Mateship With Birds

by Carrie Tiffany

  ‘A neatly patterned yoke adds charm to this simple jumper for your small daughter.’

  The Victorian Dairy Farmer brings them together. The weekly broadsheet is aimed at the dairy-farming family. After Harry has read about butterfat production in New Zealand and the threat of margarine he tears the family pages out with a ruler and takes them next door. Betty reads the short stories, the articles on nutrition by ‘calorie’, the reports from the wives of dairy experts accompanying their husbands on technical visits to Berne or Reykjavik or Idaho. She also reads the back of the farming page so she can engage Harry on dairy topics.

  ‘Do we have that weed St John’s Wort around here, Harry? It says in the VDF a German woman with a yen for gardening brought it to Victoria and it escaped at Bright racecourse. It causes hyper-mania, depression and skin problems in cows. How on earth does a plant escape at a racecourse?’

  When Betty raises the problem of ‘pugging’ in dairy pastures she finds Harry keen to explain and then to explain further … Betty thinks Harry talks about his pasture the way some women talk about their hair. The pasture, like a woman’s hair, is always under some program of improvement or repair. There is generally a difficult stage it has to go through and myriad problems in regard to low yield or poor establishment along the way. Inundation with water can wreak havoc. When things are badly poached a light harrowing is required. Betty keeps her thoughts to herself until he mentions the need for a roller. She looks up at him from her crochet. ‘I’ve heard a heated roller is good, Harry. What about using a heated roller on your poor grass?’

  Harry is struck by how much simpler things seem when they are written about in the VDF than in actual life. The dangerous job of hoof trimming, for instance. ‘Trim the hoof to distribute the weight evenly between the two claws of the foot, leaving sufficient horn to protect the corium or inner hoof, then trim the claws to their normal size and shape.’

  Some years back he was so taken with an article on an organic manure spreader he went ahead and ordered one. Harry has the standard machinery – a mouldboard plough, a cultivator of the rigid-tyne type, a middle buster, a bedder and an automatic-tying pick-up hay baler. All of this pulled by a dark red twelve-horsepower Massey Ferguson that Little Hazel calls ‘the tomato’. According to the VDF organic manure spreaders were all the rage in the USA. Manure from the cowshed is loaded into the liquid-proof hopper which is towed into the paddocks by tractor. The mechanical spreader at the back of the implement works the ground and scatters the organic material (cow shit) evenly. There’s a step missing, of course: the cows don’t shit directly into the hopper – Harry has to shovel it. Around fifty shovel loads of dripping, liquid shit per milking. ‘Fucking Americans,’ Harry chants under his breath as he pours more and more fuel into the tomato and rides it across the paddocks spreading shit and stopping constantly to unclog the choked outlet shute. ‘Fucking bastard Americans.’

  Little Hazel reads ‘Skipper’s Mail Bag’ every week and adds up the small sum awarded to the children who send in a poem, a joke, a drawing or a photograph to be published. She despises Myrtle Broad from Mologa who repeatedly sends photographs of herself on her white pony getting the Good Hands trophy at the local show, or a drawing she’s done of a rearing horse that is so clearly copied out of a book you can see the tracing marks. Little Hazel knows she could do better. She never sends anything in, but this doesn’t stop her looking for her own name in print as she reads and feeling disappointed when it isn’t there. One school holidays she does write away – she replies to an article on pen pals through the American Australian Association in Nebraska. She requests an Indian girl or boy with a spotted horse, but nobody ever replies.

  HAZEL REYNOLDS’

  NATURE DIARY

  July

  To-day one of the girls bought a goldfinch nest for the nature table. It had three broken eggs in it. A goldfinch is a pretty little bird that likes to flaunt the feathers of its wings.

  To-day we saw a dead baby rat hanging in the fork of a bush. Our teacher said a butcher bird had probably left it there for later.

  August

  There are six nests in the trees near the bins. Five are in the trees. One is on top of the water tank cover.

  To-day we wrote a bird list for our school and did a graph of it.

  September

  We found a baby mudlark on the ground behind the shelter sheds. It has been very windy and we think it was blown out of the nest. We can’t see the mother. We brought it inside and our teacher put it in her desk drawer on the duster cloth. We aren’t allowed to keep looking at it.

