Swimming with Horses

by Oakland Ross

  “Shame,” said Hilary, when I was done. “Surely he can’t be as bad as all that.”

  “Worse,” I said. “He’s evil.”

  “Ag. Evil. Well, now I can relate.”

  In fact, I meant it. The man truly was evil, and I’m sure I wasn’t alone in saying so. In Kelso County in those days, there were two kinds of people. There were those who’d lived here practically forever, working their farms or running small local businesses of one sort or another, in Alyth or in one of the other towns — a bakery, a dairy, a lumber mill, a hardware store. To these folk — people whose families had lived in this county for generations — the land was a birthright, a sort of shared heritage. True, it was mostly owned privately and, yes, the territory was marked off by fences. But those were normal fences. You could climb them. You could hike across that land. You could even traverse those acres on horseback, using wooden panels or stiles that had been constructed exactly for that purpose. But now Quinton Vasco had come along, and he was breaking all the old rules. He was preying on people’s weaknesses, buying up viable farms and letting them rot in order to drive real estate prices down. Then he bought more land and built more fences. It was impossible to climb these fences, the ones that he was putting up. They were too damned big. They were meant to keep people out, full stop. Nothing could justify the existence of those fences, not if you’d lived here all your life, like your ancestors before you.

  Lately, however, a different set of people had begun to settle in Kelso, professional people who had moved up from Toronto or other big towns. They were mostly well off, and the men commuted daily to their high-paying jobs back in the city. They purchased horses for their kids, renovated the old farmhouses they’d bought, and partied among themselves. There was no rule about that, about not socializing with the old rural stock. It was just the way things were. At first, the city folk resisted selling their properties to Quinton Vasco but, as prices started to decline, some of them began to panic and break ranks, or that was what I’d heard. I’d listened to my father talking about it on the phone, speaking to clients or colleagues of his.

  As for my own family, we were an exception to the rule, bridging both of Kelso’s two worlds. We Mitchells had lived here for generations — my grandfather and my great-grandfather and maybe my great-great-grandfather before him. Farmers, all. But with my dad the tradition stopped in its tracks. He said, no sirree. No thanks. He saw small-time farming for what it was — a back-breaking ordeal with little pay and no security. So he went off to law school instead and later met my mother at some party in Toronto, where he was living at the time. By then he’d reinvented himself as a city boy but, still, the pull of the countryside was strong.

  When my grandfather died, my father returned to Kelso with his bride, meaning to plot a new course. I was just a child then, and Charlotte could barely walk. My dad went straight to work. He tore out most of the interior walls in the old red-brick farmhouse. He put down a slate floor and lots of oriental rugs. He installed French doors and an open-concept kitchen. Then he got started on the barn, ripped out those old cattle-feeding rigs, and put in horse stalls instead, big boxy affairs. Pretty soon, he bought my sister a pony, and me a horse, and we were on our way — partly newcomers and partly old-time country folk. My father drove down to his office in Evanton each day and returned each evening, not a farm boy anymore, though not quite a squire.

  Let’s just say we had a split identity. But, when it came to the land, we weren’t in any doubt at all. I wasn’t, anyway. The land belonged to everyone. It was my grandfather who imparted this conviction, and he made me repeat it every time we visited in the years before his death. The land belonged to everyone. He called this the basic law of Kelso County, said he’d believed it all his days. I believed it, too. So, of course, I hated Quinton Vasco. Had to. What choice was there? I wasn’t so sure about my own father, though. The basic law might have skipped a generation there.

  Hilary and I slowed our horses to a walk. Just ahead, the gravel road plummeted beneath us, zigzagging down the face of the escarpment. We followed that steep, downhill route for a time, and then she swung Club Soda off to the right and followed a slender trail that snaked through the sugar bush, tracing the wall of the escarpment. I had ridden this way once or twice before, so I knew where the trail led — to a wide bench of rocky land set halfway down the descending wall. Once there had been a quarry works here, but the pits had been abandoned long ago. Pretty soon we reached the limestone banks of an old quarry pond, the largest of several. I was surprised Hilary had found this place so quickly, but I was to learn she had an explorer’s instinct for discovery.

