Cloven Hooves

by Megan Lindholm

  “Oh, no!” gasps Mother Maurie. She lets her latch-hook work fall into her lap. I can see the motif, it is a little blond girl sitting on a potty. I feel vaguely ill, it must be the heat.

  “I got that for Mother,” says Tom’s father heavily. “For our twentieth anniversary. It’s a what-do-you-call-it …”

  “Exbury Azalea,” breathes out Tom’s mother, and I am so relieved that I can hear her again that I smile at her. She stares back at me. “It’s never bloomed. This year it had buds. I’ve waited six years for that plant to bloom.”

  “Maybe it needed plant food,” I say inanely. “I understand azaleas like an acid soil. I used to know a lot about plants. I was going to be a botanist, you know, and I had to do a lot of work in the campus greenhouses. I know a lot about plants.”

  They are looking at me as if I have two heads. It cannot get worse, so I keep talking. “I brought you some trilliums. They grow back in the woods.”

  “I know.” Mother Maurie speaks coldly. “I’ve heard that if you pick them, they die. But I’m sure a botanist like you knows that.”

  I look down at the wilted flowers in my hand. They have gone totally limp in my warm fist, lax as a dead bird, their heads dangle over my knuckles, the white petals are already going brown. I resist the urge to hide them behind my back.

  “Too bad, Mother, that when you were young, you didn’t have time to go picking flowers in the woods,” Tom’s father says heavily.

  Mother Maurie says something in reply, but it is gone, my ability to hear her. The words are there, and I catch each one, try to restring the sentence in my own mind, but it is like trying to catch beads as they fall off a string, you get a handful but there is no telling what order they were in. Flowers, sheets, pony, mess, are, you, at least try, I get those bits, but I don’t know if I have just been rebuked or encouraged. I smile witlessly. “You’re probably right,” I say, one of her favorite phrases, one I’ve heard Tom say to her a hundred times. “I’d better go talk to Ellie now,” I say, and turn to go, but Ellie is coming into the room.

  “Someone tracked all over my kitchen floor,” she says, and we all look at my sneakers, spattered still with mud from the chicken yard.

  “Sorry,” I say determinedly. I will be good, I will be good, I will be good. “I’ll clean it up. And I came over to wash the sheets and towels, just like you said,” I add.

  “They’re already in the washer,” she says, “and I already wiped up the mud.”

  “Oh,” I say. Just oh. I look at the wilted trilliums in my hand. I don’t know why I am not angry or crying. I am just so empty, it’s like being in a big black room with no furniture or walls, and trying to feel my way in the dark. Nothing touches me. “Well. I think I’ll go check on the pony, then. You know”—I turn to Tom’s father and smile disarmingly—“I don’t know much about ponies. I’d appreciate any help you could give me in figuring out how to keep him penned up. Maybe I could put him in with the cows?”

  “And I can keep your pony in grain for you, huh, have him eating all the grain that’s supposed to go to the cows, I suppose? No way! You should have thought about all this before you got the pony. There just isn’t room on this place to keep a horse.”

  He is getting angry. I don’t know why.

  “Well, uh, when you were talking about getting him for Teddy, where were you going to keep him?”

  “Why the hell did you think I decided not to do it! Damn, dumb kids!” And with this he indicts both Tom and me. “A pony is nothing but trouble around a place. All they do is eat and shit. You mark my words. Teddy’ll think that damn horse is great for a week or two, and then he’ll forget all about it, and I’m stuck with it. All they do is run up bills, shoes, vets, worms, feed. If Tommy weren’t so pussy-whipped …”

  “Father!” cries Mother Maurie, shocked, but the old man only chuckles wickedly. He has evil black eyes, lecherous eyes, not lusting after sex, but after hurt and control and reaction. His eyes are snapping at me, hoping I will flinch, will react in some way, but I cannot, I have no idea how to react.

