Читать книгу Under The Harvest Moon - Gary Blinco - Страница 7

CHAPTER THREE

Lennie Symons stood back to mop the sweat from his eyes and to admire his handiwork. He had chosen the highest point in the courtyard to erect his temporary wheat silo. The area was well drained and sealed with fine gravel, an important precaution if the storms came too soon. The tall cylinder of weld mesh resembled a tubular cage, with an old tarpaulin covering the gravel at the base, forming a canvas floor to protect the grain when it came in bulk from the paddock.

‘I saw you from the cottage,’ a voice said softly at his elbow. ‘You look hot, I thought you might like a cold drink.’ Lennie turned to face Veronica Byrne, feeling his chest swell and his pulse quicken as usual when she came near him. She smiled, her pretty dark eyes dancing in her tiny, beautiful face.

He looked fondly at the small, neat woman, with her thick brunette hair swept up in a ponytail away from her neck. Her brief shorts highlighted her perfect figure, and the halter-top showed the soft curve of her breasts. She had regained her figure almost immediately after the birth of her daughter, a fact that made her the wonder of most of the women in the district.

‘I’ve been watching you for a while,’ she said softly, conscious of her impact on him, feeling a kind of pleasant guilt over the way she could tease him. ‘But I had to get the little one down for her afternoon sleep. It takes ages in this heat; it’s so hard to find a cool spot in the cottage. I put her on the back verandah in the end, it’s away from the sun and there’s a little breeze.’

Lennie smiled, looking deeply into her eyes, searching her face. She flushed as she read the unasked question in his eyes.

‘He’s been good lately,’ she said. ‘There’s been no drinking and no messy arguments. He hasn’t even been to town for two weeks. It’s the harvest, I suppose, it keeps him busy. It keeps us all busy.’ Lennie nodded, his face impassive. But she sensed some disappointment; like he had hoped her relationship with her husband was in some kind of emotional freefall.

‘And after, when he’s cashed up?’ Lennie growled. ‘My old man will pay a good bonus this year for sure, what then?’ He remembered the loud quarrels that frequently rose from the cottage after one of Derwent’s drinking sprees, he even suspected that her husband sometimes struck her in his rage, though he had no real evidence of it. He knew her husband was fond of a drink and fond of other men’s wives, any woman in fact, and that seemed to him enough reason for her to leave him. Lennie could not understand how any man could look at another woman when he had a wife like Veronica, because to him she was so beautiful, so perfect and so gentle. He shook his head quickly to clear the thoughts from his mind, he knew he saw her through rose-coloured glasses and he could not trust his judgment where Veronica was concerned.

‘He may be over the violent rages now,’ she said unconvincingly. ‘He even seems to be taking an interest in Jenny. I can only pray that it will last.’ Derwent had been very quiet and loving of late and she felt a stab of guilt when she failed to give him full credit for his efforts. But she enjoyed Lennie’s attention and she did not want him to give up on her, as he probably would if he thought her marriage was on the mend.

‘Isn’t it too late anyway?’ Lennie insisted, sorry as soon as the words passed his lips because he knew his motives were selfish. ‘Surely you can’t still love him, after the life he has given you.’ Lennie had only ever had one real relationship in his own life and the woman had passed him over for another man. He was heartbroken for months, and it had made him wary about pursuing any further romance, but he had felt a painful longing for Veronica from the first moment he saw her, and he knew he took every opportunity to discredit her husband if he could, sometimes perhaps unfairly.

Certainly Byrne was a womaniser, and he sometimes became violent when he took a drink too many, but since the birth of his daughter he had been making a real effort to make his marriage work. Lennie felt his face flush as he realised he was threatened by the new Byrne, or was it just a return of the real Byrne. But he secretly hoped that Derwent would push Veronica to the limit one day, and into his own arms. She sighed, handing him the jug of lime cordial. Ice cubes clinked against the glass as he took a long drink, straining the cold liquid through the cubes.

‘He’s my husband, Lennie, and he’s been a good man in the past. He hasn’t always been the man you have seen occasionally over the last year or so. And he has been wonderful since the baby arrived, you know that yourself. I must persevere, if only for Jenny’s sake. Besides I like it here, to leave him is to leave here; and we still have to finish the book remember?’

Lennie looked at her as he returned the jug to her hands.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I needed that.’ Their hands touched as she took the jug, lingering a little longer than necessary. ‘We’ll get back to the book after the harvest. I suppose it’s just that I can’t believe anyone could hurt you, or cheat on you,’ he whispered. ‘If you were mine I would care for you with all of my being.’ He wished he could retract the words as soon as they passed his lips. He did not want to appear to be trying to take advantage of her vulnerability.

