Fresh Fields

by Peter Kocan

  The first pair the youth tried on were too big, the second pair a bit too small.

  “How are they, lad?” Mr. Coles asked, coming back and pointing to the too-small pair the youth still had on.

  “Okay,” said the youth, anxious to please.

  “Righto then.”

  Mr. Coles led the way out and went along the path in the direction of the shed. The youth followed, trying not to hobble because of his toes being scrunched up. As he passed one of the windows of the house he saw the curtain move and a woman’s angry face peer out. Or maybe it was more upset than angry.

  First Mr. Coles explained to him about feeding the animals. That was to be his daily task. At the other end of the tractor shed from the youth’s tiny bedroom was another separate room. Mr. Coles called it the saddle room because there were saddles and bridles hung up on racks on the wall, but it also contained bins of wheat and pollard and oats and chaff. Mr. Coles showed him how to take a bucket and scoop up such-and-such an amount of this for the chooks, and such-and-such an amount of that for the pigs, and this much of the other for the horses. The pigs, for instance, got eight scoops of pollard mixed with water and stirred into a thick mush, with foodscraps from the house added into it. Mr. Coles showed him how to use an old bricklayer’s trowel to mix with. The youth listened to all the instructions and tried to fix them in his mind.

  “Got that, lad?” Mr. Coles would ask after he’d explained each thing.

  “Yes,” the youth would answer, having no idea what he’d just been told.

  “Hope so,” said Mr. Coles. “We had to let the last lad go because he didn’t listen to what he was told. Went off half-cocked all the time. Ended up feeding wheat to the horses instead of oats! Damned imbecilic thing to do! Could’ve killed the poor beggars!”

  The youth tried to look amazed that anyone could make such an error. Even in his helpless whirl of confusion, part of his mind was working clearly. He was thinking that if he just got through these few minutes, and waited till Mr. Coles left him for a moment, he would grab his belongings from his room and walk quickly away over the nearest rise and disappear.

  “Well, lad,” said Mr. Coles, “that’s the drill. If you’re unsure about anything, any time, ask. I never mind a lad asking. Just don’t go off half-cocked. That’s what I can’t abide! Do we understand each other?”

  “Yes,” said the youth.

  “Righto then, let’s see you prepare the feeds.”

  Mr. Coles supervised him through it and the youth felt slightly reassured. It had gone from being a whirl of confusion inside his head to an outward set of moves and actions that he could probably get the hang of and do routinely.

  After the feeding chores were done Mr. Coles milked the two cows, with the youth looking on to get an initial idea of it. Milking was to be another of his daily duties. “The trick, lad, is to keep her soothed and happy,” said Mr. Coles as he leant his head against the cow’s flank and directed a steady stream of milk into the bucket. Just then the cow whipped her muddy tail across the back of his neck and he yelled furiously at her that she was a blasted brute of a thing and had better stop the damned nonsense.

  “Done any welding, lad?” Mr. Coles asked a bit later.

  “No.”

  “A vital skill when you’re on the land. You’ll soon pick it up. A keen lad will pick most things up.”

  The youth tried to put a flicker of keenness on his face, but he felt too clammy and unwell. The exertion of the feeding chores had got him sweating and now he had cooled again.

  They went into the main part of the shed beside the tractor and Mr. Coles began to fiddle about with some welding gear. There were bits of broken metal from a plough or something and he was trying to weld them together. He didn’t seem to expect the youth to do anything, except hand him tools now and then. The youth gazed out at the mud and the drizzle. The shed was dim and cold, with a smell made up of metal and petrol from the tractor, grain and chaff from the saddle room, and a particular fetid odour which the youth thought was the smell of rats.

  Every so often the welding gear did not do what Mr. Coles wanted and he would yell at it that it was a blasted swine of a turnout and not worth having on the place. The youth had got used to the yelling and was starting to be able to hear it without a clutch of fear in his stomach.

