Machine Without Horses

by Helen Humphreys

  The Lady waves her stick to silence him and turns to look at Ruth. Her eyes are bright and close together. She tilts her head slightly, like a bird.

  “I’ve heard you’re a very good dresser.”

  Ruth looks nervously down at her dusty shoes, her ill-fitting skirt, and then realizes what Lady Drummond means.

  “Yes,” she says. “I can tie a decent salmon fly.”

  “Decent or good?” The head tilts to the other side. One of the enormous Russian dogs knocks against the back of Ruth’s knees and she almost stumbles.

  “Good,” Ruth says, regaining her balance. “Sometimes very good.”

  “Then no need to grovel,” says Lady Drummond to Arthur. “I will make excellent use of your daughter’s abilities. It seems a fair exchange.”

  “The Lady is a first-rate salmon fisher,” says Arthur to Ruth.

  “I’ve had the treble more than once,” says Lady Drummond.

  Ruth is impressed, despite her nerves. The “treble” is usually only undertaken by men. It refers to the catching of a salmon, the shooting of a stag and the killing of a grouse, all accomplished within a single day.

  The cottage is a long walk from the estate, across several fields, up a hill and down the other side. The small wooden gate off the laneway is overgrown with brambles. Lady Drummond slashes at them with her stick to clear a path. She throws open the cottage door with such force that it bangs against the adjacent wall and releases a cloud of dust.

  “It’s been much neglected and for too long,” she says. “I had a gamekeeper in here for a while, but that was years ago now.” She strides into the tiny building and Ruth and Arthur bob along in her wake. The dogs stay outside in the overgrown garden, nosing under the hedge for rabbits.

  The rooms have cobwebs on the ceiling, peeling paint on all the walls. There are rodent droppings on the small work surface in the tiny kitchen. One of the windows is cracked.

  “What do you think?” asks Lady Drummond.

  “It’s lovely,” says Ruth.

  The shed next to the little cottage has a corrugated red tin roof and a big window that looks out to the sea. Ruth stands in front of the window, staring at the thin white threads atop the distant waves. The vista is mesmerizing and she finds it hard to break away when it’s time to leave.

  “We’ll get your mother out here to help make the place habitable,” says Arthur, when they’re walking home.

  “I could live in it now,” says Ruth. “As it is. Did you see the view, Daddy?”

  “I did. It was entrancing. It’s all going to work out splendidly.”

  But Annie isn’t enamoured with the cottage.

  “It smells of mould.”

  When she’s shown the shed, she regards the generous window critically. “You’ll get a lot of draft through that,” she says.

  But she stays and helps Ruth sweep out, put a few dishes on the kitchen shelves, lean the mattress up against the outside wall of the cottage to air it out.

  Arthur brings over an old dressing table that he’s salvaged from one of his wealthy clients, positions it under the window in the shed.

  “You can use this as your desk,” he says to Ruth. “And I’ve made you some cubbies to hold your skins and feathers.”

  Her parents stay until tea time and then they leave Ruth there, alone in her strange new home. She stands by the gate, watching them lurch away in the horse and cart that Arthur has borrowed for Ruth’s moving day. The plume of the horse’s tail is all that is visible as they round the bend in the road.

  It is not yet dark, so Ruth goes out to the shed, sits at the kidney-shaped dressing table, running her hands over its smooth surface. Tomorrow, she will start, she thinks, but there is her vise on the window ledge, and the new cubbies her father made to the left of her desk are already full of materials. There will be light for at least another hour or so, and Arthur has promised several clients his daughter’s exquisite flies for the coming week.

  The first fly Ruth ties in the shed is a Durham Ranger. The bright blue of the hackle is cheering and the silver tinsel for the ribs glitters beautifully, caught in a ray of the setting sun. Working on the fly, head bent in concentration over her desk, Ruth can forget the loneliness she feels at being apart from her family for the first time in her life.

  Over the coming weeks, Arthur visits often, Annie not at all.

  “It’s incumbent on you to come to me,” she says to Ruth. “Not the other way around.”

