Foal's Bread (20 page)

‘Lucky, eh Rol, not to have a poddy foal in hut tonight.'

‘That's for sure. Rearing that Lamby was hard work.'

‘And I reckon from what I saw with that one of me uncle's that poddies always end up no good. Blunderers. Like their gait is mucked up forever.'

So that he couldn't stop the thought that it was like he'd been blooming well poddy-reared. The rubbish walk only now really beginning to show itself.

‘By gee though,' Noah was saying, ‘think your mother's right. We're coming in for a dry winter,' at the sound of the crackling grass outside the paddock under their boots.

‘A foot of rain wouldn't hurt. But no use unless it waits till the spring. Nothing more of a waste than heavy winter rain.'

‘Here. Shut your eyes and hold out yer hands, Noey.'

Sitting in front of their stove Roley tipped the strange thing into his wife's hands. ‘Haven't found one for years cos mare might eat it or it just vanishes. In second sac it was.'

‘Well.' Noah looked at her husband in admiration. ‘And you never saying one word. Argh, it's wet but.'

‘
Our
foal's bread, darl.' And into both their minds flooded that long ago Port Lake Show, when they'd first jumped together; when Roley was the Australian champion teamed up in the consolation hunts with the girl still in pigtails.

‘Feels rubbery, don't it, Rol?' A bit like a pony's tongue, she thought. A bit slobbery.

‘They're sort of like the edge of an eel-tail catfish,' said Roley.

‘That's right. Don't feel a bit like bread. Feels like meat to me.' Then she saw that the bread was the same colour as that first Little Mister. Black as the mare's udder. Black as her brother Montgomery's face when he'd worked a summer fencing in the sun.

‘Yeah, more meat than dough. But no one really knows what it is,' Roley said, his voice lowering. ‘They just call it that. Foal's bread. No vet even knows. And only some foals born with it. High Star, that horse who liked water jumps? He was born with bread. Though mind you,' Roley continued, ‘never went any good at either Port or Grafton for some reason. And there's lots of people about who never know to look for it at all. It can be a rare old thing. Old Rory Steggs used to say if his racing mares ate it then their ability to gallop went straight into foal.

‘Where's that old baking tray? Put the bread in that I reckon'll be best.' There was a liveliness in his voice that she hadn't heard for months.

‘With dripping?'

‘No! Not gunna cook it to eat! Mind, some people would, Rory told me. To swallow all the good luck. But we'll dry it out, we will. By the stove. When Dad was a boy he done track work for a time in Grafton. Said someone had one nailed over stable door. Dad always thought it was a round of ol leather. A bit off a blinker or brushing boot. But nope, turned out it was the bread from Belladominica's last foal. There's those who say that some foals have it plastered to their lips but I dunno. Never seen that.'

‘And what else, Rol?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Didn't you once tell me they got used for something else?'

‘Oh, that.' His voice more shy than she'd ever heard. ‘Hundreds of years ago, in England and Ireland, love charms they reckon. That people dried out the bread for that.'

Their knees touched and stayed touching. She blinked and looked away. She caught the smell of the bread on his fingers. It was a smell of something deeper and darker than blood. The mystery of life itself.

How lucky they felt, how warm, sitting with the firebox open. To hell if they burnt their week of wood in a night. How brightly the pieces of the river oak burnt as in a kind of dream they drank their next cup of tea.

I love ya, Rol, she couldn't say. ‘Lainey's gunna be that excited,' she said instead, looking at the bread lying there just a bit like a liver, or a long river rock. ‘Her Foalie here at last. Not to mention George.'

‘And Nella,' he said softly but urgently, his old name for her on his lips. As he put his arms around her she saw that even the moon looked softer up in its place in the sky. It was like one of Ralda's new peppermint creams that you could take in your fingers to squeeze and roll. Hardly daring to believe, she kept her gaze on the moon.

On the late full moon there was a way Noah had of looking from the bed so that the moon doubled; as if someone up there had got the moon round its middle and was squeezing other moons out of the top of the real one.

All that Roley saw was that Nella had somehow come back to him and he to her. As Noah made that kissing noise to sound just like the foal on the tit, he laughed with the kind of happiness that could pretend for a moment at least that there was no war on he couldn't join and that no old lightning strike was bit by bit taking out his legs.

The full-moon wind blew harder until it fair dinkum felt the hut might go over and the moon and stars themselves be blown away. It sounded like all the rustling creatures on the roof were taken and all the old leaves and grasses growing in the gutters, all the fights and silences and quarrels. All gone.

They curved in close to each other. He felt how fat his voice had grown and tried to tone it down with a few gruff words. ‘Might even keep him as colt. So long as he learns what he can and can't be interested in when he's jumping. Cos he's going to be a big boy. Maybe close to fifteen, maybe even sixteen hands.'

Was it the hope that just for this night made Roley able to be the husband he once had been? They didn't care to know. They moved into their small rough bed as if they were on a dance floor, no longer two but one and the hollowed mattress groaning like nothing so much as an old button squeezebox being played no hands.

