To all those who have been touched
by cancer, take heart.
By the track
I shiver in my sleeping-bag.
There’s dew on the grass,
and the faint silver of dawn,
but dark shadows hide the everyday
world outside my tent.
There’s the first magpie call,
then
Dad slams the back door,
the motorbike revs.
It’s cow-milking time,
and the sun is not even awake.
Dad yells, ‘Morning Toby!’ as he passes by,
and I smell exhaust fumes, sharp, strong.
It’s every morning, every evening,
milking our herd,
150 cows trekking
from paddock to milking shed,
then back out to a new, fresh, juicy
paddock for the day.
I unzip the tent,
peer outside.
I am camping on the grass
near the farm track,
on our farm, once Pa’s farm,
and his father’s before that.
I look around as if
I’ve just landed
on this tiny piece of rural
planet Earth.
‘Deep Well Farm’ –
that’s how it’s always been known.
Once families came from all around
in horse-and-drays to bucket
clean water.
That’s one of Pa’s farm stories,
‘How Our Farm was Named’.
‘All covered up before my time,’ said Pa.
‘But the original well is somewhere
in that little orchard
behind the house.
My father showed me
how to divine for water.
Maybe I could show you and Leah,’
Pa had said.
‘Yes, yes,’ we’d shouted,
and even though Leah’s
arms weren’t strong,
we each had a forked twig
and held it just like Pa,
then walked up and down
the little row between the mulberry tree,
the peach tree, the apricot tree, the apple tree,
until Pa’s twig moved and pointed down
like an arrow.
‘Oh, that hurts my arm, all that water
energy. Perhaps, Toby, you should just have a go.
Not you Leah. Maybe when you’re stronger …’
And Leah’s face had gone stormy,
so Pa had held her twig too
and walked with her,
and the water energy had shaken
along her twig. ‘You’ve inherited the skill, Leah.
You could be a water diviner,
but it’s hard work. Although some people think
it’s a joke.’
And we’d placed a big rock where the well
once was.
‘It would take a lot of digging out.
Maybe if there’s another
drought we could dig,’ said Pa.
And we hadn’t gone back to the old well
lately, not since Leah had to spend so much
time in hospital.
But Pa and I still talked
about our farm’s namesake.
Maybe I will visit the site this morning,
have another go at water divining.
Maybe.
I hear the first cows
coming up the track.
Whoosh of urine –
walking always makes the cows’ bladders active –
the stop and start
of the motorbike,
Dad chasing those straggler cows,
the tearaway cow,
bringing them down to the cowshed.
Morning milking time.
Trigger comes
to look in the tent,
to sniff for crickets
or chocolate crumbs left
over from my midnight feast.
‘Help me cook breakfast,’ I say.
I light a fire at the tent’s front,
a little fire dug into the ground,
kept safe by a ring of rocks.
Twigs flare.
I find the frying pan.
‘A sausage for you, two for me.
An egg as well, Trigger?’
‘Alright, an egg it is.’
Sizzle noises,
eggshell cracking noises,
then I put bread on
a toasting fork.
But I remember not long ago,
it wasn’t just Trigger and me,
but Leah too. Mum and Dad as well,
all of us together, cooking,
sitting, laughing,
throwing twigs on the fire.
We’d gone camping at One Tree Rock.
Just for one night; Pa milked the cows
the next morning so we could all go together.
‘Family time for Leah,’ Mum had said.
‘We’ll keep her warm, extra safe.’
And there was Leah toasting bread,
Leah melting marshmallows,
Leah making a song about
a campfire, about sparks and fairies
and eyes of coals and smoke
leaping into the morning light.
Mum and Dad laughed at her song,
telling her she was a born story maker …
That was maybe five months ago, not long before
Leah died and Mum had held her close
and whispered about the baby to come.
And I drop my bread,
my hand seems weak
remembering that camping time,
then I quickly pull the bread out of the ashes,
knock off tiny pieces of charcoal,
sticks and dust. I place it on the toasting
fork once more.
