Firehorse (9781442403352)

by Wilson, Diane Lee

  An alarm jangled inside my head. At once I knew where she was going. “I want to save her,” I interrupted. “I can’t let her die.”

  “Mmm.” She nodded, and for a very brief moment I was lulled into believing that she understood. Until she said, “There’s that word again: I.” She gave me one of her plaster smiles and grabbed my hand. “Maybe you should set your wants aside and consider what your father wants. Or what God wants. If this horse is as badly injured as it sounds, maybe it would be a blessing to allow her to die.”

  I couldn’t believe what she was saying. My hand, clasped inside hers, grew cold.

  “Oh, Nora.” Grandmother spoke from behind us. She’d obviously heard the whole conversation and had readied her objection. I’d never known a mother and daughter so dissimilar. On second thought, yes, I had. “God has never yet willed one of his own creatures to die.”

  Mother stiffened. Over her shoulder she said, “Is that so?”

  “Yes, I believe it is so.” Hurrying to make up the few steps, and puffing harder, Grandmother said, “And I believe that anyone’s eagerness to say ‘it’s God’s will’ is little more than laziness, an easy excuse for turning a blind eye to suffering.”

  “I never said—”

  “I heard what you said,” Grandmother admonished, “and that’s not how you were raised—to just stand by and let others suffer. And that’s not how I want my grandchildren raised. I don’t want them to just sit on their hands and nod to the sermon; I want them to act—”

  “All I was saying was—”

  “—to act for the good, to change things if necessary. I want them to heed their callings. So if James and Rachel want to heal this firehorse, then let them try.” As proudly as one of the soldiers from her hymns, Grandmother marched onward and ahead. Mother set her jaw and passed her. For once it was I who was dragged along in tow.

  We weren’t more than a few blocks farther along when a dog’s urgent barking made us pause and look back. I was surprised to see the fire chief’s dalmatian zigzagging down the street. He was chasing shoppers toward the pavement and nipping at the heels of carriage horses to move them aside. In the path that he was clearing came the fire engine, though the driver didn’t seem to be in any great hurry. The three horses were only coming at a trot, with the one in the middle, a narrow-chested gray gelding, looking quite unsettled.

  “Breaking in a new horse, I see.” A man in a sack jacket and matching vest who was standing beside us spoke knowledge-ably to his companion. “Looks like a goer. Bet you a dollar there’s some racing blood in that one.”

  “Keep it,” the other responded. “You’re probably right.” We all watched the steam engine go past, its silver boiler shining so brightly in the sun that we had to shield our eyes from the glare.

  “Won’t be easy, though. There’s quite a set of shoes to fill, with their best horse dying.”

  “The big gray mare? Did she die now? I heard she’d been badly burned. That’s a right shame.” He sounded truly hurt. I swayed on my feet, reaching out for a lamppost to steady myself. “But you know, I’ve always been the first to say that a fireman’s harness is no place for a hot-tempered mare. Remember the time when she plowed straight through that load of barrels on the way to a house fire?”

  “I most certainly do,” the friend concurred. “Shattered them to splinters.”

  Blood pounded through my veins and my head throbbed. The Governor’s Girl was dead? It couldn’t be! James had said she was coming. I couldn’t go on to our appointment; I needed to run back to our house to learn the truth.

  “Come along,” Mother said, taking my arm again, “we really have to hurry.” In a state of shock, I was half-dragged along the crowded pavement, then through the maze of carriages and horsecars, past the long green stretch of the Common, and into Patterson’s Photography Gallery. Dazed, I followed the photographer’s directions to sit straight, turn sideways, fold my hands, drop my chin. I was numb. The window had been slammed shut in my face. I felt like a hapless butterfly being stretched against a white cotton background. My wings ached.

  After the sitting, Mother and Grandmother insisted on stopping into C.P. Hovey’s dry goods store to marvel at the vast array of dress materials and ready-made garments. To my infinite torture, they examined the handiwork on each and every mantle, whispering about stitching quality and shaking their heads in disbelief at the pricing.

