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  The sound of horses’ hooves turns hollow on the farms west of Wirri. If a man can still ride, if he hasn’t totally lost the use of his legs, if he hasn’t died to the part of his heart that understands such things, then he should go for a gallop. At the very least he should stand at the road by the river imagining that he’s pushing a horse up the steep hill that leads to the house on the farm once known as One Tree.

  Set in hardscrabble farming country, and the high-jumping circuit that prevailed in rural New South Wales prior to the Second World War, Foal’s Bread tells the story of two generations of the Nancarrow family and their fortunes as dictated by fate and the vicissitudes of the land.

  It is a love story of impossible beauty and sadness, a chronicle of dreams ‘turned inside out’, and miracles that never last, framed against a world both heartbreakingly tender and unspeakably hard.

  With luminous prose and an aching affinity for the landscape, Foal’s Bread is the work of a born writer at the height of her considerable powers. It is a novel of remarkable originality and virtuosity, which confirms Gillian Mears’ reputation as one of Australia’s most exciting and acclaimed authors.

  ‘Dappled with fast-moving light and shade, occasionally swelling with romance, Foal’s Bread is too bubblingly vibrant to grow sentimental, the tangy vernacular of its cast a delight, the blood, sweat and saddle soap pungently rendered.’ THE OBSERVER

  ‘Mears writes with such minute appreciation of the landscape of the mid-north coast and with such love for her flawed creations that we are smitten alongside her . . . It is a rare fiction, too, that lavishes such attention and care on the depiction of animals. The horses of Foal’s Bread are so distinct in personality, talent and physicality that when, as occasionally happens, a human mistreats one, the reader aches to come to their defence. Only a writer of Mears’ talent could so enlarge the circle of our sympathy by means of style alone.’ GEORDIE WILLIAMSON, THE AUSTRALIAN

  ‘. . . the personal is raised triumphantly to the universal by the poetic power of her knotty, idiomatic prose and her acute perception of both the inner world of the soul and a sensuously recreated rural outer world.’ KATHERINE ENGLAND, ADELAIDE ADVERTISER

  ‘This spellbinding tale never lets us forget the transfiguring effect that leaping into the sky on the back of one of these noble beasts has on Noah and Roley, and their lives, nor the comfort they derive from the presence and smell of anything connected with them.’ THE HERALD, SCOTLAND

  ‘This story squeezed my heart with a tight fist and didn’t let go until the last page . . . memorable for its subtle rendering of the marriage; a marriage shot through with pathos and rapture . . . also memorable for its acute observation of nature, and the Nancarrows’ relationship with their horses . . . Some episodes of this story are so wretched they made me weep. But there is great beauty in the telling. Verdict: Powerful storytelling.’ HERALD SUN

  ‘. . . this book about winning and losing—and luck both good and bad—is a harrowing story dotted with moments of outstanding beauty . . . endurance is only a part of this engrossing, epic story. Mears writes with a bleak, precise poeticism, conveying both the tenderness and passion between Noah and Roley and the challenges and complications that strip away their chances of happiness.’ METRO

  ‘. . . poignant and beautiful with stunning description of the landscape as well as lovingly crafted characters whose journeys the reader follows eagerly to the end.’ BELLARINE TIMES

  ‘Mears does for horse high-jumping what Winton did for surfing. She made me feel the joy and beauty of the jump, of pushing oneself to achieve just that little bit more in a risky sport, of having a dream that keeps you going, of doing “the impossible”. Mears, like Winton, knows her subject inside out, and you feel it in her writing.’ WHISPERING GUMS

  ‘. . . a story about love, sex, joy, sadness, jealousy and ambition. It’s about complicated families and the ways in which history often repeats itself within those families. It’s about the hardship of living on the land in the years between the wars, of milking cows and breeding horses, despite floods, drought and raging bush fires. But above all it’s about aspiring to better things—and chasing dreams . . . the novel is completely free of sentiment, but somehow, in giving her narrative such a strong sense of time and place, you get so caught up in the mood of Foal’s Bread that it’s hard not to care for the people she writes about.’ READING MATTERS

  ‘Mears writes like an angel.’ KATE VEITCH, THE AGE

  ‘She has depth and insight and lyrical skill worthy of unmitigated envy.’ MURRAY WALDREN, THE AUSTRALIAN

  ‘In noticing her world, she has also learnt to write with a memorable love of people. Mears has that rare ability to move both to tears and to laughter in what seems to be the same gesture, the same vision of the world.’ JOHN HANRAHAN, THE AUSTRALIAN

  ‘Mears continues to nudge us back to what we suspect about ourselves and remind us of what we’d prefer to forget.’ THE AGE

  ‘It is impossible to read Mears’ work and not see the world suddenly, obsessively, magnified into tiny, balletic gestures of light and dust.’ THE AUSTRALIAN WOMEN’S BOOK REVIEW

  ALSO BY GILLIAN MEARS

  A Map of the Gardens

  Collected Stories

  Paradise is a Place

  The Grass Sister

  The Mint Lawn

  Fineflour

  Ride a Cock Horse

  FOAL’S BREAD

  GILLIAN

  MEARS

  The lines are taken from the poem ‘An Exequy’, by Peter Porter. This poem, dedicated to his first wife after her death, was published in his book The Cost of Seriousness in 1978. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Peter Porter.

