*
He took his love – JULIA – to the ‘meadow’ in the clearing of the Top Bush. Uncle had offered to come up and help show her, but the boy wasn’t having any of it. Uncle had made the room in the house – the boy’s room – comfy for two. Twin beds almost pushed together – a gap of maybe five centimetres between. Uncle kept talking on and on to Julia. Monopolising. Julia wouldn’t be interested in his new header, said all lasciviously. For God’s sake! But Julia was astonished to see the tinge of green already aftermathing the freshly yellow bristles of stubble in the just-harvested paddock. If you dig a short way down, the soil is damp, he said. There are usually sheep in here, but as it’s harvest they’re in another paddock. All the paddocks around the bush are either being harvested, or have just been harvested, or are holding sheep. Nothing fallow at the moment. The boy – the young man – then started telling her things about his mother, including how much she couldn’t stand Julia, but he said it all as a joke as he busied himself with the tent, showing how much of an outdoorsman he was. They would sleep with the stars and the sheep.
They were only staying overnight, but he’d come prepared – away from prying eyes, overenthusiastic uncles with more issues than you could poke a stick at. He wanted to show Julia the real him. It was hot and the suffocating-intoxicating bread smell of harvest overwhelmed, but there was seclusion and liberation in the enclave. We can’t light a fire, he said to her again, restating the obvious. He pointed out and named various birds, talked about his university classes. He half listened to her go on about her ex.
It was evening and they’d packed a picnic dinner. She let her hair down – exquisite long hair the colour of the unharvested wheat crop down from the bush. They could hear the header working in the distance. Won’t get even close to here tonight, he said, reassuring her. She knew a lot but not about such things. There was suddenly a bit of damp collecting in the air. When it gets too damp they’ll stop harvesting, he said. Moisture and grain are not a good combination. She was surprised: It’s so warm and the sky is clear. Won’t be a bit later, he said. No rain, but it will become overcast and the moisture will hang like a fog between heaven and earth. You’re so affected, she laughed. Blame my mother, he said, and she laughed even more.
You learn things about people camping out. For example, she couldn’t contemplate him seeing or hearing her pee. Come off it! he said, when she started to wander miles off. He called out, I hear you through the bedroom door every time I stay at yours! It’s different out here, she yelled back over her shoulder, flicking her head in a half-embarrassed, half-enticing way. Then she strode into the bush which, though thinner than when he was a child, the sheep having entirely eaten the undergrowth out, was still thick enough for her to become obscured in the splintering light before vanishing over the crest.
He’d brought Marvell with him for old times’ sake. He told himself he understood the poem now. Of course. He had experience. He could work on a farm and work a woman and read literature. He laughed at the offensiveness of his thought. He didn’t really think that way! But there were no sheep in sight to read to, though in the distance he could hear them talking between bursts of machinery noise, parrot chatter and the effusion of farm-bush sounds. A slight breeze was growing in strength and the day died off in fast-forward. As the sun vanished – she was gone such a long time – the evening star became the sheep he read to. And then she was back, laughing at him straining to see the words, to read. It’s a pastoral, he said. I know, she said, adding that she’d had a bit of an explore through the bush, by which he understood that she’d got lost, being both miffed he’d not come to find her and also glad that he hadn’t. It boded well for their future, he knew she thought.
*
They lay on a rug reading by portable fluorescent light, midgies getting stuck into the glow, the odd mosquito annoying them – he immersed in Marvell, she in Bel-Ami. The odd comment or word would almost slip from their lips, and they rubbed each other’s legs with feet, and occasionally paused to listen together, simpatico to the cicadas whirring and clicking at the end of their other-worldly journey, and the odd shit! when a mosquito bite from earlier suddenly raised its itchy, angry head. He said, self-consciously, enigmatically, almost flippantly, Cicadas and night and tents and bloody awesome displays of stars just for us are never a cliché. And he knew it was a mistake and read into her expression in the weak light, That shows how young he is. His mum was in his ear, louder than any cicada, and with human teeth, Cradle-snatcher! It piqued. He suddenly admitted to himself that it really piqued.
