Foal's Bread (30 page)

‘Mine are just like that too, Lainey.' Her mother, coming in for a visit and, seeing her daughter's gaze, hastened to disassociate the toes from everything else. ‘Can't grow up milking cows and riding horses without getting terrible damage to toes.' So that suddenly Lainey wanted to stay in the sleepout after all; to pull off her boots to show the beginnings of her toes falling into ruin, the scar where the axe had fallen last winter when she wasn't paying attention.

‘If only we could get a bit of arsenic into you, Rol,' said Noah. Already her husband's mouth had changed, grown so much older in the sleepout bed. What was happening so little by little was more than flesh and blood could bear.

‘If only it were that easy, Noh! If it were cancery, wherever its roots went that arsenic would've gone like a fish tail. A real fine one. Running that cancer out along the root. Cos you know it's got roots on it like an orchid. Oh, I've known it in a bullock's bones. Let arsenic run back into shoulder and jaw and beast comes good in no time at all.'

Hope on, hope ever might've been on everyone's lips but never before had it come out so lamely, with none of its old triumphant ring, as it became clear to them all by autumn of the following year that Rol was probably never going to get out of bed again, let alone on his own two feet.

CHAPTER 15

O
n the day of the April Fools' Day dance, One Tree was a hive of activity, with everyone aiming to get their chores done before three. Blow whatever sour looks Minna chose to level at her, Noah wanted to dance. Let Lainey be her partner. There'd be Ralda and Reenie too, always good for a whirl. Why should I always bloomin miss out, just because poor Rol laid up in bed? Working the corn-husking peg out in the far shed, Noah felt a happiness creeping through her that she'd already made plain her decision. Hearing Lainey calling out for her, she chucked down an unfinished cob and made her way over to Main House to be in time for the last bath.

Why shouldn't she get to dance too when, even with Minna's younger brother Owen recently moved back into the old hut down on the creek, keeping One Tree going was more and more left up to her? Settled in the bath, she lathered up the soap. Who got the poddies in? Who was always the most steady moving up and down the rows until all the corn was picked? Who the fastest down at the bails? Who had to deal with this or that person needing their horse's mane hogged or its hooves trimmed? And alongside that, somehow keeping the three jump horses going. Noah, Noah, Noah, she answered, and wet her hair. Why, with the help of Fabey Lavers, she'd even fired up the forge to make a heart-bar shoe for Landy. Got him sound as a bell again. Keeping the high-jump dream alive.

And, at any rate, weren't they always needing more women who could dance the man's part, since so many of the Wirri boys hadn't come home? For a moment she felt very sad. Her brother had made it back but you could see it in his eyes that the Chippy she once knew wasn't ever returning. Before he'd headed up to Queensland she'd met him at the aunties' in town. ‘Good enough to fight for country, Noey,' he'd said, ‘but still too bloody black to drink in Port pub.'

Must be frogs again in the tank. She could smell their tiny bones in the steam coming off the two top-up kettles of hot. The smell of the work it'd be cleaning the tank out was not hid by the Halo shampoo Reenie had bought in preparation for the dance.

‘I'm shimmery now!' joked Lainey in the exciting kitchen, every spare inch of the table laden with what they were taking for the dance supper. ‘Glorious with luxuriant curls.' Knowing full well that although that's what the shampoo label promised and though Aunty Ralda was forever singeing her fringe to thicken it, her hair was fine and flyaway.

‘Shimmery with nonsense more like,' said her Nin, who was going to stay at One Tree, less to be of comfort to her son than to emphasise to Noah her breach in her duty of care when it came to Rol.

‘No. Shimmery. With glorious highlights.'

Ralda came out then in the new dress she'd spent the best part of the last fortnight sewing.

‘Another red frock,' said Reenie, mock suggestive, for no man young or old had ever really looked like going with Ral.

‘You know I'm always very drawn to red,' said Ralda, undaunted. Even the brass bits of the Lighthouse she'd cleaned last week gleamed as never before. The fire too was leaping brighter in its box, as if in response to the happy mood.

‘Just like one of the black gins.' Minna looked at Ralda.

‘I don't care. It's me colour. And Lainey's.'

‘I thought you were trying to shed a few pounds.'

Ralda ignored that.

‘Well come on, Aunty Ral, let's go show Dad.' Lainey was practically already dancing, she was that excited.

‘I'm coming as fast as I can. Gotta finish ironing this shirt for Uncle Owe.'

And the miracle of
that
, thought Lainey. That Mother Potts iron as black as the stove but the shirt underneath as white as a leghorn egg.

‘Well I feel right proud,' said Roley, as they all trooped in to show him their finery. ‘By hell! Is that you, Lainey? In a few years, watch out. Those Cousins boys. There'll be a herd of them stamping up our hill.'

Lainey grabbed up George and did a few spins.

‘No doubt about you two,' said her father. ‘Sparky as a pair of firecrackers.' And though he smiled, if he wasn't careful came the feeling that he might cry.

