The Yield

by Tara June Winch

  August looked carefully into each display for Falstaff Collection labels but found none. She looped back again, staring into cabinets of wooden implements, stone pieces, bits of flint. Nothing was from their part of the river. She walked out of the exhibit to the information desk in the lobby. She spied Aunt Missy outside the museum glass doors on the entrance steps.

  ‘Hi,’ August said to the clerk at the information desk. She didn’t know quite where to start, it felt as if she were looking in the wrong place for answers. She asked about the artefacts, and took the handful of submission cards from her coat pocket and placed them on the counter. The clerk regarded the cards and recited them over the telephone and then led her down the hall, through code-secured doors and into the offices hidden out the back. August was introduced to a curator’s assistant and he introduced her to a researcher. The museum people located the artefacts on their database easily: they were currently in the collections, they said. They were helpful, kind even, and they handed August the forms she’d need to book a viewing.

  August wanted to hand the papers back and to tell them everything, draw them close and whisper that their lives had turned out wrong, that she and her family were meant to be powerful, not broken, tell them that something bad happened before any of them was born. Tell them that something was stolen from a place inland, from the five hundred acres where her people lived. She wanted to tell them that the world was all askew and she thought it was because of the artefacts, that she thought they should understand it was all so urgent now, that they knew truths now, to tell them that she wasn’t extinct, that they didn’t need the exhibition after all. All the hidden pieces were being put back together, she wanted to say.

  But she didn’t say any of those things. She thanked them, accepted the handshake, nodded as the door was held open for her, in and out of the climate-controlled space.

  August exited the curated light and joined Aunt Missy outside. She wanted to go back to Massacre – the countryside had got into her skin again, so quickly, she thought.

  ‘Can we go home now?’ she asked.

  ‘What did the museum people say?’ Missy bit her fingernails.

  ‘We have to fill out these forms. I’ve got everything.’ August rustled the forms beside her. ‘We can do it back home, yeah?’

  ‘Can we go back inside? I really do want to see the artefacts,’ Aunt Missy said, sincere and contrite, with a softness in her face like a child.

  ‘They’re all packed away, Aunty – we have to apply with these papers to see them … but they said they normally have them on display all the time!’ August didn’t know why she lied to her. Would it be any consolation that more eyes flicked at them, that schoolchildren had said cool when they saw them? That they were labelled in a glass display or tagged and serial-numbered in a box on a shelf? She didn’t think so.

  ‘But it’s going to take time! We don’t have time!’ Missy said, frustrated.

  August choked, tried not to cry. ‘They said it’s the only way.’

  ‘You sure you have all the things?’ she pointed to the papers.

  ‘I promise. To the airport?’ August put her arm around her.

  ‘Alright then,’ she said, deflated.

  They dropped the rental off, ate McDonald’s fries at Terminal 2.

  ‘Botany Bay just down the road, August.’

  ‘From here?’

  ‘Yeah, just behind the airport.’

  ‘Where the First Fleet came?’

  ‘Yep.’ Aunty didn’t say anything more, she was too sad and too tired for anything else.

  They took a train from the airport to the city and then out to Broken. They must have looked like the most despondent Aboriginal women in the entire world. They had run out of things to hope for. They had a destination, but it looked bleak from seats 18C and 18D.

  Missy turned to August after some time and lamented, ‘It wouldn’t change a thing. The artefacts. People don’t care.’

  ‘Yes they do, Aunty,’ August said gently. ‘Otherwise they wouldn’t be in a museum.’

  ‘Nup. People need tin. People so scared of not having everything …’ she let out a big breath, ‘that our people are gunna have nothing.’ She closed her eyes as if that settled it.

  After a while it sounded as if she were sleeping. August felt for Aunt Missy’s phone still in her pocket and took it out. In the search engine she typed tin mine and then clicked on images. Fourteen million entries popped up, the phone told her; six were displayed on the screen. August clicked on the first to enlarge it, it was a colour photo: blue sky, green grass ringed around a wide, deep hole that had stony-looking levels going down from the top, like seats in an ancient amphitheatre. She pressed the button at the top to lock the phone and put it back into her pocket.

