Fresh Fields (16 page)

 

MR. BLACKETT
wanted to attend to an irrigation pump that was giving trouble. There was no school that day and Greg was home.

“Get the Clanger, son,” said Mr. Blackett. Greg ran off to a shed and there was a sound of an engine starting and he drove out in an old stripped-down car. It had no roof or doors or windscreen and there were rust holes along the sides. Mr. Blackett slung a toolbox in the back and got in beside the boy. The youth squeezed in beside him. They sped off across the paddocks, the wind in their faces. The youth soon understood why they called the car the Clanger. Whenever the gears were changed, there was a loud metallic clang. But it didn't seem to have any bad effect on the way the car ran. Greg was a good driver, the youth thought, although he had to sit on the very edge of the seat to reach the pedals. They came to a big artificial ditch with a pipe running along it and some kind of pump half-submerged in water. They got out of the Clanger and Mr. Blackett began to take off his boots and socks. He rolled his trouser legs up.

“I'll come in with you, Dad,” Greg said, starting to remove his shoes.

“That's alright, son,” Mr. Blackett replied. “I've got my
paid
off-sider here.” He gave the youth a look. After a moment, the youth realised he was supposed to go into the water. He took his shoes and socks off and rolled his trouser legs up too. Mr. Blackett got his toolbox out of the Clanger and waded across to the pump. The youth followed gingerly. The water was cold and there was a current that made it swirl around his knees. But it was the feel of the bottom that worried him. It was soft, squelchy mud. He wondered what creepy-crawlies might live in mud like that. Mr. Blackett asked the youth to hold the toolbox for him. It was heavy and the youth's arms began to ache with the strain of it almost at once. He tried bracing it against his thigh and that wasn't so bad except it meant that he had to stand twisted at an awkward angle.

“Dash it!” said Mr. Blackett. “I've left the multi-grips back in the shed.”

“I'll get them, Dad,” cried Greg. He had the Clanger started and was off in a moment. They watched the car going away. It hit a bump and they saw Greg bounce up out of the seat and then heard loud revving as he shoved his foot back on the pedal when he came down.

“That boy is what you call a real live-wire,” said Mr. Blackett. “Don't you agree?”

“Yes,” said the youth politely.

“It makes you wonder what work the Lord has in store for him.” Mr. Blackett took a spanner from the box and began loosening a nut on the pump. “Do you ever wonder what work the Lord might have in store for
you
?” he asked.

The youth said nothing.

“I think the Lord would be concerned about you at the moment.”

The weight of the toolbox and the twisted way the youth was standing were starting to become unbearable.

“Do you know why?” asked Mr. Blackett.

“Sorry?”

“Do you know why the Lord would be concerned about you?”

“No,” said the youth. He wanted to adjust his stance, but was afraid of losing his footing in the mud.

“I'll tell you, shall I?”

“Alright,” said the youth.

“Because you seem to be at a loss. You've seemed that way the whole time you've been with us.”

The youth tried to reposition his feet carefully in the mud.

“Do you feel that yourself?” asked Mr. Blackett, who had stopped using the spanner and was examining him.

“I suppose so,” said the youth.

“You suppose
what
?”

“What you just said.”

“What
did
I just say?”

The youth felt insulted. Did this man think he was too stupid to know what was being said to him? Just because a person doesn't like to get into private issues, and tries not to respond when someone else starts getting personal, that doesn't mean they're too dumb to understand. He looked Mr. Blackett in the eye and spoke very clearly.

“You said that the Lord might be concerned about me because I seemed to be at a loss, and that I've given that impression the whole time that I've been here.”

Mr. Blackett seemed taken aback. He began using the spanner again and then they heard the Clanger returning. Meredith was at the wheel. She alighted and came to the edge of the water with a pair of multi-grips. She had on shorts and a T-shirt and her legs and feet were bare. She waded across to them and dropped the multi-grips into the open toolbox. The jolt of it nearly made the youth lose his grip. He just managed to regain hold of it before it could tip sideways and the tools spill out.

“My fault,” said Meredith, quickly bending to help him.

Between them, they got the box back up to waist height. Meredith's hand was clamped over his underneath the box and her shoulder and bare arm were pressed against him.

