The Yield

Also by Tara June Winch

Swallow the AirAfter the Carnage

Copyright

HarperVia

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

HarperCollinsPublishers

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Dublin 4, Ireland

This eBook first published in Great Britain by HarperVia in 2021

Copyright © Tara June Winch 2021

Cover Design by gray318

Designed by Terry McGrath

Map illustration designed by Tara June Winch

Title page art by gray318

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Tara June Winch asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

The Yield is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008437077

Ebook Edition © January 2021 ISBN: 9780008437091

Version: 2020-11-17

Dedication

For my family

Epigraph

“In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized robbery?”

Saint Augustine

Contents

Cover

Also by Tara June Winch

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Map

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Forty-One

Forty-Two

The Dictionary of Albert Gondiwindi

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Note From the Cover Designer

About the Author

About the Publisher

Map

Map illustration by Tara June Winch

One

I was born on Ngurambang—can you hear it?—Ngu–ram–bang. If you say it right it hits the back of your mouth and you should taste blood in your words. Every person around should learn the word for country in the old language, the first language—because that is the way to all time, to time travel! You can go all the way back.

My daddy was Buddy Gondiwindi, and he died a young man by the hands of a bygone disease. My mother was Augustine, and she died an old woman by the grip of, well, it was an Old World disease too.

Yet nothing ever really dies, instead it all goes beneath your feet, beside you, part of you. Look there—grass on the side of the road, tree bending in the wind, fish in the river, fish on your plate, fish feeding you. Nothing is ever gone. Soon, when I change, I won’t be dead. I always memorized John 11:26—Whoever lives and believes in me shall never die—yet life rushed through and past me as it will for each person.

Before I believed everything they taught me, I thought when all were dead that all were gone, and so as a young fella I tried to find my place in this short life. I only wanted to decide for myself how I’d live it, but that was a big ask in a country that had a plan for me, already mapped in my veins since before I was born.

The one thing I thought I could control was my own head. It seemed the most sensible thing to do was to learn to read well. So in a country where we weren’t really allowed to be, I decided to be. To get water from the stones, you see?

After I met my beautiful wife—although beauty was the least of her, strong and fearless was the most of her—well, she taught me lots of things. Big thing, best thing she taught me was to learn to write the words too, taught me I wasn’t just a second-rate man raised on white flour and Christianity. It was my wife, Elsie, who bought me the first dictionary. I think she knew she was planting a seed, germinating something inside me when she did that. What a companion the dictionary is—there are stories in that book that’ll knock your boots off. To this day it remains my prized possession, and I wouldn’t trade it for all the tea in China.

The dictionary from Elsie is why I’m writing it down—it was my introduction to the idea of recording, written just like the Reverend once wrote the births and baptisms at the Mission, like the station manager wrote rations at the Station, and just like the ma’ams and masters wrote our good behavior at the Boys’ Home—a list of words any fool can look up and be told the meaning. A dictionary, even if this language isn’t mine alone, even if it’s something we grow into and then, living long enough, shrink away from. I am writing because the spirits are urging me to remember, and because the town needs to know that I remember, they need to know now more than ever before.

To begin—but there are too many beginnings for us Gondiwindi—that’s what we were bestowed and cursed with by the same shifty magic—an eternal Once upon a time. The story goes that the church brought time to us, and the church, if you let it, will take it away. I’m writing about the other time, though, deep time. This is a big, big story. The big stuff goes forever, time ropes and loops and is never straight, that’s the real story of time.

The problem now facing my own Once upon a time is that Doctor Shah from the High Street Surgery has recently given me a filthy bill of health—cancer of the pancreas—which is me done and dusted.

So, because they say it is urgent, because I’ve got the church time against me, I’m taking pen to paper to pass on everything that was ever remembered.

All the words I found on the wind.

