The Horseman

by Tim Pears

  The first anthill was at the edge of a grove of conifers, a mound amidst the pine needles. Sid explained that the anthill was composed of rubble from the subterranean colonies. The insects excavated tunnels and chambers and brought the grains of soil up to the top of the hill. He had watched them, Sid said, and Leo should do the same. A person could learn a great deal from ants. He said that in hot weather like this the workers moved their larvae up towards the top of the anthill. He handed his brother the shovel. Leo dug into the mound and turned over the load to reveal hundreds of white eggs amongst the dry sandy soil. Sid held the tray and nodded in such a way as to indicate that his brother should transfer a shovelful to it. Leo did so. Sid shook the griddle until all the soil had fallen through the holes, leaving only the eggs. Ants that were caught up in these machinations struggled furiously to retrieve the eggs and return them to where they should be. Sid poured the eggs into one of the buckets, and thus the Sercombe boys continued. They filled the buckets and walked back towards the rearing field.

  Leo asked his brother if he did not feel sorry for the insects, that their labours which he so admired should be for naught. Sid shook his head and told Leo that he would never make a gamekeeper, he had not the stomach for it. Nor had he the interest in all of God’s creation. He should stick to his horses, his jades and screws and suchlike pad-nags, to whose limited array of behaviours he was better suited. Leo told him quietly that he intended to.

  August

  Albert Sercombe oiled the waggon wheels and greased the turn-tables. He tied a pair of ropes to the back of his waggon, coiled them and dropped them into the bed. Herbert did likewise to the second waggon. Albert laid two-tined forks of varying length against the outside wall of the barn in the stack yard. He called his son over and pointed to the longest one. ‘Do you remember what this one’s for?’

  Leo nodded. His father was a tall man and Leo estimated that the fork was as long as him and half as long again. Amos Tucker measured by paces the size of the base of a stack and Isaac Wooland the stockman laid old straw upon the ground where so directed.

  Uncle Enoch and the boy’s brother Fred prepared their waggons. All the horses save for Pleasant were hitched. Dunstone was in the middle of the yard though no one had seen him come. He might have emerged from beneath a cart or a nest in the dung-heap. The spinster Mildred Daw studied the two-tined forks against the wall. She selected two and held them together up against her, the tines on the ground. One came up to her nose, the other to her forehead. She replaced the latter and went over to Albert and climbed up on to the waggon. Isaiah Vagges greeted Amos Tucker loudly. ‘Sap’s dried out a the stalks?’ he yelled.

  ‘Good to see you, Isaiah,’ the farmer said. ‘Glad you got my message.’

  Isaiah Vagges slapped Isaac Wooland on the back as Isaac bent, continuing to place straw as the foundation of a stack, and said, ‘Still followin them cows around?’

  Isaac lost his balance and stumbled but regained it. Before he could remonstrate with Isaiah the old farmhand had moved on. He was full of good cheer and regaled each person in the yard, coming in time to Leo and saying, ‘Not yet decided to grow, boy?’ He came close and put an arm on Leo’s shoulder. He smelled of turpentine and linseed oil, and something else the boy could not identify, components of some home-made embrocation for his rheumatism. ‘Don’t worry, boy, once ye start ye’ll grow tall as yon old man there.’

  He greeted Mildred Daw with some witticism the boy could not make out, and which she ignored entirely. Seeing that she had nabbed by choice or by appointment the job of Albert’s forker, Isaiah chose a fork for himself and joined Herbert.

  The boy lay in the waggon behind his father and Mildred Daw, bumping and rattling over the dry ground. The sky was white and empty. He saw but one bird. It flew like an arrow overhead, aiming for its destination. When they reached the far end of Dutch Barn Field Albert called out, ‘Whoa,’ and the waggon came to a leisurely halt. Mildred Daw climbed down, clutching the fork she’d chosen, and speared two sheaves from the nearest stook so swiftly that the boy had to clamber over the far side of the waggon to avoid being hit as she swung her fork and with a jerk of the wrist flipped the sheaves into the bed of the waggon. Albert climbed in. He had his own, shorter fork and shifted the sheaves into the position he desired.