  The baby mudlark is still alive. We made a shoebox for it to live in and the teacher feeds it sugar water with an eye dropper. It can be very noisy when it is hungry.

  To-day we had a competition and the baby mudlark is called Smudgy. My name was Lord Feathers but it only got one vote. Smudgy comes out of his box sometimes and sits on a plate on the teachers desk. He squawks when we go past.

  Smudgy can stand up properly and walk a few steps but he tips over a lot and falls on his beak. It is very hard to feed Smudgy because our fingers are too big to go down his throat. We use a crochet hook with a fly on the end of it.

  October

  To-day we put Smudgy outside on the grass under a laundry basket. Smudgy is trying to catch his own flies now. We saw him with a grasshopper in his beak but it might have been already a dead one.

  To-day when Smudgy was outside we saw a butcher bird flying nearby and the teacher went and brought him back inside.

  When he is in the classroom Smudgy likes to stay close to Mrs Marmalade, the school cat.

  November

  The dentist is visiting and Smudgy likes the dental van. He goes inside and pecks at the drills and mirrors. We had to catch him and keep him inside when the dentist was leaving.

  To-day a new bird came to the bird table. We are not sure what it was but we drew pictures of it. It was small and sang with a silvery note.

  To-day our teacher said she thinks Smudgy is a female because she has white eyebrow feathers and white under her beak. When we were cleaning out Smudgy’s box we found a lot of hard pellets with bits of wings and cricket legs. The pellets were hidden under the straw.

  To-day Smudgy flew from the teachers table to the library corner. It wasn’t very straight but she landed well. We all clapped. She is very beautiful now.

  A kind lady is minding Smudgy and Mrs Marmalade over the long weekend. The lady collected Smudgy in a shoe box. My special cousin who is an albino is coming to stay with us.

  When we came to school this morning our teacher told us that our Smudgy had been killed. We don’t think it was Mrs Marmalade because she is always sleeping. The other thing I didn’t say about Smudgy is that she liked our teacher’s earrings. Her favourite ones were the white ones. They are made of plastic and shine when they catch the sun.

  Shirley Timms wins the nature diary prize with a picture of Smudgy made from uncooked rice. Hazel Reynolds comes second. Harry leans against the gate and reads Little Hazel’s nature diary while she runs Foot Foot through her exercises. With her black school shoes and white ankle socks Little Hazel’s feet look like another set of hooves skimming over the cape weed. Both girl and heifer are breathing hard when they return to the gate. Harry smiles at her and straightens the collar of her school blouse. ‘Well, you’re a chip off the old block,’ he says.

  Little Hazel gives Harry the nature diary to keep. In return he buys her a pair of her very own binoculars – they are the same as Michael’s, but in a tan leather case.

  Little Hazel checks on Foot Foot from her bedroom window when she wakes in the morning and sometimes turns the binoculars in the direction of Mues’s place over the road.

  Michael uses his binoculars to look down Dora’s blouse when they go out picking mushrooms together.

  Betty sometimes borrows the children’s binoculars and stands on the back step scanning the paddocks thereabouts.

  Harry’s
binoculars hang from a brass hook in his kitchen. He uses them for birdwatching and checking the cows when they are in the back paddock. He makes his regular observations of the kookaburras and sometimes he finds they come in handy for checking next door – making sure Betty’s car is in the garage and that her chimney is giving off smoke.

  Harry takes Michael down the hall and stands him in front of the yellowing mirror.

  ‘Relax your face; just let it go to putty. Jaw as well. Let your mouth hang open. Lovely. A very pretty picture. Now close, slowly, slowly.’ Harry grips Michael under the chin, gently lifting his lower jaw back to meet the upper.

  ‘There. Hold it just there.’

  Michael looks in the mirror. There he is; sweaty fringe sticking up on his forehead, a dusting of blackheads across his nose, one eye looming larger than the other. Harry’s hairy hand cradles his jaw.

  ‘Can you see it?’

  ‘What?’ Michael struggles to speak out of his squashed throat.

  ‘There. The mouth. When the mouth is held like this; relaxed. The lips just closed together, not pressed or forced. They leave an exact shape, an exact triangular nub-like shape in the middle. Fit the tool to the job, boy; what shape is that?’ Harry’s thumb is pressing against Michael’s windpipe.

