We Had No Rules

by Corinne Manning

  “I only got one,” he said. “Named Dandy. But I’m thinking of getting a female. You sell the babies for a grand. And they’re always making them, too. In the bush, they have one in the pouch and one waiting up inside. If a dingo chases them, they just throw out the one in the pouch so the dingo will leave them be, and then the next one will crawl out and into the pouch. Come on.”

  He opened his gate and motioned for me in that male way where it’s clear there isn’t much of a choice.

  The farmer had beautiful land, just about ten acres in high harvest, and it gave me a sense of the potential of my blackberry-overrun property. Three farmhands were finishing up for the next day’s market. They waved vitally, then went back to washing the last of the salad mix.

  The farmer asked me to help him move a tarp of compost back to its covering. He pointed out his cows, sweetly munching in a field beyond, and then his house, where the chickens ran like something out of a storybook. A field of calendula, a thicket of wild rose, and then a fence with a sweet purple gate led us into the wallaby run.

  Dandy stood there, a small grey wallaby, with his giant feet and his tiny, weird black-leather hands. He was smaller than I expected, but he stretched his length a bit and exposed a long, wiry, pink penis.

  The farmer laughed. “Put that situation away, Dandy.” He chuckled again in my direction, feigning embarrassment. “Poor thing,” he said.

  Dandy had beautiful long black lashes that disappeared when he got excited, his eyes large.

  “Now,” said the farmer, “he likes people and you can pet him, but we got him when he was mature, out of the mom’s sack, and they aren’t as sociable once they’re out. I breed them, I’ll have to sell them to people when they’re still in a pouch so that way they can bond.”

  “The mom’s pouch?” I asked.

  “No, it’s like—” and Dandy was on him, grabbing the farmer’s hands with his little weird ones and gnawing a finger sweetly with his white buckteeth. The farmer petted his head and then pried the tiny hands off his.

  “Don’t let him grab you,” he said. “I’m trying to train him out of that. He’s sweet but a little persnickety. They’re love bugs when you get one still in the pouch.”

  Dandy came over and nibbled at the bottom of my shirt. I pet the top of his head—standard fuzzy, maybe like petting a rabbit. He went to grab at my hand and I pulled it away. I didn’t understand why the farmer would want to train him from grabbing a hand, but I also didn’t feel like asking. I’d seen the wallaby and now I wanted to get back to work.

  “I should probably get him a female. It’s not right, him being alone out here.”

  “What does he eat?” I asked.

  “Exotic pet food,” he said. The farmer motioned and, as if on cue, Dandy hopped over to his feed area. Every time he moved it was like he’d never moved before. I couldn’t tell if that was because he’d never been outside the narrowness of the run, or if this was a strangeness particular to the wallaby anatomy. Before I left the farmer showed me the pouches he was already knitting for the wallabies to come, spools of red and blue wool cluttering his dining room table.

  That night, I watched videos of wallabies in the wild, of a baby poking its head out of the pouch. In a dream, someone reached down my pants, found a teat, and stroked it for milk. I woke up thinking of Dandy, alone, waiting behind that purple gate.

  —

  While Stacy’s breath was still rattling I knew my partner and I would split. We’d discussed it even before our apartment became a literal place of dying. Significant breakups were familiar to both of us, but we didn’t understand how much uglier it would feel having to get an actual divorce. When marriage had become legal we’d gone to city hall, subversively wearing chaps and sparkly underwear. We had strangers—two silver foxes—be our witnesses because I knew my sister wouldn’t be into it. Not that she wasn’t happy, or didn’t think it was useful that marriage was legal, but when we told her afterwards, a bit giddy, she just said, “Now you get to have the law involved if you want to break up.”

  After she died, I took what I inherited from her life insurance, left my job, headed west, like European invaders do, and started building where a house had once stood and then burned down, which was why I could so easily plug in most of the modern conveniences.

