The Sunken Road Read online

  Farmer

  In 1853 Walter Ison noted in his journal:

  There are persons hereabouts that wold take your life for an ounze of gold if you was not well upon your gard. One such blackgard goses by the name, Sydney Dan. I have nuggets to the weight of twenty pound strapt around my waist, over which I wear a blue serge shirt and a leather jerkin. I was fortnate in meeting with a compny of Adelaide men, who, like myself, are returning from Ballaarat to spend the Christmas. We have abundance of firearms at the ready, and watches by turn during the night. By day we march to a song, in militry fashion, at intervals firing a voley into the sky. I have a mind to lease another run in the Mid North but Hugo is desirous to increase our flock. I daresay that we soon at logerheads shall be upon this matter.

  Lives of desperate loneliness and hardship, wrote Mr Wheelwright, in a copperplate hand, line after line filling the blackboard. Heads bobbed up and down like a sea-chop in the classroom. Pens crawled across the pages of exercise books. At least copying was better than dictation, for Anna liked to dream, and when she dreamed she lost whole sentences, whole facts. In 1875 a shepherd lost his son in Ison’s Creek. Anna, no one knows for sure who he was. Some say he was a ticket-of-leave pickpocket from New South Wales. Others will tell you he was a free man, born in Somerset, a shepherd all of his life. It’s also been said that he was from Maryland, a veteran of the American Civil War, or that he’d run with Joseph Storey and the Blackfaced Robbers, stealing cattle and raiding homesteads near Adelaide before it got too hot for him. Some of the squatters lived on the land; others were absentee landlords with grand houses in Adelaide. The term ‘squatter’ has been replaced by ‘grazier’ or ‘pastoralist’. The Strangways Act of 1869 alienated the large leases and so a pattern of closer settlement evolved in the mid-north, resulting in the small to medium-scale agriculture and grazing that we find today. Pens down when you’re finished. Anna’s father took to farming when the little family was forced out of Isonville. Peter Tolley had grown up in the town, where all he knew about farming was that farmers bought barbed wire, wool-clipping shears and raddle from his father’s shop. He joined Stock & Station when he was sixteen, sweeping, running errands, helping in the stockyards at auction time. He was taught to memorise the local brands and ear-tags; to part the rubbery lips of merino ewes and judge their ages by their teeth; to run his eyes over their haunches and his hands into their fleeces. By the time he was twenty he was doing the rounds with the older stock agents, assessing flocks, buying and selling skins, arranging clearing sales. That’s how your dad and I met, Anna’s mother said. He came around one day to look over some hoggets that your grandpa and your Uncle Kitch were selling, stayed for a cup of tea, and it was love at first sight. When Anna was seventeen her father seemed suddenly to clarify in her mind: A town kid, a newcomer to the district, mother taken by a shark, father gloomy, being ordered around the countryside by all those farmers. Did he envy the Isons? He didn’t look like a farmer, even when he bought the six-forty acres and dressed and worked like one. The legions of farmers. If not tall, scarecrowy dustbowl survivors, they were gnomish, glum little grey-gaberdined portly men belted high at the waist, with over-large greasy hats upon their skulls and tens of thousands in the bank. You couldn’t get a laugh out of many of them. Not like her father, tall, sinuous and graceful, always ready with a grin, always ready to pull over for a yarn on a back road. Then there were men like Lockie Kelly’s father, who ran a handful of question-mark sheep on a handful of mortgaged acres, drove the council grader and were married to wheezing large women given to braying, phlegm-laden laughter around wooden kitchen tables. Anna married into the Jaegers, farmers on the Terowie Road. On the day that Sam first drove her home to meet his parents, they climbed in low gear along a dirt track from the front gate and came to the lip of a gully. Anna looked down, upon feed sheds, tractor sheds, a stone house, a battery-hen shed as long as an ocean liner; upon gleaming metal roofs and squared-off garden beds and orderly fences; upon bulk fuel tanks standing on galvanised legs like machines for traversing the wastes of the moon. You’ll be working with the eggs, her father-in-law told her, shortly after her honeymoon. Collecting, grading, packing. There’s quite an art to it. In bed that night, Anna leaned on her elbow: Nothing was said about my working in the chook shed after I married you, Samuel dear. Sam winced; winced was the only word to describe his contortions: It’s kind of expected of us to all pitch in. I see. And how much do I get paid? He winced again. When Grandfather Tolley died in a room behind the Four Square Store in Pandowie, Anna’s father called a family conference: I’m quitting the farm. I have to confess, my heart has never really been in it. He looked at Hugo, at Anna: Your mother and I have decided to move into town and run Dad’s shop. Anna love, Hugo will take over the farm, but I want you both to realise you get equal shares of it, and of the shop, when your mother and I finally kick the bucket. But Anna was the last daughter on earth to get into a fight over inheritance: That’s fine, Dad, I understand. Hugo: I can’t pay you anything. Anna: I don’t want you to. In the kitchen afterwards, Anna’s mother whispered: It’s been wearing him down for years. Plus he and your brother are always arguing. Do it this way. No, do it that way. Spend money on this. No, spend it on that. Your Dad’s a bit too slapdash, really, whereas Hugo’s too careful—though I suppose that could mean he’ll make a go of it. Anna can’t leave the Showalters alone, a year after the collapse of their sperm-bank scheme and the loss of investors’ money. She snipes at them in her Chronicle column: Grazier. Doesn’t that have a nice solid ring to it? Once you’re a grazier you may paint your surname in broad strokes upon your rooftop and be seen from the air by buyers flying in for the field days. If you’re especially grazier-ish you can afford to renovate with Carrera marble and Laura Ashley drapes. I don’t know, Anna, Carl Hartwig says, shaking his head over her copy before press day. You’ll get me sued if I publish this. The bank will foreclose on Sam and Anna. Sam will elect to stay on as manager, a deal brokered by the bank and the new owner. Sam will say: What else can I do at my time of life? Where else can we go, Anna? He’ll argue with the new owner, a man keen to try angora goats, legumes and peas. He’ll say to Anna, late at night, perplexity and disappointment permanently knotted together on his brow: I mean, this is wheat and wool country. Anna will stick it out, and when Sam dies she will move south to the coast, where her sun-narrowed eyes in a nest of wrinkles will mark her out as a farmer’s widow.