  “I’d better check on that pony, then,” I tell them all. I have my favorite sheepish grin on my face, my oh-dear-you-saw-my-T-shirt grin, my go-ahead-and-despise-me,-I-probably-deserve-it grin. It has gotten me through many a bad situation, but I think perhaps this is the worst. It only grows wider as Mother Maurie starts talking. I resist the urge to watch her mouth move, see how her lips go to shape all the sounds that I can no longer resolve into words. I turn and leave. As I go out the kitchen door, I drop the wilted trilliums into the wastebasket there. They wouldn’t talk to you like that if Tom were here, says a part of me. Go tell on them. No, don’t, that’s what they’d expect you to do, so don’t do it. The only way to win is not to do what they expect you to do. That sounds stupid, even to me, and as I go down the steps I let all my thoughts go.

  I actually do go to check on the pony. Houdini is gone, of course. I walk all around the big house, but he is not there. I do not call “Houdini, Houdini!” I know he would not come, and besides, there is something in me that has made me go silent. Thrust a knife through me right now, I’d fall without a sound. The silence is not a bottled thing, but a relief somehow. It is recognizing there is nothing to say, no one to cry out to.

  Houdini is not in the yard, not in the chicken yard, not behind the barn, not in the cow pasture, not behind the guest house, not in the driveway. I walk the long dusty driveway all the way out to the highway, right past the dealership and the huge metal building that Tom is working in. I don’t pause. I look up and down the highway, but Houdini is not there, either. I walk back, past fields tilled but left fallow, green fuzzed now with dead nettle and the beginnings of St. Michael’s wort, stink chamomile and wild violets. The wild plants do not mind this heat, do not wilt and brown, but squat bravely beneath the sun, knowing that all sunshine in Washington is at best a temporary thing. This heat and light will pass. If the truth be known, all things are temporary. All pains are temporary. Confine me to a wheelchair for the rest of my life, it’s still temporary, only one drop of moment in God’s eternal time stream. If there’s comfort here, it’s a sparse one.

  I look all the places I have looked before. The pony is still not in any of them.

  I think I know where he is.

  Cool water and crisp green things to bite. Scratching his dusty rump against a tree. Brown hands unbuckling the harness straps, rubbing the halter marks off with handfuls of moss, wiping away his tameness with the wild woods.

  As I go through the barbed-wire fence, I know it is not a good idea. Soon Ellie will be walking into the little house with her arms full of whiter-than-white sheets, with stacks of towels perfumed from fabric softener. She will wonder where I am, she will tell her parents I am gone, and they will tell Tom.

  It is not that I don’t care. It is only that I am silent inside.

  There are hoof marks beside the stream as I follow it, of hooves both cloven and shod. When I come to the halter, I pick it up. I find it is heavier than I knew, the leather is damp with sweat and the metal pieces are cool and smooth to my touch. I drape it over my arm, and it weighs it down. I try to imagine having it on my head.

  The air is cooler under the trees. I pluck my shirt loose from my sweaty back and feel my body cool. My feet are so hot, the path of packed earth looks invitingly smooth and cool, but I do not take my shoes off.

  I do not have to go far. The pony is in a small, sun-dappled clearing. Grasses have been laced through his mane and tail, woven into the shining braids. His coat has been cleansed of dust, even his hooves shine. I come toward him slowly, one hand outstretched in a friendly way. I smell the wild mint that has been wiped over him.

  When I am within range, I grip his braided mane, firmly, suddenly, but he does not flinch. He stands docile beneath my touch. He does not toss his head as the leather is settled over his brow and muzzle, does not pull away as I fasten the stiff buckles. My hands shake as I comb them through his mane,
pulling the braids free of the knotted grass stems that held them, dragging my fingers down the coarse hair so that the grasses and flowers shower loose from the braids and fall at our feet.

  When I am finished, I look around the clearing, at the straight trunks and uplifted branches, at the buck brush and the wild roses. I have something to say, but no one to speak to. I say it anyway, speaking to one who is not there but who will hear me anyway.

  “No,” I say. I repeat it to be clear. “No.”

  The pony does not resist me as I lead him home.

