Denny

Fuck it! Bloody Rome wasn’t built in a day, but I could do with some freakin help around here, Dad yelled as he climbed off the tractor.

For two days he’d been ploughing the western paddock. Three hundred hectares that we needed to tilth and get under seed before the rains, if they came.

It’s not a tough job – air-conditioned cab, music, GPS steering the tractor. All of which makes it very boring after a few hours.

Grey-black flood plain soil, flat to the narrow horizon, sauntering past endlessly as behind you the double eight discs grind through the dirt, following the tractor for at least 12 hours a day. High thin cirrus clouds streaking an azure sky helmet the monotony.

And that paddock’s a nasty shape – about a thousand metres by three thousand metres to avoid the gully down one side. That’s about 20 minutes in a dead straight slow line before the tractor turns.

No matter how loud you’ve got Doja Cat or The Weeknd in the pods your awareness and concentration evaporate as fast as the rain out here, and the gently bouncing air cushion seat does the rest.

Dad asked Denny to take a shift. He lasted a few hours and went to sleep. Mum took tea out for him and had to throw clods of dirt at the cabin to wake him up and stop it.

It’s not a fucking Tesla you moron, Dad yelled. What if the GPS went or the discs hit a stump. You could’ve put the lot in the ditch.

It’s all automatic, Denny yelled back. It looks after itself. You don’t get this computer stuff. It goes, OK?  Don’t ask me to help again.

That was it for Denny. Back to his job. He was desperate to get off the farm and had taken on a mechanic’s apprenticeship at the tractor dealers in town about 90 kilometres away to the northeast. Doesn’t pay much and I don’t think he’s learning a lot, but it keeps him out of Dad’s way for six nights a week. He’s bought himself a $500 ute for the round trip.

And I think he’s hooked up with a girl in town, but he was never one to talk, especially not at home, so I’m just guessing from the deodorant and after shave he’s started wearing and the phone calls from Mum he doesn’t answer. I know Mum noticed it too, but she never said anything. Her job is to keep Dad calm and happy.

I asked if I could do some ploughing to help get Rome built. Dad smiled at the joke but said no, I’m too young, and Mum just shook her head in agreement. It’s poison being 12 and told you can’t do it but then being expected to do adult stuff when needed, like clean up after Dad’s drinking and vomiting, wash the ute and get the horseshit out of the tray, and throw hay bales around when Denny brings some back from town.

The quip about Rome Dad picked up in the army or on his backpacking days around Asia, and he uses it a lot. Never made sense to me. I go to a one teacher school with just 23 other kids and have never been out of the district. But I’ve learned to see a bushy joke when its on the table.

The farm is small, as wheat farms go: just 540 hectares of quite healthy black soil that returns a good crop In the better - wetter - years. This isn’t one of the better years.

 But it’s the only home I’ve known. Mum and Dad and Denny moved here from the city about 15 years ago. I was born soon after. Mum says that was the happiest she’s ever been.

That was yesterday.

Today before lunch the GPS system did go down for farmers everywhere. Without that ethereal guidance tractors just stopped (despite Dad’s caution to Denny). He disengaged it, drove the tractor home, climbed out of the cab in a bad mood, and started swearing at everyone and everything again.

He sat on the porch on the derelict couch we picked up from a road side collection and Mum got him a beer, which we knew was adding fuel to a smouldering fire. By late afternoon he was a seething mess. He started talking to himself about the Vietnam war, then to his invisible mates, then he abused the sergeants, corporals, lieutenants, captains, majors and anyone else whose name he could remember. But there were days now when he could remember just a few.

Dad once told me when I was picking up empty cans that Denny was named after his best mate in the army. That Denny had stepped on a buried mine on a jungle track and died screaming in pain while they waited for a chopper to take him out. I’m just a naive bush kid but I could feel the hurt as I watched Dad’s tears.

As dark came over the paddocks it came over Dad, too. There was no sunset to mark the end, just a vast creeping grey morass of deep confusion. Mum put me to bed to keep me away from Dad, but she couldn’t hide herself.

The crash of glass, splintering of wood and Dad yelling wakes me some hours later. I creep into the hall. Mum is lying on the kitchen floor under a shattered chair, bleeding. She sees me and raises a hand, telling me to stay back. I hear Dad turn and go out the kitchen door. I run to the phone and call Denny. He doesn’t answer and I leave a message telling him to come home right now.

Mum isn’t badly hurt. She washes the blood from her head and we lie in my bed and she whispers stories to me until I am asleep. The starting tractor wakes me way before first light. I’m guessing Dad is getting a very early start on that paddock. With GPS steering he doesn’t need to see yesterday’s furrows.

When I hear Denny’s ute come roaring in about an hour later I’m glad Dad had started early.

Mum makes breakfast. None of us feel like talking. What’s left to say? We’ve been here before but not this far. And we don’t know where to go or what to do next.  Denny says he’ll take tea and biscuits out to Dad, but he is back 15 minutes later.

I can’t find him, he says. The tractor’s going up and down by itself, but he’s not out there.

I grab my drone and we pile into Denny’s ute out to the paddock. The tractor is still cutting dead straight furrows, eight discs over, with every turn. It’s almost finished.

Denny grabs the drone from me and sends it up to skim along the gully on the far side. Nothing shows up on the camera. He takes the drone higher sweeping along the furrows. He does that three times then turns and hovers over a spot about two kilometres down. He won’t let me look and all I glimpse is a darker patch of soil. Mum turns away.

I guess Denny told the police something. They came out the next morning then went away and never came back.

Now Mum and I are leaving. First to the town then maybe to the city, she says. I don’t know. It’s all a sad blurry mess. But I think Rome will never get built now.