Fifty Bales of Hay (3 page)

‘You did this, didn’t you, Nigella? You gave us the moon last night.’ She smiled with tears in her eyes and began to laugh at her good fortune, and as she did, she was sure she saw her goddess wink.

T
he handpiece vibrated in Mervyn Crank’s strong grip as he dabbed the last bit of wool from the tail of a ewe and gently let her go. She slid in a stunned stupor with her little cloven feet cast in the air and disappeared down the chute to the count-out pens below the shearing shed. There she joined the other fifty Pine Hills ewes who, because they had the dirtiest tails, had been drafted off to be crutched and wigged a second time before lambing. The early spring flush of lush green grass and no access to dry tucker to bind them up a bit had been giving the ewes grief, and Mervyn Crank was not a man to allow a lamb to come into the world through a veil of sodden dung at a ewe’s rear end. He’d been happy to help Mrs Taylor out with the crutching again.

Mervyn slipped out of the shearer’s backsaver sling that hung from the rafters of the shearing shed. The sling creaked a little on its taut spring as it dangled and bounced in the warm evening air. Sweat had beaded on Mervyn’s lined brow and pooled in his tufted grey eyebrows. He flexed backwards, placing two big hands into the small of his back, and groaned a little as he arched his tired muscles.

‘She was the one I’ve been looking for today,’ Mervyn said, grabbing up his water cooler. ‘The last one!’ He took a swig. ‘Getting too old for this game. I only crutched fifty and look at me!’

Mrs Taylor, who had been watching him in silence for the past fifteen minutes, stepped forward, unhooked his towel hanging from the nail near the shearer’s stand and handed it to him. He took it with an inclination of his head and a glance of gratitude in his vibrant light blue eyes. As he swiped the towel across his face, he winked at Mrs Taylor and said, ‘Thank you, madam.’

She indicated the clock on the wall. ‘Yes, tired you may be, but you completed the task in good time,’ she said in a smooth and gentle voice. ‘You’ll make your first of the season lawn bowls competition with time to spare, of that I am certain.’ Mrs Taylor slipped her elegant hand into the pocket of her black mohair cardigan. ‘How much do I owe you, Mervyn?’

Mervyn looked at the red lipstick applied perfectly to Mrs Taylor’s lined but still full and shapely mouth, then lifted his gaze to her large, hooded brown eyes. Her eyes were clouded with what seemed like a lifetime’s sadness mixing and melting into two pretty dark pools. In her younger days, she’d been a stunner around town, a dead ringer for Audrey Hepburn. She still was in a way. Mervyn tapped his fingertips on his lips as he thought, his eyes fixed on hers. She didn’t belong here. Not here in the shed, and not here in this district. She was graceful and nervous, like a deer, but those who knew deer knew that they were also
strong and elusive creatures. And like a deer, Mrs Taylor’s line, the shape her body made in the world, was utterly smooth and beautiful, like one of the china figurines his Sheila used to order from the magazines for her cabinet. Mervyn stopped his finger tapping.

‘I reckon fifty bucks oughta do it, Mrs Taylor,’ Mervyn said.

Mrs Taylor shifted her sparrow-like weight in her little red flats on the board and pulled the cardigan of her twin-set about her bony shoulders. She frowned at him, fingering invisible pearls. Mervyn couldn’t help notice a button missing on the cardigan that was pilling under the sleeves a little. He noticed there was a small hole in the shoulder of the garment. The signature pearl necklace parodied by everyone around the district was missing too. He watched as Mrs Taylor tried to swallow her pride, but still she shook her head. ‘No, Mervyn. I owe you more.’ Mrs Taylor held two golden fifty-dollar notes in her slim piano-concerto player’s fingers. She unfolded them and offered them up to Mervyn. Her deerlike eyes were on him, pleading for him to take the money.

He sighed, scratched the back of his head, then with kindness in his eyes, plucked only one note from her.

‘There was just a handful to crutch out of the whole mob. It’s no problem.’ He cast his eyes to the floor where a scattering of dags lay. ‘And it’ll take me no time to tidy up.’

‘I’ll pay you what’s due,’ she said curtly. ‘I don’t want your charity. And I certainly don’t want anybody’s pity.’
Mervyn smiled. It was so like her. The impenetrable veneer of the grazier’s wife. Rural royalty.

Picking up the wool paddle, he began to draw the dags into a pile, glancing at her, his eyes crinkling at the sides.

