The Yield
Inside the rental she could see the center of town nestled on the horizon. There, a lot of things had come to pass since she’d left. August had missed all the births, deaths, and marriages of nearly everyone. Enough time had turned to almost forget the town, though she’d kept a keen interest in the place that swallowed her sister up. She’d rung Nana and Poppy mostly once a month, checked the missing-persons database, and sent letters to her mother—bereft of replies. She read the online council bulletins that promised progress that never arrived—the fast train line that they managed without, the rural university that was almost built, the delayed library expansion. Even as August turned her back on the place, she still wanted it to own her. After some time, people seemed to get used to the sisters gone, and as much as August searched for the news of Jedda’s safe return, she’d hoped for a renewed plea for hers. Neither came.
From the convenience store she drove two kilometers down the ridge to the last turn-off, another two to Prosperous Farm. The rented sedan pulled up beside the twin tin letterboxes, disturbing a flock of pink-grey galahs. She noted that only the yellow box trees had grown higher and broader along the vast shoulder where the mobile library once threw up gravel. Their street had been too far out of town to be visited by the ice-cream truck, but twice a month the library bus arrived, with its shelves slanting up from the floor, its magazine racks secured with long strips of elastic. August peered through the peppermint trees, crawled the car past the roses that divided at the fork of the property where the entrance split into a dirt drive to Prosperous House which was set twenty meters back from the road, and the other divide, a hundred-meter-long concrete slope up to Southerly House. Southerly House was and had always been freshly painted and flanked by a small fruit grove. Beyond the entrance and the houses, a vast field, five hundred acres of ripe wheat, spread out to the brow of trees that always remembered, those gums that gathered at the river.
The Gondiwindi had lived at different points along the Murrumby for forever. And during the last century and a half—ten kilometers north of town at Prosperous, below the 300-meter-high rock of Kengal. At any spot on the property, whenever one of the Gondiwindi in the field took pause and looked north, they saw the ashen granite of Kengal unchanged in the changing sky.
To her right the converted church of Prosperous was ramshackle now. Only a small congregation would have fit where no more than thirty pews had once measured out the entire ground floor. Its single-story extensions had been built like splayed wooden puppet legs from the body of Prosperous. The dozen original scattering huts that dotted the property, where children once slept, were collapsed and worn to mounds of firewood.
Bottlebrush combs of red and orange hung defiant in the still, hot afternoon. Banksia blooms weighed down their branches, leaked sap into the kitchen garden below the veranda. The once-orderly rows of vegetables had turned rogue. Tomatoes sun-dried before picking. Willie wagtails quivered their feathers between the fatigued jasmine and weeping lilly pilly. Prosperous pine boards had been shocked and split in the heat and the paint shaved by time. Dust coated the windows, tiles slid from where they’d meant to be. Everything was yellow-green, sick with hot perfume. It was hard for her to see where Prosperous House began and the scrappy garden ended. August wandered the property, pausing only to listen more closely to the familiar soundtrack playing, encasing the world, in cicada friction and bird whip.
She looked out to the tin shed perched above the tractors in the heart of the field, five acres distant. Looked out to the roof of the sheep barn, the metal tops of the single-ton silos, the arms of the remaining trees that made a natural path to walk through. She knew that at a glance or in a stranger’s gaze, one wouldn’t notice everything here. Not the way she and her sister had known it once, not the secret hiding spots or the things to covet or eat if you knew where to search. Not all the bones of things she could still see. She scanned for Jedda. Jedda missing forever.
She gave the Prosperous grounds another lap and watched for snakes, for the shadow things appearing in the daylight, and having scoured the place, finally cooeed into the back veranda. A curled-up kelpie lifted its head from one of the paired cane chairs and howled a little in reply, then rested its nose into its paws as if it were work-shy. She bent and gave the dog an assuring pat between the ears. She took her bag from the car and back on the veranda, opened and let the flyscreen door slap behind her for the first time in over a decade. The screen hit the frame and continued to bounce as she dropped the keys on the wooden sideboard that was crude and dust stuck and overdue for stain. She pushed open the door to the big room, filled with cardboard boxes and tea chests, looked through the downstairs rooms and the bathroom. Outside the kelpie walked beside her past the empty workers’ annex. She peeked in the smaller garden shed, and, as she called out finally for Nana, meekly, she heard a voice bellow back, “Jedda?”
