From her bedroom window on a clear morning like this she could see beyond the vine hills. She could see Double Mountain. Nothing was simple. Nothing would be simple again. She had told Danny, but not everything. The money he’d paid her for the summer’s work would buy a train ticket to the city and a hotel. When it was time she’d go to a hospital. Money, train ticket, hotel, hospital. What was with these lists in her head? Who she’d tell, in what order; who would still like her, who hate her, who wouldn’t care. Lists replaced every thought. Lists replaced hunger. At the end of lists, she’d be empty and have a baby, but then what? The horses in the barn were freer than she was. She’d told Gee and Harry and Emma, but not who. Emma would tell Charles and she didn’t trust the storyteller.
With her eyes closed, waiting for sleep, Abi listened to footsteps squeaking on the snowy lane and imagined men wading through drifts on their way to and from the centre of the village.
She lay between her sheets under the red blanket and surfed sleep, air huffing through the open window, footsteps loud then fading, guessing who, what direction, what purpose. Wild ponies trotted past, bone-cold snow in their faces, and she grew less sensible, and the ponies were a piece of childhood, inaccessible now, and she was a mare riding black wind, lungs aching, hearing only the drumming hooves and . . . She’d have a baby of her own. She’d have the baby in early May. Five months to go. Her mother would make a decision. Things would happen. Her father would banish her. Tall grass stung her legs as she flew through pitch-black meadows, nothing decided, for company the sleeping house, amplified and slowed down, the buzz of a plane passing over, the tidal moan of trucks on the highway. And then came Uncle Danny’s footsteps, unmistakably slow, with a kind of swagger almost audible in the silence before each crunch.
She used to wonder when something would happen. Now it was happening. It was happening too fast. On her dresser were the castle and the dragon. Same dragon and castle as when she was tiny and ran up those microscopic white steps and along the battlement and into one of the doors to escape the dragon. Through the arched stone corridor to a miniature room carpeted and hung with rich fabrics, cushions everywhere, as if her home world did not exist, and all she had to think about was who to invite, be sure they did not bring sickness with them. Uncle Danny, of course. Her mother, no. Her father. But now the red dragon was dusty next to the useless castle, and no one would help her when the baby came. Her mother, no. Gee, no. Her sisters, no. Emma, perhaps. She got out of bed and went to the window. She ran her finger flat along the sill and gathered cool droplets. Emma could sleep in the chamber next to hers. Her finger was black from dirt from the wilds beyond the village. She traced the curve of her belly: this was her lowest rib, this her skin, elastic enough to stretch and hold a being. Marked a wet cross over her navel. What was it like in there? There was heartburn, ache, fear. There was a carpeted throne room hung with tapestries. There was her dream of her friends falling off the cliff. There was the urge to run downstairs to her bike and the fresh snow, to leave behind the castle and dragon. What was it really like in the throne room? Sanctum. Hidey-hole. What was there? A trove tree. A cupboard. Grail-box. Inside there was a child. (Carry it to a real place, save its life.) Don’t worry. (Get out.) Not so worried. (Get out!) No, worried. (For fuck’s sake.)
Downstairs the house bristled, with all manner of furlings and unfurlings to do with rat catching, and Lucy and Abi sat together in the kitchen, their feet in a tub of steaming water, while men on ladders banged the house walls, and Tom and Peter hunted with dogs in the cellar.
“What will you do?” said Lucy.
“What?”
“Why not talk to Gee?” Her mother meant: Make it up, you need a girlfriend, not horses; you need to talk about James, not skip school and hole up. It’s what they’d been talking about. It was a stupid idea. Her mother’s belly was so big. She hated her questions. She didn’t want to talk. She hated Gee. She would not answer.
Barking under the kitchen floor.
Their pink soft feet in the tub.
Ice inside the window glass.
Her mother was slow, so slow. She did everything slowly, child after child. Abi did not want her mother’s astonished look. Her mother was mild, so mild and sympathetic. The whole house was freezing, waiting, and the rats were squealing, and babies were revolving in both their bellies. Her mother’s baby would be a sister to hers — an aunt-sister.
