by Susan Duncan
Stuck in a twelve-student school that didn’t teach beyond grade eight. Like everyone else, she left at the age of fourteen. A wound that never healed.
‘Mr Hamilton’s wife taught sewing on Friday afternoons. The twins were great sewers. I preferred reading. Anything I could get my hands on. I’d grab a book, climb one of the cypresses and read until dark.’
There were two old cars under the trees. Falling apart. Rusted. Full of spiders and probably a snake or two. One was a 1921 Ford called Chrissie. The other a Chevy. When we spent holidays there, my mother would point at them and say they’d be John’s property when he turned eighteen. He could restore and sell them. It would give him a financial start. My brother, who skedaddled at the first hint of anything mechanical, didn’t shed a tear when they were reduced to rubble in the bushfires.
‘I remember you telling me about Mr Brooksbank,’ I said.
‘Oh, he was a lovely man.’
‘He taught you for a while, didn’t he?’ Her eyes filled with confusion. ‘Your tutor,’ I added, trying to jog her memory.
‘No, no. He was the local priest. A good friend of Dad’s. They enjoyed a drink together. I wore a bright-red cardigan one day that I thought was pretty special. He took me aside. Said a beautiful, well-dressed woman turned heads when she entered a room, but no one should be able to remember what she was wearing. Never forgot that.’ I waited patiently for more, but she’d run out of puff or become lost in her memories. (Later, I checked Mr Brooksbank’s details with my cousin Jayne. He was a friend and neighbour, nothing more).
I drove her back to the Village. Retrieved her walker, helped her to her feet and stayed at the entrance while she disappeared into the main lounge. She looked frail and terribly old. For a brief moment I thought of going after her. Looked down at my feet until the impulse went away. I had no idea what to say. Then I noticed a food stain on the front of my shirt and couldn’t decide whether to laugh or weep.
The following week I collected her earlier than usual. Bob and I were leaving for Benbulla and I wanted to get Tarrangaua cleaned and organised before we left. ‘A quick lunch, if you don’t mind,’ I said.
‘I know you’re busy,’ she retorted.
‘I’m here, Esther. I could’ve gone without seeing you at all.’
‘Don’t think I’m not grateful.’
‘Well, an occasional thank you wouldn’t go astray.’
‘How many times have you thanked me in your life?’ I drove in silence to pick up picnic supplies. Tried to remember if I was a thankless child.
I was born with a birthmark down one side of my face, a turned eye, developed great blotches of freckles from the moment the sun first hit my face, had a nose like a beak and copper-coloured hair. Years later, Esther added that I’d also been covered in a furry down at birth: like a little wolf. She’d despaired, of course. To be born beautiful in her generation was like winning the lottery. Handled with care, wisdom and a whiff of animal cunning, it was valuable currency and a passport to glory. Or, at the very least, a dizzying step up the social ladder.
From day one I needed to be pointed in different directions to most girls. Even though the doctor told her to be patient, the marks on my face were caused by pressure and would disappear in time, Esther insisted on radiation treatment. No one knew then that radiation caused long-term cell damage. She attacked my turned eye problem with equal gusto. For weeks, in the wintry predawn light, my father drove us twenty kilometres along rough country and narrow bitumen roads – although they were called highways then – to the Albury train station for the journey to an eye specialist in Melbourne.
My mother dressed in her best gear, her face smelling of face powder, her lips bright red, eyebrows coloured with a little brush she moistened with saliva and then dipped in a brown cream. She always wore a hat. I was consistently dressed in an itchy green tweed, knee-length skirt and matching jacket with a green velvet collar. Black court shoes polished to a mirror shine, white socks. (I still have a portrait wearing that suit, titled Susie 1958, which hangs on my office wall.)
I was admitted to a Melbourne hospital for surgery to weaken the muscle in my left eye. The specialist, Dr Box, told my mother I would have to wear glasses one day, but the scar under my eye would disappear. All these years later, if I am tired, stressed or angry, my eyes go wonky and, for a while, I look vaguely demented.
