Horse People

by Cary Holladay

  It is not, Nelle believes, all play. He might set them upon her, dogs and children too.

  He must be waiting inside, all agitation, wondering what she will say to his wife.

  “Mrs. Fenton,” says Sylvia, breathless, pushing her way out of the welter of children and dogs. Nelle is not surprised that the woman knows who she is. “Let my husband drive you home,” she says, as if a visit from Nelle is routine. “I saw you walking over.” She indicates a hill, and Nelle understands that the road passes along it.

  “I won’t trouble you,” Nelle says.

  The children wait in a clump, at a distance, until their mother shoos them inside, out of the rain. The younger ones go in, but the pinkeye boy lopes over to stand at his mother’s side, arms across his chest. Nelle points to the fence-biting horse. “Cribbing’s a terrible habit. You have to break him of it, or the others will pick it up.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know that,” says Sylvia. “I’m sure you’re right.”

  I’ll always remember this, what I did and said first, once it was over.

  “Have you ever seen an animal here that you couldn’t identify?” Nelle asks Sylvia. “You have lived around here all your life, haven’t you? Not a wild dog. Something else entirely.”

  Sylvia glances toward the house. “I can’t help you with that.”

  She knows what happened with him, just now.

  “I may never find out,” Nelle says.

  III

  By the time she reaches her house it is late afternoon, freezing cold, and the rain has stopped. Right there on the porch, she strips off her riding habit so she is wearing only chemise and drawers, stockings and boots. She kicks the wet clothes toward Stanton, who is too surprised to turn away.

  “Burn that,” she tells him. “Burn all of it.” Stanton picks up the clothes gently, as if she were still in them. The riding habit is filthy, torn and muddy. When did the buttons disappear and the hem unravel? She pries off her boots and says, “Take these too.”

  “Ma’am. The ground is wet,” Stanton says, “too wet for a fire.”

  “Use kerosene if you have to.”

  Still she is not finished. She climbs the stairs to Iris’s room and berates her for the sin of ordering the ham, for her doctor bills, for not doing a better job with the boys’ lessons. In underwear, in Iris’s doorway, Nelle delivers her volleys, while Iris, quaking and terrified, rotates pots of African violets on her windowsill. The plants grow poorly, their leaves pocked by some blight. “Look at me when I speak to you,” Nelle shouts, yet Iris merely shows Nelle the flat back of her head, so unbecoming. Iris’s shaking hands are square, with short nails. Oh, the talk is she had a suitor when she was a girl, but Nelle doesn’t believe it. The suitor is an old maid’s shadows and lies.

  “Those plants need fresh air, you fool,” Nelle says.

  A pot falls and breaks, spilling clumps of dirt on the rug.

  “You did that on purpose, so you clean it up. I won’t have Edmonia do it,” Nelle jeers, but she is running out of steam. It’s a relief when Richard arrives, takes her arm, and says, “You must be exhausted. Come and rest,” and she lets him lead her away. She is docile now, chilled to the bone. Richard will have to go back to his sister’s room and console her, will sweep up the mess while Iris sits on her bed and cries.

  Nelle will cross the grass between stable and house thousands of times. She will not give up hunting. She will endure seeing Ben in the fields and at the breakfasts, but never again will she have a personal conversation with him, or seek one. She will do better than ever in hunts, hitting her stride in her fifties and sixties. Over her fireplace will hang the brushes of foxes and the fierce mounted heads, all teeth and pointed ears.

  Oh, people will talk. They can’t help it, her mother used to say.

  Maps will be drawn with fingertips on tablecloths all over Orange County to show Nelle Fenton’s route, how far she walked to her lover’s house, back when ladies didn’t walk fifty yards. It was miles, people say, and no doubt they will embellish. Slept outside when her husband kicked her out, then took over the school, then ran all the way to the Burleighs’ in a blowing gale, where his wife, that spitfire, threw her off the land while ol’ Ben hid inside, a-peepin’ through the curtains.

