake his head as he scanned the flawless sky beyond the factory rooftops. That sky so skint of cloud.
‘What in blue blazes do you think you are doing?’ Bill’s boss would ask when he saw Bill standing on the porch of the factory staring out at a perfect, belated rain.
‘The rains are here,’ Bill would call as he walked out to stand under it, letting it drip off the brim of his hat and into his face as he looked to the redeeming sky.
From the safety of the porch, his boss screwed up his face and blinked his eyes and shook his head at Bill.
‘Where’s the rainwater tank?’ Bill would ask. Asking everybody, hunting all over the place, when he first arrived. Because there were no rainwater tanks to be found. Because people in the city had turned their backs on rain. Even his Aunty Agnes. Even she had abandoned it and left it alone to be snatched by the gutters and driven away down the drainpipes to waste. But Bill wasn’t going to forget. He put out an empty forty-four-gallon drum and started collecting it himself.
‘What’s that?’ his workmates asked.
‘It’s a water bag.’
‘A what?’
‘It’s full of rainwater – to drink,’ said Bill.
‘Do you think that’s a good idea? You should be careful of drinking rainwater,’ they warned.
‘Why?’ Bill asked.
Bill did do his best in the city, like his mother had urged. His aunty helped. ‘What are you doing lying about at this time of the day?’ asked Aunty Agnes, leaning, arms crossed against the doorframe of Bill’s bedroom, on his first day in the city. ‘Why aren’t you out there getting a job?’ she said as the paper boy thudded the newspapers at the bedroom window. ‘And wear your hat when you go for jobs.’
So he did. Bill – who knew nothing about life except life in the Mallee: the beauty of square miles of wheat ripened and proud and golden in the summer paddocks, and supple and green and optimistic in the spring paddocks. Of tractors clouded in dust, pulling harvesters boiling with dust – patiently circling the paddocks. Of wheat bags plump, heavy, satisfied. Those bags piled up against each other in the middle of new stubble – a communal sharing of golden grainy glory. Of sheep running dusty and lumpy, peculiar and dismayed, ahead of the insistent silent energy of the farm dogs. Or the mood of shearing time – the hazy lanolin world of the shearing shed with brown woolly fleece flying through the golden air onto the grading table. Or the value of rain. And the beauty in sound and sight of a full rainwater tank.
Bill put Nugget on his shoes, and wore his hat. He clutched his Situations Vacant and his little cardboard tram and train tickets and headed out the door.
‘Do your best,’ said Aunty Agnes, holding hard on to the front door like she was sorting the sheep. ‘And don’t take off your hat, you hear?’
The trams and trains with their cardboard tickets and their conductors lugging their hole punchers and coin dispensers and peaked caps – they all did their job. They took Bill to join all those other men looking for work. And Bill stood in a long line with them. With all the men desperate for a job. A line of more men than Bill had ever seen even at the best of a footy grand final. Bill left his hat on and stood there hot in his suit in that long and silent line.
‘Were you the only one in a hat?’ Marjorie asked every time.
‘Yes, I was.’ And Bill was back there, like it was yesterday. He could smell the stifling city heat rising up from the dust and dirt of the factory yard, radiating out from the high red-brick walls of the factory building, falling down in snaking shimmers from the bright tin roof.
‘I did my best, like Aunty Agnes said. I stood there in the heat in that line with all the rest of them. Then I heard a window opening upstairs. A man leant out and yelled at us.
‘Hey! You there in the hat. Are you afraid to get your hands dirty?
‘I looked around to see if he was looking at me. No! I called up to him. I’m not scared of dirt!
‘Well, the job’s yours then. The rest of you can go home.
‘And he slammed the window shut, and that was the end of it. I had a job. Aunty Agnes was right,’ Bill would always say. ‘Always wear your hat, Marjorie. Remember that.’
‘What happened to the rest of them, Dad?’ Marjorie would ask every time. ‘Did they get a job? Did they get to keep their farms?’
But Bill didn’t ever want to remember that long line of hot and hatless, desperate, silent men shuffling back out the gate.
‘That’s enough now,’ he would say. ‘Get and give your mother a hand to wash the dishes.’
*
Try as she did, though, Elise couldn’t reconcile the ways of the Mallee. Her nerves wouldn’t allow it. ‘This is a dusty and stubborn place,’ she whispered to Bill, her eyes wide, her strings a rabbit skin that has been left to curl in on itself and crack up in the heat – stretched and brittle and dry now from the sun. They were sitting at the kitchen table. Elise was fanning herself with a wet face washer but her hands were unsure of themselves. Their fanning was hesitant, lurching – like she had a fair idea already that there would be little hope of rescue for her strings in a warm wet face washer. Like Elise knew even now she was going to need a bit more than that. Ruby and Marjorie were hot, silent, watching. Even their legs were quiet and still under the kitchen table.
