Darcy

by Whitney Sanderson

  The farmer stopped in the dusty town square. There were many horses here, mostly weanlings like myself. Strange people ran their hands over my neck and haunches. They picked up my hooves and opened my mouth so they could check my teeth.

  A man in a checkered cap paused to talk to my owner, his lanky teenage son listening carefully to every word. They haggled for a minute, then clapped each other’s hands to seal the deal. Just like that, I was sold.

  My new owner handed over some coins and led me away. “This is a sturdy young filly,” he said to his son. “She won’t be ready to work for another year, but if you buy a weanling you know it hasn’t been mistreated or worked into the ground. A mare is best for farming, because she’ll keep her mind on her work and bear a colt or filly to sell each season.” The man gave me a slap on the neck as he hitched me to the back of a milk delivery cart. I knew it was a friendly gesture, but I flinched. Everything was so new and strange.

  “Thanks for the lift, Donovan,” my new owner said to the man on the high seat of the milk cart.

  “No problem, McKenna. Ye know I pass right by your place on the way home.” The man glanced over his shoulder. “Looks like ye got yourself a new addition to the family.”

  “Aye, ’tis lucky we had a good harvest last season,” said Mr. McKenna. “We haven’t been able to afford a horse since old Bramble passed. Taken two years to scrape up the cash, it has. We’ve borrowed Elson’s donkey to haul our turf, but nothing beats a Connemara pony for an honest day’s work.”

  I had to trot to keep up with the pace of the horse pulling the milk cart. The glass jars rattled in their wooden crates. The road cut through fields that were crisscrossed by stone walls and dotted with whitewashed barns and cottages. In the distance I could see the shimmering outline of the coast. A hint of ocean smell lingered in the air, mixed with the scent of manure, grass, and soil.

  For several hours I ambled in the wake of the cart. Around midafternoon, we turned from the road into a muddy barnyard. A bony cow was grazing in a field behind the barn, which was little more than a pile of stones. The nearby cottage looked the same, with the addition of a chimney that puffed gray smoke. It looked like any of a dozen other farms I had passed, but I guessed this one was mine.

  I couldn’t see or smell any horses aside from the draft pulling the milk cart. A pang of unease ran through me. Every horse dreads being alone, without others of its kind to groom and talk to. A horse without a herd is lost. Was I doomed to live with only a cow for company?

  The teenage boy jumped down to untie me from the cart. At that moment, a woman and a small herd of children came tumbling out of the cottage. They were followed by half a dozen black-and-white balls of fluff. I reached down and nosed one curiously, for I had never seen a kitten before. The creature hissed, and I jumped back in alarm. But the kittens were not the end of the parade. Six baby geese came waddling out of the cottage and were soon pecking at my hooves.

  In the midst of this confusion, a little girl started braiding ribbons into my mane. Another child held out an orange object on his palm. It was my first carrot, and it was a much more pleasant introduction than the kittens.

  In the weeks that followed, I came to know the people in that unfamiliar sea of faces. Mr. McKenna and his wife had two daughters and two sons. Shannon, a girl of sixteen, was the eldest. She was beautiful, with slender white hands and a quick laugh. Her brother Liam was the lad who’d come to the auction. He was fifteen, but nearly as tall as his father. Tomas was twelve and wore funny round spectacles that made him look like an owl. Fiona, the youngest girl, was eight, and her curly red hair always seemed to be escaping from its braids.

  Aside from the cow, who was rather dreamy and dull, I had the kittens, a dozen chickens, a pair of bristly pink pigs, and the geese for company. The kittens grew up to become sleek, deadly mousers, and the goslings turned into elegant, snowy-white geese. Unfortunately, they were also quite stupid. They were too tall to scramble under the pasture gate like the chickens did, so at breakfast time they all stood in a row and honked sadly because they couldn’t reach the spilled grain.

  Rarely were the animals shut inside for the night—only on Saturday evenings so the family could milk the cow and go to church on Sunday without fetching us from a far corner of the pasture. The rest of the time we came and went as we pleased.