After surgery, I crawled into bed with my mother every morning to do a series of eye exercises – following her finger left and right, forwards until she touched the tip of my nose, then backwards as far as her arm would stretch. But we both tired of that boring routine very quickly, so she taught me sewing instead. Hem stitch. Back stitch. Blanket stitch. Embroidery stitch. I’d forgotten about the sewing lessons until, when I was packing her belongings, I found a badly embroidered pink galah on a yellow linen doily. I value it alongside my father’s writing desk and the watercolour of the Murray River. It proved love. Tenderness. Care. None of it born out of the self-interest that conjoined with our adult relationship.
‘I’ve thanked you repeatedly for making sure I had a good education,’ I said. ‘Thanks for making sure my wonky eye was fixed, too. The radiation is a black mark, though. I reckon it had a lot to do with all the skin cancers on my face …’
‘Rubbish. You refused to wear a hat when you were a kid. Threw it off the second I put it on your head. Went off stark-naked a lot of the time, too. I remember the migrants bringing you back time after time. Mrs Duncan, here is your daughter but we don’t know where her clothes are …’
‘Well, consider yourself thanked, ok? I won’t see you next week. We’ll be at the farm. The new shed is being built.’
‘How many sheds does one man need?’ she grumbled.
At Benbulla, Bob measured and staked out the shed footprint. A few days later, Norm cut lightly into the ground with his excavator to establish the base. With a pencil, notebook and an old-fashioned dumpy level instead of a high-tech laser level, Bob and Norm worked to scrape a plot as level as possible.
‘Every little bit of effort saves using extra concrete,’ he said. ‘When the slab is poured, it can’t be more than five to ten millimetres out or it makes it that much harder to erect the frame and walls. Harder means it takes longer. Longer means it costs more. It all has a knock-on effect.’
It’s like making a cake, I thought, all the ingredients should be balanced to avoid a sinkhole in the middle. I held the pole for Bob to make his calculations, but mostly I contented myself with making blueberry pikelets (recipe on side of buttermilk container) for smoko and keeping the tent in a pristine condition. Who knew a little white doggie could shed so much hair? Chippy did have one great skill – she’d sussed food times with absolute accuracy. Breakfast, smoko, lunch were routine. But sometimes, if I was in danger of napping through knock-off time, she yapped in my face. Beer o’clock – the easy, wind-down period after the hard slog and before the tradies went home – included cheese and bikkies and a cold beer while chores for the following morning were debated. A ritual that took the edge off the day’s grind. Chippy lived for the cheese and biscuit titbits that no one had the heart to deny her.
‘Her obsession with food is getting worse,’ I told Bob one day, worried. He didn’t say a word but I heard every thought. ‘Ok, so maybe we’re genetically related. Seriously, though, do you think there’s something wrong?’
‘Worry if she doesn’t eat. Not before.’ But there was a new, almost demented look of concentration in her eyes around food that was increasingly disturbing. As though she’d lost her reason for a while.
The slab for the shed was poured on a bright, sunny day. The few dads and sons we knew in Wingham turned up just after dawn to lend a hand. Sunny-humoured country boys. Unafraid of grabbing a shovel and doing backbreaking dirty work. Three massive concrete mixer trucks wheezed up the hill. Tanks on their backs like turtles, they lined up to spew grey sludge down mobile channels until the framework was filled. The day gre
w warmer.
The builder had a ritzy new high-tech laser level, so we put the old dumpy level away. Gradually the dance floor – as I thought of it – was covered. In knee-high gumboots, the men and boys ploughed through the ooze, raking and shovelling, spreading and patting. Those young backs bending with the ease of sappy green timber until the air bubbles disappeared. Gradually, the foundation for the shed – Bob’s shed – took shape. But the day grew too warm.
‘We don’t want the concrete to go off too soon,’ Bob said.
‘Why?’ I asked. Wasn’t the whole point of concrete to set hard?
‘You’ve got to be able to work it to a perfect level before it dries. It has to cure properly. Otherwise it’s weak. Vulnerable. Concrete gains strength over a month until it’s bulletproof. You need toughness when you’re driving a tractor in and out.’
‘What tractor?’