  Now she called a halt, and we both dismounted. I had to duck behind a stand of cedar trees to change into my swimsuit. When I emerged, Hilary had already unsaddled both horses and was standing by a sandstone ledge, holding Club Soda and Della by the reins. She was wearing only her running shoes now and a navy-blue one-piece suit that she must have had on beneath her T-shirt and jeans. I noticed two features right away: the plump roundness of her breasts and the faint evidence of several pubic hairs slinking out of her swimsuit, down there. I looked away.

  “Now what?” I said.

  “Here …” Hilary handed me Della’s reins. She dug into her canvas backpack and produced a leather halter, then another, along with a pair of nylon shanks. She handed me one of the halters. “I brought a spare,” she said. “Put it on in place of the bridle.”

  Already my heart was beating pretty hard. Partly, it was the being down here, alone in bathing suits, with Hilary Anson. At the same time, I had an anxious feeling about what was coming next — something to do with horses and deep water. I was not a strong swimmer, but I tried not to think about that. Instead, I held Della’s reins and looped the nylon shank over her neck. Next, I unbuckled her noseband and throat latch, pulled the bridle over her ears and forelock and slid the snaffle bit from her teeth. She shook her head and tried to rub some of the itchiness out, pushing against my side.

  “Hey, Della,” I said. “Take it easy.”

  I slipped the halter on and snapped the throat latch to the side ring. Hilary was doing the same with Club Soda. I clipped one end of the shank to the offside ring on Della’s halter, ran the shank over her neck, and knotted the far end to the near-side ring. The result — a crude set of reins.

  When I looked up, Hilary had already vaulted onto Club Soda’s back. She braced herself with her knees and long upper legs and then squeezed with her heels. At once, Club Soda clattered ahead, scrambled up onto a ledge of rust-coloured stone suspended a good four feet above the pond’s sleek surface. I realized she meant to leap from the top of that rocky ledge, along with her horse, straight down into the water. But Club Soda wanted nothing to do with the plan. His ears were pinned back, and he gnashed at the air with his teeth. Hilary urged him on, but he did not obey, not at first. Instead, he settled his weight back onto his hind legs, bending his hocks, switching his tail, and even trembling a little. It was horse against rider — a battle of wills.

  But Hilary didn’t seem concerned in the least. She leaned forward and murmured to him with words I could not make out, just a lot of soothing mumbo-jumbo, probably. She stroked his neck and shoulders, and pretty soon she got him calmed down. He relaxed his stance and stopped quivering, anyway. The two of them remained motionless for a time, and then Hilary reached back with one hand. She squeezed her legs and gave Club Soda a slap on the rump, the gentlest contact you could imagine, and that was it. It was clear she had won him over. He took one stride forward, followed by another, and then a third. He lowered his stance just a little and then launched himself into the air, seeming to hang in place for an instant before dropping toward the flat, forest-green surface of the pond. Hilary’s thick onyx hair flared behind her, there was a huge splash, and they both went straight under. I couldn’t believe it. I jumped up onto the ledge and peered down.

  Almost at that instant, Hilary and Club Soda broke into view again
. Club Soda thrust out his head, horizontal, his jawline parallel to the surface of the pond, his ears darting back and forth like a pair of crazy metronomes. I had never seen anything quite so amazing. With only a few subtle moves, Hilary had completely reversed Club Soda’s intentions, persuaded him to do something no horse had any business doing. Now his body remained submerged, with only his head visible above the water. He snorted and blew out through distended nostrils before surging through the shadows, bearing away from shore. A choker of wavelets churned at his neck, and Hilary clung to his mane, floating behind, her legs outstretched in the translucent water.

  “Whoo!” she shouted. “It’s freezing!” Then she began to sing some song I didn’t recognize — an African song, it sounded like. The lyrics were in a foreign tongue, strange sounding to me, and she didn’t seem to know them all. She hummed and sang and started to laugh.

