Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (Picador 40th) Page 12

  Robert scoffs as he reads the newspaper reports: ‘Three days of discomfort. Tell them to come and live here for a year. Tell them to come and breathe a few lungfuls of our fine country air.’

  When the soil storms blow themselves out I walk Folly down to the river in search of some green pick. The Mallee has gusted itself upside down. In the pure state of nature the root of the plant lies beneath the soil, not above it. But here the drift has blown the soil away, several feet of it, so the roots of the Mallee scrub sit up, exposed, like the unclothed bodies of men and women. There is something obscene in the way the tripod legs meet the torso, often with dangling root hairs or a hanging tuberous growth.

  — 18 —

  WING FOOK’S MARE

  Robert has never been into horses but the sand drift is making tractor work impossible. He asks the Chinese hawker Wing Fook to look out for a steady mare and a week later Fook appears at the door. Robert greets him with a riddle: ‘What is the Mallee, Mr Fook?’

  Fook smiles obligingly, showing his tannin-stained teeth. He has no answer.

  ‘A small area of land surrounded by mortgage.’ Robert delivers the punchline then looks around at the dry paddocks. ‘If it wasn’t so sad it’d be funny.’

  Fook brushes a fly from his mouth. ‘Yes, velly funny Mr Petteygee.’ He is keen to change the subject. ‘Mr Petteygee, I bring that horse for you.’

  They walk out to Fook’s cart. A swaybacked mare is tied to the rail. Robert looks her over – a thin washed-out chestnut with a bitten-off tail.

  ‘Is she sound?’

  Fook shrugs. ‘I think. But she not look so good.’

  They bargain. Robert can’t afford the horse but he doesn’t want the Chinaman to see what he’s come to. Things are dire but he has his pride.

  The mare is placid. She follows Folly around. She walks with her head down, sometimes bumping her nose on the ground. Until one day when she is left on her own. Then she walks blindly through a barbed wire fence. She cuts her chest and neck to shreds and bleeds to death.

  It dawns on Robert bitterly. ‘She not look so good’ meant she could not see.

  Results from the

  1938 Harvest

  This year’s bushel weight of 47 lbs is the lowest for the past four years. A poor season created extremely taxing conditions for growers. Additives, where used, have improved yields marginally, but not enough to offset their cost.

  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 is noticeably smaller and duller. Rust is evident. The amount of weed seeds (saffron, thistle, barley, wild oats, etc.) is higher than last year’s sample. The moisture content is below normal as is the protein content.

  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 is poor. Mechanical testing of the physical properties of the dough using Brabender’s Farinograph and Fermentograph shows average flour quality with slightly lower than acceptable gas-producing power.

  The loaves are smaller, meaner and slightly orange, as if they have taken on the colour of the soil.

  I fold the table of results and place it in Robert’s notebook then I wrap four of the loaves in damp tea towels and take them over to Elsie next door. She is carting bath water out to her rose bushes, although they look all but dead. Her boys run along behind her catching the drips in a kerosene tin and transferring them carefully to a dirt cricket pitch they are preparing out the back. The older boys use their mulga wood bats to smooth the few drops of water over the dirt, but it soaks away instantly. They don’t seem to notice. They tell me they are making a ‘sticky wicket’ in the style of last summer’s test played at the Sydney Cricket Ground where Mr Donald Bradman led our team to victory against England and where the wicket, it was said, had the properties of a sticky dog.

  — 19 —

  THE DEATH OF FOLLY

  This morning, when I stretched up to find my face in the rectangular mirror over the bathroom sink, my eyes were blue. I turned my head from side to side watching the light film over them, thinking it was a trick of reflection. But from any angle, singularly or together, they are blue.

  I unpick the thread from the corner of the cot sheet and try to match the new colour in Super Sheen but the blues are too sweet – cornflower or china, or too strong – royal and navy. The new blue of my eyes is flat and streaked. It is the blue of burning kerosene.

