Since they had nothing else to try, Burley again stood at the horses’ heads, holding them, while Elton and Mart unsnapped and removed the lines. They then turned the pair “inside out,” as Mart put it, placing the paint on the left side, in the lead, and the buckskin on the right.
By the time the lines were in Elton’s hands again, there was already a difference. The horses were quieter, as if a while ago they had not known where they were, but now they knew, though it was impossible to say which horse had thought he was on the wrong side, or if both of them had thought so. When Elton asked them this time to come up, they moved off more quietly and almost together. They weren’t a team yet, but maybe they were going to be.
“Maybe they’ll work it out,” Mart said.
And Burley, who was intently watching, said, “Maybe.”
Elton, as Mart and Burley understood, was caught between two mysteries. What was going to happen he did not know, of course. But he was dealing also with an unknown past. He and those nameless horses were strangers to one another. Even so, it was early in the year. Hackett’s horses were not yet work-hardened. They had not yet been shod, as Elton’s had not. The contest would be as fair probably as it could be.
Presently Hackett, whose boys had given him the help he needed, had his team standing harnessed in the doorway of the barn. And then, with the slack of the lines coiled in his hands, he was driving them out into the sunlight.
Hackett’s horses were closely matched. They were red sorrels with blazed faces. They had wintered well, and their coats shone back at the sun. They were alike in conformation and in size. But more than that, as a team they were “put together,” as Burley said in open commendation. There was no “maybe” attached to them. They knew each other. They knew Hackett, and he knew them. They were joined by history, by mutual knowledge and experience, as much as by the leather lines and the snaps and buckles. They were put together by an understanding beyond anything visible, and yet those with eyes to see, who knew what they were seeing, could see it.
Hackett looked back as if to say something, but his boys, who knew what was wanted, were already coming with a set of heavy doubletrees for each team. The horses were hitched then, and Hackett’s two boys and Mart and Burley lifted the doubletrees clear of the ground as Hackett and Elton drove. Spence Gidwell trotted ahead to open the gate at the back of the barn, and the teamsters, Hackett first and then Elton, drove their teams out of the lot, followed by the straggle of watchers.
Far enough behind the barn to be fairly out of the way, a low sled that some might have called a stoneboat sat at the end of the bare strip it had worn as summer after summer Hackett had used it to condition his pulling horses. It had been idle so far that spring and weeds were sprouting from the scoured ground. The sled was loaded with concrete blocks weighing about thirty pounds apiece.
When he saw how well-settled the ground of the pulling strip was, maybe dry enough to plow, Elton fell into a moment of distraction, of disorientation and near-panic, such as he would sometimes feel on his Sundays of principled rest when he might have worked. The voice of self-judgment sprang in his mind like a trap cunningly set: “What in the hell am I doing?”
But that passed. It passed because the pair of lines joining him to his team was alive in his hands with a nervous and urging life. He was joined to the two horses by a connection as immediately living as his flesh and theirs. It drew him from any possible thought of elsewhere into a time older than memory and now again present, in which the bone and blood, muscle and weight, and the elation also, of a pair of strong horses became the felt thought of a man, so that while their common effort lasted he would not, he could not, distinguish between himself and them.
“Whoa!” Hackett said. And Elton also stopped his team.
“Lighten it up, boys,” Hackett said. He watched as the boys and younger men began hurriedly to unload the blocks and set them aside. “Take ’em all off,” he said. And then he turned to Elton. “Elton, you might want to practice your horses just on the sled before we start. These of mine are all right, I think.”
Hackett had the double role of competitor and host. He was being fair.
Elton drove his team into position and backed them to the sled. Mart and Burley hooked them, stepped out of the way, and Elton spoke to his team. He drove them the length of the course, stopping them and starting them again.
