Horse People

by Cary Holladay

  Iris manages to say, “I know what you think, about the table and all. Zarra does some of that for show.” Henry hands Iris his handkerchief. She wipes her eyes and says, “But she’s real, when it comes to spirits. She has the gift of,” and Iris struggles with the word, “clairvoyance.”

  “The Bible says avoid fortune-tellers, Iris,” Henry says.

  “I know, Papa,” Iris says, her voice miserable. “It hasn’t brought Zarra any happiness, I can tell you that. Before her husband died, he promised to get in touch with her from beyond. He hasn’t. She’s very disappointed.”

  “I can imagine,” Nelle says.

  Nelle sees Henry’s mustache twitch. Surely he wouldn’t be laughing, with his daughter so upset. Iris’s tears ease; she sniffs. Her face holds a turning-inward expression that never fails to irritate Nelle. In touch from beyond, indeed. Nelle will tell Richard about that, will make him recognize how foolish his sister is.

  She says, “Henry, would you like some coffee?”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” he says, and pulls out a chair.

  Henry’s voice, so strong when he came into the dining room, is unlike his usual thinned-out, crackly tones. She gets a glimpse of how he was as soldier going to fight the Yankees. Fighting Nelle’s relatives, for she had uncles in that war. Her family contributed money, supplies, and influence. She understands there were a few substitutes bought, men hired to serve, and what was wrong with that? Nothing, so far as she can see. Henry’s rejuvenated voice, as powerful as if he were Iris’s age: there was tenderness in the hand he placed on Iris’s shoulder, the spotted, knocked-about hand with knuckles like stones.

  Men’s voices, men’s hands. She’s alert to them these days, as if pregnancy has heightened her senses.

  She has not forgotten the odd, distressed man who said, “My heart’s broke.” She tells Richard about him at bedtime. The man with pitted skin and shambling gait, crying as if his heart were a cracked rib: where had he come from? Some lost, roaming soul. My heart’s broke.

  “Do you have any idea who that could be, Richard?” she asks.

  “No.” He seems distracted. “You asked me who owns that house. The bawdy house.” He gets into bed. The mattress gives beneath his weight. “Papa told me. It’s Sam Strong.” The man who left their garden whistling, the day they made the turtle trap. “Sam says they paid the rent on time. All those stories, he thought was just gossip, until that girl went crazy.”

  “He knew better,” Nelle says. “He must have. Don’t you think?”

  Richard says, “Oh, he probably thought those women were each other’s daughters or sisters, or something. He’ll fix the place up, he said, and rent it out again.”

  In the darkness a firefly flashes. Summer has been so long, stretching into what should be fall. The baby kicks for the first time. Nelle touches her belly. It’s almost October; she has been anticipating a birth in early April. She revises that date to March. Her doctor predicted April, but how could a man know?

  The firefly shines. People here call them lightning bugs. What would it be like to hire out your body? To live in that house by the railroad tracks and wait for men to come?

  “If I hear of any whores who need a place to live, I’ll tell Sam,” she says.

  Richard’s laughter shakes the bed.

  “What was the worst thing about the war?” she asks Henry. They’re in the garden, Nelle snapping dead blooms from daylilies. Henry holds a basket where she places the shriveled blossoms.

  It’s his robust, deep voice that answers her. “The horses. You love animals, Nelle, and this you’ll understand. The way they died, so many horses and mules, the way they suffered. There was this awful thing, battle rash. Sores spread all over their bodies.”

  His words strike her with the force of news. “I didn’t know,” she says.

  “It goes way back. They had it during the Crusades,” Henry says. “And there was this: A man got a letter from his wife that said they were bad off, hungry—his family. He could have left the army for a while, gone back and seen to them. You weren’t supposed to, but men did. This fellow, though, put off going. Then he got word they’d starved.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she says. These are stories she has never heard before. She takes the basket of clippings from him, remembering how old he is, older than her father.

  Henry says, “I won’t live to see all your children, Nelle.”

  She waits, to give him time. The day has grown hot. Her back aches from bending over.

