The Horseman

by Tim Pears

  The master asked the boy what he would like to eat but the boy could not say, so the master ordered for him. Then he lit a cigar. The smoke unlike that from a clay pipe was pungent and nauseating. The master repeated to the groom that the carter’s son could ride a horse. He truly could. Leo wondered if he should tell the master that his own daughter was a finer rider, though he was not sure that fine as she was she could have ridden that colt as fast as he had. The boy said that he thought there were ten thousand horses in the town but Herb Shattock said it was more like two, and the master nodded. Leo asked why the shops were boarded up. The groom told him that ten or fifteen years past a cow walked into a tailor’s shop through the plate-glass window. He said the pub windows were removed as a precaution for when the brawling started later.

  When the food came the boy ate in silence. Hot mutton stew, warm bread and butter. Cold pork pies. Greengages preserved in sweet syrup, and shortbread. The master and his groom spoke but Leo did not listen. The food took all his attention. The men drank beer and ginger wine. The boy drank lemonade.

  When they rose Leo thanked the master for his food. Herb Shattock asked the boy if he would find his father and he said that he would. He did not go straight to the pub where he had seen Albert but wandered, replete and dozy. The streets were emptying finally of horses as men who’d purchased them took them home. Those who had failed to sell the horses they’d brought did likewise. Pedlars set up their stalls where auctioneers had been. A few women appeared, here and there. A bearded man walked dolefully up the High Street bearing a sandwich-board that proclaimed the end of the world was nigh. It was time to repent. Now or never. Maids strolled in twos and threes. From a covered waggon a quack doctor extolled the virtues of his liniment. Carters and farmers with their rheumatics or lumbago heard him out. A diminutive man with a thin moustache set up a three-legged table and on it placed three cards. Two numbers and the Queen of Hearts. He turned the cards over and asked for someone to tell him where the queen was. A young man told him and the card sharp asked if he would put money on it. The youth said he would and placed a sixpence on the card. All those watching agreed. The sharp turned it over. The five of clubs. The crowd laughed in wonder. The sixpence disappeared.

  The boards came off the fronts of shops, their interiors lit up with lanterns, and the boy realised it was dusk. He heard music. A harmonium. Fiddles. He saw Herbert with some other lads he recognised. He followed them into the orchard where a ring had been set up with wooden stakes and rope. In the ring stood a giant. A gypsy shouted out that Gentle George here would take on all-comers in bare-fist boxing. When the boy looked closely at the giant he saw that he might be a gypsy but a freak one. Herbert and his mates challenged each other to enter the ring, each offering to pay another to risk it. Leo thought that none would do so. He sought the music and saw his brother Fred holding the hand of a maid Leo had never seen before.

  He made his way to the pub. On the way a hawker tried to sell him a penknife. ‘Here, boy, does your father smoke a pipe? This one’s got a pick to clean it.’ The boy ignored him but then he remembered the coins in his pocket and went back. The knife had a bone handle and did not look the most robust tool he had ever seen, but he had none of his own, and he thought that the pick might have other uses. The blade could be sharpened. With one of the coins he bought the knife.

  In the pub Leo found his father, standing in a corner speaking to no one. Amos Tucker had disappeared. Albert did not see his son until Leo had been in front of him for some while. ‘There you are,’ Albert said eventually. ‘Let me empty this mug and we can go.’ The boy did not know if his father had been waiting impatiently for him, so as to depart this place, or on the contrary was sorry to be obliged to leave so soon. Albert sipped his beer. Leo closed his eyes. There was something he had always wondered. A bird sang for a reason. To alert kith or kin to danger. To warn an enemy off. To woo. Why then did they make their noises when in a flock such that each was indistinguishable from another? Roosting in a tree or in flight. He had often pondered this. Now with his eyes closed he heard the sound of men talking. It was a kind of human song. Men spoke because they enjoyed doing so and so did birds. What they said had little meaning.

  ‘I’m talkin to you.’

  The boy opened his eyes. There stood a man he recognised. The one with the jay’s feather in the band of his black hat, who had wished to inspect the first gelding in the auction ring.

  ‘Back off,’ his father said, just as he had earlier.