Elton was not always a patient man, but that day he was being patient. He had to be. He was paying attention too, but he was always good at that. He wasn’t requiring much of his horses, only that they should start and stop when asked. He was requiring them to know that he meant what he told them, either speaking or by pressure on their bits. He did not blunder. He gave them no false signals. And they began to give him their respect. They began to trust him. His coherence and determination in himself extended to them. They began to work together and to work for him. They had begun to be a team.
When they got to the far end of the course, Mart and Burley unhooked them. Elton drove them around the sled, to be hooked again to its other end, and he worked them back the opposite way.
Hackett had set no limit to this time of practice, but of course there had to be a limit. Time was passing. Hackett was waiting. Everybody was waiting. Elton himself, though he had not relaxed his attention to his horses, had begun to feel the pressure of waiting, everybody else’s and his own. And so when he had worked his way back to where he had started, he stopped his team and turned to Hackett. “We’re as ready as we’re going to get.”
“Good enough,” Hackett said. “You make the first pull.” He turned to his boys. “Lay on about three hundred pounds. We’ll load ’em up easy.” He was again being the good host.
Three hundred pounds was not much of a load. Burley and Mart helped Elton to hook again to the opposite end of the sled, and his team quietly pulled it the requisite twenty-seven and a half feet.
Hackett’s team, unlike Elton’s, knew exactly the business they were in. So did Hackett’s boys, who hooked them virtually without requiring them to stop, and they snatched the front end of the sled clean off the ground. Hackett laughed, exhilarated by their readiness. And so the contest had begun.
As the load was increased, three hundred pounds at a time, the sense of purpose increased in drivers and horses alike, and so did the sense of contending in the minds of the watchers. The contest, as was increasingly evident, was not just between two teamsters and two teams, but between two ways of working, of moving the load. As they had been schooled to do, Hackett’s horses started the load into motion by snatching it, flinging their whole weight against it, thus gaining an immediate momentum for the rest of the pull. Elton could not have risked exciting his horses to such a pitch. Though by the rules he could not have struck them even with the end of a line, as they warmed to their work and learned to expect greater weight at each pull he might have roused them, as Hackett’s were aroused, by his voice alone. But could he have controlled them then? He didn’t know, and he had no safe way of finding out.
And so, never raising his voice, he asked them each time to pull from a standing start as if they were drawing a wagon loaded with hay. He was discarding deliberately the advantage of lunging, and asking his team to make up the difference by sheer willingness and strength. Rather than exciting them in response to himself, he was perforce leaving them free to become excited in response to the effort he was asking of them—if they had it in them to do that. Whether or not they had it in them to do that was one of the questions Elton had been asking when he had picked them out of the bunch of Hackett’s rejects. And now, pull by pull, they were answering. So far, yes, they did have it in them to do that.
After four pulls, with the burden increased to twelve hundred pounds, the two teams were seriously at work. When the load increased, after four more pulls, to twenty-four hundred pounds, they began to be tested. They began to sweat. Especially Elton and his team were being tested. Hackett’s team, starting each pull with that
calculated lunge, still were making it look easy. But Elton’s team were increasingly required, and against apparently increasing odds, to pull steadily, to take on the difficulty without flinching from it or anticipating it with too much excitement. Elton’s voice, when he spoke to them now, asked them to exert themselves, but only just enough. And they continued to give him, each time, the just enough that he asked for.
Hackett’s mind was beginning to be oddly divided. Both teams belonged to him, and so in a sense he could not lose. But it was becoming plain to everybody that, even more than Elton, Hackett had put his judgment on the line, and of the two of them he most needed to win. As Elton’s team completed their pulls, at twenty-seven hundred and three thousand and thirty-three hundred pounds, Hackett’s worry increased. But he felt also, he could not not feel, a growing admiration as Elton and that wildly mis-colored pair of horses revealed, pull after pull, yet more ability.
