Playing With Water (9 page)

Yesterday I found a dead boy. I walked to the Pines Shopping Centre and saw an old yellow car parked on the side of the road by the golf course. I looked in to see if the person was alright and saw he was sleeping. I thought, how sensible to have drawn over to the side of the road and taken a nap. I took his number, just in case. Then, on my way back, two hours later—by this time it was noon—I thought how strange it was that the man could still be sleeping with the noise of the traffic so loud. I looked in again and there he was, a young lad, in the driver’s seat, lying face down on the passenger’s seat. I thought I had better look closer, just to check his colour. I saw, as I walked around to the passenger’s seat, that he was very still and his face was suffused with
colour. I looked for signs of breathing on the back of the fawn chequered shirt and could see none. The radio was playing softly, his wetsuit was in the back, tapes stacked by the radio. It was very peaceful. Suddenly I thought he could be dead.

I ran to the golf clubhouse, cursing myself, wondering if I ought to first have tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But I felt too craven. God knows what I thought. Just a feeling of seriousness on a bright and gleaming day. There was a party of some kind in the clubhouse. Women in navy shorts and white tops were drawing out tickets, as if for a game, drinking brandy and Pimms and in full cry. I ran around asking for the manager or somebody else who worked there. Finally somebody said, ‘Irene is here’, and Irene came and gave me a phone and I dialled for the ambulance. I ran back to the car and another woman in navy shorts (who said she worked in a geriatric hospital) ran beside me, as she said she could resuscitate. But she looked and knew it was death.

The gum tree’s trunk was white against the green grass, cars whizzed by. The radio played softly. Together we waited for the ambulance. Two young men got out, boiling with life, their cheeks rosey, with pink lips, laughing, drawing on plastic gloves. ‘Yep, he’s gone,’ one said. They kept talking. I can understand why. How could they bear it otherwise?
The day bore down, the sun shone, the gum leaves moved in the wind, golfers strode across the road. It was as if a feather had fallen from a bird, it seemed to have so little significance to the world. Yet his mother had not been told, nor his father.

A station wagon drove past and stopped, and a boy called out the window, ‘We saw him there at eight o’clock last night, how is he?’ I said, ‘He’s dead.’

‘Old chap is he?’

‘No, he’s young.’ And they drove on, fishing rods poking out the back. The woman and I walked back towards the clubhouse. We parted and I walked home.

I can’t think why that boy died. He was about nineteen, parked there just as if he was tired. Nothing at all to give any idea of trouble or illness. He was clean-shaven, short-haired, fit, just a lad driving somewhere in his old yellow car. I wondered if he’d had epilepsy and suffocated with his face on the seat. It seemed so innocent and just halted somehow, alive and then pulled over, and dead. Many things have happened while I’ve been at the farm, but this is the strangest.

I keep thinking of the boy’s parents. All afternoon I thought of the moment the police went to their door. I hope to God he wasn’t married. They marry young here sometimes.

I saw the hare darting through the orchard two days ago. The white peacock is here, displaying to me like a pale fan of lace. Sometimes, when they sit on the post down at the orchard, I think they are a fall of white water rushing. The tail frothing down like a cascade. When they fly out of the mango tree in the morning, it surely is like an angel landing. I could have visions like Blake. You would know you had seen angels if you saw this bird in flight, streaming down like a hail of white stones from the sky.

I have been down in the avenue of native trees thinking over this dead boy. Blue wrens flit around. The hare bounded out again and ran through the orchard.

I wonder if anybody will find my bunch of flowers and note within them and let the parents know. They have avenues to walk down.

Another strange thing happened today as I walked back from the coast. Again, a car was parked by the creek near where the other car had been. I walked up to it gingerly, because no parked car will ever again seem benign, and from underneath it a duck walked out with a trail of eight ducklings in a line. They wobbled down to the creek and suddenly it seemed a wonderful thing. Life abundant. This enchanting family, innocently sheltering under the car. I wish I could speak to that boy’s mother.

This morning, at six, a bush turkey was stalking around the lawn, pecking. I took out some old pasta and threw it over the verandah railing. The peacocks came with the turkey, which seemed almost tame, and they ate together. This is unusual, I think, to have a wild bird come and eat. The bush turkey is a protected bird, although it is an Aboriginal food. There has been difficulty in the courts from the Indigenous tradition of hunting. I saw similar complexities in Tanzania and Uganda.

