Passover

by Aphrodite Anagnost

  “I have my Remington.” Lev smiled. “Don’t worry. Nothing’s gonna happen while I’m here.”

  He heard her voice. “I wish Aristino were alive.” Beneath the soil of the west pasture, the dead horse quickened.

  The thirty-year-old Grand Prix Hanoverian had been shot by drunken trespassers during goose-hunting season the previous fall. A late snow had frozen the humus above his shallow grave. But now, galvanized by the growing storm of ghostly life force—the power of animal magnetism blaring from the west woods—his bones shifted. Not enough to disturb the thin white above the grave overhead. But enough to alert the budding trees that he did not rest. Their leafy branches began to sway in pendulous motion—slow dancing in the incense-breath of morning. The cluster of oaks behind Ewell’s Small Engine Repair and Bike Shop whispered to one another, “He lives, he lives.”

  The horse raised the bony compartment that had once been his nostrils by leaning on the fulcrum of his great mandible. He sniffed the warm decay caked around him. The dirt was metallic, disgusting. He smelled and tasted moss and old leaves, grubs and dead roots. An emerald ash borer had lost its way and crawled into one nostril. He tried to sneeze, but couldn’t.

  Thirteen months before, Dave had filled the burial pit with two tons of Bo jack soil pushed over the body with his backhoe. Then the Sheltons had stood over the sacred grave as crepuscular rays melted into the horizon and disappeared, tears pouring from their eyes, dripping onto the dirt that covered their beloved, lost Aristino.

  His ears and hide had long since decomposed, leaving only the bleached white skeleton that had once supported the desiderata of a stallion. No sound was of interest now. He’d found peace in silence. But the awakened activity of his brain, barely perceptible even to him, caused his jaw to clench. At first, he heard only the hum of the echoing subterranean quiet, felt its ring within his vast facial sinuses. But then, came echoes of a distant voice, as if a master were calling.

  Air began to collect in his thorax within the tiny sacks of desiccated lung tissue now regenerating like champagne bubbles. Sinew adhered to bone. Ligaments wove gristly bands between joints. In the sockets of his skull, eyes connected only the memory of light to movement. Still, he saw only darkness. His tongue grew, tasting the loam around it. It snapped back with speed, pressing against the soft palate, sensing iron. He wanted to twist and turn, to find up from down. His disappointed tongue flicked out again, seeking salt, finding only bitter tannins in the remains of old stems and leaves. With a great heave, he shifted his haunches and felt dry spring earth trickle over them. As yet, his brain was dull, understanding only cramped discomfort, questioning nothing. He waited for more news from his senses. Electricity collected and traveled through rivers of nervous tissue, pushing against dark undertow, until tiny sparks joined together into burgeoning bays of lightning.

  Into the sky above his grave, a thunderstorm approached from twenty miles away. Soon there would be lightning, rain. In only a few moments, brain and spinal cord would connect to his peripheral nerves, then to emerging muscles and organs. At last, again, he would be alive.

  A gasp inflated his powerful nascent lungs. The depressed and crumbling surface of the grave heaved up to the level of the forest floor. Blue jays flew off, outraged, shrieking. A badger stayed behind, nose twitching. As did a vixen. Her hunting interrupted, she waited to see what would happen next. A rooster crowed a warning to his wandering clutch.

  Instinct told the horse nothing about where he was, or what had happened to him, or why the long sleep. Instinct only said, stand upright, so he fought to roll up off his side and flex his forelegs under his body. At first, he was pinned by the weight of two tons of crumbly loam. He rested for a moment and tried again, this time loosening enough of the heavy, dark ceiling overhead to rise to a semi-prone position, hind legs tensed beneath his belly, forelegs tucked. His muzzle, now covered with soft fur and fine whiskers, rested on one foreleg a moment.

  The horse half-closed his eyes and sighed. He dozed, mind deepening into a light sleep. But sandy loam and decomposed shells migrated between budding hairs and into the renewed flesh of his skin. An old iron plow was jabbing one rib. He quivered with cold. Then every inch of his panniculus muscle contracted, wrinkling skin in the rhythm of stars twinkling. He felt the vaulted earth around him as a cocoon—of grit. No room to sweat. He was suffocating. His adrenal glands spewed epinephrine, which made his hide slippery, releasing the thrust of his will.

