Swimming with Horses

by Oakland Ross

  For my part, I did the only thing I could do. I went back to high school in Alyth, back to my gloomy teenage existence. Each day, at the end of class, I boarded a bus for the long journey home, aching with emptiness. Could she not have written? Just a paragraph? A few lines? One afternoon as I was about to climb aboard the bus at the end of another day of boredom, I noticed a group of boys in scrappy shorts and T-shirts. They were assembling outside the school gym, and they soon set off at a run, aiming toward the high drumlin that loomed above the town to the west. Something about them fired my imagination, how independent they seemed.

  Before long I, too, was training every afternoon, along with a dozen or so other cross-country runners. Each day after classes we’d set off from the school grounds, headed for the drumlin. We dashed along the shaded streets of the town and then scaled a succession of footpaths that wound toward the heights of that great hill, rearing high above Alyth. We traced the drumlin’s eastern summit, darting among the rocks and then racing each other through newly mown hayfields before beginning our descent.

  I knew that I was neglecting Della. I knew, as well, that Charlotte had outgrown her pony, so I did what seemed the obvious thing. I handed Della Street over to my sister. When it came to horses, Charlotte had far grander ambitions than I had ever entertained, not to mention more courage and talent. It was not very long before important horse owners — people with expensive, European-bred animals — were seeking her out to ride their pedigreed equines in high-level competitions. Charlotte never quite made it to the Olympics, but her name was always in the mix. She got damned close.

  As for me, I was done with horses. The decision had a lot to do with Hilary Anson, I’m sure. I was like one of those bird species — penguins or kiwis or dodos — that perversely renounce the ability to fly, preferring to skitter among the pebbles and hedges on the ground, flapping their stubby little remnant wings.

  In my second year on the Alyth cross-country team, we battled all the way to the Ontario finals, where our school finished in second place. The next year we won. After that, I earned an athletic scholarship in the United States, so for four years I ran on the cross-country team at Purdue. I returned to Canada with premature arthritis and an undergraduate degree in English literature. I was determined to carry on in that field, focusing on contemporary writers of the African diaspora. I’m sure I was thinking of Hilary and her fascination with South African writing. I completed a graduate degree at the University of Toronto, followed by a doctorate at Rutgers. Eventually, I found a job as an assistant professor of English at Syracuse University in upstate New York.

  During all that time I received not a word from Hilary Anson. I still thought about her, though — about her and Quinton Vasco and Bruce Gruber and that long-ago summer. For a time, while Bruce was still in jail, I wondered whether he would change his story, assuming it was only that — a story. Surely, he would recant his version now. Why stick to it any longer if it was a lie? What good would it do?

  When Bruce had been eight years behind bars, I took it upon myself to visit him in a correctional facility located a couple of hours’ drive east of Toronto. We met in a characterless, antiseptic room furnished with institutional tables and tube-metal chairs. He had aged badly — not that I cared. I still loathed him. Even so, it was impossible not to feel some pity for the guy. Eight years behind bars? Eight years and counting? I fully expected him to deny his guilt, even to incriminate someone else. He had no good reason to do otherwise, not now, not anymore.

  But he stood by his tale. He still swore up and down that he was the killer and that he acted alone. He didn’t implicate anyone else, Hilary least of all. Instead, he repeated what he had insisted all along: he shot Quinton Vasco out of jealousy and hate. I asked him if Hilary had played any part at all, any direct role. Had she encouraged him in some way, goaded him into the crime? But he said no. He insisted that he alone was responsible, and he seemed to swell with pride as he spoke. But I knew that at least part of his version was a lie, the part about Hilary, about her not being involved. He virtually admitted as much.

  Only seconds after protesting that he acted alone, he drew closer to me, his chair chattering against the tiled floor. In a low voice he pleaded for news of Hilary. Anything. Anything at all. She had promised to wait for him, he said. She had sworn an oath. When he said that, I sat up straight in my chair. I felt the vertebrae shiver in my back. This was more like it. An oath. She had sworn an oath. Any other time I would have pushed him for more details. There was so much else I wanted to know. What kind of oath? What had she said? What words exactly?

