by Joe Meno
“Well, what have you got yourself into?” Jim Northfield asked, glancing down at the documents. “I didn’t know you owned any horses.”
“I don’t,” the grandfather said, rocking on his heels. “Which is why we’ve come to see you.”
“Hmmm,” the old judge proclaimed, “don’t pin your hopes on me. I lost the last three cases I had. It’s the reason I became a judge.” He eyed the wide-faced boy and then nodded at the glass jar of moth-eaten lollipops on the corner of his desk. “Help yourself.”
The boy made a motion forward but caught his grandfather’s eye. He lowered his hand to his side and said, “I’m not supposed to eat sweets.”
Jim Northfield looked over his glasses. “Never mind him,” he said, nodding toward the grandfather. “Here, go on, now,” and the boy smiled, an awkward smile, reaching forward. Jim Northfield opened the jar and the boy took out a yellow one. Then he slipped the boy a tattered-looking business card. “If you ever need a good lawyer . . .”
The grandfather rolled his eyes. The boy carefully took the old business card as Jim Northfield apologized. “Old habits. Now tell me: how did this horse show up?”
The grandfather sighed and beat his cattleman hat against his leg. “We were counting chicks yesterday when this truck pulled in, towing a trailer. The man asked me my name and address and then handed me the keys. Then he gave me that,” he said, pointing to the pink carbon-copy sheet.
“Hmmm,” Jim Northfield said. The grandfather tapped his fingers against his knee, growing impatient. “It’s all here: horse, trailer, saddle, bridle. There’s your name and your address. And that’s all correct?”
The grandfather nodded.
“Hmmmmmmm.”
The grandfather cleared his throat as Jim Northfield pawed through a few law books on his desk, and then reread the transfer of property. Smiling, he leaned back in the warped brown leather chair. “As far as I’m concerned, that animal is yours.”
“Ours?”
“That is, unless someone brings forward a suit.”
“A suit?”
“Claiming it’s theirs. But you got the transfer of property and, better than that, the horse itself. You know the old saying, possession’s nine-tenths of the law.”
“So,” the grandfather asked, “that’s it?”
“For now. Let me get the phone number of the delivery company. See if I can give these folks a call and get some information on where it came from.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
Jim Northfield copied down the address and phone number of the delivery company back east, then reclined in his chair again. “Confidentially—if it was me, I hope I’d have the good sense to keep my mouth shut, count my blessings, and try not to court trouble.”
“That’s exactly what we aim to do,” the grandfather said.
The two old men shook hands and then, reaching for the glass jar, squinting at the grandfather with a taunting smile, the judge offered the boy another lollipop.
Outside, they shuffled along the near-deserted street. At the corner they ran into Lucy Hale, Burt Hale’s widow. She was parked in front of the feed store and was struggling to get a bale of hay into the back of her rundown station wagon. The grandfather quickly ran up and grabbed one end of the bale, and helped shove it inside. She turned to him and smiled, pushing back a loose strand of dark-blond hair that had fallen across her eyes. He had not seen her nor talked to her since they had buried Burt, more than two years before.
“Hello there, Jim.”
“Lucy.”
Lucy Hale was a bona fide beauty; soft, dark-blond curls of hair, a narrow neck, a wide chest and waist covered by a white blouse, her thighs looking plump in a tight-fitting pair of jeans, the sunlight doing wonders for her dark eyes, the eyes themselves strengthened by her laugh lines, face like a television star—broad, irrepressible, fifteen years his junior.
“Thanks for the help.”
“Don’t mention it. What happened to Burt’s pickup?”
“I never learned how to drive stick.”
“Deedee was the same way. How are you?”
“I’ve been better. I lost two farmhands this month. Seem to think I’m ready to fold.”
Jim frowned and asked, “Are you?”
“I’m doing what I can. I don’t want to let Burt down.”
Jim smiled, leaning against the rear of the station wagon. “There’s nothing you could do to let him down. You’ve kept it going for two years, with all that land. That’s more than most people’d be able to do.”
“I can hear the whispers whenever I go into the grocery store. They’re all waiting for me to sell.”
