The Horseman

by Tim Pears

  The boy rode back by a different route. Flies and gnats accompanied him. A swarm would leave him unmolested for a while, then another take its place. The cob swished his tail and twitched his ears to deter them. Red butterflies too shared Leo’s journey for brief stretches. He had the impression they were inspecting him. Then, tired of his company, they fluttered off.

  He became lost but not for long. The hills in the distance guided him in the approximate direction of home. He could not go far without seeing someone, in passage or at work, and would ask the way if he had to. Then he entered a wood he did not know. The cob followed a grassy path that was not overgrown at all yet held no foot or hoof prints. They walked through a stand of beech trees whose last year’s brown leaves carpeted the ground. The thick, smooth trunks rose to canopies of green leaves.

  They rode through the cool shade of the wood. Leo thought they would pass through soon but it seemed to be a forest. They came to a huge leafless oak tree. Branches sprouted from the trunk like great twisting knives. It was dead but looked permanent, as if it had stood there in that state for centuries, in some proud arboreal afterlife.

  Leo dismounted and led the pony down towards a steep-sided creek, letting him drink. He mounted up and found a narrow path, branches of alder and birch brushing against them as they walked. He realised that he was hungry and took the carrot out of his pocket and crunched it as he rode. It must be well past noon. They came to another oak tree much like the earlier one, dead but apparently full of force, still. They passed red-barked conifers, their trunks at the base wide as windmills. He looked up and could not see how high they stood. The boy had never been in a wood like this before. Perhaps it was a part of the original forest of England, before the ships of Empire were built.

  Leo found himself in another beech grove. It was strange how little undergrowth grew under beeches. Sweat ran in his eyes and soaked his shirt yet he could feel a chill down his spine. In his armpits. He rode another narrow path between overhanging branches. The sun flickered through the leaves and he tried to use it for direction and thought he had. He stopped the horse when he came to the great dead oak for a third, or maybe fourth, time. His heart was beating hard. What was this place? A maze? A trap?

  Leo turned the cob in circles, scanning all around him. Children disappeared, did they not? And were never found again. Then the pony laid back his ears. A sign of aggression, even in a gelding. Could the cob see something that the boy could not? Leo pulled the reins up short and yelled at the cob to go and kicked him hard and rode as fast and as straight as he could, cantering out of the uncanny wood.

  August

  Amos Tucker rode by cart with Albert Sercombe at his side and the boy sitting cross-legged behind them, next to Tucker’s dog. The boy and the dog sat gazing into the dust thrown up by the horse’s hooves and the wheels of the cart. They rode from one cornfield to another. Oats, barley, wheat. In each one the men dismounted from the cart and walked into the field. They rubbed the ears of corn between their fingers and eased out grain and bit into it. The boy did likewise, analysing the texture and the nutty taste of each grain. Moisture or lack of it.

  ‘Still taste green to me, gaffer,’ his father said in a field of oats. The men’s conversation was sparse. Sometimes they merely nodded to each other, or shook their heads, or made odd faces, like-minded connoisseurs of cereals. On these occasions the boy had little to help him interpret their opinion.

  His father cracked a grain of barley between his teeth, chewed, and grimaced. Amos Tucker nodded gravely. The men studied the sky. White clouds floated in the west.

  Tucker frowned. ‘It won’t start without us.’

  There was wheat in the ten-acre twinned fields of Binnen, and more barley up in the Berry Fields. The men were determining the state of readiness of each crop and thus the order in which the harvest would take place this year. They wrote nothing down. Each time they reached a new field the dog jumped down from the cart and ran around with great purpose as though his canine reconnaissance were the true reason for this excursion and the human beings merely his chaperones or bodyguard.

  In Dutch Barn Field the barley grew waist-high. ‘It do receive a little wind up here,’ Albert Sercombe said.

  ‘One more day without rain,’ said Amos Tucker. ‘Dear Lord, one more day.’

  ‘Tis a good bet that tomorrow’s weather will be much like today’s,’ the boy’s father said. ‘But there be no one on this earth knows what the day after tomorrow will bring.’

