Great American Horse Stories

by Sharon B. Smith

  One of these evenings, while I was crouching on the hill with a delightful shiver playing along my spine, a strange man came up and stood a few yards to one side of me, looking out to the eastward. The white horse was there, perhaps a half-mile off, outlined against a bank of silver that came rolling in from the ocean. The newcomer regarded him a long time without moving; then I, being a little afraid of the man, slipped out of the bushes and down the hill to the little house.

  The dusk was already thick when he came down the dune and stopped to pass a word with my father, who was working over a net near the gate. I remember my sister Agnes peering curiously at the figure indistinct in the gloom, and my mother whispering to her that it was the man they had taken off the wreck. That made a tremendous impression on me. I was glad when my father asked him to sit a while by the fire.

  From my vantage-point behind my mother’s chair, I could examine him better than I dared do on the ridge. He was a smallish man, of a wiry build rather uncommon among our own people, whose strength is apt to come upon them with an amount of flesh. His skin was not brown but red, hairy about the wrists,—I thought of it as brittle. His hair was almost the color of his skin, his features were heavy. He sat or stood with elbows out and thumbs tucked in his belt, and he had little to say. I can give his age definitely as twenty-eight at that time.

  From the moment he entered, the stranger seemed unable to keep his slow-moving gray eyes away from my sister Agnes, who stood leaning against the door which led into the front room. Those two were as far apart as the two poles. It is hard for a small boy to know how his brothers and sisters really appear, but looking back out of later years I remember her as rather tall for a girl, full-formed, straight, dark as the rest of us, and with a look of contempt in her black eyes for this alien whom she had no means of comprehending.

  For a time my father talked about the wreck, putting questions, hazarding technical opinions in the jargon of the sea. The stranger’s replies were monosyllabic and vague. Then in a pause the neighing of the white horse came in to us, and the man started up with an abrupt scraping of his shoes on the boards. I am sure that Agnes believed he was frightened, and that she took no pains to hide it. After that the talk turned naturally on the white horse, going back and forth between my father and mother, for the stranger had even less to say now than before.

  Jem Hodges (that was the stranger’s name) came the following day and sat on the front porch, watching father who was tarring weir twine in the yard. He had nothing to say—simply sat there with his thumbs tucked in his belt.

  Agnes came in and said to my mother, “He’s a dummy—I never seen such a dummy, ma.”

  “I don’ know, Aggie,” my mother answered her. “He ain’t our kind, and you can’t tell about things you ain’t used to.” That was my mother’s way.

  Agnes flounced out of the kitchen in a manner which had no significance to me then, for my rudimentary wits could perceive no possible connection between her action and the silence of the little man on the porch outside.

  I think I can say now what the connection was. Among other things the world has taught me this—that no two men do the same thing in exactly the same way. Jem Hodges was wooing my sister Agnes. Little wonder that her spirit was restive under that wooing, when all the blood of the race in her veins sang of the lover’s fervor, the quick eye, the heart speaking in words, the abandon of caresses. And here was a man, fulfilling none of our conventions of beauty, who sat imperturbable, impassive, saying nothing, and making her come to him. I am sure that he did it without planning or analyzing—I think half of it was constraint and all of it instinct. And Agnes might flounce out of the room as she would: sooner or later I saw her again at the front of the house.

  This went on for two or three weeks. Jem Hodges came almost every day to sit on the porch a while, after which he sometimes wandered away in the growing evening over our own dune. Again and again I saw him standing there, as on the first evening, for a long time without motion, looking over the hummocks. Sometimes I could hear him whistling under his breath an air that was very strange and outlandish to me, then, who had never heard the like. Many years later I heard one of the great tenors of the world sing the same air, and it thrilled me, but not in the same way.

  On the evening of the twenty-eighth of November (I have the date from Agnes) I was ensconced in my bushy retreat, watching the night take hold of the world of sand. Jem Hodges stood on the ridge to the east of me. Every minute that passed robbed his motionless figure of some detail, and lent to it a portion of the flat mystery of the night. I had seen the white horse once that evening, topping a rise far off to the northward, and then no more till I was suddenly aware of a gigantic, indistinct form moving up hill toward me amid a vast shuf-shuf of troubled sand.