  ‘A circle?’

  ‘Right. And not just any circle. A nipple. I think, Michael, that we are not all alike. I suspect that not all male mouths and female nipples go together. But somewhere, somewhere out there is the perfect fit. The mother’s nipple is always a perfect shape for her child, of course. It’s a great pity that we don’t remember more about those early experiences at the breast. But what I’m saying is adult to adult, male to female, somewhere out there is a woman you could go to sleep with at night attached to her breast and both wake in perfect comfort. Nice thought that, eh?’

  Michael shakes Harry’s hand free.

  ‘So what am I meant to do then – go to my mates’ places and ask if I can put my lips around their sisters’ nipples just in case she’s the one?’

  Harry takes a step backwards. He hadn’t reckoned on questions or disagreement.

  He takes his hat from the hallstand.

  ‘No. I admit that, Michael. I admit that it mightn’t be straightforward finding these things out.’ He turns for the front door. Perhaps writing is better than demonstration? ‘Back to the silage now.’

  Skin. The female is covered with two types of skin. The skin of the body is easily observed on the torso, arms, legs and face. It is essentially the same as the skin of the male, but cut from much finer-grained stuff. The sexual organ (I’m talking inside front of underpants here, Michael), breasts (esp. nipples) and lips feature a skin uniquely inflamed with blood. Unlike the ordinary body skin (and male skin), where the blood runs in controlled networks of veins and arteries and sub-veins and sub-arteries (think horticultural drip-and-pipe irrigation), the blood in the sexual areas is right at the very surface. Blood constantly replenishes itself to these super-sensitive sites and ‘sprays’ up to the surface causing redness and engorgement (consider the erective nature and structure of the nipple).

  You’ll be knocked out to discover that the skin of the inner folds of the sexual organ is not smooth, but rough! I’m not talking a corrugated track here, more a beaded or pearlised oatmeal, but it is indeed rough. This wasn’t clear to me until I’d made a number of investigations as it is hidden in the ‘wet female’ by her secretions. The skin texture of this area can only be accurately observed in the compliant ‘dry female’. Poor education of males on these subjects has many believing (and expecting) that the female sex organ is simply a second pair of lips spliced in sideways between the legs and opening onto the front passage. The structure of the female sex organ is complex (more on this to follow) but as for the skin, expect a wattled texture (think poultry). The raised wattles or nodules burred into the skin encourage the flow of secretions to one particular area and I don’t doubt they also encourage the movement of the male hand in this direction too. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

  Further to our earlier chat about breasts … Unlike other animal species I have considered, the human male clearly takes pleasure from the breast of the female (an instrument for suckling offspring) and, added to this, from what I can gather this is met with a degree of agreeability on behalf of the breast owner. I would not be surprised if some candid female admitted to self-manipulation of her own breasts for pleasure. Further to this, I would not be surprised at the ‘innocent’ mutual manipulation of breasts between females who are flowering or even sexually mature. If you pick up anything on this, Michael, let me know.

  Harry felt his first female nipple at the age of sixteen. It belonged to Mary Bird, mother of Noreen Bird now at the counter at the co-op. They were petting on the edge of the creek in the shade of a strip of old tea-trees overrun with ants. Mary sat with her knees pulled up to her chest; he was cross-legged next to her. He couldn’t really get at her like this, with her all folded up on herself. He had one arm around her shoulders as they kissed and would, every now and then, exert a bit of pressure on her upper body to try and tip her backwards. The bottle of Colgate Dactylis he’d bought for her bulged in his pocket. She was a chewy kisser, well salivated. When she broke off a string of spittle hung for a second between their mouths. She stood up and put her hands on her hips. She looked huge standing above him, her blouse billowing out from the waistband of her skirt. He saw her legs in close-up, shaved below, but the knees covered in spiked yellow hairs. She frowned down at the place she’d been sitting and used her foot to sweep the twigs and leaves away, then she gathered her skirt between her legs and lay down beside him. ‘It’s your job to watch for bull ants – alright?’ she said, and untucked her blouse. Harry kissed her again. He threaded his hand through her clothes until it rested on the skin of her belly. Her skin was saturated with a fat even heat. The word pelt came into his mind. A digestive movement burbled inside her and he pulled back in surprise. She retrieved his hand and moved it higher up. He felt himself stiffening, the blood running heavily into his cock, drawing it out like an anchor pulling though water. He started to move his thumb. Slowly he stroked and gathered in the flesh and delivered it back to his fingers. She lifted her hand to brush a fly away from her mouth and then returned it to her side. He stroked and smoothed. Mary started humming. ‘Harry.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘If you’re looking for a tit, it’s higher up.’

