The Yield

by Tara June Winch

  TWENTY-SIX

  She only knew that someone had hooked under her arms, lifted her into the air, and up to the attic room where dust played with the sunbeams so it all felt like a dream. Eventually when the daylight set itself aside August stopped crying. Eddie brought in wine and they got drunk and she talked and laughed with a loud abandon, then returned into the field. Uncle Eric took out his clapping sticks and whacked them while relatives sang and danced and green wood cracked and sparked from the night air and the earth being welded together. She slept all day Sunday, and no-one came up the stairs to disturb her except for Nana. Elsie brought breakfast at midday and dinner at midnight and she kissed August’s head like her mother used to do and she told her she loved her and to rest.

  August lay there awake after Nana had gone to bed late on Sunday night. She struggled up and showered and got back into bed naked. August ran her hand over her arm under the blankets. Closed her eyes, cupped her breasts and found the place of relief between her legs. She rose her hips and tried to feel better, whole, relieved, not shameful. When she was younger, when she had finally grown tiny handfuls of breasts, she thought of Eddie. Please she whispered to no-one in the dark. But it didn’t work, it wasn’t what she needed. Instead she tucked herself, like Jedda used to do, wrapped her arms across the topography of blankets and cried out for her mummy.

  When August got up Monday morning she found her clothes had been folded, the desk papers had been stacked in neat piles. She rifled again through Poppy’s desk and still couldn’t find more than a few sentences in his handwriting. She opened the attic wardrobe that shuddered in the movement, Jedda’s empty wire and wooden coathangers clanged together, below them there were three large boxes. August took them out one at a time and emptied the contents on the bed. The boxes were full of Jedda’s and her childhood things. The cassette tape was there, Letter to the Princess. She found the other cassettes with music recorded off the radio, but not the tape recorder they had. An American-flag-patterned photo frame with a black-and-white instant photo-booth picture of Jedda and her and their mum, folded in half so that two of the pictures fit. They must have been in kindergarten, five years old. She found her own Cabbage Patch doll and lifted her dress to see if her memory was right, that they had operated on the doll. A line of cotton stitches ran down the doll’s belly. August smiled. Inside the second box she lifted out the white fur body of Mother Goose. Once, out of nowhere, their mother had given the girls the toy. She had cupped their chins in each hand, and she said, ‘For my baby swans’, and Jedda had whispered ‘cygnets’ as her mum left the room. ‘What’s that mean?’ August had asked her. ‘It’s the name for baby swans,’ Jedda had said, and fished a book from her schoolbag and showed August a list entitled ‘Animal Groups and Their Young’. She pointed out the picture of the swan babies to August. Jedda let her play with the toy while she read aloud the names of all the animals and their young. The book felt magical in August’s hands and she wondered then how she could know all those things from the two opened pages. Mother Goose’s eyes never moved, she had a peach-and-blue patterned bonnet, and a green patterned bow around her neck. The toy goose, the girls discovered, read along to the stories once they placed the cassette in its player under her velcro wing. Her orange hinged beak would open and close, lip-syncing the words of the story sheet.

  She found two grey, worn Agro dolls and cartoon Saturday mornings began to replay in her mind. Mornings soft with cotton nightdresses, blankets dragged from the bunk beds to the living room, rubbing sleep from the warm, soft skin of their faces. Faces still round like when they were babies. They’d won the dolls. She and Jedda used to make parcels to send into Agro’s Cartoon Connection, a morning television program hosted by a lady and a puppet named Agro. Every Saturday the lady would open packages from kids who’d made things and Agro would joke about his useless cloth arms. Inside the parcels were pieces of cross-stitching, Spirograph stencils, and drawings. She and Jedda used to beg Nana to post their creations. She caved in twice. On the second try they won two Agro dolls for their mouse maze that was made from toilet rolls taped together and painted perfectly. Jedda did the painting since she was the careful one. August had written the letter because that was the only job left.

  Dear Agro, my sister and me made this mouse maze for you.

