Foal's Bread (47 page)

She knew she could've stood under the deadest tree and not been struck. Knew it in her bones. She mixed the mare a bit of feed and as the rain began to pelt down took the last few capfuls of Royal Reserve before chucking the bottle out into the darkness. She felt glad of the storm that would really put out the fires.

Falling into a light doze on a horse rug, she immediately dreamt of her Little Mister. He wasn't drowned at all but sitting in a clean gravel bed that sloped gently into the cool river. First he was a baby, nearly as fat as George at that age, slapping his hands on the water, before turning suddenly into the twenty-three-year-old lad he'd be if someone had saved and reared him after all. He was a young Uncle Nip. A lovely smile. A lovely set of his own teeth. He was all golden brown but with a pair of legs that white she knew he too was a horseman.

Then the dream changed and this time Little Mister was her dead baby with the jewel flies swarming in and out of his eyes and nose.

‘Gunna fix this mane of yours, Mag.' When she woke, she spoke in a kindly way to the horse. ‘Since there's no point clipping it. Not now Minna's sold you to Mr Hanley. We'll brush it out.' She lit a lamp and hunted around in a crate until she found a metal mane comb. ‘Make you pretty.' Her fingers found a knot forming and pulled the hair free.

Her mind leapt in time with the storm as to what plan she'd be best to follow; pretending there were many, even as she knew that there was really only one left.

Just before first light, the sound of the early morning Christmas air was the sound of things ending but of other things going on. A magpie called and was joined by a throng of others in another tree. Later it was going to get hot. Over by the wood tank the shapes of a pile of chokoes and sweet potatoes began to emerge. For one mad second Noah thought of riding back up the hill.

‘Steady on,' she said out loud and began to pick out her horse's hooves with a lingering quality seldom known to her. Without telling Lainey, no one would ever find where she currently hid her money from shoeing. It was still in its jar in a box, but the position always changing as to where she buried it on the farm. Lainey would never get to use them few quid let alone know that money stored like that goes as thin as cloth and smells of leaves. It was a damned shame.

The longing to see the girl's face, so like her own at that age, had to be fought off one last time. But she knew she couldn't, not even if they still slept in the hut. She knew if she were to sight even George, the big ol softie, that her determination would fade and falter and what then?

‘No, Noey.' And the mare, listening, licked at the feed tin. The storm in the night had guaranteed it to be the kind of day where if Noah were to use her whip it would float out so slowly that for a moment it'd seem to travel out further than its length. Then the limit or point beyond which something begins might be understood at last. From the storm the air had that sweet clean feeling where anything might be possible.

Today, though, she just wound the plait of the whip into a neat circle, tied it with a swift knot and left it hanging on a nail on the wall. Nor did she unlatch Uncle Owen's new work bitch, wriggling its tail so hopefully. ‘No,' she said again. No need for whip nor little red dog for she wasn't going seeking any wild mob of weaners run off into the hills.

Next she filled the enamel basin at the back door with cold water and splashed her face. Seeing blood in a crack in the skin of her hand she used her fingernail to lever it out; washed it clean. Somewhere far above the houses a rainbird called with the pure hollow note that could make you either very happy or very sad.

The storm hadn't made her plan that much easier but it didn't really matter. This Magpie had never minded jumping in the wet. She led the horse out to the front of Owen's hut and, pausing, saw herself standing, reflected in storm water caught as still as glass in a dip of ground. No trace left of the howling westerlies that had set the land all around on fire. As she went to get on she felt her left shoulder wanting to pop out of its socket.

Rather than risk a dislocation she mounted from the veranda edge. Gracious Song, she remembered, that was the name of the eleven-stone hunter that had first put her shoulder out. The horse, that did indeed usually jump like a song, had lobbed her into the base of a jump because she'd had her mind fixed on Rowley Nancarrow instead of the job at hand. Well, she resolved, won't be making that mistake this morning.

Once again the magpies carolled forth. Their song reminded her of sitting on Nipper's knee at the Dundalla Christmas dance, looking over and seeing Mrs Leeton's fingers flying over the piano. Later, up on the platform, Uncle Nipper had played ‘Goodnight Little Darlin' on his accordion and winked. Because she was his secret.

A run of other tender memories arrived. She could just see one corner of the practice paddock. With yearning she thought of practice jump Sundays of the war years. She remembered the look of Roley riding. The way he would rise to the canter sometimes. The muscle in his legs. For a moment she even remembered her first Christmas at One Tree before she married Rol. How beautiful she'd thought the farm was with the old jacaranda tree all bright green and Minna so kind at first it seemed, offering her this then that. Making such a big fuss and even letting her have a try in old Irmie's competition side-saddle. The love and the laughter in her and Rol later. The way she felt she could drown in the light landing on the hairs along his brown forearms because she loved him so much. The sun on his good old hat tipped over his eyes at the same angle of the roof of the hut they'd make their own.