  Space

  The houses, sheds and outbuildings of Isonville homestead sprawled along both sides of Ison’s Creek, but only heat shimmers were visible from the sunken road, heat caught in the soil itself, in the walls of local stone, in the baking rooftops. The roofing iron, steeply raked, and the verandah iron, low and capped, caught the sun as though water rippled there among the stands of blue gum, peppermint gum and sheoak. A palm tree loomed at the side of the main house, home to a hundred starlings. Ancient, knotted quince and mulberry trees screened the main house from the overseer’s house, a square, blockish, unloved cottage on the opposite bank of the creek. But Isonville was no Showalter Park. There hadn’t been an overseer on Isonville since the end of the First World War. When Peter Tolley, son of the widower shopkeeper in Pandowie, courted Eleanor Ison in 1949, he found two households living in the big house on Isonville, sharing fourteen cool, deep, shadowy rooms, with ceilings of pressed tin, the pressed tin extending right along the broad central corridor that linked both halves of the house. Eleanor lived with her parents and her brother, Kitch, at the eastern end of the house; her Aunt Beulah lived in the western end. Then Peter married Eleanor, precipitating a further divide. Anna, dear, we couldn’t afford to buy a house. No, we didn’t want to live with his Dad behind the shop. It made more sense for him to come and live with me here. It was a bit cramped. We didn’t have much privacy until Kitch decided to do up the overseer’s cottage for himself and Mum and Dad retired to Adelaide. My poor mother was worn to the bone from looking after Auntie Beulah. We sh
ould have hired a housekeeper long before we did. Anna and Hugo stopped listening for a moment. Great Aunt Beulah was shuffling past their kitchen window, la, la, la. They waited. Sure enough, there was Mrs Mac, hurrying to fetch her back. One day the children’s Uncle Kitch went to a stud breeders’ conference over in the west and came back with a fiancée: This is Lorna. Handshakes, edgy laughs, then Lorna’s head swung down upon the children. Anna and Hugo froze. Lipsticked, glistening teeth, powdered pores, desperate eyes, hair stiff as wheat, assembled inches from their faces: What adorable kids. Kitchener and Lorna had twin daughters. They spilled out of the overseer’s cottage on the opposite bank of Ison’s Creek, and Anna heard her mother say uneasily: It’s as if they’re waiting, Pete. Don’t you feel it? Waiting to get rid of us? They did not wait for long. Grandfather Ison died, Beulah died, and Mrs Mac moved on, all in the space of a year. At once Uncle Kitch moved his family across the creek and into Beulah’s half of the house. The Tolleys seemed to shrink back from the stained-glass dividing door at the dead centre of the long corridor: Pete, they make me feel temporary in my own home, the home I grew up in. For six months the Tolleys searched for another house to live in. Finally: I’ve had enough of this, Anna’s father said, and he quit his high-mileage job with Stock & Station, scratched up a loan, and bought a tractor, a header, a little Austin truck and six hundred and forty acres plus house. Their new home was small, overgrown with oleanders, subject to northerlies and rising damp, but it was all theirs. Some long-ago builder had scored fine, white, dead straight lines in the cement that bound the russet creek stones together. The outside walls were warm to the eye and warm in the angling sun. The Bitter Wash school bus passed by the ramp at the end of the potholed drive. Pandowie, nineteen miles. Their party-line signal was one long ring, one short, one long, but, anxious to know that they were wanted and loved, Anna and Hugo snatched up the phone every time it rang, to be told by an irritated neighbour: Do you mind? The first house of Anna’s marriage to Sam Jaeger was