Two

By the river is where Albert Gondiwindi had wandered up to Prosperous as a little boy, wonder face, bare skinned, from the canvas shelter of Tent Town to the tin of the Mission, along with his mother, and his little sister inside her. Albert would remember how they walked, or marched; there were police officers on horses to show them the way past the red river, stained by tea tree and other things. Many years later, on the day of his death, Albert wondered once again how it must have been for the old people out by Murrumby when it flowed—a time when the air was as clean as the time before the words clean and dirty had ever been imagined. The river would’ve been clear twenty feet down, and the earth hummed its own reverent tune, day in and day out until one day. How quickly things change, he thought. In his final hours, Albert sat looking the same way all the remaining Gondiwindi would soon gather and look. Ahead of him on the foldout table was the almost-finished dictionary, beyond the table all the world. He suddenly felt a great wind blow from the Murrumby and instinctively slapped his hand atop the pile, protecting the words. In the distance he could have sworn he saw a gang of brolgas flying, further afield a swarm of locusts, the sky change color; all while the papers flapped against his will. He closed his eyes, wondered if he was about to go elsewhere, and then, as if encouraged by the wind, urged by the ancestors, took his hand away, and arced looking to the heavens to see the pages swirl and blow and eventually disappear in the air.

She hung up the phone. Poppy Albert was dead. So far away from the place where boys learned to kill rabbits and girls learned to live with the grief. Far away where people were born guilty but couldn’t admit it. Where whole years vanished from her. Days spent working thankless jobs or burrowed under a blanket, shunning whole seasons. The decade had aged her like a coin, all the shine gone. In that place on the other side of the world, she woke before the phone rang. Made coffee and a tumbler of aspirin. It wasn’t only in the mornings that she, August, was trapped between two states—sleep and coming to, yet especially that morning, on the cusp of being younger and older. She was about to exit the infinite stretch of her twenties and had nothing to show.

At the answering of the phone and the breaking of the news, she felt something dark and three-dimensional fall out of her body, something as solid as a self. She’d become less suddenly. She knew she’d felt that exact same way before, though she didn’t feel tears coming the way they burn the face and blur the eyes. Her face instead was cold to the touch, her heart rate lowered, her eyes dry, and her arms, chicken-skinned and thin as kindling, began to start a fire. She took the newspaper from the mail tray, took the crate of wood and knelt in the corner of the common kitchen. She spread the newspaper out, smoothing the pages with the side of her fist and held the hatchet and the cypress in each hand. Printed in the newspaper was a small photograph of a rhino. Above the picture it read in big ink block letters: GONE FOREVER—BLACK RHINO EXTINCT. An animal zip! Gone!

She could taste what she imagined was rhino skin, a dry warm thickness, muscle and dirt. She hadn’t told anyone about everything she couldn’t bring herself to remember and not about the things she could taste and smell instead, things that one shouldn’t be able to taste and smell.

Once, with a stack of textbooks on her lap—and knowledge of August’s hunger—a friend of hers studying social work at night school, and having not known what it was to experience a terrible inheritance, asked her simply about her school life. August had gone along with the line of enquiry, told her how she only knew she was poor at lunchtime. Told her when she lived with her grandparents it was always good food, always leftovers from the night before. She’d been the only student to use the microwaves in the teachers’ lounge. Before that? Before that she tried not to tell her that the lunches her mother packed were humiliating, instead she said they were just kooky. Kooky? August wound an invisible turbine at her ear. Her friend had nodded, had understood and closed her eyes in accordance with her training—a serene indication to go on. August had closed her eyes too and briefly let herself remember.

One day a jam sandwich, cut crusts, next day something the kids would make fun of—a tin of Christmas ginger bread in July, Easter buns in October. Sometimes a bread roll smeared with something incomplete, like ketchup. And a few times I remember opening the lunchbox and there just being imitation play food, a little plastic lamb chop, plastic-cast apple with no stem. It was my mother’s sense of humor.

August hadn’t seen the humor when she was a girl, but she had laughed about it then. They both laughed until something broke in August, and she did cry, the last time—but she pretended they were laughter tears. Afterward they went to the pub. August didn’t tell her any more, not how she was baptized by the sun, and not that as far, far away as she went from her country, from her home, she still couldn’t remove the scent and taste of dirt and diesel and flesh and muddied water from that grey hemisphere of her mind. How the worst thing that could ever happen had already happened. Time’s up.

