In the Shadow of Alabama

by Judy Reene Singer

  “You don’t have to stay,” I had told him dispiritedly, meaning the exact opposite, as we watched Maja fretfully pace back and forth in her stall. “If you have to leave, I understand.” Of course, I didn’t understand at all.

  “I signed on to foal out all the mares, and that’s what I plan to do,” he said firmly, and I smiled inwardly at this. He hadn’t actually signed on for anything.

  We stood at Maja’s stall door and watched her paw at her straw bedding, then lift her tail and press her butt against the wall. Indications of impending labor.

  “She’ll probably go tonight,” I said. “And then I suppose you’ll be leaving.”

  “A distinct possibility,” Malachi replied. “Both a very distinct possibility.”

  * * *

  I leave the barn monitor on; the camera is sending a grainy picture to the small monitor in the kitchen, but since Malachi is sitting up with the mare, I barely glance at it as I make myself dinner. He is an old hand at foaling, and has never required my help, although I have always insisted on standing there to hand him things he doesn’t request or particularly need. I couldn’t sit with him tonight, though. I could barely look at him, I felt so betrayed.

  Maja started to foal sometime as the night slipped into dawn. David had long gone to bed after a nearly wordless dinner, and I was slouched over the kitchen table, with my head resting in my arms, dozing off for the third or fourth time. At various times throughout the night, I had brought Malachi a bowl of tomato soup, a cup of coffee, a can of cola with a cheese sandwich. Just in case he got hungry. Or wanted to talk.

  “That mare’s going to foal, and I’m going to put on two hundred pounds,” he said appreciatively as he took a small plate of shortbread cookies with his tea the last time I went out to the barn.

  I glanced past his shoulder into the stall where Maja was making a nest out of her straw. “Do you need anything else?” I asked.

  He sat down on a hay bale to relax, balancing his tea and the cookies on his knees. “Don’t even need this,” he said. “Go to bed.”

  * * *

  “Missy, you got to come see this.” Malachi’s voice booms from the barn monitor, waking me up, and I rush out to join him. “It’s a filly foal,” he says as I walk toward Maja’s stall. “Big one, too. With a big problem.”

  I look in and catch my breath. She looks deformed, twisted, barely able to stand and nurse. “Oh no! What’s wrong with her?”

  “Windswept,” he says. “The foal is windswept.”

  I had never seen this before. Instead of arrow-straight, she stands grotesquely curved to the right, like a foal in fetal position. Her neck and back are rotated to the right, her head is cocked, her legs and hips shifted, blown to one side, as though she had literally been caught in a windstorm.

  I burst into tears.

  “What are you crying over?” Malachi asks.

  “She’s broken,” I barely manage to gasp out. “She’s brand-new and she’s broken.”

  “I can straighten her out,” he says calmly. “Just let her get some colostrum for now. I’ll fix her in the morning.”

  “What can you possibly do?” I ask through tears. “Look at her! Besides, I thought you had to leave in the morning.”

  He gives me a steady look; his expression doesn’t change. “I s’pose I can hang around ’til I get this done,” he says. “I can’t leave you with a windswept foal. I’ll leave after I put her to rights.”

  * * *

  “Where did you learn to do this?” I ask Malachi later that morning as he sits in the stall with the new foal, massaging her tight, misshapen body.

  “Oh, here and there,” he replies, picking up one of her small hooves and bending it back and forth.

  The vet has finished examining both the filly and the mare, giving them shots, checking the placenta to make sure it’s complete. Under his direction, I bury the afterbirth so the coyotes don’t come for it.

  “Windswept,” the vet announced as soon as he saw the foal. “Just keep her in a small paddock. Could be a problem.” He ran his hands over her body and shook his head. “She might end up being clubfooted. Or with angular limb deformity. She’ll be unrideable, if she doesn’t straighten. Time will tell.” He packed up his equipment and got into his truck.

  “Vets!” Malachi snorted after the vet left. “What do they know! I’ll have her straight before you can say Johnny-jackrabbit.”

