Foal's Bread

by Gillian Mears

  ‘And how are you, Uncle Owe?’ she said companionably, glad to find him there in front of his stove with the firebox open.

  ‘Still fit as a fiddle and goin. Was aiming to get into those suckers coming up above Bitter Ground. Keep that hill real nice and polished-looking. But seeing that sky, reckoned I’d just be aiming to get myself pneumonia if I were to go out now. So staying at home to finish this whip for Brucey Lavers you know. Hang on an I’ll just rev up this stove for a cuppa and fetch you a sweet biscuit.’

  When he picked his plaiting back up something in Lainey rejoiced to see that he was like Aunty Ral knitting. There was that same quality of a dance in each and every movement. And just like Aunty Ral he could talk at the same time. Maybe best of all he always let her choose two of his Monte Carlos from Wirri store. These she could eat so slowly that they’d last half a dozen stories or more.

  ‘This one’s going good,’ he told her. ‘See how I’m plaiting a little bit of a belly? Then I’ll put real whip on top of that. Will stay tight forever and a day, and do you know why? It’s this real thin hide. Something dairy’s always going to be best, you know.’

  Lainey sipped her tea and nodded wisely. She nibbled the side of her first biscuit. Hadn’t she seen Uncle Owe taking the hide of that last jersey died of milk fever? He’d used Cousinses’ old mare Creamy to pull and the hide had come off as easy as the skin off a banana. At the sight George had gone bellowing away but Lainey had been amazed.

  ‘Oh, this hide’s just like a bit of brown paper, you know. Beautiful thin. Not red hide, which is no bloody good at all. Swolls up the moment it gets a bit wet. The thinner the hide, the stronger it is. But for the plaiting itself this feeling of rain helps. Makes the strips softer. A nice tight whip it’s gunna be. One day I’ll try to learn you too. And we’ll soon find, darlin, if you can or can’t plait in the round. One of my brothers would think he was goin alright but before you knew it he’d totally buggered it up. Just a bloody failure at plaitin. It’s a dyin art, mate, which is why I should teach you soon.’

  ‘And you’re going to teach me how to make a light whip fall heavy and a heavy whip fall light.’

  ‘Maybe. We’ll see how you go plaitin yerself a little yard whip first. A little greenhide one. So you can double it if need be to make a cow see sense. It can get wet but always dries as good as new. What’ve you been up to, anyway? Saw you take Landy out early.’

  ‘Just hopping him a few times over this and that. Mr Cousins is gunna take me and Mum in for Port Lake.’

  ‘With all three?’

  ‘Yep. In his new truck. Cos Mum’s going to give all of them a go in the high jump.’

  And Uncle Owen smiled because such was Lainey’s pride in her mum you’d have thought that was why Mr Cousins had got the new lorry. For the Nancarrow horses to arrive in style.

  ‘Jumpin isn’t everything you know, Lainey,’ he said. ‘In a few years you could get yourself a real good job. Butter factory. Or go nursing even, like your aunty.’

  ‘Landy’s going that good for me. Jumps anything I point him at.’ She walked over to the biscuit tin, less for the desire for another one than to hear her new little pair of dummy spurs from her Nin sliding along like that behind each boot on the bare floorboards.

  ‘How high have you had him?’

  ‘Six-six.’

  ‘You did not.’

  ‘Yep. I did.’

  ‘Goody-o, Lainey. I tell you, you’re that keen. You’ll be having a go in high jump yourself sooner rather than later, hey? And lucky, too, to be on sensible horses. Not like this mad little mare I had on my last drove.’

  Refilling their cups of tea, Lainey looked eagerly over at the half-perished old man who still sat as straight in his chair as if he was on the horse all over again.

  ‘If she’d have bin goin steady I’d have bin dead. It’s only she went so fast as we went through this fence. And do you think I could remember a thing about it? Only that I was floatin. Floatin through wire, I was. Come to with my foot in stirrup leather.’ His wheezy laughter met her own amazement. ‘Never bin bloody right since.’

  Yet somehow, to the girl also sitting in the old wooden chair as if in a saddle, that last bit made the story all the deeper. That this was the price that had to sometimes be paid if your work was horses. That your body’s strength would slowly be chipped away by this accident or that. She ate the last side of the second biscuit and stood up.

