Foal's Bread

by Gillian Mears

  ‘If you won’t do the decent thing and give me a bullet, I don’t want you to come in no more. If I was a horse, a dog, a beast suffering, you’d do the only humane thing.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Got ya bacon sandwich. We’ve got to get some weight back on. You’re as thin as an ol shoelace, isn’t he, Laine?’

  Lainey leant into the arm her mother was putting around her and nodded. Her father looked like a little old bat with huge ears seemingly fitted on to either side of his face with extra cartilage.

  My Rol, my love, Noah wanted to say, or something like she’d seen once at the pictures. At the sight of his head without a hat, as had never altered, she felt an immense tenderness threatening to put her to her knees. The way his hair was standing out by his ears as soft as a baby’s, the scalp shining through. ‘And see?’ she offered again. ‘Ral’s done the rinds just as you like.’

  His eyes had darkened to that of the sea first seen from Port Lake lighthouse but not a ripple of laughter between them now. Gawd, Roley, she thought, but the best she could come up with was an invitation to get him across to see the horses; how they were shaping up; how any poverty lines on that Magpie’s rump were well and truly replaced now with muscle from all the hill work with the mare.

  ‘Why not we take you over to have a look at all three after? That’s why Reen hauled this home, isn’t it?’ She gestured to the invalid’s chair on wheels. Like the commode it was a stranger in their midst, embarrassing them all.

  Lainey picked up one of the pecans George had been cracking on the floor. Here was a nut missing some shell in the shape of a tiny circle that then framed the puzzle of what lay within like some kind of miniature embroidery too small even for Aunty Ral to finish. Her mother was saying they’d have to bring in the .22 to warn off the butcherbird so endlessly pecking at its reflection that if it wasn’t a bullet it’d die at any rate of starvation for all its vainglorious gazing.

  What was vainglorious? wondered Lainey and, putting the nut in her mouth, cracked it fully open with her teeth.

  The wheelchair was the ugliest thing ever.

  I’m not getting in that, blazed her father’s blue eyes, but still he said not a word. It was her mother speaking again. ‘Or Lainey could rig the sled up behind Tad and I’ll warrant we could get you down for a look on Sunday. In your blue room, Rol? Under that big ceiling the sky, do you the world of good.’

  Lainey looked up.

  ‘No more.’ Again he squashed down all hope.

  In saying those exact two words he was remembering shooting Gurlie—the exact right shot just above the level of her eyes. How fast she’d sunk down, how right it’d been. Before she got any more wasted away.

  ‘It’s you who should listen no bloody more to your sisters and mother.’ His wife was wolfing down his bacon sandwich. ‘Well,’ she said defensively, ‘not walking back out with that to get crucified by them in the kitchen.’

  Just as they were leaving the sleepout, Noah thought she caught a smell of buried money and for a moment her mind fled in alarm to her stash. But it was just that blacker-by-the-day bedsore on Roley’s tailbone; an odour of a grave, like something there at the base of his spine had already long ago died.

  When Dr McKay came out from his examination he got straight to the point. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m not doubting for a moment your capabilities as a nurse.’ He had begun by talking to Aunty Reen. ‘But I’m recommending we move him into the bush hospital in Wirri as soon as possible.’

  ‘Can’t yer give him something at least for his shinbones?’ Minna bent to her own. ‘They’re paining him something shocking.’

  ‘Bones don’t get pain. It’s the veins,’ said the doctor. ‘And no leftovers. Chewing on a bit of cold meat will only tire him.’

  ‘That’s part of the problem, Doctor—can’t get him to eat. He’s become that choosy.’

  ‘Well, Mrs Nancarrow,’ but was he addressing Nin or her mum? Lainey, listening gape-mouthed, couldn’t tell. ‘Short of forcing food into him, there’s not a lot to be done. I’d suggest an eggcup full of rum in his drinking water might help. Not only to take the taste out of the water but it just might be the key to kickstart his appetite.’

  Lainey wished she could’ve told the doctor that her mother had already tried putting food into her father. After Mr and Mrs Agate had visited and left a pie. It’d been worse than drenching the naughtiest horse. When her mother had levered her father’s lips open, his teeth were clamped shut but not his eyes, which had become as bright as bits of castor oil bottles smashed up in the creek.

