The Farmer's Wife

by Rachael Treasure

  Five

  By midnight the Dingo Trapper Hotel was fairly humming, thanks to the cut-out crew who, in a bid to shear the last of the wethers, had finished late at the Clarksons’ place. After a few beers on the board, the team had eagerly jumped in their utes, collecting some mates along the way, and poured themselves into position at the bar. Hours later, gun shearer Murray was still leading the charge with a huge smile on his boxy butcher’s-dog face. His bristly jowls had captured a few tiny locks of wool from the day’s shearing and lanolin still coated his clothes and skin. He was steering his men down a river of drinking that had flowed from beer to Bundy — and now several of them were even lighting Sambuca, then dowsing it with Blue Curacao, before throwing it into their gobs.

  Billy Arnott, the bar owner, better known as ‘Dutchy’ (short for Dutch Cream because of his fair European looks and the fact his surname was a biscuit brand), was enjoying the pantomime that was playing out before him. He and his wife, Amanda, had only taken over the pub three years prior, after a ‘tree change’ from Sydney. The Arnotts had big shoes to fill following the death of the last publican, Dirty Weatherby, and Dutchy knew it.

  Dirty Weatherby, who was buried at the church down the road, still had uproarious visits from his clientele, who would bring him a beer and stand and toast him around his gravesite. His old dog, Trollop, who was as fat and wide as a grizzly bear, would lumber along with the pub crowd and dutifully piss on her owner’s grave, much to the mirth of Dirty’s former clients, who loved him and the dog in equal measure. Tonight Trollop, full of leftover beef schnitzel, fishermen’s basket and chips, had settled herself into an armchair beside the pool table and was farting as powerfully as she was snoring, the resulting smell forcing the pool players to evacuate the area from time to time.

  Dutchy was grateful the dog had stuck around.

  Even though the former city newsagent was used to wooing a crowd, so too was Trollop. She evoked the memory of Dirty so strongly when people looked into her sincere brown canine eyes that when word got around Dutchy was keeping ol’ Trollop, even initially suspicious people would stop in at the pub to see her especially. One beer with the dog began to extend to three and four. And then the locals started to come back. Nights like these were now almost weekly at the pub that was nestled in a pretty river bend, almost entirely isolated from the town. Only the lonely hillside church, a few Ks down the road, was anywhere nearby.

  As Dutchy ripped open another packet of chips, emptied them into a bowl and set it on the bar, he smiled at being given the chance to start life over in this part of the world. He and Amanda knew this area was about to awaken, thanks to the sealed road and hungry, thirsty, cashed-up travellers. And even though it was dire news for the district, there was talk of mining exploration for coal. The geos and their crews loved a beer and a chicken parma too, so the future looked bright for the pub. Suddenly life seemed more interesting for the local tarts as well, who’d helped the pub get its nickname, the Fur Trapper.

  In the off-season, though, Dutchy knew he had to look after the locals. Give them free stuff to keep them feeling warmed and welcomed. Deliver complimentary trays of golden nuggets and sausage rolls to the bar, along with copious quantities of tomato sauce. Keep the wood fire blazing on cold winter nights. He’d also made sure he’d kept the music collection country as much as possible, despite the complaints from travellers. As another twanging Toby Keith song finished and the CD was about to flip to The Wolfe Brothers’ new hit song, there was a lull in the raucous pub prattle.

  Suddenly a throbbing sound filled the vacant space. Bright lights blazed through the window like searchlights at a prison. At first Dutchy thought it was a helicopter landing on the road. Just at the very moment the first guitar chords from the Wolfies exploded, the pub emptied and the boozers spilled outside.

  Dutchy lifted his little bar flap and followed the drinkers out into the cool night to see what the lights and noise were about. ‘What the …?’

  There, revving a gigantic new tractor in the middle of the road, was Charlie Lewis.

  ‘Basil Lewis, you mad bastard!’ Murray called out, using the nickname that had followed Charlie from Ag College, given to him because of the bed-hair that stuck up like a brushy fox tail in the morning. As Charlie Lewis opened the door of the tractor cab, he drank in the smiles of greeting from the pub crowd. In his larrikin way, he gave everyone the thumbs-up and a drunken smile.