  The farmer sighed and looked heavenward, then shook his head. ‘I hear you, Albert. Begin here tomorrow then, as you wish to.’

  Leo Sercombe rose with his brother and his father in the dark. School holidays were timed to coincide with harvest and he could be paid a few coins for the work, his mother would allow it. At the farm his brother Fred put corn in the horses’ cribs then gathered tools and disappeared. The boy watched his father cut five pieces of linseed cake from Isaac Wooland’s cattle room. ‘Fetch three halters,’ he said.

  The boy caught up with his father and they walked down to the pasture. His father called the horses up out of the field. Noble and Red and Pleasant the old mare came on out of the gloom to the gate and the two black geldings followed them. Albert fed Noble and Red the cake and put halters on them, and led them out of the field and tied them to the fence.

  ‘Us’ll yoke them two to the pole,’ he said. ‘Which one will us put in the traces?’ He fed the old mare a piece of cake and patted her rump and she turned and walked away. ‘One a they two,’ he said.

  The boy studied the sibling pair. There was naught to choose between them.

  ‘Ye’ll be riding him all day,’ his father prompted.

  Coal was calm, stately, would do his bidding. Captain had energy, more life in his eyes. The boy made his choice. He approached Captain, fed the horse its piece of cake on his upturned palm and then, as the gelding munched the mouthful the boy reached up his full extent to slip the halter over Captain’s nose and ears. Despite the bribe the horse lifted his head beyond the boy’s reach. The linseed crackled in his mouth as he chewed the cake, regarding the world from the lofty height of his vision. Leo smiled. His father did not move to interfere but waited to see what would happen.

  His son turned his gaze to the lower parts of the horse. He studied its anatomy, from one side to the other, up and down. Then he reached under its chest and felt its belly, searching for something there with the tips of his fingers. He looked away as he did so and closed his eyes. Then he opened them and pinched the black gelding at a certain point on his belly or brisket; the horse looked down and the boy, standing up smartly, slipped the halter over Captain’s nose and ears, this time all the way, and so secured him.

  Fred and Herbert were in Dutch Barn Field with bagging-hooks and sticks, cutting an avenue round the outside of the field wide enough for the binder. Dunstone was with them, making corn bands and tying them round sheaves of barley, which he stacked upright against the hedgerow. The lads were working their way around the eight-acre field. They heard the binder come into the gateway for they looked up, then resumed their labour at a greater pace.

  The boy helped his father unlock the iron wheels and pull the binder round. The horses were harnessed in a unicorn formation, Noble and Red hitched to the binder pole with Captain in the traces in front. Leo rode postilion on the leading horse. Albert sat on the iron seat of the Massey-Harris self-binder. The sun was up and the dew dried off the barley as they approached it. The boy rode Captain to the right and into the hedge-side avenue. His father pushed the small lever forward and engaged the main cog wheel. This was connected to the travelling wheels of the binder. The knife-bar agitated through the pointed sheath that protected it from stones. It agitated more slowly than the knife of the hay mower, for corn cut more easily than grass and the stubble was left much longer. All the interlocking cog wheels set themselves in motion.

  The boy kept Captain in his place, following the line of the
cereal. The cutting width was six feet. When he could, Leo twisted round and watched the fascinating contraption, its sails turning anti-clockwise, knocking the cut barley onto a canvas platform behind. The canvas looped over two wooden rollers, rotating in an endless circuit, moving the corn up over the machine to the far side, to the canvas packing table. Twine threaded out of a revolving tin box and knotted the corn in sheaves that were kicked off onto the stubble by a mechanical fork. The contraption rattled, the corn rustled, the sheaves swished as they were flung from the binder. His father had told him it was the wonder of the age. He confessed that his admiration for the engineers at Massey-Harris, who had devised this improvement on all the machines that had gone before, was exceeded only by his admiration for Arthur Richardson.