  Club Soda swung around with what seemed to be a desperate look in his eyes, but that couldn’t have been right because he didn’t really appear to be in any hurry to get back to shore. He seemed perfectly at home, swimming in large loops and figure eights. Hilary guided him every now and then, pulling on one side of the shank or the other. She raised one arm and waved at me.

  “Come on, Sam! Come on in!”

  That took some doing. I wasn’t even going to think of diving into the pond as Hilary and Club Soda had done. That was plainly nuts. Instead, using that same large slab of limestone as a mounting block, I climbed onto Della’s back and guided her around to the opposite shore, where there was a grassy embankment and a gradual descent into the pond. I meant to head Della into the shallows near the bank, so that she could get her bearings before she ventured in deeper. But she wouldn’t go in at all, just danced from side to side, refusing to move forward.

  I looked over at Hilary and shook my head. “She doesn’t want to.”

  “Yes, she does.”

  “No. I mean it. She doesn’t. Look.” I tried again to urge Della down the grassy bank and into the water. Again, she refused. “See? She just won’t.”

  “Sam …” Hilary guided Club Soda closer to the shore. “There’s no diplomatic way for me to tell you this. It isn’t Della who doesn’t want to go in the water.”

  I rolled my eyes. I knew what she was going to say. “You’re going to say it’s me. That’s what Major Duval always says whenever something goes wrong.”

  “Well, I’m not Major Duval. I’m just saying you should try something different, hey. Don’t try to make Della go into the water. Just let her.”

  It didn’t happen right away. In fact, it took about fifteen minutes, maybe more. But eventually I managed to do what Hilary had said I should do, which was more or less nothing. I just let Della do as she wished, and it turned out that what she wished to do was hit the water at an eager trot and keep right on going until she was all the way in. Even then she didn’t stop.

  “She’s swimming!” I shouted. “Look, she can swim! Wow. I can’t believe it.”

  I clutched Della’s mane with one hand as she struck out for the centre of the pond, where Club Soda and Hilary were already circling. Hilary waved us off.

  “Not too close!” she said. “They’ll tangle their legs.”

  That made sense. They could easily clip one another with their hooves. Using the shank, I steered Della off to the left, and she seemed to understand at once. I felt calm enough to start laughing, and only then did I fully register the temperature of the water.

  “Yikes! It’s freezing!”

  “But it’s divine.”

  It was also the best form of physical conditioning there was, or so Hilary said — far more effective than road- or fieldwork, with little of the strain. Just watch, she said. I’d see a difference in Della’s fitness in only a week or so. But that wasn’t the best thing, she said. The best thing was this: this being in the water with horses. Soon, Hilary began to croon once more, a strange, happy song. Later, when the swimming was done — when we were dressed and our horses were saddled once more — I asked her for its name.

  “Lalelani,” she said.

  She told me the word means “listen” in Zulu. She confessed she didn’t know all the lyrics, much less what they meant. But she had a book of songs that she had brought with her from South Africa — songs made famous by a singer named Miriam Makeba — and she was trying to learn them, one by one. She said she played them from time to time on an upright piano in the Barkers’ living room. They reminded her of home. She hummed this particular melody once more. It might have been my imagination, but her voice seemed to break. She swallowed and shook her head, as if to get a grip on things, and then she clapped me on the back.

  “Come on, hey,” she said.

  She turned and swung herself into the saddle, reined Club Soda around. She headed off the way we had come.

  “Wait,” I called out. I hurried to catch up. For a moment there I could have sworn she’d been about to cry.

  SEVEN

  Hilary

  South Africa, Winter 1962

  “SOUTH WIND,” SAID JACK. He glanced over his shoulder — so quick you’d barely notice — and then he smiled. “Name of this one’s South Wind.”

  Hilary knew what he was thinking. He was thinking he’d been right, after all. Once she’d seen this horse, she would come straight down, or she would come soon enough. And here she was, just a day or so after he’d taken this big strapping beast out to the paddock on a shank. He’d known at the time that she was up at the house, out on the wooden terrace on the second floor. She was sure of it. He’d done his due diligence, as he always did. Now here she was. She stood at the entrance to the stable, reporting for duty as you might say. Again, he peered around at her.

