Foal's Bread (29 page)

‘A moral cert for a record or two,' Roley said, speaking first of Landwind in the musings on the show that took place the following day in the kitchen of Main House. ‘Be real interesting to see how he handles himself in high jump. Definitely back on the program next year, Ned Cochrane said.'

‘And he really looked like he was enjoying himself that much,' said Minna.

‘That's right, Mum. You know Breezy has been his best teacher of all. Like a pair of old-timers together, weren't they?'

Noah spun the sugar bowl across the table. ‘Oh, just a bit spooky at first. Then settled down as good as gold.'

‘As you'd expect, darl. As you'd expect.'

‘And I think the little Magpie got the hang of things too,' continued Noah. ‘Didn't you?'

Roley nodded. ‘Just a pity she ran clean past the post-and-rail. And that buck in her. Like Laine found out. You never know when.'

‘But her first time. My fault entirely Mag didn't even see that fence.' Noah tipped the chair back, not to needle Min but the better to balance and think. ‘Mare handled the crowds pretty well, all things considered. Same as Landy. And people kept saying could we have named him better?'

‘Could we not!' interjected Roley. ‘Cos just like wind, slipping over those hunts, wasn't he? And Ral,' he continued, ‘champion coconut icer, eh,' and was delighted to see a blush crossing his sister's cheeks. ‘Could we all eat a piece to check those judges made no mistake?'

Somehow, it was as if in going fully public with Roley's demise, the highest leap of all had been made. Around the kitchen table a great and unexpected calm had arrived at One Tree. As they each lifted to their lips their pink and white square of coconut ice, the sweetness seemed to melt for a moment into the very air.

Oh jeez, thought Lainey. I'm going to bust open I'm that happy. Because they were all agreeing that sooner rather than later she'd be old enough to go in her first Wirri high jump too. To make the excitement bearable she broke off a bit of her ice to give to George, who'd eaten his piece fast.

‘It's a very good coconut ice,' Aunty Ral was musing, ‘but possibly next year I'll concentrate on my fudge.'

‘Oh, I count my blessings,' had become Roley's stock standard reply to anyone showing him pity. He nibbled the next corner off his ice and allowed himself the thought that everything was okay. How many more times anyway did a man have to fly over eight feet when he was lucky enough to have a wife as talented as Noey? And no, he'd told quite a few enquirers, neither Seabreeze nor Landy were for sale.

Reenie, ladling another teaspoon of sugar to cut the thickness of the stewed tea, marvelled that she'd ever been away. She resisted the sudden temptation to take her mother's pulse, for it was clear that Wirri Show being back on the calendar had lent a change to her too. That stroke-damaged cheek was not so noticeable. As Minna popped the last of her ice into her mouth to suck whole she could even look indulgently on Noey's affection for the itchy little piebald mare, the only horse to come home with white ribbons rather than blue.

The new feeling was best summed up by the foal's bread that still dangled over Roley and Noah's hut door, its shape a full, fat, even-sided heart. The brief sweetness of the truce that had fallen between Minna and Noah could later be recalled by thinking of this. Or else seeing the showground empty again after the first show, its quiet old shade trees forming a second circle of darker-coloured peace on the outside of the ring. Or Ralda's round Christmas cake, that she made a start on every first of August. She'd begin by cutting each raisin into four, then each sultana in half, before letting the children coat them and the candied peel in flour. By the time she'd assembled all the other ingredients together in her biggest basin, the children would startle at the sound of the fat on their aunt's arms beginning to slap.

Noah, for her part, knuckled to the knowledge that if there was going to be a Nancarrow team of jumpers it was going to be up to her and her daughter. She resolved to unbury no more of her shoeing money. Let it stay in its glass jar, safe in the old biscuit tin in the ground, she thought proudly. Let it truly be her emergency stash. Let them all see, especially Rol and his mother, that she really had turned over a new leaf. No more grog on the sly.

Full of virtue, she could be noticed every now and then lifting her hands to her nose. What no one knew was that it wasn't to check whether or not she'd scrubbed the reek of wet horse hooves from out of the wrinkles on her hands but rather to confirm how, over time, buried money, even totally protected from soil and rain, smelt like leaves. It was a lovely smell and the only reason, she kept reassuring herself, for going every week or so to check and count it out.

So how terribly cruel it seemed to them all that before Roley's forty-third birthday his health took a dramatic turn for the worse. An invisible set of spider hobbles looked to be snarling him. Casting him over. Like he'd had polio since birth, only he hadn't. The hatred for the specialist resurfaced, as if that Dr Spork, simply by having mentioned the possibility that it might come to this, had brought it to pass.

