Marvel and a Wonder

by Joe Meno

  After dinner, the grandfather sat in the parlor alone and fell asleep in his armchair, the radio playing, the old man stumbling between a dream and a distant memory, unaware of which was which.

  * * *

  When the phone rang around ten o’clock, the grandfather woke with a start. He strode into the kitchen, pulling the phone from its cradle in a half-daze. It was Deirdre; he could tell right away from the irregular patter of her breath.

  “Hello?”

  “Daddy? Dad?”

  He sighed without meaning to, and grasped the plastic phone hard in his hand. “Deirdre. Where are you?”

  “I called to tell you I’m not coming back. I’m done with you. I’m through. I can’t take it anymore.”

  “Deirdre.” It was not a name, not even a word, just an utterance.

  “I’m not coming back. You can tell him whatever you want, but I’m not coming back. I can’t live in your fucked-up house with your fucked-up rules.”

  Jim bristled at her anger more than her language. He placed his forehead against the cool of the faded wallpaper and asked, “How much do you need?”

  But she only laughed and said, “No, Daddy. This is it. These are the last words you’re ever gonna hear from me.”

  “You told me the same thing a year ago. And the year before that.”

  “This time I fucking mean it. This is it.”

  “Deirdre.”

  “This is it. Goodbye, Daddy.”

  Then there was the sound of the line going dead.

  He stood there with his forehead against the wallpaper for some time, waiting for a sound, a voice, an apology that did not, would never come. After a few moments, the phone gave off a dull, irritating buzz and Jim placed it back in its cradle.

  Later he did not know why he walked straight to the field and stood there, the rows of corn spread out against his legs, brushing against his fingertips. The left corner of his lips began to twitch and then his legs gave way, and suddenly he found himself kneeling among the rows, unable to breathe. He managed to crawl a little ways and get to his feet, staggering the thirty-odd yards to the back porch steps. There he sat, holding his rigid left arm in the dark, out of breath. It was the third time something like this had happened—two months before there was another spell, then six or seven months before that. He made a little prayer then, unsure of what he was praying for or to whom. “Please,” he said. “Please. Don’t let me go. Don’t let him find me like this.” Finally his breath became regular and he was able to climb inside. He called out the boy’s given name and Quentin came trotting down the stairs, alarmed; then the boy helped his grandfather to the parlor sofa. The look of worry on the boy’s face, his childish expression, was frightening.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. “Sir?”

  Jim nodded, unsure if he could answer. They sat side by side on the sofa for some time, the mayflies jostling the windows, his heartbeat slowing down, his breath coming hard.

  Twenty minutes later, the boy broke the silence. He looked over at his grandfather, who had his hands before him, folded as if in prayer, and asked, “When is she coming back?”

  The grandfather put a hand on the boy’s knee and slowly shook his head.

  The boy nodded and sniffed, then hurried from the room.

  A half hour later, when the grandfather fell into bed, it felt like death.

  _________________

  The white mare appeared on a Monday. Neither the grandfather nor the grandson had any idea who’d sent it. At first there was only the violent agitation of the pickup as it rattled along the unmarked road, towing behind it a fancy silver trailer, all ten wheels upsetting the air with a cloud of dust high as a steeple. The grandfather raised his hand to his eyes to try to make out the shape of the thing coming. It was a late afternoon in mid-July and the sun had just begun to falter behind the hills and tree line. The black pickup with its out-of-town plates bounced through the gate then pulled to a stop near the corner of the bleachy henhouse. Every bird on the farm, all the Silver Sussex roosters, all the Maran hens, turned to face the commotion with a prehistoric silence, waiting for the grit to begin to settle. When a man with sunglasses like a state trooper pulled himself out from behind the truck’s wheel, stretching his legs from what appeared to have been a long trip, Jim asked him what it was about. The man had a clipboard and some papers which he asked Jim to sign, in triplicate, before leading him around to the back of the trailer. There he handed Jim a pink sheet of paper and pair of silver keys. The horse, sleek-looking even behind steel bars, huffed through its pink nostrils, disappearing back into the darkness.

  “It’s yours,” the man said.

  “Mine?”

  “Yours.”

  “But . . . but what for?” Jim asked.

  The man with the sunglasses shrugged, itched his nose, and said, “I just get paid to deliver it,” then he put away his ink pen and began to unhook the trailer from the pickup’s hitch. It seemed the trailer had also been bequeathed, though Jim still did not know from whom. The man with the sunglasses handed another pink piece of paper to Jim, stepped clear of a mud puddle, and climbed back inside the cab of the pickup.

  “But there’s been some kind of mistake,” the grandfather said.

  The man readjusted his dark sunglasses, lit a cigarette, exhaled—the smoke rising in twin, nearly invisible tendrils about his craggy face—and looked down at the clipboard and said, “This the right address?”

  Jim nodded.

  “You Jim Falls?”

  The grandfather nodded again.

