Horse People

by Cary Holladay

  Again the door opens, and Iris emerges, cheeks pink. Nelle wonders if there is a suitor among the old men. Again a seat is vacated and accepted. Iris bends over her knitting.

  With Fannie present, the talk turns to family, with the men asking after Fannie’s people, the great Porter clan. Yet Nelle’s thoughts are on those strangers, recently dead. Horrifying, each death.

  A fat woman. A madwoman. A child.

  An unloved wife, a prostitute, and a child who, had she lived, would have been like her mother—dark-skinned, foreign, and probably engaged in fraud. It seems to Nelle as if the three deceased are all together, keeping company somewhere close by, having not yet let go of this corporeal world.

  Iris leans close to Nelle and whispers, “I had Zarra read my palm.”

  Nelle raises her eyebrows. Iris never confides in her.

  Iris says, “She said I would meet a man at church.”

  So the fortune-teller spotted that primness, that eagerness, and knew just what to say. Nelle asks, “When were you there?”

  “Yesterday,” Iris says, still so low that the others don’t hear. “I gave her one of my old dresses and some garden vegetables, and some crab apple jelly.”

  Nelle’s curiosity gets the better of her. “Where is her daughter buried?”

  “In the potter’s field, in the eastern part of the county. I went to the funeral.” Iris’s eyes flash at Nelle. “Dorothy Taylor went with me. There was a priest. I couldn’t understand what he was saying.” Iris adds, “Remember the photographer who was here on the baby’s birthday? I got him to take pictures of Erzsebet.”

  “Dead? In the coffin?” Such a horrible custom, Nelle thinks.

  “She looked beautiful,” Iris says proudly. “The pictures turned out nice, and that made Zarra feel better.” She pauses, then says, “Zarra asked about you. She said she hoped you didn’t hurt yourself, lifting the table. She knew about…” and she gestures to Nelle’s middle.

  Nelle says, “You must have told her.”

  “I didn’t! She just knew.”

  As if aware of trouble brewing, Henry announces, “Gentlemen, there’s a snapping turtle in the fishpond. Would you help me get him out?”

  Gratefully, Nelle rises to her feet. She and Richard lead the veterans, including Dallas Minetry and Bodie Glenn, down to her garden. Oh, the relief of the world of men, with their cheerful noise. Together they examine the pond.

  Sam Strong measures its depth with a stick. “Snappers like to stay where the mud is deepest, right in the middle,” he says, taking charge, “but we can rig up a trap. We’ll need screen wire and a piece of meat.”

  Coarse screens are fetched and fashioned into a cone shape. The trap is baited with a chicken neck and weighted with bricks. Nelle takes a seat on a garden bench, happy to be the audience.

  “Time was, I’d’ve et that chicken neck myself,” remarks Dallas Minetry.

  Sam Strong says, “We’ve got to be able to haul the trap up quick. Soon as he feels it move, he’ll swim out.”

  “Make long handles,” Bodie Glenn suggests.

  This is accomplished with ropes. Adjustments are made to the wire cone so that the turtle must enter a small aperture to get the meat.

  “It’s ready,” Sam Strong says. He and Henry balance the trap between them and lower it into the pond. Their arms shake with the awkward weight.

  “Be careful,” Nelle cautions, though she understands elderly Henry’s need to perform this physical feat. Richard understands too, she sees. He is poised near his father, ready to help but holding back.

  Lily pads part as the trap sinks and disappears. Goldfish swim beautifully, flicking their fins.

  “We’ll get him,” Henry promises Nelle.

  Nelle hears herself invite his friends to stay for supper. “Chicken fricassee, and you can have the necks if you want,” she says, teasing. It’s something Fannie might say.

  Only Sam Strong demurs. He has to get home to his wife, he says, and goes off whistling. Nelle can hear that whistle even as he trudges down the road. It’s such a lovely sound that she sits very still, listening. The others don’t seem to notice. They talk of turtles and Taft. She knows Richard is proud that she and her parents know him, his wife, and their daughter Helen, having met them on shipboard when returning from the Far East in the spring of 1898. Nelle and Helen Taft were both fifteen; they happened to wash their hair on the same day and laughed about it.