On the matter of bush tucker, there is a book here on its history called
The Edna’s Table Cookbook,
with recipes from the restaurant with that name in Sydney. At night I read it over and over.

Julie is here, spreading Nutririch 180, a black dust, on the orchard. She has a lawnmower she rides, with a cart full of this soil improver, which is new to me. It is made, she says, from coal. A bag of it hangs from the giant weeping fig,
Ficus benjamina,
in front of the house. As Julie was bailing the dust out of the cart she said, ‘There’s a tonne in here so if it falls on me, I won’t get up.’ The crown has fallen back from her straw hat and lolls like a tongue in the sun. She’s just blasted off down the drive to the trees near the gate. The geese came up from the dam and walked around hissing, hooting and snuffling as I sat typing here,
under the mango tree. They seemed satisfied and walked back down to the shed, waiting for Julie to feed them. Now there are five goose eggs on the nest. Last year a dog took four, but the remaining seven hatched. There were so many goslings Julie had to sell six for five dollars each. Peri hates to sell them, but there were too many.

There is a recipe for magpie goose salad in
Edna’s Table
which, if I could have my way, I would make here. But the truth is, it is not only bush turkeys that are protected. Peri’s law won’t let a goose be killed. They are a kind of pet.

Floods at home in the south. Two years ago I was staying here when I heard the same news. While I was blithely writing to friends saying the news on the radio was of floods at Wollongong, I had no idea, sitting here in the sun, how serious they were. Cars piled on top of each other, swept up by the water. Hundreds of millimetres of rain fell in three days. Wollongong was declared a disaster area. In one night, for those who, like me, still think this way, thirty inches fell. This year the floods are not so extreme. It is raining, though not as heavily. I left white tulips swaying, creamy white, almost pale green. I’m glad I took the hyacinths in to Daphne and did not
leave them for the rain. White hyacinths flowers are much more strongly scented than blue or pink. I learnt that this winter.

Crows are here with a great din. I throw small blocks of wood from the woodpile at them. They fly off when they see something picked up.

Julie is out in the vegetable garden planting dwarf French beans. She built a small shed there and put in the chooks to clean out the weeds. Now the earth is covered in newspaper, the chooks are gone and cabbage and beetroot seedlings are growing there. I cut some lemongrass to make tea and picked some curry leaves. I will dry some to take home. This crow is getting on my nerves. I threw a brush up and suddenly it flew off across the river. Peace.

I have just heard one of the reasons for the crow plague. Fish are being poisoned in rivers as sulfuric acid has been washed down in heavy rain from the canefields. At Tweed Heads, the pH of Cobaki Lake was over 3.5, which is as strong as vinegar or battery acid. Thousands of bream and whiting are lying on the shore while pelicans and crows feast.

I am having an enormous read. This morning I read some of
One Straw Revolution
by Masanobu Fukuoka: ‘Now there is no one in this village with enough time to write poetry.’ Fukuoka blames television: ‘This is what I mean when I say that agriculture has become poor and
weak spiritually; it is concerning itself only with material development.’

Lao Tzu, the Taoist sage, says that a whole and decent life can be lived in a small village. He also says that Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen, spent nine years living in a cave without bustling about. But who brought in the food?

‘Extravagance of desire is the fundamental cause which has led the world into its present predicament’, and ‘The life of small-scale may appear to be primitive, but living such a life, it becomes possible to contemplate the Great Way.’ This is defined as: ‘The path of spiritual awareness which involves attentiveness to and care for the ordinary activities of daily life.’

These are beautiful ideas. But I saw my parents struggle to rear four children, working seven days a week, thirteen hours a day, and they weren’t writing poetry between gathering eggs and washing them.

This farm is run on many of Fukuoka’s principles. As a result there are piles of big branches left from the new road-widening placed around trees in the orchard. These will rot. I love this philosopher’s method of growing cucumbers and pumpkins. Branches are laid around so, when the vines spread, the fruit is kept off the earth and doesn’t rot. He says to let tomatoes sprawl as they then put down roots where they touch the ground. Ease is always beguiling.

