The Year of the Farmer

by Rosalie Ham

  ‘It’s dark so I can’t see,’ Lana said. ‘But is there any water in that lake yet?’

  ‘A bit. Not much spare water about.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So, whose side are you on?’

  ‘I went to school with all of them, so everyone. But officially I’m a riparian. It’s hard.’

  Then they changed the subject and had a lovely meal and when he pulled up outside her house, Stacey put his arm on the seat behind her and leaned in close. ‘I really, really want to get to know you better. All of you.’

  She kissed him, longingly and deeply, but when he reached for her breast she pulled away and said, ‘On the first date I don’t sleep with boys.’

  ‘What about the second date?’

  ‘Possibly the third date, but depending.’

  ‘Want to go out for dinner tomorrow?’

  She opened the car door. ‘That was a great night.’

  ‘See you tomorrow?’

  ‘Phone me.’

  He watched her vanish into the gloom behind her parents’ house and drove to the pub and fell onto his bed, congratulating himself for not persisting. His reputation had to remain intact for a little longer. But he kept an ear out anyway, just in case the door swung open and Lana with the pert breasts was there, her nightie sliding down her long, long legs to pool about her thin ankles.

  Lana texted to report she was home – her two best friends replied immediately, awarding her ten out of ten for poise and decorum – then she undressed, hopped into bed and closed her eyes. A few minutes later she got up, dressed in a tracksuit and sneaked past her parents’ bedroom to the back door . . . where she found Jasey and Kevin, who sent her straight back to bed.

  At the pub, Neralie stood at the door of her room, listening. Then her phone buzzed in her hands. The message from Jasey read: Intercepted. But Neralie understood Lana’s need. During holidays when Mitch was home from boarding school, she’d say goodnight to her parents and brother, close her bedroom door and climb straight out her window. They’d cycle towards each other under the dome of stars, each appearing out of the tinkling gloom, and spend a pleasing time together in Esther Shugg’s haystack. And then, one Christmas morning, Santa left Neralie a packet of contraceptive pills and a reflector bike vest.

  19.

  Shot and sprung

  Mitch flicked on the computer, waited, and waited some more, and finally the grain market website loaded. Nothing had changed, with the strong US dollar and downward commodity prices. The drought was breaking all over the eastern states so exports were up and the dollar falling, making export industries competitive. But he’d probably only get less than $100 per tonne. He could possibly still break even if he kept harvest costs low, if his machinery held out, if storage costs were consistent . . . Next year would be better. He would go to the bank, sit in the air-conditioned office opposite the fragrant young man with the hairdo of many textures and tell him the good news. Then he would swan in to see Bennett Mockett with the proof of sales, and ask for brochures on a new tractor, a new ute and, most especially, a new harvester. He would pay off Mandy and wave her goodbye from the back door and take Neralie to the Riverglen Lake Resort restaurant and formally ask for her hand in lifetime companionship and permanent, exclusive rooting. ‘You’re full of shit, Mitchell Bishop,’ he said aloud. ‘You’ll be lucky if you’ve got a farm next year.’

  He grabbed a Weet-Bix, spread some butter on it and went to his dog, waiting on the ute. It was the smell of water on dry mud that made him stop, and then sunshine glinting off the surface. Water was flowing in his supply channel. He stood with Tink on the hard, dry bank looking down at it, remembering what it was like to see a flowering crop on a warm spring day, and it made him thirsty, and he wanted to strip off and jump in and get thoroughly wet, hide under the smooth, murky stuff, leaving his troubles in the other world. But it wasn’t his. It was theirs. All the water belonged to Cyril and Glenys Gravedigger and the polished chap with the gender-neutral name and $450 boots who fought with an iPad full of lies.

  ‘That is a ploy,’ he said to Tink. ‘A trap.’

  He waved to his donkeys and drove to check his crop. The soil was soft under his feet and he was pleased there was subsoil moisture, but that also meant that heavy machinery – a tractor or a harvester – could bog. He inspected a few seed heads and found them definitely shot and sprung. ‘There you have it, Tink. We’re pretty much sunk.’

