Horse People

by Cary Holladay

  Unless it wasn’t simple. Maybe nobody’s is.

  Gordon shakes the lacquered jewelry box until it breaks. When Nelle says, “It’s all right,” he looks up, startled.

  He spies the things in her hand and asks, “What’s that?”

  “Nothing. Go outside,” she says. His lessons are over for the day. Saturday’s lessons are short and include drawing, which most of the boys enjoy. Iris tutors Gordon and his three older brothers. Iris is with the older boys now. A nanny is with the two babies. Gordon’s at an in-between age, all scabs and tattling. He reaches for Nelle’s wrist and hangs on, his fingers sticky, until she opens her palm. Why in God’s name didn’t her mother have pearls or sapphires?

  Gordon’s hand hovers over the combs. He says, “Look, there’s hair.”

  Only a monster would mail his wife’s hair to his daughter. He may as well have mailed her mother’s head. That bittern-like head and neck: Nelle sees her mother, plain as day. Ida Scott was happiest in her conservatory. For a moment Nelle is twelve again, at her mother’s side, the jet combs glittering in Ida’s hair, Ida deadheading creamy, exotic blossoms that exude perfume and decay. Were Ida’s fingers really so big that this massive ring, this bullnose ring, fit her?

  As if noticing the funereal look of the jewelry, Gordon asks, “Did somebody die?”

  “My mother died, your Grandmother Scott. You knew that.”

  Gordon shakes his head. Well, he was only three the last time her mother visited. Still, he’s not the brightest of her boys.

  Even now Nelle’s father, old Thaddeus Scott, might be at the races, gambling her money away. A fortune her mother inherited from her own father, who created dental instruments. Nelle is proud of her own teeth, strong cubes stained pale maize from coffee and well water.

  Gordon makes no move to touch the jewelry. Nehemiah had the sense to back away too. Nelle laughs. Gordon says, “Are you going to put it on?”

  “No.” It’s all so ghastly, she might as well wear dental tools. “I’ll give it to the birds.”

  “Will the birds eat it?” Gordon’s face is a map of confusion. He reminds her of someone. Who?

  “They might,” she says. She flaps her elbows at her sides, and Gordon bursts into tears.

  No sense of humor. A child should chuckle when its mother tries to make it laugh. “Hush,” she says “Do you want to be a biggie or a littlie? You’re acting like a littlie.”

  His mouth opens into a full-scale squall. Sometimes he gets hiccups when he’s upset. Once he had them two days running, though the other boys did their best to scare the hiccups out of him. She seizes Gordon and swats him on the bottom. He stops caterwauling, his face freezing into a faraway gaze, his profile suddenly familiar: Richard’s mother. Nelle’s mother-in-law, Fannie. It’s Fannie’s chin and red hair passed down in Gordon’s curls. Time to cut that hair.

  She jerks Gordon’s arm. “You are not to behave that way, not ever,” she says, “not at home, not in public. Do you understand?”

  He nods.

  “Go find Martha,” she says—the boys’ nanny.

  “I want Aunt Iris,” he says.

  “Aunt Iris is busy. Go to Martha.”

  He runs off clumsily. That too is a Fannie trait, that shuffling. Fannie is dead and Richard’s father Henry too. “It was too soon,” she once overheard Henry tell his son, meaning, too soon to take a Yankee bride. Fannie at least was through with the war, except to say how excited she’d been to find a needle in a crack in the floor one time; needles were scarce in wartime. Fannie at the end of her life was thin as the needle she talked about, yet the plates the maid retrieved from her room were empty, licked clean by Fannie’s cat.

  You cannot spare the rod. Nelle has used her hairbrush on her boys, if it’s handy, or a switch. Richard leaves the discipline to her. She won’t have brats or sissies or bullies for sons.

  It would be easier to be Lorna, to rear foals in a pasture, watching one grow up much like another, all long legs and hunger. Sycamores and black walnuts flourish in Nelle’s fields, and apple trees, with deep, dappled shade and fallen fruit for horses, wood pewees calling in the branches, and this time of year, hordes of tiny vireos powering themselves about. Greenlets, her mother called them. Nelle can’t wait to get outside again, to Lorna. Something is wrong, and all Lorna can do is carry the heavy, dying infant in her belly.

