43
They rose together for coffee and cold cereal and they worked through the mornings at chores, together and separate, and then they sat with Emmet for lunch, the boy quietly chewing and Emmet telling his stories as before and never asking the boy where he’d gone or what he’d done in all that time away, and Emmet’s son Billy passing through these scenes like a character in a play, commenting in merry disdain and moving on, never stopping, always on his way to more promising scenes, more promising company.
At the waitress’s house they watched from the door stoop as the dog stepped gingerly through the snow, finding the places that suited her, the two of them standing in a draft of warmth and scent from inside the little house until the door was shut again and locked. Later they rang the bell over the cafe door and Maria smiled to see them.
Saturday found Sean up with the dawn to shower and shave, to brew the coffee and carry a cup of it out onto the porch. Cold silence and no movement in the treetops along the ridgelines and not a trace of cloud in the sky. Second week of March and no change anywhere, no sign of winter’s end. Across the way sat the El Camino, black and gleaming.
The mares nickered and blew at his approach and he stepped to the stall with an apple rolling in his palm.
He was leading the mare named Belle from her stall when the old man arrived at the bay door with his cup of coffee, dragging the red cap from his head as if entering a church.
“You thinking about riding?” he said, and the boy said that he was. He hitched the mare to the post and went back for the other while Emmet scooped oats into the galvanized pails fixed to either side of the post. When both mares were hitched and feeding, the boy returned to the stalls and began raking the soiled straw into a heap.
Emmet stood patting the near mare’s neck. With his eyes on the horse, he said: “You look a might fussed up for such work.”
The boy took up the pitchfork and said, “No more fussed than usual.”
Emmet patted the mare’s neck. “You might have yourself some company, you’re not careful.”
“I might?”
“Might.” He sipped his coffee. “Since you been gone there’s a gal been coming over Saturdays and helping with the horses.”
“That’s what I hear.”
“She don’t come every Saturday, of course. Sometimes she gets busy with other stuff. Fact is, I’m surprised she comes a’tall, lately.” He coughed and turned his face and spat, and toed a little mound of dirt over the spot. “She keeps on coming when she feels like coming, though. Calls me up when she don’t.”
The boy pitched the last of the straw into the wheelbarrow and rolled it out into the sunlight and came back in and took up the curry brush and began brushing the mare named Nellie.
“She ain’t called today,” Emmet said. “The gal. Why I said that about you maybe having some company.”
The boy said he’d figured as much.
“Did you figure you might save that curry work till after, when they’ll need it?”
The boy said he had nothing better to do and went on brushing.
Emmet stood watching him. Then he said, “That leg pain you much?”
“What leg?”
“What leg he says.” He sipped at his coffee. He scratched at the scar on his throat. “I ever tell you about my old granddad who had that same hitch in his step?”
“No, sir. How’d he get it?”
“Asked him that very thing, one time. Asked him, ‘Granddad, how came you to have that hitch in your step?’ and he looked down on me with a look to make the clocks run backwards and said, ‘Boy, I’m gonna tell you this just this one time ’cause I know you don’t know no better, but you’d best learn that a whelp never asks a growed man any such questions.’ Then he told me how he’d had three brothers, each one hardly older than the next and him the youngest. Well, the Great War come along and off went the eldest named John Junior, eighteen years of age and not over there two weeks before he got blowed in half. A month later the second brother named James snuck off in the night and never made it to the continent but got torpedoed by a U-boat in the North Sea. Two weeks went by before the third brother named Thomas slipped over there and was never seen nor heard from again.”
Emmet paused for a sip of his coffee.
“ ‘Well,’ said Granddad,” said Emmet. “ ‘There I am in the bed one cold night, fifteen and the bed all to myself for the first time in my life, and I’d just got to sleep when I woke up screamin. Felt like my foot had been dipped in molten steel, and me lying there a twistin and a cryin, and when I could finally see through the pain what do you think I saw? I saw my daddy standin over me holding the handhatchet my mother used to chop the kindling with. I looked to see did he chop my foot off, but he hadn’t, he’d just given it a whack with the blunt end, breaking every little bone they was. So I asked him, What’d you do that for, Daddy? And do you know what he said? Said, ’Cause your momma tolt me to.’ ”
Emmet lifted his coffee halfway to his lips and stopped. The boy had stopped brushing, the brush held still on the mare’s shoulder.