“Never mind those people. You ever need a hand, you give me a call. Burt had plenty of friends. Plenty of people would be glad to help you out.”
“I couldn’t put you out like that. Burt would never forgive me.”
Jim nodded, touching his right ear. She was right. “Well, like I said, if you ever need anything, you just give me a ring.”
“I will. Thanks, Jim.”
“And don’t be a stranger.”
“I won’t. Goodbye.”
He watched her climb inside the car, realizing then that he had forgotten to return her goodbye, standing there on the curb, imagining the other words, the other ways the conversation might have ended.
On the way back home, driving past the furrowed rows of corn, the boy looked at him and grinned.
“What?” Jim asked, but the boy only kept on smirking. “What? What is it?”
“I saw you talking to that lady. Hubba-hubba.”
“Very funny,” Jim said, and then switched on the radio.
* * *
Dusk came in as they approached the house. They helped Rodrigo with the rest of their work: cleaning the roosts, watering the corn, giving a sickly Maran hen a dose of antibiotics. Her chicks ran scurrying from their mud-caked boots, the boy chasing them with a rake.
Later they led the horse from the trailer to watch it run. Rodrigo saddled up the horse and climbed atop with a soft grin. Together the animal and farmhand tore across the empty field toward the end of the property. The sun was just beginning to set. The grandfather stared at the animal’s gray muzzle and gray eyelids and gray ears, the pale gray mane, everything else sleek and muscled and altogether colorless. When it moved, it seemed to be absent of any color at all, only a flash, like a zipper of lightning, a pulse of absolute blindness. Whoom, whoom, whoom. It was sort of like watching your own death, but beautiful too, something so mysterious and fulsome, something beyond any world he had imagined, that he dared not stare for long, fearing the questions he still had about life would make their answers apparent all too soon.
* * *
The grandfather had never owned a horse or had even thought to own one, as his father, like him, had only ever raised chickens and a few acres of corn, the farm passing from the father to the eldest son, and from his grandfather before that. There had been a team of scraggly-looking mules his father rented twice a year before he bought the old red Ford tractor, and even then, those mules, with their long rabbit ears and lean legs, seemed skittish, unpredictable, spastic in their quick movements. Jim, as a boy, would stand on the lowest rail of the fence and watch his father try to drive them, his father unknowledgeable in the language of equines, shouting Haw-haw-gee-haw over and over again, the team making irregular gullies in the westernmost corner of their narrow spread of land. He would see in their twin shapes the frustration of his father’s labor, another reason for the old man to be curt at the dinner table.
His father eventually saved enough for the Ford tractor, picking up night shifts at the creamery. Just after it arrived, Jim was drafted into the war in Korea, at the ripe old age of twenty-four. It was 1948. For the next three years, Jim was in the employ of the United States Military Police Corps. He did well as an MP because he had a quiet interest in the simple order of things and also a good sense of humor, generally. His work, as judge
d by his commanding officers, was thought to be exemplary, providing security and working the vice squad around the army base at Pusan. After three years of service in the Military Police Corps, he rose to the rank of lieutenant.
Then it was May 1951, the month of his undoing.
As it turned out, the same year Jim had been drafted, Truman had signed Executive Order 9981, meant to integrate the military and outlaw racial mistreatment, going so far as to make racist remarks illegal. Although there were still several all-black units, like the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Regiment, it wasn’t until the jailing of a black lieutenant by the name of Leon Gilbert—and his eventual trial—that the law began to be enforced. After Lieutenant Gilbert refused an order from a white officer—claiming it would lead to the unnecessary deaths of many soldiers in his unit—he was found guilty in a military court and sentenced to be hung by the neck. Protests broke out until Lieutenant Gilbert’s sentence was eventually commuted. By 1951, the slow wheel of progress had begun its rusty motion forward, the American military finding itself forced to abjure its unfair history, though Jim Falls found this all out a few months too late.