‘Who says charity and pity are what I’m giving you, Mrs Taylor? Maybe I like coming here,’ Mervyn said quietly. ‘Maybe I’d like to give you something other than that. If you catch my drift.’

Mrs Taylor’s eyes darted to him, one perfectly shaped and pencilled eyebrow arching up at him in surprise. He turned his back and with his strong crutcher’s hands, he grasped two short wooden planks and stooped down, using them to scoop up the dags and toss them into the bin. Then he turned to sort the few crutchings on the wool table, flicking them into two piles of dirty and clean wool. The striped belt that he wore about his waist held his shearer’s dungarees neatly at his waist. He was fit for a man of his age, and Mrs Taylor had spent the afternoon admiring this aspect of him. He had a steady patience with the ewes should any get testy and start beating their hind legs violently against the floor as he crutched. And brawny though he was, he had a gentlemanly quality about him, even when handling the sheep and dogs out in the yards.

Mrs Taylor stood now on the board feeling her pulse flutter in her throat like a butterfly caught against glass. How long had it been? she wondered. How long? She took in his broad shoulders that were stooped a little from age, but his character remained upright. He was a good man, Mervyn. Decent and clean. Kind and mild. Mrs Taylor liked that.

When she had first climbed the steep steps into the shearing shed, the pain from her arthritic knees had dissolved when she had caught sight of Mervyn bent over the sheep, intent on his work, held in a shaft of light from the skylights, more golden and serene than the light that spilled into cathedrals through stained glass, and the buzz of the handpiece delivering up a meditative drone. The peace of the place and the presence of Mervyn working with the animals had soothed Mrs Taylor instantly.

Mrs Taylor had felt a rush through her body at the sight of the quiet man at toil. There was a sense of gratitude within her, but she recognised something else. What she had felt was a rush of desire. And a surge of love for this man. Mervyn had been the one, through thick and thin, who had been there for her, in the background, since her husband had died. He was the reason she had remained here on Pine Hills.

Mrs Taylor had watched Mervyn for a while without his awareness of her presence. She saw that he moved like a dancer. The way he glided the handpiece around the ears of the ewes and across their pretty, startled faces, shearing the tips of the grey wool away to reveal divine white fibres. The way he gently let the creatures down the drop after the wigging and crutching and, unfurling himself from the sling, moved to the catching pen to grab up another one.

As he dragged a ewe backwards and again manoeuvred himself into the sling, he had seen Mrs Taylor standing there. He knew he had been caught unguarded. She had witnessed his surprised look, quickly followed by a gentle
smile of genuine gladness that she was before him. She had felt the rush then. She felt the rush now.

‘What are you offering to give me other than that, Mervyn?’ Her voice was soft. Informal. Not the voice she used with the farm workers or people of the town. With his back to her, Mervyn stopped sorting the crutchings and stood very still.

‘I get lonely too, since Sheila passed,’ he said. ‘I know what it’s like. I was thinking of giving you some company.’

He turned, and Mrs Taylor saw the look of longing in his eyes.

‘I like seeing you. You are very easy on the eye, Mrs Taylor,’ Mervyn said, looking sincerely at her. ‘But it’s not just your beauty. It’s just … you. You. I very much enjoy the company of you.’

Mrs Taylor sucked in a breath and her hand flew to her throat where the butterfly wings were beating hard, as if in death throes. She felt the absence of the protective string of pearls, which had been pawned in the city. None of the shed staff would
ever
have talked to her like that in her husband’s day, she thought. Never! Mind you, she would never have ventured to the shed. She would have been more likely to be found in the giant homestead arranging flowers, or typing CWA meeting minutes, or sinking hopelessly into an early glass of brandy and dry before the children arrived home from boarding school.

In her prime, Mrs Taylor was the most loathed grazier’s wife in the district. She kept the other women on their toes with her perfect clothing, her string of quality Japanese
pearls (harvested in the War years) and with her hated dance lessons in the local hall. The classes were executed with regimental strictness for the benefit of the uncultured and often overweight local girls. To top it all off, Mrs Taylor had been a beauty and a homemaker in that unreachable, perfect way.

Little did the people in the district know that her husband, crafty old Mr Taylor, who had a fetish for young dancing girls, had actually discovered Mrs Taylor in a questionable hotel in Sydney’s Kings Cross. Back then, she was Elsie Morgan.

