The Year of the Farmer

by Rosalie Ham

  Then the door swung open and Mitch was standing over her, the .22 in his hand. He said, ‘Morning, Mandy,’ leaned the gun by the sink and brushed his teeth. He wet a comb and dragged it carefully through his hair – missing the bit at his crown – then picked up the .22 and left, slamming the door shut. It was like an explosion in her head, and as the water vibrated against the edge of the bath, Mandy whispered, ‘I hate you.’

  o0o

  Neralie woke from a dead, exhausted sleep and rolled over in her bed. Then she remembered Christmas Day. ‘Glad that’s over,’ she said to no one, but despite everything she felt quite cheerful. She reached for her phone.

  The message from Mitch made her go cold.

  o0o

  Lana, Kevin and Jasey watched Boxing Day dawn from Jasey’s back verandah. They were enjoying a Bundy and rum, Lana smoking a cigarette, while Beau snored gently in his chair, his mouth stained blue from red wine. Mist lingered over the water and pungent smoke wafted from the burning mosquito coils. The mozzies buzzed on anyway. Eddies curled over the river surface and the water moved steadily, forcefully. Jasey sat forward, her hands up, telling them, ‘Shoosh.’ They looked to the rushes. Jasey quietly loaded a rifle.

  Beau stirred, froze, then followed their gaze to the ducks. They were lined up, flat-footed, on the low branch, their neat beaks turning this way then that, unsettled. ‘No, don’t!’ he said.

  Lana put her hand over his mouth, Jasey raised the gun, aimed, squeezed, and there was a loud crack.

  Beau jumped and the birds and mozzies stirred and the ducks flapped and scattered and the rushes shuddered then stilled. Beau looked at Jasey holding the smoking gun. ‘It’s like Apocalypse Now.’

  ‘Stick around for the cull,’ Jasey said. ‘It’ll be better than anything Marlon Brando ever did.’

  He didn’t follow his three new friends down to the river to retrieve the dead fox.

  o0o

  Neralie found Callum Bishop in his bed. His eyebrows rose and his wrinkled brow lifted. He just said, ‘He went away in the ute.’

  ‘Did he take a gun?’

  He sat up. ‘There’s the cull tonight.’ But she had gone, striding down the hall to the laundry. She pushed through the bathroom door and glanced down at Mandy in the warm brownish water, small islands of suds clinging to her knees like bubbling fungus. She was heavy-faced and greenish but had no visible bruises.

  ‘Morning, Mandy,’ she said loudly.

  Mandy heard the linen cupboard in the laundry screech open, heard the bottom shelf creak as Neralie used it as a step-up to the top shelf.

  The gun was not in its safe. Neralie raced back through the bathroom, letting the door slam. The contents of Mandy’s Christmas Day rose up from her stomach and spilled out, turning the dull bathwater around her the colour of green algae. She was amazed at the amount of créme de menthe she’d consumed and grateful it was no longer hers.

  o0o

  Mitch fed his farm dogs, let them off for a run, then tied them up.

  He cleaned the gun and blasted a few cans from fence posts. The scope crosshairs were accurate and he could shoot straight even with an injured finger.

  Then he drove towards his pregnant ewes, but when he stopped to open a gate he was saddened by the absence of the guardian donkeys, his discerning, decisive, independent and fierce creatures. ‘I’m going to be more like Cleopatra,’ he told Tink.

  In the thirty minutes or so that Mitch sat in the ute in the sunshine, birds flew past, sheep grazed, weeds grew and the eagles tended their new nest. He was on his knees finishing off the fence the day their shadow slid across the ground before him and he watched them glide towards the tall young pines a mile to the east. He needed to rebuild, but whatever he did, he’d have to pay, and it might result in the loss of the farm, but if he did nothing, he’d eventually lose it anyway. Then Tink woke from her doze and turned her ear to the sound of the approaching truck.

  Neralie pulled up beside the ute, got out and climbed into the cab to sit on Mitch’s lap, facing him.

  ‘Good to see you,’ he said.

