Foal's Bread (7 page)

She was remembering Uncle Nipper, his whiskery old voice showing her what he called the little miracles of the bush. One spring it was a red-capped robin, dead but perfectly preserved in a fallen tree; on another day, a nest lined by some busy little bird's beak which had collected her hair and his, interweaving the white and the gold with bark and spider webs.

Uncle Nip's hands with the missing fingers, she was remembering those too, swarming here, swarming there and swarming everywhere. And not just when he was playing his accordion. Loving her. Making her special, that Uncle Nipper with his eyes so stained and straining for what he called his glory that Noah had sometimes thought they were gunna pop right outta his head.

The day after Cecil Childs found himself eliminated, with the darkness of a hangover filling his mouth, he'd taken Rainbird down to a paddock behind the showground. On the way he grabbed a pitchfork not his own and, just starting off with the flat of it, began to hit the horse. By the time Lance Oldfield arrived, shouting a warning for him to leave off and never go near the horse again, it was too late. Cecil Childs had wounded the horse. The fork blades had gone into the rump. Also nearside, a shameful sight, all its ribs running bright with blood.

But as with the whole of Noah Childs' life, something bad leading to something good; in this instance her father, raving mad and hungover, saying, ‘We'll flamin well show that Lance. Git our own team happenin. That bloody idiot couldn't be more hopeless than if it were a Roman Catholic. We'll be a father–daughter combo.' For just as Roley Nancarrow and Angus Cousins had realised, so too had Cecil Childs seen that his only daughter was possessed of a rare gift for jumping. Thinking that the friendship Noah had struck up with record holder Roley Nancarrow could only be to their advantage, he said that she could after all keep the prize Roley had won for her, as long as she could work out where to stow the bloody thing on the drove home.

Which is how it was that one of the brumbies took fright: the sight of a big hoopla-stall duck weaving in the wind off Noah's saddle all too much for the woolly 14.2 gelding that leapt clean out of the holding yard. ‘We'll get that one for nuthin,' her father said, full of excitement. ‘Once broke he can be the first in our team. You think up the right name for him, Noh.'

And that horse became Ironpot because, even after he had won enough prize money to earn having a rug thrown on him in the winter, his coat always stayed that old and sooty colour of a camp oven pulled out of the fire on a frosty morning.

CHAPTER 3

‘C
an she milk, Rol?'

‘Course.'

‘Crack a whip?'

‘Can she not! Got to remember, Dad, that before she was riding jumpers she helped her father on a fair few droves. Even picked up pigs one year off One Tree.'

‘I don't remember that.' Sept Nancarrow groaned with a feeling of the Christmas gout entering both big toes at once. Why ever did Ralda have to give him that second serve of pudding? His left foot jerked with the familiar pain and then the right one joined in.

‘Mum'll remember. And Ral. Gave her cake and a drink.' Roley stood in the old kitchen of his childhood on Christmas Day. Now that the din of lunch was over and almost everyone was curled up on the veranda sleeping it off, and all the children already down at the creek, he'd just told his father that Cec Childs had said yes. That he could marry Noah. ‘Not that he was happy about it. She being his main rider and all.' Roley squinted out the window to the jacaranda tree. ‘There's not a thing Noh doesn't turn her attention to that she can't do. And that's a fact.'

‘In a wife,' said his father, wincing for his toes more than the news, ‘you really require something beyond daredevilry. You know. Something steady. Look at how many Mum fed today.'

‘Well that's not 'zactly the kind of life we got in mind. Work! Oh, that could be Noey's middle name. But high jump, Dad. Should've seen her put that Ironpot over six-six. She'll go seven one day. Maybe even be the first woman over eight.'

Please let my ears be deceiving me, thought his mother, who'd been listening in the hall with the gravy pan in her hands. ‘Rol, surely you're not thinking of marrying that girl of Childs'?' she said, coming in.

‘No thinking about it,' said Roley. ‘Already asked. And she said yes.' He looked outside. ‘Jaca's looking magnificent. With those new leaves.'

‘Terrific,' agreed his father. ‘Tuft of flowers right at top. Like Ral got there with one of her decorations. I presume this bit with the flowers is brought about by all the rain.' As if with some knowledge that it was the only big tree, not counting inaccessible and ancient softwoods permitted to live deep in the farm's gullies, the jacaranda tree had turned into a giant. Even though its trunk was opposite the original hut, the canopy swept these days into full view from Main House's kitchen window. The leaves were bright green against the cloudless sky.

Why they hadn't all got themselves down to the water, to that deep pool in the Flaggy that stayed cold all year, Roley had no idea. But without fully forming the answer he knew it would've been unthinkable to convey news of such magnitude anywhere except in the kitchen. The kitchen, with the big old Beacon stove, had always been the place for talking and decisions, no matter how hot the day. He looked at the curved relief of the black lighthouse at the front of the stove. He'd loved it so much as a boy he used to kiss it hello. Thinking of kissing of an altogether different kind, he smiled.

The day after the Port Lake dance he'd walked his girl to the lighthouse. The sea way down below had seemed to be leaping and sparkling with his happiness. In her eyes too, which were hazel, little green lights like waves dancing.

Maybe when Noey comes over tomorrow. Maybe that'll be the time for a swim.

‘What about bake you a cake, Rol—could she do that?' asked his mother.

‘Wouldn't need to if, like I was hoping, we can shift in here. The amount of cakes Ral's always got happening. Not full time or nothing like that. Just for between shows. Just so we can have a bit of a base until we get our own place.'

