Foal's Bread (37 page)

‘Well,' continued her mother, ‘that hopeless fool Farquhar Riley had put a mob of his cattle on Wirri Reserve. Got sick of waiting for flood to drop so tried to swim them over. Oh what a mess. Current still surging. Cows strung up in trees. Some landed on bank only to get back in and be drowned as they saw their mates going by. Saw it all from my aunties' veranda. Oh dear, it was a circus. He had his whips cracking and another man the same.'

‘Mum!' Lainey wanted to call out the morning they fetched up the anvil. ‘Me arms are gunna swoll up like Mr Cousins',' as together they heaved it up from the creek. Instead she clamped her mouth shut and just kept on as her mother whistled like a man, unconcerned, and neither looked up to see how far to go, or uttered one word of disappointment aloud that the widespread flooding had seen Port Lake Show cancelled.

‘By jeez, Lainey, but you're good!' exclaimed her mother when they'd succeeded in getting it within fifty feet of the bails. Lainey looked up, flushed but triumphant, and all the pain worth it for that flash of tenderness, that love as tough as muscles passing between them.

With the autumn ending, now arrived the winter of many changes. After helping clean out Uncle Owen's house of flood mud, Aunty Reen, making good her decision to pick up her nursing again, moved to Port Lake. Then the Wizard Lighting came in July. Although its installation was greeted with much fanfare, the temperamental reality of the Wizard made itself known so quickly that by the time of Lainey's birthday it was clear a pair of nimble legs were going to be required to keep the light happening.

‘It's part of your present,' Aunty Ral and Nin said both talking at once, leading her to the door of Aunty Reenie's old room. ‘Can't have you living in hut now you're getting older. And Reen said it can be yours with her blessing.'

‘But I want to stay with Mum and George.'

‘Well, Laine, the thing is, much easier for you to be here for the Wizard,' because straight away it had become her job to light the system; soaking a long stick in a bit of metho and then snapping a chain hard to light the shellite that ran around in pipes overhead. For reasons unknown, the Wizard might abruptly go out four, maybe five times of an evening. ‘Can't keep calling you over each separate time now, can we?'

‘But George'll never sleep without me.' With a feeling of despair Lainey bit through the corner icing on her piece of birthday cake.

‘She's right,' said Noah, putting down her piece of cake. ‘George won't stand to have Lainey that far off, will ya, George? Want to be awake all night with the caterwaulin that I can guarantee will go on?'

‘Well, Noh,' said Ralda, gentle as the cake's bit of cream filling but strategic. ‘He could go into Rol's sleepout, we was thinking. Good for a young boy to see the stars. Now you're both getting older you should have your own rooms. Aunty Reenie's even organised a new bed.'

Minna, as if summoning in the new order, was nodding her head in agreement like a chook with skin scale.

‘You've 'bandoned me,' Noah joked with a kind of sad vehemence to her daughter. In the new emptiness of the once-full hut Noah moved around like the ruined Chinese gardener in his ruined garden. Never say die was all very well but might as well catch at a straw as take on Minna.

Noah moved with the feeling that the waters of change had swept just about everything away. But not Roley. Only in the most temporary of ways had the flood eclipsed his absence. The dreadful yet paradoxically comforting realisation arrived one chance afternoon over in Main House: that her husband's eyes would be forever shining out to her from above Min's stroke-wrecked cheeks. His eyes in Lainey's face too. Or even blinking out at her in miniature when she picked up one of the new kittens down at the bails. The purring little thing no heavier than a hankie but that deep blue like beautiful living glass gazing up.

Sometimes she had to take a slug of this or that to make it through. She was getting the grog on tick from Thelma Cochrane. Paying it back in dribs and drabs from her shoeing money. This became the season that when anyone in Main House saw a horse tied up in some ridiculous place they knew that Noah must've secreted home a flagon and gone in search of another sip.

This was the spring when the first full-moon westerly blew most of the tiny leaves off the jacaranda early. The leaves lay against the sleepout's louvres in little yellow drifts that looked golden to the girl lying inside. There'd been no choice but to swap rooms with George ever since by terrible mischance his favourite old cat Blackie hadn't got out of the second oven in time. Then he'd broke his arm, coming off Fly, going at a gallop round his circle in home paddock with Blackie's remains in a sugarbag on the front of the saddle.

But would he keep that arm elevated? Ralda asked Reenie when she next came over. No, so that George's wrist swelled and juices began to run out of the plaster at the hand and be licked away by one of his grey cats.