‘Every farm needs a tractor,’ Bob said, giving me a slap on the backside and walking off with a bounce in his step. But water was our Achilles heel.
At last the slab was done. ‘Write your name and date in the concrete,’ Bob said, happy. ‘This is a big moment.’
I wrote both our names: Bob and Susan. And the date: March 31, 2012. I gazed at our nearby campsite nestled under the gum trees. It already looked flimsy and insignificant. As though a slight breeze could carry the canvas away, like Dorothy’s house in Kansas. It was silly, really, because it had withstood torrential rain and strong winds, and for so long had been a safe haven on a high quiet hill.
At the end of the day, when everyone had gone, we jumped in the ute with a couple of beers, some cheese and salami, and drove to the top of the Great Hill. I spread a kilim on the grass and we sat cross-legged, gazing at the slab way below. Sixteen metres long and nine metres wide, it looked like a foreshortened tennis court. We twisted the tops off our beers and clinked our bottles to toast the new shed. ‘To Benbulla,’ we chorused. I tried not to think of it as a new scar on a pristine landscape.
The next day, Bob checked the levels – they were almost a hundred millimetres out. The batteries in the flash, infallible, high-tech laser had been dodgy. ‘A disaster,’ Bob said. ‘Everything just got so much harder. I should’ve checked and double-checked. Standard procedure and I didn’t follow it.’
A long time later, he looked up from the fire where he was cooking dinner: ‘He who trusts, busts. That was the kind of blue an old bloke would make.’ He looked beaten and vulnerable in a way I’d never seen before. Above the campfire, in a pale-blue sky, Venus shone brightly.
‘This is only the beginning,’ I said. ‘We’re still not in too deep to quit if it’s all too hard.’
Bob turned a horrified face towards me: ‘Quit? Why would I do that?’
The next day we went out and bought a diesel-driven generator with enough power to run the big tools needed to cut, trim and grind steel to build the shed. The amount of unsustainable matter required to reach a state of sustainability was mounting at a rapid pace. Hmm.
Pears, Gazza, Tom and Tim joined Bob, Norm and me in the circle around the campfire. A ragged collection of blokes with deep and gentle souls. Off-site, Gazza was a long-haired, bearded, part-time poet, part-time plumber who grew grapes and made wine. Tom, a young bloke home from the UK on a holiday to see his mother, was a quiet, steady worker with tickets to rock concerts nearly every other weekend. Pears loved a chat, loved his two little daughters, loved his work. Mostly. Tim, a tough ex-rodeo star who’d once ridden bulls and had the scars to prove it, shifted fencing to keep cattle off the Home Hill. He worked his old blue tractor on our steep hillsides with the same skill and intuition you needed to ride a skittish young horse. No more wading through cow poo from now on. A pleasing thought.
Their hats matched their personalities. Young Tom in a trendy baseball cap. Pears in a spotless white terry-towelling hat. Tim in an Akubra with a rakish upturned brim. Norm in his uniform, slightly grubby, battered cloth hat. Gazza didn’t bother with one. Not that I can recall, anyway.
‘Was Gazza wearing his work boots on site?’ Brickworks Michael asked when we told him the project was going gangbusters.
‘Work boots?’
‘Yeah. Flip-flops. In winter he adds a pair of socks.’
There were many, many decisions to make every day. Some were as simple as the right nut and bolt for truss lintels compared to portal base joints. But two had ramifications that would go on for as long as the shed remained standing: Should we increase the angle of the skillion roof by ten degrees, as the architects suggested, so it would reflect the same angles on the house? Should the corrugated iron sheets run vertically or horizontally?
‘It’s just a shed, for god’s sake,’ I muttered. ‘What does it matter?’ In the end, after a long and intense debate, aesthetics were tossed aside to accommodate costs and practicality. Turns out it’s cheaper to lay corrugated iron sheets vertically than horizontally. And a costly extra ten per cent angle on the roof meant more space for swallows and willie wagtails to move in and raise their families. The dreaded tractor would fit nicely under the doorway without raising the roof, anyway.