  Mary was a strawberry blonde with a frizzy bob, thick arms and legs, and a firm, strong torso. She wasn’t a stick. Harry had been working at her ribcage – the inflation between waist and chest. He walked his fingers higher up her chest, pushing under her bra. The breast had a disappointing flatness, the tissue settled deeply against the chest in the way of a liquid seeking the lowest point. And it was so inert, so without the bouncy sway he found hypnotic when she walked, or ran. He spread his fingers and felt the ringed flesh of areola and then the first pebbling of nipple. She moaned a little. He cleared his throat. He was grinning now, and feeling immensely proud – even if the initial geography was askew. He traced the circle of areola with his index finger and dragged his thumb gently across the middle where it struck the growing nipple so naturally, as if it couldn’t be avoided, again and again.

  Dora follows Noreen Bird and Edie Plimeroll up the wooden steps to the hall. Noreen wears a yellow dress with a matching knitted shrug. She’s walking in an exaggerated bouncy fashion which causes her corsage to fall off and slip through the steps into a puddle below. The purple flower topples softly into the dirty water. Noreen looks down between the steps at the puddle, then up at Edie, and shrieks, ‘Edie, Edie, Edie.’

  Edie Plimeroll picks her way down the steps and around to the side railing where she stands with her hands on her hips looking at the flower listing sideways in the water.

  ‘Oh God, Nor. It’s ruined. You’ll have to go home.’

  Noreen’s standing beside her now. She nudges t
he flower over to the edge of the puddle with her shoe, bends down and picks it up.

  ‘Bugger that. Des is getting his tongue in tonight or I’ll kill myself.’

  She shakes the wet flower violently, like it is on fire, and pins it to the collar of her dress.

  Edie and Noreen trot back up the steps again and Dora follows them through the door. The band is tuning up. There’s a loud rush of sound and a strong smell of Brylcreem and 4711. Dora hands in her ticket and gets a tin mug of cordial in exchange. The hall has been jollied up with dolls cut out of newspaper. Down one side the dolls have skirts; down the other they have trousers. Under the dolls, lining each side of the hall, are a row of chairs: boys and girls. Dora sips her cordial and looks at the dresses. Spearmint green is popular, and violet and yellow. She counts three flat pancake hats in the style of Queen Elizabeth. Dora is wearing Betty’s tweed suit with a silk scarf tied around the waist. The scarf is keeping things in place. Betty has warned Dora not to dance too vigorously or she’ll leave the skirt behind. Michael should be with her. She only agreed to come because of Michael. While Betty was helping her to get ready some boys from the butter factory came and collected him in an old Plymouth sedan with the back doors missing.

  Dora places her mug on a chair and pats her hair. Eunice from the post office comes and sits next to her and they smile at each other when the band strikes up properly and the dancing begins.

  Errol Carton dances with Betty Whipp, Sissie MacAdam dances with Reg Lillee. Mrs Collins dances with her son Donny – against his will. Edie Plimeroll dances with Des Carton. Iris Glassop dances with Donny Collins. Noreen Bird dances with Wes Popp. Noreen Bird dances with Des Carton.

  Michael comes in after three songs have gone by. He is with two older-looking boys Dora doesn’t recognise. The three of them stand slouched against the boys’ wall sharing carefully from the same mug – too carefully for cordial. Michael’s shirt is big on him, the shoulder seams sit way down on his arms and the cuffs have been folded back. His tie – Harry’s tie, Dora supposes – is navy silk. She likes the way he’s slicked his hair back behind his ears so more of his face is on view and his good trousers are pleated – adding some bulk to his hips and thighs. Michael and his friends stand a bit apart from the others. They talk and drink and watch the dancing and sometimes point at a girl.