The Yield

by Tara June Winch

  A month prior the only good news came from my Bishop via the Postmaster-General – a fob watch in recognition for my services. It was silver and heavy in the hand before confiscation, no matter it would have not brought pride noting the years coming after all that has happened. Perhaps I regret having built Prosperous Mission – where I had hoped to labour long in bestowing the benefits of the Glorious Gospel of the Blessed God upon those to whom we owe so much, but for whom we have done so little. What irony there is in the namesake itself, for my ambitions for the Mission’s prosperity was to be all my faults.

  Unsavoury as this opinion is, and for reasons I cannot quite understand, there is no other place I would rather be. The night before removal I had a dream that I was trying to build something, though with faulty hands that no matter my pleading would not do as instructed. The task seemed to carry on to no end. The dream was finally ratified when I awoke to the sound of the townsmen gathered again outside my hut. I believe it was weapons they dragged across the outer walls. They’d departed, but I feared I may myself hang from the peppercorn tree for who I am, what I had done there – and now I fear I may hang abounded by wire. Because of the weight of time upon me I have decided not to be a man sent to the gallows of the secret bush or these internment fences without having said all the things I need to. To tell how wrongs became accepted as rights. I realise now that no matter what ruin befalls me, this is my pledge: I will tell that unhandsome truth, even if it will amount to last words. The circumstances of the times demand it.

  ELEVEN

  At first when August and Jedda had arrived at Prosperous they were distracted by the chaotic comings and goings at the house: on Mondays and Tuesdays mothers’ groups; on Wednesday afternoons karate instruction classes; on Thursdays needlework; on Fridays Bible study; on Saturdays field and garden work; and on Sundays, a free day. Church in the morning for Elsie and Albert and the girls, and then before lunch Elsie would prepare afternoon tea in case anyone dropped around, which they nearly always did. Strangers sometimes, old people, whom Albert used to take on long walks around the property. Elsie would make a large pineapple turnover cake, lamingtons with coconut she shaved herself, or scones with cream that she beat in the chilled metal bowl before her hands turned permanently stiff. Elsie was the captain of the house and Albert the storyteller, but it was the food that they lived for, the food that they shared with every person who stayed or worked in and around the house – food was the centre.

  Elsie had tried to get August to eat normal, but something animal would come over her, even if she knew deep down they would be fed Every. Single. Meal. So, Elsie taught Jedda and August how to cook her way, cook more than just the toast, pasta and potatoes they knew how. In near-perfect condition on the sideboard, Elsie had the twenty-seven volumes of Cooking the World. On weekends and nights, she’d usher the girls up on stools by the kitchen basin like they were giving confession. Sleeves rolled up high, no need for aprons, their nana said, because ‘We’ll be exact, see?’, though nothing was ever measured, just a roundabouts pinch, handful, shake, dollop; there was no need for an egg timer either. Then they’d shave this and that, then chop with their thumbs tucked in. August remembered that the best jobs were mashing with butter or stirring with cocoa because of licking the bowl. Volume One through to Volume Five was called Home Cooking, which her nana used the most, but it seemed to her like a bit of everything from everywhere else: shepherd’s pie, fettuccine, vol-au-vents with asparagus cream, satay chicken skewers, feta and spinach triangles and – one of their favourites – curried sausages with rice. Curried sausages with rice made them weak at the knees. That was until Jedda and August snuck into the sheep shed on the other side of Southerly and saw tens of lambs being castrated, baby hooves hanging from the beams of the shed, blood down their legs, mewing for their ma’s. Then the girls, the first in their family, never wanted to eat animals again. Volume Six to Volume Ten was Italian and Spanish food, Volume Eleven to Volume Sixteen was French and South American, Volume Seventeen to Twenty-Two was African and Asian Cuisine, and Volume Twenty-Three to Twenty-Seven was Desserts of the World. If they were studious and helpful and polite then Jedda and August were allowed two scoops of vanilla ice-cream from the tub. Served with tinned peaches and raspberry sauce just like the picture from Volume Twenty-Six, page fifteen.

