Pony Jumpers- Special Edition 1- Jonty Page 4

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Well, it’s a thing people say. Put it this way - if I told you to look after my garden like you do but refused to give you anything in return, would you still do it?”

  “Probly not.”

  “Too right you wouldn’t, and why would you?” Murray said. “If you want to teach Tani to do those things, you have to show him that it’s fun, make it so he enjoys it. Then he’ll work harder too.”

  I looked up at the old man suspiciously. “Murray, you do know that I don’t enjoy weeding your garden, right?” I asked him. “I mean, I don’t mind doing it, but it’s not fun.”

  Murray rolled his eyes at my blockheadedness. “No kidding. But you get something you want out of it,” he reminded me, and I nodded. “So you’ve got to give Tani something he wants when he works hard for you.”

  “Like carrots?”

  “Yeah, like carrots. Or a rest, or a pat,” Murray said. “Try see it from his side. If all you’re ever doing is kicking him and pulling on the reins, what’s his motivation to do any better?”

  For some reason, at that moment an image of Tess popped into my head, leaning forward and patting her pony after she’d trotted over the pole on the ground. Unlike Taniwha, her pony was experienced, but unlike me, Tess had taken the time to thank her pony for making an effort.

  As I walked out to the paddock to check on Taniwha, I began to realise that I still had a lot to learn.

  PART II

  -

  LESSONS

  Be humble, be hungry,

  and always be the hardest worker in the room.

  - Dwayne Johnson

  HARVEST

  The months rolled by steadily, and Taniwha grew fatter, shinier and better behaved. October turned into November, and then December finally arrived and school was out for the year, with Christmas just around the corner. The days were sunny and warm, and I was up just after dawn every day, and not home until it was starting to get dark.

  I spent hours every day at Murray’s, and when I wasn’t there I was doing my paper run, or bothering neighbours for odd jobs to help me save the money that I needed to buy Taniwha a saddle. I was determined not to go back to Pony Club until I had one – and proper riding boots, and maybe even some of those dumb jodhpurs that you were supposed to wear, even though I thought they looked pretty stupid. On days when I couldn’t find anything else to do, I’d walk into town and go to the big tack shop, and wander around for hours, breathing in the smell of the new leather and looking in bewilderment at all the equipment that some people needed to train their horses. I played a game with myself to find out what each thing was for – sometimes I could guess, but other times I had to ask, and if anyone shopping was nice enough to answer one question, I would seize the opportunity to ask them five. It was a fascinating new world and my mind soaked up the information way quicker than it soaked up anything I’d been trying to learn at school.

  I never liked school – there was far too much sitting still involved, and I’ve never been any good at that. I’ve always done my best thinking while I’m moving, and my inability to focus kept getting me in trouble. The teachers nagged at Mum to take me to this doctor in town who would give me some drugs to ‘help me focus’, but Mum wasn’t so sure. She kept saying I was just a kid and couldn’t they let me go for a run around the building when I got too fidgety, because that’s what worked at home, but they had some kind of rule that wouldn’t allow it, so I was stuck behind my desk, struggling to behave myself.

  But now there were weeks and weeks of summer holidays, and I planned on making the most of them. Until, true to form, Murray brought me crashing back down to earth one afternoon when he asked me how I planned on feeding Taniwha over the winter.

  “He’ll need hay, you know,” he told me as we sat at his kitchen table drinking mugs of hot tea.

  My initial attempts to convince Murray that I didn’t like tea had fallen on deaf ears, but I’d eventually developed a taste for it – or at least for all of the sugar I poured into it.

  I added another spoonful and stirred it in.

  “How much does hay cost?”

  “Depends on the quality. Around here, anything from eight to fifteen dollars a bale,” Murray told me.

  I tried to keep the shock from my face. “Okay. Well, I’ve got fifty-two dollars saved up from my paper run,” I told him proudly. “So that’s about six and a half bales, if I can get them for eight bucks each. How many will he need?”

  “Twenty, give or take.”

  I choked on my tea. “Twenty!”

