Horse People

by Cary Holladay

  “I’m fine,” he said, but he didn’t eat the food placed in front of him.

  Nelle whispered to Charlie, “Mother’s eye is hadal,” but his face stayed somber.

  One of their mother’s friends approached and said, “Ida, you must see this murex.”

  Charlie whispered to Nelle, “They buried Eddie this morning. I saw it. A minister said a prayer, and they rolled him overboard.”

  Nelle searched his white face. How could he say the stranger’s name, as easily as if he knew him? And if Charlie could hear a man’s heart stop beating, why couldn’t she?

  Their mother’s friend said, “There’s no easy way to clean out shells. I’ve tried crochet hooks, boiling, ice picks, bleach. Sometimes I bury them and let the earth rot them out.”

  The murex was handed around the table. Its curving spines pricked Nelle’s fingertips.

  The woman went on, “Next, I’m going to the Fiji Islands. You would love it there, Ida. The pearl-divers blow bubbles and press them into their eyes, like goggles.” She pantomimed, then said, “Look who’s here. You must be Victor.”

  There was Nelle’s middle brother. He pulled a chair to the table and sat.

  Nelle’s mother said to him, “I’d almost forgotten I had another son. Join us tonight, too.”

  “Actually, I’m meeting a friend this evening,” Victor said.

  “Whom do you know in Havana?” asked their mother.

  Victor didn’t have friends, Nelle knew. There was only that woman in his life. “A very accomplished lady is joining me there,” he said.

  The actress. Nelle’s mother sank back in her chair. Nelle wanted to stop the faraway look clouding Charlie’s eyes and the trembling of her mother’s chin.

  Then her father said, “Well, Victor, bring her with you to dinner as our guest.”

  Victor paused. At last he said, “All right. Thank you, Papa.”

  Nelle caught her father’s eye and grinned. So the rules were different in Havana. Thaddeus smiled back. Nelle was his favorite, and she knew it.

  Before the projectionist can start the movie again, a colored man bursts into the store. He cries, “Bootney Sims been cut.”

  Nelle follows the jostling crowd outside. Several cars have headlights on, and Richard kneels beside a man on the ground: Bootney Sims. Mr. Woodruff brings a lantern and sets it down. A colored woman leans over and tears Bootney’s shirt open. Someone hands Richard a towel, and he presses it against Bootney’s chest. The towel darkens instantly.

  “His wife done it,” a man says. “She took a knife and cut him.”

  “Is that her?” someone else asks, indicating the woman helping Bootney.

  “No, that’s his sister. His wife, she down the road by now. In a car with a man.”

  Richard says, “Nelle? Call Doc Minor. Tell him hurry.”

  Nelle hopes the phone in the store is working. It is. The Minors’ housekeeper answers, but says the doctor and his wife are out for the evening. Then Nelle remembers Dr. Littlepage, eighty years old and retired. He lives just across the river. She reaches him and explains.

  Dr. Littlepage says, “I’m laid up with gout, Mrs. Fenton, but if somebody can tote that fellow up here, I’ll tend to him.”

  He means the footbridge, the quickest way. To drive would take much longer. Nelle says, “I’ll see what can be done. You can send my husband the bill.”

  If Richard weren’t here, Bootney would be taken back to his cabin or a friend’s house, where the Negroes would treat his wound with turpentine. Now, because she sold him the horse and Richard is out there with him, his care is somehow their responsibility. She goes outside again and speaks to Richard. Bootney lies still, eyes closed.

  Richard says to the Negroes, “Dr. Littlepage lives up there.” He gestures toward the wooded hillside across the river. “Can some of you-all carry him? It’s right steep.”

  Men step forward. Swiftly, a board is located. Bootney is positioned upon it, his legs covered with a blanket, and he is gently roped in place. Three men bend down and lift the board. Bootney’s sister takes the lantern and runs ahead on the footbridge, the men crossing slowly behind her. At last, the light moves up the hill, winking among trees. Onlookers sigh, and Nelle realizes she was holding her breath. People head toward cars and wagons.

  “I need to call the sheriff,” Richard says.

  Mr. Woodruff says, “I done that already, Judge. He’ll find that woman.”

