The Grey Horse

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  “Never doubt me. First he came out to visit the grain bins, and I found him standing there, peacefully, assessing our supplies. I put him back after that and made sure the latch had fallen. Next he was out calling on the little red girl, and she hiding behind the stall door in terrible timidity. (I wish I had that effect upon her.) This time I closed the top door on him as well.”

  “It isn’t closed now,” said Anraí, but not chidingly, for Donncha usually knew what he was about.

  The groom glanced at the stall of the grey horse and then glanced at it again. “Indeed, it isn’t.”

  Anraí walked the length of the damp, stone barn until he came to the loose-box, which was large and airy, made really for foaling. The horse stepped forward and waited for him.

  It was the same glimmering as the priest’s white lace frock at the mass, and the skin under the hair was black, casting a light of silver over the whole. Its dark eyes closed like the silent wingbeats of an owl. Anraí caught his breath.

  “You’ve cleaned him up,” was what he said to Donncha.

  “Barely. A brush and a bucket. Clippers on the head of him: he makes no trouble in that way. He’ll need more to be presentable.”

  All this was only Donncha’s modesty. He was an artist with horses, though not Anraí’s equal as a rider. He could take a shapeless rug of grey hair and force the attention and the admiration of all the horse-appreciating world. For this animal he had carved out the great eyes, and with four little snips, revealed the tiny, thoughtful ears, which by their minuteness multiplied the size and strength of the neck. Underneath, by shaving lightly under the chin, he had shown off that muzzle which was so oddly delicate compared with the strength of the horse’s jaw and neck.

  And behind the heavy round plates at the base of its jaw he had made a few tiny clips and revealed the throatlatch as clean and arched as a two-year-old blood colt’s.

  Anraí flipped the latch and slid in, shoving with his hip lest the horse use that opportunity to escape again. He walked around the quietly attentive horse, and everything he saw was a fresh excuse for admiration. “Look at those forelegs, my friend. There’s no more ‘jewelry’ upon them than upon an equestrian statue.”

  Donncha leaned over the top door, grinned, and scraped one hand over his own, unshaven chin. “Well, there’re no splints, anyway. Probably means the old boy’s had no work in his life.”

  “Never believe it, Donncha. He knows where to put his feet, is all,” Anraí walked behind, grabbing the still-quite-yellow tail in his hand and stroking the beast’s thigh and gaskin.

  “I hear there’s a letter from Seosamh come today,” offered Donncha uncertainly, but Anraí was not hearing and the groom did not dare to repeat.

  “I think you might use his hooves to cut biscuits.” Anraí was now stroking the black sole of one of these perfect round feet with his hand. Its cleanness struck him, and he peered up around the yellow bracken that carpeted the loose-box. “Is he bound up, do you think?”

  Donncha’s grin exposed all his uneven teeth. “Not so. That was his other evening’s errand—going out into the bushes like a Christian.”

  Anraí’s face folded in little wrinkles away from his faded blue eyes. He edged out of the box door again. “A Christian! That he’s not. Well, it’s too bad, if he has such nice instincts, that we have to restrain him, but when I think of the devil that sits between those pointy white ears, I wish I had seven padlocks on him, and each of them blessed at the church font!” As he spoke, Anraí shoved the iron latch into its socket and then swung the top half of the door shut and did the same for it.

  Donncha scratched at the hair that was in his ears with his good hand. “Anraí, you’re in deadly danger of the sin of idol worship with that horse, and I don’t know why.”

  “You don’t know why?” Anraí’s normally quiet voice doubled in volume. “You brushed, washed, and shaved the contours of that beast’s frame and you don’t know why?”

  “I don’t.” Donncha sat himself on a hay bale, took a slow breath into his belly, and prepared for argument. “There’s no direct fault in him, but still, what good? I would have to say I prefer the type of that filly there, though I haven’t any reason to love her today. She’s a Thoroughbred, while this is a chance meeting of someone’s pony mare and a whistling stranger.”

