by Lauran Paine
Johnny Reb was an unhandsome old Grulla horse, but gentle with a rare, philosophical quietude. They put him in a pleasant stall and fed him warm rolled barley mash, timothy hay, and waited for the glands under his jaw to swell. Jack explained how this happened, and, when Rob came eagerly one morning to tell him there was a big swelling, he and the lad went to the stall together. There, Jack took out his pocket knife and talked as he honed it.
Rob stared at that knife until he could no longer stand the silver reflection of it and a shudder passed over him.
“You’ve got to learn these things,” Jack was saying. “Because, whether we like to do them or not, they’ve got to be done. See here, see how gray and pulpy that swelling is. See how the hair’s slipped. Feel up here...that soft spot.”
“Yes.”
“That’s where it’s headed up.”
“Are you going to cut it there?”
A nod. “Drain it. If we don’t, it’ll cut off his air.”
“But it’s not near his nose, Jack.”
“No, it’s under his throat here. That’s where the air goes into his lungs.”
Johnny Reb’s big dark eyes watched them listlessly. They were dry-hot and tired old eyes.
There was a sound of ripping flesh, a gush of ill-smelling poison — and Rob fled, leg dragging, leaving squiggly marks in the alleyway and sounds of soft swiftness.
Outside, beyond the barn, the sun was pale. The grass beyond town was cured into drabness and the world shimmered evilly around the boy. Closed in oppressively, then danced outward. He walked along with sticky dust underfoot. He was completely alone until he emerged from a dirty dogtrot between two buildings that was rank with urine scent, and stood upon the plank walk of Herd’s main thoroughfare. Down a way he saw a fine buggy draw up before a house, saw a woman get down, turn,and smile at the man who had driven her home.
Her hair was short, burnished where the light struck it. When she moved, it was with grace, like she was floating. Rob watched her without moving a muscle. She would be like that. His mother.
Then the buggy drove off, the woman disappeared indoors, and emptiness returned.
He walked as far as the water trough and sank down upon the buggy seat there that was bolted to a big sycamore tree.
Then the anguish hit him. Hard, solidly, like a fist. It made his throat constrict and his eyes blur.
He remembered the terror of that night when people had come to his grandfather’s house. Solemn-faced people, looking a little over his head or avoiding his eyes. The night his mother died. He remembered his grandfather trying to explain, how he refused to believe, and went running through the house, searching. The sick room scent had gone through him, making his teeth chatter even though it had been July.
He remembered the inward faces, the locked expressions. Remembered wondering: How could this be? Why would she do that? And the old man’s voice droning on in its tired way.
But worst of all — then and now — was that certain, absolute knowledge that she was never coming back. That she was with his father and neither of them was ever coming back.
Why?
What had he done? What had any of them done? Why couldn’t she have waited until he was big? Who had made it happen? What would fill the emptiness?
Nothing.
He scuffed the dust with his sound leg, thinking back to the days that had followed. The slow, heavy days that had followed when he had learned the answer. Nothing. So long as he lived there would always be that emptiness.
He sat there on the old buggy seat and his teeth chattered again. He knew old Johnny Reb was going to die, too. Knew it with such certainty that nothing could have shaken his conviction.
Even if the old horse had come walking toward him right then, he still would have known he was going to die. But Johnny Reb didn’t come; only shadows came, round and soft and ugly, spreading and thickening as night fell.
Along the roadway saloon lights came on.
The boy got off the buggy seat and started home with the stark memory of pain, of tearing flesh, hot and dry to the knife, the smell of poison spilling out, Jack Swift’s big hands, the knife, and the listless eyes of an old horse vivid in his mind.
III
Rob didn’t return.
Days flowed. Jack had buried Johnny Reb, knowing it was age more than distemper that had killed him. He’d treated hundreds of horses for distemper and they’d recovered. Johnny Reb had been old — too old, too tired, too willing to leave, so he had gone.
One night a sultry wind blew. A heavy, bumbling wind that dragged its swollen belly over the barn’s roof. Behind it came the sulky growl of thunder. There were massing hosts far overhead in the darkness, rain clouds none could see but knew they were there because the lanterns of the night — the stars — were obscured.
Jack was sprawled in a barrel chair in the harness room. He got up restlessly for no reason at all and walked the length of the barn. The horses were also restless. Static electricity made their manes and tails splay out. Jack went up to the roadway entrance and leaned there with the scent of a storm coming to him. The night was warm, rich with sage fragrance.
The first drops fell just as a hurrying buggy wheeled in with a man and a girl. Jack listened to their pealing laughter. He loosened the check rein loose and led the horse farther back, unharnessed the animal, and stalled it. The man and girl bent into the turmoil of the night, heading across the road. Jack watched them briefly, then backed the rig into place by the shafts. By that time rain was pelting upon the roof, beginning to smack wetly against the hardpan roadway, and glisten along the gutters.
A whooping pair of cowboys went careening past northward, slithering recklessly through the gumbo.
Orange lamplight shone clearly up and down the road and the air was cleaner. Lightning flashed. The drumming increased and a turbulent burst of thunder shook the town.
