Horse People

by Cary Holladay

  “I won’t.”

  “Have you talked this over with Richard? Have you tried writing your father a letter?”

  “Oh, Richard happens to agree with you. Would you like to stay for supper?”

  “Thank you, but I…” Ambrose stands up. He’ll eat another meal by himself tonight, a plate prepared by his housekeeper. He is lonely. Oddly, Nelle, with her husband and sons, her horse-breeding and hunting, strikes him as lonely too. She’s a fine-looking woman, but without humor. He says, “Another time I’d like to stay, but tonight I’d best be getting back to town.”

  He imagines Richard Fenton trying to keep order in the dining room with six restless boys. Richard’s sister Iris, the boys’ companion and tutor, must be there too. Iris Fenton’s life, a spinster’s dependence on a brother and sister-in-law, could not be easy.

  The sun sinks lower, and the sky is a lavish spill of gold and pink. In this light the mountains, thirty miles west, disappear. In the Fentons’ pasture, a cow moos and another answers. Cicadas tune up in the lindens along the driveway.

  He has said good-bye, yet he can’t move. He bursts out, “Don’t do this. Quarrels like this, suits in the family, always end with broken hearts. Two peas in a pod, you and your father…”

  He is crying. Where did these sudden tears come from, these sobs wracking his chest? He drops the briefcase and covers his face with his hands. His brain is white-hot, churning.

  Nelle says nothing. He might as well be weeping in front of an animal, for all that she reacts. He presses his handkerchief to his eyes and forces himself to breathe slowly. After a long time he is aware of crickets chirping, birdcalls, the breeze in the leaves of a tulip poplar. He wrings the handkerchief in trembling hands and blows his nose.

  “There now,” says Nelle. They are still alone. “You’re not ill?” she says.

  Shaking his head, he reaches for his glass. He pours melted ice over his dry, sandy tongue, sets the glass down, and starts for his car on feeble legs. Nelle won’t tell anyone. He’s certain. She is the only woman he knows who wouldn’t, not from discretion but because she’ll simply forget. This would not be important enough for her to remember, his breaking down.

  He has reached his car when she calls, “Willie. Your briefcase.” She has followed him, and as she hands him the case, its solid weight and worn leather shock him as his own tears shocked him. He shoves it into the auto and climbs behind the wheel.

  The car is stifling hot. He drives down Nelle’s long driveway too fast. On the stretch between Rapidan and Orange, he thinks, This road will never change. If he were more distraught, if he were impulsive, he might drive with his eyes closed, to test fate, to test his own memory of the big elm in the curve just before town. He reaches his house safely and goes inside.

  He never thought he wouldn’t marry. Wouldn’t his parents be surprised if they could come back and find him, still living in the home where they raised him, eating his supper of red grapes and ham at the table where he sat all the years of his boyhood?

  He could marry Iris Fenton. The thought hits him like a slap, even as he sits with his eyes scorched, a grape in his teeth.

  With the lawyer gone, Nelle can’t bring herself to go inside. She isn’t hungry. Her family must be finishing their shortcake with whipped cream and the last of the peaches. Walking down the path to the barns, she develops a crushing headache. She has avoided the dining room, Richard gloomy at the table’s far end, their boys tiresome and raucous, Iris hogging the sugar bowl. She held off the headache during Willie Ambrose’s visit. Now, in the calm, exquisite evening, she can let it out.

  Summer won’t end, the hottest summer she has ever spent in Virginia. For weeks, men have been harvesting hay and corn. She watched them reaping before she met with her lover, that afternoon. All around her is the smell of hay and earth.

  She is thirty-seven. Once beautiful, she knows she is still striking, still has her sense of daring. When she was young and traveling with her family, she found a riding stable everywhere they went. Her mother begged her not to go off by herself, but Nelle did anyway. She has always enjoyed her own company.

  How aggravating that Willie Ambrose took her father’s part, as if Thaddeus Scott had some claim on him from their one meeting at a Christmas party years ago. But her father has always had that effect on people. When he recovered from that long-ago fever in Brazil, the nurses wept for joy. The prettiest one sang prayers in front of a crucifix, the Portuguese words musical and rich, like the names of desserts, and Nelle saw with amazement that the woman was in love with her father.

