The Year of the Farmer

by Rosalie Ham

  She left him to sweep the shitty water into the gutter and ambled down to the IGA with an armful of papers. Paul the postie was at his counter sorting parcels but Jasey was nowhere to be seen. Jasey often fled to the storeroom when she saw Mandy coming with the newspapers for Paul’s mail run.

  Mandy explained that a farmer had just thrown a bag of shit at Joe Islip’s real estate and solicitor’s office.

  ‘Poor bastard. The farmer, I mean, not Joe.’ He rolled newspapers up and put elastic bands around them.

  ‘There’ll be another one, I bet,’ she said. ‘Who bought the pub?’

  Paul shrugged. ‘What have we got for lotto this week?’

  ‘A million.’

  ‘Million dollars won’t dent a farmer’s four-million-dollar mortgage.’

  ‘Jesus, what I could do with a million dollars.’ She sighed. ‘There has to be someone in the town who knows who bought the pub.’

  He took the newspapers out to his mail van and Mandy wandered back to her shop, stuck her Back in 5 note to the door and sneaked down the back lane with some useless newspapers and a couple of cardboard boxes. She leaned into the dumpster behind the pub to see what the bin revealed. A voice behind her said, ‘What can you see?’

  ‘Jesus, Denise, don’t sneak up on me!’ Mandy dropped her rubbish into the dumpster.

  Denise was an older woman with thick yellow hair swept back over her grey regrowth and the charisma of a grouper. ‘Not sneaking.’

  ‘Stickybeaking?’

  ‘You’re the one who’s got her head stuck in someone else’s bin. What have you found, anyway?’

  ‘Nothing. Plastic wrappings, boxes and papers, wood and plaster, old taps, pipes . . .’

  ‘Renovating.’ Denise chucked a pile of old shoes into the dumpster and walked back to her shop.

  Mandy tugged the padlock on the corrugated-iron gates but it held firm, so she peered through the gap. There were just a few tradies’ utes parked at the back door. She hurried back to her shop, got in her car and drove to the new twenty-four-hour servo, where she instructed Andrew to put extra butter on her sticky bun and to make her cappuccino very hot.

  ‘The usual, then?’

  ‘The pub sold.’

  ‘So I see.’ Andrew heated the milk.

  ‘Your dad still selling firewood to the pub?’

  He shrugged. ‘They bought gas heaters for the beer garden.’

  ‘Who did?’

  He shrugged again. Mandy drove straight to the pub. The front door was locked so she went to the side and pushed through the gate into the beer garden, which doubled as a playground. The barman, Levon McIntosh, was tidying up. Mandy sat on the swing, which meant Levon had to walk around her to pick up the cigarette butts from under the seesaw. The barman was a man whose life was made complete by fantasy fiction. He was balding yet had long hair, his beard was a wizard’s beard and a golden circle hung from a one lobe. He gathered empty stubbies from under the slippery dip and said that someone from Sydney had bought the pub, ‘But I couldn’t tell you exactly who’.

  ‘Were there a lot of people looking to buy the place?’

  ‘A few.’

  ‘Will you keep your job?’ The day he left school Levon joined his father to work at the pub.

  ‘No one’s told me I can’t.’

  ‘You’re the manager – I thought they’d tell you everything.’

  ‘Maybe they don’t know everything.’ He walked away with the empties and a plastic bag full of cigarette butts.

  She got up and headed for her shop, leaving the beer garden gate open for kiddies to wander in and play on the monkey bars and fall and break their necks.

  o0o

  When Esther Shugg saw Gottlob Bergen’s ute pull over by the side of the road she was inclined to put her old Dodge in gear and drive off. But he’d only catch her next time, and it wasn’t neighbourly, so she waited while he rolled to a stop. The farmers nodded to each other across the asphalt.

  ‘Dogs about,’ Gottlob said. ‘Other side of town, I’m told.’

  Beside him, Gottlob’s brother Vorbach nodded, and for a moment the three of them sat in their cabs while Esther’s woolly sheep nibbled the verges and their thoughts all turned to wild dogs tearing at the hind legs of exhausted, terrified sheep as the town lights twinkled in the distance.

  Gottlob hung his arm through his open window and aimed his thumb at her block. ‘Those bloody weeds, Esther.’