  “At least. Grass doesn’t grow in the winter, and I’m not having him destroy my paddocks because you’re too lazy to buy enough hay.”

  “But that’s at least a hundred and sixty dollars!” I said, thinking sadly of my saddle fund. “I can’t make that much money before winter.”

  Murray sipped his tea. “I thought you might say that. I do know a way you might be able to get a few bales in exchange for a bit of hard work, if you’re interested.”

  “Yeah!” I caught Murray’s sidelong look, and amended my response. “I mean, yes please.”

  “My son-in-law is baling tomorrow, and he needs a hand to pick up off the paddock. You’re a pretty scrawny kid, but if you can manage to lift a few bales for him, he might trade you a few for your day’s labour.”

  “Do you really think he will?” I asked nervously. “I can help for as many days as he needs.”

  “What’re you gonna do, neglect my garden?” Murray asked. “That lawn out there needs mowing, you know.”

  “I know. I’ll go do it right now,” I said, draining off my tea. A sludgy layer of sugar lay at the bottom, and I scraped it out with my spoon. “Will you please ask him if I can help tomorrow?”

  “I’ll ask him,” he promised.

  “Thanks Murray!”

  “Don’t you go letting me down, if he says yes,” Murray warned me. “If I’m going to vouch for you and say you’re a good worker, you better not make a liar out of me.”

  “Never,” I swore. “Cross my heart.”

  Murray’s son-in-law was named Bruce, and he picked us up early the next morning in a dirty silver ute. We drove out to his farm in near-silence, as the two men in the front of the cab had brief discussions about stock prices and rainfall and other farming topics. I sat in the back, pressed up against the window as I watched the farmland roll past. There were huge hills everywhere in varying shades of green, dotted over with fluffy white sheep and black and white cows. I wished I had Taniwha there – this was the perfect place to take him for an adventure, and I reckoned he’d love exploring all of the hills and valleys.

  Bruce turned off the highway onto an unsealed road, and we bounced over the potholes, making Murray wince. Bruce slowed down and tried to avoid the bumps in the road, and I rolled down the window and stuck my head out, looking at golden paddocks that stretched as far as my eye could see.

  “Is this your farm?” I asked Bruce in wonder, but he shook his head.

  “This is Parakai, John Maxwell’s place. One of the biggest stations in the area, been in their family for generations.”

  “Nice life if you can get born into it,” Murray muttered.

  Bruce and I ignored his grumblings. I hung one arm out of the car door like Bruce did and leaned into the breeze, letting it flow past my face, enjoying the sweet smell of hay in the air. We bumped along the road for several more kilometres, passing paddocks and thick clumps of native bush and a little house that looked like it was about to fall down. A bit further up the road and round the corner was a big white house with a wrap-around porch, with several big farm buildings spread out across the slope behind it. Other kids might dream of castles or mansions or houses by the sea, but at that moment I knew without a doubt that I wanted to live on a farm.

  We drove on, and on. I scooted across the bench seat to the other window and looked up at the top of a tall ridgeline, scattered with large rocks that hung jagge
dly out of the side of the hills.

  “Look!” I cried, and Bruce jumped, jerking the wheel to the side and making Murray swear.

  “You trying to give me a heart attack, boy?” Murray complained. “What’re you yelling about?”

  “There’s a horse up there,” I told him, pointing to the top of the ridge, where a horse and rider were cantering along, trailed by a pair of working dogs.

  It looked like the most fun anyone could have, and I wondered what the view was like, and if that lone rider appreciated what he got to do for a living. I’d never wanted to trade places with someone so badly before in my life.

  “You and your blimmin’ horses. Give it a rest for five minutes, would you?” Murray grumbled.

  “Who is that?” I asked Bruce, who shrugged.

  “I don’t know, one of the fellas that works for John Maxwell.”

  “Is that still part of the same farm?” I asked in amazement. “It must be huge!”

  “Few thousand acres. I told you, it’s one of the biggest around here,” Bruce said, turning onto another, better road and picking up speed.

