Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (Picador 40th) Page 10

  Robert sits at a table on the timber stage leafing through his papers. He wears his dark blue wedding suit and for the first time I notice that his hair is starting to thin. Behind him a crudely painted theatrical backdrop shows Henry VIII in neckfrill and knickerbockers holding an axe in a grove of gum trees. Robert stands and clears his throat. He nods to me and I walk to the rear of the hall and pull the door closed. When I turn around he is holding the back of his chair with both hands.

  ‘I have asked you here today at the request of Mr Lyons and Mr Hogan. I am a fellow farmer (there is some coughing and the shuffling of feet) but I have been called to arms, and I come to extend that call to you.

  ‘Our country, our great country, is in dire need of your skills. The world stands at present on the brink of a serious depression. The pain is already being felt in our cities and towns. We’ve had a period of wealth and prosperity (a louder bout of coughing, throat-clearing and shuffling) during which our government entered into various loans, now, as the economy contracts, the interest on those loans has to be paid.’

  Robert raises his voice over the noise from the floor. Several whispered conversations have started up in the back rows. He touches a finger nervously to the crease between his nose and mouth and pulls his jacket around him.

  ‘Mr Lyons plans to overcome these difficulties by an increase in primary production. In Victoria the target has been set at a million more acres. That’s a twenty-five percent increase in area and yield. I believe, and I have irrefutable scientific data to base this belief on, that we here in the southern Mallee can produce that amount alone. Let me demonstrate.’

  Robert shuffles the papers in front of him. The noise in the hall drops. He finds the sheet and moves to the front of the stage waving it confidently above his head.

  ‘Mr Leslie Noy. Are you here this evening, Mr Noy?’

  A plain looking man in the front row near the aisle stands up. I strain to get a look at him. This must be Wilma’s husband and the brother of Lola from the Commercial. Noy’s neck and face redden.

  ‘That’d be me.’

  ‘From my information Mr Noy farms one hundred and twenty acres out at Towaninnie. What would you be getting out there on those red loams, Mr Noy – six bushels an acre?’

  Les Noy looks at his boots. ‘More like five,’ he says, quietly.

  ‘Well, Mr Noy, consider this. Manurial trials on red loams demonstrate the efficacy of super phosphate at least one ton per acre, sown early. Add sixty, but preferably ninety pounds per acre of gypsum and several minor elements – zinc sulphate at twenty pounds per acre and borax at fifteen pounds per acre – and you’ve got a guaranteed increase to eleven bushels an acre. That’s over double the production, Mr Noy.’

  Les Noy is frowning. ‘I’m sowing Bencubbin and I’m backed up in it. Would I have to be changing over?’

  ‘Ghurka and Rannee 4H win the yield trials, Noy. If it were my land I’d be changing over but with this equation you could still make your targets on Baldmin, Bencubbin or even Regalia – although no man with an ounce of sense would grow a wheat so weak in the straw.’

  A mouse runs out from under Henry VIII’s feet, does a lap around Robert’s chair and exits, stage left. No one else seems to notice but I can’t help smiling. It seems like a good omen.

  Robert holds the piece of paper out in Les Noy’s direction. ‘Take it, Mr Noy – it’s yours. And there’s a similar equation for every man here.’

  Les Noy comes forward, with some hesitation, but by the time he gets to the stage an orderly line of men has formed behind him. Robert calls out their names like a school roll. There is a break in proceedings as the men read their equations and show them to neighbours and relatives. Robert returns to his seat on the stage although my instinct is he would be better on the floor amongst them. After a few minutes he calls the meeting to order again.

  ‘I propose we agree here today on the bulk ordering of super phosphate to decrease the unit cost for each –’

  ‘Slow down, Pettergree. Hold your horses. What’s this all about? Us putting our hands in our pockets by the looks of it. Which fertiliser company is paying you off?’

  Every head turns to the interjector, a thin man in a faded black suit.

  ‘Come clean, man.’

  I hug my arms to my chest, concerned about Robert’s reaction.

