The Farmer's Wife

by Rachael Treasure

  As Bec buzzed under the stone archway to the stable courtyard, she glanced across to the big house. She knew Sol would be in the kitchen. She felt self-conscious sitting so close to Joey on the bike. She dismissed the thought as ridiculous. Sol would know they were just mates.

  Parking the bike outside the smoko room, she waited as Joey got off. He held out his hand and helped her step from the bike. Stooping in a bow, he took her hand majestically, looking both foolish and handsome in his rider’s helmet, which was covered in red and white silks with a pompom on top. His striking blue eyes looked up into hers as he kissed the back of her hand. Then he laughed as she shoved him away.

  ‘Will you give it a rest, you dickhead?’ Rebecca said.

  ‘You love it,’ he said before winking, turning and striding into the smoko room. As she followed, Bec allowed herself to take in the perfection of his backside and she felt her cheeks flush red. She was turning into a perve.

  ‘How are we all getting on?’ she asked, shaking off her teenage crush as she entered the smoko room.

  Yazzie looked up from her paperwork and smiled. ‘Marvellous!’

  On the floor, the boys had constructed a large Lego wall. ‘Hello, Mum,’ they chorused and the dogs all stood and wagged their tails in greeting.

  Joey stood above the boys, his hands on his hips and an expression of mock indignation. ‘Huh! You say hi to Mum. But not me! What am I? What is Joey to you? Chopped liver?’

  Getting in on what was now a regular joke, Ben and Archie said in sing-song voices, ‘Hel-lo, Joey,’ as if addressing a boring teacher. He then swooped upon them, causing them to squeal.

  ‘Behaving?’ Bec asked Yazzie.

  ‘Perfectly. Until Joey arrived. Have you been behaving? You took too much time in that shed with her, Joey,’ Yazzie said playfully. She beamed a beautiful smile.

  ‘I missed out,’ Joey said, putting Archie down and giving a theatrical pout and a ‘darn it’ click of his fingers. ‘She won’t take me seriously.’

  ‘Keep onto her,’ Yazzie stirred. ‘She could do with some defrosting. Separated women take a while.’

  ‘Oi!’ cautioned Rebecca. ‘I am actually in the room!’

  Yazzie, who sat slinging a long jean-clad leg onto the desk, revealing fancywork leather cowgirl boots with worn Cuban heels, tapped her perfect teeth with a pen. She looked from Bec to Joey with narrowed eyes. ‘I reckon she’d give you a run, Joey! Like all the other girls round here have.’

  ‘Except for you, boss lady,’ Joey said. ‘You’re just jealous I haven’t put my offer in yet!’

  Yazzie burst out laughing. Rebecca laughed too, but her eyes slid to behind where her friend sat. On the wall was the photo of the beautiful woman and her babies in their double pram. Rebecca felt a twinge of pain on her behalf. Knowing the depth of Yazzie’s suffering in life, Rebecca was filled with even more admiration for this strong woman before her.

  Just then a racehorse nearby let out a roar of frustration and kicked the stable wall.

  ‘I get the hint!’ Rebecca called out to the horses, then turned to Yazzie. ‘I’ll keep going then, shall I? I’ll get this lot fed.’ She stooped to kiss her boys, who were once again caught up in their own child’s world of Lego building.

  ‘And while you do that, I’ll make you a cuppa, my sweet Princess Pure,’ Joey said. ‘But hurry along. I’m going to win you a big teddy bear at the show today to gain your sweet favours.’

  ‘Oh, Joey, please! That’s laying it on a bit thick,’ Yazzie said. ‘But yes, we’d all better hurry. We can’t be late. Sol’s been faffing in the kitchen since he stepped in the door. He’s more excited about the Man Cake comp than he is about being invited to audition in Paris for the coming orchestra season.’

  Rebecca flinched a little. So he’d be going overseas again? She realised the impossibility of even thinking about a future with Sol. Then she laughed. ‘He is one odd bod!’

  As she began to feed the fodder to the horses in the stables, she caught sight of Sol’s dark head in the kitchen window, bent intently over his cake decorating. She tore her gaze away from him. What was she thinking? His European ways and his extreme wealth were utterly foreign to her. She could never be interested in a man like that; and surely he would find her too coarse after all the beautiful, refined women he must work with in the orchestra.