  Sinking into her tub with hot water to her cheekbones and sandalwood soap in her hair, Nelle decides she would not mind owning Ben’s house. She will send Willie Ambrose to arrange the purchase. She’ll rent out the property or give it to one of her boys as a wedding present, and it will please her to own that wild stretch of river. Running scalding water through her hair, she cries. The shock will be with her for months, years, the shock of parting from Ben. If it weren’t for her dogs and horses, she would, she would… oh, she doesn’t need his wretched house. Let them stay where they are.

  I was a damn good teacher.

  Even more than the affair, her mother would be horrified by her cruelty to Richard and Iris. Nelle will make it up to them. And after this bath, she will discard all of her sandalwood soap, because she is using it on this day of days. Every time a cat yawns and a clock strikes, must she be reminded? A hunt face looks stupid when you’re eating candy, she wants to tell him. Outside, in the world beyond her house, her legend grows; her story is something apart from her, a galloping pack of tales befitting the life of a man, a strong man. The word will be out that Ben turned her down. She scrubs her shoulders, her breasts, the sandalwood soap gritty on her skin.

  I loved you so. There will never be—

  She needs a rest and something to eat and, tomorrow, a long ride. She kept her back straight as she left the Burleighs’, didn’t she? Mind your carriage, her mother always said. All right. Live long. Just live long and ride.

  What she remembers from those days is how safe she felt, sleeping at the schoolhouse with Stanton outside the door. That was the pause in her life, and later, looking back, she feels refreshed by the memory. Her respite, a gathering up of herself: she lives another forty-four years.

  Stanton, now what did he look like? Blue eyes, and something hungry about the mouth, some starved Scot-Irish blood in him, and long arms for rubbing down the horses. Her last clear memory of him is his taking her riding habit away to burn it. Such grief in his face, and why? Why did it take years for that grief to register on her? That was back in the days when men cut ice on the river.

  The tiny schoolhouse where she taught for three days becomes a museum, its walls bedecked with historical photos of local landmarks and heroes, including her boys, one of whom—Gordon—she outlives, black-and-white pictures of them in flight suits with early planes, all with names. Black Bess, Airborne Annie. In a creased photo of a hunt, she recognizes Ben Burleigh’s dime-sized image amid the riders. She rode and hunted till she was almost seventy, but Ben was long gone by then, and Richard too.

  The schoolhouse museum: airless, silent, sunlit on a late afternoon, and she at ninety-two, months before her death, alone inside it. The door is never locked. Anyone can go in, any time. A guestbook shows the signatures of visitors, tourists and sightseers traveling the hunt country. Her companion, a live-in practical nurse, hovers in the doorway, having left the car running outside. It takes Nelle’s breath away, that she slept on these floorboards, that the children she taught and the children she bore are old or dead. She tends to forget how close the schoolhouse is to the river, how you can hear the water rushing by. Her hearing, like her eyesight, is still reasonably keen.

  She sees her house from here, on its hill, through a thin pane kept shining clean by the people who put the schoolhouse on the Historic Register. There are her barns and her fields, and her tall arborvitae.

  Stanton burned her clothes as she asked him to and stayed in her employ till the following spring. No good-bye, and she never knew where he went.

  The Colored Horse Show

  After a long dry spell comes a rainy season of creatures that slither and spin. Spiders crochet over Nelle’s doors. Richard says, “Run into a spi
der web, and you’ll run into a friend.” Frogs glory in the rain that falls on the yellow grass and the brick terrace baked by months of heat. The green-striped canvas awnings sag and drip. At night, bats squeeze through holes in window screens and bobble in the hallways until Philip and Edmonia sweep them outside with brooms.

  Between drizzles, Iris sits on a garden bench reading. From the porch, Nelle observes a blacksnake drop from a tree and land beside her sister-in-law. Iris jumps up and sprints toward the house, screaming.

  Nelle takes pleasure in withholding sympathy. “It was harmless.”

  “How could you tell from up here?”

  “I have good eyes.”

  Iris huffs past her and inside.

  It is August 1945. The war is over in Europe and will soon end in Japan. Nelle’s boys are coming home, yet her spirit is heavy. Richard is recovering from a heart attack. He and Nelle argue so bitterly these days. He is angry that she refuses to sell a horse to a colored man named Bootney Sims. Twice the man has come by, and twice Nelle has sent him away.