“This refusal to talk is foolish, don’t you think?” Lucy tried again. “What happened is terrible, but you are a good person. Gee is a good person. You had a fight, but you both are good.” Cold wind blew against the house and it creaked. They both looked toward the window. They heard the men’s voices calling and Tom shouting back and the pounding on the walls intensified.
Danny had watched his boat sail away without him. She would run screaming out of the house with the rats, and quit the village — quit her mom, her dad, Harry, Gee, her sisters, all of them — even Danny, Mother Apocat, Mother Kata.
They would pull her back or try to; they’d break their necks to get her back.
Her mother’s face was red from the hot oven.
A rat ran across the kitchen floor, another, a third.
7.
Lucy was big with her next girl, walking around the house with a half-full watering can, sprinkling the perimeter, protecting the house. The physical house and what was inside. The vase of grasses, the polished table, the old cat, the thready rug, blue wall plate, box of firewood, fire burning in the kitchen stove. Murky rooms were hard to fathom. East light in the window glass. She crossed herself. Her breath wouldn’t melt the ice flowers on the glass. Indistinct shapes, blurred presences. Snow was falling cold on her head. She remembered when the house had first held Tom, when the first toddler had raced through doorways, room to room, to lodge crying between the man’s legs, and him looking up, stupefied. The full ditch was frozen. And then she was nine years old, in another kitchen, her frostbitten feet in a basin of snow, learning where children came from, tears squeezing out of her eyes, her mother a ruddy bluster of soft cotton and electric fingers. Here, Lucy, it will hurt but it will stop hurting. It will not hurt more than this.
What was reaching out of this storm?
She waited in the snow like a bee outside her hive, worried about Abi. This daughter had grown quickly and bloomed early; soon she would vanish into the violent world and come back a stranger. No wicked boy, no stranger, no wicked man, no stranger. She continued her journey around the house, praying to winter, looking through the windows into the future just as her mother had circled her childhood house, the way her great grandmother had prayed around her own house ninety years ago, the way all the mothers had walked around a house in the darkest time, sprinkling water before it froze so living was safe. No wicked boy, no stranger, no wicked man, no stranger.
The windows spilled light onto snowfields.
The mother and her girls, the lioness and her cubs, the pride and the den. And she came around to the kitchen again, almost a lioness, shielding who she loved from the dilapidated shadows. Listen. Chaos locked in the ditch. Blood and thunder borrowed from the storm. And inside her was the last child stolen from such fluency.
She paused. What had her children not understood? There was her youngest daughter crawling across the tiles toward the sleeping cat, her small hands rising and falling. There’s Abi, her next-to-eldest, staring out of the living room window, eyes big, long dark hair crazy, loose. Such pure white skin! No child was ever so wild and silent.
What must she tell them? She shook the last droplets from the brass rose, touched the spout to her lips, felt it stick. Her fingers frozen numb. May no one fall out of this house.
8.
On the wall in the barn was a blurred photograph of a boat with a black funnel and a mast in front and one behind. A little smoke came from the funnel. Danny had worked on the coastal freighter as a deck hand, a sailor.
In a stall was a horse dying.
&n
bsp; The other horses as quiet as the faraway sea.
The orchard woman had taken the photograph; she’d aimed her camera from the gravel beach where she’d been walking her dog. With a queasy stomach he rose from the bench where he polished things to have a closer look at his life as it had been, as seen by the first woman he’d loved. She had become a set of stories, lost and then remembered. He felt seasick, looking at the boat. He had cancer. He would have the thing cut out. He knew where to find the dog on the stone beach — a brown blur bottom left of the photograph. When had he stopped seeing that dog? He studied the beach, mountains, boat. And it yielded. It was not only a sepia seascape in a dusty frame across from the stalls, hanging amid tackle, no longer the stain of something ancient and irrevocable.
