by Jessie Haas
In the coop, Thea took a chick by the wing and tossed it in the air over her shoulder. She whirled to see it fall, but it landed with a dull, unresilient thump. Too dead to play with. She came out and leapt onto the roof to wash her paws.
“I suppose the coon was just playing too,” the girl said. “All those little things moving … bite, bite, bite.”
Phillip shivered. “That doesn’t make any difference to the chick.”
“No, but it does to me.”
She stood up. Phillip looked at her, trying to decide if she was the same age he was or older. She seemed too confident to be his own age.
“Why does it matter to you?” he asked.
“Because,” she said, “I want to know all about animals, how they’re related to people, and what we all want from each other.”
“Oh.” Older, he thought. He felt discouraged, and his mind wandered to the burial of the chicks. Dig a hole right here in the yard, he supposed. It seemed almost sacrilegious, though. In this whole neighborhood he would be the only person digging a hole in the earth, the only person to despoil the purity of a lawn.
“How come you have chickens, anyway?” the girl asked. “Where do you come from?”
“I come from Illinois. We had a hog farm.”
“You had a farm? And you came here?”
“Yeah. And lemme tell you, in a lotta ways it’s a big improvement!”
She didn’t seem to expect that, and now she seemed younger, looking around her in puzzlement. Phillip felt glad to be one up on her.
“Farm doesn’t mean Currier and Ives!” he said. “It wasn’t pretty! It was a great big ugly meat factory, and it stank! If these people living their nice, clean lives in their nice, clean houses could smell it, they’d never eat pork again!”
“You didn’t like it at all?”
“It sucked! I hated it. This place sucks too. It just doesn’t smell as bad!”
“Anyway,” said the girl, “I came for my flashlight. Sorry about the chicks.”
Phillip went inside for the flashlight, thinking, Boy, you have just discovered the perfect turnoff! What a genius!
When he came back out, the girl was gone. Thea, too, had disappeared, and when Phillip hurried around the corner of the house, he found them together in the backyard.
Thea was intent in the middle of the lawn; nose a quarter of an inch from the grass, ears hard forward, tail at alert half-mast. The girl was a few paces behind, bent over in equal concentration.
Thea pounced. Her paws spread wide, like hands, and Phillip briefly saw claws. The flurry was short. Next he saw her tossing something small and gray. As it fell, she scrambled after, and then lay down beside it, as proud and leisured as a Roman on a couch, speaking to the girl. Phillip saw the gray thing move.
“A mole,” the girl said, looking up as he came toward them.
Astoundingly the mole was still intact, hurrying away through the grass as fast as it could go. Thea affected not to notice the escape, leaning back luxuriously and speaking to them again. But she watched the mole from the corner of her eye, and when it had gone too far, she pounced and tossed it. The mole squeaked.
Phillip glanced at the girl. Her face was expressionless, but her eyes were bright and interested, strangely like Thea’s. She made no move to interfere.
Thea made yet another delighted spring at the mole, and Phillip sprang too. He caught Thea around the middle. She squirted through his hands, but he grabbed again, just in time, and got her by the tail. She squalled, ears flat to her skull, turned, and swatted him. It was no half measure. He heard her claws pop through his skin and saw the blood start. But for the first few seconds it didn’t hurt, and he picked her up, though she squirmed and struggled. Her body felt five pounds heavier than normal.
“You’re going back inside,” he told her, and popped her through the cellar door. He had to slam it quickly. “Sorry,” he said, looking in the window. All he could see was a dramatically lashing tail. “Better luck next time.”
He wiped the back of his hand down his jeans, smearing the blood. The girl had picked her flashlight up off the grass and was coming toward him, looking annoyed.
“It’s perfectly natural for a cat to catch a mole,” she said. “She wasn’t being cruel, she was only playing.”
Thea’s angry wail came muffled through the cellar door. Phillip felt surrounded. He looked beyond the girl, seeing a small gray wedge blunder through the grass. He wasn’t especially in love with moles, though generally in sympathy with anything that made a life’s work of wrecking lawns. He didn’t feel suffused with altruistic triumph. Still …
“It’s perfectly natural for me to save it,” he said, and shrugged and turned away.