  Elsie also taught them how to greet people at the front of Prosperous and escort them into the big room for highlighting passages in the King James. In the same room Aunt Missy would come and teach karate, which Jedda and August were allowed to join in on. They weren’t very good students – August would daydream and Jedda would be swinging her arms and legs too loose for karate, and that’d turn into a dance and she’d be out the door. Shaking up the hallway, a tune in her head. She never could stay still, she was always dancing how she liked, moving to music no-one else could hear.

  At their nana and poppy’s place they got lots of hair washing and their grandparents talked to them, watched over their homework. But then they couldn’t protect them from everything – not the bull ants, or the rock snakes, or the sun without sunscreen, or a sore tooth if they didn’t remember to brush twice a day. Just like they couldn’t protect them from Mrs Maine, the schoolteacher, who clipped August upside the head when the answers weren’t forthcoming, or Ashlie from Jedda’s grade who was mean and nasty and spat on her shoes for no reason at all. Not from their feelings when their parents could never come back. When they were sat down and told that brief yarn, that their daddy was needed in heaven and their mummy was busy getting better, but couldn’t yet get out of the shut place.

  It was true, everything changed when August was eight years old.

  But it all changed more at nine.

  When she was nine the whole world flipped inside out.

  After nine she could see all the bones of things, the photo-negatives, all the roots of the plants, inside of the sky and all the black holes and burning stars. After nine she could see the little pulleys and gears inside people’s brains, see their skeletons and veins and blood and hearts and the whole of the town’s air coursing in their lungs. It was too late to tell anyone. How she was scared to leave, even more scared to stay. Because of the things she saw, those things that changed her tongue. Those things that were dead and done.

  August woke late in the morning with the taste of mercury in her mouth. With her eyes still closed the smells wafted through the open window – the great early heating of the first Edible Things from outside. The oil in the gums, warm karrajong fruit splitting, the hot flesh-baring seeds, banksia flowers heavy with sugar – the syrup seeping off stuck stamens, and stigmas and ovaries. On the branch there was a tipping point, just as there seemed to be in the town. Days were getting hotter. Other wafts from inside the house – Dettol and hot steam rising from the staircase – soap and pine and castor. Dettol had been the familiar aid for every weekend lost to cleaning. Through sleep-blurred eyes August saw the room. The room and all the noisy years of a childhood that had slid through fingers. Out of bed she began to dress, with her footfalls the floorboards laboured. Everything breaks away from its joints, she thought, windows, walls, floors. She imagined how the house was slap-sticked together back in the old days, with glue and hessian and then putty and plasterboard, all the while the Gondiwindi inside.

  She imagined running her fingers into the heavy grooves of wet floorboards, running up the stairs on all fours like when they were kids. As much as she felt at home in the couple of days she’d been back, she understood, after all the time that had passed, that she was now a visitor there. There was an entire world that she only used to know. All she wanted was to be taken back to before she was nine years old, to that time before she woke one morning and noticed the strange skin luggage she carried around. Before she knew her body and all the pain and joy and thirst and hunger and fatigue and sweat and blood and shit and the things it could taste.

  She held the handrail down the freshly mopped stairs and crossed the
clean floor to the kitchen. She made coffee and tiptoed past Elsie asleep again on the couch and into the garden. She noticed the sky, blue and spotless after the previous night’s flash downpour, as if the clouds had fled, ashamed of having made the farmers leap from beds in the night, into the anxious expanse, crossing their fingers for more.

  Her nana still slept on, even after the sun rose bright and quick and heated the house. August took another coffee outside and spotted Eddie coming down the hill from Southerly House, limping through the peach heath, sweat-slicked shoulders, shoulders that had grown, August thought, an entire dimension of their own.

  Her chest tightened and when he was close enough he called out, ‘Stranger.’

  August chuckled, she couldn’t think of anything to say. There wasn’t anything to say, there was no more childhood, no more Jedda, no more Poppy Albert, only the haunt of the past. Eddie looked at August with his blue eyes and leant in for a hug.

