With kissing, though, her mouth was so shy he knew he must be the first. The friendly taste of jam tarts and tea from the supper table. But the mystery of it all as well. How secretly exultant he was when she put her hand on his heart and said it felt like a racehorse in there about to take a run. He took the opportunity to brush that spot where her heart was hammering away too.
Then another kiss and all those hard muscles, their horse rider’s sinews, tendons as tough as bone, melting into the softness that can happen when two such bodies touch.
How he loved that even then, her body tucking in against his own, the snort of laughter could arrive in its little throat. He knew he was hers and she was his. That from here on in they were officially set to go with each other.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘The smell of you, Rol!’
‘Don’t you like it?’ He had been full of laughter too. ‘If you must know, I got myself so nervous I spilt half a bottle of cologne over me.’ And it all seemed like a kind of perfection that, neither one being good with words, only the luck of that old photo suddenly appearing with them on the biscuit tin together seemed able to fully catch.
The following November, when the newlyweds first moved onto One Tree, already the late spring weather held all the heat of summer. The old hut that was to be theirs was attached to Main House by just a skeleton of a passageway and therefore noise of every kind carried back and forth between the two buildings. Because no evening breezes could reach their room, almost immediately Noah came up with an alternative sleeping suggestion.
‘Roley?’
‘What, little Nell?’
‘I reckon I just can’t sleep in here, Rol.’
‘Why not, Noey Nella Nancarra?’ His long arm went out to hook her in close. They laughed softly into each other, still getting used to the sound of her new name. ‘Why not, NN? Hey? Bed’s not too saggy, but if it is I can put boards beneath.’
‘No, it’s not that. It’s hotter than Cairns is what. Let’s do like Aunty Mil and Mad would.’ She pushed herself in still closer, drinking in his smell, which was of horses, leather and, from fixing the plough that afternoon, the dirt of One Tree.
‘What’s that?’
‘Sleep out. A million miles cooler, you’ll see. Aunties would sneak into garden after the boarders was asleep. Oh it was beautiful. Put out blankets and end up so cool we was cold. Rest of Wirri frying away inside their bedrooms. Aunty Mil said we could’ve called ourselves banana splits and served ourselves up for sale at the Palace we was that refreshing by morning. We can go under the jacaranda.’
‘What about the blossoms?’
‘Remind us of our honeymoon,’ because on their way to the beach the bus had stopped for lunch in the town of Grafton, which had been extraordinary and purple with hundreds of the trees in flower. He had given her his own purple ice cream to finish, just for the delight of seeing how dainty and fast went her tongue. How lovely she was against the spectacle of the river and town. And she’d laughed too, saying his eyes had got a bit of violet in them.
‘Really think we should sneak out?’
‘Of course.’
So the next night, after eating with Min, Sept and Ralda over in Main House, and after hearing the sounds of them all groaning and grumbling, heading for their stifling beds, Roley and Noah got ready. Carrying a grey blanket, they crept like children to be underneath the tree.
Noah stubbed her toe on a tree root and felt that she was going to get the giggles but maybe it was only so he would have to hold her so close, his own voice full of suppressed laughter.
‘I set the rake here,’ he whispered, taking it up from the guinea fowls’ ladder. ‘So flowers don’t pop and squash.’ He looked tall under the tree, raking in smooth strokes, making a large clearing in the blossoms. Then together they spread the blanket.
On this first night outside, just one hand loosely touching Roley, Noah was aware of all the animals on One Tree tuned in and listening. She felt the dogs’ ears pricking and the cats’ tails curling with the knowledge that now she’d come to One Tree, there was a secret. There was an outside bed and it was full of love. She thought of the cattle, how lopsided they always had to look, like their legs were different lengths, up on the steeper slope above the house. She thought of the pigs lying on the special new sty floor which was designed more for winter than summer, the glass that had been mixed into concrete pressing into their hams.
And higher, up in the scrub, wild dogs and owls getting ready for the hunt, she thought they knew too.