The rhino in the news reminded August that she’d never been to the zoo, never seen a rhino in real life—it might as well have been a dinosaur. The paper listed other recent extinctions. And just like that she thought, zip! Gone! Poppy: Albert Gondiwindi was extinct. No more Albert Gondiwindi roamed the earth, and no more black rhino either. With an armful of sticks she fed the iron stove, close enough to redden her face in the eager first flames. Poppy Albert used to say that the land needed to burn more, a wild and contained fire, a contradiction of nature. He was talking about a different land though, not the one August had known for over a decade—in the grasslands forever wet, foreign forests of elm, ash, sycamore, hazel, and in the white willows that dipped into quiet canals. Where smaller birds in secondary colors flocked together and fires never licked. Where the sky fit into the reflection of a stone well, full with rainwater. Where low morning clouds played sleight of hand, and day never quite arrived before night.

She knew that she had once known the beloved land where the sun slapped the barren earth with an open palm and knew too that she would return for the funeral. Go back full with shame for having left, catch the disappointment in their turned mouths, go back and try to find all the things that she couldn’t find so many thousands of kilometers away.

August found a replacement for her dishwashing shifts, packed the one bag she owned and, before boarding, switched off her phone forever. During the flight she watched the GPS on the headrest screen, the numbers rising and steadying, the plane skittering over the cartoon sea. At the other end, having reached a certain altitude, crossed the time lines, descended into new coordinates, she’d hoped it would be enough to erase the voyage. Erase the facts of the matter, erase the burial rites to be recited, erase all the erasures of them, and that fractured family they once were. Just as they’d been for a century: godless and government-housed and spread all over the place, and then August wondered if there was enough remembering to erase. During the flight she dreamed of Poppy Albert. He was featureless in the dream, but she knew it was him. They’d arrived in the middle of the conversation, she didn’t know how they’d arrived there—in the field—he was telling her that there was a lot to remembering the past, to having stories, to knowing your history, your childhood, but there is something to forgetting it too. At the beginning of the dream, but as if at the end of a long conversation, he’d taken her hand and said that There exists a sort of torture of memory if you let it come, if you invite the past to huddle beside you, comforting like a leech. He was telling her more—that a footprint in history has a thousand repercussions, that there are a thousand battles being fought every day because people couldn’t forget something that happened before they were born. There are few worse things than memory, yet few things better, he’d said. Be careful.

Three

yarran tree, spearwood tree, or hickory acacia—yarrany The dictionary is not just words—there are little stories in those pages too. After years with the second great book, I figured out the best way to read it. First time, I went in like reading the Bible, front to back. Aa words first—there you find Aaron, and him in the Book of Exodus, brother of Moses, founder of Jewish priesthood. Aardvark—that animal with a tube nose that eats the ants of Africa. There are abbreviations too, like AA, Alcoholics Anonymous—where people go to heal from the bottle. That punched me in the guts. My mummy, she said, “The Aborigine is a pity, my son.” She said everyone was always insulted by her no matter what she did, so she let herself do the most insulting thing she could think of—take the poison they brought with them and go to town.

You could keep reading the dictionary that way—front to back, straight as a dart—or you can get to aardvark and then skip to Africa, then skip to continent, then skip to nations, then skip to colonialism, then skip over to empire, then skip back to apartheid in the A section—that happened in South Africa. Another story.

When I was on the letter W in the Oxford English Dictionary, wiray would be in that section, it means “no.” Wiray wasn’t there though, but I thought I’d make it there. Wheat was there, but when I skipped ahead not our word for wheat—not yura. So I thought I’d make my own list of words. We don’t have a Z word in our alphabet, I reckon, so I thought I’d start backward, a nod to the backward whitefella world I grew up in, start at Y—yarrany. So that is the once upon a time for you. Say it—yarrany, it is our word for spearwood tree: and from it I once made a spear in order to kill a man.

Four

The plane stopped on the runway and August disembarked into the heat wall, thirty-seven degrees—bathwater temperature. She was born into this, but she wasn’t accustomed to it anymore. Here, she remembered, summer wasn’t a season, it was an Eternity. Inside the terminal she overdrew her account when hiring the Budget sedan and drove seven hours west of the coast, along the City Highway, the Hinterland Highway, and finally the Broken Highway to arrive on the outskirts of Massacre Plains. Broken Highway slices right through the sand-budding grain fields, seas of sheep newly shorn, and oak scrub that had begun to grow in abundance into the drier clay earth. The biggest difference between before and now was not only the wearier livestock and thirstier crops, the extraordinary heat that had settled inland, but also that the distinct point between weather and desperation was tipping.