Ralda began to teach George the Lord's Prayer and to compulsively slice off wafer-fine bits from the bottom of the Christmas cake for her and the children to sample, as if that goodness would work, even if prayer wasn't going to.

‘Better stir me stumps,' Roley would say after collecting eggs, only to find that whatever amount of tremendous willpower had allowed him to keep walking was no longer enough.

If nothing's going wrong, leave it alone, had been his father's favourite motto. Not a bit of use in this situation. Everything was going wrong and no one with a bloomin clue what to do.

The lightning was getting into his hands too, he told his mother. ‘I'm in that much pain, Mum. Near ready to give up. Can't pick nuthin up without dropping it. The bloody thing. I'm that stiff,' he only half joked, ‘you'd be doing everyone a favour if you just snapped me up into kindling for Lighthouse.'

‘We're two of a kind.' Minna lifted up her arm to the point where it had been jamming for the last ten years. ‘But we keep on, don't we, Rol? Got no choice. Cos we're Nancarrows, aren't we? Every Sunday I've been saying extra prayers. And hope on, hope ever, yes.' But found herself speaking to Reenie sooner than she'd predicted of moving her son back into Main House, where caring for him was going to be a whole lot easier.

‘The sleepout, Noey,' they told her. ‘This'll be the best. More fresh air. Where he slept as a boy.' And even Minna's voice softened.

At first Noah couldn't help but feel relief, really, that Roley was out of the hut. Alone in bed she heard the winter magpies begin their sweet midnight warbles. Did her mare hear it too and know what it meant? Victories ahead. The moon made the night a mix of silver and black, just like the mare except minus the Queensland itch.

Then, when the good spring rains arrived, grass was fairly leaping out of the ground. Noah now putting in the straight furrows for the paddocks down near the creek.

As her father lay in the old hospital bed Reenie had got cheap, Lainey liked to sit up close, holding his hand as she described the look of George playing in the freshly turned soil.

‘As excited as if he were a hungry bird, Dad. Runs up and down he does.' Thinking as she spoke, hope on, hope ever, for what better smell than that of newly turned soil? ‘Maggies, crows and George, picking up the witchetties and worms. If I take his worms off him, down he sits in a real sulk.'

By Christmas Roley was a full invalid, bed-bound, troubled in his waterworks, with a body so chancy Reenie knew it was going to come to worse than that sooner or later. It was like the war all over again, but only one soldier to look after and that one her own little brother with a wound you couldn't dress.

In the sleepout his skin grew sallow. Even the whites of his eyes went yellowish in the way of one of Ralda's oldest aprons. The sun also landed on all his old jumping ribbons strung up to cheer him, fading them quickly.

Lainey studied her father covertly and couldn't quite believe in what was coming to pass. How much easier to concentrate on the different framed photos of him on different horses at different shows. It felt to her that she'd always known the names of the horses, owners and shows. That somehow they were lodged in her own heart more surely than just about anything else.

The effects of the lightning made their way next into his throat. ‘It's a real torment to hear,' she heard Aunty Ral exclaiming.

‘Like he was gassed not struck,' agreed Aunty Reen.

When her father's voice grew still higher, just like a nestful of baby rats that knew their end had come, Lainey preferred he kept quiet. Often when she got home from school and rushed in to see him it was to find that he was asleep.

She wished then that they could put a good drop nose band on to keep his mouth shut. Stop all that drooling which she found she just couldn't bring herself to wipe up even though Aunty Reen kept cut-up flannels on top of the lowboy just for that purpose. He was worse than George, and it was that special wooden chair by the bed, that she wouldn't ever sit on, that was making her father's room smell so strange.

‘Dearie me, darlin,' he said in his new voice, waking up unexpectedly. ‘But you should go outside. This is no place for you. 'Fraid I should just get a bullet in the right place. Dunno why that lightning didn't just kill me on the spot. Be that much easier, I tell you.'

‘Hope on, hope ever,' said the girl. ‘Gotta keep battling on.'

‘But look, Laine. From all this lyin around. All swolled in me knees like an old woman. And these damn bruises.' And she saw that there were marks—bigger than shillings—all up and down his arms, as if in the night something had been striking him hard without cessation or mercy.

It was his toes, though, that held a fascination. The look of them, she marvelled, all pale yella and long as sun-starved grass.