There was a small boy with no shoes but with a large rusty barrel hoop, which he was driving with a stick before him. He glanced appreciatively at the horse, which was large by the area’s standards. Then its state of undress became obvious to the boy, and his mouth opened and puckered, and opened and puckered. The hoop got clean away from him and rolled into the middle of the street, where the cobbles set it into an awkward gyroscopic spin.
Anraí saw the hoop in front of them, and he set his legs tight and grabbed mane, for he could imagine nothing more frightening to a horse than a hoop spinning and singing in the roadway. Indeed, the horse gave a little squeal as a signal that something was about to happen, and it lifted up into the air.
Anraí hadn’t been sure they were jumping until they landed on the stones beyond, and even that landing was marked by only the slightest break in rhythm. The hoop was left behind with the gawping boy, and here ahead was the shape of the church to his left and the circles of bright red that meant women walking together, past the churchyard’s cowgate.
“God to you, Anraí Ó Reachtaire!” called one of them. “I have the weaving your own Áine spoke for!” Anraí stared straight ahead of him with a face of forbidding majesty and affected not to hear. One hand he carried clenched at the horse’s withers, as though it held a rein of such fine and narrow leather it could not be seen from a distance, while with the other he fished in his waistcoat pocket and drew out his silver pocket watch, which he held in front of his face in a preoccupied, businesslike manner.
But this did not save him, for as he passed in front of the first hostelry on the left, a man who was resting diagonally in the doorway leaned out, pulled his cap to shade his eyes, and called out “Is it Anraí the son of Thurlaigh Ó Reachtaire riding bareback through the streets of An Cheathrú Rúa, like a petticoater on an old pony?”
Anraí would have ignored this hail as he had the other, except that the horse went into a splendid piaffe, with his hindquarters tucked under his belly and his muscular neck crested like a swan’s. “God to you, Maurice,” said Anraí, with great restraint.
Maurice Ó Ceallaigh stepped across the stabling yard, his cap in his hand, and his glance at Anraí was both respectful and wary. “A horse of Spanish blood, perhaps, for certainly you’re teaching him the Spanish airs and dances, without so much as rope or halter on him, too.”
Anraí cleared his throat and considered the possibility he might be able to slip down, now that the animal had ceased its forward progression. But although it is not particularly dangerous to sit a horse that is running away with you, getting off such a horse is quite hazardous, and Anraí disliked being hurt. “As all our horses in Connacht have a strong flavor of Spanish blood, Maurice, I cannot deny it in this son of the seasons. I have not gotten so far with him, however, as to be at teaching him the continental graces. In fact, if you were able to take an easy grip on his mane, there, and put a single hand gently over his nose, you’d have my share of gratitude.”
Maurice Ó Ceallaigh was not a horseman by profession but a hosteler, but there was no human soul in Carraroe so ignorant of stock that he would not have been able to be of use in this situation. He reached a calm arm under the horse’s jaw and grabbed a handful of mane, and he put his other beery-smelling hand over the smudged white nose.
The horse snorted what he thought of the smell, and his stationary trot exploded forward, dragging Maurice with him. With every step he nodded, pulling the tavern keeper onto his toes. “Ah, don’t be that way,” said Maurice in soothing tones, while Anraí leaned back hard as a signal to stop. But the horse quite calmly went on his way, as though he could drag a town along with him as easily as not.
“Let go of him, Maurice,” said Anraí, disheartened. “He’s determined to go, and he’ll only pull you with him.”
Maurice now looked up at the old man on the horse with more understanding of the problem. “Why by the grace of Jesus did you get up there, Anraí, with no halter nor bridle on the animal?” He trotted along beside, for the horse was not going at any speed. “Is it a sport or wager?”
“It is a penance for my sins,” answered Anraí composedly, as the horse sidestepped around a young woman in petticoat and black shawl. The movement was as smooth as a cart skidding on ice, and it ended with a gallant genuflection toward the wearer of the shawl. Anraí felt a noticeable rising of his stomach, as the horse so unexpectedly dipped. “This animal is marvelously trained and not obedient at all,” he said to Maurice.
