The Year of the Farmer

by Rosalie Ham

‘Jesus,’ she said.

  ‘I get the feeling you’re not having fun.’

  ‘Sensitive, aren’t you?’

  Mitch threw his arms wide. ‘It’s beautiful here. I love it.’

  ‘Only because you’ve got no choice.’

  ‘I do actually love it,’ he said, shoving a wedge of orange into his mouth.

  They each chose a different part of the horizon to focus on.

  There it was. The truth out loud, a declaration to the land around them, the dirt they sat on, and it was also a declaration to Neralie. Mitchell Bishop was going to run the family property and, though they loved each other madly, Neralie just did not see her life matching the life he wanted. At that moment, it was like a screen had parted and what they each expected was now revealed to the other in 3D technicolour. Neralie bit her bottom lip and hoped that he wouldn’t touch her. Then he put his hand on her bare knee and she started bawling, and he gave her his hanky.

  ‘Star-crossed lovers,’ he said, which made her howl, so they huddled together against the wheel of the ute in the middle of the dry paddock, seeds splitting and noxious weeds scattering for miles. Mitch needed a partner who would be happy to spend a Saturday afternoon in mid-January burr-cutting when everyone else was at the swimming hole or lying on their couch under a fan watching the cricket. At that moment, Neralie would have given her left hip to be sitting in the cool of the public bar at the Bong, an icy beer in front of her and a pile of two-dollar scratchies to plunder. But she loved Mitch, and if she had just a bit more courage she would get out of this town and find out if there was another life, a better one.

  She blew her nose. ‘I can’t do this anymore.’

  ‘You can drive, I’ll cut burrs.’

  ‘No. I mean this. I don’t want to be your secret part-time girlfriend anymore.’

  ‘You keep telling me.’

  ‘Your mother hates me.’

  ‘She doesn’t hate you . . . and I would leave you alone but I can’t help it. It’s hard to find someone else when there’s only one pub.’

  ‘I know, but you need to let me go.’

  ‘Well, stop leaping out from behind things and dragging me for a kneetrembler every time you see me.’

  ‘Well, you stop climbing through my window.’

  ‘Don’t leave it open for me. I don’t know what you want.’

  ‘What do you want in life, Mitch?’

  ‘Rain to arrive in a timely manner.’

  ‘I want to go somewhere else and do different things. I’d even go to an art gallery if there was one.’

  Mitch said he’d get a paper and wait for her in the coffee shop and she started to cry again. He sighed. ‘Okay, I’ll look at the statues, they’re usually nude.’

  ‘I’m moving to Sydney.’

  ‘Move to Melbourne, it’s closer.’

  She wailed. He stood up, put out his hand to her. ‘Come on, let’s go for a swim and have one last root . . . again.’

  The rest of the afternoon passed in creamy, ribald delirium that left them exhausted, elated and a little embarrassed at their abandon, and when he dropped her back at her car he said, ‘Goodbye ex-secret part-time girlfriend,’ his throat hurting with love and lust and grief, but still, he didn’t quite believe it was over. It would never be over. She was absolutely gorgeous: petite but shaped like the number eight, sun-bleached blonde and lush-lipped. A startling girl standing on the landscape holding a hoe in her workmanlike hand with the dry clay plain behind her. Nature was a wonderful mother.

  When he knew his mother was going to die he told her he loved Neralie, had always loved her. Margot tugged her blankets up to her chin. ‘She’s trashy.’

  ‘She’s not,’ Mitch said. ‘She wears the same clothes everyone else does, she just looks sort of . . .’ Fuckable, he thought, but his mother said, ‘Trashy. She’s a barman’s daughter. You need to marry someone who grew up on a property, someone who’ll be a good partner running things.’

  On that day, Neralie determined that she would leave Mitch. But deep in her aching heart lurked the truth that he had always been there and always would be. You can’t erase the past and you can’t deny something that is, but around her there was nothing, just paddocks, faintly ticking, crackling as they baked in the sun. Through the windscreen, the flat land of survival and natural catastrophes stretched to nothing. Ravens abused her from the fence and hawks hung in the hot, windy sky. She turned the ignition key and drove home. Her mother was in the orchard. Birds gathered in the trees and on the electricity wires, watching her splash around in her homemade irrigation system. She called, ‘Hey, Nelly!’

