by Joy Rhoades
THE WOOLGROWER’S COMPANION, 1906
Back at the homestead, Kate put her hat up on its hook. She washed her hands with as little water as she could manage and got the post from the hall table.
‘Give me a shout if you hear Dad, will you? I’ll be in the office.’
‘Orright, Missus,’ Daisy said.
The office was cool and dark after the sunshine of the garden. Papers were scattered across the divan, on his desk chair and even on the floor under the desk. A box of pay packet envelopes lay tipped over on the desk itself. Her father tolerated only a rare tidy of the office and that was overdue. Kate put the envelopes back in the box and then the box on the shelf where it belonged.
At least the bookcases were pretty tidy. The farm journals, the working diaries her father used to write up day in and day out, were lined up in chronological order, one volume for every year since 1918, when her father took up the first blocks of Amiens.
At the desk, the first thing that caught her eye was the file sitting on top of all the papers. Typed lettering ran across the cover: Rural Employment Scheme: POWs assigned to – with the word AMIENS written in ink after that. It was the file Captain Rook had given her father at the station. She set it to one side, then cleared a space among the papers and arranged the day’s post with the envelopes marked Overdue on top. She gingerly tried the flaps on the letters, but each was sealed.
She looked through the other correspondence on the desk: livestock reports, Wool Board newsletters, and copies of The Pastoralist. And bills: from Babbin, from Darcy’s, and one from Nettiford’s. None was marked Overdue but even the most recent was more than a year old.
Kate pulled on the handle of the first desk drawer. Locked; every drawer was locked. She sat back, staring at the desk. Taking the post with her, Kate went to the kitchen to help Daisy with the lunch.
She and her father sat down together to a plate of tinned bully beef and lettuce from the garden. Her mother had hated the tinned meat – only working men ate it. Kate didn’t much like it either, but her father loved it.
‘Is Grimes all right?’ Kate asked, nudging the letters with her fingers. She’d kept an envelope marked Overdue on the top.
But her father reached over the post for the pickles. ‘Yeah. The story’ll be round the district in a day. That’ll get his goat.’
‘That POW, Canali, can ride.’
‘Grimes gave him a hiding in return; boys will be boys. Ed tells me he was a stable-hand before the war.’ He took a mouthful but did not stop speaking. ‘A tad older’n you. He’ll be useful. He’s got some English. But the other fella with the beard? Bottinella. A basket case from the war.’
She took a breath. ‘About the post, Dad.’
‘Ya not poured your tea?’
‘No. I wanted to talk to you about these.’ Kate touched the envelopes in front of him.
‘Well?’
‘They’re bills,’ she said softly.
‘Bills? Yes. And?’
She forced herself on. ‘They don’t seem to have been paid.’
‘You have an interest now in business, Kate? In the books? Have ya? What would y’mother say about that, eh?’
She couldn’t bring herself to speak.
He drank the last of his tea in one gulp and stood, yawning. ‘Think I’ll have forty winks.’
At the door he turned back to her. ‘The money, the banking. Ya want t’have nothin t’do with the bank fellas. Mongrels, all of em. Steal ya blind. Best stick to the housework. Do that for me, will ya? Leave business to your father.’
She was so angry she couldn’t look at him.
‘Oh, and another thing. You could do with some help in the vegetable garden. I told the rider fella, Canali, to give you a hand.’
‘Oh, please, Dad. No,’ Kate protested.
‘The other fella’s got no English. No, Canali’ll work in the afternoons with you when they come in from the run. Startin Monday.’
‘But he’s better in the yards. Working with the stock. At least give me the other one. Bottinella?’
‘You runnin things, Kate?’ he said. ‘You’ll do as I tell ya. Canali worked the gardens at the camp at Hay, apparently. No, you’re having Canali.’
She heard his tread on the wooden floorboards of the house, along the hall to the office at the back, where he now took an afternoon rest.
Daisy appeared in the dining room to clear up. Kate started to pour herself some tea but stopped. The pot was cold. ‘Make yez ot water, Missus?’ the girl asked.
Kate shook her head. She banged the lunch things onto the tray and followed Daisy into the kitchen.
