Everybody blamed the bay mare except for Jonas, who wanted her, and Famous, who wanted him to have her. Jonas was too young for such a wild animal, Claire said. Panos said the horse was bad luck, and pointed out some ill omen whorls under her neck, saying they were a sure sign of it if Henry’s death wasn’t. He said he would have nothing to do with her and made it plain he hoped she would starve. Clem allowed that it was just a bad accident, but agreed that the mare would have a stigma on her as everybody had liked Henry. Word traveled fast how he’d died.
It was the biggest funeral anybody in town had ever seen, full of weepy women in black mantillas and bleary-eyed nighthawks from outfits nobody had heard of. It made Jonas think of his mama’s service. The sole mourners there had been himself, his Grandma, and the minister preaching the evils of whiskey over her shoddy coffin. Famous hadn’t showed. Not even the mailman or the fella she had chased into the street (“’Proves what I told you,” his Grandma had whispered to him during the hymn, squeezing his fingers numb.).
Carrie Shallbetter made eyes at Jonas across Henry’s grave while her daddy read from the Book, but all Jonas could think about was getting home to see the bay mare. She hadn’t eaten any of the feeds they’d tried to give her. After two days of nothing but water she was wasting away.
When they had left for the funeral that morning, the mare had been tied to the snubbing post. While he stood waiting for Famous and Claire to come out, Jonas had heard a scraping sound, and turned to see her stroking the post with her tongue, licking at the dark spot of dried blood where Henry’s appaloosa had knocked its brains out.
After the service, Jonas took the bay mare into the stall in the bronc stable and tried licks, thinking maybe it was salt she was after for some reason, but it was no use.
“Eat something,” he moaned. “You gotta eat something, girl. You’re the only friend I got here.”
He meant it just then. He felt betrayed by Clem and Panos for wishing his horse dead and he sorely missed Henry. A lot of times when they’d walked the horses around the corral to get them used to the bit, Henry had promised he would teach him to break outlaws one day. That would never happen now.
Jonas felt bad for not crying at Henry’s funeral. He’d been too wound up about the mare. He hadn’t cried at his mother’s funeral either. Though his Grandma had been fit to be tied, Jonas had buried his face in her shoulder and only pretended to weep. When they threw the dirt over her, he’d been thinking of the minister’s words against whiskey and the man she’d chased into the street and the things Davey Murdock had said about her. In that moment, Jonas had almost hated her.
He kicked one of the pails of water and sent it crashing against the wall.
“Stupid goddamned horse!” he hissed.
Where the pail landed in the corner, a lean rat had been hiding under a pile of straw, hungrily ogling every grain of uneaten oat. Since the pail cut off its escape route along the wall, the rat dared the middle of the floor, taking a direct path to some hole it’d had the foresight to gnaw in the back of the stall.
The darting rodent scuttled across Jonas’ boot and under the stall gate. Jonas was afraid it would startle the mare into hurting herself, but when she sighted the sharp nosed rat, her left fore hoof came up and stomped it squarely in the middle of the back. It convulsed and squealed. The mare kept her hoof planted firmly as a cat’s paw and the rat squirmed pitifully.
Jonas had never seen anything like it. The mare pinned the rat until its flopping and squeaking gradually waned. In about a minute it was dripping pellets, dead. Then she lifted her hoof and anxiously moved about the confines of the stall, alternately bumping her rump on the wall and banging the gate with her head.
Jonas thought she was trying to dip down and nose the dead rat out, or kick it away. Panos had told him horses didn’t usually care to keep company with dead things.
“Here,” he coaxed, grabbing the pitchfork and getting on his knees. “I’ll get it.”
The mare laid her ears back and snorted. She whinnied and worked herself into a frenzy as Jonas gingerly tried to get hold of the rat. A few times her hooves struck aside the prongs, but he managed to drag it out.
He laid the pitchfork against the wall by the door and picked the rat up by its tail. He was about to toss it across the yard for one of the stray dogs when the mare began to batter her head so violently against the gate that it rattled on its hinges.
“What is it, girl? What do you want?”
