‘You may not know this, but every goat in Australia is orientated by nautical terms.’
Walking past a ramshackle gate without fence, the old farmer, known as Noel, placed his boot up on a shin-high post and looked off into the flat of a long-stretching horizon, ‘clerical error I heard, way back in the seventeens or so. It came from one of those dictionarians who thought that the horns looked like a mast, so then the tail’s obviously got to be the stern, and I tell ya, if you ever find yourself under the starboard side of a Junee billy-goat you’ll get know what a wake turns out to be, that’s for sure.’
Spitting a punctuative globule of saliva and road dust to the ground, Noel nodded at his last sentence and began to walk up the dirt trail toward town.
It was a hot day, the ripples of heat caught and coiled in the air as the dead wind had trouble shifting the fragments of dirt that were scattered across the top soil of the freshly tilled field. In the distance a hunched figure was stooped over a large basket, her gigantic sun-hat obscuring over a third of her upper torso. In the still, and despite the distance, you could just hear the faint sounds of a rather blue song involving a gentleman and a selection of cactus.
With a polite cough Noel muttered that his wife, Agnes, was a lovely woman but had the vocabulary of a Mallee stump-jump and then quickly changed the subject-
-‘Yep, life out here on Trugala station is pretty dynamic, we’ve got a post office, a library, half a court-house, and even a liquor store, all bundled up in that little shack o’yer yonder. It used to be the chook house–still is in some ways I guess–but some fella from town said we had to become proper like or we’d fall into a higher tax bracket; so Berty made up a few signs and business then opened for itself.’
‘Funnily, a bloke from Google drove out a few years back, saying that the shed was breaking their algorithms or some such; he offered to buy the business for research but the mayor was out fishing and we couldn’t find a pen so it was easier just to be unhelpful.’
Crossing the road now, Noel pointed toward a pile of bricks and timber painted with the word “Station”
‘That’s the train station and local pub, then you got the cricket oval, and beyond that there’s barren farmland for as far as sanity can take a man; the pub’s alright, two beers on tap and an operating kitchen on the weekends.’
Making toward the amalgamation of open train platform and bar, Noel whipped his hand out toward an unlucky fly that had strayed close to the old farmer’s head and connected with a surprisingly solid clip, hurling the fly off into wherever distance decided to carry it. Smiling to himself, Noel nodded at any flies that were watching, just in case they were keen to try again.
‘The old barman before this one, Kayla I think her name was, she was a bitter sort. Hated customers she did: it used to be a tradition that the first drink was always on the house, but when she started wetting down the roof and charging for use of the ladder most ended up just paying. The new Bloke’s a darn sight better,’ Noel leaned in conspiratorially, ‘He even lets you know when a train’s coming, really helps when yer’ having a slash on the tracks and the attention is only on keeping yourself vertical.’
Waving to a squat man, who sat at the bar in the exact way that you’d assume he did most days, Noel rounded toward another fenceless gate and lent up against a plaque bearing the town map.
‘Some wonder the point of the map, but we’ve left some space in case we get a second road and people start getting confused. Plus, having a way-marker is proper like, well I think so anyway.’ Disappearing into himself for a moment the old farmer smiled and clapped some of the dirt from his long-faded shirt, ‘You get to do a fair bit thinking out here I guess; like, sometimes I wonder if people hundreds of years back had the same bothers that we all do now, and all those bookish types locked up in the city, archeologists and them folk, aren’t able to see beyond the picture that they’ve scribbled for themselves. What if all those primitive rituals were just things we used to do for a bit of a laugh, or as a nice way to round off the week, you know, like footy, or knitting, that kind of thing.’
Ambling back to the cattle grid that separated his property from the single road of Trugala station, Noel smiled at his wife and picked up a mug of tea that had been left to warm up again in the morning sun. Looking over at the confused face of his visitor, the farmer remembered that he had been asked for directions some twenty minutes ago.
‘Anyway, I’ve yakked on for long enough, you say you were looking for the way to Balendup? Well, you missed it mate, head back the way you came and if you see us again you’ve gone in a circle. Bring a shovel next time, you can help Agnes.’
J.McCray
2021
Sunday Short Stories 