  Nelle says, “I hope Bootney will be all right,” but she believes he is already dead. Either somebody else will ride Farewell in the race, or she’ll be scratched from it. Without Bootney, she will not be anything.

  For now, the little filly waits at the rail where Bootney tied her.

  “What about Farewell?” Nelle asks Richard.

  Richard’s face is drained, exhausted.

  Mr. Woodruff says, “She can stay here, long as she needs to. They’d have won that race, Bootney and that horse.” He puts a hand on Richard’s shoulder. “You look worn out, Judge. You need to get some rest.”

  His rough face is kind as his eyes meet Nelle’s. So he knows. Everybody knows.

  “I’ll ride Farewell,” she hears herself say. “For Bootney.”

  The men stare at her.

  “But you’re a woman,” Richard says, “and you’re white.”

  “I won’t be trying to win.”

  She imagines the announcement on the loudspeaker: “Mrs. Richard Fenton, riding Farewell, in memory of Bootney Sims.” It will be the high, high moment of her life, the old savor returning. She’ll honor the spirit she saw in the man and the horse together. She’ll rein in Farewell to a walk and come in last, to give everybody time to cheer.

  “They were here,” Charlie said, planting himself at a spot near the railing. “Eddie was wrapped in canvas. They tied him with this rope.” Charlie placed his foot on a coil of heavy cord. “They lifted him with that pulley right over your head, Nelle, and he dropped over the side.”

  Nelle opened her mouth but found she couldn’t speak. The decks were awash in light, the ocean speckled with foam and atwitter with seabirds.

  Charlie said, “Do you think Eddie has people who miss him, people who loved him?”

  Dogs barked. Nelle turned to see men and women assembling on deck with their pets. There was to be a dog show. Some were docile, others frisky, attached to their owners with leashes. Everyone, it seemed, was engaged in activity. People threw quoits, shouting when they hit the mark. There would be a tug of war, then refreshments in the Moorish Tea Room. Nelle’s father and Russell and Victor lounged on deck chairs, examining a map of Cuba. Nelle heard her father say, “We could invest in sugarcane.”

  Nelle’s mother was circling the deck with her friends. Back home, Nelle recalled, before they sailed, Ida sewed coins in the hems of her dresses and instructed Nelle to do the same, so the sea winds couldn’t lift their skirts.

  “I didn’t do that,” Nelle said. “I didn’t bother.”

  Charlie said, “What’s that, Nelle? You didn’t do what?”

  One of the dogs, a rambunctious little spaniel, broke loose and tore across the deck. Nelle bent down and stroked it.

  “I’ll remember Eddie,” Charlie said. “Won’t you, Nelle? I’ll never forget him.” Charlie held out his arms to the wind. The wide sea tilted behind him.

  Two Worlds

  Nelle takes the jump and is borne aloft in that pleasure that she lives for, herself and her horse riding the curvature of Earth. These swooping green moments are hers and Granite’s. Woodsmoke fills her head; her rushing vision finds a distant flock of sheep. Why, she’s almost home. She has come back the long way, to hills she hadn’t even known she owned, but she’s still on the Bakers’ farm. Granite stretches out his legs. He’ll land so easy.

  A red fox—nourished by mice and voles and acorns, by birds and toads and berries—is fleeing them. She saw him in Langbourne Jones’s pasture, where the grass was cropped close as suede. Granite saw hi
m too, Granite knows where he is, Granite has a nose keen as any dog’s. The fox has evidently left a burning scent, so strong the hounds tear along in his wake.

  As Nelle scans the horizon, she loosens her grip and falls into the spinning sky, then onto the ground, hard as ice. Granite keeps going, leaving her behind.

  “Oh,” she cries, tasting blood. Her nose plows into a furrow of red clay.

  Her heartbeat matches Granite’s galloping hooves. He’s moving too fast to stop.

  Her limbs burn, and pain hammers along the bumps of her back. It is November 1950. She came here as a bride, and now she’s a widow, Richard gone; he will not be setting out to find her or waiting at the Bakers’ table, pulling out her chair.