  ‘Rough weather coming, I reckon,’ Uncle Owen said, looking up to the sky as he gave her a leg-up back on Landwind. He was wearing her favourite shirt of his, the old yellowy one with little pale green lighthouses which she thought was just the go if any emergency was up ahead. Now Aunty Ral’s wrists weren’t strong enough, since the mangle broke, Lainey had wrung the water out of Uncle Owe’s shirt more often than she could remember. Lainey loved that shirt because the lighthouses were lucky.

  The rain started in earnest just as afternoon milking began and all of them could tell by the sound of it on the roof of the bails that it was no light autumn shower. There’d be no moonlight in the horse trough tonight. The cows too, lifting their heads to the noise, sensed something coming and seemed all the more content to be having their udders stripped as they nibbled on old hay.

  There was rain of autumns past that was nothing except good. Just enough for the winter crops but not so heavy it’d wreck them. In that light-hearted rain Lainey would take George down to the creek to watch the way those old oak trees foamed up at the base of their trunks like a new ice-cream soda at the Palace. But the rain after Roley’s death was nothing like that. It came down in sheets of water so dark and heavy that Lainey thought God must be up there like her Aunty Ral, standing in front of a big copper.

  ‘I’m saddening the cloth,’ Ralda was fond of saying, standing at a cauldron full of dye, tapping in iron crystals to darken faded clothes. Making them good again.

  ‘That’s him, don’t ya reckon?’ she whispered to George.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘God, you idiot. Cryin for Dad.’ But maybe not even George and his cats that were curled in the Lighthouse’s empty second oven understood what she meant.

  Noah was still up mending horse rugs when the hammering of the rain on the hut roof became so loud she could no longer hear the sound of her foot pumping the treadle. She thought of a baby all by itself in a box. Pushing the image away, she went over to Main House for enough pans to put down under all the new leaks coming through the hut’s roof.

  The rain slid along the hills and began to pound farmhouses. It streamed down the bedroom windows of huts perched on hillsides all the way as far west as Dundalla. Further off too, in the mountains where the waters of the Flagstaff River began, heavy rain was pelting down.

  By the next evening the river had risen thirty foot, ripping out old bull oaks by their roots and sweeping away Lainey’s ice-cream-soda trees. The old bridge, its timber pylons set in such a stupid place by Septimus’s father, lasted until the rumble of boulders moving down the creek began.

  Uncle Owen, come to live at Main House for the duration, had watched the bridge go. ‘Saw this kind of shiver goin through the top of the pylons,’ he told the children. ‘Oh, it just knew its time had come. That Flaggy roaring and then—whoosh—just slewing her sideways like she were made of no more but a handful of twigs.’

  The rain had such a remorseless dark quality that Minna said her mind was made up, that as soon as it stopped she would after all go ahead and get a new Wizard Lighting set up for Main House with that leftover England money.

  Even though it was cold everything grew mouldy. When a mossy mould looked like getting interested in even their foal’s bread, Noah unhooked the bread to treat it with the same mix of pig fat and kero she put on the harness and saddles.

  Only when the rain stopped, almost five days later, did Lainey and George ride out with their mother, taking in the whole new lay of the land. Lainey was on Landy, her mother on the Magpie, and they we
re trusting George with Seabreeze. ‘Cos he needs a ride and you’re getting too big for Fly and Tad. Just carry this bit of stick, George, and if he looks like playing any tricks give him one down the shoulder alright.’ But as was the case with any George rode, old Breezy was on his best behaviour because, as Lainey loved to boast to anyone who cared to listen, when it came to horses George was some kind of wizard himself. He stuck on no matter what, even when Seabreeze did an almighty big shy at a shadow.

  After being so cooped up inside, what a wonderful mood took hold of them all. The horses were that keen, ears sharply pricked and a few pig roots of joy. Stand still and they could hear the water moving out of the long autumn grass, making its way down to the creeks and rivers. Though the sky was blue the hill sounded composed of water. Then there was the satisfying sound of horses’ hooves hitting the hard beaten road down the hill and crossing over into squelching grass past the bails. There was a light nor’-easterly springing up that made the horses crack their nostrils and want to go a bit faster.