  I was terribly frightened for the instant; then I knew it was a matter only of hopping over the bank behind me and sliding down to the very back door of the little house. I had slipped from the bushes and was almost to the bottom of the smothering slope, when I heard such a plunging in the sand above that my wits came near leaving me again; I made wild and futile plunges, and cried out to my sister, whom I saw in the open doorway. I had no thought in the world but that it was the white horse charging down. I had almost gained the house, a pathetic small figure of panic, when I felt myself brushed aside with a violence which left me sprawling, terrified, on my back in the sand, with a confused impression as of something passing through the doorway where my sister had stood. It was not beyond me at that moment to imagine the white horse, overcarried by the impetus of his charge, blundering right on into the kitchen of the little house.

  Jem Hodges had passed completely out of my mind, and it was Jem whom I found in the kitchen, ill at ease, confronted by my sister. Agnes I hardly knew that evening—she was like a new and strange person, aflame with anger and a high, emphatic beauty, speaking tensely, with the nerve twanging upward slur at the end of the phrase which discovered the blood of the Island race through all the veneer of public school. The accumulated unrest of weeks had found a vent at last.

  “You—you—oh, you coward!” she reviled him, “you little sneaking coward, you!—an’ they call you a man !” Her voice was a whispered shriek, her clenched hands moved before her as though to do him harm.

  Jem was white, and still breathing hard.

  “A man,” Agnes went on. “They call you a man—an’ you knock over little children so’s you can save your own little hairy hide. You lose your eyesight—and your mind—from seein’ a horse walkin’ over some sand . . . Agh!”

  Then she turned to me with a fierce gesture of protection.

  “Zhoe—poor little Zhoe—he hurt you, didn’t he? There, don’t cry no more—you’re more of a man ’n he is, ain’t you Little Zhoe?”

  My face was in the folds of her skirt and I still sobbed out the after-swell of the terror, but I could hear Jem’s voice speaking. He always seemed to me, when talking, to be expending his words with immense care.

  “The horse wouldn’t harm Joe,” he pronounced.

  That was a signal for Agnes to fly at him once more.

  “No—won’t harm him—you slip that out easy because Zhoe’s no folks of yourn—an’ never will be either. Agh!—God!—I could kill you if you weren’t such a worm!”

  “He wouldn’t harm Joe, nor nobody.”

  The man’s words were unsteady but assured. Agnes’s voice went from her control completely; she came close to him and screamed in his face.

  “Harm nobody?—Oh!—Oh!—Little man, go an’ bring me that white horse—You been makin’ eyes at me—Oh, I seen ’em!—Now if you want me—me—go out an’ get the white horse that won’t harm nobody—with your two bare hands—an’ bring him to me.”

  For that moment, my sister was out of her mind.

  Jem came over and laid an absent hand on my shoulder, as if he had thought to comfort me, and then h
ad fallen into abstraction before the act was accomplished. After a moment of vacant quiet he looked up at Agnes.

  “An’ you tell me that, too,” he said.

  All that evening I was haunted by a picture of the silent man, with his hard red thumbs tucked in his belt, pursuing a shadow of horror through the black dune country. This distressed me so much that I finally crawled out from beneath the table, where I had been lying, and whispered my fears in my sister’s ear. She had been very quiet all evening, but when she understood what I was saying she gave a little bitter laugh and put her arm around me.

  “Don’t be afeared, Zhoe,” she whispered her answer. “The little man is tight behind his own door this night.” Then she fell to brooding once more.

  When Jem came to the little house the following day he carried a piece of line in one hand. He sat down as usual on the front steps. The picture of him that evening has remained to me the most vivid memory of my young days—why, I cannot say. I peeped out of the front window and saw him there, silhouetted against the blazing waters of the bay—the vast, silent, and expressive shout of the departing day casting out at me the unexpressive man.