  If he had known his head was only inches from the surface, or had been able to reason that the moisture in the ground had weakened its hold on him, he might’ve been able to stand directly. But he wasn’t capable of reason. So he consulted only contracting haunches and pawing hooves, his most trustworthy advisors. His front legs burrowed while his hind legs pushed, a tactic which had its merits.

  He excavated with doggish exuberance. The displaced dirt caused the surface of his grave to collapse, opening a doorway to the sky with needles of a pine tree swinging across it. Then his eyes took over, telling him to stick a hoof, jambette, into that tempting hole of sky. As he rose to the light, there came a hunger for grasses, a thirst for water. And an overwhelming eagerness to find his master.

  Dave looked up at the broken fingers of light reaching through the fog’s gray blanket of worried sky. Broken beams slipped over the gabled roof of the Dutch barn. He watched Rachel as she pulled on leather gloves, snapped the Velcro closed, then tickled Le Pouf’s nose. She caught his gaze and smiled back. For now he would ignore the doom that pressed down on the entire family, sparing no one.

  To avoid bruising their horses’ backs, Dave and Rachel mounted from solid oak stumps positioned under a wall-sized mirror affixed to the white barn. Each horse seemed to stare at himself, or at least recognize a close relative bowing in front of his own reflection. The morning dew had all but evaporated from the glass, leaving tiny rivulets dripping from its edges. Dave and Rachel rounded their horses’ necks in the mirror simultaneously—as if the mounting process had been choreographed, right down to the patting of shoulders and the slow, moderate seat adjustments.

  “We should try to be as nice to each other as we are to Slivovitz and Le Pouf,” said Dave, reaching with a gloved hand to rub his horse’s salt and pepper mane, quick-braided from forelock to withers in the usual Andalusian style.

  “You’re right, Davey.” A tiny smile penetrated her frown. “I’m sorry we argued.” She was watching his face in the arena mirror.

  Dave rubbed his horse’s withers. Slivovitz snorted three times, blowing a cloud of snot that landed on his own slate-colored chest.

  “Hairballs?” said Dave, ignoring a fleeting spasm deep in his guts.

  “Le Pouf is not a psycho. He’s just sensitive.” Rachel patted the dove-colored Le Pouf, paler than the other horse.

  “You’re right. He’s altogether more civilized. If he were a person, he’d be a Quaker.” Slivovitz was coiled like a spring.

  They took the piaffe path, a two-hundred-meter straight trail, lined on both sides by Empress trees. Broad leaves like hands waved goodbye in the chilly pine-laced swells of wind. Purple trumpets of flowers littered sparse patches of new grass.

  Both horses offered the piaffe, the trot in place, without being asked, out of habit.

  “Le Pouf seems eager.” Rachel laughed for the first time that day. “He’s begging to gallop. Let’s go.”

  “Kay, Rach.” She’d been remote all morning. It dissolved, at least for a moment, into the suddenly scorched breeze. It was as if God had turned up the volume of the sun. Dave sighed with relief. Their synchronized rides were exercises in solitude and mastery; each merged with a horse compelled to obey—but, still, any horse by his very nature, driven to evade, to escape the rider’s will. If this were their last day on earth together, he would take Rachel by the waist and make love to her. If she resisted, he would force her.

  They rode a track through the woods, the ground flat as a billiard-table. Within minu
tes the gallop slowed without effort into a waltz-like canter. He hummed Chopin’s Ashkenazy waltz. They cantered a corner, still abreast. Hooves sounded a dull clomping as the footing changed to a tractor-wide path of close-cropped winter wheat at the edge of a field, planted at Christmas, usually harvested around Easter. The forest embraced the perimeter of the knee-high leaves of grass. A jungle of beech trees, sycamore, and black walnut was riven by game trails half- obscured by choking Virginia creeper and tangles of scrub holly and wild honeysuckle.

  “Let’s walk a minute,” Dave said, dropping his reins to the buckle.

  He ducked beneath the limb of a locust tree and scanned the gentle wave on the field that seemed to be sailing northward. For him, nothing was more mysterious than the scent on which hill-topping horses were dependent for their sport. As a rule, horses acquired their best tracking scents on grass.