  Sam Strong is still whistling. Nelle lets the moments of song stretch out. Sweet melody, holding all the feelings she has ever known and ones she hasn’t even felt yet. When the last note dies away, she heads to the house, planning the supper menu: the fricassee, summer squash, creamed potatoes, radish salad. Didn’t Nehemiah make nut cake for midday dessert? She hopes there’s enough left to slice thin and pass on a silver plate.

  That night Richard says, “If it’s a girl, can we name it after Mother?”

  Nelle is ready for this. “If it’s a girl, I want to name it for my great-grandmother, Diantha.”

  “Diana, do you mean?” Richard looks puzzled.

  She repeats the name. It’s more sophisticated than he’s used to. “Anyway, it won’t be a girl,” she says. “I’ve already decided on Alexander.”

  The Indian seer rises in her mind’s eye, the curved fingernails clawing air. Seven, a number that satisfies.

  “Alexander,” Richard says. “I had an uncle with that name.”

  “Alexander Henry,” she says in sudden generosity, “for your father.”

  So she has one son and another on the way. She has horses, a formal garden, and a large house with servants, all on an estate with a name of her choosing: Fairfield. At twenty-seven, she has her blond beauty, and she’s stronger than she’s ever been. She lies awake beside Richard. She wants a romance that will sweep her away. She married Richard because she admired the way he could train a horse, and because her mother didn’t want her to marry him. They met in their youth, when Nelle’s family spent time at their summer retreat. Her mother decided she hated the hot weather, and eventually they sold the place. For some time, Nelle did not see Richard Fenton, but he wrote to her.

  Distance lends enchantment. The phrase runs through her mind.

  Men sought her, many of them wealthier and better educated than Richard. Had she waited, the parade would have continued, the foppish and stupid, the athletic and effete. In choosing Richard, she may as well have worn a blindfold and pointed at random.

  If only she had waited.

  Her secret, this wishing, even as the fetus grows. She knows she will live to be old. A long span, fifty, sixty, maybe seventy more years in this house, the house Richard built for them. She, who visited the Pyramids, has settled into this quiet spot in Virginia. She brought sand from Egypt, a little vial that is somewhere in one of her trunks. “Arabia,” her mother said rapturously, as the family traveled on camelback to those royal tombs, Nelle and her mother swathed in veils against the sun, her father and brothers in pith helmets. Suppose their guide had led them astray in the desert and abandoned them?

  It seems to Nelle that she has cheated death many times. She has been thrown by horses, survived a fierce case of measles, and recovered from miscarriage and childbirth, when so many women succumb.

  Bad luck, to be pushed off a cliff, or go crazy, or have a mother who makes you crawl under a table and raise it with your head. Men’s folly is war. Women know better, yet their lives are no less blighted. She can’t decide which of the three recent deaths disturbs her most. It’s not pregnancy or even the full moon that keeps her awake at night. It’s the yearning for a love greater than Richard can offer, and when her mind moves away from that, it’s to those deaths. She has never been morbid. Why now?

  No need to pray for the dead, the Presbyterian preacher says, for they are already saved. It’s a sentiment that pleases her for its efficiency.

  Still, sleep doesn’t come.

  Is the guide still alive, she wonders, the
man who led her family to the Pyramids?

  He brought water in canteens, somehow kept cold, and lemonade and tea. He presented meat and bread and cheese, dates and cake, and they picnicked in shade. The Pyramids cast a shadow so deep that all she could see was the guide’s teeth. He wanted her. She could read desire even in darkness. He wanted her with such force that her skin burned. She wanted him, too. She imagined them up against the side of the tomb, her white dress crushed between them. She felt the power that her yellow hair and white skin and wealth held over him. She spent more money on fruit ices during a single day at a Cairo hotel than this man would make in a week.

  When he poured water for her, from the canteen into a metal cup, their hands touched. Is he still handsome? Does he still lead camels and foreigners along that path? She still has her collapsible metal cup. It might be with the vial of desert sand. Other white women, Americans and Europeans, had done what she’d wanted to. Surely shame and disgrace would follow, with a dusky infant, a swift descent into poverty, begging in a bazaar, flies on bowls of scant food, the woman’s face covered by a shawl, the man beating her.