  ‘There’s One Tree’s best paddock ended up there, I reckon. See that?’ said their mother, pulling over at the sight of a whole new peninsula of land formed off Christy brothers’ farm. ‘I’ll be damned,’ she half laughed. ‘Be growin Catholic watermelons next year now.’

  When it became clear exactly how much of the Nancarrow land had been taken, Lainey had the feeling that more than the river was to blame. That all of them, but most of all the fighting between her Nin and her mum, had caused the land to tear away, to slide swirling and fleeing into the currents. The land, she thought, just like a horse, taking off at a gallop to get away from the anger. Half their flats, thought Lainey, lost forever. Poor Uncle Owe. She pulled up the better to see: his paddock of baby cabbages gone.

  ‘What’s George saying?’ asked their mother, who always looked so perfect on the Magpie, even if the mare was being a bit of a nut, spooking at this, leaping sideways at that.

  ‘He’s saying about how clean the rocks look,’ interpreted Lainey. And he was right too, rocks tumbled and ripped along the creek bed now looked just that clean it was as if Aunty Ral had been down on her hands and knees scrubbing up each one by hand.

  George spotted the anvil first. Delivered by the Flaggy, it was bigger than any ever seen. ‘Well done, George. Eyes in the back of yer head! That’s the way, we’ll get that later. But crikeys,’ went on their mother, ‘it’s a shemozzle,’ making her children grin. ‘Oh, but we’re lucky being on the high hill it makes you think. When she all dries out, I can tell you now, there’ll be some good new jumps.’

  ‘Only looks like there’s barely a pole left there,’ said Lainey, looking at the flood debris all over the practice paddock with a rim of land left hanging under the line of the second maize fence.

  ‘But naturally occurring jumps. Ditches and that. My Uncle Nipper always used to get me to jump this or that gulch, just so your horse’d always be up for anything. It kept em smart, my word it did.’

  Her mother’s enthusiasm was contagious. Lainey felt her spirits climb as they surveyed this or that potential new jump. ‘And would you look at that!’ exclaimed her mother, thrilled to be the one whose eyes landed first on the sight. ‘That old bridge has gone and turned itself into a high jump.’

  ‘Mum!’ Lainey’s voice filled with incredulity.

  ‘Mum,’ echoed George, his tongue coming out and not going back in at the sight before them.

  The old bridge that Uncle Owen had seen carried away hadn’t gone so far. The waters of the Flaggy, always so fierce in flood, had moved the massive old timbers into position between two trees.

  As a section of three they rode right up until they were standing opposite its place on the edge of the western bank. It seemed a strange miracle to them all, as if even raging floodwaters knew to dump a bridge down, to pile it up in the formation of a jump more gigantic than any ever built.

  The horses, spooky with the high spirits of being out on a ride, snorted at the new configuration of timbers across the water and pretended to shy. George tilted Breezy up in a little mock rear and shook his own head.

  ‘Must be eight foot if it’s an inch, I’d say,’ said Noah. ‘Later, Laine, we’ll take a look at it from the other side.’

  Lainey looked over in awe at the towering edifice. The structure would dwarf even Landy, who was half a hand higher than the other horses. It bulged at the bottom but was stacked lean enough at the top to imagine that God as a high-jump judge really had been present, directing the roaring waters to make it land just so.

  ‘Well what a beauty of a jump. If you rode a lunatic.’

  ‘Even has one kind of wing like for a high jump, hey Mum?’

  ‘Cos must’ve known what kind of family lived here.’

  And when her mother said that, Lainey remembered that when they’d first jumped together after the war was over, the excitement in the voice of the announcer. ‘Put your hands together, ladies and gentlemen, for Mrs Nancarrow and her daughter Lainey from west of Wirri,’ when they’d won the mother and child hunts riding the Ropers’ little bay mares Cindy and Flash.