  There was no change in Anraí Ó Reachtaire’s face, except that it had gone turkey-cock red. “Donncha son of Eibhlín, you have a few tricks but there’s no soundness to you. That filly has yellow hooves the thickness of my thumbnail and no more brain than any of Áine’s laying hens. And cow hocks. And I’m not too certain of her vision on the right side, which you should thank God for, as otherwise she might have broken your head instead of your hand. You can commend your soul to heaven if that grey horse ever decides to strike a blow at you, for he has brain where she has only … only nerves.”

  Unshaken, Donncha smiled more broadly than ever. “Yet her cow hocks and her nerves may win me fifty pounds, racing, which the brain of that bog splasher in there will not. What do I care for a horse’s thinking, when what I want is for it to echo my own?”

  Anraí knew that this was a made-up argument and that Donncha no more preferred the weedy chestnut filly to the grey than he had fifty pounds to wager. Every night that Anraí came out to the barns, which was almost every night, Donncha could be relied upon to produce some outrageous statement that would keep him there as long as possible. Anraí knew this, but as he was going back to a house with a fire and a spinet and a wife who heated bricks for him, and as Donncha was going to bed down in the empty stall between Squire Blondell’s big hunter and the aforementioned filly, it seemed ungenerous not to give the groom his argument.

  “Fifty years with horses, Donncha—and I have done my own share of racing and of wagering—has taught me that it’s the clever horses that win races, time after time. And as for this grey horse …” Anraí leaped forward and snapped the top latch open. The half door fell open forcefully and banged into the stone wall, for the horse had been leaning its head against it. The beast blinked a bit foolishly.

  “… this horse has it in him to win a thousand races.”

  Donncha snorted derisively. “Make sense, Anraí! This is a workhorse! He has ribs like a barrel.”

  “You have a headlike a barrel, Donncha MacSiadhail. There are all sorts of races to be bet on: hurdles, steeplechasing, town-to-town—and for all but a short distance on a shaved track, I’d put my money on this Connemara lad. If I were riding him, I would.”

  The ragged, bristly face of the horse groom went from cunning to blank with surprise. “You can’t mean that, Anraí.”

  In fact, Anraí had been so stung (knowingly stung, but stung nonetheless) by his groom’s aspersions that he hardly had known what he was saying. But he put one veined old hand up against the horse’s neck and he repeated, “If I were riding him, I would.”

  The grey horse lowered its head until its silver-black muzzle rested on the top point of Anraí’s shoulder. Donncha pointed, for it seemed to him that in another moment his employer and longtime friend would be bitten, not noticing. But Anraí was well aware of the horse’s muzzle on his shoulder, and when the black-lipped mouth with its square teeth opened over the flesh and bone, so near his neck, he did not move.

  With elaborate calmness, almost courtesy, the horse rocked Anraí back and forth by the shoulder three times. Then it released him, turned its hindquarters, and walked away to the far wall of the stall. Anraí looked away, at the far stone wall of the barn, and then quietly he closed the upper door once more.

  Donncha was not a restless sleeper, and he did not know whether he had been half awake or all dreaming when he saw the long white body and the black-kneed legs of the new horse passing by his nest of hay. He rose, scratched out his ears, and found the horse lying at full length in the still-impeccable bracken, snoring gently. The top door was open and the bottom unlatched.

  At the same hour of the night, Anr
aí sat up in bed. “Was I dreaming or did someone tell me I got a letter from that viper son of mine?”

  “It’s I who got the letter and I who told you,” said Áine from under the pillow, where she kept her face in sleeping. “But I’m not going to trade my sleep for a brawl about it.”

  Anraí, grabbed the counterpane in tight fists and yanked up on it. Áine heard the hiss of a seam, giving way, and she sighed.

  Anraí would not lie down again. “How much?”

  “Not now.”

  “Just tell me the amount, woman. I won’t stint my horses for that boy’s debts one more time.”

  “You never did, old man. You stinted yourself instead, and your wife as well. He only wants ten pounds toward a uniform, so there’s no cause for melodrama.”

  “Ten pounds!” The ripping sound was louder. “Do you know how hard my man Donncha works for ten pounds? Or myself, for that matter.”

  “I know how hard I work for nothing at all, and without sleep,” answered Áine. She put both hands over the pillow, pressing it against her one ear, while she pressed her head into the soft feather mattress below, and she did not come out again that night.

