‘Smoko!’ called Charlie when he noticed Bec clearing a place on Kelvin’s ute tailgate for the basket. Each shearing plant was pulled out of gear and as the last sheep was dropped from the trapdoor release, the dogs were told to ‘siddown!’ Soon all that could be heard was water running from the tap at the tankstand as the men washed their hands.
‘Better late than never,’ Charlie said as he shoved a sausage roll into his mouth, looking pointedly at Rebecca. A simple ‘thank you, darling’ would be nice, Bec thought bitterly, but she bit her tongue. She was still angry with him for not being at home when she’d arrived back from Yazzie’s. He spent more time at the pub than he did at home. Then there was the shameful, embarrassed feeling that had clung to her this morning — when she’d made a move on him to make love, he’d been unable to keep going for her. In the dark in her ridiculous borrowed negligee and even more ludicrous spray tan, she felt humiliated and repulsive as Charlie’s penis had withered in her hand. She had cried silently, drowning in misery and the expensive perfume Yazzie had drenched her in.
‘And how’s Mrs Lewis this mornin’?’ Kelvin asked.
Rebecca grimaced internally, displeased to see him back on Waters Meeting. Charlie would’ve told Kelvin about the humdinger of a fight they’d had the first time he’d come last winter. Charlie was not big on tact, especially if it made Rebecca look foolish. He would’ve told Kelvin she’d wanted to hire another contractor, George Pickles.
Rebecca knew George had a passion for understanding stock movement and used his brilliant team of Kelpies to shift sheep through the yards quickly but with as little stress as possible. With George came a wicked wit too.
In the early years, before the boys, Bec had loved to work on the plant with George’s crew of cheeky, flirtatious young men. For Rebecca it had been a godsend to find a stockman like George after years of butting heads with her father over his motley crew of ill-trained working dogs and his rough, yelling ways around animals.
But it seemed since having children, Rebecca had left more and more of the stock work and decisions up to Charlie. George was ten cents a sheep dearer than Kelvin and so last year Charlie had decided George wouldn’t be coming back to Waters Meeting.
Kelvin had arrived last winter for footparing during what had been an incredibly hard time due to days and days of huge rains following three years of drought. With weak stock, muddy yards and a rough team of pushy men who looked as if they belonged in prison, the whole experience had been a disaster for Rebecca.
There were lame sheep everywhere on the property with foot abscesses, foot scald and a bad run of foot rot. Bec had been furious with Charlie for not paying enough attention to rotating the stock around the paddocks properly. Charlie had put sheep in boggy marsh paddocks and let mobs onto pasture that needed resting for regrowth.
There was also the issue of quarantining treated stock from contaminated soils that held intestinal worms and foot rot within them. All the while that winter, Bec had also battled the inconveniences of an ever shabbier house with a leaking roof, the seemingly endless domestics created by two small children and the disquiet in her mind, as the rain fell and fell. She felt guilt for everything. Even the fact she had begun to resent the rain after such a long dry spell.
One very dark afternoon, after dragging yet another weak in-lamb ewe out of a gully wash, she’d drawn up a hundred-day paddock rotation for Charlie to begin, based on Andrew’s seminars. With a bit of fencing sub-division, they could push the grazing out to a hundred and fifty days so the paddocks rested for longer. But Charlie hadn’t taken a scrap of notice. She knew it wasn’t entirely him. Rebecca knew deep down after Archie was born she had been hit with waves of post-baby depression that had never seemed to lift. Too proud to seek help from others, Rebecca had begun to let life on the farm slide on by without her. And with it went Charlie.
Hitting the gin one night after the boys had gone to bed, Rebecca had angrily thrown all the plans in the bottom drawer of the desk in the farm office and left them there. It had all got too hard and she simply didn’t have the energy any more to battle with herself, let alone Charlie.
It hadn’t rained since that wet winter and now in the dry, Bec was faced with Kelvin again. Grubby, rough and toothless. She glanced at the body of a sheep that had been tipped over the fence. A broken-necked ewe that had hit the railing hard in panic, singled out by dogs not taught to ‘steady’. Bec clenched her jaw. By the end of the day, she knew there would be more ewes piled there, with their glassy-eyed death stare.
Busily she laid out the cakes, biscuits and savouries and tried to ignore that she had just been called ‘Mrs Lewis’ in a voice that was tainted with the weight of disrespect.
She clamoured to find inside her the young woman of her youth, who had worked alongside the men at the sale yards or in the shearing shed. Instead she attempted a smile for the man who stood before her. Like always, Kelvin was dressed in grimy jeans and an even grimier tractor cap, with brown hair that was almost matted into dreadlocks sticking out from under it.
‘I’m feeling pretty ordinary, thanks for asking, Kelvin,’ she said.
‘Big night?’ Kelvin’s blue eyes narrowed and his thin smile twisted at one corner as he looked her up and down.
‘Yes, it was a bit of a big night. I’m not terribly piss fit at present,’ she said. ‘Not like Charlie here.’ She intended it as a dig, but Charlie seemed to pay no heed as he patted his belly proudly.
‘Yep, I’ve been working on this baby for a long while.’
‘Charlie tells me you got some nice Tupperware on order,’ Kelvin said slyly.
‘You blokes!’ Bec said. ‘And you say we women gossip! Really!’ She turned to Charlie. ‘I’ve gotta go. I’ll be back well after lunch. There’s sandwiches made and could you please switch the slow cooker on for tea? It’s ready to roll. I thought we could eat at home rather than the pub. Save the dollars as you say. You are coming to the info night with Andrew, aren’t you?’
Charlie seemed to tense up at the mention of it. ‘If the boss says so, I suppose I must,’ he said, glancing at the men.
‘No doubt who wears the trousers round here,’ Kelvin said, tucking his tongue cockily inside his cheek and raising his eyebrows at her.
Rebecca felt frustration simmer within. Then Ben arrived at the yard gate, Archie behind him, both little boys looking guilty. Sheep manure was already squelched into their town shoes, and paw marks, compliments of an overexcited Stripes, now smeared their once clean shirts.
‘Get in the car. Now!’ Rebecca said through clenched teeth.
As she ushered the boys back to their car seats, she heard Kelvin call, ‘Nice fake tan, by the way. Next time use something other than molasses.’
As she strapped the boys in again, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at where she found herself in life. She looked at the beautiful round face of her dark-haired Ben, who was suddenly growing long and lean now he was six. There, next to him, was quiet little Archie, who had the most beautiful sandy hair in ringlets about his fine-featured face, much like her own. They were the dearest little fellas. Her best mates.
Surely while they were this little, hanging in there with Charlie and feeling shut out from the farm was worth it? Things would improve over time. She knew it. She breathed in her resolve and puffed air from her mouth.
As she turned, she saw Charlie walking towards her, sleeves rolled up, his khaki work shirt tucked into brown RM Williams jeans, his Akubra obscuring his face so it was hard to tell what he was thinking.
She thought by the way he approached her he was about to give her a serve over something she had done that he disapproved of. She felt her internals flinch, then she