  She looked through her windscreen at the morning sun. ‘Silage, you mean.’

  ‘You seen Mitch’s crop? It’s contaminated to buggery.’

  Esther checked her rear-vision mirror, adjusted her hat.

  ‘Weeds come with the cheap feed you buy, and there’s rain coming. Come summer –’

  ‘I understand the life cycle of a plant,’ she said.

  ‘A bit of hot wind, we’ll have weeds thick as wool as far as Sydney and that’ll be enough fuel to burn the entire continent.’

  ‘That’s one scenario.’

  ‘If my goats eat noxious weeds they’ll be dead in twelve hours. There’s a drought, they’ll eat anything.’

  ‘Goats are vermin too.’

  Vorbach, who’d been sitting quietly beside his brother, said, ‘We eat the goats. Chevron! It’s better than beef, but your weeds breed rats, foxes, rabbits, and they bring raptors to eat the lambs.’

  His brother asked, ‘What are you doing with your allocation – watering your weeds again, selling, or rolling it over until next year?’

  ‘I heard you’re selling up,’ Esther countered. ‘Selling our land to foreigners.’

  ‘What’s wrong with foreigners?’ Vorbach yelled, but Gottlob said they didn’t know what they were doing; maybe they would keep the farm, just sell the water.

  ‘To the Jeongs or the Water Authority?’

  ‘To whoever pays the best price. But are you or are you not going to spray those bloody weeds?’

  Esther pinched the brim of her hat, put her truck in gear and turned her eyes to her sheep. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  Gottlob called, ‘You want a hand? Happy to give you a hand,’ but her truck roared off, the hammock on the back lagging in the slipstream.

  Beside him, Vorbach said, ‘It would have been more gratifying to talk to the weeds themselves,’ and scrolled through the contacts on his phone for Bennett Mockett, stock agent. He said, ‘Verdammtes Ungeziefer, schieß alles,’ and his brother said, ‘Ja, time for a cull.’

  o0o

  Mandy Bishop drove home through the same dull landscape to the same old house and the same old man sitting in his usual chair. She went immediately to the phone-charging spot in the kitchen where she scrolled through Mitch’s texts and emails. There was nothing of interest. She found her husband at the computer. ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘A new irrigation system,’ he said. ‘I’m told I need an above-ground lateral sprinkler. Fantastic things, very efficient.’

  ‘Terrific,’ she said, almost sincerely, and went to the living room and Cal, sitting there like a ponce in his jacket and tam-o’-shanter as if he were in Scotland. She had every mind to buy a laptop, but the internet service wouldn’t cope.

  ‘I guess I’ll cook dinner,’ she said.

  Later, the men in the house heard her call, ‘Ready!’ and sat at the table in front of the meal she had prepared for them, waiting for her to initiate conversation, if there was to be any. Failing to find a napkin, Cal removed a clean hanky from his breast pocket and spread it across his lap. Mandy settled at the head of the table, reached across and patted Mitch as if he were a good puppy. ‘How’s everyone’s day been?’

  ‘Good,’ they said in unison, and Mitch mentioned roaming dogs and Cal started on about the forthcoming water meeting so Mandy cut him off. ‘The pub’s been sold.’ They didn’t
comment.

  ‘They’re renovating. Surely there’ll be an opening night party, free beer and bar snacks.’

  Cal said he hoped the cook was better than the last one.

  ‘It might change our lives, liven things up a bit. Anyone know anything about it?’

  Mitch shook his head and Cal said, ‘Can’t tell you anything about it.’

  She watched TV but Cal clung to the remote so finally Mandy hopped into bed with her dictionary and her mobile phone. ‘Hearthrob.10+’ thrashed her with five words, so she closed the game and put her phone aside. She was in her bed, but it wasn’t hers. The furniture wasn’t her furniture, it was theirs, and it was old, dark and heavy, like her life, a small-town life, and they were too broke to go anywhere or do anything. She wriggled under the covers and nestled into the soft pillow.

  When he came to bed, Mitch lay with his back to her and in the dimness she touched where his black hair rested on his brown neck. He didn’t respond, so she closed her eyes and rocked in her bed so that the bedclothes tucked into the small of her back and held her like a long, soft hand.

  2.