‘To One Tree?' Minna's mind was casting back to a scrag of a girl of some years before. Wormy, pot-bellied little thing. Hair on it like a bloomin half-caste.

In her agitation she picked a bone off a plate and began to crunch off the cartilage. The Cousinses had grown the bird and it had been good, cooked so beautiful and slow it was a wonder they hadn't eaten Ralda too, who'd got almost as hot. The end of the drumstick was as sharp as glass and cut her lip. ‘Oh, Rol,' she said, putting the bone down and also looking out the window at the tree.

Roley took the chance to study his mother's face covertly, knowing better than to look at it straight. The stroke damage had never improved but if you looked at it from this side there was no way of telling. Just that leaky eye from some other old injury. What had happened to her hair though? Was it receding from the ears up? Had it always been as thin as sun-starved grass?

His mother had taken the stroke here in the kitchen, not a month after the news that Duncan wasn't ever coming back from the trenches in France. Roley, thirteen years old at the time, had been the one to find her; torn off down the hill on his pony to fetch his father from the bails.

‘S'pose they could move into the old place, Min.' Roley's father quite liked the idea of getting another pair of milking hands. He'd been thinking of upping the herd what with the good season and all, but with Reenie's mad decision to go train at Matron Fry's cottage hospital they'd been hard pressed to keep up with sixty. ‘It's a nice little living space that. Be good for it to be getting used again, don't you reckon? For something other than cats eatin their rats in.'

‘Well I'm real happy for you, Rol,' said Ralda, appearing. ‘We'll be getting another sister. And we'll help you scrub out that old hut for her. Reenie's gunna be home for a week and from the sound of her nursing she knows all about cleaning. That matron. She gets all the nurses down on their hands and knees. Scrubbing floors.'

‘But you know I reckon you and Reen will like Noey.'

‘Maybe I could even make your wedding cake. Put Royal Icing on. Still as skinny as a match with wood shaved off it, is she? We'll change that,' said Ralda, who it sometimes seemed lived solely for the pleasure of baking giant cakes and batches of biscuits in the roomy oven of the Lighthouse over which she ruled.

‘Thanks, Ral.' Roley looked with gratitude at his sister. ‘And I'm gunna ask Angus could he take a wedding portrait. Was planning on making wedding in October. But tomorrow I thought I'd show Noey the old uncles' hut down on creek. Close to the practice paddock and all.'

‘What? Want to drown her?' said his father. ‘Can't live there. Only take a one-in-fifty-year flood.'

‘Well, hut up here or down there. Only to begin with. We're aiming to set up our own team. Just starting small. Get one or two high jumpers and a couple of good hunters. That's all we'd need. Be owner-riders then. Because prize money just keeps going up. Get a truck even. Eventually, with van behind. A few are doing that now. Hirrip brothers. Jimmy Davidson.'

Such was his optimism he whisked his arm around his mother and planted a kiss on the good cheek and grinned. Now that he was in love, everything and anything was possible and the tree outside seemed to open its boughs wider in the faint nor'-easterly just beginning to blow. ‘Tomorrow now, when Noey comes over, you're to tell her all about Aunty Irma and her triumphs.'

‘But her name, Rol,' said his mother, standing up to violently scrape leftovers into the slops bucket for the pigs. ‘What kind of a name is it? Couldn't they spell?'

‘Someone left out the
r
, they reckon,' admitted Roley. ‘Her mother died just after she was born. Twin girls it was. There'd have bin that much confusion. She writ down what she wanted but before anyone could check that she was for real, she and the second bub was gone.'

‘Well why, for heaven's sake, didn't someone give the benefit of the doubt and slip that
r
back in? What was her sister called?'

‘She was Nelda—but she didn't live no more than a few hours.'

For a moment Minna was quiet. She knew what it was like to birth twins and then lose one. Her first boys had been twins but little Darcy not living more than a day either. And then Dunc himself lost in a terrible place. Him who'd been that particular about keeping his feet dry in winter, lost in the mud. The photo of him in uniform perched on the china cabinet wasn't her favourite. She loved the last picture taken before he joined up. There'd been just an inch of rain at the end of September. Then nothing. Lucky they'd burnt the blady grass. A bit of green pick. It'd been up to Duncan to cut the cows' fodder from the trees. In her favourite photo, that she kept in her Bible, Duncan was way up an apple box gum cutting off branches for the cattle. The picture had been taken when there were no more branches left. So it was like he'd pruned a rose, only tree-sized.

When that terrible telegram had come, she'd thought of him as fallen out of that tree. It helped to think of him died like that, lying all peaceful in a circle of burnt blady. Not rotting in foreign mud.

‘Tell me I'm mistaken—' Minna returned to the problem at hand, ‘—but her mother was an Avery from Yellow Gully?'

‘That'd be right,' said Roley, looking beyond his mother to the framed photo of Aunty Irm leaping about four foot side-saddle in a Palace Hunt at some Sydney Royal a long time ago. That kitchen mildews of every hue and colour had crept in under the glass and given Pumpkin Pop spots couldn't rob the picture of its power.

‘Well Nesta Avery was a lovely girl,' remembered his mother. ‘It's true. Cos I was at Dundalla School with her and some of her sisters for a while. But their mother. Ol darkie eyes. She was a bad one and it come out in them all eventually. She was—' She paused. ‘She was a slut, I can't think of any other way to put it.'