  The boy took his place beside Captain, the nearside horse. He watched Mildred Daw fork the sheaves of barley and his father loading the waggon. Each sheaf as he laid it bound the one before. He packed the body of the waggon, then placed sheaves on the sloping sides and across each end. It did not seem that every sheaf overlapped the one below but the boy surmised that it must have for the load became gradually longer and wider than the waggon as it rose.

  He watched his father and Mildred Daw. Neither spoke to the other, nor could he see any wave of hand or nod of head that might indicate a request for where to hurl the next sheaf. He found he could not tell which of the two of them decided the manner in which the waggon was loaded. Albert worked from the front to the back, then vice versa, placing the sheaves lengthways. The ears of barley always pointed inwards, yet the boy could not see his father turning sheaves on the waggon, so it seemed that Mildred tossed them to him facing the way he required. The only commands his father gave were to his son, for the boy to move the horses forward. They made their way across the great field back towards the gate.

  When the load was as tall as he was, Albert began to build the ends higher than the middle and the whole load narrower. They had almost reached the gate when, with a single row of sheaves, Albert completed the load. ‘That should do it,’ he called down.

  Mildred Daw took the ropes they’d let fall behind the waggon and threw them up to Albert. She walked round to the front and he dropped them to her and she secured them to the hooks below.

  The carter slid and clambered to the ground. Mildred walked around the waggon, prodding her fork into a corner, pushing the barley a little tighter.

  ‘How many sheaves you reckon’s on?’ Albert asked. Mildred pondered. Albert said, ‘Three hundred?’

  She nodded. ‘I reckon.’

  He smiled. ‘Gaffer’ll count em.’

  Albert climbed onto Captain and rode him side-saddle out of the field, watching the load behind him shake and sway with every irregularity in the ground and the rutted tracks along the lane. The boy rode on Coal beside him. Mildred waited in the field. The waggon creaked and rolled.

  In the yard Albert Sercombe untied the ropes. Leo pulled them over the top of the load. They fell upon him and he coiled one and then the other. Isaac Wooland rested a ladder against the waggon and climbed onto the load, and straightaway tossed sheaves down to the base of old straw he had recently laid. Amos Tucker laid the sheaves around the outside of his stack.

  Albert took the ladder and placed it against the wall where some forks yet unused still rested. Amos Tucker defined the shape of the stack with the first row of sheaves. It was a little wider than the base of old straw. The second row half overlapped the first, moving inward. He continued stacking around until the centre was reached. Then he returned to the outside and worked around it, this time overlapping outwards. Each sheaf he stepped on as he placed it, firming it down with his considerable weight. Suddenly the waggon was empty, and Isaac Wooland was standing in the empty bed. He climbed out. Albert was already sitting on Captain. He did not wait but commanded the horses forward. The boy followed behind, and climbed up into the empty waggon.

  They returned to the field. Mildred Daw was waiting for them on the far side. Herbert meanwhile had plotted his own course from one stook to the next and had almost reached the gate. The boy judged that Herbert’s load was not as high as his father’s but Herbert tied it down.

  ‘Don’t worry, lad,’ they heard Isaiah Vagges call to him. ‘Tis tight’s a gnat’s arse. This load would carry clear to Taunton.’

  Amos Tucker’s daughters brought food and drink to the field and the harvesters stopped to rest in the shadows
of hedgerow trees. Albert slaked his thirst with cold tea but Isaiah Vagges guddled cider and Herbert copied him until his carter said, ‘Steady, lad.’ Isaiah was known as the architect of his own downfall, a fine worker whose weakness for all forms of alcohol had rendered him unreliable. When sober he was such a grafter and an optimist that he’d been given second chances on every farm on the estate, and beyond, by men and women each one of whom he’d let down. He would be lured by wastrels and by his own nature into drinking bouts and be incapacitated at crucial times. He would disappear for days or weeks on end. His wife took their child and returned to her family in Minehead. He would pick fights when drunk and suffered dreadful injuries. All this Leo had heard when his parents gossiped with each other of a winter evening. There’d been reports of Isaiah Vagges as a young man in the inns of Exeter and of Barnstaple. He was jailed in Okehampton. Whenever he returned all were glad to see him, save for those few who found his friendliness an intrusion. Now he was old.