Jack stood in the roadside opening of the barn, smelling the cleansed, whirling air. Feeling the storm’s wildness. Inwardly responding to the night, to its unshackled swift-running turbulence, its freedom.
For some unrelated and inexplicable reason he thought of the boy, of undersize, thin-faced Rob Logan. Thought that he never should have shown him how distemper is cured by draining. Thinking now, too late, that the fear that lived in Rob was an overwhelming thing, that it blanketed all other emotions under its flooding, moving tide.
Thinking back, step by step, and seeing now that he hadn’t been building something between them that pain and fear wouldn’t destroy at the first opportunity simply because he’d never really faced Rob’s fear. He had failed to make it grow smaller because he hadn’t faced it at all; he had simply tried to ignore it. All the while the fear had lain dormant, until an old horse’s suffering had brought it up, dark and depthless and encompassing.
The breeze ruffled Jack’s hair, heavy and close where his hat had pressed it down, drew out a heavy coil of it, and fled, leaving the curl hanging low upon the man’s forehead.
Lightning bolts blasted an eerie, crackling strangeness over the world, too white, too sharp. And thunder followed with a cannonade close yet distant, echoes running down the glistening darkness. Water thickened in the roadway, chocolate-like, boiling, dissolving manure heaps and prying at the plank walk. It tumbled into crevices to hiss and gush.
Then he saw a blurred figure across the road with a small bag in his hand hunching into the storm, hastening northward. The doctor. Jack’s attention fastened upon the form, watching his progress. He could faintly hear the solid clump of footfalls. He last saw the figure, a bobbing, murky outline, shiny-wet, down where the last houses were at the north end of Herd. He thought someone was having a baby, or had slipped in the rain, maybe, and had sprained an ankle or broken an arm. Or perhaps was dying with the gigantic splendor of a summer thunderstorm all around them.
Then he s
aw another figure, a woman’s silhouette this time, coming south along the opposite plank walk toward him. She was covered almost entirely by something coarse, heavy, and rusty-looking — a rain garment of some kind.
He watched her fight through the buffet of the storm, face set indomitably forward as though she was being driven. The way she moved forward with hard intentness, almost ruthlessness, left no doubt that whatever her purpose in being out this night it was urgent.
He was surprised when she stepped down off the walk into the ankle-deep water, heading straight for where he leaned. Then, in a cold flash of lightning, he saw her face — white, wire-tight, cheeks pallid on either side of a full, set mouth, and wide eyes. Without thinking, he moved toward her, held out his hand at the plank walk’s edge, and was shocked at the iciness of her grip when she reached forward. He led her into the lee of the barn’s overhang. She looked straight into his face.
“Are you Jack?” she asked through rivulets of water.
“Well,” he answered wonderingly, “I’m Jack Swift.”
“Do you work for Mister Buck?”
“Yes’m.”
Uneasiness stirred behind his belt buckle. A premonition. Her cold fingers tightened on his hand. She tugged.
“We’ve got to hurry.”
He let her drag him out into the rain, back through the torrent of the roadway, rain pelting his shoulders like tiny fists. Over the storm he called out: “What is it?”
She looked around, but instead of answering leaned farther into the turbulence breasting each fresh burst of wind and squalling rain with an awesome singleness of purpose, hastening down the night. Several times lightning touched her profile to show the dark brilliance of her eyes and the stubborn thrust of jaw.
She stopped finally before a small, whitewashed house, partly logs, partly planed lumber. Overhead a large sycamore tree groaned and writhed, limbs flinging about in despair, rent by winds with a terrible vengefulness and showering down silver-green leaves. She put her face up close and said: “In there. Go on in. I’ll be back in a moment.” Her upflung arm pointed rigidly to where a lantern burned low. He looked from the house to her face.
“Who lives there?”
“The Logans.” She gave him a push.
He resisted it, turning toward her again. “What’s wrong?”
But she was moving away, the rusty, voluminous rain garment gathered close, hurrying up the walk of the house next door.
He stood for only a moment, then a shadow passing in front of the light at the Logan place caught his attention. He went to the door and entered.
A heavily bewhiskered man with a leonine head looked up when Jack’s entrance brought with it a raw gust of air. In the sputtering lamplight there was something primeval about him. Small eyes glowed from folds of flesh, heavy arms, and sloping shoulders bulging with strength, and his thick body moved with strange and heavy grace as he delved into a small black bag.
There were also two other men. One was very old; he sniffled constantly. His head was hairless and folded in wrinkles. His eyes, wet and cloudy, seemed only to half grasp events.
The third man continued to gaze at Jack after the others had looked away. He stood unmovingly erect, with a thin, ruddy face carved from stone. His jaw was too heavy for the rest of his features. He said: “Well...?”
When Jack stated his name, the other two men looked up swiftly, studying him. Finally the bear-like man closed his bag and straightened up with a deep sigh. “The lad’s in the lean-to,” he growled. “And the old man’s dead.”
“His grandfather?”