  Lots of luv from Jedda and August.

  The presenter did say, ‘Today’s prize winner is a brother and sister from Massacre Plains,’ and at first Jedda and August said awww and August stamped her foot and Jedda karate-chopped her own leg – they were so angry that a brother and sister had won instead of them. But then the presenter said their actual names and they jumped and screamed and their nighties flew up above their bellies. The commercial break came on and they ran into the field, past the vegies, out through the ankle-high wheat shoots and galloped and whooped like cowboys. Yeeeeahh haaaa! they screamed. August hadn’t even cared that she’d discovered she had a boy’s name. She wet her underwear she laughed so much.

  Also in the box was a stack of school journals. She lifted them out and saw several tubes of Lip Smackers flavoured lip balm at the base of the box – each of the lids was missing, the contents gone. On seeing the empty tubes she remembered how she used to eat them: watermelon, strawberry, lemonade wax flavours filled her mouth. Inside the journal with August’s name on the cover, she’d written Monday and the date in the top right corner in shaky print, below it, On the weekend our mum and dad took us camping in a brand-new caravan and we found wolves in the forest. The wolves were friendly so we spent the camping trip playing with them. The teacher had corrected the spelling in red pen and added below the drawing that accompanied the unbelievable entry, VERY interesting. The book was crammed with writing, stories she’d wanted to tell. In another entry Jedda had begun, It was a cover-up. Alice fell down the rabbit hole and she did land in Australia. The story was unfinished and the teacher had just drawn a red question mark below it. The rest of the pages were blank.

  August placed everything back in the boxes in no particular order, each item precious.

  After she dressed and descended the stairs she put the kettle on and found a tiny scrap of paper taped to the coffee tin: Out for the day, love Nan. The rental keys were on the sideboard, and in that moment August took them in her hand and imagined driving those six hours to the women’s prison. In her mind her mother would be there, waiting, returned, dressed in her old jeans, ready to play with Jedda and August, ready to return to the sisters as if no time had passed. But it had. She dropped the keys.

  August navigated around the kitchen easily, noticing how she had become used to the home again. She remembered where everything was, where all the items fit. She knew the best coffee cup to use for maximum coffee. She knew that the kitchen table rocked and the folded coaster needed to go under the leg for it to be stable. That the floorboards made it impossible to sneak. That the cold and the heat coming in had no insulation either way. It wasn’t so bad, she thought, the Packawayable Home. It could be worse. If she peered under enough carpet of her memories in the last ten years, she knew it had been worse, much worse.

  She looked into the annexe outside but the rooms were all empty. In the shearing sheds August found a scramble of bike parts, rusted pastel low-liners and red and blue racers without wheels or handlebars. Under a sheet sewn from hessian bags, she found a newish, black mountain bike with flat tyres. It had its own hand pump clipped into the middle frame and August got to work until the tyres were hard, But not too hard in the heat, ’cos the air’ll expand, Poppy said in her ear. August walked the bike past the peppermint trees to where Eddie was out talking with the postie. The postie drove off and Eddie walked to meet August, grinning. He rested his forearms against the handgrips of the mountain bike and straddled the front wheel. He admired August Gondiwindi, out at Prosperous Farm on a pushbike.

  ‘Did you see Nana this morning?’ she asked.

  ‘Haven’t. You feeling better, tiny dancer?’


  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘You had the moves the other night!’

  She didn’t remember a thing. ‘Are you joking?’

  ‘It’s okay,’ he squeezed the brakes gently. ‘Everyone was dancing. I stayed with you a while and then your aunty put you to bed.’ He tried to look into her eyes. ‘You okay now?’

  She wasn’t okay, but she said she was. ‘I’m alright. It’s a bit heavy, coming home.’

  ‘You going somewhere now?’

  ‘Just to get online. Library.’ August wondered if she was going to confirm her flight or cancel it.

  ‘I’d let you use ours, but it’s disconnected already.’

  ‘No worries.’

