Foal's Bread (16 page)

‘And let it be a lesson to them all,' Father John raved. No stopping him now.

‘Dad would bop him one for sure,' agreed Roley.

‘Let death find none of them not ready.'

But what about if it were only your legs that had decided to die ahead of the rest of you? What about that? Roley would've liked to ask his priest. For when it did come his turn, no one would be saying he died with his boots bloody on. Where had his feet gone? More and more often lately to have at least some idea of their whereabouts, he'd taken to going around One Tree with his feet bare.

‘Jeez,' his father had said, as if he had a choice. ‘What you flaming well up to, Rol? You'll give Mum a heart attack. She'll think it's old Henry Holkins scooting over the frost like that.'

Now, at the funeral of his father, some panic was beginning to stream. Hefting his share of his father's coffin onto his shoulders, for a moment there his feet nearly went from under him.

‘Died with his boots on, Angus,' Roley said, picking up the children at the end of the day. As if that phrase held some greater secret, had become the password—though to what exactly, nobody knew. He wanted to say something more.

‘I'm sorry, Rol,' Angus began. ‘If there's anything—'

Roley cut him off with the weather. ‘Good that the rain held off. How about on the coast?'

‘Oh, we got a dazzling day. That warm had to persuade George we weren't there for a winter swim.'

‘Well go on, Lainey, George. Where's your manners? You say thank you to kind Mr Cousins. Were they good?'

‘We went to the sea,' cried Lainey. ‘Et fish and chips 'cept George cried about the seagulls.'

‘Go on, George. You say ta too.'

‘Ta.'

The birds with their red eyes had tried to take her brother's chips off him. There had been a white horse and a white lighthouse that looked like they belonged wherever it was Pop had gone. But it was the sea so far down below that really had upset George, she reckoned. The white froth smashing onto dark rocks with the savagery of a hundred horses striking.

To drive the Ford that he supposed must now belong to his mother, just to be on the safe side Roley took off his boots. ‘No, George, you don't have to take yours off. Dad's just trying something out.'

‘Dad!' shouted Lainey when the moon had come up and was shining full on her face through the window. ‘Dad! Will ya put the moon away!' Then fell straight back to sleep before he'd even pulled the curtain. Next George woke up.

But in truth Roley felt glad of the legitimate diversion keeping him from going to bed himself.

‘Shush up now, George. Don't want to wake your sister. You snuggle up there next to Laine.'

Still his son cried on, as if his broken-hearted little pudding of a face was the only thing on One Tree that could afford to express the grief.

‘Here,' said Roley. ‘Here, people will have every right to call you a loony if you carry on like that. And we know you're not that. You're George. George Nancarrow, and that's the long and the short of it. But stop crying now. You'll wake Lainey.' He went to fetch out of the oven of their hut's little stove the hot rock he'd planned to take in for Noah. He slipped it into one of the bags Ralda had sewn. ‘You hold onto that, George. Don't want to wake up Mum, do we?'

George was sitting up now. Crying harder.

‘Hold your rock. It'll help.' Roley put his arm around the shirt George slept in that was as patched and mended as any old pony rug. ‘Atta boy. If we wake everyone up that'll be no good for tomorrow's milking now, will it? No! And in his time your Pop were the fastest after your mum to strip out a cow. Remember what Ral said? Can only meet your Pop in your dreams now, George. We gunna be in for it. We'll need our strength.

‘No need to cry. Look at how that Fly goes for you, hey? You've never even fallen off yet. Better than me. I was just three when your Pop put me up onto one of his plough horses. The bugger downed his head and over I went! My first jump but in the wrong direction.

‘That's good, that's the way.' For George, remembering the comfort of his thumb in his mouth, had jammed it in and was pulling the scrap of blanket Ralda called his Ruggy up and down his little squashed-in nose. The strange late sou'-westerly still hadn't blown itself out. Roley could hear the tiny leaves of the jaca as they skittered and skipped across their bare home paddock.

‘Oh dearie me,' called out Ralda from Main House, rolling over in sleep.

‘Oh dearie me,' George heard the waterbirds down on Flaggy call back, which set him sobbing all over again.

Minna, about to fall asleep lying on her back, hadn't allowed herself to register yet that there would never be another night when Sept's snores tried to rise above her own. The bed was much colder though, so roomy, and Sept's pillow where she rested her head smelt just like his hat.

‘Disasters.' She sat up and remembered to take out her teeth. Her mouth collapsed. Never again to see that of her husband's mouth. With his teeth in you'd swear he was only bloody fifty year old. Teeth out and his mouth turned about one hundred and twenty. She ran her mind over other deaths, the first obvious few. Duncan. Of course, in the first war in that land so far away. But closer to home, her own Pop killed when the load of logs broke adrift and fell fair on top of him. Had to be dragged on out from gully tied to the tail of his horse. Her own little brother Jack, kicked in the heart by a horse and dead by the time Owen carried him home. Or disasters of a stranger kind. Old Cliff Cathouse born for heaven's sake with no roof to his mouth. Or that woman of whatsername. Tractor wheel ran over her head and popped out her eyes, they said. Dangerous things, tractors, but it hadn't stopped Sept having one on order for One Tree
.
For the flats, not the slopes, he'd growled.

