The Vintage and the Gleaning Read Online Free PDF Page A

He looks like he’s going to cry any second now.
    Boss stands up.
    They knew this was one of the old rows, didn’t they? he asks Wallace. You told them, didn’t you?
    Yeah, I told them, says Wallace.
    That vine’s older than you boy, he says. That vine’s older than any of us.
    The boy keeps looking at the ground, his jaw clenched.
    Boss is still looking down at the vine. He looks at me and he looks at me for a while without saying anything, his eyes looking out pale from his face like leather, dark and tough and creased like leather, his eyes looking right through me, his mind somewhere else.
    He really should see a doctor, he says to me. If he’s still feeling crook. You can never be too careful.
    True, I say.
    Well, you tell him I said that, says Boss, smiling. Tell him he should take himself down to the doctor’s. Tell him that’s what I said.
    He smiles, showing his gums and his gaps and his gold teeth.
    For his own good, he says.
    I take my shovel out of the dirt and stick it back in. I lean on the shovel.
    I’ll tell him, I say.
    Boss goes to the next vine along and starts digging about the base with his fingers.
    He stands up, grunting.
    Anything? asks Wallace.
    No, says Boss.
    He walks around to the vine on the other side and digs about. He stands up, flicking the dirt from his fingers and goes back to the broken vine, looking at it.
    Lucy comes past with her nose to the ground. She stops and sits with us for a bit, panting and snorting, and then she’s off again.
    Who planted them? Wallace asks. Your grandfather?
    Probably, says Boss. Him or his father.
    You hear that? Wallace says to the boy. His great-grandfather planted that vine. His great-grandfather planted it, you put your shovel through it. You’ve got to think. You got a brain, don’t you?
    The boy looks at Wallace with his cheeks blowing out and his eyes glittering.
    What do you want me to do? Wallace asks Boss. Tie it up?
    Boss keeps looking down at the vine.
    Yeah, he says. Yeah, well that’s all we can really do with it at this stage.
    He squats down again to look at the break, running his finger along it.
    Wallace goes off to the ute to get twine.
    Boss stands looking at the broken vine. He pushes it with his boot and it swings on the wire.
    Just try and be careful with the old vines, he says.
    After knockoff I go down Poachers with Roy and then set off home.
    Broken glass glitters on the railway track, scattered across the stones and sleepers, catching the light as I walk. Along the sides, the thick and spongy mass of winter clover has thinned. It is frayed and spindly now, yellowing, delicate and dying. The ditch of quartz-flecked clay is festooned with debris. Grease-mottled paper bags, cardboard takeaway boxes, cans and beer bottles, a brassiere. Plastic bags fill and rise and hover, ghostlike in the breeze. Dog turds turned to chalk. The embankment rises in thick swathes of long grass, meeting hardwood fences, cracked and worn, scrawled with profanities, roofs looming behind them, patches of lichen turned to dust on the terracotta tiles. Here and there sprays of colour, the jacaranda in blossom. I pass a sunk and rotten fence. Inside the yard a gutted car body sits choked with onion weeds, rusted engine parts scattered around it. I smell the onion smell. There are kids down the line.
    They are standing huddled together in the grass at the foot of the embankment, their backs to me. A collie is pacing back and forth behind them, growling and barking and whimpering. The kids push the dog away with their feet. They are looking down at something.
    When I come up, one of the kids, a girl, turns around.
    We caught a rabbit, she says to me. We caught a rabbit.
    Some of the other kids turn to look at me and then turn back. The girl watches me, looking up at my face. She is breathless and flushed, excited.
    In the middle of the group of kids, a boy is down on his knees. He is holding onto a small grey