Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  “Mais le cheval, le cheval, avec sa ligne pure et sa grâce magistrale: ce n’est qu’au cheval que Dieu a accordé le pouvoir de nous porter, nous, qui avons été créés à l’image de Dieu.”

  “The other beasts clothe and feed us but the horse alone has the power to transport us, we who are crafted in the image of God.”

  He holds his hand in the beam of light, the shadow of his fingers splayed upon the panel.

  “Non que la chair du cheval ait attiré l’œil du chasseur, mais c’est plutôt dans la beauté et la grâce de l’animal, créés à travers des milliers d’années ou dans un instant, que l’œil du chasseur a trouvé son destin.”

  “The grace of the horse caught the eye of the hunter, and the eye of the hunter saw its destiny.”

  “C’est-à-dire de conquérir le monde entier à travers l’art.”

  “To conquer the world with art.”

  John H cannot understand the priest and can barely hear Elixabete. When it comes time to move along she nearly has to pull him from the figures on the wall.

  They duck into a passage at the back of the vault. The low ceiling undulates in shallow white domes, as though the four of them have been inhaled down the trachea of a giant. Other horses thunder ahead, rippling along the flow of the walls.

  They see yellow horses, upside-down horses, horses wrapped around pillars of stone. Horses scratched into the stone but not painted, horses weaving through great mixed herds of other beasts. At times he’s nearly disoriented, the shadow of the cave and the endless dancing animals bending his brain like the lick of a gas. The air presses in.

  Eventually he tries to speak and nothing comes out. He can’t get his tongue to touch the roof of his mouth, can barely get the muscles of his jaw to pry his lips apart, as though paralyzed in a dream in which he should be running for his life.

  Finally his voice tumbles into speech, an alien sound even to himself. “How long have these been here?”

  She translates the question to the abbé.

  “Une centaine de siècles, même plus.”

  “Ten thousand years.”

  He tries to fathom this and he can’t. A line of horses crosses the mottled wall in front of him, crosses to a territory he knows he might recognize if only he could follow.

  But he can’t.

  He looks at Elixabete in the dim wash of light, hears the hiss of the lamps. Even the familiar details of her face are blotted by shadow. He says, “Where are we?”

  Back in the city the images wheel furiously through his mind and just as furiously he paints them, onto canvas, onto butcher paper, onto the plastered wall of the apartment. He’ll have his easel set up in a garden or on a sidewalk to interpret what’s before him and a horse will dart through his mind and that will be that.

  He knows he’s not getting them exactly, or at least not getting them fully, both because he works from memory and because the flat plane of the canvas is no second for the natural contour of calcium or stone.

  He experiments, more than once painting figures across Elixabete’s abdomen, across her back, over the ridges and flutes of her ribs. Her belly button becomes an eye, her shoulder blade a forequarter.

  Other parts of the experience come back to him at different times. In the middle of the night he wakes with the abbé’s voice in his ears and he tries to rouse Elixabete, tries to get her to reconstruct everything the priest said in the cavern.

  She’s half-asleep, not cooperating. “Mm,” she says. “I need to think. Something about horses existing outside of time. I don’t remember. Something about a mirror of the soul. Sleep, babe.”

  But he doesn’t, not for a long time.

  She tells him she doesn’t believe she can become pregnant, that things happened during the war, which she believes left her sterile.

  A year after they visit the cave her cycle skips, then skips again and proves her wrong. Later he will think back and remember two other times in the interim when she was likely miscarrying, blood streaking the bed sheet like the scene of a crime. In retrospect he’s not surprised, given their shared abandon, the sheer frequency and enthusiasm with which he shot himself into her womb.

  She’s told him a hundred times she doesn’t believe in marriage, sees it as outmoded, a system of ownership. Also that she doesn’t want to be taken for granted, not by him and not by anyone. Likewise she doesn’t want to take him for granted.

  But the baby inside her changes something, proves her wrong twice. Ask me again, she tells him, and when she puts on his ring he puts on her name, because in Paris his own is a fiction.

  John H by now speaks passable French. He can’t always follow her friends’ furious conversations but he can generally get by, can read the newspaper or follow a joke to a laugh.

  They talk about leaving the city after the baby comes, heading back to Bayonne. She has relatives who farm, who hunt rabbits and boar and deer. There are horses. She wants their child to grow up Basque, to know the language and the land that has sheltered it these hundreds of years. John H thinks back to the cave and wonders what else the land down there shelters.

  He sees the course of his life charted in a certain way. He’s never allowed himself to do this, not even as a child, to stand solidly in place and look far out ahead at an image of himself, and to want what he sees. Maybe it’s the mood in the air, the war receding year by year into the past and life good again, even the city’s trees lush and leafed out, full of springtime, full of good hope.

  Whether the baby is a boy or a girl he wants it to carry the middle name Bakar. This is the one thing he asks, and it’s the one thing that makes her nervous. He tugs her hair, tells her it’s her superstition again, and she gives him an uneasy laugh and says she knows she’s silly. After all it’s just a name.