Know-what- know-what, a faraway waterbird began to call from the creek.
‘No-ah, No-ah.’ Still whispering, Roley changed the call to his own. ‘Nell-a, Nell-a? Know-what-know-what what what?’ As stealthy as the fox slipping around the front vegetable garden, she felt the body of her new husband shifting across to love her.
It made her feel beautiful in a far different way to how it had been with old Uncle Nip. Git out of me head, ya old rogue, she thought. You don’t belong in this starry new bed.
If only she could’ve seen herself from the height of the guinea fowls roosting in the branches above them she’d have realised that love had altered her shape. Her waist nipped in above the bones of hips that overnight seemed more womanly. Her skin, too, sun-damaged and thinned already at twenty-two, bloomed with a kind of lustre.
A little later, aroused by the stealth and the knowledge of Noah right there with only her nightie between her and the night, Roley moved closer. When she woke it was to find that he had begun to love her all over again even as she’d slept. ‘Nella.’
Noah shut her eyes and opened them. Uncle Nipper had called it a teapot, but Roley’s was more like a lighthouse. ‘Roley.’ She thought of a filly winking for the stallion. Over the tiny patch of grass a cool current of air seemed to flow, yet where their bodies joined was warm and smooth. She thought of a promising new colt just beginning to sire mares around the Wirri district; my husband’s like that.
As if in an invisible understanding of her thought he bit the side of her neck and he was that Tourmaline grabbing a mare under her mane.
The complicity between them against the hot sleeping house so near they could hear it snoring, their sureness that they could never turn into a pair of such charred old chops as Sept and Min, meant they began to move faster.
Then the dogs rattled their chains in their iron tank kennels and the guinea fowls took off from their roost as something huge began to roll out from the newlyweds. Over the blossomy ground, then out onto the grass beyond the jacaranda tree, their pleasure moved in a circle bigger than any show ring so far known and as bright as light itself.
Roley wouldn’t be able to sleep for the rest of the night for thinking about the nature of his marriage. Even the old blanket under them felt full of little lightning sparks. An excitement grabbed him as he dreamt of the lorry he was going to buy. The team they’d get together. Maybe they’d get as far as Adelaide some years. Instead of Queensland, why not give the southern circuit a try, as Noey had done with her father? Set up a water jump somehow, at One Tree. Practise that in the summer months.
He knew from the look of the light coming in the east that they’d better get going. He nuzzled Noah’s neck.
She felt they were one, not two. His hands were playfully in her hair—feeling around, he whispered, to see if she had any wisdom lumps.
‘Must be pretty wise,’ she whispered back. ‘Cos they’re big, eh Rol? Let’s see if you still got yours.’
‘Laughing again, Nell.’
When she said why, that they were like a pair of ponies with the Queensland itch scratching each other, that made him put his mouth first where her wither would be. Next onto her mouth again. But before anything could start for a third time—‘Shoot!’, he flung himself up. There was the sound of Main House stirring, someone thumping around getting life into the old Lighthouse, so that quick as a flash they stood up to get back to their hut.
�
�You two look bright as the breeze,’ said Minna enviously after milking was over. Making a conscious effort to stem her ill will, she poured her new daughter-in-law her tea in the best blue cup in the whole of Main House. But the needling, which was set to take root almost from the first, couldn’t be halted for long.
‘Cornflakes too dear to feed the chooks, Noh. Only pour out that which you can eat,’ said Minna, angry still about the name, but most of all angry at the nature of the happiness she had never seen before, blooming bigger than Roley’s ears. Almost, she thought, like some ridiculous flower bursting open there in the features of her only surviving son. And his eyes, like there was a light from inside making the blue of them that much more intense. It stuck in her gizzard that Noah had made him so.
CHAPTER 4
When Lainey was born, Noah was afraid that something would surely go wrong. That it would have to. Why Roley got the punishment instead would remain a mystery to her forever.
The day he first met his baby daughter was one of those shining blue winter afternoons so typical of that part of northern New South Wales. Clear as a bell with just enough kick left in the sun to make your head feel warm but the frost still lying in shady spots by the creeks.