  The hoofbeats fade. She is a child again in Pennsylvania, thrown, changed; her mother always said her temperament altered after a toss. Her thoughts pitch here and there. The hunt breakfast will be sumptuous: glazed Smithfield ham, eggs Benedict, buttered slices of Sally Lunn, and cherries jubilee. She breathes in, breathes out. A man working for her found a body one time in her cornfield, someone unknown, rotted to a skeleton, in scraps that might have been soldier’s clothing. Richard had the remains buried in the Presbyterian cemetery where he himself lies now.

  The hunt is far away. There’s not the faintest sound of bugle or hound music. She’s in the first flight—a rider who jumps everything and stays close—yet she has lost the field. She does not see the second flight—the non-jumpers—or the hilltoppers, who ride to strategic viewing spots, or the car followers.

  She would think herself lost, except she saw her land, her sociable sheep chewing grass, when she was high above the fence. And didn’t she glimpse the church steeple? Yes, and in the distance, the mill that used to belong to Richard, the mill that she forced him to sell, with a flock of pigeons rising from its roof.

  No, she must be turned around. The sun tells her she is not where she thought. The fence is behind her now, and the open land is surrounded by ragged scarlet trees from which issues the sound of crows. She loves the gathering argument they make. She wiggles fingers and toes, finding her body again. The crows clamor. There must be hundreds. A stand of oaks some fifty yards away is black with them. If riders approach, she won’t hear them. They might trample her, pummel her into the earth. The crows are shrieking. The Negroes say they peck the hurt ones to death, take turns diving in for the kill. Crows can turn on people too, the Negroes say. You hear that sound, you ought to run. Hear a buck snorting in the bushes, you run. You caught out in the open in a storm, run. The soil here so full of iron, the colored people say, it like to draw the lightning down. Didn’t Langbourne Jones lose five cows at a pond where lightning struck?

  The crows’ cries rise higher. Nobody knows where she is. Granite will find his way. He too saw the sheep in the meadow at home.

  Suddenly there is silence, and the crows lift from the oaks. Whatever business they had is finished. Might she venture into that place and find a single dead one?

  She rubs her ankle and is surprised by how swollen it is. She stands up and limps, and for the first time in her life she feels old. If she were a starfish, she could pull herself apart. Her hurt limbs would grow into whole new bodies. But what becomes of a starfish’s heart? That’s the kind of question her little brother Charlie might have asked when they were children.

  Was it just this morning she spoke with Charlie? Yes, he called very early to say their brother Victor is dead of a stroke, Victor, the brother she never liked. The oldest, Russell, died in 1928. A wonder, everyone said, that Russell lived as long as he did, injured as he was by falling in the Alps.

  She must decide if she will go to Victor’s funeral, if she can make her way from the crows’ silence to the cathedral-like train station in Philadelphia, where Charlie promised he would meet her.

  “Was he still with that woman?” she asked on the phone.

  “She was the one who called,” Charlie said. “I went right away, but he was already gone.”

  The ground suddenly darkens, and fear casts a net over Nelle’s heart. Was she unconscious for hours, with night coming on? Is she demented, wandering, while her friends send out a search party and speak with cruel pleasure of her senility? There are women in the hunt club who would laugh to see her fall. Lucy Laird, for one, still jealous because Nelle was Donald Laird’s lover before he married. There is some satisfaction for Nelle in that.

  The darkness is only a cloud mass. It passes, and there is the glorious sun, catching on the branches of a pear tree that comes into view, fruit still hanging on the branches. She spies dun-colored haunches and flanks, and yes, there’s Granite gorging on fallen pears, never mind the hovering wasps and hornets.

  Granite blinks at her. He could bolt, and she’d be stranded, for her ankle is really hurting now. She speaks softly, and he nods his great head. Is it possible she can mount him and go to the breakfast after all? She grasps the pommel and pulls herself up. She picks a pear from the tree and sinks her teeth into it. Granite pricks up his ears. She listens too, and there it is, the sound of voices and laughter.

  She lets him carry her while she breathes slow and easy. The weathervane on the Bakers’ barn gleams in the distance. In a few minutes she’ll be seated at their table, with its silver and Limoges, served by a man who reminds her of Nehemiah, who was with her so many years.

  Lucky that she found Philip to work for her, and Edmonia too. Philip has been with her even longer than Nehemiah was.

