The Yield

by Tara June Winch

  geebung – bumbadula This is a magic tree. The wood of the stem of a young tree is shaved and mixed with breastmilk for use as eyewash to treat conjunctivitis in babies. The unripe fruit are also used to treat burns, scratches and rashes and the ripe flesh around the seeds is eaten straight from the tree. The ancestors even used the bumbadula to make dye to colour baskets. The older, hard fruits are roasted and cracked, and the nut inside is eaten. Doesn’t that one sound magic to you?

  granddaughter – garingun My poor, darling garingun, there is no love stronger. It’s there forever. I’m so sorry for her. I’m so sorry, my biggest regret is that I let her down. That will be the heaviest thing I carry with me for all time.

  grey shrike thrush – yurung The yurung is a warning bird. When he calls, bad news is coming. Small and grey. He tilts his head high when he has news, his throat drops, his sharp beak points to where the news needs delivering. The call, you’ve probably heard too, it goes coo, coo, coo, coo followed by a trilling and then a final, rising cooee. Hold fast to your affairs then. The yurung, no matter how cute, gentle and delicate looking he is, only brings darkness. He visited me often.

  fish – guya The old Reverend in his notes, he wrote down cooyah – but the word comes from further back in the mouth, guya.

  fishing – ngalamarra If the water comes back to Murrumby, and the fish too, the best way to catch a fish is with patience. Ngalamarra – there’s two types, saltwater and freshwater, running water and still. There’s still saltwater too – in the estuaries on beaches, but I only know freshwater. Only still freshwater now, but the river! The songlines of our ancestors follow water like markers on a highway. Many fish are endangered now, don’t take the perch, don’t take the grayling, no freshwater cod from up north, no gudgeon, no jollytail. Never buy fish from the food mart, or the restaurant, or Nemo’s fish and chip shop in town. You want to eat it? You catch it! Everyone should learn four things – how to ngalamarra, how to love someone boundlessly, how to grow your own vegetables, and how to read. The patience for ngalamarra, respect for loving, the soil for gardening and a dictionary for reading.

  flour made from millet seed – buwu-nung, dargin When the millet plant is late flowering and the seed heads have turned golden brown, then you can cut the heads off and save the mature seeds for planting again – these are the swollen ones and will come away easiest from the cluster. The rest of the seed head needs to dry in the sun for a few days, and then the seeds should fall away easily. Next grind the seed as fine as you like, you can grind them rough for porridge or into bawu-nung for making bread. This is our harvest, since forever.

  flower, a kind of flower – bagabin, narranarrandyirang The banksia flower is my favourite, not just because it’s large and proud looking like the hibiscus, but because it reminds me of something bigger. See, the banksia is a tough-looking flower but it still protects itself with sharp, jagged leaves, sturdy wood and roots. Its nectar feeds the bees, the birds and us people. When the flower finishes its cycle its pods burst open and seeds are released, and the cone will fall from the branch. Now the cone has two uses, one it can start a fire very well and keep it going like a piece of coal; the other thing it can be used for is to filter water, it’ll run right through it.

  forbid to tell a thing – walan-buwu-ya-rra This word literally translates to ‘strong-law speaking’ and the ancestors told me that it is as serious as scripture. There were things they showed and told me that I was forbidden to tell to the wrong person. Some things are unspoken, and you carry them up until the end. That’s walan-buwu-ya-rra.

  earth oven – gulambula The ancestors showed me how they cooked in the gulambula: first they dug a pit about a metre long and half a metre deep, making sure to get any clay out of the earth as they went. Then they filled the pit with firewood and then with the clay they collected, they rolled it into lumps and placed them on top of the firewood, as the wood burned the clay would dry and become very hot. After a couple of hours, the clay lumps were then taken out with sticks used like a pair of tongs and placed to the side, then the pit was swept out and lined with green leaves, some laid down the green grasses or green wood too, not dried. Quickly, a possum wrapped in paperbark was laid, covered by more green vegetation and finally the clay lumps were returned on top. All this was covered with the earth to make a nice, tight seal. When it was ready, they dug up the gulambula and then we ate the steamed dinner. Then we talked about the little things that are big things.