  Disappointment

  In the night he heard the donkeys in the paddock hawing and a pack of feral dogs, low and hunting, panted through Mitch’s sleep. He thought about getting up to check his ewes and their new lambs, then decided it was the fox that lived in the thickets of lignum over at Esther’s. The dogs were the other side of town. But when the sun rose, Mitch leaped from his bed and went straight to the window. Tinka waited peacefully at the yard gate and high thin clouds softened the first rays. ‘Jeepers,’ he said, for they might just be emissaries for rain clouds. His wife groaned and pulled the covers over her head, and a momentary sensation, a faint emotional residue of someone happier, more positive, came and went. But the residue returned as he dressed and so he conjured Neralie McIntosh and carried her to the ute. Tink jumped onto the tray and smiled and turned a circle and they drove to the ewes and their new lambs. Mark and Cleopatra, his guard donkeys, waited together at the gate, their furry ears drooping against their long grey heads. In the paddock beyond them he saw one single dead lamb, its bewildered mother standing beside it. Bitter, cloudless nights and the lack of real feed made new mothers and their lambs weak, no match for a strong, fit fox. He slapped Cleo’s dusty flank – ‘Well done’ – and patted Mark: ‘I know you tried.’ He aimed his gun at the ravens picking at the small pale corpse but the canny birds lifted and flapped sluggishly away, their bellies full. He dropped a wad of lucerne hay and the donkeys took a frail mouthful each and chewed. Mark’s ears rose almost to full mast and he thought he saw his rude old jenny Cleo smile. The ewes and their lambs moved towards the hay and Mitch pointed to the dull sky. ‘Remember rain? We get a bit of rain, breakfast will improve.’

  He emptied a line of seed, checked the sheep had water, refilled the seed bin and went home. Tink settled at the house gate, rested her chin on her paws, her eyes following Mitch across the yard. The gate slammed behind him and the dull shadows of the grapevine moved up his back as he walked through the green tunnel to the door. He eased his boots off. The spring whined as the screen door opened and he vanished into the dark oblong. The dog closed her eyes, her ears still forward. At some point he would appear again and she would leap up onto the machine and they would go somewhere together and there would be a job for her.

  There were two ways to get to the laundry in the Bishops Corner homestead: you could turn left inside the sleep-out door and follow the enclosed verandah around, or you could take a shortcut through the bathroom. Mitch discerned no sign of movement in the kitchen or beyond so assumed Mandy was sleeping, and decided to take the shortcut to wash his face and hands in the laundry. His mind returned to the happy prospect of rain. By the time he realised she was in the bathroom, it was too late. His wife was leaning into the mirror, a pair of tweezers in one hand, and she was naked. Her arms hid her breasts but he caught a glimpse of some residual tummy folds and her bottom. He hadn’t seen it for a couple of years and didn’t remember it being like that. She turned, eyes wide, mouth open, and grabbed the shower curtain over the bath, kicking the door so that it slapped shut in his face. He winced, focused on the door just millimetres from his nose. ‘Sorry!’ Something shocking had just occurred. It wasn’t so much what he’d seen, but the fact that he had seen . . . and it conjured a feeling, new but familiar, and suddenly thick and present. It had been there since he married Mandy, though he wasn’t sure what the feeling actually was.

  He went back outside and, while he pissed on the lemon tree, gazed at the bald brown paddocks. Memories assembled like pictures along a wall: Mandy Roper at the bar in a tight dress, smiling, seductive; then Mandy waiting in his ute, topless; Mandy dragging him, half-pissed and lonely, into the little white wagon and shagging him outside the pub. There were flashes of lusty, whirlwind liaisons and then Mandy’s eyes, brimming: ‘I’m pregnant.’

  And somehow, there was a secret trip away and the registry office and when they went to the family with the news, Mandy announced, ‘I’ve never been as happy as I am at this moment and I never will be again.’ Mitch’s sister Isobel said, ‘No, you won’t,’ and the happiness left Mandy’s face. Then there was the miscarriage and a few sad weeks, and life resumed and moved through a hundred mostly unhappy scenes of some sort of marriage. He seemed to be the protagonist in the story and so remained in every scene of sleeping, waking, eating and working, but all the other cast members knew more about the meaning of the story. He was without them now at this unanticipated and brutal turning point; Mitch had just seen his marriage, acknowledged it. It wasn’t what it appeared to be.

