‘Nancarrow name’s too good for the likes of a brassy one like you.’
‘Leave off, Min. Think I might be getting pneumonia.’
‘McWilliams pneumonia most likely. Your eyes tell their own tale. Red band like a ribbon running across them.’
‘I’m here for the milkin, aren’t I? More than can be said for your brother. Letting Laine have a sleep-in but where’s Reen? Where’s Owe, eh? Where would this farm be without me I’d like to know.’ Through her pain she stared at her mother-in-law with a fury she couldn’t contain.
‘The stink of you,’ Minna continued, her neck arching like a pony with a crupper on too tight. ‘If they won’t take cream at factory we’ll know who to blame. For tainting it. Where’d ya go with Angus Cousins then, who didn’t show back at dance for close on an hour? The whole of Wirri knows you never reappeared. Not till you was found in your rotten drunkedness.’
‘I’d said I was gunna help him with an April Fools’ joke on Fred Dawes’s horse but in the end didn’t. Was gunna paint a white star on the old mare. Practical joker is Angus, nothing more. April Fools’ and all.’
‘And Mary’s me middle name. It’s bred in your bones. The filthy state of your dress. Ral’s never seen anything like it. She’ll have to set copper fire going specially for it, I warrant.’
Then Noah told Min she could go and get fumigated, to which Minna replied that if the unwashed stink of her didn’t turn the milk then the dirty mouth on it would.
The hum and ding of the separator began to turn in time to Minna’s words. Setting the cups on cows as well as hand-stripping from the old girls who wouldn’t take them, Noah stopped listening; her thoughts turning to how she could best retrieve herself. Only one way. To win Wirri high jump. Come what may. No mistakes this time. So Rol would know they were back on track. Show only three weeks off.
A cow thwacked her face with its tail so hard that she felt tears form but she snorted them back. They’d set the truck up good for Rol. He could look after George. There could be a ladder up to the top of the truck where Rol could sit as if in his own grandstand and see everything.
With this realisation, even with her throat so on fire it felt like she was growing a swamp cancer in there, a triumphant note came into all the usual noises of the dairy. ‘Eh, Blackie?’ she whispered to the cow she was up to. ‘Wait a while and we’ll show them. Cos we know I didn’t do nothing wrong ’cept have a few snorters too many. When Angus tried it on, no. We said no.’
‘But the shame of it,’ Minna shot out, ‘under the honour board. In the hall with my dead son’s name and all.’
Lainey was in the sleepout with her father and George, trying to forget the bad bits of the night before.
‘So tell me all about the dance,’ said her father. ‘Bet those Cousins boys wanted to whirl you away, didn’t they?’
Lainey pulled a face. Bert had fished a frog out of the toilet and put it down her dress and Billy hadn’t stopped him. Dancing with Uncle Angus—that had been the best, Lainey knew. The way he’d spun her. The way her shoe had gone flying all the way to the other side of the hall.
‘Which one did ya give the most dances to?’ Her father was rolling himself a smoke. Almost with delicacy he was wetting it together, setting it alight. Then he took her hand to hold, as if in that way he could be there dancing with his daughter though the night was over. ‘Were it one of the Cousins or a lucky Lockyer or Withrow?’
‘George!’
‘Oh, you were the lucky boy, eh George? And yer mum, did she get Aunty Ral up and going?’
‘Uncle Angus and Mum,’ she began with an excitement that quickly faded.
For a moment father and daughter looked away from each other to the noise of a bird’s beak. On the outside of the sleepout window hung a half-oval tin shutter with edges decorated as if to resemble a fancy biscuit. The butcherbirds would get in under the cover to fight their reflections. This one bird was going at itself today hammer and tongs. The insistent noise of the dogs gnawing at the rotten bones of a dead wallaby could also be heard; the smell of it even though the morning air was cold.
Suddenly her father’s hand felt smaller, frailer. Holding it she passed one of her fingers through the gap where the finger went missing the summer when he was fifteen and working at the mill. That was her old game with her dad, to make George laugh, but now suddenly her mind filled with the memory of her mother with Uncle Angus. How they’d almost swerved as one. How no one else on the dance floor came anywhere close to how good they were.