Rough Road Ahead traffic signs cautioned August’s arrival in the Plains. She caught the first signs of visual heat that radiated from the split bitumen and the sparse foreboding landscape beyond the road. That far inland everything was browner, bone drier.

The town of Massacre Plains was home to roughly two thousand locals and their children and children’s children. Half a town of wives tended counters and half a town of husbands were suicidal with farm debt, and most sons and daughters, seduced by a living wage, signed up as army cadets. All navigated boredom until the annual race days. Some made do on unemployment benefits and some had jobs though few had careers.

Murrumby River divided the people in town. Epithets were procured off supermarket shelves: Chocolate Milk were the old Mission Gondiwindi north of town, south of town in Vegemite Valley was where the blackfellas in the government housing lived, pegged after the salty sandwich spread, dark as molasses. In the center of town was where the middle class lived, according to a census like theirs, and were dubbed the Minties: named after the white, sticky candy sold in individual paper wrappers. The Minties’s houses had doorbells and locked gates. Only in Vegemite Valley were the doors left wide open on the houses. Love and fighting traveled freely inside and out onto the streets. Through some doors pitiless diocesan priests used to visit, those entrances that led to broken homes, where shame-filled single mothers brought up silent boys who became angry later in life.

August didn’t know and hadn’t remembered everything dealt to the people of Vegemite Valley. Her memory had been good enough to bury the bad thoughts, although reliable enough that the good were sometimes suppressed too.

Out on the old Mission at Prosperous a copse of gum trees had remembered everything for two centuries. August didn’t know all that the trees had seen. She didn’t remember the whirly-whirlies throwing dust about the paddocks, those small harmless tornadoes, that as a child were an almost permanent fixture. Most farmhouses in Massacre Plains were on the grid and buzzed endlessly; others further out, like Southerly and Prosperous, would come alive with the spit and start of the generator. She remembered the constant chug of electricity. And she remembered—or wanted to remember—the cool of the river Murrumby. Poppy used to call the Murrumby River the Big Water, and it had once flowed through the country, from state to state, south to north. August’s memory of the river was faint since the water had ceased flowing since she was a girl, and not just because of the Dam Built but because of the Rain Gone. And some say because enough people cry water in this whole region, Murrumby thinks she’s not needed at all.

August stopped for supplies before the turn-off, wanted not to buy cigarettes but knew she would. The outside of the convenience store was wrapped in green netting, like an art installation, she thought. On the pavement, more green mesh was for sale; huge rolls leaned against each other, just as bundles of fabric do, or she imagined, people starboard on a sinking ship. Beside the bolts of green were crates of plastic rip-ties that she recognized as those that policemen used to carry on weekend nights.

She fumbled with the mesh hanging over the shop doors as she exited and came face-to-face with another customer, keys in hand, entering the store. He was an elderly man, and he stumbled back, startled, as August drew the screen aside.

“Sorry,” she offered, and put her hand out toward him, suspended in the air. He steadied himself without her help and studied her face briefly.

“Now, you must be a Gondiwindi girl,” he said, saccharine as butterscotch.

August gave a short nod, clutching the bag of groceries to her chest, dipping her chin into the crumple of foodstuffs.

“I know a Gondiwindi face when I see one.” He gave a small smile as if it were a compliment. “Pass on our condolences from the church.”

“I will. Thank you . . .” she hadn’t known what mark of respect to bestow upon someone she didn’t know; she settled with, “Sir, thanks sir.”

August turned before he grabbed at the air like an afterthought were floating away. “God bless,” he added. August got a distinctly awful feeling of pins and needles and could taste the smell of his acetone skin. She walked away without another word. Locals who didn’t pay her any attention carried bundles for their own shopfronts. A couple of men crouched at their utes by the gas pumps, fixing mesh cut-offs onto their engine vents. August took in the clear, blue sky—the locusts were yet to arrive.