  The youth needed to go to the toilet, but did not know where it was. When he finally asked, Mr. Coles waved his hand vaguely. “Just go round the side of the shed, lad.” The youth went round the side of the shed in the drizzle but could see no toilet. The dogs saw him and began to bark. Mr. Coles called out to him to let Dolly off the chain. The youth hobbled across and looked at the three dogs. One was a big yellow thing that barked more savagely as he approached. The second was brownish and seemed to follow the lead of the big yellow one. The third was a nice black-and-white collie. She stopped barking and began to wag her tail cautiously as he approached. “Dolly? Are you Dolly?” the youth asked her. She wagged harder and looked up at him with soft intelligent eyes. He unfastened her chain and they went back to the shed. Mr. Coles slapped and patted Dolly and the dog wagged and twisted her body and made little swooning sounds as though being in Mr. Coles’s presence was the sweetest thing that ever could be.

  “Um, I couldn’t see the toilet,” the youth said.

  “Ah,” said Mr. Coles, realising that the youth didn’t just need to pee. “There’s the old outside loo of the house for you to use. Up the rise at the back. But try to be quiet, lad. Mrs. Coles might be having a lie-down.”

  The rain had got harder, so the youth went to his room and put on his new army disposals greatcoat. It felt stiff and heavy, like a coat of iron. He trudged through the mud, sinking deep with every step and having to pick his feet up carefully lest he step right out of the gumboots, tight as they were.

  The loo was an old upright wooden dunny on the slope about twenty paces from the back door of the house. A big bush grew up against it, the leaves pressing round it on two sides, shielding it a little from sight. There was a horseshoe nailed above the door. Inside was a flat seat with a hole above a big tin container. In the corner was a bucket of sand and a drum of disinfectant. On the back of the door hung a hand-printed notice in capital letters: SPREAD SAND AND DISINFECTANT AFTER EVERY USE. WE DON’T WANT THE SMELL AT THE HOUSE THANK YOU! It was signed with the initials “C.T.C.” The youth knew that Mr. Coles’s first name was Howard, so they weren’t his initials. Instead of toilet paper there were squares of cut-up newspaper skewered on a piece of wire. The youth wrestled the skirts of the greatcoat up and undid his other clothes and sat. Then a thought struck him and he got up hurriedly. He peered down through the hole. He could see no movement there. The youth knew vaguely that snakes went to sleep in cold weather. He wondered whether they chose dunnies to sleep in, and how much disturbance it took to wake them up. He sat again.

  Up there on the slope a wind was blowing and it made the branches of the bush rasp and grapple against the dunny walls. The mournful sound of it was quite soothing. The youth read some of the squares of newspaper. There were bits of information about wool prices and cattle sales, and ads for sheep-dip, and stuff about export prospects for dried fruit. It was interesting enough. The youth found most things interesting when he could be alone with his thoughts. There was a sudden extra whoosh of wind against the side of the dunny and a cold rush of air came through the space under the door. The youth got the clammy, unwell sensation again and shivered.

  He remembered a scene where Diestl is in Russia and the autumn of 1941 is beginning to wane. He is trudging back from the latrines, hunched over in his greatcoat, and he steps in a shallow puddle of water and hears something—the tiny crackling sound of the film of ice that had formed on the surface of the puddle. Diestl’s heart sinks as he realises how close the winter is, and how bad it is all going to be. The youth had thought what a beautifully simple and profou
nd moment that was in the story. Just after that Diestl’s unit is suddenly transferred to Yugoslavia to fight partisans. It is very nasty, fighting partisans in the Yugoslavian hills, but sometimes there’s a lull and then Diestl and his pals can sleep under a proper roof at night, and have proper rations. They can even sit around in village inns drinking wine and flirting just a tiny bit with the waitresses. Of course you can only sit around in the villages if you are in parties of at least half-a-dozen or so, and you are all fully armed. You can only flirt with the waitresses as long as you understand that you and they are only pretending, that the partisans are their friends and relatives and that they might be partisans themselves when they aren’t serving the wine and exchanging the flirty half-smiles with you. You have to be aware that the only reason the wine isn’t poisoned, or your vehicle wired to blow up, is that everyone understands about reprisals and about the official ratio stipulated by the highest authorities. Ten-for-one is the ratio. Diestl has seen an instance of this ten-for-one rule being enforced and he hopes very much that nobody will do anything to provoke it again in his unit’s area. But even taking all those things into account, it is like a rest home compared with being in Russia. Diestl feels guilty that he has been spared from going through the worst of it in Russia and even applies for a transfer back there.