  “No mistake.” The man scowled and gave the ignition a start. “By the way, it’s got a name. Right here,” the man said, pointing to the pink page. Then the black pickup was pulling away, was driving off, then was gone. Jim walked over to the rear of the trailer. The horse was turning back and forth before him with an air of expectancy, the old man and the horse like children then, hesitant at their parents’ ankles, waiting to meet. The grandfather had never been fond of horses; there had been a pair of mules his father had borrowed to plow furrows for the corn, but those days were long gone.

  The hired hand, Rodrigo, had always claimed to have been raised on a horse ranch. Without so much as a word, he set down a Maran rooster, stepped up to the trailer, unlocked the bar, opened the gate, and slowly led the horse down the ramp. He whistled through his front teeth once the animal was standing there in the full sun where they could take in its shape.

  “It’s a racehorse, Mister Jim,” Rodrigo grinned, patting its sleek flanks, then looking under, apprising its sex. “And a lady.”

  Jim reached out a tentative hand in the horse’s direction, feeling the humid moistness of the animal’s nose, placing his palm against its neck. Its ears flicked, the blue-black eye staring back, expressionless. In its stoicism, in its stony quiet, the grandfather saw what he most often loved about the land, the country, the world. It was enough to say he had not nor would never have dreamt of standing this close to a horse on this day or any other, and the unexpectedness, the absolute un-reason of the animal’s arrival, is what gave the grandfather a sense of joy.

  “What you going to call her, Mister Jim?” came Rodrigo’s voice.

  The grandfather studied the animal’s shape, tried to take in its perfect, imperturbable appearance, and then, looking down at the pink paper, he said, “It says here her name’s John the Baptist.”

  “John? For a lady?”

  “Yes, John. For a lady. That’s what it says.”

  “From the Bible?”

  “I guess so.”

  Rodrigo shrugged, and then searched inside the trailer and found an expensive eastern saddle and bridle. He whistled once again through his front teeth and then set to tack up, the horse remaining completely still as the blanket, then saddle was fit into place, then the bridle. It huffed once, not even a snort, and became silent again.

  “You ride her, Mister Jim?”

  Jim stared at the ghostly creature, at its formidab
le stature, and shook his head with a frown. “Not in this life, buster.”

  Rodrigo shrugged his shoulders again, holding the leather reins in his hand, asking a serious question by raising his eyebrows slightly.

  By then the boy—having heard the unfamiliar pickup rambling back down the gravel drive—walked out of the house and stared at the animal suspiciously. He stood a dozen feet away, pushing his glasses up against his face, trying to decide if this interruption was going to be worth his time. “Whose horse is that?” he asked.

  “Fella said it’s ours.”

  “Ours?”

  “Mine, I guess.”

  “But what for?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  The horse gave a soft whinny, which would have gone unheard if it wasn’t for the open air of the farm and the nearby highway—quiet at this time of day.

  Rodrigo pulled lightly on the reins, turned to face Jim once again, a daring smile crossing the farmhand’s face, the question having already been answered, in his mind at least, awaiting a sign, which Jim gave without begrudgement, nodding in a curt manner.

  “Okay,” Rodrigo said, slipping his left boot into the silver stirrup, then pulling himself up and fitting in his right. The horse took no notice of the stranger upon its back, its nostrils flaring slightly, its tail alighting back and forth, until the lean-faced man gave a short, gentle kick and the horse, as if having heard some celestial trumpet, was off, bucking and rearing in a flash of dust and dirt, clearing the low wire chicken fence, wreaking havoc in the dry-looking field of corn. Before the man on its back could whisper, “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” the animal seemed to have made one full pass of the entire property, galloping breakneck alongside the culvert, its hide speckled with sunlight.

  “Good God,” was all the grandfather could get out.

  It was clear from the first that the horse had been bred as a racer; standing fifteen hands high, it was lean-muscled with long legs, the hindquarters a rig of fibrous muscle. Four years old, it looked as spry as a filly.

  By the time Rodrigo had slowed the animal down to a canter, then a trot, then was heeling the horse before them, the farmhand’s face had lost none of its expression. There was a wide smile frozen below his black mustache, creeping from one ear to the other, his dark eyes runny with tears.

  The boy hung behind the fence apprehensively, excited by the creature’s presence, but too frightened to get closer.

  Jim, on the other hand, felt a weakness well up in him. He carefully strode over to the animal, slowly raising his hand to the side of its broad neck, and then he began to pat it, in ever-widening circles, the horse breathing huskily, its blue-black eye momentarily lidded by the longest eyelashes Jim had ever seen on an animal. It felt like the horse was the answer to something. He had an ache just then, not in his joints nor his stomach nor his liver, and remembered the place where he had been struck one afternoon when catching sight of the back of his wife Deedee’s knees as she stood on a chair and reached to retrieve a box from the top shelf of the school supply closet where she was teaching. He put his hand over his chest now, wondering if this is what it was like to get hit by lightning.

  “Do we get to keep it?” the boy asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jim said.

  The horse turned before them and snorted. Jim gave an easy smile.