  When I wasn’t filling my belly with sweet meadow grass, I liked to stand near the gate to watch the goings-on of the family. On sunny days, Mrs. McKenna churned butter or spun wool in the yard, and Mr. McKenna was always fixing something that had broken. When the children had a free moment from their chores, they liked to play ball games or mark out hopscotch grids in the dirt with a sharp stick. No matter how busy they were, someone always spared me a friendly pat or a leafy turnip top to crunch.

  I still missed Alana and my dam, but I had found a new herd in the McKenna family.

  Shannon and Fiona loved to weave colorful flowers into my mane, and I kept Tomas company in the stable while he secretly read books he had borrowed from school. The cow got milked and the pigpen mucked between chapters of Huckleberry Finn. If my sharp ears heard someone coming, I would snort and raise the alarm so Tomas could hide his book under a straw bale.

  Liam was the quietest of the McKenna children. He worked hard beside his father in the fields, but I often saw him gazing into the distance as if he were imagining someplace far away. He was the first of the McKenna children to ride me, sneaking out of the house at night and coaxing me over to the stone wall. I was quite startled the first time he flung himself onto my back, holding tight to my mane as I raced around the pasture until I was sweaty and winded. In the morning, Mr. McKenna saw the dried flecks of foam on my chest and wondered aloud if a fox or a stray dog had spooked me in the night.

  My life was certainly different now, but in some ways it was less lonely than at my home on the seacoast, where for months at a time I saw no creature other than the two mares, the birds above, and an occasional fox or rabbit. But the ache of Ciara’s death never left me, and often the sight of my shadow cast on the turf or the wall of the barn reminded me of what I had lost.

  Sea and Soil

  Now that I was two years old, it was time for me to earn my keep. All the creatures on the farm worked for their oats: The cow gave her milk, the chickens and geese gave eggs, and the pigs … well, the less said about that, the better.

  I had been trained to pull a cart and plow, and my slender frame had filled out with muscle. I still stood only fourteen hands high, but my hooves were hard as flint and my coat shone with good health. My fuzzy baby fur had shed out and now I was dappled gray, with a storm-colored mane and tail.

  My pasture was large enough that I could forage for most of my food, but there was always a scoop of oats waiting for me at the end of a day’s work. In the mornings, Mr. McKenna hitched me to the pony cart and dropped the children off at the schoolhouse, some seven miles away. Liam and Fiona dragged their feet, muttering that they’d rather sow potatoes or gather reeds to rethatch the roof. But Tomas loved reading and sums, and Shannon treasured every opportunity to gossip with her friends.

  In the misty cold days of March, my main task was hauling seaweed from the shore to fertilize the potato fields. The slimy plants were full of minerals that the stony soil lacked. But it takes a lot of seaweed to fertilize a field, and all of it had to be carried on my back in scratchy woven baskets. The seaweed had a pungent, fishy scent that filled my nostrils so I could smell nothing else for days.

  At first the smells and sounds of the seashore filled me with dread. I remembered Ciara and the eagles on the cliff. But the coast was different here, more open and gentle. The waves that skimmed to shore looked like the manes of white horses galloping in from the depths of the sea. The salty gales that whipped the coast made me feel free, even with a pannier of soggy kelp strapped to my back.

  Sundays were our day of rest. The family ate a quick breakfast of boiled potatoes and hitched me up
to drive the twenty miles into town. The horses, naturally, remained tethered outside the stone church. The sound of hymns and sermons drifted out through the colorful stained-glass windows.

  Sunday mornings were the perfect opportunity to catch up on the latest gossip. We farm ponies rarely stepped off our own land during the week. If we did, we were too busy to stop and socialize. While our families worshiped, we had ample time to shoot the breeze about the growth of crops, new foals, or the goings-on at Hulton Manor.

  Sir Henry Hulton was the main landowner in this part of the county. The McKennas leased their farm from Sir Henry, and they had to pay most of their earnings to him. Since the rent was so high, few farmers could save enough money to buy the land that they worked.

