The Vintage and the Gleaning by Jeremy Chambers Page A

beneath their crusts, bearing the deep indents of tractor tyres, crumbling beneath my feet. Vineyards back onto them, the vines crawling wild over the fences and webbing the lanes in a crazed tangle, leaves tiered to the ground.
    Brief canopies of trees cast a scattered shade, sunlight glancing through the still shadows. Their bark is thick and scarred and they creak in the heat. The deafening screech of cicadas. I break a branch from a stringy-bark and peel it to its pale wood, pummelling the bald stick against the ground as I go.
    Dogs bark as I pass. Quartz juts from the earth and sparkles. A single birdcall sounds across dead open spaces. A motorcycle comes towards me down a rolling paddock, lined by a high deer fence. The farmer, Dan Patterson, waves as he recognises me and turns back to the doe pen. The stags graze in the open. One of them raises its head to look at me, chewing its cud. It is young, bay-pointed, strips of velvet hanging from its hard naked antlers.
    Farmhouses in the distance. Crops of blanched wheat and barley. Orchards of towering cherry trees, glossy-leaved citrus, walnuts, olives, vines, always the vines, some disbudded in neat rows, others still wild with summer growth.
    A flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos line the bare branches of an ancient gum. They call their harsh call and flare their crests and take off with a sound of wings and the flock dazzles against the shifting vapours of the sky. I spot a half-dead tortoise struggling through the grass and I pick it up, turning it in the direction of the river.
    In one paddock a horse trots cautiously towards me, a big Irish hunter. It dodges and feints as it approaches, sniffing and snorting. Coming close, it rests its head on my shoulder, its great weight against me. I stroke the nose and mane.
    You’re a big fella, aren’t you, I say.
    The horse half closes its eyes, occasionally flicking its nose at the flies crawling over it, making gruff sounds. Its nostrils flare and sigh and I feel its hot breath. Muscles twitch under the sheen of the coat and its back legs shuffle from side to side. Sweat prickles against my cheek and neck. I push its head away with both hands. The horse leans back heavy against me.
    All right big fella, I say.
    I twist away and it follows me to the fence, stopping to graze and making quick retreats, looking back with large, liquid eyes and then trotting after me again. It pushes its flank against me as I climb the gate. When I come down the other side I stroke the chestnut nose again. The fence creaks under the horse’s chest and it snorts and whinnies as I leave, before turning and galloping away.
    I cut through Boss’s old farmyard with its empty dam and broken barley silo, littered with derelict equipment from Boss’s father’s day and his grandfather’s and all the way back. Old winepresses of cast-iron and cracked wood, ploughs and yokes and rusted rims, machines with forgotten purpose. It is overgrown with cactus now, a great sprawling mass of pale leaves spreading out toothed and thick and taller than a man, drooping under their own weight.
    Past Boss’s father’s stables, full of saddles turning to powder, mice nesting in the blankets and uniforms, his dress-sword rusted fast to the scabbard, the old .303 gone to pieces and nothing left of the medals but the medals themselves, scattered among the rodent droppings, tarnished green and black and beyond recognition.
    In the paddock behind, the descendants of his thoroughbreds have gone brumby, ribs showing through their mangy coats. They turn and flee as I pass.
    I cross the road to the cellar and go looking for Boss in the tasting shed and the cooling shed and among the vats and in the stockroom. I stop to chat with the women but they don’t know where he is.
    Outside I go around the back to the slumping shanty of the old cellar. It is dim and cool inside, the air heavy with wine and fermentation. I walk through the maze of