  “He wouldn’t take proper care of her,” Nelle tells Richard. They are in the garden, beside the bench where the snake scared Iris. Nothing is blooming except a few daylilies.

  “Bootney Sims is a good man,” Richard says. “He was in my court, and I believe he’s a man of his word.”

  It’s time to feed the goldfish. Nelle goes to her shed and fetches a box of Quaker Oats. “Why was he in court?” She tosses oats into the pond, and fish kiss the water with orange lips.

  “His wife was beating him,” Richard says. “He wanted a divorce. I granted it. She’s a violent woman.”

  Nelle pops the lid back on the box. “You should be resting.”

  “Have you ever listened to anything I say?”

  “I have the right to approve the buyers of my horses. I don’t believe most Negroes know how to treat Thoroughbreds.”

  “Some of the best trainers in the county are colored,” Richard says. “Look at the Ellis brothers. Their standards are as high as yours.”

  “Nobody’s standards are as high as mine.”

  The Ellis brothers own the track where the Colored Horse Show is held. Until the war the show was an annual event, drawing crowds of Negroes and whites alike. It was almost as well attended as the regular shows held in Orange and Culpeper, the ones organized by whites. Nelle and Richard went to the Colored Horse Show every year. There were jumps, mule races, sulky races, and prizes for best draft horse, harness horse, yearling, brood mare. It was a pageant, with bands playing and black jockeys in colored silks flying around the track, the animals all curried and groomed, their manes plaited. During the war, the show was canceled. Now the Ellis brothers are reviving it.

  Well, this year Nelle isn’t interested. “Let Bootney Sims buy a horse from the Ellis brothers. For that matter,” she jeers, “he can go to Montpelier and ask Marion duPont Scott for one of Battleships’s foals.” Nelle admires Marion duPont Scott, who is the daughter of a pharmaceutical baron and is divorced from a movie star. Battleship was sired by none other than Man o’ War. “I don’t want to do business with him.”

  “You’re wrong, Nelle. You’re wrong about so many things,” Richard says and walks off. She can’t bear to watch how slowly he trudges up the lawn.

  She really does want to go to the Colored Horse Show. It was fun to bet on the races and eat fried fish from paper plates. If Richard turned around and asked her to go, she’d say yes.

  Hasn’t she provided for the family, doing as much as Richard or more? All during the war, her household suffered few privations. Iris promoted foolish economies, digging up wild greens to put on the table, never mind that the gardens were bursting with crops. When Philip ran out of vanilla extract, Iris convinced him to put peach leaves on a cloth and place a baked cake on the leaves as it cooled. An old Civil War recipe of her mother’s, she said; Nelle had to admit the flavor was delicate, like almonds. Iris knitted ugly socks for Nelle’s boys, but Nelle receives more letters from the boys than Iris ever will. She is Mother; Iris is Aunt. Richard writes to each boy once a week. He reads his letters aloud: which of their friends came for dinner, reports of his own health. “Mr. Jenkins had to carry me up the courthouse steps,” Richard wrote.

  All their boys served in the war. Gordon is stateside already. He visited last week with a new girlfriend. She had the face of a cutpurse, with enough mascara to tar a roof. After Gordon and the woman left, Nelle caught the feral reek of perfume in her dressing room. The cutpurse had sneaked in there, and something was missing. Nelle just couldn’t figure out what it was.

  Now that the war is over, Nelle expects there will be a spate of weddings among her sons. She and Richard have two grandchildren so far. There may be many more.

  Nelle knows, though no one has said so, that Richard is dying.

  Her old life is calling her, her old, wild life. She misses the traveling she did before she married. She has always loved parties, dancing, good food, but she feels stale and uncertain now. She has put up with Richard’s hangdog expression and with Iris, doleful and prim.

  A pewee calls, sounding lonely. Yes, the war is over, yet her soul feels forsaken. In early morning, with Richard asleep beside her, she hears the gulk of bullfrogs, and the sound appalls her. Bullfrogs mean the quality of life in her fishpond has diminished. Last year’s leaves are filling it up. Richard has let things go. Weeds grow beneath the pasture fences.