  Yes, thought the youth: maybe it is better to go through the worst of it. Then you don’t have to feel guilty that fate has given you an easy ride. That idea had helped the youth a lot in difficult moments. It had helped him get off at Balinga when every nerve of his body had wanted to stay safe in the train. Diestl’s story was full of profound ideas. You could study it your whole life and still not cover all the ideas that were there.

  A loud thud on the toilet door startled him. “Coming!” he called, hurriedly finishing up and adjusting his clothes and the greatcoat. He opened the door.

  Mrs. Coles was standing halfway down the slope with a large stone in her hand. She had a sort of scared look, as though she would turn and bolt back to the house any moment.

  “What are you doing there?” she demanded. “Why are you so long there?”

  “Just using the toilet,” he called back.

  “Twelve minutes!” she cried, her voice going shrill.

  “Pardon?”

  “I can tell the time! Don’t think I can’t!”

  The rain was plastering her hair and her mouth was working in an odd way. The youth began to feel frightened. What if Mr. Coles came along now and saw her looking so upset and him right there? It might look as though he had done something.

  He started to walk away across the slope, away from the plastered hair and oddly twisted mouth, but then realised he hadn’t spread sand or sloshed antiseptic in the dunny. He turned back, but Mrs. Coles gave a peculiar little screech and waved her hands as though to shoo him off.

  “I forgot to spread the sand,” he called, his heart thumping.

  She continued to wave her hands and make little screeching sounds. He turned away again and went as quickly as he could back through the mud to the shed.

  “I thought you might’ve fallen in, lad,” Mr. Coles said, glancing up from the welding.

  The youth did not mention the incident.

  THEY WENT for long periods without speaking. The youth didn’t mind. It left him free to think his own thoughts. But it was also a drawback at this early stage because it meant he wasn’t getting the signs and clues he needed. The best thing was if the other person rattled on while you just put in a word now and then to encourage them. The Diestl story had taught him that. “Yes, I remember you,” the beautiful Yugoslav girl says when he happens to bump into her a week or so after he and a bunch of his pals had drunk wine at her tavern. “You’re the man who speaks one word to hear a hundred.” She explains that this is a local proverb, but that it fits Diestl exactly. The youth often thought of that scene. It was a lovely moment because they only have a smattering of each other’s language and you can see the communication happening in their eyes and their hand movements and the way they hold their bodies in relation to each other, rather than through what’s being said. And it was sad because you know that if they hadn’t been on opposite sides in the war they’d have had a love affair. It was poignant, too, in a way you only understand later, for it shows how sensitive and sweet Diestl was back then, before that side of him got burnt away.

  The youth decided to ask a few offhand questions. He would use the knack of being social that he’d picked up at the Miami. So he asked how many acres the property had, and how many sheep were on it, and where the name “Dunkeld” came from, and things like that. Mr. Coles answered readily enough and didn’t seem to mind expanding on certain topics. He explained, for instance, there were twenty-five hundred sheep at the moment but that the place could carry four thousand if there was a bit of Improvement done. Mr. Coles put an emphasis on the word “Improvement” whenever he said it and the youth got the feeling it was an issue. So he asked what sort of Improvement the property needed and that kept Mr. Coles rattling on for quite a while.

  The youth found out that Mr. Coles wasn’t the owner of Dunkeld. He was managing it for a big city businessman who’d bought it three years ago. Jimson, the chap’s name was, and he made his money importing luxury Italian cars. Mr. Coles sounded a bit fed up with Jimson. “I said to him, when I agreed to come down from Burracoola: Just give me the proper support and I’ll have the place on its feet in five years!” He had pushed the welding mask back up on his head and was glaring out at the mud. He muttered something about the “blasted dozer,” put his mask down and went on working. After a few minutes the youth asked what sort of a place Burracoola was, and Mr. Coles told him about the small property of his own that he had there, and which he’d neglected these past three years for no other reason than to help Jimson out.

