Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (Picador 40th) (11 page)

‘It's coming.' The boys run down the platform. ‘It's coming, it's coming.'

A dark shape shimmers through the haze and, as it gets closer, solidifies into an engine. The stoker throws his cigarette out onto the line and straightens his cap. We are enveloped in a warm wet cloud of steam and cinders. Women cover their ears at the scream of the brakes. Robert walks down the line of trucks, clipboard in hand, to check the order. He frees a tie-rope on the first tarpaulin and flicks it high over the mound of super phosphate but it snakes back and catches him sharply across the face. He flinches.

We peer up at the truck. Something is moving on top of the tarpaulin. A filthy bedroll, tied up with a pair of stockings, is thrown down onto the platform. Some of the women look away uncomfortably. Then a man jumps down. He brushes the worst of the grey-green dust from his greasy suit, smiles at us a little sheepishly, hoists the bedroll on his back and saunters off. As we look down the line of trucks more and more men are jumping down onto the platform. They are not farming men, or men we would normally associate with the city, but a different sort of men altogether. They have matted hair, ill-fitting clothes. They are men with deep-etched lines of hunger on their faces. Some have battered suitcases, some sugar bags. Several are hatless. One has no shoes – just newspaper tied to his feet with binder twine.

Stan Hercules turns his camera away from the train and takes a portrait of one of the men nursing a thin and mangy kitten. The photograph makes the front page of the
Ensign
under the caption
The Day the Depression Came to Wycheproof
. The kitten, according to the report, died shortly after arrival.

— 15 —

SISTER CROCK PROCLAIMS THE BABIES THIN

O
ne night just before the 1937 harvest Robert gets out of bed – not stealthily, but ordinarily, as if the day has already begun. His tread is sticky on the linoleum. The screen door sighs and slaps. Time passes. Perhaps he is tying up the dog, or relieving himself in the garden, or checking the crop for locusts?

I run my fingers along the walls to find the back door The step is still warm from yesterday's soil drift. There is no moon but the garden is bright with starlight. The beams hit the car, the outhouse and the washing line from different angles so that everything is distorted – bigger, smaller, longer, and flatter, than in the day. The washing line swings gently. He must have touched it as he walked past. I check the car and the shed and walk to the front of the house to look down the track. Some wheat is broken near the fence in the first paddock. It is a neat stand of
Gallipoli
, nearly grown, already as high as my navel. I can see where he has walked in, where his legs have crushed two valleys in the wheat.

I follow the broken path looking for the shape of him in the distance – the paddock doesn't lead anywhere, just into another paddock of a different variety of wheat and then one of oats. Because I am looking up, not down, my foot touches his leg before I see him and I call out at the surprise of it. He is lying on his side in a half-moon of trampled stalks. ‘Are you sleeping out here?'

He looks up at me but doesn't answer. I run my foot along the back of his warm calf.

‘It isn't working,' he says.

‘What isn't working?'

He turns his head away. The starlight catches at the corner of his mouth. I stamp the wheat around him to make some room and lie down with my hand around his chest. I hold the prow of his ribs, and lie close to him, his body a tug piloting us through the night. Except that he seems to have lost direction, and I am no longer sure where we will end up.

I must have slept a little, next to Robert, for when I wake up the sky has turned upon its head. The giant saucepan is no longer at its jaunty angle but twisted and slipping from the sky.

I lie awake and think of the Better Farming Train. I remember Sister Crock's saucepan of shiny aluminium that was only to be used to boil water for babies' supplementaries. Demonstration boiling of course, given to supplement the demonstration baby in cases of extreme heat or loose stools. I remember Mary nodding mechanically when Sister Crock stored the special saucepan in the kitchen and insisted it be kept free from contaminants.

A few days later, when we were at Beulah, we were making Folly her Friday-night treacle pie.

‘Here's a good old pot for the treacle!' Mary smiled at me as she placed the shiny saucepan on the stove. We only left it for a minute. Just long enough for Mary to move me into the light near the door to pluck my eyebrows. I stood nervously in front of her. Mary's pale brows were modelled on the startled arches of Lupe Velez. We had seen Lupe and Douglas Fairbanks in
The Gaucho
at Ballarat and walked back to the train together holding hands and sighing at her loveliness.

Too late. Too late for my eyebrows and the treacle. The pan was ruined. We took turns at scrubbing and hacking at it with a butter knife.

‘Just hang it up, Jeanie, she won't notice. She only uses it for a doll – really, she's not going to notice.'

So we put the saucepan back in its place.

