The Farmer's Wife

by Rachael Treasure

  At the top of the rickety pub stairs, Rebecca tugged her borrowed black dress over her thighs, then swore as she hoicked it back up over her cleavage. She felt like an overstuffed sausage, the casing not coping with the ooze of meat and fat. She steeled herself, holding tight to the oil-stained banister, gingerly sidestepping downstairs in Yazzie’s towering shoes, trying to remember what she had said about walking in them. Something about heel-toe, looking forwards and forgetting you were wearing them.

  Yeah, right, Rebecca thought, regretting she’d agreed to Yazzie’s makeover. She felt a fool. And it had been Charlie who had turned her into one.

  She recalled sitting at a timber laminate desk in a tutorial room at boarding school, flipping through a dog-eared work of Shakespeare. What was the word the teacher kept on with? Cuckold? Cuckold. That was it. She had been ‘cuckolded’ by Charlie, and she suddenly realised that her schoolteacher must have been too, the way she’d coughed up the word and so violently taught the Shakespearean text to Rebecca’s English class. Rebecca tried on the word: cuckold. She shrugged it over her shoulders and wore it like a grubby coat. It felt hurtful and dirty. But somewhere deep inside, the pride within her — from the days when she was Rebecca Saunders, not Mrs Lewis — swelled. It was enough pride and energy to get her down the stairs and into the room full of people and to where her cuckolding husband would be.

  Fourteen

  Rebecca eyed the backs of the crowd of men, who were mostly farmers. They sat squarely on the brown vinyl-covered chairs that oozed foam stuffing from worn corners. Many of the men clustered in the back rows in case the talk became too boring and they needed to escape to the bar. There was only a sprinkling of women; they sat at the front and mostly worked for RLM.

  The farmers in the room don’t know what they’re in for, Rebecca thought smugly. Tonight, with Charlie as a bitter aftertaste, she viewed many of the farmers as cowards, too scared to go into battle against the problems on their land, but mostly too scared of the battles within themselves. She had seen it before, the way the farmers were challenged by Andrew’s words and how they sat closed off as they mentally wrestled their own bullish beliefs.

  Tonight Rebecca knew many of them would be trapped within their own resistance and simply label Andrew a ‘wanker’. But she also knew the more open-minded farmers would be in for paradigm shifts in thinking about themselves and their land. A small percentage would become intrigued and join the growing group who were changing management on their farms. Andrew’s methods of grazing, cropping and restoring native grasslands not only solved many of the problems that the media spewed out about global warming, but his methods also provided a quick answer to carbon sequestration from the air into the soils. However, his methods also went against the grain of every complex government program on tree plantations and carbon credits that had been dreamed up by the corporates and bureaucrats. In the past ten years or more, he’d copped a lot of flak. But he always seemed unaffected and brave, despite the storms that people tried to hurl at him.

  As Bec ordered herself a beer from Lucy at the bar, she resolved to be brave too. She raised the cold beer to her lips and suddenly thought of the white-haired woman she had met today in the Heaven is Here! hippy shop. What was it she had told her about her thoughts creating her reality?

  She realised she was passing all her blame and all her problems to Charlie, instead of getting on with achieving her own wants and needs. It wasn’t him causing the issues. It was her thoughts about Charlie. She suddenly saw clearly how constant her negative thoughts were. A subconscious knowing that she had failed before she had even tried! Just as soon as the clarity came, it folded in on itself. She tried to grapple with what her mind had just so clearly seen, but the distraction of the people in the room blurred what she felt could be the key to unlock her prison.

  She sipped her beer, watching Andrew, whose face was illuminated by a computer screen as he prepared to start his slide show of farming photos. She realised now that Andrew spoke a similar language to Evie from Heaven is Here! He had the same quiet, balanced yet passionate energy.

  ‘You reap what you sow,’ Andrew had once said to Rebecca in a break at a field day. ‘And the most important seed to sow is positivity. I’ve been to so many farmers’ meetings and all we focus on are the problems and the negatives in farming. We need to change our thoughts to positive ones. Life is easier that way. And our farms benefit from it.’

