by Tim Pears
Leo looked once more around the field. ‘That sounds fair,’ he said. ‘It sounds good.’
2
The farmer’s name was Wally Luscombe. He gave Leo timber for a hut and the three girls helped him build it with their tools. Each of them was muscular and competent with hammer and plane and saw. They gave him two of their laying hens. One or other girl came over every day with a scythe or a loaf of freshly baked bread or a jacket their father had grown too fat ever to wear again. Leo cut the grass. The year was too far gone for haymaking yet in those calm, dry autumn days the grass quailed in the pale sun and he turned it with a rake. It dried right through and he raised it in stooks.
Then one evening rain came, and it fell for much of the night. In the grey damp morning the soil and plants and flowers gave off rich odours, like beings that had been woken and breathed out the breath of a long sleep. Leo inhaled the smell. He tried to hold it in his nostrils. He’d known it each autumn, each year of his childhood.
That day the earth looked just as brown and parched as it had these last weeks, as if there had been no rain. But on the day following Leo woke and saw the colour of the landscape had altered, all was green and alive once more.
*
At first he was able to tell the girls apart only when they spoke. Agnes, the eldest, who told him she was twenty-one and had first addressed him, had a confident, commanding voice. Ethel, the middle daughter, aged eighteen, spoke softly and slowly. Myrtle, the youngest, who said she was sixteen and a half, spoke quickly, her words tumbling over themselves and sometimes catching in a stammer, over which she gabbled swiftly in the attempt to outrun it. Soon Leo could distinguish them by sight, too, even at a distance, by their slight differences of gait.
He dug the level plot. When he asked for advice, Wally Luscombe said, ‘I never touch the garden, oh, no, that’s all Agnes’s work. I’m a farmer, Leo. A farmer don’t make a good gardener, and a gardener don’t make a good farmer.’
Agnes gave him some of her autumn onion, winter lettuce and spring cabbage to plant. Asparagus and rhubarb crowns too. As well as gardening, she was the housekeeper. She also did her family’s laundry. She lit the furnace and boiled a big tub of water and boiled up the clothes. When she’d washed them, she wrung them through a mangle and hung them out to dry. On wet days she kept the furnace going but got rid of the water from the tub, bucket by bucket, to rid the room of moisture, then hung the clothes on lines run from hooks on the ceiling.
Ethel tended the stock. She bred calves and milked eight cows. She scalded the milk and made cream. She sold skimmed milk and cream at market in Bampton, and she carted vegetables there to sell too. One market day Leo saw her come home with a cow and a calf she’d bought, the calf in the cart and the tethered cow walking along behind.
Myrtle assisted her father with the horses. All helped each other as necessary. Leo worked one day a week as agreed for whoever needed him.
On Sundays the Luscombes did not attend church or chapel but worked as on other days. They insisted their tenant join them for lunch.
Wally regaled Leo with tales of his youth. The girls served the food and listened, or pretended to. Roast beef was tender and tasty, served with roasted vegetables and greens and thick gravy. Pork skin was crunchy and crackly. Leo told Agnes she was the best cook he’d known but for a certain gypsy woman by the name of Rhoda Orchard. The girls wanted to know more of this gypsy but their father overbore them, saying Agnes’s true talent lay in wine-making.
‘This young woman can make wine from anything,’ he said. ‘Parsnip, rhubarb. Her peapod wine was a rare vintage. And her runner bean … You would not believe it, Leo.’
None of the girls drank. Perhaps their father would not allow it. He wanted all the wine for himself. Or they chose abstinence. After lunch they insisted Leo make up a four at cards while their father nodded off in his armchair and slept off the great quantity of food and wine he’d ingested.
‘Which games have you played?’ Agnes asked.
Leo said he reckoned that from his days in the Navy he likely knew the rules of every game men had devised using a pack of royal cards. But the girls seemed to have invented rules of their own. In rummy, sevens were wild. In whist, the jack of hearts beat the king. Random aberrations. House rules, they called them, and obliged their guest to learn.
