Foal's Bread (41 page)

‘How do you feel?' asked Mr Cousins in the truck going home. George, asleep on her shoulder, gave a little laugh that made Lainey laugh too. She grinned.

‘On top of the world I'd say,' said Mr Cousins.

‘Gunna buy me mum a pair of Maranoa boots.'

‘Maranoas, hey? And why not a pair for yourself too?'

‘But first for Mum. Cos she's the one that got our Chalcey boy going so good.'

‘But you were the one jumping on the big day. Any rate, if you want, I'll take you back in tomorra to secretary's office and you can collect it yourself. Fifty pound it is, you know. Five times as much as before the war that is. Because of Produce coming to the party as sponsor.'

Only as the lorry turned left to head up One Tree's hill just on dark did a flicker of anxiety come that her mother might not be okay about the events of the day. That a pair of Maranoas might not be enough. A light rain shower began, turning the road the colour of milk caramel. Lainey could feel it nourishing their paddocks; making happy the little triangle of a one Uncle Owe had put to cabbage just to see. She wound down an inch of window the better to smell the wilder country running along the creek and up on the ridges above the house.

Aunty Ral, Reen and Nin would've been home long before and would they've told her mum? Well of course they would, but only if her mother had got over last night.

‘The shades of evening,' said Len Cousins, and in itself the phrase seemed to cradle the sky with a kind of tenderness. ‘Hey, Laine? Comin down just on home time.'

Even with Mr Cousins in the driver's seat, and George against her, solid as a sack of potatoes, Lainey again felt afraid. With the line of light above the hill fading to grey, without knowing exactly why, she knew that jumping seven foot three was too shocking for words.

So what that the unloading went so smoothly? Or that Mr Cousins and Uncle Owen carried George by his arms and feet into Main House? Or that such wild whinnies of welcome were coming from the Magpie—forelock all frizzy now it was out of its plait, running up and down the length of home paddock—it was a wonder she didn't jump out? So what?

Flackety-flackety-flack
went the old rhyme in her head, but if words alone could avert disaster those were not them. Now she didn't feel lucky at all but blighted in some indefinable way.

Nothing would ever wipe from her memory the first look of her mother,
flackety-flack-flack-flack
, all yellow and useless like a horse-sick paddock that needed more than a year off.
Flackety-flack
. Coming to the door of the hut with a kero lamp.

To have equalled her father's record when he jumped as a boy at Coonamble? Nothing wrong with that, but what about going higher than her mother's best by a full half a foot?

CHAPTER 19

N
oah's eyes after Wirri Show were unforgettable because the left one had turned green and wouldn't stop twitching. It was the colour of ribbon weed in the Flaggy, all bright and glowing in the current. Worst of all though, saw Lainey, having followed Mr Cousins into the hut after the horses were unloaded and fed, was her mother's new but terrible smile, looking for all the world as if it had been pulled into place by a pair of old fencing pliers.

The floorboards of the old hut also glowed; polished so sweet clean that in other circumstances someone would've joked was the king coming to tea.

‘Hear how she went then, Noey?'

When Mr Cousins put the question, Lainey saw how everything stopped in the room; even, it seemed for a moment, the flames in the hut's stove.

‘Yep,' uttered her mother. ‘Her Aunty Ral and Nin's told me all about it.' As she spoke she was aware that she was holding her breath in the way of a sneaky horse resisting having the girth tightened.

Mr Cousins cleared his throat. ‘She's her mum's girl.'

‘Oh, no doubt about it! They told me who you was jumpin against. The best, Laine. Hey? You beat the best the district has to offer and further afield too, I hear.' And she bit the side of her teacup like a windsucking horse with too much time on its hands.

‘This new woman,' said Mr Cousins. ‘A Mrs Knox it was. Married to a Yank, they say. Anyhow, everyone thought she was the goods. She definitely made a considerable impression only that she lost her nerve, I suppose, at the last.'

Everything so neat. No sign left of the night before except for the harsh quality in Noah's voice. All her life up until then, Lainey Nancarrow had watched her mother, copied her mother, and just when she'd succeeded beyond her wildest imaginings, just when their Chalcedite foal, their Landy, had really jumped—oh, like a bird, everybody had kept on saying—too late Lainey realised she'd gone too far.

This was like a ride through perilously uncertain country. This was like the shadow of mother and daughter on horseback thrown far across to the bald flank of Christys' hill on the other side of the Flagstaff. This was an avulsion of a different kind—family land torn away, irretrievable and grieved over. This was a flood with water as thick as the barrel of neatsfoot into which Noah had always chucked bridles and saddle. Bits, stirrup irons and all.

‘Could've knocked me down with a feather duster,' said Noah, struggling to get her voice normal. ‘I tell you.' But it was no use. She was kidding no one, least of all her daughter, for the jealousy was leaping like a horse over a jump lit with kero.

My god, oh my god
, began an owl, tentatively, in a corner of sky south-west of the hut.
My god, my god.
Noah's terrible stony eyes, even as she kind of crab-walked over to shake her daughter's hand.
Myyy god!
As if wild birds knew already this day was the beginning of a rope burn that might never heal.