But he had interested her. She followed him toward the chicken coop, and when he looked, she was frowning at him.
“Is it?”
“Well, mammals …” said Phillip. “Fellow mammals …”
“Okay,” she said, kindling. “What if you had … a gerbil, say, that you liked a lot, and you had Thea, and all of a sudden—let’s just say, for the sake of argument—all of a sudden there was nothing left in the whole world to feed her except that gerbil. What would you do?”
What a ghoul! thought Phillip; and then, Of course, give the thing to Thea! Then he remembered the gerbil his friend Rob had had in fourth grade, its smooth brown hair and bright black eyes. Oh, damn! Trapped!
He looked up and saw her face, intent as Thea, hunting. Oh no, you don’t!
“That will never happen,” he said, “so I’m not going to worry about it. I feed her cat food, and if she catches things, I don’t really care, as long as it’s not in front of me.”
“Inconsistent,” she said. Her eyes sparkled.
“Yup,” said Phillip. He felt as if he’d like to smile.
“Well, as long as you’re aware,” she said.
“I’m Phillip,” said Phillip. It seemed like time for introductions.
THE BOTTOM LINE
“LISTEN TO THIS,” said Kip from behind the Rutland Herald. One hand reached with blind but sure instinct for the coffee cup.
“‘Cooper’s herd of forty-five milking Saanens’—a Saanen is apparently some kind of goat—’Cooper’s herd of forty-five milking Saanens have paid for themselves for the past two years.’ Paid for themselves, James!”
James rubbed the old toothbrush over the lip strap he was cleaning. The last crust of chewed, dried grass came away, and he looked up. “Pretty good!”
“Whaddaya mean, pretty good? The guy’s been at it fifteen years! About time he started breaking even!”
“Well, calm down,” said James. The long legs stretching across the space between Kip’s chair and the one beside his own had stirred passionately, slopping the grayish water in James’s quart yogurt container. He snatched it up as Kip, paying no attention, started to swing his feet down. “Hey, watch it! You almost spilled this!”
A face appeared above the newspaper. Dark eyes flashed scornfully at the yogurt container. “Disgusting! Throw it away and let’s go do something!”
“Nothing to do.” Kip, his roommate from boarding school, had come to visit and to ski, but it was thirty degrees out and raining steadily.
“No, come on! What do you do here all winter?”
James sighed and scraped the toothbrush over the golden bar of glycerin soap. If Kip wasn’t here, he might be riding in the indoor ring with Tom and Marion. He might be in Woodstock with Gloria, getting groceries and stopping for a cup of coffee. He might be in his room, studying for his microbiology course. Or he might be writing a poem, trying to get down once and for all his understanding of the art of horsemanship.
“Not much,” he said.
Kip swung to his feet and moved restlessly to the window, looking out at gray sky and sodden snow. He made an elegant figure, tall and thin in his jeans and cranberry-striped, button-down shirt. Très prep! James glanced down with a slight sense of surprise at his own sweatshirt;
moldy-looking from an encounter with the bleach, speckled with grease and suds. His lap was wet where he had laid the straps and rubbed the sponge along them. He smelled of saddle soap.
As if sensing an opening, Kip looked back over his shoulder. “So,” he said, “when are you coming back to the real world?”
“I’m not,” said James quickly. Then he shook his head, angry with himself for accepting Kip’s premise. “Or rather,” he said, “I’m in it.”
An irrepressible smile broke through Kip’s obvious effort to contain it. He primmed his mouth to keep the smile from spreading. “The eighties, James! We live in the eighties. Dropping out is out!”
James felt his breath begin to come more quickly. He concentrated on the strap in his hand, rubbing the toothbrush over it until the soap foamed grayish-brown with dirt. “I haven’t dropped out.”
“Oh, James. James, James, James.”
“Look, Kipper, if the place is so far from reality, you didn’t have to come!”