  He put her in the cab with him and just sat for a while behind the wheel, Tinka panting, the spider repairing its web in his cracked rear-vision mirror, but he finally headed through Esther’s to the river. He travelled slowly, his arm resting on the open window. At the Jeongs’ westernmost boundary, Tink’s ears whipped forwards and her mouth closed; he followed her unwavering gaze. He reached to the glove box and found the binoculars. The men were on the riverbank near an old pump. Next to it, the bald guy with the big earlobes was working away at a very big hole with a crowbar and another was mixing cement with a shovel on a sheet of plywood, while the skinny bloke with ropey hair studied a sheet of paper. They wore brand-new workboots and their high-vis vests were discarded on the ground. ‘There you go, Tink. Gravedigger said she’d create employment. You could get a job installing meters. They’ll pay you more than me, but you’ll do a better job than these chaps.’

  The meter installers stopped to watch Mitch’s ute approach, holding their implements like Romans on guard.

  ‘You should tie your dogs up at night.’

  ‘You should stop exporting live animals, genetically fucking the food we eat, using all the water and polluting the air and the earth with chemicals.’

  ‘You certified and trained to install those meters?’

  ‘You certified to give dog-management instructions?’

  ‘Dogs eat sheep and lizards and Christ knows what, including fox bait.’

  ‘My dog doesn’t go anywhere. I know that for a fact, because she sleeps with me.’

  ‘Right,’ Mitch said, and put his ute in gear. ‘That’s no way to speak about your missus.’ He drove away and in his rear-vision mirror he saw the feral throw his shovel down and walk in a circle.

  ‘Well,’ he said, reflecting, ‘I’ve just about had a gutful.’

  20.

  A harvest, of sorts

  In the cab of his harvester, Mitch prodded the screen with his grimy thumb to adjust the satellite configurations. The B-double pulled up and his big sister descended from the cab into the new morning, wearing clean work clothes and lipstick. For a couple of years she’d arrived with Rory and Philippa in booster seats beside her, and the first time she’d backed the B-double up to a loading ramp, she’d squared it.

  Though he’d long been made redundant, Cal also fronted for harvest. He gave the advice he gave every year, then limped away with Tink – also redundant – to watch events from afar. The regular chaser-bin driver arrived and went to the tractor, and Mitch turned the ignition on, pressing the starter button, and the old harvester engine lurched and failed and lurched again and then turned over and kicked into life. He lowered the head. Every adjustment he made and every button he pressed lit a rattle somewhere way back in the contraption but, like a cruise ship, the harvester moved forward, the reel spun and the great combs brushed the crop into the cutters and the weak heads of the sad, shot crop vanished into the churning, thrumming machinations beneath him. He stripped through the first thin tonne in record time and as the seed spewed from the auger into the chaser bin, he acknowledged it was dull, weed-contaminated rubbish.

  It was when Isobel’s truck was three-quarters full and waiting for a final load from the chaser bin that the header slowed and came to a halt. Something always went wrong, and it was always because of wear and tear. The reels stopped and rose and the CB radio clicked and Mitch said, ‘The keys.’

  The cabin door opened and he climbed down f
rom the cab to reach through the wall of wheat at the head into the keyway.

  He had sharpened the tines, but cut stalks and weeds had gathered in one of the reels and bunched against the drapers and cutters, clogging the feeder and leaving the thresher to thrash away at nothing. Friction and metal fatigue.

  They started again and soon the light flashed on the harvester and the chaser bin was unloaded into Isobel’s truck and Isobel drove to the silos at Riverglen. Once there, she eased the truck up to the small cabin, where the lass on the testing deck worked the probe through the load, spilled the sample onto a dish and went inside to test it. The girls, in shorts and Blundstones, Southern Grain stitched to their shirts, worked away at the samples, testing and weighing and logging readings. Isobel handed over Mitch’s grower registration card and the tester handed back a small square ticket, which showed the impurity content of the grain was high, as was moisture, but protein was low. They offered her a very low cash price, which Isobel accepted. There was no point paying storage fees; grain like that would not sell for much no matter how long it sat there waiting for a price rise.

