The Farmer’s Wife

She looked down at her splotchy tan and grimaced.

‘Mum!’ called Ben from his booster seat. ‘Can I get out? Pleeease!’

Rebecca shut her eyes and clenched her teeth. ‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’ll never get you back in and we have to get to the health clinic! We’re late as it is.’

‘Oh, but Muuum! I want to see the sheep machine! Daddy said I could.’

Ben’s little brother, Archie, joined in. ‘Mummy! Get out? Pleeeease!’

‘No! Enough of the begging! I don’t care what Daddy says. He never has to get you anywhere on time! Plus Daddy insists on using nasty chemicals on the sheep. I don’t want you near the sprays,’ she said as she slammed the door, barged past Stripes and jogged with the basket over to the shearing-shed yards.

As she rounded the side of the galvanised-iron shed, Rebecca baulked at the intensity of the work that met her seedy senses. The contractor and his crew’s team of barking dogs were noisily pushing Merino ewes up and into a mobile shearing plant. A diesel generator was adding to the din. Each sheep was unceremoniously tipped upside down on her back into a metal crate for the men to treat. Kelvin the contractor and his workmen stood on the trailer platform, wielding their handpieces through the wool around the startled faces of the ewes, then jabbing through the dags on their rear ends.

When she saw the pile of dirty wool crutchings accumulating in the bins, Rebecca felt another wave of disappointment and frustration. She’d asked Charlie not to put the ewes on the rich monoculture diet of oats, which messed with their digestion and led to shitty dags around their bums. She’d reminded him the animals needed mostly dry feed to fill their gut, with just a bit of green pick.

It would soon be joining time, on Anzac Day, later than most places due to the altitude of Waters Meeting, though Charlie never seemed to manage to meet even that deadline, putting the rams in too late, thereby pushing lambing out too late and missing the feed burst in spring.

‘If you don’t crutch them before joining,’ Rebecca had yelled at him one recent Sunday afternoon, ‘the bloody rams won’t be able to get their dicks past the shit!’

Charlie had simply looked up at her with annoyance from his football viewing, feet propped up on a stool, a row of empty stubbies beside the chair. He had waited until a goal was kicked and the TV flicked to an ad break, then he’d turned to her. ‘Not only are you a screaming banshee in front of the kids, but you’ve got a filthy mouth,’ he’d said to her mildly. He swigged his beer, then turned up the volume some more. Rebecca had quietly taken herself off into the bedroom to cry and fold washing.

She looked down to the river flats now. They seemed exhausted to her. Bare soil that she knew would sprout weeds in between what was left of the oats. She thought of the luscious vibrant feel of the farms she’d visited with Andrew. There, the farmers had waited for the perennial plants to become dormant as they did at certain times of the year. Then when they had grazed the plants down, they had sown the oats directly into the soil, without the need for a single pass of a chemical spray unit or a plough. The farms looked untidy with the long dry grasses and vast variety of plant species, yet as Andrew explained, the grass was simply hay left standing for the animals. The array of plant species offered the animals a banquet of healthy options. She had seen first hand on those farms how the stock thrived. When she suggested to Charlie that they try the same so the animals could self-medicate on herbs, forbs, annuals and perennials, he’d looked at her as though she’d dropped her guts in front of the Queen.

Couldn’t he see today that the ewes looked terrible, weighted down with dags from the too rich, too lush oat crop?

Rebecca noted the shorn strips of dull green wool that ran up the backs of many of the ewes. They had been flystruck and maggots had taken hold, eating their flesh away. Charlie’s jetting looked to be way too late.

Despite that, he seemed happy with himself, keeping the flow of the wigged and crutched ewes moving through the jet that sprayed anti-fly mix over their bodies. The sheep packed tightly onto the trailer as the frantic commotion of men, dogs, metal yard gates clanging and machinery buzzing rolled on. Some sheep were sinking to their knees in the crush of bodies. Rebecca hated to notice the weak ones among them.

In the let-out yard, the processed ewes stood watching, their faces now bright white. Some occasionally nibbled at the short yard grass while others planted their feet, cast their heads low and shook their bodies, sending any excess of the bitter-smelling jetting-fluid droplets into the air.

