Fifty Bales of Hay (14 page)

‘Shut your eyes.’ Then she wrapped her hand around each of Maurice’s fingers and she began to slowly pull up and down. Massaging his palms, sensually gliding pressure over each finger. The plastic and the lube slowly pistoning like a condom sheath on a cock with every stroke of her hand. Maurice let out a long breath from the sensation and she heard him give a little moan. She hoped the gesture she was performing on his fingers would be rushing blood to his cock. She looked down. Mary saw the bulge in his pants.

‘Now take those off.’ Mary nodded at his trousers.

Maurice’s blue eyes flashed open and locked onto hers as he tugged at his belt and let his green KingGees fall to his ankles where they gathered at his boots. His breath was fast now, his chest rising and falling in the evening sunshine. She could see his erection bulging behind his navy supermarket Bonds. Mary set the lube down in the dense forest of clover, rye and phalaris. It was a good paddock, number five. The perfect choice, she thought.

Standing before him, she began to unbutton her faded navy drill shirt until her breasts billowed out white in the sun, as large as full balloons. Reaching round behind herself, she unhooked the thick strap of her bra and let it fall to the ground. The sight of her exposed breasts caused Maurice to tug his undies down a little, his gloved hands roaming up and over the shaft of his thick stub.

Mary stooped and squirted a huge dollop of lube into the palms of her hands and began to smear the gel over her breasts so her nipples stood out like two dark cherries. The lube was cold and clear like ice and the delightful shock of it on her skin made her gasp. Their eyes fixed together, Mary lay back in the grass, looking up at Maurice’s cock emerging from his open shirt like a bayonet ready to charge. Mary began to unbutton her work jeans and writhe out of them. When Maurice saw the thick black hair of her bush, he fell to his knees before her, his cock pointing at her, pink and quivering in the sun. Hastily he pumped more lube into the palm of his hand and cupped it onto her sex. The ice-cold sting of it made Mary arch her back. Beneath the weight of her body she felt the lush clovers
and grass stems explode juices and spread with each heavy press of her shoulder blades. The pungent smell of summer was smeared in green on her skin.

Maurice’s fingers slid easily inside her and she groaned. First one, then two, then three, his hands and fingers working up and over her clitoris and into her vagina. The glove sliding too beneath the pressure of Maurice’s fingers and the taut muscles of her enlivened sex.

His other gloved hand massaged soft gel over the snow-white skin of her jelly-like belly and breasts. Strong dairyman’s hands probing and palpitating her ample womanly flesh. Grasping and releasing. Her giant udders swaying about from the quickness of her breath and Maurice’s insistent touch. His hand slid further between her legs and she felt his fingers stroke the puckered skin of her arse. A fingertip ventured in and she groaned from the surprise of the feeling. The delight of it. Clear lube in every crevice and orifice. His condomed fingers sliding in and out of every place he could find. The weight of his body pressing alongside her, his cock’s head jutting against her thigh, desperately waiting for its turn.

Maurice hastened his movement, pumping his fingers in and out of her, gliding over her clit. As she gave way to orgasm, her mouth opening up widely to the sky, Mary moaned so loudly the cows answered her from the dairy. Their deep, throaty lowing sent out moist vibrations of sound from across the electric fence. Mary orgasmed in waves against Maurice’s strong fingers, her mouth still cast open in a now-silent cry with the dense damp grass pressing against her bare back.

Seeing his wife so, Maurice was in a frenzy now. She could see a solitary drop of clear liquid balancing on the slit eye of his cock. She cupped her giant double-D breasts together and invited Maurice’s cock between the long line of her cleavage. He hastily drew off his boots and work trousers so he could straddle her. Sitting astride her tubby body, he plunged his cock into the tunnel of her breasts and began to move. There was so much lube, so much heat, that Mary thought her skin would burn red from the fire they were making of flesh pumping flesh under the sinking sun. Maurice’s cock and the skin of her breasts made little squelching sounds like gumboots through mud, as she looked at his strong arms holding his body above her. She pressed her breasts closer together as Maurice began to pump a steady rhythm like the sucking cups on a milking machine. He was lost in what he was doing. His eyes shut. Sweat beading on his brow. Pump, suck, pump, suck. Mary arched her back and urged him on.

‘Come on, baby! Come all over me.’