Noah, waiting in bed, thought this might be the right night. To give Roley the nicest consolation of all. To take their mind off the funeral. To comfort each other in the best way.

Standing up, she pulled out from the back of her drawer the gift from Aunty Mad. Solemnly, sadly, but swiftly too for the night was freezing, wind howling in through cracks in the boards, she pulled on the garment and did up as many of the hooks and eyes, in as right a configuration, as she could manage. It was as hard as learning to plait in the round for a whip. Devilish tricky. Giving up, she pulled her own nightie back on and the dressing gown over that and didn't know if she was glad he was late coming in to bed or fed up. But in all the waiting her heart began to go faster. She checked the wick of the fat candle, wished her bosoms were big enough to properly fill the cups, and lay back down.

‘What is it, George, what is it?' repeated Roley until it sounded to Noah, wide awake and listening, that her husband and George were making up some kind of song. Nothing to do with Sept, whose time it had been. ‘What is it, George, oh, what is it?' A song about the ongoing and mysterious decline of Roley, who'd just last week turned thirty-eight.

Can no longer walk a straight line! What did that army man know? When not so long ago look down any one of Roley's rows of corn and see light at the end. Straighter than any bloody battalion of marching soldiers. His unerring eye behind the plough.

At least, Roley was thinking, laying George back down next to Lainey, at least one good thing about his father's passing was that it was going to take away a lot of the shame of being knocked back by the army.

Good you've got Rol
, he'd heard probably a dozen people telling his mother.
They need the best farmers to stay behind. Keep the food growing.
That sort of thing.

His daughter's mouth moved in the way of a fresh-born foal facing the world in its first brave days. Her jaws opened and shut. There was the snop and grind of small white teeth.

‘What is it, George, what is it?'

Something that must never be put into words.

‘What is it, George, George, George?' whispered the wall boards Sept's father had used to line the original hut of One Tree's roof.

Finally, Noah knew that only if you were nearly eighty and your name was Uncle Nip and you were more than half tanked could you name it. She could hear Roley raking over their small stove, ensuring that there'd be a cuppa before tomorrow's milking without having to go over to Main House. He was always so thoughtful. She propped herself up on her elbow to look out the window and right at that very moment saw way away the Cousinses' house go dark on its own hill.

‘The death of me ol dick, darling.' Uncle Nipper, under the weather fifteen-odd years ago, after the Dundalla Show, had walked in to stand by her pillow. Pretending to be asleep but as awake as all else she'd caught a glimpse of Nipper looking at the shrivelled-up white caterpillar of a thing that he held between his fingers. Standing with his flies undone. The moonlight splashing down.

‘Might as well cut it off for all the use it is to us tonight, Noey.' When he lit a candle she half expected the fumes coming out of his breath to set the room on fire. Then he'd moved even further off to tap at his old teapot the way you'd try to get some life going in a dud lamp wick. Or feel if that old bit of parsnip forgotten at the back of the vegetable safe was still alright to eat.

How could Noah tell Reenie, let alone any doctor, that something—lightning in the year of George's birth or the strikes further back—appeared to have knocked out the life down
there
? Though all of them would remember the yellow glow that seemed to cling to Roley's face and arms a good week after the lightning, only Noah had come to understand its deeper meaning.

That numbness, she thought bitterly, slipping her hand between her legs for comfort and warmth, had taken away all the sons and all the daughters who might've been. Their team. She felt a sensation of ice, as though her fingers had got stuck in a milk pail full of hailstones.

Then came a thought from nowhere. Who had said it? That marriage is like a horse and rider. It must've been lovely Roley himself, back when he'd popped the question. That patience and forgiveness are constantly required.

When at last she felt Roley slip into his side of the bed she reached out, wanting to remind him of those words. At first he wouldn't melt over to her side of the bed. He lay stiff as a board on his back, holding her hand. Even so she could feel the thinness of his body. She could feel his chest narrow and beating.

‘Wonder how Mum is,' he said at length. Because the curtain didn't fit the window he could see the jacaranda. It'd been such a cold winter that it had lost most of its leaves early. Its branches were spreading out so wide in the night he thought of a set of long arms. ‘She'd be that lonely. Their fiftieth anniversary next month.'

Remembering
that
, thought Noah, when last year he'd forgotten their own.

But what Roley was really imagining was carrying Noey over the threshold where light became dark, over the concrete path, onto the grass, and under the tree to be her husband. He could imagine the very shape their shadow would make as finally they got set for a son who'd be right in the head. Who'd be able to farm, fence, milk, jump horses.

Maybe the majestic canopy of a tree held all the power to magically restore what had been taken, if only they dared? Come the spring? Except vehemently he remembered that in the dark his lack of balance now was likely to tip him over.

He felt one of her fingers touch his face.

‘Our sixth coming up,' he said. ‘Almost a lucky number, isn't it?'

Still she didn't speak. Spring, she was thinking, back at Dundalla. The mulberry trees all bright green and pink with baby fruit. Fences to mend. Pigeons to shoot or poison.

Although Roley had jumped eight foot the day Lainey had been born, a record for Toowoomba, every time he thought of trying to explain to Noey what was happening in his body, courage utterly deserted him. Also, he simply didn't understand it himself.