‘Okay. You can tell me anyway if you want.’
She wondered if J knew. If he’d read between the lines. But he would have said. J was not the sort to play games. She felt sick. They were not facing what had to be faced. They were pretending it hadn’t happened. Which was strange, because normally they were very good at dealing with the difficult stuff, together, no matter how bad. Perhaps that was it. The ‘together’ thing had lost its strength. They were now two individuals finding their own way.
‘J. Can you come home? You and Finnie? We need to see you.’
‘Sure, Mum. I’ll get onto it.’
When she put the phone down, Dimple arrived and told her that Russell had been too busy for a cuppa but had sent his best to her.
‘He’s going to have one last go at finding a good place for them. He asked us to give him a week or so.’
‘Okay. J rang.’
‘How is he?’
‘Suspicious.’
‘Did you tell him?’
‘No.’
Dimple’s face told her how much he dreaded that call and everything that was about to happen.
‘Everything will be all right.’
He laughed without humour. ‘Of course it will.’
A week later, Russell told them he couldn’t find a place, nor could anyone else. Dimple asked him to book two B-double trucks for the following week to take the cows and calves to the saleyards.
‘There might be a buyer at the sale who could give them a good home,’ Ruthie said, forcing the positive.
‘Yeah, but more likely they’ll get their heads cut off.’
It hit her like a punch to the stomach. She had to grab for the back of a chair to hold herself up. She knew it was a possibility, had known it for all the cows they had sold. It shouldn’t have taken her by surprise. This time, it was different: it felt like murder. Dimple didn’t comfort her, and she understood. He was out of nice things to say. She watched him leave the house, and wondered if they could recover.
In the safety of the ute, the weather report on the radio was full of warnings about the coming system: high winds and flash flooding; hail and mini-tornados. His only thought was a hope that the weather wouldn’t stop the trucks getting out. He changed the channel to a music station.
On Friday night, a small car bumped up the driveway to the house.
‘That’s J’s car,’ Dimple said, after going to the window to see who would be calling in at this hour on this day.
‘It’s J and Finnie. I asked them to come.’
‘What?’
‘I didn’t know what else to do. They deserve to know.’
He didn’t lose his temper in the way she expected he would. He simply nodded his head.
They walked to the car together. J and Finnie got out yelling their greetings like they always did, as if they had just arrived for the biggest party. They hugged in turn and stood under the dark fingers of the trees, smiling at each other. Dimple asked about the drive home, and Ruthie asked how they both were. When each had answered, Finnie grinned and said, ‘It’s so good to be home.’
Even in the half-light, their faces must have confirmed a suspicion, because J said, ‘You’ve sold, haven’t you?’
Dimple was so quiet that Ruthie started to reply. But then he said quietly, ‘Yeah, mate. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t find a way to tell you.’
Finnie stepped forward and put his arms around his father. ‘No need. We understand. We get it. We really do.’
‘Group hug,’ J said, and dragged Ruthie into the embrace with Dimple and Finnie.
In Ruthie’s opinion they had the best weekend they’d had in a very long time. It was filled with food and drink and long conversations. There were some tears (mostly hers, Ruthie noted) and long walks. The boys took the bikes out during the day and went shooting one evening. They talked about selling the last of the cattle, but her sons refused sentimentality and she was proud of them. She wished they were both farmers bringing their partners to live nearby and raise families. Even she was permitted an idle fantasy.
At Sunday lunch, when J and Finnie were leaving to go back to the city, they all did their best not to be glum. They agreed to focus on the good things that the future could bring.
That night, Dimple drank more beers than he ever used to, and passed out on the couch. Ruthie guided him to bed and then went back to her chair and put on some music from J and Finnie’s playlist. She had just had the weekend with her beautiful sons. Her husband was sad, but he would be okay. She was healthy. There was nothing more she could wish for. And she knew that wasn’t true.
