Horse People Read online

  Bessy Bedlam threw Henry once, deep in the woods, worst fall he ever took. Lying on the thick leaves, the hard damp ground, he’d thought of this chunk of petrified wood on his desk, timber to rock, its thick, plugged veins that once held sap, its sawed-off level base. Bessy Bedlam was not contrite or faithful. Stepping high, she took off through the trees, empty stirrups jingling like a woman’s earbobs. He had to admire that.

  Lanterns and stars, the old men said, for a party. Mary Jane does not believe they would know a party decoration from a hound dog. Lanterns and stars hidden in a wagon, lumps beneath a coverlet, suspicious heaps that the old men examined. Whose party was it? I want to go. It’s fall and so warm outside, the river might evaporate and nobody would need the bridge.

  Henry has two brothers, Joe and Lawrence. One knows locks, the other ice. That is their business, locks and ice. Both brothers are gone to war, and the shop is closed; the stucco building by the river, not far from Henry’s mill, stands empty. You can go and stare through the cloudy windows. Would it not have made more sense to stay here, running the business? Lawrence and Joe wanted to go. Loud, showing off, betraying locks, forgoing ice.

  Their wives visit Mary Jane on Sundays, bringing their sewing. She longs for her sister. Why don’t you write to me, Beth? Why should I keep pouring out all my news, my heart, in letters to you, and you don’t answer?

  In the empty stucco building, ice melts, locks rust. Yet the sewing sisters-in-law chat about a new style of collar. They will edge the collars with crocheted lace. War has fueled a fever of fashion, a need to create daily a different aspect of face, figure, and hair. The sistersin-law are as caught up in it as young girls. Mary Jane, well enough to be out of bed, digs her elbows into the sofa pillows. “You’re looking better today,” her sisters-in-law say. They would write to her, if they were apart, letters about weather and visitors and any little gifts the visitors bring. She loves these women for the mundane letters they will never have to write to her. She does not understand why her own sister, whom she knows to be alive and presumably in possession of paper, does not. Henry wrote Beth, explaining that Mary Jane is sick, asking Beth to visit, but Beth hasn’t answered, hasn’t come. Mary Jane last saw Beth five years ago, when she and Henry journeyed to Beth’s home on a foggy, cobblestoned Richmond street. Beth and her husband were aloof, directing most of their attention to their children. That was before I had my little girl. Would that have made a difference? When after a few days Mary Jane announced their departure, Beth’s face showed relief.

  Mary Jane keeps on writing but holds some things back and finds pleasure in that: the owl riding on the mule, the lanterns and stars hidden in a wagon. I don’t have to give you everything. Surely Beth will feel something missing, will pine for what’s not there, for what she has pushed away. Mary Jane would stop writing entirely if she could. The withholding of bits of news takes all the energy she has, the keeping back and the staving off of what is too terrible to admit. Beth doesn’t care if I die. She won’t miss me, and she won’t mourn. Does my life press down on hers in some bad way?

  She has Henry’s arm around her at night, but still there is the blowing out of the candle and the sense of failure that darkness evokes. The doctor has brought sleeping medicines, malodorous, the colors of dark jewels, but they no longer have an effect. She could swig laudanum by the bottle and still gaze wide-eyed at the ceiling all night, flexing her ankles and pointing her toes, as if she is swinging on the moon. “Swinging on the moon,” her mother used to say, of the time before Mary Jane arrived on this Earth, “that was way back, darling, when you were still swinging on the moon.”

  She has a lock she likes to play with, given her by Henry’s brother Joe, for Joe is Locks and Lawrence is Ice of Fenton’s Locks & Ice. The lock is her toy, small and heavy, with a whole universe of tumblers and ratchets within. She knows the combination by heart; she just enjoys twirling the dial, hearing the mechanisms fall into place. She has, in fact, a whole cabinet full of locks and keys of all metals and shapes.

  She had thought her child would play with them.

  One balmy night before dawn, she rises and gets dressed. She hasn’t worn these boots in a long time, nor this shawl. The garments’ scent and her own smell of skin and hair say, Welcome back; hello, Mary Jane. Henry stirs but doesn’t wake.

