Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (Picador 40th) (4 page)

— 5 —

THE HONEY CAR

W
e have stopped for a few days' rest at a siding near Dimboola. The animals are released into paddocks alongside the railway line and we are driven into town to buy supplies. The mayor and his wife take some of the train's senior men and all three of its women on a tour of the town hall and a new cricket ground. I picnic with Mary at Woraigworm Station and we look for Mallee fowl, a strange scientific bird that builds a nest like an oven and bakes its precious eggs into life. The people of Dimboola bring us their produce: bags of flour, a watermelon large enough to sit on, some beehives ripe for extraction.

I write up my notes and sort through my samples and supplies. I have twenty-one half-finished turn-back collars. One for each town we have visited. I am walking alongside the train, checking to see if Folly is getting her fair share of the pasture, when a window slides up and Robert Pettergree calls down to me from the honey car.

‘Come up here,' he says. ‘The apiarists are at the pub and these hives need doing before they candy.'

He hoists me up into the car by the plump of my arm. It is hot and dark inside – the shutters are drawn to calm the bees. He places a knife in my hand; its bone handle radiates heat.

‘Here,' he says, ‘like this.'

He hands me a wooden frame strung with a fine gauge wire mesh. Each tiny square is filled with waxy honey. I sluice the wire with the hot knife. The wax melts. Honey drips slowly, brightly, through the mesh into the tub of the extractor. It is so hot in the honey car. I plunge the knife into a jug of boiling water to clean it. The stove at the end of the car crackles, a kettle steaming on top of it.

‘Here,' he says. ‘Here.' He is moving quickly, going outside opening hive boxes, removing frames, bringing them to me. Each frame brings a few bees with it. Slow, sad bees stuck amongst the honey and the wax. Slow bees crushed between the frames. Slow bees in my hair and on my wrists.

I am sweating. Sweat slides from my face and throat and mixes with the honey. There is honey on my cheeks, my fingers, my dress, on the toes of my shoes.

He tends the fire and refills the knife-jug with boiling water. His part of the job is done. He doesn't thank me. He doesn't offer to help. He just stands and watches as I sluice the last of the frames.

‘I did a bit of bee work with my uncle. In the old country.'

I nod. My arms ache with the weight of the frames.

‘It's hot in here.'

I nod again. Then he takes off his shirt, pulling it over his head, the buttons still done up. It is so tender a thing to see – his face hidden in the cotton like a boy.

I watch him as he takes a cup of water, drinks, and splashes it onto his head and chest. Then he is behind me, sprinkling water over me, flicking it through his fingers. I lean back towards him. He paints me with water, his thick finger dipping into the cup then tracing my forehead and the curve of my jaw.

There is a sense of everything crumbling and swirling.

‘Go on,' he says. ‘You're not finished.'

So I stand with him behind me and drag the knife over the last frame again. But I am weak with it. Honey is splashing and dripping, missing the extractor. He is wetting my arms, pushing his fingers up under my sleeves, wetting my skin, pushing higher, searching out the join between arm and body.

What happens next? I can hardly say . . . but the knife and the frame are gone and I am taking off my dress, arms reaching over my head like him, and letting it fall to the floor of the car into the water and honey.

Then there is this moment – one still moment – when he watches me but does not move and I could almost have felt foolish, but for the drowsy effect of the heat. So I busy my hands with undressing, shoes, stockings, slip, and go to him with my head bowed.

Then he is touching me. From my fingers up to my shoulders, down my legs and up again, across my breasts, licking the fine hairs that snake down my belly, stopping to part my sex with his tongue.

His clothes are with mine on the floor and then we are on top of them. He is biting my mouth, dragging and sucking my lips, folding them in his. His tongue is strong and urgent. He grips my breasts hard in his hands, the flesh spilling between his fingers. He is drawing out my nipples in his mouth, then letting them fall, stunned. He is grinding his penis into the flesh of my belly. Hard flesh into soft. He is working at me, pushing at me, his toenails scraping at my calves. It hurts, it is almost pain. He is moaning and keening and straining and then shuddering and suddenly still.