Machinery brrrs into life,
the rhythmical hiss and sigh
of milking machines.
The huge steel milk vat
purrs like a big-stomached cat
ready for endless thick milk.
The day has officially begun
with the first set of milking cups
on the first cow
who is always the leader
and is always first.
Cows are bossier and love routine
even more than my friend Emmy.
And the very last cow is always last too.
Now I explore this farm,
our family farm,
as if it’s my first visit, like I’m a cousin
or a friend coming to our farm, learning,
seeing our family’s treasures,
but I try to hide that it’s really close
to the last time I will be able
to wander and remember how our farm
is right now.
Soon it will change
and another family will work things
out a different way, maybe pull down a building,
make a new laneway, build a new cowshed …
I don’t know, but it won’t be the same. It will
be their farm, no longer ours.
I walk to touch ea
ch hand-planted tree:
red gum, sugar gum, melaleuca,
bottlebrush, wattle. Mum grows all these trees
for farm shelter,
bird shelter,
ladder steps to the sky
for me.
Some trees hold my history:
my growing-up falls,
my tree house skills.
I touch the scars left by my building
and climb my favourite
tree just for fun.
Now up high I look across
the flat farmscape,
try not to see or remember the huge
‘For Sale’ sign hammered into the soil
near the fence of the paddock closest to the road,
and the bright red
‘Sold’ sign
plastered across it.
Mum and Dad had talked about selling,
about moving on, a fresh start, but I’d
said, ‘No, no! What about Leah?’
And I’d shouted and shouted and run
to the haystack. Trigger had come too.
And he’d licked all my tears until I couldn’t
cry anymore.
Then after a week or two had gone by,
somehow I’d grown used to the idea.
A little bit.
Then Dad had talked to me, shown me
the rolled-up map he’d drawn as a boy.
How he’d marked important spots around the farm
with little sketches and coloured them in
with pencils,
labelled them with names and hints of mysteries.
‘Several generations of little stories,
yours now,’ he’d said.
And I’d taken that map
‘Leave Taking’ and made my own version.
Leah would have liked that.
She liked all the places around the farm I liked.
I’d wanted Dad to tell her about the farm too
and Pa to tell her his stories. And they did,
often when she was in for a hospital stay;
the farm stories helped her to forget
about her pain,
about her tiredness.
Leah would have made a great farmer.
She was gentle. Dad said Leah was good
with calves,
with cows. Gentle is good for the milking shed.
I rub my eyes and look again
from up high
and see the silos
higher still than me.
The sheds are dotted
around: machinery,
calf sheds, storage sheds,
welding, mechanical repairs sheds
bursting with it-might-come-
in-handy odds and ends
accumulated over many years.
Yesterday, Dad began to sort
them into clearing sale lots.
Trigger is barking for me
to come down.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘We have to move camp
anyway.’
I have a plan to visit different
sites around the farm and camp
at each one before we shift.
It will be like a special goodbye tour,
my way, for Leah, for the farm
stories she didn’t have time to hear.
I have my ‘Leave Taking’ map with me,
and I can add new labels for Leah’s and my
farm history.
I’ve seen a spot from my treetop
lookout. A concreted corner
of the machinery shed.
I want to find my initials that I
wrote in the wet cement three
years ago.
But first I throw the breakfast scraps
to the magpies; I know them.
They don’t swoop me, generations
have been born and lived here:
that big sugar gum over there
is their home nest.
‘Just in case I don’t get
another chance, goodbye,’
I say, then add,
‘fly well and thanks.’
The words my grandma used to say,
every time she shook the tablecloth
out the back door
and the crumbs were scattered.
On the last word, I toss the scraps
and the magpies squawk and pounce.
I pull out the tent pegs
and start the packing up.
I move to
my new sleeping spot.
Trigger sniffs for mice.
‘Chase them all out before
tonight,’ I say.
