The Woolgrower's Companion

by Joy Rhoades

  In the kitchen, Daisy was peeling potatoes at the sink for the evening meal, a tune on the wireless the only sound in the quiet house. There were no tears, and Kate hoped Daisy was feeling better. She put the egg in the basket on the top of the kerosene fridge and got the post that had accumulated while she was away. She sat at the kitchen table, steeling herself for more bills. Kate half tuned in to the words on the wireless.

  Yes nothin like a night in the air raid shelter,

  Cards and tea and prayers and heat and fleas.

  ‘Must be terrible to have to go down into those things,’ Kate said, her eyes on the Babbin envelope in her hands.

  ‘Ya gotta do that, Missus? Go unna tha ground?’

  ‘I think so. If the siren goes off.’

  ‘Better a hole in the ground than one in y’head.’ Kate’s father had appeared in the hall doorway. He was beltless and she suspected he could do with a change of shirt.

  ‘Dad, you’re up,’ she said. She gathered the bills into a pile as casually as she could, covering them with her elbows. Daisy disappeared into the laundry.

  ‘Them air raid shelters are probly dry. Dry. Think of that.’ Her father looked away, shaking his head, and went back out the way he’d come. Kate hoped that was it. She listened for the door to the office as the wireless played on.

  Nothin like a night in an air raid shelter …

  Daisy came back, and Kate spread out the post again. Not only was there no letter from Jack but there were bills, one each from Nettiford’s, Darcy’s, and Babbin’s. The Babbin’s account was for £7-4-2d, all of it 90 days overdue. The detail column said Wool bales. Kate couldn’t believe it. Her father must not have paid their stock and station agent for the shearing supplies last November. And Babbin had not even docked her father’s wool cheque after he arranged the sale. She shook her head, touched at Mr Babbin’s belief that her father would pay. They needed Babbin’s for pretty much everything – for shearing supplies and even to sell Amiens’s wool.

  ‘Yoo-hoo.’ Meg’s voice floated through the afternoon heat into the kitchen.

  ‘Yoo-hoo, you too,’ Kate called back. She could do with a dose of Meg. She put the bills into the junk drawer and pushed the gauze door open.

  ‘You’re pretty cheerful for a girl who just came back to the bush.’ Meg slid down off her horse and tied the reins to the railing. ‘Swim? We should get over to your dad’s dam while there’s still water in it. Get your cozzie.’ Meg had already decided. A teenager going on twenty-five, as Jack said.

  ‘I’m not sure there’s enough water in the dam.’ Kate held the door open for her. ‘Is that lipstick?’

  Meg grinned, the little gap between her front teeth smiling at Kate. ‘My word, yes. Old Winston Churchill says lipstick is good for morale. Maybe he wears it himself?’

  ‘Your lipstick will be wasted today. The POWs are out in the back paddocks.’

  ‘Canali too?’ Meg looked disappointed.

  ‘Both of them, but Canali’s a dark horse. Awful. I’ll tell you.’

  Meg came into the kitchen while Kate went into her room to ferret about in her chest of drawers for a cozzie, having a quick look – a new habit – for hidden bank notes or even the sapphire.

  ‘Will we walk?’ Kate called through the house.

  ‘Fiva’ll take us,’ Meg’s voice came back. ‘How’s Sydney then?’

  ‘You know, big.’ Kate took two worn towels from the linen cupboard.

  Outside, Fiva was pulling clumps of dry grass into his mouth, and Kate stared, distracted.

  ‘Everything all right?’ Meg untied Fiva’s reins.

  ‘Not really. That POW Canali beat Rusty to death.’

  ‘You sure? Can’t see him doing that.’ Meg led Fiva to the old wooden stump next to the fence.

  ‘I’m telling you. He’s terrible.’ Kate pulled at a persistent knot in her hair, partway down her plait.

  ‘You planning a nest in that?’

  ‘I might cut it short,’ Kate said.

  ‘Whatever will Jack say?’

  Kate grimaced. It was true he would be unhappy. She hung the two towels round her neck and pulled herself up behind the younger girl. The horse moved away, wanting to be off.

  At the fence line, Kate slid off to get the gate. She unhooked the chain to let them through then climbed back on.