‘The cool change will come through soon, love,’ said Bill. His eyes were busy all over Elise’s face.
‘Mrs Doherty says I am not fit f
or here, Bill,’ she said, her speech soft and slow as it struggled to cut through the damp flapping face washer. Her words labouring to cover the distance of the table top in all that heat.
‘Eh? Who said that?’
‘Mrs Doherty – Shirlene,’ said Elise. She looked at Bill. She smiled apologetically and gave a ladylike shrug of her shoulders.
‘She said, You want to be careful. You’re on the road to being a complete damn failure, the way you’re going,’ said Marjorie.
Bill turned to Marjorie. Ruby tried to give Marjorie a warning kick under the table.
‘She did,’ Marjorie insisted. ‘And she swore. She said damn. Which is a swearword.’
‘Don’t take any notice of Shirlene, Elise. I’ve told you that before. She’s just a busybody with nothing better to do all day than try to upset people,’ Bill said.
‘But I must, Bill,’ said Elise. She was distracted now, enthralled by Bill’s eyes that were looking like the sea in a storm.
‘What?’
‘I have to be able to know when I am good enough,’ she murmured, watching that rolling sea.
‘You are bloody well good enough right now. Never you mind about that,’ he said.
‘Mrs Doherty said, I don’t think you are cut out for round here. Do you?’ said Marjorie. ‘What does that mean, Mum? Cut out?’
Ruby tried for another warning kick.
‘You girls go on outside and leave your mother be,’ said Bill.
The two girls scrambled off their chairs and out the back door into the baking heat.
‘Do you reckon we are cut out for around here, Ruby?’ Marjorie asked.
‘I think we are cut out for more things around here than Mum is,’ said Ruby.
‘Damn is a swearword, though,’ said Marjorie. ‘It’s not a bad one. Not like Pa uses – more like what Mum uses.’
‘Sometimes it is better not to say things, Marjorie,’ said her sister.
‘But damn is a swearword,’ Marjorie said.
*
Swearing was like the Mallee. Swearing was elemental, no-nonsense, mulish. A necessary cover against the outside world. Ruby and Marjorie learnt the value and meaning of swearing from Pa. Because Pa was just like the Mallee. He was stubborn and he had precedence and he had expectations. And there is nothing more normal than swearing in the Mallee: it is good and normal. So Pa had no intention of listening to Elise with her soft city concerns and her anxious face and her timorous eyes.
‘Please don’t use that bad language in front of the girls,’ she asked.
‘What bloody bad language?’ he said.
Pa swore all the time. And as far as Marjorie could remember, Pa’s swearing was an indication of his underlying best intentions. Because it was mostly instructional.
Pa swore about the weather to instruct Bill on how to be a decent Mallee farmer instead of a useless one: ‘It’s going to be a scorcher tomorrow – I don’t care what that flamin’ thermometer is reading and that barometer ya keep tapping says. You’re a damn fool, Bill. You can’t go moving the sheep tomorrow. You’ll bloody kill them all in that heat.’
He swore about the rounding-up process and its intended outcome – to instruct the dogs into better sheep yarding practices: ‘Gorn, get in behind, I told you. Go way back. Go way back, you useless bloody mongrel.’
Ruby and Marjorie were the subject of Pa’s swearing too. And it also was instructional. Pa swore at them to keep them safe when they climbed the sugar gums in the front yard: ‘What are you kids doing up that bloody tree? Gorn, get down before you fall down and break your bloody necks.’ He swore at them to explain science and geography: ‘Shut that bloody wire door, you two. Do you want to let in every blowfly this side of the Black Stump?’
Pa proved to be a natural-born teacher. Even the cocky listened and learned. ‘Shut the bloody gate,’ the cocky said to anyone approaching the house. ‘Turn that flamin’ tap off,’ the cocky said to anyone in the yard. ‘Look out, you bloody fool,’ it said to anyone passing its cage under the tank stand.
Elise swore and it was never instructional. Although, according to Elise, she did not swear. And she believed this as a tenet of faith even against the word of witnesses roundabout who knew otherwise. Because everyone in that house knew Elise swore. Except for Elise – she didn’t know.
Marjorie took up swearing towards the end of grade five. She figured that if Elise could swear then so could she. She swore at the sandhills, the barbed-wire fences and the sagging gates. She swore at the dogs – when they were safely chained in their kennels, and couldn’t sneak in behind and bite her on the back of the ankle. She swore at the beehives and their onion-weed honey and beeswax hoard. At Pa and his 1080 rabbit poison – swearing at him from the dubious safety of the inside of the house yard fence. And Marjorie took her swearing elsewhere. She swore at school – at Jesse Mitchell – and laughed. She never swore at Ruby, though, or at Jimmy Waghorn.