He responded by tit-fucking her harder. He thrust and thrust until suddenly the cows came home. Milky white sprayed upwards onto his wife’s throat, then spilled onto the lush green clover, sweet enough to eat. Maurice, spent and panting, sweating and trembling, fell on her and lay there. She put her arms around him and kissed along his shoulders that were tufted with the same fine ginger hair of his chest.

When he got his breath back, Maurice rolled off her. Together they lay on their backs side by side dozing,
listening to the buzz of flies being carried on a gentle breeze far above the cowpats. A few straggling magpies called out in the dappled shade of the gums over by the house. Maurice slowly peeled one glove from his arm and reached for Mary’s hand. He turned to look at her.

‘Thank you, love,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

Then, soon enough, it was milking time.

K
rissy reached for the lever on the woolpress and jerked hard. The doors flew open and the wool bale emerged suddenly, with a bang from the pressure release. She grabbed a bale hook hanging from the side of the press and with a determined
thwack
pierced the wool pack and dragged it over onto its side. The bale thudded onto the wooden floor, rattling the old grimy windowpanes and shaking the corrugated-iron shed wall.

As Krissy stooped to write number fifty in the wool book, and record the bale’s 150-kilogram weight, she smiled. Outside, she could hear the gorgeous Shaun letting the last of the off-shears wethers out of the footbath, hooves scuttling on concrete and Macca putting in one last deep bark for good measure. She pictured young Shaun, his checked blue shirt undone a fair way to reveal a baby-smooth chest flecked with soft dark hair, his curved eyelashes blinking long black curls out of his hazel eyes, and all the while looking country boy rough-and-ready-for-it in his lanolin-soaked John Deere cap.

He was a sweet lad. So sweet, Krissy thought wickedly, that this morning she hadn’t been able to help sucking on
his long, lively cock just before dawn and right when the cook’s bell had sounded from the shearers’ mess to tell them breakfast was ready.

Minja Downs was one of the few places that still ran live-in quarters for shearers, and every year Krissy loved the anticipation that she felt building inside her, knowing that she was headed there again to join the crew. In her younger days, Krissy had been the best woolclasser about. A born leader with the shed staff and, beyond that, sharp as a tack. She had had the ability to follow the trends in the international wool game and could class the wool accordingly as it came off the board, expertly sorting the fleeces into the bins so that the farmer would make the most money possible from her wool lines. After work, Krissy was always studying the agricultural papers and roaming through internet wool sites on her laptop, the keyboard of which was blackened by wool grease. The pint-sized energetic Krissy had been so passionate about sheds and sheep that all the cockys liked her and she was always in demand. At one point in her career, Krissy was travelling and working the sheds pretty much full time, with an eye to climbing the ladder and becoming a wool industry corporate. Offers kept coming in from the big players for her to work for them. There were overseas trips too, such as industry exchanges to New Zealand and England. The prizes that she won in the wool industry sports competitions had begun to fill her mother’s kitchen dresser. She had a bright future.

But that was before Wayne Rodgerson, and before she had, stupidly, let her fanny run away with her dreams.

At the age of twenty-six she’d fallen for Wayne and promptly had three kids in three years to him. Her life as she’d known it had derailed entirely. For six years she and Wayne had shacked up together in a two-bedroom, rusty-roofed weatherboard shitheap on a so-called highway just out of Dubbo. God only knows, Krissy mused, why she had even been won over by the gun shearer Wayne and his smooth talk in the first place. She was smarter than him. She should have seen through him. Plus, he already had a certain reputation.

But her hormones had fired when she had felt the erotically charged air around him. She had lost her breath at the sexually attractive, masculine way he stooped over the rams while shearing, his pert arse upwards and his ice-blue eyes darting to her flirtatiously as she moved around the wool table, plucking the skirtings from the fleece before bundling it into the wool bins. Then she’d turn back to Wayne for another perve. His arms were to die for, rippling with muscle and softened by wool grease. And he was a bad, bad boy, who smelled of a heady concoction of cigarettes, booze, shearing sheds and soap. At the time, he was irresistible. Krissy sighed. Three weeks in one shed together was enough time and enough shagging for Krissy to think it was love. She should have known better. She should have listened to her mother.

The wedding had been a riot though, with Wayne’s mates hiring not only a Harley, but also a big, ugly bulldog named Trevor for the day as a ring bearer. If it wasn’t the classiest affair, it sure was a lot of fun. And it
had
been a
happy marriage, thought Krissy … for about a week. Then the shit had hit the fan. Yes, she thought now, her mid-twenties hormones and her fanny had a lot to answer for.