  Eventually the truck in front of Isobel rolled away and she drove onto the weighbridge, where another girl in a booth took her ticket, studied the screen in front of her, wrote the weight and handed it back to Isobel, who took her place in the next queue to unload.

  Mitch had just read her text – 2 hr wait – when the affirming thrum and grind coming from the drive component behind him groaned and the harvester stalled, as if the system was threshing a horse. There was a judder, everything seized, and the stink of burnt oil filled the cab. Something watery shifted in Mitch’s belly and acrid saliva filled his mouth. He sat there in the ruined header, eighty percent of his miserly income remaining in the paddock, wheat grit under his sweaty shirt and prickles in his socks, the air dusty and dry and filled with the alarming smell of hot metal and the sound of nothing.

  The CB clicked and the chaser-bin driver said, ‘May as well go home, then?’

  ‘Just give us a hand first, will ya? Please?’

  The old man saw it all through high-powered binoculars. He rubbed his sore hip with his palm and said, ‘We’re buggered now,’ and then his son disconnected the chaser bin from the old tractor, drove the tractor away and came back with the grain head trailer. They raised the reel and grain head, manoeuvred the trailer under it and dragged it away, leaving the castrated monster in the middle of the paddock, acres of unharvested wheat before it, a couple of rows of stubble behind.

  Later, in the subdued comfort of the pub, the discussion was about what might have caused Mitch’s header harvester to pack it in.

  o0o

  Sam Jeong parked his shiny ute, with its logo and multiple lights and aerials, next to the river. He stood in front of one of his new pumps, in the small square of shade from the solar panel. The concrete was still wet but the metal post held firm. He used the key to open the small metal box. Nothing registered on the screen. Water was flowing through the flume gates, but no flow was registering here. He opened the power control box, but the motor didn’t seem to be working. Cyril Horrick’s solar-powered pumps didn’t work, his new meter was useless, and an unknown quantity of water was flowing, flooding his crop. He reached into his back pocket for his phone, but there was no reception, so he drove to town.

  o0o

  The class had made great progress over the weeks, and so it was that the riparians, townies and farmers arrived at Lana’s computer class, sat with their respective clans and turned their devices on. The atmosphere was aloof, but not hostile. Some took advantage of the library’s free wifi, some discussed new tasks they’d discovered the machines could do. Mrs Goldsack sent the moneybox around for tea and biscuits and scolded those with overdue library books.

  Lana took her position before the class, the screen behind her. ‘Everyone turn on their computer or iPad,’ she said, her tone unusually cheerful.

  They adjusted their glasses and squinted at the screen and put their fat fingers over buttons or thumped too hard with their fingernails, but Lana waited, her screen projected onto the big whiteboard.

  ‘On my screen behind me, you can watch what I’m doing with my fingers, if you’re confused, okay? So, there’s an email I’ve sent you all. Remember what an email is?’

  Some nodded, others looked to their neighbour’s screen instead.

  ‘Look for an email with lana@srgv when you’ve opened your email account. You can search for a keyword, remember, or just scroll down.’

  The students, dutifully mimicking Lana’s actions as displayed on the screen, searched for and found an email in their inbox from her and opened it. Some read the message, Congratulations! You’ve just received your first email!, while others had a photo attached. It was a blurry photo, the lines ill-defined and the colours block-like, but it was of two people having sexual intercourse against the front of a white van. The pale-skinned man had bright red hair and the girl’s head was thrown back in ecstasy, her dark hair vivid against the white bonnet of the van, and it was projected on the screen behind Lana.

  The members of the technology class closed their devices. Those who knew how pressed delete. Someone went and closed Lana’s screen and sat her down. ‘It’s never been an issue for any of us, Lana. It’s none of our business.’

  Then someone leaned over to Mrs Goldsack and whispered why the room was deathly silent and Lana’s glowing presence had suddenly radiated such heat at Mrs Goldsack’s side. Eventually, they helped Lana to her feet and took her across to the pub. When they stepped into the bar, all talk ceased. Neralie put a bottle of top-shelf Scotch whisky in front of her friend, saying, ‘You’ll smile about it in five years’ time,’ and the regulars patted the vacant stool and told her, ‘It’s safe harbour here.’