  The sheet is for Mary’s baby. An outline of Folly’s face and my own half turned towards each other like newlyweds. Across the top, in spokestitch, I have embroidered GREETINGS FROM THE MALLEE. When I post the sampler to Mary there will be a letter with it breaking the news that Folly is dead.

  If Mary were here I would have told her how it happened many times over. By telling it, always starting or finishing at a different place, focusing on each small piece of it, I would somehow have etched it into my mind. Whenever I thought of it again it would have been there – a solid moving picture of memory. Without Mary, and with no one else to talk to, it has been laid down without words and is forever getting up again and disturbing me with some new detail.

  Now it is my sandals. I remember them filling with twigs and stones as I run across the fallow paddock. It is so hard to run on this slippery bed of burnt dirt. Folly is in front of me, lying bloated on her side in the barbed shade of some stunted gums by the river.

  I’m running and slipping. Stopping to hop and shake my feet. All the while Folly is in front of me. I don’t seem to be getting any closer. Her back moves up and down with my breath. I limp the last few yards on the sides of my feet and kneel beside her, smoothing my hands across the flat of her haunches, across her belly snapped tight. Her front legs are bent at the knee as if she is having a cantering dream. Her ears are thin and frayed at the edges, the veins still blue with blood. But I can see too that her sheen is gone and her chest has sunk unnaturally into the dirt. Her tongue, a nasty mottled purple, protrudes from slack lips. I think for a second that I see one of her eyes move – that she has winked at me, like Abe the cat – until I lean in closer. A fat clump of maggots slides across the lake of her eye. My breath is solid and hard to move and I think not now, Folly, not now, please, don’t be dead now.

  Leave that. Go back further. Go back a few more days to the first time she was down. Remember how her milk was tinged with green and I had to coax it out of her. How I asked Robert to look at her.

  ‘Just look, you don’t have to do anything, just look at her.’

  ‘It’s hardly my speciality – scrub cow. I said you shouldn’t have brought it here.’

  I ripped the cloth off the table in fury and stood with it flapping in my hand.

  ‘Just look at her!’

  I remember the whole dragging length of that next day. Checking Folly every hour, watching the horizon for the tractor. Not cleaning or cooking. Sitting on the step eating a whole shepherd’s pie with my fingers. Finally, at dusk, Robert comes back in. I am holding a bucket of treacle mash up to her.

  ‘How long has she been this bloated?’

  ‘A while, I think. I thought she was putting on condition. But this last week she can hardly move.’

  He reaches for her udder and squeezes it hard. She groans and lifts a hind leg in protest.

  ‘Stinking weed. She’s eaten a belly full of stinking weed. She’s chock-a-block with poison gas. Most likely it’ll kill her.’

  ‘Can’t you do anything?’

  ‘Try to pump her. If that doesn’t work we’ll have to stick her, which will probably kill her anyway.’

  I remember the next morning. Getting up early to walk to Ivers for a bicycle pump. (It occurs to me here, at this point in the retelling, that Robert could have driven me the evenin
g before. He could have got the car out or gone himself and if she’d been pumped sooner perhaps she would have lived.)

  There are three large paddocks between the two farms. A mass of tiny green locusts attach themselves to my yellow dress as I walk. One of the Ivers boys hangs upside down in a nectarine tree near the house. I lick my teeth and try to smile at him. ‘Is your mother about?’ He hangs still for a minute, not wanting to believe I can see him, and then swings down to the sound of tearing fabric that we both ignore.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll look.’

  Elsie is in the washhouse where she’s up to the blue and pleased to see me. I wring and rinse her last load while she searches for little Percy to send into the paddocks to find his dad who will be able to put his hand on the pump straight away. (Unlike Elsie or the bigger boy, who don’t even bother to look.) We peg out together while we wait. Elsie looks at me sharply as she shakes out a towel.

  ‘At least you come when you need something. It’s a start.’

  I am reluctant to handle her husband’s large underpants and fish around in the basket for something safer.

