The Stranding (24 page)

That’s how it was when the Wallaces came back, Mrs B said. Vic came back to fix up the house, while Queenie stayed in Albany so the kids could finish the school year. The old house was too far gone to live in, so Vic pulled down what was left of it and started over. By then, Ted was rotten with the madness. On the days he could get up, she had to lock him in the house so he wouldn’t wander over the cliffs. He lost weight quickly and it was lucky she was strong enough to lift him in and out of bed. They were hard times. It wasn’t something she had expected to happen so early in her life.

She had talked a lot with Vic while he was building the house. Most nights after she’d fed Ted and put him to bed, Vic would come over and she would cook him dinner. Sometimes he’d help her lift Ted out of the bath so as she could dress him, then he’d lift Ted into bed for her. She was thankful for the company. She was so lonely in those days—still young and energetic, nursing a husband who could only talk nonsense. And Vic was like a breath of fresh air—so full of life. She didn’t think she’d have survived Ted’s decline without Vic. He was there for months working on the house before his family could pack up and come back east. Mrs B used to go out on the porch to tend to Ted and there Vic would be, slick with sweat, working without a shirt, sawing or hammering.

They were both lonely, Mrs B said. So it had to happen. All those long evenings over dinner telling stories.

She was three months pregnant when the house was finished and Queenie and the kids finally came over to join Vic. Everything between her and Vic ended straightaway. And nobody guessed. People thought Ted had fathered a child just before he died. They used to say what a comfort it must have been for Mrs B to have Frank as a reminder of Ted. But Vic knew, of course. She would see it in his eyes sometimes—passion that neither of them could express. It was a line they couldn’t cross while Queenie was still alive.

And when Queenie died, it should have ended happily ever after. But Mrs B had been too shocked by Queenie’s death to chase after Vic right away. Queenie had been a close friend of hers and it seemed wrong to be making designs on her husband when she was barely in the grave. Often Vic came over for dinner and sometimes Mrs B would see him looking at her, waiting for her to say something. But she let the months go by, biding her time till it seemed decent. It was a mistake, she said. After a while the light went out of his eyes, and it wasn’t long after that he brought Beryl home. Mrs B tried to talk to him, but by then it was too late. Beryl already had a hold on him.

When Vic died, he left everything to Beryl. It was a whitewash for the Wallace family. Beryl had persuaded him to sign appropriate documents several months before his health started declining. When it came to appeals, the Wallaces didn’t have a leg to stand on. And they weren’t aggressive people. Jimmy and his wife, Cynthia, let it go passively. Jordi and Callista had been upset because the house was their family heritage after all. But Beryl’s documents were watertight. And Beryl figured she deserved it after nursing Vic to his grave. There was no negotiation as far as she was concerned.

At the end of it all, Mrs B stood up and emptied the dregs of her tea in the sink. She looked tired and washed out and Lex was glad it was over.

‘Go to bed,’ he said. ‘You’re tired.’

‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘It’s a wearying thing. And I still get steamed up over it.’

‘Somebody should have lynched Beryl,’ he said.

Mrs B smiled faintly. ‘It’s a wonder I didn’t kill her myself . . . But really, killing Beryl wouldn’t have fixed things. You can’t force a heart to feel passion that’s not there . . . And I can see now it was probably for the best. People might have guessed about my Frank if they’d seen Vic and me together. And that would have been humiliating for Frank. I raised him to love Ted, even though he never knew him.’

She stopped and looked at Lex seriously.

‘You’re wondering why I’ve told you this, lad, aren’t you? Not even my Frank knows it, and he never will.’ She frowned and set her mouth. ‘What I want you to know is this. I have never regretted those few beautiful months with Vic when Ted was still alive. I lived what was in my heart and dared to love, even though it was wrong by most standards . . . I’m not saying that I did right to have an affair with my friend’s husband. I’m still ashamed of that, even though Queenie is long dead. Where I went wrong was in not opening my heart to Vic after Queenie died. I was too careful. Too wounded, and too concerned about propriety.’

She reached out and touched Lex’s hand lightly. ‘I’m telling you this, lad, because you’re wounded too, like I was. And wounds like yours take a lifetime to heal, I know it.’

‘I lost a child, Mrs B.’

‘I know.’

‘Did she tell you?’