  Must she see to everything?

  She should be happy, for she has the horse she has waited for all her life: Granite, a dun-colored stallion. She has never felt such power in any animal. The rainy spell is delaying her exercise. She could order a new riding outfit, but the thought doesn’t cheer her.

  The horse that Bootney Sims wants is a Thoroughbred but unremarkable, a three-year-old filly named Farewell. Nelle had paid her no mind until Bootney came, beseeching. There is something of the plug about Farewell, never mind her good lineage.

  Here comes the rain again, big pattering drops.

  She can’t be happy, because Richard is dying. He will die with nothing from her heart except an impatient fondness and the ready yielding, inexplicable even to herself, that brought them John, Alex, Gordon, Vernon, Miles, Barrett, and Dudley, and oh, the beautiful baby in between Barrett and Dudley. Three weeks old when he died, while she and Richard were still deciding on a name. It has been ages since she let herself think of him. She had time for that baby, she who had little time for the others.

  Her back aches suddenly, a spasm. She presses her hand to the small of it.

  Well, she can’t sell a Thoroughbred to a Negro whose own wife beats him up.

  And shame on Richard for making a spectacle, being carted up the courthouse steps, looking pitiful, making a legend of himself so people will say, Judge Fenton held court even when he was dying. Is she the only one who knows he is dying? Does Richard know? Mr. Jenkins, the clerk, is a big strong man. Does he use a fireman’s carry or pick Richard up like an infant? Richard should try harder. He still manages at home, ascending the stairs at night with help from Philip, though it takes a long time.

  “Mrs. Fenton,” someone says, and she turns.

  It’s Bootney Sims, cap in hand, his face and shirt streaked with rain.

  “I told you no,” she says. “I will not sell that horse to you.”

  He steps closer. In the strange rainy light, she sees that his eyes are green. She has always seen his eyes in shade before, when he has come knocking at the back door and Philip has summoned her. She doesn’t think he is one of Philip’s sweet-men, swanning around, trying to lure Philip behind the barn. She has sent several sweet-men packing.

  “I’ll take good care of Farewell,” Bootney Sims says. “Please, Mrs. Fenton. She a winner. I got my heart set on her.”

  He loves Farewell. The realization makes her mouth fall open. She stares at him.

  He says, “I got the money in my hand. If you want more, I’ll bring more. In my hand
,” he insists, showing the money.

  Yellow-green, those eyes, like the wet garden around them. She says, “If you plan to race her, you have no time to train her. The Colored Horse Show starts in a few days. The posters are already up.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he says, his face eager. “She ready to go. She don’t need extra training.”

  “Where would you keep her? Do you have land enough for a horse?”

  “My cousin live next to me. He have a big pasture.”

  “Where do you work?” Nelle asks.

  “At the seed plant in Mitchells.”

  She could telephone the plant owner, Bud Grasty, and check if she wanted to.

  Bootney says, “She’ll get good grass and hay. There’s a clean stream where she’ll drink.”

  The train whistle blows. The enveloping sound fills the air between them. When at last it dies away, Bootney is waiting, his eyes on Nelle’s face.

  Nelle says, “If I hear of any mistreatment, if there is even a suspicion of it, you lose the horse, and you will go to jail. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He holds out the money.

  She is tempted to put him off with some delay, but no, she’s sick of him. She accepts the payment and says, “Do you have a halter?”

  “I do.” From his jacket he takes a frayed halter and bridle. Triumph lights his eyes.

  The path out of the garden feels slick. Rain falls harder. Bootney puts on his cap, and she ties her hat more tightly under her chin. They cross to the field where Farewell grazes, and Nelle calls. The horse raises her head but doesn’t come.

  Bootney puts his foot on the fence and says, “I’ll catch her.”

  He vaults over the fence, and to Nelle’s surprise, Farewell moves toward him. Bootney slides the bridle easily over her head. Nelle tells herself she has made a good bargain, unloading this unattractive creature. As soon as dry weather comes, Nelle will have Granite saddled up. He’s getting fat and lazy, and so is she. Worse, he is indulging in bad habits. She has ordered a net tied around his private parts to put a stop to that.