The following Monday afternoon, as Kate sat, pulling on her boots to work in the garden, she considered what was ahead. The POW would start work in the veggie beds this afternoon, and she was dreading it. She had the first boot on when she heard barking and hoof beats, and she hopped out and across the verandah. Rusty was in the paddock, running behind the stock horses, barking, nipping, giving them curry.
‘Rusty,’ she called, but the dog chased on, cutting Mustard out from the other horses.
Her hands cupped round her mouth, Kate shouted again. ‘Rusty!’
He stopped.
‘Come here!’ she shouted.
He cast a longing glance at the horses but turned back. It took him only a minute or so to cover the distance. Kate pulled the other boot on and went out the gate, grabbing the dog waddy as she went. The waddy, a rolled-up newspaper held together with rubber bands, was for meting out punishment, but more for noise than pain. Rusty sidled the last yard in, dropping at her feet in submission. He knew, all right.
‘Bad dog, Rusty.’ She hit his haunches once with a thwack. His punishment had, he slunk away down the fence line. He had to stop chasing stock. If her father knew, the pup would be put down.
Still dreading Canali’s arrival, she started her usual circuit to enjoy it in peace. She went first to look for the bowerbird. A small brown ground-dweller, they were canny enough to avoid snakes and the claws of the house cats and the shed cats alike.
The current bower was tucked in between the base of the California pine and the fence. A tiny avenue only six inches long, it was two walls of short sticks set vertically against each other like a long teepee, the uprights intertwined here and there for strength and beauty. Gathered round one opening was the bowerbird’s careful collection, ordered by category, shells here, gum nuts there, bits of glass beyond them and then shiny rocks at the far end. This bowerbird liked the drive’s white pebbles too, and his collection was laid out in a neat fan from one end of the bower avenue of sticks. ‘It’s an ad,’ her father had explained when she was small. ‘With his work, the male bird is saying “See, ladies? See what I can do?”’ But where was he? Kate waited.
From behind the corner fence post came the little bowerbird, with a pebble in his beak. He stopped, wary when he saw Kate. He was tiny, no more than four inches high from beak to feet, fully grown, including his outsize stick legs. And he was pretty, his grey and white feathers perfect for blending into the mess of the bush floor. He darted in, dropped the shiny pebble by the bower and scuttled away to eye Kate from behind the pine.
She left him in peace and walked in the shade, past one surviving zinnia with a single white flower, self-seeded. Across the front of the house, Kate enjoyed the mock orange, its perfume heavy and sweet in the still heat of the afternoon. A walk through the wisteria arbour brought her to the corner of the house yard with the fruit trees, quince and apricot, eleven of them now, one lost to the drought.
Her track took her past the lean-to of tools, and the lawn at the back of the house. From time to time she’d considered putting another bed in here, for more potatoes, cabbages and other veggies. She’d never quite found the time to ask the men to do it. With the drought, she couldn’t ask; the soil would be like cement.
Her circuit done, she took her kneeler mat from its hook under the tank stand upright and checked it for spiders and
centipedes. Then, on the strip of yellowing lawn that separated the beds from the fence line, she knelt down to weed. She was happiest with weeds dead, Mayne’s curse especially. Oh, she knew from endless childhood Sundays at church that officially everything on God’s earth had a place and deserved God’s love. But she didn’t hold much with that view. In a country where every day was a prayer for moisture, where life was threatened by centipedes and spiders and snakes, where the sun could fry eggs on bitumen, that original gentle version of Christianity, the one the English had brought with them when they came, didn’t fit well.
Kate now practised her faith from afar – she hadn’t been to church since her mother died two years before – with unspoken amendments, giving thanks where she could and forgiving where she should. Weeds were on the wrong side of that divide and deserved to die.
A movement on the other side of the fence caught her eye. Rusty sidled towards her, getting closer to the ground as he approached, fawning his apology. When he was within three feet of her he lay down and rolled over, arching and hunching his back to push himself along the ground.
‘You goose,’ Kate grinned, patting the dog’s belly, ‘stop mucking around, or I’ll have to let Grimes have his way.’
