Chapter 3 #2
“What’s that short for?”
Ron raised an eyebrow.
Nev went out on a limb, hoped it didn’t break. “Pronouns?”
The young man laughed loudly. He seemed like a nong.
Ron didn’t appear to mind. “She. What about you?”
“Same. How old’s the baby?”
“She’s twenty-two months.”
“Reckon she’s cute. When was the last time you saw her?”
“Thursday.”
Visitation, then, baby in foster care or with the ex.
“How did you know she had a baby?” the brother asked.
Nev ignored him. “Pictures?”
Ron took out her phone, showed pictures of a toddler with curly black hair and dark eyes. The family resemblance was strong.
“Cute kid. Looks like you.”
“Thanks.”
“What does she like?” Nev asked.
“Music, animals...”
“Delightful.”
“She is,” the girl agreed.
“You have kids?” the older brother asked. Nev had already forgotten his name.
She shook her head. “Never married.”
“You don’t have to be married to have a kid.”
“True. Never had time for it.”
A week later Ron showed up alone in a beat-up black Ford truck while the dew was still cold underfoot and a cloud of fog erased the lower paddocks.
The Madonna siblings had been coming around her place early morning and leaving mid-afternoon—something about community service in the afternoons at the primary school, some sport.
Ron had been released with two years of parole and a curfew.
Youth sentencing was either lenient or draconian depending who you asked.
Nev didn’t have a strong enough grasp of Queensland’s justice system to say whether the state was tough or soft on youth crime.
She didn’t belong to a political party and only voted on behalf of those who couldn’t.
Ron hadn’t destroyed the edges of the lavender with the whipper snipper yet, which was a good sign. She paid attention, head down, took her time. She was faster every day.
Coffee mug in hand, Nev brought her over to the machine shed where she showed her how to hose mud off the rear of the farm utes and blow grass off the hay mower and baler with an air compressor. She supervised for a while, then left her to it.
The girl found her in the machine shop an hour later. “I’m done. What else can I do?”
In the silver F-250 Nev brought her down into a low-lying paddock below Boar Pocket Road. Later there would be an epic sunset over the lake.
The grass in most of the lower pastures was short where she had baled hay and sold it already.
Along the fences the grass was still tall where she couldn’t cut it with the mower, gone to seed, golden tops bobbing in the breeze like wheat.
Cicadas and other buzzing insects droned.
It was lovely down here. No one ever spent time here, except scrub wrens, wallabies, brush turkeys, and sometimes three thousand sheep.
It was early April. That time again. The not good time. Travelling time.
Nev spent half an hour teaching Ron how to mend a timber and barbed wire fence: not complicated, but a perpetual chore.
Storms blew dead trees and branches down on the wire.
Pulling staples off a neighbor’s posts had been Nev’s summer job when she was thirteen.
“He put the fear of god in me, specifically about losing staples. If I lost one a cow would eat it and cark it. I never lost one. It’s best you don’t either. ”
The girl had a low ponytail and a shaved undercut.
Ron always wore sunglasses, a baggy black T-shirt and footy shorts with crew socks and work boots, and bench pressed more than Nev weighed on the old bench behind the barn.
Kazi had told her that one evening over a beer with a big shit-eating grin. Nev had nothing to say to that.
He didn’t know she had pointed a loaded gun at the girl, held her life in her hands, or that she still had nightmares about shooting the girl.
Gunni, her old German friend who fancied himself an amateur psychoanalyst, said her pain and pleasure synapses had been crossed during the war, and it was too late to do anything about it now. She figured he was probably right.
After lunch she taught the girl to drive a tractor.
On, off. Forward, reverse. High gear, low gear.
“Don’t ride across a steep incline or you’ll roll over, crush yourself to death.
Don’t drive in mud or you’ll tear up the grass.
” A tractor wasn’t all that different than a truck.
Ron picked it up so quick in the first lesson that Nev decided she was ready to slash an overgrown paddock.
At the end of the second week she handed Ron a tax form in the middle of the muddy gravel yard between the barns and shop buildings. It was the heart of the place, the spot through which everything with wheels or legs on the farm crossed. “Congratulations. You’re hired.”
Ron’s eyes widened. She glanced down at the tax form, then back up at Nev. The girl looked down at the form, frowning.
Sudden tightness in Nev’s throat, a sick feeling in her stomach as it occurred to her that the girl had never seen a tax form. Come to think of it, she didn’t know if Ron could read. Had to be tactful about these sorts of things.
“Your dad will help you fill it out.”
Ron nodded.
Nev cleared her throat. “Questions?”
The girl shook her head.
“Forty hours a week, minimum wage. Try not to spend it all. Have your dad fill that out and give it back to me.”
“I appreciate it.” The girl held the sheet of paper like a photograph, gently, by the edges.
Nev knew the girl would put it in her truck right away.
She didn’t underestimate the importance of a first job to a person on parole.
Ron’s Adam’s apple bobbed when she swallowed.
