Down a Country Lane. Gary Blinco
gunna buy no more chicks, so I reckon we should try an’ make our own.’ Darryl creased his brows and stared hard at me. ‘Shit, you don’t know do ya?’ he said in a patronising voice. ‘Well, we just bung one of the roosters from the other pen in with the hens and let him root ‘em all. Then the old hens just sit on the eggs until the chicks come out, it’s easy.’
‘How do you know? An’ what’s rootem mean?’ I persisted. I did not like his superior tone. ‘Pop told me, you know the chicks he got, well he made them himself,’ Darryl explained, his tone softening as he saw my flush of anger. ‘But Pop’s are only bloody bantams, they ain’t no good fer nuthin.’ Encouraged, I thought I would risk another question.
‘What does rootem mean but?’ Darryl laughed long and hard at this, rolling about on the ground. ‘You know, like Mum and Dad do all the time and she keeps havin’ more kids.’ Now it was my turn to colour a bit as I remembered how we sometimes watched my parents coupled together on the bed when they thought we were all asleep. The chooks seemed to lack some of the basic equipment, but I dared not risk another question. To demonstrate his point, Darryl selected the largest rooster and released it into the hen house. It attacked the hens with gusto, mounting several in rapid succession. I stood and watched in amazement as the eager rooster pounced on the hens, most of whom seemed to enjoy the experience, despite the torn and bleeding combs the rooster left mangled on their heads.
After about half an hour we captured the quivering rooster and returned him to his own pen, exhausted by his workout. He appeared to be the envy of the rooster coop after that. ‘We’ll get a different one next time.’ Darryl mused as he saw the obvious envy among the roosters, his sense of fair play showing through. ‘We can put one with the hens every arvo for a while, but don’t tell the old man.’
A few days later Dad arrived home late in the afternoon with two bony, nondescript cows, as part payment for some task he had performed. Suddenly we were in the dairy farming business and he was on another roll, his eyes bright with the prospect of joining the moneyed cockies at last. Mum called at the butter factory in Millmerran and they presented us with a three-gallon cream can, duly endorsed with a somewhat pretentious title, given the size of our holding. The proud words proclaimed:
‘EASTVILLE YANDILLA’
I was bursting with pride and expectation as Darryl and I took it in turns to rise early each day to round up and milk the two cows. I liked plodding alone over the white frosty grass with nothing on my mind but the shit matted behinds of the cows in front of me. I walked through the lazy moist dawn, watching the bush come alive with colour and birdsong. The sun rose in a golden haze above the tree line and a gentle mist steamed over the creek as the first sunbeams kissed the surface of the water. I wondered what this place would have been like a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago, and decided that it would probably have been pretty much the same. It took little imagination to see a tribe of aborigines standing around smokey fires near the pump hole on the cusp of day, feasting on fish that had been roasted in the coals. Quiet, content and at one with nature.
One of the cows bawled loudly as it strolled along, breaking the daydream and bringing me back to the present with a jolt. I looked up and saw the old house squatting in the mist with the sun on the roof. I grinned as I realised we were pretty close to the earth ourselves.
It was a good season with plenty of sweet green grass about the farm and along the lanes so the cows gave a bountiful supply of rich milk. Somehow my mother had ‘borrowed’ an old hand operated cream separator from one of the local farmers who had gone out of the dairy business. I fought my brothers and sisters for a turn at winding the handle of the separator, the novelty of it overpowering the fact that it was hard work to operate the thing. We all watched with delight as the cream came rich and yellow from one of the spouts and the white skimmed milk came frothing from another.
After a week of milking the two old cows every morning and night the cream can was full of bright yellow cream. I went with Mum to deliver our first shipment of cream to the factory. Mum said the money for the cream would be a welcome addition to the vegetable run money. The manager of the factory was a large fat man named Otto; I remembered his name from the cord wood venture. He came out to welcome Mum with her first delivery, reaching into the can and dipping his chubby finger into the cream. ‘Good cream Grace’, he said, smacking his lips, I could see why he was so fat. ‘What sort of a fridge have you got, seeing you will probably only deliver once a week?’
Mum silenced me with a quick look. ‘Oh just the old kero job you know’, she lied beautifully. ‘But it does the job, specially in this cold weather.’ Otto slapped her back and rubbed my head.
‘That’s all you need, just as long as you can keep it cold. Well, all the best, I got a lot of work to do.’ He waddled off into the inner rooms of the factory as Mum winked at me. I wondered how anyone so fat could work at all.
Luckily it was winter at the time so the cream had not spoiled, but the incident took the edge off the enterprise. Getting up at dawn to milk the cows, especially in the winter, proved a painful chore, and the gloss soon waned from the dairying business. We made a few more deliveries, but the cows were soon milked but once a day, usually in the afternoon, serving our domestic needs only. The fresh milk while it lasted was wonderful, and we had milk drinks and puddings every day.
We now had chooks, a couple of cows and the garden, so when Dad came home with five mangy pigs I thought we had really arrived in the world of mixed farmers. ‘Where did you get them?’ Mum asked as she covered her ears against the loud squeals of the terrified animals. ‘And where are you going to put them?’ Dad struggled to contain the pigs in the small crate he had borrowed from somewhere as it threatened to lift clear off the truck as the pigs struggled noisily for their freedom. ‘Old Bill Caldicott gave them to me, he didn’t have the money to pay me for the new gates I made for him, the old fart, so I accepted the pigs instead. I’ve always wanted to have a go at pigs.’
Mum shook her head and laughed. ‘And my second question, where are you goin’ to keep the bloody things? You’re not letting them in the house except on a plate with an apple in their mouths.’
‘They can camp in the rooster’s pen for a few days until I build a little sty. C’mon you boys, help me get them into the pen before it gets dark. You little kids go and pull a few lettuce and stuff for ‘em, it’ll calm ‘em down.’ Mum grabbed the smaller children in tow. ‘Come and I’ll show you what you can pick for them’, she said. ‘Feed them my good crop and your father’ll have to calm me down.’
Next day we built a sty for the pigs using palings split from iron bark logs and erected between posts with a lace of fencing wire. We buried the palings a few inches into the dark soil because Dad said pigs were mad diggers and would try and burrow out of the pen if they got half a chance. They squealed in protest as we carried them to their new home, their eyes wild like steers in a killing yard. When they were all safely in the pen we served them a feed of grain and sat on the top of the fence posts to watch them eat greedily from the rough trough made from half a hollow log.
The pigs finished the food and then stood back to stare at us with their bright, pink intelligent little eyes. They looked at the now empty trough and grunted sullenly, then they inspected every inch of the paling fence and grunted some more, as if to say ‘keep us well fed or we’ll bust out of this shoddy pen.’ Darryl and I now had one further chore to attend to each day in caring for the demanding animals. Three of the five made good their unspoken threat and escaped within a few weeks by burrowing under the fence of the sty. Dad fumed when one of our neighbours shot them as wild feral pigs when they were caught destroying crops, but there was nothing he could do about it.
The couple that survived Mum ordered slaughtered or returned to the original owner. Dad’s reluctance to butcher anything prevailed and we returned them to the farmer. Dad came home quite pleased after returning the pigs. He had managed to collect the wages he was due, minus the cost of the pigs that had been shot. Darryl winked at me across the tea table as Dad told the story, we were glad to be rid of the pigs.