  But Neralie didn’t want to sit on the verandah shooting at birds. She went straight to her room and locked her window.

  Then her mother was there. ‘Where’s Mitch?’

  ‘In his element,’ she said, thinking of his burr-caked socks and his sweaty shirt with its hovering black flies.

  ‘His mother’s back up at the hospital. Had a seizure.’

  Neralie turned to Elsie, who was fanning her hot, red face with her hat. ‘Minister’s on his way.’

  He would drive somewhere and reception would drop in and his phone would ping and tell Mitch that his mother was dying. Neralie unlocked her bedroom window.

  On that same day, while a whirly wind whipped in from the plains, bringing topsoil and wheat dust, Mandy Roper heard a dog bark. She stopped and leaned on her bike, and that’s when she saw Mitchell Bishop. He was at Kev’s bowser filling his ute. The sleeves were torn from his shirt and his jeans were worn, the oil on them velvety with dust, and he held one brown hand over his eyes. He took that hand and reached out to a black kelpie on the back of the ute, stroking its head soothingly. The dog smiled, circled and settled, and an unfamiliar yearning in Mandy’s sore, fatty heart flickered to life. Mitch’s mother was dying, everyone knew. As a kid, Mandy had seen her own mother and father die, and when she returned from boarding school she settled in with her grandmother to care for her, though her grandmother didn’t really require a carer. But Mandy stayed and then, finally, her grandmother died, only weeks prior to Margot Bishop’s sad demise. Mandy was left with a shack that was only fit to demolish, which she sold to pay for the funeral. Mandy and Mitch were soul mates, obviously.

  The day after Margot Bishop was buried, Neralie tearfully gave the landlord a month’s notice. ‘I have to leave this town.’

  The landlord, speechless for a moment, took off his fake Panama and put it back on again. Then his face turned cunning. ‘I’ll put a comfy chair behind the counter, and you can have maternity leave.’

  ‘You’ve got it wrong. Girls only get pregnant if they want to stay here.’

  o0o

  The envelope on the kitchen table from the Water Authority had been torn open, the letter removed and shoved back in. It was addressed to Messrs Callum S. and Mitchell S. Bishop, 1105 Bishops Road. While the porridge cooked, he read:

  Dear Mr Bishop,

  Your State Water Authority, in conjunction with the Sustainable Environment Department . . .

  Then he skipped to:

  At particular issue is the health of the river and this crucial subject will be central to a discussion to be held by the Water Authority . . .

  But it was the section addressed to irrigators that he was most alarmed by, though he’d been expecting it:

  As part of the upgrade to the region the Water Authority will be instigating modifications to your irrigation water supply channel. In preparation for the forthcoming meeting between the Water Authority and irrigators in your region, we write to advise you of the implementation of Total Channel Control (TCC), that is, end-to-end automation for efficiency and water-saving. Measures that need to be taken include the installation of solar-powered gates, meters and radio networks that will gradually replace Dethridge wheels and this will in turn ensure a
low-energy, low-carbon solution . . . there will be an opportunity to ask questions and voice concerns at the above-mentioned meeting . . .

  He put the letter down. ‘Modifications,’ he said, and in the living room Cal said, ‘What?’

  ‘The channel,’ he said, and Cal said he didn’t want to change the channel, the news was about to come on.

  The truth of the matter was that the pages on the table condemned his lifeblood. The twelve kilometres of channel that fed water to his farm were to be decommissioned, ploughed in, graded flat. Mitch was the only farmer on Bishops Road who used water from the channel, the only farmer, apart from Esther (who only watered weeds), who waited each season for that lifeblood to come babbling down the channel to feed his crops. And he was the only farmer left who maintained and used Dethridge wheels. The shiny black waterwheels once ubiquitous on channels through rural Australia were now obsolete; the lovely dark blades that steadily pushed clay-coloured water out to the thirsty bays were being replaced. Dethridge wheels were not efficient enough to meet the exacting needs of water conservation. Everywhere, farmers were busily ploughing in irrigation ditches and channels and replacing them with pipes and C. & P. Water automated pumps and application systems; everywhere irrigation bays glinted with solar-powered meters, small metal trees buzzing in the blazing sun. All very good to save water, if you could afford to. He’d made a half-hearted attempt to comply by lining his supply channel with plastic to stop seepage but his thirsty sheep found no purchase and were claimed by watery suffocation, just slid to the bottom of the black channel to become yabby food like the emus and koalas that came to drink at dusk. But change was vital for progress, everyone knew. At least there was the meeting, where he could ask questions and voice concerns.