It was getting late and there wasn’t much power left in the light, so they moved inside the tent and stretched out, but the header kept going on and on and they couldn’t settle. He said, It’s getting pretty moist, but I guess Uncle wants to get that paddock done. I will have to come up next week to help him finish off. I feel guilty as it is. He knew he shouldn’t have said it, but he did. She didn’t react.
The chewing of the header was closer to them now and occasionally its spotlights lit the rim of the clearing, bringing a pink to the eucalyptus leaves. Bloodshotting the stubble. It’s a little unsettling, she said. Don’t worry, it’s just Uncle, he said as mantra. He might be a bit pissed that I’m not helping him, but he knows this is important to me. He paused. Still no reaction. Then Julia hoicked herself up on her elbow, placed her hand on his crotch, and rubbed slowly. He wanted to push her off with a laugh, but he aroused easily, and went with it. Gift horses. Then she stopped and said, abruptly, Sorry about this, but believe it or not … I’ve got to pee again. Bad timing, eh. This was the third time since they’d arrived. I’ve got my special spot, she joked. It was that bottle of riesling, darling. Warm riesling makes me want to go! I’ll take the torch, she said, Don’t worry. I hope your spot isn’t too hard to reach, he said, snatching at her crotch. Pushing his hand away, giggling, she said, It’s just over the crest, down on the edge of the paddock. That’s a long way away, Julia – cripes, just go around the back of the tent. No sheep around to see or hear you going, and I’m in here. No, I don’t want you to hear my piss hitting the ground – that splashing into dirt sound. You’re weird, he joked, half pushing her out through the flywire as she unzipped it.
And then she was gone into the milky darkness and he was trying to picture where precisely she actually meant. He tried to follow her map in his mind – this bush, this whole area, so imprinted on his mind. But how well did he really know it now, visiting so rarely these days? He had once known it … like the back of his hand. He had, he was sure. A second home.
Listening to her footsteps crackling up through the trees, he quickly lost track as they merged into the distant noise of the header, but when she hit the edge of the bush, stepped under the canopy of wandoo, he heard a familiar crunch crunch of leaves and twigs and sheddings of bark. But this also faded quickly and was lost to the obtuse hunger of the header as it ate its way through the crop. Strange place to go just to piss … Really, he thought … She’s actually exposed to the road if she goes there. Mind you, at night, she’d see headlights a mile off. He went back to Marvell by the dying light of the fluro and then he fell back, pleased with himself, and baaa-ed baaa-ed baaa-ed! to the glorious night, to the harvest, to the evening star, to the moon. He was alive! He recited from memory, out loud:
My mind was once the true survey
Of all these meadows fresh and gay,
And in the greenness of the grass
Did see its hopes as in a glass;
When Juliana came, and she
What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.
The glow of the header’s lights lit the front of the tent and it came closer and made the moment almost …. well, visionary. She had him. He was entirely hers.
*
The inquest showed it to be an accident, which it was. But why did she run out in front of the header … not only out, but straight into its jaws? His uncle had no idea – how could he? The screams had
ripped the night apart. The crop and the header were her tomb.
*
He never went back there but later in life, visiting his mother in the nursing home, he whispered to her that he felt guilty. Why, son? she asked. What could you have done? I don’t know, he said. I just can’t believe, not deep down, that Uncle didn’t know. I mean, he looked at her funny. He was always strange with women. Don’t be daft, said his mother with a look of horror and disgust. Then distantly, as if to himself, he continued, Maybe she … my Julia … heard me speaking to the sheep. What sheep, darling? All sheep, Mum. I am a shepherd of souls. I watch over all of us. I sing for my supper. His mother struggled to find her call button but he’d pulled it aside. As he baaa-ed for all the world to hear he watched the fear grip his mother’s face. You sing for your supper now, Mum! And she tried to sing out, but the note cracked and slipped from the bed and he grabbed her in the crook of his arm and she bleated with every bit of life she had in her, as if his life depended on it.
