Roley nodded. ‘Just a pity she ran clean past the post-and-rail. And that buck in her. Like Laine found out. You never know when.’
‘But her first time. My fault entirely Mag didn’t even see that fence.’ Noah tipped the chair back, not to needle Min but the better to balance and think. ‘Mare handled the crowds pretty well, all things considered. Same as Landy. And people kept saying could we have named him better?’
‘Could we not!’ interjected Roley. ‘Cos just like wind, slipping over those hunts, wasn’t he? And Ral,’ he continued, ‘champion coconut icer, eh,’ and was delighted to see a blush crossing his sister’s cheeks. ‘Could we all eat a piece to check those judges made no mistake?’
Somehow, it was as if in going fully public with Roley’s demise, the highest leap of all had been made. Around the kitchen table a great and unexpected calm had arrived at One Tree. As they each lifted to their lips their pink and white square of coconut ice, the sweetness seemed to melt for a moment into the very air.
Oh jeez, thought Lainey. I’m going to bust open I’m that happy. Because they were all agreeing that sooner rather than later she’d be old enough to go in her first Wirri high jump too. To make the excitement bearable she broke off a bit of her ice to give to George, who’d eaten his piece fast.
‘It’s a very good coconut ice,’ Aunty Ral was musing, ‘but possibly next year I’ll concentrate on my fudge.’
‘Oh, I count my blessings,’ had become Roley’s stock standard reply to anyone showing him pity. He nibbled the next corner off his ice and allowed himself the thought that everything was okay. How many more times anyway did a man have to fly over eight feet when he was lucky enough to have a wife as talented as Noey? And no, he’d told quite a few enquirers, neither Seabreeze nor Landy were for sale.
Reenie, ladling another teaspoon of sugar to cut the thickness of the stewed tea, marvelled that she’d ever been away. She resisted the sudden temptation to take her mother’s pulse, for it was clear that Wirri Show being back on the calendar had lent a change to her too. That stroke-damaged cheek was not so noticeable. As Minna popped the last of her ice into her mouth to suck whole she could even look indulgently on Noey’s affection for the itchy little piebald mare, the only horse to come home with white ribbons rather than blue.
The new feeling was best summed up by the foal’s bread that still dangled over Roley and Noah’s hut door, its shape a full, fat, even-sided heart. The brief sweetness of the truce that had fallen between Minna and Noah could later be recalled by thinking of this. Or else seeing the showground empty again after the first show, its quiet old shade trees forming a second circle of darker-coloured peace on the outside of the ring. Or Ralda’s round Christmas cake, that she made a start on every first of August. She’d begin by cutting each raisin into four, then each sultana in half, before letting the children coat them and the candied peel in flour. By the time she’d assembled all the other ingredients together in her biggest basin, the children would startle at the sound of the fat on their aunt’s arms beginning to slap.
Noah, for her part, knuckled to the knowledge that if there was going to be a Nancarrow team of jumpers it was going to be up to her and her daughter. She resolved to unbury no more of her shoeing money. Let it stay in its glass jar, safe in the old biscuit tin in the ground, she thought proudly. Let it truly be her emergency stash. Let them all see, especially Rol and his mother, that she really had turned over a new leaf. No more grog on the sly.
Full of virtue, she could be noticed every now and then lifting her hands to her nose. What no one knew was that it wasn’t to check whether or not she’d scrubbed the reek of wet horse hooves from out of the wrinkles on her hands but rather to confirm how, over time, buried money, even totally protected from soil and rain, smelt like leaves. It was a lovely smell and the only reason, she kept reassuring herself, for going every week or so to check and count it out.
So how terribly cruel it seemed to them all that before Roley’s forty-third birthday his health took a dramatic turn for the worse. An invisible set of spider hobbles looked to be snarling him. Casting him over. Like he’d had polio since birth, only he hadn’t. The hatred for the specialist resurfaced, as if that Dr Spork, simply by having mentioned the possibility that it might come to this, had brought it to pass.
Ralda began to teach George the Lord’s Prayer and to compulsively slice off wafer-fine bits from the bottom of the Christmas cake for her and the children to sample, as if that goodness would work, even if prayer wasn’t going to.
