Red Dirt Heart 3 (25 page)

He looked so worried and tired, and I wished I could run my hand through his hair and pull him against me. I wished, so much. “How the hell can I be mad at you?”

“It’s one less thing you have to worry about,” he said.

“And what about you?” I asked. “You look so tired. How’s your grandpa?”

Trav tried to smile and failed. “He’s holding on. He just kind of lies there asleep or something. He doesn’t talk or even open his eyes really. It’s not how I want to remember him…”

“Then don’t,” I said. “Remember the man you told me about. The one who took you fishing and helped you build stuff. Remember him like that, Trav.”

Travis stared at me for a long while, like he wasn’t quite sure what to say. “You have no idea how much I miss you right now.”

“You have no idea how much I wish I was with you right now.”

He sighed. “We’re heading back into the hospital after breakfast. It’s so draining.”

“I wish I could do something to help you.”

“Just seeing your face helps me.”

I could hear a voice in the background, and he sighed again. “That’s Mom calling me down for breakfast,” he said. “I’ll talk to you soon.”

“It’s real good to see your face too, Trav.”

* * * *

The new tracking beacons I’d ordered arrived, and workin’ out how to calibrate them to do what I wanted was a welcome, welcome distraction. I spent four days installing ’em, getting ’em right.

I spent my nights talking to Trav via Skype, and I told him what I was doin’ with the beacons, askin’ him if what I was doin’ was right. So, from opposite ends of the planet, we worked on it together.

I think it was a welcome distraction for him too. When I’d told him what I was tryin’ to do but couldn’t get it to work, he was all over it. The next day he showed me notes he’d written on how to make the bore-tracking beacons work like the cattle-tracking ones.

And by day four, almost two weeks after he’d left, I could sit in my office, and through my tracking app, I could see which bores were pumping, and how many litres per hour.

It was all part of my plan to show the likes of Melville at the upcoming Beef Farmers meeting that I’d drag the beef industry into the twenty-first century if it killed me.

When I said goodbye to Trav the night before I left for Alice Springs, he’d put his hand on the screen, told me he loved me and wished me luck.

It was with those words—and George’s speech about bein’ a better farmer for the right reasons—I packed my bags into the new Cruiser and drove to the annual meeting of the Beef Farmers Association.

* * * *

I met Greg out the front of the clubhouse where the meeting was taking place. He grinned when he saw me, like a kid at Christmas. “Ready to show these old guys or what?”

I shook his proffered hand. “I think so.”

Greg looked over at the Land Cruiser. “New wheels?”

“Yeah. I’ve done more trips to the Alice this last six months than I’ve done in my life,” I told him. “It was about time I bought something a little more comfortable.”

He was still smiling. “Next meeting is in Darwin. Ready for that?”

I sighed. “Man, I have so much on right now. I almost didn’t turn up.”

“What?”

I nodded. “Yeah. It was just a phone call from the ever-charming Jack Melville that made me show up. I’m really only here to see him lose.”

Greg barked out a laugh. He looked around, obviously searching for someone. “Where’s Travis?”

“Oh,” I said. “He’s gone home.”

“Have you got staff sick or something?”

“No, no. He’s gone
home
home. As in Texas.”

Greg’s eyes near popped out of his head. “What? For good?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I hope not.” I gave him what I hoped was a smile. “His grandfather isn’t well.”

“Oh,” Greg said, sighing with relief. “Man, don’t give me a heart attack like that. I thought you two were, you know, the real deal.”

I snorted. “So did I.”

He tilted his head and studied me for a minute. “You don’t think he’s coming back.” It wasn’t a question.

“Well, he says he is,” I admitted. “But it’s always different when you go home. All his family’s there and old friends…”

Greg clapped his hand on my shoulder. “If he says he is, then he is.”

“You sound like George and Ma.”

He laughed at that. “Oh, how is Ma?”

I told him how she was getting better one day at a time, then we talked about the sleep-stealing joy of spring and calving season. It wasn’t long before Allan joined us and our talk turned to the meeting.

There were formalities to go through first, then nominations would be read and each of the nominees would get up and do a spiel on themselves and why they wanted a place on the board.

“Excellent,” I mumbled, rolling my eyes. “Can’t wait.”

