She agreed. Most of them were. She had high standards. These animals would be perfectly plump by the time they went to slaughter in May, but the ritual worrying was what guaranteed they met the standard every year. Perfect marbling didn’t happen by accident. She had to fuss over them this time of year.
Ron stood behind the shop butchering feral pigs, hosing blood off the concrete slab, spraying the color red downhill into the grass. She had three of the dead animals strung up in the doorway and was taking cuts off the carcasses systematically with an electric knife, like a butcher in a meat market.
Nev clicked her tongue and put Uni away.
The pigs all had a clean hole through the forehead, execution-style.
She set up another folding table near Ron’s work station, ran an extension cord out from the barn, dusted off the old vacuum sealer and brought it outside. Watching Ron cut a tenderloin along the spine felt like watching an artist carve clay or marble. Ron knew exactly what was inside, had a picture of it in her head.
Nev cleared her throat. “This is a sentence I never thought I would utter, but you are the Michelangelo of meat.”
Ron chuckled, head tilted in concentration as she worked. An earbud dangled precariously from her ear on a blood-stained white cord. “Years of practice.”
“Be careful what you get good at, right? Any way we can monetize this?”
Ron snorted. Not a chance. Pity.
“What are you listening to?” Nev asked.
Ron held out the second earbud. Nev held it up to her ear, curious what kind of music the younger woman listened to when she was deep in the flow state of filleting.
She was listening toThe Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobeby C. S. Lewis.
Nev felt her eyebrows rise. Unsure how she was supposed to feel, she returned to vacuum-sealing meat at the other folding table. “I admire how productive you’ve been since you bought the sawmill, but all work and no play makes Jill a dull girl. How is the housing search coming along?”
Ron put the second blood-smeared earbud back in and returned to carving.
Ron gave her hands a cursory wipe on the grass, lit up and puffed away, careful not to touch anything except the cig with her crimson gloves. Smoko time. Blood shrank when it dried, became tight, itched. It was impossible for her not to stare at her own wrinkled hand every time it approached her mouth. Blood lined the wrinkles, threw them in contrast.
Ron didn’t appear to mind the mess. She probably didn’t see it. It didn’t remind her of anything other than what it was.
Maybe that was the secret to happiness, Nev mused. See things as what they are, not what they appear to be.
“I don’t think the real estate agents in town like me,” Ron admitted.
That was understandable given that they worked on commission.
“You could always buy another donga.”
Ron shook her head, then blushed, took a last drag from her cigarette, dropped it on the dirt and crushed it with her boot.
Ugh…That answered the question of who to blame for the disgusting confetti of crushed filters littering the ground.
Ron glanced down at her face, reconsidered, picked up the butts and put them in a trash bin.
It was a shame that such a remarkable person who had lived so much in her years and had such an old soul was homeless again, and a shame that she wouldn’t let Nev help her, but that was life. ‘Such is life,’ the outlaw Ned Kelly had said on the gallows. Pride bubbled up from beneath dirt like water from a desert spring.
18
MVP
Edmonton was an hour’s drive to the north-west, past Gordonvale. Nev didn’t want to go. A denial letter from the insurance company burned a hole in her pocket. She didn’t know what to do. The last-minute decision to go watch Ron’s AFL practice in Edmonton was Reg’s fault. It wasn’t that she disliked Aussie rules football. She had lived on the Tablelands long enough to become a devoted fan of the South Cairns men’s team, the Cutters.
Cutters was short for cane cutters. The team logo was a cartoon drawing of a man holding a machete. You couldn’t make this shit up. She followed the stats for the women’s team but didn’t attend games because that was Ron’s thing.
In the stands Reg waved, gesturing for her to sit beside him in the direct sun. He had saved her a spot with his jacket. He was wearing a wide-brimmed kangaroo-leather crusher hat.
She worried that the popcorn she brought from home wasn’t enough.