She flushed again. ‘I’m not yours Lennie,’ she said, a little more sharply than she intended, but he had just crossed over a line that she had drawn in her own mind — a line that kept him near her, but not too near. Lennie flinched slightly, like he had been slapped. ‘At the moment I’m not even my own.’ She added in a lighter tone. She looked at the mesh cylinder and determined to change the subject to safer territory. ‘Anyway, what is this contraption you are building? It looks like a cage of some kind.’

Lennie sighed; clearly the topic was closed for now. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is a grain silo.’ She laughed, wrinkling her tiny nose. Lennie fought off an urge to sweep her into his arms. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she giggled. ‘The grain will run out the holes. What is it really?’

‘It has to be lined with that hessian over there before the grain is pumped in, silly,’ he said in mock sternness. ‘Bulk handling is the way of the future for grain crops, they’ve been doing it this way in America for years.’

‘How do you know that?’ she asked, genuinely interested.

‘I have researched the subject from books,’ he replied. ‘I actually wanted to go over and do a study tour, but my dear brothers convinced the old man that ‘Loser Lennie’ was just after a holiday, so I had to do it from books and articles.’ His face set for a minute; the memory of the denied study tour still

galled him.

‘So you know what they call you?’ she said, a little embarrassed. His brothers made open fun of him, calling him the runt, the shakings of the bag and the loser. He was smaller than the rest of them; they were all tall, solid and tanned, with dark hair. Lennie was slight, but fit and well built, with ginger hair and freckles. The resentment of his brothers did not stem from any inherent dislike of him, but his apparent aversion to the dirty aspect of farm work alienated him from them most of the time. His modern views on farming and conservation seemed to them to be romantic idealism.

He peered at her, his bright green eyes dancing behind his glasses, the spectacles another difference from his siblings.

‘Of course I know,’ he said. ‘They would be delighted if I left and went to work in the town full time, instead of just writing a few articles or painting the occasional picture. I’m out of place here, and I don’t hate the old man and he talks to me, which is definitely against the grain.’

She looked at him and saw a pout of resentment clouding his face. ‘That’s terrible,’ she said sympathetically, ‘How can they hate him, after all the success he has given them? I think he is a lovely old man.’

Lennie laughed again as he resumed his work. ‘Oh, he can be an old tyrant at times, believe me, particularly when he gets on one of his hobby horses. But then I remember the good things about him, and there are plenty of them to remember after all, and I forgive him his little quirks. He has earned the right to have them at his age, and he has suffered some tough times in his life with the war and the early days here on the farm. Anyhow, I hope he lets them break the place up the way they want him to, so they can do their own farming as they see fit, they need to learn the hard way that the land has its limits.’

‘When that happens, as it ultimately will, I’ll cash out most of my share and move on. I’ll get a small plot surveyed off down by the creek and that way I’ll have somewhere to come back to and dream in my old age. They can have the rest. It’s the bush I love more than the farming,’ he admitted, suddenly honest with both her and himself. He tapped her nose playfully. ‘But let’s get back to me skiting about my knowledge of bulk grain handling.’

‘Sorry,’ she laughed, ‘Please go on skiting, I’m really interested.’

‘Well this year we will handle about twenty per cent of the crop in bulk. We don’t have the equipment to go higher, and the slow thinking wheat board can’t process it in bulk yet anyway. We will be able to collect the grain direct from the harvesters in the paddock, and pump it straight into bulk bins on the backs of the trucks. We don’t even need to stop the harvester; we just cruise along beside the machine with the truck and auger the grain straight in. Then we take it directly to the railway siding and dump it through a grate into a pit, or at least we will next year when they should be able to process it in bulk.

‘From there it can be pumped onto a bulk train, or stored in giant concrete versions of this temporary silo here. If there is a bottleneck at the siding, we can store the grain in one of these temporary units, or in some more permanent models I intend to build before next harvest. This also allows us to sit on grain if the price is down, but that’s another story.’ He finished tying the weld mesh together and stood back, reaching again for the jug of cordial.

‘The real blessing, of course,’ he said, wiping his mouth,

‘is that we can get the crop off and under cover or sold in about a third of the time, limiting the risk of loss from those babies.’ He pointed to the bank of dark clouds along the horizon. She smiled at him warmly; again surprised at how relaxed she felt in his company, how she longed to touch his hand. ‘Why do they call you a loser?’ she said, colouring because she feared he would read her feelings and move to force the relationship over that hidden line again. ‘It looks like your ideas will make them a fortune.’

‘True,’ he said immodestly, indulging in a bit of self- righteousness. ‘At the moment they are pleasantly tolerant of me, they even say nice things about my university degree and my arty nature. But it’s a passing fad I fear, they just don’t want me to cut out before the job is done.’

The sound of a baby crying carried across the courtyard.

‘There goes Jenny,’ she said, ‘I’ll see you with the milk in the morning, thanks for the talk.’ Lennie was the official farm dairyman, butcher and deliveryman.