  But I saw his eyes were welling up, and I couldn’t bear to put him through more pain. I almost started weeping myself, thinking of Hilary and that summer and the emptiness she’d left behind. So I let Bruce Gruber be. He had clung to his story for so long that he had probably convinced himself it was true. That was enough for me. Besides, there was the law of parsimony to consider. I was thinking once more of Professor Lisgard, my philosophy teacher from my undergrad days. It was he who introduced me to the logical principle also known as Occam’s razor. Expressed in its classic form, it goes like this: “Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.” In other words, don’t overcomplicate things. When you are faced with competing explanations for some occurrence, it’s generally best to go with the simplest account — and Bruce’s version took that prize, hands down. He’d stolen a gun and killed a man for the most shopworn reason going: good, old-fashioned jealousy. What could be simpler than that?

  Finally, there was at least one other unusual wrinkle to the case. Call it cosmic justice. Even if Bruce Gruber had not killed Quinton Vasco, he belonged in prison just the same. I thought of that terrible night down at the quarry pond, the assault on Leslie Odegaard. For that crime, Bruce had gone unpunished. And so there was a certain rightness to his being in jail, whether he’d killed Quinton Vasco or not. In the end, he got what he deserved — ten years behind bars. I sometimes wonder what became of him after his sentence was served and he walked free, but I have never bothered to find out. I lost interest in him after that.

  And the years ground past. Shortly before his seventieth birthday, my father fell ill — some unsteadiness of the heart. I drove back up to Kelso for a visit. Charlotte was going to be there, too. I hadn’t set eyes on either of my parents for a year at least, and I was troubled to see how much they had aged. Charlotte was living in Alberta now, training at a big equestrian centre they have out there, a place called Spruce Meadows.

  When the weekend was over, I drove back down to Syracuse, where I had recently gone through what would prove to be my first divorce. I buried myself in my work once more — my teaching load, plus a book I was working on about literature and radical politics. A few years after that I married a second time, but that venture ended in a breakup, too. There were no children in either case.

  I know what a therapist would say: “Hilary Anson rides again.” And maybe that would be right. I thought about her still. I wondered what I had meant to her and why she had remained silent for so very long. I hadn’t heard from her in all that time, not once since she had left Kelso. Not a phone call. Not a letter. Nothing. For twenty-seven years.

  FIFTY-ONE

  Sam

  En Route to South Africa 1994

  I TRIED TO FIND her. For a time, I did. I ran down every clue I could find, but there were precious few of those, and they brought me no closer to learning Hilary’s fate. Nothing changed on this front until 1994, when I was in my forties.

  With a sabbatical year coming up, I decided to travel to South Africa myself. I planned to do research for a book I had in mind, a study of literature and courage — writers in sub-Saharan Africa practising their craft in the face of economic hardship and political upheaval, challenges I could barely imagine. I was lucky enough to obtain funding for the project from a philanthropic institution in New England. God knows there was nothing on the domestic scene to hold me back. I figure
d I could carry out both missions — conduct research for the book and also try to find Hilary or some vestige of Hilary. It had been thirty years. No, wait — it had been thirty-one.

  I bought a bucket-shop ticket that took me on a roundabout route. First I flew on a small regional airline to New York City, where I had a three-hour layover at JFK before I boarded a VARIG flight, non-stop to Rio de Janeiro. There, I wandered around the departure hall at the Galeão International Airport for hours on end until finally I dragged myself aboard a South African Airways jet bound for Johannesburg. I had a window seat, and I nursed a Scotch — the first of several — as we arched high over the Atlantic, bathed in the deep, bronze light of the setting sun.

