Machine Without Horses

by Helen Humphreys

  “We use one wagon to get to the other wagon,” says Evelyn.

  “Genius,” says Ruth.

  Evelyn smiles. “Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” she says. “But it does solve our problem.”

  It takes hardly any time to move the milk canisters from the barn to the floorboards of the wagon. Ruth didn’t need to get up early after all, as it is still dark when she has finished loading the milk.

  “I’m going to make you a cup of tea before you head off,” says Evelyn. “You didn’t have any breakfast, did you?”

  “No,” admits Ruth. It was too dark to see properly when she left her cottage. She didn’t have time to grope around in the kitchen, looking for something to eat, and it didn’t seem worth it to go to the bother of lighting one of the paraffin lamps.

  The farmhouse kitchen is cozy and cheerful, much nicer than Ruth’s meagre worktop and old cooker. She sits at the big wooden table, watching Evelyn fix a pot of tea, scrape some toast with marmalade.

  “You won’t go hungry at least,” says Evelyn, putting down a plate in front of Ruth, pouring her a cup of tea.

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  “Nonsense. It’s our milk you’re delivering. My milk now, I suppose.” Evelyn sits down opposite Ruth. “Dan said it will be over by Christmas.”

  “The war?”

  “What else.”

  Ruth crunches into her toast, washes it down with a mouthful of hot tea. “I hope so. I don’t know how much longer I can do battle with Ned.”

  “Horses can be very stubborn.”

  Evelyn sips her tea and Ruth makes a mental note to try to eat and drink more delicately, instead of stuffing food into her mouth like a dog and gulping her liquids. Often, at home, she doesn’t even sit down to eat, always in a hurry to get back to work.

  “I want Dan to be home for the baby’s birth,” Evelyn says. “I don’t like to think he might still be overseas.”

  “That was what happened to me,” says Ruth. “To my father. He was fighting in France when I was born. He didn’t see me until I was three years old.”

  “I’m sorry about your father, Ruth. Cancer is a nasty business.”

  “Yes. I mean, thank you. They didn’t discover it until it was too late. He just thought he had a backache from clambering about on the river.”

  “May I ask you something?” Evelyn tops up their cups with tea, doesn’t wait for Ruth’s reply to her question. “Is that why you wear his clothes? Because he died so recently?”

  Ruth rubs the worn fabric of her father’s suit jacket.

  “I didn’t want his clothes to go to waste, I suppose.” She pauses. “I should go. It’s getting light out now.”

  Evelyn walks with Ruth outside. The sun is rising over the fields. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I was just curious.”

  They stop by the wagon.

  “I remember him coming back from France,” Ruth says. “I think it’s my first real memory, seeing him walking through the front door in his uniform. He picked me up and swung me around. No one had ever done that before. I remember how it felt. Like flying.”

  Evelyn takes Ruth’s hand and puts it on her stomach. They both stand very still, concentrating. The morning sun inches into the farmyard. The baby flutters under Ruth’s hand like a salmon in the river.

  The war continues past Christmas. Evelyn’s baby is born, a girl that she names Ava. Her mother moves in with her to help out. Ruth’s mother follows her eldest daughters, who have fled south into marriage.

  “They will have families,” she says to Ruth, about her decision to leave Brora. “You don’t need me here.”

  Often, in the mornings when Ruth comes to the farm to fetch the horse and wagon, Evelyn is inside with the baby, and Ruth ferries the milk canisters out to the yard by herself.

  But one morning, Evelyn is inside the barn when Ruth arrives to get the cans. She waves a postcard under Ruth’s nose.

  “I wanted to show you this,” she says. “It’s from Giles, asking after his horse. I don’t think he’s even written his wife yet.”

  Ruth takes the postcard, studies it.

  “He’s a POW,” she says. The card has the camp’s address in the far-left corner and two words blacked out by the censor in the main body of the text. “Shall we write him back? He might like a letter.”

  “Tell him all about his horse?”

  “In agonizing detail.”