“I meant what I said that night. I want to pay you back for the damages. Subtract it from my pay.”
“Don’t be silly. You’re doing me a favor.” Nev looked up the drive towards the back of her house. Inside the front door her suitcase was packed.
“I insist.”
“You’re not going to win this one.”
In an hour a taxi would drive her to the airport. “I’ll be gone for two weeks. Kaz’s in charge. He’s been here longer than I have. I trust him.”
“Where are you going?” the kid asked.
“Kigali.”
“Where’s that?”
“Africa.”
“Business or pleasure?”
Nev turned back, surprised that the girl was still talking. Eye contact was there, although it broke under her gaze.
“I go every year,” Nev said.
“What is it like?”
“Green.” And red. “They had a genocide there.”
“Fuck.”
Correct response.
“What was your favorite subject in school?” Nev asked.
The kid hesitated, probably didn’t have one. “Band.” Interesting. Not what she expected. “I was homeschooled. By my mum. But we didn’t really do school.”
“Lucky you. You’ve had an interesting life,” Nev guessed. For someone so young.
“It’s been a lot.”
“Your dad’s a good bloke?”
The girl nodded.
“You’re safe at his place?”
Hesitation, averted gaze.
Shit… “You’re not safe there?”
“I don’t like my parole officer.”
“Tell your dad. You can talk to Kazi and Barney, too. I don’t know about Ric-Rac, he’s kind of a nong. But they’re good kids. Once you’ve been here a while they’ll have your back. Teamwork makes the dream work, eh? Don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone.”
Two weeks later Nev’s plane landed back in Cairns on a Monday afternoon.
The taxi from the airport raced to beat traffic, got her back to Upsend in record time, an hour twenty.
A pile of papers on her desk welcomed her home.
Kazi had not sorted the unpaid bills from the requests for charitable donations; Nev did it now.
At the bottom of the stack of mail on her desk was a tax form, filled out in neat handwriting with small round letters.
She picked it up. Was it the great Reg Madonna’s handwriting? Or the girl’s? Hard to guess. Based on the birthday written on the form, the girl was eighteen. Nev let out a breath. Thank god… Dodged a bullet there. She was still a creep for finding her attractive. Her new farmhand was a Sagittarius.
How long would she last?
She found Ron poking around the machine shop early the next morning staring at chainsaws. “You like them?” The old boom box played gentle Scottish folk music from the seventies.
Ron shrugged, and turned off the music. Interesting. She hadn’t been studying chainsaws, she had been daydreaming. “How was your trip?”
Terrible. Challenging. Sobering. Emotional. Horrifying. Same as usual. “Humbling.”
“How many years have you been going?”
“This makes nine. You know how to ride?”
“I know the general idea,” Ron said. In Lionheart, there were two types of country kids: those who grew up riding horses and those who grew up riding four-wheelers. Nev suspected her new employee fell in the latter category.
“Come on, then.” Nev showed Ron how to saddle and put tack on Dreadnought, the great bay mare.
Tighten the girth, the belt under the mare’s belly.
Put the toe of her boot in the stirrup and throw her leg over Dreadnought’s back.
Reins held between fingers and thumbs. Pressure from heels and tension on the reins told the mare to go forward, left, right, and stop, back up, or go faster.
Post in a trot or the saddle will slap your arse. A canter is nice, smoother.
“That’s it. You’re a natural.”
She showed her the ice machine, electric kettle and coffee maker in the employee kitchen in the shop building that the other farmhands used.
“You ever been in trouble?” Ron asked. “Why are you so nice to me?”
Nev only knew one way to answer that question. She brought her inside Stone House on the hill, showed her the photos of Rwanda.
“Black and white, artsy fartsy.” Ron stared at a picture of a Hutu man with a machete. “Did you take these?”
Nev hated that picture. She nodded, watching Ron move from one framed photo to another down the high-ceilinged corridor that led to Nev’s bedroom.
She hadn’t thought this through when she had this bright idea.
She stood in the foyer, her side towards the open door, not blocking the exit, but as close to it as she could be without losing sight of the eighteen-year-old.
She had to wrap this up post haste, return to Upsend and the public side of the farm.
“Were you a professional photographer?” Ron asked.
“Nine years,” Nev said. ‘87 to ‘95.
“Why did you stop?”
Nev pointed to a photo of the hotel in downtown Kigali, 1994. She couldn’t tell if that meant anything to her or not.
“Do you still take pictures?”
Nev shook her head. The old SLR camera from her conflict photojournalist days gathered dust in the attic. She should sell it. No sense in holding onto an expensive toy she would never use again. She had come close to selling it on several occasions, but each time something had held her back.
“These are really good.”
“Thanks.” Nev didn’t look at the black and white landscapes.
To her, they weren’t art or anything to be proud of, but windows into a reality most Queenslanders with their first world privilege refused to see.
She had physically escaped every war zone she photographed, but carried them with her inside.
You ever been in trouble? Why are you so nice to me?
Nev didn’t know if the pictures answered the questions, but the girl looked satisfied.