Firehorse (9781442403352) (3 page)

With the crickets humming and the light fading, I turned up the flame on my lamp, settled against the bed pillows, and
began reading. After horses, that was my most pleasurable way to spend time.

Over the past six months, I'd worked my way through selecting a horse (already had one, thank you), structure of the perfect horse (that would be Peaches), and diseases of the bones, the glands, the muscles and tendons. Now I was up to page 293 and struggling through diseases of the chest and lungs and their horrific cures. Thank the Lord I hadn't had to attempt any of those on Peaches. The only time I'd been able to apply any practical knowledge at all from the manual was in treating her thrush. And for that I'd had to skip ahead to the chapter on diseases of the feet.

Turning the pages in chunks, I located the spot where I'd left off and dived into the sea of tiny type. I was soon finding it hard to swallow, as I waded through paragraph after paragraph on coughs and consumption and corrosive liniments.

I suppose I was so immersed in my book that I didn't notice the house going to sleep around me. Only when the mantel clock chimed in the parlor below did I look up to check the oil in the lamp. I realized then that James had gone to bed, and Father and Mother were in their bedroom next door. The uneven rise and fall of voices on the other side of the wall sounded as if they were quarreling. Or rather, as if Father was speechifying and Mother was listening, pale-faced and mute for the most part.

A drawer slammed shut and I heard Father mutter something about “backward thinking” and “small potatoes.” Another drawer opened and closed. Some shoes hit the wall, low and in
the corner. “… thinking they could fire
me?
he said with heavy sarcasm. “There are bigger newspapers.” My stomach pitched a little and landed unsettled.

I struggled to focus on my book.
Any disease that affects the respiratory organs
, I read over for the second time,
can give rise to inflammation and fever, and in consequence to cough
. Father's grumblings faded into the background.
Should the inflammation and fever be neglected and thus become chronic—

“What about her horse?” It was Mother's voice this time, quiet as a breeze riffling through her lace curtains, yet clear as a jangling alarm to me. I sat up fast, straining to hear Father's response.

“Time we all made changes,” is what I thought I heard, along with some less than flattering comments about “willfulness” and “a disturbing lack of propriety.” But then, “For God's sake,” he said, loudly enough for the neighbors down the road to hear, “she doesn't even wear shoes.” My face burned.

For a while, a silence as heavy as a roar enveloped our house. I remained rigidly upright in my bed, imagining it a small boat on a storm-tossed sea. I braced for the wave that would drown me.

There was more talk, more planning, which I only made out in syllables and phrases. My heart beat faster and faster. Right on the other side of the wall, my life was being decided and all I could do was grip the sheets and listen.
What about Peaches?
I wanted to scream. I heard Father climb into bed, heard him punch his pillow into place. There was more silence.
Out by the garden, an owl hooted. I kept listening. Before long Father's snoring took up a steady rhythm.

Then I heard Mother. Her voice sounded pinched and achingly sad. “She won't understand.”

“What?” Father had been startled awake.

“I said, she won't understand.”

The bedsprings creaked as Father harrumphed and rolled over. “It's just a horse,” he said all too clearly. “And she's just a girl. She'll forget about it the minute we get to Boston. Now, good night.”

The next day dawned clear and sunny, with no trace of a storm, though one had surely blown through. And one of their secrets was revealed: It was a plan to change me—to tie me to a tomato stake, as it were, and fasten me up tight and make me grow a certain way. Father had ordered it and, in compliance, Mother had quietly paired my shoes and set them by the nightstand before I awoke. She'd laid my corset on my bed too, where I couldn't miss it. She always complied. Much earlier in her life, someone had tied her to a stake, and while she'd grown tall and rigid, there wasn't much color to her. She hadn't had enough oxygen.

THREE

I
T ALL HAPPENED SO FAST
, I
WENT COMPLETELY NUMB
. One minute, it seemed, I was brushing Peaches in the warm, sweet-smelling air of a stable and the next I was imprisoned in a damp tower. In reality it was the stoop-shouldered attic room of a narrow brick townhouse that gasped between dozens of other identical brick townhouses along a cobblestone street in Boston. Father had taken a job as managing editor of a small newspaper there. A shroud of sea fog pressed against the room's one tiny window. The wallpaper curled away from the seams, and odors of stale smoke and wet potatoes clung so heavily to the walls that my throat clamped shut. Just one day after moving there I could no longer smell Peaches on my clothes. I could barely breathe.

I'd thrown a fit when Peaches was sold and led away—childish, I admit, because it was a pure, raving-berserker fit. That had only added to what appeared to be Father's growing disdain for me. Stonily peering through the gold rims of his spectacles, he'd said, “You've none but yourself to blame.
Time's overdue for some changes.” And then, with his judgment passed and, I suppose, while waiting for me to make those changes, he'd stopped speaking to me. Other than the necessary civilities of “Pardon me” and “Please pass the salt,” our wordless battle had marched across the country.

All during the packing, all during the wagon ride to the station and the long train ride and the carriage ride at the opposite end, I sat motionless and numb. Mother petted my shoulder. “When God closes a door, he opens a window,” she said, and I wanted to scream,
Is that what you're calling Father now?
James threw his arm around me and tried to point out scenes of interest. Grandmother was the only one who didn't try to console me. She sat clutching her Bible and staring at the receding horizon, lost in her own misery.