  The lines are taken from the poem ‘Silver Wind’, by Geoff Page.

  Reproduced by permission of the author.

  This edition published in 2012

  First published in 2011

  Copyright © Gillian Mears 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Some parts of Foal’s Bread were written with the assistance of a New Work

  Established Writers grant from the Literature Board.

  Allen & Unwin

  Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74331 185 1

  Cover design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko

  Internal design by Yolande Gray, Sandy Cull

  Set in Garamond by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my sister Yvonne

  ‘Lameness is the language of pain,

  not a disease . . .’

  ‘A lame horse will often seem full of

  great silence and suffering.’

  HAROLD LEENEY,

  HOME DOCTORING OF ANIMALS, 1927 />
  Contents

  PREAMBLE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CODA

  Acknowledgements

  PREAMBLE

  The sound of horses’ hooves turns hollow on the farms west of Wirri. If a man can still ride, if he hasn’t totally lost the use of his legs, if he hasn’t died to the part of his heart that understands such things, then he should go for a gallop. At the very least he should stand at the road by the river imagining that he’s pushing a horse up the steep hill that leads to the house on the farm once known as One Tree.

  In April the land will already seem yellow. Only further away, along the ridges, on slopes too steep to have been cleared, will the brush be either dark or bright, depending on whether or not a fire has torn along up there in summer. But it would be wrong to conclude that in the years before the second war and immediately afterwards, bushfires, not milk and cream, did best along One Tree Farm’s hills and thin ridges. This would be to forget the Flag River flats, and the paddocks flanking Flaggy and Bitter Ground Creek; the land never ruined or sour for long because of the floods. Most importantly of all, that would be forgetting the kind of horses that mixed kind of country like One Tree can breed.

  Don’t fall off. Don’t put the horse in those yards held up by various bits of twine and wire. Go for a gallop. Get off the horse’s kidneys. Lean forward. Don’t hold the reins up like that. Get them into a decent bridge.

  Through the stirrup irons might come the voices of the dead. Through the stirrup irons will come a hammering from the earth itself as if all the high-jump dreams of all the men and all the women who’ve worked this land have somehow turned the subsoil into stone.

  When that horse pulls up half dead from the exertion, the sweat frothy under the reins, the rider should listen even more carefully. Listen and there will be the sound of sobbing in there too. At One Tree. Of dreams turned inside out the way the half dingo-cross wild dogs eat out the fetlocks on fresh-born calves before melting back into the uncleared land, the calf still bellowing.

  If the rider is a woman or a girl, she should maybe never venture up those hills of One Tree Farm. If the horse that she’s on has already bolted and is hard in the mouth to boot, then she could spin it. Forgetting pretty, she could whirl it around and around using her heels and her hands and the reins as her whip. If in her fourteen-year-old womb a dead uncle’s baby grows, this One Tree Farm might just be steep enough to see that it begins to slip.

  The tree is an old jacaranda, a moment of almost antique-seeming grace next to a wooden house painted cream, built in front of an original hut. Every summer a thorn vine in flower is a burst of red over the long streaks of roof rust.

  Only once the One Tree house is reached comes the feeling that the land is sliding in steep folds towards it; as if paddocks are to flow right over first the jacaranda, then the hut and house; as if the verandas of hardwood milled from the farm will gradually be pinched into pieces by the pressure of the land’s pitch.

  A way away, visible from the front veranda, is even steeper land, more mountain than hill, that some madman long ago tried to clear by hand. That such a reckless attempt isn’t seen as mad, not at all, is proof that for people around Wirri good land is clean land, is cleared. The bright green slash going fair up the middle of that small mountain means anything is possible, even if whoever it was making the attempt died abruptly under a log. Or mistiming it with a dingo in a trap (because clubbing the bastards with a stick saved bullets) lost his own life instead.

  Man, woman, boy or girl, when you arrive at the jacaranda tree, take a lick of your horse’s salty neck. Watch out your horse doesn’t throw its head and hit your nose with the bridle buckles. Lick that salt and see what story it tells. Under the mane the salt is best. Watch out you don’t cry.

  CHAPTER 1

  It was an early afternoon in 1926 when Cecil Childs and his only daughter first came onto One Tree Farm. Leaving Baffy and Brian to keep a mob of about one hundred pigs moving slowly along down the road, the man and the girl turned in at the cream shelter without a thought. Unheeding, happy that the drive had gone so well, this was what they’d been doing for close on two weeks for the buyer in Sydney. Picking up pigs from one farm then the next. Cecil knew they were a day early for loading onto the boat at Wirri that would take the pigs down to Port Lake and then to the bacon factory in Sydney, and this knowledge had also brightened his mood.