I am trying to discover how to grow cumin. This is now my favourite spice. When it is stale, it smells of armpits; but when it is fresh, it is wonderful and goes with almost anything. Grilled chicken thighs sprinkled with cumin, served with mashed potatoes and a chopped, not torn, lettuce salad covered in garlic mixed with fresh lime juice and oil is very good.

A blue wren darted around when I walked among the avenue of trees I planted years ago. I cut a big bunch of grevillea flowers to take to the roadside where I found the boy. I’ve been doing this every third day to pay respect and also in the hope that his parents might see it, find the note and contact me. I could tell them how peaceful he seemed—how the music played around him.

Julie is here in her gumboots, making a fence around a goose’s nest. The bush turkey is near her, striding about, picking grain the other poultry have left. It is now tame. I wish it had a mate. They are rare here—although once on a walk at Burleigh Heads, on a wild hillside, Peri and I saw a great mound of leaves. It was the nest of a bush turkey. It buries its eggs and lets them hatch in the heat that comes from rotting vegetation.

I have been collecting lemons and oranges that lie under the trees. Fruit fly breed in these so they must be put into plastic bags to dry out in the sun. The crows make holes in the oranges, sucking up the juice.

Standing beside Julie while she was making the fence, I asked her something I have wanted to know: ‘How do you rear a turkey?’ She said in exasperation, ‘What am I going to do with this gate when I’ve made it? How am I going to get it to swing?’ I didn’t have any ideas. Then Julie answered me: ‘The most important thing with baby turkeys is that they’re kept warm with a light above them when they are little. Also, that there’s always fresh food and water. They get raised on a medicated starter or turkey starter, if you can get it. Also, they must have medication in their water. Emtryl is its name. You get it from some vets.’

Julie knelt down beside me while I took notes. The sun shone down and the goose that owned the nest honked on and on at a rooster.

‘You need to keep the Emtryl up to the baby turkeys for about six months,’ Julie continued. ‘They’re susceptible to black-head disease and another problem I forget the name of. They get various problems and the Emtryl stops all of them.’

A wild duck waddled over to peck at the grain left on the ground. Its beak was curled upwards in a sweet way.
‘They know they’re all safe here, you see,’ Julie said, nodding her chin at the duck. Then she went on answering my question good-naturedly.

‘I put the chicks in a box under a light bulb for about six weeks. Depending on how big the box is, probably a forty-watt globe. I wouldn’t put a hundred-watt in. It is good to give the baby turkeys boiled mashed-up egg—that’s very good for them.’

‘While this is going on, where is their mother, Julie?’

‘Well, of course, this is if I am raising them. If the mother does it, she just does it. You lose about ninety per cent of the chicks to crows. And if it rains and they get wet, well you lose them. I mean, somebody might read this and say, “What is she talking about?” But every place is different. This is what we find here.’

While talking, Julie climbed onto an upturned bucket, wired the fence to a tree branch and then went off saying, ‘I need two more nails.’ I was left to watch the comings and goings. The wild duck, gobbling up the pellets I flung to it as it cringed and fluttered, strode off and returned. A pair of topknot pigeons came to eat too, and a wild water hen with its redtopped head stood on one leg waiting. A finch flew into the shed beside us, small enough to fly through the wire netting.

Julie returned and began banging old nails into a post to make a new safe perch for the poultry. This is because
the angry gander that guards the sitting goose is stopping all the other birds reaching their perches. We ended our talk about turkey-rearing and Julie gestured to a white peahen. ‘I’ve locked this one in this cage all weekend because its wings were hanging down, drooping. That’s often a sign they’re sickening. So I put her in with medicated water and I was wrong. See, she’s laid an egg. They droop their wings down when they’re going to lay. So I misread you, didn’t I, girl?’

I am more than usually glad that Julie is here today, as while she is the caretaker she doesn’t need to come every day when I am here to feed the poultry. But yesterday I spent half the day waving a bucket at the gander, trying to help four peacocks from a perch where they were bailed up, too afraid to come down. They sat swaying and calling in a plaintive desperate way. No sooner had I got the gander away, and the peacocks down, than one returned to the predicament. It reminded me of the way some of us return to situations we swear we hate.