  Agnes came around a corner and stood, looking down at the line in Jem’s hand. He looked down at it, too.

  “I been thinkin’ it over,” he said.

  “You’re a-scared to do it!” she answered. For a long time they remained there without moving or speaking, both looking down at the line.

  “You’re a-scared to do it!” Agnes repeated at length, and Jem got up from the steps and went out through the gate toward the dunes. Never have I seen the whole world so saturated with passive flame as it seemed to me, peering from the gloom of the front room that evening.

  At supper Agnes talked feverishly of many things, but ate nothing. All of us noticed it, and my mother remarked upon it. The silence outside was so complete that the riffle of the coming tide was audible in the pauses, and once I heard the note of the stallion, far away over the sand. Then my sister broke out into a humming tune—the first and last time I ever knew her to sing at table. I remember wondering why her eyes, which were usually so steady and straight seeing, turned here and there without rest, and why, after the meal, she wandered from window to window, and never stopped to look out at any.

  That was to be a gala night for me. My father had been raking up the brush and leaves about the place for a week, heaping them, together with bits of old net and tarry shreds of canvas, in half a dozen piles before the house, and tonight I was allowed to set them off. I had them blazing soon after supper was over, and a fine monstrous spectacle they made for me, who danced up and down the lines full of elemental exultation, and then ran off to call Agnes to see my handiwork.

  I could not find her anywhere in the house; I went through all the rooms and out and around the yard. No one knew where she was. My mother thought she had seen her with a shawl over her head, but had taken no particular notice at the time. It didn’t matter, at any rate—Agnes often wandered out toward town in the early evening. The rest of us sat on the steps and watched the fires, baby brother and all, but they had lost something of their enchantment for me. I was pursuing an idea, an obscure apprehension.

  “I b’lieve Aggie’s gone to the dunes,” I proclaimed, at length.

  “Dunes!” my mother cried out. “No—you’re foolish, Zhoe. Why?”

  Thus confronted by the direct question, I found my reasonings too diaphanous for a logical answer.

  “I dunno,” I answered, abashed.

  But I had set them worrying. It is a strange fact that fisher-folk are at once the bravest and the most apprehensive people I have any knowledge of. When worried, my mother was generally restless with her hands, while my father betrayed his anxiety by unwonted profanity and by aimless expeditions to inspect the dory mooring in the creek.

  These things they did tonight, my mother on the steps, impassive save for her writhing fingers, my father visible in peripatetic red glimpses as he wandered, muttering, about the yard. He called out that he was going to step down and take a look at the boat.

  After that, he was gone a long time—half an hour I should say—while the flames died down over the fires, replacing the uncertain flicker in the yard with a smooth pervasive glow. When he at length appeared, I wondered to see sand burrs clinging about the edges of his trousers. The nearest sand burrs I knew of were half a mile off toward Snail Road.

  I don’t know how long we waited after that. My mother put the baby to bed, and returned to sit with restless hands; my father, muttering curses the while, added bits of driftwood to the fires, with the instinct inbred in sea-people of keeping a beacon alight.

  Their coming was as the coming of an apparition seen suddenly in the firelight, tottering forward on limbs too frail for its inexplicable and uncouth frame. Then my mother cried out, and my father’s oath was a prayer, and it came to me that the apparition was not one but two figures, one bearing the other.

  Jem staggered up between the fires and laid his burden down with her head in my mother’s lap. My sister’s face was a queer color, her eyes were closed. I was bewildered and afraid.

  “Scared,” Jem panted. He collapsed rather than sat upon the lowest step. “He never touched her—just scared her—out of her head.”

  None of us doubted for an instant who “he” was. I ran into the kitchen under my mother’s order for water. She worked with a sort of feverish calm over the girl in her lap, while Jem sat, head in hands, and back heaving. After a little he got up and regarded my sister’s face.

  “She’ll come around,” he said.

  It may have been a question. If it was the answer was at its heels.