‘The Wallace girl? No. Old folks like me just know these things. Loss like that is so large you wear it all over yourself . . . I saw it in you when you first came here. Your walk is grief, lad. And there’s a great sadness in your eyes. It makes you vulnerable.’

She paused and Lex thought he saw tears in her eyes.

‘But, lad,’ she continued, ‘life passes by quickly, and when you’re old like me you see that loving and caring and giving of yourself are all that matter . . . I want you to know there are some bits I’d do differently if I had my time over. I don’t want you to make the same mistakes I did.’

For a moment she leaned shakily against the sink and it seemed as if she had drained herself completely. Then she nodded at him. ‘That’s the view from inside this old body of mine. For what it’s worth.’

Nineteen

Lex talked to Sue about work possibilities and she gave him the names of some farmers. Within a few days he had a job at Ben Hackett’s dairy farm on the other side of the river. He had to do the evening milking four times a week and help with odd jobs around the farm, including fencing, spraying and fertilising. It was a steep learning curve and it meant he had to learn how to drive a tractor and how not to be scared of cows.

Ben Hackett had a sixteen-stand herringbone shed. His herd was mostly Friesians, but he had a few old Jerseys with doe eyes and hellish-looking horns. Lex was scared of all of them at first, but the Jerseys scared him most—they knew how to slyly hook him when he let his guard down. The first milking session was the worst—and the funniest according to Ben. The cows filed in wide-eyed and toey, their cloven hooves tapping on the wet concrete as they shoved and shuffled into position.

‘They’ll be a bit off today,’ Ben said. ‘They get edgy around strangers.’

He swung the gates to and stomped down into the pit in his gumboots. The milking machine was already sucking and slurping rhythmically.

‘No matter, they’ll get used to you soon enough. And soon you’ll know them all by name, or be making up your own names for them.’

Decked out in faded blue overalls, Ben walked along the line of cows, brushing clods of dirt off their udders and slipping the suction cups onto the teats like they were extensions of his own fat fingers. He had thick round arms like ropes and a ruddy brown face from too many days in the sun without a hat.

‘They’ve all got their own personalities, same as people. Some will like you and some won’t. Watch out for that one.’ He straightened his back and pointed to one of the Jerseys glaring impatiently into the shed. ‘That’s Brownie. She’ll hook you, she’ll kick you, and she’ll toss off the cups and make your life hell. I should get rid of the old bitch, but she’s too damn good a milker.’

He swung a set of cups to Lex. ‘Here, you have a go.’

Lex took the dangling, pulsing cups and it was like holding something alive. Ben pointed him to the hairy pink udder of the next cow. She was stamping and swishing her tail and jiggling with impatience.

‘Don’t muck around,’ he said. ‘Whack them onto her. It’s easy.’

Lex tentatively brushed the back of the cow’s bag and carefully wrapped his hand around one of the teats. It was surprisingly leathery and tough, hard and wrinkly. The cow stamped again as Lex shakily directed a cup up near a teat. The suction grabbed at it and the teat sucked half in, so that it coughed and choked and the cow stamped repeatedly.

‘Here.’ Ben shoved in a big hand. ‘This is how you break the suction. Just fold the line like this.’ He folded the rubber tubing that the cups hung from and they fell away immediately. ‘It hurts them a bit when the teat’s kinked in the cup like that. Now straighten her up like this and slip her on nice and quick.’ The teat sucked smoothly into the cup. ‘Now you do the others.’

Lex’s attempt was clumsy, but he managed without annoying the cow too much. Her tail swished but she stood patiently.

‘They’ll have to put up with a lot from me,’ he muttered.

‘Don’t worry, mate,’ Ben clapped him on the shoulder. ‘They’re patient buggers. It’s their job. Just get it right before you tackle the tricky ones. We’ll get you trained up in no time. You’ll be doing the lot by yourself before the week’s out. Now, let’s give her another try. Then we’ll get you on the tractor. You’re a challenge, mate. I’ve never had to get a city slicker up to speed before. It’ll be the making of you.’

It all went okay until Brownie finally pushed her way in. Lex was starting to get the feel of slipping the cups on without dragging on the teats. He was also getting the hang of breaking the suction of a set when a cow was done and hooking the cups off in one movement. Ben showed him how to watch out for the milk flow slowing in the line. There was a clear bulb at the base of each set of cups where the lines from the four cups joined together. When a cow was letting down, the milk swished and sloshed and spun in the bulb. Near the end of her run, the milk would slow to a dribble. That was the time to get the cups off and dip the teats if they had any cracks in them, to prevent mastitis.