  After the milk run, Ruth stays on, sitting in Evelyn’s kitchen, balancing the baby on her lap, while Evelyn searches out a fresh sheet of paper and a pen. Evelyn’s mother is out in the yard, collecting eggs from the coop. Ruth watches her slump across the dirt on her way to the henhouse. She has the same weariness about her as Annie does, a heaviness that Ruth thinks must come not just from the war but from motherhood itself.

  “Got it,” says Evelyn, coming back into the kitchen. She puts the paper down on the table. “Now, what do we say?”

  “Dear Giles.”

  “After that.”

  “Ned is a terrible horse. But Ned misses you. Ned only wants to deliver the milk with you. He doesn’t care about contributing to the war effort.” Ruth bounces Ava on her knee and the baby smiles at her.

  “Dear Giles,” writes Evelyn. She frowns in concentration. “Why don’t we describe the milk run today?”

  “Ned stopped outside the bakery,” says Ruth. “Then he stopped by the cricket pitch and again out on the drover’s road. I fed him so many apples and carrots that he developed a bad case of wind, and I could no longer sit behind him because the stench was so awful, so I had to walk for miles.”

  “Well, I can’t write that.” Evelyn is smiling.

  “We’ll have to make it up then,” says Ruth. “Like a fairy tale.”

  They concoct a story of Ned the wonder horse for Giles in his German prison, and for Ava, who giggles with delight when Ruth wanders off script and imitates the farting horse.

  Evelyn’s mother returns with her basket of eggs. Ruth leaves on her bicycle with Socks running beside her, licking his lips in a manner that suggests he’s been gleefully feasting on the dollops of fresh manure in the yard.

  The new gillie is waiting for Ruth when she gets back to her cottage. She’s met him a few times before but is still shy around him. It feels odd to her that her father can be replaced so easily, and that no one but her seems to mind, or even notice, the switch. The new gillie is Ruth’s age and without a family. He must rattle around inside her old home, leaving many of the rooms unused.

  “I meant to write out my order,” he says as Ruth disembarks from her bicycle. “But I saw you in the distance, coming up the road.” He follows her into her work shed, sits on the chair in the corner without being asked to stay.

  “What do you need?”

  “Thunder and Lightning. Two perhaps?”

  He is polite, knows she is the former gillie’s daughter and has respect for her because of this.

  “Are you going to wait?”

  “If I may.”

  Ruth wishes he hadn’t sat down and that she hadn’t given him a choice of staying. She could have told him she is behind on her orders (which is true) and sent him on his way, delivering the flies to him later in the day. It’s not as if she doesn’t know where to find him. In fact, it might be nice to see the house again. Or it might not. Graham probably doesn’t have her mother’s flair for making the most from the least.

  “Is there going to be a storm?” she asks.

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “You do know that this fly works best in stormy weather. It’s fairly useless at other times.” Ruth can’t stop the annoyed tone from creeping into her voice, can’t stop the advice. She might begrudge him the job of gillie after all, even though she tells herself that she doesn’t.

  “I do.” Graham shifts his position on the chair. Ruth can hear it creak behind her. “I’m just missing that fly from my wallet. Lost my last one to a salmon tw
o weeks ago. I like to be prepared, to have everything on hand. You never know what to expect.”

  You should know what to expect. It’s your job, thinks Ruth, but thankfully, she doesn’t say it out loud.

  It’s excruciating to have him sitting there waiting for the flies, so Ruth works at her quickest speed, usually reserved for VIPs like HRH. It’s a speed that’s not sustainable. She can only do a few flies at this velocity before making a mistake.

  “There,” she says, clipping the last bit of thread and applying a drop of wax to seal it. “Done. You can be on your way.”

  “It was a real pleasure watching you work.” Graham stands up, hands Ruth the money for the flies. “I knew you were good, but I didn’t expect you to be that fast.” He puts a hand on the doorknob of the shed, opens the door and then turns back to Ruth. “If you would ever like to see your old house, you would be most welcome.”

  He has good manners. Ruth will grant him that.