Her father let go of her hand then but she kept it in hers until it felt to her that she had a hold of a horse waiting patiently for the day to be over. The index finger stained with tobacco was the colour of a paddock after a two-foot frost.
He was taking a last draw of his smoke and speaking again. Even the butcherbird flew off. ‘Reen said there was some kind of trouble. You know anything about that, darlin?’
‘Aw . . .’ The child cast her mind wildly around. On the wall opposite the end of his bed was a photo of her dad soaring over six in the wet at a small show in southern Queensland the year she’d been born. ‘George nicked off with the caramel tart.’
‘Did he now? George!’
But George, picking up Blackie, the cat with half a tail, for a nurse and cuddle, telling them he was just gunna have a sit in the sun, was backing out the door.
Her father’s hand felt cold. It felt that a frost had got into all his fingers, even the one missing. The air was colder in the gap.
‘But yer mum, Lainey?’ He bared his teeth as if after a shot himself of shanty grog with too much boot polish in the mix.
Just then a butcherbird in the jacaranda began its new autumn song. The melody held a note of salute, almost like the Last Post, in the way those notes were running up and down.
‘Think that’s one of them grey ones,’ Roley said. ‘The grey butcher? He really gets the baby bird into the crook of a tree to pull apart.’
‘I love that song the best,’ said his daughter. ‘There were sweet jam tarts Mrs Engels made. White baconfat, Aunty Ral said that had made the pastry so good.’ She was babbling a bit. Anything not to have a memory of Uncle Angus floating her mum around the hall.
But her father’s line of thought wasn’t to be deterred.
‘She got rotten, didn’t she? And who give it to her, that’s what I want to know,’ and his eyes went wild with the blue anger of a man almost unable to move.
This autumn month when Rowley Nancarrow would starve himself to death in his lonely bed was the same lonely month that the biggest flood in almost eighty years would sweep away the original farm bridge and much more besides. If there’d been a chance to pay any attention to George cleaning his ears as madly as his cats were cleaning their own, some inkling might have come of the rain gathering, but by the middle of the month all attention was on Roley.
When it became clear that he was not just off his food but had decided not to eat at all, the crisis was responded to in different ways, by each of them according to their nature.
George, putting the curly-back work dog up on his hind legs, made it perform one waltz too many and had his cheek snapped open with a bite. Lainey chopped so much bloodwood for the stove that the calluses on her hands grew as hard as the axe. It was for her a difficult but exciting time on account of some of the Cousins boys coming across each day from Oakey Flat to help clean the corn, what with her father’s sickness and all. The excitement was in not knowing which Cousins boys it’d be till they showed.
There was in addition a strange pride starting to arise from the compliments her aunties and Ninna were beginning to shower on her. ‘Oh, but no doubt about it,’ they all said whenever she went in to her dad, ‘Roley knows it’s Laine. You can see it in his eyes. At least he’s still got his ears and eyes, not like poor Mona Clarke’s husband.’
Dad, Dad, Dad. She swung the axe in time to his name and sought to save him by going in afterwards so that he’d have
to breathe in the sour, cold good smell of the wood.
‘Got something real special for you this time,’ she said, stealing in after school. ‘One of Aunty Ral’s ’speriments. Turkish it is. Delight. In your tin, you know? You and Mum. Port Lake.’
Aunty Reenie had the blankets pulled up around her father’s face so high that all Lainey saw at first were his eyes and that in their blueness was the sadness. She unwrapped a sweet and held it out on the flat of her hand, just holding it there as if he were a horse who might bite her fingers by mistake if she didn’t keep them out straight.
‘C’mon. Aunty Ral and George is practising. Gunna let George enter his caramels in the show. And I’m gunna go on Breezy in the hunts, Mum says. And we reckon George might even be good enough to try that Fly in the bend and flag. And you’ll be there, won’t yer, Dad? Watchin?’ She moved her hand closer.
Finally he took the piece and, sucking, watched as his daughter began the never-ending joy of searching for this or that in the scrapbook.
