by Susan Duncan
‘Yeah.’
‘Belle thought it should’ve gone to her. She’d looked after Mum and Dad all her life.’
‘So that’s why the two of you fell out for such a long time.’
‘Didn’t you know?’
‘Not really.’
‘No. Of course you didn’t. You weren’t a kid who hung around during confrontations. You’d leave the room when talk turned nasty.’
‘Did I?’ It was a revelation to me. But one that rang true. We talked a little longer before saying cheerio. Later, I thought about researching the Lord Nelson angle.
Did it matter? No. Whatever Felix’s lineage, I fiercely hated the man. To me, he was descended from the devil.
23
BACK AT BENBULLA, Bob announced it was time to drench and tag the cattle. But while Benny’s Boys were gentle, good-humoured beasts that followed a bucket of grain like a holy chalice, our saleyard cattle were wild crossbreeds that bolted as soon as you fired up the ute. Bob organised a round-up: Fletch and his friend on motorbikes, Brickworks Michael and Bob in utes. The rest of us – a couple of extra blokes and wives – on foot.
We waded through dew-heavy grass, arms spread wide (a device to trick cattle into thinking you are bigger than them), the damp seeping all the way to our thighs. The herd took one look at us and, with an impressive speed that belied their heavy frames, scattered like birdshot into dense rainforest gullies where they stayed hidden until we gave up the chase in frustration and returned to the shed for a well-earned smoko. Blueberry pikelets, freshly cooked in a frying pan over the gas jet. Covered in sweet blueberry jam and thick cream. Slung along the table on enamel plates with the speed of frisbees and scoffed just as fast while we plucked inch-long, skinny black seed heads with a nasty little hook at one end from our clothing.
‘Sticky beaks,’ Michael explained. ‘Also known as Farmer’s Friends or Cobbler’s Pegs. Won’t even let go in the washing machine.’
‘How do you get rid of them?’ I asked, thinking there must be a quick trick.
‘You pull ’em out one by one,’ he replied, grinning with wicked glee.
Right. I walked over to Foggy. ‘So. How do you know if you’re looking at a weed or a precious plant?’ I asked, anxious to learn.
‘If cattle won’t eat it, it’s a weed,’ he said flatly, leaving no room for argument.
A couple of days later, Bob came up with a new strategy to get the steers under control. He opened a pen in the cattle yard, nestled a salt lick in a corner. Cattle, we’d been told, were drawn to the heady mix of minerals like an alcoholic to booze. Each day, we looked out from our hilltop to see whether they’d fallen for the con. They remained aloof or obtuse. Or just plain canny and distrustful. I couldn’t decide.
Then suddenly, six days later, I drove down the hill on the way to Wingham to pick up supplies. There they were, all twenty-eight of them, crowded into a single pen and jockeying with rough headbutting and violent hip-thrusting to have a go at the lick. I pulled up, took my time and, at an angle instead of directly – cattle spook if you walk straight at them – crept towards the main gate. ‘Aha! Gotcha!’ Slammed the lock shut. Double-checked. I drove off, slapping the steering wheel. Victory is sweet.
As soon as my mobile came into range, I called Bob. ‘They’re in the yard,’ I shouted in the way my father once shouted on a landline, as if it might make his voice carry better over a distance of one hundred miles. ‘Quiet as lambs. Sort of. Gate’s shut good and tight. There’s nowhere for them to go. You’re a genius!’
The following day, Saturday, the utes turned into our drive, ready for battle. Brickworks Michael, Fletch, Foggy and his daughter, Sarah, who was studying animal science. Blue-eyed like her father, with silken-corn blonde hair and a face like an angel, she expertly swung a leg over the fence and jumped in with the steers.
‘You’re fearless!’ I shouted, full of admiration.
She walked through the cattle as though they were baby lambs, slapping a rump, pushing a head out of the way, leaned on a steel rail: ‘Dad doesn’t have time for wimps.’
‘So you breed ’em tough in the country, Foggy,’ I said, lining up beside him with a clipboard, ready to note ear tag numbers and any relevant details for each steer.
Foggy, mostly quick-witted, funny and irreverent, looked up from filling an injection the size of a small missile with a vaccine called 5-in-1. ‘You don’t do kids any favours by spoiling them,’ he said.