  “Perhaps,” she says, more gruffly than she means. She has already decided against it.

  But she does go to see the house. She can’t help herself. She’s curious about what might have changed, what will have remained the same.

  The hens are gone.

  “I don’t eat many eggs,” says Graham. “I’ve never been partial to them.”

  Surprisingly, he has kept up her mother’s flower garden, and her habit of cutting bouquets to bring inside the house. When Ruth visits, there is a very nice arrangement of rhododendrons on the kitchen table.

  The box room is smaller than she remembers and looks even tinier because it is empty.

  “I don’t really have much,” says Graham, who has followed her up the stairs.

  “It’s a house for a family,” says Ruth.

  “Well, I still have some hope there.” Graham casually puts his arms up inside the door jamb, essentially blocking her exit. She contemplates running at him like a bull, but stands stock still instead, waiting for him to lower his arms, which he does, after an awkward moment. She doesn’t like the feeling of being trapped in her old bedroom, so Ruth bolts downstairs and heads outside. Socks is sniffing around the empty chicken coop, looking for traces of the former inhabitants.

  “Will you come to the house again?” asks Graham.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “May I come and visit you then?” His face is red and he looks embarrassed. Ruth softens. She has been a little too hard on him.

  “Come in an evening,” she says. “I stop work at sundown.”

  But it is Evelyn who shows up on an evening. A Friday evening, when Ruth is sitting in the garden, enjoying the sound of the distant sea and the fragrance of the flowers that twine beneath her kitchen window. It is the first warm day in ages, the first time she has been able to sit out.

  “Hello,” Evelyn says, suddenly appearing at the top of the lane and startling Ruth.

  “Hello.”

  “So, this is your lair.” Evelyn unlatches the gate and comes across the garden. She is wearing a dress without an apron and has her hair up.

  “It’s beautiful,” says Evelyn, staring out at the sea, which is laid like a blue tablecloth across the horizon.

  “I look at it all day,” says Ruth, “so it’s hard to think about it being anything. But I would miss it if it wasn’t there.” She is thrown by Evelyn’s presence in her garden. “You don’t have the baby with you?”

  “My mother is looking after her. I’m on my way to the dance.”

  “But the dance is the other direction.”

  The hall where the ceilidhs are held is at the edge of the village, not this way up the coast road.

  “I’ve come to petition you,” says Evelyn. “We’re down men because of the war, and since you have the kit and look the part, I’ve come to ask if you’d help us out.”

  “I don’t dance,” says Ruth.

  “Don’t, as in you’ve never learned, or don’t, as in you’re just not interested?”

  The whisper of the surf sounds like a voice, murmuring just beyond the road. It brings back, unbidden, the lines from a poem that Ruth once had to memorize in school. Begin, and cease, and then again begin, / With tremulous cadence slow, and bring / The eternal note of sadness in.

  “I never learned. It wasn’t something my parents ever did, or encouraged us to do. They moved here, but essentially, they remained British. Dancing wasn’t for them.”

  “Would you be willing?” Evelyn reaches down, extending her hand to Ruth. “To give it a go?”

  It’s the chivalrous gesture more than the idea of dancing that moves Ruth.

  “Yes,” she says, taking Evelyn’s outstretched hand. “I’d be willing.”

  Highlander

  THE VILLAGE HALL IS PACKED, OVERFULL, with people spilling across the steps and down onto the lawn around the building. Ruth, used to evenings with the dim, smoky light from her paraffin lamps, is blinded by the brightness of the interior and has to put her hand over her eyes when they enter the building.

  Evelyn misreads the gesture, thinks instead that Ruth is overwhelmed by the sheer number of people inside the hall.

  “Don’t worry,” she says, taking Ruth by the arm and leading her away from the dancers in the middle of the floor. “We’ll just stand over here for a bit so you can get used to it.”

  They lean against the wall, just inside the door. At the opposite end of the hall, the band energetically launches into a jig, then a reel. Evelyn is tapping her hand against her knee, her foot against the floor.

