At Upsend Downs the next morning, Nev noticed a car parked on the grass at the bottom of the drive. Out of town girls got out and took selfies with the sign. Photography wasn’t the elitist art form it used to be when she wore maroon Dr. Martens and smoked hash out of a whalebone pipe at Oxford in the early ‘80’s. Everyone had a camera in their pocket now, every teenager was a documentarian.
She didn’t know why the young women stopped, but cars had been doing that ever since Ron planted chrysanthemums in front of the azaleas. How did Ron know to do that?
Someone with the mind of a child had booby-trapped her kitchen. Pomegranates fell out when she opened the fridge door. They tumbled in groups, like penguins diving off an Antarctic ice sheet. She watched, amused, as they rolled across the tile floor in every direction.
A week ago, she had filed the agricultural insurance claim for the storm-ruined hay, and now waited for the approval of the insurance man, and tried not to think about it. She sang inside her head.A live, a live-o, a live, a live-o, selling cockles, and mussels alive, alive-o…Being judged by invisible strangers was not her favorite sensation; they had all of her information, but she had none of theirs.
Since the flood, Ron lived in a tent down in a clearing she had cut on the edge of Lazy creek, undaunted by wind, rain, highwater, or electrical storms. Speak of the devil, there Ron was now, rolling up the drive on her retro black Kawasaki.
Nev envied her. Ron was a force of nature with her whole life ahead of her.
She wished she could enjoy camping the way Ron did, but sleeping in a tent always reminded her of the uprising in Mali in the early nineties that went on to become a civil war.
Ron’s lack of housing was a problem. Ron needed to rent or put a down payment on a property to create a paper trail to prove that she had stable housing. A tent didn’t count as housing—neither, apparently, did crashing in a friend’s guest bedroom.
On a whim, Ron had bought a used sawmill—a lumbermill that turned round logs into professional-grade custom boards. It was her new favorite toy. Ron thrived on routine, and exercise to the point of exhaustion, not unlike Gaia and Blair, so Nev wasn’t surprised that Ron appeared to be living her best life in her lumberjack era at Upsend.
Nev sat on the grass to watch her work the machine. Ron knew how to use it from a summer spent milling wood for a church camp up near the Northern Territory in a previous life between age nine and fourteen. When she ran the sawmill she wore a safety helmet with a face shield, safety goggles and noise-cancelling headphones.
Nev watched the blurry blade, spinning disc with shark teeth, eat linear holes in one tree trunk after another, waited frozen by morbid fascination for the day Ron cut off her fingers. It looked like that would be easy to do. Ron always wore leather gloves and used safety equipment, rails and guide boards, but even so, it was only a matter of time. Sensible, intelligent people had accidentally lopped digits off.
“Quit,” Ron said. “You’re making me nervous.”
“Sorry.” That was Nev’s cue to leave. “You could build a house, you know. If Johnson won’t sell you a piece of his farm, I’d sell you a postage stamp at market value.”
Ron lifted another log, set it down on the table, straightened it, fed it through the blade. She had lost weight felling trees, stacking them, milling them, and restacking them. More specifically, she had lost a layer of fat under the skin on her face.
“You’re too generous, mate. I can’t take your land. Breaking up a farm’s like sacrilege. I’ll find something. He’ll come around.” Ron had a lean, hungry look under the safety goggles, was probably dehydrated; most people were. “If he doesn’t, one of the other neighbors will. Someone in Lionheart will sell to me.”
“Have you scoped out ‘For Sale’ signs? Gone to open houses?”
Ron nodded. No takers, then.Damn.Becoming neighbors had been too much to hope for, given the price of real estate on the Tablelands.
As Nev got up to leave, she remembered what she came to say. “Chest freezer in the staff kitchen is empty again.” They kept frozen meat in it for all the employees but really it was for Kazi, who otherwise survived off tinned beans and spam. Now even last year’s leftover ground lamb was gone, eaten up by the lads one frozen half-kilo at a time in pasta sauce and burgers. “Next time you go hunting put some away for Kaz, eh?”
“Will do,” Ron said, turning off the saw blade and taking off the ear protection. “Want me to fill the deep freeze?”
“If you like.” Recently they had seen signs of feral pigs along the creek, bank churned to mud by hooves. The prints were too big to be sheep and too small to be brumby.
“I’ll need your hunting rifle.”
“Next time you’re up at the house remind me.”
Losing half the hay crop from flooding after the cyclone would not have been a problem if the taxes hadn’t chosen that month to arrive in the mail. Life was a stack of bills. She had been late in paying an insurance bill before and nothing bad had happened, so she wasn’t panicking yet. But… This situation had not happened before, with the hay, and the mortgage, and the taxes. This was uncharted territory. She tried not to catastrophize. Better to wait and see what the insurance company said.
Eight days left until her flight to Kigali.
Four days.
Two. She had plans to meet her Aussie colleagues from UNAMIR (United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda) at the hotel bar on the thirty-first. She was the only one who wasn’t a veteran of the Australian Defense Force. Packing the dusty leather suitcase always gave her pause to wonder what she would regret leaving unfinished here on the farm if her Qantas flight made a ballistic dive into the Pacific or erupted in a karmic fireball. She would prefer not to leave Ron with a crushing amount of debt. Foreclosure would defeat the purpose of leaving her the farm.
She took a break from packing to ride the grey stallion Rainbow had named Unicorn. Before that his name had been Ned, but he didn’t seem to mind the change. Horses were resilient, like children. They weren’t neurotic like adults.
Barney was still fixing the baler. Ric-Rac mended fence. Kazi was out pinching the sheep.
Nev dismounted, tied Uni to a fence, walked over to join the old drover. She pinched the loose skin at the top of a lamb’s shoulder-blades, felt the fat under the skin and wool, estimating the distance between her thumb and third finger. She and Kazi had been trying to fatten up the lambs. She was good at predicting what the marbling would look like by the feel of the back of the lamb’s neck.
Kazi spat on the grass. Nev raised an eyebrow, disapproving. Chewing tobacco, nasty habit. Turned his teeth orange. It was a miracle he didn’t have gum cancer yet. “Some of them are decent,” he said.