  The man made to swing a punch. As he did so Albert Sercombe chucked the remains of his pewter mug of beer in the man’s face. As the man hesitated Albert let go of the empty mug and threw a straight arm at his chin. To the boy’s astonishment it missed and pawed the air beside him. The man tried again. He landed a punch on Albert’s left ear. Albert did not seem to feel it but swung his fist again. The man appeared to stand stock still and wait for it. The boy did not know whether the cracking sound he heard came from the man’s jaw or his father’s knuckles. There was no space to flounder in the crowded room. Instead the man crumpled boneless where he stood and collapsed unconscious to the floor. Albert stepped over him and men parted to let him through. The boy followed. They climbed out of the empty window space and into the High Street, and walked out of the town.

  March

  In the evening of the day Albert Sercombe and his lad Herbert took their two teams of horses to the forge and fetched the steam engine and the threshing drum. These belonged to the blacksmith Jacob Crocker, who hired them out along with himself and his crooked-backed son. It was dark when they hauled them to Manor Farm, a noisy caravan with their iron-tyred wheels approaching along the pot-holed road, metalwork rattling, wood creaking. Leo could see the faint glow of his father’s pipe when he inhaled. He helped Amos Tucker light stable lamps and hang them in the yard.

  They brought the engine with its chimney stack up beyond the last rick in the yard. Albert told Noble to hold up. Tension was released from the traces and the collar relaxed on her sweaty shoulders. Behind her, Red stood back half a pace to rest in his breeching strap between the shafts. Herbert brought up the drum behind the engine, beside the rick. It was covered in a great canvas sheet like some mysterious statuary ferried in secrecy, to be revealed with a flourish on the morrow. The men unharnessed the horses and tended to them.

  *

  In the morning the boy accompanied his father and brother back to the farm. The earth was covered with a light frost and their boots rang over the hard ground. While they fed and groomed the horses, Jacob Crocker and his son arrived. They unsheeted the threshing drum and uncoiled the huge leather driving-belt. Young Crocker slipped it over the large driving-wheel of the engine and onto the smaller pulley-wheel of the thresher. Jacob Crocker took a pair of steel-rimmed glasses out of his red waistcoat pocket and peered at the spirit level embedded in the wall of the thresher. ‘That’un,’ he said. His tall son laid a wooden chock under one of the wheels and stood and kicked it in with his heel. Jacob Crocker studied the level once more. ‘That ’un.’

  When he was satisfied that it was true his son broke up hard steam coal with his hammer from a pile the farmer had placed beside the engine. Leo felt the fire box. It was still warm from the day before. Young Crocker shovelled in shining cobbles of coal.

  Amos Tucker rolled half a hogshead barrel alongside the steam engine. ‘You’ll find yokes an buckets in yon tool shed,’ he told the boy. ‘Fill em up from the pond.’

  Others congregated in the yard. Ernest Cudmore the shepherd and Isaac Wooland the stockman found the long ladder and carried it to the corn rick. They laid it on the ground, its end abutting the bottom of the rick. Ernest walked back along beside the ladder and joined Isaac at the far end. They picked it up one either side, hoisted it aloft and stepped underneath, Isaac holding the end rung just above his head. The stockman was not a particularly tall man but still Ernest Cudmore was six inches shorter and held the third or fourth rung in, his arms
fully extended. Together they walked towards the rick, passing the ladder over their heads one rung at a time, thus raising it in the air. The effect of their different heights made the sight comical. Young Crocker looked down at Leo when he heard him chuckling and frowned in disapproval or lack of understanding. Then he turned to the spectacle himself and Leo heard a kind of snickering issue from him.

  The higher the two men raised the ladder, the closer Isaac came upon the shorter man in front of him until, as the ladder approached the vertical, it looked as if Isaac meant to crush the shepherd between his body and the ladder. Ernest struggled aside out of the squeeze he found himself in and for a moment the ladder tottered. Isaac floundered, his hands holding a rung far above his head. It looked like if he took one arm off he would stagger backwards. But then he seemed to summon some burst of power from somewhere and stepped forward with great purpose and flung the ladder hard against the corn rick. He and Ernest pulled the bottom of the ladder away from the rick and now it leaned secure against it. Ernest climbed up and Isaac followed. They stepped off onto the roof and began drawing out the pegs from the thatch, still white with frost.