  ‘How’s your dad these days?’ Meg asked.

  ‘He’s all right. A bit worse, maybe.’ Kate looked away, embarrassed. ‘He thinks I hide things from him now.’

  ‘Ooof.’

  Kate nodded. ‘But he hides the stuff himself – for safe keeping, he says. Then forgets where.’

  ‘Dead set?’ Meg put her arm back and patted Kate’s side. ‘Is Amiens all right then? I mean, who’s managing it? Are you?’

  Kate waggled her head. ‘Sort of. But I pretend Dad’s running things.’

  ‘You’re not short of money, are you?’ It was almost a whisper, even here in the middle of nowhere.

  Kate wondered what Meg might have heard. ‘Don’t say anything, will you? But I think we are. That’s why I went to Sydney. To sell my pearls. I’ll take the cheque in to Addison first thing Monday.’

  ‘My poor Kate. You need a swim.’ They slid off the horse and walked up the side of the gully and then across, out onto the dam wall. In front of and below them lay a stretch of water about the size of a cricket oval, with a boundary of cracked mud pieces. ‘It might be deep enough right in the middle, I reckon,’ Kate said.

  The girls took off their old shirts, and Kate hooked the dam towels and their clothes onto the rain-gauge post. Above them in a high branch was a pair of black-and-red Banks cockatoos, watching.

  Meg ran, first one way, then the other. She grabbed a small stone from the ground and threw it hard at the birds.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Kate asked.

  ‘Trying to get em to fly east,’ Meg said, coming back to Kate. ‘The cockatoos.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s how it works.’

  Meg took her boots off and put the top of one upside down inside the other, to keep out ants and anything else that might bite. Then she turned towards the water and ran in, full pelt. Within two paces, her feet stuck in the mud and she belly-flopped into shallow brown water. Landing hard, she lifted her face out of the water, coughing and laughing.

  Kate entered the water carefully, walking into it until she could lie, then she breast-stroked out to join her friend. She rolled over onto her back and let the water fill her ears, looking up. She loved to float, to be cut off from everything, even sound, nothing above her but a bright blue sky. A splash of water landed on her face and she rolled upright.

  ‘Wish you had a tooth gap now, don’t you?’ Meg took another mouthful of water and spurted, hitting Kate’s face again. ‘Such a good sight. Even a little bit of water. When was it last full?’

  ‘All the way? Years now.’

  ‘It’s dry all over. We’re buying grain again this year, to build up the ewes for joining. The rams as well.’

  So Grimes was right. They needed to buy grain now. But they owed Babbin money already. ‘I’m sick of it all. The whole jolly thing,’ Kate said.

  Meg sniffed. ‘Can you smell that?’

  ‘Smoke?’ Kate was all attention.

  ‘I smell a martyr burning.’

  Kate rolled her eyes.

  ‘You must miss Jack,’ Meg said.

  Kate looked up at the sky. If she thought about it, she’d idolised him when they got married. She loved his noise and his jokes and his bluster, how he seemed to fill a room, a wonderful joyous thing in her family of quiet people. But now that he’d been away so long, she worried that they’d married too quickly, just because her mother had wanted it. Whether they were suited, even. It occurred to Kate that Jack rarely ever made her blush. That damn Canali did, though … Even now she knew what he was like.

  ‘That’s a lot of thinking for a yes–no answer.’

  ‘What?’ Kate swallo
wed. ‘I do miss him. Jack, I mean. Yes.’

  ‘You must miss the best bit. What’s it like? Making love.’

  ‘Cut it out, Meg!’

  ‘No, true blue. What’s it like?’

  ‘Well. It’s … it’s a wife’s duty, isn’t it?’

  ‘Pretty bloody pleasant duty,’ Meg cackled, ‘so I gathered from Robbo.’

  It might be fun for the men but not for her. Kate remembered their wedding night. All that fuss over nothing, she’d thought.

  ‘Sometimes … I feel like I don’t know Jack,’ Kate said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, he wasn’t here long. We courted for a bit. Then we got married just before Mum died. We only had a few months as a married couple before he was posted to Kogarah.’

  ‘Aw, you’ll get on after the war. How does he like Kogarah, anyway?’

  ‘Can’t stand it. Says he’s missing out on the fighting. But he’s a good shot, and apparently even better at teaching recruits to shoot.’