Mr Cousins thought that Noah, whose help each year with the autumn corn harvest he always swore was worth that of three men, had taken on the look of a scrub mare about to open its mouth and, with a screaming neigh, seize you up in its old yellow teeth.

‘Mum? I jumped seven foot three.'

‘I know, Lainey, it's bloody marvellous. It really is. Your father would've bin that proud.'

What the girl saw next in her mother's face made her want to copy Ewan, the smartest boy of Mr Carmichael's. His father had kept on building such an almighty fence that one day Ewan, deciding he'd had enough of holding up the horizontals, took off. When Mr Carmichael sent Kevin, his youngest, after him on a horse, Ewan pretended Kev was the best thing he'd ever seen. ‘You get off, Kev, and I'll double you back.' But no sooner was he up on Kevin Carmichael's little bay than he'd taken off again and still to this day hadn't returned.

Lainey looked properly at her mother. Her mum's eyes were harder than river pebbles. Oh
flackety-flackkkk
, the words drummed away inside her.
Get away down the track.

Len Cousins wanted to say, Noah Nancarrow, bloody ruining everything, you are. A sorry sight, a mother jealous of her own. But where could you possibly begin? ‘Even old Seabreeze created a sensation, Noh,' he said instead. ‘Wish you could of seen ol Breezy. Flew over those hunts like he were five not twenty-bloody-five.'

‘Closer to thirty. If you take a look at his teeth.' Then Noah grinned again and looked away.

Was it possible, later that night, that her mum was crying? Lainey thought so, maybe, when she was back in Main House. There—that noise—as if deep in behind her own heart, behind all the celebrations and reliving of the day, behind Lainey's great proud breaths of disbelief at the final height of her jump—what was it?

‘Think your mother's still a bit crook, isn't she?' said Aunty Ralda, bringing Lainey another sandwich, as if jumping so high had suddenly conferred the need to eat extra corned beef.

‘Maybe I should go . . .'

‘Leave her be, Lainey,' said Mr Cousins. ‘She'll come good in morning.'

Lainey, chewing slowly in the comfortable kitchen, felt the pain of being so much a part of the wholesale betrayal. Standing up to toast her back against the Lighthouse, she only half heard the ongoing prophecies. In the excitement no one had remembered to draw the curtain. As the autumn air cooled the glass of the window, a sorrow came into everyone that Port Lake, following the early lead of some bigger southern shows, had scrubbed the high jumps right off its program. For good, so the rumour went. Then talk moved to the new photographer.

‘He did get a picture, did he?' asked Ralda.

‘My word he did,' said Minna, joining her granddaughter at the stove. ‘Every time I noticed him he was here, there and everywhere.'

‘Pity Angus upped roots and went to set up shop in Sydney,' Len couldn't help musing. ‘Imagine. Never thought one of my boys would end up in a city.'

‘Angus would've thought it was Roley all over again, that's for sure,' said Minna.

‘And George!' said Lainey suddenly. ‘That new photographer man got some good ones of you in the bend and flag. Before, you dill, you took off on your own route! Must've got ten toffee apples off people for Fly if he got two.'

‘Ah, George.' Ralda got him another bit of toast. ‘You didn't do too bad, hey?' But George's attention was all on the cat just arrived in his lap for a nurse, and oblivious for the moment to anything else, he moved his hands in time to the purring.

Purrs as warm as the stove. Purrs as smooth as a winner's silver coat, thought Lainey. Purrs as thick as gravy, because cats loved George.

After this night, the sound of the early morning autumn air tore away inside a mother and daughter who didn't know how to proceed. They didn't even make an attempt to get to Port Lake Show on the first of May because without the high jump there didn't seem any point.

The jealousy of Noah was like a front hoof crack grown so steep and dark where was its wandering ever going to stop? What oil would heal such a thing? What gift, what switch of heart?

The new pair of Maranoa boots were inadequate for the task. ‘Done this for you, Mum,' said the girl, offering a card with a drawing of Magpie jumping to go with the gift. But that night Lainey dreamt that her mother, with neither head nor body, had swooped down as an eagle coming for the fowls. And though Lainey screamed out loud enough to make George sit bolt upright with the hair on his arms prickling in fear, she herself didn't wake until the bird had torn out its only daughter's heart.

To halt what kept flickering in her, at first Noah looked to George. When winter arrived early she longed to put her arms around him. Give him a hug. In the miniature pair of braces Uncle Owen had fixed for him he looked just so friendly. Like one of his sweet potato men with a funny half-human face and body. Like her simple son could warm away milking chilblains and something much worse.

But even George's loose-in-their-sockets eyes rolled in alarm in the face of that most shameful of human emotions. Other disasters, in comparison, looked relatively easy. Boils on George's neck? Drain them with a mix of sugar and soap. Horse with a cold? Paint back of its tongue with Stockholm tar. Fire or flood, a sick cow down or a husband dead, whatever, you cleaned up the mess and could even enjoy the feeling of everyone working together. The camaraderie of it all. In the case of this more invisible disaster, no one at One Tree or Cousins farm next door really knew how to respond.