I did not want a tractor. Tractors were dangerous. Tractors were especially dangerous on steep slopes. The bloke who helped haul Russell’s car off the track edge once rolled his machine – and his land was comparatively undulating. Our terrain was the Swiss Alps in comparison.
‘If you kill yourself on that bloody tractor, who will chop the wood?’ I asked.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Bob replied in a casual way that made me worry even more.
‘I thought we’d said we would hire contractors when there was tractor work. Thought we’d decided we wouldn’t use a tractor often enough to justify the investment. Thought we’d agreed: no tractor!’
‘When?’ Bob asked.
‘Now!’
He took my hand: ‘Let’s go and have a look at what’s available. Might help us decide whether it’s pointless. Or not.’
A week later, a brand-spanking bright orange tractor with a rooftop, bucket and slasher was delivered by the salesman, a denim-clad, Akubra-hatted, leather-belted (with silver and turquoise buckle) bloke who looked like his jeans had been tailor-made. He gave Bob a technical run-through, then climbed into his dashing, chrome-encrusted ute and waved goodbye. He was so good at his job that a few weeks later we returned to buy a lawnmower and came home with a small tractor that, with the right accessories, could do all sorts of tricky small-area jobs (hoe, level, dig) as well as cut grass in a five-foot wide swathe.
‘That’s your personal tractor,’ Bob said, grinning.
‘You mean I’m the designated mower of lawns from now on.’
‘Always said you were a smart woman.’
‘Huh!’ After that, I saw the infinite potential of new technology to eliminate the grind and sweat of land care. As long as we could foot the bill for the machinery and the fuel to run it, dilettantes like us might survive, and even thrive. I riffled through farm machinery catalogues obsessively. Told Bob we’d probably need another shed. No wonder they called me chaos.
At the end of a day of test runs, Bob parked Big Red, as the tractor became known, on a slope. Bucket raised. It was beer o’clock. I handed him a frigidly cold beer.
‘Seems to go alright,’ I said.
‘Yeah … Oh shit.’ The tractor was gently rolling down the hill towards the dam way below. He sprinted off, caught up, leapt on board, found the brake and sorted himself out. Back at the shed, he took up his beer once more.
‘Might be a good idea to drop the bucket when you park in future,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ he agreed.
Later, I heard that farmers who try to catch runaway tractors frequently get caught between those head-high, rolling black tyres and squashed to death into the ground they’re trying to tame. Bob had been lucky. I threw the machinery catalogues into the campfire.
21
BY THE BEGINNING OF WINTER, as kangaroo grass turned rosy
pink along the roadsides and grey gums shed the last of their bark, the framework for the shed was in place. The new fencing to isolate the home paddock from the cattle paddocks was also completed. A trench the length of a cricket pitch had been dug by Norm and his excavator for the transpiration pit, and Brickworks Michael had supplied a truckload of broken bricks to go on top of a gravel base. Eventually, moisture would drain into a dense and diverse plantation of nearby gum trees: iron bark, blackbutt, spotted gum, scribbly gum, red mahogany, grey gums, cadaghi and bloodwood. A magnificent tallowwood, too. Near the edge of this forest, the bony arms of a dead gum stretched high with a mighty black bulb near the top. A white ant nest, Norm explained when I asked him what it was, but not the same species that turned timber houses to dust. Although there were plenty of those around, too.
In happy anticipation of the flushing loo to come, Gazza had thoughtfully rocked up with a real porcelain dunny on a large styrofoam slab that he’d removed from another job. The plan was to set it somewhere in the bush, but I couldn’t quite get my head around how it might work without water and stuck with the fold-up dunny chair.
As it turned out, the local council was in the process of changing rules about septic systems. Aspiration pits were now banned and, in a sweeping, across-the-board dictum that failed to take in individual sites and conditions, had been replaced by tertiary effluent treatment systems. Essentially, this meant two tanks, an electric pump and recycling water through a treatment system. Trouble was: we didn’t have any power source and, even when it was installed, solar was limited by overcast days. Trouble was: we’d already dug the pit. Trouble was: we didn’t have the luxury of town water. Negotiations with the council began.
