Foal's Bread (35 page)

‘He's gawn, George,' Noah told the still-sleeping figure of her son. The hurt in her heart was like the day her piebald mare got into that bad bit of barbed wire—a terrible tearing injury the mare tried to gallop out of. ‘Gawn, gawn, gawn,' like some monosyllabic noise, like the kero pump started up way too early, that shadow forth would mark the beginning of many other goings yet to come.

CHAPTER 17

T
he idea to jump her father had formed in the night. It was just a week before Port Lake Show and three days after the full of the moon. She rode Landwind, the six-year-old they still sometimes affectionately called Foalie, up the road to Oakey Flat. He was in the mood for a jump too, she could just tell by the beautiful way he was cantering, his neck bowed. When she turned back to look at One Tree the washing she'd helped Ralda to peg was flying in the breeze like there'd been a celebration, not a funeral, up there against the jacaranda tree just beginning to turn yellow. Though the sky had been clear blue, already it was changing from the west.

My dad is dead, Dad is dead dead dead
, the rhythm of the shoes seemed to say. She stood up a little in the irons just to feel the strength in her own legs, gathered her reins up and put the horse a little faster along the road. She could hear a shoe was loose on one of his hinds. It made a clatter over the bridge. Her mother was going to shoe him all round again tomorrow in readiness for the show.

When the gelding did a big shy on the track down to Oakey Flat bush cemetery her body automatically softened to flow with the horse. Though no lightning had ever struck to enhance her balance, it was of itself exceptional to the point that she too at this nimble age of eleven going on twelve could race along the top of a line of fence rails that only one of George's cats could reasonably be expected to walk.

‘None of that nonsense,' she said without a trace of crossness, for she knew that on this horse, anything was possible. Their Chalcey foal had lately grown very handsome. His dapples were so perfect that, glancing down his shoulder, Lainey forgot for a moment that she was meant to be sad. Then the sight of the grave mound through the sharply pricked grey ears amazed her. How could it be possible that he could be underneath that heaped-up dirt? My father. Who art in heaven?

She'd come up here to talk to him somehow. Was there anything she'd need to know to help for next Saturday, for Port Lake? When Mum tried all three horses over that high jump in front of grandstand? And what about me in the hunts, Dad? Which horse do you reckon? Mum says Seabreeze but you know how good Landy can go for me. Any hints for if I give Mag a go? Like how to hold on if she bucks, cos I don't have Mum's knack there!

Sizing up the grave mound, she hopped the horse over. ‘S'not much of a jump for you, is it, Landy?' she murmured conversationally, getting ready to jump it again from the other direction. ‘But he'd have liked it, hey?' Him what ended up nothing but a rack of ribs really, more like some old milker's bones down where Flaggy Creek joined the river than anything to do with her dad. ‘Careful,' she growled, when the horse stumbled.

Again she looked at the grave. She could smell horse sweat intermingled with grass and that freshly dug grey clay soil. Now thoughts moved in her mind as thick and fast-moving as the clouds that she was yet to notice. Very high clouds were moving east to west and then much lower ones travelling west to east.

What if her mother, instead of yelling so much, had followed the advice that came from the very worried Mr Cousins who'd come over just before the end with another one of Mrs Cousins' baked custards?

How the food was given to the sick horse was what was important, Mr Cousins had said. He'd told of struggling animals turning the corner back to good health by something as simple as giving them grass the right way. Not old, bruised, over-handled grass that the sick horse would refuse, but just one handful very fresh, maybe a little bit frosty. Tips the right way up. In this way he'd seen horses and cows with so-called incurable conditions brought back from death's door.

A broth, Lainey berated herself. Why hadn't she or her mother thought of that? If not out of chicken bones then why not their lucky charm itself? Foal's bread broth, imagine such a thing. She slipped a hand underneath the horse's mane. ‘From when you was born, eh Landy?'

Instead, her mother had as good as given her father a flogging using her voice. Lainey hadn't stopped her. ‘And I never do, not even with you.' Talking to the horse again. And why? What possible excuse could there be? Only the truth, which was fear. Fear, that's what it was. That her mother would turn on her. Whereas if her mum was hitting the horses or biting a pony's ear or whatever next the anger led her to do, much less chance of being in the direct line of fire.

‘Aunty Ral's right,' she told the long silver ears flicking intelligently forward and back. Half admiration, half awe filled her voice. ‘Me mum's as tough as a bleedin bullock hide. So true! Make a stew out of her and there'd be whip marks in the gravy. Well you'd know it yourself, hey? We all know it.'

Wasn't it only the day after the burial that her mother had got stuck into a horse she'd been shoeing? And what about the day of the burial?

This fight had broken out in the kitchen over what should be on top of the coffin. Nin had thought maybe his walking stick, which he'd carved himself out of a piece of tree root taken out of the Flaggy, but on hearing this Lainey's mother had picked up the kitchen chair Nin was sitting on and shoved it backwards.

‘No wonder he went,' Ninna had said, exultant, unhurt, from the chair on the floor. ‘What wouldn't you do to get away? Why wouldn't you bloomin die?'

‘Well we're not having him remembered with this!' And quick as a flash her mum had seized up the stick, snapped it in three over her knee and was shoving the pieces into the Lighthouse.

