The Year of the Farmer

by Rosalie Ham

  Across the hall Callum’s thoughts were of his ancestors. They’d be disappointed about the failing farm. He should have bought more land and built up a profitable business . . . but there was the 1963–64 drought, and another in ’82–83 . . . and the years of Margot’s illness, the medical bills. A business needs capital to work, especially a small business, otherwise it starves to death. He had gifted his son a perilous future that was now doomed.

  He would find a way to set things right.

  o0o

  Elsie reported that they’d done forty plates and fifteen bar meals and taken bookings for Christmas lunch. They agreed they needed better internet access and Steve said he’d see about an antenna. Wanda wanted to know about the divisions, how the locals would cope with conflict over their ‘spiritual homes’, and Darryl said it’d take more than a war to stop the locals coming to their own damned pub. Steve suggested the regulars should be moved outside with the hippies, who’d been smoking wacky-baccy. Elsie said you couldn’t put smokers in with the kiddies and Levon said the ferals paid cash and they’d harvest soon and be too stoned to go anywhere.

  Then Neralie finally spoke: ‘It was a disaster. It was all over by ten-thirty and it was all because of that woman.’

  ‘Nah,’ Darryl said. ‘It wasn’t the worst night we’ve had here, and they’ll all be back for episode two.’

  But it was a disaster for Neralie. She’d wanted it to be perfect, wanted it to fix everything, get it back to how it was. But it was impossible, she could see that now. She’d left for Sydney and discovered that she wanted to be home and she wanted Mitch. But if she took him, well, there was Cal’s farm . . . And now her calves burned, her feet told her she would have to buy her first pair of cushioned orthopaedic shoes and she stank of beer . . . but you couldn’t erase the past and you couldn’t deny something that was.

  She climbed the stairs to her room with thoughts of crawling under her sheets to weep, but when she opened her door, something was wrong. In the pink glow of her bedside lamp her room usually looked soft and fleshy, but tonight her bed was stripped and her messy room was very tidy – rudely bare, in fact. The cupboard doors were open and the drawers emptied. In the middle of the room was a big fat bundle. It appeared someone had taken the linen from her bed, spread it on the floor and dropped the entire contents of her room onto the sheets. That person had handled her bras, panties, frocks, hairclips, socks, shoes, notebooks, postcards, photos, pyjamas, face cream, lipstick, tweezers, mirror, mascara, earrings and purse. Everything had been dumped onto the sheet, and her entire life now sat like a large, alien pudding, the sheet ends tying it all up with a bow. The skin up her spine crawled and she felt nauseous.

  17.

  Unacceptable

  The grain report told them nothing they wanted to hear. More local rain was forecast and the strong US dollar was pressuring commodity prices down, but the forward-selling market was looking positive because the American crops looked grim – no rain – and rain was expected in Europe, which the grain producers there didn’t want. On top of that, Canada, too, was wet and the Black Sea region was too hot. So if Mitch had even a reasonable crop he’d be able to sell it for a top price. But his crop was poor. Then the reporter told them that fuel costs were rising because of some war somewhere.

  Mitch’s phone rang and Mandy brought it to him. ‘We’re not going to Girri Girri for Christmas,’ she said, and the rest of the rural report was lost.

  ‘There have been more dog attacks,’ Isobel said. ‘Out your way this time. And we’re not going there for Christmas, we’re having it here. Come if you want.’

  He watched his wife through the window. As she stomped past Tink, the dog leaped up onto the back of the ute and flattened her ears, keeping her eyes on the little white wagon. As it sped away, Mandy’s fist came out the window, her rude finger pointed to the sky. Tink hopped down and sat at the yard gate again. ‘I can’t come for Christmas,’ he said, feeling wretched, because he wanted a peaceful Christmas; he wanted Mandy to be approachable; he wanted to talk to her about Christmas, and the future.

  o0o

  He parked his motorbike near an outlet on his neglected irrigation bank and glanced around for sunbaking snakes. Finding none, he took his shovel from its holder and dropped the blade onto the bank of the ditch, compacted by hard hoofs and blasting sunshine. The blade bounced like metal off cement, and then, of course, the flume gates wouldn’t budge in their concrete runners. But the infrastructure was nothing he couldn’t rebuild with the tractor and the grader blade. So he replaced the shovel, Tink jumped up and they headed for his stud rams and their ewes, content in their new marriages, grazing together in the crop stubble, making pure-bred stud Merino lambs. As he drove towards their rounded grey forms, he dismissed his fear of wild dogs and dreamed of a hundred-percent pregnancy rate, even some twins. This year he’d cull the barren ewes again so that in a few years’ time every sheep on the property would be paying for its own upkeep.

  At the sound of the motorbike, the sheep raised their heads. There was something about some of the pale faces and legs and the fluffy torsos among his thick-set, dusty Merinos. He stopped the bike. It was the ears. They were at the top of the head, almost upright, not the leisurely downwards incline of the Merino ear. His guts turned and his saliva thinned. Among the rounded, fluffy polls were bald polls and bald faces, pale and narrow . . . and bald legs . . . and, finally, the profiles: those distinctive snouts. Border Leicesters. Esther Shugg’s Border Leicester rams were in with his stud ewes and Christ knew what the fuck they’d produce now. He got off his bike and turned in circles with his fists clenched. ‘Faaarrrrrkkkkkkk!’ he roared. ‘I do not want Border Leicester cross sheep!’

