The Yield Read online

  Rough Road Ahead traffic signs cautioned August’s arrival in the Plains. She caught the first signs of visual heat that radiated from the split bitumen and the sparse foreboding landscape beyond the road. That far inland everything was browner, bone drier.

  The town of Massacre Plains was home to roughly two thousand locals and their children and children’s children. Half a town of wives tended counters and half a town of husbands were suicidal with farm debt, and most sons and daughters, seduced by a living wage, signed up as army cadets. All navigated boredom until the annual race days. Some made do on unemployment benefits and some had jobs though few had careers.

  Murrumby River divided the people in town. Epithets were procured off supermarket shelves: Chocolate Milk were the old Mission Gondiwindi north of town, south of town in Vegemite Valley was where the blackfellas in the government housing lived, pegged after the salty sandwich spread, dark as molasses. In the centre of town was where the middle class lived, according to a census like theirs, and were dubbed the Minties; named after the white, sticky candy sold in individual paper wrappers. The Minties’ houses had doorbells and locked gates. Only in Vegemite Valley were the doors left wide open on the houses. Love and fighting travelled freely inside and out onto the streets. Through some doors pitiless diocesan priests used to visit, those entrances that led to broken homes, where shame-filled single mothers brought up silent boys who became angry later in life.

  August didn’t know and hadn’t remembered everything dealt to the people of Vegemite Valley. Her memory had been good enough to bury the bad thoughts, although reliable enough that the good were sometimes suppressed too.

  Out on the old Mission at Prosperous a copse of gum trees had remembered everything for two centuries. August didn’t know all that the trees had seen. She didn’t remember the whirly-whirlies throwing dust about the paddocks, those small harmless tornadoes, that as a child were an almost permanent fixture. Most farmhouses in Massacre Plains were on the grid and buzzed endlessly; others further out, like Southerly and Prosperous, would come alive with the spit and start of the generator, she remembered the constant chug of electricity. And she remembered – or wanted to remember – the cool of the river Murrumby. Poppy used to call the Murrumby River the Big Water and it had once flowed through the country, from state to state, south to north. August’s memory of the river was faint since the water had ceased flowing since she was a girl, and not just because of the Dam Built but because of the Rain Gone. And some say because enough people cry water in this whole region, Murrumby thinks she’s not needed at all.

  August stopped for supplies before the turn-off, wanted not to buy cigarettes but knew she would. The outside of the convenience store was wrapped in green netting, like an art installation, she thought. On the pavement, more green mesh was for sale; huge rolls leant against each other, just as bundles of fabric do, or she imagined, people starboard on a sinking ship. Beside the bolts of green were crates of plastic rip-ties that she recognised as those that policemen used to carry on weekend nights.

  She fumbled with the mesh hanging over the shop exit and came face-to-face with another customer, keys in hand, entering the store. He was an elderly man, and he stumbled back startled as August drew the screen aside.

  ‘Sorry,’ she offered, and put her hand out towards him, suspended in the air. He steadied himself without her help and studied her face briefly.

  ‘Now, you must be a Gondiwindi girl,’ he said, saccharine as butterscotch.

  August gave a short nod, clutching the bag of groceries to her chest, dipping her chin into the crumple of foodstuffs.

  ‘I know a Gondiwindi face when I see one.’ He gave a small smile as if it were a compliment. ‘Pass on our condolences from the church.’

  ‘I will. Thank you …’ she hadn’t known what mark of respect to bestow upon someone she didn’t know; she settled with, ‘Sir, thanks sir.’

  August turned before he grabbed at the air like an afterthought were floating away. ‘God bless,’ he added. August got a distinctly awful feeling of pins and needles and could taste the smell of his acetone skin. She walked away without another word. Locals who didn’t pay her any attention carried bundles for their own shopfronts. A couple of men crouched at their utes by the petrol bowsers fixing mesh cutoffs onto their engine vents. August took in the clear, blue sky – the locusts were yet to arrive.