For two whole days after we arrived I lay in my attic bedroom and watched the colorless ceiling shift from morning's gloom to evening's shadows. I watched a spider take hours to spin an intricate web and then cling to its outer edge, hungry and alone, waiting for something to happen. I lay so still that a mouse ran across my foot, pausing to sample a button on my shoe with his sharp teeth before lifting his head to sniff in my direction, whiskers atwitch, and scampering on.

For two whole days I stayed like that. Thinking and wondering. Remembering and wanting. On the third day I rose.

It was terribly early; the sky was black as pitch. The house, this strange house in a strange city, where we were all crammed together, was still. Yet I knew something was about to happen. I
could sense it. Sitting upright and wadding the coverlet between my fingers, I held my breath and listened. Down the street came the heavy
clop-clop
of a tired horse pulling a delivery wagon. A wash of silence spilled in behind him. I waited. The mouse and what sounded like thirty of his friends thumped between the walls. Somewhere out in the harbor, a ship moaned. Then more silence. Under the eaves outside my window, the pigeons began chittering uneasily. Stiff tail feathers scraped along the bricks as the birds shuffled nervously back and forth. My leg twitched once, then again. The hairs on my arms rose to attention. Something was definitely going to happen.

That's one of
my
secrets. Ever since I was a little girl, my legs have gotten a strange, twitchy feeling right before something important happens. The feeling isn't frequent. And Father would call it girlish nonsense, especially when nothing at all happens afterward. But, often enough to raise the gooseflesh on my arms, when my legs begin twitching my life is about to take a sudden turn.

Two floors below me, the mantel clock began chiming the hour and I counted along with it. Before I could whisper “four,” I was jolted right out of my bed by the raucous jangling of a fire alarm. Dogs barked, men shouted. And even though our house was around the corner and down the street from the neighborhood fire station, the noisy clatter of hooves seemed to charge right through my room. My heart banged wildly. Swept up in the frenzy, I leaped back onto my bed. I twisted the sheets until they were near to ropy reins and hung on every sound. The
choppy hoofbeats turned rhythmic: The firehorses were coming together under harness. There was a shrill whinny from one and an answering call from another. The men shouted orders. My breath came faster. The staccato quickened as the horses leaned into their work, then built to a seamless thunder as they turned the corner and raced past our house toward the fire. Like a summer storm, they were here and gone, leaving me panting.

It's a powerful tonic, listening to horses gallop. Clutching the pillow to my chest, I played the hoofbeats over and over in my head, until the silence subdued them. In the emptiness of the ordinary, and as my breathing eased, I began to wonder about the twitching. What did it mean?

The alarm must have awakened Grandmother, too, because in the room directly below me, I heard her talking to herself. Cocking an ear, I could tell she was quoting Scripture. It's funny how you can hear something and instantly smell something, when the two don't seem at all related. At that moment, in the darkness of my room, I smelled bacon. And I remembered a Sunday back in Wesleydale, after church, when Grandmother and I had been working in the kitchen together. I'd promised her to secrecy, then haltingly sought her opinion of my twitching legs.

Grandmother, a woman who was dependably unperturbed, didn't so much as bat an eye. “God has given you a gift,” she replied brightly. She tapped my nose with a finger that still smelled of breakfast: butter and flour and bacon grease.

We were rolling out biscuit dough, and I'd been cogitating on the sermon that morning, which had been about Adam and
Eve in the Garden and how it was a sin to try to know too much. “Do you think Reverend Wyeth would call it a gift?” I asked.

Grandmother snorted, dismissing my question as easily as a horse swishes away a bothersome fly. “No, I don't expect that he would. That's because he's a man, and men don't like what they don't understand.” She slammed the biscuit cutter hard into the dough and twisted it sharply. “And I expect that's why God gave this gift to you, a girl, or young woman, I should say, since you're taller than me now. At any rate, Rachel dear, don't you ignore those twitchy feelings. They're heaven-sent, I'm sure of it. Use them as your compass to the world around you.” She deftly twisted a few more circles out of the dough, plopping them onto the baking sheet, then looked at me. There was a twinkle in her eyes. “And let me know if you get a feeling for which horse is going to win the mile at this year's fair. I'll place a large bet with that know-it-all Mr. Schmidt.”

She'd laughed back then and popped a pinch of dough into my mouth. But that laugh, like that scene, had taken place half a nation away from here. She didn't laugh much anymore, ever since Father insisted she move with us to Boston. She'd left her husband buried there; she'd left her beloved garden; and, it seemed, she'd left her laughter.

There was a time when she quoted the Psalms, the verses of joy and praise. But now she was stuck in the last book of the Bible, the Revelation of St. John. It seemed she was just waiting to die. “Fear God, and give glory to him,” she recited now, “for the hour of his judgment is come….”

FOUR

B
EFORE IT WAS FULL LIGHT
, I
WAS DRESSED
. I
WAITED
, listening, as one by one the other members of my family rose, performed their toiletries, and passed over the hall's creaking floorboards and down the stairs. I thought I heard Grandmother mention my name, but there was only silence afterward, during which I imagined a shaking head. I was grateful they'd stopped pestering me to join them. When the upstairs was empty, I tiptoed down from my attic bedroom and stood in the hall, gazing out one of the tall, narrow windows there.