Foal's Bread (3 page)

‘Arghh,' went her father and the men.

‘Dunno, Noh,' said the one called Baffy, ‘but sometimes can't help but think you remind me of a dog. Is there anything you couldn't eat? Here, take the rest of mine if you're that famished.'

‘I'm gunna go with the boys tonight to shanty,' her father was saying, given in totally to his need for a drink. ‘See if we can't organise something for homeward direction. Give you a chance to be in charge for a night. Then we'll drive em in the first thing tomorra. Feed pigs half the corn on dark. They're that dozy now it'll settle em good for the night. Give em a bit more than usual. Keep em sleepy. Get an early night yerself. I'll leave dogs with you. Just in case.'

Her father and the men had barely disappeared from sight when the first wave of the agonies came inside her guts. It was worse than being kicked in the knee by that bitch of a pony with the seedy toe Uncle Nip had needed a hand with. Worse than being food poisoned last New Year off her aunties' mouldy Christmas meat.

The sound of the girl with the boy's name beginning to slip the baby was a scream not uttered. The cake came up first. Somehow she just knew it was nothing to do with butter gone a bit bad but she still put her fingers down her throat to bring it all up.

Noah moved down along the creek's beach. At first, under a sky the pale damaged blue of the wall-eye of Uncle Nipper's workhorse, she was sure she must be dying. Because she didn't want to bring the pair of women from One Tree, instead of screaming she bit her wrist. Her own steep little face grew steeper. Then, as if in tune to pain, the chatty birds began to go off in the trees behind her.

‘Shut up!' she shouted, but neither as fiercely or loudly as she might've an hour before. For something in her did after all know what was happening.

Noah Childs could see the knowledge in the eyes of the oldest of the sows, watching what was beginning. See that they knew and also remembered. The youngest work dog, that'd had a first lot of pups last winter, keenly alert where it was tied underneath the corn cart? Noah could tell that it knew too.

When water began to stream out from between her legs she took off all her bottom-half clothes. Took off her duds. Sat down in creek and knew all about the shit and blood coming. Fixed her eyes on hills that looked in the failing light like old lips with the darkness running through. Moved her gaze to the fences. Wondered if that were Nancarrows' place across there too.

When the wind picked up it seemed to go wild on that smell of blood. Bits of her sun-faded hair whipped free of its plait. In between the steep sides of pain, following her father's instructions, she put out the corn. She put her mind away, took one of the cobs still in its husk and bit down on that; kept it jammed in her mouth just the way she'd had to do with a block of wood when helping her father and uncle de-tusk the old boar.

That old boar had got into a fight with the draught stallion and, playing dirty, got up under the horse's belly. Noah had seen the guts sliding out of that poor old Nugget. No more black foals to hope for ever again. No more mixing up that special teaspoon of yellow sulfur in his feed to keep his coat black. Then her father, who'd been the one who left the gate open, roaring at her for his rifle and putting a bullet fair between poor old Nugget's eyes. Having to shoot again because that was too low.

The minute her dad had roped the pig, tipped that bloody cunning boar over, Uncle Nipper had the hacksaw at work on the tusks. Her block of wood had been so that the hacksaw didn't break its jaw.

‘Reckon by the time Dad and men git back I'm gunna be gawn.' She spoke to the creek, she spoke to the darkening sky and to the old girls, soup bones by next week, that had left their share of corn to follow Noah back down to the grassy hollow she'd chosen. She was sure of that now because it felt like her whole body was vomiting itself up. ‘Just like me mum. Gunna go that way too.' And wished her father, bad eyesight and all, would appear with his rifle at the ready to put her out of her suffering too.

‘Tolley! Tolley!' Noah heard a man calling in his lead milker. ‘Tolley! Tolley!'

The night was becoming everything in reverse. Instead of her watching for piglets it was pigs watching what was coming out from between her own legs. Something, something as big as the moon rising up above the oaks, felt like it was being born and that it was going to split her in two.

‘Tolley! Tolley!'

Would that man's cows never come in? Did he milk by moonlight or what?

Standing up, still connected to that which all of a sudden had slithered out, wild with relief and panic, she could see the cord glinting white and blue. She cursed for her knife. Searching with her fingers found a piece of quartz with an edge that felt sharp enough. Sawed it back and forth, then, because that clearly wasn't going to work, picked up the baby and walked wide-legged, hunting away that young boar coming in too close. Found her belt with its knife. Cut cord with a flick of her wrist.

‘Stick you in snout with this if you come a step closer,' she warned another pig.

That's when what she held in her hands let out a first noise.

‘'Fraid mewing's not gunna help ya.' As she spoke, her fingers that had helped with foals were already on automatic, tying up a neat enough knot in the cord.

Some fourteen-year-old mothers kill their firstborn with a stone. Or dig a hole in the sand and bury it alive. Leave it in a forest or park or under a lonely bridge.

Noah did none of those things. In the moonlight the shadows of pigs were looming and lengthening. She could hear the water golloping downstream like an old man drinking.

‘Better if you'd have bin born dead. Save me havin to be one to do job.' She laid it on a corn sack. ‘Garn! Git out of it,' switching the next over-curious porker on the nose. ‘Leave off. Not gunna feed him to you!

