Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (Picador 40th) (12 page)

— 17 —

MR FROGLEY BLOWS IN WITH THE DRIFT

F
ences mark one man's crop from another but they have no power over the land itself. They can't contain the sandy soil that blows and blows in vast rolling clouds most afternoons. The soil storms rush through trees and dams and herds of anxious sheep who lie down to sleep thinking it is night. Soil clouds roll right through the house, in at the back, out at the front. There is always soil in our cups when I pour the morning tea.

Department of Agriculture Journal, Victoria, March 1938

The Sand Drift Relief Committee reports that claim forms should be obtained from post offices. Claimants are advised to complete both the pink and the blue form and attach them to the yellow form. An entirely separate claim must be made on the green form where a share farmer is party to a share-farming agreement. In order to facilitate payments, and to obviate unnecessary correspondence and delay, all writing must be in ink, and incomplete claim forms will not be accepted.

The soil is so high against the door of the machinery shed Robert has to dig the tractor free each morning. Will's kennel has been buried. He now sleeps in the car which is stranded, soil as high as the running boards.

The government sends a gang of labourers to shovel the soil that has built up in dams and channels and along fence lines. The labourers started at Swan Hill some months ago and are working their way down to us. When the gang arrives at Ivers' next door, Robert insists on going out to help. I cook Cornish pasties with a knotted pastry top for a handle – just like the miners' wives, except my concern is for dirt above the ground rather than below it. Robert digs the car free and leaves with a gunnysack on the front seat, Will and the tools on the back.

Later, as I am brushing the dirt from the windows in my apron dress, Folly starts to bellow. I think Robert must be back and check the shed for the car but it isn't there. The dust has risen in Folly's paddock. She is trotting towards the house – she doesn't usually trot anywhere – but in the distance I can make out a figure moving in front of her. A man is walking across the paddock with Folly close on his heels, pushing his pockets with her nose. He sees me and waves. A cloud of flies rises and disperses and then settles again around his outstretched hand, which he is holding at a strange angle, as if it is injured.

When he reaches the fence Folly gives up on him and heads back to the shade. The man's clothes are filthy. His rabbit felt hat has a tide of sweat stains rising from the crown. I stand still on the back step and watch him climb through the fence. I'm unnerved by a strange man appearing so brazenly at the back door but his face, when I can see it more clearly, is reassuringly old and ordinary.

‘Your mister said you could help me with this.' He shakes the fly-covered hand towards me. ‘Frogley. Me name's Neville Frogley.' He takes off his hat and smiles. His eyes flicker quickly over my body. ‘Got a touch of the Barcoo rot in me hand and she's slowing me up a bit.'

The man is short, but strongly built. His hair is flat and dark, most likely dyed, and he has a beautiful pair of false teeth – small and elegant, as if they were made for a woman. I retie my apron strings firmly and invite him into the kitchen. He holds the back door open leaving his arm outside for a final shake, then quickly pulls it in. I fetch an enamel basin with water and throw in a handful of salt. He lifts his hand onto the kitchen table and I flatten his fingers back gently. The rot – an infection caused when the skin is broken and open to the flies, has eaten a deep channel across his palm – part of the heel of his hand has been worn away. I splash it with salt water and blot it dry with a tea towel. He watches me as I fetch an old sheet and rip it with my teeth.

‘Is it hard work?' I ask him, picking a cotton thread from my tongue.

‘Government gangs are as hard as it gets. Not much else around though. And that's the Mallee for you, eh? Hard work and no reward.'

The pretty teeth make a slush of his s's. He looks around the kitchen at my labelled tins and boxes, at my lists of oven temperatures and at my cleaning rota pinned to the wall. He looks through the glass that covers the kitchen table to the menu underneath with the list of meals and ingredients; Monday through Sunday – roast of course, with a fruit or egg pudding depending upon availability. He looks at the long bench under the window – Robert's notebooks and samples, his microscope, jam jars full of soils and seeds and fertilisers, boxes of slides.

‘I recognised your husband. Can't think from where though. Ink slingers, are ya? You and the mister?'

‘Ink slingers?' I soak the bandages and squeeze the excess brine into a basin.

‘Teachers. You know – ink slingers, pen pushers.'

‘No. We're farmers – like everyone else, Mr Frogley.'

He snorts and jerks his head around. ‘So you're from around here then?' he asks.

‘I'm from the city, originally.'

‘Haven't seen you there,' he says.

‘In Melbourne?'

He rolls his eyes. ‘Swan Hill. Swan Hill is the city around here.'

I fold the bandages in a wad over the wound, packing them in tightly. He grimaces.

‘I come to Wyche sometimes. Played footy here way back and I like to catch up with me mates.'

I nod.

‘There were always them small parrots here – red-rumped fellas. We'd come off at half-time and they'd be all over the field scratching about in the divets, pulling up onion grass. Even hung about when we played, they did. Like playing in a storm of feathers it was.'

He looks across at me. ‘So I suppose you've seen 'em then, suppose you see 'em all the time, them parrots?'

‘No. I've never seen them.'

He snorts.

I fetch my sewing basket and thread a needle using the faded blue of his shirt as a backdrop, then I stitch the layers of bandages together. It is a test of accuracy – my head bent close in front of him – to pick up the cloth but not the flesh.

‘I think it's the wheat,' I say. I don't know where this thought came from but suddenly it seems somehow true, obvious even, that with more wheat there will be fewer animals and that the small creatures – frogs, skinks, birds – will be the first to go.

‘Well you've got enough of it,' the man says. He looks around again. Stares for a minute at the jars of soil and then slaps his good hand on the table.

‘That's it. He's the soil chappie from the farming train. That's where I seen him before, down at Avoca. I was on me way back from a fishing trip in Gippy.'

