No
one was really sure just how, but Albert and Sarah managed to
live an extremely contented and harmonious life together. Some people theorise
that this came about through Sarah beating down on Albert, with him just accepting
all her decisions and declarations out of fear of incurring her wrath if he
were to do otherwise, but I think there was more to it than this. From my
observations they were truly and mutually in love. Yes she was often impetuous
and prone to outbursts of anger, but she would always return once she’d cooled
off, apologise and concede ground that allowed them broker a compromise that
suited them both. And Albert allowed her these flurries of emotion because he
knew that in the end she would calm down and be able to approach the problem
rationally and with commonsense. Each was the central figure in the other’s
life. They drank of each other emotionally, spiritually and physically and yet
their thirst was never quenched.
In June the year after they were married,
two significant events occurred. The first: the birth of a son, Phillip. While
their love confounded everyone, the fast following of a child surprised no one.
The second event, while no less momentous, had a rather negating effect on the
jubilation caused by the first. War had broken out in Europe the year before,
and as a colony Australia had swiftly followed the emperor into battle. France
had fallen to the Germans, and Albert, along with Pat and Eamonn Moriarty, Josh
Craig, and Arthur Kelly, enlisted with the AIF to fulfil their duty and save
their motherlands from the Nazi scourge. All five of them were enlisted into the
9th Division and hurriedly packaged off into ships to undergoing
arms and combat training in Egypt. Pat, Josh and Arthur never returned.
Two
and a half years after signing up Albert returned. He would come to me, unable
to sleep; a silhouette against the blue-black sky, haunted by ghosts unknown. He
backed even further into his own mind. There were things he would not talk about;
things he would rather consign to the dustbin of his mind than to bring up.
Sarah offered an open dialogue, but never forced the issue, allowing him to instead
work through his demons at his own pace, at night, with me.
Some
nights he would stay for hours, standing, sitting, leaning against my naked
skin. Often he would fall asleep amongst the rocks and bracken that sheltered
my roots, waking to the soft padding of kangaroos heading down to the dam to
quench their thirst.
Many
of the stories he told do not bear repeating, and nothing would be gained from
me doing so in detail. It is perhaps suffice to say that Albert saw and went
through things that no person should ever have the indignity or misfortune to
go through. He survived shrapnel wounds and a bullet graze, but worse than
these the mental scars of bombs exploding in the darkness all around, not
knowing where the next one would land, where the next bullet would come from,
the slow and protracted deaths of his mates in the trenches alongside him, and
the constant gnawing thought that he could be the next one to go. He held his
brother-in-law in his arms as blood bubbled from the hole in his lung. Hell
populated his nightmares; ghosts of comrades stalked his dreams. If he didn’t
sleep he didn’t have to confront them and explain to them how he had managed to
survive and yet they had not.
In
public he and Eamonn would tell their stories of the siege of Tobruk, laughing at
the comedy of Lord Haw-Haw, who extolled the virtues of surrender on their longevity
and his derogatory dubbing of them as ‘Rats’, a tag which was immediately taken
on as a badge of honour. They played chicken against each other as the
Messerschmitt’s buzzed and fired on them with machine guns. They won the first
major battle of the war for the Allies at El Alamein. They adopted stories of
self-deprecating bravado as their truth, leaving their mythology unchallenged
for fear of either appearing cowardly or causing offense.
Eamonn managed to successfully hide
behind, or even find belief within, these tales and reacclimatise into everyday
life. Yes he suffered as any man would have suffered, but he managed to
disguise his pain from others, or else drown it with beer when things all
became a little too much for him. While Albert also tried to hide, his veneer
of triumph was much less convincing and people took to avoiding any reference- direct
or not- to the war while he was around, preferring instead to limit the scope
of their conversations strictly to farming, weather and the future.
But life continued, as it always does, in
its own intractable way, and as they say, time heals all wounds. The scars
would always bear testament to his pain, but through the slow and turbulent
cycles of bleeding, clotting, infection, inflammation, suppuration,
contraction, and remodelling Albert’s mind was gradually brought back from the
brink of madness. The busyness of running the farm, loving his wife and getting
to know his son diverted his focus from his memories and greatly aided his
recovery.
And while he kept visiting my lonely
vista across the dam, these visits became less frequent and less volatile.
Around others there would always be that invisible wall blocking off any
intrusion into his crippled psyche, but alone with me on the tender slope he
could let it all go free without fear of judgement or recrimination.
In time Albert managed to reinstate some
sort of routine back into his life. Scraping together his wages from the war
and taking out a loan from the bank, he first bought the diesel tractor he had
always wanted, and then bought the Craig’s farm when they left the valley out
of grief for their lost son.