The next day we left Beulah and headed for Birchip. The newspaper was full of babies. A local woman had given birth to triplets – three healthy boys – a credit to womanhood, the medical fraternity and the whole of the Mallee district. Such astounding productivity in such a small town.

It was the abundance of babies at Birchip that led Sister Crock to change her mode of operation. She looked out at the attendees for her infant hygiene and nutrition lecturette. There were an astonishing number of babies. The Birchip triplets took pride of place in the front row – two in the arms of their sturdy mother, the third held by a teenage girl with long pigtails. The heat was stifling; the babies breathed small hot breaths. Sister Crock rubbed her hands on her apron. ‘I'll be using a real baby for the demonstration today,' she barked. ‘Pass one up.'

Mary had done the preparation – sprayed the pews with Insectibane, boiled the pan of water and left it to cool with the lid on. When Sister Crock poured the foul brown treacly liquid into the demonstration bottle she was as surprised as the women who watched her. There was no explanation or apology. She stared for a moment at the bottle with its slimy lumps of floating treacle, then at the baby in her arms. The contents of the bottle looked much nastier than they were. It did not look like food.

Sister Crock licked her lips briskly. ‘We will not be doing the demonstration feeding today. It is too hot. But it is the perfect time for a weigh-in. Correct weight of the infant is of great importance. Mothers, strip your babies, please.'

It was a military style operation. The naked babies were handed up to Sister Crock and back again via a human chain. The carriage filled with a noisy wailing, the women's hands were wet with sweat and tears. Sister Crock's scales bobbed and dipped and only halted when she bent to rule another column in her record book. Sweat marks spread across her uniform like a tide, starting at the underarms.

The event pushed the harvest from the front page of
the Birchip Advertiser
.
Sister Crock Proclaims Our Babies Thin
ran the headline. The story reported that even the Birchip triplets were of lower birth weight than a random sample of city babies conducted by the Melbourne Royal Children's Hospital.

‘Thin,' said Sister Crock, ‘is the enemy of every healthful mother.'

Sister Crock, who had never married or had a baby. Who had never worn trousers or swum naked in a river. Who, on my engagement, had given me a private lecture on ‘marital hygiene' in which she referred euphemistically to ‘flowers' and ‘stethoscopes'. What would she think of me spending the night with my husband in the wheat?

We wake in the noisy half-light to the pernickety tread of ants and the tearing jaws of leafhoppers. And something else. The sound of movement beneath the earth. The roots of the wheat pushing through the soil? Or the scratchings of mice?

Robert reaches his hand over my head into the stems and snaps one clean. A tiny brush drags at the back of my calf. A pause. The stem bends under folds of cotton and finds its path again; circling my thigh. Further rucking up of my nightdress, the muffled feel of it through cotton on my buttocks then skin again – the small of my back. Upwards, slowly, tracing the triangles of my shoulderblades. Then the sound of him moving behind me and his sharp inhalation as he pushes the nightdress over my head. Turning me over – a hand on either side of my belly, my hair twisting and spraying a mist of dirt and wheat stubble across my face and chest. Somewhere in the distance a magpie warbles. The stem again; brushing the fronts of my thighs, sweeping around my navel. Higher. Dragging through the moistness of armpits. The brush's head now bent and crushed. A fast figure eight over the large circles of my breasts, slower over the areola, slower still over the nipple's eye, a gentle swabbing. I can feel the valves of my heart opening and closing, opening and closing.

He watches the path of the brush intently. It curves up my neck, climbs my chin, traces the ridge where skin becomes lips. Quickly, impatiently, he pulls back and starts again at my belly, drawing a sharp, straight line into the curly hair of my sex. He traces the very edge of the soft mound and then dips in, nudging the lips apart in a slow prising.

Things are slipping. I reach out over my head and grab a handful of stalks. The soil cracks around me as I hold on to them and pull. Robert dips himself into me, coating his fingers, then his penis, jutting and rubbing. The brush has fallen across my face. Tongue stretching, I pull it into my mouth. As he slides into me I grind it between my teeth – it tastes of wheatmeal and my own yeasty oil.

Results from the

1937 Harvest

This year's sample has a lower bushel weight (54 lbs) than previous years. The gains expected through the adoption of super phosphate have been more than offset by the severe mouse plague. In accordance with standard sampling procedure a portion of FAQ (fair-average-quality) wheat was critically examined and subjected to analysis and a milling test in the experimental flourmill.

The sample was variable with some bright, plump grains of pleasing appearance and some smaller and paler grains. Contamination with rodent faeces was evident. Protein and moisture content is sub-standard.

