Foal's Bread

by Gillian Mears

  What the girl saw next in her mother’s face made her want to copy Ewan, the smartest boy of Mr Carmichael’s. His father had kept on building such an almighty fence that one day Ewan, deciding he’d had enough of holding up the horizontals, took off. When Mr Carmichael sent Kevin, his youngest, after him on a horse, Ewan pretended Kev was the best thing he’d ever seen. ‘You get off, Kev, and I’ll double you back.’ But no sooner was he up on Kevin Carmichael’s little bay than he’d taken off again and still to this day hadn’t returned.

  Lainey looked properly at her mother. Her mum’s eyes were harder than river pebbles. Oh flackety-flackkkk, the words drummed away inside her. Get away down the track.

  Len Cousins wanted to say, Noah Nancarrow, bloody ruining everything, you are. A sorry sight, a mother jealous of her own. But where could you possibly begin? ‘Even old Seabreeze created a sensation, Noh,’ he said instead. ‘Wish you could of seen ol Breezy. Flew over those hunts like he were five not twenty-bloody-five.’

  ‘Closer to thirty. If you take a look at his teeth.’ Then Noah grinned again and looked away.

  Was it possible, later that night, that her mum was crying? Lainey thought so, maybe, when she was back in Main House. There—that noise—as if deep in behind her own heart, behind all the celebrations and reliving of the day, behind Lainey’s great proud breaths of disbelief at the final height of her jump—what was it?

  ‘Think your mother’s still a bit crook, isn’t she?’ said Aunty Ralda, bringing Lainey another sandwich, as if jumping so high had suddenly conferred the need to eat extra corned beef.

  ‘Maybe I should go . . .’

  ‘Leave her be, Lainey,’ said Mr Cousins. ‘She’ll come good in morning.’

  Lainey, chewing slowly in the comfortable kitchen, felt the pain of being so much a part of the wholesale betrayal. Standing up to toast her back against the Lighthouse, she only half heard the ongoing prophecies. In the excitement no one had remembered to draw the curtain. As the autumn air cooled the glass of the window, a sorrow came into everyone that Port Lake, following the early lead of some bigger southern shows, had scrubbed the high jumps right off its program. For good, so the rumour went. Then talk moved to the new photographer.

  ‘He did get a picture, did he?’ asked Ralda.

  ‘My word he did,’ said Minna, joining her granddaughter at the stove. ‘Every time I noticed him he was here, there and everywhere.’

  ‘Pity Angus upped roots and went to set up shop in Sydney,’ Len couldn’t help musing. ‘Imagine. Never thought one of my boys would end up in a city.’

  ‘Angus would’ve thought it was Roley all over again, that’s for sure,’ said Minna.

  ‘And George!’ said Lainey suddenly. ‘That new photographer man got some good ones of you in the bend and flag. Before, you dill, you took off on your own route! Must’ve got ten toffee apples off people for Fly if he got two.’

  ‘Ah, George.’ Ralda got him another bit of toast. ‘You didn’t do too bad, hey?’ But George’s attention was all on the cat just arrived in his lap for a nurse, and oblivious for the moment to anything else, he moved his hands in time to the purring.

  Purrs as warm as the stove. Purrs as smooth as a winner’s silver coat, thought Lainey. Purrs as thick as gravy, because cats loved George.

  After this night, the sound of the early morning autumn air tore away inside a mother and daughter who didn’t know how to proceed. They didn’t even make an attempt to get to Port Lake Show on the first of May because without the high jump there didn’t seem any point.

  The jealousy of Noah was like a front hoof crack grown so steep and dark where was its wandering ever going to stop? What oil would heal such a thing? What gift, what switch of heart?

  The new pair of Maranoa boots were inadequate for the task. ‘Done this for you, Mum,’ said the girl, offering a card with a drawing of Magpie jumping to go with the gift. But that night Lainey dreamt that her mother, with neither head nor body, had swooped down as an eagle coming for the fowls. And though Lainey screamed out loud enough to make George sit bolt upright with the hair on his arms prickling in fear, she herself didn’t wake until the bird had torn out its only daughter’s heart.

  To halt what kept flickering in her, at first Noah looked to George. When winter arrived early she longed to put her arms around him. Give him a hug. In the miniature pair of braces Uncle Owen had fixed for him he looked just so friendly. Like one of his sweet potato men with a funny half-human face and body. Like her simple son could warm away milking chilblains and something much worse.