Ralda’s Turkish delight was soft on his tongue but a bushel of them would not have been sweet enough to put together what he felt had bit by excruciating bit been taken. Lying there looking at the profile of his daughter, who would in no time be the very age Noey had been on that tin, he felt the injustice threaten his sanity. Just for a moment he wanted to bellow and wail like George did when Noey clipped him on the running rope.
Up until the April Fools’ dance, the father in the sleepout had been a Bitter Ender. He had not given in. He had persisted in believing that somehow or other he would get back on his feet to resume training up Noey and Laine. It was the unforeseen that had made it impossible to continue. Whatever had happened between Angus Cousins and his wife was the last and furtherest extremity. The suspicion was like the iron entering the soul.
Such a sadness Lainey saw gleaming in those blue eyes as dark as Flaggy Creek’s deepest coldest pool, where the coal ran out of the mountain. Quick, lest she began to cry, she fished out two more pieces of Turkish. So sad that she had to turn her eyes of that same colour away. So sad that she quickly went to a favourite page of the scrapbook.
She felt relieved. Maybe he wouldn’t take another piece of Turkish delight but the pictures—these were doing the trick. He couldn’t help but tell her stories and stuff. ‘Ooh, that Signal was cunning as all else. That’s how come your mum’s got her hand up like she’s about to catch a taxi mid-jump. Urging him outa mischief just like you always had to.’
‘But this one here?’ Lainey bent closer to a shot of the old Albert swooping a fence.
‘Oh, he was only all good. A gentleman through and through. Good as gold in just a snaffle. I always said I could’ve won a high jump blindfold on that one. Our Foalie, he’s going to be the same when he reaches that age.’
Aunty Ral came in with a cup of hot tea for them then and oh, he breathed deep because in the steam he always could smell horses. And on his daughter too, without fail that smell of horse sweat and leather.
The scrapbook lay between them like a magic book, not least for more ordinary photographs such as Sydney Royal of ’25, her father holding sheaves of oaten hay, a line of stabled horses facing him, ears pricked. Or her father jumping a horse off a train because that’s how the Sandersons always travelled their teams.
Next she turned to the page she felt sure would be her and George at their first Wirri, but unfortunately it was the tragedies section.
‘They were real good people,’ her father said, touching the faces of Frank and May Winton, who’d died trying to save their horses from a stable fire. ‘To this day no one knows how that fire got goin.’
Lainey turned the page but not before looking into the face of one Alice Baker, killed in such a way, her father had once said, that the imprint of a hoof was left fair on that lady’s forehead.
Lainey could feel the atmosphere in the sleepout shift a gear sadder. Now they were looking at the clippings of the rare rider and horse who’d died at their job; a kind of death he’d always said was a good one. Heroic even. Over a solid fence. And the horse sometimes buried, against all the rules in the showground. Rider remembered forever as one who’d attempted something amazing in the fading light in a sprinkle of rain, or the kicked-up dust of a summer trotting track. Whatever the weather or the accident, rider remembered.
The novelty events section of the scrapbook was safer. Special, too, because now she and George began to make a bit of an appearance. There she was in the melon race. George and the joey that year they made front page of the Wirri Courier.
A whistly little half-snore left her father’s mouth and shocked her from her reverie. But good, here was the chance she’d been waiting for.
Quickly, wanting to race down to the bails to see if Vera and Violet, Billy, Bert and Ned Cousins had arrived, maybe with some of that homemade toffee of their mum’s, she waved the Bible card she’d been most saving up, confident even in her rush that the picture of Matthew amidst the lilies of the field couldn’t fail her.
But when she went in the next morning to see if there was any difference, her dad had dirtied his pants and Aunty Reen was shouting at her not to come back in until he was all fixed up. ‘Go out. Go out,’ like Lainey was a hen in the flower garden. So she’d gone away but not before oh dearie me, as she’d say to George later. Tears she thought as big as George himself might cry, squeezing up and overspilling her father’s eyes. And the terrible smell in the sleepout just like the whelping box of a bitch with pups.
On this day it was Min who said nothing for it but they were going to have to fetch the doctor.
