by Ian Stansel
“Hey, Pop,” Frank said.
The old man’s eyes broke slowly from their position and made their way to Frank’s tall, lean frame.
“How’re you doing today,” Frank said.
Silas Sr. breathed twice, slowly, and said, “All right.”
“Good. That’s good. You need anything?” Silas Sr. looked at Frank but did not respond. “Some good things happening out there, Pop. You wouldn’t believe the business we’re doing. You know we’ve got three Arabians in the barn right now. Can you believe that? Did you ever think we’d have that kind of horse in those stalls out there?”
Silas Sr. watched his son with an inscrutable, vacant expression until finally, with visible effort, he turned his head. “Lena,” he said in a croupy whisper. “Who is that?”
Frank didn’t come up to his father’s room again, and Lena didn’t press him to. Not until two weeks later when Lena recognized something different in Silas Sr.’s breathing, some new level of desperation, and knew that death’s final advance was under way. She ran downstairs, hailed a passing boarder—a young girl she’d met only briefly—and told her to fetch Frank and Silas at once. The boys made it and the doctor was called and they were all there and helpless to stop what was happening. It was a Tuesday afternoon in the early fall. The weather had just broken and outside the few people there that day walked their horses across the stable grounds with their chins up high, as if after the summer’s hot spell, they were finally able to breathe again.
Seven
Silas woke the next morning to the sound of a kettle whistle. He watched in silence as Henry crept in from the bathroom and made a press pot of coffee. Silas’s head throbbed and he twisted to reach into his bag and retrieve three Tylenol. “You’re awake,” Henry said. Without water, Silas chewed the pills and swallowed. “You strike me as a coffee man,” Henry said. “But I have tea too.”
“Coffee,” Silas said.
“The girls offered to make breakfast up at the house, if you’re interested. To be honest, we don’t get too many people out here, so I think they’re eager to have a visit.”
“Shower?” Silas said.
“If you don’t mind me saying, I was hoping you’d ask.”
Henry offered to run Silas’s things through the wash and said he’d loan him clothes for the time being. The men were about the same size. After showering and drying off, Silas dressed in a white T-shirt and white button-down, a decent pair of wool socks, and his own jeans, no shorts beneath. Henry said the women wanted them at nine o’clock, which gave them a half hour.
They went out to the barn and Disco whinnied at Silas’s presence. Henry fetched a flake of hay and tossed it to the mare.
“Been a long time since she had to wait this late for breakfast,” Silas said. He stroked her neck and felt her immense muscles working as she chewed. “Sorry, girl,” he said.
He could see the stiffness in her steps. She’d been riding long and hard for a couple days now. He bent his creaking knees and rubbed her legs, these magnificent muscles like fingers of lava. He found a brush woven with long, coarse oak and tawny hairs. “Mind?” he said to Henry, who shrugged approval. Silas pulled out as much of the llama hair as he could and used the brush on Disco’s muddied belly and legs. He picked the mud and manure from her hooves. There was a bucket hanging from a nail in the wood beam, and Silas poured the rest of his stash of grain into it, then retrieved an apple from the saddlebag and his wood-handled knife from his pocket and cut the apple into eighths and dropped the pieces in. Disco stomped a foot in anticipation. “Don’t suppose you’ve got any molasses,” he said to Henry.
“Probably do somewhere.” Henry disappeared into the light of outside, returned three minutes later with a jar, the label obscured by the tarry sweetness. Silas struggled mightily with the stuck top and respected Henry for not saying a thing. When he got it open, the black suspension crawled out and down into the pail, grabbing the oats and grain pellets and even the hunks of apple as it rolled over itself to the lowest regions of the bucket’s topography. Silas mixed the mess with his hand, Disco snorting, and then let the horse lick his palm and digits clean before allowing her to take the sweet grain in a matter of just a few flops of her lips. Silas ran a hand over the star on her forehead, watching her negotiate the last of the food within the cave of her mouth.
