The Farmhand's Interview

The bus had been running four hours and I still hadn't gotten used to the dark. Out here there were no streetlights. No gas stations glowing on the horizon. Just black scrub and more black scrub, and stars stacked up so thick they looked like spilled salt on a table.

I had my forehead against the window glass for most of the trip. Cold glass. Smelled like dust and old upholstery in there. The driver had stopped talking somewhere past the last town, and the other three passengers had all gotten off before that, so it was just me and him and the engine.

In the duffel bag at my feet, my bowling ball kept rolling against my leg every time we hit a dip in the road. Thump. Roll. Thump. I'd packed it in a towel but that didn't do much. Most men bring a book on a trip like this. I bring Hilda.

My name is Clayton, I'm fifty-five, and I do HR consulting for a living. That means I fly into companies, poke around at the staff, write a report about morale, and fly out. It pays fine. It's also duller than watching paint dry in a room with no windows.

This job was different. A cattle outfit way out in the middle of nowhere wanted somebody to come assess their operation. The email had been vague. Something about staff turnover and "cultural alignment." I don't even know what cultural alignment means and I use the phrase myself, which tells you something about my profession.

But the money was good, and honestly? I wanted to see it. The real thing. I've spent thirty years in carpeted offices asking people if they feel valued. I wanted to know what it's like to work somewhere the weather actually matters.

So here I was, on a night bus, with a bowling ball rolling against my shin and a duffel full of clothes that had never touched actual dirt.

The driver pulled over at a gate around two in the morning. Just a gate. Wire fence running off in both directions until the dark ate it.

"This you?" he said.

"Looks like it." I grabbed my duffel and climbed down.

He was gone before I'd fully shut the door. Tail lights shrinking away. Then nothing. Silence so total I could hear my own breathing.

I stood there with my bag and my rolling ball and thought, well. This is either an adventure or a very long mistake.

A light came bobbing up the track after a while. A lantern, held by a big shape that turned out to be a man. Broad, weathered, maybe forty-eight or so, wearing a coat that had seen better decades.

"You the new hand?" he said. Flat voice. Flat look. Like he was reading a stock list and I wasn't on it.

Now. Here's where I should have said no. I should have said, actually, I'm the consultant, I'm here to assess morale, here's my badge and my itinerary.

I didn't.

I don't fully know why. Maybe it was the dark. Maybe it was thirty years of carpet. Maybe I just wanted to see what happened next. The man was looking at me like I was a problem to be solved, and some part of my brain that had been bored for decades went, let's find out.

"Sure," I said. "Clayton."

"Russell." He didn't offer a hand. He picked up my duffel like it weighed nothing, which was insulting, since Hilda was in there. "Bunkhouse is up the track. You'll want sleep. Day starts at five."

"Five," I repeated.

"Sun don't wait for you out here, city."

I followed him and the lantern up the track. Gravel crunched under our boots. He walked as if he had never once thought about walking.

* * *

Five came fast. Five came brutal.

Russell knocked on the bunkhouse door once, hard, and said "Shed. Ten minutes." That was the entire orientation.

Breakfast was tea and toast I made myself on a stove that spat at me. Then he handed me a shovel.

"Calf shed needs mucking. All of it. Before the truck comes at noon."

I looked at the shed. Then at the shovel. Then at the shed again, in case the first look had lied to me.

It hadn't. It was a long low building, and the floor of it was exactly what you'd expect the floor of a calf shed to be after a week of calves.

"You're joking," I said.

"Do I appear to be a man who jokes?" He didn't smile. "Gloves are on the nail. Wheelbarrow's out back. Go."

And this is the reality of being fifty-five and hiding your age from a man who thinks you're a strapping farmhand. You dig. That's what you do. You dig and you shuffle and you haul and you pray he goes away, and you do not under any circumstances mention your lumbar region.

He went off to fix a fence somewhere, which was a mercy, and I dug. The gloves helped for about an hour. Then they didn't. I could feel the skin on my palms going hot, then raw, then that wet feeling you get right before a blister opens.

I kept going anyway. Don't ask me why. Pride, probably. Stupid, dusty pride, mixed up with the fact that this was the most physical thing I'd done since school and my body was humming like I'd plugged it into a wall.

By noon the shed was clean. Mostly. My back had filed its own complaint through official channels, both shoulders included, and my hands looked like I'd lost a fight with a cheese grater.

Russell came back, looked at the shed, looked at me, and said nothing for a second. Then, "Not bad."

Coming from him, that felt like he was giving me a standing ovation.

The truck came. I helped load calves, badly. Russell corrected my grip twice without touching me, just words over his shoulder, and the second time I got it right and he grunted, which I'm told is praise in foreman.

Lunch was sandwiches on a tailgate. We sat looking out at paddocks that went on until the earth curved.

"You from the city?" he asked.

"Years back, yeah."

"Hate it here yet?"

"No," I said, and it surprised me that it was true. "Not yet."

"Give it a week." He almost smiled. Almost. The corner of his mouth moved about a millimeter and gave up.

* * *

Supper was stew, eaten at a scarred wooden table in the main house kitchen because he said the bunkhouse stove was "temperamental," which I took to mean broken. He cooked the stew himself and it was good, which also surprised me, though I kept that off my face.

I'd set my duffel on a chair by the door, and while he was ladling seconds, the zipper had gaped open a bit. Hilda sat there in her towel nest, marbled purple and black, catching the lamplight.

Russell stopped mid-ladle.

"What the hell is that?" He set the pot down and leaned over to look. "Bowling ball? You hauled a bowling ball onto a night bus to a cattle station?"

"It's not just a ball," I said. "That's Hilda."

"Hilda." He said it like I'd named a cow after my mother.

"She's my lucky ball. Sixteen pound. I bowl every weekend back home, Tuesday league and Saturday open play. Hook shot, right-handed. She's taken my average from one-forty to one-sixty-eight over four years and I will not travel without her."

He stared at me. Then he laughed. Actually laughed, a big rusty sound like an engine turning over after a cold snap, and he dropped into his chair still shaking his head.

"A farmhand," he said, "who brings a named bowling ball to the Outback."

"An HR consultant," I heard myself say, before my brain could stop my mouth, "who couldn't resist the mix-up."

The kitchen went quiet.

He set down his fork. Looked at me properly for the first time since the gate, and I mean properly, the lantern light doing nothing to soften it.

"Say that again," he said.

"Clayton," I said. "Fifty-five years old. HR consultant. Hired to assess your operation. Your agency apparently also sent a farmhand, or meant to, or there's been some crossed wires somewhere, and when you asked, I just... didn't correct you."

"Why?"