  In the middle of the day there came a couple of hollow clanging sounds from the direction of the house. “There’s lunch,” said Mr. Coles. He put the welding gear down and led the way across. The youth hobbled behind, his toes really hurting from being so scrunched up in the gumboots, but his mind alert and wary.

  The table in the kitchen had a meal laid out on it under a clean tea-towel. There was a portion of shepherd’s pie with peas and carrots and cauliflower, some jelly and custard, and a pot of tea. The thought suddenly came to the youth: What if she’s poisoned it? But then he reflected that it was a case of eat it or go hungry, and he told himself that a bullet either has your name on it or it doesn’t.

  So he sat under “The Banks of the Burracoola” and ate the food and listened to a vague murmur of conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Coles as they ate somewhere further inside the house. Mrs. Coles’s voice sounded plaintive and Mr. Coles’s sounded as if he was trying to jolly her along, but there didn’t seem to be anything really wrong. He heard Mr. Coles call her Clare. That fitted with the initials C.T.C. on the sign in the dunny. Once or twice Mr. Coles called her “Clarey” in a fond voice. “Scary” was more like it, the youth thought, and began to giggle softly. Then he got a mental picture of her rushing in with an axe, and that helped him stop giggling. When he’d finished eating he went back across to the shed and sat patting the collie dog until Mr. Coles came over.

  The afternoon dragged by. The youth was losing the last of his alertness and beginning to feel clammy and unwell again. He wanted to ask if he could go into his room and lie down, but couldn’t pluck up the nerve. He wished he could just curl up in a corner like Dolly. When the evening dark began to come on, Mr. Coles went back to the house and left the youth to do the feeding.

  The youth racked his brain to remember the exact routine, and the amounts, and hoped he was doing it fairly right. The difficult part was feeding the pigs in their big enclosure down in the corner of the home paddock. There were five of them, large and black, and they came bustling and oinking to the fence as soon as he approached. They would not wait for him t
o pour the food into their trough, but shoved their snouts up and jostled the bucket as he tried to get it over the railing. The big snouts came very close to his hands and he was afraid of being savaged. The jostling, and his fear, made it hard to pour the mush cleanly. Most of it ended up on the pigs’ backs or on the ground. The youth had never been this close to pigs before and it shocked him how big and pushy and frightening they were. The pigs made him understand Mr. Coles’s habit of yelling at things. The youth felt like bellowing at the blasted brutes and swines to stop their damned bloody nonsense.

  Feeding the horses and cows was much nicer. He would fetch a sweet-smelling bale of hay from the stack, cut the wire that held it together, break the bale up into several bits and then spread them so that the three horses and two cows could all have a nibble without crowding each other too much. The youth was also a bit scared of the horses and cows at first, in case they might bite or kick, but none of them seemed to want to do anything bad. One of the horses was enormous, some kind of draughthorse. It approached and sniffed at the youth. Mr. Coles had told him you can tell if a horse is in a bad mood by seeing whether its ears are laid back. This horse’s ears were upright. He lifted his hand carefully, ready to snatch it away if he had to. The horse stood calmly while he stroked its nose. The breath from the big nostrils was warm on his hand.

  After a few moments the horse backed gently off and went to join the others at the hay.

  “You there, lad?” Mr. Coles called from near the shed.

  “Yes.”

  “Shower at the house, lad, before dinner. You’ll need to step lively. It’s almost on the table.”

  The youth fetched his towel and went across. Mr. Coles showed him through to a bathroom. It was lovely being under the hot water, feeling the long day’s cold and damp being soothed away. There was a cake of flowery-smelling soap and he lathered himself up with it. But then the hot water began to give out and he had to rinse himself off as quickly as he could. He dried himself and dressed and opened the bathroom door. Mrs. Coles was standing there with a mop in her hand. She gave him a dark intense look and strode past him into the bathroom and began running the mop across the floor in angry swipes. The youth went out to the kitchen.