  All Nelle wants for supper is a mint julep. After she checks on the horses, she’ll pick some mint. It grows behind the barn, along with sage too old and harsh-tasting to use in cooking. The headache hurts even her teeth. She prays she isn’t pregnant.

  If she is, she’ll ride till she loses it. Aren’t six children enough for anyone? For years, given all the births and miscarriages, she has hardly had a period. First John, then Alex, Gordon, Vernon, Miles, and Barrett. Oh, I’m through with babies, she’d like to tell that sorceress.

  Once she was young and free, and now she is tied by more strings than she can count.

  It seems to her she has known Richard all her life. His knowledge of horses piqued her interest in him. From him she learned that breeding a 50 percent purebred mare to a purebred stallion will better the blood; in six generations, the mares of the herd will possess 98 percent purebred genes. Thus are race horses created, and harness horses, and hunters and jumpers. Richard’s expertise is little more than a farmer’s, she knows now, though he can train a horse beautifully. He enjoys hunts and shows as much as she does. With his advice, she usually buys and breeds their Thoroughbreds, and leaves to him the workhorses and the choice of ponies for their boys. It’s easy to breed animals for desirable traits. You select for soundness, disease resistance, temperament, and vigor. You avoid fads, keep records, and maintain your aims and goals. You cull those that disappoint. With humans, it’s so much more a game of chance. Her boys—she’s lucky with them. Her strong blood and Richard’s dependable qualities have created a legacy of sons with few faults.

  She unlatches the heavy stable door, takes a lantern from a hook, lights it with a match, and closes the door behind her. The headache bears down on her again, so she’s almost blinded. She breathes deeply of the welcome, creaturely odors.

  Just hours ago her lover, Donald Laird, informed her that he is getting married.

  Donald Laird is not the great love of her life; she no longer hopes for that kind of love. But Donald Laird has mattered a great deal. And now, abruptly, this announcement. All this, the courtship and engagement, has taken place alongside—interspersed with—his secret meetings with Nelle. She can’t believe the extent of his betrayal.

  The horses never betray her. Her favorite, Lorna, a mare of admirable bone and substance, is pregnant, her time three months off by Nelle’s estimate. The foal will be born around New Year’s, the official birthday of all horses. She strokes Lorna’s nose. Lorna whickers, and for a moment Nelle feels as if she’ll fall asleep standing up, the way soldiers are said to do—as her father-in-law, dead now, claimed he slept even while marching.

  There’s a faint sound, a stir of air.

  The stable door blows open as if exploding. Whirling, Nelle sees no one. She cries out. Wild, cold wind sweeps through, lifting straw from the floor and whipping at her hair. The horses go berserk, neighing, rearing, battering at their stalls. A stallion screams. Their shadows race up the walls, flamelike, huge and jagged. The wind knocks Nelle to her knees. She crawls into a corner and holds her arms over her head until the wind stops, which it eventually does after five minutes, maybe ten. Stops fast, completely, so that the air feels dead.

  The horses take hours to calm down. She stays with them until they do.

  At last she stumbles back through the fragrance of lindens and magnolias, the ground dry and undisturbed, and she goes inside. Richard and
Iris are chatting somewhere deep in the house. The boys’ voices reach her from their rooms. Have they not missed her? She’s tempted to call out, but she doesn’t trust her voice. Where did this smelly foliage in her hands come from? Sage. She must have grabbed it on her way back, mistaking it for mint, though all thought of a julep has left her. At least her headache is gone.

  After throwing the sage away and pulling off her shoes, she creeps fully dressed into bed, where several realizations come to her.

  First: Lorna will lose the fetus. Even if carried to term, the foal will be born dead, Lorna finished for breeding. Nelle had such hopes for this baby, had pictured a shining, sharp-hooved dancer. The mare is of superior lineage, and now that bloodline will end.

  And second: There wasn’t any storm. The stable boy, who sleeps in a room above the stalls, never appeared, so he must not have heard it. She and the horses experienced some private, freakish phenomenon beyond her understanding, except at the primitive level, which means, Stop. Stop your wanting, your yearning for something different than what you have.

  To which she says, I can’t.

  The veterinarian presses his stethoscope to the mare’s belly. “Both heartbeats are strong,” he says. “Would you like to hear?”

