J.B. In Charge Chapter 3

I Am Promoted To Farm Manager

The cows were now mooing anxiously and hanging around the cowbails. My world and everyone else’s might turn upside-down but the cows still had to be milked.

Brian and I dressed and put on our gumboots. We had twenty-five cows and milked everyone by hand. As our calloused hands pulled on the teats, we squirted the warm milk into our buckets that we held between our knees. Brian whistled.

All I felt was a great weight of sorrow. I was sure that Dad was going to die soon. He was like most dads. A lot of the time you wished he wasn’t around. But life without a dad was so awful you normally never even considered it.

When dads of kids at school died, we class mates became hushed and respectful for at least a week in their presence. We knew they were enduring a misfortune so deep and wide we lucky ones could never begin to fathom it. They seemed surprisingly normal, but had a disturbing habit of mysteriously disappearing from the district.

Now I was convinced Brian and I would be joining these children. I felt a rising panic when I found myself wanting to sob and cry but nothing came out only a funny dryness. The sun was blazing on the mountain when we finished. When we left the cowbails, we saw the town doctor drive out our gate. We harnessed Charlie to a sledge and took our cream cans to our gateway. The dairy factory truck was waiting for us.

You beat us this morning for once, said Brian to the driver.

If this wasn't the first time in all the years I've worked here I would be swearing now, replied the driver.

We returned to the house. Our old familiar home was now a frightening place with a terrible secret. We washed ourselves at the outside tap, and left our gumboots behind the kitchen door. We walked inside the kitchen for breakfast. Mum and Aunty Fan were sitting at the table with bowls and the saucepan of porridge. We ate in silence.

I was always now so ravenous that I would have eaten anything anywhere. After my last birthday when I was still being spoilt, I announced I was tired of porridge every morning. From now on I would only eat bread and butter for breakfast. The following morning after I had shown off with buttering my third piece of bread, Mum suddenly grabbed me and stuffed the porridge down my throat. After that, I found I had a new obsessive taste for it.

Brian had only been told Dad was unwell. As soon as breakfast was over, he dashed off on his bike to visit his "comrade" friends. That was what Dad called them with always a snort. I never knew what comrade meant but that was a favourite word of Dad's for anyone who supported the Labor Party.

Mum began to fill up the big basin from the kettle on the stove to wash the dishes. She said,

J.B., Dad wants to talk to you in our bedroom.

I slid into my parents' bedroom. Dad was sitting up in bed. He was still in his pyjamas and the white quilt was still wrapped around him.

Hello J.B. he said kindly.

A lump rose in my throat as I noticed the murmuring sound in his voice.

Come and stand beside me.

When I did so, Dad put up his good arm and ruffled my hair. I shivered. Dad had never touched me in that way before.

As you saw this morning, I have something very wrong with my left eye. The doctor has been and he has told me and Mum that I am going to have to stay in bed for quite a long time.

I knew that something very wrong wasn't just Dad’s eye but stretched over the whole left side of his body. But I nodded.

Our Sunday school teacher, Mr Dick, had told us – or rather shouted to us – last Sunday that a white lie was as bad as a black lie. Mr Dick and Mrs Dick, who taught the little ones, lived at the Church in a house with apple trees and chickens. When I was a little one, whenever I passed their house I used to shiver in case I saw God taking a stroll under the apple trees. Now I was a big boy and knew Mr Dick got sometimes carried away by himself, not by God.

Dad took his hand away from my head.

Have you said anything to anyone?

I shook my head, this time truthfully.

That helps matters, said Dad

I was already aware I was entering a world where grownups told you things, other people you knew didn’t know, and you must not tell.

Dad went on.
The doctor said I might recover if I stay in bed and not get excited. But then again, I might never recover. We are all going to assume I will. And that is where you fit in. Everything, our home, my recovery, may depend on you.

Me! I marveled. I was just a boy.