  Surely someone is watching Nelle. Alone in her entrance hall, she’s stranded, the scent of boiled tomatoes issuing from the kitchen, with too much brown sugar, her nose tells her. She feels an opaque, opalescent eye trained upon her, aqueous and disapproving.

  Will you be riding Lorna tomorrow afternoon? I would like to accompany you, Donald Laird’s note said, a year ago, slipped into her hands as she sat beside him at a dinner party. Later, Donald gave her other letters in person, saying, Read this later. She has them all, passionate letters tied with a green ribbon, in a drawer of her writing desk.

  It’s hot as blazes in the large dressing room that she uses also for her office. She generally devotes Saturday afternoons to correspondence, but today she shoves the desk drawer closed.

  Her displeasure focuses on the furniture around her.

  This desk and chair are part of a set her father gave her. Why keep anything that reminds her of him? She goes to the bedroom she shares with Richard. Her chest of drawers is part of the set, so that will go too, out to one of the sheds, and a cheval mirror that needs resilvering. Her face wavers in the spotty glass. Dark patches show on her cheeks, sunburn that used to fade by this time of year.

  She might telephone Wanamaker’s up in Philadelphia and ask Mr. Jacobsen, manager of the furniture department, to choose some beautiful items and ship them.

  From her linen closet she takes pillowcases, and into them she empties the drawers: Donald’s letters, her own stationery, fountain pens, scissors, and stamps. She could make the popinjay laugh, and she’d rarely made anybody laugh. The popinjay would really roar, throwing back his balding head with its little frill of hair. “Whew, that felt good,” he’d say. Her mother had met him before he became Nelle’s lover. Nelle’s mother had scolded her, saying, “You appear to enjoy quite a social life apart from your husband,” to which Nelle replied, “Why not, Mother?” It was innocent then, luncheons and drives, and she spent more time as part of a group, with other women included, and married couples. Why not, when better roads made it easy to go back and forth to each other’s houses, or take off for vacation at a moment’s notice? The Lynes once decided at a hunt breakfast to drive their new motorcar to Virginia Beach, and the party continued after they waved good-bye.

  The popinjay had howled when she described how her mother made Nelle and her brothers, as children, open their mouths so she could sniff out rot. Ida Scott, ever the dentist’s daughter.

  She upends the last desk drawer. All that falls out is dust.

  If her father would die, that would solve everything. The thought freezes her. Her boys’ voices reach her from outside. In spring she’ll enroll the older two at an academy of good repute. She does not believe Iris is capable of teaching past the earliest years.

  If her father were to die.

  Oh—she’s not ready for that. Yet what if it just happened? Her brother Russell fell off an Alp, and that fast, his powers of reasoning, self-control, intellect, and even basic abilities were gone. Thus Mr. Hull, who cares for him, ageless Mr. Hull of the hunched shoulders and soft, agreeable voice, always with a tray in his hands, Mr. Hull who has been assured a place in the family crypt.

  Quite a social life apart from your husband. Well, her mother ought to know. How about the time Nelle’s father left Ida behind to go to the Klondike gold fields, with an expensive camera and a buckskin suit made by the best tailor on the Main Line? The whole family was just back from the Far East, but Thaddeus Scott packed his bags again. Ida nursed a cold fury through the rest of 1898, snapping deadies off the stinking tropical flowers in her conservatory, all bustle and blac
k bombazine, a ship in full sail among spiked leaves and powdery petals. Fifteen-year-old Nelle studied maps, tracing her father’s route to the Territory. In 1899, Thaddeus Scott returned at last, whiskery and thin. He thrust a tiny canvas bag at Nelle and her brothers—gold dust—before he and Ida locked themselves in their room. Nelle heard a single shout, then silence.

  She is tired of people coming up to her porch on Saturdays, colored people and poor whites, to consult with Richard, miller and farmer, Richard who is also a judge of the county’s Juvenile and Domestic Court. They roost and gather, men who have tired of wives, women ill-treated by husbands, sometimes both parties of a couple, to make sure there is no doubt in the mind of Judge Fenton that they want to quit each other. Mothers, fathers, and the occasional grandparent or guardian stops by to plead the case of a troublesome son or daughter.