  She was used to harsh brusqueness in men. Right from the outset, when she had met Sol on the roadside, she had felt more masculine than he. He was all sophistication and she was all farm girl. Her solid physical way in the world made her feel clumpy around him. Yet he seemed so kind and open. And gentle. Not rough and closed, like Charlie.

  She stooped to pick up another heavy slab of feed and dropped it into the stall to a gleaming bay called Too Many Reds, or nicknamed by the staff as Tommy.

  As her thoughts slid to Charlie again and his horrible leaving, she recalled the one phone call he’d made directly to her since driving off Waters Meeting.

  It had felt oddly surreal to hear his voice. And to feel nothing but a void. No anger. No sadness. No longing. Just an empty space between him on the flat plain country and her in the mountains, hundreds of kilometres apart.

  When Rebecca had asked him if he wanted to see the boys, he had replied, ‘Only if you drive them out here.’

  ‘OK. I will,’ she’d said.

  ‘But if you are pregnant, as you say, then I don’t want to see you,’ Charlie had added. ‘You’re too old to be pregnant. And too old to be tarting about. It’s disgusting.’

  She tried to believe his words no longer bit, but the sting had been too great. When she’d pressed the end button on the mobile, a heaviness had settled about her for days afterwards, like a grubby city smog.

  As she made her way around the day yards to feed out the second trailer-load of fodder, she pictured Charlie at his mother’s old Laminex kitchen table with its slightly rusted silver legs. After all the reading and listening she had done, Rebecca could now see Mrs Lewis as clearly as she saw herself. They were both women who were prisoners only unto themselves. If Rebecca owned up and faced the truth, she now saw she had allowed the men to hunt her from the farm into the kitchen. She had so wanted to make good as a farmer’s wife. To undo the way her mother had unravelled their lives by leaving. Bec now saw she had been no better than Mrs Lewis. Disempowering herself because she had an ingrained belief system that she should serve the men. Not out of a sense of love for them, but out of a duty that she wore like an itchy heavy garment. She had been behaving as she thought she ‘should’ ahead of being aligned to her true self. But what was her true self? It had been buried under the demands and silent emotional blackmail of her father, the constant disapproval of her mother.

  She imagined Mrs Lewis now, lifting Charlie’s coffee cup and wiping the surface beneath while sighing about her family’s burdens that she dearly made her own. Rebecca could visualise Charlie’s father as he sat with his glasses well down the bridge of his nose, peering at farming bills and grain results, muttering that the costs were too high and the wheat payments too low. Rebecca knew not much would’ve changed since the days she had stayed there before their marriage. And therefore the land would be on that gentle slide into barren lifelessness.

  Charlie’s parents were now older, fatter and even more rusted up with angry habits that they would never bother to face and unlock. It was easier to see the world as being full of people doing wrong to them than to look within. Rebecca knew Mr and Mrs Lewis would be killing the fatted calf because their eldest son had come home, but at the same time slicing him with knives of judgement for, first of all, leaving them for her and Waters Meeting, then coming back home with his tail between his legs. His mother would be dishing up meals to him that were peppered with ‘I told you so’ and ‘I knew this would happen’.

  Rebecca almost felt sorry for him. She slung the last slab into the day yard for the yearlings to eat and high-tailed it back to the stables. Turning off the bike, she was m
et with the sight of Joey on one side of the courtyard, coming towards her with a cup of coffee and a big slice of chocolate cake.

  ‘What took you, Princess MILF?’ he sang out to her. ‘My hardon’s gone and it’s time to go to the show. We’ll have to aim for a quickie in the stables on your next shift.’

  On the other side of the courtyard, as Joey finished speaking, she saw Sol walking towards her from the kitchen, holding his Man Cake entry. In keeping with the Prime Lamb feature theme of the show, Sol had created a cake in the shape of a giant pink chop, complete with white icing that served as chop fat. Stuck in the meaty middle of the cake was an Aussie flag adorned with the words, We Love Our Lamb.

  She could tell it was going to be his ‘tada’ moment. His cake was hilarious and brilliant, but a brief cloud had crossed his face and he was looking at Joey with a closed-off expression.