  Tinka jumped down. Mitch reached for the .22, emptied a few bullets into his palm, loaded up and took aim at the imposters, but they gazed calmly back at him through their innocent green eyes and he lowered the gun, swore, and put it back in its holder. His hands went to his knees and he dry-retched into the sharp stubble, hating everything and everyone.

  o0o

  Nurse Leonie Bergen, on her way from a maternity visit to Mary-Lou Jeong, an expecting mum with a one-year-old and a dose of hyperemesis gravidarum, saw Mitch dancing exuberantly with his gun and slowed a little. ‘Border Leicesters,’ she said, knowing full well that the gate had been closed when she’d driven past earlier and now it was open. Nurse Leonie had passed only one car that morning. Her mind went back to the day Gloria Roper forced her baby into the world and Nurse Leonie momentarily regretted the battle she had waged to get baby Mandy to breathe.

  Nurse Leonie Bergen saw her patients and then, at the end of the day, lumbered across the road from the hospital to see her husband in his thriving new shop, the German Shepherd. Gottlob turned to her as she came in, relieved she wasn’t another bloody customer. He placed a cucumber salad in front of her with his large farmer’s hands and wiped them on his German Shepherd–emblazoned linen apron. They talked about the day’s trade – brisk and constant – and the day’s news. Behind him, Vorbach washed dishes and placed them gently onto a drying rack.

  Then Leonie went to the IGA and the pub, so by five o’clock that evening, every person in town knew Mitch’s breeding stock had been sabotaged.

  o0o

  Lana had an inkling the presence dimming the light around her desk wasn’t a local – the smell and the substance of the air lit her senses – so she looked up from her screen, her pleasant expression in place, and met the eyes of Stacey Masterson, leaning on her counter like a cowboy at a saloon bar. ‘Lovely morning.’

  ‘How are ya?’

  ‘Same as I look.’ He smiled, then straightened, businesslike. ‘I’m after a map.’

  ‘Topographical or road?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘The shire?’

  ‘Please.’

  He watched her stand and walk into the back offices, the
door behind her clicking shut, and while he waited he circled the spacious vestibule, looking at aerial shots of the town, black-and-white photos of the opening of the Water Authority Plant, and photos of the local Aborigines, long gone, in the early 1880s. When Lana returned she carried two fat, neatly folded maps and asked if he’d like to look at them before he took them.

  ‘Nah, you’ll find out I can’t refold maps.’

  ‘Other stuff you’re good at, I bet.’

  ‘Yep,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’

  She nodded, sat back down again, smiling stupidly, though a little deflated that it was just maps he wanted. At the door, he turned. ‘Got a question. If I wanted to take someone out Friday night, impress them, eat nice food somewhere different . . . where would I go?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘twenty minutes away there’s Riverglen, and they have the Riverglen Lake Resort restaurant. Excellent food, I hear, but a bit pricey.’

  ‘The Riverglen Lake Resort restaurant, you reckon?’

  ‘I reckon.’

  She watched him type in his password and do a search on his iPad. He told her reception was good in her foyer and that he might drop in more often, and then he looked her dead in the eye and said, ‘All booked. Pick you up about seven, okay?’

  At the door, he turned and smiled at her, and she wished she could think of something witty to say, but she couldn’t, so she just smiled and waved until the door had closed behind him. Then she walked across the reception area to the table under the photo of the vanquished Aborigines and tidied the magazines. When she saw his car reverse out of its spot, she skipped back to her desk and dialled Jasey’s number.

  o0o

  The lunchtime pub topic was how to get a truck back from Kev before harvest. Neralie, who appeared to be out of sorts, suggested the farmer just pay him if he wanted his truck, but he shook his head, finished his beer and left. The topic moved to dogs, which had torn apart a few thousand dollars’ worth of that farmer’s sheep in the night.

  ‘Bennett Mockett is responsible for culls, isn’t he?’

  Everyone agreed.

  Neralie turned to the regulars. ‘Which one of you lot’s responsible for your bar tab?’

  ‘We’ll pay after harvest.’ Then one looked at the other and said, ‘It’s your turn this year,’ and the other said it wasn’t and the third said he’d worked the last harvest but the other two disagreed.

  Two minutes into the argument, Neralie interrupted. ‘It’s been five years! Does it make any bloody difference whose turn it is?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ they said in unison.

  She was anxious, fretting and impatient. Steve and Wanda had left for Sydney, not entirely happy, so her bar had to thrive, and there was a better life to get on with after five years of only half living. Neralie was tired of seeing with only one eye, missing the middle of everything, catching the edges and not feeling the relevance. And then the door opened . . . but it was just her friends, Lana looking as if she’d been elected shire president and Jasey looking like she’d just won lotto. They stood beaming at her.

  Neralie called, ‘Dad?’