At night the girl listened in the sleepout to the crushed notes of an owl in the scrub up on top of the highest ridge. Uncle Owen had fixed her up a beautiful fat lamp in a syrup can for her to read by. Hung it on a nail by her pillow and all. He'd even cut up one of his old hats to use the felt as the wick. But full-moon nights were not for reading.

My God, my god
, went the owl in the south-west.
My god
, as if only a wild bird coming down off the timbered ridges for mice scampering in home paddock for the shed could fully describe how profoundly the farm had been altered.
My god, my god
, like it knew that on One Tree Farm had lived a man who'd starved himself to death because from holding his daughter's hand he'd realised that another man wanted to do more than just dance with his wife.

Oh my god, my god.
Noah, taking another swig from her stash, heard the owl too.

Without needing to put it into words, she knew Min had truly trumped her this time. In taking away Lainey and George. That moment Minna had decided to have the Wizard Lighting installed into Main House. The rat cunning of it, for now when Noah looked across to Main House after dark the windows were all soft and golden again. No sooner had Lainey got to be the wizard at getting that Wizard going, than Minna had declared it all a dangerous failure, and was seeking somehow to get her money back. Gone back to kero lanterns.

One Tree was unsettled, the land weakened by inappropriate desires which in the state of trembling that follows any change had to be fought off. Noah took another mouthful. Oh, they all met at mealtimes and rode together, milked together, but when half drunk, the rupture felt as complete as the land lost from the flats in the flood.

Roley, thought Noah, simply because the topmost branch of the jacaranda tree had burst into blossom like a parrot's crest, two months ahead of the rest. But he was dead so how could the shape of Angus not come into her mind instead? And could it really be true that he'd shut up shop in Port Lake and gone to Sydney with never so much as a hooroo or goodbye? So that all she could do was fall asleep sucking her own thumb, relieved if she could keep that one she'd let go in the river from riding up to her on top of its upturned boat like the baby captain of all nightmares.

My god, my god.
Down in his own hut again Uncle Owen strove to keep busy. After dealing with the flood mud in his hut, he oiled up his sister's old side-saddle and later was ashamed that, unable to put a halt to his needs, had dropped his trousers to grease up that which still lived sometimes between his skinny old legs.

My god, god, god
. Ralda, surer than ever that the terrible smell of George's cat was still getting into her baking, chomped into another old scone. For goodness' sake, she thought, but then had a victory the next day when her new Russian stickjaw ripped out two of George's teeth. And everyone applauded because they were going rotten anyway and it saved having to get him to the dentist.

Only the foal's bread still dangled unchanged from where Roley had hung it over their hut's door. No rats had ever chosen to chew it and from the oiling Noah had given it to stop the mould, a sheen had come into its surface. That which had been flesh had turned now to what a stranger would surely think was polished wood. It was so light that if floodwaters high enough to take on the hill ever came it would float free of all the shouting and shame; a tiny boat, a little heart of an ark upon which could lie piled every noble high-jump hope left.

CHAPTER 18

B
y three o'clock in the morning of Wirri Show day, two years on from Roley's death, Noah Nancarrow had drunk herself into oblivion. After lodging the entries the week before, unable to know when she'd next be back in town, Noah had nipped into the hotel. Thelma Cochrane had had a flagon wrapped in readiness. When Ralda asked suspiciously where she had been, Noah was able to truthfully say that she'd picked up a sack of staleys from the bake-house for the horses. The flagon was invisible down in its paper bag, in amongst the hard old high-tops.

Now, on show day, the tot she'd poured at midnight to help her sleep had led to a couple more. With that amount flowing in her blood she could feel the nature of her victory fast approaching. On Magpie, what might not be possible? And to toast the horse as much as anything else she let herself have a fourth. Since her wins at Port Lake and Wirri last year the mare had only grown bolder, willing to face whatever Noah turned her for. If only there'd been someone else left in the competition, who knows how high Mag would've gone. As it was, six foot for Wirri then six-nine at Port and the prize money had been hers. Bloody Minna gloating. Taking half off her. And Noah never a leg to stand on when it came down to money.

A fierce kind of love for the ugly misfit of a horse filled her. She could feel that at last she was going to wrest back not only some kind of respect from mean ol Minna but her daughter too.

Suddenly she remembered that this year Lainey would also be in the high jump. That keen to try again, game as her mum, after being eliminated first off on Breezy last year. After the show, thought Noah, taking another slug, she'd get Lainey back to the hut with her. George too. Another few sips led to the loneliness of no husband. How sad that Roley wasn't here to see the Magpie jump the Nancarrow name back to glory. Or his children out to do their best. To cope with the flood of sorrow she took a whole glass.