Foal's Bread Read Online Free Page B

when you’re the champ? But yeah, I’ll have a go in men’s open high jump. Probably on Rainbird too, after you’ve got him sorted.’
    The youngest porkers grunted and sparred under the oaks. Only that old long Large White, its little intelligent eyes as black as the frypan, still watched the girl. ‘Ya ol’ backfatter,’ said the girl as her father went to hitch up the carthorse. ‘At any rate, ya slabby bitch, youse’ll be bacon bones in Homebush in no time.’
    Uneasy then in that gaze still coming at her from the end of a body that must’ve had as many as one hundred and fifty piglets in its life, Noah also made herself busy, packing, getting the horses ready.
    Seeing the butter in the crook of a tree where her father must’ve placed it and forgot, she kept as quiet as anything, but just as her uncle had sometimes let her, slugged down the last little shot left in the bottle fallen over in the sand. Already the breeze was picking up. It blew pure and cold into her new face and onto her bare throat that now felt so warm.
    The rum hit her blood. Flushed her cheeks as pretty as wild creek pomegranates, curled her hair; made her want to sing. The knowledge of the river of blood that had so recently flowed could be left behind, she thought, slapping her pony down the shoulder with the reins.
    Only as they set off down the road did she wonder how far the butter box boat would’ve reached. What if somehow her father should sight it? What if somehow the bubba was still alive, its eyes all full of red dots from the biting flies? What if, just as they reached the bridge over the river at Wirri, it was gliding along underneath, screaming?
    By the time her father noticed dabs of blood coming through on his daughter’s saddle they were almost at Wirri. Mistaking it for the ending of her girlhood, unable to stop himself, as fathers since the beginning of time have been unable to stop themselves, he glanced to confirm what he had already known: that she was no longer his flat-chested right-hand man.
    The noise he made was a mixture of satisfaction and resignation. If it had to come, then Noey couldn’t have timed it more perfect, because her aunties ran the boarding house just by the Wirri Hotel.
    Which is how it was that as her father fed one hundred and fifty-eight pigs the last of the corn in husk to keep them quiet for loading, Noah Childs heard from her mother’s sisters, Aunty Milda and Aunty Madolin, the sketchy facts of life.
    They’d already had a tot or two she could tell. Aunty Mil’s chin looked hairier, like the plonk was blood and bone for bristles alone. The main thing seemed to not be one of them bad girls and never was she to talk to boys about it.
    â€˜Every month now,’ repeated Aunty Mad with evil certainty. ‘Blood in bloomers. Pain in yer guts. Just gotta get used to it.’
    But Noah was barely paying attention to the old belt and pins they were ferreting out. Her thoughts were with the baby. Sometimes he tipped over and was gobbled by catfish. Maybe an owl or eagle the next day, or maybe not? Maybe an eggboat man or eel trapper, seeing that baby floating by, had grabbed him up and, even as Aunty Mil and Aunty Mad got back to their euchre, was feeding it flour and sugar mixed up with pony mare’s milk? On and on, under night and under day until in her imagination it even reached the ocean at Port Lake where she had been once.
    Where the Flagstaff River’s mouth met the sea, the baby’s bluey-black eyes, not pecked out after all by the crows, stared up ever in search of her. Then the lighthouse beam, failing to detect anything that small making its way out to sea over the bar, arced off in totally the other direction and left the tiny box to face the waves alone.

CHAPTER 2
    I t was a fine April afternoon, the middle day of Port Lake Show, when Rowley Nancarrow, universally known as Roley, first saw the girl having her