‘Of course not. Goes without saying. So,’ I said, grabbing the empty vaccine box, ‘what’s this stuff do?’ … for the prevention of pulpy kidney disease, tetanus, black disease, malignant oedema (blackleg-like disease) and blackleg in cattle and sheep, including swelled head in rams. Swelled head in rams? Blackleg? Pulpy kidney? Bob and me, we were babes in the woods. I fought off a strong instinct to turn and run. Crossing dark waters on wild, stormy nights in a small tinny suddenly seemed like a doddle. I knew, though, that we were in too deep, committed to a new way of life that would make or break. It was up to us. Rise to the challenge, my mother used to say if I was feeling lily-livered about a chore. I grabbed the clipboard and tried to stand straighter.
‘C’mon, c’mon.’ Bob, Sarah, Michael and Fletch began to coax the cattle from the pen into the race – a narrow lane meant to force cattle, single file, into the crush. The crush is a small pen with a rear gate that locks an animal from behind and a front gate that slams shut against the neck, leaving the head trapped. Timing is critical. The steer can bolt straight through without being drenched, vaccinated and tagged, and you have to start again. If cattle are familiar with people, it’s a simple enough procedure. But ours were delinquents. Maybe Foggy was right – there’s a price to pay when there’s no early childhood discipline.
In a split second, they switched from quiet salt-lickers into bolshie bastards intent on havoc. Snot flew left and right, along with spit and green bits. Bolters climbed on the backs of the steer in front. Everyone started shouting, prodding, shoving. Just as one steer moved forward, another reversed. Pandemonium. I lost track in the melee.
‘Muscle up,’ Foggy ordered. I took a deep breath. Looked at Sarah and Fletch in the pens and found a skerrick of courage. But cattle are so bloody big, I thought.
A strikingly good-looking black steer with four white socks, a white tassel on the tip of his tail and black eye patches on a white face, like a mask, had a suspicious-looking sac hanging between his legs.
‘Stag,’ Foggy said. ‘Someone didn’t quite finish the job when his balls were cut.’ He dug into his jeans pocket and pulled out a pocketknife. Made a quick, decisive slash. Blood spurted. High as a fountain. Everyone ducked and scrammed. I looked away. Fought off nausea. ‘Not a nut, then,’ he said, more to himself than anyone else. ‘A blood vessel gone bad. Sarah! Twine from the ute!’ She vaulted the rails, ran off. Returned seconds later. Handed him some frayed bits and pieces that looked like they’d been saved in the same way women save ribbon – because it might come in handy one day.
Foggy bound the wound, tied it off. Slapped the steer on the rump. Opened the crush and let it out. With a careful gait, like a woman who’d just given birth, the steer tiptoed into the pen.
‘If the wound opens, do I call the vet?’ Bob asked.
‘Nah. He’ll bleed out in a few minutes. By the time the vet got here, he’d be dead.’
‘What do you call that?’ Bob said, meaning the sac.
Foggy grinned: ‘An unexpected loss, mate.’
The team went back to work. Bob took over my job. I’d been so distracted by the blood I’d lost track of the numbering. Failed at my first real attempt at farming cattle. Not a good start. Muscle up, I thought, hearing Foggy’s words echo in my head, but the noise was like a rock concert gone feral. Clanging. Bellowing. Crashing. Shouting. All performance, as it turned out. The moment the cattle were released into a paddock where clover waited like a doggie treat for good behaviour, they trotted about twenty yards, slowed to a stro
ll, dropped their heads to the ground. Ripping. Munching. And, yes, shitting and pissing. In one end and out the other. As consistent as daybreak.
Jobless and redundant, I went off to get smoko organised.
‘You’re good with cattle,’ I told Sarah at smoko. She shrugged, as if it was nothing.
‘My sister and me, we’ve worked with them all our lives. A steer trampled me once. I was about five years old and Mum was away. We were helping Dad in the yards. Only time I’ve ever seen Dad go white. Mind you, he waited till the bruises came up before he chucked me in the car and called in on the local chemist – who happened to be his sister – for advice. She took one look and yelled at him to get me to hospital. Then the doctor locked Dad out of the consulting room. Said I could tell him if Dad was beating me up. He’d make sure I got professional help; there was no way telling the truth would get me into any trouble. “I got snotted by a cow,” I said.’ She laughed. ‘It’s one of the famous family stories now.’