“It’s me, Nan, August.” She’d spotted her rounding the citrus trees, cradling a basket of pegs. “I’m sorry about Pop, Nana.”
August noticed her nana wince, and regretted offering the standard commiseration. Everything was quietened in both of their minds as Elsie instinctively pulled August toward her by her arms, like a hand-reeled catch, and kissed the ear. She placed her hand at her granddaughter’s cheek and looked at her as if to make certain she wasn’t the lost sibling. She ran her arthritic fingers into the creases of her collarbone, quickly down the length of her arms, before August pulled her body away from being measured. Elsie, like Prosperous, like August, looked different now too, aged, as if gone to seed.
August was reminded of when Jedda disappeared for too long, how the family had drawn inside, their sadness like a still life. But that, she’d known, was because she had only been a child and her nana and poppy had reason not to lose themselves to despair. Now, though, there were no little children around to be frightened of the great grief that possesses a person. But Elsie hadn’t reached hopelessness, the magnitude of her husband’s death had not yet bent her completely.
Instead, in those first days after Albert’s death, Elsie felt that he had still been there, napping in another room of the house, working in the garden, or cycling out on the road to keep his knees from aging. Elsie’s thoughts zeroed in on her granddaughter—it had been such a long time since she’d seen her. She found it difficult to look at August and to not look at her, because Elsie could see how sick she’d made herself, how she’d kept herself in a boy-child’s body all this time.
Elsie gestured for August to follow her into Prosperous and August took her outstretched hand as they walked inside. Inside, her Nana rested the peg basket on the dining table and sat on the day bed. She looked confused, but was lucid, when August stood closer to her.
“Cuppa, Nan?”
Elsie nodded and steadied herself upright, leading August and leaning on her by the waist, thumbing at her wet eyes. August didn’t know if it was disappointment or sorrow she was feeling, and Elsie wasn’t sure either.
“Milk and sugar?”
Together they prepared the tea. Elsie moved easily around the kitchen, her trouble was beyond the wrist, not the rest. August watched her Nana take the cooking pot and place it on the counter and then waited almost fearfully as she stared into it for a beat or two. “Can I help, Nana?”
“You may.” She said after that uncertain pause where she’d been thinking of meat and two veg for dinner, “Get me the beans from the fridge, and you fix the potatoes.”
The beans were passed along with a paring knife and, in the cupboard under the sink, potatoes were found where they’d always been. Elsie took a straight-backed chair into the kitchen, sat and topped the heads off string beans, and from a distance she tried to hold August with a silent gaze, pursed her lips at what she’d become, willing her to speak. And why should Elsie speak? After all, she thought, she’d been here waiting during all the years August was too young to run away and then during all the years she was old and capable enough to visit but didn’t. Elsie thought again that August’s lack of appetite had spoiled her once-beauty, and August, having sensed herself scrutinized, turned her body away from her nana and looked out the back door where the dog snoozed.
“What’s the kelpie’s name?”
“Spike. Your pop bought her for me last month. She’s a good old girl.”
August felt anxious to ask things, but didn’t want to intrude right away. After some time she couldn’t help it.
“Is Mum coming?”
“Reckons she’ll get day release, but don’t count your eggs.”
“Is she okay?”
“Not since forever, girl.”
“Will everyone come here? For the funeral and stuff?”
“Yes, love. Get the butter ready.”
August opened the fridge and took the butter to the sink and returned to peeling the potatoes.
Elsie sighed aloud. “City folk are taking the house, Augie.”
“What’s that?” she asked, not sure she’d heard her properly.