  By November, my little home was set up and cozy. I’d built a composting toilet a few feet away and constructed a kind of bath shack with a tub inside and a shower outside. When the blackberries died back, I attacked them with a machete.

  The farmer stopped by one day and offered to help with his farmhands. I asked about Dandy and he said that he was about to be doing much better. They had just gotten a pet goose to live in the run with him, and they’d gotten a dog about his size and they’d really taken to each other.

  “They love to box; you should see them. Really shows how small a wallaby’s brain is when a dog gets tired of playing with him. Same thing over and over. But, man, it’s cute.”

  After a few hours of work, two of the farmhands took off—they were just doing a favour, after all—but one of them stayed. She was at least twenty years younger than me, with a nose ring and a cute short haircut covered by a bandana. She was just the type of girl I went for again and again, and I felt like a time capsule: older body but same desire. She was giving me these little looks that indicated she didn’t care about my age, and I might have given her a look that meant the same thing. I think the farmer was waiting for her to want to quit, so he stayed and helped way longer than he intended. Around dinnertime he stretched, picked at some splinters in his thumb, and said he’d better head in and rest. The farmhand asked me if I was going to work for a little longer.

  “Just a bit,” I said. “But I got it from here.”

  “I’m not tired and could still help, if you don’t mind. I’d love to see how you set that container up.”

  I said that would be fine and the farmer left us. As soon as he walked away, she put her shears down and stretched her arms up over her head.

  “I’m a yoga teacher,” she said.

  “That’s good,” I said, swinging at a blackberry vine. “I’m sure the other farmhands like that.”

  “Yeah. I could give you a private session, if you like.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t like yoga.”

  Her eyes got wide like the wallaby’s, but her lashes didn’t mysteriously disappear—still long and black and kind of extravagant, like they were covered in grease.

  “I bet you just haven’t had the right teacher,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “Sometimes people just aren’t into things.”

  I picked up her tool and motioned for her in a way I thought was gentle, not like the farmer, but the way she followed reminded me that I was masculine. We took our shoes off outside the container. She ran her hand along the metal ridges, and when I opened the door, she crossed in front of me.

  “So cool!” she cooed.

  The container had once been used for trekking frozen things across the country, so it was insulated. A bed was at one end and I’d put a window by the oven, which let in a nice amount of light. I lit the stove and put the kettle on. The farmhand took pictures of the space with her phone.

  “Are you gonna live in this place forever?” she asked.

  “I might.”

  “There’s enough room for another person, I guess,” she said.

  “I’m not worried about that.”

  She looked down at her hands. I could tell she was trying something with me she’d never tried before, and I felt bad for her.

  “Would you like to see the bathhouse?” I asked.

  “Cool,” she said.

  I took her out back and she oohed and aahed, and I suggested she take a bath. “You did all that work for me. Least I could do. I’ll make you some food, too.”

  I know I offered these things, but I didn’t exactly expect her to say yes. I just didn’t want her to feel bad. It doesn’t take l
ong being around a twenty-year-old before I start thinking like one.

  While I cooked, I heard her singing from the tub—it was the kind of night that carried sound lucidly, and I bet the farmer, or at least the other farmhands, could hear her. I cut up vegetables that she’d probably pulled from the ground and washed. I thought about how nice it would be next year when I would be able to use at least some of my own food. It’s a bit obscene when you think of it, eating the food that other people grow rather than what you make happen.

  It was too cloudy for stars and her singing ceased and the night carried the energy of her wanting me to come out and check on her. It rushed electrically between the bathhouse and the container. I figured she was wondering how that works and I knew I could show her how it works, the way Jill showed me. I knew what role was there for me.