  “Southey,” he said, “for short.”

  He leaned in so that South Wind would raise another of his hooves, permitting Jack to claw the muck out with the pick. He went around like that, till all four hooves were done. He rubbed the pick clean on his leather apron and tossed it back in the equipment box, wiped his hands on a towel. Everything just slow, methodical. He was being careful, she could tell. It seemed he was near to trembling himself.

  She knew what he wanted, what he always wanted, times without number. She could almost feel the blood fizzing through his veins even now, could sense him trying to tamp the urges down. He fished a dandy brush out of the box and went back to this proud new horse, started up at the animal’s neck on the offside — quick, clean strokes. Didn’t look at her. Commenced to hum.

  She advanced a step. “Can I take him out?”

  She knew how he’d react to that. There now, he’d be thinking. There you are. She’s said it already. Easy as pie. He moved down along South Wind’s shoulder. She watched the coat shimmer in the morning light, the skin rippling beneath the strokes of Jack’s dandy brush.

  After a time, he shrugged. “This one here’s your daddy’s. You’ll have to ask him.”

  “My da— I mean, my father. He’s in Durban today.”

  He knew that, of course. A few strokes across Southey’s withers, then along his back, down the croup. Jack didn’t say anything more, started up his humming again.

  She put out her arms. “Well, I can hardly ask him for permission if he’s in Durban.”

  “Oh …?” said Jack, pretending to be surprised. “You were wanting to take this fella out — today like?”

  As if this weren’t obvious. She knew what he was up to, bargaining for gain. They both knew it, which would be just fine in his book. In the gospel according to Jack Tanner, bargaining was just the job. It would get her mind working in the proper way. She understood that full well. She damned well should. She’d been down this road a hundred times, and now here she was, stumbling along the same old route again, barely a week after she’d sworn to break it off for good.

  Jack tilted his head, all understanding and co-operation. “You’ll be wanting to ride him today then?”

  At first, she said nothing. Then she sighed, mor
e in exasperation than anything else, knowing what this conversation meant — that old sinking feeling, all over again. “Yes. Today.”

  “Ah.” He watched her from the corner of his eye.

  She took another step inside the barn, shuffled over to the big wooden equipment box, took out a curry comb, started to pluck stray hairs from the teeth.

  Jack was over on Southey’s near side by now, looking at her. She could imagine what he saw — a young girl with her knees locked, pouting down at a curry comb, a spoiled young girl wanting to have her way.

  She cleared her throat. “My father won’t mind.”

  Jack clenched his teeth and whistled through them. “Won’t he now? New horse he just bought, not a week ago? I don’t know.”

  She didn’t say anything at first. She just waited, and then she said the same thing again. “He won’t mind.”

  Jack smiled because she was wrong there, as both of them knew. In fact, her father certainly would mind. He took a distinctly proprietary interest in things. He was liable to act as if he owned a thing that wasn’t even his, if it suited him. She knew this, and Jack Tanner knew it, too.

  She set down the curry comb. She nodded at South Wind. “What is he?” She meant his breeding.

  “Selle Français.” Jack gave this strange new term a flat anglo pronunciation and a casual tone, as if it were a thing you came across every day, the same way he might say thoroughbred or Arabian or mention the colour of someone’s skin. But this was different. Selle Français. He knew she wouldn’t have heard of it.

  “What’s that?”

  “Warmblood. From France. This here South Wind, he’s one of the first ones to come down here. And he didn’t come cheap — Lord knows, and your daddy does, too. Big animals, they are. Strong but graceful. Just look at him, would you?” Jack stood back and ran the dandy brush against the heel of his palm to clear the dust. He acted as if he were on a stage, as if this horse were the centrepiece of some grand production he alone had brought to fruition. Jack gestured at Southey with both his hands, inclined his head in the same direction. “He’s a beauty, all right. Look at the legs on him. Like trees. Yet have you ever seen anything finer? Just look.”