  Inside the rental she could see the centre of town nestled on the horizon. There, a lot of things had come to pass since she’d left. August had missed all the births, deaths and marriages of nearly everyone. Enough time had turned to almost forget the town, though she’d kept a keen interest in the place that swallowed her sister up. She’d rung Nana and Poppy mostly once a month, checked the missing-persons database, and sent letters to her mother – bereft of replies. She read the online council bulletins that promised progress that never arrived – the fast train line that they managed without, the rural university that was almost built, the delayed library expansion. Even as August turned her back on the place, she still wanted it to own her. After some time, people seemed to get used to the sisters gone and as much as August searched for the news of Jedda’s safe return, she’d hoped for a renewed plea for hers. Neither came.

  From the convenience store she drove two kilometres down the ridge to the last turn-off, another two to Prosperous Farm. The rented sedan pulled up beside the twin tin letterboxes, disturbing a flock of pink-grey galahs. She noted that only the yellow box trees had grown higher and broader along the vast shoulder where the mobile library once threw up gravel. Their street had been too far out of town to be visited by the ice-cream truck, but twice a month the library bus arrived, with its shelves slanting up from the floor, its magazine racks secured with long strips of elastic. August peered through the peppermint trees, crawled the car past the roses that divided at the fork of the property where the entrance split into a dirt drive to Prosperous House which was set twenty metres back from the road, and the other divide, a hundred-metre-long concrete slope up to Southerly House. Southerly House was and had always been freshly painted and flanked by a small fruit grove. Beyond the entrance and the houses, a vast field, five hundred acres of ripe wheat, spread out to the brow of trees that always remembered, those gums that gathered at the river.

  The Gondiwindi had lived at different points along the Murrumby for forever. And during the last century and a half – ten kilometres north of town at Prosperous, below the 300-metre-high rock of Kengal. At any spot on the property, whenever one of the Gondiwindi in the field took pause and looked north, they saw the ashen granite of Kengal unchanged in the changing sky.

  To her right the converted church of Prosperous was ramshackle now. Only a small congregation would have fit where no more than thirty pews had once measured out the entire ground floor. Its single-storey extensions had been built like splayed wooden puppet legs from the body of Prosperous. The dozen original scattering huts that dotted the property, where children once slept, were collapsed and worn to mounds of firewood.

  Bottlebrush combs of red and orange hung defiant in the still, hot afternoon. Banksia blooms weighed down their branches, leaked sap into the kitchen garden below the verandah. The once-orderly rows of vegetables had turned rogue. Tomatoes sun-dried before picking. Willie wagtails quivered their feathers between the fatigued jasmine and weeping lilly pilly. Prosperous pine boards had been shocked and split in the heat and the paint shaved by time. Dust coated the windows, tiles slid from where they’d meant to be. Everything was yellow-green, sick with hot perfume. It was hard for her to see where Prosperous House began and the scrappy garden ended. August wandered the property, pausing only to listen more closely to the familiar soundtrack playing, encasing the world, in cicada friction and bird whip.

  She looked out to the tin shed perched above the tractors in the heart of the field, five acres distant. Looked out to the roof of the sheep barn, the metal tops of the single-tonne silos, the arms of the rema
ining trees that made a natural path to walk through. She knew that at a glance or in a stranger’s gaze, one wouldn’t notice everything here. Not the way she and her sister had known it once, not the secret hiding spots or the things to covet or eat if you knew where to search. Not all the bones of things she could still see. She scanned for Jedda. Jedda missing forever.

  She gave the Prosperous grounds another lap and watched for snakes, for the shadow things appearing in the daylight, and having scoured the place, finally cooeed into the back verandah. A curled-up kelpie lifted its head from one of the paired cane chairs and howled a little in reply, then rested its nose into its paws as if it were workshy. She bent and gave the dog an assuring pat between the ears. She took her bag from the car and back on the verandah, opened and let the flyscreen door slap behind her for the first time in over a decade. The screen hit the frame and continued to bounce as she dropped the keys on the wooden sideboard that was crude and dust stuck and overdue for stain. She pushed open the door to the big room, filled with cardboard boxes and tea chests, looked through the downstairs rooms and the bathroom. Outside the kelpie walked beside her past the empty workers’ annex. She peeked in the smaller garden shed, and, as she called out finally for Nana, meekly, she heard a voice bellow back, ‘Jedda?’