  FOURTEEN

  * * *

  The Farm

  July 1976

  When I get back, I put the pony in the chicken yard. Then I get my purse from the house and check the cars in the yard. There are three, Ellie and Bix’s huge clunker, Mother Maurie’s shiny sedan, and Tom’s father’s four-wheel drive red pickup. The keys are in the ignition of the sedan, so I take it. I don’t ask permission. The silence inside me wouldn’t let me.

  At the hardware store I buy nylon line and shackles, a long metal rod and a swivel.

  When I get home, I take a sledge from the shop, and drive the metal pole into the ground of the chicken yard. I put the swivel on it, and then peen the head over. The line and shackle fastens to the swivel, and finally the swivel clips to Houdini’s halter. He is not pleased, and immediately checks out how long the picket rope is. He backs up and pulls steadily on it. I watch long enough to be sure my rod isn’t going to pull out of the ground, and then I go put the sledge back in the shop. Houdini still has the picket line stretched tight when I come back. I ignore it. He’ll get tired of it soon enough.

  I go back to the little house and go straight to the laundry cupboard. The sheets and towels are there, in precise white stacks. A little stick-on-the-wall deodorizer has been added to the cupboard. Lemon-spice flavor. Oh, goody. I shut the cupboard doors.

  Teddy comes home from swimming, hair slicked to his small head. Tom comes home later. We eat dinner. Teddy runs back to watch Disney with Steffie. Later he comes home to go to bed. Later Tom goes to bed, and then I do. He sleeps. And no one notices my silence, no one comments on it, or asks if I am all right, am I angry, am I sad? I think perhaps it has been a long time since they really heard me. And it doesn’t bother me. If Tom’s parents have said anything at all to him about me or the pony, he does not mention it. I cannot believe they haven’t said anything to him. Before today, I would not have believed that they could complain to him about me and he wouldn’t tell me about it. But now I can imagine it, how they talk together, how he shrugs his shoulders over me and says, “Well, Dad, I just don’t know what to do about her.” I wonder what else he has discussed with them, if any of our quarrels have been private. It makes the emptiness inside me a little colder.

  I listen to the wind blow, and feel the house cool. Before true dawn, the rain begins, falling steadily in a drenching, cooling flow. I cook breakfast to its music. I find that words and silence are not mutually exclusive. “Over easy?” I say, and “More coffee?” and “Your clean socks are in the top drawer now,” and still my silence is undiminished. It holds when Teddy and I go out to give the pony a bucket of water and some grain.

  Houdini stands in the rain, looking abjectly miserable. “Can’t we put him in the cow barn?” Teddy asks, and I have to shake my head no. No sense in even asking. “He’s used to being in the rain,” I tell Teddy, and I know this is true, for his old owners left him out in that one pasture, rain or shine. He has already made a circle of trodden mud at the limits of his picket rope.

  The rain lasts five solid days. After the second day, Teddy doesn’t want to go out in the rain and mud to feed and water the pony. So I do. By the third day Houdini has worn a great brown circle in the chicken yard. I have to pull up the rod and move his picket line. It is difficult dirty work, mud splatters up in my face as I struggle to drive the rod into the ground, but I don’t ask anyone for help. I can’t think of anyone I could ask.

  I can’t even think of anyone I can talk to. I now know that talking to Tom is like talking to his parents via satellite relay. If it isn’t something I want to say to them, I shouldn’t say it to Tom.

  There is nothing I want to say to Tom.

  On the first sunny day, Teddy suits up in his cowboy clothes and rides Houdini for an hour. The next day he rides for fifteen minutes. The next day is Saturday, and he goes to watch cartoons with Aunt Steffie. The next day is Sunday, and he wants to sleep in. He no longer helps me feed and water the pony each morning. I don’t really blame him. Houdini is not exactly a bundle of personality. He is to Trigger, Fury, and the Black Stallion what Cream of Wheat is to Super Sugar Puffs.