  Agnes’s eyes opened at the sound of the words with a shadow of unutterable horror behind them—her hands went out to him in an agony of rigid appeal. Jem knelt down with an arm about her shoulders.

  “You’re all right,” he comforted her, still expending his words, as it were, with care.

  “He came out of the sand—right up out of the sand at me.”—there was a certain queer quality of raving in Agnes’s whisper. She clung to him with the impossible strength of terror. “He came out of the sand—his eyes were red—oh, red—I could see them—and—an’ I couldn’t run—couldn’t step—not step—”

  “Yes—yes—Home now, Miss Aggie.” Jem’s red hand was on her hair, soothing, as one might a child.

  “How did I come here?” She put the question abruptly—in her own voice now—took her arms from his neck with a gesture of shame and laid them across my mother’s shoulders. It was my mother who answered her query.

  “Meester Hodges bring you, Aggie girl.” Agnes’s eyes went to the little man, but he was lost in abstract contemplation of the nearest fire bed. My mother went on, “Ain’t you goin’ to thank Meester Hodges, Aggie?” Jem turned at that, lifting an imperative hand.

  “Wait!” said he. ‘“Wait! You told me—to bring the horse.”

  Agnes cried out, “No!—no!—Oh, please—”

  “You told me. Wait—an’ don’t be afeared.” He leaned against a post of the railing, his red skin seeming to take to itself all the dying light of the embers, and began to whistle, low at first, then filling out clear and high and throbbing. He whistled in a peculiar way which I have never observed in any other.

  The air was half familiar to me, the one he had played with softly on the dune behind the house. But to me and to my people, bred to the cloying accents of the South, that clear, soaring, sweet thread of Northern melody came as strange and alien and tingling, filling our own familiar night with a quality of expectancy. Jem Hodges was a new man before our eyes; for the first time in our knowledge of him, he was giving utterance to himself. He swept through the melody once, and twice, and paused.

  “He’s far,” he said, and a note of whickering came to us from the eastward dunes. He caught up the air again, playing
with it wonderful things, sweeping the little huddled family of us out of our intimate house and glowing, familiar yard, into a strange, wind-troubled country of his own.

  And this time it was the night, not the sea, that gave up the great white stallion, rising to our fence in majestic flight, exploding from the flat darkness.

  Jem cried, “No!—no!—don’t be afeared!”—for we were making the gestures of panic. The animal came to him, picking a dainty way about the coals for all his tremendous weight, making a wonderfully fine picture with the fiery sheen over his vast deep chest, along the glistening flanks where the sweat stood, turning the four white fetlocks to agitated pinions of flame. Thus, I believe, the horses of the gods came to the ancients.

  He stood over us there, heaving, mountainous, filling half the sphere of our sight. But his nose was in the bosom of Jem Hodges’s coat, and his ears pricked forward to the breathing of Jem Hodges’s song without words. The little man wandered on and on, picking a phrase from here and from there, wooing, recounting, laughing, exulting, weeping, never hating. When he suddenly began to speak in words, it was as though he had come down a great way, out of his own element.

  “It had to be—after all,” he said. “After all.—Now I suppose I’ve got to take you on to the rich American leddy? She’ll keep you fine—in a fine paddock—you—you of the big wide moorland—free gentleman of half an English county. Ah, it’s bad, Baron boy.”

  Then he was talking to us—to Agnes. “I been lying’ to myself—tryin’ to make myself believe Baron was away off and wild—I wanted to have him free like the air—long as he could. The rich leddy will pay five hundred pounds. Why do I need it? We’re comfortable on our little place at home. Why?—because father says so an’ a man must do what his father says—till he gets a wife an’ family of his own. I thought Baron was gone when the ship got wrecked—I was near glad of it—he’s no boy to pen up—in a paddock—with a ribbon on, mebbe. An’ when I knew he wasn’t gone—why—I fair couldn’t do it—put it off an’ off an’ off. Ah, Baron, Baron,—they gave me you when I could pick you up in the meadow—but a man’s got to do what his father says—”