  He didn’t reply.

  ‘DARRYL!’

  Her father rushed in from the kitchen, a tea towel and saucepan in his hand. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Hold the fort.’ As the three girls left the bar and ascended the stairs, Darryl looked at the regulars and said, ‘Secret women’s business.’

  They nodded. ‘Won’t be secret for long.’

  o0o

  When Isobel mentioned Mandy’s plans for Christmas, Aunt Opal said, ‘It’s unacceptable. She doesn’t cook well. I’m not going.’

  ‘It would be easier just to go to Bishops Corner. There’s always next year.’

  ‘At my age, “next year” is a wish rather than a promise.’ She hung up and slumped in her Victorian spoon-backed bedroom chair and let her bottom lip drop. ‘Blast.’ She folded her lace handkerchief and popped it back in her large bra, recalling the happy Christmas images of 1940 onwards from her aged but remarkably reliable memory. She didn’t want these memories sullied, nor did she want to drive all over the countryside in the searing heat in that high square machine Isobel drove. And why endure bad food, second-rate wine and paper serviettes on Christmas Day? Or any day, for that matter? Plus, she’d be a guest in her own home.

  At Girri Girri, Isobel put the phone in her pocket and said to her husband, ‘Mandy Roper is the arse through which the devil herself shits.’ She rode to her flock and prodded them homewards on the quad bike. Closer to the yards, she parked and walked ahead so that they followed her, mothers and their lambs, some yearling siblings, and even a few old muttons. She closed the gates and they turned their triangular faces to the ram in the next yard and huddled closer together, a group of boulders wearing woolly coats. Isobel decided they no longer felt safe in their fold. ‘I’m going to shed them,’ she said.

  Digby reminded her that the dogs were over at the other side of town.

  ‘Dogs travel,’ she said. ‘And my sheep aren’t happy.’

  He looked at the ram, a beautiful specimen, pale curled horns, straight-backed, deep-shouldered and square-hipped, with a large, firm, woolly scrotum. She had a good eye, his wife. ‘I don’t think it’s necessary but we could put the ram in.’

  ‘Fuck off, Digby,’ she said in her cultivated accent. ‘All the sheep should be up close to the house.’

  But Digby had too many sheep; it was too impractical and far too much work.

  They drove over the plains to check on the dust-coloured Dorper ewes and their new lambs gathered in small, bewildered mobs across the paddock. Small patches of green phalaris and ryegrass, temperate grasses, reminded Digby that his property, Girri Girri, was ideal pastoralists’ land. He felt successful and proud, but when they came to the river he saw that the tide had risen. ‘Released water. Too much there just to be rainwater.’

  Isobel said, ‘I didn’t see anything from the Water Authority about it, did you?’

  ‘No one sent warnings to me.’

  So they drove to the old barrages and stood on the bank, watching the tide carry steady islands of branches and debris westwards into the pink-tinged sky. A swamp harrier skimmed past, on the lookout for dinner, and a gull-billed tern stood up to its knees in the reeds watching for fish. The evidence of returned wildlife and the majesty of the river flowing strongly after all these years made Digby nostalgic, so he told Isobel – as he had many times before – that Prestwich ancestors had built the barrages, now frail and elderly, back in the days of steamboats and Aborigines. ‘And in the 1870s, there was a pier to transport wool to the railway station, but this water will revive the river gums, give a bit of stability to the dry banks. I’ll start the reticulation, have a green lawn by Christmas.’

  And that was when Isobel pointed to the great log. ‘You might not have a lawn if that log takes out the ancestral barrages.’

  The log was drifting towards the fast lee side of the riverbend. It swung wide, revealing the detritus propelling it – an ammunition island – and it was aiming straight for the ancient barrages beneath them. They stepped back, Digby glancing to the vehicle. At the last second the log missed the barrages but its wandering tail caught a massive red gum root reaching down to water from the high, bald bank and the whole mess turned like a great wreath and finally rammed the giant tree trunk and its dunnage into the bank, brittle from the drought and soft with water, and Isobel and Digby watched as the bank dissolved, dragging the old barrage planks, about one hundred and fifty years of history, with it, yowling and splintering. Then another few metres of rich alluvial bluff sank and all that was left was a great chunk of exposed riverbank, like the centre of a warm cake.

  Isobel swore and Digby said, ‘That was a few hundred thousand dollars of my prime grazing land that just washed away.’ He’d have a glass of thick red wine th
en sit down and write a stern letter to the ombudsman. No, damn it – he’d ring the chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. They’d rowed together at school. Isobel would phone Cyril, and Bennett. ‘We should have been warned, and Bennett has to organise a dog cull. It’s all very unacceptable.’

  o0o

  He didn’t hear the back door slam, just her quick, hard footsteps. ‘You phoned your old aunt yet?’

  He got up and went to shut the door. Family skirmishes were new to Mitch and he didn’t quite know how to please his recalcitrant aunt, his stormy sister, his garrulous father or his furious wife.

  ‘I said, have you phoned –’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Okay, I will.’ She snatched up the phone and dialled, so Mitch grabbed it from her and held it high.