  ‘It’s me, Nan, August.’ She’d spotted her rounding the citrus trees, cradling a basket of pegs. ‘I’m sorry about Pop, Nana.’

  August noticed her Nana wince, and regretted offering the standard commiseration. Everything was quietened in both of their minds as Elsie instinctively pulled August towards her by her arms like a hand-reeled catch, kissed the ear. She placed her hand at her granddaughter’s cheek and looked at her as if to make certain she wasn’t the lost sibling. She ran her arthritic fingers into the creases of her collarbone, quickly down the length of her arms, before August pulled her body away from being measured. Elsie, like Prosperous, like August, looked different now too, aged, as if gone to seed.

  August was reminded of when Jedda disappeared for too long, how the family had drawn inside, their sadness like a still life. But that, she’d known, was because she had only been a child and her Nana and Poppy had reason not to lose themselves to despair. Now, though, there were no little children around to be frightened of the great grief that possesses a person. But Elsie hadn’t reached hopelessness, the magnitude of her husband’s death had not yet bent her completely.

  Instead in those first days after Albert’s death Elsie felt that he had still been there, napping in another room of the house, working in the garden, or cycling out on the road to keep his knees from ageing. Elsie’s thoughts zeroed in on her granddaughter – it had been such a long time since she’d seen her. She found it difficult to look at August and to not look at her, because Elsie could see how sick she’d made herself, how she’d kept herself in a boy-child’s body all this time.

  Elsie gestured for August to follow her into Prosperous and August took her outstretched hand as they walked inside. Inside, her Nana rested the peg basket on the dining table and sat on the day bed. She looked confused, but was lucid, when August stood closer to her.

  ‘Cuppa, Nan?’

  Elsie nodded and steadied herself upright, leading August and leaning on her by the waist, thumbing at her wet eyes. August didn’t know if it was disappointment or sorrow she was feeling, and Elsie wasn’t sure either.

  ‘Milk and sugar?’

  Together they prepared the tea. Elsie moved easily around the kitchen, her trouble was beyond the wrist, not the rest. August watched her Nana take the cooking pot and place it on the counter and then waited almost fearfully as she stared into it for a beat or two. ‘Can I help, Nana?’

  ‘You may.’ She said after that uncertain pause where she’d been thinking of meat and two veg for dinner, ‘Get me the beans from the fridge, and you fix the potatoes.’

  The beans were passed along with a paring knife and in the cupboard under the sink potatoes were found where they’d always been. Elsie took a straight-backed chair into the kitchen, sat and topped the heads off string beans, and from a distance she tried to hold August with a silent gaze, pursed her lips at what she’d become, willing her to speak. And why should Elsie speak? After all, she thought, she’d been here waiting during all the years August was too young to run away and then during all the years she was old and capable enough to visit but didn’t. Elsie thought again that August’s lack of appetite had spoiled her once-beauty, and August, having sensed herself scrutinised, turned her body away from her nana and looked out the back door where the dog snoozed.

  ‘What’s the kelpie’s name?’

  ‘Spike. Your pop bought her for me last month. She’s a good old girl.’

  August felt anxious to ask things, but didn’t want to intrude right away. After some time she couldn’t help it.

  ‘Is Mum coming?’

  ‘Reckons she’ll get day release, but don’t count your eggs.’

  ‘Is she okay?’

  ‘Not since forever, girl.’

  ‘Will everyone come here? For the funeral and stuff?’

  ‘Yes, love. Get the butter ready.’

  August opened the fridge and took the butter to the sink and returned to peeling the potatoes.

  Elsie sighed aloud. ‘City folk are taking the house, Augie.’

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked, not sure she’d heard her properly.

  ‘Council reckons there’s nothing to do about it. We said no but town-hall meeting few months ago said there isn’t one way around it.’ She lifted herself from the chair and walked back to the day bed, exhausted with all the surfacing sad things. ‘It’s not our land they say, not even this little house. It’s Crown or something. Use the sage from the garden, dear.’

  August came back into the kitchen with a fistful of herbs. ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know, August. They just told us to wait and see—’ Elsie corrected herself, ‘what they told me.’

  ‘I’ll stay with you if you like? Should I stay, Nana?’