Other images arrived higgle piggle as up on the wild ridge country the cicadas came bursting out of the trees, ready to begin their noise of the day. Yet she was still early enough to have beaten the flies. The cows only just beginning to grumble at the cessation of their time-honoured routine.

Now time to have a bit of a think of George. Ralda's kindness from the first: ‘Now come on, Noey, Reenie says nothing as good as cabbage leaves for the mastitis.' Ralda wrapping up her hurting breasts in the best big cabbage leaves. What about Rol! His undying love for George from the start; perching George before he were two year old on that pillow in front of his saddle, determined no matter what that, subnormal or no, George'd be a rider like the rest of them. And make no mistake, hadn't George shown that he was! What about that time George somehow got up on that mare of Christys' that bolted hell for leather down the hill? George that nonchalant. Sticking on like a little leech. And now it was almost as if Lainey was riding with her, smiling too.

For the first time ever Noah wondered why exactly it was that jumping had always been the be-all and end-all? Could it be that she and Rol had wanted to fly? Engineless, like the butterflies and birds? Leaving the ground with that much beauty?

She felt glad, glancing down to the mare's nearside hoof, to see the nails she'd hammered in putting on a new pair of fronts were in a perfect line-up. Good God, if her eye got any straighter what next?

Next she remembered what Roley had called their loving. The birds and the bees. And they like being with us, wouldn't you agree, Nella Nancarrow?

Once, before that lightning strike on bridge to Kennedy's, not long after they'd been married, there'd been this big commotion up in the jacaranda. What could that be? Rol had wondered. Then they'd grinned at each other. That noise had been a pair of spring doves that then flew up still joined. Dove feathers had floated down to earth looking just like the little pleasure boat Roley had pedalled on the estuary for their honeymoon. Those feathers so dipping and gay. And little light pleasure boats seemingly in them too that night, so that for a minute she was melted, she was soft as feather down inside her husband's arms.

CHAPTER 22

W
arming up the mare something began that she had not felt since that night, so sweetly, so secret with Roley, they'd snuck out to sleep under the jaca. For now it was as if the movement of her black and white horse had become her husband; as if she'd never seen it so scared and little, folded into an efficient nappy by Reen.

Something big, a tingling wave, was beginning. But if as a young woman that circle of pleasure had been as fast as a wild raspberry bursting open under a finger, this was of a different order.

She could feel the glide and pull of her body over the saddle. The rim of pleasure forming up where her body touched the pommel of the saddle was now so huge, so unsought, that even the mare she was riding seemed to disappear. This terrible bliss, had there ever been anything like it? Circles grown so huge they seemed ripped from the sky. Something as big as giving birth when you are still a child: the womb being turned inside out, only in pleasure not pain.

Her head went back. The sound coming from her rippled out onto the creek, down along the river and the land, up the hill and into the lightening sky. It was as if every stained-glass window in Wirri's St John's had shattered and exploded far and wide for miles in every direction. Then the circles were becoming smaller, showground size. Now just a circle cantered, before dwindling to no more than the diameter of an all-day sucker from Kingston's Corner.

After this, to have a try at that ruined bridge was the only idea left that could work. Black and white butterflies could hatch out of cocoons the colour of gold or silver. Uncle Nip had showed her that on those old oleander bushes out the kitchen window at Dundalla. She knew small miracles like this went unnoticed each and every day. Did it matter that no one would be watching her attempt? Did she really have to give it a try? ‘Never say “I can't”, Laine.' The phrase she's uttered hundreds of times to her daughter came to mind with eerie force.

What a crop of pumpkins there was going to be out of that paddock Uncle Owen had planted up. Surely for Christmas, God was at One Tree this morning? The glory of the first sun hitting the bails and illuminating everything. What a clean, clear-cut Christmas Day, a feeling of more blue air than ever; a feeling that suddenly her eyes had grown more piercingly able to see the great further colours of the hills and ranges far away.

From the Flaggy Creek flats the hill of One Tree rose steeply enough to resemble just for a moment a temple from one of those lands where her brother Chippy was wounded, where Jesus Christ himself had walked. And how about that new paddock with the rows running along on the contour, an experiment recommended by Len? From the irrigation, Little Paddock was lime green and growing.

It is amazing what a horse will do for you, even if it's well nigh impossible. Noah sat on Magpie
,
suddenly so easy in the inexorability of her realisation. As she began to move the horse closer to the bridge that she'd always seen as a jump, up at Main House her daughter catapulted out of bed.

Kittens! Lainey was thinking. George, Mum, Magpie and her Nin. Surely something could be done? Hark and Herald Angels. And Glory, if there's been a third kitten born. Snail trails in the night on the curtain over one set of louvres looked exactly deliberate. Like she and George had got their Christmas snow after all.