Then to Henry: “I should take her out for a stretch.”
“A ride?”
“No, not yet,” Silas said. “Just something to keep the kinks out.”
“How do you think she’d do with the llamas? Big pasture, plenty of room to roam. Unless you think she’d kick at them or something.”
“What’s their disposition?”
“Laid back, basically,” Henry said.
Silas grinned at the notion of his beautiful horse out mingling with these odd beasts. “No, she won’t likely kick.” He turned to Disco. “You want to make some new friends?”
At the pasture fence, the men drank their steaming coffee while Silas’s mare side-eyed a trio of llamas as they approached and sniffed her.
“Easy now,” Silas said.
After a few minutes, they left Disco alone with the llamas and strode up to the main house, where Silas met Maggie’s wife, Mira, a lovely and bird-small woman. Maggie wasn’t large by any reasonable standard, but with her hips and considerable breasts, she seemed positively huge next to her wife. Mira extended a tiny hand, said, “So nice to meet you.” She spoke with an accent that bespoke a global existence.
“Likewise,” Silas said.
The house was bright and appointed with dangling green plants on just about every flat surface. Amid these was a long oak table and chairs. The women had put out a spread: coffee and orange juice, croissants with jams, scrambled eggs, bacon, fresh fruit cut into slices. “Christ, I haven’t eaten so well in years,” Silas said, and he honestly couldn’t conjure a memory to dispute this.
They ate and talked most of the time about horses and llamas, each species’ habits and needs. The women and Henry discussed shearing; Silas talked jumping and dressage. It was all so pleasant that Silas nearly forgot what had brought him there in the first place, that he was wanted, that he’d killed his brother, that he had no design to speak of save for moving, moving, moving in a vaguely northern direction. Until? He pushed it from his mind and downed a glass of orange juice, practically feeling the vitamins deploying themselves through his body.
“Come back in the spring and you can help us shear,” Maggie said.
“Yes,” Mira said. “It takes only about six weeks.”
“Is that right,” Silas said.
“It’s a whole operation,” Henry said.
“I’d like to see that,” Silas said.
After breakfast they went down to watch the horse and the llamas. Disco seemed used to the other animals now, pointedly ignoring them as a kid might younger siblings. The women oohed and aahed when one llama rubbed its body against Disco’s belly. Disco half trotted away, came to the fence line, where Maggie and Mira stroked her face and neck.
“Hanoverian,” Silas told them. “Maybe my favorite breed of horse. Strong but still fast. And smart. Goddamn smarter than most people. From Germany originally—the breed, not Disco here. She’s a California girl.”
Mira said, “I used to ride some. I was a girl near Bangalore, but my family moved to the UK when I was ten. I took lessons there, not that I ever got very good.”
“My sister-in-law’s family is from England,” Silas said.
“What part?”
“North. Liverpool.”
“Ah,” Mira said. “We were southern. Not far from London.”
“It’s a hell of a life, isn’t it?” Silas said. “You start off in India, go to England, and now you’re in California shearing llamas. Who could have predicted that?”
“No one,” Mira said and smiled.
“What was your path?” Maggie said.
“Me, I was born in a barn and never lef
t.”
“No plans to, I suppose,” Henry said.
Silas was overcome with pangs of homesickness. He knew with a new depth of understanding that he would never see his stable again. “Oh,” he said. “I guess I’ll keep riding for a while longer.”
The women said they had things to do around the house, projects, said goodbye to Silas, said they hoped to see him again, and excused themselves. Silas watched them ascend the hill and disappear around the corner of their house. Silas and Henry spent another half hour talking and filling up on coffee, and when conversation ran out Silas said, “I’d best be getting out of your hair.”
He brought Disco back into the barn and tacked her up. Henry had washed and dried and folded Silas’s clothes. Silas thanked him and slipped the still-warm fabric into the saddlebags. He removed the white button-down and untucked the T-shirt, but Henry said, “Keep them. The socks too.” Silas nodded a thank-you and shook the man’s hand. He buckled the saddlebags and winched the girth one more notch.