“Yes. Died a few minutes ago.” The doctor was briefly still, then added: “It’s hard on the boy, of course. That’s why Amy went for you. He got hysterical and kept repeating your name.” The nearly hidden, bright, sardonic eyes lingered on Jack’s face. One big-knuckled hand snapped the bag closed with abrupt finality. “I guess she couldn’t handle him,” the doctor concluded, and started for the door without a backward glance at any of them. When he passed out into the night, the lamps guttered again and the old man peered at one of them and sniffled.
The unmoving man’s hard stare was coldly impersonal. “You’re the new hostler at Buck’s barn, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
As he replied, Jack moved past the icy-eyed man and through the only closed door. The girl was already there, evidently having come there through some rear entrance or hallway. Jack noticed that her rain dress was gone and that she was smaller than he had first thought her to be.
Rob was there, too, cold to the touch and with sweat dappling his thin face. His eyes were expressionless; they looked empty, hollowly sunken in the thinness of his face. Jack moved forward, casting an enormous shadow in the little room. The girl looked up quickly, clearly awed by the way he dwarfed everything else. The only sound was the tumult beyond, in the night.
Jack’s hand fell lightly on the boy. At the contact a wild trembling seized Rob. Outside, the wind sucked back suddenly, leaving a stillness. Then the girl’s breathing was audible, sharply drawn and cutting. Jack picked the boy up and was surprised at the insignificance of his weight. The trembling lessened. For a moment there was utter silence, then Rob cried. His whole body shook. It was as though a dam had burst except that there was no sound and no tears, just the terrible retching and the scrabbling of small fingers groping along big-muscled arms.
Through the odd burning in the big man’s throat he said: “Easy, boy, easy.” This was a totally new experience for him.
Rob’s tearing grief went beyond this last, final hurt to a hopelessness that was beyond reasoning, acceptance, or justification. Beyond everything except despair. The big man felt this intuitively. He also felt something else. In other days the boy had said: Learn to use a gun real good so’s folks’d be scairt of you....
If he had felt that way then, how would he feel a month from now when only the loneliness and bitterness remained?
Jack looked around at the girl. Her full and beautiful mouth was vivid in a locked setting of pallor. There was nothing in her eyes, in her expression, to guide him, so he rocked a little, with rain pounding overhead and occasional growls of thunder thickening the night with a strange power. Finally he spoke, let words flow outward in a soothing way until the trembling died and the wrenching sobs lessened, and his voice filled the room, overriding even the sounds of the storm beyond the solitary window.
His arms ached after a time and his back protested against its hunched-forward position, but he did not move and the entire immensity of the world was squeezed into the lean-to room as his voice droned on.
Then, against his chest, the tumbled hair moved and waxen lips said: “Was it my fault?”
The girl half turned away, eyes hidden behind dark lashes. “Never think that,” Jack said.
“Then...why?”
Jack looked at the girl again, shared with her the sublimity of knowledge that here, in two words, was something older than man himself, and no one could answer it.
She might have spoken but Jack shook his head. He knew — had lived just that long — what people said now. They mentioned God and His mysterious ways. He also knew that in a small boy’s mind hate and fear were lying, waiting to fasten upon something. There must be no mention of God.
He said: “I don’t know, Rob. I reckon nobody really knows.”
The bowed head moved, gray lips murmured against the big man’s chest. He caught only two words: “Johnny Reb....”
He understood and spoke again, with the sounds of the storm atrophying, the intensity of the rain lessening around them, the guttering lamp ceasing to smoke. “Johnny Reb was old, Rob, and he was sick. Inside a horse, like inside a man, is a thing called will. When will dies, so does the horse, or the man. Age takes the will out of things, like it takes the strength away. When an old horse loses his will, he is tired. When he is tire
d, he wants to lie down and rest.”
“But he doesn’t want to die!”
The body against Jack’s chest stiffened in protest.
“Sure, son,” the big man said softly. “Death isn’t hurt. It isn’t pain or fear. It’s rest.”
“My grandpaw wouldn’t want to go away from me.”
Jack could feel the heartbeats. “Your grandpaw needed rest,” he said. “You’d want him to have that, wouldn’t you?”
“My mother wasn’t old...she wasn’t tired.”
“Son, sickness is like age. It takes away the will, too. It makes folks want to rest.”
Jack looked at the girl. Her back was fully to him now. He looked past her at the drab wall, crooked where the log foundation had settled. Rob relaxed a little in his arms and Jack knew that because he and the boy had shared sorrow together, twice now, they would never be apart again, for in them both dwelt a might of loneliness, each had to gather up the pieces of their lives and start over again.
Then Rob slept, slumped imperceptibly against the big man with his breathing deep and soft, broken only by an occasional drawn-out shudder.
Jack put him to bed. The girl helped. They turned his face toward the wall and away from the light. When they both straightened up beside the cot, the girl said: “I can’t cry any more.”
Jack ignored that. “What happened with his grandfather?”
“He had a stroke. He was very old. Since his daughter died...well...like you said, the will to live was gone.”
Watching the shadowed, thin face, Jack said: “What becomes of him now?”
The girl returned to her chair. “I suppose Josh will take him.”
“Josh?”
“Josh Logan...his father’s brother. Rob’s uncle.”