  ‘You be quick, Noey,’ said Cecil, sending his daughter up the hill to the house which was maybe half a mile away but fully visible because the paddocks were without so much as a sucker. ‘Tell em we’re in a bit of a hurry.’ The hill was full of cows and weaners of all colours. A few bullocks. The pigs had already been put into the yard by the bales at the bottom of the hill. Three different types of pigs, saw Cecil, including a few spotty old Berkies. He licked his lips. Counted them up once and then again.

  Because they had made such good time and because he knew the Flaggy wine shanty was still in operation, he was thirsty now for something other than river water turned into tea.

  ‘Mind you go steady. Never seen fences like it. Looks like whoever put that up run away with itself into the hills.’

  ‘Nice but, isn’t it, Dad?’

  ‘She’d be wild in flood. Reckon hut over there would’ve had to go under more than a few times. Stupid place to have built. No wonder they had to put in that better bridge but even so.

  ‘Pity we got the pigs or you could’ve popped pony over those.’ Her father pointed to a paddock near the bales where a couple of jumps had been built. ‘Got a bit of a hop in her I warrant. Well don’t dally, Noey! Go let em know we’re here. Mr Nancarra it is. I’ll stay down with pigs. Least they got em all ready. Well go on, Noah! Git up that hill and mind you don’t fall off it.’

  The girl pushed the pony into a canter. That’s when the feeling of the land first began to be known to her; its hollow quality. Jumping horses. That thoroughbred-looking thing in the other paddock might be one hopeful, fed only on wild air and wild water by the looks of its ribs.

  If there had ever been a time when she hadn’t had the jumping dream she couldn’t remember it, and without thinking she hopped her pony over a log lying by the side of the road.

  Maybe it was this, the heave of a horse rising between her legs, that made the baby first begin to lose anchor? Or was it that final sprint up to the house that disturbed it irrevocably? Or deeper in, the fear for what was happening under her shirt? At them what her Uncle Nipper had to begin with given her a whole ha’penny for, just for a look.

  If she were to unbutton her shirt for him now, if he hadn’t had his big heart attack and died with his boots on, she’d be even more afraid. Cos they were ripening. They hurt as her horse tackled the hill.

  That Uncle Nip, she thought fondly, pretending he wasn’t dead.

  ‘You love me don’t yer? Yer old unc?’

  And last Christmas Day, when she found him asleep on her bed, she reckoned that she did. His hat was off and when she put out her hand to feel his hair it was just as fine as the old grey work mare’s mane and tail.

  At the memory of her uncle she went all tingly with a hope she couldn’t understand. She felt the way you do lining a horse up for something impossibly big. The chance of victory inside the likelihood of an almighty fall.

  Pulling up outside the house she could look down to see the pigs, toy-sized from this distance, with Baffy and Brian, t
he Neville brothers, smaller specks on the road.

  Slipping off and parting the pony’s mane, she leant close to take a little taste of the salty neck. That’s when the horse, thirsting for a drink, gave her a butt in her belly so rough that she punched the horse’s nose straight back before looking up to greet the two women who were coming out of the house.

  ‘Here. Here!’ shouted a woman at a pair of over-eager dogs. ‘What, just you and your father is it?’

  ‘No. Pair of brothers are getting em into shade. So no overheating, no deaths. Dad’s waiting down ready with your pigs.’ One of the dogs was a curly back, the other a bushy tail, but both, saw the girl, had one eye strangely blue, strangely human.

  Half of the lady’s face was slipped sideways from a stroke. Every few minutes she had to use her sleeve to wipe away at the left-hand side of her mouth as if a spring that never ran dry was located there. The numb cheek had something of the steep crooked look of the land, as if it too had been pounded into immobility by the pressure of over-grazing and the hooves of many a high-jump dream.

  Noey looked past the house to the higher slopes where the hill appeared to be moving in the breeze on account of all the ring-barked trees yet to fall or be pushed over. The giant jacaranda moved differently, all its little leaves quivering to create the feeling of a big-bosomed woman wanting to waltz.

  ‘Looks like a big drive you got,’ the old lady said.

  ‘Big alright,’ said the girl. ‘And they’re all still fat. We’ve moved them that slow.’ A bubble of pride surfaced and was gone. ‘With yours there’ll be over a hundred and fifty. Started picking them up Sundale and then all the farms between Dundalla and the ranges.’ Thinking, you could walk more gullies in that Mrs Nancarra’s face than all the washouts on the hill.

  ‘No doubt about it then,’ said the younger woman, with the figure of a long slabby pig herself, moving closer. ‘Bet you wouldn’t say no to a cup of tea with a piece of cake, made today?’ Her apron was the same yellow as her eyes.