Moonstone Promise Page 2

He probably wouldn’t see the old man until lunchtime. That was the only time Luke saw him now: after the horses were fed and worked, and all the odd jobs were done. Annie rarely left Harry’s side. She sat next to his bed, adjusting the tanks, fiddling about with the sheets and bringing him cups of tea which he never drank. Around midday, Luke usually went in there and gave him a morning report on the horses. The last couple of days, though, Harry had seemed uninterested.

  Luke decided to quickly pop his head in and see if he was feeling any better this morning. He’d missed the old man’s gruff humour and reassuring manner, even though they never really talked about much – just horses, mostly. He knocked quietly on the door.

  A voice mumbled.

  Luke pushed the door open and saw Harry pulling himself upright onto the side of the bed, facing out the window.

  ‘That you, Lawson?’

  ‘It’s Luke,’ he said, walking around to where the old man could see him. ‘Just wanted to see if you were feeling any better today.’ He sat in the chair that had been strategically placed for visitors.

  ‘Bloody freezing,’ said Harry. ‘Pass me my jumper, will you?’

  Luke helped him to sling it around his shoulders, noting how hot he felt himself. After a short silence, Harry spoke again. ‘Can you put Bunyip in the paddock where I can see him?’

  ‘Bunyip?’ Luke questioned. Bunyip was Harry’s first horse – he had died years ago. ‘Don’t you mean Biyanga?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, the stallion,’ Harry corrected himself.

  ‘He’s just finishing his feed, then I’ll put him out.’

  Harry stared at the window. Outside, his property stretched over acres of riverfront land, patched into paddocks, sloping gently down to the water. But Harry didn’t seem to see past the glass. ‘Gonna see old Bunyip again soon,’ he mumbled.

  He’d been saying this for days and it seemed to make him feel better, so Luke went along with it. ‘Gonna pull some big scores on that old fella, hey, Harry,’ he said, trying to sound cheerful. ‘Sounds like a pretty sharp horse.’

  ‘The best,’ mumbled Harry. He hacked out a horrible wheezing cough and reached for a hanky. ‘I want to ask you a big favour,’ he whispered.

  ‘Anything,’ said Luke. ‘You name it.’

  ‘Ride the stallion for me,’ said Harry. ‘Right up the front. When they . . . you know. It’d mean a real lot to me.’

  ‘Biyanga?’

  Harry nodded and wheezed into his hanky again.

  ‘Don’t you want Lawson to?’

  Lawson was Harry’s only blood son. Surely he would lead the procession. He would ride Harry’s good horse.

  ‘No, I want you to ride him,’ said Harry.

  ‘Me?’ Luke clarified again. Maybe Harry meant Ryan. Ryan was his stepson, Annie’s boy. ‘As in Luke?’

  ‘I know who you are,’ grumbled Harry.

  ‘Won’t the others mind?’ Being fostered, Luke always considered himself to be at the bottom of the pecking order.

  ‘I already told them what I want.’ Harry sounded short.

  Luke’s breath caught in his throat as he thought of what Harry’s funeral might be like. He hadn’t let himself think about it up until now. None of it seemed quite real. ‘Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I’d be . . . honoured.’ Talking about this was weird. It was wrong.

  Harry nodded. ‘Better rest now.’

  Luke helped him back down onto the pillow and the old man shut his eyes. ‘I’ll get Annie,’ Luke told him.

  Harry nodded again without speaking, his face tight with pain.

  Luke passed Lawson on the way out of the bedroom. He didn’t mean to push past him, but he had to get out of there before he was swallowed up and drowned. Outside the room, he leaned against the closed door, taking a moment to get himself together. This was it. It was really happening. He was going to lose Harry.

  Inside the room, he could hear Harry and Lawson talking.

  ‘Yeah, whatever, the foster kid can ride him,’ he heard Lawson say. ‘Have you sorted out his arrangements?’

  Luke strained to hear Harry’s answer. He only caught a wheezy mumble.

  ‘Jesus, Harry.’ Lawson sounded annoyed.

  There was another wheezy mumble.

  ‘Well, did you tell him that?’

  Tell me what?