a transportable kit house, a present from Mr and Mrs Jaeger. It resembled a log cabin, and the truck hauling it north from Adelaide took a wrong turn at Pandowie and arrived three hours late. Sam and Mr Jaeger raged uselessly at the driver, who shrugged, caught Anna’s eye, winked obliquely as if to say: What have you let yourself in for, love? Anna spent the next two years landscaping the garden. She set deckchairs on the splintery verandah and enjoyed drinking sundowners there, where Mr and Mrs Jaeger were bound to see her through the lace curtains in their stone house in the gully below. She found it impossible to call them anything but Mr and Mrs Jaeger. Mr Jaeger, stabbing his finger at an item in the monthly ledger: I see you’ve been buying icecream for the shearers again. Michael and Rebecca, toiling up the hill from the stone house, red-faced and elated: Mum, we’ve been clapping hands for Jesus. The Jaegers had also given them little books to read. Anna would not clap hands for Jesus: Mum, are you the anti-Christ? That’s what Grandpa Jaeger says. After five years of being crowded by his parents, Sam said: We’re moving out. It was Grandfather Tolley who told Anna about an advertisement on his noticeboard: ‘House to Let. Restored schoolmaster’s residence near Showalter Park. Late-nineteenth-century charm, adjacent to picturesque ruin.’ Good God, Anna’s mother said. My old school. Are you sure you’ll have enough room? There’s never been a family in it, as I recall, just a string of bachelor schoolmasters. Sam sat Michael on one knee, Rebecca on the other: Just temporary, kids, till we fall on our feet. Anna lost count of the roofs Sam painted, the post holes he dug, the truckloads of wheat he carted for the locals. Hugo and her father brought him in to help sow and reap the six-forty acres. The Showalters hired him to work with the stud manager. He was paid a hundred dollars to appear in a film as a Boer farmer galloping down the skyline, footage that was never shown. Anna herself found two days a week at the Chronicle, helping Carl Hartwig with his hatch, match and dispatch stories. Just temporary, but Sam and Anna lived in the schoolhouse for fifteen years, until old man Jaeger died and the Mrs retired to a house in Pandowie. Back to what’s mine, Sam said. Back again to the transportable house at the lip of the gully. Anna had no intention of moving into the stone house where Sam’s parents had lived: Your father’s spirit still moves there. The transportable house badly needed a new coat of paint, new carpets, a slow-combustion stove for winter: I don’t remember it being such a chilly place, Sam, do you? I guess we were young then. Sam put his hands on his hips: Anna, the kids got colds every winter. Becky developed asthma. How could you forget that? There was another reason why Anna wanted to install a slow-combustion stove in their old house. She wanted to drive out the sourpuss residue of all the crackpots who’d stayed in it temporarily over the years, clap-hands-for-Jesus guests of the Jaegers in the gully below. These days Sam is learning to grant his daughter some space—as Rebecca would call it. This evening he stands musing on the verandah long after Meg and Becky have waved goodbye and bumped down the track to the Adelaide road, and now he’s rasping a worn hand along his jawline: Anna, if those two are planning on having a kid, I guess it can’t be temporary? Drily: No, Sam. He blushes: Umm, how do you reckon, you know, they’ll go about it? Without a man, I mean? When Sam is gone, Anna will move to the coast. One day she’ll get a call from Hugo: Mum died in her sleep last night. Anna will drive back to Pandowie for the funeral, step into the little stone church for the first time in years, and be struck by how small it is, no more than a boxy room with dusty roofbeams, and yet it had seemed such a vast, booming chamber when she was a kid.