  The summer days are as rainy now as they have been hot before. The days drip by, interspersed with clear spells when the sky is incredibly blue and the wind blows fresh over the green fields. My life drips by, spells of grey interrupted by brief moments of clarity. On the grey days, I move Houdini’s picket line from his current circle of mud, and wonder with trepidation when Tom’s father will pounce on me about the ruin of his chicken yard. I feed the pony, and water him, and groom him, as if he were my own. Everyone refers to him now as Evelyn’s pony. It is a household joke. I am a household joke. It doesn’t really bother me. All I have to do is keep going from day to day. I have come to understand Ellie’s obsession with housework. There is always something to do, always something to busy the hands and dull the mind. It is wonderful, how every day there are more dishes to wash, more dirt to sweep, more clothes to wash. An endless supply of busy boredom. The clear spells are much harder to deal with. I awaken in the middle of the night, weeping, and have to go huddle in the darkened kitchen so that the shaking of my body will not waken Tom. I do not know why I weep, whatever I dream hides itself from me. When the fit passes, I look out the window into the darkness and hate. Hate Tom for trapping me, hate myself for submitting to being trapped, hate Pan for giving me up so easily. Why does he not come to my windowsill, push open the window from outside, offer me a hand to take as I clamber over it and outside to freedom? Why don’t I climb out on my own? The second question is the most painful one. The only answer that I can seem to find is that if I just walk away from it all, I will have lost everything I ever cared about keeping. I try to believe that if I just hang on, withstand this battering and hang on, in the end it will get better, and that when I leave, I will leave a winner, taking what I care about with me.

  After one such spell, I resolve that I will at least have Teddy. The next day dawns clear and blue, and I devote myself to him with a single-mindedness that is devouring. My favor shines on him like a spotlight on a deer. He cannot escape me. I start with pancakes shaped like teddy bears and swans. I have him wash the dishes afterward, while I stand beside him and dry them. Then we go out together, into the new washed day. I insist he help me feed the pony and brush him, ignore his resentful silence and his unsubtle hints about the morning cartoons at Grandma’s house that he is missing. Without his help, I saddle Houdini.

  “Today,” I tell him, “you’re going to ride him outside of this stupid chicken yard.” And this is enough of a novelty that it wins his attention. I lead them up the long driveway, my grip on the bridle firm, and then, on the way back, I say, “Hold on now,” and let go of the leather and give Houdini a determined slap on the butt. Houdini has come to respect me over the last few weeks, and he jolts into a determined trot. “Grip with your knees,” I call to Teddy as I run along beside him. “Toes toward his nose. Hold the reins with your thumbs up, like you’re holding ice-cream cones. Move with him, now.” Wisdom garnered from a hundred horse books read when I was a kid, rules I’ve never applied, telling him to do things I’ve never done. But he listens, and tries, and suddenly, halfway down the driveway, instead of being spanked up and down by Houdini’s back, he is riding. And that fat little devil of a pony, from some unsuspected depths of his soul, remembers what it was like to be ridden, and actually launches into a canter. They outdist
ance me rapidly, and to my horror, when they reach the chicken yard, Teddy actually reins him around in a circle and they come cantering back toward me. I stand my ground as they come toward me, that four-legged liar and everything I still care about on his slippery barrel back. I will not let them past me, will not let him carry my last hope and joy out onto the highway and into the path of some determined chicken truck.

  But Teddy hauls back on the reins as they approach, and Houdini actually slows, then halts. Teddy launches at me and I catch him, barely making out his shrieks of “I did it, I rode like a real cowboy!” I hug him tight, swing him in a circle, and then he is kicking free of me, running back toward the pony. He hugs the cussed little beast, and Houdini actually appears to enjoy it. Maybe he was just sick of plodding around a chicken yard, I think to myself. Teddy still needs a boost to scramble up, and then they are off again, this time Teddy leaning forward and urging him to even greater speed.

  On the third time down the driveway, Teddy slips off at the turn, and lands with a thud I can hear. But even before I can get to him, Houdini is standing over him, sniffing him concernedly. There are no hard feelings, but that is enough riding for today. For the first time since Teddy got him, there is actually sweat on the pony’s hide when he rubs him down.

  “I gotta tell Steffie!” Teddy exclaims.

  Guile rises in me. “Later,” I tell him. “Maybe this evening. But right now we have to pack our picnic lunch.”