Jim had been on duty, patrolling the back rooms of a well-known Pusan whorehouse, when he had come upon a black boy harassing a Korean prostitute. It was well known that the baby-faced girls of Chuncheon were the property of the white servicemen only. The jo-sans had a name for the black soldiers who they were not allowed to fraternize with: “crumbs” or “number-ten GIs,” which meant the worst, the lousiest, of those they beheld.
Jim immediately intervened, giving the colored soldier the explicit choice of removing his hand from the prostitute’s leg or forever losing the use of it. The young serviceman—a rail-thin radioman fresh from the slums of Pittsburgh, who believed he was a soldier enlisted in the United States Army with all the rights and privileges therein—made a mistake by ignoring the threat. Jim set down his helmet, handed his sidearm to his junior partner, and commenced to beat the hell out of the younger man. Of course, by then Jim had tussled with a number of colored soldiers, but this fellow was the only black he fought who didn’t bother to fight back. The more Jim whupped him, the more pleased the kid looked; maybe it was some new kind of colored psychology, Jim wasn’t sure. He did not think the black boy would have been hurt so bad if he had only raised his hands once or twice, but he had not. The contented look on the radioman’s face bothered him, but other than that Jim did not remember feeling very bad about the incident, only a queer sort of dissatisfaction. In the end, the radioman lost the use of his right eye and his commanding officer, a white bleeding heart from Los Angeles, made a formal complaint.
In the makeshift courtroom, Jim sat confidently, his hands folded before him not in prayer but surety. He watched as the acting judge, an Irish fellow with a jutting lower jaw, returned from his chambers with a hangdog look and the unfathomable guilty verdict. The sentence was more harsh than anything Jim had dared to imagine: a dishonorable discharge and a reduction in rank back down to private. It seemed that the military brass could not condone Jim Falls’s personal views regarding racial miscegenation and the prostitutes who populated the sweating back rooms around Pusan. Jim stood there in the courtroom, completely befuddled, his head spinning, as the world turned away from him and the lengthy sentence was read out loud.
Arriving back in Mount Holly in August 1952, he stepped down from the Indianapolis-bound bus and breathed the dry air—familiar with its stink of henhouses, motor oil, and the fetid dust of ground-up corn. He was disheartened but not surprised to find no one waiting for him. There were no colored balloons nor a ticker-tape parade. He lit a cigarette which had been given to him from a fellow inmate while in stir—a young grunt from Oklahoma who had been caught filching from his bunkmates and had a welt the color and size of a plum across his cheek—and thumbed a ride back to his parents’ farm, leaving all sense of duty, honor, and importance behind. He was twenty-eight then. He had seen the world and the world—with its clap, its smeared-on makeup, its drooping black stockings, its desperate foreign mouth—hadn’t been much. He placed his rucksack in the high rafters of the shambling barn, searched out his denim overalls and mud-caked boots, and found his father wrestling with a bawdy Silver Sussex who refused to leave her nest. The two of them commenced to count her eggs, barely speaking a word. Fifty years elapsed like that, or very nearly fifty, before Jim looked up and realized he was already much older than his own father had been the day the old man had turned to face the afternoon sunlight streaming in from the slats of the newly erected chicken coop and had fallen over dead.
Remembering himself, the grandfather glanced up at the horse now, seeing its eyes blink thoughtfully. Watching the gray eyelids shudder open and then closed, the eyelashes looking like they belonged on a doll, it was hard not to think of the things you ought to have done, the things you had been too afraid to do, or the things you’d done and wished you hadn’t. It was sort of a second chance, this animal. He petted the horse’s neck and tried to dream up a better life for himself, for the boy, for the both of them.
_________________
Days later, a week on, they still hadn’t heard anything from back east. It looked like, for now, the horse was theirs without contention. In its own way, this was as strange a dilemma as the grandfather had faced. At night, he would lie beneath his untucked sheets, unable to sleep, trying to figure out the how, the why—quietly contemplating this odd occurrence of luck.
One morning toward the end of July, he and Rodrigo put together a tiny ramshackle stable—a lean-to made of tin and two-by-fours—and bolted it onto the side of the sheet-metal chicken coop. They led the horse inside, filled a large trough with clean water, and stood back, watching the animal take in its quarters. It gave a weak snort and then began to munch at the stand of hay, quickly ignoring them.