  ‘Really good to see you.’ She kissed him. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Thinking.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Buridan’s ass. It’s a paradox; we studied it at school. Humans should choose for the greater good. But when faced with equally good choices, a rational choice can’t be made – by donkeys or humans. It has to do with free will, some say instinct.’

  ‘I’m about to employ my free will to satisfy my instinct,’ she said, removing her shorts.

  ‘I’ve decided to act for the greater good,’ he said, as Neralie pulled his shirt over his head. ‘Though it isn’t rational.’

  ‘I’m perfectly rational,’ she said and helped him to remove his pants.

  o0o

  Mandy saw Mitch drive past with the grader blade on the front of the tractor. She abandoned the tub of ice cream she was eating and reached for the phone. Stacey had not phoned her; she would enjoy telling him his channel was lost.

  In his library, Callum sat in his tweed coat with his tam-o’-shanter in place, dabbing at his cloudy old eyes with a hanky. In front of him, the cupboard doors were open and the shelves were bare. The logbooks were missing. A century’s worth of data – the entire history of sheep-breeding records and statistics, as well as rainfall records and crop harvests – was gone. Three generations of work erased from the world. Callum pressed both palms to his wincing heart and gritted his teeth, waiting for the pressure to ease.

  o0o

  Over at the channel, Neralie held her phone up and said, ‘Smile,’ and Mitch smiled for the camera.

  ‘I don’t know why I didn’t just do this in the first place.’

  She took the photo. ‘Because they control your water and therefore your life.’

  o0o

  At first Stacey ignored the ping, presuming it was Mandy again, but when he saw it wasn’t he returned the call.

  ‘Mate,’ he said nervously, ‘what’s happening?’

  ‘I’m about to bulldoze the channel flat and send a film of the event and a letter of complaint to every media outlet in the southern hemisphere and to every Opposition politician I can think of. I’ll tell them about your scheme selling pumps and meters and installing them badly so you can get paid to reinstall them, and I’ll tell them how you skimmed water off the top of allocations and sold it for a hundred and fifty dollars a megalitre while you frigged about reinstalling the pumps, and how you sent the water down my supply channel to fill Riverglen Lake and want me to pay for the upkeep of the channel. And I’ll tell them that you want to give me a free sprinkler system to shut me up. Now I’m hanging up so I can phone old Gravedigger Dingle.’

  In the past he’d done some impressive circle work, but the one-eighty the representative from the Southern Water Supply renewal project performed that day in the main street was perfectly executed and raised a cloud of rubber smoke that impressed Stacey himself as well as the patrons at the Bong.

  o0o

  Mitch lowered the blade to the bank at the point where the supply channel narrowed to travel under the small bridge at Bishops Corner’s gate. The water underneath was invisible beneath the camouflage of newly multiplying weeds, lovingly germinated from Esther Shugg’s stock. He revved so that the diesel smoke lifted the cap on the exhaust above his hat and he smiled and waved to his girlfriend. She gave him the thumbs-up and pressed record.

  Then Stacey’s car came tearing down the road and skidded to a halt in a dusty cloud and he burst from the driver’s door, his hands held up in a gesture of surrender. ‘Stop!’

  ‘Facebook, YouTube, every newspaper and TV news program, mate,’ Mitch yelled. ‘The politicians are being paid by someone somewhere not to care, the water traders are in on it, no one’ll do anything until it goes on Four Corners.’r />
  ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘If you take my wife off my hands, I’ll stop.’

  ‘A lot of people will get hurt – innocent, defenceless scapegoats, people who were only doing what they were told.’

  ‘This is my year. Take it or leave it.’

  Stacey put his hands on his thinning hair and said, ‘Oh fuck, I need to think this through.’ He’d back-doored this determined man on his tractor and it was a shameful thing to do, but he could never submit to a meaningful relationship with someone who was prepared to ruin someone else for money, someone who’d deface a lovely 1990 Holden Commodore. Stealing water was an unacceptable practice, he knew, yet he was prepared to skim water off this channel and sell it on the sly for $150 a meg, and he’d agreed to suck water from the river and send it down this channel to fill Glenys’s lake. And though he was reluctant to admit it, he really did like Lana, the riparian. It was all very confusing.