  “But where’s it gonna live?”

  “We’ll see.”

  The boy held out a hand and patted the horse’s flank.

  Later it was decided they would drive to the nearby hamlet of Mount Holly the following morning and make an appointment to see Jim Northfield, the former lawyer and judge.

  _________________

  Approaching the silver trailer the next day, both the grandfather and the boy tried to catch a glimpse of the animal asleep inside. But it was already awake, poking its great pink nostrils through the metal slats. The boy held out his hand and felt its breath—humid, so much like a human’s. It was a marvel. The grandfather watched the boy and pondered what they had done to deserve such a thing.

  Once they had finished their morning chores, they led the horse out of the trailer and mucked the urine-soaked dirt and straw, making sure the trough was filled with cold, clean water. The grandfather held the animal by its fancy silver bridle while the boy raked out the rounded lumps of manure with the flat edge of a shovel, piling them into a wheelbarrow. Then they dumped the remaining bag of feed in a bucket and placed it near its feet. As the horse ate, the boy gently touched its neck, trying to read its thoughts. “Hello, hello, hello,” the boy whispered. “I am your friend.”

  * * *

  The boy and his grandfather made their way to town. From behind the dashboard of the blue pickup, the nearby fields looked fearsome, zigzagging with bayonets of rippling corn. The boy had his headphones on, and was nodding along to the persistent rhyming annoyance of rap music; Quentin listened to his Walkman even when riding in the truck, because, as he had said a number of times before, he did not care for his grandfather’s “shitkicker” music. The music Jim preferred was old country—Jimmie Rodgers being his favorite—a habit he had picked up in Korea, listening to the Armed Forces Radio while he was stationed as an MP, the deejay then being like the voice of God, playing songs that put into words the faraway feelings of his young, wrong heart, though now there was no radio station within fifty or sixty miles that broadcast anything like that. Everything on the radio around here was oldies or new country or Christian secular music, none of which Jim could stand.

  * * *

  Interstate 65. Interstate 69. Interstate 64. Interstate 70. Interstate 74. Interstate 80. Interstate 90. Interstate 94. Route 6. Route 20. Route 24. Route 27. Route 30. Route 31. Route 33. Route 35. Route 36. Route 40. Route 41. Route 50. Route 52. Route 136. Route 150. Route 224. Route 231. Route 421. Hope. Laurel. La Fontaine. Markle. Churubusco. Kokomo. Hamlet. Peru. Macy. North Liberty. Santa Claus. English. Tell City. Bellwood. Russiaville. Mulberry. Zionsville. Brownsburg. New Whiteland.

  Or the sign saying, Mount Holly, the pale-blue pickup driving on through the afternoon into the full brightness of day.

  * * *

  Over the past two decades, Mount Holly had become a ghost town. The town square was surrounded by a failing copper fence that had begun to go blue and was guarded by an iron statue of a soldier from the Forty-Fifth Regiment of Indiana Volunteers, a cavalry unit comprised of locals who proved their valor during the Civil War at the grisly Battle of Antietam. The memorial to the town’s fallen soldiers was a bleak depiction of a lone volunteer heeding the call to arms, his steel rifle slung in a weak position over one shoulder, his untrimmed mustache and beard a favorite nesting spot for the town’s wrens. In this ignominy—the birds roosting beneath his neck—it appeared as if the soldier had truly accepted his ruin. The square was usually vacant except for the gray and purple birds, a small flock of them crowding the only bench, the birdsong of this particular species the exact melody a grieving Civil War vet might find himself singing. The stores on the square observed a similar air of mourning, their windows dim, shaded with unwashed blinds, the shops empty of life; there was a café where three customers had been murdered nearly a decade before—the speckles of blood and chalk-lines encircling the bodies becoming irreducible, forever marking the meager restaurant with the lurid drama of a dime-store pulp novel; a failing hardware outfit whose owner had become a born-again Christian—the store’s tools, supplies, and other merchandise now replaced with handmade crucifixes, all whittled childlike; an unmarked department store whose sign out front—announcing the name of a local chain—had been taken down and never replaced; a shop that only sold greeting cards, some coated with thick dust; a corner saloon whose windows had been painted over in blackish film—the blurred phantom shapes of loners and old-timers drinking away their troubles adding to the town’s sense of vague gloominess; and, last of all, a farm supply and feed store whose street-facing wall leaned precariously west, tilting farther and farther out of
shape each year, the store no longer a rectangle but a kind of trapezoid. All of these stores’ facades looked ghostly, a picture-postcard town that had seen better days fifty years before, the glassy windows desolate, unmarred save for the reflection of the pale-blue pickup truck that was pulling into a parking spot alongside the boarded-up café.

  * * *

  Jim Northfield was a gray-haired gentleman with bushy eyebrows who no longer practiced law but who was kind enough to look over the receipts and bill declaring the transfer of property. They sat before the judge in his tiny second-floor office, the air of which smelled like a public library, wooden bookshelves filled with ancient half-opened law volumes.