Leo snared rabbits, and pigeons. He caught small trout in the nearest narrow river. He walked the fields. He scouted horse mushrooms and made ketchup. He picked the last blackberries of the season. In his haphazard orchard were apples, pears, plums, damsons, greengages, of which particular variety – recorded or not – he had no idea.
One evening he heard yelling and stepped outside his hut to find Ethel running along the fence around his vegetable plot. ‘’Tis Shadow the big gelding,’ she gasped. ‘In an awful terrible state. Come look.’ She took his arm as she spoke and pulled him along. Ethel was out of breath from rushing to Leo’s smallholding and slowed down. ‘Go,’ she uttered, and he let her fall behind.
The other Luscombes were all in the stable. The four horses stood in their line, three of them pulling lucerne through the ash bars of the high hay racks above the wooden manger. Shadow the big black gelding did not eat but stood still. Wally and Myrtle stood beside him, studying him.
‘He broke a fence into our orchard,’ Agnes told Leo. ‘He’s a greedy sod, that one. Filled his guts with apples.’
Shadow subsided on the cobbled floor, kicking and groaning in pain. His chain pulled taut his leather neck band.
‘He’ll choke, Father,’ Myrtle said.
Wally Luscombe bent and unbuckled the chain and Shadow clambered to his feet. With his mouth open and teeth bared he came at the man and girl.
‘Whoa,’ Wally said. ‘Whoa, boy!’ And the gelding stopped advancing and settled back in line.
Leo came forward. He saw that the horse’s skin was hugely distended beneath him and tight as a drum. When Wally Luscombe turned to him, the expression on his face was one of despair. ‘I can’t recall,’ he said. ‘I just can’t mind what you should do with gripes.’
By now Ethel had arrived in the stable. Leo asked her if she had linseed oil and turps in her cowshed. She nodded and he asked her to mix some half and half in a long-necked receptacle.
‘I’ll fetch a wine bottle,’ said Agnes, and she followed her sister out of the stable.
‘There’s a loose box next door, ain’t there?’ Leo asked. ‘Put him in there away from these others now.’ Wally attached a head collar to the gelding and led him out. Leo followed, Myrtle coming after. It was still light outside, and it made them realise that their eyes had been adjusting in the stable to the dimness at the edge of night.
In the loose box, Leo looked around and saw rope hanging from a nail. He took it and cut a length. He twisted this and knotted it and brought it over. Leo stepped between father and daughter and up to the horse, speaking to it in his calm, gravelly voice. ‘We’re here to help you out, old fellow,’ he said. ‘You be blown with gas, we needs to release it.’ He put his quick-spun rope twitch on Shadow’s nose and looped it in his mouth while Wally held the head collar.
Leo climbed up on the manger and fastened the twitch to a beam above, obliging the horse to stand open-mouthed, with his head up. Leo jumped down. Agnes came in with a wine bottle which she gave to him. Ethel held up a hurricane lantern. Leo raised the bottle and poured the drench of linseed and turpentine down Shadow’s throat. Restrained by the head collar and by the twitch, the horse was helpless to object.
Myrtle clambered onto the manger and stood there unsteadily, reaching up to loosen the rope twitch from the beam. Leo advised her to hang on a moment in case Shadow tried to spew the drench back up. He waited until he saw the horse swallow, the muscles of his brisket bulging. Myrtle loosened the twitch and climbed down. Leo undid the rope from the horse and asked Myrtle to put her ear up against Shadow’s ribs and listen to see whether his belly was working.
‘How do
you mean?’ she asked.
‘Rumblin,’ Leo said.
Myrtle bent and listened to the carthorse. She glanced up at Leo, keeping her ear to the horse’s stomach, then looked back down towards the floor. She stood up. ‘Nothing,’ she said. She turned to Wally. ‘I can’t hear nothing, Father.’
‘Full a gas, right enough,’ Wally said.
The gelding knelt on the floor again and rolled onto his side, groaning with the griping pain. Wally let go of the head collar. When the horse came up again, his mouth open, he bit the wooden lip of the manger.
