Swimming with Horses

by Oakland Ross

  “Oh.” She shrugged. “Anyway, as I was saying, you would never hurt a girl, would you?”

  “You mean like — hit her?” What had Charlotte been saying?

  My mother tilted her head and pursed her lips. “No. I mean, more like —” She broke off, with a shake of her shoulders. “Oh, I don’t know. Some of the women downstairs were talking. Boys will be boys, they say.” She seemed to fix her gaze on my book, the one about Sir Isaac Newton, but I didn’t think she was really looking at it. “I just want to say, Sam, that if you ever do hurt a girl — if you ever — then just don’t come looking for help from me.”

  I waited, expecting her to add something more, but she didn’t.

  “Okay, Mum. I won’t.”

  She’d had too many penultimates again, as my father called them. You had preparatories, then warriors, then ceremonials, then penultimates, and finally ornamentals.

  “You don’t have to worry, Mum. I promise.”

  She nodded and straightened her shoulders. There. Mission accomplished. “Well, then,” she said. “That’s all I have to say.”

  “Okay. Good night.”

  “Good night, honey. Lights out now.” She squeezed my arm, stood up, and wobbled out of the room.

  I marked my place in the book and slid it under the pillow then switched off the light. For a time I lay motionless in my bed, gazing up at the stucco swirls on the ceiling, barely visible in the near-darkness. I was thinking of Hilary, her voice, and the passages she had read from that novel, Cry, the Beloved Country. The high rhythm of its language reminded me of tales from the Bible that I had read, marvelling at their power, their lofty grace — the words bequeathed by God. I had never before imagined that a mere human could approach that magnificence, and yet this South African writer named Alan Paton had surely done so. It was strange to think that a man could summon such words and fashion them in such a way. Already, I sensed the world around me shifting, reshaping itself, the way tectonic plates drive skyward, forming mountains where once there had been only plains. I pulled the covers up around my shoulders and rolled onto my side. My last thought was of Hilary Anson. She was holding a Russian-made gun, a gift from someone named Mandela, and she was pointing it right at me.

  THREE

  Jack

  South Africa, Winter 1962

  WHEN JACK TANNER LOOKED back on all that happened and all that went wrong, he could specify the exact day — in fact, the exact effing hour — when the earth began to shudder and the sky commenced to fall. Granted, he hadn’t recognized it at the time, but later he saw it clear.

  It wasn’t the kaffir. It was the girl. It had been the girl all along.

  Of course, that wasn’t what he told Daniel Anson, the girl’s father. It wasn’t what he told himself, not at first. What he told the girl’s father, along with anyone else who asked, was that it was the kaffir who had caused it all. The shame. The scandal. The physical harm. This was easy enough to say because it was close enough to being true, or so it was by a certain way of thinking. But, in his heart, Jack understood that the kaffir had only been taking advantage of a rent already torn. Truth was, the trouble had got started even before the boy showed his goggle-eyed visage around Daniel Anson’s farm. Of course, it wasn’t long before he did pitch up — and then everything went straight to effing hell.

  But first, the beginning: the time when Jack should have noticed, but didn’t quite, that his fortunes were headed off the rails.

  It had been late in the afternoon on a Sunday, and he had been about to tend to the feeding of the horses, a chore handled other days by the stable hands, but Sunday was their day off, so Jack chipped in. He was the stable manager at Daniel Anson’s farm, but he didn’t mind dirtying his hands now and then. Besides, he liked to see the horses content. He liked to be the source of their contentment. All it took was a flake or two of dampened hay in each stall and a quart or so of grain in each bin, with a chopped-up apple and maybe a tot of molasses added as a treat. That did the job.

  Jack sometimes wished that people could be as straightforward as horses — but, no, not even close. Even a man of mature understanding, a man such as himself, could sometimes be flummoxed by the ways of the human species.

  And so it was that time with Hilly. She marched into the barn alone. Obviously, she’d picked the moment, an hour when there would be no one else about. Just him. Just her. He heard the swish and click of her approaching footsteps, and he looked up.