On their next trip into town, the boy stopped off at the public library, which had all but closed. He checked out their only book on horses, An Encyclopedia of American Equines.
* * *
At the kitchen table, the grandfather and grandson flipped through the encyclopedia’s pages until they found the right breed—an American quarter horse. Technically, American quarter horses were not white—they were perlino, cremello, or a startlingly light shade of gray—but in both of their hearts the matter had already been decided.
* * *
In his most private thoughts, the boy dreamt of fitting the silver-stitched eastern saddle onto the horse, then the custom-made bridle, then putting his feet in the black and silver stirrups and climbing on top, and then flashing swiftly over the mud-specked earth, the animal and the boy moving so fast as to transform themselves into a steady white blur, a spark, a haze of constant colorlessness, a single thing without color.
But he was afraid, believing the animal was smarter than him. In the solitude of his imagination, he had a notion which he had not dared to share with anyone—his grandfather included—that the horse, in all its splendor, was actually the Holy Ghost; that it was God made in the flesh and spirit; that while running there, its eyes showing silver, it knew everything the boy did, it knew his own mind, it could bear witness to his most private thoughts and sins. The boy told no one of these strange intimations, only stood there against the wooden fence rails, silent, like a penitent before a cross.
* * *
One afternoon at the beginning of August, they were cleaning out the horse’s stall when Rodrigo asked, “You ride her?”
The boy looked up from the shovelful of manure and shook his head. The farmhand repeated the phrase and patted the boy on the back. “You ride her. Come on.”
“But I don’t want to,” Quentin mumbled. “I’m scared. Besides, she doesn’t like me.”
The grandfather shot him an impatient look and the boy sunk a little. “She’s an animal. She’ll like you if you tell her to like you.”
“But sir . . .”
“Just give it a try,” the old man said.
The
boy frowned and nodded in defeat. Rodrigo slipped on the saddle and then the halter and led the horse to the makeshift paddock. He crouched over and helped the boy climb up, Quentin’s gym shoes squeaking with dew against the metal rings.
“I don’t like this,” the boy said, trying to get his balance. “This is a bad idea.”
“Give a little kick,” Rodrigo said.
“I don’t want to kick it.”
“Just a little one.”
The boy sighed and gave a small kick. The horse did not move, only knelt over, nosing at the grass.
“A little harder,” Rodrigo said.
The boy obliged and this time the mare took off, jerking the reins from the farmhand’s fist, trotting a sharp path along the fence line. The boy’s stomach leapt from his mouth as he tried to cry for help.
“Whoa!” Rodrigo called, but the horse kept bolting forward, the boy letting out a high-pitched sound, his glasses flying from his face. “Whoa!” Rodrigo repeated. “Whoa!” until he could catch up and grab hold of the reins.
Rodrigo and the grandfather were laughing, the boy tumbling out of the saddle, cursing, finding his glasses in a bowl of mud. He wiped them off against his pants and cursed again. “Very funny, very funny, laugh it up,” he muttered, and then at the horse, “We’re not friends anymore. We’re not friends.”
“Go on,” the grandfather said. “Give it another try.”
“No way. She tried to kill me.”
Jim watched the boy storm into the house, the kitchen screen door slamming behind him. He turned and glimpsed Rodrigo combing the mare’s hindquarters, then slowly headed inside.
The boy was at the kitchen table eating cereal. He did not look up. Jim poured himself a cup of coffee, staring out the rectangular window, his back to the boy.
“When I was just about your age,” he began, “or maybe just a few years older, they made me an MP and sent me over to Korea. I was stationed in a place called Chuncheon. In the north. Right by the thirty-eighth parallel. The other side of that line was all the bad guys. They sent all the roughneck American soldiers up there, the ones they didn’t mind seeing shot or blown up. I was in the vice squad. That’s what it was called. We were supposed to keep the other soldiers, the enlisted men, out of trouble. They’d get themselves drunk and get in a fight or go and get VD from some Korean prostitute, or else they’d steal something and then try to sell it, and it was our job to make sure none of that happened.