  In minutes, with a lantern in her hand, she is out of the house, down the drive, on the road, and at the bridge, where she finds the boy, Burrell Taliaferro, asleep.

  She flies at him with whip-sharp words. His waking is a spasm, a contortion of face and body that strikes Mary Jane as funny, and her ire subsides. He is young, after all, and she recalls with a pang that he lost his eye to a bully’s rock.

  When Bonnie Hazlitt arrives at daybreak, she finds Mrs. Fenton earnestly consulting with the boy. Bonnie has trouble remembering his name—Burrell, rhymes with squirrel. Bonnie is amazed to find Mrs. Fenton out of bed.

  “Has the war ended?” Bonnie asks, for this is the only event she can imagine that would bring Mary Jane Fenton here to the bridge. Bonnie is hoping for fireworks, a celebration, the hundred people of Rapidan converging to kiss and cheer.

  Mary Jane Fenton and Burrell Taliaferro laugh. The war is not over, Bonnie infers, as Mary Jane and the boy double up so violently they might be sick.

  Later that day, Mary Jane is sick, and there is blood. Dr. Stover tears the stethoscope from his ears and says, “Mary Jane. Stay in this bed. No more running off in the night, hear me?”

  It’s Henry he’s talking to, and Henry nods.

  * * *

  She sees the woman put a hand on Henry’s arm, observes this from her obedient bed, through the window that a servant polishes weekly with vinegar and water. There on the road, the woman is conferring with Henry. The woman has short red hair and, Mary Jane guesses, the frank brown eyes and freckled skin that go with that, and she does not know better than to wear brown with that hair and skin. Puts out her hand and lays fingers on Henry’s arm.

  I will die, and he will marry her.

  Fannie Porter. That is who the woman is, a friend of Mary Jane’s sisters-in-law. She came to church with them one time. Lives in Madison with her brother. They teach music, and what good is that with a war on? They will eke and starve, brother and sister, fainting away with their fiddles in their arms, their piano strings snapping, hoping somebody might need them to play at a wedding. They probably practice war marches for something to do, praying their hen might lay an egg. Maybe Fannie Porter is asking Henry for a loan. No, she is consoling him. In the dip of her head, there is the practiced strength of a woman steadying a violin with her chin, a sturdiness and patience that Henry will grow to prize, forgiving those ham colors of her. Doesn’t he see the stubbornness of that chin? Consoling him for what? Mary Jane squints through the window. For having a sick wife?

  Henry’s stance is straight. The woman’s attention means something to him.

  You were a little too sharp for him, Mary Jane’s father said once, at a time when Henry’s budding interest had seemingly waned. Mary Jane recognized her father’s compliment. Sharp women were admired in her family. She was sharp, Beth was not.

  Henry’s younger brother Joe had come calling a time or two. Joe and Henry were the only suitors she ever had.

  A walking stick proceeds along Mary Jane’s window, its black feet attaching to the glass, the jaunty pencil of its body impossibly thin, carried high. You never see but one at a time, strange creatures, you never see them arrive and then where do they go? She’ll forget about it for just a moment, and then it will be gone…

  Too sharp for him. A little too…

  Fannie Porter lifts her hand away. A buggy nears the group on the road, and there is a general dispersal. Henry might be conscious of warmth on his arm, through his sleeve. Fannie climbs into the buggy with clumsy efforts that emphasize her backside, beneath its ugly brown dress. Mary Jane checks the mantel clock: two minutes past noon. There is an untouched pot of cold
tea by her bed, and all the medicine jars, smelling as bad as the fluids of her own body. She’d do better to drink whiskey. Most of those potions are just alcohol anyway. Her head swims; the nausea is closing in the way it does, fast, with light pulsing at the sides of her face, a fanning heat. The walking stick, she has got to remember to check…

  She won’t have you. I won’t allow it. Red and brown—you’d get so tired of the colors of her, and of the children she would bear. Fannie Porter, bumpkin, would sing at her own wedding, and Henry might be embarrassed but he would be proud too, and afterward, that evening, there would be silence, bare arms, and firelight, here in this very room or out in the field, on the grass, with Fannie’s brother sending a few last notes of fiddle and flute their way as he took his leave. Sweet notes that ride the air: Listen, he is playing for us, the old song I told him you love. Fannie will whisper to her new husband, “Do you remember one day on the road, right out here? You were not free, but somehow I knew then that I, that you…”

  I will get well, Mary Jane decides. I will live.