THE HANNAFORD GRADER MAN
The Hannaford Grader Man was tall and thin and made from steel. And he was old, really old.
It was like a small show coming to town. He sorted the seed, the good from the bad – the cracked and wizened, the foreign bodies and other impurities were plucked from the golden grain, the promise of a bountiful tomorrow. He graded and cleaned and applied fungicide and other ‘sides’, as he called them, on request. He would joke with the farmers: I’m always pickled but haven’t touched a drop in years!
Though he was old, he kept up with the times and the changing fortunes of the company. He was a franchise man now, running his own truck – a state-of-the-art big rig that attracted new clients just by driving through town. His patch was what he nicknamed the golden triangle, just north of Northam. Heavy with grain. He could handle twenty tonne of grain an hour through his machine. He could clean pre-sowing, and he could clean up a damaged harvest to make it saleable. Miracle man. Wonderman. Superman!
Over a lemonade in the pub, he admitted that he enjoyed the attention. Sure, he had pizzazz and flair, but when it came to brass tacks, to getting the job done, he was only about the work. He wanted people to think they were getting the best. Results were the main thing, but they also wanted value for money. He talked his clients through everything he did – waved his hands, modulated his voice, sprinkled his conversation with anecdotes and analogies.
Somehow even the most work-orientated conversation came around to the question, You never married …? He’d laugh it off with the usual: too busy, costs too much, do you think I’m made of money? – bringing the requisite laughter back. The uneasy truce in the game of doubt, suspicion?
But he was such a ‘bloke’s bloke’, no one meant much by bringing it up, and often farmers who had made use of his services for decades would ask the same question year in year out, their families gravitating to the grader and orbiting around as if it were the centre of the universe. None of the farmers ever felt uncomfortable about their wives taking the Grader Man a cuppa or a chunk of cake, which he’d handle with his pickled fingers, nor about one of their kids going up to ask how it all worked. In essence, he was seen as benign – kind of funny, and a bit of a know-it-all braggart – well, fool … not fool, he was top-class at what he did. Now, how did one wife put it thirty years ago? A bit of a jolly buffoon. Yes, benign – not threatening or creepy. Make no bones about it – have no doubt! – the people of the golden triangle would have picked up on anything ‘odd’ if it had been lurking within his wizened and hardened exterior!
In his spare time – in the downtime between the hectic busy periods – the Hannaford Grader Man wrote letters. When the internet came, he went with it in his professional capacity, using email with an evident literacy often commented on by a farmer’s wife who was a schoolteacher or nurse, and would keep the farm’s books. But in his personal correspondence, in matters of his personal life, he wrote with pen on paper, and mailed his letters in envelopes, with postage stamps. He did not have a wide-ranging correspondence. He wrote to three people – one in London, one in Cincinnati, and one in Paris. Two women and one man. He had written to these people since joining a pen-pal club from the back of a comic book, when he was nine. The four correspondents, who from early on had also corresponded with each other, had been doing so for sixty-three years. None of the four had ever married.
The Grader Man did not go to the movies, to art galleries, to theatres, to auditoriums. But his correspondents did. He did not have an active sex life, outside a yearly ‘shout’ to a brothel, which he’d been doing since he was eighteen. But his correspondents did – to varying degrees. Each of them described their experiences in detail, in their letters. In envisioning their sex lives he was ‘active’, satisfied, even replete. What he did do, aside from work (which he discussed with forensic illumination in his letters), was attend the odd local football match, drink lemonade in the bar after work, play the odd game of pool, and watch television. He watched a lot of television and discussed what he watched with the others. His letters formed a history of Australian television.
But from the age of seventeen to thirty-five the Grader Man had been alcoholic, and his letters had been full of raging against the world. He committed a few crimes, one of them major, yet got away with them all. They were detailed in the letters. The one general rule all correspondents abided by was that there would be total secrecy, privacy and no judgement on the others’ behaviour. One of the writers had committed three financial crimes of significance in their official capacity and never been held to account. But all the evidence required for convictions was in the letters.
