Foal's Bread (49 page)

Maybe if Billy would come into the pumpkin paddock with her, they might carve their initials? Because gee, just once, because they were both in saddles on the way to school, ‘Practise pairs?' she'd asked. And how good they'd gone together. Stirrup irons clanking but Bill Cousins that careful not to hurt her ankles. And on the dance floor. We was just like me mum and dad, she dared to think. Would the ice cream still be hard enough to sit up on the cones? Might Billy also be thinking of her now?

Monny and Cath Carmichael liked him too, she knew. The Chubb girls also. Always trying to get his attention. Some hope! They were sewers not riders.

And when was Aunty Ral going to realise that she, Lainey, weren't ever going to have a hope chest full of neat stitching and tatt work? That cloth tore on the rough bits of her fingernails? That no matter how carefully she'd washed her hands, the material invariably ended up stained with a mark? A boy like Billy wouldn't mind.

Best of all though, knew Lainey, and she'd saved this thought until last to really gloat over it in full, would be the look on her mother's face when Nin said Magpie wasn't gunna be sold.

A great white wave of birds exploding from the old shade tree made her remember the other pumpkin secret she had to check. Further towards the fence, here it was. The pumpkin she'd drawn with a heart. Their jumping colours symbol. Growing perfect.

In the river, her horse dying on top of her, Noah thought of the drowned baby. She thought of its eyes looking always into her own. Its little mouth moving. Wanting a feed. She thought of the heart of a child separated for so many long years from its mother.

Now that baby's heart was coming closer. A bit of wind rippled darker water over the woman and her horse.

Damn waste of a good new set of horseshoes, Noah had time to think, for surely no other bugger would be smart enough to pull them off.

A new feeling arrived, almost like a flutter of pain. That she must leap again.

As if in invisible connection, as if a long bit of spider gossamer came floating its way down from the hut, the foal's bread up on its nail also moved for a moment, then fell still.

CODA

A
lthough some of the land west of the town has been put to olive trees and plantation hardwoods, even as the twentieth century turns into the twenty-first and almost a decade speeds by, the old voices remain. The voices are funny, flinty, relentless. The voices are her family—that old lady's. She's walking a little blue pony mare along the road, so much busier now out of Wirri ever since two new national parks have been declared on Pinparrabin mountain range and beyond.

Don't blast your car horn and make pony shy. Don't spook them. Slow down. Don't let there be the terrible accident that is a vehicle colliding with a horse. Don't make a road fatality of Elaine Nancarrow. Finally come back. To say hello and goodbye, if only to headstones.

In the top pocket of her favourite shirt, its collar reversed and mended so many times it looks like a paddock put to variegated pastures, are buttoned two things she's been meaning to give her parents for just about half a lifetime now. Secrets she found by herself but the spirit of her brother always alongside.

This means she's as brave as ever she was. Her mother's daughter through and through. My word yes. When yesterday she could've just kept on driving up the Pacific Highway as usual when on her way to visit the granddaughter just over the Queensland border.

This time she deliberately drove into Port Lake. Shocking how busy it had become. Stopped there only long enough to get a feed of fish and chips and arrived in Wirri, towing the fat and faded little Duke van, at dusk the night before.

Finding out from the woman at the servo that it was twenty-five dollars less to camp at showground than caravan park, why wouldn't you? But she'd had to almost clamp her eyes shut driving through those old ornate gates, to withstand the force of memories. Luckily there'd been kids mucking about a bit on some raggle-taggle ponies. Jumping little poles and that. Reins all over the place. Not a bloody clue except for that one girl on the ex-racehorse. Good to pause awhile at the old timber rails; helping stave off the tumult of memories as well as allowing a few simple ones to trickle in.

And oh, how good last night to find the amenities block had been made all sophisticated. Hot showers like nothing else. If she'd let drop her wily guard though, she would've been lost. Seeing a new hand dryer—ooh, very fancy now, little Wirri—she used it for the novelty of drying her hair with warmth.

Once back at her van she'd got the kettle going, made a nice cup of tea, filled up her hot-water bottle and slipped it into the cover her granddaughter Suze had knitted; with a horse on it and all, the darling. And there. The whole world could feel as wonky and off-balance as anything but never at this moment. Not as her cat George, the big softie, come up to snuggle in too.