  ‘I envy them, you know. Sort of,’ Meg said, on her back, her eyes on the sky above her.

  ‘Envy who?’

  ‘The boys in battle. Oh I know they might die, and that’s a terrible, terrible thing. Still, they’ll have a moment, one moment, when they’ll be tested, see what they’re made of. We’ll just have kids and make scones and grow bloody roses,’ she said in disgust.

  ‘It’s not one moment for us,’ Kate said slowly. ‘I mean, I think for girls, every moment is a test in its own way. We hold things together, especially now. In wartime.’

  ‘You’re right about the war. We’re doing stuff we never got to before. It’s why I love being a VA. It’s a real job, even if it is with bedpans and bandages and even if they don’t bloody pay us. But that’ll be over when the war is, when the men come back, back to tell us what we can and can’t do. Does Jack do that? Tell you what to do?’

  ‘Well, not while he was working on his hand. But once he was passed fit by the Army, for those weeks before he left, he started to …’

  She didn’t enjoy taking orders from Jack. He’d never really worked the place, not for long anyhow. Even though he’d jackaroo’d for a time, he knew little about grazing, that was for sure. Kate knew more, despite her mother’s best efforts to keep her away from working the paddocks. After the war, having to take orders from Jack might well annoy Grimes and Ed. And her.

  ‘Any news of Robbo?’ Kate asked, changing the subject.

  ‘No.’ Meg shook her head and frowned. ‘I kid myself that’s good – that if he’d been killed, they’d tell us. I just want to get back at the Japs, you know. Got my very own bloodthirsty need to hurt em.’

  ‘But not the Italians?’

  Meg shook her head, wet curls limp around her face. ‘No. The Eye-ties are all right, I reckon. And they’re having a rough trot too. Luca’s little sister is somewhere over there, swimming and worrying just like I am, eh? Wondering if her brother’s orright.’

  ‘Luca?’

  Meg smiled, embarrassed. ‘Canali. He’s got a brother too, come to think of it, and four older sisters. I reckon it’s having all those big sisters that has made him such a sweetie.’

  Kate said nothing.

  ‘But the brother’s missing. He’s only sixteen or something. Or was.’

  ‘So they know his brother’s dead?’

  ‘His dad thinks so, apparently. The brother was helping the partisans up there in the north, in the bit that’s still German. They say he got caught but poor old Luca doesn’t want to believe that, of course.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘I always yarn with Luca. He’s handsome with those green eyes, and that Roman nose, don’t you reckon? And he’s a bachelor! I asked im. How’d he get away, eh?’

  ‘Meg! He’s a POW, for heaven’s sake.’ Worry filled Kate’s head. She’d spotted Meg stopping by the garden to talk to Canali often enough on her way out. But Meg’s parents would never approve of her chatting with a POW, let alone her crush.

  A crow picked his way towards their boots on the dam wall.

  ‘You know they bombed a whole town in Germany? Dresden? It was in the paper,’ Meg said. ‘But serves em right. That’s how I feel now.’

  Kate reached out in the water to take Meg’s hand. They floated on until the sun dropped behind the dam wall and the light turned orange in the late afternoon.

  Kate walked from Riflebutt to save Meg the bother of carting her all the way home. Her wet plait banged against her back, keeping her shirt damp when the rest of it dried in the heat. The track ran along the fence line, and she kept to one of its two dirt corrugations, head down, on the lookout for snakes. She liked the walk, wanting a chance to think about what she should do. She’d better tell Grimes to buy the grain, so long as Babbin would overlook their unpaid account.

  The sun was low. Canali might be in the garden by now and she’d have to see him. She hadn’t spoken to him since she caught him burying Rusty.

  Gunner came out to meet her, and she stopped to scratch behind his ears. He stayed by her side as she walked on. And, Murphy’s law, Canali was in the garden all right, throwing a pick easily into the ground, dark circles of sweat visible even through the purple of his shirt.

  He straightened up, watching her as she went past him across the dead lawn.

  ‘Signora.’

  She didn’t look at him.

  ‘Per favore, Signora,’ he called again, moving towards her. Kate heard him. All she could see was Rusty wrapped in that bloody tarp. She got inside and shut the door.