  “Hey,” she said, not bothering to utter his name, not even bothering to issue more than a word of proper greeting. Then she just blurted it out, the thing she must have thought needed saying.

  “I’m telling my father,” she said, her voice strained. Nerves, probably. “It’s over.”

  Jack eased the wooden lid of the grain bin back into place and dusted off the palms of his hands. All right, then. He’d attend to the feeding later. He turned, slow and easy, to look at her. She was wearing blue dungarees and a dark anorak, and she had some kind of woollen band pulled over her forehead, something he hadn’t seen her wear before. Navy blue, it was, very striking against her raven hair. Matched her eyes, those deep pools of sapphire. What he noticed next was that her complexion was high. Nerves, no doubt about it. The blood, racing.

  “Over …?” He shook his head. “I don’t think that’s the case. I think you’d be sorry if that was so. I think you’d regret it.” He took a step in her direction. Pleading didn’t work any longer. Might have to take a harder line.

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “Now, now,” he said. “Hilly.”

  “Hilary.”

  “Ah.”

  “I don’t want you to touch me, not ever. Not ever again. I want you to leave.”

  “It’s feeding time. I was about to feed the horses.”

  “I don’t mean leave the stable. I mean leave here. Quit. Go.”

  “Where would I go?” Interesting — she’d stopped saying anything about telling her dad.

  “I don’t care. Anywhere you want. Just away. It’s over.”

  “Over? What’s over?” He ran a hand through his hair and took another stride toward her. Slow. One step at a time.

  “Please. Just leave.”

  “Hilly …”

  “Let me go.”

  “Just this once. Can’t see no harm in that. Just once more.”

  “I said, let go! I said —”

  She turned and darted away, ran straight out of the barn, a thing she had never done before. Jack stood his ground and watched her go. Something had surely changed, and he wondered what it was. Strange that he wasn’t sure. With Hilly, he sometimes thought he knew all there was to know, knew her better than she knew herself. Now he wasn’t certain. But that was all right. He was not a man to rush matters. He knew there were times when it was better to stand down and keep your trap shut. Let troubles tend to themselves. There’d be a cooling out. He knew that. Still, he had a feeling she would come around in time. She was a good girl, all in all. But something had changed. He knew that, and it bothered him. There was nothing for it, though, but to go back to work, back to feeding the horses.

  He didn’t appreciate it at the time, but later he would remember that tussle. There. Right effing there. That was where it began, and it only got worse — far, far worse — when that bloody kaffir got involved, when it came to blows. Later, much later, after his smashed-in cheekbone had partway healed, Jack marched straight up to see Mr. Anson himself, knocked on the door at the main house, tweed cap in hand. The big man was summoned to the entrance, and straightaway Jack offered to take his leave, no hard feelings, just finished and done. He was that cut up about it. He confessed he should have known all along what was happening between Mr. Anson’s daughter and that kaffir swine. By a certain way of thinking, it was indirectly his fault, what took place. After all, he was the one who’d hired the boy.

  Daniel Anson nodded, his eyes glistening, his shoulders slumped. He told Jack not to punish h
imself. One man could not be blamed for another man’s sins. Life brings its burdens and its pains. You endure them. You move on. That was what Jack should do. That was what he, Daniel Anson, proposed to do. It was out of their hands now. Jack nodded and narrowed his eyes in what he hoped would be taken as a display of sympathy — sympathy and remorse.

  “All right, Jack,” said Daniel Anson. He stepped back and closed the big door of the main house, never having invited his stable manager inside. Never had. Never would.

  Jack replaced his cap. He turned and trudged in his rubber boots down the verandah steps, past the lunatic peacocks, across the unkempt green lawn, and along the macadam lane that ran by the poplar windbreak. He kept on walking till he reached the stables, and there, after a bit of aimless bustling about, he plunked himself in the tack room with a glass of Glenmorangie cradled in his hand. Drank it down. Straightaway poured himself another. Drank it down, too. From that day on, he’d swear to anyone who would listen that Daniel Anson was the finest man he’d ever had the privilege to know. Anyway, those were the words he used. Let no one say that old Jack Tanner was in any doubt as to which side his bread was buttered upon.