The hosteler was dropping behind, and he looked back nervously at his untended bar. “I believe, your only sin is temper, old man, and if your rage ran away with you so gently, it would be no sin at all. God bless you, I can’t keep up with a trotting horse.”
“No reason why you should, Maurice. Keep you safe; I’ll be all right. Unless he drops me in the ocean,” he added in more private tones.
At these words the horse gave a squeal and slammed a heavy foot onto the stones. Its ribs swelled and heaved between the rider’s legs.
“No need for you to take offense, you great bully,” Anraí told it. “This is the road to the water, after all.”
But in three paces more the horse swerved right between two walls of sand-stuccoed stone and took Anraí into the backyard of Fenton the butcher, where white sheets of linen hung on the rope, still damp from the morning’s shower, and equally white báinín work clothes lay stretched over the hedge of stubby fuchsia. Anraí took a handful of mane and prepared for trouble by relaxing. “It’s no ghost or spirit, lad, but only the washing,” he whispered. “It won’t do you a bit of harm.”
The horse, standing surrounded by flapping banners of white, flicked its little ears forward and back. Suddenly it gave a warlike trumpeting and assaulted the length of twine from which the sheets depended, tearing stallion fashion with its teeth. There was a musical ping, and Anraí was struck in the forehead by a broken clothespin as his dirty white horse bounded into the mass of the fresh laundry and through it.
They came out onto the sidestreet between the ironmonger’s and the old convent house, dragging a double tail of ruined linen. It was the length of the street before the horse got rid of it, and Anraí could barely hear the woman chasing behind them.
“You blackhearted, scoured, foul-tailed, cow-hocked, bog-spavined, unchristian …” Anraí could not think of an appropriate noun to end the string of calumny. He rubbed his forehead as the easy rolling canter carried him out of the town and between stony fields. “What worse could you do to an old man than shame him in his life’s profession that way? Cruel! Why, you might as well be my son, and there is no insult worse than that.”
Now the row houses, neat as hens along a roost, disappeared from the side of the way, their places taken by cottages of unplastered stone set at every convenient angle among the strips of stone-walled fields. The horse cantered nicely, with ears reversed for listening, and but for the fact that nothing he did had any influence on the beast, Anraí could have asked for little improvement in its manners. But the quality of the horse’s movement did nothing to soften Anraí Ó Reachtaire; he was very angry.
He must have been very angry to have mentioned his son.
“And you can’t cozen me into believing you felt a natural animal terror of those blowing sheets, for I know when a horse is afraid and when he has a nasty spirit in him. It was nothing but the desire to do me damage, as your own face itself betrayed to me. Well, I’m not a rich man, nor a young man, nor a healthy man, to endure being made sport of in this manner, and in the name of Christ I have had enough.”
As Anraí chided, the horse’s gait slowed and lost its elasticity, until by the end of his jobation it was a shuffling trot. Anraí saw his descent clear and heaved a great sigh.
“And now I’ll have a miserable walk in front of me and a great apology to make, all thanks to you, you great disgrace to a fine race of beasts. And with my heart, the way it is, who knows the damage it may …”
He got no more o
ut. Anraí had time only to slip an inch to the left on the broad white back when the horse bugled again, sank onto its haunches and leaped from a standstill off the road and over the dry stone wall, where it took off galloping over the dead sedge and glistening bog toward the north.
Its round black hooves splashed and sucked with every step, filling the air with a noise almost like bells. Sometimes one foot would slip in the standing puddles and sometimes two or three feet at once would sink into a soft spot and Anraí would prepare to be flung off. “Sweet Jesus, lad, haven’t you lived in this parish long enough to keep out of the bogs?” Anraí’s tenor voice cracked as he addressed the horse.
It was not personal fear that moved the old man, for although the ground was scattered with stones just fit to break a head, Anraí had fallen countless times and never broken anything more than his collarbone. A man might get stuck into the bog, certainly, but if he did he’d be more likely to die of an ague than drowning, for here there was no bog more than four feet deep.
