Foal's Bread (44 page)

‘With eel?' She felt a thrill of disbelief.

‘Dry out a bit of eel skin and twist that up. Oh, you'll have never heard anything quite like it. Better than the silkiest mane or tail.'

Lainey checked to see if he was joking. No, must be for real; she ducked her head down, just so pleased by the friendly feel of the morning that it was a pity when he then said that they'd best put George on the lead.

‘Can't George come and help us catch him?'

‘You know George. What a noise he'll make. Anyhow, George is gunna stay here and catch us a perch for Christmas, aren't ya, George?' And he snapped the clip onto George's harness. ‘Give you a nice bit of length to roam. And he can keep all the jar of crickets. And this'll keep the flies out his eyes.' And drew the blade of his belt knife over one of George's ankles to make a scratch. ‘Never fails.'

Lainey put out her ankle too.

‘No, we'll do us when we get to eel pool,' he said. And happily she followed him along the little slope up the creek in four-beat dance step, clicking her fingers to the imaginary fiddle moving in old Uncle Owen's fingers.

Everywhere Magpie walked the grass was bright green. So green it nearly makes you sick, thought Noah. Without fail, whenever the mare saw her approaching, she let out a great nicker and came at a gallop. Noah tipped the little sack of stolen feed into the cut-off kero tin in one corner of the meatworks paddock. So comforting to listen to a horse chewing. She'd filled the tin with round river rocks to make Magpie less able to bolt the feed down.

Up until now Noah Nancarrow had never brushed a horse. No time. No point. But the brush she'd found chucked in under the paddock's water trough she now kept by the kero feed tin. Just an old round brush, its varnish chipped off, but even with half its bristles missing Magpie seemed to like it a lot. When she brushed, the horse's ears went all long and slow.

But yes, the grass was sickening, just like the colour of the new icing on Ralda's latest teacake, what people marvelled over and always ate too much of. The grass was fed on blood that came straight to the paddock in a pipe from the slaughterhouse.

In the air was always the smell of blood. The anxiety running inside her also felt of an over-bright hue. Minna ordering the horse to here. Noah didn't like it one little bit; didn't trust what might be coming next. Surely she wasn't planning on getting Magpie knackered. ‘Over my dead body,' Noah told the horse.

As she saddled up, a pair of butcherbirds began to call, their up and down notes as smooth as the blue sky itself with its clouds drifting. Everywhere in the bright green paddock was the intense feeling of life being turned over. ‘Might ride you over to One Tree,' she said conversationally. ‘Or get the good pair of clippers off Cousins and give this mane a haircut for Christmas. Pity the bloody itch is coming back so strong.' She cast a regretful eye at the messy state of the horse's mane and tail. ‘Mozzies must be something else.'

Three large grey kangaroos leapt the fence for the green pick. That the kangaroos cared nothing about the meatworks was kind of shocking. It didn't seem natural, she thought, that even if a meatworker, Angus Reilly or Bob McMurty with blood all over their clothes, went close to where the kangaroos were eating, they only just paused for a minute in their chewing. It was as if they knew that here in this holding paddock of death, they had protection. She saw it in the face of the lead roo that it knew though dogs and guns could get them elsewhere, near the slaughterhouse they were outside of what went on in the building.

The Garroty sisters, come out of the hills for Christmas Eve duties at the church, went past next, still in the little spring cart with the black Galloway mare. When Noah waved, one sister raised a gloved hand whereas the other made the sign of the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost and spat on the road as if to warn off bad luck. Old Garty, their father, his eyes straight ahead, flicked the pony on with the whip as if Noah Nancarrow down there in the meatworks paddock didn't even exist.

Well, she'd show them, she thought, and giving the horse just a few circles, oblivious for a moment that she'd be reminding the mare of her bad old fence-jumping habit, hopped her nicely over the five-bar gate.

Once on the road she kept cantering in the direction of One Tree. She could've just as easily gone the other way, into Wirri to see Thel, only that she'd sighted a pair of Abo kids hauling a heap of offcuts home to Blacks Lane in flour bags. When they heard a horse, thinking they were being pursued, they took off into the trees along the Flagstaff, their bare backs running with blood and fat. For a moment she thought of giving her whip a crack to really send them but they reminded her too much of her own brothers to do such a thing. She felt so inexplicably happy that one hand even stole down to Magpie's wither to give it the lightest bit of a pat.

Noah had put her back in a plain old ring snaffle and the mare moved it in her mouth will all due contentment. The mare, feeling the rider's good mood, moved less choppy than usual as the rich nourishing aroma of blood and bone boiling down floated west with them in the light morning breeze.

What a rare feeling, a day off almost, thought Noah, hopping the horse over a log. The piebald's coat had never been so beautiful, glowing from the inside out. As if all that blood and bone wasn't just good for roses but high jumpers too. As if that, not all the pots and potions and evil-smelling yellow creams Noah had mixed, had seen the end of the Queensland itch on all but the mare's mane and tail.