  Inevitably, I started to brood once again about Hilary and the little I knew of her life before I met her. There’d been a man named Jack Tanner, who had preyed upon her and who later killed her African boyfriend or lover, a political activist named Muletsi Dadla. At the time, the two of them — Hilary and Muletsi — were trying to flee South Africa, setting off from a township called Bruntville, where a man of some authority also dwelled, a man named Everest Ndlovu. That was about all I knew. Oh, and Hilary’s tale about Nelson Mandela. Supposedly, it was he who had given her that Russian gun. At age fifteen, I hadn’t even known who Nelson Mandela was, and now all of humanity celebrated his name. He was the president of the whole damned country.

  But at the centre of it all was Hilary. What had become of her? Did the Anson clan still live on a horse farm near a town called Mooi River? Was Jack Tanner ever put on trial for murder? If so, did Hilary testify? What became of her then? How did it all turn out? Did she ever think about me?

  The drinks trolley rolled past, and I secured myself another Scotch, a double. I peered out the window, staring at a vacuum of darkness that seemed to extend in all directions. What happened? That was what I wanted to know. What the bloody hell happened?

  FIFTY-TWO

  Sam

  South Africa, Summer 1994

  I SPENT A COUPLE of days in Johannesburg, decompressing at a small guest house located in a bohemian part of town, a neighbourhood called Melville. This was the new South Africa. Apartheid was finished and done, at least in principle. Everyone had a vote, and all were equal. In theory, there was no colour bar. But it was apparent at once that matters were more complicated than that.

  I did little during those first two days but walk, something I do with a cane owing to this arthritic hip of mine. I took note of everything — the children strutting along the streets in their starched school uniforms; the couriers decked out in blazers and ties as they clipped through the city on their motor scooters; the whiteness of people’s teeth; the bustling newspaper vendors; the shiny Mercedes sedans; the crowded, fume-spewing bakkies; the evangelical women parading along the shaded streets in robes of white; the high, forbidding walls that seemed to enclose every dwelling, every office; the razor-wire barriers; the jacaranda trees; the electric gates.

  After two days and three nights in Joburg, I flew to Durban. It was summertime in the southern hemisphere, and flowering trees festooned the streets. The sun beamed down. I rented a car and drove, very cautiously, on a course that took me out of Durban en route to Mooi River, into the very heart of that town. This was my first experience of driving on the left-hand side of the road, and I suffered one or two perilous moments. Somehow I made the trip without killing myself or anyone else. Once I was safely in Mooi River, I parked the car in a central lot and clambered out. For a time I just stood where I was, peering around, amazed that I was standing where Hilary herself might have stood.

  I got straight down to business, putting questions to the people I encountered on the street — black men in threadbare jackets and cheap fedoras; black women with babies slung on their backs in knotted shawls; elderly white couples tottering along the sidewalks, the men in short pants, desert boots, and knee socks, the women in cheap floral dresses and sun hats.

  I explained that I wanted information about the white folk who lived around here, the rich white folk. But I had no luck. People just shook their heads. Oh, there may have been horse farms hereabouts once upon a time, but not anymore. As for someone named Daniel Anson, people merely nodded and told me a man with such a name had been a force around here in olden times, but no longer. Gone to England, most likely — that was what they said. Gone to England along with the rest of them, the rich ones. To England or to Oz.

  After a couple of hours of getting nowhere, I climbed back into my car and headed off through the hill country that surrounded the town. I didn’t know what I was looking for, some pulse of recognition, I suppose. And, sure enough, the landscape matched Hilary’s description, or my memory of her description — broad summits and plummeting valleys criss-crossed by narrow macadam roads, like loops of black ribbon. It wasn’t difficult to imagine there might once have been vast equestrian estates hereabouts — in fact, several remained — but it seemed that none belonged to a man named Daniel Anson … or at least not any longer.

  I spent that night in Mooi River itself, in a tired little inn adjoining a bar that jittered with African pop music until 2:00 a.m. The next morning, I drove down to Pietermaritzburg and found my way to the offices of the Witness on Longmarket Street, said to be the oldest continually published newspaper in South Africa. I wanted to rummage through their files if they would let me. Somewhat surprisingly, they did.