  Still no pump. We move in to the kitchen and I help her chop onions and peel hard-boiled eggs for a new, modern recipe she is trying for the first time. Spaghetti Beehive. Elsie reads the directions to me from the latest edition of Woman’s World: ‘An intriguing and economical concoction. Line a mould with cooked spaghetti arranged in beehive fashion.’

  Elsie is using a shallow pan in place of the mould – more a car tyre than a beehive.

  ‘Fill with sliced rabbit, tomato, sliced hard-boiled eggs. Firmly pack dissolved gelatine in hot stock and pour into mould. Chill. When set serve upside down on a plate surrounded by lettuce.’

  There’s nothing green or leafy in the Mallee. I wonder what she’ll use for lettuce.

  Leave the beehive. Robert wouldn’t have eaten it anyhow. We don’t eat rabbit. It’s one of Robert’s principles. Pests are the enemy and eating them encourages laxity in control. Skip over the search for little Percy, who has found the pump and taken it to his lair of broken fruit crates under the house. Ignore the older boy, the nectarine tree boy who has been picking the remaining locusts off my dress and crushing them between his fingers, and who now, even though all of the locusts are gone, continues to rub his hand up and down my leg.

  Get home at last, with the pump. Wave it at Robert like a baton. This time he gets down from the tractor and comes to help. Hold Folly’s head while Robert does this foul thing to her, forcing the air back up through her teats to clear the first milk and make a vacuum through which the stinking gas can escape. He uses one hand to make a seal between the valve and her teat and the other to operate the pump.

  ‘Hold her, Jean, hold her still.’

  I’m trying. We dance about, Robert and me connected to each other by a rope and a struggling cow and a hissing pump. There are embarrassing noises – balloons squirting and deflating. Robert isn’t hopeful, he says there’s nothing more to do but wait.

  Back to the sandals. To the fallow paddock. I find a smoother path to run on. The twin tracks of the tractor wheels are on either side of me. I am running in the path made by something dragged behind them. Something large and heavy.

  Robert dragged her here to burn. The chains had dug into her hind legs so deeply he cut them off with an axe to free them. He lit her with a can of kerosene at dusk, when the wind had died down. I sat on the back step and watched the blue flame burn through the night.

  — 20 —

  A DODGY MERCHANT AND HIS DOG

  For some it is not the drought or the mouse plague or the sand drift or even agricultural science that brings them undone, but economics – the money science. I piece this together from what Doris gets out of Ern and from Lola at the Commercial and the other women whose husbands sign up for a forward contract.

  Ride the market, ride it hard.

  Enter a forward contract.

  It was too mystical an equation for Doris. Ern tried to explain it at the kitchen table.

  ‘Imagine the tablecloth is a paddock. Right now it’s bare, nothing there, but it has the potential to produce something valuable.’

  ‘More tablecloths?’ Doris quips.

  ‘No. No. It’s an example, Dodee. The tablecloth is the paddock. The paddock without wheat, but considering everything, our previous harvests, the weather, the price of wheat in Europe, it has the potential to produce so many bushels of Australian Standard White at fair-average-quality. Where are you going?’

  ‘To get the good tablecloth. It’ll look more like the wheat.’

  Ern watches Doris as she unfurls the best linen cloth, waving it like a flag in front of her. The soft pink flesh of her arms jiggles above the elbow. She is smiling a small pretty smile. The cloth is smoothed, the salt and pepper shakers repositioned in the middle of the paddock. Ern continues.

  ‘So when is the price of wheat better? Now, when there is nothing on the market? Or the end of next summer when every cockie in the country has stripped and bagged and can’t buy next year’s seed until he sells?’

  Doris takes a punt: ‘Now?’

  ‘Exactly. We are going to sell before we’ve even planted. We are going to sell our potential.’

  Doris strokes the tablecloth. ‘So it’s a good idea?’

  ‘It’s a ripper.’

  ‘You don’t think you should write to the boys and see what they think?’

  ‘Pah! It’s wheat, not ruddy sugar cane.’