  The other ponies claimed that the Hultons owned the finest Thoroughbreds in all of Connemara. These fabled horses slept in stalls the size of entire cottages that were bedded with goose down. They wore silver horseshoes and ate oats mixed with molasses three times a day.

  It sounded like a tale as tall as an evening shadow to me. My life was certainly nothing like that. Indeed, by the time May wildflowers bloomed, the hardest labor of all began. Wood was scarce near the rocky coast, and people in Connemara relied on turf bricks to heat their cottages. The McKennas harvested their turf from the peat bog that lay between their farm and the town.

  The bog was a vast expanse of puddles and waterlogged earth. The ground sucked at my hooves and swallowed any object that was set down and forgotten. People used heavy spades to cut the turf into bricks, which were then stacked to dry in the sun.

  One of my jobs was to carry these blocks of earth back to the McKenna farm, so they would have fuel enough to last the winter. It was hard work, but I thrived on it. The other farmers made envious comments when they saw how lightly I pulled a full cartload of turf.

  I was impervious to the wind and cold, and I rarely sought shelter in the barn. I felt sorry for the humans, who had no fur to protect them from the elements. On the other hand, they could take off their clothes to dry them. It rained more days than not, and my coat was usually damp beneath my harness. Sometimes the leather rubbed my fur right off and made a sore. When that happened, Mr. McKenna was quick to apply a salve of goose grease to the wound.

  On afternoons when I didn’t have other work to do, Fiona and Tomas would often go to the beach to collect mussels, riding double on my back. Even on cloudy days the water was a brilliant turquoise color. While one child waded in the shallows with a bucket, the other would find a stretch of smooth white sand to gallop on.

  And so my first year with the McKennas passed more quickly than I could have imagined. I rarely thought of my old life now. I had grown to love all the McKenna children, and my days were spent in a joyful harmony of work and play. But outside the sheltered hills of our farm, things were changing.

  Ireland was at war. I didn’t know what that meant, but it seemed to be all people talked about. War and freedom. To me, freedom was being let out of my harness after a day of plowing so I could have a good roll in the dirt.

  One afternoon when I was sowing furrows for seed potatoes, I noticed a line of men marching down the road toward town. I would have heard the tramp of feet sooner, but Mr. McKenna was singing as he worked. My ears were filled with “Black is the color of my true love’s hair” and “Red is the rose that in yonder garden grows.”

  The men were nearly in front of our noses by the time we noticed them. They were all dressed in the same round hats and long jackets with brass buttons. Some were walking, and others were riding in a cart behind a pair of stocky bay horses.

  They carried rifles, but this wasn’t so unusual. Mr. McKenna sometimes took me out to hunt rabbits and grouse in the brushy lowlands. I didn’t like the gun’s sharp report, or the smell of burning that lingered in the air, but I’d gotten used to it. Still, it seemed strange that so many men would be walking down our road, carrying guns. There were more of them than there were rabbits to eat, I was certain.

  Strangest of all was Mr. McKenna’s reaction to this odd parade. He stopped in his tracks and his voice died on his lips. If I hadn’t had to wait when I reached the end of the furrow, I could have plowed the world’s longest seed potato row. One of the soldiers raised a hand to Mr. McKenna as they passed, but he didn’t return the greeting. When the troop had marched out of sight, Mr. McKenna returned to the plow. His face was grim, and he seemed to have forgotten the rest of his song.

  Black and Tans

  Soon after the soldiers came, the family made a trip into town. The McKennas grew most of their food and had little extra to spare. Much of their rent to the Hultons was paid in the form of grain. Instead of cash, the McKennas brought eggs, milk, wool, and homemade jams to trade for shop credit.

  When the family pulled up in front of Beadle’s General Store and Apothecary, Liam said he would wait outside. Fiona, Tomas, and Shannon followed their parents into the store. Through the window I could see that Shannon was dabbing samples of rouge onto her cheeks and spraying herself with amber liquid from a crystal bottle.

  Tomas and Fiona went straight for the candy jars lining the walls. Their lips moved soundlessly as they argued about how many root beer barrels, lemon drops, and licorice sticks should fill the small bag they would get to share as a treat. This was a topic that interested me as well, for Fiona could always be counted upon to slip me a candy for the drive home.