The mare only shrieked and bucked all the more, straining against her confinement.
Panos and Clem were right. She was too crazy to be ridden. She’d never be his.
Angry tears leaked out of the corners of Jonas’ eyes.
“You stupid jughead! You know what’s gonna happen to you now? You know what they’ll do?”
The horse’s multicolored eyes bulged. She rammed the gate again, and her stripy mane whipped about like long grass swept up in a tornado of fire.
“They’ll butcher you up for glue and bar soap!”
The mare banged against the stall door again. A thin cut opened in the middle of the white blaze, red as a new day rising.
Jonas felt something warm on his leg. The rat had bled out onto his jeans while he held it.
“Goddammit!” he cussed, looking at the dark stain.
The horse looked about to explode, her neck stretched over the gate, straining. Blood was dripping down her nose now.
“Here!” Jonas screamed. “Here, you stupid bitch!”
He whipped the rat straight at the horse’s face. Instead of bouncing off her broad forehead, the mare threw back her neck and caught it in her teeth like a dog snatching up a cast off soup bone.
Immediately she stopped thrashing and her mouth began to work, noisily grinding the rat to meal between her big teeth. Blood spilled over her smacking lips.
Jonas watched fascinated. She wolfed the whole thing down in a matter of seconds, tail and all.
Famous and Clem came rushing into the stable. They had been across the yard cutting out a string of ponies they were taking to the Bisbee auction in a couple days.
When Famous saw Jonas’ leg and the blood on the bay’s muzzle, he told Clem to get his gun.
“No!” Jonas said, his brain working fast. “No, there was a rat! It scared her, is all! She banged her head on the stall and cut herself up.”
“What happened to you?” he demanded, coming over.
“Nothing,” he stammered. “She didn’t bite me. It’s rat blood.”
Famous crouched down and checked his leg. Satisfied there was no tear in his pant leg or a wound beneath, he ruffled Jonas’ hair and looked back at the horse.
“Jonas,” he started, “this horse....”
“I got her to eat.”
Famous looked at him sideways.
“Really. I did. She just needed to calm down. She was doin’ fine till the rat showed up.” Then, taking a breath, he started toward the stall. “Look.”
Famous drew him back by the wrist.
Jonas pulled away.
“No, look!”
He went to the stall gate, staring into the wild blue eye of the mare.
If you’re gonna be mine, it’s got to be now, he thought. If you just wanna be an ornery bitch, I can’t help you.
There was another pail of water nearby. He dipped a rag in and raised his hand.
Don’t you bite me!
He slowly, gingerly touched the cut on her forehead with the rag, dabbing the blood.
She submitted to the attention, and even went so far as to make a pleased sound deep in her throat and nuzzle his hand.
“Well goddamn,” Clem said, shaking his head.
Famous smiled and looked at Clem as if to say he had told him so.
“Alright,” said Famous after a bit. “Claire’s just about got supper on. You come into the house and get washed up. Clem’ll finish up with that.”
“I wanna do it,” Jonas snapped over his shoulde
r. Then, easier, “Please...daddy?”
It had the effect he wanted. He could practically feel the man glowing.
“Alright...son. Don’t take too long. Come in when you’re finished.”
“I’ll bring you something for that cut,” Clem said.
The two men turned to leave.
Famous stopped.
“How’d you manage to do it?”
Jonas shrugged.
“She just needed time.”
“I guess,” said Famous, nodding to himself as he left. “Sometimes the horse picks the rider.”
Every night afterwards, Jonas dreamed of the bay mare.
He dreamt she was one of three who pulled the rich chariot of an old time king. The king dropped tangles of wailing babies, the children of his enemies, into a bloodstained manger. Their mothers screamed as the ravenous horses dipped their long faces like pigs at a trough.
He saw a man all in lion skins pull the king down and throw him to his own horses. He awoke screaming, feeling the horses gnawing his own guts.