“Good-looking horse,” Henry said. “I’m glad to have met her.”
Silas left Henry there and led Disco up the incline to the house, where he wanted to thank the women for their kindness, and tossed the reins over the porch banister. He knocked on the screen door, waited a moment, went inside. The front room was empty and the table where they’d eaten half cleared. In the next room he found Maggie standing on the other side of the kitchen island, a newspaper spread out in front of her. She looked up at him in alarm, then fear. He didn’t need to see his own face staring out in black-and-white, but there he was. Motes of dust twisted in ribbons of window light. Neither Silas nor Maggie breathed.
“You call the cops yet?” he said finally, and then he spotted the phone clear across the room on the counter. He said, “There’s a lot more to it than whatever it says in that paper.”
“You need to leave,” Maggie said, voice tremulous.
“A whole lot more.”
“Leave now.”
“He really was a son of a bitch. I knew the guy my whole life. He was a son of a bitch if there ever was one.”
“Go away now.” He could see she was on the verge of a breakdown.
“Yeah, I’m going.” But he didn’t make a move. And he was suddenly overcome with anger at the woman. It was an anger that, even in the moment, he knew he couldn’t justify, and yet there it was radiating from some hard and ugly spot in the core of him. He was desperate, scared, and when he left to go wherever he was going, she would still be here, she and Mira and Henry, all of them comfortable and safe. But now, right there in that bright kitchen, he felt his own power in her trembling voice. It was something. Something he had.
“Is this what it’s come to?” he said. “A couple of lesbians living out here, their faggoty husband sleeping down in an outhouse. All of you trying to make a living off these ridiculous, stupid animals. This is America now?” He didn’t mean any of it and hated himself for it even as the words sliced past his teeth. He sounded like some mean and ignorant redneck, the kind of person he would normally disdain, the kind of person he’d always feared he really was. But at the same time, it felt like a great relief. A release. Simple, intoxicating anger against a simple, vulnerable target.
“Please,” Maggie said, her voice now barely there.
“Horses. Now there’s an animal worth the goddamn time.”
Silas took the cord of the phone and yanked it out of the wall and let it drop from his hand to the floor. The screen door banged shut behind him as he bounded down the porch steps.
He mounted his steed and they moved out of the shadow of the house and Silas looked back and saw Maggie and Mira peering down from an upstairs window, a cell phone in Mira’s hand. He kicked at Disco’s flanks and they moved fast and hard away from the house, back over a rise and into the valley where he’d met Henry the morning before, Disco’s hooves crushing and ripping the ground below. They jumped a cedar fence and took a fire road a quarter mile or so before breaking off across another meadow. But on the other side of the wind roaring across his ears, Silas could hear the faint cry of sirens. He pressed harder into the soft of Disco’s belly, and the horse put an extra hustle into her gallop. They jumped another fence and moved across a vast field, jumped again, dashed around the side of a humpback hill, and Silas saw a mile down the start of the redwoods. The horse was giving everything she had, and Silas’s heart pounded as he slapped and slapped at the old girl’s rump. He was up in the stirrups, hunched over. Disco took a particularly ambitious stride, and the back of her head smacked into Silas’s nose. Pain shot through his face and deep into his skull. His vision swam and he nearly toppled backward off his mount, but he regained his footing in the stirrups. Moments later he tasted the salt of blood and snot. Still they ran on. And still he heard the sirens, but from which direction Silas could not tell for sure. They became louder. Silas was banking on the cars, wherever they were, whatever they were, not making it over the treacherous terrain. No guarantees, though, and as fast as this horse was, she would soon need to slow.
They made it to the other side of the meadow and entered the dark of the great forest and Silas could feel the sweat that had slicked his back and arms go cold.
Eight
The cartilage that held Frank and Silas together wore away gradually, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t a moment when it finally snapped apart for good. Lena was there, and though she’d been witness and occasional party to their disagreements and tussles, she recognized the event as a watershed.