Roley had been up on the North Queensland circuit, trying to get as many rides as possible, earn a few extra quid in preparation for the baby coming. The moment the news had come through of a daughter he started on the long way home to One Tree.
‘Just wait till he sees the car,’ said a proud Septimus when at last the sound of the train could be heard coming half an hour late around the hill from the east.
‘Just wait till he sees her, don’t you mean.’ Noah felt a knot of panic and excitement in her belly. ‘Gunna stand up the other end,’ she said. ‘Reckon he’ll be up the back.’
They spotted each other at the same time. He was standing at the open door of the train. She was in a patch of sun holding a small bundle wrapped in pink. But she’d miscalculated and his carriage was pulling up right in front of his family, so that just for a moment she lost sight of him. She looked down at the sleeping baby, wondering what Roley would see.
‘We win,’ Reenie was saying to her brother. ‘Told her this’d be the end you got out at. But she had to know best.’
‘That’s our Noey,’ said his mother.
Ralda was giving him a peck on the cheek even as his father pumped his hand. Then his mother’s mouth, covered in a line of lipstick for the occasion, landed high up on his cheek.
He couldn’t move fast enough down the platform. Although Ralda and Reenie flanked him, with Min and Sept not far behind, he knew that they wouldn’t break into a run. Not caring what anyone thought, clowning it up, he took off down the platform like it was the home straight. Knowing it would be their only chance to meet alone.
A face much thinner. He saw that before he’d even pulled up. But more beautiful and alive too. As if some of the shiny light of the afternoon had crept underneath her old summer freckles. Lit everything from the inside out.
Time seemed to hang for a moment like a cloud over the hill behind Wirri. His wife. Their first baby. He could hardly believe his luck.
‘This is her, Rol,’ she was saying, tilting it up at him. ‘Called her Elaine because she just didn’t look like an Edith.’
When Noey touched a fingertip to its little cheek Roley saw it flinch because her hands never warmed in winter. ‘Have to get used ter that. It’ll soon learn: cold hands, warm heart. Maybe the next one will be a little Edie, eh?’ And he grinned with that impossible-to-resist certainty about their future. ‘Or Eddie.’ But it was her he wanted to swoop up. His one and only small-framed wife but oh, here the question was coming.
‘So, wanna have your first hold, Rol?’ She was looking down at the bundle with such love that for a second, in amongst the pride and happiness, came a moment of despair.
Would he be up to the task? It was as light as a little chook. At the feel of his longer, less certain arms it wrinkled up its face.
‘She’ll wake up any minute now. Then you’ll hear there’s nothing wrong with its little lungs.’ Noah was sure that there, beneath the odour of smoky train carriage and however many hot dinners it had taken for the train to come so far, she could catch the true smell of her husband. If anything his eyes were bluer than ever due to the tan on his skin from being up north.
‘Keep supporting her head.’ Reen had reached them first.
He felt stupid, but also a stupid delight, standing on the platform like this.
‘She’s the spittin image of her dadda.’ Ralda came huffing up to stand on the other side.
‘Prettier than that, we hope,’ said Roley.
Minna and Sept, the new Nanna and Pop, delayed down the platform speaking to the Withrows, also felt all proud and somehow softer, as if a baby in their midst had temporarily lent some of its downy, delicate reality to everyone on One Tree.
‘So who’s me best girl now then, hey?’ Roley said, carefully handing her back to Noah. And again, just before the baby began to cry, the look flashing fantastic between them.
‘Might go sit in the car. Give her bottle while you get your luggage.’
‘So Dad’s bit bullet, hey? Got himself a car?’
‘It’s a Ford. I put in a bit of my pay, you know,’ said Reenie. ‘That’s it over there. And Dad’s gunna teach me to drive.’
Roley looked over to where his sister was gesturing and saw a yellowy-looking Ford with mudguards just the colour of a chocolate milkshake.