‘Smoko!’ called Charlie when he noticed Bec clearing a place on Kelvin’s ute tailgate for the basket. Each shearing plant was pulled out of gear and as the last sheep was dropped from the trapdoor release, the dogs were told to ‘siddown!’ Soon all that could be heard was water running from the tap at the tankstand as the men washed their hands.

‘Better late than never,’ Charlie said as he shoved a sausage roll into his mouth, looking pointedly at Rebecca. A simple ‘thank you, darling’ would be nice, Bec thought bitterly, but she bit her tongue. She was still angry with him for not being at home when she’d arrived back from Yazzie’s. He spent more time at the pub than he did at home. Then there was the shameful, embarrassed feeling that had clung to her this morning — when she’d made a move on him to make love, he’d been unable to keep going for her. In the dark in her ridiculous borrowed negligee and even more ludicrous spray tan, she felt humiliated and repulsive as Charlie’s penis had withered in her hand. She had cried silently, drowning in misery and the expensive perfume Yazzie had drenched her in.

‘And how’s Mrs Lewis this mornin’?’ Kelvin asked.

Rebecca grimaced internally, displeased to see him back on Waters Meeting. Charlie would’ve told Kelvin about the humdinger of a fight they’d had the first time he’d come last winter. Charlie was not big on tact, especially if it made Rebecca look foolish. He would’ve told Kelvin she’d wanted to hire another contractor, George Pickles.

Rebecca knew George had a passion for understanding stock movement and used his brilliant team of Kelpies to shift sheep through the yards quickly but with as little stress as possible. With George came a wicked wit too.

In the early years, before the boys, Bec had loved to work on the plant with George’s crew of cheeky, flirtatious young men. For Rebecca it had been a godsend to find a stockman like George after years of butting heads with her father over his motley crew of ill-trained working dogs and his rough, yelling ways around animals.

But it seemed since having children, Rebecca had left more and more of the stock work and decisions up to Charlie. George was ten cents a sheep dearer than Kelvin and so last year Charlie had decided George wouldn’t be coming back to Waters Meeting.

Kelvin had arrived last winter for footparing during what had been an incredibly hard time due to days and days of huge rains following three years of drought. With weak stock, muddy yards and a rough team of pushy men who looked as if they belonged in prison, the whole experience had been a disaster for Rebecca.

There were lame sheep everywhere on the property with foot abscesses, foot scald and a bad run of foot rot. Bec had been furious with Charlie for not paying enough attention to rotating the stock around the paddocks properly. Charlie had put sheep in boggy marsh paddocks and let mobs onto pasture that needed resting for regrowth.

There was also the issue of quarantining treated stock from contaminated soils that held intestinal worms and foot rot within them. All the while that winter, Bec had also battled the inconveniences of an ever shabbier house with a leaking roof, the seemingly endless domestics created by two small children and the disquiet in her mind, as the rain fell and fell. She felt guilt for everything. Even the fact she had begun to resent the rain after such a long dry spell.

One very dark afternoon, after dragging yet another weak in-lamb ewe out of a gully wash, she’d drawn up a hundred-day paddock rotation for Charlie to begin, based on Andrew’s seminars. With a bit of fencing sub-division, they could push the grazing out to a hundred and fifty days so the paddocks rested for longer. But Charlie hadn’t taken a scrap of notice. She knew it wasn’t entirely him. Rebecca knew deep down after Archie was born she had been hit with waves of post-baby depression that had never seemed to lift. Too proud to seek help from others, Rebecca had begun to let life on the farm slide on by without her. And with it went Charlie.

Hitting the gin one night after the boys had gone to bed, Rebecca had angrily thrown all the plans in the bottom drawer of the desk in the farm office and left them there. It had all got too hard and she simply didn’t have the energy any more to battle with herself, let alone Charlie.

It hadn’t rained since that wet winter and now in the dry, Bec was faced with Kelvin again. Grubby, rough and toothless. She glanced at the body of a sheep that had been tipped over the fence. A broken-necked ewe that had hit the railing hard in panic, singled out by dogs not taught to ‘steady’. Bec clenched her jaw. By the end of the day, she knew there would be more ewes piled there, with their glassy-eyed death stare.

Busily she laid out the cakes, biscuits and savouries and tried to ignore that she had just been called ‘Mrs Lewis’ in a voice that was tainted with the weight of disrespect.