  ‘You get ready, Laine, with a spoon of pie when I get his jaw unlocked.’

  As it was happening, Lainey could see that her mother wanted to use some device, a twitch maybe, a rasping bridle, anything to increase her chances. Oh, the terrible glassy quality to the air in the sleepout then. In the end her mother had used her fingers as a lever. Then some of her father’s teeth had fallen out, they were that rotten. There’d been guilt in the girl then, because wasn’t it meant to be her job, keeping her dad’s teeth clean? And look what sort of a job she’d done.

  ‘You flaming well get any worse, Roley,’ her mother had hissed, ‘and what’s gunna happen to me and Lainey and George? We don’t have anything. No land. Nuthin. We’ll be at the total mercy of Min. What about our team then, hey?

  ‘Oh well, go ahead,’ she said in disgust when the crust they’d got onto his tongue slid back out. ‘Die on us then.’

  And ten and a half days later, two days before their little Wirri Show and ten days before Port Lake, he had.

  Reenie, half awake in her chair in the corner, was woken by the wireless. Although its batteries had not worked at all for a good three days, something in the way her brother’s spirit was leaving made it crackle unexpectedly into life so that just for a second or two a replay of a football match joined in with his last breaths.

  Lainey, snuggling in her bed, clenched against getting up into the cold morning for milking, heard the crying beginning. ‘Roley,’ she heard her aunties call out. ‘Roley.’ Next there was a noise that might’ve been her mother, or her Nin, and then the work dogs tipped their throats up in their overturned-tank kennels and began to howl.

  Lainey hopped out through her bedroom window to stand under the sky that was so still and huge. She had thought of her father as a starved horse, down and dying, but right up until this moment had been waiting for the miracle which had failed to arrive. And now it was too late, too late, too late and what were they going to tell George?

  She went to hold the trunk of the jacaranda tree; thought briefly of climbing up the guinea hens’ ladder and roosting. Then she saw the shape of her Ninna stepping out the back door. ‘Leave off! Leave off!’ Nin was shouting at the dogs. But they wouldn’t. They kept up their unearthly noise. Next Lainey saw her father’s favourite, old Blue, leap up into the air. The chains rattled and spun on the corrugated arm. The dog was jumping as if to greet Roley. Again. Again.

  ‘Git down, you mad bitch,’ shouted Minna, looking into the sky at the same time as Lainey. So that there, there, there, Lainey and her Nin, as if their gaze was for a moment joined, saw what could only be described as a ring of light in the sky, like a huge halo as big as a showground over One Tree. Although there was the feeling that her father was galloping away from the mess of his emaciated body lying in the sleepout of One Tree, it was also as if the starry horse which carried him was streaming down along the dark blue air of morning towards the thick mist along the creek. Lainey felt the very ground beneath her feet seeming to curve up into the shape of a bold horse jumping. She saw a starry mane flying east before it disappeared.

  Their lead cow Molly began to moo and there was Uncle Owe coming up. Something in him somehow knowing too. Lainey heard the mutter of her Ninna telling him the news. She pressed herself closer to the tree. Her dad was gone. She felt an emptiness that no breakfast would ever fill. To think that she would never again be able to sit up by his pillo
w listening to stories as his hands repaired the world in the air. No more ever trying to learn how to roll him the perfect smoke.

  As if in some recognition of that grief first being felt, Uncle Owen, spotting her under the tree, came and, bending down, gave her his own kind of rough hug. ‘Hey, little Lainey.’ She could smell his jumper and his old man’s hat. ‘Come and let’s get the milkin done. That mist’s not going to clear from bails till after lunch by the looks of it. Get yourself dressed. And for crikey’s sake get off the freezing ground and get your boots on.’

  Reen, realising no way on earth to straighten these perished legs, didn’t see Noah moving as if already hobbled out the door. ‘He’s gawn. He’s gawn.’ Noah stood back in her own hut, seeking the shape of her daughter.

  ‘Tolley! Tolley!’ Through the early morning air the voice of Len Cousins cried like a bell. ‘Tolley! Tolley!’