“Council reckons there’s nothing to do about it. We said no but town hall meeting few months ago said there isn’t one way around it.” She lifted herself from the chair and walked back to the day bed, exhausted with all the surfacing sad things. “It’s not our land they say, not even this little house. It’s Crown or something. Use the sage from the garden, dear.”
August came back into the kitchen with a fistful of herbs. “How?”
“I don’t know, August. They just told us to wait and see—” Elsie corrected herself, “what they told me.”
“I’ll stay with you if you like? Should I stay, Nana?”
“Don’t ask silly questions,” she said as her eyes dropped closed, topping the head off the conversation.
August took her pack and groceries into the attic bedroom. Now an office. Albert’s papers and books were spread out on the glass top of a wicker desk. His chessboard sat without rank, a dish beside was filled with the wooden pieces. August remembered him teaching her, scolding her if she touched a piece and changed her mind. “Uh-uh—you’ve touched it, you’ve got to move it.” Over the desk there was a missing shard from the stained-glass window, a petal from the Lutheran rose. It was a small window, the length of an arm. For a second August wondered what God would think of her now. What Poppy would think of her up or down there with God? Quickly she knew they were questions without answers, they were roads without destinations. Religion had left her and that house a long time ago. August thought about how people would descend on the house soon, how everyone she knew before would be there. She took in the room. She thought to herself—I know this place, but it had bunk beds before; it was we back then. In her mind ten-year-old Jedda is backlit, running from the attic room, down the stairs, leaping off the veranda and through the fields before the cutting. The tractors approached November as if the year were a song, harvest the chorus. Afterward those sisters would run through the field again, the wheat cut to fine stumps, the boar-haired field of their childhood.
Five
Yellow-tailed black cockatoo—bilirr Bil-irr is rolled at the end, the most musical part of any word is the “rr”—I can’t think of any words in Australia like that, but if I was in Scotland then I could, they don’t speak with flat tongues there. Bilirr—it’s a trilled sound with the tongue vibrating close to the teeth. The bilirr is a magnificent bird, strong, eagle-wise. Black as a fire pit, the yellow feathers in the tail visible in flight. I saw the yellow-tailed black cockatoo all my life. All the Gondiwindi loved bilirr. Before Prosperous Farm, my mummy was living in Tent Town four miles downstream, where she birthed me there on the flat warm sand, below the caw of bilirr.
After Tent Town was flattened and the Mission turned into the Station, and me and all the other kids were taken away, I remember walking out onto the landing of the Boys’ Home, standing under the sign that used to hang outside—Think White. Act White. Be White. I was looking at the blue sky and down again. When I looked down into the valley, I saw a woman walk toward me, and she walked right through the stock wire fencing that ringed the entire home.
I walked down on the grass to her and said, “Good day.”
The spirit woman was empty-handed and showed me her hands, she looked like my mummy a little, and she said, “Wanga-dyung.”
“What’s that mean?”
She said, “It means lost, but not lost always.”
I said okay, and she told me to practice it. I recorded it in my mind as my first-ever time travel because the sky, when I turned back to enter the home not ten paces, was grey and hung low. The woman was gone, just a bilirr remained on the fence. I knew it could have never been cloudless just a few seconds before, and at that moment I realized I’d gone, not the world.
yet, if, then, when, at the time—yandu The first time I heard yandu, it was run on with a jumble of others, it was like spotting the meat in a soup of words, and lifting it out to look at it. My ancestors were coming to the Boys’ Home every day by then. A mob of them, old and young too, even little kids would arrive by the outhouse, any place—by my pillow when it was time for bed or even when it was time to make the bed in the morning. They’d look at me and wave, call me out to the river. The river would just appear wherever we were. Then we’d walk about and talk about this and that, and those ancestors were speaking English to me as well, so they could translate everything too. In the night there’d be a fire made, sometimes corroboree, and a big feed of kangaroo tail cooked on the hot coals or eels from the river cooked on the hot coals too. So it was around the campfire that I learned that word yandu—everyone was telling stories about this animal and that animal and this fella over here and that woman there, there were plenty of jokes and lots of laughter. My great-great-great-grandfather was there, and he’d do lots of the talking. I started to hear the music of the sentences, the pause, the d sounds bumping in his mouth. Most of the time around the fire with everyone else there I couldn’t get a word in edgeways, but when I did, when I could find that word yandu, I waited for the first pause in his storytelling, and when it came I said, “Yandu,” and he said, “When what?” “Yandu,” I said again, wanting him to tell me the meaning—and he just put his arm around me, laughing and patting me. He said, “Yandu, son, is the glue of your stories.” I remember that.
