Two real magpies sitting on the roof of Main House gave a last exultant chorus and then she was riding the piebald back down the hill carrying carefully in a sugar bag the almost-full flagon and a half-built plan growing stronger in her mind.
CHAPTER 21
The old man, mistaking the mother’s changed appearance, this apparition of apparent friendliness, spotted the shape of the flagon almost immediately. He gave a sly smile of triumph and invited her in. Crick-crick went her joints like she was an arthritic old mare. Still, in the soft light of the tilly lantern he thought she wasn’t that bad.
‘Just a bit jealous, weren’t ya?’ he asked when half the grog was gone. ‘Well, Uncle Owe understands. Want me to make you a couple of sandwiches then? With a bit of vegetable and corn meat, Noey? Noey and Owey, hey. No one else need never know.’ And overwhelmed by the scope of his own generosity he dug around in his sack of dog biscuits for his own almost-full bottle.
Noah, drinking only a cap to each of his teacups-full, had the feeling of life speeding up but also of it all about to change irrevocably. In the vertical lining boards of this old hut she thought that she could still smell the mud from the flood of ’47. She could hear an uncle of a very long time ago’s whiskery old voice, lovely with a rough kindliness she’d never previously known.
In the old kitchen at Dundalla he’d make tomato jam at the end of each summer. Learning her his secrets. How to cook chokoes. Gramma pie too. Learning this. Learning that.
Good ol Uncle Nip. Never without his hat and then that day his hat off. Sitting up with him at the little square table when her father was off on that turkey drove. Then layin on his bed not hers cos it was time, he said, for her to know other things.
When he began to show what he meant she remembered that his eyes had gone pale Manchester-china blue. Like a horse poisoned itself on gutsing into the creek paddymelons. Learning off Uncle Nipper how it might hurt her the first few times when he put his teapot in. But that she was to be brave for him and so she always had been. Learnt how it was something you didn’t mention to no one. Learnt to know what it meant when his eyes went like it was melon blindness.
Whenever her dad was out for the count after a spree, she learnt how her uncle liked it best if she didn’t get into her milking gear straight away but stayed in her school dress.
‘Just slip off yer duds, darlin. And put yer leg over like you’re hoppin on board your horse. There’s a good girl, Noh.’
He’d give a kind of signal with the glitter in his eyes and then she learnt to ride him home like only she knew how. The great big old nosebag of skin under his throat taking off with a momentum separate from the rest of his face the faster she went. Then the old darling harder than the spout of the fountain endlessly on the simmer on stove.
Their secret. Sometimes accompanied by the sound of her father chucking his guts up in the basin under his bed in the room next door.
She could remember the splinters from the rakes and the smell of oats from when Uncle Nipper had got work, helping on McPhersons’ with hay. The grain was getting left in stooks and her uncle said it was going to be real nice hay too.
Then she’d felt those fingers that had held so many reins checking her as if she were potatoes just before harvest or a heifer getting milked for the first time. How little and hard hers were at first.
Until that night of his mouth. Right over each one. Could that really be true? First one. Then t’other. Like they was a pair of fairy cakes. Or like he was a hungry calf and she was too. The noises. And things becoming more fluid and soft, dough on the rise, and maybe anyway by then she was already pregnant. Uncle Nipper, a name still with the power to sometimes hold back all the old shade her heart holds.
‘You’re not on the rag yet are ya?’ And not having a clue what he meant and half liking by then the game Uncle Nipper liked to play she said, Nah, course not. Which made him laugh. Which made him pull out of his pocket a surprise he’d got her for Christmas, from the Dundalla store. A ha’penny’s worth of Milk Kisses.
‘Only five of me own teeth left,’ he’d said, with what she used to think of as the laughter light in his eyes. ‘And all of em sweet.’ Popping a white chocolate whirl into her mouth and then one into his own.
The scene buckled and cockled up in her memory, as if water was running over precious photos and ruining them forever.
Talk with this other uncle eased round to the late litter of pigs. Owen was saying how he thought they should be sold as slips. ‘If bloody Minna can be persuaded.’
