The Yield

by Tara June Winch

  Eddie had been at a different school. Had he been thinking about her since school, she wondered. Had he really wanted her heart, all broken too early, with its missing bits already? Or just wanted to kiss her because he was sorry, because he knew Jedda and Poppy too, because everything was beginning again or finally ending? She didn’t know. She cared, but tried not to. Not then, not with everything else she needed to care about.

  Later Aunt Missy arrived and Aunt Mary, Aunt Betty and Aunt Nora too, who’d grown up with Poppy and then without Poppy, at and then away from the Station. Elsie wiped her hands, set the wooden spoon on the sink and retrieved the linen. She handed August the stack of laundered sheets and sent her out to make up the annexe beds while she and the Aunties continued cooking.

  The annexe doors had bolt locks without bolts on the outside; inside every surface was thick with dust. August, having worked most areas of the pub, even the bed-and-breakfast rooms, knew where to start, and opened up the windows first, leaving the doors ajar. Outside she shook the pillows, brought them in and concealed the yellow of them in patterned cases. She flipped the sagged mattresses and tucked the stiff sheets over them, tucking in the thoughts of how many had rested there before. She swept the floor, hung the wool blankets outside on the line and beat them with the worn broom until they shed all the flakes of skin and dust. Bringing the blankets in one by one, she laid them edge to edge on top of the sheets, turning the linen down to make an inviting triangle over each blanket. In the shaded area around Prosperous, she cut stems of native orchid. She didn’t spot Eddie working in the field. She placed the flowers in water tumblers on each of the four side tables.

  One side table had a shallow concealed drawer with a little groove at the top. August jiggled the drawer unstuck. A Holy Bible lay inside. She took it out and sat on the made bed. This is a book, her poppy had said the first time he placed one in her hands, speaking with fortified sureness. I want you to read it as if every sentence inside is a lie and, if you find anything true, I want you to write it down.

  She hadn’t known if it was a trick or a challenge, but he’d assured her she’d get a dollar coin every time she was right. It had been therapy in his mind, for Jedda being missing. She remembered how she’d filled half an exercise book over summer holidays, and was looking forward to a good amount of candy-buying money at the end. He’d rewarded her with two dollars for the trouble. August had looked through the pages of quotes she’d written and found the two marked ‘Yes’ by her poppy, with a circle around the words. She could only now remember the first. It was Proverbs, Death and life are in the power of the tongue.

  August took the Bible out of the annexe and dropped it into the wheelie bin beside the house. It was never the book she was searching for.

  Elsie’s energy level had changed since August arrived. She’d charge on keeping busy like a train getting up a hill, and then would slow and become silent again, coasting down the decline. After the Aunties retired in the annexe beds, neither Elsie nor August ate the curry, they instead took turns making tea for each other. In the evening they cooked some more, a stew and a vegetable lasagna. All the dishes were cooled and Tupperware-sealed, placed into the fridge for the farewell.

  August poured two glasses of wine she’d picked up from town, downed one quickly over the sink and then filled it up to a polite level. Elsie was ironing lengths of white tablecloths along the dining table. The iron steamed while she massaged her hands, waiting for the pain in her knuckles to pass. August placed and then nodded at the wineglass. ‘I can do the ironing for you,’ she offered gently, not wanting her nana to feel she couldn’t very well do it herself.

  Elsie took the glass with one sore hand and flicked the cord from the outlet with the other. ‘Did you eat anything today?’

  August wanted to ask her the same thing, but they just let the question hang there. The sad, shrinking women.

  ‘Should we sit outside?’ August said instead, and pushed the glass door along its track.

  They settled on the twin outdoor chairs, the cane bones cushioned with fleece throws. Spike padded up the deck and dropped onto Elsie’s feet.

  ‘Was Poppy writing a book? Eddie told me that he was.’

  ‘No, he was writing things down on paper – a sort of dictionary – he was trying to remember the words. He’d been writing it for a month or more.’

  ‘Can I see it?’

  ‘I can’t for the life of me think where it is, Augie. Have a look in his office, I’d like to see that too.’