“You hardly need to say anything,” Greg said with a smile. “You’re Charlie Sutton, for God’s sake.”

“Fat lot of good that will do me if I stand up there and they all think I’m a dickhead.”

Allan laughed. “Oh please. Everyone thinks half the current board are dickheads and they manage just fine.”

Greg looked at his watch, then at the doors to the auditorium. “You guys ready?”

“No,” I said. “But do I have a choice?”

Greg and Allan both smiled and answered together. “Nope.”

And with that, we walked inside.

* * * *

The formalities were all business details, finance reports and minutes of the last meeting, boring, but necessary. We broke for lunch and there were whispered conversations with the occasional glance at me from other attendees. When I sighed, Greg asked, “What’s up?”

“Do you reckon Jack Melville sent out a memo to everyone to be wary of the fairy farmer?”

He looked around the room. People were trying not to openly stare, but weren’t real good at hiding it. “Ignore ’em, Charlie.”

“I hope it doesn’t ruin our chances,” I said, realising that it probably already had. No wonder Jack Melville was looking so smug.

“It’s wrong, you know,” Allan said. He’d never said much about me being gay. I knew that he knew, but he’d never spoken about it. “It don’t make no difference. What people do behind closed doors don’t make ’em any less a farmer than the next bloke.” He shook his head. “I’ve got three boys. They’re only kinda young and it’s too early to be guessin’ which teams they’re on, if you know what I mean,” he said, embarrassed. “But my middle boy… well, I dunno. But I tell ya, Charlie, it don’t make no difference to me. And I’ll be damned if I’ll let the likes of Jack fucking Melville tell me that one of my boys isn’t good enough. So you stand up there and do your speech, Charlie, and look that arsehole in the eye with your head held high. Because fuck him.”

Greg threw his head back and laughed. “Shit, Allan. Tell us what you really think.”

I was stunned. And humbled.

Allan wasn’t finished. “It’s hard enough out there,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s hard enough to get kids to carry on the family business as it is. I mean, makin’ money outta red dirt is the cruellest job on earth, yet some kids are brave enough to take it on. And if one gay kid in this whole territory can see that Charlie Sutton can make it, then it just might stop them from walkin’ away. It might stop one parent from losing a kid. Know what I mean?”

Greg wasn’t laughing now, and I had to swallow the lump in my throat.

I think he was calling me some kind of role model for his could-be, might-be gay kid.

It was one of those profound life moments, and I was standing there with a sandwich halfway to my hangin’-open mouth. I slowly put my hand down and swallowed hard. “Uh…”

Greg laughed beside me, and Allan smiled. “It’s the truth.”

“I could kiss you right now,” I said to him, without really thinking how that might sound to a straight guy. “Well… you know… if you were half a foot taller, twenty pounds lighter, and blond with a Texan accent.”

Greg laughed some more, and Allan looked a mix of embarrassed and offended. He patted his midsection. “Twenty pounds lighter?”

“Yeah, I didn’t mean that how it sounded… I just meant that you weren’t Travis…” I cringed. God I was making it worse. I looked around at the bar. “Is it too early for bourbon?”

Allan threw his head back and laughed, just as the auditorium doors opened and some guy called the meeting back on.

“Righteo,” Greg said with a deep breath. “It’s game on.”

Greg went first. Considering he’d been to every meeting in the last few years, it only seemed right. He knew everyone by name and told the room of some fifty people that he’d spare them a long and boring speech. They knew who he was, and if they wanted this industry and this Association to have a future, then it was time for a change. Short, to the point, and no-nonsense.

A few other guys spoke, telling more of their company and not saying a great deal about what they represented. I got that, I really did. If I had to describe myself, I’d probably describe Sutton Station instead, and people would see who I was.

But I wanted to show them more than that.

When it was Allan’s turn, he spoke of family and future, but then he went into how he thought we needed to be aware of health issues and depression in particular.

I wasn’t expecting that at all.

He gave figures on the rates of depression and suicides in the farming community across the country, and he said as an Association, we should be doing more. There should be some kind of system, he said, because there’s pressure, familial and financial, that can bury a man out in that desert.

It was sobering.