His chest feels hard and sharp so I push his shoulder and he moves to the side. There is the sound of skin unsticking.

Then I lie there with him, alight and dripping, until I can take myself away and make it right alone.

Because of the train we are coming together at a gallop. It's different for people who meet on open ground: in a house, on the street, in town. They have the chance to skirt around, to evade, to see each other from different angles, to turn a corner and claim more time. When I conspire to meet Robert Pettergree on the Better Farming Train, we must walk towards each other down the aisle. If the train is moving we walk with a wide-legged gait for added balance so it looks like we are wading towards each other, a thick sea pulling about our legs.

We meet in the soil and cropping wagon where he tends his miniature fields. It is not gardening, it is clearly science. He weighs and measures each additive – water, nitrogenous fertiliser, phosphate, potassic fertiliser – and applies them gravely. We sit together on the narrow bench between the rows of wheat while he records his observations in his notebook. The glass louvers on the sides of the wagon are open and it is often windy and noisy. Even when the train is not moving the wind will push the wheat, teasing it, until it sways forward in a pulse. The sun beats through the glass roof so it is almost like sitting in a real paddock, except that we are moving and there is a large sign above our heads:
Super Phosphate is the Manure of Birds from Pacific Ocean Islands.

I measure the wheat. He grows the very best of varieties:
Ghurka, Currawa
and
Baldmin
are smooth and golden bronze. The strong bearded heads of the
Nabawa
brush my face as I lean to reach its roots. There are native grasses too, clearly poorer in comparison. Wallaby grass,
Amphibromus nervosus
– and it looks nervous indeed, thin stems all elbowed and bent about. Its heads are tiny silky spikelets, they disintegrate between my fingers leaving traces of skeleton filigree in the air. It would take a day to collect a thimbleful and then a farmer's boot would surely crush it dead. Robert feeds it no additives; he says it just grows, endlessly, everywhere, wallabies spreading the seeds. I imagine they carry it caught in their fur, shaking it off as they bounce, or perhaps grooming it out of each other like monkeys.

Robert explains scientific replication to me. ‘These plots are like a bathtub, Jean, and there's a great ocean out there, just look at it, stretching for miles. Everything I do in here, small-scale, I could do out there. Imagine the poor soil of the Mallee chemically fertilised to produce at its utmost capacity. Imagine wagonloads of super phosphate being transformed into a trainload of wheat. Imagine, Jean, the harsh backblocks of the Mallee becoming the breadbasket of the nation. What greater challenge could a man have?'

The word bread hovers. I wish I'd spent more time watching Mary. I've never been good at baking.

Robert picks a wheat head and dissects it with his scalpel. It is fleshy and tightly packed. I'm surprised at the moistness of it and the strong smell of earth.

It seems to me Robert is a transformer in the same way that Mary is, and that it really is a question of scale. Mary takes the flesh of an animal, or grain from the ground, something raw and unappealing, and makes it into an attractive and flavoursome meal. Robert can turn super phosphate into wheat. Robert's achievements are credited because they are so visible. We gawp at his plants day after day while Mary's apple pie is consumed in minutes.

Mary is hungry for information about Robert's background, but I have little to share. We meet, tend the plants and he talks about science. Often he doesn't address the talk at me but at the rows of wheat around us. It is hard to keep Mary's interest.

‘We touched. Just a little . . .'

‘Did he kiss you, Jeanie? Tell. Tell me everything.'

‘No, it was just the train. You know, we just sort of crashed into one another.'

Mary smiles. ‘I bet he did it on purpose.'

I'm perplexed. ‘But he said sorry.'

I can tell that Mary doesn't wholly approve. That she considers Robert odd – a boffin, a cold fish. He certainly hasn't used any of the standard techniques of wooing and seduction. We have barely touched at all since the honey car. When the train does throw us together, accidentally, he could steady me, but instead he reaches for the roof of the carriage and I'm left flailing, embarrassed by my outstretched arms.

