Foal's Bread (32 page)

Looking further into the sky, taking another slug, that's when the sadness hit. About no chance of any more kids, either right or wrong in the head, with Rol. About being thirty-four and still not over seven foot in a show ring. It didn't seem fair. When there was a nineteen-year-old girl in Queensland who'd just jumped that in her first year of competition.

In the shining stars Noah thought she saw a horse's head. Even had a bit of a Chalcey nose on it. Silver and black but, just like Maggie. Not for the last time she rehearsed in her head the small error of judgement she'd made with Seabreeze in last year's ladies' hunt. Then repeating the mistake in the open with Mag. So near but not near enough. Beryl Doncaster getting the takings instead.

It might go differently this year. With the high jump, sure enough, back on the show program. Really good prize money too. Her piebald mare was that bloody handy that on a good day what wouldn't they be able to clear?

So what that Angus Cousins would be ropeable, she took another swig because it made everything bearable. The dance was getting going again. There was the music. There went the heads of Mrs Grates and Mrs Wheeler, passing back and forth across the windows, tidying up after the supper.

When the one-step polka music began, so did her tears. That had been her dance with Rol.

Oh Lordy. She couldn't go back in now though. She ran her fingers through her hair. Dead frogs in the water and all, it did feel silky. It made her feel that she was beautiful. Next she imagined that some colour tinting from Angus's photography studio must've entered her mouth. Each time she touched her lips with a finger or the tip of her tongue, they tickled so sweetly.

She took another long pull of Angus's bottle. That baby let go into the river. How far could her Little Mister have really gone? What if, unblessed and unbaptised, he had reached the sea? He'd wanted her tit too but instead she'd done that. As good as drowned it, as if she'd tucked it into a sack and held it under the water for a few moments.

‘You're nearly as quick as your mother,' said Uncle Angus, taking Lainey for a dance. Just as the band had gone faster for her mum at the beginning of the night, it seemed to do the same again for Lainey now. It was as if the dancers flying over it more than the Floor Speed applied after supper had kept it so fast and smooth. Faster and faster Uncle Angus spun her until a shoe flew off. ‘Where is she anyway?'

‘Who?'

‘Your mum.'

Lainey, who at first had been counting her lucky stars about her mother's disappearance, shrugged with assumed nonchalance. ‘The little ladies?' Her mood, as fat and golden as butter pats on the pikelets earlier, only began to really shift after the question had been put.

‘Well she's been away a heck of a time.' It was not going to be alright, he knew, because when he'd gone back for a snort, his bottle was gone and Noah Nancarrow nowhere to be found. He'd grabbed Lainey in the wild hope of forestalling a disaster. ‘Let's go have a look for her, Laine.' But too late, he knew. Some panic was already taking off around the room. About something outrageous. About someone or something outside.

Uncle Angus and Lainey came across her mum moments later—not playing any April Fools' joke but, as Reenie would tell Minna the next day, laying on her back, legs spread, shoes off, just like that Tottie Carr after a night of it.

‘When I got down to her,' told Reenie the next morning, ‘I swear the smell of her nearly burnt a hole in me. Smelt like a soldier after a night on the town.'

‘And did she say anything?' Min wanted to know.

‘'Fraid so.'

‘What?' With a sense of vindication, Minna was remembering Noah's grandmother. That old paralytic Mrs Avery.

‘It was Ral who heard her. I'd gone to get Len to help.'

Ralda, feeling the irresistible glee of betrayal stalking in under her apron cord, tightened it and leant on the table. Her head began turning from side to side. ‘She yelled it out really, Mum. Not a person, except deaf old Ossie Carmichael, wouldn't have heard. Well, just as Lainey come round the corner with Len and Angus, Noah—well, she shouted.'

‘Go on,' said Minna with barely concealed relish. ‘What did she say?'

It was too late to retreat but the effort of abandoning her usual kindness was telling on Ralda. She seemed to turn her head in such a way that her huge chin and bosom moved and flowed with a life separate from anything else in the kitchen. She looked over at the neat fresh newspaper liners she'd cut for the pantry. The lovely scalloped borders.

‘Well?' As if it weren't enough for One Tree to have Rol in nappies, Minna could feel she was close to wetting herself. Ralda was setting up to make rosella jam. Such a fiddly fruit but her daughter never turned a hair.

‘You'll hardly believe it, Mum, what she yelled out.' Ralda felt her apron go greasy with sadness at what she was about to do but it couldn't be resisted.

‘Go on, Ral!'