‘Better stir me stumps,’ Roley would say after collecting eggs, only to find that whatever amount of tremendous willpower had allowed him to keep walking was no longer enough.
If nothing’s going wrong, leave it alone, had been his father’s favourite motto. Not a bit of use in this situation. Everything was going wrong and no one with a bloomin clue what to do.
The lightning was getting into his hands too, he told his mother. ‘I’m in that much pain, Mum. Near ready to give up. Can’t pick nuthin up without dropping it. The bloody thing. I’m that stiff,’ he only half joked, ‘you’d be doing everyone a favour if you just snapped me up into kindling for Lighthouse.’
‘We’re two of a kind.’ Minna lifted up her arm to the point where it had been jamming for the last ten years. ‘But we keep on, don’t we, Rol? Got no choice. Cos we’re Nancarrows, aren’t we? Every Sunday I’ve been saying extra prayers. And hope on, hope ever, yes.’ But found herself speaking to Reenie sooner than she’d predicted of moving her son back into Main House, where caring for him was going to be a whole lot easier.
‘The sleepout, Noey,’ they told her. ‘This’ll be the best. More fresh air. Where he slept as a boy.’ And even Minna’s voice softened.
At first Noah couldn’t help but feel relief, really, that Roley was out of the hut. Alone in bed she heard the winter magpies begin their sweet midnight warbles. Did her mare hear it too and know what it meant? Victories ahead. The moon made the night a mix of silver and black, just like the mare except minus the Queensland itch.
Then, when the good spring rains arrived, grass was fairly leaping out of the ground. Noah now putting in the straight furrows for the paddocks down near the creek.
As her father lay in the old hospital bed Reenie had got cheap, Lainey liked to sit up close, holding his hand as she described the look of George playing in the freshly turned soil.
‘As excited as if he were a hungry bird, Dad. Runs up and down he does.’ Thinking as she spoke, hope on, hope ever, for what better smell than that of newly turned soil? ‘Maggies, crows and George, picking up the witchetties and worms. If I take his worms off him, down he sits in a real sulk.’
By Christmas Roley was a full invalid, bed-bound, troubled in his waterworks, with a body so chancy Reenie knew it was going to come to worse than that sooner or later. It was like the war all over again, but only one soldier to look after and that one her own little brother with a wound you couldn’t dress.
In the sleepout his skin grew sallow. Even the whites of his eyes went yellowish in the way of one of Ralda’s oldest aprons. The sun also landed on all his old jumping ribbons strung up to cheer him, fading them quickly.
Lainey studied her father covertly and couldn’t quite believe in what was coming to pass. How much easier to concentrate on the different framed photos of him on different horses at different shows. It felt to her that she’d always known the names of the horses, owners and shows. That somehow they were lodged in her own heart more surely than just about anything else.
The effects of the lightning made their way next into his throat. ‘It’s a real torment to hear,’ she heard Aunty Ral exclaiming.
‘Like he was gassed not struck,’ agreed Aunty Reen.
When her father’s voice grew still higher, just like a nestful of baby rats that knew their end had come, Lainey preferred he kept quiet. Often when she got home from school and rushed in to see him it was to find that he was asleep.
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She wished then that they could put a good drop nose band on to keep his mouth shut. Stop all that drooling which she found she just couldn’t bring herself to wipe up even though Aunty Reen kept cut-up flannels on top of the lowboy just for that purpose. He was worse than George, and it was that special wooden chair by the bed, that she wouldn’t ever sit on, that was making her father’s room smell so strange.
‘Dearie me, darlin,’ he said in his new voice, waking up unexpectedly. ‘But you should go outside. This is no place for you. ’Fraid I should just get a bullet in the right place. Dunno why that lightning didn’t just kill me on the spot. Be that much easier, I tell you.’
‘Hope on, hope ever,’ said the girl. ‘Gotta keep battling on.’
‘But look, Laine. From all this lyin around. All swolled in me knees like an old woman. And these damn bruises.’ And she saw that there were marks—bigger than shillings—all up and down his arms, as if in the night something had been striking him hard without cessation or mercy.
It was his toes, though, that held a fascination. The look of them, she marvelled, all pale yella and long as sun-starved grass.