  edible milky yam – murnong, bading In the old times, if you didn’t catch anything hunting or now if you are a vegetarian, this one is a good meat replacement. The murnong has the yellow, firework-shaped flower, and the tubers that grow under the ground you dig like carrots, and just the same way, you can eat them raw or cooked in the gulambula. They taste a bit sweet and a bit like coconut; murnong is very good food.

  emu feet – nguruwinydyinang-garang Biyaami, or Baiame, has such feet – sometimes in my dreams I float around with useless hands and feet. Hands that won’t do the things I tell them to while I’m sleeping, and feet that won’t run fast enough to escape the bad guys. They might as well be flippers in sand then. Think about how impossible it is that a goanna looks like he does, and then look at your lover and wonder how they look the way they do. Now imagine the lizard in a rage, and then imagine your lover really angry. I reckon that it’s not so hard to imagine the blending of human and animal. We all come from the same soil. Well, Biyaami had emu feet, I don’t know why, they are as good a feet as any. I asked my ancestors and they said, ‘Little one, what does it matter? Some things just are.’

  TWENTY-NINE

  August spent the morning packing Prosperous’s shaving cabinet, medicine cupboard and linen press into boxes. She scoured the attic again for Albert’s manuscript though came up empty.

  Before lunch she went to see Eddie. August felt light and excited, she thought about the books Poppy had put together and a little lamp of hope began to burn in her guts. She was thinking about the conversation she’d had with Eddie the day before, about summer, the world getting bigger. She wanted to talk to Eddie about how everything didn’t have to end. How she could stay, how they could save Prosperous and the farm, she thought, as she walked up the hill towards perfect Southerly House. She heard a rumble, and in the field she could see Rinepalm trucks entering the southern cattle road, a crane arm bent over a cab, another piled high with what looked like fences and scaffolding, supplies for a more elaborate set-up.

  The door was open, but the flywire door was shut.

  ‘Oi,’ she sang, and let herself in. No wooden surface had been polished in a while, walls were stripped of the landscape paintings, the moulded ceilings were the high home of spiders now.

  She walked through the house and found Eddie in the back room. He was wearing jeans, kneeling beside a cardboard removal box.

  ‘Oi,’ he said, glancing at August and taking a swig from a beer bottle.

  ‘You on the booze already?’

  ‘Going down like nails. You want one?’

  ‘Why not.’ August took her shoes off and walked them back up the hall to the front door. She came back and Eddie passed her an opened beer then put his phone in the top of the tall speaker. Pearl Jam were playing halfway through Ten.

  ‘Remember this?’ Eddie said, and raised his beer to tap against her own.

  She felt fifteen again. ‘I feel like your parents are going to come home and I’ll have to sneak out the back door.’

  ‘Good old days,’ he said, and stood, stretching out his back. ‘You could have left your shoes on, it’ll be rubble soon.’

  She held the beer against her chest, took a breath through a smile, looked around the empty space.

  ‘You want some help?’

  ‘Lunch first?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  He assembled a box quickly, taped its base and threw it at August.

  ‘How much am I getting paid?’

  ‘My eternal gratitude.’
>
  ‘Everything I ever wanted,’ she said, sitting at the foot of the bookshelf, swigging at the bottle.

  After a few minutes of silent packing Eddie asked, ‘You know that book you were reading about the spirits in everything?’

  ‘Animism,’ she said, hands deep in the box.

  ‘Do you reckon your pop went to the land then or to heaven?’

  ‘You mean, do I believe in the afterlife?’

  ‘That,’ Eddie said, and took the last mouthful of his beer.

  ‘I think he’ll go somewhere, but I don’t think there’s a heaven.’ August took another gulp and added, ‘Pearl Jam and talking about the afterlife – I really do feel like a teenager again.’