  Never has he been more wrong. With the baby not due for another month Elixabete wakes one night with her insides twisting like an auger. She tries to let John H sleep, tries to convince herself she’s merely got a nervous stomach but in no time she’s wringing with sweat and then nearly sobbing in agony and terror both.

  He phones for a cab and then phones the hospital and finds his neophyte French flummoxed by panic, and while he’s trying to communicate with a nurse Elixabete struggles out of the bed on her own to get to the water closet, doubles in a paroxysm and hits the floor on her hands and knees. She cramps into a ball holding her belly as though she’s been disemboweled and when she wets herself on the floorboards John H at first thinks her water has broken.

  He learns his mistake ten minutes later when her water actually does burst, as he’s helping her to hobble down the front stoop to the waiting cab. She’s still in her nightshift with a blanket around her shoulders, still doubled in pain. He’s unable to lift her because that hurts her even worse. She clutches his arm and takes the two steps as though each is a precipice and she’s no sooner got both feet on the cobbles before a gush comes out of her like an upended jug. He feels the splash on his shoes and against his shins and though she wails out she also tells him in the cab that she feels a little better, that releasing the fluid seemed to release some of the pain as well. He tells her everything will be fine. For a little while he believes it himself.

  At the hospital two sisters get her into a wheelchair and rush her through a set of doors into what he suspects is a surgery rather than a delivery room. He tries to follow and another nun stops him and speaks to him, soothingly but firmly, and guides him instead to a waiting room. He gives this a few restless minutes and then drags a chair out and waits by the surgery doors.

  Later he’ll hate himself for falling asleep but evidently he does because the doors bang open and snap him awake, somebody in white rushing toward him and seizing his hand, stabbing the tip of his finger, then rushing away again with a bead of his blood on a plate of glass.

  A little after a siren in the streets dies in front of the hospital and John H thinks it must be an ambulance until a policeman bursts through the entry, confers with a n
un at the desk, and then darts past him into the surgery. A shriek pulses out, rising and subsiding as the doors baffle on their hinges.

  He stands and parts the doors and listens, but apparently another door has closed deeper into the surgery because now he can pick up only muffled crying. Then her voice at an awful pitch, yelling in Basque and then muffled again.

  He goes back to the desk and asks the nun what’s happening. She tells him they’re all fighting very hard.

  He asks if she’s having the baby, or if it’s something else. She tells him it’s both.

  “C’est mal?”

  “Oui, monsieur. Very bad.”

  He asks if she is going to die.

  “Je ne sais pas, monsieur. Only God knows.”

  In the morning they bring a priest and he has his answer.

  He walks back to the apartment with the spring sunshine warm on his neck, holding the blanket he’d wrapped around her the night before. He’d wanted to see them before he left the hospital but they wouldn’t let him, told him to come back later when the trauma of the night had passed. He wishes now he’d asked for a lock of her hair, or the ring from her finger. Anything to carry home.

  In the apartment he sits in a chair and weeps and wonders what he could have done. Not fall asleep. He curses his own lapse, his own escape. He wonders if God in his heaven holds a scale that weighs such things, that tips the balance of a life in one direction or the other based on the strength or the weakness of somebody else. He remembers what his father told him in a Maryland jail cell, how it’s in the Bible that children pay for the sins of their parents. He wishes he could go back and only stay awake.

  It crosses his mind to retrieve the Mannlicher rifle from behind the door and set the trigger and then turn the gun and place the muzzle beneath his chin, reach with his thumb and with no more effort than the force of a sigh he’ll run through the stars to catch them, knows if such a thing is possible she’ll hear his call and turn to wait, that she’ll tuck her babe beneath her chin like a Madonna.

  But he doesn’t know if such a thing is possible, any more than he knows the location of heaven or the mind of God. He thought he had heaven. Thought he’d won a benediction but now in some intentionless episode of original sin he might just as easily tip another scale and doom them both to perdition. He simply doesn’t know.

  He takes them south by train in a single casket. She was estranged from her family and then close to them again and now they feel a loss greater for the reconciliation. They are haunted the way he is haunted, by a baby who never drew a single breath of air.

  They bury them in a churchyard with graves going back centuries. The family buys a headstone and has it engraved with her name and when they ask the name of the child he tells them Jean Bakar. The baby was a girl. They don’t ask for an explanation.

  He gives the city another month and maybe it’s not long enough but it’s all he can really take. Everyplace he goes he sees a possibility that will never come to pass. A culture of his own despair. He hears from her family and he knows he can go to live near them, knows they will take him as their own.

  Something compels him not to. Maybe it’s the fact he’s put three people to rest in that country already, or maybe that he’ll always be there under some cloud of what could have been. Whatever the case, he gets it in his head to do what he’s always done.

  One of her friends in Paris is a lithographer and platemaker who worked as a forger during the war. John H meets this friend at a café and when it becomes obvious what he is suggesting the friend stops him from talking in this public place and takes him back to his apartment and hears him out.

  Three weeks later Elixabete’s friend delivers American entry papers bearing the name Borel. John H. Borel.