“You think I’m making this up?”
The boy resumed brushing. “You might be telling stories.”
“True stories. Years later, at Granddad’s funeral, I kissed my granny’s cheek and said, ‘Granny, he sure will be happy to see his brothers again, won’t he?’ And she blinked at me and said, ‘Brothers? What are you talkin about?’ And I said, ‘His three brothers what all died in the war, which is how he come to have that hitch in his step on account of his momma telling his daddy to bust his foot with the handhatchet.’ Well. Granny stared at me and then started laughing. Laughing, at her husband’s funeral. ‘Boy,’ she said, ‘your granddad never had no brothers a’tall. He come by that limp thirteen years old when he kicked a mule and broke his foot.’ ”
Emmet lifted his coffee and sipped noisily, and when he lowered the mug he was frowning happily.
The boy brushed along the mare’s back in slow, mechanical strokes. “That reminds me of this dog I found one time by the side of the road,” he said.
“Dead dog?” guessed the old man gamely.
“No, still alive. Big German shepherd. Whoever hit him had driven off. His lower jaw was missing.”
Emmet said nothing. He watched the boy.
“Lifted his head and looked right at me, this dog. He couldn’t bite if he wanted to, but I don’t think he wanted to. Somebody had run him over and left him there like that, but he let a stranger walk right up and touch him.”
“He knew you didn’t mean him no harm.”
“I killed him with a hammer.”
Emmet looked at the boy. The boy went on brushing.
“You did him a mercy, that’s all. You did what any decent man would do.”
The boy went on brushing.
Emmet combed his fingers into the mare’s dark mane. He was quiet. Then he said: “I bought these two animals for two reasons. One was so Alice and me could ride them, time to time, and the other was to give my boy Billy something to do with himself. But after Belle here throwed him and busted his arm he wouldn’t have a thing to do with either one of them. They was already tame as lambs when I bought them and when I asked him what he did to make her throw him he looked at me and said, ‘Nothing. She’s just a crazy mean bitch of a animal.’ ”
The old man coughed and sipped from his coffee.
“Alice and me. We didn’t do nothing different for that boy we didn’t do for his brother before him. We did a good deal more for him, truth be told. But it was just one heartbreak after another, year after year. That poor gal. You think the heart gets harder but for a mother it never does. It just breaks and breaks and breaks once more.”
The boy glanced at Emmet and went on brushing. “Not for a father?”
“For a father too. But a father don’t know it so well. A father keeps busy in his body. A father don’t stop. Then one day his wife of forty-five years is gone and then he knows. Then he knows. He gets up one day and he’s got too much love. Just too much love. What’s he supposed to do with it? Where’s it supposed to go?”
The boy held the brush on the mare’s croup. The old man stared into his coffee mug, then glanced up, abruptly, as if surprised to find he was not alone with the horses. “You was gone a long time,” he said plainly. And the boy resumed brushing.
“I shouldn’t have done it how I did it,” he said. “I know that much.”
“Something tells you it’s time to go and you go. In that respect a young man ain’t so different from a old one.”
The boy brushed down the mare’s hindquarters and moved to the other mare, Emmet beside him. The mares puffing and smacking at the empty pails.
“Well,” said Emmet. “I won’t chew your ear no more.”
“You weren’t.”
“Well,” he said. He moved as if to go but then stopped, and the boy turned to see the blue-green Subaru wagon come around the corner of the house, swing around the big spruce and stop short of the bay door. They watched the girl step from the car and come across the snow in her cowboy boots and her cowboy hat. She raised up to peck Emmet on the jaw and the mares turned their heads from the pails and flared their nostrils at the changed air and snorted.
Under the wicker weave of her hatbrim her dark eyes shone.
“They think I have carrots,” Carmen said, and Emmet said, “They know you do,” and she said, “I know. But that’s for later.” She stepped between the mares and raised a hand to each and they pushed their muzzles into her bare palms and snuffled and blew, and for a moment with the two horse heads balanced in the cups of her hands she seemed to be weighing them one against the other, like some figure of equine justice come to decide their case.