  And the truth was that Jack did take some comfort from what the big man had said, to wit: that he, Jack Tanner, could not be blamed for what ensued. He liked to think it was precisely so. But, looking back, he could see plenty of signs that should have aroused his suspicions, long before any of them had. For example, the garish way the boy behaved with Mr. Anson’s daughter. Damned kaffir. Why, he sometimes looked her straight in the eyes, and he talked to her without first being talked to. Cocky was what it was. Bold. It was a dead giveaway, or it should have been. An African that gets stroppy with a white man — well, that is one thing. To a point, you can tolerate it. But with a woman, it’s different. You’d never know where that might lead. And yet Jack hadn’t seen it. It would only be later, too late, that he would detect for a certainty what had been right square in front of his eyes all along.

  Something had got started between those two, something you maybe couldn’t put a name to or a finger on — not at first — but something just the same. And who could be surprised? That Hilly was a fine piece of work. Young and fancy, all that shiny black hair, and that long slim shape, not a woman’s shape but a kind of stripped-down version of a woman’s shape. It had an excitement all its own. She’d been maybe fourteen or so when things with Jack had first got underway.

  Well, thirteen, come to think of it.

  Twelve, to be honest.

  “Please, Hilly,” he would say when the time came, when he couldn’t keep the monster down. “Please, just this once. Hil.”

  And she obliged — maybe not at the instant of the asking, maybe not with the alacrity he’d have liked to observe. But that was no cause for complaint, long as everything totted up square in the end. And so it did. She got something out of it. He got something, too. Where was the harm in that? You never get anything free in this life. You get only what you pay for, and he’d paid for this, invested everything, his livelihood, maybe even his life. Just think of the risk he was taking — and all for her. She owed him something in return. That was what he told her, as many times as she needed telling. Besides, he was the only one who understood her, who had ever understood her.

  Twelve years old. That was her age when he first started forming some designs on her. Of course, she was away at school in Durban during the week, a boarding school. But she was home on most weekends and for the holidays at Christmas, which would be the very drear of winter in England, of course, but was near the fat of summer down here. Balmy, splendorous days. Plenty of time for riding out upon the broad green hills above Mooi River. That was where Hilly and he would go.

  He called her Hilly. Hardly anyone else did. Maybe no one at all. They were a formal lot, the Ansons. Cold-like. Austere. Both their sons had grown up and gone off to add to their riches in the mining game, up in the Transvaal. So now there was just the one daughter, left on her own the bulk of the time. No one to talk to. Slump-shouldered on account of her early height. She warmed pretty quick to a man who said he understood her. Was her only friend. Called her Hilly.

  Of course, he was not supposed to call her that. Miss Anson — that was the indicated nomenclature, as he was given to understand. But Hilly it was when they were out on their own. Hilly or Hil. And it didn’t take Jack long to get things inclining his way. It isn’t difficult at all, not with a twelve-year-old, not when you know what you are about. There’s a knack to it, no denying that. And could be he had the knack. Could be that was part of the reason he left England in a mite of a rush, so soon after the war. Could be it went some distance toward explaining why he’d shortened his stay in Bulawayo, up in Southern Rhodesia. Could be. Mum’s the word, though. Best to let those old dogs lie, for love is a ravenous beast that can turn on you in a flash. Eat you whole.

  Besides, there was another lesson he had learned over the years. What works with a twelve-year-old won’t likely work with a thirteen-year-old. And what works with a thirteen-year-old won’t likely work another year on. And one dark morning you awake to discover that nothing will work at all.

  As for the boy, well, that one was trouble. Trouble from the first light of morn. Jack should have seen it all along. It should not have come as a surprise. The boy was Xhosa, after all.

  His name was Muletsi Dadla, and he hailed from Bruntville, the African township across the way. A township, they called it. A garbage heap was what it was. Pitiful. It was Jack himself who hired the lad, took him on to work as a groom at the Anson farm. He was twenty-two years old and a good-looking buck, good-looking for one of them. He had a strapping build and a coffee-coloured complexion, and he was fastidious about his appearance, which wasn’t always the case with their kind, or so it was writ in the gospel according to Jack.

