A Bloody Good Man

You can either blame or thank Waratah and Tennesseered for this one.

~~~~

One of my brother's favourite hobbies is whinging about how much farmer's whinge. It's worse when he's drunk or emotional, and on the day of my parents' wake, he was both.

The mourners had all long since departed and it was just us kids and our partners. The food had been cleared away, the mess tidied, and still it was only seven o'clock, too early for bed, but too late for anyone to try and make their way 'home', because for two thirds of us children, home was now somewhere else.

I'd been the first of the kids to move away. I went to Sydney, or rather, I should say, the outer suburbs of Sydney, where I got a job in a real estate agent's office. Two years later, my sister Monica moved to Melbourne where she met a man and moved in with him. Four years after that, the baby of the family, Paul, followed in Monica's footsteps.

I'd moved back five years ago, when Mum and Dad were having issues with their health and needed someone to help run the farm and household. Monica and her husband had two children, and Paul was a poofter, so there was no way either of them were coming back, but I'd been single and easily manipulated, so home I'd come.

'Literally, they just

do not shut up

,' said the man who had not shut up since he arrived the previous morning. He gestured to his partner. 'This is why Dave and I get on so well. He's the son of a taxi driver. He understands.'

I wondered if Paul had always been this annoying, or if I was just tired and stressed and grieving, and therefore more intolerant than usual. Unlike Paul and Monica, who'd be travelling back to suburbia the following day, I'd stay in town, and I was going to be entirely responsible for my parent's farm until it sold. I wasn't naïve enough not to know how much work was involved.

While I inwardly fumed my husband sat, expressionless, in a chair, wearing the blank expression of someone who knows he has to endure another few hours of his wife's family and it's best not to speak, argue or even make eye contact. I reached over and patted his leg. The gesture did not go unnoticed by my sibling.

'Of course, I'll make an exception for you, Brett,' Paul said to my spouse. 'We barely even know the sound of your voice.'

Brett tipped his head ever-so-slightly, still masking whatever emotions he was feeling but playing the game well. He was forty-eight years old, nine years' my senior, and we'd been married for two years. In that time he'd seen my siblings maybe half a dozen times. He wasn't 'from here', but somewhere else, somewhere similar but not quite the same, and when he'd met my parents, he'd understood why two thirds of their children made it a mission to stay away.

Paul decided to swap topics. He kept his attention on my husband as he asked; 'I just don't understand why you and Hailey don't want to buy Mum and Dad's farm. It'd make it so easy. You could just pay out Monica and I, and the whole matter would be taken care of.'

'We don't want the farm,' I replied tersely. 'We've already had this discussion.'

'Hailey, he's only asking,' Monica interjected in her typically patronising tone of voice. 'He's just making sure.'

'Well, we're sure,' I replied. 'We have our own land.'

'But you could have more!' Paul said brightly.

I resisted the urge to get up and strangle him.

~~~~~~~~~~

Two days later my siblings and their partners had gone, and the funerals were already fading from the locals' consciousness.

I'd packed up my parents' belongings in between their deaths and their funeral, and after the wake I contacted a valuer to come through and put an official dollar value on everything so there could be no disputes about what things sold for, and what I should have sold them for. In the midst of it all, I worked. Work is the perfect catharsis at times.

I grieved of course, that was only natural, but it wasn't an excessive grief. My parents had passed away in a way that was so representative of the selfish, mean-spirited way they lived their lives that there was only so much sentimentality that I could give into. Perhaps I was also relieved they were dead. They'd been getting older, and less and less capable of doing anything but barking orders at my husband and I, and there had been times where relations had been strained. I loved my parents, but I didn't like them. Often, I'd wondered if they even loved me.

Both Monica and Paul called me separately to see if Brett and I were absolutely sure we didn't want to keep the family farm, and on each occasion I politely told them that Brett and I were a hundred thousand million percent sure. For starters, I didn't want to hold onto the memories. Secondly, it just didn't fit with our business model.