  ‘And would you look at that,’ her mother said as they came across a section of the road low enough to be holding a stretch of shallow water that, muddy and all, held the reflections of the day. ‘That there’s a water jump. Think I’ll give this Magpie a try at that. Before it ’vaporates.’ Although the horse had never jumped water, let alone a twenty-six-foot expanse of it, the mare knew what it meant when Noah gathered the reins in just that way.

  Even so it astonished them all that when she shot the mare at the water the piebald lifted into an incredible low-skimming leap over the stretch of trapped floodwaters, landing with a good couple of feet to spare on the other side. Lainey tried Landy and George old Breezy but both horses just galloped through, not recognising at all it was something they were meant to try.

  When a few days later the girl went over with her mother to see how their neighbours had fared they found the Cousinses in a similar state of excitement. Just this side of Oakey Flat, big lumps of bullocks from some place further upriver had been trapped and drowned. ‘And them’s not the only drownings,’ said Mr Cousins when they arrived, and set about telling of the man he’d had to pull out. ‘Snagged upriver he was. Oh, on Mondee I think it was. Still raining but the river was falling. Didn’t think twice. Just hauled him up but that was forgetting about all these cuts in me hand from shoeing knife. Just little nicks but that was enough for that rotten bastard of a body to get in and swoll me up to the shoulder.’

  ‘Rotten bastard,’ said Lainey under her breath with a thrill, before suddenly hoping that her father’s grave was high and dry.

  ‘Who was it who drowned, Len?’ Noah’s hands around her teacup drummed like a horse going at a canter.

  ‘Dunno. Never seen him before. Harold and Horrie are sure it was maybe one of them old bushies on the turps higher up. Like wild animals. Nothing like a bit of a fire or flood to clean out the hills. Cyril Wingfield took body into Wirri yesterday.’

  Lainey, listening with rapt attention, copied her mother’s hands; that canter rhythm with a few flying changes chucked in for good measure. Rotten bastard, rotten bastard, rotten bastard.

  ‘Well,’ continued her mother, ‘that hopeless fool Farquhar Riley had put a mob of his cattle on Wirri Reserve. Got sick of waiting for flood to drop so tried to swim them over. Oh what a mess. Current still surging. Cows strung up in trees. Some landed on bank only to get back in and be drowned as they saw their mates going by. Saw it all from my aunties’ veranda. Oh dear, it was a circus. He had his whips cracking and another man the same.’

  ‘Mum!’ Lainey wanted to call out the morning they fetched up the anvil. ‘Me arms are gunna swoll up like Mr Cousins’,’ as together they heaved it up from the creek. Instead she clamped her mouth shut and just kept on as her mother whistled like a man, unconcerned, and neither looked up to see how far to go, or uttered one word of disappointme
nt aloud that the widespread flooding had seen Port Lake Show cancelled.

  ‘By jeez, Lainey, but you’re good!’ exclaimed her mother when they’d succeeded in getting it within fifty feet of the bails. Lainey looked up, flushed but triumphant, and all the pain worth it for that flash of tenderness, that love as tough as muscles passing between them.

  With the autumn ending, now arrived the winter of many changes. After helping clean out Uncle Owen’s house of flood mud, Aunty Reen, making good her decision to pick up her nursing again, moved to Port Lake. Then the Wizard Lighting came in July. Although its installation was greeted with much fanfare, the temperamental reality of the Wizard made itself known so quickly that by the time of Lainey’s birthday it was clear a pair of nimble legs were going to be required to keep the light happening.

  ‘It’s part of your present,’ Aunty Ral and Nin said both talking at once, leading her to the door of Aunty Reenie’s old room. ‘Can’t have you living in hut now you’re getting older. And Reen said it can be yours with her blessing.’

  ‘But I want to stay with Mum and George.’

  ‘Well, Laine, the thing is, much easier for you to be here for the Wizard,’ because straight away it had become her job to light the system; soaking a long stick in a bit of metho and then snapping a chain hard to light the shellite that ran around in pipes overhead. For reasons unknown, the Wizard might abruptly go out four, maybe five times of an evening. ‘Can’t keep calling you over each separate time now, can we?’

  ‘But George’ll never sleep without me.’ With a feeling of despair Lainey bit through the corner icing on her piece of birthday cake.