“Whoa there,” said Mr. Blackett. “That was a close one. Have you got it?”

“Yes,” said the youth. “But I need to put it down for a sec.”

He and Meredith waded side by side to the bank and put the toolbox down. The youth didn't know whether to be relieved at having the weight of it off his muscles at last, or bereft at Meredith taking her hand and arm away. She watched him rubbing his thigh.

“Did I make you sprain something?” she asked.

The youth shook his head.

“What happened to your brother?” Mr. Blackett asked Meredith.

“Mum needed him,” she answered. There was something abrupt in her tone.

“Oh well, not to worry,” said Mr. Blackett. “We can work you just as hard.” He gave a hearty laugh as though trying to smooth away her abruptness. But Meredith didn't smile or bother to glance in his direction. Instead she continued to look at the youth.

“Sure you're okay?”

“Yes,” he replied. “I'll just give the multi-grips to your dad.”

He bent to the toolbox but Meredith pushed his hand aside, picked the multi-grips up, waded briskly in and across and handed them over, then turned and splashed her way back.

“Thanks,” said Mr. Blackett, turning to the pump with a troubled expression and tinkering with it again.

“Come for a walk,” Meredith said to the youth.

“Can't,” he replied. “I'm supposed to be working.”

She took him by the elbow and pulled him forward.

“We're going for a walk,” she called to Mr. Blackett as they went away along the bank. The youth walked carefully because of his bare feet and being worried about creepy-crawlies on the ground.

“Oh, okay, sweetie,” said Mr. Blackett.

There were some beautiful trees growing alongside the irrigation ditch. They were thin and tall and upright, but very green, and they rustled in the breeze and the light glinted off their leaves. Meredith said they were poplars that her grandparents had planted.

“Your whole family tradition is here then?”

“Yes.”

“Does it feel nice, to know you belong so much in a place?”

“It does, sometimes.”

“And yet you want to get away.”

“I'm not asking for a voyage to the moon. Just to go to the city and be a hairdresser. I mean, I'd be coming back for holidays. It isn't such an extreme demand, is it?”

The youth shook his head.

“To hear my parents talk, you'd think I was asking to go and be a whore in the streets of Babylon!”

The youth was embarrassed by the word “whore.” For a long time, he'd believed that a whore was a whale or a porpoise or something like that. He'd read a story about the old sailing days and one of the characters had said that something was “whiter than a whore's belly.” The youth had got a picture in his mind of some kind of sea creature swimming beside the ship and turning over and showing a pale underside. But later he'd seen the word in other places and knew it didn't mean any sort of sea creature. He wanted to ask Meredith exactly what it did mean, but he could hardly speak for the constricted feeling in his throat. Meredith had got a pace ahead of him as they walked and he couldn't take his eyes off her bare legs and her bottom and her straight back and shoulders and the back of her neck. She had a lovely strong way of walking. The youth was having to hurry to keep up.

“That's enough,” she said, halting so suddenly that he almost ran into her. “We can go back now.”

“Can we stop for a minute?” he asked. “My feet are hurting.”

“Let's sit up there,” Meredith said, pointing to a rise with a giant tree-stump on it. The youth was fearful of the long grass they had to wade through, but Meredith strode ahead.

From the rise you looked down on a broad sweep of wheatfields going away to low hills in the distance. Behind where they sat were the irrigation ditch and the line of poplars. The fresh breeze rippled the grass all around.

“How old are you?” Meredith asked.

“Fourteen,” he replied. “Why?”

“Just wondered,” she said. “Have you got any sisters?”

“No.”

“I didn't think so. You haven't mixed with girls much, have you?”

“Not all that much.”

“Except your hairdresser friend; Milly, was it?”

“Polly. It wasn't anything really.”

“Do you mean you made her up and there wasn't any Polly?”

“No, there was a Polly.”

“Okay, I believe you, even if you are a dud.”

“A what?”

“A dud. Dad said to Mum that you're a dud and they'll probably have to let you go.” She put her hand on his shoulder. “I probably shouldn't have told you that.”

“It's alright.”

“If it's any consolation, they think I'm a dud of a daughter. So we're duds together.”

“I don't think you're a dud.”