  “Why, certainly, Mr. Mitchell.” A middle-aged woman in a red skirt and white blouse guided me straight into the paper’s small, musty library. “Why not sit yourself down here?”

  She said her name was Blessing Ndlovu, and she explained that the paper’s files were not fully computerized and possibly never would be. Instead, she brought me several reels of microfiche from the early 1960s and patiently showed me how to feed the film through the reading machine.

  I spent three hours that day hunched over a scratched wooden table, peering at decades-old film. I came across about a half-dozen references to a Daniel Anson of Mooi River. It seemed he was both a businessman — a mining magnate — and a politician. He had been the minister for national security, no less. For all his power and influence, he seemed to have kept a remarkably low profile, just a brief speech here and there, a couple of international trips on government business. I supposed that a lot of his activities would have been kept secret, not the sort of thing you would read about in the press. Still, what little information appeared in the Witness was enough to prove the man existed. Had existed.

  I kept feeding the film through the reading machine, and finally I found the story I was looking for, or — let me put it another way — what I found was the story I was not looking for. I had hoped to find an article or two that recounted the murder or disappearance of a political dissident named Muletsi Dadla, employed as a stable hand at the farm belonging to Daniel Anson. But I didn’t find that. Instead, I stumbled onto a report about the death of Jack Tanner, the transplanted Englishman who had long tormented Hilary.

  In July of 1963 a man’s badly decomposed remains were discovered by a group of young herd boys in South Africa, near the border with Basutoland, then a British protectorate and now an independent country called Lesotho. They came upon the body where it had snagged itself by a wooded embankment bordering the Tsoelike River. After its discovery, the corpse was conveyed to Durban, where the British consulate got involved.

  Forensic experts used dental records to identify the body while an autopsy determined the cause of death — two gunshots to the side of the head. As for suspects, the article in the Witness said there was just one — Muletsi Dadla, an escaped convict who had earlier been jailed after an attack on this same individual, Jack Tanner. But Dadla’s whereabouts were unknown. According to the newspaper’s account, he’d simply disappeared.

  I found one other article that mentioned Muletsi’s name — an earlier story from mid-1962 reporting the man’s escape from jail. That was it. I searched as carefully as I could, but I did no
t come across any other news items that provided any further information. It seemed the story of Jack Tanner’s death simply stopped in its tracks, and I wondered whether someone — someone with the wealth and sway of a Daniel Anson — might have put pressure on the papers to ignore the whole business. Surely, Daniel Anson would have wanted to keep his daughter out of the picture.

  I stood up to stretch my legs, and I gazed through the window at the street outside. A black man in a fedora rode past on a wobbly bicycle. A pair of elderly white men stood on a nearby corner. They seemed to be engaged in a heated argument, waving their arms and berating each other in a muffled tongue that I took to be Afrikaans.

  I looked back down at the table and the spools of microfiche. None of this made any sense at all. Jack Tanner had been murdered? By Muletsi Dadla? Hilary had told me the exact opposite, that Jack Tanner killed Muletsi. Why would she lie? I shook some of the stiffness out of my legs and then set about reorganizing the spools of microfiche. Before long the woman named Blessing passed by.

  “You found what you were looking for?” she said.

  “In a way. I found something.”

  And I had. I just didn’t know what it meant.

  FIFTY-THREE

  Sam

  South Africa, Summer 1994

  LET’S FACE IT: I am not a private investigator. I am an assistant professor of English literature at a university in upstate New York. I decided I had better get started on the work that had ostensibly brought me to this continent, which was to conduct interviews and carry out research in the subject area of my academic discipline. I had decided to focus on three countries — South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria — so chosen because they possessed a wealth of novelists, mostly working in English and against a backdrop of political and social unrest. South Africa was just emerging from the long night of apartheid rule, Zimbabwe was in the throes of oppression and economic mayhem under a virtual tyrant named Robert Mugabe, and Nigeria was, well … Nigeria.