Lainey hated the burial, everyone like a line of fleas at a cat's mouth in front of the open earth. But in the church had been different; old Uncle Will with his beautiful voice, and Aunty Irm on the piano played by ear, singing her father goodbye. All in the church joining in a hymn. Her father's hat on the coffin bringing the sobbing.

But then later, at One Tree, it was really more like some kind of a party, with everyone wandering around not knowing what they were exactly meant to do. Instead of Aunty Ral's Turkish delight getting judged in the Wirri Show pavilion it'd been put out on saucers dotted around amongst the plates piled high with sandwiches Lainey had helped Aunty Reen and Mrs Cousins and Mrs Agate cut before milking.

Aunties and second cousins from far away had walked around Main House like they were in a museum, staring at photos, running fingers through her father's ribbons. People were so everywhere that Main House felt it might split at the seams. People had even trickled in and out of their hut as if to check her father wasn't in there after all, laying low until it was quieter.

George thought it was the dance all over again and wouldn't understand that he could go into his father's sleepout a hundred more times only to never again find his cats purring the days away either side of his father's legs.

At Wirri Show itself, they found out later, on the Friday her father was buried, there'd been a minute's silence in his honour, just like her father had been a soldier of a different kind. ‘We are sad to have to tell of the passing of the greatest high-jump rider our district has ever bred.'

According to Mr Hirrip, the announcement came just after Clem Richardson had won the open jump. All the ring events halted. Then all the stewards and officials, all the judges, Mr Naseby himself and many others besides, took off their hats and it must've been just like Anzac Day because at the going down of the sun and in the morning she was always going to remember him. The blaze of blue sadness in his eyes. But age will never weary him. No frozen stroke face for her dad.

To deflect tears she focused on jumping something else.

‘Just hop you over my great-grandfather as well, I think. To finish up. John Albert Nancarra,' she told the horse, unable to know that her mother, when pregnant with Lainey, had jumped those exact iron railings, taking the same angle on board Tadpole the farm pony.

Landwind jumped it neat and clean. Had anyone been watching they would've seen the extraordinary sight of a girl on a white horse with blue dapples like a painting from a more romantic country, turning the small cemetery into a different kind of practice paddock; graves big and small in a hunt of her own making as overhead the cloud cover thickened with the rain coming.

When she got back to One Tree the first spits of rain made her turn past the bails to visit her Uncle Owen. She loved nothing better than to have an excuse to walk in under the back skillion. This part of his place was always hung with weighted lengths of leather that he was stretching for the next whip waiting. Hitching the horse under the overhang she went through the strips as if disappearing through a magical, almost alive curtain.

Although as old men go her Great-Uncle Owen was particularly decrepit, in his company nothing could dim the girl's delight. So what that the teeth he had left were the colour of charcoal and old tea or that his lips were spotted with cancery-looking things, for the love young girls have for old horsemen is sweet and thick. Its very nature gleams. If you could pour that love, or wind it round a spoon, it would taste like molasses straight from a sugar mill, a mysterious mix of salty sweet. And what makes it so? It's the stories that old man can tell. It's that knowledge about the old days on which his stories hang that the girl is so hungry for.

‘And how are you, Uncle Owe?' she said companionably, glad to find him there in front of his stove with the firebox open.

‘Still fit as a fiddle and goin. Was aiming to get into those suckers coming up above Bitter Ground. Keep that hill real nice and polished-looking. But seeing that sky, reckoned I'd just be aiming to get myself pneumonia if I were to go out now. So staying at home to finish this whip for Brucey Lavers you know. Hang on an I'll just rev up this stove for a cuppa and fetch you a sweet biscuit.'

When he picked his plaiting back up something in Lainey rejoiced to see that he was like Aunty Ral knitting. There was that same quality of a dance in each and every movement. And just like Aunty Ral he could talk at the same time. Maybe best of all he always let her choose two of his Monte Carlos from Wirri store. These she could eat so slowly that they'd last half a dozen stories or more.

‘This one's going good,' he told her. ‘See how I'm plaiting a little bit of a belly? Then I'll put real whip on top of that. Will stay tight forever and a day, and do you know why? It's this real thin hide. Something dairy's always going to be best, you know.'

Lainey sipped her tea and nodded wisely. She nibbled the side of her first biscuit. Hadn't she seen Uncle Owe taking the hide of that last jersey died of milk fever? He'd used Cousinses' old mare Creamy to pull and the hide had come off as easy as the skin off a banana. At the sight George had gone bellowing away but Lainey had been amazed.

‘Oh, this hide's just like a bit of brown paper, you know. Beautiful thin. Not red hide, which is no bloody good at all. Swolls up the moment it gets a bit wet. The thinner the hide, the stronger it is. But for the plaiting itself this feeling of rain helps. Makes the strips softer. A nice tight whip it's gunna be. One day I'll try to learn you too. And we'll soon find, darlin, if you can or can't plait in the round. One of my brothers would think he was goin alright but before you knew it he'd totally buggered it up. Just a bloody failure at plaitin. It's a dyin art, mate, which is why I should teach you soon.'

‘And you're going to teach me how to make a light whip fall heavy and a heavy whip fall light.'

‘Maybe. We'll see how you go plaitin yerself a little yard whip first. A little greenhide one. So you can double it if need be to make a cow see sense. It can get wet but always dries as good as new. What've you been up to, anyway? Saw you take Landy out early.'