  He is instantly indignant. ‘I represent no one and I resent the implication. I stand here as a scientist – if anything I represent scientific endeavour and the improvements it can make to this land. There’s no magic here.’ Robert folds his arms over his chest. ‘And patriotism. Mr Lyons asked me to appeal to your patriotism.’

  Stan Hercules is the first to clap. The others quickly join in. Some men even get to their feet. One or two of the younger men whistle.

  Robert motions for quiet. ‘Down to business. I need a man to take the bulk orders. Is there a volunteer?’

  ‘In for a penny, in for a pound. I’ll do it, Pettergree.’

  Robert gives Ern McKettering a grateful nod and says his name aloud as he writes it down. ‘Mr Ernest McKettering.’

  Ern smiles proudly. He is now the scientist’s assistant – an apprentice scientist, perhaps. He taps the toes of his white cricket boots against the hall’s timber floor – the action of a man going in to bat. Then he turns and winks at me, as if to say, ‘That was a bit of fun, eh?’

  The day the super phosphate train arrives we are the first at the station wearing the yellow rosettes pinned to our chests. All of the men of the district are there – some with their wives and children. Boys have been kept home from school to help with the carting; they play marbles as we wait. The sun strikes the glass baubles as they tumble and crack on the platform. The sky is the deepest, brightest blue. We watch a small flock of galahs clean up around the silos across the tracks. They are so common here I hardly notice the beauty of them anymore – their feathers the softest nipple pink.

  ‘It’s coming.’ The boys run down the platform. ‘It’s coming, it’s coming.’

  A dark shape shimmers through the haze and, as it gets closer, solidifies into an engine. The stoker throws his cigarette out onto the line and straightens his cap. We are enveloped in a warm wet cloud of steam and cinders. Women cover their ears at the scream of the brakes. Robert walks down the line of trucks, clipboard in hand, to check the order. He frees a tie-rope on the first tarpaulin and flicks it high over the mound of super phosphate but it snakes back and catches him sharply across the face. He flinches.

  We peer up at the truck. Something is moving on top of the tarpaulin. A filthy bedroll, tied up with a pair of stockings, is thrown down onto the platform. Some of the women look away uncomfortably. Then a man jumps down. He brushes the worst of the grey-green dust from his greasy suit, smiles at us a little sheepishly, hoists the bedroll on his back and saunters off. As we look down the line of trucks more and more men are jumping down onto the platform. They are not farming men, or men we would normally associate with the city, but a different sort of men altogether. They have matted hair, ill-fitting clothes. They are men with deep-etched lines of hunger on their faces. Some have battered suitcases, some sugar bags. Several are hatless. One has no shoes – just newspaper tied to his feet with binder twine.

  Stan Hercules turns his camera away from the train and takes a portrait of one of the men nursing a thin and mangy kitten. The photograph makes the front page of the Ensign under the caption The Day the Depression Came to Wycheproof. The kitten, according to the report, died shortly after arrival.

  — 15 —

  SISTER CROCK PROCLAIMS THE BABIES THIN

  One night just before the 1937 harvest Robert gets out of bed – not stealthily, but ordinarily, as if the day has already begun. His tread is sticky on the linoleum. The screen door sighs and slaps. Time passes. Perhaps he is tying up the dog, or relieving himself in the garden, or checking the crop for locusts?

  I run my fingers along the walls to find the back door T
he step is still warm from yesterday’s soil drift. There is no moon but the garden is bright with starlight. The beams hit the car, the outhouse and the washing line from different angles so that everything is distorted – bigger, smaller, longer, and flatter, than in the day. The washing line swings gently. He must have touched it as he walked past. I check the car and the shed and walk to the front of the house to look down the track. Some wheat is broken near the fence in the first paddock. It is a neat stand of Gallipoli, nearly grown, already as high as my navel. I can see where he has walked in, where his legs have crushed two valleys in the wheat.