  August wasn’t used to him, so the hug she braced for was more awkward than lifeless. It had been such a long time since she had been squeezed so easily, so familiarly, that through the feeling of fish hooks in her guts and the sudden smell of blood, she smiled.

  ‘August Gondiwindi,’ he said to her eyes, ‘as I live and breathe.’

  ‘In the flesh,’ she said, avoiding eye contact, ‘pretty jet-lagged though.’

  Eddie Falstaff, heir of Southerly House, old friend, her first real kiss. Eddie had stood out in Massacre more than a Gondiwindi even. He had always been tall and protected in a frame like that. He was born at a short-lived time of abundance when children in Massacre enjoyed a period of fortuitous rainfall and plenty. For two good years people snapped ripe black plums from branches, stained teeth under mulberry trees, they took hunks of food into wide mouths. Mosquito-bitten legs ran year-round evenings under the stars, whipped through the lush wheat and barley and canola. August remembered when it was drier and Eddie Falstaff was ten, almost eleven and how he’d told all his schoolmates that in his basement at home they had a golden cannon. This big! – as he arranged three of his friends, side-by-side, their arms outstretched. He’d forgotten about the lie until his eleventh birthday party when, after the birthday cake and chaff-bag race, the boys complained enthusiastically as one to his mother. ‘When do we get to see the golden cannon?’ Eddie’s mother had cocked her head and mouthed the words ‘golden cannon?’ at Eddie before going in the house and leaving him to explain his way out of it. Eddie told August all about it after, but she’d already known since she’d been hiding in the bushes watching. August hadn’t been invited to the birthday party because it would make other people uncomfortable, Eddie’s mum had told him, and he’d relayed to her. Louise Hong from the Hong’s Chinese Restaurant couldn’t go so neither could August. Eddie thought his mother was talking about girl-germs, but August knew it was something else.

  Eddie Falstaff didn’t need to lie about the contents of his home – even during the drought, he was almost the richest kid in all of Massacre Plains, second to the Gadden kids whose family ran the local garage. The Gaddens that worked with all the best Holden and Ford lap cars every Grand Prix, when a hundred thousand bomber-jacketed blow-ins descended on Massacre. Barracking from the bleachers. It was the highlight event of every calendar year, and effectively, during those thin seasons, kept the region the barely oiled machine it was. Eddie’s family owned the grain of Prosperous Farm, a thousand head of cattle and also the pharmacy in town, before it burnt down.

  ‘How’s your folks?’ August asked, leaning into the verandah column.

  ‘Ah, what are you gunna do … they’re old. Mum’s in Broken hospital.’

  ‘She alright?’

  ‘Cancer.’

  August looked up at Southerly, imagined Mrs Falstaff during her perennial spring-clean, holding the straw broom aloft, clearing cobwebs from fascias. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry about your pop too, aye.’

  ‘Thanks, Eddie.’

  ‘I gotta bring down some of his books I borrowed and whatnot …’

  ‘Books?’

  He glanced at the wheatfield. ‘Well, your old pop must’ve rubbed off on me.’

  August was surprised, raised her eyebrows.

  ‘He was out here writing that book, wasn’t he?’ Eddie gestured towards the never-dismantled folding chairs.

  ‘A book?’

  He held his hands apart in front of his face. ‘Big thing.’

  ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘Dunno. He was writing it while watching them survey.’

  ‘Them?’

  ‘Rinepalm – strip mining.’ He rubbed his fingers together to sign money.

  ‘Nana and Poppy never told me.’

  ‘S’pose there isn’t anything we can do is why. They’re a tin mine company, real boss—they’ve been looking everywhere but they’ve settled here. Whole town’s rolled out the red carpet for them. See there!’ He pointed out into the field where August saw only the rust-spotted tops of wheat stalks.

  ‘Can’t see nothing,’ she said.

  ‘Look along my finger. Here.’ He drew her in with his free hand to see what he saw. And then she saw it, maybe half a kilometre out – three metal domes that looked to her like the heads of pins.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Drill sites – measuring or something, they reckon …’ he dropped his arm, flinching. ‘They’ll be here soon, you can ask them all about it. Seen them lot at Kengal too?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Protesters,’ he smiled, and widened his eyes. ‘They’ve been trying to get in here for months!’