  The trip home was longer, it seemed, and with the fog having lifted, hotter. Only Mother and Grandmother talked now, idle conversation about what to cook for dinner, the late hours kept by our neighbors, the need to empty the ashes from the stove. It was all so absolutely unimportant when those words kept ringing in my ears: “Did she die now? Did she die now?”

  By the time we were turning the corner onto our street, the day was stewingly hot. The blisters on my heels were oozing. Mopping the perspiration from my face for the hundredth time, I noticed an odd contraption in front of our house. It was a wide, low-slung wagon with a canopy and a boldly lettered sign that read HORSE AMBULANCE. Hardly daring to hope, I gathered up my skirt. Mother gripped my arm yet again. “Ladies don’t run,” she scolded.

  “Mother, please,” I begged, but she shook her head firmly. Her fingers tightened. I fretted and pranced the remainder of the way, as uncomfortable as the new gray horse in his harness. Until we reached the front steps. That’s when I pulled free and went tearing around to the back of the house. All the way to the carriage shed I ran, plunging through the doorway, breathless with imminent euphoria.

  James was there. And the same veterinary I’d seen at the fire station that morning. And, yes, so was the Governor’s Girl.

  But, oh my Lord, the hours must have washed the horror of her from my mind. Up close, she wasn’t so much a horse as some wretched, half-slaughtered cow. Her swollen tongue hung from her mouth and though she was bracing shakily on spread legs, she looked as if she could drop over dead at any second. She must have just arrived, because the rope was still dangling from her neck. Fresh, golden straw bristled across the stall’s floor, and an old rain tub had been dragged to the corner and filled. God bless James. Something must have been thrown in the trough, too, because a sparrow was hopping cautiously along its rim, cocking his head with interest.

  The Governor’s Girl showed none. Her face and lips were so badly swollen from the burns that I didn’t see how she could eat. She looked so miserable, so cast off from the world. I had to go to her. I had to whisper to her that she’d be all right, that I was going to take care of her.

  “Here now, miss. You’ll get yourself hurt.” Just as I started to duck under the bar, the veterinary grabbed my elbow. Why was everyone trying to hold me back today? He looked at James as I struggled, quite unladylike, to get free. “Really, Miss … Miss …?”

  “Selby,” James answered. “Rachel Selby, my sister. Rachel, this is Mr. Harland Stead, Boston’s finest veterinary, I’m told.”

  I nodded acknowledgment but pulled my arm free. I was suddenly focused on the mare. I couldn’t see her breathing. Couldn’t they see that she wasn’t breathing?

  “Well, how much money would you lay on her?” James asked, as blithely as if they were betting on a game of croquet.

  “How’s that?”

  “Is she going to pull through?”

  The veterinary cleared his throat. “Interesting choice of words. Have you ever seen this mare pull?”

  James shook his head. The mare finally took a shallow breath and I took one myself before turning to the veterinary with new curiosity.

  “There are firehorses that pull when the driver speaks to them,” he was saying, “and there are firehorses that begin to pull when the alarm rings. And then there’s this mare. Seems as if she’s pulling toward something all the time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve been at the station when it’s quiet. The other horses, they’re just chewing on their hay. But this one? I’ve seen her lift her head and wait,
all twitchy, like she knows something’s going to happen even before it does. Then she starts leaning her chest into the stall rope and bang! The very next instant the alarm rings, the rope drops, and she’s first in front of the engine, dancing and snorting and waiting for the harness to drop.”

  “The harness to drop?”

  “You’ll see soon enough, if you’re going to work there. But to answer your question, this one’s a puller. The bad news is that some of these burns that looked to be class two last night are actually threes. She’s bordering on shock. Surviving the night, and half this day, are good signs, but—” He shrugged, pulled a tangled bandage from his satchel and began rolling it. “At least she’s alive; better off, I guess, than those thirty others that went down with the livery itself.”

  My stomach upended. Dead horses, dying horses. But not this one. I wasn’t going to let it happen.