  This soldier’s praises his father sang many times. During the Second Boer War his company of forty men was engaged at close quarters by a force twice their number. When the order to retire was given, Sergeant Richardson rode back under heavy fire and picked up a trooper whose horse had been shot, and who was wounded in two places, and rode with him out of fire. Arthur Richardson was himself riding a wounded horse. He received the Victoria Cross. When the carter recounted this story to his sons or others it was as if he knew the man, and it never failed to move him.

  Herbert and Fred worked behind the binder, lifting the discarded sheaves into stooks, eight sheaves in each, forming aisles of stacked barley. They were joined by Isaac Wooland the stockman. Kizzie brought food and drink at midday. The men ate the bread and cheese and drank the cold tea then lay on the stubble until Albert Sercombe rose and went to the horses. The others rose and followed him.

  Leo approached the black gelding on its nearside. With his left hand he reached up and gripped the top of the hames of the collar. While they ate he had been envisioning the manoeuvre and calculated that he could accomplish it. He placed his right hand on the horse’s withers and sprang up, twisting so that he might land in place, neatly side-saddle, but Captain was too tall and the boy merely belly flopped across the horse. He wriggled and scrambled to keep on top of the animal and to right himself. Before he could do so the gelding turned his head and promptly bit him on the arse. Leo found the strength to heave himself up and in a moment sat astride the horse, ready to chastise him, but to his dismay exactly that which he had hoped for had occurred. The spectacle was witnessed by all those in attendance. And they were laughing with a joyful incontinence.

  Leo’s cheeks burned. His brother Fred laughed as heartily as Herbert. Their sister Kizzie laughed, as did Isaac Wooland, so did his father. Only Dunstone the old lad kept his dignity, frowning, for he had not seen what happened or did not understand it or failed to find it comical due merely to his witless condition.

  ‘Should a given the beast summat to chew, afore he chew you,’ Herbert called out for the company to extend their amusement.

  Albert stood beside the horse, shaking his head, a man who should not wish to laugh at his son but could not help it. He had tears in his eyes, grinning still. ‘Don’t you worry, boy,’ he said. ‘Us have all been nipped on the backside by a horse in our time.’

  In the afternoon Fred left to help his carter, Uncle Enoch, in the barley field on Great Eastern Hill, but he was not missed, for every time they brought the binder up the slope from the far western side it seemed there were more people in the field. Kizzie had stayed. Their mother was there, Ernest Cudmore the shepherd, Amos Tucker and his daughters. And as the irregular rectangle of uncut corn diminished to an acre, and less, so boys and girls of the estate and even from the village appeared. Some had their dogs with them, terriers quivering in anticipation as they watched the standing corn. Isaac, Herbert, Ernest, Kizzie, abandoned their sheaf stacking. They closed in, armed with cudgels and lash sticks cut from the hedgerow.

  The horses pulled the binder, its blades cut the ripened barley, knotted sheaves were expelled onto the stubble, and rabbits began to bolt from their precarious shelter. The dogs ran and caught them at their necks. Leo Sercombe watched the slaughter from his vantage point astride the black gelding. Men fell upon the rabbits. Both the laid sheaves and the raised stooks hindered the animals’ escape. The boys and girls attacked them with their sticks and some threw stones.

  Albert Sercombe finished cutting the corn in Dutch Barn Field before the dew began to fall in the evening. The children headed home with their plunder, for their mothers to make pies or stew for the meat-hungry labourers.

  They unhitched the horses from the binder and left the machine in the field and walked the tired, sweating horses home. They led them to the yard, unyoked them from their harness and put halters over their heads. Albert led Noble to the stable, Herbert took Red, Leo led Captain.

  They let the horses feed on vetches while they groomed them. When the horses’ coats were dry, the lad Herbert and the boy led them from the yard and turned them out in the pasture.

  August

  The mornings were misty, and still, as they walked the horses to the binder waiting in the fields of oats and barley. Dew revealed cobwebs draped over hedgerows and over grass, the lacework of countless spiders on their farm, though the boy did not see a single insect. They must be resting after their intricate nocturnal labour. Each day the sun rose and burned away the mist and the horses pulled the binder through dry standing corn.