yield, bend the feet, tread, as in walking, also long, tall—baayanha Yield itself is a funny word—yield in English is the reaping, the things that man can take from the land, the thing he’s waited for and gets to claim. A wheat yield. In my language it’s the things you give to, the movement, the space between things. It’s also the action made by Baiame, because sorrow, old age, and pain bend and yield. The bodies of the ones that had passed were buried with every joint bent, even if the bones had to be broken. I think it was a bend in humiliation, just like we bend at our knees and bow our heads. Bend, yield—baayanha.
younger sister—minhi I went mustering when the droughts hit again and again and the skeleton weed took two years of crops and there was no work on any station for us. I loved mustering, being high there in the saddle, wearing the ten-gallon Stetson, relying on my stockhorse, leading the herd to water. They were fine years and I made friends for the first time in my life. There was so much I wanted to be talking about with people. I asked a roving man from our neck of the woods about his family, how his family were my relatives. He turned away threading the stirrups against his horse, sick and tired of my chitchat. I learnt that a lot of men on the farm and out in the bush like to focus on an animal or an engine to hide their faces before they tell their truths. “The family trees of people like us are just bushes now, aren’t they?” he said. “Someone has been trimming them good.” I wouldn’t ever forget these words because they sounded like sad poems. And I guess that’s a true thing, because all the years I’ve lived I’ve lost so many parts of the people that make me up. My mummy, my daddy, my cousins, and my younger sister, my minhi. When I was little and in the Boys’ Home, I never forgot our people on the river. It seemed every night the moon came to the dormitory window to remind me of my family. I’d think of my minhi across the country in the Girls’ Home, and my urine would run like quicksilver over the hessian cots, onto the stone floors to wake my schoolmates. I was just three years old after all. I never forgot her. She was just a baby, Mary was, when we were both taken away. That’s a sad story with a happy ending because we found each other again. She is different from me, we don’t hug each other and be affectionate like I’d want to be. But we got to be brother and sister again, which is special. I got to be the older brother again, and she got to be my minhi.
Six
August and Elsie couldn’t bring themselves to eat in the end, and Elsie, avoiding her marriage bed another night, had fallen asleep on the couch. August walked into the field and could see that the windows of the workers’ annex were darkened. She thought about Saturday when they’d gather together, imagined the lights on again. After Jedda disappeared, no workers came and stayed and the annex doors had been closed since, lights dimmed. Elsie and Albert had also let the preaching and karate room in the front of the house turn quiet. All the photos of Jedda were taken down and wrapped in muslin and put away. And just like that the home became just a house; they never really talked about Jedda Gondiwindi again. In the beginning people had shaken their heads in the street, and mothers wept, and at afternoon tea the few people that came by wondered aloud how something so bad could happen. How puzzling it was—that she could disappear without a trace. There were murmurs and tears, but no one had answers. After that, childhood wasn’t so carefree; it was risky. Kids got picked up from school, parent volunteers crossed names off lists and manned the bus stops, few were allowed to walk home alone, and playing on the street was mostly forbidden. In spring no one sold purple bunches of Paterson’s curse to tourists by the side of the road. Though, the thing about a small town in a place like Massacre Plains is they love their own. Or if they don’t love them, they at best stick by them; defend them against the outside world of troublemaking out-of-towners, tourists, big money. But the Gondiwindi weren’t their own. They never double-checked if they saw a Gondiwindi walking home alone. The newsreader said Jedda’s name and flashed the school portrait on the screen only twice over a pressure-cooked week, and Jedda, like the kids who went missing, the brown-skinned children like her, became a mystery manufactured to forget about.