  Lady fair, Henry used to say, catching her hair in his mouth.

  “It is a waste,” she tells Henry, “to let the shop go. Who knows how long the war will be? People need locks and ice. It should have stayed open, even with them gone.”

  “Now, now. Joe and Lawrence believe they can better serve the country…”

  “This is why we will lose. You know that, Henry. Melted ice and rusted locks—men running off to kill each other and ignore the very business that would give them a future.”

  Henry said, “When the war’s over, they’ll pick up where they left off. My brothers’ll be rich men. Me, I’ll still be just a poor miller, but I reckon we’ll do all right.”

  Mary Jane won’t let him off so easy. “But now, you’re saying, Lawrence and Joe need to fight.” She’s going too far; the crimp in Henry’s eyelids tells her so. She can’t help it. Poor-miller talk annoys her. And Fannie’s hand on his arm, she can’t forgive that. Poor-miller talk is not attractive, she longs to say. Fannie will grow to hate it too. Fannie will go and get the rolling pin, and I don’t blame her, wave it at your head…

  “I can’t manage it all,” Henry says, “not the mill and the other too. We talked about it, Joe and Lawrence and I.”

  The wives, the collar-makers, could run the business, and better than the men. What are locks and ice, compared to making lace? You chop, you store. You forge ahead. You listen to the tumblers falling in a lock, with a sound like faraway applause. You pray the lock will open, click, right in your hand, its scent of oil the breath of surrender.

  Joe, the youngest Fenton brother, will live the longest. Mary Jane expects this. He will outlive all the other members of the family who are now alive, and that includes his son and daughter. He will take a notion to visit San Francisco in 1906, where he will be saved by a stray dog that wanders into the bar where he is drinking beer. The dog tugs on his pant leg till he follows it outside, where moments later the sky crashes and the street rolls in waves beneath his feet. “Everybody in that bar was killed,” he tells a reporter, who puts his story on the wire worldwide, “and that dog, some little mutt that picked me out to save, I got to thank him, but I can’t find him.”

  Home in Virginia and restless, he will close his eyes, circle his finger above a map, and move to the spot he touches: Memphis, Tennessee. Mary Jane does not, cannot, know that Joe will step into the best society and be elected Cotton Carnival King. Even into the 1920s, when Mary Jane and Henry and Lawrence have been dead for decades, Joe will be riding high, literally, on a float in a Cotton Carnival parade, saluting crowds on a hot June night, Joe, the man to call in Memphis if you need something locked up tight and forever. Joe Fenton, he’ll make you a safe nobody can crack. Where’d he come from? Virginia. Well, he’s one of us.

  During the war, he’ll tell you, he thought about locks all the time. He figured out some things. He had to get away from locks to learn them right, he’ll say.

  He’d courted Mary Jane before his brother Henry did. She was a distant cousin, and he called on her twice, even called once on her sister Beth, but Beth spooked him a little, something kinda mean about her. It was Henry that Mary Jane encouraged. Joe sometimes wonders, well, if things might have been different.

  Even in the Twenties, on a motorized float shedding dyed carnations, with cornet music blaring in his ears and a Cotton Carnival princess on either side of him, he misses Mary Jane. She used to play with those locks he gave her, not like a child plays but as if she were solving a puzzle far beyond sport. Oh, Mary Jane. One time I said, You hold that lock like it’s somebody’s heart, and you smiled and said, It’s not that easy. The Cotton Carnival princesses aren’t nothing but tacky little girls, all rouged up, hair whacked off, grimacing, offering gum. “Want some Juicy Fruit, Pops? I’m carsick as hell.” With his cracked old teeth, he doesn’t dare chew it, but he loves the way it smells. Women used to be prettier. His Clara, so modest, always sewing. Mary Jane, oh, it’s not that easy. You were still right young when I was off at war, and you were so sick. I used to hope for news of you in letters from my wife.