Then I remember Dad and the cows,
look across to see the number
of cows left in the yard.
Last two line-ups of cows, the backing gate
moving down slowly.
It’s my cue.
I change my sneakers for
gumboots, walk to the shed.
My job is hosing down
the manure,
all green and thick
from the yarded cows.
It covers every speckle of concrete.
There’s a system, a rhythm,
and I power away the manure
in thick rivulets, directing
the flow towards the manure pit,
the manure pump on.
I had to show Leah how
to fire the hose so it sweeps
away the manure.
The hose was almost too thick
and heavy for Leah to hold. Even though
she was two years younger than me,
she wanted to share the jobs.
She was determined to do it.
Dad waves to me
from the pit of the milking shed.
It’s too noisy to talk.
We wave and smile.
Co-cow workers.
Once the yard is clean
and the hose rolled up,
I head back to my new
camping spot.
I want to look for my initials
and see if Leah’s are there too.
When the concrete was poured,
Leah had just begun to write letters.
She said, ‘Wet cement and a stick
are like writing on the beach in the sand.’
Even though we’d only ever had one seaside
holiday, she remembered.
Leah made thick furry letters
and she had tried hard.
I search in the corner,
scratch at the dust with my boots.
Yes, like a little sandwich triangle
of concrete, crusty,
but there are my initials
and nearby Leah’s initials
and a half-moon shape
as a smile.
I squat down and move my fingers
across Leah’s initials, then jump up
quickly because Trigger is still sniffing,
whining at some
stacked hessian bags.
Snake, I think, snake
hunting for mice.
I run back to the cowshed.
Dad is just switching off
the machines, he’s ready
to head back home for
breakfast.
‘Snake,’ I blubber out.
‘Snake, in the machinery shed,
Trigger’s there.’
‘Get Trigger out
,’ orders Dad.
I remember one of our cats
getting a snake bite; I don’t want
Trigger to die. I want to take
him to our new place, part of
my old life coming with me to the
new.
I call then, pull Trigger away,
my knees are shaky.
We run from the shed
just as Dad runs in.
Lucky the machinery shed is close
to the milking shed.
I hear Dad grunting,
pulling the bags back,
scraping, his boots scratching
and rasping on concrete.
Then silence.
‘Dad, are you alright?
Dad?’
Dad reappears.
‘Yes son, it was a brown snake,
fat from all the mice.
Those bags have got to go,
we’ll put them on the bonfire
after breakfast.’
I remember Dad’s dog White Tail.
He’d chase the cows home, follow Dad everywhere,
not let anyone else pat him. Just Dad,
and occasionally Mum.
Then one night when Dad was out
switching the irrigation channel to flow water
down another bay,
White Tail was bitten by a tiger snake.
And White Tail died, even though
we’d taken him to a vet an hour away.
And Dad cried.
First time we’d seen him cry, Leah and me.
But since then I’ve seen Dad cry a lot.
Even when he doesn’t mean to cry,
he does.
So do I.
‘Are you camping in here tonight?’
Dad is looking at my tent,
my sleeping-bag, my cooking gear,
and nodding.
‘Yes.’ I feel my eyes begin to prickle.
I don’t want to tell him that I’m following his map,
have made a map of my own.
I’m not really sure why I’m doing it,
but it feels right,
and I have to do this before we leave for good
in less than a week. But Dad seems to know
what I’m thinking, why I’m doing it
even though I can’t explain.
‘Okay, that’s fine son, just keep Trigger
with you. I’m sure we won’t see
that brown snake again.’
Dad heads to the house
and I walk to the bonfire.
So many gardening scraps, bits of old
boxes, paper, anything that will burn,
to clean up the farm
ready for the new owners.
I helped Mum, a few days ago,
to sort through Leah’s drawings;
she had so many.
‘We can’t keep everything,’ Mum explained,
and she’d smothered a sob.
So together we chose a little history of Leah’s life,