  —

  Once, when I was eighteen, I was asked to speak at a fundraiser for the youth program Stacy had set me up with after I ran away. She went thrifting for weeks to find a suit that our roommate Jill could tailor, and it felt like the best thing I’d ever worn, not just since running away but like the best outfit I could possibly put on my body. But when I got to the ballroom, because of either the lighting or the crisp shininess of all those rich people’s clothes, my suit looked drab and strange and didn’t actually fit me as well as I thought. Even though I would have hated it, I felt like I should have worn a dress. Bill Cunningham took photos and I wasn’t in the spread for the Times, which wasn’t even what bothered me. The organization had also invited my friend Marquis to speak, the only Black person present. During the cocktail hour, I watched as they ignored him or, like, touched him too much, making a fuss over his suit, white hands constantly on his shoulders. I think I felt that pull from the world we were getting money from—that all it would take was for me to grow my hair long and wear a dress and it could take me in.

  “Let it make you angry,” Stacy said that night. “All these systems are waiting right underneath you, and if you aren’t paying attention, you become complicit.”

  That night, I really took in those tennis bracelets that caught the light, and the men with their grey hair and younger wives, and the number of empty champagne bottles Marquis and I counted when we snuck into the caterer’s area to hide. When the auction started, paddles were getting raised for $5,000, $15,000. I remember watching one table where a woman bid something like $5,000 for a weekend vacation, and when she couldn’t go up any higher, a man at her table lifted his paddle again and again, until, at $12,000, he won the vacation and gave it to her. She said thank you like he’d bought her a coffee or something, and he said, “Not a problem” like he’d just taken out the trash.

  Marquis and I laughed, but then he looked at me half-surprised but mostly amused. “These are your people,” he said.

  “They aren’t.”

  “No, for real, they are.”

  —

  I married. I got an apartment in a gentrifying neighbourhood and didn’t become part of the community. I set up fundraisers to keep rich white donors comfortable and happy and blind to their complicity.

  Now I was on a farm, and maybe it looked like I was doing something different, but I was on this farmer’s land, not a farmer, with a farmhand waiting in a tub for me. I don’t know what we can ever have control over, when the wiring is there and my sister is not.

  I was chopping beets when the farmhand came chirping in, clean and shiny in her filthy farm clothes.

  “You cry from chopping beets?” she asked.

  “All the time,” I said. “You need another shirt?”

  “Sure.” She sat down at the table. “That’s my favourite thing about cleaning up after a day like today, putting on a clean shirt.”

  “Big pleasures,” I said, “out here on the farm.”

  She blushed. I gave her a shirt that was particularly warm and soft, and we turned away from each other while she changed.

  She warmed her hands on a mug of tea. I put the vegetables in a pan to cook and told her I was going to take a quick shower, and if she didn’t mind swirling them from time to time, that would be great. The water was hot and the air was cold. I think in books, older people’s bodies feel younger when they are about to get with a person with a younger body, and though I felt that option waiting for me, I chose instead to just feel older.

  I put on a clean shirt and when I went inside dinner was done and she’d set out two dishes. We ate and the feeling settled over me—like it always does before I fuck someone I’m going to fall in love with—that I already knew the farmhand. And maybe because I’m older I did know a version of her, I’d dated her before, I’d confused and hurt her before. I enjoyed the feeling of eating in the kind of silence that comes from already loving someone for years.

  We didn’t sleep together that first night. She just didn’t go home, and neither of us slept. We sat at the table for so long that my body began to ache from the chair, and then for even longer we sat on the floor, with our backs against the wall. Do I remember the moment we moved towards the bed? No. But she just sat at the edge of it, and then near dawn I started to doze, still sitting upright. I heard the rooster from the farm and got up to make her coffee. I had that chill that overruns the body after a sleepless night, the feeling of impending diarrhea. I could go to bed—I could slack off on my land for at least one more day—but the farmhand didn’t have that option. And maybe it was just to make it all worth it, but she came forward and kissed me. Her lips were chapped and cold, and she tasted like the garlic from last night’s dinner and the coffee I’d just made her.

  “Can I come back when it’s time to sleep?” she asked.

  All these systems are waiting right underneath you, and if you aren’t paying attention, you become complicit.

  “Yes,” I said.