‘Don’t need no bloomin doctor.’ Noah wanted to smash her teacup against the Lighthouse. ‘Let’s just hope poor Rol’s warmer than us over in hut. Oh we had a restless cold night,’ she said, thinking that Minna’s stinking thrift and monopoly over the wood would see the end of them all.
‘Well we’re going to get the doctor over.’
‘How about I go to get Dr McKay,’ said Mr Cousins, who, having brought over some more of his wife’s cooking to help in his neighbours’ emergency, had accepted Ralda’s offer of a bacon sandwich.
‘Thanks, Len,’ said Minna self-righteously, ‘but I already sent Owen in for what should’ve happened last week.’
Lainey fixed her eyes on the tall stern lighthouse of the stove front; at the black lines of light passing out in the shape of a fan.
‘And I’m telling you he doesn’t need a doctor.’ Because of Len’s presence Noah was staying half civil. ‘Just has to make up his mind he wants to live. That doctor couldn’t cure colic of the little fingernail.’
‘Know-It-All is what you should’ve been christened.’ Minna took in Noah’s angry panic and felt satisfied. ‘But you know nuthin. You just make him worse. Every time you go in. He gits that upset. Reenie says his pulse goes like mad and then grows that weak she can hardly feel it.’
‘So I know nuthin, is that what you’re saying? My husband of twelve years.’
‘My son of forty-three!’
‘Made up your mind, Laine, and gonna come cart that molasses with me to O’Ryans’?’ Mr Cousins took his hat back from George. ‘Could even take you, George, if you want to come too.’
‘Be careful,’ said Minna. ‘Cos the devil will get you.’
‘Now then,’ said Mr Cousins, striving to hold the peace. ‘Love your own but respect everybody else’s.’
‘I tell you,’ said Noah, ‘but those O’Ryans are going to end up with all their horses sick with kidney stones at the rate they feed them molasses.’
Lainey had gone just the once to O’Ryans’ with Mr Cousins. She’d been that curious, but terror had come down at the sight of the picture of Jesus and his bleeding heart hanging in the hallway of the house. So far she’d never been back.
‘Think here come more visitors.’ At the sound of an engine Len crossed over to the window. ‘The Agates, is it?’
‘Oh, they’ve heard about Rol, but if Charley keeps
coming up the hill how he does in that truck then he can come over with a pick and shovel after next heavy rain,’ grumbled Minna.
‘Why not try Rol with this?’ Ralda finished putting together a bacon sandwich and handed it to Noah on a plate.
‘Here, you take it, Lainey, I saw him this morning. But mind you don’t go mooning all over him.’
‘Must be the first time just about since dance, wouldn’t it?’ said Minna with a voice tarter than Ralda’s cumquat marmalade.
‘Oh Min, what would you know? I seen him most days.’
‘Just call me a Sao biscuit.’
‘You go on with some rot. Not everyone can sit around all day. Moonin’s the worst thing for helping anything to heal. Someone’s got to get potatoes planted and can’t see it’s gunna be you though you like to eat more than your fair share.’
‘Arrgh,’ said Reenie, chopping things ready for lunch, seeking to defuse anything before it really blew, ‘but this is a bony old bit of pumpkin. Never known Rol to lose his appetite.’
‘Roley . . .’ began Lainey.
Noah clipped her hard behind her ear. ‘Dad to you. And don’t you bloody begin.’
‘Bloody will.’ The slap was no more than a sting, no worse than the cracker of a stockwhip accidentally getting her, but at her mother turning on her, tears sprang into Lainey’s eyes.
‘There’ll be soap in mouth for you.’
‘Too old for that now.’ But Lainey backed a bit away, just in case.
‘C’mon then,’ said her mother. ‘Give me that sandwich.’
‘That’ll get his appetite back,’ said Len appreciatively and headed for the door. ‘That was a very nice sandwich.’
‘And we’ll see you, Len, on show day if not before. Lainey, you come with me to help cheer up Dad.’
Except for in the kitchen with the Lighthouse permanently doing its job, the house was freezing cold. Roley’s sunroom was warmer but there was cold in there of a different kind.
‘No more, Noh,’ he said almost the moment they walked in.
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