‘Thank you for the drink, and for just being you,’ he said softly. She smiled radiantly and touched his hand, risking a little encouragement to balance her earlier rebuff of his advances. She waved and ran to her cottage.

He continued to work quietly until his father hobbled slowly across the courtyard on his walking stick. The old man still carried himself with the dignity of his years and experience, withered and worn as he was. He had been driven mercilessly by his own father, and felt that he treated his own offspring well by comparison, but received little recognition in return. He had served with the army in France during the First World War, the bitterness of that experience somehow adding to his abrupt, intolerant nature.

The courtyard sat amid the collection of houses and outbuildings, the place looked almost like a small village. There were three weatherboard cottages apart from Ken’s large brick house and the main homestead, a building that had been added to over the years but still retained its splendour. Unlike the other building, the homestead was constructed of stone and the iron roof was painted a deep red. A neat garden of flowers, vegetables and fruit trees surrounded the house and a large aviary at the rear housed a wide collection of local bird life. The other married sons had chosen to build homes some distance away, to retain some independence and space.

Derwent Byrne and Veronica occupied the largest of the cottages, Alan Hale another, and the third was usually empty. At the moment, however, it housed a Dutch couple and their five children, temporary workers for the harvest.

The outbuildings consisted of a disused shearing shed and a dairy shed both left over from the same era and several large machinery sheds. The usual assortment of slaughterhouses and fowl coops were present, along with a collection of windmills to pump water from the underground wells to supply the houses. The history of the farm could almost be gleaned from the collection of buildings as the changes from cattle and sheep through dairying and now to grain growing were in evidence.

The old man looked affectionately at his favourite son.

‘Ken wants you to go with Derwent and Willie to load the grain from the new paddock over near Brinkley’s place,’ he said, patting his son on the back. ‘He says it’s a record yield over there this year.’ Lennie looked at the old man, studying the fallen face with its patchwork of sunspots and the sad grey eyes that had grown watery with age, hoping that his own life would not end in unhappiness and the ingratitude of his offspring.

‘No problem, Dad, I’m pretty much done here for now. We will have the first bulk stuff coming off in the next few days when we start to harvest the big paddock down near Brinkley’s, on this side of the creek.’

‘Is all the gear ready then?’ the old man asked, grinning at his son. ‘Sure is,’ Lennie said, returning the grin. ‘We have one set of bulk handling gear ready to go. From harvester, trucks, augers and silo, as you see here.’ He pointed to the mesh enclosure.

‘Good,’ the old man said. ‘Your smart-arsed brothers may well sit up and take notice when they see your plans in action. I’ll ask Norma to cut you some sandwiches in case you are late tonight. And son,’ he looked closely at Lennie, ‘I’m proud of you, boy. The others ploughed headlong into this grain- growing thing against my better judgment. I still think they’re trying to avoid the dirty work of dairying and tending stock, but I think you can make it work.’ Lennie nodded, bathing in the praise, gripping his father’s shoulder as they strolled towards the house.

‘I went for a drive around the paddocks today,’ the old man said, gasping a little from the exertion of walking, ‘I see you have hired another one of those bloody migrant teams over on the six-forty.’ His tone had taken on an edge of disapproval.

‘Yes,’ Lennie said quickly, ‘they’re good workers, Dad.’

‘That may well be,’ Nigel said hotly, ‘and I can stand the Dutch, even if they are arrogant bastards, but at least they were on our side in the war. But the Eyeties kept changing sides, and there are three friggin’ Germans in the team I saw today. One of ‘em was in the German army, for Christ’s sake boy. Why do we hire these damn new Australians anyway?’

‘The last war has been over for a dozen years, Dad, and the first one for almost forty,’ Lennie said gently. ‘Besides, the people and the soldiers were not to blame. We have to put it behind us. The Government is bringing these people out here to help the country grow. It’s up to us to give them a go.’

‘It’s alright for people who didn’t have to fight the buggers in the war,’ Nigel spat. ‘It’s easy to forget when there is nothing bad to remember, but I’ll not forget. I had to mix it with the Krauts in the first war, and they behaved even worse in the last show. I managed to keep your older brothers out of the last war because they were primary producers, and you were too young to serve anyway.’

He paused in the middle of the courtyard to shake his stick in Lennie’s face. ‘Now I let you have a pretty free rein, lad,’ he growled, ‘but no more Germans and Italians! I’ll tolerate the rest.’

Lennie nodded his agreement; he had recruited all the labour he needed to see them through the harvest anyway. There was little point in stirring the old man up over the issue. He could get pretty passionate about the subject. Lennie often envied his father these bouts of passion. He could find little in the world to engender any really deep emotions in himself. He wanted to preserve as much of the bush as he could, and he had strong feelings for Veronica Byrne, but he could never see himself obsessed with any single issue. But he had never faced the trials and life-threatening situations that his father had endured and maybe that changes you in ways you can never imagine.