  CHAPTER 13

  Any man who might usefully impart some kernel of knowledge is to be valued by the prudent woolgrower, no matter his guise.

  THE WOOLGROWER’S COMPANION, 1906

  It was one minute after opening time when Kate climbed the stone steps of the Longhope branch of the Rural Bank of New South Wales. There was general acceptance that the bank building was an eyesore, all squat modern lines and pallid stone. ‘It’s a bloody mausoleum, not a bank,’ her father had said of it.

  Before this day, she’d always gone there with her father, never alone, and she jumped when the heavy door swung shut behind her with a bang, loud in the dark and quiet stone interior. Her eyes took a second to adjust. Beyond the teller counters were four desks with four bank johnnies, each head down, pencil in hand. And beyond them, in her cat’s-eye glasses, at a corner desk in front of a panelled office, sat the secretary to Addison, the bank manager. At twenty-six and without a suitor, Emma Wright was a career girl, according to the more charitable, and a spinster waiting for Mr Right, according to everyone else.

  ‘Morning, Emma.’ Kate had been a few years behind her at school, so they knew each other a bit. ‘Can I pop in to see Mr Addison?’

  Emma shook her head slowly. ‘He’s free, but he won’t see anyone without an appointment. It lowers the tone.’

  The door behind Emma opened and Addison’s head appeared round it, like a glove puppet, with a wispy moustache above a trim vest, collar and tie. ‘Mrs Dowd. What a pleasant surprise. Come in, come in.’

  Addison closed the door behind them, and its seal was good. The Venetian blinds in the window rattled as the air and her courage were sucked out of the room.

  ‘Arriving without an appointment is somewhat unorthodox, Mrs Dowd. But anything for you.’ He joined his hands together on his desk and smiled at her. It wasn’t pleasant.

  ‘I need to cash the cheque for the Amiens wages. Please.’ Kate was struck that the desk was bare. Not a paper or file anywhere. ‘I forgot, you see. I took the cheque to Sydney by mistake.’ She pulled the Amiens cheque out from her bag and pushed it across the bare desktop towards him.

  ‘You’ve been to Sydney?’ He smoothed out the corners of her cheque with his bony fingers.

  ‘Yes, to sell something, Mr Addison. As you suggested.’

  ‘I suggested?’

  Kate put Mr McGintey’s cheque on the desk. Addison didn’t touch it but
tapped his fingertips together. He got up and pulled open the office door, rattling the blinds again.

  ‘The Amiens file, please, Miss Wright.’ He waited, his hand on the doorknob, and then returned, putting a large file tied up with pink cotton ribbon in the middle of the desk between the cheques. He brushed the ends of his reddish moustache with both index fingers, cleared his throat and untied the ribbon.

  He exhaled slowly, removed his glasses and placed them to the right of the file. Then he pushed himself out from his desk, leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head to stare up at the ceiling of the office, as if he were thinking. ‘These are difficult times,’ he said. ‘I want to help but we must do things by the book.’

  ‘I know we owe some money, Mr Addison. But today I am depositing more than I’m taking out for the wages. So the bank is better off, isn’t it?’

  He rose and came round the desk to sit in the spare visitor’s chair. When he leaned forwards, he was within a foot of her and she had to fight hard not to recoil.

  His voice was soft when he spoke. ‘I said to you the other day that I am sorry about your circumstances. And I am sorry. I would not have gone to you, as a friend, to tell you to make arrangements to move if I were not.’

  Kate could feel a ‘but’ approaching.

  ‘But, Mrs Dowd, this cheque is tiny – minuscule – com pared to what you owe. It changes little, I am sorry to say. The bank will proceed.’

  ‘How much do we owe?’

  ‘I really should speak only to your father about these matters, but under the circumstances, I shall be open with you. The interest alone is more than £1,000. The principal on the mortgage is £20,000, and the overdraft is a bit over £6,000.’

  ‘So that’s £27,000? But Amiens is worth more than that.’

  ‘Not much more. Not enough more, if you follow me. The property, with the stock (also encumbered to us), is worth about £42,000. Give or take. So, we’re concerned. Very concerned. The amount owing is now at the cut-off point.’ He went back to his own chair, sat and closed the file.