‘Signora, you worry for me?’ The POW Canali was just outside the fence, a swollen smile under his odd pale-green eyes.
‘Hardly.’ She went back to her weeding, embarrassed, her heart pounding.
But the man squatted beside Rusty and rubbed his ears. The pup nudged at the POW’s shirt, and his nose left a wet mark. His uniform was neat, even after most of a day’s work.
Kate stood up, cross. ‘You’re here to work, aren’t you?’
He came through the gate and stopped near her, his hands on his hips. His fingernails were stained black with sump oil from the engines. Grimes had him doing all the dirty work.
He looked about appraisingly, as if she wasn’t there. Kate threw her gardening gloves on the lawn and walked round the corner of the house to the lean-to at the back. When he caught up, she pulled a pick from the neat row of tools and held it out to him.
He didn’t move.
‘This is a pick.’
‘Peek,’ he said, nodding. When he took the tool from her, she felt the quick brush of their hands sending heat to the tips of her ears. Why did he rattle her?
‘C’mon.’ She strode back the way she had come, gathering her wits, then stopped in the middle of the dead lawn behind the house. ‘We need a bed here.’
‘Bed?’ He leaned the pick handle against his thigh and put his palms together against his cheek, miming sleep.
‘A garden bed. Here.’ She pointed down at the hard dirt under their feet.
‘Sì. Big?’
‘Big,’ she said and left him. That’d teach him his place. Then it struck her she sounded just like her mother.
There was only a little noise from the back of the house so he must have got on with it. A dusty white chook wandered by looking for grubs as Kate tugged and pulled at her weeds, breaking roots off. She was still annoyed with the POW twenty minutes later, when a girl’s voice rang across the paddock to her.
‘Hulloooooo!’
It was Meg Yorke, on horseback, coming from the lane that ran along the southern side of the house paddocks. The lane saved a few gates if you came overland from the east, as Meg did a bit, for a cup of tea and the gossip you couldn’t risk on the party telephone line. Her family’s property, Blairvale, was a couple of miles along the main road – fortunately not on Four Mile Creek, which her father had dammed, so the families were still friendly.
Meg looped the reins of her horse round the top rail, and pulled a magazine out of the saddlebag. She vaulted over the fence, magazine rolled up in her hand. She managed to look comely, even in blouse, joddies and riding boots, flashing Kate her gap-toothed smile from a head of fair curls. Just seventeen, with an hourglass figure, she was, according to Jack, going to be a handful.
‘Cup of tea?’ Kate said.
‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’
‘You’d better cut that out. We’ve got POWs. They’re —’
‘Tykes. The whole country is.’
Kate pulled off her gloves and went ahead, inside. She was glad the POW was on the far side of the house and would not see Meg. It’d be like bees to a honey-pot.
‘Brought you a pressie from the hospital. The Weekly.’ She dropped the Women’s Weekly on the table.
‘How is the hospital?’ Kate asked.
‘Busy. But I love it.’
‘You’re better than me. I wasn’t good at nursing.’
Meg leaned over and tapped her arm. ‘Don’t do yourself down. You took such care of your mum, all those months. And she appreciated that more than anything, I reckon.’
Kate said nothing; it was so painful to think of.
She put the kettle on. ‘We’ve got two. POWs, I mean.’
‘We didn’t put in for any, y’know. Dad won’t have them. Not with Robbo still a prisoner in Singapore.’
‘I can understand that.’
Meg pushed a wayward curl behind her ear and leaned over the jigsaw puzzle, a map of Australia, spread as threatened across one end of the kitchen table. ‘You doing this?’
Kate rolled her eyes. ‘Dad got it out for Harry. The little boy our manager has taken in. His great-nephew, I think.’
She scooped tea leaves in, one heaped spoonful for each of them and one extra ‘for the pot’.
‘According to Elizabeth Fleming, their POWs are built like Greek gods. Only Elizabeth’s would be anything more than just plain gorgeous.’ Meg laughed. ‘I hear they all are, you know. Even got the odd girl knocked up.’
‘No,’ Kate said, disbelieving. She was glad Daisy wasn’t hearing this.
