Foal's Bread (26 page)

Lainey thought she could catch the sweet smell of it in the air. ‘But what if eggboat man won't sell?'

‘Look, he might say he's going deaf as a bloody beetle but he'll know a good offer when it's made.' According to Uncle Nipper, a piebald horse was lucky, whereas a skewbald, with the exception of the clever little high-jump pony Patches, would be the opposite. Never keep a brown and white foal or trouble would come. Cross your fingers, however, whenever you see a piebald in a paddock and make yourself three wishes. And Uncle Nip, was he ever known to be wrong?

‘Your Aunty Ral said you'd be starving.' Noah spoke again to Lainey.

Lainey could smell horse's hoof on her mother and though in one way that was a horrible, half-rotten smell, in another way it was the best in all the world. It was a smell deep with the toil of a woman doing the work of two or more men.

‘I'll sneak her a bit of a feed. Tomorrow we'll get that shoe on and the hinds as well. No worries,' Noah called to the child figure vanishing in the dark. ‘No drama,' and felt as excited as if she was the doctor in Sydney, putting Roley right at last.

‘Righteo,' Lainey said, speeding up now for the house, starving alright; happier even than when Mr Mapleston had given her the Most Popular Laughing Girl certificate last year.

‘Have to think of a name, Lainey,' called Noah.

‘I'm already thinkin,' came back the voice and also a snorting series of little laughs, like her daughter had the chokes.

‘You okay?'

‘I'm okay,' Lainey said, the thought of her father home at the end of the week turning her all over again into that Laughing Girl.

At that moment it was as if she and her mother were those scales at the Wirri store, in perfect balance. The weight of certainty in Lainey's voice as her boots ran through the carpet of jacaranda flowers about to rot was exactly matched in her mother.

Noah, suddenly girlish herself in the dark, crossed her fingers. For sure Minna would love to swindle that eggboat man too. Get him back for selling them those diseased pullets.

‘You'll be as good as mine then, I reckon,' she told the horse, imagining the look that would be in her husband's eyes when he came home with all his troubles nothing more than a bad memory.

So what that the mare might be hard in mouth and for sure and certain would kick all the other horses to billyo, dominating the feed tins. No matter. Not since Ironpot had she seen such raw talent. Those low-slung hocks. That goose rump. Beautiful big flat knees.

As her Uncle Nip had shown her, she made an ‘o' with her mouth and puffed some of her breath first into the horse's right nostril, then the left. No doubt about it, mare was ugly as all else, except for these beautiful nostrils the size of teacups. The mare relaxed. Blew her horse breath right back into Noah.

‘There then, now we know each other. And hang on . . .' She slung the lead rope over her shoulder in order to cross the fingers of her left hand as well. She leant into the mare with the black-and-white-smelling sweat.

No question about her first two wishes. Please let Rol come home cured. Please let war be over so shows can get going again. And lucky number three. ‘Might as well say it now.' She slapped the horse's shoulder good-humouredly. ‘I wish to fly over at least seven with you.'

CHAPTER 13

G
otta take the good times with the bad, Roley had always advised his children and wife. Gotta be prepared for the falls and the victories. However, just over a year after seeing the specialist, when it was clear that the deterioration in his walking was, if anything, speeding up, he no longer knew what to say. He stopped mentioning Horrie West who, wooden leg and all, had jumped before the war. For the truth of it was that by the end of 1945 Roley could barely ride Tadpole down the hill to the bails, let alone jump so much as the line-up of kero tins Lainey had fixed for George and Fly.

‘Jappy Christmas! Jappy New Year!' he heard Lainey and George screaming out to the pigs, because now the war in the Pacific was over too, it was allowed.

The panic in him was like the sound of the hens, their little urgent marching feet, trying to escape the mosquito plague of this first Christmas of peacetime. He'd put cow shit inside corn cobs and lighted these inside kero tins but it didn't help that much. Down at the bails, closer to the creek, the situation was even worse. The udders of the cows were that inflamed, with so much blood getting into the milk that, as his mother said, it was a wonder the factory hadn't asked was it strawberry milkshakes they were making in their cream.

The panic was that for so long he'd quietly connected up the ending of the war with the ending of his walking problems.

‘Pretty sure we'll be right, once war's over,' had been his most common reassurance to Noey. As if somehow his own walking mystery, the numbness with no name, was tied into battles unimaginable, raging away on the other side of the world; then closer to home, New Guinea, but still so far removed from One Tree as to feel like a strange dream best summed up by all the boats of Wirri being hauled out of the water and stored in a secret location in case the Japanese invaded.

Now here it was, the war really had finished. Harold Cousins had fired the shots down at Oakey Flat when the news came through on the wireless of the surrender of Japan. Soon after that, all the boats, including Uncle Owen's own little fishing one with the red ash oars, were back in their rightful places. Talk of Wirri Show resuming for '46. A chance for Landwind to make his debut as a five-year-old. He was showing promise. Oh, a beautiful walk and canter on him for a baby. Also the wildcard mare Noey had called Magpie what never walked but always jig-jogged, looking for the next hill to bolt up or fence to jump. And high time for old Breezy to do what he loved best, which was jumping.