  A car pulled into the shingle driveway of Prosperous. August couldn’t make out the people in the front and turned back to Eddie, but he’d already stepped off the deck.

  ‘See ya soon, Augie,’ he said, going up the ridge, back to Southerly through the still-rising light.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll come see you soon,’ she called to his back and he raised a hand in agreement as he went.

  Out of the car stepped the heavy frame of Great Aunt Mary. August noticed right away that her face had taken on sadness year by year, her mouth turned down like the gob of a Murrumby cod. With her was Aunt Missy. August thought she looked less spry and even more grey in the head than she’d been before. She was still tall, but everyone was – everyone still had their height.

  ‘AUG-UST!’ they yelped in unison.

  August had always felt strange around Great Aunt Mary, not just because she was so blunt that the sharp things she said hurt, not just because a stare could rock a boat right out of its mooring, but because she didn’t know about the bad in her own son, and August felt she had to be sad for her, that her boy was gone.

  Great Aunt Mary and Aunt Missy dashed silently to the house, heads bowed, as though they’d realised by closing the car doors, with those final thud thuds, that Poppy Albert was dead, and the sole reason August had returned.

  ‘How are you, darl?’ Mary asked.

  Under the awnings Aunt Mary briefly took August’s neck into her arms and August held her tentatively at the waist like they were slow-dancing.

  ‘Niece,’ Aunt Missy said, before taking her turn to slow-dance August, too. August fell into the hug. ‘You are teeny-weeny in my arms!’ she said and leant out, interrupting their choreography, holding August by the elbows, shaking her a little as if her body might change back like a Magic 8-Ball reading.

  ‘Els up?’ Aunt Mary asked, as she entered through the opened back door.

  ‘Asleep on the couch.’

  ‘Good flight?’ Aunt Missy said, letting her go and measuring her up and down with eyes instead.

  ‘Still tired, but it was okay.’

  ‘How many hours was it?’ Missy asked, wide-eyed.

  ‘Lost count.’ August smiled, and Missy poked her playfully.

  They followed each other inside. Elsie was asleep on the couch still, the sheet twisted at her feet. Aunt Mary stood in the kitchen and held coffee mugs in
the air and nodded at August like a response.

  ‘Black, no sugar – thanks,’ she whispered, and gently took the stairs to the attic room for cigarettes. Also, she thought, she wanted to find that book.

  The book, August recited in her mind and turned to address the room. ‘Big thing,’ Eddie had said. She rifled through the papers on the desk. What exactly she was looking for in the book, she couldn’t be sure. She felt, though, that Poppy had known something, had something to tell her. August felt that it was only he who had understood why she’d left without a word, yet he who wouldn’t have himself left without a goodbye. She felt that her poppy had been the only one, unspoken as it was, who knew why she’d never stayed.

  The book was second to food when August was little, then the book took the lead. Her books, though, were different from Poppy’s. The mobile library had been stocked with yellowed romance paperbacks, dog-eared murder mysteries and well-loved children’s books. Staff always located a book for her – first, all those possibilities, all those happy endings; afterwards, the perfect order of series, the succession of worlds for a while, until she’d needed more or grew out of others. They recommended Goosebumps, The Baby-Sitters Club, to Roald Dahl, Judy Blume, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Austen, Dickens, Faulkner. But in every mobile-library book, she could never find herself or her sister. Never a girl like August and Jedda Gondiwindi, not ever. She’d been reading nineteenth-century books, characters in which good and evil are clear, the books where time is evenly distributed throughout a life, and then the books where the characters could be both, times changed. In the pages she sometimes found those characters that lived in her childhood too, in the town where a person’s life fits and flits and ends. She loved her books, the pages filled with company when she was all alone, having those few movable possessions that were often lost, waterlogged or never returned yet had a way of replacing themselves. She was her grandfather’s granddaughter, August thought, looking around the room at the comforting stacks of bound spines.