  Henry continues, “I’ll see this baby, and maybe the next one.” His elderly voice is back. He gestures to the daylily blossoms. “Will those be pig feed?”

  It’s a joke of his. He likes pigs, the way they eat anything.

  “It’ll make the blooms come back better next year,” she says.

  “You thought I didn’t like you,” he says. “I didn’t used to. I wanted Richard to marry Mattie Lowe.”

  Bucktoothed, round-shouldered Mattie Lowe, warbling hymns at church. People praise that terrible voice, to make Mattie happy. How embarrassing for Nelle that such a common sweetheart preceded her. There is the fact of the social gap between Nelle and the Fentons. Yeoman farmers they were and are, despite prosperity; Richard got ambitious in marrying her.

  Henry says, “You’re a mite high-powered for my boy, Nelle.”

  No compliment has ever pleased her so much. She notices sweat on his face. Heat is dangerous for an old heart. “Let’s go inside,” she says.

  She asks Nehemiah, “The day you went into the pharmacy. Did you see a strange man in the street when you came out?”

  He’s shelling beans on the back porch. “No, ma’am.”

  “Do you remember that day? Mr. Grymes put candy in the package for me.”

  “I remember, but I didn’t see no man.”

  “He passed by the carriage,” she says, “talking to himself.”

  “Uh-uh.” A tightening of the jaw: his protest at her insistence. Nehemiah’s skin is reddish. Cherokees, Pamunkeys, and Chickahominys lived here. Richard can talk endlessly about which families intermixed. Some of the Scot-Irish in the mountains, as well as the blacks, married Indians. Nehemiah’s eyes flick to the edge of the porch, where a tiny lizard rests in the sun, brown with a blue streak down its tail. The flick tells her he remembers the man.

  Maybe he’ll talk about others.

  “Those women,” she says, for this is part of the secret they share, the secret of having gone to look at the bawdy house; wasn’t that what they did right before they went to the druggist’s? “Did you know any of them who lived in that house?”

  Never ask a Negro a question he can simply say “no” to. A shake of the head, a rattle of beans in the pail.

  “Remember to use plenty of ham with the beans,” she says, giving up.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Suppose she told Richard she wanted to live up North? They could move to Philadelphia, buy a home in Rittenhouse Square, and keep horses out at Devon, at her family’s place. She pictures a pile of calling cards on a hallway table. She hears the Pennsylvania voices: the clipped elegance of her parents’ generation, the merry flurry of her girlhood friends, the downward German lilt of country people. Nobody thinks about the war up there or relives its hardships.

  But there’s more challenge in living here, and she’s running her own show, away from her mother, though she misses her father. At church, whenever the minister speaks of Heaven, she has only to look out the window. Heaven is her pastures, fenced with arborvitae posts, and her stable, finer than most houses, with six box stalls, brick center aisle, tack room, and garage, and on the second floor, loft and living space.

  Nehemiah scoops the bean pods into a piece of newspaper. He says, “Mr. Henry ask me to make rice pudding. He gone home now. I could take it to him this evening.”

  He’s asking permission. “Yes,” she says.

  Later, she sees lantern light bobbing across the field between her house and the hou
se where Richard’s parents live. It’s Nehemiah, she knows, with the pudding warm in a dish. He’ll hand it to Fannie at the kitchen door and take a while getting back. A sweet, long evening, with time to himself. Nelle could envy that.

  Secret lives are all around her.

  No sign of Iris, and Nelle guesses she has gone to visit the Gypsies again. Iris is in love with that woman. Zarra reached out for Iris’s spinster heart and claimed it with her rolling dark eyes and the melodrama of her daughter’s death. For Iris, the séance must have meant the start of something new and important. Nelle has never loved anyone enough to cry the way Iris did.

  Iris returns at ten o’clock, hurrying through the front door. Nelle looks up from her book, taking in the flushed cheeks, the light dew that Iris shakes from her shawl.

  Nelle could stop it with a word to Fannie. Or the minister. Yet there’s satisfaction in knowing Iris has been pulled in. Zarra is a cat and Iris a cornered chipmunk, no, not that clever. A hatchling, fallen from a nest. Iris will give the Gypsies what she can, and someday they’ll be gone, without even a good-bye to poor yearning Iris.