She clamoured to find inside her the young woman of her youth, who had worked alongside the men at the sale yards or in the shearing shed. Instead she attempted a smile for the man who stood before her. Like always, Kelvin was dressed in grimy jeans and an even grimier tractor cap, with brown hair that was almost matted into dreadlocks sticking out from under it.

‘I’m feeling pretty ordinary, thanks for asking, Kelvin,’ she said.

‘Big night?’ Kelvin’s blue eyes narrowed and his thin smile twisted at one corner as he looked her up and down.

‘Yes, it was a bit of a big night. I’m not terribly piss fit at present,’ she said. ‘Not like Charlie here.’ She intended it as a dig, but Charlie seemed to pay no heed as he patted his belly proudly.

‘Yep, I’ve been working on this baby for a long while.’

‘Charlie tells me you got some nice Tupperware on order,’ Kelvin said slyly.

‘You blokes!’ Bec said. ‘And you say we women gossip! Really!’ She turned to Charlie. ‘I’ve gotta go. I’ll be back well after lunch. There’s sandwiches made and could you please switch the slow cooker on for tea? It’s ready to roll. I thought we could eat at home rather than the pub. Save the dollars as you say. You are coming to the info night with Andrew, aren’t you?’

Charlie seemed to tense up at the mention of it. ‘If the boss says so, I suppose I must,’ he said, glancing at the men.

‘No doubt who wears the trousers round here,’ Kelvin said, tucking his tongue cockily inside his cheek and raising his eyebrows at her.

Rebecca felt frustration simmer within. Then Ben arrived at the yard gate, Archie behind him, both little boys looking guilty. Sheep manure was already squelched into their town shoes, and paw marks, compliments of an overexcited Stripes, now smeared their once clean shirts.

‘Get in the car. Now!’ Rebecca said through clenched teeth.

As she ushered the boys back to their car seats, she heard Kelvin call, ‘Nice fake tan, by the way. Next time use something other than molasses.’

As she strapped the boys in again, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at where she found herself in life. She looked at the beautiful round face of her dark-haired Ben, who was suddenly growing long and lean now he was six. There, next to him, was quiet little Archie, who had the most beautiful sandy hair in ringlets about his fine-featured face, much like her own. They were the dearest little fellas. Her best mates.

Surely while they were this little, hanging in there with Charlie and feeling shut out from the farm was worth it? Things would improve over time. She knew it. She breathed in her resolve and puffed air from her mouth.

As she turned, she saw Charlie walking towards her, sleeves rolled up, his khaki work shirt tucked into brown RM Williams jeans, his Akubra obscuring his face so it was hard to tell what he was thinking.

She thought by the way he approached her he was about to give her a serve over something she had done that he disapproved of. She felt her internals flinch, then she steeled herself.

‘About last night,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry. Y’know, I’ve been under the pump lately.’

Rebecca wasn’t sure if he was alluding to the abysmal love-making that had ended in a flop of failed sex, or the fact that he had been out all hours yet again, or his guilt over the ploughing, but she was relieved that at least he was talking. She waited in silence, hoping for more from him.

‘Let’s, you know … give it another go. Give it a red-hot shake,’ he said.

She searched his face, but he gave her little to go by. ‘You know me. I’m up for anything,’ she said. And next he was pulling her into his embrace, holding her close to his chest. He smelled strongly of lanolin, dirty-tailed sheep and fly chemicals, but she let her face be pressed against him; starved of his affection, she drank the moment in.

‘Yes. Let’s give it a go,’ she said. ‘’Specially for the boys’ sake.’

As he pulled away from her, he muttered, ‘You know I love you, babe.’

And that was all Rebecca needed to hear.

Eight

As Rebecca drove away from the stockyards and shearing shed, thoughts tumbled in her mind. If Charlie felt that way, surely they could solve anything in their marriage? She took comfort from his hug and those few precious words, as if they were a rope to which she could cling. As she passed her father’s now vacant log cabin, she looked at it, suffused with emotion. The dwelling sat low and lonely on a tree-lined rise in the heart of a river flat. She didn’t want to be like her parents. Ever. Separated and surly with each other. Surely she and Charlie wouldn’t suffer that fate?