  ‘Don’t ask silly questions,’ she said as her eyes dropped closed, topping the head off the conversation.

  August took her pack and groceries into the attic bedroom. Now an office. Albert’s papers and books were spread out on the glass top of a wicker desk. His chessboard sat without rank, a dish beside was filled with the wooden pieces. August remembered him teaching her, scolding her if she touched a piece and changed her mind. ‘Uh-uh – you’ve touched it, you’ve got to move it.’ Over the desk there was a missing shard from the stained-glass window, a petal from the Lutheran rose. It was a small window, the length of an arm. For a second August wondered what God would think of her now. What Poppy would think of her up or down there with God? Quickly she knew they were questions without answers, they were roads without destinations. Religion had left her and that house a long time ago. August thought about how people would descend on the house soon, how everyone she knew before would be there. She took in the room. She thought to herself – I know this place, but it had bunk beds before; it was we back then. In her mind ten-year-old Jedda is backlit, running from the attic room, down the stairs, leaping off the verandah and through the fields before the cutting. The tractors approached November as if the year were a song, harvest the chorus. Afterwards those sisters would run through the field again, the wheat cut to fine stumps, the boar-haired field of their childhood.

  FIVE

  Yellow-tailed black cockatoo – bilirr Bil-irr is rolled at the end, the most musical part of any word is the ‘rr’ – I can’t think of any words in Australia like that, but if I was in Scotland then I could, they don’t speak with flat tongues there. Bilirr – it’s a trilled sound with the tongue vibrating close to the teeth. The bilirr is a magnificent bird, strong, eagle-wise. Black as a fire pit, the yellow feathers in the tail visible in flight. I saw the yellow-tailed black cockatoo all my life. All the Gondiwindi loved bilirr. Before Prosperous Farm my mummy was living in Tent Town four miles downst
ream, where she birthed me there on the flat warm sand, below the caw of bilirr.

  After Tent Town was flattened and the Mission turned into the Station, and me and all the other kids were taken away, I remember walking out onto the landing of the Boys’ Home, standing under the sign that used to hang outside – Think White. Act White. Be White. I was looking at the blue sky and down again. When I looked down into the valley I saw a woman walk towards me and she walked right through the stock wire fencing that ringed the entire home.

  I walked down on the grass to her and said, ‘Good day.’

  The spirit woman was empty-handed and showed me her hands, she looked like my mummy a little, and she said, ‘Wanga-dyung.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  She said, ‘It means lost, but not lost always.’

  I said okay, and she told me to practise it. I recorded it in my mind as my first-ever time travel because the sky, when I turned back to enter the home not ten paces, was grey and hung low. The woman was gone, just a bilirr remained on the fence. I knew it could have never been cloudless just a few seconds before, and at that moment I realised I’d gone, not the world.

  yet, if, then, when, at the time – yandu The first time I heard yandu, it was run on with a jumble of others, it was like spotting the meat in a soup of words, and lifting it out to look at it. My ancestors were coming to the Boys’ Home every day by then. A mob of them, old and young too, even little kids would arrive by the outhouse, any place – by my pillow when it was time for bed or even when it was time to make the bed in the morning. They’d look at me and wave, call me out to the river. The river would just appear wherever we were. Then we’d walk about and talk about this and that, and those ancestors were speaking English to me as well, so they could translate everything too. In the night there’d be a fire made, sometimes corroboree, and a big feed of kangaroo tail cooked on the hot coals or eels from the river cooked on the hot coals too. So it was around the campfire that I learned that word yandu – everyone was telling stories about this animal and that animal and this fella over here and that woman there, there were plenty of jokes and lots of laughter. My great-great-great-grandfather was there, and he’d do lots of the talking. I started to hear the music of the sentences, the pause, the d sounds bumping in his mouth. Most of the time around the fire with everyone else there I couldn’t get a word in edgeways, but when I did, when I could find that word yandu I waited for the first pause in his storytelling, and when it came I said, ‘Yandu,’ and he said, ‘When what?’ ‘Yandu,’ I said again, wanting him to tell me the meaning – and he just put his arm around me, laughing and patting me. He said, ‘Yandu, son, is the glue of your stories.’ I remember that.