Chapter 17
MICHELANGELO OF MEAT
In late March, the autumn equinox marked the turning of the year for Nev.
Yesterday, Ron had mustered the courage to ask the grouchy neighbor, Johnson, if he would sell her the open hectares of grazing land below Upsend Downs where he ran cattle, but he said no.
This hadn’t surprised Nev, but Ron had been visibly disappointed.
Accepting defeat wasn’t in Ron’s nature. After moping around for a few hours, lifting weights and blasting heavy metal, she had cheered up. “He’ll change his mind.”
Last night Ron had brought her down to admire a row of gnarled pomegranate trees in the gully behind Johnson’s barbed wire.
Ron had big plans for them. “You like getting attached to things that don’t belong to you, don’t you?
” Nev had asked, rhetorically. Ron had smiled.
What a dangerous way to live, with your heart on your sleeve.
Perhaps because she fell asleep happy, Nev dreamed of the time she watched the Tour de France from the Champs-Elysées in Paris.
The dream felt like a gift, a reprieve from the teenager with the machete and the cowering kids hidden under the floor. She hadn’t seen them herself, but other people’s memories had become her own.
She assumed they all died, but she hadn’t heard the end of the girl’s story, so she would never know.
Women in the village had put the babies under the floor in an attempt to hide them, and the women had all been killed.
What had happened to the babies under the floor?
Did they meet the same fate as their mothers, the man with the machete?
Or did they die of dehydration, later? She hoped someone had come back for them at night. Maybe someone had taken pity on them.
The pub looked half full: not bad for a Thursday night. In the corner a small stage held a drum set, guitar, fiddle and bass. She and Gunni drank a pint at the bar before the Wild Drovers played their weekly set list of classic covers.
Nev was lubricated and running her mouth. She saw Gunni turn with a bright grin and a “Hullo darling!” to welcome someone as a hand squeezed her shoulder.
Someone tall. A man. No, not a man, Ron. Ron bent to give their bass player a peck on the cheek, then squeezed Nev’s shoulder again. “Have you done sound check?”
She nodded. “Did you close the gate?”
“Which one? Just kidding.” Ron bent to give her a peck on the cheek like she had given Gunni. She was wearing one of Mattie’s black Alien Weaponry band T-shirts with the sleeves cut off. She was vain about her arms. Dopamine released by lifting heavy weights hours every day was a kind of drug.
Ron sat down at the drum set in the corner and started warming up.
Nev carried her second pint over to the stage and set it down between her fiddle and guitar, then pulled her fiddle onto her lap. “How do you tell the difference between a fiddle and a violin?”
Ron was in a good mood. “I don’t know. How do you tell the difference between a fiddle and violin?”
“You don’t spill beer on a violin.”
Ron laughed.
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, high water, 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.
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 to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by 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.