  August looked out towards the field. She could see trucks way out. More trucks than before.

  ‘What are they doing?’

  Eddie let go of the bike, straightened up and looked out to the field. ‘Getting ready.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Stripping everything.’

  August rested on the bike seat.

  ‘I talked to the hippies at Kengal the other day.’

  ‘What do they have to say for themselves?’

  ‘Reckon they’re going to chain themselves to machines.’

  The two of them looked up at Kengal. ‘You should stay,’ he said matter-of-fact.

  ‘Aren’t we all leaving?’ she said over the whiff of sentiment.

  He looked back at her and smiled. ‘Yep.’

  What a smile.

  ‘Want to come to the library?’

  ‘Me at the library?’ he laughed. ‘Can’t, I’ve got about a hundred years of machinery to move from the sheds.’

  ‘Did Poppy ever go out to the sheds? I mean, the last couple of months?’

  ‘Nah. You still looking for that thing he was writing?’

  ‘Yeah, but running out of places to look.’

  ‘Wanna help me in the sheds?’ Eddie asked, laughing.

  ‘Nope. Look at these hands.’ She showed him her palms as if they were useless for manual work.

  He looked at her hands and grinned, gave her a low-five. ‘I’ll see you later?’

  ‘Alright.’ She put on a pair of sunglasses. ‘See ya!’ she flung a pedal up and began to ride. From under the peppercorn trees she could make out the protesters standing outside their tents.

  ‘Just print your name here,’ the librarian at the information desk pointed at a form. As August wrote her name she asked, ‘Are you related to Albert? Albert Gondiwindi?’

  August nodded. ‘My grandfather.’

  ‘Lovely,’ she said, folding her hands on the high desk between them and smiled her cracked lipstick smooth. Her name tag was crooked; Linda handed her a two-page list of titles.

  ‘Would you ask him to return those books tomorrow, end of the week at the very latest? Most were ordered in from the city branch. Otherwise he’ll accrue a lot of fines.’

  They exchanged smiles and nods. She couldn’t say the words that meant her poppy wouldn’t be back.

  Outside the library’s entrance was a building directory in black and white. August’s eye caught Council Chambers Level 3. She thought to pop in and say hello to her Aunt Nicki.

  She took the elevator. The office was open plan and no-one was manning the desk. Beyond a wall of glass on the right, the entire staff seemed to be sitting around a long conference table. A projector played graphs. Aunt Nicki must have seen August come in because she came out of the glass door quickly, and jog-walked across the room to her.

  ‘August.’

  ‘Hi, Aunty.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Just thought I’d see how the other half live.’ She mock-nodded approvingly around the office.

  Nicki laughed impatiently. ‘You know, I’m in a meeting now, but are you in town for long? Want to get lunch?’

  ‘I can wait.’

  ‘Here, I’ve got a voucher for a free coffee at the cafe, take that and—’ she power-walked to her desk nearby, opened her purse and took out a little card, ‘have a coffee, and if you are still in town at midday then come find me, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  She hugged August and tapped her on the side of her arm. ‘See ya at twelve, my shout,’ Aunt Nicki said, and scooted back towards the glass wall. August turned to walk back to the elevator, where the doors were idling open, but something caught her eye. She looked back at Aunt Nicki’s desk and swore that on it she saw her childhood cassette recorder – a vintage thing, rectangular, black, with a red button for recording letters to Princess Diana.

  Then she reminded herself they must have manufactured fifty billion of the things when they were still being made. She stepped into the elevator and descended.

  Outside there were crows watching her, while a sprinkler spat intermittently over the lawn between the footpath and the building. Crouching beside the bike padlock she skimmed through Poppy’s overdue list:

  A Million Wild Acres by Eric Rolls

  Blood on the Wattle by Bruce Elder

  Cooper’s Creek by Alan Moorehead

  The Fatal Impact by Alan Moorehead

  A History of Australia by C.M.H. Clark

  The Story of the Australian Church by Edward Symonds

  The list went on, there must have been at least forty titles on the subject of Australia alone. She’d seen the books around the house, in Poppy’s office. She wanted to see them again, flick through the pages, try to find Poppy’s words. Aunty Nicki wouldn’t mind. She cycled straight home.