  Philip and Edmonia are the only people she has told about Victor’s death. Edmonia helped her dress in her riding clothes, and Philip brought coffee. Dudley, Nelle’s youngest, still lives at home. He’s twenty-five. He served in the war and struggled through college, and now he drinks too much, but he does help with the farm. He was asleep when she left, and so was Iris.

  Nelle remembers that Iris is to give a bridal shower tomorrow night for another old maid who has somehow become engaged. The thought of the shower is the deciding factor. Of course Nelle will go to Victor’s funeral. She’ll ask Dudley to accompany her. No, she needs him at home. Aren’t roof repairmen coming, and a new farrier?

  She finishes the pear and lobs the core at a stump, wanting a julep, or a whiskey. She will know everybody at the hunt breakfast, and the men will want to sit beside her, even the young ones. She won’t bother to say she got tossed.

  The others are converging, coming into view, horses and riders and dogs, from woods and fields. The Bakers’ hired folks are out on the lawn, serving champagne to riders still in the saddle. Nelle reins in and reaches for a glass. Granite is so tall that she has to bend way down, and the man holding the tray lifts it high.

  “Morning, Mrs. Fenton,” the man says with a smile. “Fox got away, I hear.”

  “He was a pretty one,” she says. She already has two mounted over her mantelpiece, fierce scowling heads—the masks—with brushes hanging beneath, beautiful in firelight.

  Victor’s inamorata was an actress named Abigail Barnaby, older than Victor, who was twenty-one when he met her in the early spring of 1900, and she was married. She had performed for years in playhouses in Philadelphia and at last had a starring role at a small theater in Society Hill, an old part of the city, paved with Belgian blocks. Smitten, Victor sent flowers and presents. At home he paced the floor, sharp-tongued and miserable.

  Nelle was seventeen. She attended a matinee of the play along with other girls from the finishing school where she studied literature, French, and music. She sat on an upholstered theater seat, her mind busy with a thousand things. She knew she was beautiful and that beauty would be a passport to a life of adventure. Her friends whispered around her, sharing a box of fudge. Their chaperone, the school librarian, sat coughing beside Nelle.

  The theater darkened, the curtain rose, and a woman—Abigail Barnaby—swept through a door at stage right, entering a parlor where a man waited by a fireplace. A real fire burned; Nelle smelled its papery heat. Abigail was slender, with black hai
r and large eyes.

  Nelle held her hand at the side of her face to ward off the librarian’s cough. She didn’t care if she were rude. She had to admit the actress was beautiful, with a way of moving her body as if waking up from a night with a man she loved. Instinctively, despite inexperience, Nelle recognized that languor.

  A girl whispered to Nelle, “Your brother is here.”

  Nelle nodded. She heard the girl pass the news, heard the ripple of excitement up and down the row. Several girls had crushes on Victor. Beside Nelle the chaperone, Miss Pettit, wheezed. The threat of catching the woman’s cold was unendurable.

  Nelle whispered, “You should leave.”

  Cupping her mouth and nose with her hands, Miss Pettit looked at Nelle. Her eyeballs were covered in a sticky film.

  “Go,” Nelle said, and the woman stood and left silently, disappearing up the dark aisle. She was only a librarian after all, little more than a servant to the wealthy girls.

  On stage, the man and woman avowed love, then quarreled. Tears and parting ensued. The other girls in Nelle’s row watched raptly. When the play was over, they asked, “Where is Miss Pettit?”

  “She had to leave. She said to go to the station and take the seven o’clock train. Don’t wait for her,” Nelle said, and the girls yelped, excited by the freedom. In the lobby they gathered cloaks and hats. They looked to Nelle, expecting her to lead. Their plans involved more sweets: malted milk at ice cream parlors, hot cocoa and cake in the homes of nearby aunts. Nelle felt like a guardian abandoning them as she said, “I’m meeting my brother. He’ll see me home.”

  It wasn’t true. She invented the plan because she wanted a chance to explore the theater.

  Her classmates pushed open the lobby doors and stepped into the fresh air. Nelle watched them go. She was troubled, but not about them, nor about Victor and the actress.

  It wasn’t obedience in Miss Pettit’s glazed eyes. It was the way a person looks when hearing the truth. “You should leave,” Nelle had said, and Miss Pettit did. She was very sick. She might have gone home to die.