‘Would’ve put me off for life,’ I said.
‘Mum was furious. Dad made me get back in the yard soon as the bruising faded.’
The steer with the twine bandage walked carefully for a few days. He survived, though. Grew a new sac, too. He ended up with a beautifully rounded rump that brought a good but not top price when we sent him to the abattoir. Abnormalities, we discovered, bring down the price per kilo. It was a strange, new, hard-hearted way of thinking for soft-souled city people like us, who have never had to deal with the realities of birth, death and farm economics. But it was amazing how quickly we adjusted.
It was a long, wet summer. Strong plaits of kikuyu runners smothered weeds and pasted a deep emerald-green lushness across the land. The earth gave off a chocolate-scented fecundity. Eager young gum trees put on growth spurts of a metre, sometimes more. Spindly wattles rose up on hillsides like banners. Labyrinthine springs erupted in puzzling patterns, running like blood vessels under the ground. Why here on a slope? Why not here, in a gully? Mapped over millennia, no doubt, and for very particular reasons. Norm’s track, though, held firm as one humid, sweat-soaked day followed another.
One morning, the ABC’s Kim Honen reported a Three-day Sickness epidemic. Cattle were dropping, even dying. Bob and I looked at each other blankly. Bob dialled Foggy.
‘Most cattle get over it without any problems, but if a steer goes down, get it back on its feet as quickly as you can,’ he advised. ‘Their lungs can fill with fluid and they’ll drown.’ Bovine Ephemeral Fever, we learned, was carried by midges and mosquitoes. Animals stopped eating and drinking, drooled badly, developed a nasal discharge and watery eyes, became stiff in the joints and even lame. They also ran high temperatures and suffered from depression. Steers? Depressed? We crossed our fingers. Hoped our elevation might work to our advantage. Tried not to think about Foggy’s ‘unexpected losses’ column.
At daybreak, Bob drove around checking the herd. At sunset, he checked again. It wasn’t until about two weeks into the epidemic that our first steers started to get crook. Heads drooping, sweaty flanks, shaky bodies – looking very, very sad and sorry. And, yes, depressed. Still standing, though. Just when we thought we might escape the worst, Bob noticed a big black steer lying under a spindly old gum with a crown of dead branches. He hadn’t moved for a day. Not chewing the cud, then. Just crook, his hooves facing uphill. He’d need to be rolled over or he’d die.
It was Friday, just before lunchbreak on the building site. Bob walked over from the shed and asked Terry if he could step outside his official job description and help out with a sick animal. Terry nodded, slammed his straw hat on his head and, without a word, the two men set off down a track sludgy with the rain and springs seeping out of the hillside. The humidity was thick enough to chew.
When they reached the steer, one man stood on either side, looking down at the beast shaking with fever. Terry cleared a few fallen branches.
‘Get his back legs,’ Bob said. ‘I’ll grab his head.’
‘Watch his legs,’ Terry said. Bob didn’t take much notice. He was standing behind the head. Out of range, he thought. But cattle are double-jointed. A hoof flew towards Bob’s face. He ducked. Fell backwards on a broken piece of log.
‘Barely got me,’ he told Terry. There’d be a bruise at worst. They tried again. Pushing, pulling. Trying to roll it into a safer position. Miraculously, the steer staggered to his feet. Took a shaky step or two. Moved off with a slow, elongated, slightly stiff gait. He’d live.
Late that afternoon, curly-haired Lisa and her husband, Roy, arrived for the weekend. ‘How’s it going?’ they asked. ‘What a view, eh?’ Lisa hauled iceboxes filled with treats. Cheeses, pâté, herbs to plant. A cake.
‘You’re in the spare room,’ I explained. ‘Also known as the honeymoon tent. Bunk beds. Hope you can manage.’
‘We’re New Zealanders, Susan. We can handle anything.’
‘Proper bed linen, though, and doonas if you need them. Feather pillows and a milk crate for a bedside table.’
‘Not too shabby, then,’ Lisa said, grinning.
‘Got to look after your mates,’ I replied, linking my arm through hers.