  August had always thought important events happened in every other country except for Australia. That the tremors of their small lives meant nothing. But at that moment, on a train going to the deep past and the place she knew best, she felt as if she’d awoken from a stony sleep to find herself standing on the edge of something larger than she’d ever been able to see before. After digesting all those schoolbook lies, after reading that Reverend’s letter, after walking the aisles of the museum, she knew that her life wasn’t like before. There was an expanse behind her, their lives meant something, their lives were huge. Thousands of years, she thought to herself. Slipped through the fingers of careless people. That’s what homogenised Massacre thought, that they were a careless people. Anyone watching the TV that week must’ve thought it – that Jedda was just a little brown girl gone missing from a messy brown family. Other people didn’t have lumps in their throat year in and out, century after century. They didn’t know what it was like to be torn apart.

  They pulled into the station at a minute past midnight and began walking on the safe side of the railway strip, past the empty benches. August carried the rucksack and had both nylon sleeping bags draped around her neck – she imagined them like the possum-skin cloaks she’d seen at the museum. She felt for a moment as if she were a queen arriving for a coronation that she couldn’t live up to. Joey was standing on the platform, waiting.

  ‘You both look shattered.’

  ‘Exhausted, yep,’ August said, thrust back into the moment.

  Missy nodded, glad to see her son again, to be home again.

  Joey was jittery, he rubbed his palms together. ‘So … I’ve been with Nana all day. It’s a bit wild out there.’

  ‘What’s wild out where?’ Aunt Missy snapped.

  ‘Well, a little circus. Just a word of warning for when I drop you off, Aug.’

  ‘Spit it out!’ Aunty shouted.

  ‘They started clearing the trees yesterday arvo, knocked one of the sheds down and now the protesters are all over Prosperous. Chained themselves to everything.’ He started laughing then through a wide, dramatic mouth and clapped his hands together.

  ‘Oh my God’ was all Missy said, over and over, as they sped along the highway until they arrived at the turnoff of the Upper Massacre Plains road. As they drove down it, they could see an orange haze coming from Prosperous that blurred the usual stars on the horizon. ‘Oh my God.’

  They drove on, it felt, in slow motion, finally steering through the arch of peppermint trees. And there they saw it all: the field ablaze, the silhouettes of people running and a few police cars parked beside Southerly, misery lights flashing in the maw of the dark. Aunt Missy said a final, foreboding, ‘Oh my God’ and the car turned right to Prosperous House. Lit by the field, standing on the verandah were Elsie and Aunt Mary who flagged them down as if Joey’s Mazda were a rescue ship and they were stranded in a sweep of wild ocean.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf ’s letter to Dr George Cross,

  2nd August 1915, continued

  IX

  Many more of the German and Prussian descendants’ homes and businesses were razed by fire, and more posters hung about the town of Mass
acre Plains:—

  ‘INTERN THE LOT!’

  ‘ANTI-GERMAN LEAGUE MEETING’

  Before my departure a notice was nailed to the Mission Church, which read: ‘DO YOUR BIT. KILL A GERMAN.’

  I’m certain I will die here. What use is this petition then? I fear my truth will go unnoticed and my life will simply be reduced to the coat of arms of a distant land. What use is determining our value or morality under the colours of a single flag? As you, Dr Cross, whom I believe to be of Irish stock? Be it Ireland’s flag. Be it the British flag or German or Australian? What use is persecuting us upon the weight of inconsequential co-ordinates on the globe, of that trifling place of our birth?

  I am a Lutheran minister, and I haven’t thought to be anything else all my days. However, later in my clergy work my friend Baumann had condemned our Founder, the theologian Martin Luther, as a hatemonger. Baumann told me of the things Luther wrote in regard to the Jew. He informed me that Luther had gone so far as to compose a petition calling for the eradication of the Jewish race – ‘the cockroaches’, as Luther, a man of Scripture, had referred to them.