  But even George’s loose-in-their-sockets eyes rolled in alarm in the face of that most shameful of human emotions. Other disasters, in comparison, looked relatively easy. Boils on George’s neck? Drain them with a mix of sugar and soap. Horse with a cold? Paint back of its tongue with Stockholm tar. Fire or flood, a sick cow down or a husband dead, whatever, you cleaned up the mess and could even enjoy the feeling of everyone working together. The camaraderie of it all. In the case of this more invisible disaster, no one at One Tree or Cousins farm next door really knew how to respond.

  Unlike almost everything else after the full of the moon, the jealousy wouldn’t shrink, it refused to empty. Instead, like the meat of a beast killed before the full moon and put in a boiler, the jealousy swelled and nearly doubled in size.

  To try to get away from the new sound of the early morning air, George began to move between Main House and his mother’s hut with a hot-water bottle held to each ear. For Noah’s malady was like a vice in a horse taking hold. It was like a young horse learning how to weave; the sound of the chain on the headstall becoming a kind of addiction even though such a horse only ever in his sickness took his pleasure sadly.

  If only there had been something that needed flogging. That would’ve been easier, with everything seeming to bleed at once so that there was plenty to attend to afterwards; sometimes even Noah’s right leg, which might accidentally, in the punishment, get flogged too. However, after Wirri it was as if every animal already on One Tree, or every horse that was brought across for Noah to shoe, knew better than to unleash the rage in the woman with the file in her hand.

  One day, after Magpie wasn’t paying quite enough attention, Noah decided to put the sulky bit on the mare. But Magpie, in reaction to the pain of the bit’s chain, turned just that little madder. No telling what the mare might have a go at. Afterwards Noah was ashamed and apologised to her favourite by nicking some of the oats Minna had said were for the grey pair, the winners. The mare’s nostrils were still going like a pair of bellows in alarm. ‘I’m real sorry, Maggie,’ Noah started. ‘It’s a wonder you don’t buck me off before we even begun. Won’t happen again and I’ll even chuck that sulky bit away. Uncle Nip didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. Bloody best bit? Lot of bloody rot.’

  Something in the tone of her mother’s voice crept into Lainey. The effect of this was like a slow crippling blow to the back of the knees. Whenever her mother’s eyes landed on her she couldn’t help but feel like one of the war veterans wheeled out at Anzac Day and Christmas. In the practice paddock, horses that could normally canter a tidy enough circle yawed sideways and gave the shape corners.

  Lainey wished she could talk to someone, but how would you begin? What exactly did she mean about her mother? Riding by the ruined bridge the girl saw again how more than ever it looked like a jump too big to leap. A half-uprooted river oak stood like an equally ruined old jump judge to one side. There would be words in the world to describe what was happening at One Tree but Lainey didn’t know them.

  Hope on, hope ever, still ran the saying around Aunty Ralda’s best plate, until, one night towards the end of winter, for no reason anyone could find, it cracked in half.

  ‘By gee but it looks bleak out there,’ said Aunty Ralda, a piece of the plate in either hand as she looked out at the frosted-up paddocks.

  ‘All we need,’ replied Noah, coming in, ‘is a good two inches of ra
in and we’ll be right into spring. What happened to your plate?’

  ‘Had been cracked a good while. Reckon it was just one cold night too many.’

  ‘Want me to have a go at fixing it?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘I’ve got that good old glue.’

  ‘No, Noah.’ And Ralda didn’t even look at her sister-in-law anymore when she spoke. ‘But listen, isn’t it about time you stop revenging your spite on your only daughter?’ Carefully placing the pieces of her plate into a bag to take down to Owen.

  Although the sound of the early morning air was howling away even louder in Noah she thought she should make every effort to heed the advice of the woman who until Roley’s death had been her ally on a farm which had always been, more or less, a hostile land for Noah.

  It would’ve made even Minna’s heart bleed if she could’ve witnessed Noah’s promise each night before getting into bed that she’d let it all be gone, only for it to have reappeared by breakfast.