  ‘He’s gawn, George,’ Noah told the still-sleeping figure of her son. The hurt in her heart was like the day her piebald mare got into that bad bit of barbed wire—a terrible tearing injury the mare tried to gallop out of. ‘Gawn, gawn, gawn,’ like some monosyllabic noise, like the kero pump started up way too early, that shadow forth would mark the beginning of many other goings yet to come.

  CHAPTER 17

  The idea to jump her father had formed in the night. It was just a week before Port Lake Show and three days after the full of the moon. She rode Landwind, the six-year-old they still sometimes affectionately called Foalie, up the road to Oakey Flat. He was in the mood for a jump too, she could just tell by the beautiful way he was cantering, his neck bowed. When she turned back to look at One Tree the washing she’d helped Ralda to peg was flying in the breeze like there’d been a celebration, not a funeral, up there against the jacaranda tree just beginning to turn yellow. Though the sky had been clear blue, already it was changing from the west.

  My dad is dead, Dad is dead dead dead, the rhythm of the shoes seemed to say. She stood up a little in the irons just to feel the strength in her own legs, gathered her reins up and put the horse a little faster along the road. She could hear a shoe was loose on one of his hinds. It made a clatter over the bridge. Her mother was going to shoe him all round again tomorrow in readiness for the show.

  When the gelding did a big shy on the track down to Oakey Flat bush cemetery her body automatically softened to flow with the horse. Though no lightning had ever struck to enhance her balance, it was of itself exceptional to the point that she too at this nimble age of eleven going on twelve could race along the top of a line of fence rails that only one of George’s cats could reasonably be expected to walk.

  ‘None of that nonsense,’ she said without a trace of crossness, for she knew that on this horse, anything was possible. Their Chalcey foal had lately grown very handsome. His dapples were so perfect that, glancing down his shoulder, Lainey forgot for a moment that she was meant to be sad. Then the sight of the grave mound through the sharply pricked grey ears amazed her. How could it be possible that he could be underneath that heaped-up dirt? My father. Who art in heaven?

  She’d come up here to talk to him somehow. Was there anything she’d need to know to help for next Saturday, for Port Lake? When Mum tried all three horses over that high jump in front of grandstand? And what about me in the hunts, Dad? Which horse do you reckon? Mum says Seabreeze but you know how good Landy can go for me. Any hints for if I give Mag a go? Like how to hold on if she bucks, cos I don’t have Mum’s knack there!

  Sizing up the grave mound, she hopped the horse over. ‘S’not much of a jump for you, is it, Landy?’ she murmured conversationally, getting ready to jump it again from the other direction. ‘But he’d have liked it, hey?’ Him what ended up nothing but a rack of ribs really, more like some old milker’s bones down where Flaggy Creek joined the river than anything to do with her dad. ‘Careful,’ she growled, when the horse stumbled.

  Again she looked at the grave. She could smell horse sweat intermingled with grass and that freshly dug grey clay soil. Now thoughts moved in her mind as thick and fast-moving as the clouds that she was yet to notice. Very high clouds were moving east to west and then much lower ones travelling west to east.

  What if her mother, instead of yelling so much, had followed the advice that came from the very worried Mr Cousins who’d come over just before the end with another one of Mrs Cousins’ baked custards?

  How the food was given to the sick horse was what was important, Mr Cousins had said. He’d told of struggling animals turning the corner back to good health by something as simple as giving them grass the right way. Not old, bruised, over-handled grass that the sick horse would refuse, but just one handful very fresh, maybe a little bit frosty. Tips the right way up. In this way he’d seen horses and cows with so-called incurable conditions brought back from death’s door.

  A broth, Lainey berated herself. Why hadn’t she or her mother thought of that? If not out of chicken bones then why not their lucky charm itself? Foal’s bread broth, imagine such a thing. She slipped a hand underneath the horse’s mane. ‘From when you was born, eh Landy?’

  Instead, her mother had as good as given her father a flogging using her voice. Lainey hadn’t stopped her. ‘And I never do, not even with you.’ Talking to the horse again. And why? What possible excuse could there be? Only the truth, which was fear. Fear, that’s what it was. That her mother would turn on her. Whereas if her mum was hitting the horses or biting a pony’s ear or whatever next the anger led her to do, much less chance of being in the direct line of fire.