  “I’m going to live on a farm just like that when I grow up,” I told them, watching the horse and rider disappear into the distance.

  Bruce looked at Murray, who glanced at me in the rear view mirror. “Nobody living on a farm ever got there without hard work,” he told me. “Sit down and put your seatbelt on for Christ’s sake, how many times do I have to tell you?”

  “Sorry.” I scrambled to secure the belt across my lap, hating how it held me in place, but forcing myself to put up with it. I had to work hard and make a good impression if I wanted hay for Taniwha.

  After another fifteen minutes or so of hurtling along the sealed road, then another ten minutes bumping slowly across potholes, we made it to Bruce’s farm. We turned in at the farm gate, shuddered over the cattle stop and drove on up to the house, which was a lot smaller and less impressive than the one we’d passed back at Parakai Station. We’d barely parked before a woman came out of the house to greet us.

  “Dad! How are you?”

  She gave Murray a warm hug and a kiss on the cheek, which struck me as funny because he was such an old grump, but Murray didn’t even look embarrassed. I’d jumped out of the ute as soon as it stopped and started to follow Murray as his daughter led him towards the house, but Bruce stopped me.

  “You come here to work or socialise?”

  I rushed back over to him. “Work,” I promised.

  He looked me up and down, clearly unimpressed. Murray had told me to wear long sleeves and jeans so I didn’t end up with a hay rash, but I’d outgrown my gumboots so I was wearing old grey sneakers that were coming apart at the toes.

  “Well, let’s get going then. You bring gloves?”

  I shook my head, and he sighed before getting back into the ute and motioning to me to join him. I scrambled into the front seat that Murray had vacated, and this time Bruce didn’t tell me to put my seatbelt on.

  Before that day, I’d thought that I was a pretty hard worker. I’d spent all those hours getting Murray’s garden in order, mowing the lawn and weeding the beds and pruning the trees and shrubs (under Murray’s very close supervision), not to mention mucking out Tani’s paddock, pulling up ragwort and digging out gorse, scrubbing out the water troughs and oiling my bridle until it shone, trimming Tani’s hooves and spending countless hours riding him around the paddock, teaching him to go over a pole on the ground and then over a low jump, slowly convincing him to bend around the row of garden stakes that I’d set up as a bending line, even spending a few minutes each day making him go round and round in circles, though I still wasn’t sure what I was trying to accomplish by doing that.

  But none of that was the kind of hard work that awaited me at Bruce’s farm. He drove the tractor and baler, which gathered up the hay that had been cut and raked into rows on the paddock and compacted it into bales, tied them with string and dropped them back onto the cut grass behind it. I was working with a couple of Bruce’s farmhands, picking up the bales and lifting them onto the flatbed trailer that was being towed around the paddock in the baler’s wake. It looked easy, but it turned out that hay bales were a lot heavier than I’d been expecting. Despite my best efforts, I was being outpaced by the trailer, and was doing less than half the work of the other guys. As a skinny eleven-year-old, they probably didn’t expect me to keep up with them, but I didn’t know that at the time, and wouldn’t have accepted it as an excuse, even if I had. I gave it my best shot, but I wasn’t really strong enough to toss the bales up onto the trailer, so they threw me up onto it and told me to stack the bales as they came up. One of the guys showed me how to push the bales up tight against each other, and cross-stack them like bricks so they wouldn’t topple over. Time went slow and fast at the same time, and by midday we had loaded and unloaded the trailer several times into the huge half-round hay barn.

  We’d just finished a load and were preparing to head back out when Bruce stopped us for lunch. I immediately collapsed onto my back in the grass, making everyone laugh. Murray and his daughter came down with plates of thick sandwiches, bacon and egg pie and fresh scones with jam and cream, and I ate until I was stuffed full, then lay back down and closed my eyes, making the most of this rest time so I would be ready to go again as soon as Bruce was.

  “How’s the boy working out?” I heard Murray ask.

  I opened one eye halfway to see if he knew I was listening, but he had his back to me, so he probably didn’t.