  “How?” I asked. “When will you get the time—I thought you were running from ghosts.” He just flapped his hand at me and went into the stall again, where he sat in the straw, next to the foal. He took her into his large, sensitive hands and began to massage her body.

  “Leave us be,” was all he said. “You got horses to ride.”

  * * *

  Malachi has been sitting on the stall floor with the foal in his lap for three hours, murmuring to her, bending her neck, rubbing her tight little muscles. “You be a good girl now,” he says into her ear as he pulls on her crooked legs. “Or we’ll have to name you Pretzel.”

  I am sitting outside the stall on a bale of hay, watching. “How do you know she’ll be okay?” I ask him. “How do you know what to do?” I am hoping for a few words from him, something that will tell me about him, let me in. In all the years he has been with me, he hasn’t told me much of anything. I don’t really know where he’s from, or where he’d been. He had mentioned family, but in all the years on my farm, no one has ever visited him. I need to know it all before he leaves me.

  He doesn’t answer. His hands just slowly knead the filly’s back muscles, adjusting them, stretching them, counter-bending her to the left, adjusting her some more.

  Suddenly I smell something acrid, foreign. A curl of noxious hot plastic wends its way into my thoughts, even before my nose detects it. Even before I realize that the smell is something burning. I spin around to look down the aisle; nothing. But it is there. I sniff the air like a spaniel. The smell is growing stronger. Black smoke spirals from my tack room and I run toward it.

  In the middle of the floor, the coil of the portable water heater has burned through the bottom of a water bucket, burned right down into the rug underneath. I unplug it, grab the smoldering bucket, and throw it out the back door of the barn. It flies into the air and lands sideways in the dirt, displaying a black hole in the bottom that allows a circle of daylight to shine though.

  “Totally forgot I plugged it in,” Malachi apologizes behind me. “Wanted some warm water to relax her back muscles.” I am shaking. He walks back to the tack room and stamps on the still-smoking rug, then carefully pours water on it. I say nothing, but in my mind I am seeing a raging barn fire. The hay, the shavings, the wooden stalls, the horses. My breath is caught inside my chest and I can’t speak. Another minute. Another minute, and it would have been too late.

  * * *

  I check on the barn throughout the day, because I am scared to leave it. Malachi has never forgotten to turn off the heater coil before. He has always stood over it until the water was hot, then unplugged it. And now I am checking, checking, all day, nervously eyeing the barn, sniffing the air.

  I take Malachi lunch, although it is just an excuse to check the barn again. He is rubbing the filly with a wet, hot terrycloth towel, and I watch him scrub big, strong circles against her body. “Watch how I do this,” he says, “and learn something.”

  I excuse myself and check the tack room. In the middle of the floor is another bucket, filled with warm water; the water heater has been neatly replaced on its hook on the wall. Relieved, I return to him.

  “How do you know what to do?” I ask him again.

  He shrugs. “Oh, I picked up some techniques here and there.” He flexes her joints, one by one. The fetlock, the knee, the shoulder, pulling against them, rubbing them, his muscular hands working deep into her body to take out the spasms. It seems to me that she looks a little straighter.

  “You’re going to disappear out of my life, and I’ll know nothing
about you,” I say softly, then start to cry. “It’s not fair!” I want to tell him that my heart is being bent and twisted, windswept with grief, that he must stay.

  His hands stop for a moment, and his dark eyes search mine. “Aren’t you a Nosey Parker!” He says it with humor, and affection, I know. I hear it in his voice. But there is a wariness there.

  “It’s just that—just that—” I can’t finish my sentence. I can’t tell him that if I could love anyone as a father, it would be him. I just stare at the filly, blinking tears away.

  “Worked on a big breeding farm in Kentucky,” he suddenly says. “Seen racehorses born like this. Fixed them up, too. A few went on to win some mighty big races.”

  The thing with Malachi is that sometimes you can believe him and sometimes you can’t. “Is that where you were born?” I ask him. “Kentucky?”

  He shakes his head. “Mississippi,” he says. I am trying to lead him, like a horse getting halter-broken, one step at a time. Or is he leading me? “I was born in Mississippi,” he adds reluctantly. “Then I drifted to Kentucky.” He pulls the filly to her feet and she stands. Almost straight.