Moving to Sydney had done two things for me. Firstly, I bought property. Working for an estate agent, I was encouraged to 'invest' and being a country girl, I believed in land over buildings. Stuff the house, the house was nothing but an improvement. Improvements come and go, but the land on which they sat was there forever. That was my mantra. My boss thought I was a bit of a fool, but I was happy with my choices. My initial rental returns were low, but when property started booming, well, you know what a thousand square metre block looks like to a developer... And I had five properties by that point, four houses and one very large, three bedroom flat.

Secondly, after two years of working as a receptionist and then a sales assistant, I decided to get my real estate agent's license. It was during a night class that a lecturer made the observation that the easiest way to make a sale is to sell people what they

want

to have, not what they

should

have. This piece of advice was to come in exceptionally handy when I was called back to help Mum and Dad.

Despite having grown up on a farm, I knew next to nothing about farming. This might sound odd, but how many accountant's children know about the complexities of capital gains tax? I rest my case. My father had had no interest in teaching me anything about the farm, because in his eyes - and this was when he was still convinced Paul was just 'going through a stage' - the son would be the one to take over. I was female and ergo, supplementary to his needs.

I got a baptism of fire when I returned home five years' ago. Dad didn't teach me, so much as yell and scream and insult me. No mercies were cut. I cried, I walked away, I made more fuck-ups than I care to recount, but I've always been stubborn and after every failure, every mistake, I dusted myself off and got on with it not because I wanted to, but because I needed to. If

I

didn't help Mum and Dad, who would?

After a year, I started not only being able to do a lot of stuff by myself, but I could listen in to conversations, read forums and start understanding what was going on. Nobody paid much attention to me. I was by that stage too city for the country folk, and still too country for the city ones but that afforded me a little leniency, and the merging of the two lifestyles put an idea in my head.

I told my father we should look at producing organic stockfeed.

My father's response isn't even printable. He was convinced I'd gone greenie, but that wasn't it, not at all. I'd had a neighbour in Sydney who literally

rented a fucking chicken

and I knew organic wasn't going anywhere in a hurry, and I knew that city tree-changers who went to the country would raise organic meat, never thinking about where they might get the food for their organic cows and pigs and chicken and sheep, and I knew that if we acted quickly, we could get in on what I felt was a good line of business.

I sold two houses to buy land that had been cleared but not farmed. I applied for organic certification, got it, had irrigation put in and sowed - badly - hectare after hectare. And the next year was fucked. Really, really fucked. It wasn't the weather. It wasn't the market. It was me, still trying to figure shit out.

Thank fuck I didn't know how fucked it was. I thought I'd done a decent enough job and I had false confidence, and that false confidence got me through another year, and that's when I made some money, thanks largely in part to another farmer who was interested in what I was doing and gave me the specialist advice and mentoring I needed in return for real estate advice.

The third year ended well. I still had my critics but I was living with, and caring for, the two most vocal ones, so nothing anybody else said bothered me. I continued to work, to learn, to swear worse than ever, and my pretty, Sydney, corporate clothes languished in the cupboard, but my little endeavours grew, and I sold another property to buy another parcel of land, better machinery, and to build a new dam.

I'd mostly forgotten about men. There were some single ones in town, but no one had caught my eye, and vice versa. I had a good enough body; slender without being skinny, decent boobs and lots of thick, sun-streaked hair, but I also had a face full of freckles and a potty mouth. Worse still, in full conservative, God-loving, Queensland country, I was an atheist who supported unfettered access to abortion, gay marriage and asylum seekers - and I grew organic stock feed to boot. A rumour started that Paul wasn't the only homosexual in the family.

A little over two years' ago, Brett moved into town without question, comment or warning. It wasn't a town that attracted a lot of newcomers, so his arrival didn't go unnoticed. He didn't say much about himself, and I thought he might become a sitting duck, someone for the more bored members of community to make a target of, but if anything, he was treated with respectful apprehension. He was quiet but he saw a lot, and you could just see his brain ticking over. I think he scared people, if I'm to be honest with you. He was country, too. Nobody quite knew where he was from, but they knew he was one of them, and that meant he was harder to dismiss, harder to lead astray and harder to make trouble for.

It was at the local bistro when I first realised he was interested in me. I was standing at the buffet with Mum's dinner plate in hand, ready to fill it with the stuff she wanted, when Brett came and stood behind me. He wasn't tall, dark and handsome, rather he was of regular height, large around the middle, with mousey brown hair and skin that was tanned and leathery.