  She hears a moan—her own voice, and she has sweated through her nightgown.

  Beside her, Richard whispers, “There, there, Nelle. You’re having a dream.” He strokes her temple.

  She reaches for him, and he holds back, murmuring, “Will it hurt the baby?”

  “No,” she says. Reckless, angry, happy. All at once.

  Pieces of the madwoman’s story reach Nelle’s ears through the gossip of visiting neighbors, Julia Sanderson and Alice Barbour. The crazy woman shut herself up in her room until the sheriff hauled her out. There was blood on the curtains, Julia whispers, blood from her period. There were plates on the floor, but they didn’t hold food. They’d been used as chamber pots. The room stank, and so did the woman.

  Julia, whose husband is a cousin to the sheriff, reports, “When they dragged her out of the room, she held onto the doorframe, screaming. She took scissors and tore a hole in her own cheek.”

  “Shh,” Alice Barbour says, with a cautionary look toward Nelle. “Remember,” she says, meaning Nelle’s pregnancy.

  “What was her name?” Nelle asks, wanting that, at least.

  Julia Sanderson supplies it. “Cora Shiflett.”

  Cora Shiflett. Bertha Mize. And the Gypsy child: Erzsebet. The Gypsy family’s last name is Szendrey; Nelle learned that from the child’s death notice in the county newspaper. Zen-dree, the name is said. Survivors are Zarra and her sons Istvan, Miklos, and Benedek, and daughters Krisztina and Magdolna. The paper didn’t mention a husband or a father. How could a woman support herself and all those children by fortune-telling?

  The names sound Polish or Russian. Gypsies, just the same. Do Istvan, Miklos, Benedek, Krisztina, and Magdolna miss their sister, or has Erzsebet been forgotten as easily as they must forget the lies their mother tells, for money? How could you believe anything good would happen in your future, if your sister broke her neck lifting a table?

  Go back, Nelle wants to tell them. If she, a northerner, is out of place here, the Gypsies are aliens, intruders. She would like to run them out with fire, as she has heard white men do to troublesome Negroes. Leave the blacks alone, she wants to say, what have they done? These foreigners, though, they let a child break her neck.

  The women who died—Bertha Mize, Erzsebet Szendrey, and Cora Shiflett—have left their marks as stories. Nelle wants more. And what will her own story be? What of herself will she leave behind? Seven sons would be a fine legacy. And boys are less likely than girls to be pushed off cliffs, to die from lifting tables with their heads, or to become prostitutes and go mad.

  Yet something about those dead women seems powerful. Bertha Mize screaming as she fell; Erzsebet Szendrey breaking her neck for a hoax. Cora Shiflett dying in custody. It was the fight in all of them. That she understands.

  My heart’s broke. My heart’s broke.

  The other women are all looking at Nelle: Iris, Fannie, and the visitors, Alice Barbour and Julia Sanderson.

  “Are you feeling well?” Iris asks her. “Would you like some cold water?”

  “Not too cold,” Fannie sings out. “Drink cold water only if it’s been a while since you felt the baby kick. Or eat something sweet. It’s kicking, right, Nelle?”

  “It’s too early for that,” says Nelle, feeling irked. Richard announced the pregnancy to the family, and the news spread immediately among their friends. Nelle would have preferred to wait.

  “Do you think it’ll be a boy or a girl?” asks Julia Sanderson. She was a beauty, Nelle has heard; men fought over her. She still has a beauty’s blue eyes and fluid movements, though she must be forty-five. She married both the men who fought for her, first the one who lost, and years later, when he died, she married the one who won.

  “Another boy,” says Nelle.

  “I never thought I’d have six children,” Alice Barbour says in a tone of wonder. “They grow up so fast. Only George and Nancy are still at home.”

  Fannie says, “Somewhere in my attic, Nelle, I have a camel-hair coat John can wear. It was Richard’s, when he was little. Iris, will you remind me to look for it?”

  “Yes, Mama,” Iris murmurs.