This past couple of years since she and the kids had cleared out and left Wayne, the one place Krissy had gained back a little of her confidence and former self-esteem was here on Minja Downs. She was boss of the shed; Minja’s exclusive woolclasser. So precious was their fine merino wool, the Thompson family practically paid Krissy double her usual rates to be here. Even the divorce, which left her skint, and the drain on her resources of full-time care of three kids, hadn’t stopped her making the long journey east in her beat-up old Holden each year. Good on her crusty, cranky old mum for minding the little buggers, so she could have some time away.

Usually she would arrive at Minja Downs on dusk and, after a quick hello at the homestead with the Thompsons, head to the shearers’ quarters where cookie was already on the job and on the grog. Then she’d drag her bags out of the car, dump them in the best room of the quarters, always reserved for the classer, and make her way over to the shearing shed. There she would stand quietly on the board, the only sounds were tomorrow’s sheep milling about on the grating and the occasional bleat, and she would shut her eyes and inhale the scent of the place, thinking there was nothing like the smell of the shearing shed. Then she would picture how, tomorrow, the sleepy shed would be jolted awake with the arrival of the shearers. The tin would rattle with the buzz of machines, the daily business and brawn of
men and the tumble of snow-white fleeces. The staff would catcall and larrikin it up, then there would be the lulls when the monotony kept everyone silent, engaged in their own mental battles within. There would be the occasional explosion of swearing brought on by the sudden kick of a sheep, or the occasional fleece that was booby-trapped with savage burrs. The running of the rouseabout, the clatter of hooves on flooring, the sudden kick of the handpiece as the shearers pulled the starter cord, was all evoked in her mind. The ebb and flow of a shearing was like a dance for Krissy, like a really good dream. Her long days cocooned in one team, in one shed, on one farm. Bonded with the crew, the hard days distracted the mind from its inner demons for a time.

For Krissy, Minja represented the ideal of her past life when she was a full-time classer; where she had always enjoyed a bit of fun, a lot of hard work and a beer in the evening with Trev and his crew. Nowadays it was her only shed and Minja took her out of her real life of dishes and washing-up, of breaking up fights between her kids, cajoling them to school each day, driving them all over the place amid the wastelands of suburbia. This year, with her youngest identified as having severe learning difficulties and her eldest almost expelled for behavioural problems, Krissy desperately wanted to be taken out of her always stressful, always mundane, life. She had been banking on Minja Downs to add a little spice, but not once in her dreaming of Minja Downs did Krissy ever bank on the spice of Shaun.

She and Shaun had ‘happened’ last night when she returned from her pilgrimage to the woolshed. After her meditation there, Krissy went back to the shearers’ quarters peaceful and eager and, happily, found the rest of the team had arrived and were in the process of unloading their cars.

The men had greeted Krissy with backslaps and handshakes, introducing the board boy as ‘newbie, shed virgin, Shaun the sheep’. It was only his first season in the sheds and Krissy almost rolled her eyes. She liked the board boy to be fully trained. Trev sensed her concerns and, as the contractor, added, ‘But he learns quick, if you treat him right.’

Then the team, including Krissy, had got themselves full on cookie’s first-night offerings of chops, mash, corn, peas and carrots and topped themselves up with a carton of Tooheys and a good dose of catch-up conversation. Eventually, as the fire in the mess dithered and began to die, one by one the shearing team had sauntered off to bed, winking at the new board boy, Shaun, wishing him luck getting to know ‘the boss’.

Soon it was just her and him left, both sitting on the couch.

‘I’m off to bed too,’ Krissy had said, looking up at the bare light bulb that hung from a cord through the cracked, unpainted ceiling. ‘Big first day tomorrow. Early start to get my bins and lines just right. And I expect my rousie to be on the ball, so you had better shove off too, Shaun.’

She narrowed her eyes at him as he fizzed the lid off the top of another stubby.

‘Just the one nightcap,’ Shaun said. ‘Want to join me?’

Krissy sighed. ‘You always pay for just one more,’ she said, standing and putting another log on the fire. ‘But … why the hell not?’ she said as she sat on the couch again.

Reaching to the old tea chest before her that served as a coffee table, Krissy grabbed one of Shaun’s beers, pulled it from the plastic, topped it, then swigged.

They sat in silence listening to the open fire snap, staring at the darting yellow flames that were livening up the blackened recess of the brick fireplace. She gradually realised his deep hazel eyes kept darting around to look at her and he was shuffling a little closer to her bit by bit. He gave her a sudden shy smile. She returned the smile.