Old Mr Taylor had found Elsie during what had been a dark time for her. Elsie had been a showgirl working in scant costumes fashioned from cheap satin and golden tassels. In a room, under the harsh shine of a spotlight, with a backdrop of red velour curtains, Elsie had worked most nights doing her ‘tease and trapeze’ act. The ropes of her trapeze were entwined with faux flowers and the air was woven with the dark thoughts of the desperate men who shuffled in to sit in surly shadows and watch her. There on the stage, in the air, she would contort and writhe in her revealing clothing for the men, for the money for her rent or, occasionally, for an abortion. Her dreams of Broadway and acting slowly dissipated as yet another man, such as Mr Taylor, ran his hands along the milky white of her impossibly young and soft inner thighs and found her wet weakness.

Fixated, Mr Taylor had visited Elsie again and again at the hotel, and not long after the Sydney Royal Easter Show
he had brought her home as his wife, pregnant at seventeen. He the older gentleman farmer; she the young wife with a questionable past and a desire to escape what she had known.

Her history had been discreetly buried with old money and a fake pastoral pedigree linking her to the west. Her time in the city with men had made her a clever actress, and she fell into her role of grazier’s wife easily, at least on the exterior. In a short time, after her first baby, Giles, was born, followed quickly by Sophia, Mrs Taylor was accustomed to pretending that she was a good and graceful countrywoman. In the same way, her husband pretended to be a good farmer and a good husband. But Mrs Taylor knew never to trust him. Never to trust men.

And she had been right. The day after Mr Taylor died, the solicitor came calling. Mr Snell had stood before her in a rather has-been suit with a look of smugness, barely disguised, on his face. Mr Snell happily told Mrs Taylor that her husband had left her with a massive farm debt and a farm about to fold. Of course, Giles was of no use away in London and, naturally, Sophia wanted the property sold to provide money for her and her husband’s renovations in Double Bay and to pay for the grandchildren’s university education. But Mrs Taylor had held strong against her spoiled children and grandchildren, like an icy glacier. She made sure everything was very hard to do and that she and others moved very slowly. So far, five years on, the farm remained.

It was hard for her to believe it was five years since Mr Taylor had left her with the debt. Mrs Taylor had managed
to not just hang on, but to begin to find herself again after all these frozen years.

With the help of Merv, and Timothy the jackaroo, she had kept Pine Hills ticking over and had kept the greedy children at bay. Mrs Taylor knew she had to be a strong woman. Very strong. But now, here in the shed, she had keenly felt the loneliness that had seeped into her bones. She wanted to spend the last years of her life knowing that there were kind men out there in the world. Men who could be trusted. Men who admired women deeply, but with a purity of their souls. Not the way the men were in that hotel years ago; not the way Mr Taylor had treated her, as if she was another one of his items of property. A tool that functioned to smooth his way through life and lift his status. A commodity.

Today, watching Mervyn in the beam of diffused light from the skylights in the shearing shed, she had felt the years falling away from her as she remembered her girlhood when she believed in a world of love and romance, a world where men had loving intentions and honour within. Now, with Mervyn Crank’s soft voice and kind words, Mrs Taylor felt the stress tied up within her suddenly loosen, and there before Mervyn, she felt it unravel and tumble out. She swallowed as emotion crawled up her throat and clutched her there, the butterfly stilled. No breath coming. A choking. She felt her cheeks flame and the tears rise; she began to quiver and tremble.

Mervyn sensed her distress, saw her tears and the grappling for her throat. He moved over to her. Awkwardly
at first, but then he cast his big strong arms around her. He felt her wiry, birdlike body fold into his chest, and as she gave into him, he released any apprehension and held her like he wanted to hold her. The embrace of a lover. The hug of a man who had desired her for the length of years.

Mrs Taylor felt it too. She lifted her head and suddenly she was kissing him. She felt the heaviness of his lips on hers and the urgent force of his torso pressed against her. She inhaled the masculine scent of him and felt herself waken. Then, as if life suddenly began again to tick over for her, Mrs Taylor felt herself breathe easily for the first time in years. She ran her hands down the front of his body and, beneath her delicate palms, she felt Mervyn’s penis in his dungarees swell to life. Just the hardness, there, against her thigh, so very near her vagina, deepened her breath as if she was suddenly revived. How long had it been?
How long had it been?