  ‘I swear,’ Isaiah said, as they lay digesting their morning bait, ‘every time I see thee, Mildred Daw, ye wears more items a men’s clothing than before.’

  The spinster turned away, as if to study the far hedge.

  ‘I mean not to offend thee,’ Isaiah said.

  Albert rose to his feet. ‘Well, them waggons won’t load their selves,’ he said. ‘You can sweat some a that cider out.’

  Each time the boy returned with his father with a new load to the yard, Amos Tucker had built the stack higher with Herbert’s intervening waggonload of barley. Albert fetched a barrow of vetches and placed it for the horses to help themselves. On occasion he brought in buckets of water for them to drink. Amos Tucker built his stacks in the oblong shape of a house, with walls rising at an outward slant. At times Isaac Wooland threw sheaves down to him, at others he tossed them up, and for brief periods the waggonload and the rising stack were at the same height and the two men could have stepped across and swapped position if they had a mind to.

  Amos Tucker removed his jacket. His waistcoat bulged like some odd men’s corset, his white shirt was wet with sweat and his face some colour midway between a radish and a beetroot, yet he worked with a calm authority. He built the house, then he built the roof, now stacking sheaves in a ridge along the centre of the stack and laying others out at an angle like the tiles of a house, the last overlapping the stack below.

  Returning to the field, Albert spoke to his son. ‘Impressive, the gaffer, eh?’ The boy nodded. ‘He can build a stack and not come down all day. Has his bait thrown up to him. Answers the call a nature with a piss over the side. When I’ve to build one, I’m up and down that ladder to make sure it’s not leanin, I don’t mind tellin you nor no one. And barley what he’s workin with now’s more inclined to slip than wheat. No, boy, I’m glad I’m not doin it. Leave me with the horses.’

  They worked until it was too dark to see. The last load they brought to the yard beside the stack and covered with sheets. Amos Tucker felt his way down the ladder to the ground. The boy lit a paraffin stable lamp and held it for his father to unyoke the horses. The work was not arduous for the beasts. They had spent much of the day at ease. As soon as they were stripped of their harness the carters turned them into the pasture for they had no sweat on their bodies and there was plentiful grass to graze on.

  Albert and his sons Fred and Leo walked home. Ruth had a meal of vegetable stew enlivened by bacon fat awaiting them. Albert told his wife how the day had gone. He told her Mildred Daw was steady as ever, and that Isaiah Vagges was still a bibbling fool. He told her Pleasant would soon be of little use and that the filly would before too long be ready to replace her. The boys ate in silence and climbed the stairs to their bedroom and slept.

  August

  Ruth Sercombe spoke of her dowry only if another commented upon it. This had happened just once to the boy’s knowledge, for visitors rarely entered the parlour. Leo studied the china. ‘Staffordshire blue and white,’ his mother had named it to the vicar in a tone that assumed he could not fail to be impressed. The boy scrutinised the blue pictures. Of ancient cities or parts thereof, pillars and entranceways to huge buildings that would make the Manor House seem tiny. People outside were pouring water into baths or courting. He put the plate down carefully, muting china on china.

  There was a case of books, leather- or board-bound. A Holy Bible with pages made of thin crisp paper. Ruth’s husband could not read and her older children had not wished to. Kizzie did everything well at school. Perhaps she would be a teacher. Leo looked through one of his favourites, Everyman’s Handbook. It was inscribed: To Ruth Penhaligon from Miss Hare, Penzance Church of England High School, 1889. He opened it at random and learned that apples are preserved by packing them in sawdust. He read a list of winners of the Derby. A proverb taught that it is better to ride on an ass that carries me, than on a horse that throws me.

  Leo heard the back door open and his father enter the kitchen next door, greeting Ruth and being greeted by her. The boy breathed silently. He knew the scene so well he could almost see it through the wall. They had a wooden table, four chairs and one wooden armchair. His father’s. Mother used it if he was out. Now she rose, relinquished the chair to him, shifted the kettle to the hotplate. He was back for breakfast. Fred would soon follow. Leo could hear the sounds of preparation.

  ‘Seen the boy?’ Albert asked.

  ‘Is he not with you?’ Ruth said. ‘Must be still abed.’