In the morning, Ruthie went to town. They needed food, and Dimple had asked her to pick up a hydraulic ram that had been delivered to the depot in town. But she would have gone whether she had good excuses to go or not. In the kitchen or the garden or the paddock, she could not clear her head. She hoped town would give her a chance to do something productive, and to enjoy the meditative effect of driving. And it was essential she have a few hours away from the place and from Dimple. He was grumpy and sore-headed, and she knew that sooner or later it would be her fault.
In the supermarket, she wafted around, unable to think what people like she and Dimple would eat. The practical processes of life eluded her. She put things in her shopping trolley that she couldn’t imagine they would ever need.
And then Innie Parker was bumping her trolley against Ruthie’s, saying, ‘Hello, stranger.’
Innie was a friend, a good friend, who lived on the same road out of town as Ruthie, but not close by.
‘Where have you been?’ she was asking. ‘Haven’t seen you forever.’
‘Yes, sorry. I’ve been a bit incommunicado. We were away. We went up north … ah, west, to see some friends.’
‘You must have been gone for weeks, because no one has heard from you. We were about to stage an intervention, or whatever it’s called.’
Ruthie laughed. It was good to hear people worried about her.
‘I’m serious, Ruthie. In a drought like this, we have to try to keep an eye on each other. You just slipped off the radar. That could mean anything.’
Ruthie felt cornered. She was usually pretty good at sharing things, but not this time. She was not ready. She would have to deflect this unexpected warmth. ‘Yes, I know. Silly of me. I just got a bit wrapped up in everything, and there’s still plenty to do, what with feeding cattle and everything.’
‘Same for us. It’s terrible, isn’t it? We’re all going through it. But we have to look after each other. Is Dimple going okay?’
‘Yeah, he’s fine. Sick of it, of course, but he’s in good shape.’
‘Pleased to hear it. There are people who aren’t, you know. Ones you wouldn’t expect.’ She shook her head worriedly. ‘Have you got time for a coffee?’
‘No. Sorry — I’m on a rush trip. I’ve got to pick up a part for Dimple that he’s been waiting for. I just thought I’d grab a couple of things in here before he starts ringing, asking where I am.’
Innie rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, god. Don’t they go on? Ted is exactly the same. They think everything they do is of earth-shattering importance.’ She began to push her trolley away. ‘I’ll catch you another time, okay? But pick up your phone, please.’ She waggled a finger.
‘I will. I definitely will.’ Ruthie watched Innie go, then walked smartly to the meat section, grabbed a couple of trays, wheeled round to the milk and the cheese, and headed for the checkout. She wanted to be gone by the time Innie finished her shopping.
She picked up the part for Dimple, and immediately made her way out of town to avoid meeting anyone else she might have to explain herself to. But Innie was right. She had been avoiding her friends. When she got the cancer diagnosis, she had not wanted the pity or the whispered concern or the melodrama, but that was behind her. Now she wasn’t
ready to tell anyone they had sold the place, and having conversations and not telling them was a kind of lying that she didn’t want to be a part of.
On the radio, they were talking about a severe weather system that was almost upon them: due to hit in the next 48 hours. Ruthie heard it, but she had stopped taking weather forecasts seriously. She knew Dimple viewed several sites and kept up a constant vigil when a system seemed near, but she couldn’t be bothered with forecasts. They changed overnight, so you could go to bed with a high-percentage chance of rain and wake up to not much chance at all.
On the road home, she could see by the green in the paddocks and on the side of the road the places that had caught lucky storms and those that had missed out. And then she stopped looking. None of this would survive the heat that was coming.
At dinner, she said, ‘I found a place to rent in Fresh Well.’
‘Great,’ he said. ‘Trucks are booked for 10.00 am Thursday.’
