Gossip is the linchpin of rural communities, so it didn’t take long before word of the dramatic events at the Minzion had filtered through into local consciousness. auddenly I was no longer the reclusive stranger building a controversial house at the Lonely Graves turnoff (though in the local farmer’s vernacular my property was still “Cassidy’s Place”, twelve years since Cassidy had last stepped foot inside the gate ... who said farmers were slow?), I was the deserted husband struggling valiantly to fend for himself. my weekly excursions to Faigans (the local store) for groceries and mail were an opportunity for the community to gauge how well I was coping with my setback.
My entrance was greeted with consoling smiles and small talk. Other shoppers shrank apologetically away as I cruised the aisles (all two of them). My groceries were scrutinised and their nutritional value assessed. (Was there a ledger somewhere recording my decline into unhealth? Would mutton casseroles and pavlovas magically appear at the front gate once I reached my nutritional nadir, or would the consequences of my vitamin deprivation be summoned to scare the village children?) No matter how extravagant the contents of my basket, they always seemed to spell ‘bachelor food’.
Food has always been important to me. I began cooking for myself when I became a vegan at eighteen. At first it was out of nutritional necessity - my father has never been a vegetable disciple, and his girlfriend’s rissoles are cannonballs fired across the bows of good health. Then economic necessity - my traveller’s budget barely extended beyond pasta and vegetables, occasionally stretching to a pita gyros or roadside bratwurst ... veganism having been abandoned at Brisbane airport.
Later, when it was no longer necessary, out of enjoyment. Though Marion had been nominally in charge in the kitchen - mainly because she’s fussier than I am - we’d always cooked together. So, over the years I’d become adept at replicating all her recipes, with my own modifications. Though I’d dropped a few items from the menu and increased the frequency of others, Marion’s departure had had minimal impact on my diet.
Now that I was a bachelor, however, sympathy seemed to trigger a form of maternal blindness. My basket was no longer overflowing with colourful culinary potential, it was weighed down by the bleak survival rations of the single man. The regiment of fresh produce, grains and pulses, canned and packaged goods, imported vinegars and oils defeated by the single can of baked beans, the dozen eggs, the loaf of bread ...
But there’s no such thing as ‘spinster food’. For a woman, the beans would be evidence of a well-stocked larder, the eggs of home-baking and Women’s Division morning teas, and the bread... well, the menfolk do like their sandwiches. But in a man’s hands, they’re symbols of laziness and ineptitude, of fry-ups and TV dinners, of mother’s boys, of refrigerator grazing and take-aways, of just surviving until another woman comes along.
Before I’d become afflicted, I’d clocked up thousands of miles on a heavily-laden tandem, but now people began offering to drive my groceries home as though fearful of discovering me overturned in a ditch, having finally succumbed to the combined effects of vitamin deficiency and love deprivation.
Bachelorhood was not only a debilitating condition, but a highly contagious one. It is, after all, primarily a social disease, and a fallen man is often a harbinger of disharmony and a purveyor of unease. At first there are consolation dinners and sympathy teas, but while he maintains his stoic silence, his reputation is slowly crippled by the poisoned barbs of the prosecution’s half-truths. Commiseration begins to sour as his fevered demands disrupt and contaminate his friends’ lives, until their beleaguered wives have no option but to insist the diseased limb be amputated from their lives.
You could see the cliques of stricken men huddled around beer-sticky tables at the bistro on Friday night, eating fish and chips disguised as a meal, scantily clad in a parsley g-string. (The fish and chips, not the bachelors.) You could hear them yapping like an abandoned litter, greeting the cook with drooling gratitude, a surrogate mother sprinkling salty affection across their plates. And when, late one night, the beer finally begins to speak of injustice, of loneliness and fear, there are no longer sober ears to hear their pleas.
Of course there was no way to prevent gossip from spreading. No tourniquet of silence would stem the flow of falsehoods. But I wasn’t about to let gossip cast me in the role of either villain or victim. Of sinner or saint. I didn’t want sympathy or scorn, and I wasn’t looking for a quick cure in the shape of ‘a good woman’. I just wanted to be allowed to continue living in peace, and to continue building my house.
Truth is weightless in the rarefied air of rumour. Fact and fiction are two kites carried on the winds of hearsay, the distance they travel depending not on their ballast of truth, but on the length of their string. Each repetition left undisputed unwinds another coil of validity, allowing one version of reality to soar towards acceptance. So I began handing out my own sanitised, suitable-for-public-consumption version of events to anyone who’d listen, filling the sky with low-flying counter-gossip. Counter gossip being opposing gossip, not gossip passed over the counter, though in Millers Flat, it’s often the same thing.
Does gossip ever have a physical source? Nobody ever claims “Someone told me ...”, it’s always “I hear ...”, as though the information had been relayed by Indian tom-toms, or read like smoke signals in the still evening air. There’s no smoke without fire, and the worst fires give the most smoke. Perhaps that’s just the nature of information. Why bother trying to distinguish a reliable source from all those other cranks and liars, when they can all wear an expert’s hat? Why bother trying to sift facts from old wives’ tales, when both can be disguised as truth? After all, truth is like a first-past-the-post political system - it’s supposed to be democratic, but the majority view doesn’t necessarily win against those of a self-serving minority, and it’s heavily weighted in favour of maintaining the status quo.
Not that I was aware of any gossip. Apart from my weekly ride to the store and the occasional brief gateside chat with neighbouring farmers as they sat in their four-wheel drives waiting for their idle flocks to climb the hill heading up to Beaumont Station, I had little contact with the outside world.
I could add that the outside world also had little contact with me. My only regular visitors were my neighbour’s cows stampeding across the creek looking for grass and shade. Not that I could blame them. My ungrazed paddock, lush with juicy clover and striped poplar shadows, must have seemed like a mirage after days in their bare, treeless desert parched by the summer sun. Incentive enough for them to stumble up the steep, muddy bank and over a sagging strand of barbed wire. And they weren’t the most welcome of visitors, nor the most circumspect.
A bull in a china shop has nothing on a herd of famished cattle in a newly-treed field. Within an hour they’d trampled a destructive path from the farthest point in the bottom paddock to the rocky knoll in the uppermost corner, casually snapping off branches and uprooting trees ... which isn’t intended to over-dramatise their immense strength, because they’re not elephants, it’s just that my trees were only 30 centimetres high at the time.
Later, when I complained to their owner, he insisted it was my responsibility to keep them out. Although I didn’t know he was lying at the time (though perhaps ‘lying’ is a little harsh, because it’s possible that he actually believes it’s true - there is, after all, the law and country law which, when translated, roughly means those practices farmers have gotten away with for years), I argued that it seemed a trifle unfair that those without stock should incur fencing expenses rather than those with stock. Would he remain loyal to this principle if I started farming kangaroos?
He shrugged it off - he was sorry about my trees, but his stock needed water, and it was ... a sudden commotion on the bridge, one of his bulls has escaped and is lumbering towards freedom ... my responsibility ... his dogs leap from the ute and race after the snorting beast, harrying it into a corner ... to keep ... the bull’s head pendulums ponderously, then it turns, and before my incredulous eyes, hoists itself upwards and crashes over the fence ... them out. (Of course, when a neighbour’s bungled burn-off turned his retirement forest into charcoal, I’m sure he berated himself for not having adequate fencing to keep the fire out.)
But no visitors meant no interruptions. Even the building inspector stayed away, leaving me free to devote every moment of sunlight to completing the house. Which, at this point, meant the ceiling.
No comments:
Post a Comment