  ‘Aunty Ral’s right,’ she told the long silver ears flicking intelligently forward and back. Half admiration, half awe filled her voice. ‘Me mum’s as tough as a bleedin bullock hide. So true! Make a stew out of her and there’d be whip marks in the gravy. Well you’d know it yourself, hey? We all know it.’

  Wasn’t it only the day after the burial that her mother had got stuck into a horse she’d been shoeing? And what about the day of the burial?

  This fight had broken out in the kitchen over what should be on top of the coffin. Nin had thought maybe his walking stick, which he’d carved himself out of a piece of tree root taken out of the Flaggy, but on hearing this Lainey’s mother had picked up the kitchen chair Nin was sitting on and shoved it backwards.

  ‘No wonder he went,’ Ninna had said, exultant, unhurt, from the chair on the floor. ‘What wouldn’t you do to get away? Why wouldn’t you bloomin die?’

  ‘Well we’re not having him remembered with this!’ And quick as a flash her mum had seized up the stick, snapped it in three over her knee and was shoving the pieces into the Lighthouse.

  Lainey hated the burial, everyone like a line of fleas at a cat’s mouth in front of the open earth. But in the church had been different; old Uncle Will with his beautiful voice, and Aunty Irm on the piano played by ear, singing her father goodbye. All in the church joining in a hymn. Her father’s hat on the coffin bringing the sobbing.

  But then later, at One Tree, it was really more like some kind of a party, with everyone wandering around not knowing what they were exactly meant to do. Instead of Aunty Ral’s Turkish delight getting judged in the Wirri Show pavilion it’d been put out on saucers dotted around amongst the plates piled high with sandwiches Lainey had helped Aunty Reen and Mrs Cousins and Mrs Agate cut before milking.

  Aunties and second cousins from far away had walked around Main House like they were in a museum, staring at photos, running fingers through her father’s ribbons. People were so everywhere that Main House felt it might split at the seams. People had even trickled in and out of their hut as if to check her father wasn’t in there after all, laying low until it was quieter.

  George thought it was the dance all over again and wouldn’t understand that he could go into his father’s sleepout a hundred more times only to never again find his cats purring the days away either side of his father’s legs.

  At Wirri Show itself, they found out later, on the Frid
ay her father was buried, there’d been a minute’s silence in his honour, just like her father had been a soldier of a different kind. ‘We are sad to have to tell of the passing of the greatest high-jump rider our district has ever bred.’

  According to Mr Hirrip, the announcement came just after Clem Richardson had won the open jump. All the ring events halted. Then all the stewards and officials, all the judges, Mr Naseby himself and many others besides, took off their hats and it must’ve been just like Anzac Day because at the going down of the sun and in the morning she was always going to remember him. The blaze of blue sadness in his eyes. But age will never weary him. No frozen stroke face for her dad.

  To deflect tears she focused on jumping something else.

  ‘Just hop you over my great-grandfather as well, I think. To finish up. John Albert Nancarra,’ she told the horse, unable to know that her mother, when pregnant with Lainey, had jumped those exact iron railings, taking the same angle on board Tadpole the farm pony.

  Landwind jumped it neat and clean. Had anyone been watching they would’ve seen the extraordinary sight of a girl on a white horse with blue dapples like a painting from a more romantic country, turning the small cemetery into a different kind of practice paddock; graves big and small in a hunt of her own making as overhead the cloud cover thickened with the rain coming.

  When she got back to One Tree the first spits of rain made her turn past the bails to visit her Uncle Owen. She loved nothing better than to have an excuse to walk in under the back skillion. This part of his place was always hung with weighted lengths of leather that he was stretching for the next whip waiting. Hitching the horse under the overhang she went through the strips as if disappearing through a magical, almost alive curtain.

  Although as old men go her Great-Uncle Owen was particularly decrepit, in his company nothing could dim the girl’s delight. So what that the teeth he had left were the colour of charcoal and old tea or that his lips were spotted with cancery-looking things, for the love young girls have for old horsemen is sweet and thick. Its very nature gleams. If you could pour that love, or wind it round a spoon, it would taste like molasses straight from a sugar mill, a mysterious mix of salty sweet. And what makes it so? It’s the stories that old man can tell. It’s that knowledge about the old days on which his stories hang that the girl is so hungry for.