  Not the next day but the one after, Anraí rode down to Carraroe again to pick up the cob he had left lame. It was an errand, said Áine, that might as well or better be left to Donncha, what with Anraí’s age and the soaking he had gotten two days before.

  But Anraí Ó Reachtaire would as soon have given his wife to Donncha as trade the chance to ride his new Spanish horse, on a day that glistened like summer.

  Anraí had not been to Spain, but he had many times been to London in the course of his occupation, and had a great respect for the grey horses he had watched at the amphitheater, so much like his own Connemara beasts, and for the trainers who taught more than jumping breakneck over fences. So as he progressed down the Cois Fhairrge Road under January sunlight, he explored various possibilities.

  The horse he rode bore very little resemblance to the yellow-tailed creature with sticks in its mane that he had found so recently. Given all yesterday morning and a free hand, Donncha had turned it into a carving of white marble, close clipped, with a neat-pulled mane that showed off both the masculine ruggedness of its neck and the fineness of feature. Its sweeping tail was full and silver and its knees mottled with gun-metal blue.

  There was nothing it wouldn’t do for Anraí: passage, piaffe, the Spanish Walk … At an extended trot its forelegs rent the air like scissors. And it did not collect by pulling in its neck, like a horse trained quickly and by force. Instead it coupled its whole body closer, and all the long motions rounded until Anraí remembered the sensation he had treasured as a boy, when he rode the springy end of a pine bough in place of the horse he did not have.

  It was a warm day: too warm to be quite clear, for the soaked pastures and bogs released their water into the air, softening and wrinkling it. At the bridge of the Cashla River Anraí noticed the bloom of an early white violet poking from among the stiff twigs of a meager holly bush, which still wore its winter red berries. He pointed this out to the horse as they went over the bridge, making a confident music of horse hooves.

  Grouse rose thundering up from the road on the other side of the bridge, causing Anraí, but not the horse, to start. A reed bunting gave a small interrogative call from the riverside, answered by a frog somewhere. The water standing in the fields was a dazzle to Anraí’s eyes.

  “Isn’t this day a gift from God, bless His Holy Name?” said Anraí aloud, scratching his hat back and forth over his skull, where it itched from the heat. The horse gave none of the small replies Anraí expected, of ear, eye, or nostril. Anraí chose to regard this as slighting.

  “Lad, the thing of it is, is that a fellow gets no credit in life, no matter how clever he is or how brawny his back, if he has not a generous heart. And I wonder to myself about you. It’s certain you can trot, and it’s certain you can run, but if you have any soul in you more than my pocket watch, you haven’t shown it to me today.”

  Anraí didn’t really doubt that it was a great-souled horse under him, but he did suspect it was the sort of beast that holds grudges and might resent the bit in its mouth. And although it was easy, on this sunny morning, to sympathize, he believed in his own soul that horses were there to be ridden, just as men were there to ride them.

  “Haven’t I picked out the gravel in your feet, a bhúachaill, including a lump the size of a hearthstone in your near fore that had ground a hole into the frog around it? And haven’t I kept your manger as full of oats and bran as is good for a fellow? And didn’t I tell Donncha to take a sponge and brush to those shameful and embarrassing stains on your … ”

  A fox ran into the road in front of them and barked three times. The horse gave a low and ominous rumble and stopped in place. Anraí stared at the red dogfox, which glowed like a fire in the sunlight. It didn’t move, and neither did the horse. Or Anraí.

  Seacoast Connemara was not great foxhunting country, for there breakneck riding leads ineluctably to breaking one’s neck. But the red fox was no more popular among the poor Gaels of that place than elsewhere, and the vermin do not stop in the road to pass the time of day with men on horseback.

  “Please God that the creature isn’t mad,” said Anraí, either to himself or the horse, and at the sound of these words the fox darted off the road, running low to the ground, as though on little wheels.