“My point, Jimbo! Fine for a weekend—but you’re not really going to spend the rest of your life here!”
James didn’t know, and didn’t answer. He dumped the soapy water down the sink, reached under the chair for his soft piece of worn-out undershirt, and opened the bottle of Neat’s Foot Oil.
“I think you ought to come back soon, Jimmy, before your brain turns to mush.”
“My brain is doing just fine, thank you!”
“James, a guy starts to break even with his goats after fifteen years, and you think that’s pretty good! You think you can make money with horses in a backwater place like this, where the only people with bucks are the out-of-staters! Come on! If you absolutely have to do this, at least you could go to real horse country. And even then—”
“Kip—”
“Even then the chances are a million to one against you. People don’t make money with horses, they just spend. Nobody gets rich.”
“Kip—”
“And now you’re going to tell me you don’t want money. Well, to hell with that, James! To hell with it!” “Kip—”
“Jimmy, I’m gonna call a guy I know at Dartmouth and see if we can find something to do. You want to come along, you’re welcome!”
“No,” said James. “I’ll just sit here and wait for the hospital to call. Better carry our phone number someplace they can find it!”
Half an hour later he stood at the window, watching the friend’s Plymouth slither down the long drive. It was a day when none but the foolhardy or the flatlander would venture forth. Gloria was out, but she had the four-wheel-drive. She ought to be back any minute.
The Plymouth disappeared around the corner. James sighed. The house was empty, chill, and damp. He could have gone with them, laughing wildly as they spun over the icy spots, cracking jokes, looking out the window as the white hill country rolled past.
Instead, he hung up the clean, oiled noseband and reached for something else from the pile of leather by the wood box. He came up with a piece of harness.
They were always going to train one of the horses to drive, but it hadn’t happened yet. The harness came in every winter to be cleaned, and otherwise hung molding in the tack room.
Could try it on Robbie, thought James. He’d make a cute driving horse. He dreamed ahead to a couple of driving competitions, a couple gold cups. Soon people would be wanting MacLiesh-trained driving horses and would be willing to pay fat sums.…
No, they wouldn’t. Not enough of them.
Could get a few thoroughbred mares and breed them to Ghazal—start a new strain of warm-bloods. The New England Sport Horse? The Vermont Warm-blood?
Nah.
He glanced at the ticking clock. Gloria should be back now. He wished she were. Gloria was good for taking away thoughts like this. She did her work, and then she sold it. The one activity never seemed to get tangled with the other.
“Damn you, Kipper!” He dropped the piece of harness. Suddenly he was full of schemes, and a dozen sums jostled in his head; addition, multiplication. Yet how ridiculously small the figures were! He remembered Kip last night, talking about his stock portfolio. A sophomore in college, for God’s sake!
The strong, assertive engine of the four-wheel-drive pickup sounded in the yard, and a minute later a heavy door slammed. James hurried to the kitchen door and opened it as Gloria skidded onto the step, arms full of grocery bags.
“Awful driving!” Her cheeks and eyes were bright, as if she had enjoyed it. “Hey, I thought I saw your friend Kip helping some guy dig out of a snowbank. It was on a really bad hill, so I didn’t stop.”
“Green Plymouth?”
“Green something.” She had the refrigerator door open. “Hand me the milk, James?”
“Yeah, that was Kip.”
“Hand me the milk, James?” Gloria looked back around the refrigerator door, and James wiped the smile from his face.
“Sure. Here. Want some water on for tea?”
“Yes. And then I have to go right into the darkroom.” She started to unpack the bags.
“Any gossip?”
“Oh! Yeah! There’s a for-sale sign on that quarter horse farm.”
“Really? They’ve only been there a year and a half!”
“Wicked mortgage, I heard. They thought they’d make enough selling young stock to pay it off, but it costs too much to raise ’em. Plus, nobody around here’s into quarter horses.”
“Boy, that’s too bad!”
Gloria shrugged. “They were doing all right till they decided they had to make a living at it.”
“That’s right; they used to have that little place on the corner, didn’t they?”