  ‘Do what you have to,’ he said to Mitch, and went and sat on the bonnet of his car and watched the grader blade shift the bank. Lovely water sloshed free and spilled, washing the dirt away, the brown fluid catching in the tyre imprints to run through the stubble, and Mitch just kept flattening the bank, shovelling it down into itself, mud spinning in the air from the rubber wheels and water spreading and seeping into the ground. When he’d erased a good couple of hundred metres of channel, Mitch got down and stood up to his ankles in the valuable water as it trickled to Esther’s weeds and he poured his heart out to the phone Neralie held. He spoke of being an ass and how he was midway between the hay and the water, feeling paralysed by the choices he had to make, but he would not let himself be killed, and something had to change in order that he could go on living.

  They emailed the video clip to Glenys Dingle, to various officials at the State Water Authority, to the federal minister for agriculture, to the Department of Primary Industries, and to newspapers and the ABC, and Mitch was pleased that his actions would produce consequences of some sort.

  Stacey drove away and Mitch took a selfie in front of the grader blade of himself with an arm around Neralie, Tink by his knees, the sloppy heap of mud that was once a supply channel all around them.

  o0o

  Early evening, they started coming through Neralie’s door. Esther drove past the kerb decorated with utes boasting spotlights and gun rests and boxes of ammunition, and parked her Dodge at the back of the pub. Everyone came. The Bishop arrived, Callum sat with Esther and Mitch joined Kev and Levon. Mandy followed in her little white wagon and joined Beau.

  The local stock and station agent stood in the white light of the projector, a conductor with his baton, indicating shooting areas north of the riverbank and allocating drivers and shooters. ‘As I predicted, it’s a mild southerly tonight, so stay upwind. Keep the town behind you and the breeze in your face. I can tell you that a pack of wild dogs has travelled as far and wide as Girri Girri and Esther’s property, so it’s feasible that the culprits come out of the ferals’ camp, or they’re wild and live in the grassy box woodlands opposite the swimming hole. The night is all about apex predators.’

  Bennett Mockett turned off the projector and the carpenter asked Two-shits why he had allocated the top shooting spot to himself and his Digital Night Vision Riflescope. Bennett replied that it was only right that he and Stacey and the officer from the Department of Primary Industries take responsibility, since they were the most qualified and had organised the authorisation.

  Esther reminded them all that her Dodge was equipped with a sling and hoist should anyone need help to transport disposed vermin. Bennett eyed the hunters. ‘I’m aware each group has reached their own arrangements with regard to appropriate transport and disposal.’ Then suddenly, in groups of two and three, the councillors, irrigators, riparians and townies left the pub and went, united, into the black star-speckled night, the smooth barrels of their loaded guns frosted silver by the moonlight.

  Mandy had a good view of the telly and the remaining patrons, including Callum, Esther . . . and Isobel Prestwich. She eyed Jasey sitting with her fighting partner, Lana, across the bar next to the single mothers. And there were the walkers too – Keira and Madison, Amelia and Bree-Anna and Loren and Trixie and Nicole and Debbie and Coral and Kelli – and the smart set, and Isobel’s precious craft ladies, knitting. Mandy was not done with any of them yet. They deserved more. She moved her chair a little closer to the boy from Sydney and demanded wine from Neralie, who filled her glass, generously and graciously. Elsie turned the TV down; the patrons watched their phones for messages and photos. A song played through the sound system – ‘I stopped loving you though I knew I could because you didn’t love me as much as you should, so now it’s your turn to die . . .’ – and faraway gun blasts spiked the tense atmosphere in the pub. Beau said, ‘It’s callous and primitive here, dangerous,’ and Callum said, ‘Not if you do the right thing.’

  o0o

  A round white glare caught the dogs coming out of the bush behind where the swimming hole used to be, heading west, a low puffing pack, the silver moon sliding across their fast backs. Bennett, Stacey and the officer from the Department of Primary Industries followed them in their crosshairs as they gathered pace, vanishing and emerging from lignum stands and tree trunks. When the pack hit a wide clearing shots cracked and dogs dropped, flipped and stumbled to the ground, dead. After two minutes of intense fire and a few more minutes of sporadic shooting, six dogs had been felled.