He set to work tidying up his three
farms- slashing back the bracken, ploughing fertilizer and ash into the
topsoil, replacing fenceposts that had started to rot- until the farms were
restored to their past glory. And with the energy and distraction of this work,
his sleep, his relationships and his general demeanour improved. Life was
restored to something akin to what it had been like before the war.
Across this new decade, with its new and
exciting opportunities, the land sprang back to life at Albert’s touch. No
other farmer in the district was able to match the Spring’s produce- the
sweetness of the corn, the richness of the tobacco, the yield of the spuds.
Most contented themselves with one maybe two different crops with some sheep or
cattle to supplement their income if times got tough (and they were always
tough), however my father and brother would often have seven or eight crops,
plus sheep and cattle, growing simultaneously and still be able to harvest just
as much as anybody else. Nobody knew how they did it and it aggravated and awed
them in equal measure.
Dad and Albert’s success was such that
within just seven more years they had paid off the loan for the Craig’s farm,
re-mortgaged it and bought the farm abandoned by Bob Enfield all those years
before, which had since been run by a succession of English and Greek
immigrants. In addition to the original block next to the dam wall they now
owned the entire southern bank. Itinerant workers now had to be brought in from
town, some of whom were put up in the old houses of the Craig’s and Mr Enfield,
to help conduct the day-to-day activities that so much land demanded.
Unfortunately, while the addition of
workers lightened their daily workload, it also had the unforeseen effect of
reducing the efficiency of the yield. The overall size of the harvest was larger,
however when this was averaged out over the total area being used it was quite
a bit less than when Dad and Albert were doing all the work themselves. The
quality of the produce also slipped back towards the pack. It was as if the
extra hands diluted the magic in Albert’s fingers.
Even so, the profits kept on rolling in,
and the extra time the use of workers afforded them gave them more time to
spend with the family. Just as his father had done with him, Albert taught his
son the ins and outs of running the farm- matching crops to soils, the art of
fallow, improving the soil with fertilizer, ash and mulch, work in the shearing
shed, the cattle yards.
From the time Phillip was 7 or 8 he would
help his father mark the calves. He would help round the cows up into the
stockyards and man the gate as Albert tried to separate the cows from their
calves; chasing the stock around the larger yards in circles and yelling at
Phillip to either close the gate in the face of a cow or keep it open to allow
a calf to pass. As they moved the animals through the yards from the larger
pens to the smaller ones, they gradually sieved the calves from the cows until
they were left with a pen full of cows and a pen full of calves. By now father
and son would be covered either in a fine layer of brown dust or thick black
mud depending on the days weather. It was tough and dirty work, but theirs was
a real sense of achievement at morning tea when all the stock had been separated.
Phillip would spend the rest of the day making sure there was a constant supply
of calves to be fed into the race, keenly watching the measured movements of
his father and grandfather, and throwing lumps of wood for the cattle dogs to
fetch. Working as a team Albert and Dad split the tasks of earmarking, tagging,
injecting and neutering according to who was closer to what at that particular
time.
As the years went by Phillip gradually
took over more and more of the workload and responsibility from his
grandfather. Dad was getting on in years, and the tough physical work of the
stockyard was becoming a little much for his frame to handle. He also
recognised the day for what it was- an opportunity for father and son to work
together, to teach and learn and to develop the bonds that bind family
together. And so he would head out to the crops and attend to whatever odd jobs
needed doing with the pumps, pipes, plants and fences.
With the yards now the domain of father
and apprentice son, Phillip took charge of the injections syringes and passing
implements between the wooden railings to his father on top of the roles he had
always played. Before too long he was also getting into the race with the
calves, sliding his thin frame between the ribs of two poddy calves and pinning
them against the wooden railings so as they couldn’t move about as his father
rummaged around behind them with the Burdizzo’s.
It came to be a time of year that Phillip
looked forward to with excitement- of getting out into the paddocks on the cold
and wet winter’s mornings to chase cows and wrestle calves. Come evening they
would come splashing into the house, drenched to the bone, bruises disguised
beneath a layer of mud, only to be unceremoniously marched back outside at
knifepoint to take off their ruined clothes and wash at least some of that mud
off under the water tank before daring to set foot in Sarah’s house once more.
But once they had, a scalding hot shower and a rich mutton stew would be
awaiting them and all would be forgiven. On this day more than any other day of
the year a real kinship developed between father and son, and the day became
just as much about time spent together as about marking the calves.
But while everything was so perfect with
the family they had, try as they might Albert and Sarah were unable to have
another child. They could conceive without too much trouble, but a series of
miscarriages crippled Sarah emotionally. With each passing pregnancy the pain
of loss grew heavier, accumulating in weight until her mind could no longer
move beyond its innate inertia. She would stay inside for weeks; neither
visiting nor being visited. Her bed became her hideout. At night Albert would
rock her to sleep as she gently sobbed in his arms. Ghosts sat upon on both
their shoulders.