  Young Crocker turned to Leo, grinning, and shook his head. Leo carried buckets to the pond. He broke the thin ice there and scooped cold water into the buckets. He put the yoke across his shoulders and attached one bucket to the left-hand hook and the other to the right, and brought them both up. He bent forward under the yoke and set them down. Then he lifted one and poured the water into the barrel. Young Crocker dropped a hose-pipe from the boiler into the tub. He stared at the pressure gauge. When Leo returned with another load he was still peering at it.

  Albert and Herbert finished with their horses, Enoch and Fred likewise. Isaiah Vagges the old waggoner appeared, and Mildred Daw the spinster too. The congregants greeted one another and Amos Tucker directed them to their stations. Mildred rubbed linseed oil into the larch handle of her fork. Isaiah massaged a small lump of grease or lard into his hands. Fred laid a net around the corn rick. Herbert passed round lengths of string, which men tied around their trouser legs, just below the knees. The boy copied them. All of a sudden a shrill whistle blew and all turned to young Crocker on the steam engine. He opened the regulator and set the wheels in motion. The leather belt began to turn the drum. Brass knobs rose and fell. Puffs of smoke belched out of the chimney.

  Leo delivered more water. The barrel was almost full and he watched the workers take up their positions. His father laid a pile of four-bushel sacks upon the ground and Enoch hooked one under the grain chutes. Fred and Herbert dragged sheets of hessian and set them beneath the threshing drum. Isaiah Vagges and Mildred Daw stood to one side.

  Jacob Crocker climbed up to a platform by the drum. He held out a hand and pulled Amos Tucker up easily beside him as if the corpulent farmer were some slender girl and the blacksmith a young gallant. He nodded to his son, who knocked open the engine’s throttle with the palm of his hand. The drum rotated faster now and Leo could hear it moaning as it turned, a metal gut calling to be filled. Then Jacob looked up to Ernest Cudmore and Isaac Wooland atop the rick above them and nodded to them too. Straight away the shepherd tossed wheat sheaves down to the platform. Amos Tucker cut their straw bands. Jacob lifted the loose wheat and fed it ears first into the hungry drum.

  The first corn went through the empty drum. Its moaning rotation was interspersed by the chattering sound of grain being separated, like hail on a corrugated-iron roof. Riddles separated the grain into two grades. As more sheaves were thrown in the sound of separate grains was lost in a low and constant growl. The grain ran from the drum into the sacks hung there. Leo saw that two of the farmer’s daughters had appeared beside his father and uncle. When the first sack was full they sewed it up with long needles and twine in swift crude strokes.

  The sheaves of wheat had gone through the drum and came out denuded of their grain and changed thereby into straw. This Isaiah and Mildred forked over to a spot across the yard where a man Leo recognised as one of the other estate farmers, a friend of Amos Tucker, began to lay a new rick.

  The chaff flew out from under the centre of the drum and settled more or less in a cloud of dust on the hessian sacks laid there. Herbert and Fred brought up the four corners. These Herbert held in his fists and Fred helped him lift the gathered sheet over his shoulder and set off for the chaff barn.

  Leo looked into the barrel and saw it was already half-empty. He resumed his water carrying. When it was once more almost brim-full he studied the threshing machine. Its engine was an impossible chaos of pistons, cranks, rods and wheels, juddering and wheezing. If anyone spoke he could not hear them above the noise. He could smell the coal in the steam that gulped out of the chimney. The great belt circulated endlessly on the wooden wheels. How it stayed in place was not clear for there were no restraints to its sliding off. It never did. Smaller belts drove smaller pulleys that shook the riddles.

  ‘You dreamin, boy?’ Leo looked up. Young Crocker, his face and hands already filthy with black oil, pointed with the long spout of his oil can to the barrel. Leo picked up the yoke and the buckets and trotted out of the yard and down to the pond.