Test Baking

Purpose:
To measure the quality of wheats grown by Mr R.L. Pettergree of Wycheproof in regard to high yields of good-coloured flour with superior baking quality.

Quality Tests:
The Pelshenke figure, which gives an indication of gluten quality (time taken for dough ball to expand under water at temperature; time divided by protein content = quality), is below average. Mechanical testing of the physical properties of the dough using Brabender's Farinograph and Fermentograph shows below average flour quality with gas-producing power in the low to normal range.

They ate the grain from its bags, inside out. They ate the Ford's upholstery. They ate the eyelids of a sleeping baby. They ate the kitchen curtains. They ate every chaff bag in the district. They did not eat the super phosphate.

They lived in tunnels and caverns and great moving nests under the ground. Children held them by their tails and smashed them on the ground or stood on them or burnt them or drowned them in buckets and kero tins and casserole dishes. They stopped being many small things and became one big thing.

No one said mouse. Mouse was too soft, too small, too frail. We said mice. Mice. Lice. Vice. I saw one run over Robert's head, skid down the pillow and leap for the floor as he lay next to me in bed. I let him sleep.

They ate the pink gloves Mr Talbot gave me. They ate two of Robert's notebooks. I would not have blinked if they had carried Folly away. They wore her out. She stamped her feet all night long to stop them climbing up her legs.

When they had eaten everything they died, but we could still smell them. Even when all of the corpses were gone – burnt to cinders. The fetid perfumed smoke of dead mice hung around. It was always there – behind every other smell we reached for.

— 16 —

DROUGHT

W
e dream of baths. Of that delicious moment when skin goose-pimples and prickles and then slides smooth under a film of water. Hot baths. Cold baths. Mottled river-baths. Baths slow with heady oils and perfumes.

Doris McKettering tells me that she dreams of the New Radox Bath which, for two shillings and sixpence, oxidises away fat. In her mind's eye she sees herself rising from the fizzing waters no longer a jolly tugboat but a racing yacht. She keeps the New Radox Bath in her vanity box under the bed along with some Venetian Muscle Oil for sunken tissues and a Celadonna Knit Artificial Silk Nightgown. All on hold, but for rain.

Iris Pfundt reports a rush on books about the seas and oceans, about polar exploration and the snow-covered lands of Canada.

The
Ensign
records the days without rain and runs articles on stock losses and how a local housewife is saving water by boiling potatoes in beer or using wool fat to clean her infants.

The government sends water trains.

Folly gives milk every second day. She grubs around for feed and is a Houdini with the gates. She eats two pairs of socks off the line and the bristles from the house broom. If I'm late with her hay she calls for it incessantly and stamps up and down the fence digging a tunnel with her hooves.

I purchase Robert new cooling, super-absorption asbestos insoles for his boots. Several local farmers have asked him to buy back their super phosphate. Without rain there is no point in spreading it.

I cut my hair short to save on washing. A short straight bob that grazes my ears. When I look down the hair falls forward into my face. It feels light, like the touch of fingers, and for the first few days, until I get used to it, I imagine Mr Ohno's cool fingers stroking my forehead.

Robert hasn't said anything about my hair. He doesn't say much at all. Everything has dried up between us.

‘Now isn't that a beauty? Isn't that the roundest, most beautiful thing you've ever seen?' says Ern McKettering.

Doris rocks backwards on her heels and smoothes her apron over her middle. ‘Ern, don't be a goose. She was a purely economic decision. She's a whatsit – an insulator. One good rain and we'll be right.'

I smile at Doris. Robert rubs his chin and looks at the ground. Ern can't drag his gaze from his new water tank. It is the biggest ever seen in the district. And here, on its side, attached to a knot of struts and ropes and pulleys, it is indeed a very beautiful vessel. The galvanised sheen is so fresh and new it glows blue in the morning light. Each corrugation casts a perfect shadow on the dip below so the tank looks somehow alive and undulating.

Robert takes off his jacket and slowly rolls up his sleeves. He is here to advise on the best spot for the tank stand. Ern ordered the tank after one of Robert's spiels. It was the insurance spiel about planning and managing drought – about insuring against the lack of rain in the same way ships insure against hitting a whale. ‘We don't need to insure with money. We need water. If every farmer had a big enough tank to see them through several years – enough even for irrigating – we'd be shored up for as long as it takes.'

Ern had nodded. It made sense. He told Robert about a book his mother read to him as a boy. A squirrel that played the fiddle all summer instead of collecting nuts. The tiny creature nearly died in a puddle of icy snow until his neighbours took pity on him. No squirrels here, of course. But Robert might be right. Maybe the Australian farmer lacked the collecting and insuring ethic – always expecting his mates to pull him out of a tight spot.