  ‘We must look forward,’ I had said in response. Yet the dishonour I felt was pointed. What woe filled my spirit – that I should have lived my life spreading the Word under the banner of Lutheranism, when its Founder held such misguided ideals. I sought verification, and after I’d read the document that Baumann gave to me I threw it against the threshing floor after not ten pages. What horror. I felt I was questioning all that I had knelt before. God above all? The law and the Church? Church above all men? The White man over the Black man? And all men above beasts? What have I done? Have I become the beast? I am despised as a beast and I fear hatred has reduced the so-called civilised man to a pack of murderous barbarians.

  The words! What have we done by taking the words of our God and turning them on their heads for our own purposes? And I am of that number. What have I done, dear Dr Cross, that I feel such guilt in replacing Baymee with the Lord? What right had I to erasure? What right did I have to say one belief begets another? What right does any person? What has man done to man?

  I fear I am losing my faith completely, in the Church and in Humanity. If I had known the dark deeds, I question whether I would have asked to be shown back to the sea, and the unkind ocean, asking it to sweep me homeward. Though, I remained.

  In closing, I beg for reason and for you to insert this letter – or its sentiment – in a rightful place. Although I deeply deplore that Great Britain has been compelled to declare war against Germany, the land of my father, I am a British subject and am willing to defend the honour of His Majesty King George V, of our beloved Australia. As a clergyman without chattels, I can only offer my body and life and this humble truth.

  With sincerity,

  Ferdinand Greenleaf

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Aunt Missy ran up the steps and ushered Elsie into Prosperous. Joey wandered onto the verandah, held the rails and looked out over the field as if he were watching the lit new year arrive over a town oval, exchanging fire over the theatre of the trenches.

  Up at Southerly there were two police officers outside their car; the other officers were running in the chaos further out. Eddie was there outside Southerly. August could see the orange light flickering off his outline. She turned from him and stared into the flames off the crop as she followed Joey onto the deck. From there she could make out firemen holding a hose that sprayed a huge stream of water from the dam, the water looked white in the dark field. She saw a policeman tackle a silhouette to the ground. There were maybe thirty people running about. August looked for Mandy, but she couldn’t make out their faces. It reminded her of childhood, clutching sparklers in their little hands, running through the night air and innocent: everything in the past was backlit in her mind.

  She stood close to Joey. He laughed; he looked strung out. She leant in to look at his eyes, dilated as dinner plates.

  ‘How was the nightclub?’ August asked.

  ‘Sick,’ he said, and she shook her head. They could see the protesters standing atop the machinery way out, those on the ground kept running from the cops. The knee-high flames were racing down the dry field quickly, west towards the feed sheds, about half a kilometre from Prosperous and the drill sites. The fire brigade would contain it there, August reckoned. It wouldn’t reach the house.

  Joey looked the way he had looked into a campfire when they were young. Elated.

  ‘You never had a riot in gaol? Set your mattress on fire?’ August asked.

  ‘I never got involved, was pointless. At least this isn’t pointless. It’s cool. You ever been in a riot?’

  ‘I went to an anti-war protest in London. But it was calm from the back of the crowd.’ She thought about it – they were just numbers, the gentle, shuffling bulge of dissent at the end of a line. She moved inside the house where Elsie was weepy, and Mary was rapidly explaining, filling Aunt Missy in on the details. August hugged her nana tight and rubbed her back.

  ‘About four yesterday arvo the bulldozers started. They’ve got logs strapped across the front so they can clear a big sweep. I was here with Mum. Next thing, a bunch of protesters are out in the field, standing in front of the machines! Fucking mad!’ She added just as fast, ‘You wouldn’t get me out there in front of a bloody ten-tonne truck.’

  ‘How’d the fire start?’ August asked.

  ‘We were about to leave and the kids, kids they are, locked up the gates and said, “No-one in, no-one out.” I called the cops and Nicki.’

  ‘Why’d you call Aunt Nicki?’ August asked.

