Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 15, Issue 2 by Susan Midalia

Author:Susan Midalia
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781922171887
Publisher: Review of Australian Fiction

A Woman Who Went to Town

Josephine Clarke

All that remained of him was the smell of coffee and his empty bowl in the sink. It was Sale day, and he had already driven off in his ute. Lena couldn’t help herself; she left the dishes and went outside to her garden. She’d been waiting all week for a chance to look over the roses. Her shoes darkened with the wet dew. It was delicious, the freedom.

She quickly pulled on her rubber boots and hurried down to the dairy, singing as she strode. With the wheelbarrow from the feed shed she went to where they heaped the hay, foetid and warm, from under the cattle. She took the pitchfork from its hook at the shed door, stacked the barrow high, then pushed the heavy load up the little hill to her garden. She started at the furthest end of the rose beds and piled the warm grassa around each plant, not too close, working it into the soil with the fork, talking to her roses as she did: Superstar—such a brash, lipstick orange; Queen Elizabeth with her delicate English pinkness; Memoriam—strong stems and tightly clustered petals, like her memories. Apricot Nectar, Chrysler Imperial, Blue Moon… Her allies, every one of them.

Lena moved more swiftly and filled the barrow again. The day was warming. Clouds drifted away in the southern sky, and in the east the sun was reaching over the forest. She drew in the smell of it all: the damp leaves, the richness of the grassa, the wet soil broken open by her fork.

When she had finished the first bed, she moved on to the second in the side garden. It was like sewing; her fork going in and out of the soil. With her secateurs she trimmed off the yellow leaves and quarantined them into her apron pocket, then dead-headed the overblown blooms and buried them into the soil with the manure. She cupped her hands around the last few blooms and drew in their sweetness, treasuring it.

The soil was swollen with her generosity. Soon, when the winter set in, she would prune each rose, feed them all again and wait for their spring bounty and the Agricultural Show. If the timing was right, if the weather smiled, the moon waxed, and the days before the Show were calm enough, perhaps, if all these conditions were met, she might win the Champion sash. In her mind she already saw the purple and white ribbon wrapped around a Charles Mallerin or a perfect Pascale.

Across the paddocks she could hear a tractor ploughing. The sun fell full on the orchard but the vegetables still hung wet with night. She knocked her boots against the bottom step, shook them clean over the fuchsias and went back inside, where everything sat as she had left it. The fire needed stoking. In a flurry she raced through her tasks– the dishes, the sweeping. She filled the woodbox, put away his Weekly, emptied his ashtray. She

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