  “You’ve got a nose like a rat terrier,” Rachel said. “You ought to try tracking.”

  A week before, he’d found a mouse nest between two stacks of hay that’d eluded Nijinsky. Poor, dead Nijinsky. “I try not to miss a thing, Rach.”

  He lifted his nose to the air. Slivovitz rotated his ears back toward his rider and snorted as if to blow a sprig of hay out of his own nose.

  “You could get a job with Homeland Security.” Rachel laughed. “You know, sniffing luggage like a Labrador.”

  A smell reminiscent of stale horse sweat, but fetid, fermented, now greeted Dave’s nostrils. Repulsive yet familiar, almost like the buck rack bedraggled with strings of meat Wolfgang had dragged home last week. But this wasn’t decayed deer carcass.

  “Let’s walk a little more.” He called through air, now tainted with too many odors: sulfur, a freshly dug hole, grass, a hint of cinders. But fused, in a swampy, alluvium stench.

  “Yuck,” she said. “God. What is that?” Both horses’ sweaty necks bulged. Their haunches coiled as if winding up to leap into gallop. The horses didn’t like the smell either. “Not your typical carrion that Wolfie rolls in. Far worse than last week’s bath in decomposing deer organs.”

  Dave remembered how funny Rachel had looked, wagging her finger at Wolfgang, lecturing him in her good-boy-doggie voice. He grinned, recalling the smarter-than-shit cardiologist and county medical examiner, and her ineffectual childlike admonishments of the droopy dachshund. He patted Slivovitz’s withers. Both horses snorted, alarmed.

  “What is that stink, Davey. You’re the one with the nose. Come on. Tell me.”

  He shrugged, drool filling his mouth. “Just—gross.”

  “Jesus.”

  Both horses lowered their heads as if trying to make out the meaning of some sound. A pounding of earth inaudible to their riders.

  Dave and Rachel looked over their shoulders, into the woods behind them.

  “I think we should canter on.” Dave reached up and rubbed the loose braid of Slivovitz’s gray mane.

  “Ready,” she said.

  Both their mounts struck off in the same breath, abreast, having practiced it a million times.

  The muffled thudding of another galloping horse echoed through the forest. “They hear it, too.” He called back to Rachel, over wind that batted his ears.

  “Of course they do,” she yelled. “They’re horses.”

  He thought of turning back. No. She wouldn’t want to. He knew that. But inside his chest his heart jackhammered.

  The horses cantered faster, almost stampeding. Fear tasted bitter as grape seeds on Dave’s tongue.

  Beside a tangle of woods, he extended an arm to ward off some specter galloping along next to them. He touched nothing, except the speed of the rushing, scorched air. The ears of Slivovitz and Le Pouf twirled like antennas. Had some fetid thing risen from the grave to come rushing up behind them? An injured animal, sick with some horrible pestilence, like the germ that had caused the frogs to die? He twisted his neck and glanced over a shoulder, but saw only the blinking eyes of beech trees, the green choking vines that ate up weaker, smaller bushes.

  In the next instant a huge, brown shape leapt straight at him.

  Slivovitz and Le Pouf must have seen it too. They wheeled and flew into the woods like lasers. A duet of snorting filled Dave’s ears.

  He looked over at Rachel, unable to speak, throat knotted shut. She ducked her head below Le Pouf’s neck, avoiding a branch.

  They sailed over a massive ancient stump and landed in a box canyon of trees made impenetrable by palisades of undergrowth. Then, as if protected like foxes in a den, the horses slowed, seemed to relax, heads low, ribs heaving. Both riders loosened the reins to the buckle and halted.

  They were panting, too. Rachel sneezed into the crook of an arm, then lifted her shirttail and wiped her forehead, jaw set. Dave stared at her face, a face he could never grow tired of. He wanted to protect her. She flashed a reticent smile. She was damming up her emotions. Stalwart in all edgy games of dominance, she knew when it was safe to crumble, and when it was not.

  The smell was gone. The only sounds in the forest now were the deep breathing of the four of them, the rustling of leaves.

  “Listen,” he said. “No more hoof beats.”

