Small Mercies

by Richard Anderson

  ‘Oh dear.’

  He took his tea to the window, and looked out on the sodden landscape. ‘You know, maybe I will hang around and help out. What do you reckon? You could hunt for houses.’

  ‘You are incredible, Dillon Travers. One big rainfall, and it’s sweetness and light. Everything is A-OK. These last few weeks, I’ve wondered if you might be suicidal. This morning, you couldn’t be happier.’

  ‘I know. Stupid. You can take the boy out of the farm, but you can’t take the farm out the boy.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound right.’

  ‘No. But you know what I mean.’ He was smiling, and she was shaking her head at him. He left the room. She knew he would be cooking eggs and bacon the way he always did when he was happy and he had the time and space to do it. No doubt he would find sausages, too, and maybe try and fail to make hash browns. She forced herself up and out of bed. There might soon be a disaster inside the house as well as outside. She tentatively looked out the window at her garden. Even though a lot of the garden was waterlogged and bruised, she knew that at this time of year, with that amount of rain, the recovery would be swift. Some things would have to be replaced, but too much rain was always way better than not enough. There were already sizzling noises in the kitchen and the awful sound of Dimple humming. She came up behind him at the stove, and put her arms around him. ‘Hey, chef.’

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘No hash browns, please.’

  ‘If you insist. Pancakes then?’

  ‘No. Wait for when the boys are … around.’

  ‘You were going to say home, weren’t you?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I’m not going to think about that just yet.’

  They cooked and ate, and took their time with the food and each other. They read the papers online and had second cups of tea.

  Dimple pulled on his gumboots, made bad jokes about forgetting how to use them, and then walked down to the sheds. The cows still needed their hay, despite the mud and the mess the tractor would make. When he’d fed them, he trudged out to inspect the paddocks as the water gradually receded.

  The erosion wasn’t as bad as he had feared, but there was one new sharp gully near the house. It was running water like a creek. He allowed himself to imagine that the place was still his, but, even so, he couldn’t see the flooding as a real problem. Better mud than dust, he kept muttering to himself as he worked his way across the flats.

  Ruthie joined him in pink gumboots that he admired, and they walked down to the cropping country, their feet bogging into the mud the further they got from the house. When they looked across the plain, they could see where water had gathered, but on their own country, or what had been their country, the furrows down the contour had allowed the water to get away without tearing off too much of the topsoil. In places, there were cuts and gougings, but mostly it was intact.

  ‘It’ll be a while before we can get onto the country,’ Dimple said as they walked towards home. ‘But we, or at least they, will definitely get a crop in.’

  He was still buoyant, but Ruthie could feel herself sinking. All the pleasure they could be enjoying, they had given away. They and their country had survived a terrible drought, but they could not triumph in it. She had so badly misjudged the things that mattered to her. She took Dimple’s arm, and he put his hand over hers.

  ‘It’ll be all right, you know. It’ll be all right.’

  The mud made them almost overbalance, and they caught each other before they could fall.

  They stumbled forward, leaning against each other.

  Less than two days later, Dimple was firing up the tractor and dragging the planting rig down to where he wanted to sow. He hadn’t consulted Wally or Ken — he just knew they would want to put something in the ground as soon as possible.

  Ruthie said he had spent so many hours making sure the planter and the tractor were ready, it would have to be an act of the devil if anything broke down or went wrong. She had helped him repair the flood fences, and places where sticks and mud had backed up against low fence lines, even though it was still too wet to do a proper job. It seemed their pride in keeping the place in good order had not diminished.

  He was pacing up and down the verandah when the phone rang. Ruthie waved him over, knowing it would probably be for him.

  ‘It’s Ken Lidcombe.’

  ‘Hey, Ken. How are things in your part of the world? Bit boggy?’

  ‘Pretty bad, actually. We’ve had a fair doing up here.’

  ‘That’s no good. We copped it here, but the country has stood up pretty well, I reckon.’

  ‘Good for you. I was wanting to talk to you about your place.’

  Dimple readied himself for directions. Wally would probably be sending his own men down to get on the tractor, especially as the wet probably meant there wasn’t much for them to do for the time being.

  ‘Wally Oliver has had an extreme amount of damage done to his operation over a very wide area. It will put a severe dint in his cashflow, and I cannot see him being able to take on anything else except the resurrection of his own farms for a very long time.’

  Dimple drew in a deep breath. ‘My wife and I signed a contract. It was witnessed.’

  ‘I know that, and I’m not trying to say that contract isn’t valid. I just wanted to sound you out about what possibilities there might be.’

  ‘Possibilities?’