  ‘That could make it a long meeting,’ Mitch said, and sifted through the remaining letters, because there was always another one. And there it was, the envelope with the bank logo in the corner. Dear Mr Mitchell . . .

  ‘Christ. Please.’ He rubbed his forehead.

  Callum crept into the kitchen, looked at the fridge, then the stove, then Mitch.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘The bank is asking us to sell some of our water allocation.’

  ‘We’ll need it next season.’

  ‘They want us to pay some of the overdraft and the mortgage and the hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar loan for the header. Interest costs us five thousand a year – seventy-five grand all up over fifteen years.’

  ‘Sell the house to pay half the mortgage.’ Cal opened the fridge, squinted inside, then closed it.

  Mitch pulled some bread from the freezer. ‘Baked beans on toast?’

  ‘Good-o.’ Cal crept back to his TV and his chair, his cane thucking gently on the worn floor.

  ‘And we could do with a new harvester,’ Mitch said, because each year the costs associated with maintaining it rose.

  o0o

  Jasey and Kevin came up from the sluggish, brackish river with their catch. Between them they had seven European carp, one undersized redfin and a gasping, insubstantial yellow belly. They, too, found a letter from the State Water Authority.

  Your State Water Authority, in conjunction with the Sustainable Environment Department, understands that community engagement and support is crucial to gaining successful environmental outcomes. The active engagement of the community’s energy, knowledge and intelligence is a vital ingredient in sustainability and ongoing education in communities. At particular issue is the health of the river and this crucial subject will be central to a discussion to be held by the Water Authority in the shire hall . . . there will be an opportunity to ask questions and voice concerns.

  Jasey dropped the letter on the kitchen table next to the fish and they looked towards the house opposite. Bennett and Megan Mockett’s house boasted a spa bath and sauna, a plunge pool and evaporative air conditioning. In stark contrast were the surrounding homes where the riparians, the people of the flood plain, lived. Jasey’s humble house was serviced by two yard taps, a laundry and a bathroom. Mrs Maloney’s shack had a rainwater tank and no bathroom at all, and her cow drank from the river and ate its grassy verges. The McIntoshes’ neat house and the Jovetics’ spare cottage bled recycled water from their single bathrooms onto their rows of struggling fruit trees and lines of luscious green vegetables.

  The station wagon parked in Bennett Mockett’s driveway had a Water Authority logo on its door. This told anyone who drove past that Bennett Mockett, the local stock agent, was friendly with the enemy – the Water Authority. And Megan Mockett was Kevin’s very own sister.

  ‘I understand that she’s your sister, Kev, but that car in her drive belongs to Cyril Horrick and that means they’re up to no good.’

  ‘Possibly.’ He picked up the letter from the Water Authority. ‘We’ll go ask Megan.’

  ‘Good one, Kevvy – make her choose between her husband and her brother.’

  ‘Isn’t blood thicker than water?’

  ‘At this point, water is blood.’

  They gutted and cooked the redfin and sat on the back verandah to eat it with lettuce, tomato, onion and vinegar in brown bread, all the while watching for the fox in the brittle reeds by the creek. Jasey was draining the last of her wine when the carp leaped and splashed and the fox shot from the reeds. Kev put down his can of beer as the fox trotted past, metres away, smiling at them on his way to the plains. The gun remained against the wall.

  ‘Yeah,’ Jasey said. ‘Enjoy your day. You’re going from “is” to “was” real soon, Mr Fox.’

  Kev picked up the letter again. ‘That redfin tasted like rotten mud.’