  They sipped their wine. ‘I’ll look again,’ August said.

  ‘Yingaa, that was one of the words I saw him writing on those pages.’

  ‘Yingaa?’

  ‘It means yabby, the bush lobster, you know …’ Elsie sipped and added enthusiastically, ‘Our first date was eating yabbies.’

  ‘You and Pop?’

  ‘He brought me out here,’ Elsie held her glass ahead of her into the dark. ‘It was the first time I visited Prosperous. He walked me out to the dam and told me all about yingaa. City-girl I was then, I didn’t know anything about yabbies, never had ’em before! I told him that and he ran back to the house and I followed him. Inside,’ Elsie shifted to turn to the kitchen, ‘he starts riffling through the garbage bin there,’ she laughed. ‘When Alb looked up at me I must’ve looked so shocked! I was thinking, What’s this man doing in the bin? Then he held two chop bones up triumphant and we went back out to the dam with a line off of the clothesline. He tied up a bone at each end and dropped them in the water and there we walked around the outside slowly dragging our bait. When the water flinched twice and he showed me how to ease my line out of the dam, lo and behold – well, that was my first feast of yingaa.’ Her nana shook her head and sipped again, smiling at August. ‘He was writing about that!’

  ‘What a catch,’ August said, and the two women laughed.

  ‘Why did you come back for Pop?’

  Elsie thought for just a moment. ‘I think I noticed that your pop and I could do good things together. That our love could bounce off the world and I was that age, I guess. I was open to him and I knew straight away that he loved me, that he wouldn’t put me down.’

  ‘Put you down?’

  ‘That we were both Koori, that we would lift each other because we both knew we needed it.’

  Their goodness made August feel sad, thinking about her own mother, how so much went wrong for her. ‘Why’d all the bad stuff happen to Mum, when you two were good together?’

  Her nana shook her head. She didn’t have an answer, and while she struggled for one the lights in the workers’ annexe flicked off. They both looked over to the windows gone dark, the Aunties had turned in. ‘Who else is coming tomorrow?’ August asked, taking cue that her nana didn’t want to answer a hopeless question. Or couldn’t.

  ‘Just the family – mob from here and there. Uncle Fred should arrive, I think, all the way from the cane fields up north. You remember him?’

  ‘Not really. Just his arm, and that he bought banana ice-creams for us once.’

  Elsie drummed her fingers on her glass. ‘I used to think he was the most miserable man on earth, but I like him now. He’s your pop’s older cousin.’

  ‘What happened to his arm, anyway?’ August asked, bold with wine.

  ‘He came back from serving in the war. He wasn’t injured there, but they said some shrapnel or something hit him. So he had all this pain in his arm when he got back, nerve damage or something. Doctors couldn’t work it out, he travelled all over the country seeing specialists. No-one could work it out and paracetamol didn’t change a thing. He decided he wanted the doctors to take it off, he even worked with a bad arm slashing sugar cane to save up to pay for it himself. Not one doctor would do it though, ’cos of his functioning hand on the end of his arm. So, one day he got the idea to cut the thing off himself …’ Elsie was shaking her head, her face dimmed once more. ‘You can’t always see a thing that hurts. He bought an axe and a hatch’s
spring or what have you, started a fire in a tin pail, cut the hand off with his homemade guillotine, singed the arteries and then threw his hand in the fire so it couldn’t be reattached.’

  August gasped and almost yelled, her face contorted in horror. ‘What the hell?’

  Elsie continued, nonchalant. ‘So they took the rest of the arm off for him and now he is such a happy fella. Goes to show ….’

  ‘Show what?’

  ‘The things people will do for pain relief.’ She rubbed her knuckles against her knee.

  ‘Don’t chop your hands off, Nan!’

  She looked at August shocked, and they both started laughing again. When they’d laughed enough to stir the owls, Elsie said, ‘You’ve always had a good nature, girl – you know you can talk to me about anything, okay.’

