The Year of the Farmer

by Rosalie Ham

  o0o

  Jasey had noticed Lana no longer bought lamingtons and chocolate milk for breakfast, opting for yoghurt and a banana instead. She had ceased buying cigarettes, too. But Jasey knew for sure what was going on when Lana declined a glass of wine and ordered mineral water. She watched her two friends work at their scratchies, the remains of lunch in front of them.

  Neralie looked at her pile. ‘Don’t think I did much good.’

  Lana said, ‘Not a cent.’

  They looked to Jasey, who dropped her five-cent piece. ‘You’re pregnant, aren’t you, Lana?’

  Neralie froze, Kevin put his beer on the table, a regular turned the TV down and Levon closed his book, anticipating intervention. The sound of the trucks at the silos in the quiet reminded them Kevin was back in business. Lana blinked and her big blue eyes filled with tears. Neralie looked from one to the other and was about to say, ‘I’m sure we can work this out,’ when Jasey said, ‘Pretty radical step to take just to give up smoking.’

  Lana said, ‘Can I still be bridesmaid?’

  ‘Mitch and Levon’d look pretty fucking stupid in the photos with only one bridesmaid between them.’ Jasey held her hand out to Kevin. ‘Come on, Kevvy, you’ve got work to do. I need to be pregnant by morning.’

  o0o

  Mitch finished typing his protest email and pressed send. Then he printed off a copy:

  Dear Sirs,

  Your letter tells me that I cannot clear the property I lease from Miss Esther Shugg to run a lateral above-ground sprinkler system because the trees are natives. I am writing to appeal for an exemption because I’m happy to clear around the stands and leave them undisturbed in order not to miss the coming sowing season. In the meantime, I will replant and establish another native forest . . .

  On his drive to town, the rural news told him that if the predicted El Niño eventuated, it would have a devastating impact on cropping regions in the coming season, but if average rainfall was achieved then fifty-two percent of crops had a chance of making average yields.

  ‘Mother Nature, please don’t be a bitch,’ he said, knowing the bank managers would swoop, like ravens to a dying lamb. But life looked promising. Mandy had vanished, shot through with Beau to a life she wanted – deserved – presumably in the vast mess of Sydney. There’d be a letter from a lawyer some day, some time, demanding something, but for the time being . . .

  Mitch parked next to the ute that belonged to the hydraulic fracturing company. The new boy in town, known fondly as ‘the frucker’, was staying in room nine.

  Tink watched the pub door open and saw Mitch vanish into the dark oblong, then she turned a circle, lay down and closed her eyes. When the sun came up he would appear again and they would go to the farm together.

  When he stepped into the pub the regulars called, ‘Welcome home, darling,’ and Mitch studied the menu board. Neralie put a beer in front of him. ‘Yabbies are off the menu, swimming hole’s contaminated.’

  ‘Right. The flood, I guess.’

  Neralie smiled. ‘Something like that. The council put a sign up.’

  ‘I’ll have the roast, please.’

  She asked if he’d written to the Land Conservation Council.

  ‘I did,’ he said. ‘And then I just walked out the door and came here without having to lie or make excuses to anyone. You heard from Beau?’

  She shook her head, ‘I bought you your own toothbrush.’

  He leaned across and kissed her. ‘I haven’t heard from Mandy either.’

  He sat with the farmers and they discussed the possibility of the El Niño event and their water allocations and what to do about the outbreak of Chilean needle grass left by drovers along the Jeong–Bishop road, and the action strategy to repel the frucker.

  Epilogue

  The following spring season brought weeks of unusually heavy rain. It fattened the crops, and the harvest was good, a bumper one, then plump green weeds contaminated the precise lines of stubble and sucked the life from the precious subsoil. Bennett Mockett put pesticides and weed killer on sale but rather than waste chemicals, useless against such thick infestations, the locals discussed the topic and decided to use the exacting efficiency of fire to eradicate the contaminated fallow and its nuisance tenants. So for days, the neat paddocks that contained the town burned low, spreading smoke and ash far.

  Through the window of her joyless prefab across the street from the swimming hole, Esther watched. First, the Water Authority had rebuilt the levee and walking track, and now they were draining the swimming hole to clean it and repair the jetty and pontoon. As the pump sucked water from the small lake, a group of kids and the smart set paused by the ‘Contaminated’ sign to watch the tide fall and see what they had really been swimming with all these years, what fed the yabbies they’d caught and eaten with vinegar and salt.