Leo grasped the head collar and spoke to the horse, telling him they needed to keep moving, and pulled him away and led him out of the box. Myrtle ran after him with a length of rope which she clipped to the head collar so that Leo could lead Shadow from a foot or two away. They walked up the yard and back. Ethel came out with her lamp and walked along off to one side, lighting their way. Wally and Agnes stood by the stable door, watching.
‘If we keep him movin, the gripes won’t be so bad,’ Leo told Myrtle. ‘He’ll be more comfortable. And it’ll give the drench time to work its way through.’
‘To loose a passage for the gas?’ Myrtle asked. ‘The wind?’
‘Aye, though he’ll need to empty his bladder first, I should think. Let’s have another listen.’
Leo halted the horse and Myrtle put her ear once more to the gelding’s stomach. She straightened, shaking her head. They resumed walking the horse. They led him up the yard and when they came back Agnes had retired to the house. A while later Ethel hung the lantern on a metal bar sticking out from the wall of the stables, and followed her elder sister indoors.
They walked to and fro. The movement seemed to ease the horse’s pain or perhaps he understood that this strange constitutional was for his benefit, so he submitted to it. Leo stopped him periodically and Myrtle listened to his insides, then they resumed leading him around the yard. He did not groan but once or twice he stopped and spread his hind legs apart and tried to piss but could not. Leo spoke to him at these moments, but it did not help.
‘My father had some horses he could whistle for to help them stale,’ he told Myrtle. ‘The turps might aid him, but there’s other things I should carry with me if I were a horseman.’
The girl asked him what such other things might be.
‘Sweet nitre would be one. To be honest, I do not know why a blown horse should be unable to piss. Perhaps the blown gut presses on the bladder. Or perhaps the apple juice here has had some ill effect upon it. I do not rightly know.’ He shook his head. ‘Oil a juniper was another my father kept close to him.’
Myrtle stopped. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘We’ve got some of that. I swear I’ve seen a little bottle in the stable cupboard with “Juniper” writ upon the label.’
The girl ran across the yard. Her father was no longer standing in the doorway. Leo walked the gelding up the yard and back and Myrtle came out with the bottle and a syringe. She gave them to Leo and took the rope from him. He drew a little of the oil into the syringe and injected it into the horse’s mouth. They led him on.
Beyond the feeble light of the lantern the night was dark. Leo told the girl how horses used to suffer widely from asthma, or broken wind. More often in the old days than today. The worst form they suffered was an emphysema of the lungs. He told her how in the past, unprincipled dealers practised all sorts of tricks when selling an animal thus affected. One was to pour a pound or two of lead shot, mixed into a pound of melted butter, down the horse’s throat.
Myrtle asked how on earth that had any beneficial effect. It sounded mad. ‘Are you teasing me?’ she wondered.
Leo assured her that he was not. ‘The shot weighs the stomach down,’ he said. ‘It takes the pressure off the diaphragm, so the lungs have more play, and the horse can breathe almost natural. A course it don’t last long. And if the new owner has the wit to study the animal’s dung over the next day or two, he’ll see in what way and how badly he’s been had.’
So Leo spoke of horses. He told the girl stories that he remembered from his childhood, and his voice was for the black gelding too, calming him in his discomfort. The gelding stopped once more. He straddled again in the middle of the yard, close to where the lantern hung. He stood with his hind legs apart and his penis hanging down and the apple-sour urine at first dribbled, then flowed. It ran onto the cobbles and along the gutter.
‘He’ll be fittle now, I reckon,’ Leo said. ‘He’ll make it.’
They walked the horse on. Myrtle said the swellings on either side in front of his hips remained. Leo said it would be about the right time to take the horse back into the box. No sooner had they entered than Shadow raised his tail and farted for an inordinate length of time, the whole stable echoing with the sound and the air filling with a stink of cider, until his huge extended belly had returned to its normal size. Leo advised Myrtle to give him a drink of water and to bed him down in the loose box for the night. ‘He’ll be right as rain in the mornin,’ he told her. ‘Let him off work, I should. Give him a bran mash and he’ll empty his bowels and be back to normal.’
