Page 12 of Queenslander
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 aboutlosing 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 taxform. 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.”