  He still has a letter Clara wrote about making a pie out of crackers and cloves to substitute for apples. The float turns a corner a mite too fast for a clumsy chassis on wheels, and a gum-smacking princess knocks against him, squealing. Oh, all those substitutes for coffee during the war, and none of them much good, were they? He and Henry used to laugh about that, once they were home, with all the coffee and good meat they wanted, all the roast chicken and hot rolls and bacon. They came back scarecrows from the war and got barrel-chested once they had enough to eat. Lawrence, well, he didn’t make it home. Joe and Henry looked after his widow, and Joe learned ice as well as locks. He and Henry rebuilt the burned mill, and after Henry died, Joe looked after Henry’s widow too, that red-haired woman he could never quite warm up to. He gave her some locks, and she tossed ’em in a drawer, didn’t appreciate ’em the way Mary Jane did. Back in Rapidan, people still talk about the night the mill burned, how you could see the fire for miles and hear the commotion of flames and shouts. The road stayed hot for days, people said.

  Joe kept meaning to ask Clara to make him a cracker pie, but he’d forgotten about cracker pies till after she died.

  Clara lost a crochet hook in the backyard during the war, and he was so proud the day he found it for her, years later, after a hard spring rain, the silver hook a tiny winking eye in the earth. She wiped the dirt from it and kissed him. “I just happened to look down,” he told her.

  Funny, he’s never raised cotton in his life.

  He is ninety-eight years old.

  He waves, and his arm stays high.

  Early one morning a deer ambles to the river, wades in, and swims toward Bonnie, who holds her breath. The deer progresses at a slight zigzag, making up for the current. Bonnie has heard that deer can swim for miles, crossing the greatest rivers, far broader than this. How must it feel, head high above the water, your four slim legs churning, and what if you were pregnant, a doe swimming for your life, fixed on reaching that opposite shore, running from hunters maybe or a hungry dog, so you can’t stop? The middle of the river, shadowed by clouds, must feel so big.

  The deer emerges downriver, clambering onto the bank and breaking into a run for the trees. Bonnie lets out her breath with a moan. Her baby is safe at home with her mother, who is making potato candy. But Bonnie’s heart is wide open, lost. If the deer had floundered, she’d have gone into the water herself. Died trying to tow it in and save it. Loved it better than anything else in the world, her whole life—

  Henry has engaged a man to make a daguerreotype of himself and Mary Jane. “There are newer methods,” Mary Jane says. “Photographs.”

  “This will do for now,” Henry says. Mary Jane sits on a horsehair sofa that has been dragged onto the verandah. Henry stands behind it. The sofa smells stale, stable-like. She touches the cameo at her throat, yes, it’s s
till there; it was hard to pin the brooch to her dress. Beads of sweat gather on her forehead, and pain slides razor-thin through her middle.

  “Hold,” the man says. Mary Jane doesn’t like his beard, which sticks out spoonlike from his chin. Daguerreotypes unnerve her: the amber light; people’s frozen, spread-out expressions. She could hold her breath forever. Henry’s watch ticks loudly behind her ear. If she turns around, she’ll see the silver fob and chain, marked by their daughter’s teething.

  “There, I’ve got it,” the man says.

  Henry says, “Someday I’ll get equipment of my own and take a picture of my shadow on grass. Long grass.”

  Packing up his camera, the man says, “That would be right pretty.”

  Mary Jane has no photographs of their daughter, but after the child’s death she commissioned a portrait, which hangs in the parlor. The painter was the same one who painted that horse Henry loved, Bessy Bedlam. From Mary Jane’s own drawings and descriptions, and furnished with a lock of the child’s hair, the artist got the little girl’s arms and hands, even her neck, but not her face. The expression is skeptical, adult, lips and teeth hooked in a pruny way as if saying Future. Though Mary Jane made the artist do the face over, the expression did not improve. Henry said, “It’s close at it’ll ever be,” and paid the man. The portrait is slowly erasing Mary Jane’s memory of how her daughter really looked. Just because you can paint a horse, with an ugly jockey in the saddle, does not mean you can paint the sweetest child in the world.