  Rebecca realised she was drawn to Andrew for the little gems of wisdom and positivity that sprang so naturally from his Queensland cattle farmer’s mouth. He often joked to his audiences that he learned as a small boy in the outback cattle yards not to open his mouth too far or the flies could get in. Everything about Andrew had surprised her and inspired her, because he thought about the world in such a different way from how she and Charlie did.

  ‘You’ve got the hots for him,’ Charlie had said once after Rebecca had failed to deliver dinner to the table on time, her nose so firmly stuck in the gigantic pasture-cropping course manual. She’d sighed. How many times had she fought Charlie with denials about Andrew? Sometimes to the point where she was red in the face with fury and frustration, slopping a careless dinner in front of him.

  If the boys hadn’t been around, there were nights that she would have dumped the plate on him, wanting the scatterings of burned chops, frothy overcooked spuds and plain cups of iceberg lettuce dotted with cheese, that was supposed to resemble a salad, lying in his lap. But instead, like always, she bit her tongue and set his meal down in front of him. What a good wife, she thought bitterly. Some days she wished she did have the hots for Andrew. It would make the beatings of accusations from Charlie easier to bear.

  Andrew was a good ten years older than Rebecca, and although tall and gorgeous-looking in that rangy Queensland horseman way, it was the vision and vitality he had for farming that had her hooked. That and his quiet wisdom. There was nothing sexual about it, Rebecca had decided. But Charlie had pushed and pushed her on it, eventually using his suspicions as an excuse to reject Andrew’s farming techniques for Waters Meeting. As Rebecca studied Andrew now, she let the notion bubble to the surface that she could be physically attracted to him. The fact that she was married had seemed to put a haze around how she saw men in the world. At this moment she noticed Andrew was actually extremely handsome. In fact, she was stunned to realise he was hot!

  She liked the feelings that it raised in her, seeing him that way. She toyed with the idea for a short time, like a prisoner imagining an escape from an apparently inescapable prison. She told herself not to feel an ounce of guilt at the thoughts. After all, hadn’t Charlie started all of this? A mix of fiery anger simmered inside her and she felt her cheeks redden. If Charlie thought she had a thing for Andrew, if he badgered her and accused her daily about it, then she might as well create a thing for Andrew! She couldn’t win either way.

  Then she caught herself. Her thoughts! She had just thought, I can’t win either way. So that would be her future? Angrily she again realised how that woman, Evie, had unnerved her with her weird words and ways. Bec’s mind was a mess. She was starting to hear the words that traipsed through her head, and she didn’t like them one bit.

  Her eyes bored into the back of Charlie’s head. She tried to make her memory see him as the young man she’d fallen in love with, but the crown of his head was shining through his brown hair and his shoulders no longer tapered towards a slim waist. Rather they were rounded down, a mix of muscle and middle-aged fat. She felt a sudden grief for the larger-than-life party boy she had fallen in love with. Somewhere back in time that love was alive, but for Rebecca it felt unreachable in the now. She wished she could find it again. But instead of seeing Charlie sitting on the chair, she now saw his father. His bitter, Bible-bashing, misogynistic father, who sat on the couch expecting dinners to be dished up, washing to be done, cleaning to be performed without complaint and women to put up and shut up.

  Waking her from her thought
s, Rebecca realised Yazzie was waving at her from the front row.

  ‘Come and sit here,’ Yazzie mouthed and motioned. Bec lifted her head and raised her beer.

  On her way, she glanced at Charlie, not noticing the stares from the others in the small crowd.

  No one had seen Rebecca Lewis dolled up like that in years. What was on the go? The men had sniffed a change and were intrigued. Charlie didn’t let on. He sat amidst the men with his arms folded across his chest and his crossed legs kicked out in front of him. He hadn’t even saved a seat for her. Nor was he looking to invite her to join him.