  “Make them stop coming here. Court’s the place for that,” she tells Richard.

  He frowns. “If I can keep a marriage together, save a wayward youngster…”

  Nelle abandons the rest of her plan, which was to ask that he stop giving away the modest check the county pays him. He donates the money to a boys’ home.

  “The people who come to me are having a hard time, Nelle,” he says. “If it helps them to talk before they’re in court, then that’s what they should do.”

  I don’t love you. Never did. Their honeymoon comes back to her, a tedious week in Cape May, New Jersey. She’d visited there many times, but the place was new to Richard. Hayseed. I could have done much better. She spent her time reading in their rented bungalow while he walked the beach. Who ever went to a northern beach in March? She should have insisted on San Francisco, or Greece, which she longs to see.

  Oh, marriage, this state of being harried and pestered.

  She can’t imagine Richard’s life, living for the small triumph of keeping a man and wife together. Yet couples go away laughing, whirling down the Fentons’ driveway like they’re off to a dance, while Richard sinks back in his wicker chair, smoking his pipe, petting the dog. It’s so damn hard being married to a saint. Oh, one or two of their friends have gotten a divorce, but you just don’t. Barry Woolfolk left Amy Woolfolk for a woman he met at the fair, some hoyden selling Karo kisses for five cents each. The lawyer, Ambrose, handled their divorce. It would be too awful if Nelle and Richard’s friends turned up on the porch, airing marital grievances.

  The memory of her honeymoon chills her, literally. Richard had begged to go there. He’d never gotten enough of the sea. Lonely and cold, Cape May was, in that season between winter and spring. Even as a child she was bored there, with tame fireworks on the Fourth of July and confectioneries where she and her brothers ate ice cream under their mother’s watchful glare. Lonely on her honeymoon, and awed by the rough waves. Richard’s figure grew tiny as he ventured down the sand. His nose was cold as he held Nelle in his arms. “Come out with me,” he said, but she was afraid of that gray surf that was nothing like the waves of childhood summers, and she stayed inside.

  She checks on Lorna a dozen times a day, convinced she’ll find her dead, a slick blue sac beside her, flies swarming. Nelle’s love of horses came to her from God, though she doesn’t believe in God the way Iris and her friends do, annoying women who pray in the parlor and complain about tetters and kidney trouble. Nelle leaves them to Iris, feeling the weight of their gossip on her back. “I’m waiting on the Lord’s answer,” the women declare about the trifling matters that make up their lives.

  Predestination. That’s what Presbyterianism is based on. Richard goes every Sunday to the church just across the field. Sometimes Nelle goes with him, though she still belongs officially to the Episcopal church in Devon, Pennsylvania. “A contract,” the preacher likes to say. “Our Lord gave His word in writing and signed it with the blood of His son. Don’t you feel better when you’ve got something in writing?”

  In their pews, farmers and their families nod assent.

  “Inked in blood,” the preacher says, “a guarantee of eternal life.”

  Nelle thinks about eternity when she gazes at the sky. Who doesn’t think about it then, one’s own death?

  Unknowable, that future, everlasting life, and nothing she expects she would enjoy.

  The pockets of her jacket sag with her mother’s jewelry. Today she’ll get rid of it, all of it. She opens the pasture gate and is surprised by an ache in her shoulders. It takes ten minutes to walk to the crest of the hill, where she arranges the brooch and combs and ring one way and then another, wondering if she’s being watched from the house. The jet beads glint in the afternoon sun. The brooch is a chipped cameo, a woman’s profile carved from some kind of gray shell or stone. She examines the mourning ring. Whose braided hair is trapped beneath the oval of glass?

  “Won’t you ride with me?” she once implored her mother.

  “How can I?” Ida fumed, meaning, with only one eye.

  Nelle laughed, and her mother never liked her after that.

  Is it her imagination, or are her husband and sons avoiding her? She’d expected someone to follow her. Only Lorna climbs the hill to meet her, mane blowing in the light wind, body rippling with the easy walk Nelle so admires, the gait for which she bought her.