  Anraí, like most men who get their living from nature, was very superstitious. He knew what three ravens meant, flying eastward, and he was familiar with the portents of the hooded crow. He knew that if a nightjar called out to one, one must turn clockwise, while this was no help against an owl. But if he had ever heard explained the meaning of a fox’s blocking one’s path and barking three times, he had forgotten it. He doubted it could signify any good.

  “What did he mean by that, my boy?” he asked the horse, which nodded its head and leaned against the bit. Anraí pushed the horse forward, saying “Good. Now I’m no wiser than before. I should ask my questions only of Christians.”

  As he trotted the beast down toward Carraroe, with the waters of the bay blue at his left hand, it seemed that all the populace of the Cois Fhairrge were on the road. There were women in black and white and in red and white, and men in báinín, either cream colored or dirty. There were donkey carts hauling milk, though it was late in the morning already, and pony carts hauling stones to fix the road. There was hardly a donkey that did not in some way object to Anraí’s passage, and not a pony that he had not to nudge his horse past, to prevent conversation.

  Anraí was in a sweat, partly from the balmy air and partly because he expected at any moment that a man would stride out in fury and claim his wonderful horse.

  Not that he’d be easy to recognize, smartened up as he was.

  And the old man was hailed, not fifty yards from the granite dome where he had found the horse. Anraí stifled a desire to flee, and pushed into a halt.

  But it was a woman’s voice, and coming up the small road from the pier was Seán Standún, or John Stanton, with his two daughters. Seán was a fair man, tall and thin of face, like a blood horse. The youngest of his daughters, Eibhlín, resembled her father, though not too much, for she was a beauty, with small bones, wide blue eyes, and a very fresh complexion.

  The other, elder daughter was as tall as Standún, but dark faced and square. Her eyes were black. Many in the parish had commented how little Máire Standún resembled her father, but most had long since decided why that was. It was she who had called out to Anraí.

  “God to you, my dark rose,” he answered her, relieved that he was not to be suddenly unhorsed, and he edged over to the walking party. He touched his hat to her and to her sister, continuing, “and how is the fairy lass of An Cheathrú Rúa today, and Seán Standún of the ships?”

  Eibhlín giggled at this gallant appellation, though she had heard it often before. Standún did his best to look down his long nos
e at the man sitting above him.

  “God and Mary to you, Anraí Thurlaigh,” answered Máire. “It seemed to me, when I saw you at a distance, that you were riding a good friend of mine, though now I’m not so certain.”

  Anraí forced a smile, though he felt heat on his face. “Do you know this fellow, Máire?”

  Máire Standún put her broad hand quietly on the horse’s shoulder and looked at its head. It snorted into her full dark hair and showed its upper teeth in a horsey gesture of appreciation.

  “I’m almost sure of it. He was a bit rougher to look at and he wore more hair, but this is the horse that’s always about the pier here, having sport with everyone.”

  “Not everyone, Mary,” said Eibhlín, in her piping little voice. “I’ve never seen him, nor has father.”

  “You make too much of things,” said Seán Standún, glancing reluctantly up at Anraí. “She wants a man to believe she knows a great deal more than she has any way of knowing.”

  Anraí, though not subtle in conversation, was a decent observer, and he did not miss the manner in which Máire Standún froze in place, not looking at her father, and how pretty Eibhlín was pleased by it.

  Anraí’s conscience convicted him. “In fact, I’d say you have a piercing eye, lass, for I did find this beast by the road here, just two days ago, and although he’s the perfect horse for me, I’ll be no thief. What man owns him and let him go to seed so badly?”

  “I don’t know,” said Máire. “It was my idea he was a wild pony from the hills. They can be very forward, if someone encourages them.” Then she laughed, for the horse, his head under strong rein control, still lipped at her and made a coarse, vulgar sound.

  “That isn’t it, for no animal learns what he knows by eating grass on a mountaintop.”

  “Ó Reachtaire, I will have my men ask around. When we find the horse’s owner we will tell him where his horse is to be found.”

  Anraí looked down the man’s hound nose into blue eyes with slight haws at die lower lid. Dislike almost overflowed from the rider. “I have no doubt but you will, my friend,” he said, trusting himself to say no more. He gave them “health” and went on his way. From behind he heard Standún calling his big daughter a fool. In English.