The Farmer’s Wife. Rachael Treasure

Y’know, I’ve been under the pump lately.’

      Rebecca wasn’t sure if he was alluding to the abysmal love-making that had ended in a flop of failed sex, or the fact that he had been out all hours yet again, or his guilt over the ploughing, but she was relieved that at least he was talking. She waited in silence, hoping for more from him.

      ‘Let’s, you know … give it another go. Give it a red-hot shake,’ he said.

      She searched his face, but he gave her little to go by. ‘You know me. I’m up for anything,’ she said. And next he was pulling her into his embrace, holding her close to his chest. He smelled strongly of lanolin, dirty-tailed sheep and fly chemicals, but she let her face be pressed against him; starved of his affection, she drank the moment in.

      ‘Yes. Let’s give it a go,’ she said. ‘’Specially for the boys’ sake.’

      As he pulled away from her, he muttered, ‘You know I love you, babe.’

      And that was all Rebecca needed to hear.

       Eight

      As Rebecca drove away from the stockyards and shearing shed, thoughts tumbled in her mind. If Charlie felt that way, surely they could solve anything in their marriage? She took comfort from his hug and those few precious words, as if they were a rope to which she could cling. As she passed her father’s now vacant log cabin, she looked at it, suffused with emotion. The dwelling sat low and lonely on a tree-lined rise in the heart of a river flat. She didn’t want to be like her parents. Ever. Separated and surly with each other. Surely she and Charlie wouldn’t suffer that fate?

      When Bec’s mother, Frankie, had left, taking with her a carload of her vet equipment, life at Waters Meeting had spun out of control. Frankie thought she was doing the right thing and had waited for years until her children were ‘old enough’. Bec, the youngest, was sixteen when her mother left, but the impact had been huge for all of them — even her brothers, Mick and Tom, who were young adults at the time. The three children of Harry were left at Waters Meeting to deal not only with his temper and drinking, but also his hurricane of negativity, which battered them daily. Burdened with memories of parents who no longer cared for each other, Rebecca had keenly felt the struggles of the whole family.

      After Harry’s death, Bec felt guilty that there were days when she was relieved her dad was no longer on the place. His once green lawn, kept vibrant by the house grey-water, was yellow and bleached. The vegetable garden was now filled with long rank grasses and weeds. Some days it hurt Bec too much to look at it. Let alone go into the place.

      Bec had watched age soften her father a little, so that by the time he’d died, most of the bridges between Rebecca and him had been rebuilt, if only cosmetically. Even though her father’s love was unspoken, Rebecca tried to believe it was there. Like the river. Sometimes it flowed, sometimes it didn’t, but the bed of it, the vein of it, was always there. Deep inside, though, she knew she was telling herself a lie. Her father had resented her. Loathed her tenacity. Her unmovable commitment to remaining on the land, despite the fact he didn’t want her there. He wanted his sons.

      Bec looked at the verandah and imagined her father sitting there. His one arm resting on the squatter’s chair, the stump with the pinned sleeve held close to his chest. His solitary wave as she and Charlie passed his house, both of them busy with the farm. At first he was supportive of her and the plans she and her rural counsellor friend, Sally, had put in place, but then as the seasons stalled and, as she now knew thanks to Andrew, the soils began to decline from their outdated farm practices, Harry’s bitterness and disbelief in her ability had returned.

      Bec suddenly wanted to find a tenant for the cabin so that new memories could be made there. Charlie had reservations about having strangers in their space. But she was ready to move the memory of her father on.

      It was four years ago this summer that Harry had died. On a sweltering day in February, in the same bush clinic she was taking the children to now. His stomach cancer had worsened. Bec had driven him, Harry wincing at each and every pothole. With the morphine no longer hitting the spot, his face had blanched a deathly grey. She hadn’t thought it would be the last time Harry would draw in the fresh Waters Meeting air. Rich clean oxygen, seeping from millions of trees. Instead Harry ended up breathing from a canister, the mask on his face slipping sideways, his inhalations slowly softening until his life was no more.

      When Harry’s casket was lowered into the grave next to Tom’s, it was as if her wounds were torn open again. She didn’t want him buried so close to her brother. Now, four years on from Harry’s death and over a decade on from Tom’s, she still felt wide open and raw. Bec had not a clue how to heal herself.

      The minister in his sermon encouraged the sentiment that it was nice that a father would be reunited in Heaven with his son, but Bec thought bitterly that Harry was the last person on the planet Tom would want to see.

      Even though she had made peace with her father, the shadow of Tom always sat between them. She still got chills as she passed the spot where the old wooden garage used to be. The rafters on which he had slung the rope, long since burned and blown to the wind, gone since the night she took to the structure with a tractor and a chain, followed by a drum of fuel and a match, in a wild rage of grief.

      She often talked about Tom to Ben and Archie, trying to keep the memory of him alive through her words. She rarely spoke of their grandfather. It was sometimes difficult to find positive things to say about him. Ben remembered little of his granddad and Archie had been a baby still being carted about in a front pack by Rebecca when Harry had died. But it was the energy of Tom she wanted to foster in her boys.

      ‘He was so different from your Uncle Mick,’ she would say to them, often when she was busy so the little ones couldn’t see emotion contort her face. ‘He was smaller than Mick, but very, very handsome. And brilliant at art. You know that painting in the dining room? Of his horse, Hank, and the hut? He did that. Before he died.’

      When Ben sometimes asked how their Uncle Tom had died, Bec would go quiet. How could she explain suicide to a child?

      ‘The angels called him away because they needed him,’ she would eventually say, then change the subject. But the shadows of Tom were all about Waters Meeting and the light of him. Some days she was overjoyed to see the sun paint the mountainside golden and she felt sure he was there, still up at the high-country hut, where he had long ago sheltered from the storms in his own head. Other times, in the half-dark, when her own mind was awash with despair, she felt the torment of his haunting.

      As she passed the big double-storey Waters Meeting house on the hill, she wondered why, no matter how much she pushed and worked, she could never seem to transform the place to anything other than a tired old homestead that struggled, alongside a farm and a family that struggled. The visit to Rivermont the night before had made the feeling even more sharp. Bec was failing. Failing life, failing her boys, failing herself. Her dreams were dying before her eyes, yet the reason why was beyond her reach. Did she not pour enthusiasm into everything she did? Did she not try her hardest?

      She glanced at the plastic bag on the front seat; it contained Yazzie’s freshly washed baby-doll nightie. She must’ve been so drunk to borrow it and put it on for Charlie! Along with the spray tan! She felt such a fool. Wheels whirring over the grid onto the bitumen, Bec settled into the drive to Bendoorin. Again she reassured herself that things would be OK. Once the parcel from the sex-toy party arrived, she and Charlie would get back on track and she would feel alive again.

      As Rebecca drove into town, her bleak mood shifted to one of amusement when she saw the sign that announced the current campaigns of the state police. A wag with a big black Texta had defaced the sign. The formal overzealous state budget font read: POLICE ARE NOW TARGETING … And in the space provided some clown had scrawled CRANKY CHICKS.

      She burst out laughing. That was something she and her college mates would have done in their wild Ag College years.

      ‘Police