When Bec’s mother, Frankie, had left, taking with her a carload of her vet equipment, life at Waters Meeting had spun out of control. Frankie thought she was doing the right thing and had waited for years until her children were ‘old enough’. Bec, the youngest, was sixteen when her mother left, but the impact had been huge for all of them — even her brothers, Mick and Tom, who were young adults at the time. The three children of Harry were left at Waters Meeting to deal not only with his temper and drinking, but also his hurricane of negativity, which battered them daily. Burdened with memories of parents who no longer cared for each other, Rebecca had keenly felt the struggles of the whole family.

After Harry’s death, Bec felt guilty that there were days when she was relieved her dad was no longer on the place. His once green lawn, kept vibrant by the house grey-water, was yellow and bleached. The vegetable garden was now filled with long rank grasses and weeds. Some days it hurt Bec too much to look at it. Let alone go into the place.

Bec had watched age soften her father a little, so that by the time he’d died, most of the bridges between Rebecca and him had been rebuilt, if only cosmetically. Even though her father’s love was unspoken, Rebecca tried to believe it was there. Like the river. Sometimes it flowed, sometimes it didn’t, but the bed of it, the vein of it, was always there. Deep inside, though, she knew she was telling herself a lie. Her father had resented her. Loathed her tenacity. Her unmovable commitment to remaining on the land, despite the fact he didn’t want her there. He wanted his sons.

Bec looked at the verandah and imagined her father sitting there. His one arm resting on the squatter’s chair, the stump with the pinned sleeve held close to his chest. His solitary wave as she and Charlie passed his house, both of them busy with the farm. At first he was supportive of her and the plans she and her rural counsellor friend, Sally, had put in place, but then as the seasons stalled and, as she now knew thanks to Andrew, the soils began to decline from their outdated farm practices, Harry’s bitterness and disbelief in her ability had returned.

Bec suddenly wanted to find a tenant for the cabin so that new memories could be made there. Charlie had reservations about having strangers in their space. But she was ready to move the memory of her father on.

It was four years ago this summer that Harry had died. On a sweltering day in February, in the same bush clinic she was taking the children to now. His stomach cancer had worsened. Bec had driven him, Harry wincing at each and every pothole. With the morphine no longer hitting the spot, his face had blanched a deathly grey. She hadn’t thought it would be the last time Harry would draw in the fresh Waters Meeting air. Rich clean oxygen, seeping from millions of trees. Instead Harry ended up breathing from a canister, the mask on his face slipping sideways, his inhalations slowly softening until his life was no more.

When Harry’s casket was lowered into the grave next to Tom’s, it was as if her wounds were torn open again. She didn’t want him buried so close to her brother. Now, four years on from Harry’s death and over a decade on from Tom’s, she still felt wide open and raw. Bec had not a clue how to heal herself.

The minister in his sermon encouraged the sentiment that it was nice that a father would be reunited in Heaven with his son, but Bec thought bitterly that Harry was the last person on the planet Tom would want to see.

Even though she had made peace with her father, the shadow of Tom always sat between them. She still got chills as she passed the spot where the old wooden garage used to be. The rafters on which he had slung the rope, long since burned and blown to the wind, gone since the night she took to the structure with a tractor and a chain, followed by a drum of fuel and a match, in a wild rage of grief.

She often talked about Tom to Ben and Archie, trying to keep the memory of him alive through her words. She rarely spoke of their grandfather. It was sometimes difficult to find positive things to say about him. Ben remembered little of his granddad and Archie had been a baby still being carted about in a front pack by Rebecca when Harry had died. But it was the energy of Tom she wanted to foster in her boys.

‘He was so different from your Uncle Mick,’ she would say to them, often when she was busy so the little ones couldn’t see emotion contort her face. ‘He was smaller than Mick, but very, very handsome. And brilliant at art. You know that painting in the dining room? Of his horse, Hank, and the hut? He did that. Before he died.’

When Ben sometimes asked how their Uncle Tom had died, Bec would go quiet. How could she explain suicide to a child?

‘The angels called him away because they needed him,’ she would eventually say, then change the subject. But the shadows of Tom were all about Waters Meeting and the light of him. Some days she was overjoyed to see the sun paint the mountainside golden and she felt sure he was there, still up at the high-country hut, where he had long ago sheltered from the storms in his own head. Other times, in the half-dark, when her own mind was awash with despair, she felt the torment of his haunting.