And maybe it hit just a little too close to home. Because I wondered, for just a moment, how different my life might have been if my father had someone to talk to when life got him down.

Allan said it was the twenty-first century, for God’s sake. We’re not living in the fifties anymore. We know these things exist, and we know it’s okay to get help. There were means to get help, and hell, it didn’t have to be formal. If monthly meetings were a BBQ and a few beers or a fishing trip up north—if it was just a bloody game of cricket—that once-a-month weekend just might be someone’s light in the dark.

He thanked everyone and took his seat between me and Greg, and the room was stock-still and silent. Until someone started clapping, and then everyone did. I nudged his knee with mine. “You did real good,” I told him.

Allan exhaled loudly. “Still too early for that bourbon?”

I chuckled at him. “How about we make them doubles.”

He smiled. “Sounds like a plan.”

Then the speaker announced, “Next speaker is Charles Sutton.”

Great.

I hated speaking in front of a group of people. But I was doing this, not just for Travis or for Sutton Station. I wasn’t even really doing this to show Jack Melville that he was a fossil stuck in 1982.

I was doing this for me.

I took my laptop case with me and took a minute to get it all connected up to the Smart Board, thankin’ God I remembered how to do it since my uni days. I ignored the chatter behind me and tried not to wonder if any of them had turned up just to see what a gay man looked like or to see if my handbag matched my dress.

I laughed to myself and covered it with a cough. I made a mental note to tell that joke to Travis because he’d think it was funny too, and with a smile still on my face, I faced my audience.

“My name is Charlie Sutton.” I didn’t have to tell them any more than that. They knew the name, most of them knew my father, and I didn’t need to spiel off my credentials or rave about the reputation of Sutton Station.

“You’ve seen the emails we’ve sent out that talked of technology and the future of farming,” I said. “Well, I’m gonna show you what we mean.

“I know what it’s like, you hear someone talking about technology and you tune out because you don’t have the time, the resources, or you think it just doesn’t apply to us out here. But I’m going to show you how it does.”

I pulled out one of Travis’s cattle tracking collars and held it up. “This is a tracking collar. A somewhat crude but effective alert device that is simply worn by your cattle, and it works like this,” I said, pressing the button on my laptop. The Smart Board behind me lit up, and on it was a satellite map with the boundary of Sutton Station outlined.

“This is my place,” I told them. “It’s… kinda big.”

There were a few chuckles around the room, but suddenly they were interested. All eyes were on the board.

“Two point five eight million acres, give or take a few,” I said. “That’s two-thousand, six-hundred kilometres of fencing, three thousand head of cattle, twelve bores and a helluva lot of man hours to cover.”

There were nods of agreement. “Now, what if I told you that I didn’t have to leave my office to see it?”

I pressed another button, and an array of dots covered my property on the screen. “Twelve blue dots, twelve bores. The ten red dots?” I held up the collar again. “Are these.”

“I have ten animals tagged. Five cows, five steers. Each in segregated mobs, as you can see”—I waved my hand at the screen—“in different paddocks over the entire property, hundreds of kilometres apart. Every bore on my property is solar powered, as most of them are these days. These collars are networked into those battery cells.”

“Just the other day, a vet wanted to check some grazing cattle,” I told them. “Which isn’t such a big deal, but instead of looking for one needle in a haystack that’s a few hundred square kilometres wide, I could pinpoint the herd to within a few metres.”

I pressed another button, and the GPS coordinates came up on the screen. “Every collar has a code, every code has a GPS location.”

I went back to the mapping screen and asked a guy at the closest table to pick one of the red dots on the screen. He chose a random dot and I clicked on it, bringing up another screen of numbers. “This collar is on a steer. Two years old, with a data-recorded complete insecticide drenching history, and there’s even a migration history since he was fitted with the collar. You can see on average what percentage the animal spends grazing, and if that spikes or declines, I want to know why.”

There were some blinks in surprise, a few head tilts and a few smiles. “You might think it’s just one animal, what good is that?” I asked rhetorically. “Well, I know if he’s there in the top western paddock, so are about another two hundred two-year old steers and heifers. Now before these collars, I could have guessed that’s where they were, roughly. But with these collars, I don’t need to send two of my team up there to check. I don’t need to waste days and dollars. I can see it all from here.”