  “She looks better.” I sniffle.

  “You never know what you can do,” he says, “until you get it done.” And the words remind me of my own father’s philosophy, which was so opposite. Cynical and angry, he had always thrown his hands up and said, “The world doesn’t give a crap about anything you do, so why bother?” and then, to ratchet up the pressure, he would gleefully drop every obstacle he could think of in my path. And I would struggle and strain until I accomplished what I wanted. College, first job, first apartment.

  But the memory of my father was becoming more and more of a puzzle. There was Willie, telling me how hard he had fought for his men, yet the man I knew was a defeatist. Willie remembered him as a man full of compassion, battling for what he thought was right. What could have happened to him that turned him so around, like a windswept foal, twisted back on itself; distorted, broken?

  I see the foal is standing before me now, her legs straighter, her little hooves pointing forward. I can’t help but wrap my arms around her. She is slowly healing. But was there anything that could have healed my father? Straightened his soul? Restored him to the man Willie remembered, the man I never knew?

  “I knew I could fix her,” Malachi says with obvious pride. “I know all the tricks.”

  “Did you learn them from your family?” I ask. “Did they own horses?”

  He laughs out loud and slaps his thigh at the idea, startling the filly. “Missy, my family didn’t even own the dirt we lived on.”

  * * *

  I decided, when I grew up, I would be a writer. I got accepted into college when I was fifteen, having skipped a few grades, and immediately sat down to plan a program that would lead me, at the very least, to the Pulitzer prize in literature. Until my father informed me that I would be paying for my own education.

  Fifteen is a little young to have accumulated a college fund, and so I was stuck. I think I had about 150 dollars in a savings account, having spent most of my babysitting money on classical music records. I loved piano music, and couldn’t wait to own a copy of Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations or Barenboim’s Beethoven sonatas, in which all the reviews said his technique overpowered, and which I thought were just fervent. I played the piano, torturously learning “Moonlight Sonata,” a few simple Bach pieces, Liszt’s “Ständchen,” and then “Les Preludes” . . . wonderful pieces. And though I played them clumsily, they enfolded me, calmed my heart, and lifted me to heaven. My parents didn’t see a reason to give me lessons, as my father had no use for music. It served no purpose, he used to say; it doesn’t save the world from anything.

  I taught myself to play on the old upright that came with the house. I played all the time, the piano becoming my companion, my best friend, my diary, my solace, my passion. Every note was a new word; every passage, a thought. The music would surround me, sometimes so strongly that I almost forgot that I could still be seen by other people when I played. It made life bearable.

  Until I came home one day from school and the piano was gone. My piano. My heart. No explanation, no apologies. I stood in the living room for a whole hour, staring at the spot where the piano had been. I didn’t cry. I just stood there. And then I swore that nothing would be that important to me, ever again.

  * * *

  “If you can find money to buy music, you can find money for college,” my father announced when my first acceptance letter came in. “And don’t look to me for help.” I wouldn’t have dreamt of it.

  I did find money for college. I worked three jobs.

  “If you’re working, you can pay us rent,” my father announced. “No one gets a free ride.” I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction, and so I ran away. At the age of sixteen, I lived secretly and illegally in the gym locker room of the city college I was attending. My mother, busy with her shop, barely noticed I was gone.

  And I didn’t become a writer for a very long time. I became a teacher first, only because they had a better chance of earning a living.

  * * *

  “She looks almost normal,” I marvel to Malachi. And the little foal does. We are out in the paddock, where he’s tied Maja to a fence post. The mare watches her baby with anxious eyes as Malachi hand-walks the foal back and forth, a halter on her tiny, deerlike face, and a lead line wrapped around her pumpkin-size butt. Her legs are straight, her neck arches out at the correct angle from her shoulders, her back is almost straight. Her steps follow in a neat line, hind hoof into the print of the front hoof. Perfect. The mare nickers softly, and the baby answers her with a tinny squeal.