The idea to ride a horse to One Tree had only come as she'd begun to drive out along the old road. No sooner had she passed the 100-kilometre sign than she'd seen that Lockyers' property had been turned into a place where horses were for hire.
Equine Rest Home and Riding School
said a sign so faded it was barely readable.

The pommy woman running the show had looked at Elaine dubiously. Wanted to know if Elaine really thought she could ride well enough to take a horse out along the road.

And oh, that had really made Elaine smile. And the bloody cheek of the youngster stretching out the little pony's front legs after the girth had been tightened, telling her, ‘Sorry, no ride' if she didn't strap the ridiculous safety helmet onto her head.

She'd hidden that as soon as possible. Marked the ditch with a twig. As sure as anything else, she wasn't going to ride the old road looking like a great big egg was on the boil on her head.

Now her hair, which is the colour of the whitest mane, grows hot in the November sunshine. She puts a hand up to feel how hot and just as the pony cracks its nostrils in contentment, lets out her own noise of happiness.

But isn't she seeing some funny things? Maybe nothing funnier than the old meatworks apparently turned into an art gallery. With a cafe advertising scones. She has them butter her a couple of those to put in the bag on her back for later and keeps going.

And Jesus Christ! Look what's happened to Wingfields'! A housing subdivision going in. Kerbs, guttering and streetlights. Whatever next? A dog kennel and cattery too.

To reach One Tree is to find a land at first almost beyond recognition. The old cream shelter is there but painted blue and gold now. Very flash and silly, with olive oil for sale made from the trees of the property. Well you couldn't call it ‘One Tree' now, but nor could she be sure how to pronounce its new name. Another Aboriginal word she guessed. The district seemed to have gone crazy with them. She can hear her Nin's sarcasm as if Minna hadn't been gone more years than was worth counting—Min who without fail called each new black work dog Nigger be it a boy or a bitch.

Elaine knows for sure now that she's got a bit of Aboriginal blood in her herself. Found out from her own granddaughter Bridie.

Her great-grandmother wedded a white man and created a scandal. Bridie had even tracked down a couple of photos. The young woman, ever so dark in a white dress, had apparently been known as Nup.

After Elaine had got used to the idea she found it made her strangely proud. And it sure did explain many things. A whole life of never settling for long anywhere. That love just like her mum had had for being outside: for stars, for wind. Maybe even their incredible balance, all there in their skinny shanks?

Wilparinka? She gave the new name a try. It was nice. According to Bridie all the old names, even Wirri, were Aboriginal. Bridie said it was because the white settlers who'd murdered and maimed and drove out the original inhabitants couldn't resist the prettiness of the sound of their words.

At the sight of the rack of jewellery behind the oils and soaps, Elaine hops off the horse. Well for goodness' sake if that isn't the funniest thing. Earrings made out of jacaranda seed cases. So the old tree lives on. And looking up at last to Main House she sees the jacaranda like a huge purple cloud hiding the rooflines.

She thinks for a moment of riding up there but no, that feels impossible. She might've bought a pair of jaca earrings each for Bridie and Suze only the price on them's ridiculous. She feels that people are watching her from Uncle Owen's, turned so neat and respectable it's hardly recognisable. A channel-billed cuckoo lets out its raucous cry as she leads pony to a hummock so that she can easily get back on.

Why had poor Maggie never been taken out of the creek? she ponders as the pony picks its way over the next little bridge up across the Flaggy. Hadn't there been some kind of a plan hatched? For Mr Cousins to get together some Clydies to haul mare out, just in case the good bridge didn't like the weight of a tractor? Somehow, though, in the heat of the summer, and amidst the emergency of One Tree having lost its two main milkers, all such ideas disappeared.

For a time, if a nor'-westerly come up, so too did the smell of death; blowing into Main House kitchen, straightening George's curls. Upsetting all of them in their own different ways. The cows bellowing more. A sow eating all its babies. Then had come a little February flood big enough to shift the carcass so that everyone could focus on the luck of that rather than how Magpie had ended up there in the first place.

The long curious horse skull might still be somewhere or other. Green with mosses if it had settled up in the shade. Or else bleached smooth in the sun. Very lucky if only whoever might've found it recognised it was from a horse; from a mare, what's more, as brave as Magpie.

Elaine clicks the pony into a canter to get past Cousinses', thinking, if I were to go through that gate well surely we'll all come tumbling out as we were that last Christmas. In shock. The blood colder in our veins than even strawberry ice cream. For what had been done to Uncle Owen.