  ‘Oh, so I have to tell him? I’ve told you, if you want to bring in every stray kid you find, you can sort it all out. I don’t want a whole lot of caseworkers and child safety officers going through every inch of my life. You know what’ll happen if you leave all that to me.’

  Dread seeped, warm and sickly, through Luke’s body.

  ‘Don’t let them take me back, Harry,’ he whispered. ‘Please don’t do that to me. This is my home now.’

  3

  LUKE PUSHED THROUGH the front door and a blast of hot air hit him in the face. It wasn’t until he was in Legsy’s stable and standing with his arms around the colt’s big, solid neck that his head stopped spinning.

  Biyanga and the other horses were already out in the yards. Grace must have fed them. In the yard closest to the stables Luke could see Nosey, Legsy’s twin brother. Harry reckoned it was rare for mares to give birth to healthy twin foals. Usually one died before full term. Both these colts were spectacular, the only minor flaw in Nosey being a slightly clubbed foot. Harry had gelded him and sold him to Tom. But Legsy was too good to geld. He was already showing a lot of promise at campdrafting.

  Luke slipped a bridle over Legsy’s ears and led him out of the stable, wishing Tom would hurry up and get back from boarding school. His practical jokes and wrestling would be a welcome change from the gloom and doom. Luke kicked off his thongs, vaulted onto Legsy bareback, and walked him down the road.

  He turned the colt off into some trees and rode down a well-worn track that came out onto the river flats – long green stretches of land that followed the river and connected all the properties in Coachwood Crossing. Legs danced about beneath him, so he took hold of a chunk of mane and let him have his head. The colt lurched into a canter, then stretched into a rolling, thunderous gallop through the knee-high grass. The wind rushed over Luke’s face, and the wide open sky let him breathe again. Legsy pigrooted, and he laughed.

  He didn’t need to tell Legs where to go. The colt headed straight for the tree-line and pushed past some bushes down to the bank of the river. There was a sandy spot with hoofmarks all over it, where Legs lowered his nose and sniffed his way to the water’s edge. He drank a few quick mouthfuls, then ventured in further and began smashing playfully at the water with his front leg.

  The colt buckled at the knees and dropped. Luke jumped off to the side and let him roll in the cool river, grinding his back into the grainy sand, his huge black belly in the air and his legs waving clumsily about. Finally Legs scrambled to his feet, shook like an enormous dog and nipped at Luke’s face. Luke smiled and gave him a rub on the forehead, then led him to a tree and tethered him.

  A tree had fallen into the river, creating a dam a little further down. Luke took off his boots and shirt and clambered along the boulders like a monkey. He climbed up onto a rock platform and dived into the deepest part, letting the water swallow him up and cover him in its silky coolness, soothing the tension away.

  He floated on his back, staring up at the trees. Bands of silver light streaked through them, bouncing off the water that rippled over his chest. On his right side, his ribs stuck out in ugly lumps, five of them.

  I’m not going to another foster home. Not ever. I’m done with that.

  He thought back to the time when he’d first met Harry, through a six-week horse-gentling program run by a youth organisation. Luke was a busted-up, angry kid. Harry was a horse trainer.

  The stallion had been crazy, screaming and prancing, pulling both front feet off the ground and tossing his long black mane. He was blacker than black and evil-looking. When Luke saw Harry pull that wild six-hundred-kilo animal out of the stable, all snorting and farti
ng and screaming, he had nearly crapped in his pants. With the stallion carrying on behind him, Harry had walked quietly as if nothing was happening, chewing at a toothpick, inspecting a fingernail and even stopping to empty a stone out of his boot.

  Luke had backed away, out of reach of those powerful hind legs, but Harry had spoken to him without even looking at him. ‘Chuck me that hoof pick, kid,’ he said. Then he turned and picked that enormous animal’s foot up off the ground.

  That was all Harry had said to him for the entire day. Luke hadn’t even known what a hoof pick was. He had just stood there, staring, noticing that despite the stallion’s noise, it never pulled away from the rope, or harmed a hair on that old man’s head – not that there were many.

  The stallion seemed to know exactly where old Harry was at all times, and respected his space. That was the first time Luke had ever seen such power and strength bridled through respect rather than force. It was a strange and fascinating energy between the horse and the old man.