  Surely not? Bec wondered. He must know what Joey is like and that what he’d just said was all in jest? She was about to go over to make a fuss of his cake when her mobile rang.

  It was Charlie.

  ‘Hello?’ she said tentatively, turning her back on both men in the stableyard, walking away, her shoulders hunched.

  ‘I want a divorce,’ Charlie barked down the phone.

  She absorbed his words like a sudden surprising punch.

  When she didn’t reply, he continued, ‘A lawyer will be in touch about what I get out of the farm.’

  Winded from his words, Rebecca took a moment to speak. ‘Just like that?’ she asked in a voice barely audible.

  ‘Just like that,’ came his cold reply. Then he hung up.

  Thirty

  The Bendoorin Show was buzzing with small-town country-fair activity. An array of utes was lined up for judging, some polished to gleaming, others mud-splattered and dinted beyond belief. A handful were flying huge Bundy Bear and CAT flags, the tailgates so coated in stickers it was hard to see the paintwork.

  Rebecca, Yazzie and the boys walked past the line-up, and Bec smiled as she thought of her own long-carked-it Subaru she’d had when she was a teenager, which had been towed to the wreckers after the second engine blew. Ute comps hadn’t been around much in her day, but she was sure she could’ve won the ‘old bomb ute’ section several times over. She missed that ute.

  Up until recently she would’ve told herself she missed her youth too and that she herself was now ‘an old bomb’. Lately she’d started to feel the energy that she’d enjoyed when she was a young girl. But after receiving the call from Charlie this morning, Bec felt her old demeanour and fear slipping back into her very being. She felt plagued by questions about what he and his solicitors might do.

  Bec looked over to Yazzie, who was almost skipping beside her, a lit-up smile on her face. It always intrigued her that her friend was only a few years younger than her. She seemed so much younger! Rebecca realised she had allowed herself to become old before her time. The way she dressed and walked about in the world was so staid, compared with Yazzie’s behaviour. She seemed to have no boundaries and great freedom … not just because of her wealth, which was certainly a factor, but also because of her attitude to life. Bec had come to see her as an almost obsessively perfectionist workaholic with the horses, but always she seemed to cope with the workload and find joy in the smallest of things.

  Today, for example, in the car driving to the show, Yazzie couldn’t contain her excitement and was bouncier than the kids, bursting with the joy of the simple fact that she was going to the Bendoorin Show. Rebecca had puzzled at her. It was only the Bendoorin Show. Yazzie was vivacious now as she fussed over Funny in Ben’s arms, adjusting the little costume they’d put on the puppy for the Pet Parade. Bec wondered if Yazzie’s exuberance was a mask on her grief, but when she looked at Evie, she saw the same inner control.

  Evie, who must’ve been ancient, still held a youthful way about her and seemed to have made friends with the entire town, including the sullen teenagers who normally hung outside the store, smoking, spitting and swearing. Evie was still playful and had a wicked twinkle in her eye. And not once did she ever complain about the age that must surely be settling into her bones. Instead she could be found offering the spotty, sweaty kids free angel-card readings and the occasional home-made ‘herb’ cheese biscuit. These had nothing more exotic in them than dried thyme, but the country kids thought the joke was pretty cool, like Evie.

  Rebecca recognised that Sol shared the same zest too. She wondered if it was because the Stantons didn’t have money troubles that they were able to be so carefree. But then maybe it was the other way around? Maybe it was their positivity that kept money flowing to them? Their utter belief that they could have all the good things in life. Sol and Yazzie were the hardest-working pair she’d known, but they made the work look effortless and they seemed to love every nuance of life — even when it came to day-to-day chores. Bec decided to try for the Stanton attitude and pushed her worries about Charlie and the looming divorce and property settlement aside.

  ‘Hiya!’ said Yazzie, waving at Candy, who was selling salad rolls at the footy-club tent. She turned to Bec. ‘I’ve been wanting to catch up with her. I’ll see you soon.’

  ‘No probs.’