We ate dinner at a picnic table under the gum trees while the landscape changed colour. Green. Purple. Mauve. Pale grey. Pink lines of light etching the contours of distant hills. A silver moon rising. Talked about Pittwater. Fire-brigade dinners. Who would cook? Mandatory life jackets – a good or terrible idea? Weed days. Would the bush regenners ever get on top of lantana? Beth’s stroke. At almost eighty-five, would she come good again? Booming Mona Vale. Parking was horrendous, wasn’t it?
The tug of another world. Still so strong but changing fast. One new rule after another – revenue raisers introduced under the guise of safety (or that’s how it felt to me) – was deadening our once larrikin spirits. Not long before midnight, when our talk slowed and we’d caught up on all the Pittwater news, we said sleepy goodnights.
In the shed, I turned to Bob: ‘Do you miss Pittwater when we’re here?’
He unbuttoned his shirt. Folded it over the back of a camp chair. ‘Nope.’
‘Do you miss the farm when we’re at Pittwater?’ I sat on the end of the bed, removed my boots.
‘Nope.’
The ease with which men compartmentalise, I thought, crawling into bed. Half an hour later, Bob tried to turn over and let out a yell.
‘You ok?’ I asked, sitting up in fright.
‘Nope.’ He tried to move again. Groaned. Tried to get out of bed. Fell back.
‘What can I do? What do you need?’
‘Hospital.’
I dressed in a rush, helped Bob with his clothes. His face was white. He’d aged a thousand years in a few hours. I begged those unseen forces my mother firmly believed in. Please, nothing life-threatening.
He struggled into the ute, refusing to let me touch or help him. I scurried through the shed in the pitch dark to Lisa and Roy’s tent: ‘Lisa, you awake?’
‘Unngh.’
‘Just taking Bob to hospital. No dramas. Stay where you are.’
‘Unngh.’
Saturday night emergency at Manning Hospital, on this particular night, was like a CWA meeting. Home-baked muffins. Coffee. Tea. Lots of chat. A great sense of calm. Bob was gently eased onto a bed. One by one, doctors came by, pressing his body and asking where it hurt. Nurses checked his blood pressure, heart rate. He was taken off for a scan.
‘We’re worried about internal bleeding,’ a doctor told me. ‘His kidneys have taken a hit. We’ll know more tomorrow.’ At four in the morning, when there was nothing else to be done, I headed back to Benbulla. Fell into bed. Lay awake staring at the ceiling. A thousand familiar emotions writhed like snakes. We were putting ourselves at risk … for what? To prove we could deny aging its dues? We’d made a shocking mistake. Yes, we were a long way into the project, but life was more important than worrying about the financial fallout. Face it. We were mugs. Delusional idiots who were
too old to take on a career that real farmers – worn out by hard slog, dodgy weather, fluctuating interest rates and strong boofy beasts that could be felled by a tiny little midge bite, for god’s sake – retired from at the first opportunity.
Back in Taree a few hours later, I bought Bob a pair of pyjamas (he doesn’t own any), a new toothbrush and shaving kit, a takeaway flat white, and returned to the hospital. Walking along the corridor to his room, I overheard a group of doctors: ‘Bed twelve. Kicked by a cow. It’s always a cow, isn’t it?’
I pulled up. ‘Are you talking about my husband? Bob?’
‘That’s the one,’ said a woman with red hair, wearing a white coat.
‘Is he ok?’ I asked anxiously.
‘We’re going to run a few more tests,’ she said.
Bloody cattle, I thought, torn between rage and fear.
They gave Bob every possible scan, test and examination, and ultimately concluded his kidneys were bruised but not damaged. On Sunday morning we drove back to Benbulla.
‘Fit as a Mallee bull,’ Bob said cheerily. ‘That’s me. Won’t need a check-up this year. I’ve had one.’ I was beginning to realise farming would always be an emotional seesaw; I would have to adjust or withdraw. Time to have a cup of concrete and harden up, as a woman once told me when we met on a camping trip.
At the farm, Lisa and Roy had a fresh cuppa made, cake laid out. Bob said, ‘Roughest ride to town I’ve ever had. Susan found every bump and went for it.’ I walked away and swallowed a sob.
After Roy and Lisa returned to Pittwater, Bob and I discussed the mounting workload.
‘You need help with farm work,’ I said. ‘Just until the building is finished. Otherwise you’ll be wrecked.’ He nodded, still in pain, and called Benny to ask if he knew anyone who was looking for casual work. Benny recommended Eric.