  In Rebecca’s mind came a flash vision of his white pumping backside and she felt her jaw tense. Betraying bastard. She pushed the thought away and sat, with as much grace as she could muster, between Yazzie and Sol.

  Now it was Charlie’s turn to bore his eyes into her from behind. She felt the heat and it took all her willpower not to cry. Instead she chose to focus on Sol’s gorgeous hands, clasped in his lap. The beautiful smooth strong hands of a European musician and a gentle horseman. She imagined Sol’s hands running along her bare inner thighs. The thought of his hands, like revenge. She shut her eyes and breathed in his Ralph Lauren flavour, leaning slightly towards him. Then, still thinking revenge, Rebecca turned her attention to Andrew, as he began to talk in the beautiful deep, gentle tones of his very manly Queensland-speak. She let the vibration of his voice permeate her body, welcoming him into her. She felt eroticism stir within and with it came a vengeful satisfaction.

  ‘About twenty years ago,’ Andrew began, looking out to his audience with clear outback-sky eyes, ‘we got burned out by bushfires. No fences left, three thousand sheep dead, all the crops gone and no money left for fuel and fertiliser. Instant broke, I was. I ended up not just psychologically burned by that fire, but also physically. I was in hospital for a time, knowing my life had changed forever. What do you do in a crisis like that?’

  With a measured pause, Andrew cast his sincere gaze around his hard-arse audience.

  ‘It’s obvious. You get on the piss with your neighbour,’ he said with a grin. ‘He’d been burned out too. We were both buggered. Up shit creek without a paddle.’

  The farmers defrosted slightly with a trickle of laughter underlaid with empathy. All had been through hard times.

  ‘While we were sitting drinking beer, feeling our backs to the wall with nowhere to go, we came up with a really silly idea. We thought, bugger it, we’ll just sow the bloody crops straight into the ground … no ploughing. Just one pass over the ground with a direct drill seeder when the perennial pastures were dormant — just to see what would happen. And partly because we had no choice.’

  Andrew paced the room and delivered Rebecca a subtle look and a gentle smile. Rebecca bit her lip and Yazzie nudged her.

  ‘We were as shocked as anyone to find it bloody well worked! The yields weren’t great that first year, but it worked! And we’ve been direct-sowing crops into dormant perennial pastures ever since. Not only have we saved eighty thousand bucks a year in fertiliser, but we also use only ten per cent of the amount of fuel we used to need. Plus I’ve doubled the livestock I carry. The topsoil that was once only about five centimetres deep now goes down over a metre in places and the carbon in the soil has more than doubled. The farm is resilient to drought, to pests and to debt.’

  He paused again as he showed slides of rich soil, where root systems like abundant, healthy tributaries of lungs breathed vigour and life deeply into the earth.

  ‘Now I’ve got Australia’s leading soil and climate-change scientists chasing me, saying, “What have you done, Andrew? How did you do this? Can we study it?”’ He smiled at his audience. ‘Nowadays I leave my manager to the farm while I travel the world, speaking to people like you. People who are struggling. People who are wondering why their land and their farm businesses are bleeding to death. Why they no longer feel happy with farming. Imagine if we farmers were paid to sequester carbon like I’ve done in my soils. Agriculture would be stabilised and the environment would be regenerated.’

  Rebecca half turned to see if Charlie was taking in any of Andrew’s words. There he sat, with his body language closed, like most of the men in the room. Arms crossed, ankles crossed, a glazed expression on his face. A chin that had doubled in the past five years, resting on his hairy chest. Why didn’t his years at Ag College open him up to new ideas? Rebecca thought. She looked back down the years and realised Charlie hadn’t been at college because he had a thirst to learn about agriculture. He’d been there because he had a thirst full stop. For grog. And he had been there to escape his family. To get shit-carted and be a party animal with his peers so as to forget the badgerings of his mother and the demands of his father.

  The realisation left Rebecca feeling cheated, not so much by Charlie, but mostly by herself. She had imagined him to be someone else. She had married him believing he was a totally different person from who he actually was. She realised she had been putting demands on him he simply couldn’t meet. She felt suddenly sorry for him. Sorry for both of them.