I owe a lot of money to old Bootles. If it wasn't for my bad eye, I would never tell you these things. But I am asking you for the next few weeks or months to be no longer my little boy but to be my right, or rather left hand, man.

I knew now that Dad knew how sick he really was but was trying to pretend to himself. How like a grownup I was already becoming. I remembered with a blush how only a few hours ago I had diver into his bed and squealed like a little pig.

Dad went on.
Do you remember when the butter factory went bankrupt? I was one of the guarantors. The bank closed down the factory. We guarantors had to make up the balance from our own pockets

That was well over my head. But the big words echoed in my ears along with forgotten memories of pain and fear. I now recalled, as in a nightmare, how grownups trembled and went pale at those big words. I now knew what they meant together. They meant homelessness.

At that moment I remembered something that happened a few days ago.
Dad, Bruce and I were digging a new outside long drop dunny. Dad opened with his spade a rats nest. We gazed at the babies, so helpless in their pink jackets. Bruce took a good sniff. I saw Dad hesitate and then he gently covered up the nest. Not one of us three could bear to kill those babies or make Mr and Mrs Rat homeless. Now I felt that was what the bank had tried to do to us Browns.

Dad went on.
I entered into a Deed of Arrangement with the bank. The bank took half of our factory cheque until my debt to it was paid off. It was either that, or you would come home one day and find our farm gate padlocked and the bailiffs loading up their vehicle with all our furniture to sell. We have just coped over the last few years. Unfortunately last year I began to take tips from old Bootles and began to spend our money on the race horses.

Dad hesitated.
What happens to you when you are found out to have been really bad?

Mr Macgregor gives me the strap or Mum gives me a hiding,
I replied.

Dad had never raised his hand at me.
Dad nodded.

Well, I have been found out to have been really bad, and my punishment is much worse. At first I had good wins at the races. But then old Bootles gave me tips that were all bad. I have lost this year's earnings and now I cannot pay off my debt to the bank. I went to old Bootles and accused him of deliberately giving me bad tips so he could force us off our farm and take it himself. He just laughed at me and said there was no law against bad tips from a friend. I had to borrow a lot of money from old Bootles to pay off the bank.

Poor Dad, I thought,
to get us all into such a mess. Poor me to be expected to somehow solve all this for him.

Dad went on.
If old Bootles finds out the condition I am in, he will be able to get an order from the Court to sell off the farm. That’s what he really wants, so he can take our farm. No one else must know I am ill.

Not even Mrs Dick, I said timidly.

She was never happy until she knew everything that happened in our family and was always so terribly kind.

No‑one, said Dad, and his face took on that serious grownup look. But now that look was no longer a mystery.
Until I recover I have to stay hidden from everyone who doesn't know. Therefore …

Dad turned his face away from me. I could see a reddish tinge on his cheeks.

I am asking you, until I recover, to be our farm manager. Mum and Aunty Fan know nothing about farm work and if they were seen outside working, all the neighbours would be shocked and we would be found out. Brian is clever at school work but at farm work he is completely stupid.

I did not need to be told that. I had not yet seen Brian hit a nail straight.

So now on the farm you are his boss.

Dad now started to talk about the farm chores with his new manager, that was me. I found to my surprise the grownup talk about the farm I could understand by putting my mind to it. It was like reading the school book, Our Nation's story. When you first encountered it, it looked far too difficult. But you had to try to understand it, and you could if you studied it bit by bit and fixed everything together as it should be.

I soon thought managing a farm would be a lot more interesting and challenging than being William the Conqueror. King William only had King Harold to mess up his plans. I had the whole world. There were all our animals. There were the humans too. I sort of thought there weren’t just the people I knew bearing down on me. There were also Hitler, Mr Churchill, Mr Roosevelt and Mr Fraser. My biggest foe was, at first, Brian. Sometimes I would have loved to have shot an arrow into his eye as King William did to King Harold.