  It was a statement; she’d just wanted August to know. ‘I know,’ August said, reassured and reassuring at once. August knew her nana wasn’t her guardian anymore, that she could be her confidante, but August still didn’t know how to say the things. The field was buzzing, a sort of beating rhythm. The locusts had settled into their meal for the night. There was a crescent moon and no light fell onto the old field.

  ‘To Alb,’ Elsie said, raising her almost full wineglass to the darkness.

  ‘To Pop,’ August said, holding her hand high, and the sliver of silver moon bent through the empty glass.

  EIGHTEEN

  Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf ’s letter to Dr George Cross,

  2nd August 1915, continued

  IV

  As the crops began to grow, I would visit the Blacks’ camp and offer wheat seeds and the knotted carrots from the kitchen garden. In this way I began to build on the trust we would need to occupy the Mission. It was after many of my humble visits that the Natives in the territory, hearing that a home was properly prepared for them, began to arrive in groups of twos and tens at Prosperous Mission, our House of Mercy, for protection and food. The Lord blessed us during the following year’s harvest with the first of many births at the Mission. A small, beautiful half-caste girl was born in December 1881 and I noted her birth in my logbook – she was conferred with good health and a Christian name – Mercy.

  The accommodation was small, and our means were slender, but seeing so many unfortunate women and children in a state of hunger and nakedness touched my deepest sympathies, and I was compelled to admit them, even if I had hoped initially for married couples only. People of the town warned me that the Natives would never sleep in the places I planned to build for them, but when the second and third huts were completed I had the satisfaction of seeing the Natives happy in possession of their own dwelling. Quite a township sprang up in the lonely bush, with my own home, the schoolhouse (which also served as a church), fifteen two-room cottages for married couples, a dormitory befitting fifty girls and single women, another for the same number of boys and single men, a storeroom, three outbuildings and last but not least, a teacher’s cottage, for after the second year I was compelled to give up the duties of teacher and secured the valuable services of my learned friend from the south, Hans Keller, to fill that responsible post. In so doing I was free to assist the male residents erect fences for the Mission property to secure our crops and grass from surrounding stock. I witnessed them over the years climbing the few remaining gum trees and crossing the often fast-flowing waters of the river with such certain ease and immense grace, and I was glad to see them set to work keenly and under my clear instruction.

  We had no regular or certain income except my donations for clergy work, so we were frequently reduced to the deepest poverty. In my frequent absence I appointed Keller to be at hand as Manager. At times we were without either mutton or flour, to say nothing of the necessities of life. But although our work during the first many months was very hard, and our privations continued to be many, these trials did not affect us nearly as much as did the cruel conduct from those around us, people who were professedly Christian. Over the years I’ve come to understand they had one desire – and that was to deal with the Natives in their own way. In different ways these mean-spirited people sought to break up the Mission and to scatter the Blacks that had grown, in almost two years, in excess of ninety souls, including forty students on the roll and thirty in regular attendance.

  On one occasion, in the third year of our Mission, while absent due to presiding over a wedding, an individual who passed for a gentleman sent a case of gin to the women’s camp. At a small camp, only a mile from the Mission square, the ‘gentleman’ had proceeded to make them all drunk, and invited his fellows. Keller informed me the scene that followed was pure evil – debauchery by the single and married men of the town against the hapless women and girls. On another occasion, again while I was away, the keeper of the less aristocratic hotel where I had once taken accommodation supplied the camp with drink again. He called in the White men whom I believe to be the same men I gave rights of abstinence to, and, as Keller again informed me, the scene was much the same. That following morning I returned to the camp and witnessed old women and quite young girls helplessly intoxicated. One poor creature, with a half-caste babe upon her bosom, staggered towards me. ‘What have you been doing, Daisy?’ I said. ‘I have been drinking, gudyi.’ ‘Who gave you the drink?’ ‘Mr Murray’ referring to the publican I had crossed paths with. Daisy was very upset and begged for my protection. She said she did not want to take the drink but they had forced her, and then forced her still further performing their sordid deeds, before leaving. Daisy was bruised and swollen about the face and a tooth had been knocked from her mouth. I decided it was best to send Daisy, whom I guessed to be about fifteen, out for service and so she was placed with what I believed to be a good Christian family in the north. Her family were quite distressed at this, but I vindicated that the families were known to me on strong recommendation and that she would return for visits.