  Horses

  1

  She cut his hair in the sunlight in front of the stone house, nervous at first and more dangerous with the scissors for her own caution but pleased he asked her. She had to stop and study from different angles, learning as she went, but his hair was fairly short anyway and there wasn’t much room for error. She was timid at first about adjusting his head. Soon she realized he would roll whichever way she wanted. His eyes were closed like a napping dog’s. Snip snip. Eventually she tilted him this way or that simply because she could.

  “Do you ordinarily do this yourself?” she asked.

  “No. I like to have a woman cut it.” Catherine felt a green flicker, wanted to suss out exactly whose handiwork she was following. He said, “So what do you think will happen when you come out of here with that camera?”

  She stopped short, nearly jabbed him with the scissor. She had been consumed by this and then distracted away from it and now he snapped her right back like a thunderclap. “A few things, actually. Number one the Smithsonian or the National Geographic Society or the University of Pennsylvania or somebody will send a real team in here for a real survey. Who knows what else they might come up with, but honestly it hardly matters. The gallery alone will change the way we think about New World prehistory. It’s major, believe me, and there will undoubtedly be an injunction to stop the dam, which is going to be a great big bomb in Dub Harris’s face.”

  She kept thinking, her mind finding fragments, putting them together. “It’s an irony, really. I’ve hardly been able to stare it down but I feel like I just pulled the sword from the stone and can finally wield the thing. I think he used his clout to get me assigned here because he thought I wouldn’t be serious. That I’d take one look at this gigantic wilderness, sniff my nose, and write a cursory if plausible report declaring it irrelevant. Which in all honesty was almost the case.”

  “Guess you proved him wrong.”

  “Guess so. Even proved myself wrong.”

  She felt him smile. “You may never get hired again.”

  “Oh I’ll get hired, all right. Just not by a dam builder. I’m a reverse failure. Proud to say.” She resumed her cutting but stopped short again. “Oh my God. I didn’t even think of it. This place will be ruined for you whether it’s flooded or not. Either the dam ruins it, or I ruin it.”

  “Ruined for me and flat-out ruined are two different things.”

  “I know, but still.” She put the tips of her fingers into the hair on the back of his head. He no longer felt so malleable. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”

  He reached behind and took her hand and pulled it around in front of him and put his mouth to the inside of her wrist. Pulled her thin skin to the tip of his tongue and studied the mark he made when he pulled away. He said, “Let’s take a ride. There’s something else you need to see.”

  Two hours later they eased around the shoulder of a low butte, gingerly raised their eyes above the soft erosion of the grade. She saw a horse in the bowl, then another and another. She looked through the field glasses he’d handed her, caught the glint off their sleek summer coats.

  Their own horses were a half mile back, tethered in the scrub along the river. He had his little carbine over his shoulder and they walked to where he’d glassed the herd, traveling in the low ground of the river bottom for a long way and then angling off toward the butte through the shallow contours of the canyon floor. She’d made love to him more or less all night long and then again after they slept in the morning, and then the wincing journey by horse, and she could relate to his limp because she had one too. She watched him pick his way with care through sage and strewn rock, watched the lovely flex of the seat of his jeans and she thought, Oh well, at least mine’s worth the trouble.

  He had showed her how to adjust the lenses before they started out, how to close one eye and tune the diopter. The nearest horse sharpened magically into focus, the line of its back lit with a sort of nimbus of sunshine and impossibly precise against the clean air around it. She panned to another horse, a blood dun grazing a little farther along. She turned the focus to blur the horse and then brought it sharply back. Her father would love these glasses.

  The rest of the herd ha
d been tucked beyond the curve of the butte and a few drifted into view. The spring foals were twice their original size but gangly still, their tails like the sprouting feathers of a half-fledged bird.

  She spoke in a whisper. “Jack Allen’s been looking for them all summer. He acts like they’re some kind of ghost horse, like they don’t really belong here.”

  John H eased down below the grade. “He’s right and he’s wrong at the same time. Has he actually seen them yet?”

  She crouched with him so she could speak above a whisper. “I’m not sure. I thought he found them a month or so back, but I guess he lost them again.”

  “They’re not typical mustangs, cut and crossed with everything under the sun. These are straight-up Spanish horses. Barb stock.”

  She wracked her brain and a light went on. A pair of old English portraits on the wall of her father’s study. Racehorses, their names in brass plates on the heavy wooden picture frames. “The Godolphin Barb,” she remembered aloud.

  He nodded. “Right. One of the foundation thoroughbreds. You are something.” He tipped his head in the direction of the horses. “I chased mustangs over this country till hell wouldn’t have it, saw every combination and shape and size and color you can imagine. I mean thousands of horses. That mare you’re riding is one of them—what in a dog you’d call a mongrel and I don’t mean it as an insult. I wish every horse had some of her in it.

  “But that red colt? He’s out of this herd, and this herd came off a Spanish boat somewhere five hundred years ago. Those zebra stripes on their legs, that black line down their backs. These horses are a time machine.”

  “Jack said they don’t act like other mustangs, that they don’t live where you’d expect them to. He seems almost put out by it, outraged or something.”

  “He either hasn’t actually seen them or he hasn’t figured out what they are. Or maybe he’s just missing the point. They’re a relic.”