  Nana still wasn’t back when August returned. She lugged all the books and papers down to the living room, spread them and matched each title with the list, stacking subject piles across the floor. She took breaks for coffee, and padded around in her worn sleeping t-shirt, shorts and sneakers. She arranged the Post-it notes on the tabletop. She found the gardening radio that only played short wave, and listened to songs she couldn’t sing along to. She skimmed through all the library books until she’d assembled small towers, sorted into their categories: Christianity. Plants. Animals. Cosmology. War. Art History. Farming. She thought she understood then that Poppy was really up to something with these books – he was trying to explain something big.

  Several times she stepped out on the verandah and searched for Eddie in the fields. She watched him leading huge machinery across the land, trampling the crop. The sky was wide, heat blurred at the edges.

  August was back inside reading one of the library books, On Animism, when Eddie came and asked for a quick glass of water.

  ‘They already turned your pipes off?’ August asked, side-eyeing Eddie, filling the glass.

  ‘Wanted to see you.’

  He drank the glass fast and passed it back for a refill. Eddie licked his lips and side-eyed August back.

  He looked down at the books and papers between gulps. ‘What’s all this?’

  ‘Poppy’s stash of overdue library books.’

  He sat the glass down, wiped his hands on his t-shirt and grabbed the book from the counter. He turned it in his hands. ‘What’s animism?’

  ‘When you believe that the earth – and all living things – are alive with ancestors, with spirits.’

  ‘Is that what you believe?’

  She looked at the book. ‘I think so.’

  ‘Why’d your pop have it, you reckon?’

  She smiled widely, ‘I think he was trying to save the farm.’

  ‘How would he have done that, you think?’

  ‘Dunno, reckon he was trying to explain how the land is special?’ Eddie raised his eyebrows for August to go on. ‘I just remember how much he loved, truly loved, the land, the property. You remember?’

  ‘Yeah, I remember,’ he said and placed the glass in the sink.

  ‘Hey,’ August said, ‘have you got a cassette thing – to play cassettes?’

  ‘Not bloody likely.’

  ‘Come on, you must – you guys always had everything!’

  ‘
I’ll check after a few more hours of work, yeah?’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  She passed him at the sliding door.

  ‘No worries, mate,’ he said.

  They were friends again after all those years.

  Late in the afternoon August walked with Spike around the vegetable patch, picked the shrivelled beans that grew through the chicken wire, put her hand under the skirts of strawberries that lapped up the last hours of sunlight. The fruit was hot-sweet. She imagined smiling, serene Poppy in a floppy sunhat, wearing a blue singlet, leaning into the vegetable patch and dusting soil from beetroots. Him carrying a plastic bucket up and down rows of struggling plants, distributing small blessings of water. She never saw him sad on the land. She missed him. At that moment August regretted having been gone so long.

  She walked further, let the sound enter her ears – the way the locusts twitched, the warble from birds that seemed to come from a hundred directions at once, the slow build of a draught passing through thousands of bearded stalks. Spike wanted to run, he dipped his back, edged his paws to August, slapped them into the dirt and gazed at her with his mouth open, barking, tongue out, eager for her to join in. She looked at him for a moment and he threw his paws again, dipped the spine. They ran down to the dam for Spike to drink at the edge and then back, alone and not alone at the same time. So many people ran beside her in her mind. Not only Jedda. August truly felt like herself there on the land. Her people’s land. Her people with her on the land. The dog ran off into the bush and August wandered over to the one-tonne silos and opened the hatch, no grain fell out. She looked inside the opening, the grain covered less than a foot of the base, it looked wet and lumpy in places and clung to streaks of rust on the steel walls. She and Jedda used to pretend they were bubblegum machines, the nitrate fixers and the lupin pulses their candy.