They didn’t speak after that. They didn’t know what to say. They had been through a lot together — good years and terrible years on the farm, as well as their worry about Finnie and the million other things they fretted over as parents. But nothing like this had ever happened to them. They had never created a problem that neither could see a way through. And each thought the other was on a different side of the argument. Ruthie felt like there would be very little talking any time soon, because Dimple didn’t talk when he was really stressed. He withdrew, like men did. She could normally ease him out of it, but now she had no idea how to do that. She didn’t even know why.
Eventually, as Dimple made tea and she sat on the couch, she said, ‘There’s supposed to be some wild weather coming.’
Dimple just grunted.
‘Tomorrow, apparently. Going to wash us away, they say.’
‘Well, that might be a good solution,’ he said, not engaging.
‘It’s nearly time they got one right.’
‘Yes.’ He took a deep breath. ‘But it no longer matters, does it?’
‘I guess not.’
‘I thought you’d be happier.’
‘Why?’
‘You’re the one who wanted to leave. You’re the one who wants the money to live a more interesting life.’
‘That’s not fair. I do want to live a more interesting life. Don’t you? But I changed my mind about leaving here when we got back from that weekend. You know that. I had the weird idea I might be dying. Forgive me if it distorted my reasoning a bit.’
‘It’s a bit late now.’
‘Oh, stuff you. You had the final say on this. It was about the money, remember? You achieved your aim, so you should have the courage to be decent about it. Not sulking.’
Dimple didn’t answer. He took his cup of tea and went outside. Ruthie was right, but he wasn’t going to concede. He gripped his mug too tightly and sucked in a couple of deep breaths. He was cursing Ruthie, trying to think of comebacks, when he noticed that the air was different. It was humid. It hadn’t been humid at any time in maybe a year. And high up there was a distant wind, a wind that wasn’t here yet, a wind that was in front of something much bigger. He walked out across the lawn. The insects stuck to his skin and his eyes, and drowned in his tea. He took his phone out of his pocket to confirm the forecast, but bugs of all shape and sizes swooped on the light and almost blocked out the screen. He threw out his tea, shook his phone, and went back inside.
‘The bugs! Outside! Incredible.’
‘Yes. They’ve suddenly got bad in here. I don’t know where they’re getting in.’
‘Maybe there is something coming.’
The doors began to bang. Ruthie got up and walked around the windows, pushing them shut. ‘Can you check the back doors at the other end?’
Dimple walked down to the other end of the house, listening as the wind began to shake the leaves in the trees and whisk the fallen ones along the ground. It was getting stronger and louder. It was whooshing down the side of the house, lifting a sheet of corrugated iron on the old shed. ‘It’ll just dry things out even more,’ he said to a door as he wedged it shut. But by the time he’d checked the other doors and got back to the kitchen, the wind had dropped to a light breeze. With the windows shut, he and Ruthie were caught in the humid room with the sheltering insects, like bugs in a bug catcher.
Then it rained — slowly then heavily — and stopped. The outside table had a film of water across its top, but Dimple could see, in the verandah light, that it was dry underneath.
‘I guess that’s the big flood then.’ She heard him laugh, nasty and bitter.
He went to the fridge and took out a beer. ‘We don’t want it to rain now anyway, do we? We want Wally to have the driest season in the last 80,000 years.’ He twisted the top off, lifted the beer to his lips, and drank in salutation. ‘We want the water to dry up, and the trees to give up the ghost, and the grass to blow away in the howling westerlies, and the fucking kangaroos to starve, and the parrots to drop out of the endlessly blue sky. That’s what we want.’
Ruthie put the air-conditioning on so she didn’t have to open the windows again and let more bugs in. It was her attempt at a distraction. Dimple was worrying her. He had gone somewhere she didn’t know about.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked.
He laughed. ‘I’m fine. I’m just an idiot, and it’s taking a bit of getting used to.’
Lightning flashed brightly in the south. Once, and again and again. The lights went out.
‘Fuck. That’d be right. A blackout,’ Dimple said.