  He flicked on the rear light, illuminating the business end of the tractor. The new yellow plough was covered with a film of dust, but the edge of the discs that had been corroded clean by soil gleamed in the tractor’s bright lights.

  ‘Geez, Basil, you coulda taken the plough off before you drove in! Ya dick.’

  Charlie shrugged. ‘No time to waste! It’s beer o’clock, according to the Tardis controls in here!’

  After conducting a guided tour of the tractor and its features, Charlie was ushered into the hotel by the men, where a fresh barfrenzy exploded. Dutchy, as he frantically poured beer and Bundy and rang the till, found himself wishing his wife, Amanda, would get back from the ladies’ party sooner rather than later.

  ‘They must be trying before they buy at this sex-toy party,’ Dutchy said as he pushed a Bundy and Coke towards Charlie. ‘It’s making me nervous.’

  ‘Sex-toy party?’ Charlie asked. ‘My missus told me it was a Tupperware party!’

  Murray and his crew erupted into laughter.

  ‘Nah-uh. No Tupperware, mate,’ Dutchy said. ‘Wonder what she’ll bring you home! Or is she gettin’ it for someone else and givin’ you the lettuce containers?’

  ‘Sex-toy party? Geez!’ The penny dropped for Charlie. That would explain Janine’s photo earlier this evening. That wasn’t a black salami she had between her tits, he realised with utter amusement and a shiver of excitement. He’d not yet heard back from her. Part of him was relieved, but part of him was hoping she’d be lurking out there somewhere, looking to hunt him down.

  ‘If my missus went to one of them parties and came home with one of them sex-toy things, I’d tell her to pack her bags,’ Murray said, his stubble-covered jaw jutting out. ‘If my tackle’s not good enough for her, then that’s it. I’m not getting replaced by some made-in-China piece of plastic!’

  ‘No wonder she’s cleared out on you then, Muzz,’ Duncan, the cheeky board boy with the acne scars, said, wiggling his little pinky at him.

  ‘She did not clear out on me. I cleared out on her.’

  ‘That was only after she found out you were doing the lollipop lady at the Bendoorin high school,’ Duncan said, edging stupidly closer to a set of knuckles in the face from Muzz.

  Charlie began to laugh. He remembered how word had got around that Muzz had been having a red-hot affair with the lady who held the stop/slow sign at the school. If they knocked off early, the shearers would try to time their travel home from the sheds to get a look at her. A lot of the women on wet-sheep days couldn’t work out why their husbands were suddenly interested in dropping their kids to school.

  Muzz shook his head. ‘She was the one who stopped me!’

  ‘It was her job to stop you,’ Charlie said, hoping Muzz would again tell the story. Somehow it made him feel better about his own guilt. As if what he was doing with Janine was normal — acceptable in fact. Everyone else did it, didn’t they? They all cheated? Muzz had.

  ‘Yeah, well, she did ask me how my day was …’ Murray said, swigging his beer ‘… and I said it had been rough. We’d been shearing rams. Bloody bastards were full of prickles. As I dragged one out, there was a huge patch of fissles in one’s topknot. So I ended up with a fissle in me nuts. Painful as!’

  ‘A fissle?’ Dutchy asked, cocking an enquiring eyebrow.

  ‘Thistle,’ Charlie interpreted.

  ‘Oh,’ Dutchy said, pulling a face, then lifting both fair eyebrows.

  ‘So,’ Murray continued, ‘I told her I was in agony coz I had this fissle in me nuts and she
said to me, “Well, I’ve got a pair of tweezers in me car, darlin’, and a certificate in First Aid.” Then she looked at me all funny.’ Muzz licked his wet beer lips and shook his head at the memory. ‘She had a real good body on her, but, by geez, her head was a bit rough.’

  By this stage, the men about him were wetting themselves, wheezing and back-slapping.

  ‘So what’s a bloke to do when he’s in pain like that? Of course he’s gunna drop his strides for the lady to help,’ Muzz continued, pretending to ignore them, but savouring their mirth.

  ‘Oh, Muzz. You’re priceless, mate,’ Charlie said.

  Muzz shrugged and swigged his beer.

  ‘So did she get it out?’ the board boy asked.

  Muzz and Charlie looked at him blankly. ‘What? Get what out?’