  I also obtained a firearm for the premises from Baumann, who showed me how to pack the gunpowder and to aim confidently. I endeavoured only in the neediest circumstances to leave the Mission for formal duties as clergyman.

  I did not want to leave my Mission, but we at times had no choice as far as funds were concerned. On each of my returning journeys I went around to every resident to let them know I had returned, reassuring those I had promised indeed to save. Some months later, one evening I was awoken to the girls running to my hut for protection, as wicked White men had broken into their dormitory. I dashed to the girls’ quarters and shooed the two brutes away and was compelled to mount my horse and pursue the offenders. I rode four miles, not sure what it was I could or would do. Though I was unable to apprehend them in the end, I think it was clear to the residents that I was loyal in my avowal to protect them.

  After many months of peace another unfortunate incident occurred, when in broad daylight a young settler from a neighbouring Station deliberately rode into the Mission square. After tearing off the stirrup iron from his saddle and brandishing it over his head, he swore that he would kill the first man, Black or White, who ventured near him. After keeping us in a state of terror for half an hour the settler threatened to break up the Mission, saying that if I did not abandon it I should have to stand the revolt by the town’s men. They want to be a law unto themselves. I understood that the carnal interests of these men was why they wanted the Blacks to return to lives of disorder in the open camps. They would not tolerate someone who sought to bring ‘peace and goodwill’ to the poor Black man, for it was common knowledge that the monstrous traffic of the Natives’ bodies and souls had been routine before I arrived.

  And so, after writing yet again requesting police intervention, which was to never eventuate, we took all safeguarding measures upon ourselves. I made certain that the residents did not wander away from the Mission any longer. I was sure to keep the girls busy with a female teacher sent from Sydney, who filled their days: schooling of most importance, and at times the rudimentary details of cooking, cleaning and se
wing as with most institutions. At close of day we made certain the children slept in the dormitories throughout the night. With the help of the male Mission residents, we reinforced our fences, and above the main house we engraved a pledge of our unity. With the chisel and by scorching each character it read:

  BY GRACE ALONE

  THROUGH FAITH ALONE

  ON THE BASIS OF THE SCRIPTURE ALONE

  I stood back to inspect it after hanging the beam and was very pleased indeed. For in my deepest heart, that trembled with fear, so accustomed to circumspection, I hoped it would protect us in the storm that I anticipated was brewing.

  NINETEEN

  play – girinya When we were boys at the Home we played cricket, handball, marbles, leapfrog, and spear games. We made the spears with bulrush reeds or maybal sticks that we’d run against stones to sharpen and tie little stones with string that we’d unravel from our blankets. One boy would act out the kangaroo and the other boy would do the throwing. We’d hide our toy spears under the stairs out the back where we lined up with our hands on our hearts to sing ‘God Save the Queen’. Nothing is ever terrible all the time, even during the worst time. When you’re a kid you always find a way to play, girinya.

  platypus – biladurang There’s a story about biladurang and how that platypus came to be only in this country – but it starts with a little duck called Gaygar. Once, long ago, Gaygar disobeyed her elders, disrespected the values of her family and she left the safe lake and began to swim into the creek away from her family into waters that ducks weren’t supposed to go. There she was captured by a water rat called Bigun and he kept her up at a creek for a whole season. When she escaped back to the lake, all the ducks had their babies, and Gaygar had hers too. When her family saw Gaygar’s young they shook their heads and told Gaygar she had to leave, otherwise bad things would happen to her family if she stayed. So Gaygar took her strange babies down through the water system, through the rivers and catchments. She finally found a spot where her young were happy. But it was too cold for Gaygar, since she didn’t have fur like her children. When Gaygar passed away, her babies stayed in the cool rivers, all webbed feet, billed and covered in fur. Biladurang.