  ‘Mr Oliver has many projects — some of them financed, some of them not. My company is involved in many of them. It seems to me that it would be a good time for him to curb some of his ambitions. I was thinking that since you are still on the property, you might be open to helping him out?’

  ‘You want to tear up the contract?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mr Oliver knows about this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I will have to talk to my wife.’

  ‘Please do. But if I could have an answer in the next couple of days, that would be greatly appreciated.’

  Dimple found Ruthie in the office on the computer, entering figures.

  ‘You’re not going to believe this.’

  She didn’t look away from the screen.

  He told her about the call, and she looked at him intensely, as though she thought he was lying.

  ‘It’s true. That’s what Ken just said on the phone.’

  Ruthie closed her eyes and bowed her head. This wasn’t possible. You couldn’t tear up a contract just like that, could you?

  Dimple was saying excitedly, ‘Don’t say anything. I don’t want to know what you think until six o’clock tonight. Okay? We sit down here at six, and we’ll tell each other where we go from here. Deal?’

  She pushed her chair back, smacked her lips, and said, ‘Deal.’

  Ruthie left the accounts and went out into her garden. She knelt in amongst the salvia and the oyster plants, chopping off broken stems and pulling out the sick and the dying. But already the plants were responding to the rainwater and the warmth, and the weeds were joining in. She worked by rote, thinking only about what Dimple had said.

  At 6.00 pm, they took seats opposite each other. Dimple clapped his hands and said, ‘All right. Tell me what you think.’

  Ruthie cleared her throat. ‘You first.’

  ‘Okay. Here’s how I see it. Even if we still want to sell, I don’t think we’ve got the resources, and I don’t have the will, to fight them. I think forcing a mob like this to live up to their contract would be very difficult. I’m guessing they would have experience with this sort of stuff, and I don’t have a clue about it. So I reckon there’s no real alternative but to tear it up.’

  ‘But what do you feel? Do you want to stay or go?’

  ‘You first.’

  ‘I want to stay. I want to be here. I don’t want the money. But … I want
us to try to do a little more; some new things, new people. Not work all the time. If we can’t agree that has to happen, then we should sell up. I don’t care who to or for how much. What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t want to go anywhere else. I’ll do whatever you want so we can stay.’

  ‘It’s not just what I want. It’s what we need. Both of us. So, as soon as we get another crop, we’re going on a trip — maybe overseas, or just around the country if that’s all we can manage.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘And we have to include the boys in our plans. Finnie might be planning to come home for good, and we don’t even know because we haven’t talked to him about it.’

  ‘I’ll ring Ken back.’

  Dimple went to the phone. It was after work hours, but he knew he would get Ken on his mobile. They talked, and Ken agreed that the cancellation would need to be done in front of independent witnesses. But he seemed very relieved. Dimple hung up. Ruthie was at his shoulder, waiting for the response.

  ‘We’ve set it up. We’ll do it in town tomorrow afternoon.’

  She hugged him and said, ‘New start, Dimple.’

  ‘Yeah. New start. But there’s one other call I’ve got to make.’

  His eyes were sparkling, and she could almost feel her feet lifting off the ground.

  ‘I’m going to ring Russell and cancel the trucks.’

  Then they were dancing clumsily, joyously together around the room, and she was certain they were the stupidest couple anyone had ever known.

  Fifteen

  They met in the solicitor’s office in Fresh Well. Wally was not present, but the solicitor said Ken had the authority to represent him. As soon as they had signed, Ken was out the door, thanking them and disappearing.

  ‘It was a lot of money,’ the solicitor said ruefully as he picked up the paperwork.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ruthie.

  They thanked him and left, making sure the bill for his services went to Wally.

  In the coffee shop across the road, they drank cappuccinos and ate carrot cake.

  ‘The coffee’s not even that good,’ Ruthie said, looking out the window onto the empty street.

  ‘Not good enough to leave me for?’

  ‘No.’ She took another sip. ‘But that Burraga coffee was good.’

  An older couple walked slowly past the window. Was that something to aspire to, Ruthie wondered. She wasn’t sure.

  ‘Do you think Finnie really wants to be a farmer?’ Dimple asked.

  ‘I’m sure of it. But I think we should discourage him. It might be an awful business to be in.’

  ‘Yeah. But imagine if we made it to four generations. That would be pretty good.’

  ‘Dimple, you really are a stupid person sometimes.’

  ‘I was kidding. Come on. I was kidding.’

  In the morning, Dimple and Ruthie let the cows out into fresh paddocks. They didn’t need encouragement. The dogs watched from the back of the ute as the cows walked with their heads down, eating as they went.

  ‘Don’t you ever get sick of being a good woman?’ he said as they drove back to the yards.

  ‘That’s not funny,’ she said. ‘And you shouldn’t make fun of it.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We won’t.’