  ‘She deals with the mine, doesn’t she? So, then the cops come. The kids out there start filming stuff and chanting “Lock the gates. Lock the gates.” We locked the door and stayed inside waiting for the cops when this one dreadlocked fella threw a bottle of something on the field … We saw it! … Bugger lit it!’

  August wasn’t listening properly. She was putting pieces together in her mind. She stood up, interrupted Aunt Mary. ‘Has anyone here seen the book that Poppy was writing, the dictionary, since we’ve been packing?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you seen it at all?’ August whined.

  ‘No!’ Aunt Mary yelled. ‘I’m telling a story!’

  ‘Nana?’

  ‘I don’t know where it is. For God’s sake, August, the garden is on fire and you’re worried about a book?’

  A policeman appeared and hesitated at the back door for a moment before he spoke. ‘All you lot need to get out now. Take your things, this place’ll go up like a tinderbox if the wind changes.’

  The Aunties gathered the bags that Nana had prepared, everyone was yelling at each other with care as they left the steps of the verandah to the cars. August ran up to Eddie as he hosed the garden with tank water.

  She could hear her aunts calling out ‘August!’ behind her, but ignored them, heading for Eddie. ‘Hey?’ August barked at him from a distance.

  He watched her run towards him and bent the hose to stop the spray ‘Aww, Aug, please forgive me?’ He twisted forward a little towards the chaos as if in physical pain. ‘I didn’t mean to say those things, I promise you.’

  August ignored it, she didn’t need to go over what he’d said. She had a more pressing question on her mind. ‘The other night – after the memorial – who put me to bed? Which of my aunties came upstairs?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Which aunty?’

  ‘Don’t know her name.’

  ‘Black dress?’ August said, trying not to yell near the police.

  ‘Red shoes,’ he said.

  ‘Did you tell the local council about the artefacts?’

  ‘I’d just found them. Day before your pop passed, Aug – I promise!’

  August ran back down to Prosperous. Elsie and the Aunties were still pushing the bags into the boot and back seat. Joey was standing on the verandah watching the field. August grabbed his arm. ‘Where’s Aunt Nicki now?�
�

  ‘Home probably.’

  ‘Drive me there?’

  ‘It’s one a.m., idiot.’

  ‘Alright, time to clear out. All valuables are in my car,’ Aunt Mary directed.

  Elsie pointed August to Joey’s car. ‘August, you go with Joe – there’s no space.’

  ‘I’ll go with Joey,’ August said, looking at Joey for confirmation but he was looking back to the fire. ‘We’ll leave soon, yeah?’ August reached out to him, tugged on his sleeve. ‘We go together, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said vaguely, and turned to the women.

  ‘You just both leave when the cops tell you to, leave soon, okay?’ Aunt Missy warned, pointing at the two of them. ‘Joe! Snap out of it!’ He nodded.

  August gave Elsie a quick hug before Aunt Missy and Aunt Mary hustled her into the car. They cradled bags on their laps, while August helped heave the doors shut. When the car left, Joey said he’d take August to Aunt Missy’s and to grab what she needed.

  ‘And to visit Aunt Nicki on the way?’ August asked as they walked back to the house.

  ‘Alright, we can stop there – but tell me why?’

  ‘I’ll tell you in the car …’ August climbed the stairs to get her belongings from the attic. She grabbed her passport, threw it in her duffel bag and dumped the box’s contents into another filled to the brim with Jedda’s and her childhood things. She heaved the box and duffel bag and stumbled, upright, down the stairs.

  Joey stood in the kitchen and reached out to help with the box.

  A sudden white light flashed and lit up the interior of the house like a camera flash and a boom shuddered through the field.

  They ducked, August dropped the box.

  August could feel scorching heat, her skin dried and felt as if every particle of moisture drew from her pores, eaten by the dry air. They heard the pop, pop, pop of tin, that sounded like ricocheted gunshots. They stayed on the lino floor of the kitchen. After a few seconds they braved the kitchen window. Silhouettes of tin sheets peeled into the sky from the shed, and then they heard the beams crashing into the cackling, sparking fire. They watched the quick disappearing act of the shed as it collapsed, spewing flames.