  ‘The fissle.’

  ‘She got more than just me fissle out, Duncan, let me tell you! Stop! S … low! Stop! S … low!’ Muzz said, gyrating his hips.

  The men laughed with bravado and swigged their beers with smiles still fresh, but Charlie felt his mind drift away from them. He knew this bawdy behaviour from them all was just a cover for the pain they held in each of their lives. Do they all share the same sense of dissatisfaction as me? he wondered. The dissatisfaction with their women? When he thought of Bec, all he felt was a quiet anger towards her. She had been so gutsy and capable when they had been at Ag College together. Sexy and fit too. Now, since the kids, she’d turned into a nag. A surly one at that. And she’d pressured him to have that operation. Like a Jack Russell at a rabbit hole, she’d dug and dug at him until he caved in. Since the vasectomy, he felt like half a man. A gelded stallion. A castrated cat. Emasculated beyond belief. After the op, one testicle had felt like an AFL football and the other a rugby ball and both were competing to see which could be the bigger code. It was agony. It was humiliating. No wonder in recent months Janine had lit a fire within him.

  ‘Least she never got you to cut your nuts out, like my missus,’ Charlie wanted to say sulkily, but instead he just downed his rum faster and pushed a ten-dollar note on the bar towards Dutchy. As he did, he noticed the Rural Land Management poster behind the bar advertising yet another no-till cropping and holistic grazing info night at the pub tomorrow. How many of those fuckers does the district need? Charlie thought.

  He rolled his eyes. Andrew bloody Travis. Since RLM had been funding Andrew bloody Travis’s visits into the area, Rebecca, who had for the past few years gone quiet on the farm, was now hounding Charlie for change. He wasn’t sure if her old man’s death was what had prompted her sudden, intense concern with the farm’s management, or if it was purely that she had a thing for Andrew. She’d been begging Charlie to come along to one of the nights. Then begging him to change how he’d been running Waters Meeting. All the while parroting Andrew Travis’s crap.

  When Charlie had first come to Waters Meeting to manage the cropping program and to see if he and Bec had a shot at being married, her father, Harry, was hell bent on grubbing out all the willows on the streamsides and fencing out the stock. The hours they’d put in dozing and heaping and burning. Then Bec had got hold of a book by Peter Andrews and she’d ranted at them daily that they should be doing the opposite. She said they ought to be slowing down the water run-off and letting the weeds choke the marshy places on the property. And she was spouting off that the riverbanks were now undergrazed and they should let the sheep, cattle and horses in from time to time. In the ten years he’d been here, the advice dished up to farmers had done an about-turn. And now here was Bec, snubbing the fertiliser reps when they called by with a new calendar and big plans for more business with them, then slamming him for ploughing, all because of this bloody New Age farmer Andrew Travis.

  Suddenly Charlie found himself wondering why she hadn’t said it was a sex-toy party she was headed to tonight. Maybe there was something going on? He took note of what time the seminar started tomorrow. This time he’d go. Not to find out what the guy was on about, but to keep an eye on what was going on between the soil/grazing expert and Rebecca.

  He glanced at his watch and wondered when Bec would be home.

  Just then Dutchy’s wife, Amanda, sailed through the door with a waft of cold air and perfume. She carried a silver platter over her head with aplomb and her auburn hair, curled by the damp night air, framed her lively face.

  ‘Never fear, gentlemen, I am here!’ she called out as she set down the platter on the bar. ‘Leftovers from the ladies, for you!’

  As she lifted the bar flap and took her position next to her husband, the men began inspecting the carved carrots with creamy dip and carefully constructed penis-shaped hors d’oeuvres made from tiny cocktail onions joined with toothpicks to sausages.

  ‘Not sure I like the look of those, Amanda,’ Muzz said, but with his crooked teeth he snapped the end of a carrot and dunked the rest in his beer, using it as a swizzle stick. ‘What’d ya bring Dutchy home?’

  ‘I’m saving my show-and-tell for later,’ she said coyly, then went to serve ol’ Bart, who was propping up the end of the bar. ‘It’s Charlie who’s gunna have the fun,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘Stanton’s shouted her the biggest order.’