Thinking back over the evening, Krissy had noted the many glances Shaun sent her way when the banter was running high between the crew. Then there was the brief brush of his hand as he passed her a beer, and the way he had sat with his thigh touching hers on the threadbare grimy couch. At first, Krissy thought Shaun had sat so close because of Dozer parking his massive arse alongside and shunting Shaun practically on top of her, the old couch threatening to buckle beneath the three of them. But Dozer was long gone to snore the roof off the place, and Shaun had had every opportunity to move away, but still he inched nearer to her. He was in such close proximity, Krissy could hear his Adam’s apple glug up and down as he swallowed his beer in anxious gulps, as if he was gasping for air.

She narrowed her eyes again. She knew the blokes were up to something. They never went to bed this early on the first night. She twisted her mouth to the side and thought
briefly before she suddenly twigged. Trev had laid a bet of some kind! He probably had fifty bucks riding on whether Shaun could bonk her before the week’s end. As he was a newbie, they must’ve been giving ‘Shaun the sheep’ hell on the long drive out to Minja. Toying with him endlessly. Krissy realised Shaun would be going along with whatever Trev said just to fit in. That would explain the moves he was making on her. It would explain the sniggering between the men. The winks. The nudges. The ‘goodnights’ laced with innuendo.

Silly bastards, Krissy thought. And poor Shaun. She stood up and moved away, looking at him directly. Taking him in properly for the first time. He was hellishly good-looking and incredibly young. It made her rumble with anger at the older men. They could be such cruel buggers. But then again, Krissy thought, Shaun was a bit of a goat to go along with them. Where were his balls? He didn’t have to be here now. She frowned at him.

He sat on the old brown couch, not knowing what to do or say, so he reached to the arm of the chair where Dozer had earlier jabbed a first-aid needle into the fabric. Krissy got the feeling he might be losing courage now that the rest of the team had gone and she was staring so openly at him. He suddenly bent his head and intently began trying to dig a thistle out of his index finger with the needle. Krissy looked down at him from where she stood, her back to the crackling fire.

‘How much did they put on?’ she said suddenly.

‘Huh,’ Shaun said, glancing up.

‘In the bet.’

‘What bet?’ he asked.

She watched Shaun’s cheeks flame red and the muscle in his square jaw clench. His Adam’s apple danced again. This time he wasn’t swallowing beer.

‘How much?’ Krissy pushed.

He shrugged.

She moved over and took the needle from him. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘I’ll do it.’ She sat, clasping his hand, and began to dig into the pink pad of his fingertip. She felt him shift uncomfortably in his seat. She held his hand firmly.

‘Was it fifty?’ she asked.

He shook his head.

‘A hundred bucks?’

He shook his head again.

‘How much?’ she urged.

‘Twenty,’ Shaun said quietly.

‘
Twenty? Twenty bucks!
’ She exploded with indignation. ‘Is that all you offered to bet? Huh, you must think I’m easy. Bastards!’

The red blush on Shaun’s cheeks was now running down his neck. He couldn’t look her in the eye.

She turned to face him. ‘And you’d do it for twenty?’

He squirmed again on the couch. Then his body jolted suddenly as she jabbed the needle in a little too hard.

‘Ow!’ he said, pulling away.

‘Sorry,’ she said. He glanced at her nervously as she grabbed his hand again, a grimace on her face.

‘Taking a bet to sleep with the classer,’ Krissy chastised. ‘How can you lower yourself like that? A nice
young man like you, being put up to it? What would your mother say?’

‘It wasn’t that they … we … thought you were easy,’ he said, his head hanging down. ‘They reckoned you’d had a bit of a dry spell, you know, with the divorce and all. They reckoned you’d had a hard time. And that I could make you happy. They told me you could be a mean boss in the shed if you weren’t getting any. That I could improve your mood.’

Krissy pulled a face, her eyebrows shooting up. ‘Did they now?’ she said.

He nodded, grappled for his stubby and guzzled more beer. Then he set his beer down. He swallowed and turned to face her, settling his hazel eyes on her blue ones. He looked sincerely at her, his youthful face beautiful and unguarded.

‘I don’t see it as lowering myself,’ he said quietly. ‘When I first seen you, I thought you were a bit of alright. Bit of a cougar, really. Real nice. Real, real nice.’ He bit his lower lip and lifted his eyebrows at her.