'Sorry,' I apologised. 'Won't be a minute, and I won't take the last of the potato bake.'

'You take as long as you want, and as much as you want,' he said, stringing together more words than I'd hitherto heard him speak.

I smiled at him. I often smile, forgetting that an easy smile is often perceived as a come on, and that more than one woman has incorrectly accused me of trying to steal her husband.

'I must look like a woman who likes potato bake,' I said, heaping some onto Mum's plate and putting a teeny bit on mine. The tray was nearly empty. 'Here, hand me your plate and I'll put the last of it on it.'

The way his eyes drank everything in told me he'd heard I was single and was scoping me out. I just thought 'mate, you wait until you hear the rest of the story and you'll pull back any whiff of interest'. Obviously that didn't happen, though. He didn't so much court me, as much as made it abundantly clear that if I wanted a husband, he was willing to have me as a wife.

It turned out he had some money of his own, not much, but enough to stop any vindictive gossip, and we had a small, quiet wedding. I'd been living with Mum and Dad in their house, but after the marriage, we had a removal home moved to my farm. It was a beautiful house, an old Queenslander that had been half-renovated, and within it's walls I found myself loving my new husband with a ferocity that I hadn't known I was capable of.

Brett had spent most of his life working in irrigation, and he stayed in that field doing project work here and there, but he also gave me a lot of much-needed help. Without him, and the assistance he gave my parents, they probably would have had to sell up a good year before they died.

Twelve days after my parents had passed away, Brett and I were lying in bed, staring at the ceiling. My husband seemed a million miles away.

'What's wrong?' I asked.

'Hmm?'

'What's wrong?' I repeated. 'You've seemed very quiet the last few days.'

'Oh, just thinking I suppose.'

'About?'

'Life.'

'Life?'

'Yeah.'

I rolled onto my side and laid my head on his chest. There was a thick scar running across his shoulder, from just above the armpit upwards. He'd told me he'd had a full shoulder reconstruction, but hadn't told me when or how or why. There was a lot about his life I didn't know.

It wasn't until we were filling in our Notice of Intended Marriage that I learned of his birthplace - Wangaratta, Victoria - and that he'd been married once before. I asked him about his ex-wife, and he said he'd come home from work to find her in bed with another man.

That was a lie I'd heard countless times before. Men always say that, don't they? 'I came home from work and she was in bed with x.' Really mate? I used to think. That's the best you can come up with? Less than half of women cheat. The overwhelming majority who do, never get caught. And yet according to every divorced man, his marriage has ended because of the same, precise set of circumstances.

It took me a while to realise that men probably don't expect you to believe them when they tell you this. It's just a fucked up defence mechanism to stop you asking questions that have painful answers. No man wants to say 'she just didn't love me' or 'I failed to act like a fucking adult' or 'I don't know why she left'. It's easier to say 'she cheated', because cheating invokes an emotion, and it elicits sympathy and when you're heartbroken, sympathy is what you want.

I traced a finger around one of Brett's nipples before leaning in to kiss it. He finds my interest in his nipples baffling, but he has literally the most perfect man-nipples I've ever seen.

'Are you thinking about death?' I asked.

'No.' He moved his head to the side and brushed his lips against my temple. 'I'm thinking about life. You won't be fertile much longer.'

'Yeah, well,' I replied. 'You know it doesn't matter.'

Brett couldn't have kids. He'd been upfront right from the beginning that he wasn't capable of fathering a child, and I'd gone home the night he gave me the news and had a good think about what he'd told me. I could end our blossoming relationship and try and find a new man, or I could give things a shot with Brett and accept I'd be childless. The decision hadn't been easy, but I'd loved him, and once I'd made my choice, I'd found myself surprisingly at peace with it. Brett had never again mentioned it, so I'd assumed it wasn't an issue for him.

'I feel like I've robbed you,' he said awkwardly.

'What? No. Fuck no, Brett. You never lied to me. You told me how it was, and I made a choice.' I kissed his chest. 'A good choice. A great one.'