  Invest

  With the help of a loan from Grandfather Tolley, Anna’s father bought a small farm in difficult country out near the Razorback. The investment didn’t end there. He bought a black Austin truck, a Massey Ferguson tractor, and implements to plough, sow and reap, all second-hand from the dealer in Canowie Belt. Throwing in a good job with Stock & Station, changing careers, going into debt—he called these things an investment or a gamble, depending upon how the season was going. Either way, investment or gamble, he hoped for a pay-off somewhere down the track. One dry year he said, very patiently, edged with impatience: Eleanor, love of my life, I can’t help feeling you’re being unrealistic about this—we could go under. Now, it’s good that you’re not a worrier, a good example for the kids, but I think being an Ison has cushioned you a bit, made you not anticipate things enough. The high school offered an academic stream and a commercial stream. Anna was disappointed when her best friend chose bookkeeping over Latin. Like her, Maxine had always been disruptive, slangy and free, her head fixed unfirmly upon her shoulders, so where had it come from, this sudden investment in her future? No one had taught Anna to be sensible in quite that way. Within the space of a summer, the two girls had little to say to one another. Within a year, Anna scarcely knew Maxine, didn’t recognise the person who nimble-fingered typewriters, columns of figures, sewing machines and cutting boards. All Anna owned was a brain that poked uselessly in all directions. The careers counsellor glanced over her list of subjects and said: Latin. Teaching Latin, that’s all Latin’s good for. Maxine was working at the Inquiries counter when Anna went in to arrange the transfer of her savings from the Pandowie branch to the University branch. The bank had fitted Maxine in a pale pink uniform that strained at her breasts and hips and filled her waist with air, so that she looked briskly stern and mature, her body unflattered and irrelevant. Her motions, so quick with her pen and her date stamp, intimidated Anna, who badly wanted to slang off at someone or something with Maxine but was reluctant suddenly to assume that a common ground still existed between them. Anna saw Maxine at the fortnightly dance whenever she came home between semesters, but they rarely spoke now. Eventually Anna came to believe that Maxine was better than her in unnameable ways. When she prepared to fly off to London, no return date planned, she knew—even though distracted by her grief for Lockie—not to apply to Maxine for travellers’ cheques, for that would underline the difference between them. She felt undeserving, and imagined the repro
ach, the contempt, in Maxine’s face. When Anna married Sam Jaeger, her mother-in-law’s refrigerator seemed to admonish her: You young wives, so slapdash! Mrs Jaeger’s hands whirled about the kitchen, filling it with sound: of cutlery riding loose in a drawer, of air seals breaking, of greaseproof paper whispering, of bread, tomato and mutton falling away in slices, of Tupperware lids snapping down over peaches in syrup, of tea the colour of dark-tan boot polish splashing into a vacuum flask destined to end its days flattened by a tractor tyre. Mrs Jaeger seemed to be telling Anna, as she packed the smoko buns and lunches and cold-water containers into a cane basket: It’s an investment of love in the menfolk. The menfolk came back at nightfall and dumped the dusty basket on the shoe-cleaning cupboard on the back porch: Corker lunch, you two. Anna thought: I spent hours sorting and packing eggs today. Where was my lunch? Chilled water in summer, that was Mrs Jaeger’s most loving investment. She kept the freezer stocked with metal beakers of frozen rainwater, and before the sun was up she had the beakers thawing on a bench, a few minutes’ thawing until a frosting of condensation on the metal sides told her that she had blocks of ice ready to tip into the menfolk’s drinking water. I’ll say one thing, Mother—you sure do look after us. The twenty thousand that Anna’s father left her in his will was not enough for a deposit and yet it was too much to spend, so Anna went to Pandowie Accounting Services in the main street, where Chester Flood drew up an investment portfolio: It’s best if we diversify it a little—stocks and shares, bonds, property, some of it high risk, some of it low. But the market’s healthy at the moment, so I don’t anticipate any problems. Chester was still angular and vivid to look at, and Anna watched his hands, one bracing the prospectus upon his desk blotter, the other cuff-scraping a cross with a scratchy pen at the dotted line: Sign here, here and here. Such beautiful hands. Those hands had once invested love and passion in her, one warm April day, the day Michael was killed. This afternoon Anna is helping her brother water trees on the six-forty acres. Hugo’s been planting them up and down creeks and gullies and washaways, inside tiny chicken-wire fences to keep the sheep and rabbits out. A hundred trees, and I haven’t had to pay a cent. Anna pours a bucket of bore water around the base of a golden cypress, a good windbreak tree—slowly, slowly, for the stone-flecked red dirt is in a repelling mood. Hugo has left a little plastic flag on this one: ‘Invest in Australia’s Rural Viability. Plant a Tree and Help Stop Soil Degradation.’ Anna would urge Sam to plant a few trees, but Sam has lost a bundle investing in the Showalter Park sperm-bank scheme, and he’ll only say: What’s the point, when we’re going to lose the place anyhow? He’s harder to live with now, more like his father every day, but Anna will stay with him, she owes him that. When he’s gone there will be her granddaughter to invest in. And Becky. Anna will never stop investing something in her daughter, even though Rebecca had never been an easy person to love.