Another night he dreamt he saw the animals galloping free across wide, green hills. He saw, or he was, a soldier in bright bronze and leather, picking out the bay mare as the best of the bunch, roping her for his own. She pulled his chariot then. He dragged the bloody body of a hated enemy (in Jonas’ dream, it was Davey Murdock) around and around a corpse-strewn battlefield before a huge, walled city.
Jonas lived lives behind his eyelids. He saw ages of war in faraway places. Through it all, the bay was there. He was always her rider, whether a helmeted Spaniard spitting savages two at a time on his lance or a whooping, painted Indian shaking dripping scalps at the moon.
He felt overwhelming affection for her. Through squalls of bloodshed, when men and animals would buck or cut and run, he knew she would be there beneath him; no sword or bullet or scent of slaughter made her flinch. She was his, and he was hers.
In the hours between dreams, Jonas became a confident rider, to the delight of Famous and Claire and even Clem, but not to Panos, who maintained his mistrust of the mare.
Jonas took the feed she was allotted and buried it back of the trash heap at night. At first he used what money he had left from his Grandma to buy meat from the butcher’s in town, which he fed to the mare down by the river where no one could see. The money didn’t last long.
He fed her such stray cats and dogs as he could bait and catch, but eventually no more would come near their place.
He soon had himself a dilemma.
Jonas was thinking hard about what to do when he led her into the stable and found Famous waiting for him.
“You’ve been scarce,” Famous said.
“Just out riding.”
“I mean ever since you got that horse. You’re a stranger.”
He shrugged, unsaddling her. He’d always been a stranger, hadn’t he?
“Want some help?”
“I got it.”
“Ought to think about putting her in with Lily Belle,” he observed. The mare had been off by herself in the bronc stable all this time.
Jonas shrugged.
“I guess.”
“Sorry I haven’t been around to help you out with her. ‘Been so damn busy getting ready for Bisbee. I meant to make an appointment with the farrier, maybe get her teeth rasped. They look a little sharp. But you know, since Henry...hell, none of us are the buster he was.”
“Yeah.”
“I know you liked him a lot.”
“Yeah.”
Famous walked around the stable, rubbing his sides.
“What’d you name her?”
Jonas hadn’t. He felt like he didn’t have the right to name her any more than he had the right to name the Queen of England if she wandered up. He felt she had a name, she just hadn’t told it to him yet.
“Blondie,” he said lamely.
“How come?”
“She looks it in the sun, sometimes.”
Famous nodded.
“Panos still says she’s bad luck.” He looked at the mare.
Jonas shrugged.
“I wanted to take you to Bisbee this year,” Famous began, “but well, with Henry bein’ gone...I got to go instead. I don’t wanna leave Claire with just old Panos for company...”
“I don’t mind stayin’,’’ Jonas said.
“No?”
“Nope.”
It was true. He didn’t know how he’d manage to feed the mare on the trail with Famous and Clem around all the time anyway. This way he could keep on like he was for a while longer, till he figured something else out.
“You and Claire’ll have a good old time,” Famous said. “She’s lookin’ forward to it. She told me last night she’s planning to fix a pie for you every week till we get back. Act surprised, though. It’s supposed to be a secret.”
“I’d like peach pie,” said Jonas.
“I’ll let her know.” He patted Jonas’ shoulder and went to the doorway. “Why don’t you fix up the stall next to Lily Belle’s for Blondie? Get her used to it.”
“I will,” Jonas said. “Hey, daddy?”
“Yeah?”
“Where’d you and Claire meet?”
Famous leaned in the doorway.
“She was a schoolteacher in Tucson.”
“She was always a schoolteacher?”
“Yeah. I told you that.”
“I forgot.”
Famous and Clem left for Bisbee before dawn the next morning. That afternoon Panos hitched up the buggy and Claire let him drive her into town.
Along the way she chatted him up about school. He half listened, gave half answers.
They went into the mercantile. Carrie Shallbetter came out with the reverend and smiled at him.
When Claire got all she wanted to and gave him the sack to carry, she pointed out a bag of hard rock candy on top.
“That’s for the reverend’s daughter. You take it with you on Sunday and ask her if she wants some after church. Be sure and ask her daddy’s permission. Nothing’ll ingratiate you more with a young lady and her family than hard rock candy and manners sweet to match,” she said.