  “She’s going to need a few more sessions,” he declares, as he gently leads the filly forward.

  “Okay.” I move to his side, ready to take over. “Show me what to do.”

  “Missy, you need the touch,” he says and flexes his fingers proudly. “I got the touch.”

  “But you’re leaving,” I remind him, hoping it’ll make him open up. “Unless you leave your touch behind, you got to show me what to do.”

  “I ain’t leaving nothing behind,” he says dryly. The two of us take a few more steps with the foal.

  “Afraid the ghosts will find you?” I joke, but he looks at me sharply and I feel bad for saying it. I try another tack. “What if someone asks me about you?”

  “You’ll know where I’m going after I leave,” he says.

  “Okay,” I say. “How will I know?”

  He thinks long and hard about this statement. We are at Maja’s side, and her baby stretches her long, elegant neck forward to nurse.

  “You will know,” he answers. “My sister’s coming for me. Minnie.”

  “How long has it been since you’ve seen—Minnie?” I ask.

  He watches the foal nurse. “They sure need their mama,” he says, “but they never care who their daddy is.”

  “That’s horses,” I tell him. “People are different. Or should be. How long has it been since you’ve seen your sister?”

  He doesn’t answer me.

  “Whatever went wrong,” I say, “she must still love you if she’s looking for you.”

  There are clouds scudding across the sky, making purple shadows on the ground. We watch the earth and hay in the paddock fall under the weave of dark and sun as the clouds pass. Danielle is singing to herself in the barn while she cleans the stalls.

  “She wants to bring me back to the family,” he replies. “I don’t mind it, missy. It’ll be a good thing. She says they’ll take care of me, and truth be told, I kind of miss them, too.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you had a sister? We could have made arrangements for you to see her sooner. Don’t you want me to meet her?”

  And he turns his face from me, and stares off into the graying sky and the blowing clouds with sad eyes and says nothing more.

  Which is an answer, of sorts.

  Chapter 23


  “We were boys, really,” Willie is saying. “Boys.”

  He had called me from his hospital bed to “chat me up a bit,” as he put it. Rowena is working and he was lonely. I was at my desk, working, too, on a new novel, and I reluctantly turn away from my computer screen to talk, but I am annoyed. Doesn’t he understand that I work, just like Rowena works; doesn’t he understand that at all? Does he call her in the middle of her workday to tell her stories? Does he interrupt her day with pointless memories as he tries to relive the old days?

  He wants me to come to Boston.

  “I’ve run out of tapioca,” he jokes. “And Rowena is tired of my stories.”

  “I’ve got to take care of my farm,” I remind him. “My manager is leaving.”

  “If I could come to New York, I’d help you,” he says. “I’m a bit indisposed at the moment, but I used to be good on ladders if you need anything painted.” Is he being ironic? Just in case he isn’t, I diplomatically refrain from pointing out that ladders might be a little difficult for him to negotiate, since he is ninety and has only one leg.

  “That’s very kind of you,” I reply, “but I think I can manage.”

  “Well, it’s just that I would really like to see you. I don’t buy any green bananas, if you know what I’m saying.” His voice is full of meaning. “I want to finish my story. So, come soon. Soon.”

  Is he warning me that he is ill? I know old men talk in code.

  And before I realize it, I’ve promised to go.

  * * *

  Two days later, Malachi has partitioned the big pasture with some post and rail we had left in the garage, so that Maja and her windswept filly can graze in peace. I insisted that he at least put Lisbon in with them.

  I am leaning on the fence and watching Maja browse through her hay. Suddenly, as though cued by an unseen ghost, she pins her ears and raises her head high to swing at Lisbon, threatening him, telling him not to come near her foal. He just stares. The foal regards him with big, blinking, trustful eyes, before mincing a few dainty ballerina steps toward him. I hold my breath as she stretches her neck out and makes a chewing motion with her mouth. Mouthing, they call it. She is telling him that she is a baby and poses no threat. His eyes are fixed on her, his face alert, ears pricked, his neck rigid. She suddenly retreats behind her mother, only to peek out at him again.