‘Well she’s in a selling mood,’ said Noah.
‘Otherwise we’ll just have all these greedy little pigs who suck the tits dry.’ And now his eyes latched onto that part of her own body. She leant forward to fill his cup again, letting him get a look.
Blow me down, he thought, mistaking the bruise beginning from where she’d fallen by the creek earlier in the day. One white. One black. Like the bloody hide of a Hereford or spotted beast. Never use that hide for a whip because where it changed colour it thickened or thinnened. Made for all sorts of problems. Something dairy much better.
One as if dipped in tar, t’other white as cream. So! It was true enough then. All them rumours. For the left breast had been bruised in such a way that it was nearly as black as a mulberry ready to pick.
Noah, glancing down herself, saw that the bruise was like a storm front. She could see its frilly edges.
Uncle Owen couldn’t keep his eyes away. One of the wild gins! ‘Used to be called the Taipan you know,’ was the last thing he told her before, in the early hours of Christmas morning, he took a last gulp of drink. ‘Wouldn’t never know who I’d strike next when I was at mill.’ And passed out.
‘Oh dearie me, Owe. You as full as a goog. Well then,’ said Noah, finding her belt knife. ‘Well, Owe. I was gunna learn ya this. Learn ya that. But this is easiest I reckon.’
Uncle Nipper had never lost his hairline but now she saw that without his hat this uncle had a face like a fingernail. A circular line of dirt marking where his hat usually sat rimmed his all-but-bald skull. She lit a lamp and her shadow crossed onto the ceiling and wall like a pair of large wings.
Efficiently, sober in her deftness, as if castrating a young bull what had somehow been missed as a calf, she flicked open his nuts. Taking out the first, she flung it with a growl out the window. Finding the second one harder to get, again just as if she was working on a beast, she bent down, about to sever it with her teeth. Then she stopped. ‘Reckon you can just be a bleeder, Uncle Owe. Then you’ll be striking no one ever again, let alone Lainey. Lucky I don’t take off your old pizzle too.’ She held it up as if to raise Cain then let it drop. ‘That long it’s a wonder you don’t tread on it. Not that it’s likely you’ll ever be tryin it on again.’ And working on automatic she cleaned the knife as if it were all part of her routine work of the day. Just a good-for-nothing mongrel.
Now let’s see how you stand up in the morning, she thought. Up on the hill, though it must’ve been a good few hours to go before daylight, the rooster crowed.
Only when she saw the blood pouring out from between his legs did she speak again. ‘Need to rip you some rags I reckon, Uncle Owe,’ and laughed, wounded herself, in memory of the shame of the hundreds of times Ral had had to carefully go to cunning lengths to hide the rags of the women of One Tree between other, bigger bits of washing.
She thought of those Indians Len Cousins had help him with last year’s corn harvest. How they’d make curry of an evening with chopped-up chooks. Killed the fowls by wrapping the wings and legs in their turbans and sawing through their throats with a knife. Funny then that those turbans always looked so white.
Were they going to get a storm? There was a sense now of clouds pressing her down. She heard the waterbirds’ crying honk and then, at last, lightning. Shutting the door of Uncle Owen’s as far as she could pull it she went out to lead Magpie into the shelter of the skillion.
She knew she could�
�ve stood under the deadest tree and not been struck. Knew it in her bones. She mixed the mare a bit of feed and as the rain began to pelt down took the last few capfuls of Royal Reserve before chucking the bottle out into the darkness. She felt glad of the storm that would really put out the fires.
Falling into a light doze on a horse rug, she immediately dreamt of her Little Mister. He wasn’t drowned at all but sitting in a clean gravel bed that sloped gently into the cool river. First he was a baby, nearly as fat as George at that age, slapping his hands on the water, before turning suddenly into the twenty-three-year-old lad he’d be if someone had saved and reared him after all. He was a young Uncle Nip. A lovely smile. A lovely set of his own teeth. He was all golden brown but with a pair of legs that white she knew he too was a horseman.