  The wind is soft in Nelle’s ears and against her cheek, the sun so strong it’ll tan her skin. Let crows carry off ring, pin, and combs in their beaks and talons. Ida’s gray hair might be the prize. Nelle tries not to touch it, even as she turns the combs so they catch the light. Is this how you make a sundial like the one in her garden, invoking some logic of the sky? Who was it who positioned that sundial when the house and garden were new? A clockmaker from Locust Dale. He adjusted the dial on its pedestal, squinting up at the sky and down at the brass numerals, checking his pocket watch. At last he showed Nelle and Richard that their sundial was a working timepiece, wedges of shadow chasing the hours.

  This place on the hilltop, with her mother’s jewelry: she marks the spot in her mind, like a grave. Lorna nuzzles her shoulders.

  She could buy back the colts, Lorna’s colts. As soon as the thought hits her, she’s wild to accomplish it. She hurries down the hill. On the fence sits a shrike, feathered shoulders hunkering. Nelle looks beside the shrike for prey impaled nearby and spies a grasshopper wriggling on a nail.

  Buy the colts back no matter what the cost. Even the one she gave Donald Laird. Especially that one, a promising filly. To give her away was crazy. She lied to Richard that she’d sold it. By the time she reaches the house she’s out of breath. She goes to the telephone and can’t talk fast enough. “Come tonight. Put the horse in a trailer or ride it over here. I’ll drive you home. Just come.”

  So they bring Lorna’s progeny, long since grown out of colthood, and the gathering turns into a party. Nelle has Edmonia serve supper on the terrace: creamed chicken on toast points, baked tomatoes, bread pudding with caramel sauce. The boys eat hungrily and then disappear. Richard talks to the guests with the air of a man keeping something to himself; he thinks she has lost her mind.

  Emmett Baker and his wife bought the first of the foals twelve years ago and had him gelded. He is seventeen hands high and has brought in a nice purse. Marjorie Coad rode over on the second colt herself. It was too much for a woman her age. She is lying down in the guest room upstairs, Iris tending her with hot tea. Well, Marjorie can spend the night, or Richard can take her home. Nelle will send Nehemiah up with the whiskey bottle. That’ll do Marjorie more good than tea.

  They can all spend the night, for all Nelle cares. Lorna’s offspring are stowed in the big barn, with the stable boy putting out feed. They’ll be turned out in a pasture tomorrow. Nelle greeted them in silence, afraid she would cry when her friends surrendered them.

  She leaves her guests and goes inside to write the checks for the enormous sums she has offered, amounts that stunned the owners. Emmett Baker protested until his wife said with a toothy grin, “Thank you, Nelle. That’ll do just fine.”

&n
bsp; Lucky thing she reached them all by phone, one after another, even the popinjay, though he balked, saying, “I gave that horse to Lucy,” meaning his fiancée.

  “Get it back,” Nelle said. “I’ll pay Lucy or pay you, if I have to.”

  He was silent for a long time, then said, “You gave her to me. You don’t have to pay me.” He would have his groom bring her in the morning, he said.

  Now, in her room upstairs, Nelle tears the checks out of the book. She turns off the light, and from her window surveys the group outside. In the moonlight they’re gray-skinned, lovely, unearthly. Footsteps, and Richard’s voice. “Nelle?” The light comes on, too bright. “Nelle,” he says, “you don’t need all of Lorna’s youngsters. She’s about to have another one. What are you thinking?”

  “That foal will never be, Richard. It’s already dead.”

  “No.” He hurries to her, and in the harsh light he looks younger, not like the old judge who sits on the porch. “Lorna’s like you; she’ll come through this birth with a beautiful baby to show for it.” She lets him gather her in his arms. He says, “I’ll tell them you’ve gone to bed. They’ve finished supper. The Bakers are taking Marjorie home.”

  Nelle is tired and suddenly cold, but she’s never been the kind of hostess who retires before her guests leave. “Hand me my hat, Richard,” she says. A new fur cloche, sleek and lightweight, made of sable. She pulls it on, tucking her hair beneath it, and instantly she’s warm.

  She pays her guests and they depart, and then she’s alone. On the terrace, the tablecloth glows white in the moonlight. Edmonia is nowhere to be seen, nor Nehemiah, and if they don’t clear and put away, there’ll be foxes and skunks jumping up on the table.

  Richard’s tenderness surprised her.