‘My husband is an agrostologist – a specialist in soil and crops.'

The man snorts. ‘He's a bloody specialist all right. He was a bloody specialist with my money if I remember rightly.'

I lean in towards the stitching. I'd like to know more but it would be disloyal to Robert to ask.

A fly bangs angrily against the kitchen window. I can feel the man's eyes on me – he's looking through my thin dress with no sleeves and deep V-neck which is meant for a blouse underneath if it wasn't so hot.

‘My eldest looks a bit like you, but she's got one of them permanent waves. Spends her life looking after it.'

There is a glass of Folly's milk still on the table from breakfast. It is thin and silvery – with a cinnamon dusting of soil. He places a finger in it and paints the milk across my cheek. I cringe.

‘Good for the complexion. That's what the girls say.'

I glance up at him – the teeth are somehow repulsive, like my sour aunt's mouth transplanted into a man's face. I wipe my cheek with the selvedge from the sheet and tie off the thread.

He looks a little nervous, like he wishes he hadn't touched me, but then his face hardens again.

‘Well the Mallee's finished anyway. You'll all be sold up. You should never have come out here in the first place, missus. It ain't the place for the likes of you.'

The wind is rising outside. I can hear soil moving against the side of the house and I'm pleased to be sending him out into it.

The drift that blew in Neville Frogley, or maybe the drift we battled the days and weeks before or after, made its way into the city. Melbourne – the real city – that is.

In a lunch shop on Collins Street clerks are perched on a row of stools, their briefcases standing to attention like faithful working dogs, when the sky suddenly starts to darken. Some of the men – the younger types – run out onto the street, the shop bell jingling in their wake. The sky is in turmoil. A great orange cloud moves overhead, skirting the tops of the tallest buildings.

‘It's a tropical storm.'

‘It's an alien invasion.'

‘It's the Russians.'

‘It's a fire at the paint shop.'

‘It's the end of the world.'

An older clerk polishes off the sandwiches his friends have left behind, chewing the crusts resolutely – if he is to die let it be while eating – and stumbles on the answer. The great orange cloud is soil. The very soil that nurtured the seed that grew the wheat that made the bread he chews upon.

For three days a freak wind takes whole paddocks of Mallee soil up and away to Melbourne where it rains upon lush green lawns and stains the underclothes of the city folk. They are outraged. There is an increase in nasal catarrh, the discharge a disturbing liquid pink. Housewives write to the newspapers demanding compensation for their ruined washing. One woman claims the soil that came through her window contaminated a summer's worth of fruit she had cooling in jars.

Robert scoffs as he reads the newspaper reports: ‘Three days of discomfort. Tell them to come and live here for a year. Tell them to come and breathe a few lungfuls of our fine country air.'

When the soil storms blow themselves out I walk Folly down to the river in search of some green pick. The Mallee has gusted itself upside down. In the pure state of nature the root of the plant lies beneath the soil, not above it. But here the drift has blown the soil away, several feet of it, so the roots of the Mallee scrub sit up, exposed, like the unclothed bodies of men and women. There is something obscene in the way the tripod legs meet the torso, often with dangling root hairs or a hanging tuberous growth.

— 18 —

WING FOOK'S MARE

R
obert has never been into horses but the sand drift is making tractor work impossible. He asks the Chinese hawker Wing Fook to look out for a steady mare and a week later Fook appears at the door. Robert greets him with a riddle: ‘What is the Mallee, Mr Fook?'

Fook smiles obligingly, showing his tannin-stained teeth. He has no answer.

‘A small area of land surrounded by mortgage.' Robert delivers the punchline then looks around at the dry paddocks. ‘If it wasn't so sad it'd be funny.'

Fook brushes a fly from his mouth. ‘Yes, velly funny Mr Petteygee.' He is keen to change the subject. ‘Mr Petteygee, I bring that horse for you.'

They walk out to Fook's cart. A swaybacked mare is tied to the rail. Robert looks her over – a thin washed-out chestnut with a bitten-off tail.

‘Is she sound?'

Fook shrugs. ‘I think. But she not look so good.'

They bargain. Robert can't afford the horse but he doesn't want the Chinaman to see what he's come to. Things are dire but he has his pride.

The mare is placid. She follows Folly around. She walks with her head down, sometimes bumping her nose on the ground. Until one day when she is left on her own. Then she walks blindly through a barbed wire fence. She cuts her chest and neck to shreds and bleeds to death.

It dawns on Robert bitterly. ‘She not look so good' meant she could not see.

Results from the

1938 Harvest

This year's bushel weight of 47 lbs is the lowest for the past four years. A poor season created extremely taxing conditions for growers. Additives, where used, have improved yields marginally, but not enough to offset their cost.

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 is noticeably smaller and duller. Rust is evident. The amount of weed seeds (saffron, thistle, barley, wild oats, etc.) is higher than last year's sample. The moisture content is below normal as is the protein content.

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 is poor. Mechanical testing of the physical properties of the dough using Brabender's Farinograph and Fermentograph shows average flour quality with slightly lower than acceptable gas-producing power.

The loaves are smaller, meaner and slightly orange, as if they have taken on the colour of the soil.

I fold the table of results and place it in Robert's notebook then I wrap four of the loaves in damp tea towels and take them over to Elsie next door. She is carting bath water out to her rose bushes, although they look all but dead. Her boys run along behind her catching the drips in a kerosene tin and transferring them carefully to a dirt cricket pitch they are preparing out the back. The older boys use their mulga wood bats to smooth the few drops of water over the dirt, but it soaks away instantly. They don't seem to notice. They tell me they are making a ‘sticky wicket' in the style of last summer's test played at the Sydney Cricket Ground where Mr Donald Bradman led our team to victory against England and where the wicket, it was said, had the properties of a sticky dog.