‘Now, Rol,' Ralda said, waddling forward with a supper tray. ‘Not to eat this until ten tonight. When dancing's stopped and we'll be eating ours. Some lol-lols in this bag will help the time pass. And then there are my new invention. Wish biscuits. Make your wish before you take first bite.'

Although Roley knew his sister was the milk of human kindness he felt sad that lately she'd begun to address him as if he was George. Even slowing her speech right down. As if a few screws, not just his legs, had gone missing. Another thing was that people he'd never known much and cared for less suddenly were landing kisses on top of his defenceless head. He could see they thought they were so noble to have visited poor ol Rowley Nancarrow, laid low. It was a wonder some didn't convert so they could be in the running for sainthood. Saint Monny of Sunshine. Saint Olwyn from Port Lake.

Reenie leant down and kissed her brother. ‘You gotta kiss for yer dad, Laine?'

Lainey, who was turning twelve come the end of July, sat next to him on the edge of the bed.

‘You're in for something tonight, darlin.' He held his daughter's hand. ‘You know what that is?'

‘What?' Her mind ran again to the Cousins boys.

‘Your mum. If she gets Ral up for a dance, watch out!'

‘How come?'

‘It's like she could dance the feathers off a chook. One Wirri Show ball, just before I married her, it was that cold everyone was dancin in their overcoats. But not your mum. And by jeez you had to be Phar Lap to keep up.'

As everyone else was filing out Noah came in. When she bent to kiss him a little smile crossed his face and stayed in his eyes.

Us, Rol, she wished she could've found the words to say. The blaze of blue in his eyes! The outer black right at each eye's edge. Like someone had cantered two perfect circles in her husband's face. The longing she saw that even now danced between them with nowhere to go. I don't forget us either together on dance floor, she couldn't find the way to say.

Seeing her uncertainty he felt a quavering dread. ‘Be good!' he said, and to cover up his sense of grief, the moment she left the room he switched on the wireless Reenie had bought for the sleepout. He wasn't listening, though, for it was that time of evening he once had loved best. That last surge of work as dusk was falling. That extra charge of meaning it gave the day. To pick up a hind fetlock, to hold it easy in his hand as he worked the rasp—what wouldn't he give for a simple pleasure such as that to be his again?

‘There's them Levitts,' said Uncle Owen, at the sight of a mob of girls climbing through a fence onto the road to Wirri. ‘All eleven of em. Like they could be their own mountain platoon. Only prettier.'

‘For heaven's sake!' said Reenie. ‘You know they would've walked all the way over Pinparrabin Mountain from the other valley.'

‘And carrying food,' noted Ralda.

‘And it'll be good. I'll see if any of them want to squeeze in.' Uncle Owen slowed down. But the Levitt girls, saying they were nearly there anyway, just shook their heads.

Before Uncle Owen wound the window back up, Noah could smell Flaggy Creek from that nice inch of rain they'd had last night, a watery wild smell.

‘Don't kiss me, George!' Lainey moved closer to her mother.

No, thought Noah, too many years gone by to think of that one. But she did anyway. Because it was April again. Because that smell of the creek would've been exactly like that in its dark little nose. Watery wild. Cold, when what it would've wanted, what it would've desperately been straining for in its little boat, like any other newborn thing, a foal, even a mouse, was its own mother's milk.

‘Don't yell.'

‘Well he's trying to kiss me.'

‘Save yer kisses for later, George,' Ralda advised as they pulled in at the hall. ‘And careful! Don't sit on the angel cream cakes. Come on here and give your aunty a hand carrying these plates over.'

Uncle Owen was up on the platform with his fiddle in one hand, his other arm around the piano lady, when the first of the Cousins contingent arrived. Not the Oakey Flat ones yet, not Billy and his brothers, but Uncle Angus with his mum and dad, Mr and Mrs Cousins from next door.

Lainey skidded up and down the hall with George, skittish and glad because here at last were the Oakey Flat Cousinses. Which boy was best? In the same way as their Uncle Angus, they were all tall, but Bill the only one with the head of curls.

The band was getting going and George whooped and went silly in a way that would've been embarrassing at school but not tonight at the dance. April Fools', wasn't it? A night built for George. He was very spick and span with a blue tie and all.

‘C'mon!' said Lainey, taking her brother's hands. She could feel George's heart was beating just as fast as her own, full of the lovely certainty that up ahead, in a few hours' time, supper, followed by another set of dances before the end.

Then there was Uncle Angus, just after more kero and sawdust had been put over the floor to keep it fast, asking her for the three-hop polka.

‘Don't know how to dance that one.'

‘I'll teach you.' But when she couldn't quite pick it up he said, ‘Tell you what, you grab one of the boys. There's Bill—' he passed her over, ‘—and I'll grab your mum. Show you that way.'

Unfortunately Bill Cousins couldn't get the hang of it either and after three tries he said they'd better sit down before all their toes were broke.