Then the dream changed and this time Little Mister was her dead baby with the jewel flies swarming in and out of his eyes and nose.
‘Gunna fix this mane of yours, Mag.’ When she woke, she spoke in a kindly way to the horse. ‘Since there’s no point clipping it. Not now Minna’s sold you to Mr Hanley. We’ll brush it out.’ She lit a lamp and hunted around in a crate until she found a metal mane comb. ‘Make you pretty.’ Her fingers found a knot forming and pulled the hair free.
Her mind leapt in time with the storm as to what plan she’d be best to follow; pretending there were many, even as she knew that there was really only one left.
Just before first light, the sound of the early morning Christmas air was the sound of things ending but of other things going on. A magpie called and was joined by a throng of others in another tree. Later it was going to get hot. Over by the wood tank the shapes of a pile of chokoes and sweet potatoes began to emerge. For one mad second Noah thought of riding back up the hill.
‘Steady on,’ she said out loud and began to pick out her horse’s hooves with a lingering quality seldom known to her. Without telling Lainey, no one would ever find where she currently hid her money from shoeing. It was still in its jar in a box, but the position always changing as to where she buried it on the farm. Lainey would never get to use them few quid let alone know that money stored like that goes as thin as cloth and smells of leaves. It was a damned shame.
The longing to see the girl’s face, so like her own at that age, had to be fought off one last time. But she knew she couldn’t, not even if they still slept in the hut. She knew if she were to sight even George, the big ol softie, that her determination would fade and falter and what then?
‘No, Noey.’ And the mare, listening, licked at the feed tin. The storm in the night had guaranteed it to be the kind of day where if Noah were to use her whip it would float out so slowly that for a moment it’d seem to travel out further than its length. Then the limit or point beyond which something begins might be understood at last. From the storm the air had that sweet clean feeling where anything might be possible.
Today, though, she just wound the plait of the whip into a neat circle, tied it with a swift knot and left it hanging on a nail on the wall. Nor did she unlatch Uncle Owen’s new work bitch, wriggling its tail so hopefully. ‘No,’ she said again. No need for whip nor little red dog for she wasn’t going seeking any wild mob of weaners run off into the hills.
Next she filled the enamel basin at the back door with cold water and splashed her face. Seeing blood in a crack in the skin of her hand she used her fingernail to lever it out; washed it clean. Somewhere far above the houses a rainbird called with the pure hollow note that could make you either very happy or very sad.
The storm hadn’t made her plan that much easier but it didn’t really matter. This Magpie had never minded jumping in the wet. She led the horse out to the front of Owen’s hut and, pausing, saw herself standing, reflected in storm water caught as still as glass in a dip of ground. No trace left of the howling westerlies that had set the land all around on fire. As she went to get on she felt her left shoulder wanting to pop out of its socket.
Rather than risk a dislocation she mounted from the veranda edge. Gracious Song, she remembered, that was the name of the eleven-stone hunter that had first put her shoulder out. The horse, that did indeed usually jump like a song, had lobbed her into the base of a jump because she’d had her mind fixed on Rowley Nancarrow instead of the job at hand. Well, she resolved, won’t be making that mistake this morning.
Once again the magpies carolled forth. Their song reminded her of sitting on Nipper’s knee at the Dundalla Christmas dance, looking over and seeing Mrs Leeton’s fingers flying over the piano. Later, up on the platform, Uncle Nipper had played ‘Goodnight Little Darlin’ on his accordion and winked. Because she was his secret.
A run of other tender memories arrived. She could just see one corner of the practice paddock. With yearning she thought of practice jump Sundays of the war years. She remembered the look of Roley riding. The way he would rise to the canter sometimes. The muscle in his legs. For a moment she even remembered her first Christmas at One Tree before she married Rol. How beautiful she’d thought the farm was with the old jacaranda tree all bright green and Minna so kind at first it seemed, offering her this then that. Making such a big fuss and even letting her have a try in old Irmie’s competition side-saddle. The love and the laughter in her and Rol later. The way she felt she could drown in the light landing on the hairs along his brown forearms because she loved him so much. The sun on his good old hat tipped over his eyes at the same angle of the roof of the hut they’d make their own.