  Levon phoned Kev and asked him if he’d checked his emails, then suggested he go see Jasey. And then the topic of conversation turned to Foxoff, the dog cull and the benefits to the community of exterminating vermin.

  o0o

  The letters were fanned across the kitchen table like brochures in a real estate office. Mitch had anticipated the abysmal bank balance, knew the end-of-year rate rise notice from the council was due, and expected Cyril’s formal rejection of his application for the riverfront pump. It was the invoice from Bennett Mockett that hurt the most. Everything from spray chemicals and inoculation products to fencing wire – even the cost of ear tags – had gone up. So he loaded a lucerne bale onto the back of the ute and drove away towards his friends, Mark and Cleopatra. As they crossed the supply channel, still full and flowing with other people’s water, a flock of starlings rose and folded and fell in a whorl over the grass. He looked to the fat messy eyrie in the old pine but Mr and Mrs Eagle were not there. The donkeys were in the far back corner of the paddock so he dumped the food and filled their trough, but only the weaners came towards Mitch. Cleo just raised her head and Mark swung his low head to see. He called, ‘I have put the feed over there, and over there is a trough of water. You can remain undecided, do nothing, but you’ll die . . .’

  The sky turned brilliant pink and he turned again to look up at the eyrie, but it remained lifeless, and he knew that his eagles had eaten something that had died from bait at Esther’s. Everything had a price. There were always consequences, good and bad. He set off for home and in the rear-vision mirror he saw the donkeys still standing there between the hay and the trough, and the weaners nibbling at the feed and drinking the water.

  He found the washing he’d done days before stuck against the spinner and hung it on the clothesline, matching trousers seam to seam so he only had to iron the cuffs and pockets, and then he stood back and admired his handiwork, enjoyed a moment of what life was like when it was just him and Cal, when he could drink beer in the shower and read the paper on the toilet with a cup of tea. He remembered the week he’d had with Neralie before she went away; she used all the
dishwashing liquid to shampoo the donkeys, and when he came in for lunch he found her lying on the couch in her pyjamas, her nose in a book, the house around her a complete mess. Mitch tidied their bedroom, hung her dresses and blouses according to colour and picked up her soiled garments. As he shoved them in the washing machine he called, ‘Don’t you know how to use a washing machine?’ and she reached for her mobile phone saying, ‘I’ll ask Mum.’

  Then his phone rang. It was Neralie. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Fretting.’

  ‘I’ve got a bar full of fretters here. Why don’t you join us?’

  o0o

  When he arrived at the pub, tanned and handsome in a sleeveless torn cotton shirt, Neralie was at once pleased, afraid and triumphant. He said hello, kissed her across the bar, and she gave him a beer. He joined the united front of Kev, Jasey and Lana in the corner where Stacey usually sat. He stood by the stool with a beer in his hand and spewed forth his latest tragedy. ‘Production squeeze,’ he said, and the people in the bar rumbled and shifted on their stools and shook their heads. ‘Bennett Mockett has just put all his prices up.’

  Levon, Darryl, Elsie, Neralie, Kev, Jasey, Lana and a couple of farmers just looked at him sympathetically. In Neutral Bay, the regulars stared.

  He drank his beer and put the glass behind the bar. ‘What?’

  Kev cleared his throat. ‘You’ve got metal filings in your harvester oil and petrol tank.’

  ‘Filings?’

  ‘Filings.’

  Mitch couldn’t speak. Neralie put another beer in front of him. Kev explained, finishing with ‘and that’s not all’. They told him about Kelli’s bent aerial, the poaching of Paul from the IGA, Neralie’s possessions molested and tied in a bundle in her room, and Morton Campininni said she’d once short-changed him five cents. ‘She didn’t return a book to Mrs Goldsack,’ Larry added. There were things she had done in primary school, too, and finally, Kev explained that they’d found his balsawood planes and treasures at the town tip, ‘. . . but we saved them, or as many as we could.’