‘So little,' she marvelled. ‘Well you come on just the right night, little mister. Yeah. You did. But 'fraid it makes no difference.' Knowing and not knowing like hundreds of child mothers of history what she'd have to do next.

Just as before drowning kittens, she commenced a conversation with the condemned. ‘Way too little any rate to live.' And picked it back up. ‘And aren't you that lucky that I didn't lay down? A cow that lays down for a calf never gits up again. No. Cos the wild pigs would eat ya and yer mother.'

The wrinkly little old face reminded her of something. What could it be? Again she held it up in the moonlight.

Not kittens. Its eyes and ears were wide open. Oh, of course.

‘You know what you look like? Rag doll what Aunty Lala sewed up for me. When she was nursing little Billy.' And at this memory, for no more than a moment, the way she would with that Billy rag doll, she put the baby up to her shirt just like she was her Aunty Lal. Fondled it and held it close. She could never be sure but she thought later that she'd felt its little old mouth trying to get a hold. ‘You're that small you nearly could be kitten. No bigger than bloody pound of butter.' Which was what gave her the idea.

‘Not gunna cry but am gunna risk me skin givin you butter box. Gunna set you in that, down creek. After.'

After she'd held him under she meant, but when it was time to get the job done, she found herself only washing it, sensing more than actually seeing the creek water turning milky and then running clear. Careful to keep its head above the water. Aware so much of each little joint she could've been a butcher's boy. Next she used her knife to tear a bit of sack off to line the box with before popping him into there alive.

‘In. In. We put ya in,' so that for a moment came the feeling that she had set a miniature rider up on a jumping pad. ‘Gunna give you a chance, little fella.' It wriggled in her hands but the moment she laid it in the box everything, including him, went all peaceful, like he wasn't alive after all but only a toy fashioned out of that darker kind of beeswax. The deeper creek water sparkled and ran with the bluey-black light, just like what she saw shone in his eyes.

At the next little noise from its mouth she felt the new pains. ‘Wait a while.' She felt the after-mess slither out onto the beach. Felt then she wanted to bid him goodbye properly. Didn't see or hear the dogs cleaning it up. Too intent on her explanation.

‘You're that little ya couldn't bloomin well've lived anyhow, see? And at least I haven't put you in that Mr Oswald's dray.' By now she was sure it could not only listen but understand as well. ‘Mr Oswald. Him what rears his pigs to be cannibals. Fetches in the sick and broken-legged horses and calves from all around. And all the piglets not born right. That's the truth. Not just a story. Bloody boils em down to feed to his porkers. And at least I've kept these ones off ya.

‘Got a few Oswald Tammies with us and I wouldn't bank on it that they mightn't be a bit hungry. Least not gunna be burnt in the pit by no nun.'

Though she had no memory of her own mother, who'd died soon after Noah came into the world, or of any kiss with the exception of Uncle Nipper's after he'd tanked up on rum, she found herself crouching down. Keeping it in the box, she held the morsel of a baby up to her face.

Allowing her mouth, her eyes, to fill with a feeling hitherto only bestowed on the eyelids of foals, she gave him a soft and squeaky kiss. A full-moon wind, this time blowing from the north, seemed to be springing up in acknowledgement that he must soon be on his way. Like its face, even the stars seemed to wrinkle at the parting.

‘Go on then.' She waded out into the deeper water. Found the current. ‘Be good! Don't fall out!'

In the moonlight the butter box went like a crazy toy, pulled quickly into the faster water of the Flaggy by the weight of its miniature boatman. But even as the boat and the baby disappeared around the creek's bend, his forehead holding all the softness of her farewell, Noah's face changed shape forever.

In kissing instead of killing, she had set a mark upon her mouth that men everywhere were going to recognise for the rest of her life. Something about the tenderness underlying the toughness.

A kind of triumphant relief was sweeping through her that it was done, the baby gone. She couldn't realise that for the rest of her life she'd be watching Flaggy Creek spinning that baby away from her, the fast waters making it disappear like a little bend-and-flag pony that's forgotten to take the final turn.

‘Oh yes,' her father, well away on his early spree, had begun to boast to whoever was left listening in the shanty. ‘Pigs wouldn't be safer than with Noey. My daughter. She's like a good dog she is! What she can't do I wouldn't know. Only has to watch me do somefin once. Nuthin Noah can't turn her hand to. Musterin, milkin, cuttin a calf. But then comin into kitchen to prepare a nice bit of vegetable to go with yer chop of a night.

‘She'll be my right-hand man getting those horses back over range. As good as Baffy and Brian here.'

‘What else, Cecil? What else will that girl of yours with the stupid Bible name be good at?'

But if he caught the unspoken thoughts, the hunger of at least a dozen drunk men dreaming of his daughter out alone with the pigs on Flaggy Creek, he wasn't letting on. He could see a ring around the moon outside and, turning the talk to weather, said he hoped that the rain was going to hold off. Just then, a gin, not too old or ugly, came into the shanty to ask would any of them be feeling like a bit.

‘What! You gunna cut it up and hand it round are you?' shot back Noah's father, his eyes quivering.

‘Not on your nelly,' she chiacked, and gave him a look that meant for a swill of rum he could be the first to follow her outside to the bit of a sack humpy where she did her business.