  But Arthur shares none of that Victorian sentiment. He is up at Ruth’s cottage every chance he gets, sometimes on the pretext of collecting flies, but often just to have a cup of tea and escape the constant and sharp unhappiness of his wife. He sits on an old chair in Ruth’s shed while she works, drinking his tea and talking to her back.

  “Honestly, Daddy,” says Ruth, after one lengthy recounting of Annie’s complaints of him, “why did you ever marry her?”

  “I thought we had a great deal in common.”

  They both laugh out loud, trying to imagine what this commonality might possibly once have been.

  Arthur visits on behalf of his clients, but soon, the clients themselves start to come up the coast road to see Ruth, and she has to leave a book and pencil on the bench outside her cottage for the fishermen to write down their orders when she isn’t home.

  Once in a while, Lady Drummond strides up the drive with her Russian dogs to choose a few flies for herself. She never puts in an order and so Ruth is required to give her flies that she had meant for someone else, and then has to stay up later than she wants to make new ones.

  But she doesn’t mind. It seems a small price to pay for her rent-free tenancy, and Lady Drummond never takes more than one or two flies at a time. She favours the Durham Ranger and the Jock Scott, so Ruth tries to have several of each always to hand.

  The Lady arrives one day and knocks with her stick on Ruth’s shed window, startling her.

  “Come in,” says Ruth, but Lady Drummond remains standing outside the shed, and so Ruth gets up from her chair and goes into the garden.

  “I brought you something,” says Lady Drummond. She’s carrying a basket over one arm. “I thought you might like it.” She pulls back the cloth that covers the basket and Ruth looks in to see a squirming black and white puppy.

  “The shepherd’s collie had nine puppies,” says Lady Drummond. “And it occurred to me that you might like the company of a dog, being all alone out here.”

  Ruth has been feeling lately as though she is never alone enough, what with Arthur’s constant visits and the dropping in of the local fishermen, but she doesn’t say this. She reaches into the basket and lifts out the puppy and puts him down on the grass.

  “I like his white feet,” she says. “They’re like four little socks.”

  The puppy wants to chew the legs of Ruth’s desk. If a feather falls to the floor while she’s working, he runs off with it. In the garden, he snaps the heads on the flowers and rolls in the carcass of a long dead fox. But at night, when he’s curled up on the rug in the parlour, she often sits on the floor beside him, stroking his silky fur and listening to the whistle of his breathing.

  One day, Lady Drummond arrives in a pony and trap.

  “You’re wanted at home,” she says. “Bring the dog. I don’t know how long you will need to be there.”

  Ruth tucks the puppy under one arm and climbs up into the trap.

  “What’s wrong?”

  The Lady just lays a hand on Ruth’s arm and shakes her head.

  Arthur is tucked up in bed in his blue-striped pyjamas. He is surprised to see his youngest daughter.

  “What are you doing here?” he says. “You’re meant to be tying a set of flies for the Duke.”

  “Arthur, you know very well you’re not going back out on the river,” says Annie from the doorway.

  “Of course I am.” He struggles to sit upright but doesn’t have the energy and flops back down again.

  Ruth sits down o
n the edge of the bed. She can hear Socks crying out in the yard where she has tied him to a drainpipe. She takes Arthur’s hand.

  “Daddy,” she says. He looks at her with wild eyes, his brow spiked with sweat.

  “Help me, Ruthie,” he says. “I don’t know why they’re keeping me here.”

  Eliza and Marjory arrive by train that evening. They walk from the station arm in arm. Ruth watches them arrive from the bedroom window, can hear their voices drift ahead of them up the road. When they come into the house, she listens to Annie talking softly with them in the kitchen, preparing them.

  “We’re all here now, Daddy,” Ruth says, but Arthur is suddenly beyond hearing. His eyes are closed and there is a lot of time between each breath. Ruth can count to eight, then to ten. By the time her sisters get upstairs, her father barely seems to be breathing at all. She puts her head on his chest, listening to the slow slippage of his heart, the flannel of his pyjamas warm against the side of her face. She hasn’t put her head on her father’s chest since she was a child. There’s such a relief to doing it that she keeps her ear pressed against his chest until there is only silence beneath it, and the patch of flannel against her cheek grows slowly colder.