  When the rain came, with just the wheat of Ferny Piece and Essythorn to reap, it came unannounced one night, with no warning in the dusk. By morning it had laid the crop. The wheat was spread in all directions. Albert Sercombe yoked his horses to the binder left in Ferny Piece the previous evening and set off, with the boy on the trace horse as the day before. Where the wheat had fallen with ears pointing towards the binder it could be cut, but otherwise Fred and Herbert walked before and lifted the corn with forks. Still the sheaves that came out were misshapen, and awkward to handle for Isaac Wooland and Kizzie Sercombe. They had to disentangle the heavy sheaves, and manhandle them into stooks.

  Soil stuck to the travelling wheel of the binder, which got bogged down. Twisted corn blocked the canvas elevator. Fred or Herbert removed such corn and threw it to the ground. Dunstone gathered it into odd sheaves and tied them by hand with corn bands he fashioned himself. He was the one person pleased with the direction events had taken.

  When the binder was stopped it had to be reversed before moving forward once more. Albert ordered the horses back. They did so in the morning, Noble and Red, with old Pleasant now in the traces, obeying his commands. But it sapped their energy and midway through the working day, while others ate, he led Noble and Pleasant back to the stable and returned with the black geldings. He yoked them to the pole and put Red in the traces, and asked Leo if he would go to the stable to groom the two horses there and put them in the pasture when he was done.

  August

  One hot afternoon the boy crossed the estate. He went directly to the pheasant-rearing field and there found his brother Sid feeding the young birds in their runs. The brothers did not greet each other. Sid did not ask after their mother or others in the family, but said, ‘Just in time to give me a hand, boy.’

  There were forty coops in the rearing field, made by the estate carpenter. Each coop held twenty young pheasants. Sid fed these poults four times a day. The first feed was at six in the morning. Sid cooked the food in a four-gallon pot boiler in the rearing-field hut. Scalded biscuit meal and boiled rice. In between feeds he had to make his round checking the ginns. Small traps took the stoats and weasels, the six-inch ginns took foxes and the occasional badger.

  Leo helped his brother with the last feed. Once the birds were all locked up Sid shot a few rabbits and Leo helped him gut and skin and butcher them. He dug a hole for the innards while Sid minced up the meat ready to add to the morning feed. Then Sid slept on a bench in the field hut, and Leo slept on the floor.

  The door of the hut was opened in the dead of night. It was Aaron Budgell. Sid rose and went outside. Leo stood at the door and watched the
m in the moonlight. Sid and his gaffer slid a sack under a coop. They lifted the four corners and tied them, and loaded the coop onto the donkey cart. They walked the cart away. Leo followed them into the larch plantation. Pheasants liked to roost on their more or less horizontal branches. Aaron Budgell and Sid lifted the coop quietly and placed it on the ground.

  The boys returned to the field hut and slept again.

  In the morning they took four buckets, a shovel and a hole-ridden tray and set off. Sid knew where he was going for he had taken mental note of the anthills he had seen and remembered their locations. ‘I should mark em on a map,’ he said. ‘Trouble is, if I write em down, I worry I’d forget where they is.’

  Sid carried the long-handled shovel over his shoulder. Leo carried the buckets stacked inside one another and listened to his brother’s gamekeeping tales.

  ‘Last Tuesday, after the first feed, I went to the cottage where Mrs Budgell give me breakfast. Come back to the field and there they was. Seven poults I counted, dead in their run, all with a bite on the top of their heads. What do you think it was?’

  Leo suggested weasel. ‘No.’ Stoat? ‘No, not that neither.’ Leo said he did not know. ‘Fox? Badger?’

  Sid shook his head. ‘Next mornin I did everythin the same only I didn’t, I doubled back quiet, like, with my gun. Waited and watched, till I saw summat movin. There he was and I shot him.’

  Leo asked him what it was.

  Sid grimaced, and turned his head to the side to spit as he walked. ‘A flea-ridden bloody hedgehog,’ he said. ‘Folk don’t believe you but tis true. Mister Budgell said one time one of they buggers went for the broody hens. Went for their rear ends, tore em up summat rotten. Before he helped hisself to the eggs.’