Foal's Bread by Gillian Mears

Author:Gillian Mears
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: FIC000000, book
ISBN: 9781743431184
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2012-09-23T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

Gotta take the good times with the bad, Roley had always advised his children and wife. Gotta be prepared for the falls and the victories. However, just over a year after seeing the specialist, when it was clear that the deterioration in his walking was, if anything, speeding up, he no longer knew what to say. He stopped mentioning Horrie West who, wooden leg and all, had jumped before the war. For the truth of it was that by the end of 1945 Roley could barely ride Tadpole down the hill to the bails, let alone jump so much as the line-up of kero tins Lainey had fixed for George and Fly.

‘Jappy Christmas! Jappy New Year!’ he heard Lainey and George screaming out to the pigs, because now the war in the Pacific was over too, it was allowed.

The panic in him was like the sound of the hens, their little urgent marching feet, trying to escape the mosquito plague of this first Christmas of peacetime. He’d put cow shit inside corn cobs and lighted these inside kero tins but it didn’t help that much. Down at the bails, closer to the creek, the situation was even worse. The udders of the cows were that inflamed, with so much blood getting into the milk that, as his mother said, it was a wonder the factory hadn’t asked was it strawberry milkshakes they were making in their cream.

The panic was that for so long he’d quietly connected up the ending of the war with the ending of his walking problems.

‘Pretty sure we’ll be right, once war’s over,’ had been his most common reassurance to Noey. As if somehow his own walking mystery, the numbness with no name, was tied into battles unimaginable, raging away on the other side of the world; then closer to home, New Guinea, but still so far removed from One Tree as to feel like a strange dream best summed up by all the boats of Wirri being hauled out of the water and stored in a secret location in case the Japanese invaded.

Now here it was, the war really had finished. Harold Cousins had fired the shots down at Oakey Flat when the news came through on the wireless of the surrender of Japan. Soon after that, all the boats, including Uncle Owen’s own little fishing one with the red ash oars, were back in their rightful places. Talk of Wirri Show resuming for ’46. A chance for Landwind to make his debut as a five-year-old. He was showing promise. Oh, a beautiful walk and canter on him for a baby. Also the wildcard mare Noey had called Magpie what never walked but always jig-jogged, looking for the next hill to bolt up or fence to jump. And high time for old Breezy to do what he loved best, which was jumping.

But as for his own walking? Worse. The realisation was like a talented pony unexpectedly baulking and lobbing you over its head when the odds were that you’d be the winning combo.

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