By the rules, each team would have three tries at each increase of weight. So far, both had gone the full twenty-seven and a half feet on the first pull. But when the load went to thirty-three hundred pounds, both teams began to suffer noticeably the disadvantage of being unshod. As the friction between sled and ground increased, the horses’ hooves found less purchase. On his first pull at thirty-six hundred, Elton’s buckskin lost his footing. Before the horse’s knees had touched the ground, Elton had called, “Whoa!” and the paint had stopped. The buckskin was instantly on his feet again, but the pull had failed, and the mishap had upset the horses. When they were unhooked Elton handed the lines to Burley. While Hackett’s team made the pull successfully, Elton went to his horses’ heads, laid his hands on their faces and spoke to them. “Be easy, boys. Be easy.” In response to his touch and the sound of his voice, they grew quiet.
When they were hooked again, he said, “Easy now. Easy.” And this time as they tightened against their collars they struck their toes into the ground, they stayed on their feet, they kept going, and they made the pull.
A murmur of surprise and admiration ran among the watchers. They, like Elton, had passed into the old moment of union and communion between man and team, reduced now to a Sunday morning’s pleasure, only a pastime, but while it lasted, it held them out of time. Like Elton, they were in the old time, and while it lasted it kept them. The weight of the load was raised to thirty-nine hundred pounds. The three hundred pound increment, which at first had been negligible, had now become critical. Everybody knew it. Both teams, barefooted and at that time of the year not hardened to the work, were coming to their limit.
Elton’s two tries to Hackett’s one at thirty-six hundred pounds had disrupted the order of the contest. If they were to keep to the original order, Elton’s team would have had to go from one hard pull directly to another. Again Hackett did the gracious thing. “My turn,” he said.
Now Hackett’s horses, expecting the heavier load and champing at their bits, hurled themselves into their collars, but then the force of their effort appeared to swing them out leftward, and the sled stopped. They had moved it six feet and five inches. So near their limit, the horses’ all-out lunge into their collars did start the load, but at the same time it threw them off their footing. To go further, they would have to start again.
In his turn, Elton again said, “Easy, boys,” and a fraction of a second before they would have quit on their own he said, “Whoa!” They had gone ten feet and seven inches.
They each had, by the rules, two tries remaining. On his second try, Hackett’s team threw themselves forward with the same willingness as before, but they were wearing out. The force with which they bore against the load seemed at once to fling them backward. The traces slackened, and the sled had moved a fraction of an inch less than three feet.
Elton’s team also was weary. It was clear that he would make the second try only to honor the rules. Again his horses moved the sled, and again, knowing maybe sooner than they did that they had done all they could do, Elton stopped them before they could quit. They had gone this time five feet and three inches.
When the watchers turned to Hackett, he shook his head and lifted an opened hand. He would not waste his horses on a useless try. “That’s all, boys. We had a question. Now we’ve got the answer.”
In his triumph, instead of the elation he might reasonably have felt, Elton felt himself suddenly stranded in a kind of embarrassment. A charge passed through him, as if he had wakened from a dream. He had made a dare, and had fulfilled it so far in excess of what he might have expected, and so much further in excess of what the others had expected, that he did not know where to look or what to say. He was now the exceptional man. He had become, strangely, new to himself and to them all.
And then old Mr. Wright, who was standing closer to Elton’s lead horse than the others would have allowed him to do if they had been watching him, said for all to hear, his voice trembling, “As good a ones as ’ar a man drawed a line over!” Utterly oblivious of the others standing behind him, he was leaning on the cane held in his right hand. With the flat of his left hand he stroked once the horse’s black-and-white rump, and then he turned to Elton. “And ay God, son! You’re a teamster!”
Mike (1939–1950)
After my parents were married in 1933, they lived for three years with my father’s parents, Marce and Dorie Catlett, on the Catlett home place near Port William. My mother and my grandmother Catlett did not fit well into the same house. Because of that, and I suppose for the sake of convenience, my parents in 1936 moved themselves, my younger brother, Henry, and me to a small rental house in Hargrave, the county seat, where my father had his law practice.