  No one took any notice of old Esther Shugg when she steered her electric buggy across the grass and pulled up next to the kids. ‘It was 1940 – that was the last time they drained the swimming hole. Found a hundred-pound Murray cod.’

  A tall boy glanced at her.

  ‘They say they grow a pound a year,’ Esther continued, ‘and this one was as big as a small child. They put it in the rainwater tank at the pub until they filled the lake again.’

  The boy had only ever seen the old lady in faded bib-and-brace overalls sitting at her front window, but up close she looked like a goanna. He nodded at the swimming hole. ‘Is it still in there?’

  ‘If it had any sense it would have swum off when the levee broke.’

  The kids turned back to the water. The tide continued to subside, and something began to rise in the middle. An old gate? A drum net?

  ‘Drum net,’ a little girl said, pointing to the circular rusted thing. ‘You’re not allowed to have drum nets.’

  ‘No, you’re not,’ Esther agreed.

  Esther moved her buggy forward a few centimetres. The tide around the end of the suction pipe dropped abruptly, the engine on the truck screamed, and the worker cut the generator. In the abrupt quiet the willow trees around them relaxed and the stench of sour mud swelled.

  ‘Smells like something dead,’ said the tall boy, and the ladies in their exercise attire hurried off across the grass.

  The small crowd scanned the slimy lakebed. Gathered against the end of the suction pipe was a pile of plastic bags iced in runny black clay. Beer bottles and cans rested in sheet-sized puddles and lying neatly in the weeds, a deflated tractor inner tube and a sheep skeleton. Most eyes settled on the rusty thing resting in the puddle in the middle of the small lake. The worker called from his truck, ‘Youse kids stay out of that swimming hole, y’hear?’ and the kids nodded. He drove away with the pump.

  Old Esther said, ‘Mind what he says, alright?’

  The kids nodded again.

  Esther pushed the ignition button and her electric buggy sputtered to life. They watched her roll away, then turned back to the putrid lakebed and the brown rotting thing. They stepped into the slime, stopping to turn up old tin cans and piss into yabby holes. Shrimp flicked across the mud, brown bubbles rose and popped, and the fish, mostly carp, too heavy for the drag of the pump, writhed and gasped, but they saw no monster cod. On the horizon the sun sank to a molten half-circle, the burn-off appeared more sharply in glittering lines and the breeze dropped. The rank grey cloud of ash hovered above the kids.

  They plodded on towards the thing, mud sucking their feet, and when they got there, they stared. In the grey sludgy bed, caught against what remained of a drum net, a human skeleton rested, its flesh long ago eaten.

  The smallest boy asked, ‘Did he drown?’

  ‘Yep,’ said the pale boy. ‘Dived in and got caught. You can see where he broke his rib on impact.’

  The little girl looked at the wormy ribbons of hair that clung to the head. ‘It could be a
lady. We’d better call the police.’

  The tallest boy upended his yabby net, setting the freshwater crustacean free, and turned to look back at Esther Shugg’s house with its two front windows. Inside, Esther Shugg picked up her phone and dialled. While she waited for the call to be answered, she closed her eyes and took a very deep breath.

  ‘Hello, it’s me . . . they just drained the swimming hole.’

  o0o

  He put the phone back in its cradle and sat in the kitchen chair, looking out through the window for a long time. Then he drove to the spot and parked in the afternoon sun. In the warm cab his cold hands eased and Callum turned his thoughts to his mother, then his father and sister. After a while he thought about his wife and daughter, and finally his wise and discreet friend and neighbour, Esther. He was tired, and his chest squeezed again. A year ago he’d ceased taking his medications, just left them in the sludge at the bottom of his porridge bowl, so he gave in to the malaise and enjoyed the rich sun on his skin.

  Then the landscape of his life was below him and he could see the pattern of tracks fanning out from the water troughs, to and from, to and from, and it seemed to him that they should build more dams so the sheep didn’t have to travel so far. The tracks he and Mitch made across the farm were deep and direct, also returning again and again to places of work, and to home. He’d led a useful life, though it had its share of disappointments. Then patches of landscape went missing from the picture, but it didn’t matter because there was Mitch going around and around in the harvester, though harvest was over, and the grandkids driving the chaser bins and Isobel in the B-double, and there was the pine tree – tall and straight again, the last remaining tree of the whole forest that was there in his grandfather’s time. And there was the woolshed, and the channel was back! Brand new! And he was standing with his father watching the first ever wave of tea-coloured water flow to them, cooling the air and bringing insects and birds. Sheep were grazing, and so were his cattle, though he’d taken them to market in 2002, and he smelled wet clay and animals, wheat and dust. Everything was wrong, yet nothing was wrong, and something was ceasing and draining away inside.