  He lifts the scope over his head and hands it to Nelle. She moves the instrument where he points. There. For a moment she has it, the slow drumming. Lorna takes a restless step. Nelle returns the scope. “I heard Lorna’s but not the baby’s. I haven’t felt it kick, either.”

  “Remember, Lorna carries quiet. We could push, to make it react.”

  Nelle caresses Lorna’s side. “I’m afraid to do that.”

  The vet says, “You say she had a scare? What happened?”

  “Oh, the wind. A sort of gust. She took fright.”

  “High-strung critters. Did you hear? Donald Laird’s horse got spooked by a copperhead. Don got thrown, but he’s all right.” The vet rummages in his bag. His bent back shows that he knows about her and Donald Laird.

  “Isn’t he a popinjay,” she says.

  The vet pauses, then holds up a box of feed supplement. “You could try this, but I don’t think she needs it.”

  When the vet departs, Nelle leads Lorna out to a pasture. The day is splendid, a cool breeze riding shoulder-high. The vet’s a good one. Didn’t he prevent moon blindness in one of her workhorses when it looked hopeless? And didn’t he stop a spontaneous abortion in a mare who’d been splashed on the side with cold water by Nelle’s sons as they played with the garden hose? Nelle had raced to call the vet, and he came and halted the miscarriage while she walloped the boys—John and Alex, the two oldest.

  Safely inside the fenced field, Lorna glides toward a walnut tree. Nelle stands still. The horse’s heartbeat reminded her of something—What is it?

  The Brazilian doctor. The first man she was with. That was how she celebrated her father’s turning the corner toward recovery. They used a room on the hospital’s deserted uppermost floor. Windows overlooked the tops of palms lining a boulevard.

  The doctor had such a heavy throb in his penis. That surprised her. It was like a second heartbeat. São Paulo, 1900: summer or fall, yet weren’t seasons backward? Was it really winter? “A practical matter,” the doctor said of the prophylactic he used. And with a grin like a child’s, he said, “The forbidden is sweet,” even as he was overcome by a spasm and surprisingly, so was she. She lay drowsily on the clean sheets, wondering if the young nurse, her father’s devotee, would be the one to strip the bed. Her father and mother and brothers would soon notice her absence. There were no clocks in those hospital rooms, nor screens in the open windows. Palm leaves rattled. The doctor’s curing a wealthy American would make his reputation, Nelle imagined.

  What was he saying? From slumber she woke to his urgent words, a babbling tenor like a song. He was afraid she would tell. She laughed and swatted the doctor with a pillow. The mirth was part of the celebration. Her father would be well. She would have the secret of this afternoon, of the doctor’s body and her own, naked. Feathers popped out of the pillow and floated, and the doctor disappeared in the snow of them. She was seventeen, yet the doctor seemed too young for her. He wanted to tell her about a dream. Her mother always said talk of dreams was rude, narcissistic. This was because, Nelle realized, they evoked your sleeping, desirous self.

  So long ago. Twenty years.

  Beneath her hand, the pasture fence post is rough. All her posts are made of arborvitae or red cedar. Under the walnut tree, Lorna disappears into shadow, the curve of her sides a velvety sheen. She’s my best friend.

  “Wasn’t he a popinjay,” she says to the fence posts and trees, and that fast, she’s through with Donald Laird. A warbler trills, buzzy and sweet. She has felt this dazed way before, and when? When she has fallen from a horse, lying on the ground checking to see if she’s broken in pieces. She has fallen many times, has been knocked unconscious and waked through a process now familiar. First her sense of touch returns, then hearing, then sight. It’s like emerging from the sleep that follows birth. “You have lost your floor,” Dr. Minor has told her, as if she were built on sand. All the babies have caused her pelvic muscles to weaken.

  She can speak to Lorna of the violent wind in the stable, for Lorna lived it too. Nelle will never tell anybody else. Oh, the wind, she said to the vet, as if the horse took a notion.

  Her father is behaving as if she takes notions. As if she couldn’t manage for herself the money her mother left her. Her brothers have their shares already—even Russell, mind maimed from a fall from a mountaintop, who is tended by a manservant named Mr. Hull. Her father has insisted he will manage Nelle’s funds himself, that he’ll invest them. She knows better. He’ll spend the money or lose it.