  Rebecca helped Archie and Ben lead Funny past the coffee and hot-chips caravan. She managed to coax them quickly past the small array of sideshows and children’s rides, until they entered a small ring cordoned off with hay bales, where other kids and their pets were already gathering. Behind them on a larger field, beautiful horses sailed over jumps and danced on collected reins so their necks arched, their riders turned out neatly in jodhpurs and dark tailored jackets.

  Rebecca let go of Archie’s hand and ruffled his blond locks, then squatted to stroke Funny. In the line-up of children’s pets, the pup had discovered a cat, a lop-eared rabbit and a chook, and was now sniffing at the air with curiosity and caution. She’s the sweetest little pup, Rebecca thought. She sometimes wondered if Murray or Charlie might ask for the Kelpie back, but she pushed the thought away. She wouldn’t part with her now, nor would the boys, no matter what.

  The ‘celebrity’ judge was a local radio announcer from a larger town a hundred Ks away. He began booming everyone awake on the PA system as he spruiked his station and commenced the event. He was clad in denim and leather that barely made it over his portly body. He cast his eye over the array of animals, which included a blindingly white goat that had clearly been washed in Napisan, some worms in an ice-cream container and even a moth on death’s door in a jar.

  Rebecca stooped to straighten Funny’s shearer’s singlet and red-and-navy bandana.

  ‘What’s your pup’s name, son?’ asked the DJ in a ‘shock-jock’ voice.

  ‘It’s Funny,’ said Ben.

  ‘That’s a funny name,’ the DJ laughed, his voice joining a crackle followed by a whine over the public-address system that had been borrowed from the local hall committee for a gold coin donation.

  As he moved off down the line to interrogate and sometimes terrorise more small children about their pets, Rebecca looked about.

  A little way off she noticed Yazzie leaning on a rail watching the jumping, her blonde hair swept up in her classy pony tail, whipped by a gust of wind. Unusually she was alone. Rebecca wondered how she so graciously survived what must have been the worst possible life event, ever. How could any mother be so well after losing two children? Yazzie was amazing.

  Rebecca thought of the time in the hospital when she hadn’t known if she would ever hold little Archie again. It had almost undone her and she still shuddered from the mere memory of those hours when his life hung in the balance. Rebecca now knew, thanks to her nightly talks to Sol, that it was in those dark days of fresh raw grief after Yazzie lost her twins that the Stantons had first met Evie.

  Evie had been running meditation classes and doing healing work in Sydney’s inner city and Sol, in desperation, had sought her out to help Yazzie through. Rebecca had pieced together a couple of the
puzzles through conversation with Sol, and she now knew that the tragic event had been an accident on the way to a show-jump event: a semi had lost its load onto the Stantons’ horse float and four-wheel drive, which Yazzie was driving.

  Yazzie’s then-husband, a Sydney businessman, hadn’t coped. Sol had, in very few words, intimated that after three months of trying to keep the surviving twin — a boy — alive on life support, Yazzie had discovered payments from their joint account to a high-class Sydney brothel. One particular transaction was dated the night of the show-jump event and accident.

  ‘Her life had completely fallen apart,’ Sol said to Bec, one night on the phone. ‘I didn’t know how to bring her back. That was when I found Evie to help us. Bit by bit Yazzie rebuilt her world.’ The sorrow in Sol’s tone was palpable. It had opened Rebecca up enough to talk about Tom with him.

  Rebecca knew grief would still be moving slowly through Yazzie like an ice-cold glacier and that it always would. Sol had said in return for Evie’s gift of wisdom and kindness in helping Yazzie through the worst of the storms, the Stantons had offered to move Evie to Bendoorin and set her up in her shop. She had been tired of Sydney and missed the bush.

  Bec knew Evie was still hovering near for Yazzie’s sake. If the grief did show in areas of her friend’s life, Bec knew it was on the subject of both men and horses. Yazzie never mentioned men in reference to herself. And Rebecca had noticed she worked extremely hard training her show jumpers out on Rivermont, yet she never, ever competed. She suspected that the show jumping, the death of her babies and her solo status despite her beauty were now shockingly and inextricably linked.

  Yet still Yazzie radiated such love and vibrant energy it was impossible to know what went on in the quiet times when her loss returned to haunt her. It was also wrong to feel pity for her. Rebecca knew that did not honour the woman she was.