  The boy’s father and uncle Enoch had the most arduous task, lifting the great sacks of wheat grain. They carried a sack across their shoulders so that the entire eighteen-stone weight was not directly on their backs. Herbert was eighteen and allowed to carry barley sacks of sixteen stone and oats of twelve. The following year he would carry wheat. Fred at seventeen could carry none. Their father had told them of men whose spines were ruined from carrying the sacks when their bones were too young. He and Enoch took them in turn across the yard and up the dozen stone steps to the granary. Each struggling tread of his father those of a farmer up his hill of Golgotha.

  They and others too at intervals made brief excursions to the tool shed, to fill their mugs from the nine-gallon barrel of cider Amos Tucker had placed there for them.

  By ten o’clock the top of the rick had been pitched through the thresher, and the new straw rick stood waist-high. At a signal from Amos Tucker, young Crocker blew the steam whistle. He turned the regulator to a gradual stop. The driving belt wound down. The sound of the drum ceased. The yard was quiet again but the noise of the machines rang in their ears like the sound of something there still all around them yet invisible.

  Fred and Herbert walked across the yard, fidgeting and stretching and running their fingers in under their collars where the chaff and the whirling dust had infiltrated. It stuck to the sweat of their backs, between the shoulder blades, in their armpits.

  ‘I fuckin hates this job,’ Herbert said.

  They ate their lunch in the tool shed, sat on the benches and any bucket or drum that might provide a seat. They ate bread and cheese and drank the cloudy rough cider. Amos Tucker’s daughters sat next to each other on a single barrel, like a pair of Siamese twins, their dust-besmirched white dresses a single garment.

  Isaiah Vagges told Jacob Crocker that his son seemed to know how to run the machine.

  ‘Aye,’ Jacob said. ‘He’s no smith but he can work that engine. He’d like to work on the trains if I let im, I reckon.’

  ‘That’s not bad pay, that,’ Herbert said.

  Young Crocker listened as they spoke of him, head bowed.

  ‘Aye,’ said Jacob Crocker. ‘He’s an engineer, but he’s no smith.’

  ‘Useful machine, though,’ Isaiah said. ‘We used to have to thresh the corn with flails.’ He looked around the room. ‘You young gentlemen think this is hard work, you should a been here thirty year ago.’

  Amos Tucker and the other farmer spoke quietly to one another in a corner. When they were silent, Enoch said, ‘Reckon tis time ye got one a them barrows, gaffer? In time for next year?’

  Amos Tucker looked blankly at the under carter. ‘Ye puts the sack on its platform,’ Enoch said. He laid his lump of cheese in his lap and used his hands to illustrate what he described. ‘Winds a handle to raise i
t. The platform keeps in place with a ratchet. When tis the height you wants ye can roll the sack onto your shoulders.’

  Amos Tucker nodded slowly. ‘What do you reckon, Albert?’ he asked his carter. ‘Could we do with such a barrow?’

  Albert chewed his bread. ‘Some might,’ he said. ‘My brother is gettin old, a course. But not to worry, my lad’ll soon be of an age to carry his father’s corn.’

  ‘Yes, and I’ll be bloody glad to,’ Herbert said. ‘Let some other sod carry the chaff. I hates it.’

  ‘Careful what ye wish for, lad,’ Enoch said.

  ‘Aye, and careful with your language,’ Amos Tucker told him.

  Enoch shook his head. ‘Others use a barrow. Ask yon Crockers while you’ve got em here.’

  Amos said nothing. No one spoke, but waited for what might happen, for all knew of the brothers’ mutual animosity.

  ‘A further device we could do with,’ Enoch persisted. ‘An elevator what takes straw from the thresher to the rick. All the time Isaiah and Mildred there waste walkin across the yard with them forkfuls a straw over their shoulders, they could lift it easy onto an elevator.’

  ‘He’s tryin to do us out of a job, gaffer,’ Isaiah said. ‘He’ll ave you pay us to be a sleepin.’

  No one else joined Isaiah in making light of the matter.

  ‘Ask Mister Doddridge,’ Enoch said. ‘I believe he’s got one a they on Wood Farm.’

  The other farmer, Doddridge, looked towards Amos Tucker and said nothing. ‘We can think on this and talk of it another time,’ Amos said, rising to his feet.

  ‘Tis a pity to waste the opportunity to ask yon Crockers’ opinion.’

  ‘Someone might wish to tell my brother,’ Albert said, ‘to shut his rattle.’