  And now for the denouement. He had an inkling of what his sister meant about momentary happiness.

  Feeling breathless and light-headed, he leaned on the strong, kindly lemon tree and looked at his dog sitting beside him, her small brown eyes gazing back into his.

  ‘Holy shit, Tink.’

  Eventually, he plodded up the path under the arbour and vanished through the dark oblong again and Tink put her head on her paws.

  Mitch washed up in the laundry, plugged his phone in to charge and stood in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen. The Morning Show was on the TV and his father’s bald head leaned uncomfortably from the edge of his reclining rocker. ‘You right, Pop?’

  ‘Righto,’ he said sleepily, his head moving upright along the side of the chair.

  Mitch poured half a cup of rolled oats into a bowl with a cup of water and put it in the microwave, made tea and four pieces of toast – two with Vegemite and two with honey. When the microwave pinged he removed the bowl and dribbled milk and sugar all over the gruel, grabbed Cal’s analgesics and placed them on his father’s stable table with a cup of sweet milky tea. Then he saw Mandy’s deflated bum again and the hateful defiance in her face. Why wasn’t she at work? It was well past seven-thirty. All those customers outside her shop! He changed the picture in his head to something good . . . Shane Warne, his slow run-up, the roll of his right arm, the ball travelling straight down the cricket pitch, spinning, the lovely drift to leg, Gatting moving towards the ball, his bat to the fore and it bouncing outside his leg stump. The ball passes, spinning to the outside edge of Gatting’s bat, it clips the top of his off-stump, the bails flip through the air and Gatting stares at the ground where the ball has bounced. The crowd in the Bong erupts. The world erupts. 1993. Ball of the Century. Mitch felt better.

  Callum Bishop – happy in his recliner rocker, neat as a pin in his clean blue shirt and woollen jacket – tucked a napkin into his collar, put the painkillers in his porridge, scooped them up and ate without taking his eyes from the TV. Milk spilled from his spoon, splashing into the gutter around the edge of the stable table then eking down into the deep crevice between the seat cushion and the leather rest.

  The Morning Show told them news about tollways in cities and car accidents on h
ighways, hurricanes in other countries and stranded whales in Tasmania. Then the attractive girl with pillow lips and stiff hair said, ‘And now for the weather,’ and the two men stopped, their tea halfway to their mouths. The low was still at the bottom of Australia and there were still no rain clouds anywhere on the continent. The men resumed breakfast, then Mandy was in the kitchen. They stopped chewing. Mitch turned his head from side to side to ease the tightness. Cupboard doors shut fiercely and water ran for too long. The microwave opened, slammed and then was quiet while she scrolled through Mitch’s text messages. The microwave pinged, cutlery and crockery collided and when the back door shut, the two men watched out the window, cups in hand, as she emerged from the end of the corridor of the sparse arbour into the dry air. She passed the shrivelled garden and the brittle orchard, her thumb moving across the keypad on her mobile phone, her small, triangular handbag bouncing against her disappointing bum.

  She reversed without looking. Tink jumped up onto the back of the ute and the farm dogs danced away from the wheels and her little white station wagon diminished into a low, brown dust cloud. The men resumed their breakfast. Mitch couldn’t remember if he had actually seen Mandy’s bum before he married her, but he knew he hadn’t seen her stark naked and sitting at the kitchen table like Neralie had on the rare occasions she lost at Strip Scrabble. And he understood with sinking certainty as he sat there in his recliner rocker, next to his father in a matching rocker, that his life wasn’t going to pan out the way it should have. And, come to think of it, he probably already knew that. ‘And so does she.’

  ‘What?’

  He looked at Cal, his old face screwed up in frustrated anticipation. ‘I said, do you want more tea?’

  ‘I’ve still got this one.’ He raised the mug, unsteady in his hand.

  Marriage was meant to make things solid. When you gained a partner the pressures eased because you kicked on together. Every Sunday the presenters on Landline introduced couples in clean work shirts standing side by side at the silo, shed or tractor: ‘My wife and I run three hundred hectares of wheat . . . The adoption of new digital technology has helped farmer Mitchell Bishop achieve greater efficiencies in his cropping . . . Together, he and his wife . . .’