  To the east of town, out towards Bishops Corner, Kevin manned the spotlight. Mitch and Levon sat beside him on the ute tray, waiting. Above, the black night sky held silver bursts of light and shone with washes of stardust and twinkling planets. Scraps of remaining cloud floated away quickly. Faint gunshots came to them but they saw no dogs, just many foxes chasing the call of the fox whistle, running to their deaths in the blinding spotlight.

  o0o

  When the gunfire surrounding the town thinned, patrons switched on their torches and drifted to their homes. ‘May as well finish this,’ Neralie said, emptying the bottle of wine they’d been drinking into Mandy’s and Beau’s glasses. Neralie locked the front door and soon Isobel, Callum and Esther left using the back door. The barmaid and her mother put up the stools, tidied the bar and counted the cash, then Elsie stood by the light switch and Neralie said, ‘It’s all over, Mandy, time to go.’

  Beau said goodnight and Mandy scraped her change from the bar and followed him. Elsie shut all the lights down and the place went black. The odd shot rang out until dawn.

  27.

  Try the Billabong Hotel

  Cyril placed a cup of tea on his wife’s bedside table. Pam was reading the newspaper on her iPad, so Cyril left and returned with his own cup of tea. ‘Have you seen my watch?’

  ‘Top drawer, bedside table,’ she said, and Cyril strapped his watch onto his wrist. He pulled the covers back and sat on the bed. Pam looked at him over her glasses and said, ‘I want you to go to the shed and get two large suitcases.’

  ‘Of course.’ He pulled the covers up.

  ‘Now,’ she said.

  He pushed the covers back and went immediately to the shed, thinking, It’s a ruse, she’s organised a surprise trip for my retirement. He dusted the cases off, took them inside and put them down next to the wardrobe. ‘Now what, my love?’

  ‘Love is gone, Cyril, and so are you. Fill those suitcases with your possessions and leave this house.’

  She flipped the iPad over and held it up. The headline of the online newspaper read: minister for primary industries sacks Water Authority managers in water fraud scheme. ‘I didn’t mind earning money from installing pumps and meters, Cyril, but stealing water from the locals and selling it back to them is unacceptable.’

  On the kitchen bench his phone started to ring. At the same time the landline phone rang and someone knocked on the front door.

  ‘
You haven’t started packing, Cyril.’

  ‘Pam, darling – please . . .’

  ‘“Investigations revealed that the Water Authority was using 60 percent of water buybacks and water-saving measures for the Riverglen Lake Resort project, funded and mostly owned by local and state government employees, and retaining a mere 35 percent for farming purposes, with 5 percent of the tally unaccounted for.” You were selling that five percent, weren’t you?’

  ‘Where will I go?’

  ‘You could try the Billabong Hotel. I hope they give you credit – I’ve emptied all our accounts.’

  ‘I’ll get time with the puppies, surely?’

  ‘The Billabong Hotel is no place for puppies.’

  Outside, the ferals rolled their vans up onto the lawn and parked next to the television trucks. Camera people focused lenses on the house and well-groomed TV anchors stood in Pam’s petunias talking into microphones.

  o0o

  In the dining room at the Bong, a table of strangers – TV crews and reporters, men with very white teeth and women with fake tans wearing inappropriate shoes – were running up a huge tab. But Neralie had their company credit card, so she smiled while she pulled beers and served meals.

  Levon looked at Cyril and his suitcases. ‘First you have to pay for room nine – it was suddenly vacated by Stacey overnight. You can have his unpaid tab too.’

  Cyril opened his mouth to object but thought about the puppies and handed over his credit card. On the TV above the bar, Glenys Dingle was elbowing her way to her office through a media pack wielding smartphones and microphones. ‘Will you resign immediately, Ms Dingle?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ she said, and ran into the Water Authority offices.

  Levon handed Cyril his card and said, ‘We’ve got no room for you here, try the caravan park.’