  The mother’s best attempt came the day Lainey turned fourteen. ‘It’s a real good age to be,’ she told her daughter. ‘Lucky. But mind you keep your wits about you. Those decorations on your cake? They’re from me, you know. Got them at Kingston’s Corner specially.’

  But Lainey, uncertain about the sudden turnaround, couldn’t even trust the silver crunch of the tiny balls in her mouth.

  As the jacaranda began losing its leaves, Noah kept on finding the reasons to go into Wirri to get the necessary bottle to see her through. When she went on a spree, the baby she let go in the river always went too. She could talk to it—‘Didn’t mean to let you go, you know?’—but the baby’s fly-bitten eyes always found otherwise. ‘Murderer,’ the little pair of eyes had begun to say.

  Inside a hangover the waters of Noah’s bitterness increased. At One Tree the ground crumbled under her feet and nothing was trustworthy anymore. Instead of fishing a pair of drowned rats out of the cream can, Noah sneered at the corpses, thinking, let the factory see what One Tree’s really good for. Let Minna miss out on her fat cream cheque once in a while. Then she twitched one of eggboat man’s yearlings up so hard that the filly grunted in fear and Lainey saw the wee run down its legs.

  ‘You leave the horse alone, Noah,’ said Uncle Owe, coming over from the bails to look.

  But in answer Noah just pushed a wad of tobacco up under the filly’s tail. ‘That’ll help it,’ though what exactly it was meant to help, Lainey, battling to keep hold of horse and twitch even as Uncle Owe gave a wheezy, all-knowing laugh, didn’t quite know.

  In the fifth month after the high jump, with the winds of spring creeping into the corners of the hut and Main House, Noah’s loneliness began to spread, stretching out in the way of last light crossing bare ground. ‘Eh, ol Slumpy,’ she’d taken to calling to her daughter, so that Lainey’s shoulders did begin to curve forward as if to hide her face from her mother’s. ‘See what Aunty Ralda’s started to sew?’

  Lainey walked over to Ralda’s Singer and saw the beginning at last of that rug made of ribbons.

  ‘Finally got doing it.’ Lainey stroked her own blue ribbon which had been arranged next to one of her father’s from Wirri 1929.

  Noah also put her finger on the ribbon rug and on all it represented. ‘Better get yours in here quick smart too, hey Mum?’

  ‘It’d be nice. Aunty Ral’s even got a plan against any more moths. But somehow don’t think so, Laine.’ And just for a moment all the shock of missing each other passed between mother and daughter. ‘Reckon Ral’s got it in mind to be a seven foot or higher rug. Don’t think I’ve earnt me position on that winner’s rug yet.’ And though she strove against it, once again her eyes turned colder than ice over the pig trough.

  Young as she was, Lainey felt the pity move in her at the recognition that more than anything else her mother hadn’t ever wanted to be ordinary. Heck, Mum, Lainey wished she could just spit it out, I could never have jumped anything ’cept for you. For in her memory, although some images from the April show had already taken on the air of an old clipping, how her mother had got Landwind going so sparky in the weeks immediately before the show he probably could’ve leapt a lighthouse never faded. How her mum had trained her to never say ‘I can’t’, no matter how bloomin giant the jump.

  ‘You know, Mum . . .’ But the chance vanishing as Nin and Aunty Ral came into the kitchen too. Then Noah was just like a lone horse, looking across the land to where the other horses were together in a paddock; as if God had cut her away from the herd. As if God had snaked his neck and cracked his whip and said thou shalt not be with the children you have loved. Thou art not fit.

  ‘You look terrible,’ began Minna.

  ‘Only a bit diarrhoeay,’ said Noah. ‘Calves give me that bad a case of it.’

  ‘Sounds like you’ve bin down for the count.’ Ralda picked up another old blue ribbon and ran it through her fingers.

  ‘That wind’s already picking up.’ Noah avoided their insinuations. ‘Listen to it! And I haven’t mended those rugs yet for that pair of Burrell ponies to go home. But they should go cos I’m jack of feeding them.’

  ‘I could do the rugs.’ Lainey looked at her mother and started to clean the fowl eggs.

  Hope on, hope ever, hiccoughed the words on the repaired fancy plate glued back together less expertly than longed for. Hope on, hope ever, heard Ralda in her sewing machine’s treadle. Hope on, hope ever, hopped the willy wagtails that always nested right outside George’s bedroom no matter what volume his groans and bellows. ‘They’d nest in him if they could,’ Aunty Ral said each spring. ‘They just wag and dance right past him like he were a tree.’