But the Gondiwindi (and the Coes, Gibsons, Grants, and every other family like them) couldn’t forget. Almost every woman’s hair in the family then took a journey into silver and, by the next year, all August’s aunts looked old and grey on the tops of their heads. All the religion and the festivity of a full house became mute rooms, faded to white noise. That noise of the mind where all the questions restaged and all suspicion rehearsed. Over the once-comatose valley of town, their minds rattled with every combination. August, just nine years old—her heart stretched like bubblegum string until it snapped. And it stayed snapped.
Once August had run away from Massacre Plains and made something resembling a life, when someone would ask her if she had siblings, she’d tell them she had a sister but never said she was missing. August would furnish a space in the universe where she imagined she could have been; at twenty Jedda was at a faraway university, at thirty she was expecting her first child in the city. Or sometimes she’d just say she was dead. Life or death have finality, limbo doesn’t; no one wants to hear about someone lost. Someone that just went and disappeared altogether.
In the field now her skin prickled, that big organ remembering everything that happened before. She thought about what her nana mentioned—of losing the house, of all the Gondiwindi leaving here forever, and even though the bad memories were beginning to seep back into her skin, it still didn’t seem right to her to be forced off that place. Not, she thought, if they go all the way back to the banks of the river and further, like her poppy had always said. The air changed, a breeze pulled at the trees and August looked up from that dark field where stars were hidden. The possibility of rain was a simple smell, a good taste. She slipped off her shoes and within seconds the dirt that stretched out around her was covered in fresh scars from the sudden, heavy rain. It was a single burst. A thermal updraft but not enough to break the hard topsoil. August thought about what her poppy used to say, that rainfall after a dry spell is the perfect condition for good wheat yields and also, the perfect condition for locust outbreaks. Simply put, he’d say, sometimes there isn’t a silver lining at all.
In the walls of her former bedroom she smoked out the louvre window, fingering the packet of cigarettes. Her mouth ached for something more, wanted some unknown balm, not a kiss, or a meal, or a drink, but something long denied. Since she was a girl the ache had scratched further inside her, for something complete to rest at her tongue, her throat. The feeling that nothing was ever properly said, that she’d existed in a foreign land of herself. How she saw home through the eyes of everyone else but her. The feeling had begun before Jedda vanished. She stubbed the cigarette out, looked at the block of telly rehomed in the corner of the room. On the same telly, that was once downstairs, the newsreader had initially encouraged people to search their properties, dams, silos, and abandoned wells. Some people searched with dogs. August had wandered down to the flats of the Poisoned Waterhole Creek and ate roots and tubers for the first weeks without a sister. She’d taken slices of stringybark gum and let the paper melt on her tongue. Sucked at the bulrush reeds. She’d been compelled to eat the earth, become immune to it so it didn’t hurt, eat up the whole place where Jedda was lost. Forever? If she could eat the entire earth, be of the earth, she thought she too wouldn’t disappear that way. A month later when Jedda was still missing, Albert baptized August himself in the field under the hot cracked sun while she cried. Everyone was gathered and talking about the sanctity of childhood, the kids they kept saying, and then her poppy poured water over her head and recited the absolution of the dead:
“Suffer the little children to come unto me, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. For unto Thee are due all glory, honor, and worship, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.”
He told August that it was to protect her, and she, feeling all the weight of blood rushing to her head in his hands, saw the world as she always felt it was—turned, upside down.
Seven
war—nadhadirrambanhi There was a big one here, that’s how the town got its name in the end. The war lasted one hundred years. Everyone was fighting that war, even the Ghan cameleers and train-track fettlers were there and fighting alongside the Gondiwindi. It all started when the Gondiwindi were sick of the settlers taking over their land, digging up their tubers, ruining the grazing work they’d done forever. The Gondiwindi were farmers see, farmers and fishermen, and they cultivated the land here long before, they stayed even through the rare winters. They’d keep warm by turning their possum-skin cloaks inside out and rubbing the fat of the pelican on their skin.