‘Mine are just like that too, Lainey.’ Her mother, coming in for a visit and, seeing her daughter’s gaze, hastened to disassociate the toes from everything else. ‘Can’t grow up milking cows and riding horses without getting terrible damage to toes.’ So that suddenly Lainey wanted to stay in the sleepout after all; to pull off her boots to show the beginnings of her toes falling into ruin, the scar where the axe had fallen last winter when she wasn’t paying attention.
‘If only we could get a bit of arsenic into you, Rol,’ said Noah. Already her husband’s mouth had changed, grown so much older in the sleepout bed. What was happening so little by little was more than flesh and blood could bear.
‘If only it were that easy, Noh! If it were cancery, wherever its roots went that arsenic would’ve gone like a fish tail. A real fine one. Running that cancer out along the root. Cos you know it’s got roots on it like an orchid. Oh, I’ve known it in a bullock’s bones. Let arsenic run back into shoulder and jaw and beast comes good in no time at all.’
Hope on, hope ever might’ve been on everyone’s lips but never before had it come out so lamely, with none of its old triumphant ring, as it became clear to them all by autumn of the following year that Rol was probably never going to get out of bed again, let alone on his own two feet.
CHAPTER 15
On the day of the April Fools’ Day dance, One Tree was a hive of activity, with everyone aiming to get their chores done before three. Blow whatever sour looks Minna chose to level at her, Noah wanted to dance. Let Lainey be her partner. There’d be Ralda and Reenie too, always good for a whirl. Why should I always bloomin miss out, just because poor Rol laid up in bed? Working the corn-husking peg out in the far shed, Noah felt a happiness creeping through her that she’d already made plain her decision. Hearing Lainey calling out for her, she chucked down an unfinished cob and made her way over to Main House to be in time for the last bath.
Why shouldn’t she get to dance too when, even with Minna’s younger brother Owen recently moved back into the old hut down on the creek, keeping One Tree going was more and more left up to her? Settled in the bath, she lathered up the soap. Who got the poddies in? Who was always the most steady moving up and down the rows until all the corn was picked? Who the fastest down at the bails? Who had to deal with this or that person needing their horse’s mane hogged or its hooves trimmed? And alongside that, somehow keeping the three jump horses going. Noah, Noah, Noah, she answered, and wet her hair. Why, with the help of Fabey Lavers, she’d even fired up the forge to make a heart-bar shoe for Landy. Got him sound as a bell again. Keeping the high-jump dream alive.
And, at any rate, weren’t they always needing more women who could dance the man’s part, since so many of the Wirri boys hadn’t come home? For a moment she felt very sad. Her brother had made it back but you could see it in his eyes that the Chippy she once knew wasn’t ever returning. Before he’d headed up to Queensland she’d met him at the aunties’ in town. ‘Good enough to fight for country, Noey,’ he’d said, ‘but still too bloody black to drink in Port pub.’
Must be frogs again in the tank. She could smell their tiny bones in the steam coming off the two top-up kettles of hot. The smell of the work it’d be cleaning the tank out was not hid by the Halo shampoo Reenie had bought in preparation for the dance.
‘I’m shimmery now!’ joked Lainey in the exciting kitchen, every spare inch of the table laden with what they were taking for the dance supper. ‘Glorious with luxuriant curls.’ Knowing full well that although that’s what the shampoo label promised and though Aunty Ralda was forever singeing her fringe to thicken it, her hair was fine and flyaway.
‘Shimmery with nonsense more like,’ said her Nin, who was going to stay at One Tree, less to be of comfort to her son than to emphasise to Noah her breach in her duty of care when it came to Rol.
‘No. Shimmery. With glorious highlights.’
Ralda came out then in the new dress she’d spent the best part of the last fortnight sewing.
‘Another red frock,’ said Reenie, mock suggestive, for no man young or old had ever really looked like going with Ral.
‘You know I’m always very drawn to red,’ said Ralda, undaunted. Even the brass bits of the Lighthouse she’d cleaned last week gleamed as never before. The fire too was leaping brighter in its box, as if in response to the happy mood.
‘Just like one of the black gins.’ Minna looked at Ralda.
‘I don’t care. It’s me colour. And Lainey’s.’
‘I thought you were trying to shed a few pounds.’
