|
Hay: recollection 1
When we were small the haystack was at the far end of our world. This was the route: out the back door, the spring-shut flywire door banging behind; past the ferns and the little kitchen garden on the left and the step up to the laundry door on the right; jump across the open brick drain; don't go through the long dark shinyleaf forest to the toilet; past the woodshed stacked with firebox wedges and open fire logs and tarantulas; past the slatted fernhouse and the little dairy sometimes open so we could scoop handfuls of dog pellets from the hessian bags, sometimes tied shut; keep wide of the thorny roses and sticky blue plumbago. Then a choice: straight to the top of the dogs’ yard through the narrow pass in the trees, or continue down the path past the woodheap and the clothes line and the ivy-covered well that we weren’t supposed to clamber over and the cottage where the Cirillos squeezed as many of them as there were of us into a quarter of the space. Then out into the dogs' yard through the gate or over the fence, depending on whether or not it was a race.
The dogs lived on long chains under the old pines when they weren’t working. They shared their yard with tractors and mowers and diesel and petrol pumps and broken trailers and other junk. The track from the main road passed through it to the woolshed; sheep were penned there, bleating like a carnival, before shearing or crutching. The woolshed marked the bottom of the yard, with its yawning door and sheepshit fug and dangerous dipping pool. Between it and the haystack, the old dairy lay in a ruin of concrete and rocks and twisted old bits of fence, so thickly strewn with treacherous debris and grown with thistles and attractive to snakes that we rarely explored it. Beyond that was the haystack, then open paddocks flanking the gully that was slowly turning to salt.
In late winter when all the hay had been fed out the haystack was skeletal: ten uprights of straight tree trunks a couple of stories high crowned with a corrugated iron roof the size of a tennis court. In late spring, after the hay was baled, a flatbed truck with a conveyor belt hitched to it would crawl around the paddocks. Men would grab the brick-shaped bales of hay by their two strings and throw them onto the pick up of the conveyor belt. At the top, on the truck, more men would catch the bales as they fell off the conveyor and arrange them lego-like into a stack. When the stack grew precarious the truck would be driven slowly to the haystack and the whole operation would go into reverse. The bales would be thrown off and become building blocks for the haystack proper within the perimeter marked by the roof and the uprights. The men would yell at each other, their voices echoing under the tin roof. At the end of the day they’d sit in the shade on couches they'd made from bales and drink from long cold brown bottles of beer. For days, or weeks, the truck and conveyor and men would crawl around the farm sucking up bales until the paddocks had become clear green expanses of lawn and the hayshed was full.
Once built, the haystack was ours. We had tunnels from the bottom to top, around and up, crazy steps in a giant’s mansion, and chambers with seats and windows to the outside world. It was our fort, our castle, with towers and turrets and battlements. Rain on the tin roof would make a deep incessant throbbing; hail would ring staccato pinging; if the wind got up it would roar through the pines, their branches waving in distress, but we’d be snug and sheltered in the middle of the stack. We’d post lookouts to warn of approaching adults but we’d never be found because no one but us knew the tracks through the haystack. Sometimes someone would leave us a blanket in one of the little rooms, to cover the scratchy hay, and we could lie down and watch the comings and goings of the grownups from the house: mum hanging out the washing, or dad driving the car down the yard to fill the petrol tank, or men out in the paddocks gathering up a mob of sheep, whistling and calling to the dogs. Or we’d look out for cars on the road or airplanes in the sky or have pretend tea parties.
At the end of the summer when the grass was dry and the paddocks were browning the haystack would go into reverse again. The men would throw bales back onto the truck, stacking for the third time, then crawl the truck with its tottering stack back into the paddocks. They'd cut the strings before throwing a bale at a time out to baying sheep who’d straggle behind the truck, until there was a line of hay and sheep right across the paddock. And we’d find new cubby holes, and make new tunnels and establish new lookouts. Until there’d be just a few mangy bales left in the haystack and mud on the ground from the winter rain and the cold, and we’d find something else to do.
**********
Hay: recollection 2
|
|