And then in 1939, when I was five years old, my father bought us a house of our own. It was a stuccoed brick bungalow that had previously served as a “funeral home.” It stood near the center of town and next door to a large garage. After we had moved in—there being six of us now, since the births of my two sisters—my parents improved the house by the addition of a basement to accommodate a furnace, and by the installation of radiators and modern bathroom and kitchen appliances.
My brother and I were thus provided with spectacles of work that fascinated us, and also with a long-term supply of large boxes and shipping crates. The crate that had contained the bathtub I remember as especially teeming with visions of what it might be reconstructed into. These visions evidently occasioned some strife between Henry and me. The man who installed our bathroom assured me many years later that he had seen me hit Henry on the head with a ball-peen hammer.
One day, while Henry and I were engaged in our unrealizable dream of making something orderly and real out of the clutter in our back yard, a man suddenly came around the corner of the house carrying a dog. The dog was a nearly grown pup, an English setter, white with black ears and eye patches and a large black spot in front of his tail. The man, as we would later learn, was Mike Brightleaf.
Mr. Brightleaf said, “Andy and Henry, you boys look a here. This is a pup for your daddy.”
He set the big pup carefully down and gave him a pat. And then, with a fine self-assurance or a fine confidence in the pup or both, he said, “Call him Mike.”
We called, “Here, Mike!” and Mike came to us and the man left.
Mike, as we must have known even as young as we were, came from the greater world beyond Hargrave, the world of fields and woods that our father had never ceased to belong to and would belong to devotedly all his life. Mike was doomed like our father to town life, but was also like our father never to be reconciled to the town.
Along one side of our property our father built a long, narrow pen that we called “the dog lot,” and he supplied it with a nice, white-painted dog house. The fence was made of forty-seven inch woven wire with two barbed wires at the top. These advantages did not impress Mike in the least. He did not wish to live in the nice dog house, and he would not do so unless chained to it. As for the tall fence, he would go up it as one would climb a ladder, gather himself at the top, and leap
to freedom. Our father stretched a third strand of barbed wire inside the posts, making what would have been for a man a considerable obstacle, and Mike paid it no mind.
As a result, since our father apparently was reluctant to keep him tied, Mike had the run of the town. For want of anything better to do, he dedicated himself to being where we children were and going where we went. I have found two photographs of him, taken by our mother. In both, characteristically, he is with some of us children, accepting of hugs and pats, submissive, it seems, to his own kindness and our thoughtless affection, but with the look also of a creature dedicated to a higher purpose, aware of his lowly servitude.
One day our father found Henry and me trying to fit Mike with a harness we had contrived of an old mule bridle. We were going to hitch him to our wagon.
Our father said, “Don’t do that, boys. You’ll cow him.”
I had never heard the word “cow” used in that way before, and it affected me strongly. The word still denotes, to me, Mike’s meek submission to indignity and my father’s evident conviction that nothing should be cowed.
Mike intended to go everywhere we went and he usually did, but he understood his limits when he met them. One Sunday morning we children and our mother had started our walk to church. Mike was trailing quietly behind, hoping to be unnoticed, but our mother looked back and saw him. She said sympathetically, “Mike, go home.” And Mike turned sadly around and went home.
He was well-known in our town, for he was a good-looking dog and he moved with the style of his breeding and calling. But his most remarkable public performance was his singing to the fire whistle. Every day, back then, the fire whistle blew precisely at noon. The fire whistle was actually a siren whose sound built to an almost intolerable whoop and then diminished in a long wail. When that happened, Mike always threw up his head and howled, whether in pain or appreciation it was impossible to tell. One day he followed us to school, and then at noon into the little cafeteria beneath the gymnasium. I don’t believe I knew he was there until the fire whistle let go and he began to howl. The sound, in that small and supposedly civil enclosure, was utterly barbarous and shocking. I felt some pressure to be embarrassed but I was also deeply pleased. Who else belonged to so rare an animal?
A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership Page 18