“I don't think you are either.”

“I suppose I should get back. Your dad'll be getting angry.”

“No, he won't. He's in his humble phase at the moment. That's when he's regarding me as a heavy burden put on him by the Lord and he thinks he should be long-suffering about it. I took you away so he won't go crook at you. Anyway, what does it matter? He reckons you're a dead loss in any case.”

They stayed up on the rise watching the grass rippling and the clouds going across the sky. Meredith lay back on the stump with her hands under her head and closed her eyes. The youth did the same.

They were side by side like that when Mr. Blackett came up behind them, clearing his throat.

“Ah, there you are. I was starting to think you'd run off.”

“No such luck,” murmured Meredith without opening her eyes.

 

MR. BLACKETT
was working a lot in the machine shed, fiddling with the dismantled irrigation pump and other things. The youth hovered around trying to look useful, but knowing he wasn't being any real help.

Mr. Blackett tried to get him to talk about Meredith and the youth responded as politely as he could without saying anything.

“You and Meredith get on pretty well.”

“I suppose so.”

“The two of you find a lot to talk about?”

“Not all that much.”

“She confides in you, I dare say?”

“Not really.”

“She's the apple of our eye, you know, that girl.”

“Mmmm.”

Then Mr. Blackett would look sort of mournful as though he was on the verge of saying something else but thought better of it. Ever since Meredith had told him about being a dud, the youth had been expecting the sack to come at any time.

“It's obvious that you have no interest in this work, and no aptitude for it,” said Mr. Blackett after he had raised the subject of Meredith again and the youth had answered in the usual way. The youth assumed this was the sack about to happen. But Mr. Blackett went on.

“Well, not everyone is mechanically minded. What sort of work do you like? What were you mostly doing at the last place?”

The youth told him about chopping the tussock.

“Ah well, you could do much the same thing here. We don't have serrated tussock. The noxious weed in these parts is Paxton's Pea. If you like you can start cutting it tomorrow, going along the fence lines and other places where we can't plough it out. That would be a useful job. It does need seeing to.”

 

NEXT MORNING
the youth equipped himself with a hoe and went off along the fence line. He felt as though he'd been let out of prison. It was a cool and windy day, just what he liked best, and the knowledge that he'd be left to himself for hours was like a tonic.

Paxton's Pea was a prickly weed with small purple flowers. It grew in clusters of stalks that came up to waist height and the first dense patch of it was about half a mile from the homestead paddock. Paxton's Pea could give you a nasty scratch. You had to wield the hoe from slightly side on and try to chop under the base of the cluster without brushing your hands against the prickles. After a quarter of an hour the youth had the hang of it and there was a swathe of chopped green and purple on the ground. But the backs of his hands were scratched and bleeding. He didn't mind. “First blood,” he said aloud. “First blood in the battle.”

He felt more cheerful than at any time since he had come to the Blacketts'. It was so good knowing what your work was, knowing that you had a talent for it, and being left alone to do it at your own pace, thinking your own thoughts and being able to speak those thoughts out loud to yourself when you wanted to hear what they sounded like.

A lot of the thoughts were about Meredith. He imagined talking love talk with her. He didn't exactly know what love talk was, but he supposed it was like in movies when the two people tell each other things like, “I can't live without you” or “I'd die if you went away.” The youth murmured these things to himself and they sounded about right.

These thoughts about Meredith led to other thoughts. Thinking about Meredith's unhappiness, the way she was trapped by circumstances, made him think of King Harold and his people trapped in their time and being so brave, almost winning through in spite of the odds and only going down in the end. That was the thing about Meredith, the youth realised. She was brave. You could sense that in the way she looked you in the eye without wavering, and in the strong way she walked, and the firm way she spoke. He imagined himself and Meredith as two of King Harold's people, a house-carl and a shield-maiden. They had survived Hastings and escaped to the forest. They would be outlaws in the greenwood and harry the Normans. They'd be dressed like Robin Hood, and have lots of snug hideaways, and sleep in each other's arms with the rustle of leaves around them. Other loyal people would join them, and they would love and defend each other to the very end. The youth thought again about the love talk. It didn't seem so appropriate now. It was a bit soppy.