But as for his own walking? Worse. The realisation was like a talented pony unexpectedly baulking and lobbing you over its head when the odds were that you'd be the winning combo. The other one who he knew felt winded was his sister. Poor old Ral. After such a focus on knitting and baking and endless stitching up of packs for the soldiers, thinking any one of them might've been Splash, she moved ponderously around Main House, too preoccupied to even rouse at the dogs and magpies that ate up all the blood and bone on her garden before she got a chance to have Lainey and George dig it in.

The Wherret brothers, who'd both been in the services, wounded in action in a place Roley couldn't pronounce? Also caught out. Instead of keeping their high-jump horses in any kind of work, they'd turned them out to wander free. Now those horses were just like a pair of brumbies coming down out of the wilder country, with manes halfway to the ground; their jumping muscles all withered away, seedy toe that chronic in the once-formidable Mr Loveliness that Jim Wherret said a bullet had been the only choice.

Although the outcome of seeing the specialist in Sydney last year had been made light of, deep down something in them all recognised that Dr Spork, the old grunter, was right. That there was going to be no comeback. That it was curtains for Roley. That possibly, depending, he might even end up in a wheelchair.

‘Depending on what, Doctor?' Reenie had raked up courage enough to ask.

‘It remains to be seen,' Spork had said. ‘But maybe your brother . . .' Speaking as if Roley had suddenly become invisible. ‘Perhaps it would be for the best if he accustoms himself to the idea of some kind of work that needs neither balance nor physical dexterity. We'll do a reassessment same time next year.'

‘Well no way, Mum,' he had said when Minna reminded him. ‘Once was enough for that big waste of time and money.'

He thought he saw her relief and felt inexplicably betrayed. For hadn't they all been that embarrassed on the train trip home? His own mother and sister. A kind of shame coming in the refreshments carriage; a kind of triple temptation growing to let other passengers go on thinking that he must be one of the returned. Gassed or wounded or starved. Or only survived by frying up stolen orange peel in some bloody Jap prisoner-of-war camp, because then at least the bloody walking stick would've had an easy explanation.

Back at One Tree he never failed to get a laugh, describing all over again the small feather in that doctor's fat fingers.

‘And he come to all those conclusions using a chook feather?' Though they've been over it a hundred times, fresh frustration scorched through Noah. All their high hopes.

What use her first two wishes, she thought sadly, taking smaller and smaller bites of her burnt toast. She wanted to put her arms around her husband as easily as she could around George or Lainey but somehow it seemed impossible. A waste of wishes, that's what he'd been, that Dr Spork.

‘Yes,' Minna was saying. ‘Specialist was like a bloody blowfly with a feather.'

‘And a hammer,' Roley said. ‘Like he aimed to see me shod. Tap-tapping me here, there and everywhere. And a real strange-looking man he was too.' How cruel, how incredible it had seemed after the appointment, sitting on a bench in Martin Place watching men and women of every shape and size walking along so effort-lessly. ‘A woppin head on that doctor,' added Minna, as if this would render his words even less trustworthy. ‘His advice were about as handy as a hip pocket in a singlet, isn't that right, Reen?'

‘That fat that were he to fall over he would've exploded like an overripe melon.'

But underneath the habitual scorn, just as had happened when a couple of times they'd gone to Port Lake to watch the newsreels of the war, into the disbelief had crept an acceptance. Something in them conceded and gave up.

No mustard gas or shellfire responsible but an unlucky bolt from one of their own storms. Paralysis by lightning. Dr Spork had thought there was validity in the idea. The doctor, this idiot they'd for so long pinned all their hopes on, had stared at him sleepily and mentioned that the ongoing derangement of his nervous system could accelerate at any time. Or halt altogether. Because lightning had as good as fried his nervous system.

‘I'm gunna be Dr Spork.' Even this long later, it was a game his children enjoyed playing. Lainey was always the doctor, stretching her brother out on the bit of concrete path where Ralda normally scrubbed clothes. ‘You lay down.' He'd seen his daughter move up and down her brother in such a close imitation of the actual event that it seemed to him she must've been a stowaway watching.

The strangest thing was that the war years of One Tree had been better than most. Good seasons had meant they'd never been short of milk or meat. Except for the spring when the cows got out among the weeds along the road into Wirri, they'd had their good farm butter.

As a family there had been a kind of beauty, an inseparability. Keeping Seabreeze in condition. Learning George how to get the best out of Fly. Getting Lainey started with jumping. In no time at all she was that confident she had George up behind her on Breeze
,
giving her brother a feel of cat-jumping one of the gulches above Bitter Ground. Just for the heck of it. Just to have George clutch on to her and scream with terrified glee.

Whatever they told their daughter to jump it made no difference. She was a natural. Even bareback, hopping Tad over this or that, her style was so good you'd swear she was in the finest jumping pad ever made. An invisible one. She never hauled on her horse's mouth. Just real smooth, just fearless.