  Until this colossal outrage, she trusted him more than she’d trusted anybody else.

  She makes her way back to the house. Richard has been to the post office, and there is a package for her, from her father. She tears off the wrapping and discovers a lacquered box. She lifts the lid and finds jewelry she recognizes as her mother’s: a hideous brooch and a pair of combs missing half their jet beads, a snare of gray hair caught in the broken teeth. Her mother’s hair. And a ring, a heavy gold mourning ring too big for Nelle. She had forgotten how large her mother’s hands were.

  No note, no letter.

  She takes the jewelry to the kitchen, where Nehemiah is stirring a pot of tomatoes.

  “Nehemiah,” she says, offering the things. “You may have this.”

  “Ma’am?” he says, resting the spoon across the steaming pot. He reaches out, then pulls his hands away and shakes his head. “No, ma’am, I can’t. Thank you, but I…”

  She feels sick, for she has embarrassed him.

  She loops her thumb through the ring as she leaves the kitchen. Back in the parlor her son Gordon, age six, has found the lacquered box and is playing with it. Well, she can sell the ring and brooch or trade them in Culpeper. The combs she’ll put out in the field, where crows can pluck the hair for their nests and peck out the jet beads for their pleasure, shiny tokens to carry into the sky.

  Beads like eyes. Her mother had only one eye.

  “Mother,” cries Gordon, “did you get a present?” He waves the box. Something rabbity about that child’s face. If she had to lose one, she would choose him. She is horrible; her father has seen all the way through her. This box of ugly, gaudy things is a gauntlet thrown down. Well, he will get the papers. She’ll call Ambrose to make sure they’ve been sent to Seebold Brouse & Stull. Her father himself is a lawyer, retired now, depending on Seebold Brouse & Stull for counsel on how to get his daughter’s goat. She has never been so angry at anyone. Her anger circles around and lands on her mother too.

  The missing eye was explained only in murmurs, “an accident when she was young,” but Nelle clearly recalls the day it happened. She was six when Ida Scott got drunk and drove the pony cart into a fence. After that, Nelle’s father threatened divorce
unless the drinking stopped. Nelle watched her mother struggle and succeed, though if anyone imagined that an abstemious Ida Scott would be a calmer, easier one, that person was sore mistaken; Nelle believed that Ida Scott, sober, was more intimidating. Nelle’s family knew the Fentons; her father bought her a spotted saddle horse from Richard, and Nelle admired how well he’d trained it. She was fourteen and in love with shows and hunts. That was the year her parents sold their summer place, but Nelle had already decided—oh, with her mind, not with her heart—to allow Richard Fenton to court her, which he did, by writing to her. Once she was grown, he traveled to Devon to visit whenever he could and eventually asked her parents for her hand. Nelle was twenty-four when they married. Her father liked Richard, but her mother said, “He’s a hick, a yokel.” Nelle knew the sharp lick of spite in choosing him. So many men had pursued her; the attention was hard to give up, in marriage.

  Fairfield—that was the name of the spotted saddle horse, and now it’s the name of their farm.

  Ida Scott’s remaining eye reminded Nelle of abalone, a flat slick jewel behind tinted spectacles. Ida was adept at keeping the bad eye turned away. The good eye was the color of blue spruce. The memory of the ghastly injury rises in Nelle’s mind—her mother’s screams, the bloody cavity below her brow. Nelle’s curiosity had driven her to lift her mother’s hand away for a view of the wound. Later, her brother Victor begged for a description, but she wouldn’t talk about it. She believes her brothers have forgotten the day of the accident. How could they? But Charlie was just a baby, Victor was himself injured, and Russell, never the reflective type, may no longer have access to the memories stored in his damaged mind.

  She was a brave child, she thinks, braver and smarter and more observant than irksome little Gordon, playing at her feet. She remembers a local woman named Bonnie Hazlitt who was Nelle’s own nanny on the day of her mother’s accident. Just last year, Bonnie died in her sleep; Nelle heard that her family and friends brought to the funeral the canaries she’d raised and sold. Suddenly Nelle envies Bonnie Hazlitt’s simple life, and never mind that it’s over.