“Love you. You are strong.”
“Love you, too, Mum. You’re strong, too.”
“Sweet dreams, baby.”
16
FOOD BANK
Ronnie woke the next morning in the hayloft over the sheep barn. Kazi’s bedroll was empty. The drover was already out moving the herd. He was an early riser, wasn’t happy unless he was outside.
Kazi always wandered during storms. Like an old farm dog, he knew his way around, had his trails, his places he went. He couldn’t get lost here. She knew that Nev, who lived in bittersweet premonition of all things ending, dreaded the day he became too frail to go up and down the barn ladder or flip the sheep on their bums. They couldn’t put the soft-spoken man in a home.
Ronnie looked at his things in the hayloft since he wasn’t there. He owned a handful of antique but functional tools with hand-carved wooden handles, a small pile of books, and clothes that could fit in a backpack. It was a painfully antiquated way of life. Poking through Spartan evidence of a life off the grid didn’t give her nostalgia, but she knew it affected Nev differently. Nev didn’t go up here.
School was cancelled. No one could go anywhere in a hurry until volunteers cleared fallen trees off the roads and the highway department fixed the washouts on the Gillies RangeRoad. According to local news radio, the Gillies looked like swiss cheese.
At a folding table in the front entranceway of the closed citizen center in Lionheart a coordinator recorded the names of locals volunteering to saw up the fallen trees blocking the roads.
Ronnie had left her Stihl in the cab of her truck, since it was raining and this wasn’t a dick-swinging contest. The man at the card table turned her away when he saw the cast on her wrist. “Sorry, mate. Come back next time.”
Life slowed. Energy companies preemptively cut power to the worst affected areas to avoid electrical fires. The town shut off public water for a week. Locals boiled drinking water and checked on their neighbors. Everyone had lost something. No reported fatalities, but almost three thousand people had requested help from the State Emergency Service and tens of thousands of homes lacked power.
The radio said the upper reaches of the Stanley River received more than 410 millimeters of rainfall in two days.
In Lionheart, storefronts remained dark. The local hardware store had a “sausage sizzle” to raise money for the food bank. People eager to fill sandbags had overwhelmed the depot team and were calling the Council asking for other ways to help. Since Blaise was a Shire Councillor, her phone rang off the hook.
At Upsend Downs, farmhands still had to feed the horses and move sheep from one muddy paddock to another.The Express,the newspaper that covered Mareeba and Atherton, featured a photo of Nev’s neighbor’s horses and chooks swimming in a paddock. “It’s full on,” the neighbor said in a quote.
Water permeated round bales left out in hayfields, left them sodden and moldy, worthless for animal feed. Ronnie knew thatwhen the storm was over, agricultural insurance agents would drive from farm to farm tallying crop losses.
“Can we donate frozen lamb to the food bank?” she asked.
“Good idea.” Nev helped her empty one of the chest freezers. “This is the worst flooding I’ve seen in the twenty years since I moved here.”
The town website listed addresses of food banks in Atherton, Lionheart, and Malanda accepting donations for displaced families. Ronnie jotted them down on the back of an old holiday card.
She delivered two crates of vacuum-sealed frozen lambchops to each of the food banks. They liked receiving donations of protein, frozen meat especially, because most people donated bags of rice or boxes of pasta. Lamb was expensive, felt special, would cheer people up.
Volunteers at the food banks laughed and hugged her. That felt good.
“It’s from Nev.”
The woman at the food bank in Lionheart had seen her on the telly helping evacuate the donga park in Tinaroo. “You’re a hero, Ronnie. A real Good Samaritan.”
She was surprised that someone had filmed that on their phone. There hadn’t been any camera crews. She wondered if the boy she brought to the police station had been reunited with his mother. She hoped he had.
The volunteer followed her out for smoko on the veranda. They lit up next to each other under the eaves, pressed side-by-side against the building to stay out of the rain. It had been raining for eight days. Biblical. Flood waters rising.
The volunteer leaned against the cinder-block wall with a shy smile. Early twenties, pretty, high ponytail, T-shirt and jeans. They were always the most obvious, the ones trying to be discrete.
Her phone buzzed. It was her lawyer.
“Sorry,” she told ponytail girl. “I have to take this.”
She got in her truck and called the lawyer back.
“Do you want the good news first?”