Though at first letters had sailed back and forth with seeming randomness – in big, flat nine-year-old printing – over the years a pattern was developed, so at any given time letters were crisscrossing the world. Different postal systems meant different things, but they worked that out, too. All wrote in English, though sometimes the Parisian correspondent would write pages in French. And this is how the Grader Man, who left school at fourteen, was able to surprise one very snooty, privately educated rich cocky’s wife by coming back with a witty riposte when she muttered in French under her breath but loud enough for him to know he was being spoken of in some foreign tongue. Translated, what she said was, It’s a long way from Perth Modern to this … my husband might be rich as Croesus but this Grader Man, who stinks of poison pickle, wheat and bad manners, shows how far I have fallen. To which he replied, to her excruciating agony, Why, Madame, I would say you have risen in the world and from this point on your finest moments are behind you – all else will now pale to insignificance. A few words of French, but a sophisticated, if poorly pronounced, grammatically perfect rendering. And he noted to himself that her accent for all its effort was not much better. That he’d spent years with grammars, a dictionary, French language tapes ordered from London, correspondence courses, and later the internet, was merely part of the act of writing and reading the letters that constituted the substance of his life.
*
The Hannaford Grader Man was tall and thin and made from steel. And he was old, really old.
It was like a small show coming to town. He sorted the seed, the good from the bad – the cracked and wizened, the foreign bodies and other impurities were plucked from the golden grain, the promise of a bountiful tomorrow. He graded and cleaned and applied fungicide and other ‘sides’, as he called them, on request. He would joke with the farmers: I’m always pickled but haven’t touched a drop in years!
One of his regulars decided to ‘do something’ for the old man. Think you’ll ever retire? the farmer asked. No, I’ll die on the job, half joked the Grader Man.
Well, my wife and I were wondering if you’d like to spend Christmas Day with us – that is, unless you’ve got a prior appointment.
The Grader Man looked surprised – he was surprised. He had spent every Christmas for fifty years watching television and writing letters. Except for one, when a storm hi
t and there was a blackout. But even then, he wrote letters through the storm well into the night, with a hurricane lamp.
The farmer, seeing the Grader Man’s discomfort, said, Well, think it over – couple of weeks away yet.
*
Dear … and … and … and …,
This will be my last letter and it will cross in the mail with your last letters, as we arranged. Who will open them? we have asked. Who will find our correspondence and piece the jigsaw of our intertwined lives together? How many unanswered questions will have answers, how many crimes will be solved? In my profession, I am the travelling showman, the buffoon, the ill-educated country bumpkin ‘without a mean bone’ in my body. And yet, we all know each other so differently, so well, so intensely. With each other we are who we truly are without ever having seen more than a single photograph of each other, and that when we were children. Yet we know how each looks, down to each blemish of the skin, internal trouble, missing or white hair.
The news of what we have done will be local news. In the age of the internet coincidence might be noted and something conjectured, but given our ‘approaches’ will be – are – so different, and given that only two or three individuals – strangers – will suffer as a result of our ‘scheme’ in each case, it’s unlikely anything will connect up. Until some distant family member or some official troubles to trawl through our correspondence. Then something else will emerge, arise, spread like a smoke pall over their lives. What is imaginable? What can the ordinary ‘lonely’ person do when linked with three other like minds? And yet, our walks of life so different!
It was a lovely Christmas lunch. In fact, I am writing this letter at the dining-room table. I helped with the clearing up – that is, I cleared away the bodies (popped them in the machine shed), and then the table. I did the dishes. Place is spotless. It’s a hot time of year and the bodies will start to stink soon. I think I will join them (sort of metaphorically speaking) later – I actually drove here in my rig and parked it down at the shed. When I arrived, the farmer and his wife rushed out to see what or who was coming and she said, Glory be! when I climbed down from the cab. The farmer betrayed himself with a brusque, Can’t leave ya work at home even on our Lord’s birfday! Park it down behind the machine shed!
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