'You could have done better.'

'You reckon?' I replied lightly, trying to inject some humour. 'You forget that I was thirty-five when you met me. I'm pretty confident that being single at thirty-five proves I

couldn't

do better. I couldn't even get a crap man, let alone a good one.'

'You never would have tolerated a crap one.'

'No,' I agreed, kissing both his nipples. 'Shit. Fuck. Do

you

want kids?'

'This isn't about me, Hailey.'

'Do you want a divorce?'

'Christ no. I...' He pushed me off and rolled onto his side. He stared at me. 'I've been thinking. I love you. I love you more than I thought it was ever possible to love a woman. You'd probably be selling, packing up and moving back to Sydney right now if it wasn't for me. You'd probably be with some fella your own age, who could give you the kids you always wanted.'

'That's just crap, Brett,' I replied, starting to get cross. 'You're letting emotion overrule common sense.'

He didn't respond.

I sighed heavily. 'I'm going to ask you again, Brett; do

you

want kids? Is this what this is about? Do

you

want kids?'

'I...' he trailed off helplessly.

For a minute or two he was silent, and I lay beside him, wondering what to say or whether I had a snowball's chance in hell of actually getting a proper answer out of him, when he spoke once more.

'I'd like you to be pregnant,' he said. 'You'd be a fantastic mother.'

'And do you have some proposed way of me

getting

pregnant?'

'No,' he replied. 'Not as such. But I was thinking that the picking season is coming up. Maybe you could seduce one of the workers. Then they could head off into the distance, none the wiser that they'd knocked you up, and you'd get to have your baby.'

'Seduce a farm worker?'

'Yeah. They're all young and horny.'

It was a good thing he couldn't see the expression on my face.

'A baby,' I repeated, trying to comprehend what he'd just said and the logistics of it. 'Would you see it as 'my baby' or 'our baby'.'

He kissed my cheek. 'Our baby. I'd like to have a child with you, Hailey. If it's possible, I'd like us to be parents.'

I was convinced he was crazy.

~~~~~~~

There were four people who knew Brett was planning on proposing before he actually got down on one knee and asked if I'd be his wife. The first was the jeweller from whom he bought the ring. The second was a close friend of his. The third and fourth were my parents.

I cried when I learned he'd asked my father for permission to marry me. This was the man who'd spent a lifetime belittling me, who'd openly favoured my brother, who'd laughed whenever I made a mistake on the farm, and who had called me a murderer when I'd told him about the abortion.

Brett knew about the abortion. I told him the day he told me he couldn't have children. I'd been twenty-seven and living with a physically and emotionally abusive man. He'd hit me over the back of the head and when I said to him I was going to go to the police, he'd laugh and say 'and what? Shave your head to prove you have a bruise? What if you don't

have

a bruise, Hailey? What if you shave your head for nothing?'

I tried to leave him, but he'd show up at my workplace and loiter around outside until my boss told me to 'go and make up with him, he's driving people away'. I'd scream at him to move out of my house, but he'd cry and say he had nowhere else to go.

He wanted the pregnancy. A baby would mean I was trapped, he told me. And I knew, then, that I had to end the pregnancy, so I went and got an abortion, nice and simple. I was ten week's gone at the time and have never felt so much relief as I did the moment the nurse told me it was 'all over'.

Financially, it cost me twenty thousand to get rid of my ex. He thought the only property I owned was the house we were living in. Thank God for that. Thank God.

I told my parents about the abortion during a state election, when they were planning on voting for a conservative hardliner. I wanted them to understand. I wanted them to see that there are reasons, needs, that women should have choices, but instead it just became something else for them to insult me about. In their eyes, women and children were nothing more than the property of men.

Brett knew all of this and still he asked Dad for his permission to marry me.

'But it would have caused no end of drama if I didn't,' he said blankly, not understanding why I was crying.

It was because I felt powerless and disrespected, not that he ever understood that.

I cried a lot for the three days following my engagement, but it was nothing compared to the crying I did when my husband told me he wanted me to sleep with a labourer so we could have a baby. I didn't want to sleep with anyone but my husband and I hated the implication that it would be nice and easy for me to go and seduce a random man.