  He stood and continued packing from the back of the room, removing spines from wallpaper-lined bookshelves. He shook his head. ‘It’s silly. Doesn’t change anything whatever we believe.’

  ‘Believe?’

  ‘It doesn’t change the fact you end up dead, does it? I hate religion.’

  August rolled her eyes in his direction. She didn’t think Eddie was stupid, but felt like he’d just never stopped saying the stupid things they’d said when they were young. ‘You hate religion – that’s original. What about all the churches and paintings and poetry?’

  ‘What about all the wars?’

  ‘I’m having déjà vu. I think I’ve had this conversation a hundred times and I still think humans would have warred and slaughtered each other with or without religion.’

  ‘Over land?’ he turned and looked at her with a gravity, but also a question. He moved back to the bookshelf. ‘Or race wars?’

  ‘Yeah, and even if we all had the same skin tone, it’d be language, and then even if we spoke the same language, it’d be eye shape, nose length, people with thick hair …’

  She sat down her empty bottle, got off the couch and stood beside him, lifting a handful of books to pack. ‘How’s your mum doing, really?’

  He put another handful of books into the box. ‘She’s okay, I think she’s about done with life, though. She always hated the country.’

  ‘Australia?’

  ‘Farm life.’

  She looked again around their huge, now-empty home. It was big, as she always thought it was and even seeing it again with adult eyes.

  ‘Couldn’t have been that bad,’ August said, but guessed it was.

  When Eddie was thirteen years old and August was eleven, a black book was swiped from a massage therapist in Broken and lists of names were smuggled around the region. After that loads of parents got divorced. They’d watched Eddie’s mum beat Eddie’s dad with a fresh strip of willow branch as he left the property, but not for the last time.

  ‘You know they reunited in a way again, when Mum got sick. I guess that happens when …’

  He looked tired with trying to work out his feelings, bowed his head into the box. ‘I reckon I liked your pop more than my old man.’

  ‘Pop?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I reckon he was likeable, that’s for sure. I know I liked him more than anyone else.’ He paused before he spoke again, quieter, gentler. ‘You really thought your mum would turn up?’

  August sat back on the couch, exhausted, she knew maternal empathy hadn’t been sealed by the umbilical-cord clip. Enough time as an adult made her know this, but she was confused about what the whole trip meant, what Poppy’s death was supposed to mean. What Jedda missing meant. They’d waited for a death certificate for her, as families just like August’s do. Or waited for an end to a life in gaol. So many people gone and dead – she thought more loss would make the family close, a whole thing again.

  ‘I turned up.’

  He dumped more books and sat beside August, looked at the almost bare bookshelves. ‘I was hoping you would. Do you know where she is even? Your mum?’

  ‘Last news from Nana was that she was trying to get day release. I don’t think she can leave anymore.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think for some people you always find your way home. Gaol becomes like home. Reckon Kooris know how to stay locked up.’

  Eddie pulled at a frayed part of his jeans.

  ‘But,’ August added, ‘I reckon we’re meant to stretch our wings, move around, it feels so natural to travel. I think Mum just couldn’t see herself out of a cage. Maybe she stopped waking up and thinking of somewhere else.’

  He lay his arm across the back of her neck, grabbed her shoulder and pulled her into his chest. She let her head rest there. She realised she was desperate to be touched.

  ‘Families are tricky, Aug. My dad disappeared forever then just shows up for Mum’s finale.’

  He ran one hand hard along the top of his thigh as if he were somehow cold in the high thirties.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She looked at him playfully, wanted to forget the muddied water, the diesel, the dirt, the flesh that she was beginning to taste and smell again, wanted to wash it out of her mouth. ‘Let’s have another drink!’

  ‘Ah, you haven’t changed after all!’

  She hadn’t, she thought. She still needed to be numb. Her drink of choice was always oblivion. She couldn’t bear to feel so much and they each drank another beer hastily. They wanted the same thing that they both didn’t want to admit.