  I follow the broken path looking for the shape of him in the distance – the paddock doesn’t lead anywhere, just into another paddock of a different variety of wheat and then one of oats. Because I am looking up, not down, my foot touches his leg before I see him and I call out at the surprise of it. He is lying on his side in a half-moon of trampled stalks. ‘Are you sleeping out here?’

  He looks up at me but doesn’t answer. I run my foot along the back of his warm calf.

  ‘It isn’t working,’ he says.

  ‘What isn’t working?’

  He turns his head away. The starlight catches at the corner of his mouth. I stamp the wheat around him to make some room and lie down with my hand around his chest. I hold the prow of his ribs, and lie close to him, his body a tug piloting us through the night. Except that he seems to have lost direction, and I am no longer sure where we will end up.

  I must have slept a little, next to Robert, for when I wake up the sky has turned upon its head. The giant saucepan is no longer at its jaunty angle but twisted and slipping from the sky.

  I lie awake and think of the Better Farming Train. I remember Sister Crock’s saucepan of shiny aluminium that was only to be used to boil water for babies’ supplementaries. Demonstration boiling of course, given to supplement the demonstration baby in cases of extreme heat or loose stools. I remember Mary nodding mechanically when Sister Crock stored the special saucepan in the kitchen and insisted it be kept free from contaminants.

  A few days later, when we were at Beulah, we were making Folly her Friday-night treacle pie.

  ‘Here’s a good old pot for the treacle!’ Mary smiled at me as she placed the shiny saucepan on the stove. We only left it for a minute. Just long enough for Mary to move me into the light near the door to pluck my eyebrows. I stood nervously in front of her. Mary’s pale brows were modelled on the startled arches of Lupe Velez. We had seen Lupe and Douglas Fairbanks in The Gaucho at Ballarat and walked back to the train together holding hands and sighing at her loveliness.

  Too late. Too late for my eyebrows and the treacle. The pan was ruined. We took turns at scrubbing and hacking at it with a butter knife.

  ‘Just hang it up, Jeanie, she won’t notice. She only uses it for a doll – really, she’s not going to notice.’

  So we put the saucepan back in its place.

  The next day we left Beulah and headed for Birchip. The newspaper was full of babies. A local woman had given birth to triplets – three healthy boys – a credit to womanhood, the medical fraternity and the whole of the Mallee district. Such astounding productivity in such a small town.

  It was the abundance of babies at Birchip that led Sister Crock to change her mode of operation. She looked out at the attendees for her infant hygiene and nutrition lecturette. There were an astonishing number of babies. The Birchip triplets took pride of place in the front row – two in the arms of their sturdy mother, the third held by a teenage girl with long pigtails. The heat was stifling; the babies breathed small hot breaths. Sister Crock rubbed her hands on her apron. ‘I’ll be using a real baby for the demonstration today,’ she barked. ‘Pass one up.’

  Mary had done the preparation – sprayed the pews with Insectibane, boiled the pan of water and left it to cool with the lid on. When Sister Crock poured the foul brown treacly liquid into the demonstration bottle she was as surprised as the women who watched her. There was no explanation or apology. She stared for a moment at the bottle with its slimy lumps of floating treacle, then at the baby in her arms. The contents of the bottle looked much nastier than they were. It did not look like food.

  Sister Crock licked her lips briskly. ‘We will not be doing the demonstration feeding today. It is too hot. But it is the perfect time for a weigh-in. Correct weight of the infant is of great importance. Mothers, strip your babies, please.’

  It was a military style operation. The naked babies were handed up to Sister Crock and back again via a human chain. The carriage filled with a noisy wailing, the women’s hands were wet with sweat and tears. Sister Crock’s scales bobbed and dipped and only halted when she bent to rule another column in her record book. Sweat marks spread across her uniform like a tide, starting at the underarms.

  The event pushed the harvest from the front page of the Birchip Advertiser. Sister Crock Proclaims Our Babies Thin ran the headline. The story reported that even the Birchip triplets were of lower birth weight than a random sample of city babies conducted by the Melbourne Royal Children’s Hospital.

  ‘Thin,’ said Sister Crock, ‘is the enemy of every healthful mother.’