The baby, secure in Noah’s lap as they all squeezed in, seemed to be looking over to him with eyes as blue as his own. There was an almost invisible forelock of hair. Impossible not to put out one finger for a stroke. His fingertip could hardly feel it, it was that silky.
‘We started off shortening her to Elly,’ Reenie was telling him, ‘but somehow the next day when Noh said little Lainey, we all started calling her that.’
‘And what day did she come?’
‘Friday before last.’
‘Is that right?’ he marvelled. ‘Reckon there’ll be a clipping of what I jumped on her birthday then. One of the luckiest days on a little pony I’d never rid before.’
‘And me and Mum was pickin up car in Grafton.’ His father waited hopefully for the talk to move from the baby to the car, to his hope of a little tractor, but the number of women to men in the car meant that the story of Lainey’s arrival wasn’t over yet.
‘Guess where Noey ended up havin her?’ said his mother with a triumphant note. ‘Same place I had Ral. But come faster. Ralda took three days and there was nowhere for Dad to get his dinner.’
Roley felt their happiness flowing through him, thicker and of more substance than the winter light.
‘It was up on the bloomin kitchen table for me.’ At last Noah had got a word in. ‘No flamin time to get to Hinley’s lyin-in home. No sirree. This little Lainey. She’d picked her day! She was coming, ready or no.’
‘Just so lucky I was home for weekend,’ said Reenie. ‘Ral was all for still making the try. I said, “Don’t be ridiculous. What,” I said, “do you want Noey to give birth in the cart going across the Flagstaff?”’
What would you know about it? Noah had wanted to flare at both her sisters-in-law when the pains began, because at first Ralda and Reenie had fussed around looking like they wouldn’t be able to hatch a nest of eggs between them.
‘Lucky alright,’ added Ralda. ‘Cos later I had to go over in a dead faint. But after, when it got real cold, I was the one that thought to make baby a bed out of a shoebox. Warmed up the bottom of it with rocks left in stove. The look of bliss on its little face.’
‘The cat what got the cream.’ Reenie put one of her fingers into the baby’s hand. ‘Have you seen her thumbs? Like a little doll is this Lainey. And she’s a knockout, Rol. Compared to all the babies I’ve ever seen born.’
Squashed in the back between Roley and his sisters, briefly Noah remembered other thin
gs. Lying up on that big table with the river of pain opening into a flood inside, how could thoughts not have come of the other one she’d already birthed on Flaggy Creek alone?
Cantering Flat, Tin Kettle Crossing, Oakey, Breakfast and Heron Creek—listing in her mind all the places the butter box baby must’ve floated past. Still alive or sometimes dead. The possibilities shifting around in the glow of pain. But she never, not once, screamed out. Just in case Ral or Reen ever did get a bloke. Just in case she wouldn’t ever be able to stop the scream.
Lucky alright too, remembered Noah, that none of the sootiness she thought she’d seen in that first set of tiny hands and feet had gotten onto Lainey. Him what she called in secret That Little Mister. Or Mister Littlie. Its arms. All blacky-blue under the moon. What happened to them as in her rush she’d squashed him in. How in her imaginings its arms always lifting up anyway in a useless attempt to flap away the big black crow picking out its little Uncle Nipper eyes.
With Lainey, once Noah’s love began to rush out like her out-of-control milk, she’d even wished she had a pair of ears that she could’ve pinned back at Reenie and Ral. Tell them to leave off. So that for a moment she could be alone with her girl.
‘Thought we might come back to Wirri tomorrow, Rol,’ said his father, pulling the celebratory mood into another, more serious topic. ‘Bit of news that’s really gunna interest you. Just found out then that Withrows are sellin not only all their workhorses—got emselves a tractor—but also the old Chalcedite mare.’
‘What, not Chalcey Girl?’ asked Roley.
‘That’s the one. Old Gurlie. If you’re still thinkin about gettin our own Nancarrow team happenin, could do a lot worse. Even if only got a few foals left in her.’
‘I hear that in her time she’d fly at anything and usually get over it.’
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