  But not even baby waggies or the young black swans George had hatched out under chooks from eggs Noah’s brother Mont had got for him off Everlasting Swamp could add any saving grace really to the situation. Not the dew hanging like trillions of tiny lights on the twiggy shrub outside the kitchen window or Uncle Owe joking that Lainey peeled enough moulting winter coats off the insides of her legs from riding home after school that no kidding, she had enough to stuff a saddle.

  A saddle to dream on, thought the girl. Of high jumps ahead. But also that Grafton boy she sort of liked so much who’d jumped with her in the pair of hunts and also Billy Cousins, who she’d shyly seen last time he was over must’ve begun to shave. That new clean jaw all of a sudden.

  ‘I’m good on rugs broke at the front,’ added Lainey.

  ‘An prob’ly bust machine like last time. Look out.’ For under her mother’s gaze Lainey put a finger through an egg. ‘No, no—’ But the effort of speaking brought on an almighty alcohol-smelling burp. ‘No. Today I reckon I’m going to teach you about spaying the old cows. Once this belly of mine settles. You had your breakfast?’

  Lainey nodded.

  ‘Well if you go catch the horses and get together the gear.’

  ‘Which horses?’

  ‘Burrells’. Do em the world of good to have a last ride.’

  ‘Thought we weren’t spayin this year.’ Minna was over by the sewing machine seemingly watching Ralda at work on the rug.

  ‘Well that’s second year the pair of those baldies haven’t gone into calf. They’ve had their chance. And there’d be another six or seven old girls.’

  Walking outside, the mother and daughter sighted Uncle Owen, moving the position of the guinea hens’ ladder on the jacaranda trunk.

  ‘How come you’re doing that?’ And this time Noah spat the sour taste in her mouth onto the ground.

  ‘Been at it again, have you, Noh?’ Uncle Owen didn’t take his eyes off the task at hand.

  ‘Nuthin wrong with me. Caught somethin off calves, I think. They’ve all bin wearin yella pyjamas from all the green feed.’

  Uncle Owen exchanged a knowing look with Lainey.

  And no, George, straddling the pen where the pig was being grown out, couldn’t come. Not today.

  Tightening the girth on one of the ponies, Noah burped aga
in and, seeing Lainey pull a face, said that her daughter was lucky she only got to smell them. Whereas for herself it was the very taste of the dead calves she’d been having to chop up and pull out already half rotten to save the heifers. ‘In me mouth, mind.’

  It wasn’t a very noticeable day to begin with; pleasant enough, with the kind of clouds Lainey called little skimmers decorating the blue sky. In fact, at first the day began extra well, with the ponies Noah had broken trotting out beautifully.

  They found the elderly cows not far from the yards, but as if knowing this was no friendly morning, they all charged off. Then Roley’s dog, turning them, got a hold of one of the old girls’ noses and wouldn’t let go. So that even as Lainey used a little yard whip to get that most cunning old girl into the yards, and to make the dog let go, the blood was already dripping.

  ‘Don’t let that one out,’ Noah instructed Lainey, who was working the gate. ‘Oh, these bloody gins and bitches. Don’t know why we bother. Fair dinkum I don’t.’

  With the sunshine flooding onto her face, even with her mother’s bad mood, Lainey loved being able to recognise individual old cows. There was that one who liked to break away. And also small Tess that you always had to humour or she’d as soon kick you as let you put the cups on. Blackie with the walleye what got so fat feeding on reeds in the middle of the creek the year Min had bought Magpie.

  I know these cows as well as I know my brother George, thought Lainey fondly.

  ‘Watch out,’ cried her mother, when the brindle that had landed on One Tree in the flood, its brand now overstamped RNN, had a bit of a run at her daughter.

  Noah growled at the first cow fidgeting in the race before snagging a rope out over its jutting hipbones. ‘Too blunt,’ she said, testing her belt knife against her thumb. ‘What’s yours like, Laine?’

  ‘Sharp.’

  ‘Well give it here and I’m gunna show you where to make the first cut. See here? To get my hand in. Then you make the shape of a cross into the muscle. Right? And you have the emasculators ready.’