  Sister Crock, who had never married or had a baby. Who had never worn trousers or swum naked in a river. Who, on my engagement, had given me a private lecture on ‘marital hygiene’ in which she referred euphemistically to ‘flowers’ and ‘stethoscopes’. What would she think of me spending the night with my husband in the wheat?

  We wake in the noisy half-light to the pernickety tread of ants and the tearing jaws of leafhoppers. And something else. The sound of movement beneath the earth. The roots of the wheat pushing through the soil? Or the scratchings of mice?

  Robert reaches his hand over my head into the stems and snaps one clean. A tiny brush drags at the back of my calf. A pause. The stem bends under folds of cotton and finds its path again; circling my thigh. Further rucking up of my nightdress, the muffled feel of it through cotton on my buttocks then skin again – the small of my back. Upwards, slowly, tracing the triangles of my shoulderblades. Then the sound of him moving behind me and his sharp inhalation as he pushes the nightdress over my head. Turning me over – a hand on either side of my belly, my hair twisting and spraying a mist of dirt and wheat stubble across my face and chest. Somewhere in the distance a magpie warbles. The stem again; brushing the fronts of my thighs, sweeping around my navel. Higher. Dragging through the moistness of armpits. The brush’s head now bent and crushed. A fast figure eight over the large circles of my breasts, slower over the areola, slower still over the nipple’s eye, a gentle swabbing. I can feel the valves of my heart opening and closing, opening and closing.

  He watches the path of the brush intently. It curves up my neck, climbs my chin, traces the ridge where skin becomes lips. Quickly, impatiently, he pulls back and starts again at my belly, drawing a sharp, straight line into the curly hair of my sex. He traces the very edge of the soft mound and then dips in, nudging the lips apart in a slow prising.

  Things are slipping. I reach out over my head and grab a handful of stalks. The soil cracks around me as I hold on to them and pull. Robert dips himself into me, coating his fingers, then his penis, jutting and rubbing. The brush has fallen across my face. Tongue stretching, I pull it into my mouth. As he slides into me I grind it between my teeth – it tastes of wheatmeal and my own yeasty oil.

  Results from the

  1937 Harvest

  This year’s sample has a lower bushel weight (54 lbs) than previous years. The gains expected through the adoption of super phosphate have been more than offset by the severe mouse plague. In accordance with standard sampling procedure a portion of FAQ (fair-average-quality) wheat was critically examined and subjected to analysis and a milling test in the experimental flourmill.

  The sample was variable with some bright, plump grains of pleasing appearance and some smaller and paler grains. Contamination with rodent faeces was evident. Protein and moist
ure content is sub-standard.

  Test Baking

  Purpose: To measure the quality of wheats grown by Mr R.L. Pettergree of Wycheproof in regard to high yields of good-coloured flour with superior baking quality.

  Quality Tests: The Pelshenke figure, which gives an indication of gluten quality (time taken for dough ball to expand under water at temperature; time divided by protein content = quality), is below average. Mechanical testing of the physical properties of the dough using Brabender’s Farinograph and Fermentograph shows below average flour quality with gas-producing power in the low to normal range.

  They ate the grain from its bags, inside out. They ate the Ford’s upholstery. They ate the eyelids of a sleeping baby. They ate the kitchen curtains. They ate every chaff bag in the district. They did not eat the super phosphate.

  They lived in tunnels and caverns and great moving nests under the ground. Children held them by their tails and smashed them on the ground or stood on them or burnt them or drowned them in buckets and kero tins and casserole dishes. They stopped being many small things and became one big thing.

  No one said mouse. Mouse was too soft, too small, too frail. We said mice. Mice. Lice. Vice. I saw one run over Robert’s head, skid down the pillow and leap for the floor as he lay next to me in bed. I let him sleep.

  They ate the pink gloves Mr Talbot gave me. They ate two of Robert’s notebooks. I would not have blinked if they had carried Folly away. They wore her out. She stamped her feet all night long to stop them climbing up her legs.