‘She said, “Them stars are so close, I'm gunna piss on em.”'

The wood in the Lighthouse whistled and popped. And again Ralda pulled at her apron as if tightening a girth. She, who all through this and that fight had done her best to stick up for Noey, found she could do so no more. Not after what else Noah had said. Just when she and Reenie had been so good in the crisis, finding a way of heaving Noah up from the path, Noah had let fly.

‘Git away off me,' she'd screamed as if they were dogs. ‘You bloody pair of barren bitches.'

CHAPTER 16

‘Y
ou're an utter disgrace.' Minna took to Noah the moment she arrived down at the bails the next morning.

Noah leant into the warmth of an old cow and felt like sicking up again. Using one of the cow's hip bones she held herself upright. ‘Ooh, that's a cold wind. Must be snow at Dundalla.'

‘Nancarrow name's too good for the likes of a brassy one like you.'

‘Leave off, Min. Think I might be getting pneumonia.'

‘McWilliams pneumonia most likely. Your eyes tell their own tale. Red band like a ribbon running across them.'

‘I'm here for the milkin, aren't I? More than can be said for your brother. Letting Laine have a sleep-in but where's Reen? Where's Owe, eh? Where would this farm be without me I'd like to know.' Through her pain she stared at her mother-in-law with a fury she couldn't contain.

‘The stink of you,' Minna continued, her neck arching like a pony with a crupper on too tight. ‘If they won't take cream at factory we'll know who to blame. For tainting it. Where'd ya go with Angus Cousins then, who didn't show back at dance for close on an hour? The whole of Wirri knows you never reappeared. Not till you was found in your rotten drunkedness.'

‘I'd said I was gunna help him with an April Fools' joke on Fred Dawes's horse but in the end didn't. Was gunna paint a white star on the old mare. Practical joker is Angus, nothing more. April Fools' and all.'

‘And Mary's me middle name. It's bred in your bones. The filthy state of your dress. Ral's never seen anything like it. She'll have to set copper fire going specially for it, I warrant.'

Then Noah told Min she could go and get fumigated, to which Minna replied that if the unwashed stink of her didn't turn the milk then the dirty mouth on it would.

The hum and ding of the separator began to turn in time to Minna's words. Setting the cups on cows as well as hand-stripping from the old girls who wouldn't take them, Noah stopped listening; her thoughts turning to how she could best retrieve herself. Only one way. To win Wirri high jump. Come what may. No mistakes this time. So Rol would know they were back on track. Show only three weeks off.

A cow thwacked her face with its tail so hard that she felt tears form but she snorted them back. They'd set the truck up good for Rol. He could look after George. There could be a ladder up to the top of the truck where Rol could sit as if in his own grandstand and see everything.

With this realisation, even with her throat so on fire it felt like she was growing a swamp cancer in there, a triumphant note came into all the usual noises of the dairy. ‘Eh, Blackie?' she whispered to the cow she was up to. ‘Wait a while and we'll show them. Cos we know I didn't do nothing wrong 'cept have a few snorters too many. When Angus tried it on, no. We said no.'

‘But the shame of it,' Minna shot out, ‘under the honour board. In the hall with my dead son's name and all.'

Lainey was in the sleepout with her father and George, trying to forget the bad bits of the night before.

‘So tell me all about the dance,' said her father. ‘Bet those Cousins boys wanted to whirl you away, didn't they?'

Lainey pulled a face. Bert had fished a frog out of the toilet and put it down her dress and Billy hadn't stopped him. Dancing with Uncle Angus—that had been the best, Lainey knew. The way he'd spun her. The way her shoe had gone flying all the way to the other side of the hall.

‘Which one did ya give the most dances to?' Her father was rolling himself a smoke. Almost with delicacy he was wetting it together, setting it alight. Then he took her hand to hold, as if in that way he could be there dancing with his daughter though the night was over. ‘Were it one of the Cousins or a lucky Lockyer or Withrow?'

‘George!'

‘Oh, you were the lucky boy, eh George? And yer mum, did she get Aunty Ral up and going?'

‘Uncle Angus and Mum,' she began with an excitement that quickly faded.

For a moment father and daughter looked away from each other to the noise of a bird's beak. On the outside of the sleepout window hung a half-oval tin shutter with edges decorated as if to resemble a fancy biscuit. The butcherbirds would get in under the cover to fight their reflections. This one bird was going at itself today hammer and tongs. The insistent noise of the dogs gnawing at the rotten bones of a dead wallaby could also be heard; the smell of it even though the morning air was cold.