CHAPTER 10

H
ow George and Lainey loved the foal: the feel of his foal ribs, his fluffy baby's mane; the look of that little plumed tail and the circles of white hair around his eyes that Dad said were his spectacles. Meant he'd be grey. Right into the middle of July they totally forgot about playing all their usual games in favour of getting into Gurlie's paddock. Whatever the foal was up to they would copy.

‘Let's let him nip us. Now let's nip him back, George.'

At six years old Lainey was the captain of their games. She could neigh. She could gallop mad figures of eight. Tucking her imaginary tail in tight between her back legs, Lainey instructed her little brother.

‘Get down all fours, George! Knees together. Pig root. Foal roll. Snort. Now sniff the wind!' She stamped and tossed her own mane that was as fine and pokey-up as the foal's.

As if they had dark foal nostrils they both tipped back their heads to take in deep draughts of the winter air of One Tree. The early morning air smelt so good they sort of sucked it in as a thirsty horse drinks, both nostrils totally covered by the water.

The air was pale, the air was freezing. With their foal nostrils flaring they could smell the cow bails, the hungry pigs, Little Darkie Eyes—Lainey's favourite chook—egg-bound in the roost and the latest lot of kittens yet to be discovered by their Nin and drowned. They smelt George and their father's double birthday of a big boiled fruit cake being mixed. They smelt the clear blue sky with its curl of stove smoke and underneath that Ralda's secret tact as she hung out the washing in such a way that the shameful rags were carefully hidden behind sheets.

‘Watch he don't kick out,' shouted Lainey as the real foal performed a series of little on-the-spot bucks before trotting down the fence line to the gate. ‘Now paw the dirt with one front hoof!' Down on her hands and knees Lainey showed her brother every foal way known. ‘And we gunna scratch our forelegs with our teeth. Scratch, George! And now nizzle me arm!'

The real foal watched their game, his ears pricked. As he came closer again Lainey snapped out the order to canter. She could do a perfect imitation—just as delicate, just as high an up-and-down movement, whereas George, doing his best in the constraints of all the winter clothing, looked like a little porker more than fat enough for the knife.

Old Gurlie, dozing on her feet in the sun, seemed to do more than just tolerate the antics going on around her. Had their game progressed to trying to take a feed off her the feeling in home paddock was that she really would've accepted their mouths as if she'd had triplets.

To avoid getting kicked, Lainey only ever touched their foal's rump when he was drinking. Like their Nin's new bed it felt full of coiled springs. ‘See this here, George? How hard it is to lift up his tail? That's a test you can do to check you've got a horse that'll jump.'

She handed her brother over his morning tea. The mare, groaning down to the ground for a mid-morning snooze, licked up a few yellowy crumbs from Lainey's hand. The foal's mouth was all white and bubbly with milk. ‘Like he's been and had a milkshake at the Palace.'

‘Lainey,' said George, his voice more bamboozled than ever by the sun and the sugary cake. His lower lip had gone so floppy that not only did he really remind Lainey of the sleepy foal but of Uncle Owen, too, without his teeth in, or that new baby of Mrs Sweetland's lying under the supper table at the last fundraiser dance.

‘Birthday tomorrow. And there'll be cake, George. How old you reckon Dad is?'

When the foal crumpled down to the ground for his midmorning nap, George with no reply also went down. Lainey knew that she was six and that George was going to turn five but as for her mother and father she hadn't a clue.

At first the foal stayed a bit alert, one front leg outstretched like a cat, his tail still moving, swishing at flies. But then sleepier and sleepier until—bang! His head hit the ground and he half woke up.

George was already out for the count. Lainey, curling up next to her brother, could see that, way down at the bottom of their farm, Flaggy Creek was bluer than it had ever been. A rim of oaks framed some frosty-looking sand. A few weeks ago they'd got an orphan lamb off Cousinses to rear. Not Mr and Mrs Cousins from next door, or the Cousinses from the road to Dundalla, but the Cousinses from Oakey Flat. Lainey had loved Lamby, too. But last month they'd eaten him with mint sauce Lainey had helped Aunty Ral make. At least you won't ever feel our teeth, her thoughts to the foal carried on. Least George won't be gnawing round your ribs, little fella.

Roley saw them all curled up together. In his father's heart great love, great hope and great fear kindled in equal measure. The miracle of his legs seeming to recover had swiftly passed to the point where now sometimes even George could move faster.

His mother joined him at the fence. ‘Fair dinkum, Rol, would you take a look at that? Spend any more time in there and I reckon there'll be three to break in.'

‘Gunna turn into foals, you reckon? The high-jinks of them. See George? Smiling in his sleep.'

And not for the first time it seemed to them both that more than any other thing—more than even the crunchy biscuit leftovers from Ralda's endless assembling of comfort packs for the soldiers, or the relief of cutting the milking herd back to sixty for the winter—it was the presence of George and the foal that kept One Tree Farm united.

‘Foal!' Noah liked to fling her arms round his neck when she thought no one was around and to land on his eyelids the squeaky kisses he adored. Or she just liked to stand at the fence, admiring him in the blue foal rug Min had forked out the money to buy. She liked to watch the high smooth action of his trot, his dainty hooves, the way he often leapt a shadow for all the world as if he knew he'd been born for show ring jumping.