Second, his gun was an instrument of mercy. A dog might be dragging its hindquarters, a horse limping on a fractured leg, a cow shaking its head over and over in the confusion of skull worms, and the farmer would send for Guillaume. Promptly he would arrive with his pistol and do the work of God.
At the insistence of his wife, Marie, Guillaume had hired an apprentice: étienne DuFour. He was a pale, sniveling weasel, weak in every way that the veterinarian was strong. DuFour’s job was to maintain the doctor’s apothecary, carry salves and bandages, and sometimes sit the night with laboring cows or colicky horses. People wondered why the veterinarian had hired such an insubstantial man, until one day Emma asked him directly.
“Why are you wasting your breath and time on that fool?”
Guillaume was angling a claw hook into a horse’s hoof, digging out a twisted nail. It was farrier’s work but the farrier was itinerant and would not arrive for a fortnight. Guillaume chuckled, resting the hook on his thigh. “Marie believes I can help him,” he answered. “The man tries my patience. But she says I am capable of healing more than animals.”
Then came a week the veterinarian spent away from town. He had offered no explanation, nor warned anyone, nor arranged for anyone to serve in his stead. People knew that his blue bicycle was gone, nothing more. Marie volunteered no information, and beautiful Fleur was too young to be asked.
In the week’s middle, Neptune, one of Pierre’s immense draft horses, caught herself in a hedgerow. He had left the corral gate open in a moment of absentmindedness, and she wandered off into a tangle. Trying to turn in the narrow space under the hedges, she snagged her hoof in some roots, and in yanking on it had managed to wedge herself deeper.
That would have been a surmountable problem, requiring a few minutes’ patience by Pierre as he sweet-talked in her ear and used a rope to work her powerful leg free. For all her size and power, Neptune was a compliant beast. But on that day a thunderstorm blew up from out to sea, swift across the fields till lightning struck close to the hedgerow, and the giant horse panicked. In the attempt to bolt, she managed to break her shin.
When Neptune did not return during the storm, Pierre pulled on his oilskin and went searching. The rain had ended by the time he found her, standing sideways across the path. He knew what the injury was without touching her. He pressed his head to her flank, weeping for a minute, then calming, then ever so gently, as if he were helping a baby to be born, easing her injured hoof free. Much as he hated to abandon Neptune in her pain even for a moment, he strode off, faster than his old man’s balance truly allowed, till he found a boy at a neighbor’s farm, and with a penny for his labor, sent him to fetch Guillaume.
DuFour arrived instead, nose running, shoes and pant legs wet from hurrying through drenched fields. In one hand he held an umbrella, half of its ribs inverted. In the other he carried a satchel of bandages and salves.
“This animal needs no ointment,” Pierre lamented. “You must end her misery.”
The farmer tried to lead his horse from the path into the open. Neptune gimped and squealed, tossing her head until he relented.
“Perhaps I can heal her,” DuFour told Pierre.
“Perhaps I can fly like a crow,” the old man responded. “She has a broken leg. Do what you must, I prefer not to watch.”
Pierre hobbled back toward his house, bent with grief. It was a slow and quiet walk across two wheat fields, which gave him time to think about his other draft horse. Apollo and Neptune had pulled beside one another, cutter and tedder and plow, for fifteen years. As Pierre’s strength had dwindled over time, and the land he farmed therefore diminished, those two animals made his life possible. He had not needed to steer them at the plow in years, for example. They knew when to turn and how to follow the previous row.
But one horse? Worthless. Apollo would eat and require medicine, he would wallow and sicken and resist, the whole time missing his work twin, imbalanced as if a leg had been amputated, not trained to work by himself, not strong enough to pull alone. And in wartime the odds of finding, much less affording, a partner horse were as low as a repeat of the miracle of fishes and loaves.
There was, too, the inescapable reality of age. That winter Pierre had been unable to draw the wood-splitting ax higher than his shoulder. It was as clear a signal as the bell ringing in the spire of St. Agnes by the Sea: he simply did not possess enough remaining life to train a new animal. Neptune’s mishap aside, a draft horse typically lived beyond twenty years. The farmer knew he himself would be lucky to survive another five, and that was without considering the effects of the occupation, which were unlikely to lengthen the count of anyone’s days.
Pierre approached the barnyard across from his tiny stone house. Sorrow over Neptune pierced him. He imagined an identical pain would afflict Apollo once he came to understand what had happened—and do not tell a farmer that animals do not comprehend death; they know it as fully as any human, and often mourn with greater dignity.
Now Apollo stood before him, a deep-breathing giant. The horse scratched his flank on the fence, which leaned from his weight, then he ambled nearer to be petted.
“Funny thing, Neptune getting in this scrape,” Pierre told him, scratching along the horse’s mane, under his massive jaw. “You were always the one who wandered.”
The last of the thunder rumbled from the east, and an idea came to him. The very notion gave him a sense of relief. Biting down on his pipe, Pierre slipped the loop of rope off a fence post and opened the gate. And that was that. He turned away, leaving the gate wide.
At first the enormous animal did not move. Pierre took his sadness and shuffled into the house, closing the door quietly. That way he would not hear the pistol shot for Neptune. What an admission for a man, to acknowledge that his days of horses are done. His mother, rest her soul, had often made a point of telling people that he had learned to walk by holding a mare’s tail for balance. Now, at long last, the time had come to let that tail go.