But for a horse the story was different. The suckholes, the pools, and the hidden boulders were all designed to snap a leg like a green stick, and where was the winch and rope out here to haul to safety a helpless beast weighing a half ton?
Here was the wall that divided O’Faoilin’s garden patch from the grazing. It was three feet high and held in place by briar. The white horse came blowing up to it and skidded, and from that skid it leaped the wall, its hindquarters advancing as it flew, so that it landed almost sideward and took off in another direction, over the fallen ruins of a house. Through all this, Anraí felt no jar or stumble.
That sparkle of blue at his left was Greatman’s Bay, which made the west shore of Carraroe. Ahead, once again, was Lochan an Bhuilín, with the busy sky reflected in its flat waters. This time Anraí came at the lake from the other, or west, side, and the mad horse made a detour onto the stony bottom, soaking its legs up to the knees and destroying the sky picture all around it.
Anraí considered flinging himself off at this juncture, for at least the water would be soft to land in. But though he was no sailor, still he could not swim, and he was not sure about the depth of the lake. Besides, until the horse came to grief, he would be fine where he was.
It took one small fence after another and bounded from stone hummock to dry grass to dead black heath. The bog sucked at it but did not hold it or strain the cables of its swinging legs. With his eyes closed, Anraí found, he could convince himself he was hacking quietly along the road. “If you were my horse,” he said under his breath—and twin, perfectly matched impulses of fury and affection choked the horseman’s breathing—“if you were my horse, I’d do a thing or two with you.”
He opened his eyes again to find he was hacking quietly along the road. In fact, they were already as far north as Drumalegaun, where two men in báinín were hurrying a donkey cart filled with milk cans down the road in the direction of Glashnacally.
Anraí automatically took a deep breath and thought slow, quiet thoughts, for horses can be funny about donkeys. But this one wasn’t, it seemed, for it cantered on, looking neither left nor right, its neck at such an arch that the rider might have been restraining it with hands of iron. Neither did Anraí look around, lest he recognize the men and be recognized in his turn.
But though the horse had no objection to donkeys, this donkey did not reciprocate. Anraí glanced around in time to see the cart and milk being propelled violently off the road in reverse, while the ass wore its ears laid backward, like a frightened rabbit’s.
The horse did not tire, and Anraí’s great concern wore itself off. By the time the sky clouded over and the drizzle took up, they had left behind the ruination of rocks that was the peninsula, and in front of him the earth was a soft, unbroken brown of bogland, with the perfect round cones of the hills to the right, and the tall Twelve Pins, the mountains of Connemara, winking in and out of the clouds ahead.
Anraí yawned. “Would it bother you too much to know that you’re taking me on my road home, lad? Would it ruin your pleasure in the day’s sport if you found I wasn’t lost at all?” The horse danced and shook its head, but made no sound. Perhaps it was finally getting tired.
The road went right and the horse with it. At the easy, rhythmic, but never mechanical pace they reached the Cashla River in a few minutes and crossed it. Evidently the animal had no fear of bridges. Anraí dropped his head forward so that the pervasive drizzle slid off his eyebrows, and he further closed his eyes to keep the rain out. Not for the first time in his life, he fell asleep on a moving horse.
He woke to a snort and a foot stamping to find the sky cracked with light once more and an afternoon wind blowing. The land before him dipped down in a dizzying smoothness of rock and dry grass, and he saw his own valley below, familiar to him as the face of his wife. He was sitting horseback on the dome of Knockduff Mountain, where he had often climbed in years past. The horse was still beneath him.
He gave a yawn and believed he would be sore soon. He scratched the wet wool and linen on his shoulders and felt a rough touch on his stomach, under the shirt.
It was the rope halter he had used on the yearling that morning. Half asleep, he took it out, pulled the rope through to adjust it for size, leaned forward, and clapped it over the grey horse’s nose and behind its ears.