  “Back to the castle,” Nelle murmurs and laughs to herself.

  “What’s that, Nelle? What are you reading?” Iris asks breathlessly.

  “Thackeray.”

  When Iris has vanished upstairs and Nelle is alone, she can’t concentrate. The dog that barked during the séance: was that Griffin, her childhood pet? She hadn’t seen any dogs in the Gypsies’ yard. Well, a mutt could come up from the road. Maybe one of the séance visitors brought a dog.

  Yet the bark she heard sounded just like Griffin’s.

  “I want to buy that house,” Nelle tells Richard. “I’ll speak to Sam Strong.”

  Richard stares at her. “The house where those women…?”

  “You’ve said I should diversify.”

  She’s brushing her hair at her vanity, in the morning sun. One advantage of pregnancy is its effect on hair. Hers has never been thicker.

  Richard is wearing old clothes, for there’s a problem with the machinery at the mill; he will climb inside and fix it. He says, “Plenty of other houses you could buy, places without the,” he pauses, “association.”

  She coils her hair and pins it on top of her head. “It has a nice deep lot, and it’s close to the railroad station.”

  “So close the trains rattle it every time they go by.” In the mirror, Richard’s eyes meet hers, and they’re wary.

  Nelle laughs. The new plan excites her. It’s not the economics of the house; it’s her curiosity, which would be satisfied by buying it.

  She says, “That part of town is going to grow.”

  “You have investments already, Nelle. Stocks and bonds,” Richard says, “and what about your horses? You don’t have time to be a landlady.”

  “Yes, I do. I’ll find good tenants,” she says. The question of what she might discover in the house, what horrors the prostitutes might have left behind, what bits of their lives might reveal themselves: all of that brings anticipation.

  Richard holds out his hands in a gesture of bewilderment. “Nelle, I doubt you’ve ever seen a house as filthy as that one is likely to be. Think of what went on there.”

  When Nelle was a girl, her mother worked with settlement houses. Ida Scott admitted that the poor sometimes clung to hunger and depravity, even when salvation was offered. Nelle smiles at a memory of Ida in high dudgeon, her elaborate hat askew, having been chased out of a slum. “No better than rats,” Ida stormed, while Nelle and her brothers smothered their mirth.

  The house Nelle wants will hold the stories, if not the women themselves. She says, “I’m not going to change my mind.”

  Richard leans down and kisses her. He’ll come home with chaff in his clothes, having decided this idea is just a whim, the caprice of an expectant woman.

  He touches her hair and says, “Oh, Nelle, I love you so much.”

  The look in his eyes: it shakes her to see that, the very face of adoration.

  Sam Strong agrees to sell the house. Nelle has a telephone, but Sam, like most people in the county, does not, so they make arrangements through the mail. Sam suggests they meet at the property to sign the papers. Sam will bring a lawyer.

  Sam appears to understand that she herself, not Richard, is buying the house.

  The day she is to meet Sam, rain falls warmly, heavily. Nehemiah and Roby have colds. She could go to the mill and get Richard to drive her. He does not want her driving herself while she is pregnant, but she’d rather go alone. At the stable she chooses a mudder, a big gray gelding who’s steady on his feet even on slick roads, and she hitches him to the buggy.

  She covers the six miles easily. As she reaches Orange, the rain stops and the sun comes out, hot and brilliant, so that the fall roses in yards are a garish, humid red. She turns onto Railroad Avenue, then into the alley. Sam Strong and a younger man who must be the lawyer lounge on the steps of the house she intends to buy. The lawn, such as it is, has been trimmed. Dragonflies shimmer across the path where the two women fought. The men stand up and stroll toward Nelle’s buggy.

  Sam Strong says, “Willie Ambrose, meet Richard’s wife, Henry’s daughter-in-law, Nelle Fenton.” He pauses. “Are you sure you want to do this, Nelle?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  Willie Ambrose asks, “Would you like to look around the house, Mrs. Fenton?”