  “Go and dance,” says Ruth, nudging her. “I’ll watch you. Learn a thing or two that way.”

  It’s all about patterns, Ruth can see that after a while. There’s the pattern of the music, swinging out and in, repeating, and there’s the pattern of the dance that mimics the tune somewhat but also creates its own design on the wooden floor. The music moves in a circle. The dancers move in a circle. She watches Evelyn twirl with her partner, an old man Ruth recognizes from the fishmonger’s.

  After a couple of dances, Evelyn comes back, her face flushed.

  “What do you think?” she asks. “Ready to give it a try?”

  “I wouldn’t want to let you down,” says Ruth. “You’re very good. I’d be beginner clumsy, get in your way. Tread on your toes.”

  Evelyn takes Ruth’s hand, for the second time that evening, a fact that Ruth registers very clearly.

  “Come on,” she says, tugging Ruth towards the door. “I’ve got an idea.”

  They walk outside, around to the back of the hall, where they can hear the music clearly through the walls. The moon makes the grass look like a dark lake, like the waters of Loch Brora when Ruth was there once with her father at night. He was looking for a rod and reel a client had accidentally left on the shore. She remembers the blackness of the water, its shiny surface, how, at one point, her father got on his hands and knees to feel around for the fishing rod. He eventually found it by tripping over it.

  Evelyn hooks her elbow in Ruth’s, spins her slowly around on the lawn.

  “This is a spin,” she says. “We can spin right, or left.”

  They hook opposite elbows and spin the other way.

  The moon goes behind a cloud and there’s just the glow from the windows of the hall to see by.

  Evelyn gives instruction and they spin and dance down an imaginary line, spin again. Ruth remembers the patterns from inside the hall, plays them over in her mind as she searches out Evelyn’s hand, the crook of her elbow.

  “You’re a natural,” says Evelyn.

  “I’m just a quick learner,” says Ruth.

  The music changes and they start again, this time not talking, no instruction needed.

  Ruth goes to the dances every week after that. If there’s not a ceilidh in Brora, then she drives over to neighbouring villages and takes part there. Sometimes, Evelyn comes with her, but often, she has to remain at home because of Ava or the farm, or because she has given her mother a much needed night off
instead.

  Ruth is fine on her own. She is good, in fact, at being alone, and her confidence with dancing grows each time she steps out onto the floor, but she always prefers the Friday or Saturday nights when Evelyn can slip the lead of family and farm life and accompany her.

  It is best when they are dancing, no talking, the music a current that moves them this way and that. The mass of people in the hall, spinning and stepping, turning together, is not unlike the way salmon move as one in the rivers, and Ruth likes to think about this as she is skipping over the floor, carried along by the beat of a tune.

  All week now she waits for the night of dancing, sitting in her tin shed, fastening feathers and wool to steel hooks, watching the rain bead on the window and humming the tune to a waltz.

  Graham comes to visit her. He likes to tell her stories about his clients, and the fish that have been caught on the flies that Ruth has made. He sits on the chair in the corner of her shed, drinking tea from his flask, while hers goes cold in front of her on the work table, because she can’t make herself stop tying to drink it.

  “You’ll never guess what happened this week,” Graham says.

  Ruth waits for him to continue, winding on a layer of silver thread.

  “Are you guessing?”

  “Do you really want me to?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were eaten by a salmon.”

  “Close.”

  Ruth turns around in her chair. “How can that be close?” she says. “You’re sitting in my shed, not a mark on you.”

  Graham reaches into the pocket of his jacket, pulls out his fly wallet. He opens it and holds it up for Ruth to see, pointing to a fly in the upper right corner of the wallet.

  “The Duke caught a twelve pounder at Stoney Pools with one of your Highlanders. This one. And when we hauled the fish out and I’d given it last rites, we found another of your Highlanders hanging from its mouth. An older one. This one.” He points to a fly directly below the first one. “Someone fishing in the same conditions, with the same fly, but maybe years previous.”

  “Months perhaps,” says Ruth. “It was only a twelve pounder.”