But swearing so copiously at school must have made Marjorie lazy, because Marjorie forgot herself and one day swore in front of her mother. Marjorie stood in the kitchen now, next to the stove, watched by an embarrassed and disappointed coffee percolator, popping brown coffee-infused water out its glass lid nonetheless. Standing before an enraged Elise.
‘You are a bold, brazen little article.’
Marjorie’s teeth were chattering. But not from fright. Or cold. They were chattering because Elise had Marjorie by the chin and was shaking her jaw up and down. Marjorie stared her mother in the eye as best she could.
‘You should be ashamed of yourself. You are a filthy little guttersnipe,’ Elise went on.
You’re going to shake my head off in a minute, Mother.
‘You are a disgrace. You are not a lady. You are a trollop,’ she fumed.
Lucky I’m keeping my tongue out of the way. I could be in serious bloody trouble with all of this jaw shaking and teeth crashing going on.
‘Your father will wash your mouth out with soap when he gets home.’
Do you think soap will eradicate the words from my brain? Or the will to continue? Go ahead and bloody well try. You and Father do your best.
‘You’re a disappointment,’ said Bill, when he came home. He pulled Marjorie towards the washhouse. ‘You’ll think twice about swearing after this,’ he warned as he grabbed the bar of Velvet soap and shoved it all around inside Marjorie’s mouth.
I don’t think the swearwords live in there, Father, thought Marjorie.
‘Let that be a lesson to you,’ said Bill as he threw the soap back into the wash trough and headed out the door.
‘Why did you do it?’ asked Ruby that night. ‘I told you before if you were going to keep swearing then just make sure you didn’t swear in front of Mum. You knew it would make her angry.’
Marjorie shrugged. ‘I forgot. Anyway, I’m not going to stop just because Dad shoved soap in my mouth. I like swearing. It makes me feel better. You should try it yourself.’
Ruby sighed. ‘What’s the point of upsetting everyone all the time, Marjorie?’
‘I was only swearing! I don’t know what Mum is so upset about. And I already told you why – I like it!’
‘Well, if you are not going to stop, then you need to learn not to swear out loud again when Mum and Dad are around,’ said Ruby.
And while Marjorie might not have thought there was anything worth her while to learn from her father’s lesson, she did think Ruby’s lesson was worth something. So after that Marjorie only swore inside her head when in earshot of adults.
But when no adults were present, Marjorie swore often. She swore in the safety of the schoolyard, hemmed in by the drab schooling and listless learning of the budding crop of the next Mallee generation. Or in the middle of the paddock, encased by the stubble of last season’s hopes; or bounded by the green and hopeful shoots of this season
; or encircled by the lines of the resting and quiet fallow of the hopes and prayers to come. Marjorie swore long and loud. Because no one was going to stop her. Not even Ruby. Not even the bees could stop Marjorie swearing.
*
The house cultivated two beehives. One should have been enough for anybody. So how and why the house acted outside the boundaries of decent Mallee thriftiness and chose to acquire two beehives was anyone’s guess.
The house harboured one medium-sized beehive under the side verandah, just beside Pa’s bedroom window, where it hummed menacingly at anyone who came too close. The other hive was a monster. A huge ball of pulsating bee industry glued to the outside wall of the dairy. It hummed and swayed with its own life force and within its own thermosphere. It radiated collective purpose and dripped beeswax and onion-weed honey down the wall and onto the waiting red dirt. It was a law unto itself, and bees came and went in dizzying numbers, tiny machines dwarfed by the size of the sphere. These machines were fanatical in their devotion to the cause – armed to defend and itching to prove their worth. Minuscule transporters constantly landing and departing from that titanic sphere. It was a Buck Rogers, apriaristic space station.
The dairy was a sanctuary of sorts for Ruby and Marjorie. No cream or butter had been churned there since Bill’s mother died, so the girls knew they had it all to themselves. It was cool and neat and clean and orderly – a relief from the encroaching chaos around them. But getting there was a trial of fear for Marjorie every time, on account of the bees.
‘Let’s go to the dairy,’ Ruby would say.
‘But what about the bees? I’m scared of the bees,’ Marjorie would say.
‘I’ve told you: the bees won’t hurt you if you just leave them alone. And anyway, when did you last get a bee sting?’
That stopped Marjorie. Because Ruby was right. Marjorie had never had a bee sting. Not in all the times they had visited the dairy. But Marjorie knew a bee sting was bound to happen one of these days.
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