The day started early, at dawn. It was late October and fog rested on the surrounding hills like a whisper. Lena and Frank rolled up to the stable to find Silas already in the barn, his quarter horse Ace tied in the aisle. Silas himself was in his show breeches and boots, a crisp white shirt fastened at the top by a stock pin, though this was obscured for the moment by the dirt-and-manure-stained Carhartt he wore over it all. Lena and Frank, likewise gussied up, coaxed their sleepy-headed horses from their stalls, haltered and tied them, slid the blankets from their backs, and went to work with brushes and curry combs. Lena’s horse, a sweet palomino called Luckygirl on account of her touch-and-go breach birth four years before, dropped her head low while Lena picked her hooves.
Silas was just finishing braiding Ace’s mane, speaking softly to the gelding as he did. “There you go,” he said. “Handsome boy.” Lena was used to hearing these quiet conversations. Silas seemed to be in an ongoing dialogue with the horse species. She doubted he even realized he spoke aloud. As stubborn and wild as he could be, he was soft when it came to the horses they kept. Soft in a way that often irritated Frank but that Lena always found surprising and sweet.
When he was done with Ace, Silas brewed a pot of coffee. Frank ambled back to the car and retrieved a coffeecake they’d bought the night before. He cut it into wedges and ate a piece in two bites. Aside from Silas’s whispered coos, none of the three humans said a word for a good half hour. When the horses were ready, Lena and Frank and Silas led them to the trailer, hitched up earlier, and then the three of them donned their red coats. It was the first fox hunt of the year.
They drove to Nicasio, to the stable that within eighteen months would be Silas’s, and unloaded their horses. Others were already there, nearly all in red coats and stark white shirts and black helmets, nearly all drinking from thermoses of coffee or from glasses of the bloody marys being mixed in the back of a GMC pickup, and chattering about last year’s hunts. They weren’t real hunts, of course. No actual foxes involved. But the scent had been laid in the hours prior, and they all hoped the trail would be long and a bit tricky, with good lengthy gaps between to challenge the hounds leading the way. On the far side of the meadow, where the huntsmen and huntswomen had stashed their trailers and now stood holding their horses’ reins, the priest arrived, a black knit cap atop his head and white cassock dragging in the tall, brown grasses.
Frank and Silas each downed a drink and got another. A man came aro
und with a tray on which stood delicate glasses of port, and each of the boys took two. Since their father had passed nearly two years before, the brothers had taken to the bottle more often and more seriously, with what looked to be less enjoyment. More than she would have liked, Lena went to bed hours before Frank and in the morning would find their supply of whiskey and beer significantly diminished. God knew what Silas was up to back at the old Van Loy homestead, alone. It was when they were together, though, whether in a period of peace or war, that they drank with such abandon. They could be in a terrible row, arguing over bills or schedules or plans for the business, but neither would return from the kitchen or the bar without a drink for the other. Lena didn’t fault them—grief did things to a person—but it scared her each time she saw them passing the point of casual inebriation. Such fuel for such fire.
When everyone seemed sated, the hounds were released from their own trailer and gathered within a circle formed by riders and horses and spectators.
“It is said,” the priest began, pulling the cap from his head, “that Saint Hubert saw the sign of Christ while on a hunt. The cross was illuminated within the points of a buck’s horns, and he was converted. This is why he is the patron saint of the hunt, and why we invoke his good name on occasions such as this. This morning these are my parishioners.” He motioned to the pack rolling and playing and scuffling at his feet. “And I can think of no finer congregation. So we pray that the Lord keeps them safe and free of harm. We pray that they lead the masters true and keep them safe and free of harm. And while we’re at it, we pray for the fox, in spirit and absentia. May she be fleet-footed and as clever as her kind is known for. This is the blessing of the hounds, and may they be blessed indeed.” He took in hand the aspergillum and shook the holy water onto the pack.