Griff looked up from where he was digging and swore under his breath as he saw his father’s ute heading across the paddock towards him. ‘What now?’ he muttered, hoisting himself out of the muddy hole and wiping an arm across his forehead as he waited for his old man to climb out of the vehicle.
‘Just had a phone call from Sue. Bill’s about to go into surgery,’ his dad said in lieu of a greeting. It had been a tense twenty-four hours since Bill Dawson had rolled his tractor next door and almost killed himself.
‘Shit.’ Griff rubbed his jaw, thinking about his best mate Ollie sitting in some cold hospital waiting room.
‘Yeah. Young Ollie said he tried to call you but couldn’t get through.’
Griff had been working in one of the reception dead spots on the property. Bill must be in more trouble than Griff had first thought if his father had taken it upon himself to drive out and deliver Ollie’s message personally.
‘Figured you’d want to know.’
Griff waited for the lecture … there had to be one. After all, it was the perfect opportunity to find something to moan about, seeing as he’d driven all the way out here anyway. But nothing happened. His father stuffed his hands into his pockets and glanced over at the hole Griff had been in. ‘Got a leak?’
Griff folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the bull bar of his dad’s ute. He’d been out checking the water troughs this morning when he’d noticed the wet ground at the base of one of the troughs. ‘Yeah. Bloody pump needs a new hose.’
‘Bugger of a job.’ His father nodded at Griff’s muddy gumboots.
Okay, this was beginning to freak him out. What the hell was going on? His father never made small talk. ‘Everything all right, Dad?’ Griff asked warily.
‘Yeah. Course it is,’ he said, shuffling his work boots in the dirt. ‘Your mother thought I should come out and see how you’re doin’.’
‘Why?’
‘Buggered if I know. I told her you’re more than capable of handling whatever needs to be done. I don’t need to come out here and hold your flamin’ hand.’
Okay. So this was his mum’s big idea to get them talking. A memory of the hopeful look she’d given him flashed through his mind and he gave a silent curse. ‘Actually, Dad, while you’re here I’ve got a heifer in the yards with a bad eye. Do you reckon you can take a look at her for me? Let me know what you think?’ He’d spotted the weepy eye the day before and isolated her, but hadn’t had time to have a proper look at it. His guess was it was a grass seed—there were no signs of pink eye in the other cattle so it was fairly safe to say it wasn’t going to be that, but if asking the old man’s opinion helped keep the peace around the place, then so be it.
‘I suppose I could,’ he said, seeming a little surprised by the request.
‘Thanks. That’d be great.’
‘Well,’ Bob said, taking a step back, ‘you be bloody careful out here. Bill’s accident makes you realise just how quickly things can go wrong,’ he said gruffly.
‘Yeah. Righto. I will.’ Griff managed to hide his own surprise at his father’s uncharacteristic concern—he hadn’t told him to be careful of the machinery, he’d told him to be careful of himself. ‘Are you sure everything’s all right, Dad?’ Maybe there was something really wrong with him.
‘Of course everything’s bloody all right. Now get back to work, that leak’s not gonna fix itself.’
Griff instantly relaxed. There he was. All good, he obviously wasn’t dying or anything. ‘Righto. I’m goin’.’
He found himself thinking about Bill Dawson as he replaced the broken irrigation pipe. He wondered how Ollie was coping. Coming across an accident was never easy, but finding your own father in a life and death situation—that had to be rough. As much as he bitched and moaned about his old man, the thought of losing him felt like a punch in the gut. If any good came from Bill’s accident, maybe it was the reminder that parents weren’t going to be around forever. It was a sobering thought.
Olivia and Ollie spent the next few days playing tag, making sure someone was always with their father at the hospital. Their mother spent the majority of the day by his bedside, refusing to leave until evening. ‘He needs company,’ she’d say whenever Ollie or Olivia tried to get her to take a break.
Bill had undergone two surgeries since his admission to hospital, the first to stabilise his spine and the second to realign the fractures in his arm and leg, which required pins to be inserted. It was upsetting seeing him broken and battered, in such pain and feeling so helpless.