  “Are you all right, Miss Selby? Perhaps you’d like to return to the house?” Mr. Stead looked closely at me, concern clouding his face, and then at James.

  I shook my head, determined to stay. “No, I’ll be fine.” For several minutes we all watched the mare; I counted her every breath. I got the eeriest feeling that the spirits of thirty dead horses were hovering about her unseen, inviting her to join them. I mouthed the words clearly: “Don’t go!”

  “Does anyone know how the fire started?” James asked.

  When I turned to hear the veterinary this time, I was surprised to realize that he didn’t have all that many years on James. It was his sharp features that made him seem older and perhaps more serious. But his hazel eyes were definitely those of a young man, and heartwarmingly gentle.

  “It could have been about anything,” he replied. “Livery stables, as you know, with their lofts full of hay and their wooden wagons by the dozen, and more often than not bales of cotton and rags, are in simple terms nothing more than a fire in need of a spark.”

  “But I’m sure that everyone working in a livery knows to exercise caution,” James said.

  “Yes, well, it happens nonetheless, and more frequently than I like to think about. There are rumors, though, that this fire was no accident.”

  I got a chill as Grandmother’s words were echoed. “You don’t mean that someone deliberately started the fire … with all those horses trapped in their stalls … and no way to …”

  The veterinary glanced at me, then concentrated on his bandage. “Firebugs … or arsonists … aren’t like the rest of us with feelings. There’s such as will burn down an entire city to prove their point, with no thought to the cost in lives.”

  “So where’s the point in this?” James angrily gestured toward the Governor’s Girl.

  Mr. Stead shrugged again. “Sometimes answers are where we least expect to find them. The Good Book, for example, says that there are certain things that are never satisfied, and one of them is fire. I’ll add another: the man who sees an imperfect world and takes it upon himself to set things right.”

  SEVEN

  THE MEN FINALLY LEFT, BUT BEFORE THEY DID, THEY propped open the shed’s sagging double doors. The air that drifted in was hot, hardly a comfort to the Governor’s Girl, who’d been slathered in linseed oil and wrapped in bandages like some mummy from Egypt. Abandoned to her sea of straw.

  I refused to leave. For some reason, this mare mesmerized me. She was different from any horse I’d ever laid eyes upon. Even though the shed was stifling, and clouded with annoying black gnats that kept entangling themselves in my eyelashes, I settled myself on an upturned crate and prepared to pass the afternoon with her. There was truly no place in the world I’d rather have been.

  A meditative silence settled over us. Sitting in a stable could be very much like sitting in a church, I’d always thought. On that afternoon I sensed God’s presence in the weightless motes drifting in a slant of light. And as always when I quieted myself, I became distinctly aware of the many other lives unfolding around me. At my feet a black beetle clambered across the freshly turned dirt, tumbling and righting itself again and again to keep on course. Atop the pimpled rust of an old hoe, a pale wisp of a spider balanced against the new breeze. He was waving one leg. A brown-capped sparrow alit in the frame of the open window before hopping onto the feed trough. Another joined him, then another, and the three chirped their questions and considerations to each other. Completely content, I picked up a stray blade of straw and methodically creased its length under my thumbnail, curling it into a spiral. Holding it up against the window’s bright square of light, I studied it. The spiral ran around and around, much like my galloping, I thought. But did it go anywhere? And if it did, where did the journey start? At the center, moving outward, or at the outside, moving in? And was the center truly a destination, or just the abrupt end of all that galloping? Was it death? I shook my head to clear those rambling and unanswerable thoughts. Shredding the spiraled straw, I watched the beetle’s progress.

  James returned all too soon, unknowingly breaking the harmony. He was balancing a cumbersome packing quilt, along with a plate of cold lunch and a goblet of milk. He narrowly missed squashing the beetle. I jumped up to help.

  “Mother’s gone out again,” he informed me, arranging the food on the upturned crate. “I know she’s not happy about … this.” He nodded toward the Girl. With a heavy snap, he spread the quilt on the dirt floor. “Grandmother’s resting in her room.”