  What Ern doesn’t tell Doris is that they don’t really have an option. Without the forward payment they can’t cover the interest on the machinery loan and the tank loan, or buy seed and fuel to get the next crop into the ground, let alone out again. She makes him a cup of tea and he puts his arms around her middle. She doesn’t move or suck herself in; she fills the space perfectly.

  The forward selling merchant is impressive. Within a week he has signed up sixteen of the Wyche district farmers. He visits each place individually in his Hispano Suiza with a tiny golden-coated dog on the front seat. He is from Sydney. He uses a brass slide-rule calculator to assess how much he can pay now and how much on delivery. His chequebook is covered in alligator skin. All sixteen farmers overstate last year’s production figures. They see how smoothly the slide rule slides, how easy it is to let it slide a little further.

  ‘In this book I have written proof of my connections in the European market,’ says the merchant. He pats the book; it too is covered in alligator skin. The farmers nod without asking to inspect it.

  The merchant offers fair prices. Prices higher than 1938 when the rain was poor and late, rabbit damage was high and at least half of the crop had rust.

  ‘Rain, rabbits and rust. The three Rs add up to one big R – RISK. Forward sell and I carry the risk for you,’ the merchant spins his spiel. ‘You can sleep soundly in your bed at night without listening for rain on the roof or for the mice chomping through your crop. It’s the modern way of doing business.’

  The merchant explains that the good prices are the result of his advanced organisational abilities. He books his ships through the Baltic Exchange in London months before the wheat is stripped. The ships are timed to arrive just as the wheat trains chug into the docks. There is no double handling, no risk of demurrage. The wheat is loaded straight from train to ship, the ship turns around and sails back to Europe. The merchant has the seven or eight weeks of the journey to sell. It is this selling afloat that makes him riskier. The other merchants wait until harvest, purchase the product at the best, current, market price, sell it out of the country and then order the ships for its delivery. The offer of some cash now is too much for the Mallee farmers. They don’t read the fine print of the contract – the convoluted legalese that allows the merchant to sell at any price once the wheat has left the country and to deduct a massive commission for his efforts.

  ‘Better seven or eight anxious weeks for me than a whole anxious season for you, eh?’ the merchant chortles.
>
  ‘What if you don’t sell it?’ Ern McKettering asks.

  The merchant taps his alligator-skin book. ‘It’s all in here, good sir, every Eye-talian, Frenchie and Britisher with an interest in Australian Standard White. There’s trouble in Europe, Mr McKettering – even talk of war. You need someone with inside knowledge. It’s all here in this book.’

  Ern signs the contract and follows the merchant out to his car.

  ‘Nice tank you’ve got there.’

  ‘Empty,’ Ern grunts.

  The merchant’s dog has moved over behind the steering wheel. It looks up at its master with big limpid eyes.

  ‘Is it a rabbiter?’ Ern asks.

  ‘A Pomeranian. A very fine European breed. All the rage in Sydney.’

  Ern shakes his head. No good for rabbits, too small for stockwork. But Doris would love it. Perhaps, he thinks, when the forward sell money comes in, he’ll buy her one.

  According to Lola Sprake the merchant had meant to come to us. It was just a matter of timing. He moved through a district in a logical and workmanlike fashion. Only farmers with sufficiently large holdings were approached and only when they were in close proximity to a railway siding. The merchant mapped his movement through the district with a compass and a knack for arriving just as something was coming out of the oven. Our farm happened to be at the end of the line.

  The merchant’s last morning in Wycheproof, the morning he was coming out to us, started badly. He had hardly slept. A fierce wind had blown the Commercial’s sandwich board (Steak and Kidney Pie with Pud. 5/4d) about on the porch below his room for much of the night. He arrived early in the dining room and was attacking a pair of breakfast kidneys when he was disturbed by the muffled sound of Lola’s screams. The Pomeranian had bitten her as she stripped the bed. The merchant was forced to leave a slightly larger than normal tip – there was some blood and the need for a sweet sherry. He was glad to be manoeuvring his large suitcase down the stairs.