As she passed the big double-storey Waters Meeting house on the hill, she wondered why, no matter how much she pushed and worked, she could never seem to transform the place to anything other than a tired old homestead that struggled, alongside a farm and a family that struggled. The visit to Rivermont the night before had made the feeling even more sharp. Bec was failing. Failing life, failing her boys, failing herself. Her dreams were dying before her eyes, yet the reason why was beyond her reach. Did she not pour enthusiasm into everything she did? Did she not try her hardest?

She glanced at the plastic bag on the front seat; it contained Yazzie’s freshly washed baby-doll nightie. She must’ve been so drunk to borrow it and put it on for Charlie! Along with the spray tan! She felt such a fool. Wheels whirring over the grid onto the bitumen, Bec settled into the drive to Bendoorin. Again she reassured herself that things would be OK. Once the parcel from the sex-toy party arrived, she and Charlie would get back on track and she would feel alive again.

As Rebecca drove into town, her bleak mood shifted to one of amusement when she saw the sign that announced the current campaigns of the state police. A wag with a big black Texta had defaced the sign. The formal overzealous state budget font read: POLICE ARE NOW TARGETING … And in the space provided some clown had scrawled CRANKY CHICKS.

She burst out laughing. That was something she and her college mates would have done in their wild Ag College years.

‘Police are now targeting cranky chicks!’ she said, giggling again. ‘Huh! That’s funny.’

‘What, Mummy?’ Ben asked. ‘What are you laughing at?’

‘Oh, nothing, sweetie. Just a silly sign. Not very politically correct.’

‘Not very what?’

She smiled at Ben in the rear-vision mirror, his serious dark eyes looking at her, curious.

‘Politically correct. It’s when very nerdy people don’t get jokes and take life far, far too seriously for their own good.’

She now looked at her own image in the mirror and wondered if she would be considered a ‘cranky chick’ these days. She suddenly realised she too had become a very serious person. With a start, she wondered when? And how had the seriousness set in? Why didn’t she do anything crazy any more, like she had done at Ag College? Where was it in the rule book of life that you had to grow up and be sensible? Even at the sex-toy party, she had barely let herself go. She resolved that she should be more fun, like Yazzie had suggested. Rebecca realised she was in one huge deep rut — she needed Charlie’s bloody stupid new big tractor and a chain to pull herself out of it. For herself, for her boys and, of course, for Charlie. With that resolve in mind, she cranked up the CD of The Sunny Cowgirls for the last hundred metres of the main street, rocking to ‘Summer’ until she turned into the car park of the health clinic.

An hour later, after the dentist, Bec found herself whizzing the boys in a trolley up and down the supermarket aisles of Candy’s store, making V8 engine noises. At Ag College they’d had many drunken adventures with the sturdy steel contraptions. Why shouldn’t she have fun with them at this age? But even as she whizzed the boys from the canned goods section to the sauces, she felt her mood was forced. Strained. She knew the Who’s Who of Bendoorin would be lurking in the aisles to find out the gossip from the scandalous party at Doreen and Dennis’s. Luckily Bec managed to avoid too many encounters, making it to the checkout with only one ‘Hello, how are you?’ from Mrs Newton, who looked equally knackered from minding the boys.

At the checkout they found Candy also looking frazzled from the party. Her bright orange poncho with blue knitted flowers cast a sickly hue across her greenish-grey face.

‘What a night! I feel so undone!’

‘You’re not alone,’ Bec said, loading groceries onto the counter.

‘Nice tan, by the way,’ Candy said, starting to bip the goods past the scanner. ‘One of Yazzie’s, I’d say. She got me last week when the parcel first arrived. We took the bloody thing upstairs into my shower and she turned me into a Polly Waffle.’

‘Hah! Yeah, it’s not the best look,’ Bec said, holding up the palms of her hands to reveal patches of tanning lotion.

‘It’ll wash. While you’re in town, you should get yourself a coffee and some lunch for the boys. Larissa’s new shop is open for business. I know I’m her very proud mother, but she really does make the best coffee. She can give you a double shot. Get you over the line back to Waters Meeting this arvo. There’s also the hoodoo guru’s new shop next door. You should check it out.’