  ‘And cow shit.’

  They walked down the drive and across the road and up the gentle slope to their local stock and station agent’s double-storeyed concrete house. Cyril’s Water Authority car was still there, but only Bennett came to the front door. He opened the metal, laser-cut, gum leaf–designed front door of his eco-friendly, low-impact, high-performance, carbon-neutral bunker, holding a yabby stick. He smiled, pointed the skewer at their boots and said, ‘Coming in?’

  In unison they said, ‘No, thanks.’

  Kevin thrust the bucket of carp at Bennet.

  ‘Don’t eat ’em, mate, but thanks anyway. Maybe the Jovetics can do something with them?’

  Jasey held up the letter from the Water Authority and tried to see beyond him into the house. ‘We’ve come to be actively engaged and to offer some of the community’s energy, knowledge and intelligence for sustainability, and we’re also here to ask questions and voice concerns.’

  ‘Do that at the meeting, but I want you to know I’m on your side.’ Bennett bit a curled white yabby tail from his skewer. ‘These yabbies are from the swimming hole, harvested them myself. Sure you won’t come in and have one?’

  Kevin put the bucket of fish on his sister’s whiter-than-white carpet next to Bennett’s white ankle socks. ‘Since you’re on our side, you can fix a few things for us. We don’t call you Two-shits Mockett for nothing.’

  Bennett stood there in his you’ve-only-done-one-shit-but-I’ve-done-two house with his gourmet snack and bigger-than-most front door, shaking his head. ‘That name’s not fair; I don’t play one-upmanship.’

  ‘That bloody creek is so low and slow it’s an environmental hazard to everything except carp and leeches and you reckon you’re environmentally conscientious?’

  ‘I am conscientious! Have you seen the size of my compost heap? The size of my water tanks? This house is insulated with six inches – not four or three but six inches – of wool plus a reflective barrier nailed to the beams. I’m all for recycling and eco-living and most especially sustainability of the river and the bottomland we live on. I’m a riparian, I live across the street from the riverbank houses –’

  ‘We can see Cyril’s car, it’s got the Water Authority logo on it,’ said Ja
sey. ‘No one’s blind, we can also see this big cement fortress up here above the flood plain.’

  ‘You’re always the first to say the flood plains should be maintained.’

  ‘We can live with the odd flood if it means the river stays healthy, and I speak for the ferals, the McIntoshes, the Jovetics and Mrs Maloney and her cow and the kiddies who drink her milk.’ The riparians looked to rainfall in the high country and gauged when a flood was coming, but would the Water Authority tell them when water would be released from catchments? Would the riparians have time to load kids and chooks and cows and heirlooms and flee?

  ‘But,’ Kev added, ‘if the barons have purchased all the water and run it off for resale to all the poor suckers desperate to buy it, we don’t have to worry about floods, eh?’

  Bennett said there was no such thing as a water baron, but Jasey stepped back to look at his brand-new, very big and very expensive house. ‘So you just live in some other baron’s house, eh? You’re taking water from the irrigators, right, they’re only getting twenty percent of what they’ve bought, but how much of the remaining eighty percent will go back to the river for “sustainability”? Where will it be stored so the irrigators can go and scoop out a bucketful when they need it? Where and how will you release water back into the river system? Will it stay in the catchments and how much of it can we have? Just pop inside and ask Cyril for us, will ya?’

  ‘Restored river flow is good for the ecology.’ Bennett smiled, but Jasey had yet more questions.

  ‘We, the riparians, and your other clients, the farmers, want you to ask old Glenys Gravedigger Dingle how we are meant to do two shits instead of one without anything to shit. How much of the area’s production will vanish because of water buybacks? How will I run my store when most of my customers have no money? When can we all expect to die from fatigue and starvation, and how much money will all you water traders make out of our water?’

  Bennett repeated that there were no water barons, but Kevin said, ‘I’ll still have to pay increased water rates so that the riparians can go fishing and swimming without getting cholera, and the irrigators will be happy with their whizz-bang water toys, but none of them will be able to pay me the money they owe me for the repairs I’ve done because they won’t have any money left.’