  I couldn’t stop smiling. “Isn’t she …?” I wanted to say “splendid,” but to anyone with two eyes that was lunacy.

  James was different, though. He understood. “She’s a fine mare,” he agreed. Then he crossed his arms in big-brotherly fashion. “You did hear what the veterinary said, didn’t you? That she’s not to be trusted?” He waited for my nod, but I wasn’t going to betray my mare by agreeing. “I’ve already heard the men at the station say the same: She has a mind of her own; you can’t predict what she’s going to do. That’s dangerous. Are you listening to me, Rachel?”

  “Um-hmm.”

  “You have to promise me you’ll stay away from her until we know her better.”

  “I will.” Since he’d started talking, my eyes hadn’t left her.

  “I mean it. Don’t go in there alone.”

  “I won’t,” I promised, and dropped obediently onto the quilt. “See? I just want to look at her. I want to stay with her.”

  James’s frown lifted into a smile. “All right, then. I’m off to polish some brass—a lot of it. And perhaps,” he added in a deep, ghostly sort of voice, “to be Father’s informant. I’ll see you at supper.” His happy whistling sounded all the way down the alley, fading away when he turned the corner. The Girl and I were again alone.

  Saying that I wanted to look at her was an exaggeration, of course. The mare’s injuries were so ghastly that I had to work to keep my stomach settled. I certainly had no appetite for the lunch at my elbow—cold chicken, bread, and jam. Yet I couldn’t not look at her. For some reason she kindled a flame inside of me, and I sat there trying to figure out how she was doing that.

  The obvious answer would be that, amongst the blisters and bandages and soot, there were remnants of her beauty. Her mane, for instance, or at least the one tuft behind her ears, was as absolutely fine and white as fringed silk. And the dappling on her muscled hindquarters, an area that had escaped the flames, put me in mind of a spring rain on a silvery pond. It must have been something to see her galloping to a fire: nostrils flared, white mane blowing, tail flagged. She mocketh at fear and is not affrighted. The Biblical words that leaped from my memory had never seemed more apt. She swalloweth the ground with her fierceness.

  As I saw past the awful injuries, my stomach calmed and actually began to growl. I’d had little more than a single bowl of porridge in close to three days, so, chasing away the flies, I picked up a chunk of Grandmother’s bread and nibbled its crust.

  From where I was sitting, staring up at the mare, she seemed taller than Peaches, though I don’t think her le
gs were much longer. I think the deception came in her massive girth; her powerful shoulders and high, rounded withers gave her a certain grandeur. Her knees, in fact, were set lower than Peaches’, and there was some feathering around her fetlocks. There must have been some draught blood in her veins. Her hooves were huge. Then there was her face. Even ignoring the hideous blistering, it was so different from Peaches’. While she had had a narrow head, with sweet, almond-shaped eyes, this mare had a forehead as broad and flat as a skillet, and a long, Roman nose. Her eyes, large and liquid, burned like black fire.

  My breath caught. That was it. It was something in her eyes, something about her spirit that was kindling my own.

  Ever so slowly, she began turning her head. I could almost hear the burnt skin crackling and I tensed. When her gaze fell upon me, I was taken aback. The only way I could describe her look would be critical, and I realized nervously that it was my turn to be appraised. Self-conscious, I straightened, wondering if I’d measure up. The Girl stared hard at me, and through me, not even blinking. It was as disquieting as a surprise examination in Mr. Moore’s science class.

  At long last she let out a miserable groan and looked away. I had no idea if I’d passed judgment. Just like Mr. Moore, apparently, she was going to keep my grade for the morrow, leaving me to wonder.

  There was something else on her mind. I could see that she was gathering all her strength in an effort to move. Shifting one hoof, and then another, she slowly began shuffling toward the rain tub. The procession took several minutes. I held my breath, agonizing every step of the way with her. When she finally reached it, she just stood, her head drooping over the water. It occurred to me that she was staring at her reflection, and while I knew the idea was absurd, I couldn’t help but wince at what she must see.