  He caught her looking at him, so she hastily turned away and fixed her eyes on Andrew, who was now saying passionately, ‘You don’t put a Band-Aid on an arm that has been cut off! You’ll bleed to death. But that’s exactly what we’re doing as a human race … putting environmental Band-Aids over our problems when we actually need extreme remedies, because this planet is bleeding to death and our farms and farming families along with it.’

  Rebecca had heard Andrew use this analogy before and she both loved and loathed it. It sparked memories of her father, Harry, and of his severed arm in the posthole-digger accident years back on Waters Meeting. During the years afterwards, he carried himself like a wounded returned soldier. He had turned inwards and softened. But he hadn’t changed. He still saw right past Rebecca and each year, no matter how gently insistent her coaching and encouraging, nor how strong her rages of silence, her father and Charlie more and more ignored her. They ordered the fertiliser truck in without consideration for what the land actually needed. Superphosphate nuking the earth. Year in, year out, toxic waste dumped on her beloved Waters Meeting. Because the men said so. Because the men refused to see. Because they would not listen.

  She felt the sting of years of the men’s scoffing scepticism and she felt Harry’s and Charlie’s relief when the babies came and they had quieted her, getting her off their backs. But recently, with Andrew’s work and his words as her wind in her sails, she had begun to make noise again. This time Charlie had no one-armed Harry to back him up. This time Charlie was struggling to quash what was growing within his wife. A return to self. A return to the passions she had held as a younger woman.

  And now, cheated and cuckolded, Rebecca felt the barbed wire snap and the fence that held her within break. She felt the urge to bolt. To run. If yesterday she’d felt old and washed up, today she could choose to feel alive, powerful and full of energy. She could now see that she was no longer who she was meant to be. It was time to get mad and to get even. Not just for herself, but for the land. For their bank balance and for her sanity. And most of all, for her boys. The new generation of men, who she knew she had to guide to see the world differently.

  She realised it all pivoted on what was within her, and the myriad negative thoughts that ran rampant in her head from the moment she woke to the moment she slept. She shifted a little in her seat, feeling a bit woozy. She knew it wasn’t the hangover or tiredness that was making her giddy. She knew it was the revelation: her whole being had shifted.

  ‘Agriculture is crashing all over the world due to the misapplication of technology,’ Andrew continued. ‘I’m here to tell you that the cost of fertiliser and fuel is going to go through the roof. It’ll be reserved in the future for the military and the governments. You as farmers need to learn how to work with what you’ve got and let nature move us forwards in our own “quiet revolution” — so you don’t have to depend on the thieving basta
rds who take our money. But first you need to open your mind.

  ‘Did you know that there are six billion living organisms in just one teaspoon of healthy soil? That’s almost equivalent to the entire world population of humans on the planet today. Each time you plough you are killing those organisms. When you think it’s possible to have that much life in such a small amount of soil, it really does blow your mind at what we’ve been doing to our soils.’

  Despite trying very hard, Rebecca couldn’t keep her own mind still. She glanced about the room, looking for the woman Charlie had been with. The only other local women in the room were Lucy the barmaid, Amanda, Yazzie and old Mrs Huxley. None of them would be the culprits, Rebecca thought. Unless Charlie was into octogenarians in Mrs Huxley’s case. God, she thought, how can I think such flippant things right now? But then she realised there was almost a sense of relief about today’s discovery. She was being forced to change, whether she liked it or not.

  ‘Change!’ Andrew said, eerily echoing her thoughts. ‘We’ve all heard we need to embrace it, but the methods we inherited from our British past and our pattern of not being connected with animals, plants and landscapes has to change. We need to see that industrial agriculture has failed us. Often we need a crisis to force us to change. That’s what we all face. A crisis is not necessarily a negative thing. It may feel that way at the time, but it is the best catalyst for positive change. That fire was the best thing to happen to me. Didn’t feel like it at the time, but it was!’