He tapped the photograph with his fingernail. Coastal freighter steaming right to left. Perhaps he’d been at the helm; perhaps it had been his watch the day it was taken. That period had resurfaced in conversations with Abi. Nothing for years, and then the girl asking questions about his affair with the married woman. Where was that woman now? Why hadn’t they run away together? Had her marriage disintegrated? Had she left the pilot? Abi’s questions were a fresh link to the woman holding the camera. She had been thirty-three and he’d been nineteen. Now his eyes were seeing what hers had seen then. Was that possible, to look though the eyes of a girl at what he had once been to a woman? Was the purpose of love to cancel time? What was left of that young man?
Love. Of course. He crossed to the big woodstove and opened the door and threw in a log. His bones felt tired. He slumped into the oak chair by the stove. Tortoise must feel like this. He looked at her where she lay, unable to rise, her ribs sticking out, her breath rattling, and felt tears coming. It took great effort to cross to her side and kneel. His fingers were frozen on her thick hide. He had always loved Tortoise, such a slow mare, and her eyes had looked at him, loved him slowly, for how many years? The account book of captures and births and deaths open to a day in the summer. Thirty years. Dust on the pages. The horse’s life ending as the day outside was ending, freezing wind sweeping clouds away, whistling through gaps in the walls.
Day ended but he didn’t want to leave her side until it was over, until she was dead. There was the sense of propriety, duty, faith, everything still to do. Food heavy in his belly, nausea. A pain in the ass. Likely he’d need the backhoe tomorrow. The living horses were rattled. The girl just left was still bright on that old kitchen chair in front of the feed chute, her ankles bare, her shoes immaterial things, beige, like dirty feet, her head cocked to one side looking at him tending the dying horse. The girl was not finished, not forgotten. Nor night. Nor fragrance. The cattle are lowing, no crib for his bed. Pity for Tortoise made him sob. He’d have to leave the horses. Of this life he would quit, he regretted the horses. Loth to leave the horses. Songs heard long ago. Rustle of hay. That kitchen chair and the oak chair brought down from the house winter before last.
Found my heart in the Bay of Biscay.
Chairs and framed photograph of the coastal steamer. He needed these items of his life, passed to him from experience or from his parents, and to fit them into the next cold day. It was none too easy, dying: dizziness, vomiting, weakness. For a man with no children death was a kind of blind from which to praise life, despite blood in the stool, red threads in Tortoise’s snot. He felt so sorry for himself. Adjust your course every day, read tides, currents, season, angle of light, keep an eye on the old creaking chair by the stove, on the girl come loose from her family (she would never belong here), her squinting worried grey eyes leaping into his own because fifty-nine was too young to die. It couldn’t be finished, couldn’t be. What a giant bobbling squally thought! Such eyes! Such a winter!
“She won’t be long,” he’d said.
“What will you do?” she’d asked him.
“Borrow your dad’s backhoe. Open the big doors. Tow her out.”
“Can I come and help?”
“Sure, if you like.”
Light cut across her midriff. Short fleece jacket, thin shirt, thin jeans, that prominent belly he’d been trying not to stare at.
“Aren’t you cold?”
“Yes,” with a shiver. “Not really.” A smile. “Kind of. I’m okay. I like being cold.”
It made him feel alive, careful. That she was young. That she didn’t mind the cold. “Your parents know yet?”
She’d shaken her head. “No,” with a smile. “Not exactly.” A shiver. “Maybe. I don’t think I’ll come tomorrow. I don’t want to see her — you know.”
She’d shot out of her chair, out of the barn, and darkness had fallen, was still gathering. Through webby glass he could see his parents’ rundown house (which was never his) up there on the hill. The one kitchen light, yellow, dim, muted as it flared through the hallway, the living room window, through cold shifting air down to his orbs hunting something. What? His thigh was cramping. He laid a hand on Tortoise’s neck and a shudder rippled through his body. He stroked out her old legs. She was a foal again, just for a moment.
Someone.