Ralda ignored that.
‘Well come on, Aunty Ral, let’s go show Dad.’ Lainey was practically already dancing, she was that excited.
‘I’m coming as fast as I can. Gotta finish ironing this shirt for Uncle Owe.’
And the miracle of that, thought Lainey. That Mother Potts iron as black as the stove but the shirt underneath as white as a leghorn egg.
‘Well I feel right proud,’ said Roley, as they all trooped in to show him their finery. ‘By hell! Is that you, Lainey? In a few years, watch out. Those Cousins boys. There’ll be a herd of them stamping up our hill.’
Lainey grabbed up George and did a few spins.
‘No doubt about you two,’ said her father. ‘Sparky as a pair of firecrackers.’ And though he smiled, if he wasn’t careful came the feeling that he might cry.
‘Now, Rol,’ Ralda said, waddling forward with a supper tray. ‘Not to eat this until ten tonight. When dancing’s stopped and we’ll be eating ours. Some lol-lols in this bag will help the time pass. And then there are my new invention. Wish biscuits. Make your wish before you take first bite.’
Although Roley knew his sister was the milk of human kindness he felt sad that lately she’d begun to address him as if he was George. Even slowing her speech right down. As if a few screws, not just his legs, had gone missing. Another thing was that people he’d never known much and cared for less suddenly were landing kisses on top of his defenceless head. He could see they thought they were so noble to have visited poor ol Rowley Nancarrow, laid low. It was a wonder some didn’t convert so they could be in the running for sainthood. Saint Monny of Sunshine. Saint Olwyn from Port Lake.
Reenie leant down and kissed her brother. ‘You gotta kiss for yer dad, Laine?’
Lainey, who was turning twelve come the end of July, sat next to him on the edge of the bed.
‘You’re in for something tonight, darlin.’ He held his daughter’s hand. ‘You know what that is?’
‘What?’ Her mind ran again to the Cousins boys.
‘Your mum. If she gets Ral up for a dance, watch out!’
‘How come?’
‘It’s like she could dance the feathers off a chook. One Wirri Show ball, just before I married her, it was that cold everyone was dancin in their overcoat
s. But not your mum. And by jeez you had to be Phar Lap to keep up.’
As everyone else was filing out Noah came in. When she bent to kiss him a little smile crossed his face and stayed in his eyes.
Us, Rol, she wished she could’ve found the words to say. The blaze of blue in his eyes! The outer black right at each eye’s edge. Like someone had cantered two perfect circles in her husband’s face. The longing she saw that even now danced between them with nowhere to go. I don’t forget us either together on dance floor, she couldn’t find the way to say.
Seeing her uncertainty he felt a quavering dread. ‘Be good!’ he said, and to cover up his sense of grief, the moment she left the room he switched on the wireless Reenie had bought for the sleepout. He wasn’t listening, though, for it was that time of evening he once had loved best. That last surge of work as dusk was falling. That extra charge of meaning it gave the day. To pick up a hind fetlock, to hold it easy in his hand as he worked the rasp—what wouldn’t he give for a simple pleasure such as that to be his again?
‘There’s them Levitts,’ said Uncle Owen, at the sight of a mob of girls climbing through a fence onto the road to Wirri. ‘All eleven of em. Like they could be their own mountain platoon. Only prettier.’
‘For heaven’s sake!’ said Reenie. ‘You know they would’ve walked all the way over Pinparrabin Mountain from the other valley.’
‘And carrying food,’ noted Ralda.
‘And it’ll be good. I’ll see if any of them want to squeeze in.’ Uncle Owen slowed down. But the Levitt girls, saying they were nearly there anyway, just shook their heads.
Before Uncle Owen wound the window back up, Noah could smell Flaggy Creek from that nice inch of rain they’d had last night, a watery wild smell.
‘Don’t kiss me, George!’ Lainey moved closer to her mother.
No, thought Noah, too many years gone by to think of that one. But she did anyway. Because it was April again. Because that smell of the creek would’ve been exactly like that in its dark little nose. Watery wild. Cold, when what it would’ve wanted, what it would’ve desperately been straining for in its little boat, like any other newborn thing, a foal, even a mouse, was its own mother’s milk.
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