Ruthie grabbed her phone for the torch and made her way to the cupboard, where she took out three large candles. She lit them, and the night was so still that their flames were straight, without wavering. Then she went around the room, turning off lights, appliances, the air-conditioning, and the TV.
Dimple finished his beer and stood quietly in the dark. ‘I think I’ll go to bed.’
‘I might read down here for a bit.’
‘Right.’
When he was gone, she opened a window, fished out her e-reader, and searched for something she hadn’t read. A crime novel she didn’t remember came up, and she settled down to give it a chance. She ignored the insects that crawled under her collar and settled on her face.
After more than two hours, when the power had still not come back on, Ruthie snuffed the candles out and put the e-reader away. Before she went to bed, she put her head outside to look at the sky. In the bedroom, Dimple was lying on his back, and she knew he wasn’t asleep.
‘Didn’t rain again?’ he asked.
‘No. Nothing. The sky is clear as.’
‘Good.’
There was no need for him to say it. He knew that. But he couldn’t let go of the idea that the worse the drought got, the more he was vindicated, and the greater was his revenge on Wally.
He listened to Ruthie put on her pyjamas, clean her teeth, use the toilet, and get into bed. She rolled away from him and was asleep. He lay still, hearing her soft breathing, wanting to put his hands on her and knowing he couldn’t. He forced himself to shut his eyes and relax.
Fourteen
He thought he hadn’t slept, but he woke to a furious noise. Water was being dumped on the roof in quantities that might have been truckloads. The gutters were overflowing in torrents. He got up, and in the half-light saw water pooling deeply on the front lawn. At the back door, the water was brimming up to the level of the floor, threatening to seep in. He shut the door, and pushed a towel up against it to seal it. The roar of the rain continued, and water started dripping from a leak in the kitchen ceiling he had never seen before. He placed a cooking pot underneath it. Another leak started over near the TV. Ruthie appeared and said, ‘Deluge!’
‘Yeah. We’re springing leaks. Can you help me?’
He took a saucepan over near the TV, and Ruth
ie checked the rest of the room. Then they sat on the couch as water cascaded off the roof and covered the windows and pounded everything, as if it was their fault that the rain had not been allowed to come for such a long time. They went back to bed, and the noise continued, and Ruthie wondered if the roof might cave in under the weight. They slept lightly, waking to the continued battering of the storm.
In the morning, it was raining lightly, in a parody of the night before. Dimple went out into the garden. There was a foot of water over the lawn, and every plant was either bowed and battered or snapped off. The paddocks were covered in water, or being drained by new deep gullies. The rain gauge indicated they’d had over 225 millimetres overnight — almost a third of their average rainfall. The damage would be significant. He told himself it wasn’t his country or his problem, but he couldn’t stop hoping that the cropping country had stood up to it all right.
In the kitchen, the power was back on, so he made tea and listened to the radio. It reported that the damage had been statewide, as expected. He took a tea to Ruthie, mouthing ‘as expected’ to himself. As he entered the bedroom, he heard the reporter say that the destruction had been particularly bad in the irrigation areas to the west of Willi. Dam walls had been destroyed, causing dams to break and adding flash flooding to the already extreme conditions.
‘Did you hear that?’
‘Yes,’ Ruthie said, hugging her pillow and watching him.
‘I bet Wally’s copped a belting!’ He chuckled, and put her cup of tea down.
He felt suddenly light on his feet. ‘Wally, eh? Still, you can’t wish anyone ill, can you?’
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘You want to send him a card or something? Best wishes?’
He laughed his light, happy laugh. ‘Great idea. Dear Wally. Hope you drowned, you bastard.’
Ruthie laughed with him.
‘What’s it like out there?’ she asked.
‘The garden’s a mess. I can’t really tell about the rest of it, but I guess pretty bad. There would be plenty of erosion, and it looks like a few new gullies might have been cut. Nothing a dozer can’t fix.’
Small Mercies Page 16