  They dress Arthur in his good suit, comb his hair across the bald patch on the top of his head. There are to be no shoes in the coffin, but Ruth polishes his brogues anyway and then puts them neatly by his side of the bed. She slips a fly into his breast pocket, a Durham Ranger, the first one she tied when she went to live in the Kintradwell cottage.

  “There’s unlikely to be fish in heaven,” says Eliza, who stands across the room, watching her do this.

  “But there might well be people wanting to fish,” says Ruth.

  It rains at the graveside, great sheets of water running down the earthen walls of the grave and pooling on top of the coffin. Eliza and Marjory share an umbrella and Ruth holds one over her mother. Water drips down the back of her neck. With all the rain, it is hard to tell who is crying and who isn’t.

  Back at the house, there is tea and whisky and sandwiches. Everyone crowds into the parlour and there is the overwhelming smell of wet wool from the rain-soaked tweed of the mourners.

  Ruth is encouraged to see many of the fishermen whom Arthur worked for, but becomes gradually annoyed when some of them use the opportunity of the funeral to order salmon flies from her.

  After the last guest has left, Ruth goes upstairs and sits on her father’s side of the bed. She touches his pillow, which still carries the dent of his head. Then she bends down and touches the tips of his newly polished shoes, first one, then the other. It’s mostly dark in the room, just the borrowed light from downstairs rising weakly up the staircase, and night thick upon the window. She can hear the overlapping voices of her mother and sisters, how similar they sound to each other.

  On a nail on the back of the bedroom door hangs Arthur’s old suit. Ruth gets up from the bed and walks over to it, burying her face in the worn wool of the jacket, breathing in the scent of fish and smoke, the metallic tang of the river underneath everything, in every fibre of the cloth.

  When she leaves the next day, Ruth takes the suit with her. Annie assumes her daughter will be giving it to one of Lady Drummond’s shepherds and is grateful.

  “Thank you for thinking of that,” she says, in a tone usually reserved for Eliza and Marjory.

  But Ruth has no intention of giving her father’s suit away. She walks back to her cottage, the suit under one arm, Socks tied to a length of rope and trotting along the road in front of her.

  She pushes the gate open, flips through the notebook on the bench outside her front door, noting with dismay the number of new orders that have been written there during her absence.

  Inside, the cottage is damp. Ruth banks a fire in the grate, puts some food down for the dog. She carries her father’s suit to her bedroom, where there is a small mirror overtop of her dressing table.

  The trousers don’t fit at all. They drop to the floor even when she has buttoned them up. But the jacket is better. She turns back the sleeves, smooths down the lapels with an open hand. In the mirror, she regards herself critically.

  Not quite a boy. Not quite a girl.

  Her mother’s high forehead.

  Her father’s green eyes.

  Thunder and Lightning

  RUTH LOOKS OUT AT THE HORIZON, STANDING at the bottom of the garden, where she has the best possible view of the sea. The sun is barely up and there is just a whisker of light between water and sky to separate night from day. There’s nothing out there. An empty sky. The empty sea.

  “All clear,” she says to Socks, who is snouting through the flower bed, following the scent of night rabbits.

  Ruth goes back to the cottage, grabs her jacket from the hook inside the front door, checks to make sure there’s a notebook and pencil on the bench outside, in case a customer comes by wanting to order salmon flies when she’s off on the milk run. Then she grabs her bicycle from where it leans against the wall of the shed, hurtles aboard the seat and pedals quickly down the lane. Socks streaks along beside her, keeping level with the front wheel.

  Mr. Munro isn’t in the yard outside the farm like usual, but Ned is there, hitched up to the wagon and ready to go. Ruth palms him a carrot from the pocket of her jumper, where she also has several apples stashed for bribes during the morning route, in case the cart horse decides to be stubborn.

  “Good boy,” she says, stroking the side of his face while he chomps on the carrot.

  There are no milk canisters on the floor of the wagon. Usually, it’s fully loaded by the time Ruth arrives at the farm.