The girl thanked Leo and he turned to go but stopped and turned back and said, ‘And I’ll fix that broken fence for you. By tomorrow that horse will have forgotten what bad the apples done him, but he’ll remember how much he liked the taste of ’em.’
3
Leo walked across the fields. A sound like singing came on the wind, eerie voices. As he walked on he realised it was ewes and lambs, mothers and their lost children, calling plaintively to one another. In another field two horses stood, one with its bent leg raised as if cocked ready for movement, still as statues.
He stepped on pine needles through a gloomy conifer plantation, trees packed close together. The wood’s silence was unsettling. No sound of birds.
He crossed a meadow where cattle lay. Then a chestnut horse came from a distance towards him, neighing and prancing, and the heifers rose and moved off out of its way. The mare was unafraid and came to him and stood. He stroked the horse. Her skin quivered under his hand.
Leo walked through the village, past the church, the shop, the school. Everything was smaller than it should be, the buildings had shrunk or perhaps he had grown to gigantic size and wandered through an eerie land. Two old men stood in the lane beside the lychgate. They greeted him. He did not recognise them, but touched his cap in reply. He passed the wheelwright, then the smithy. He stopped for a moment and watched Jacob Crocker’s swarthy son, alone, hammering some metal on the anvil. How often as a boy Leo had stood watching the Crockers shoeing horses, putting iron tyres on waggon wheels. He looked around but there was no sign of Jacob, nor the tall crooked son.
Leo walked on out of the village and on to the estate. Men and women worked. Some saw the tall young man with the rangy tread but none looked twice at him. He did not believe even his cousin Herbert would recognise him.
His memory had flattened the land. He’d thought of it all these years as little more than undulating plain, but it was carved up and crooked, bumpy, with woods on hillocks and coombes in shade.
Leo went first to the home of Aaron Budgell and his wife. Perhaps he would be given word here of his brother Sid, who would be over thirty years old now, and surely no longer still lodging with them. Perhaps long gone from the estate. All was quiet. He knocked on the door. No one answered.
Leo walked on to the stables. Even as he approached, he knew much had changed. There was no sound of horses or of human activity. He stood in the yard. There was a faint smell of horse but also of petrol. He looked around. One of the boxes held not an animal but a motorcycle. The others were empty, and but for a single one with straw bedding were all swept clean.
He walked up from the stables to the manor house. He walked past the kitchen yard. The back door was closed and there was no activity there or the sound of such from within. He walked on along the path around the side of the house. There was something ghostly inside but he coul
d not tell what, for the glare of the sun on the windowpane prevented it.
The lawns and the flowerbeds were tended. The windows at the front of the house were shuttered on the inside. There were no vehicles of any sort on the gravelled drive. Leo knocked on the front door and stood waiting. No one came. He tried the handle of the door but it was locked. Leo stood insensible as if some understanding might come to him but it did not.
Rufus Devereaux had once tried to persuade him that ownership was nothing. That he who looked upon a landscape owned it as much as the man with a piece of paper in a safe. More so, in fact. Leo told him that was easy to say for one who passed across the land like a shadow. For those who resided in one place it was different. Without the paper they were merely cottagers, powerless.
‘Then they should take to the road like us,’ Rufus had said, and the two of them had laughed together at the prospect. ‘We are all tenants,’ Rufus added, ‘if only of our mortal form.’
Leo walked back around the side of the house and across the lawn. After a brief hesitation he stepped cautiously through the flowerbed and leaned forward and pressed his nose to a windowpane. With his hands he formed a shield and peered into a room whose every item of furniture was covered with white sheets. He began to lean back away from the pane but then he saw a man, a ghostly figure, moving about amongst the furniture. Then this man stood still. He raised a gun.
‘Come away from there,’ said a voice. It issued from behind Leo. He stepped back and turned around.
The man stood upon the lawn. He held a shotgun raised towards the intruder. He had a thick beard and wore rough working clothes. ‘I seen you traipsin about,’ he said. ‘Get your thievin carcase off this property. Now.’
Leo put his hands up in the air and trod carefully back across the flowerbed to the lawn.