‘What are ya?' said Lainey, tapping her knee with the handle of the fishing knife to watch the reflex jerk. She hit her knee again and this time the reflex really made her lower leg jump out.

‘What are you up to, Laine?' said her uncle. If I were to touch that hair, reckon I'd get a spark, he was thinking. If she was a cat she'd be the kind that you had to watch out for. Purring one minute, scratchin your eyes out the next. Screaming for the nearest tom too, and pushed that last thought down, because wasn't she just a kid? Yet even so, his eyes flickered to the line of her neatly growing bust. Away again. Then back. Because Ralda hadn't got around to lowering the hem on the dress he couldn't keep his eyes off the length of her legs.

‘What're ya thinking about?' Uncle Owen asked her. The girl, he swore under his breath to see, was all leg and its dress just the same pink as Gem's Tooth Powder. But young enough to not care less about the dried mud all over her knees.

‘Well we always want to know what made them teeth marks in your braces.'

‘Oh, something wild enough.'

But if she grasped the innuendo she wasn't letting on. Really she'd been thinking of how she didn't believe in her mother anymore. Thinking how if she could sweep up all her mother's broken words then they could build an almighty big jump that none of the horses, not even Magpie, would be mad enough to try.

When Lainey remembered the last time her eyes had properly met her mother's, a flood of if onlys always overcame her: If only I'd had a fall at Wirri. If only Mum had stayed off the plonk. If only Landy had knocked down top rail. If only we'd crashed. If only we'd died.

Tree shadows on the water were mesmerising her. A cracker made of old eel, that'd be a first, and taking the empty shell of a .22 out of her pocket she began to whistle a tune over its rim.

She perched on the ground some feet away from her uncle, looking at the hand calluses gone so weak the way they did every summer. So that they wouldn't be a bit of use when it came time again to help Cousinses with their corn pick.

She thought of Mr Cousins always knowing when she'd looked up to see how much left of a row. ‘Doesn't make it any easier,' he invariably called out. ‘Might make it slower.'

‘Seen how good me punkins are goin?' Uncle Owen asked.

Lainey nodded. ‘Oh, they're growin good.'

‘And the melons.'

‘Mr Cousins thought you took a risk. Says he can remember when he was a boy punkins being killed by frost at his place in November.'

Uncle Owen smiled. ‘I know. To plant in August was mad but I had a hunch. We'll have first punkins of anyone. Make a very good sale we will, and they're the good hard-skinned ones. Won't be going all watery when cooked. Nuthin worse than a punkin that goes to mush.'

The girl nodded again. She hugged her knees up close with the pleasure of something she'd kept secret even from George. What she'd writ on some of those young punkins. The hearts she'd drawn, too, in the hope they'd keep their shape no matter how big those punkins grew.

‘Did I ever tell how careful you sometimes have to be when clearing brush?'

Lainey shook her head no.

‘Well I hit a wallaby with the hook. By accident. Didn't even know it was there. Sleeping in the long grass. Cut it clean in half and though the top half and head fell off dead, bottom bit kept clean on hopping down hill, over the fence and away as if nothing had happened!'

‘Aw, you did not, did you?'

Then her uncle, abandoning fishing, half flung himself down alongside her. When he took off his hat she felt alarm racing through her. Without it Uncle Owen looked like a stranger. Someone she wouldn't recognise if she fell over him. His lips were like a split sausage from all the sun they'd seen.

‘I dunno why I keep botherin with this hat.'

‘How come?' That was more reassuring. That was the Uncle Owe she knew, never short of a story.

‘Ever since that heifer had a go at it. Never wanted to stay on since.'

‘Reckon George might be getting sunburnt.'

‘Don't worry about George for a moment. There's something else. All the veins in me legs are swolled,' he was saying, but she saw a lump the size of a duck egg in his groin. ‘Somethin else.'

What else? wondered Lainey. What else could there be? Suddenly, though, into her mind came the rude word that had been chipped into the door of the school toilet. Mr Mapleston had made them all gather around, trying to spot the culprit.

‘What is fuck?' Lainey had whispered the question later to Dimity Watson.

‘It's when a boy puts his dick inside yours,' Dimity had whispered back, and it was Leithy McCliver who'd got ten cuts of the cane and hadn't cried a drop.

‘Let's just come up off the creek a bit. Have a bit of a nestle we will in the dip up there.'

What did that mean? Her alarm came back. There were cracks in the ground with ants running in and out. There were crows, sort of like twelve little black horses flying. There was a small grey and silver bird in the closest shrub. It had a neat black cap on its head and was bashing a lizard back and forth on the branch.

Uncle Owen looked like he was walking on eggshells. Like a horse about to go all navicular.

‘Now shut your eyes.'

It was like being little again. A lucky dip at the show. She felt his old hand guiding hers.

‘Keep yer eyes shut. Now take a hold of that.'