  “Wait here,” she says to Socks. She walks across the dirt in the direction of the barn.

  Mr. Munro is nowhere to be seen, but his wife is struggling to manoeuvre one of the metal milk canisters across the swayback floor of the barn. Ruth rushes to help her.

  “Let me,” she says. “Is your husband ill today?”

  “Signed up.”

  “But he’s a farmer.”

  Farmers are exempt from service because they grow and provide food.

  Mrs. Munro straightens up, putting a hand into the small of her back and arching over it. There’s a telltale bump visible beneath the front of her apron.

  “He wanted to go,” she says. “His brothers have all gone. Dan isn’t one to be left behind. He’s the eldest. It’s a matter of principle.”

  “But you’re pregnant.”

  “Yes. Don’t think I’m happy about it.”

  It’s unclear whether she means the pregnancy or her husband’s absence during it.

  “Stand aside,” says Ruth. “You can’t be doing this sort of work in your condition.” She clamps both arms around the canister and manages to wrestle it over to the wagon, then returns to the barn to perform the same task with the remainder of the milk cans.

  Mrs. Munro watches Ruth struggle.

  “You’re going to be exhausted before you even begin the milk run,” she says. “I’ll have one of the lads who works the fields come and load the wagon tomorrow morning.”

  “No. I’m fine.” Ruth is leaning against the running board, trying to catch her breath. “It will be good for me. Make me fitter. I’ll just get up half an hour earlier. Don’t change anything, Mrs. Munro.”

  “Call me Evelyn.”

  “Don’t change anything, Evelyn. We’ll just go on as usual. We can manage.”

  Ruth vaguely remembers Evelyn from school. They were a year apart. She has a foggy memory of seeing Evelyn in the schoolyard, playing hopscotch with her friends.

  Ruth climbs up into the wagon, whistles for Socks, who is digging at the base of a tree near the drive shed, and they lurch out of the farmyard and into the road.

  Giles, the milkman, was one of the first men in the village to be called up. When Ruth volunteered to take on some of the work of the absent male villagers, she was offered the choice of the milk run or the postal route. She chose the milk run bec
ause she liked the idea of working with the horse. The post is delivered by bicycle.

  Ned, the horse, has been with Giles for years, and he has not taken kindly to the switch in handlers. Even with the copious amounts of carrots and apples that Ruth bribes him with every day, there is always at least one moment during the milk run when he stops dead in the road and refuses to budge. It is as if he forgets that Giles is gone, and then suddenly remembers, and in the remembering, he proves his loyalty to his real master by ignoring the wishes of this new, temporary, one.

  Today, Ned decides to halt on a lonely stretch of the coast road, in front of a gorse bush. He stamps his feet and sways from side to side, trying to wriggle free from the wagon shafts.

  Ruth hops down, carrot in hand, and holds it out to Ned while backing up slowly so that he will have to start walking after her if he wants to reach the carrot.

  Ned stares at the carrot, not moving.

  “Come on,” says Ruth. She waves the carrot in front of his nose. “Please. We’re late as it is.”

  Socks’s whole focus on the milk run is the moment when the wagon stops in front of a house and the householder comes out with jugs to be filled from the canisters and, in the transfer from one container to another, milk is spilled on the ground, which the dog then helpfully laps up. Socks doesn’t care for Ned, and he especially doesn’t like it when Ned stops in the road, nowhere near a house. The collie stands beside Ruth and barks at the horse.

  Whether it’s the annoying sound of the dog or the lure of the carrot, Ned reluctantly begins to move forward again, but ambles so slowly that Ruth is able to walk alongside him, keeping perfect pace.

  When she finally finishes the route, an hour later than she is meant to, she returns to the farm, hands Ned over to one of the farm workers and races home on her bicycle to start work on her salmon fly orders for the day.

  The next morning, she leaves her cottage before the sun is up.

  Evelyn is waiting for her in the barn.

  “I’ve thought of a solution,” she says. She waves her hand towards the bank of milk canisters and Ruth sees, in front of them on the floor, a child’s wooden wagon.