Then in came Brownie. She raced into the shed with some other cows and jostled and horned her way to a bail. Ben was scowling as he hitched the gate closed and locked them in.

‘Old bitch,’ he yelled above the din of the milking machine.

Lex was just shaking out a set of cups to milk the cow beside her when Brownie shot out a stream of runny shit straight onto his head and shoulders and all over the cups he was holding. He tried to shake the gooey mess off the cups and looked around for a tap. Then she doused him in a shower of piss.

Ben was above the pit, bent over the gate laughing. He laughed so much he wheezed.

‘I’m caked in it,’ Lex cursed, shaking off wet clods of dung. It was warm, green, fibrous and unpleasantly wet. ‘It’s in my ear.’

For a moment he thought he was getting pissed on again, but it was Ben turning a hose on him. Head down, he took the spray and used his fingers to wipe the muck out of his hair. Ben continued to choke with laughter. He looked so goddamned amused that Lex started feeling annoyed.

‘Here, let’s clean you off and then get you up to the house for a shower. Glenda will find you a spare pair of overalls.’

‘A hazard of the trade, hey?’

‘It happens to everyone.’ Ben’s eyes were crinkled and merry. ‘And she’s an old bitch that Brownie. But you know—it was worth keeping her all these years just for that!’

A week into Lex’s new job, Ben came down to the shed near the end of milking. He waved and yelled over the click and suck of the milking machine. ‘Come over to the house after you finish. I want to ask you something.’

Lex finished up, hosed down and checked the vat temperature. He liked the quiet of the shed after the cows had gone. After the hose-off, it smelled sweetly milky and it was cool in the still shadows. Ben’s rubber gloves were big on his hands as he hooked the crud and swill out of the drain, chucked it in the crap bucket and tossed it out of the shed. He could see the last straggling cows making their dozy way down the lane out into the paddock. They were pleasantly mellow after milking, compared with the stamping steady waiting of before. It must feel good to off load an udder tight with milk.

He flicked the lights off and walked up to the house. It was a white weatherboard place, surrounded by Glenda’s neat garden of red geraniums and purple hydrangeas. The back porch was a mess of boots and hessian sacks thrown down for the dogs. Their gouging toenails had scored deep marks in the back door. It was the kind of thing Glenda overlooked so long as the front was tidy and there wasn’t too much old machinery or junk left lying around the sheds. She was nervous about snakes coming up near the house or getting into the chook pen.

Lex kicked his boots off and banged on the door. Inside, he could hear Ben’s loud voice on the telephone competing with the radio. He opened the door and waved Lex in, phone still hooked to his ear.

‘Come in, mate, have a seat.’

Lex stepped carefully in his socks on the shiny linoleum and sat at the kitchen table. Ben wound up the call and swung open the fridge.

‘Here, have a beer. Glenda’s in town doing the shopping.’ He flicked the ring-pull off a cold tinnie and pushed it across the kitchen table. ‘I wanted to talk to you about the Show.’

‘The Show?’

Ben leaned back and took a long haul on his beer. He threw his empty can in the bin and opened another.

‘Merrigan Show. It’s in a couple of months. I fancy putting a cow in it, and one of my bulls. What do you think?’

Lex shrugged. ‘I don’t know much about cow shows.’

‘I figured you wouldn’t. But I thought you might scrub up better than me to lead them around the ring.’

‘Are you kidding? The bull will make mincemeat of me.’

‘Nah. He’s got a nice brass ring in his nose. You give that a good yank if he’s getting a bit excited and everything’ll be fine.’

‘That easy, you reckon?’

‘I’ll take that as a “yes”. Great. That’s tops.’ Ben took another swig of beer. ‘I wanted to ask you something else too.’

‘What’s that?’

‘We need someone to MC the Show Girl competition.’

‘Why? What happened to your last compere?’

‘John Watson says he doesn’t want to do it any more. Says he’s got enough on his plate with all the other announcements.’

‘Why me?’

‘Thought we might get somebody new involved. And it looks to me like you’ve got it in you.’