  But Charlie didn’t hear her. His phone had buzzed and there on the screen was a text from Janine: Where R U? He wrote back, Pub.

  Church, now, came her reply. For a fleeting moment he baulked at the mention of the church. Tom was buried there. The memory of Rebecca’s crippling grief after her brother’s death almost stopped Charlie going now to Janine. But as he looked again at the RLM poster and the smiling photo of fit and lean Andrew Travis with his George Clooney salt-and-pepper hair, Charlie felt the quiet anger rise again.

  Next he was downing his beer and paying his dues. ‘Better get my tractor cranked,’ he said to the boys and out he wavered into the night. ‘If your missus is home, mine will be soon too. She’ll have my nuts. Again.’

  ‘You right to drive that thing?’ called Dutchy, but Charlie Lewis was already gone.

  ‘He’s keen to get home to try a few toys I reckon,’ said Muzz, watching from the window as Charlie turned the tractor and plough around and revved away into the night.

  On the bitumen, Charlie hurtled the tractor to maximum speed. With a thrill he felt the steering wheel jump to its own bizarre robotic life as the automated steering function took over. He felt like he was driving a gigantic monster truck at a speedway. Sure he’d chewed up his bonus diesel voucher getting to the pub, but the laughs from the boys had been worth it. And now here was his chance for a quick stop-off with Janine before heading home. He knew Bec would have his balls for real if she found out, but right now he didn’t care. Within him lay an insatiable appetite for any excitement at all in his life. There was something eroding him away inside. It was the same gnawing feeling he’d had in the days when he was stuck at home on his family farm, living under the shadow of his father and constant pressure from his mother. He needed something to move him through this porridge of a life he now found himself in again.

  Something like Janine. And there she was, standing in the headlights of the tractor beside the church. The breeze blowing her long dark hair, the coat that was wrapped about her flapping open so Charlie glimpsed the shiny purple fabric of a tiny negligee. Tonight she was all curves and wickedness. He didn’t care that she was Morris Turner’s wife and mother to two painfully shy teenage boys. He just wanted sex with her. And to forget. Charlie swung open the cab of the tractor and hauled her in.

  Six

  Rebecca half fell out of Gabs’s Landy on the mountainside and instantly felt a deep unseasonal chill in the air. The dark gums above her glistened with night-time dew and the roadside gravel beneath her feet felt damp and cold.

  ‘You sure you’re right to drive?’ asked Gabs.

  Bec nodded as she hitched up her boob tube and wrapped her arms about her body. ‘The old girl will get me home,’ she said, thumping the roof of the battered Hilux, once a vibrant red
, now faded, scratched and dinted. Knowing she had to drive thirty Ks home from the turn-off where she’d met Gabs earlier that night, she’d been drinking water since ten at Doreen’s and now felt horribly sober and incredibly tired. While someone thought it had been a good idea to seal the road, some of the bends on the southern slopes on dewy nights like this were sheened in a slippery concoction of oil and water. She intended to take it slow.

  ‘All right. Hoo-roo then. Enjoy Dental Day!’ Gabs said, delivering a gigantic toothy smile, folding her lips up above her teeth, before driving away.

  Inside the ute, Bec turned the key and waited for the glow light to click off before she chugged the diesel engine over. She clunked the fan on flat-out for warmth, then headed off at a meagre speed, her headlights fanning across the summertime native grasses that bowed their seed heads with the weight of the dew. The roadside grasses prompted thoughts of Andrew Travis and what he had taught her about native grasses in the past twelve months. It was more than she had learned in a lifetime of farming.

  At Ag College she’d never been taught the difference between a C3 and a C4 perennial plant that lay dormant at certain times of the year, depending on the warmth or coolness of the season. She hadn’t realised, until Andrew had taught her, that modern agriculture favoured annual plants and decimated perennial plants with herbicides and ploughing. Or how superphosphate fertiliser killed crucial fungi that fed plants essential sugars and nutrients. Mind-boggling stuff, especially when she considered how she and Charlie had been managing the place.

  Along with Andrew Travis opening up Bec’s mind, she felt he was also slowly opening up her heart too. He not only spoke to her without judgement, but with utter respect; he not only praised her intelligence, but he also fed her what was rare to find in her industry — a positivity and hope that there was a bright future in farming.