  —

  When the farmhand came back that evening she shared the big drama that had occurred on the farm: a raccoon had gotten into the wallaby and goose run and killed the goose, totally severed its head from its body. I thought of Dandy watching this—did wallabies have any ability to help? They found Dandy with a gouge out of his neck but okay, just hopping nervously. I thought of Dandy looking at his tiny hands, and the raccoon’s tiny hands, and maybe for a moment he found himself and reached for the raccoon’s head.

  The farmhand, trying to describe the sharp, desperate chittering sound, the stress sound that Dandy made, began imitating it in sharp, high gasps. I wanted it to stop, so my mouth found her mouth, her belly, her cunt, like a tiny sum of nickels. After she came, with my fingers worked their way inside—three, then four, then five, my hand closing into a fist, only my wrist outside her—she gasped and attempted to look like this had happened for her every time. I thought of the woman who was once older than me, who first put my finger in her so that I asked if this was sex, and I looked at the farmhand now and wondered if this was sex. I wanted my sister to see what Jill had done. I wanted to know whether it was sex. The younger woman’s hands ran along the inside of my thighs, then out and around my ass, but my body was numb, like always. Her hands were there, but I didn’t feel them. Her body shook and she made moans that sounded like gibberish and became real speech.

  “Your skin’s seen a lot,” she said.

  “Like what?” I asked, hoping she would see what Jill had done to me, my sister’s complicity.

  “Resistance,” she groaned. “History.”

  —

  She left for the farm early. What was I even doing on mine? I hauled the torn-up blackberries away. I sowed cover crop on my one measly row and borrowed the farmer’s tiller. When I returned it, he looked at me like I had been messing with his stuff.

  “How’s Dandy doing?” I asked, interested in getting him to stop trying to figure out how the sex worked.

  “Healing. Wanna see him?”

  I didn’t, but I nodded. We went beyond the wild rose, back to that purple gate. And there was Dandy, standing tall like last time, with a pink of expose
d flesh, only now it was on his neck. The farmer picked him up by his mighty tail so I could get a closer look, and Dandy’s little arms writhed. The wallaby grabbed my hand and I let him chew on it.

  “Don’t let him do that,” the farmer said.

  I didn’t move my hand. I let him move Dandy from me instead.

  “I put an order in for a female. She’ll still be in a pouch when she gets here, but it feels like the least I can do. You wouldn’t want to help, would you? Once she’s matured and mating and birthing?”

  I hesitated and the farmer spoke a bit faster.

  “We could do a trade. I could give you a farmhand for a few hours. I know you two’ve hit it off.”

  I told him I’d think about it.

  “I’ll need help to arrange all those sales. Once we’re making money, I could pay you. Doesn’t look like you got big plans for your land anyway, and money probably wouldn’t hurt.”

  But then he sort of sneered, at least, I saw it as a sneer.

  “Maybe, though, money’s not something you need.”

  —

  I walked home and looked at my three prepped beds. I was hoping to put in some drip irrigation but mostly wanted to leave it all alone. I didn’t want to have big plans for the land. Even that one field seemed like an exposure.

  That night in bed the farmhand looked excited. She mentioned what the farmer had said. She was excited for Dandy.

  “I’m not,” I said.

  “You want him to stay alone?”

  “No. But it’s better than creating more babies that have to go off and be alone somewhere else.

  “It’s good money,” she said.

  I started feeling cold, so I pulled my shirt on. I got up and found a stale package of cigarettes I had saved from New York. While Stacy was in hospice I took up smoking to have an excuse to go outside. I lit one and frowned. It tasted like Stacy was dying.

  “She won’t be birthing until just as I’m finishing. I could stay here and help you out,” the farmhand said.

  “You can take the baby out of the pouch?”

  “No, I can put the baby in the travel pouch in which it will arrive ready to love its new owners.” When I didn’t say anything she stood up, too, took a stale cigarette, but when she heard the sound of it crackle, she didn’t light it, just held it in her hand. “I could help you really turn this land into something. You have a fair amount of space here.”