Other images arrived higgle piggle as up on the wild ridge country the cicadas came bursting out of the trees, ready to begin their noise of the day. Yet she was still early enough to have beaten the flies. The cows only just beginning to grumble at the cessation of their time-honoured routine.
Now time to have a bit of a think of George. Ralda’s kindness from the first: ‘Now come on, Noey, Reenie says nothing as good as cabbage leaves for the mastitis.’ Ralda wrapping up her hurting breasts in the best big cabbage leaves. What about Rol! His undying love for George from the start; perching George before he were two year old on that pillow in front of his saddle, determined no matter what that, subnormal or no, George’d be a rider like the rest of them. And make no mistake, hadn’t George shown that he was! What about that time George somehow got up on that mare of Christys’ that bolted hell for leather down the hill? George that nonchalant. Sticking on like a little leech. And now it was almost as if Lainey was riding with her, smiling too.
For the first time ever Noah wondered why exactly it was that jumping had always been the be-all and end-all? Could it be that she and Rol had wanted to fly? Engineless, like the butterflies and birds? Leaving the ground with that much beauty?
She felt glad, glancing down to the mare’s nearside hoof, to see the nails she’d hammered in putting on a new pair of fronts were in a perfect line-up. Good God, if her eye got any straighter what next?
Next she remembered what Roley had called their loving. The birds and the bees. And they like being with us, wouldn’t you agree, Nella Nancarrow?
Once, before that lightning strike on bridge to Kennedy’s, not long after they’d been married, there’d been this big commotion up in the jacaranda. What could that be? Rol had wondered. Then they’d grinned at each other. That noise had been a pair of spring doves that then flew up still joined. Dove feathers had floated down to earth looking just like the little pleasure boat Roley had pedalled on the estuary for their honeymoon. Those feathers so dipping and gay. And little light pleasure boats seemingly in them too that night, so that for a minute she was melted, she was soft as feather down inside her husband’s arms.
CHAPTER 22
Warming up the mare something began that she had not felt since that night, so sweetly, so secret with Roley, they’d snuck out to sleep under the jaca. For now it was as if the movement of her black and white horse had become her husband; as if she’d never seen it so scared and little, folded into an efficient nappy by Reen.
Something big,
a tingling wave, was beginning. But if as a young woman that circle of pleasure had been as fast as a wild raspberry bursting open under a finger, this was of a different order.
She could feel the glide and pull of her body over the saddle. The rim of pleasure forming up where her body touched the pommel of the saddle was now so huge, so unsought, that even the mare she was riding seemed to disappear. This terrible bliss, had there ever been anything like it? Circles grown so huge they seemed ripped from the sky. Something as big as giving birth when you are still a child: the womb being turned inside out, only in pleasure not pain.
Her head went back. The sound coming from her rippled out onto the creek, down along the river and the land, up the hill and into the lightening sky. It was as if every stained-glass window in Wirri’s St John’s had shattered and exploded far and wide for miles in every direction. Then the circles were becoming smaller, showground size. Now just a circle cantered, before dwindling to no more than the diameter of an all-day sucker from Kingston’s Corner.
After this, to have a try at that ruined bridge was the only idea left that could work. Black and white butterflies could hatch out of cocoons the colour of gold or silver. Uncle Nip had showed her that on those old oleander bushes out the kitchen window at Dundalla. She knew small miracles like this went unnoticed each and every day. Did it matter that no one would be watching her attempt? Did she really have to give it a try? ‘Never say “I can’t”, Laine.’ The phrase she’s uttered hundreds of times to her daughter came to mind with eerie force.
What a crop of pumpkins there was going to be out of that paddock Uncle Owen had planted up. Surely for Christmas, God was at One Tree this morning? The glory of the first sun hitting the bails and illuminating everything. What a clean, clear-cut Christmas Day, a feeling of more blue air than ever; a feeling that suddenly her eyes had grown more piercingly able to see the great further colours of the hills and ranges far away.
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