Anraí felt a jolt as though the horse had shied in place. Its sides went as stiff as wood. It hopped and trembled and before Anraí’s eyes began to steam. Startled himself by this reaction, Anraí very warily tied the lead rope to both sides of the mouthpiece, making a sort of bridle out of the halter. “Don’t tell me you’re a stranger to the old rope halter, my lad,” he whispered gently, close to the horse’s ear. He saw a round eye ringed with white, and the long, unkempt yellow tail switched left and right. Anraí had a sinking feeling there would be a fight between himself and this horse on the stones of Knockduff Peak.
But he had to go home. At this season, there were no more than two more hours of light and likely no visible moon after that. He gave the horse an experimental squeeze of the legs. In perfect obedience it moved down the mountainside.
Chapter Two
Knockduff, or Under the Black Hill
Áine said the pig’s trotters were ruined. This was not true, of course, but it was the closest she could get to scolding Anraí for coming home wet and weary, when that had been no fault of his own. Anraí, wrapped in a blanket and with his feet in wool over a hot stone, sat by the kitchen fire and ate two trotters and a great heap of mash, both of which he covered with buttermilk and a crystalline layer of salt.
He told her about the horse, but not that he had mounted it without a bridle or halter. She told him how the chestnut filly had kicked Donncha, and what liniment she had used, but did not tell him about the letter from Seosamh, their only child. Áine and Anraí had been married for forty years.
Night fell and she saw her husband’s face reflected by lamplight in the glass of the window, with his jaw working around the potatoes and the shadows licking in and out. It hurt her to see how old he was getting to be, and she scraped more mash onto his plate. The reflection glared at her in response, as though she had challenged his ability in some way.
One son she had given him and no daughters at all. And he had put her in a house of two storeys and seven rooms, with a girl to help her with the work, sometimes. Of course there was no knowing she was the one who lacked, as far as children went. If Anraí had sired a ragtag, lot of babies before marriage, or even outside of it, then Áine would at least know. But that was not Anraí: nor did he drink or even wager more than one had to expect of a horseman. His only fault was in being at war with fully half the neighborhood at all times.
In the eight years since Áine had left off the possibility of another baby, she had begun to regret Anraí’s fidelity that had once made her complacent. A love child was a great shame, but better than no child at all in this great echoing house. She would have taken it in as that of a c
ousin, if decency could have been preserved. That she might have had her own love child, and with greater secrecy, never occurred to her.
She took up Anraí’s plate and fork and carried them to the sideboard. She heard him scratching his wiry hair with both hands as he got up.
“Are you going out again tonight, nursing a chill like that?” she asked, without turning.
“I am, of course, my dear. To the barn. I can’t dump a strange horse in like a sack of bran and expect it to sit neat until morning, I won’t catch cold in the fifty feet of drizzle.”
Áine’s plates each showed a little blue Chinese man and a little blue Chinese woman standing on a bridge like the one standing over the three-seasons stream in the close pasture. Over the bridge in the Chinese plate hung a sally wood: proof, as Tadhg Ó Murchú, the priest, said, that the Chinese were just like everyone else. The picture did not prove that, of course, for no Connemara man would let a willow grow uncut to such a height that its withies fell to the ground, however gracefully. Áine stared fixedly at the plate, thinking of that and thinking that she had to tell Anraí now.
“I got a letter from Seosamh today,” she said. Her words rang loudly in the room and were followed by silence. Áine looked over her shoulder to find nothing but the table and the cupboard, with the spinet peeking through from the sitting room beyond. Anraí had gone out very quietly.
Donncha MacSiadhail had his right hand wrapped in linen, with blue fingertips protruding. The chestnut filly that had kicked him was stalled by the front door, for it seemed she needed to be worked with. Donncha gestured to the corner loose-box and winced from the pain of it. “He ate his dinner with the appetite of a sporting gentleman and has been paying calls ever since.”
“Paying calls, Donncha?” In the light of the groom’s oil lamp Anraí could see a pale shape, looking clean and ghostly against the darkness.
The Grey Horse Page 2