  Luke had watched every day from the fence, until he worked out what a hoof pick was and began taking it to the old fella with arm outstretched, not wanting to get too close to the big hairy animal. ‘Chuck us the clinch cutters,’ the old man had said on another day. Luke had passed him several different tools before getting the right one.

  Back then, Harry had never tried to be a father or a mentor or a leader. He just demonstrated a better way, quietly going about his business, letting Luke come at him with questions in his own time. ‘How do you control them?’ Luke had finally asked. ‘How do you break them when they’re wild like that?’ That was when their friendship really began.

  After days of running his hands over them, winning their trust, working with them, Luke would sit on his bed looking through his photos, trying to remember who he was before he got lost in the black hole.

  In his favourite, his real mum sat on a horse with him in front of her. Her arms were wrapped around him, a grinning little boy, keeping him safe, holding the reins and smiling for the camera. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Young, fit, barefoot, in shorts and a singlet, with shoulder-length thick hair – he didn’t know what colour, because it was a black-and-white shot.

  His real dad was only in a couple of photos, riding a horse in both. Luke had tortured himself with the same question for years.

  Why did he give me up?

  In the end, Luke had stopped torturing himself about it. It wasn’t going to change anything. His real dad hadn’t wanted him after his mum died, for whatever reason, and that was that. Harry filled that gap now.

  But it was the photos that had made him want to give the horse-gentling program a go. He knew that somehow horses were a part of his make-up, even though he had felt no connection with them before he met Harry. And he was right. Once he did connect with them, he knew he could never let them go. Horses were a part of him and always would be.

  Harry had seen it in him, too, and asked him to stay on. It had taken a lot of organising on Annie’s part, but eventually Harry and Annie ended up officially fostering him. The last few years had been the best of Luke’s life.

  He closed his eyes and lay there floating in the river with his arms out, thinking about those years – he didn’t know how long for.

  4

  WHEN LUKE EVENTUALLY pulled himself out of the river, he jumped back on Legsy and rode further along the river flats. He didn’t want to go home yet. When he passed the back of Lawson’s property, he pulled the colt back to a walk and looked searchingly up through the hill paddock. He wondered if she’d be there, sitting under the mango tree.

  Jess. He remembered when he had first came across her. She was the girl he had seen riding over the river flats, on a buckskin appaloosa. The small horse was striking: golden, with a thick black mane and tail, and silver spots all over its rump. The girl rode so easily, often bareback and barefoot. Cantering, always cantering, never walking, so Luke never had an opportunity to ride out across the big grassy stretches and say ‘Hi’ to her.

  Then she had turned up at Harry’s place one day with the biggest black eye he had ever seen. He hadn’t recognised her at first. She was riding a bike and trying to hide her face. But he recognised her hair, golden-brown, silky and messy. She was quiet, withdrawn, as if she’d had the spirit knocked out of her.

  She too found refuge at Harry’s place, and as she started to heal, Luke watched her downcast eyes gradually become feisty and determined again. Her serious mouth had a one-sided smirk that flashed so quickly across her face you could miss it. He found himself watching for it and sometimes she would catch him, holding his gaze for just a second. But then Grace or Shara would break the moment with a loud yell, an excited suggestion or a pushy demand.

  ‘Doesn’t matter how much you stare at it,’ he yelled out to Jess now. ‘It’s not gonna grow any faster.’

  Jess, wearing an old flanny and jeans, smiled and waved as she jumped up and ran over to the fence. ‘I saw it kicking,’ she called out before she got there. ‘I could see a little hoof popping out the side of her belly. It was so cute!’

  ‘I still can’t believe you’re getting a foal out of that mare for two hundred bucks,’ he said.

  ‘Two hundred and forty-six,’ she corrected him.

  Lawson’s mare, Marnie, had fallen pregnant to a runaway stallion one crazy night in the outback, months ago. The horses had all escaped from a campdraft, and everyone had gone out looking for them. But only he and Jess had seen the min min lights – three of them, appearing out of nowhere and buzzing around the mares.

  Jess reckoned they were spirits, ghosts, or some crazy mixed-up stuff to do with her first horse, Diamond, who had been destroyed after an accident. When she saw those lights seemingly disappear into Marnie’s belly, she was convinced that Diamond had been reincarnated. She persuaded Lawson to sell her the foal for a pittance. And ever since, she’d been walking on sunshine.