  Nelle could tell them a thing or two about camels. In Arabia, after the excursion to the Pyramids, the camel knelt down so she could dismount, with the guide holding her stirrup. The camel’s long eyelashes, its droll, feminine lips. She sees it as vividly as if it’s here in the room, where the neighbor women are rising to depart. She smells the camel’s thick woolly hair and spicy yellow urine—for didn’t it relieve itself when she stepped away, loosing a spurt so hard the liquid kicked up dust? She feels the chafe of the veils that wrapped her face and tied beneath her chin. Sand collected in the veils, so that by day’s end they were heavy and nearly solid, reminding her of a chrysalis.

  “Good-bye, Nelle,” say Julia Sanderson and Alice Barbour, from the door.

  Nelle says, “Good-bye.” The visitors hug Fannie and Iris. Does it hurt Nelle’s feelings that Julia and Alice don’t hug her, too? She looks into her heart and discovers that it does, a little bit. But she hasn’t known them very long.

  The camel’s name: she thinks hard, until the name comes to her. Jawharah.

  “Jewel,” the guide answered, when she asked him what it meant.

  Day after day, Nelle has Nehemiah and Roby, one of the farmhands, check the snapping turtle trap. While Nelle watches, they raise the wire contraption. No turtle, but the chicken neck is gone. Nehemiah rebaits it with other scraps, and these too vanish. Nelle hates the thought of the monster in the depths.

  Nelle fumes, “All we’re doing now is feeding him.”

  “Snapper gettin’ fat,” Nehemiah says. The thought seems to please him.

  Nehemiah and Roby try lifting the trap fast, so if the snapper’s in it, he won’t have time to move. Other days they raise it slowly, so as not to startle him. It’s always empty.

  “I seen him,” Roby offers. He’s a quiet boy, about fifteen, a nephew of Nehemiah’s. “He comes up for air early in the morning. I try to grab him, but he gets away.”

  “They can live a long time,” Nehemiah says.

  “How long?” Nelle asks. The pond reflects her summer dress. Water lilies are in bloom, pale pink, so beautiful.

  “Longer than us,” Nehemiah says. “A hundred years.”

  IV

  Nelle notices that Iris is frequently gone from the house. She’s not out in the garden, for gardening doesn’t interest her. She’s not out in the fields; she doesn’t ride. Nelle waits, and one morning when she and Iris are alone at the breakfast table, Nelle asks, “You go to see those Gypsies, don’t you?”

  Iris’s face flushes. “I feel sorry for them.”

  “What do you do there?”

  “I’ve taught the girls to crochet. I took them one of the barn kittens, the little orange one.” Iris sips her coffee. “Zarra showed me how to s
moke! Don’t tell Richard.”

  Well, Iris will never go to Arabia, Nelle knows. The Szendrey family, in their squalor, represents the most exotic adventure Iris will ever have.

  Iris says, “They’ve got royal blood. Zarra’s kin to a Hungarian queen.”

  “What a liar.”

  “She grew up in a castle,” Iris insists. “Other people in the family got jealous and made her leave. That’s why she came here.”

  “Do you curtsey to her?”

  “Don’t make fun,” Iris says. “They’re a wonderful family.”

  “Do you have a favorite?” Nelle asks.

  Iris sets her mouth. “It’s none of your business,” she says.

  Nelle blinks, surprised by this defiance.

  Iris says, “Zarra asked me, if anything happened to her, would I look after the children? And I said yes. And I told Richard, and he said, since I made that promise, then if Zarra died, he’d help those youngsters.” She glares at Nelle. “That means you’d have to help them, too.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” Nelle says, taken aback. “This has gone too far.”

  Iris sets her cup down so hard that the coffee sloshes over. “It’s just if! If anything happened to her.”

  “I’ll speak to Richard about this,” Nelle says, furious, “and from now on, nothing from this property is to go to those people, do you understand?”

  “You wouldn’t care if they all died,” Iris says with a sob. “Your heart’s so hard.”

  It’s true. Nelle wouldn’t care about that family. But she’s shaken by Iris’s words and pouring tears.

  “Iris,” comes a voice from the end of the room, a voice so clear that at first Nelle doesn’t realize it belongs to Henry. He must have heard everything. He will take Iris’s side because she’s his daughter. Henry approaches the table and places his hand on Iris’s shoulder. Iris shakes with weeping. Nelle raises her eyes to Henry’s and finds sympathy in his face. For her or for Iris?