  August walked to the stereo and skipped the song on his phone. ‘Better Man’ flooded through the speakers. The sun was high and streamed through the skylight, a column of white light fell against the way ahead of her. Eddie’s shadow came behind her, his arm reached around her waist and slid the volume up. August sculled the beer while he stood close, not touching her. She stood her bottle atop the speaker and turned into him.

  Avoiding his eyes, she looked at his lips as he mouthed the lyric waiting.

  August reached her face up and kissed him hard on the mouth. He pulled her so their hips pressed against each other. His mouth was soft, the short stubble on his face brushed around her lips and didn’t hurt.

  He picked her up, their teeth bumped. Her toes barely off the floor, he carried her blindly down the hallway and together they fell onto his bed.

  They were on their sides, facing each other. He held her around the middle, tight and kind at the same time and mirrored everything she did, and she mirrored everything he did. His hand on her waist, her hand on his waist. Her hand smoothing up his back, his hand smoothing up hers. His lips on her neck, behind her ear and her lips on his neck, behind his ear. It tasted like salt. His breath turned into a groan. His hand on the small of her back, her hand on the small of his and with one hand he unclasped her bra, then unbuttoned her blouse.

  A metronome ticked faster through their kissing that was full of wet hot breath and needing. It all felt synchronised, as natural as swimming.

  She tugged at his waistband and he stood up flinging each of his cap boots against the wall. Quickly, he dropped his underwear and jeans and kicked them across the floorboards. He stood naked, unashamed, fine hair ringed his nipples, a line spread from his penis almost to his navel. He smiled like a question; she returned the smile like an answer.

  From the end of the bed he crawled slowly above August as she eased her neck into the pillows and closed her eyes. He kissed down to a cup between her abdomen and hip. ‘This,’ he said, and licked the skin.

  She looked down.

  The muscles across his back shifted with the movement of his arms. There was a line of tanned skin at the back of his neck. He unbuttoned the top of her jeans, slipped his fingers between the denim and her like testing the heat of bathwater, as if he feared it was too hot. He kissed her and she flexed her hips away to stop his hand from going any lower, guiding him to stay high. As soon as his fingers touched her clitoris pins and needles started from the bottom of her feet, the palms of her hands, filling out the rest of her body. Like she was being dipped into the stars, like sherbet and Pop Rocks on the inside of her skin. Her legs and arms became heavy, the same way grief felt, and for
a moment she wondered whether she was actually feeling sad, and not pleasured.

  He kept one hand wedged in against her and took the side of her neck with the other, his mouth on hers was wetter and hotter. Then he rested his face into the side of her neck for a moment. Further down his tongue circled each of her breasts and down again the length of her arm until he reached the hand. He turned his head, opened his mouth and bit into the inner skin of her forearm, softly first and then his eyes looked up at hers as if asking if it was okay, waiting for that little nod from her. August nodded. He bit harder and harder, then stopped and sucked at the skin. Kissed it better. He pushed off the mattress with his lower body and sat at the end of the bed with bent knees, his chest was upright. Above her his fingers worked at the zipper of her jeans.

  He looked at her face. ‘I want you, August Gondiwindi.’

  ‘Wait,’ she whispered.

  He stood off the mattress and pulled under her knees to draw her to the edge of the bed and buried his face into the parting of her jean buttons. He kept moving and kissing the curve in her. Kissing what curve he could find.

  ‘Wait.’ She wanted to be drunk. She wanted not to feel it all, not to become something else, let go, transform. Not to fall into the act where Eddie’s body was just another, blended into the memories and desires and smells of others.

  ‘For what?’ he looked up from her bare torso. ‘Another ten years? All I’ve wanted – is to do this to you.’ He grunted then. He looked back at her face, she nodded, relinquished.

  She groaned and lifted her arm and inspected the bite mark. It was faint and didn’t break the skin. A clearing opened in her mind, in it a memory lodged clear of Jedda and her fighting.