  His father said no more. His mother said, ‘What troubles you, man?’

  There was a long pause. Then, ‘He never asks nothin.’

  The sounds Leo’s mother made ceased. He pictured her leaning back against the rail of the stove.

  ‘I want to learn him what I know,’ the carter said. ‘Horses trust him, see?’

  ‘He watches,’ Ruth told him. ‘All the time. Didn’t you tell me you picked it up off of your father the same way?’

  The kettle whistled. Leo heard his mother remove it and pour water into the teapot.

  ‘I want him to have the best job on this estate one day,’ his father said. ‘On the stud farm or in the master’s stable. I don’t want no other bastard’s son to come before ours.’

  ‘The master won’t live for ever.’

  ‘Aye, the poor master.’

  ‘Left with just that headstrong girl a his. What’ll happen when the master’s gone?’

  ‘It’s naught to do with us, mother. Things’ll carry on one way or another. Naught for us to worry over.’

  The boy bent and untied the laces of his boots and removed them. Scarcely breathing, holding a boot in each hand, he climbed the stairs in his socks, step by step. In the room he shared with Fred he sat on his bed and pulled the boots back on. He tied the laces as before, then rose and clumped downstairs to breakfast.

  September

  The poorest of the village came to the estate at certain times. One was harvest. As the first field of corn was being carted so they came. Mothers pushing children in prams, widows, spinsters. One of the old women wore a granny bonnet tied beneath her chin. As the last load left the first field of wheat those who had gathered at the gate went on to the stubble. They walked the sun-burned ground picking up single ears of corn. Bent over, they picked with one hand and passed the ears to the other. When each bunch was too large to carry they tied it with straw and put it aside. How each woman knew which bunch was hers Leo did not know. Perhaps the gleaners each twisted their tie of straw such as to scrawl their signature. The old woman in the bonnet said that gleaning was not what it was since the new-fangled binders came and her friend said new horse-rakes cleaned up all but the last few ears of corn. The bunches were gathered in the evening, or when the field had been scoured, into large sheaves in the shape of rosettes of wheat, which they carried home to their cottages.

  The boy’s mother said it would be good to turn their poultry out in the stubble for the corn. Amos Tucker said his pigs would benefit the more. But neither dared rais
e it with the master. Albert Sercombe told them both the gleaners had the right to the leftover corn, it was the only right he knew of that had survived the enclosures. The cottagers would rub the corn out from the ears by hand in the evenings and on wet winter days, and the miller would give them one day of his time to grind their corn to flour.

  Rain interrupted the harvest. On wet days, while Amos Tucker fretted, the carters and their lads drew straw for thatching the stacks, stripping lengths of wheat of its foliage and tying them in bundles. This year Leopold joined them. The work was unending for if all went well the yard would be full with ten or more stacks of wheat or oats or barley to be given a rain-proof roof. And it was dreary, for though it required little exertion the discomfort of sitting or standing in the same posture for hour upon hour had a more demoralising effect than hard labour to which their bodies and minds were accustomed.

  ‘If I were the gaffer,’ Herbert said, ‘I’d ask the master to build a couple or three big Dutch barns for storin my corn.’

  ‘If you was the gaffer,’ Albert told him, ‘you’d last no longer than the bad steward in the Good Book. It’d be slapdash here and bodge it there.’

  Dunstone joined them in the barn for it was work that he could do, if at a slow pace for he measured each strand of wheat and cut it precisely with his knife so that he produced one bundle for another’s ten but each was perfect.

  They grew irritable and bored, and welcomed Isaiah Vagges, who like Mildred Daw was paid half his daily wage when it rained if he so wished to help with this chore.

  ‘I’ll be thatchin,’ he told them, ‘so’s I best keep an eye on you sluggards. Lost in reveries and dreamin a fair women. I don’t want my bundles all a mish-mash. Here, lad,’ he said, addressing Fred Sercombe. ‘Ave you heard of the manner in which Mildred here dealt with her suitor back when us was young? I’ll tell thee.’ He turned to the subject of the story. ‘I’ll tell them, Mildred, for it casts but a fond light upon thee. But do not interrupt me if ye think the details wrong, I beg ye.’