  He swallowed past the bucket of acid locked at the bottom of his throat. “That was no horse behind us,” said Rachel. “It must have been a sick buck.”

  “Too big to be a buck.” Dave looked around for a way out of the thicket. “Did you get a good look at it?”

  “I didn’t see a horse,” Rachel insisted, shaking her head. “Just a big, brown stinky blob. It wasn’t that weird.”

  “Well, it scared me.” He refolded his sleeves, which had fallen and were flopping at his wrists. “And I didn’t say it was a horse. Maybe a moose.” He considered faking a laugh, but couldn’t muster one.

  “I know you think it was a horse,” said Rachel, chewing one cheek.

  “You have to admit,” said Dave, snatching off a chokecherry twig that stuck in his hair. “The hoof beats sure sounded like a horse.”

  “Didn’t smell like one. Phew!”

  Dave leaned over Slivovitz’s neck and worked a burr from his forelock, then buried his face in the horse’s neck and inhaled. He swallowed, rubbing his cheek against the silky hair.

  There was a sudden look of enlightenment on Rachel’s face. Then she turned pale and lines formed on her brow. “That was not a dead horse,” she said.

  A gunshot, then a shout rang out through the woods. Rachel jumped, spooking her horse, then gave a wary side-glance to Dave. He shook his head in a kind of shared foreboding. No birds sang. No insects chirped. There came only the sussurant whisperings of leaves, like old men wringing dry hands. Le Pouf and Slivovitz lifted their necks and pricked their ears, snorted and stamped. For them, country shootings made familiar noise. Rachel backed her horse away from the top of a slope. The ground fell away steeply for ten yards. We should have ridden out into the woods last week, or the week before. Not today, she thought. Her hands and feet went cold. She shook them until they tingled and burned, then patted Le Pouf’s neck and held the reins at the buckle with one hand.

  Dave looked at Rachel, and blinked. “Let’s check out the perimeter.” The horses walked nose to tail on the rim of the thicket.

  “That could’ve been someone shot. By the killer,” she said. She stood in her stirrups, trying to get a view of the felled tree and the old creek bed that’d led them here. Was it a trap?

  “Not enough speed to get out the way we came in. Can’t jump it from the walk,” she said.

  Dave leaned over one side of his horse and pulled away a tangled mass of honeysuckle vine. He peered down a dark alley of woods. “It only kills at night.”

  “What do you mean, ‘it’?”

  “I don’t mean anything.” He led the way down a narrow trail between a pair of loblolly pines.

  “Why are you so sure he’ll only do it at night?” she asked.

  Dave broke dry branches that blocked a game trail, breaking off twigs that cou
ld injure the horses’ eyes. “Come on, Rachel. It’s always been that way.” He was a few meters into the woods now. Deer scat freckled a narrow track of dirt, marked by hoofprints. “That was probably just a turkey hunter.

  “You don’t know that.” She and Le Pouf followed Dave and Slivovitz, one length behind. Slivovitz swished his tail at a dogwood branch that struck him on the rump. “Those tail hairs would make a beautiful violin bow for Mom,” Rachel said.

  “She’d like that, Rach.” He held a juniper limb back for his horse to pass, then took his pocketknife out and sawed off some green sprouts. “Watch out you don’t get branched, honey.”

  “Thanks, Davey. You’re doing a good job leading us out of here. A real mountain man.” Rachel thought of the cords of oak he and the kids had cut and loaded in the rickety wheelbarrow and stacked by the side of the house, where the coal chute had once been.

  A cardinal called Wheat!Wheat!Wheat! from the crotch of a maple. She looked up and saw baby clouds sailing through patches of sky as if they had all the time in the world. The cardinal fluttered off.

  “The shot had to be a marsh hunter.” He stepped over a lodge pole pine. “Careful.”

  “They hunt more turkeys…on the bayside these days than the seaside.” Rachel bent over to pick a stem of bluebells poking out of a gnarl of thorns.

  “If it is a hunter,” said Dave. “We’ve got to do something about it.”

  “You’re right. I don’t want to see another one near our farm. Ever. Not after—”

  Le Pouf let out a shrill neigh. Dave stood in the stirrups and looked around. Rachel froze and listened for the cause of Le Pouf’s worry. She trusted her horse.