  A pair of British soldiers were loitering outside the pub across the street, smoking and looking bored. Their rifles, tipped with shining bayonet points, were propped up beside them. I’d heard from the ponies at church that the soldiers had taken over the Gallagher estate, which rivaled the Hultons’ in size and grandeur. Brandishing their weapons, the soldiers had scarcely given the family time to pack their things.

  Now the uniformed men stalked around town searching for “suspicious activity”—evidence of the Irish Republican Army, who wanted to throw the British troops out of Ireland and let the Irish rule themselves. Otherwise, the soldiers seemed mostly to occupy themselves in the pub, sometimes shooting at stray dogs and demanding “taxes” of whiskey, meat, or fruit from local shopkeepers.

  I felt the cart jiggle as Liam kicked restlessly at the baseboard. I noticed that the soldiers across the street were looking in our direction. One of them crushed out his cigarette, then flicked it into the road. The cart bounced. Liam had jumped down and was approaching the soldiers.

  “Ye aren’t supposed to throw trash on the street,” said Liam, his eyes narrowed.

  The soldiers looked surprised for a moment, then laughed. “And who made you the king of County Galway, little lad?”

  “Ye don’t belong here,” said Liam, his fingers curling into fists. “Our land was clean and good before ye came.”

  One of the soldiers looked annoyed, but the other reached down and picked up the cigarette with a good-natured grin. He dropped it into an empty bottle that was resting between the two men. “Happy now?” he said.

  “I was talking about ye,” said Liam. “Ye’re trash, and ye don’t—”

  The first soldier grabbed his rifle and aimed it at Liam’s chest. There were only a few inches of space between the muzzle and the faded plaid of Liam’s shirt. I couldn’t see Liam’s face, but he had quickly fallen silent.

  “Come on now, Keppler, he’s only a boy …,” said the other soldier, looking uncomfortable.

  “Old enough to face the firing squad,” muttered the soldier with the rifle. “Hands up, little Paddy.…”

  I didn’t like this situation at all. I wanted to go over to Liam, but my reins had been tied to a post.

  Just then, Shannon trotted out the door of the general store. She was smiling and gazing at a small gold tube in her hand. Her grin faded when she saw her brother facing off with the soldiers. She glanced back at the store, then hurried over to where Liam stood sullenly at gunpoint.

  “What’s going on here?” she said in a honey-sweet tone. “What fool thin
g has my brother done now?”

  “Talking treason, he is,” said the soldier, giving Liam a prod with the muzzle of the gun.

  Shannon stepped in front of Liam and put her hand on the barrel of the rifle, flashing a coquettish smile that showed off her even white teeth. “He’s just a hothead. Don’t listen to a thing he says.”

  The sneer faded a little from the soldier’s lips, but he still didn’t lower the gun.

  “Fetching lass, in’t she?” said his companion, elbowing him in the ribs. “Guess there’s some benefits to being out here in the sticks.…”

  “Aye, I reckon that English girls aren’t very pretty compared to us native savages,” said Shannon pertly, hiding the fear that I saw lingering deep in her blue eyes. “Come on, Liam,” she said, grabbing her brother by the back of his collar. “Time to go.”

  No one argued with Shannon when she had that expression on her face. I’d seen it a thousand times—be it Shannon’s turn to milk the cow or fill the pigs’ slop bucket or not, you could bet that a little brother or sister would be doing the task instead. The soldier let his gun drift down, looking a bit perplexed, and Shannon marched Liam back across the street.

  “What were you thinking?” she hissed, all but shoving her brother into the cart. “You don’t go mouthing off to the Black and Tans. They’ve shot people for less.”

  I had a feeling she was just warming up, but the rest of the family emerged from the store with their packages and Shannon fell silent. The soldiers had gone into the nearby pub. Mr. and Mrs. McKenna didn’t seem to notice anything was amiss as they loaded their supplies into the back of the cart. Fiona gave me a strange-tasting pink candy.