‘Yeah – down south. Stands to reason. The war’s got everything topsy-turvy. Our boys are all away and there’s a nice handsome chappy on your doorstep.’
‘Never. People wouldn’t.’
Meg laughed, her tooth gap clear. ‘Anyhow, I’ve come to chivvy you into the CWA tennis one Saturday arvo.’
Kate frowned. The ladies of the Country Women’s Association were lovely. That wasn’t the problem.
‘I know what it is. You don’t like to leave your dad. How is he?’
Kate trusted Meg. They’d grown up together, and Meg was like a sister to her. ‘The nightmares are always with him. He wakes up shouting, thinks he’s in the trenches.’
‘So better or worse, you reckon?’
Kate took a breath. ‘You remember I told you he went downhill after Mum died. I was very worried for those months. Then he seemed to get better. But now?’ She shrugged. ‘He’s getting bad again. He even thought I was Mum the other day.’
‘Crikey. You’ve got a lot on your plate.’ Meg fiddled with the jigsaw, holding up a piece marked Yeppoon.
‘Maybe. How are your oldies anyway?’
Meg shrugged, trying to find a home for the piece. ‘They’re getting along. But there’s no word from Robbo. Or poor old Doug Jamieson either. The Army’s bloody useless. Still, maybe the Japs don’t tell them anything.’
Kate put the teapot on the table and turned it three times to send the leaves to the outside.
Meg pressed the Yeppoon piece into its spot on the central Queensland coast. ‘I worry about Robbo. I never say this to Mum or Dad, but he’s a softy. I don’t know if he’ll cope.’ She sat. ‘I wish it were me up there.’
A knock at the gauze door interrupted them. Kate turned in her chair, ready to have some straight words with Canali. Instead, it was the one with the beard, Bottinella, and today he held a hand up against his jaw, as if he had a bad tooth.
‘Miss,’ he said, through the gauze. ‘Luca?’
Kate got up and went to the door. ‘Round the back.’ The smell of him wafted across, ripe, as if he hadn’t found the shower yet.
Meg had come to stand behind Kate. Kate knew that, because the man’s eyes had moved and were not on her
. He dropped his hand from his jaw.
‘He’s round the back,’ Kate said again. But the man stared at Meg.
‘How do you do. I’m Meg Yorke.’ She smoothed her curls with a hand.
Kate could hear she was smiling.
‘Sì,’ Bottinella said, smiling back. ‘Ciao bella.’
‘It is hot, isn’t it? Is he saying it’s hot?’ Meg asked Kate, who frowned.
‘Round. There,’ Kate said again and stuck her hand out of the door to show him.
The Italian backed away, nodding and grinning.
‘My goodness. Greek gods, indeed. Short Greek gods.’ Meg sat herself on the table, tapping a piece of the jigsaw against her lips.
Kate started to answer when Harry appeared at the back door with Rusty at his feet. She got up again. Her kitchen was like Central Station.
‘No dogs in the house paddock,’ Kate said. Rusty stopped but didn’t retreat. ‘Gorn!’ she called and the pup ran back across the lawn and leapt at the fence, scrambling over. She waited to make sure he didn’t have a go at Meg’s horse, tied up at the fence.
‘Come in then,’ she said, holding the door for the boy. ‘Harry, this is Meg Yorke, a neighbour.’
‘You up from Sydney?’ Meg asked.
‘Wollongong.’ Harry sat down at the table and looked at Kate expectantly. He took a swipe at Peng with his foot.
‘Don’t do that, please. Where’s your uncle, Harry?’ Kate asked.
‘Dunno. Out on the run, eh.’ He wasn’t interested and scratched at his spikey hair. He watched as Peng delicately positioned herself by her milk bowl and lapped. ‘Can I’ve some milk?’
‘All right,’ Kate replied.
‘Would you like a bikkie?’ Meg asked.
‘Yep.’
‘Yes please, Miss Yorke,’ Kate corrected. ‘Can you wash your hands, please, Harry?’
Daisy materialised and put a biscuit onto a plate for him, as the boy stretched to wash his hands in the sink. Tap running, he leaned in and tipped his head on the side to get a drink of water.