“Yes. They sold two or three colts every year and supported their habit. But they’re pretty bitter about the whole thing now, or so I hear. They’re selling everything.”
“Too bad!”
“Well, I don’t know.” The kettle was whistling, and Gloria poured her tea. “If people get greedy, I don’t have much sympathy for them.”
She swished the tea bag three or four times through the hot water, plopped it into the wastebasket, and headed for the darkroom.
James slowly mixed himself a cup of instant hot chocolate, reading the list of repellent ingredients on the back of the package as he stirred. Then he wandered to the window, to look out at the dreary yard.
He liked the thought of Kip in his loafers, digging the Plymouth out of a snowbank.
Kip would smile knowingly if he heard about those quarter horse people, and give James that triumphant look. He would think he understood all about it.
But Kip didn’t understand, and James thought that Gloria probably didn’t, either. Wasn’t she herself making every effort to earn a living—if not now, then someday—from doing the thing she loved best? Weren’t they all, here at MacLiesh Farm? How could you fault someone else for trying? The most you could honestly say was that the attempt had been injudicious.
Musing and looking out at the yard, he saw Tom and Marion leave the barn together. Marion was draped in a long gray-green rain poncho that concealed her almost entirely. All James could see were her hands out in front; waist-high, clenched in light fists with the thumbs uppermost. Clearly they held an imaginary set of reins. By certain indefinable motions within the poncho, James understood her to drive the horse forward onto the bit, while her hands braced delicately against him. She was speaking to Tom all the while, with a shining face that at this distance seemed almost as young as Gloria’s.
He didn’t have to stay in the house anymore, James realized. With Kip gone, he was free to go to his work again. He set his half-empty mug in the sink and went out to the mudroom to pull on his riding boots.
The rich, pleasant barn smells greeted his nostrils: good hay that they had gotten in this summer by the sweat of their brows; clean horses; pine shavings; and manure. A few heads looked at him over stall doors, with mild interest. He went straight to the white, noble head of his own horse, Ghazal.
“Hi, buddy. Wanna do some work?”
Ghazal would consider it. He dropped his silver moleskin muzzle into James’s palm, blowing his breath out gustily.
“Sorry. Treats later.” He slipped the black leather halter over Ghazal’s bony head, buckled loosely, and led him out to the cross ties in the aisle. Ghazal wore an ugly yellow-plaid blanket, rumpled and stained.
Beneath the blanket he was fairly clean, but James ran a brush over him anyway, for once not tempted to skimp. He spent several minutes on the long silver tail, combing until all the hairs were separate, and swished silkenly. Then he saddled and led Ghazal to the indoor ring.
It was empty and quiet. Ghazal’s hoofbeats, even muffled in the sand, were loud. His breath, and James’s, puffed white in the dimness. Ghosts shadowed them on every wall; four repeated figures, dark young riders on white horses, moving silently in the mirrors. At every corner James approached himself, then paralleled himself, then left himself behind.
Trot trot, Ghazal—smooth and regular and strong.
He strove to remember, warming up, what it was that he wanted to work on. Transitions, he thought, and did a few; trot to walk, walk to canter, canter to trot to walk …
The reins flapped loose. Ghazal wandered at will.
What in hell am I doing this for?
Kip was upwardly mobile. James knew that he himself was likely moving down. He would never again have the degree of affluence he’d enjoyed in his father’s house; the certainty of new, expensive cars and far-flung vacations, the easy choice of an expensive restaurant dinner, an expensive education. In the eighties you wanted those things; so they told you.
And who am I to play holier than thou?
Ghazal walked to the door and stopped with his nose to the latch, breathing a sigh. When James did nothing, he nudged the latch suggestively. Here’s how you do it, buddy!
“Sorry, fatso. At least you’re gonna get some exercise.” He turned Ghazal away from the door. Eight or ten laps, and then they’d go back, having accomplished nothing.…
No, he knew himself, and as soon as he felt Ghazal’s uncommitted, shambling trot, he pushed scoldingly with his legs. No response. He tapped with the whip. A startled surge of power told him he’d gotten through.