We spend three days at Jeparit. The train has been skirting the edge of the Mallee but now we are truly within it. The sky seems suddenly to widen and deepen. The country appears uninhabited until we reach the station where every farmer in the district, every child at the local school, every shopkeeper and every day labourer, is waiting for us. The women have swarmed into the cookery car. They wear their best clothes and Sister Crock is quite overcome with the smell of mothballs. Nothing is white in Jeparit. The water is hard and rusty and they wear its colour – streaky orange. The wheat too suffers from rust. The farmers seek out Robert urgently. They bring bouquets of diseased wheat for him to examine. I have no doubt that he can help them.

Sorry.
He sent me a message, via a stock hand, as I helped Mary to clean her pots; she'd burnt the jam, again.
Sorry, Jean, can I see you tonight?

Even after dark the soil and cropping wagon is full. Anxious farmers file through by lamplight stopping to exclaim at the
Nabawa
and insist some magic has been worked on it. So we meet, for once, on open ground. Robert holds the fencing wires apart for me and we walk into a paddock next to the train. We walk side by side and I notice the solid set of his neck, the breadth of him.

The paddock is empty except for a few dried-up thistles. We walk to the middle and stop. The train glows behind us. Robert takes a slim parcel from his coat.

‘You might like to read this, Jean.'

His hands guide mine to the page, where I can just make out his name and the title of the article.
Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living
.
By Robert L. Pettergree, Department of Agriculture.

‘I've been working on it for some time. I think it makes clear how things could be. What I – ' he stumbles – ‘what
we
. . . could do.'

I turn the journal over in my hands and flick through the neat typewritten pages.

‘There is something else too. I sent away for it.'

He pulls a tiny box covered in dark velvet from his pocket then he quickly takes my shoulders and turns me around.

‘Shut your eyes.'

I can feel the heat of him through my dress. His arms are firm around me and I have a sudden giddy recollection of playing cricket in the orchard with my father. I stood under the strong ledge of his body, our hands laced together around the bat. He smelt of orange peel.

Robert fumbles with the box and reaches for my hand.

‘I'm not sure which finger you wear it on.'

The metal is cool. I blink with surprise at the gift on my finger. It is a silver thimble. A perfect silver cap finely etched with a pattern of small wheat heads and notched on the top to push off or receive a needle. A thimble is a practical and appropriate gift for a woman – for a sewing instructress – and I know I will keep it forever.

The real gift was some papers inside the agricultural journal. I found them later, as I was meant to. Mortgage papers and a map of a farm at Wycheproof in Robert's hand. The paddocks were neatly drawn with the fences marked in green pencil. The farm was oddly shaped, as one of its long boundaries is a river. He had drawn only one bank of the river with its many twists and bends, but not the other. I guess it would be wide, perhaps with an island in the channel for ducks and swans.

The paddocks were all named, after people or purpose. Gurney's, Dump, Horse, Smith's, Timber, Wether's, Melville's, Back, Dam and House. The house paddock is smallish and square but there is no indication of an actual house. I'd looked at the map for some time before I noticed something else in the house paddock: the letter
J.
It was quite faint and looked to have been written recently, almost as an afterthought.

Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living

By Robert L. Pettergree, Agrostologist

1. CONTRIBUTE TO SOCIETY FOR THE ACHIEVEMENT OF MUTUAL BENEFITS.
   
2. THE ONLY TRUE FOUNDATION IS A FACT.
   
3. KEEP UP-TO-DATE.
   
4. AVOID MAWKISH CONSIDERATION OF HISTORY AND RELIGION.
   
5. KEEP THE MIND FLEXIBLE THROUGH THE DEVELOPMENT AND TESTING OF NEW HYPOTHESES.
   
6. CULTIVATE THE COMPANY OF WISER MEN – MEN WHO ARE STICKERS – NOT SHIRKERS.
   
7. DISSEMINATE. THE LABOURS AND ACHIEVEMENTS OF MEN OF SCIENCE MUST BECOME THE PERMANENT POSSESSION OF MANY.
   
8. BRING SCIENCE INTO THE HOME.