  ‘These are my final minutes,’ he said.

  He had an inkling Margot was about, a thin, posh girl fresh from school, with city hair and high heels, not an entirely satisfactory person for a small community, as it turned out, with her ideas of class, but there was always the dirt, the soil, the life force . . . and he would be part of it soon. The sound of rushing water – or was it air? – brought the river to him, wide and flowing and clear enough to see snags at the bottom. But the very last thing Callum Bishop saw was a string of villages across North Africa, a few mud abodes sprinkled around a hole on a vast orange plain, and the smiling community were gathered, working at pulling an animal-skin bucket from a well that went deep in the earth. They spilled the fresh water into a trough, just enough for their needs, no more, and Callum rose high through blue sky and folding rain clouds, and a word came to him: marvellous.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to extend thanks to The Bundanon trust, RMIT and McCraith House. Also to Janie and Rob Armitage, Antoni Jach and the masterclass writers, friends and family for the support and advice.

  About Rosalie Ham

  Rosalie Ham is the author of three previous books, including the sensational no.1 bestseller The Dressmaker, now an award-winning film starring Kate Winslet, Liam Hemsworth, Judy Davis and Hugo Weaving. Rosalie was born and raised in Jerilderie, New South Wales and lives in Melbourne, Australia. She holds a Master of Arts in Creative Writing and teaches literature.

  Also by Rosalie Ham

  The Dressmaker

  Summer at Mount Hope

  There Should Be More Dancing

  MORE BESTSELLING FICTION FROM PAN MACMILLAN, BY ROSALIE HAM

  The Dressmaker

  A darkly satirical novel of love, revenge, and 1950s haute couture.

  The number one bestselling novel, now a major motion picture starring Kate Winslet, Judy Davis, Liam Hemsworth, and Hugo Weaving.

  After twenty years spent mastering the art of dressmaking at couture houses in Paris, Tilly Dunnage returns to the small Australian town from which she was banished as a child. She plans only to check on her ailing mother and leave. But Tilly decides to stay, and though she is still an outcast, her lush, exquisite dresses prove irresistible to the prim women of Dungatar. Through her fashion business, her friendship with Sergeant Farrat – the town’s only policeman, who harbors an unusual passion for fabrics – and a budding romance with Teddy, the local football star whose family is almost as reviled as her own, she finds a measure of grudging acceptance. But as her dresses begin to arouse competition and envy in town, causing old resentments to surface, it becomes clear that Tilly’s mind is set on a darker design: exacting revenge on those who wronged her, in the most spectacular fashion.

  Summer at Mount Hope

  A blackly comic and unputdownable story of a young woman’s attempt to resist the worlds of men and money in nineteenth-century Victoria, from the bestselling author of The Dressmaker.

  Phoeba Crupp lives with her squabbling parents and younger sister Lilith on a small farm in rural Australia. Her father is an eccentric ex-accountant who moved his family from the city in order to establish a vineyard, a decision her mother bitterly – and loudly – resents. But Phoeba has loved it here since they day they arrived and she met Henrietta and Hadley Pearson, a brother and sister from a neighbouring farm who instantly became her closest friends. At their mother’s urging, Lilith throws herself into trying to find a husband but Phoeba resists, until circumstances beyond her control push her towards the world of men and money. All the while the local community is shaken up by the arrival of pastoralists, suffragettes and squatters, carrying the threat and promise of change to their quiet corner of the country. And as Phoeba wakes up to the realities of the adult world, she comes to realise the friendship of those near to her may count for more than she could ever have imagined . . .

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, institutions and organisations

  mentioned in this novel are either the product of the author’s

  imagination or, if real, used fictitiously without any intent to describe

  actual conduct.

  First published 2018 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000

  Copyright © Rosalie Ham 2018

  The moral right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have been in the print edition.

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available

  from the National Library of Australia

  http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

  EPUB format: 9781760782696

  Typeset by Post Pre-press Group

  Cover images: Rowena Naylor/Stocksy, FoxyImage/Shutterstock,

  vectorkat/Shutterstock,

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