  In addition, the boy wore a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with round lenses that gave him a strange scholarly air — strange considering he was from Bruntville, where few young men completed secondary school. With the females, it was even worse. But the boy had not only finished secondary, he’d gone to university, as well — the University of Fort Hare in the Eastern Cape, where the black people went, a chosen few. He’d studied English literature there. It was said he was the first person from Bruntville to achieve such a feat, acquiring a university degree.

  To Jack, this was a good joke, the boy’s famous scrap of paper. He’d heard all about it. English literature. Eastern Cape. Blah, blah, blah. He laughed each time the subject came up. No doubt some people considered him jealous, indignant that a black man was better educated than he. But Jack didn’t give a fig about that. Not one effing fig. None.

  “Name …?” Jack had said on the boy’s first day. Damnedest names they had. He could never keep them straight.

  “Muletsi Dadla, baas,” the boy said. Or some such.

  “Muletsi what …?” Jack shook his head and then sniggered in anticipation of what he was about to say. Had it all worked out. “Tell you what. Let’s say I call you Hunt. Berkeley Hunt.” It was rhyming slang for a lady’s privates.

  “Hunt, baas?”

  “That’s right.” Jack could see the boy didn’t get the connection, despite his alleged brains. Didn’t have an effing clue. That made the joke all the better. Berkeley Hunt.

  “All right, baas. If you say so.”

  “I do say so.” Jack held out a manure fork. “Know what this is?”

  The boy said he did.

  “And do you know what it’s for?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Fine.” Jack handed over the implement. “Get to it then. Can’t stand here jaw-wagging all day.” He sniggered again and said the boy’s name aloud once more. “Berkeley Hunt.”

  The moniker stuck from the very first time it was used, or it did for Jack, who relived the joke all over again each time he said the name. The boy never cottoned on, which just goes to show how much a degree in English literature is worth on
a horse farm outside Durban.

  English degree be damned. What mattered was smarts, which Jack had aplenty while others came up short. Take these Africans. They lived in a different world. A world apart. That was why it was called apartheid. Apartness was what it meant. Whites over here. Blacks over there. Not much in between.

  Over here was Mooi River, where the white folk lived — in the town itself or in the surrounding terrain. This was horse country, and the people of the vicinity mostly owned big places, with houses meant to last, all surrounded by sprawling meadowland and dense woodlot. Meanwhile, the black folk lived over in Bruntville, as if on a different planet. That was the way it was.

  It hadn’t taken Jack long to learn the score. As a white man, you’d have to be pretty damned dense not to figure it out, and so he had, quick as you please. He’d come down from England after the war, when there was no work to be found at home, certainly not at the racetracks that had employed him in earlier times. Like a lot of former enlisted men, he first pitched up in Southern Rhodesia. Then he worked his way down to the republic and wound up here on the Indian Ocean side. Never regretted it for an instant. You could have Europe for a fiver, as far as he was concerned, and he’d throw in England for free, as a bonus. That was all she was worth. But this here, this was Africa. God’s country. “Come on, Berkeley, put some shoulder into it. Like this. See? Make that coat shine. Put your English literature to work. Fat lot of good it will do you here.”

  These words were meant to be insulting, but the boy seemed unperturbed. He shambled about, kept his head down, always did as he was told. He must have had his reasons for that, his reasons for being here, working as a groom in the stables belonging to Daniel Anson, a powerful businessman and a parliamentarian to boot, a minister in the government of Hendrik Verwoerd. Daniel Anson was the minister responsible for national security matters, which got Jack Tanner thinking. Was it beyond the wits of the ANC to put a spy among Daniel Anson’s servants? The ANC — that was the African National Congress, a plague of communists and malcontents who were stirring up trouble in the land. If they were smart, that was exactly what they would do, sneak a spy onto Daniel Anson’s hired staff. Jack sometimes wondered who it might be. On the other hand, who ever said the ANC was smart?