  ‘Hoping for a filly or a colt?’ asked Luke.

  ‘A filly,’ Jess said, ‘so I can breed from her one day.’

  ‘Then you can spend another year sitting under a tree,’ he teased.

  Jess spent hours sitting under that mango tree staring at the mares – whole days, in fact. She had beaten a track along the river flats to Lawson’s property to visit her favourite horse, Wally, and to check on Marnie’s belly size. The mare wasn’t due for weeks yet but it was all Jess ever talked about.

  She took a swipe at Luke’s foot and laughed. ‘I like watching them. Anyway, I don’t have a horse to ride. Dodger’s foot still isn’t right.’

  ‘You know you can ride any of Harry’s horses.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Who, Harry?’ Luke looked down. ‘Not good. Tired. Cranky.’

  ‘How about Annie?’

  Luke just shrugged. ‘Wanna come for a ride?’ He gestured at Legsy’s rump.

  ‘Where to?’

  Luke thought about it. ‘Mossy Mountain?’ It was the biggest mountain in the district, with a winding trail through palm forests and fern-covered cliffs. It took two hours to ride to the top. The view was amazing.

  ‘Does he double?’

  ‘Dunno,’ Luke grinned, ‘only one way to find out.’

  ‘What if he bucks?’

  ‘I s’pose we’ll fall off.’

  Jess climbed through the fence. ‘I’m game.’

  He held out an arm, and she grabbed it, springing up behind him. Legsy instantly lurched sideways. Jess squealed and clung to Luke’s waist, nearly dragging him off.

  ‘Get your feet out of his flanks,’ he said, pulling the colt around.

  ‘They’re not in his flanks,’ cried Jess.

  ‘We just got to get him used to us both. Give him a pat on the rump.’

  Jess leaned back and gave the colt a loud slap on the rump, making him startle and jump forwards. ‘Whoa!’ she screamed.

  ‘Not like that!’ said Luke, grabbing at Legsy’s reins.

  ‘I
thought this horse doubled,’ laughed Jess.

  ‘I thought you could ride!’ he answered.

  ‘Who told you that? It’s a vicious lie!’

  He felt two hands push into his back, then turned to see her somersaulting backwards over Legsy’s rump and landing on her feet on the ground.

  ‘Yeah, right.’ Jess could ride all right. She was small and agile and brilliant at vaulting; she’d ridden in mounted games with her best friend Shara for years. Luke could tell she was stirring Legsy up on purpose.

  ‘Try again?’ she asked, climbing up onto the fence. ‘Back him up.’

  Luke reined Legsy’s rump towards the fence. Jess patted him, more gently this time. ‘Easy, fella.’

  Legsy snorted and shifted about, unsure.

  ‘Gee, he’s nervous,’ said Jess. ‘Who broke him in? They did a crap job.’

  ‘Me,’ said Luke, indignant. ‘You getting on, or you just gonna do clown tricks all day?’

  Jess leapfrogged onto Legsy’s rump and wriggled up onto his back.

  Luke let the colt’s head go, and they set off towards Mossy Mountain.

  As they passed the Pettilow property, Legsy began nickering and prancing about beneath them. He let out a loud squeal. Out beyond the trees a brilliant white horse grazed along the river flats.

  ‘Chelpie’s out again,’ said Luke. He had lost count of how many times he’d come across the mare and led her back to Katrina Pettilow’s place. He had even fixed the fence a couple of times, without so much as a thank you from the Pettilows.

  ‘She’s always out,’ said Jess. ‘If I had my phone on me, I’d ring the ranger.’

  ‘She just wants some green-pick,’ said Luke. ‘There’s hardly any grass in her paddock, poor thing.’

  ‘Katrina should look after her better,’ said Jess. ‘Look at her big wormy belly. She needs a good stomach-drench.’ He felt Jess shudder behind him. ‘Ugh, she’s so . . . nasty, and weird. I don’t know what it is about her.’

  Like Jess, Luke couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was about Chelpie. She was always on the outer. Other horses didn’t like her and she didn’t like them. But he had a soft spot for the little mare.