When Robert heard from Ivers and several other sources that the biggest bloody tank they'd ever seen was waiting in the railyards for collection he rubbed nervously at the deep groove that ran between his nose and mouth. That evening we drove into town and sure enough there it was. A brand spanking new 30,000 gallon tank. And there was McKettering, hands in pockets, hat tipped back, showing it to Don Busby from the bank as if he'd given birth to it.

Finding the best spot for the tank and planning its installation isn't an everyday job. Which is why we are here on a Saturday and why the men are wearing their good shirts and I'm to help Doris with the lunch for after.

Robert does slow laps around the tank. His face is bunched in concentration.

‘Right, McKettering.' He slaps his hands against his thighs. ‘This is an exercise in the science of loads. You will be aware that the ancient Egyptians built pyramids with the most rudimentary of tools. Force and fulcrum equals load. That's all we need – history, knowledge, and a piece of paper.'

Ern is delighted to have Robert take control and even happier to be given an instruction. ‘Right, Pettergree. Paper it is.'

Doris and I follow Ern into the house where he pulls out every drawer in the kitchen before she opens a biscuit tin and hands him a pad of writing paper.

‘Housewives' mouse-proofing tip number one.' She smiles at me. ‘Tea, Jean lovey?'

While the men work on the tank Doris boils the kettle and gives me the news from her boys. I notice that she adds the milk to the cups before the tea. I think about my experiment with Robert in the cookery car. At the time I thought it was some sort of metaphor for us – to prove or disprove the success of our partnership. It didn't occur to me then how important a few cups of liquid could be. Or the significance of the vessel in which the liquid is contained.

In the face of all this we celebrate the Queen's birthday with a jazz picnic on Mt Wycheproof. Banjo Andrews and the Wycheproof Footwarmers have returned from playing on the radio in Melbourne. They wear dinner suits at midday. Flora May and her sister Nell sit on wicker chairs at the front playing twin banjo mandolins, their hair blowing in a rare breeze. The whole town is out – adults perched on the odd-shaped boulders, children swarming on the lower slopes. I sit with Elsie Ivers on an old rug of Douglas tartan. She's hard pressed swatting flies and keeping the boys out of the picnic basket. Lola Sprake from the Commercial comes over for a chat. She makes a point of mentioning that her sister-in-law, Wilma Noy, couldn't be here as Les has had to sell the car, and gives me a long hard look.

The wind is rising. Robert is off talking to McKettering. They are watching some young men get ready for a bicycle race down the mountain. I watch as Robert's hat is swept from his head in a strong gust. The scraggly gums are shedding their leaves like confetti on the crowds. The May sisters raise their heads and stare up into the sky. Their light and twangy music rolls over the sides of the tiny mountain like mist.

The first drops of rain pass without notice. It is the wind that has caught our attention. I feel a tiny splash hit my hair and settle warmly on my neck. Then more, my head is prickling with it. The older Ivers boys return with little Percy; he is just walking and has never seen rain before. He holds out his wet-smattered hands to his mother in astonishment.

Everyone rushes for the cars and buggies. Ern and Doris wave cheerfully to us as they pass: ‘I reckon me tank will be full before we get home.' Ern grins. The dust and rain on his cricket boots has turned them streaky orange.

People return to their farms and houses and, like us, take every vessel, every pot, pan, basin and bowl outside to be filled. Children dance to the syncopated sound of raindrops hitting enamel. Thunder rolls and cracks overhead, it seems to be threatening a downpour. But then, after less than half an hour, the rain stops. The grey sky rolls away and is replaced by high white cloud – pretty but empty. A cruel false alarm.

The only rain comes in Mary's next letter. Flash flooding in Gippsland strands her in hospital for an extra week with her new baby. She says that at least the youngster will feel at home – exiting one watery world to arrive immediately in another.

A few slow dry afternoons later Les Noy comes by on a bicycle. His face is very sunburnt. I offer him a drink. He shakes his head. He asks for Robert, but I'm not sure whereabouts on the farm he is, or what time he'll be back. Les says goodbye and I assume he's left when I hear a noise against the side of the house. I open the window and see him stacking some bushels of poor-looking wheat under the eaves. He sees me watching him and points to the wheat.

‘Tell him that's an acre.' He takes a piece of paper from his pocket, screws it up and throws it on the feeble stack. ‘He can have his bloody equations back too. Fat lot of good they did me.'