As he put the groceries into the buggy, she said, “Now I’ve got one more thing to pick up and then we’ll head home. You wait here till I call for you.”
He watched her go off down the boardwalk. He picked up the bag of candy. Two cans of peaches were tucked underneath. He felt like throwing the candy into the street, but he put it in his coat pocket.
“Jonas?”
Claire poked her bonnetted head out of Fitzsimmons’s shop and waved him over.
Jonas went inside and found Fitzsimmons and her both smiling ear to ear.
There was a handsome, brand new black saddle on the counter.
“A new horse ought to have a new saddle,” Claire said.
Jonas stood in the doorway. The saddle was stamped with flying eagles and curlicue designs, and the polished leather gleamed like oil. It was a saddle worthy of the bay mare.
“Well go on, Jonas,” said Mr. Fitzsimmons, chuckling. “You don’t expect your ma to carry it herself do you? Not after she was good enough to foot the bill.”
Jonas looked at Fitzsimmons, then at Claire. He could feel his face heat up.
“She ain’t my ma,” he said, and stomped out.
Panos found Jonas sitting in the stable next to the mare’s stall, cracking candy between his back teeth.
“I oughta yank your britches down and beat your little ass blue,” he growled.
Jonas sucked the red from the candy.
“What the hell’s gotten into you?” the old Greek said. “Miss Lady’s laying on her bed crying her sweet eyes out. You could’ve at least drove her home.”
“Felt like walking,” Jonas said.
Panos spat and turned his bushy browed glare on the mare, standing quietly in her stall.
“Your daddy never should’ve given you this goddamned nag.”
“Don’t call her that,”
Jonas said, looking Panos in the eye for the first time.
“We should’ve put her down that day Henry died,” the old man muttered, and stalked out.
Jonas finished the candy and bridled the mare. She needed to be fed, and with Claire busy bawling there’d be no supper, no scraps of beef to sneak.
He climbed onto her back, not bothering with a saddle, and gave her a nudge with his heels. She seemed to respond to the angry fire in his chest, and beat the earth down hard beneath her hooves. They went like an arrow into the desert. Her frothy, swelling flanks wet the insides of his legs. Her mane whipped against his cheeks as he bent low against her.
When they were far from the ranch he dropped the reins, tore open his shirt, and let the wind snatch it away so that the flying grit in the air attacked his bare skin.
He threw out his fists and squeezed her between his skinny knees. He yelled loud and shrill, a boy’s wild scream, his lungs in savage contention with the rushing wind. He wanted to turn around and ride through Delirium Tremens like the bullet of an angry angel, burning up everything he passed. He wanted to run down Fitzsimmons in the street as mama had been run down. He wanted to trample Claire under the bay’s hooves as she lay in Famous’ bed, smash Panos into a greasy paste. He’d ride for Bisbee then, overtake Famous and Clem and the mailman, and that drunkard mama had chased out of Skinner & Dunn’s, hell, even pound the grave mounds flat over mama and Grandma, smash and burn the whole bunch like a low flying meteor plowing up a sizzling furrow in the earth, leaving everything in its wake black and smoking. Let the bay mare gobble them all down like a hungry goddess come to eat the world. He couldn’t love the living, and the dead wouldn’t let him go. There was only the bay mare.
Jonas wanted to ride that horse until their own flesh and blood and guts melted away, until they were just a handful of black bone and ash. The glowing embers that remained would intermingle and be carried by the momentum of their going, up like on a gust of high hot desert wind, up into the empty night sky to there flash out like roaring, dying stars in the cold, lonesome black.
The horse cut left and let out a scream to match his own. Jonas clung to her as she galloped after a fretful, darting white form that flew out from under a creosote bush, yowling its distress.
It was a tawny, big eared coyote out hunting mice. It bolted at the sight of them, but she easily overmatched its speed. Her nose shot down like a hawk’s beak and caught up the howling coyote by the nape, lifting it from all four paws and snapping its neck with one shake of its head.
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