‘Mum can’t sit in a hospital all day for the next few months,’ Olivia said to her twin after yet another failed attempt to get their mother to leave the hospital for lunch.
‘Looks like she’s planning to,’ Ollie said, stepping out of the hospital elevator as the doors slid open on the ground floor. ‘She’s worried about him.’
‘I know she is. We all are, but he’s in a hospital. It’s not like he’s being left home alone. We have to talk about what’s going to happen, Ollie,’ she said, slipping her sunglasses from her head as they stepped out into the sunshine.
‘Dad’s not going to be able to come home for a while. You’re going to have to sit down with him and sort out what needs to happen to keep the business running.’
‘He’s not in any condition to have that discussion,’ Ollie said, shaking his head adamantly. ‘Besides, he’s going to want to approve everything from his hospital bed.’
‘He won’t be able to, will he. He’s hardly going to be able to direct the harvesting or pay for fuel and feed from here. It’s just not possible.’
‘He won’t want to hand it all over to me, though.’
‘Well, he’s going to have to deal with it. Mum’ll see reason; we’ll talk to her about it tonight. But you’ll have to do it sooner rather than later. The property’s a business and it can’t stop because Dad’s suddenly not at the helm.’
‘I’ll keep it running,’ Ollie said a little stiffly.
‘I’m not talking about the farming side of things, Ollie. Of course you’ll have all that under control. I mean all the other stuff. Dad has all the banking passwords and the authority on accounts, all the tax stuff, invoices.’ She saw Ollie’s shoulders droop slightly. She knew he’d already been considering everything that he’d need to do farming-wise, but she suspected he hadn’t had time to wrap his head around the business details their parents normally handled. The weight of responsibility finally seemed to be dawning on him. It was too much for one person to take on alone. They stopped at the car.
‘It’ll be okay,’ she said gently.
‘Yeah,’ he sighed as he sat behind the steering wheel and stared through the window. ‘I’ll manage.’
Griff kicked his boots off outside the back door of his house and hung his hat on the coat hook on the wall inside. It’d been a long, frustrating day. He’d been chasing up parts for the harvester in a mad hurry to have all the maintenance done before harvesting got underway. It didn’t matter how prepared you were, something inevitably went wrong; but it was better for things to go wrong unexpectedly than for something to go wrong that could have been avoided in the first place.
He grabbed a cold beer out of the fridge and sank down on his lounge, pulling out his phone as it began to ring.
‘Hey.’ Ollie sounded tired.
‘How’re things going, mate?’ Griff asked.
‘Slow. They’ve managed to stabilise the fractures to his spine, but the pelvis fractures were pretty bad. I’m not sure when I’ll be getting back home.’
‘Don’t stress about anything this end, Ol. I’ve just come back from your place and everything’s okay. If you think of anything you need doing, just let me know.’
‘Thanks, mate,’ Ollie said, and Griff heard him clear his throat.
‘No worries. You just concentrate on what you need to do down there.’
‘That’s the thing, there’s bugger all I can do. It’s frustrating as hell.’
Griff could only imagine. There was nothing worse than sitting around waiting.
‘To be honest, I need to get out of here so I can do something useful, like run the damn property. Dad doesn’t need me sitting beside his bed holdin’ his hand.’
‘Yeah, well, I hear ya. I’d probably be feelin’ the same way, but your mum and sister need you right now and I can take care of this end for as long as you need me to, so don’t worry about getting back in a hurry.’
‘Yeah. I know. Thanks, Griff. For everything. We left in such a hurry, I don’t know what I would’ve done if you hadn’t been there.’
‘Any time, bro.’
They hung up and Griff sat in the quiet room for a long while afterwards. He would have thought he’d have shaken this stupid mood by now, but sometimes, when he was least expecting it, a heavy kind of dread settled on his chest and he was thrown back into those first few dark days after he and Linc had had the fight. Maybe it was all the talk about hospitals that had done it this time.
Whatever it was, he didn’t like it.