  “No need,” she says. The men’s faces are grave and respectful. Maybe they realize she is neither naïve nor particularly civic-minded. She simply wants property. She’ll acquire more acreage around her farm, and houses, lots, and stores in Orange. She would like to be able to leave real estate to all of her children.

  Her seven sons. Almost, she hears their feet pounding across the wooden porch of her house. She’s ready. She has only to bear them and bring them up, and they will keep coming back to her, even when she is old. The properties will be part of all that, fodder for conversation, an inheritance that will tantalize. What a surprise, that being a mother and being in business would be entwined. Gazing down the alley, she wonders how the vista of these streets, this town, might change within her lifetime.

  “Nelle?” asks Sam.

  His voice calls her back from the spell that had caught her. She takes her fountain pen from her purse. “Before I sign,” she says, “there’s a favor I’d like to ask.”

  Sam nods.

  She is a woman and she’s from the North. She might ask anything. If her request is outlandish, Sam’s friendship with her father-in-law and the Fentons’ standing in the community will require that Sam and the lawyer protect her by not revealing it.

  “Whistle for me,” she says.

  Sam’s face lights up. She sees how he must have been as a young soldier, cutting up in camp. He laughs so hard his face almost cracks in two, and Willie Ambrose joins in. Nelle smiles. She can’t help it.

  Sam takes a flask from his pocket, knocks back a swallow, and licks his lips. He says, “I’ll walk a little ways. Have to forget you’re listening.”

  “I understand,” she says.

  Willie Ambrose relaxes, leaning against the buggy. There’s something appealing about his round face, some bluish worry there, like the man in the moon. Willie Ambrose might become a friend, an ally. She might hire him herself.

  The sun slips behind clouds, and Nelle guesses she’ll have a rainy drive back home. Sam strolls away, and in a moment she hears the high, clear notes she remembers from that day in the garden, more beautiful than any music at an opera or a cathedral. The melody travels down the alley, and Nelle closes her eyes.

  With seven sons, there will scarcely be time to finish anything—a conversation, a recollection, a meal—before something else begins. There will be jackets to button and fevers to soothe, and her boys’ father’s father, old Henry Fenton, will be only a story to them. Where are the children’s books she was taking to be repaired, the day she saw the women fighting? She set them down somewhere
and hasn’t thought of them since.

  She opens her eyes, and still the whistled song carries to her ears. Willie Ambrose passes a hand over his brow, and some struggle or sorrow plays across his face. A raindrop falls on Nelle’s cheek. A fly lands on the horse’s flank, and his hide twitches, throwing it off. The whistling stops, and in the silence Nelle hears Sam walking back to her.

  Monstrosities

  Because Nelle Fenton is who she is, her lawyer, Willie Ambrose, comes to her house whenever she needs him. He is there on a hot Friday evening in September 1920, with the papers necessary for Nelle to bring suit against her father. They are locked in a bitter dispute over her mother’s estate. Nelle’s father lives in Pennsylvania; Nelle’s animosity is not lessened by distance.

  Nelle’s husband and their six sons are inside, having supper. Nelle and Ambrose occupy wicker porch chairs in the dusk, the burnt end of summer. Nelle sips cold champagne. Ambrose drains his glass of iced tea. He is heavyhearted about the suit. “If you can avoid this kind of trouble in your own family,” he begins, but she plucks the papers from his grasp and signs them.

  “He has kept money from me,” she says, “money that’s mine. I can’t reason with him.”

  Ambrose doubts that. He met Thaddeus Scott, a less fierce version of Nelle herself, during a Christmas party at this very house and liked the old man, full of stories of the Far East, the Klondike gold rush, and South America, where he took his family when Nelle was seventeen. In Brazil, Nelle’s father had caught malaria, sunk low, and nearly perished. Nelle pulled him through, the old man said. She ordered the physicians to administer quinine and directed nurses to bathe her father’s head with alcohol and feed him lemonade and broth.

  Two peas in a pod, Nelle and her father, down to their jutting noses and drooping lids, as if regarding the world from beneath a curtain.

  Nelle hands the papers back, and Ambrose slides them into his briefcase. “I’ll hold on to these for a couple of days,” he says, “in case you change your mind.”