The useless. The eavesdropper. The tattletale. The betrayer. The failure. The condemned. The guilty. Him. You. It’s you.
Who woke and rubbed his eyes, asked as usual no question. Simply stood from his cot there in the barn. The stove still warm. On the straw Tortoise was awake. Alive, but barely. The other horses’ ears aswivel. All breathing silence. A visitor. A meeting.
“Your name is Harry.”
“Yes.”
“She’s not here.”
“I know.”
“You should be home.”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
“Go home, I’m busy with a horse.”
“I heard you were sick.”
“Who told you that?”
“Kata.” The boy wouldn’t meet his eye, was as restless as he was tired. “How are you doing?”
“Like shit.” He stifled the urge to talk about that moment in the doctor’s office when something inconceivable was known, or disclose the diagnosis, the order of coming events, the prognosis. It was not right. Not with this boy. Not Harry. He waved his arm. “What do you want, then?”
“Did you and Abi . . . ”
“No, we didn’t.”
Danny and Tom picked their way up the frozen path, ice crystals scattering, half moon above. They went single file, not talking. Only their laboured breath signalled their passage up to the house.
“Thanks for the help,” Danny said.
Once inside the house, Tom shouted how cold the place was. “Don’t you keep a fire burning?”
“I don’t live here.”
“You’re living in the barn.”
“That’s right.”
“Why leave the lights on?”
Danny shrugged. He felt the dismantling loneliness of the rooms. He felt thin in his gut and went about the ritual of sticks and paper spills and threw a match in. “Be warm enough soon. Have a seat.”
Words might later be erased. Welcomes erased. The conversation about to launch itself deleted. He hadn’t wanted Tom in the barn, but he’d needed his help to move the horse. He put the kettle on the stove and opened the grate.
“You know, then?” Danny said.
“About Abi?” said Tom.
“Yes.”
Tom rubbed his hands together. “She won’t talk. She’s with you a lot.”
“Oh yes.”
“She talk to you?”
“She chatters a bit when she’s happy.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah. She tells me a bit.”
“You know who it was?”
“No.”
“Looks like you’re packing.”
“Just turfing the old stuff out. Eliminating, getting shut of.”
“Abi’s still useful with the horses, then?”
“That okay with you?”
“It’s okay.”
“She loves the horses.”
Danny poured water over the tea bags in the cups and sat down across from Tom at the table his father had built. He felt his muscles aching. He was exhausted. Towing the horse, digging the shallow hole, burying the horse, the uphill walk from the barn to the house, grape hills rising and falling — these repeated, the buckets of earth repeated, the paths multiplying. His toward uncertain health. After the operation, they wanted to hook him up to a bag and push chemicals into him that would make his hair fall out and his teeth loose in his head. Fuck that. It had taken a year to straighten and shore up the old barn, replace the split boards, double up the old studs, re-shingle the roof, fashion a new door, new windows, install the stove. It still wanted painting but he’d run out of time. He’d worked every day for a season, and returned every night tired and happy to his old room and sleep. His parents’ house had been all right then, and it was close to the work. His cabin on the bench had been neglected, too far from his horses, the barn work. He hadn’t gone camping all summer, hadn’t visited the valley. He’d thought the ponies all caught or gone, but one day in the fall he’d seen a small herd with foals in the distance: life in the valley had gone on unobserved during his frenzy of renovation.
“Lucy wondered — I’m supposed to ask you to come for Christmas Eve,” said Tom.
“I’ll be there.”
“You look like hell. Are you all right?”
“That appaloosa cross was a wonderful horse.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry. What’s going on, Danny?”
“Nothing, Tom. Abi’s a gentle girl. The horses were apprehensive about her, but she’s got the touch. Looking after them does her good.”
“I’m not talking about the damned horses, Danny,” said Tom.
This old fixed-up barn. The dividers horse-bitten. Sheaffer’s stall cracked through to Tortoise’s. Tooth marks of dead horses. Some of the landrace were ghosts before they decided to be captives again. He made hot chocolate on the primus.
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