  “He’s a good worker for a kid,” Bruce said. “These fellas say he’s been pretty helpful.”

  Someone else spoke, and I recognised Paul, the farmhand who’d taught me how to stack hay.

  “He’s pretty sharp,” he said. “Not a scrap of muscle on him, but he hasn’t made any mistakes yet.”

  “Got a better track record than you then,” Bruce said. “Maybe I should keep him on and replace you.”

  My heart leapt at the thought, but Paul just laughed.

  “If you want your work done at quarter speed, go right ahead,” he replied.

  Murray coughed. “You could do worse,” he told his son-in-law. “He’ll grow. Don’t think he’s been fed too well. Bit like that pony of his, looks like it’s been half-starved its whole life.”

  “Well, he’s earned his pony a bale or two so far today,” Bruce said. “Let’s see if he can keep it up.”

  I was pretty gutted, to say the least, to think that my morning of back-breaking labour had only netted me two bales, but I was determined to leave Bruce with a good impression of me, and I worked even harder all afternoon. I could feel the skin on my face and the back of my neck burning, and knew I’d be red as a lobster by the evening, but I didn’t let up. The sun beat down on us mercilessly as the temperature climbed into the high twenties, and Paul, despite his teasing at lunchtime, made sure that I had plenty of water, and halfway through the day he gave me his cap to wear for a while to keep the sun off my face.

  Around three o’clock the baler jammed, and we were left waiting while Bruce attempted to fix it, with much swearing and grumbling. Each of the farmhands took a look at it, but nobody could do anything until Bruce called me over and asked if my smaller hand could reach in and find the snag. These days I’d be pretty careful about shoving my hand into any kind of machinery without knowing exactly how it worked, but I trusted Bruce implicitly, and was quickly able to release the twine and solve the problem. It was my proudest moment in what turned out to be a pretty satisfying day. We finished just before six, and since Murray was staying for dinner, they set a place for me too. Murray’s daughter Belinda had two little boys, a four-year-old called Malcolm and a two-year-old called Simon, and was pregnant with her third one. I played with Malcolm while Belinda put little Simon to bed. She kept thanking me for keeping Malcolm occupied, but really I just wanted a chance to play with his awesome toy farm, which had a tractor and a milking shed and a little black and white shee
pdog that reminded me of Sprout.

  Dinner was served once both boys were in bed, and I still think it was one of the best meals I’ve ever had in my life. The roast lamb was tender and delicious, the gravy thick and the vegetables cooked to perfection. Just like at lunch, I ate until I was stuffed full, and even then Belinda kept trying to feed me more. She was a round woman who obviously enjoyed food, and everyone around the table had hearty appetites, even Murray, who usually ate a single sandwich for lunch, scoffed down a whole plate of roast lamb. And he hadn’t even been out working in the sun all day!

  The roast was followed by apple crumble, with fresh whipped cream, and even though I was so full my stomach was starting to hurt, I ate a big helping. Finally the meal was done, and I helped Belinda carry the plates into the kitchen while she put the kettle on for tea. I leaned my elbows on the table and listened to Bruce and Murray talking, not understanding half of what they were on about, but just letting the warmth of the house and the satisfied feeling of a full stomach sink in. For the first time in a long time, the last niggle of restless energy had ebbed away, and I felt myself actually start to relax. I looked around the room at the old paintings and rustic furniture, and thought that I could get used to this life. If only it was mine. Malcolm’s toy farm was stacked away in the corner, and I stared at it, wishing I could swap lives with that little kid. He had no idea how lucky he was.

  Belinda came back into the room with a mug of tea for each of us, me included. I immediately added my usual four teaspoons of sugar, and was contemplating a fifth when I caught the incredulous look on Bruce’s face.

  “Got a sweet tooth, have you?” he asked me, and if I hadn’t been so sunburnt I probably would’ve been caught blushing.

  “Would you like a biscuit?” Belinda asked, getting up and going to the pantry. “I made these yesterday.”