Mending Horses (11 page)

And the damn fool beast had been saying it ever since, more than twenty-five years now. Jonathan smiled and wiped his eyes before putting
his spectacles back on. The girl stared solemnly back at him. Her frown deepened, bracing for his mockery
.

“He said yes, eh? Now ain't that funny?” he said. “First time I met him, he said that exact same thing to me.”

“. . . and it's been me and Billy and Phizzy ever since,” Jonathan said. “I know less about being a daddy than Phizzy does, but I'm a better father to her than Hugh Fogarty ever was.”

“But it's a son you're making of her, not a daughter.” Daniel said. “Don't you even know her true name?”

Jonathan shook his head. “It's Billy she wants to be and Billy she'll stay until it don't suit her no more.”

“It just ain't right, her going 'round with a peddler and singing for her supper like a trained canary. What sort'a life is that for a lass?”

A pretty sorry one
, Jonathan thought, but that wasn't the point. “It was all right when you thought she was a boy.”

“That's different.”

“Which would you rather do? Spend your days cooking and cleaning and sewing for a pack of unthankful men, or travel around the wide world with a coupl'a fine horses and a coupl'a fine fellas such as us?” He spread his arms and swelled out his chest.

Daniel squirmed. “That ain't a fair question. I'm not a lass.”

“So a girl can't hanker to go adventuring, same as a boy can?”

“But lasses are . . . well, different. It's unnatural. 'Tisn't the way things're s'posed to be.”

Jonathan's voice turned serious. “Son, the way things're s'posed to be is, you're s'posed to spend another five years slaving away for your Mr. Lyman, and maybe another ten slaving away for somebody else before you scrape together enough money for a little shack and an acre or two of rocks and swamp. But here you are with a fine horse, a pack of goods, and a full purse. The way it's s'posed to be is, she keeps house for her daddy and her brothers until they wear her down with work and beatings.” Daniel winced and looked down at his feet. Good, Jonathan thought. He
was getting through to the boy, making Daniel understand that he and Billy were cut from the same threadbare cloth. “If she's lucky, maybe her father won't kill her, and she can escape to a husband who'll wear her down with work and babies. And if she's very lucky, maybe he won't beat her. As a boy, she's safe.”

Daniel chewed his lower lip and scuffed his feet in the dirt. “And what happens when she can't be playing the boy no longer?”

“I've been thinking on that, believe me.”

Daniel apparently had been, too. “Your cousin seems a motherly type,” he said.

“You think so?” Jonathan asked.

“She could do worse,” Daniel suggested.

“Billy or Sophie?”

Daniel peered more closely at Jonathan's face. “You been playing games with me, ain't you? You been planning to leave her here all along.” He threw his hands up in disgust. “It's all games with you. Peddler's games and tricks, ain't it? Why ain't you just told 'em straight out?”

“These things take time. Sophie's won Billy's stomach already. Another day or two, she'll have her heart.” The peddler took his spectacles off and wiped them on his vest.

Daniel snorted. “If all it took was good eating to win someone's heart, I'd still be back to Lyman's.”

“That's why it's lucky you came along. Billy's been spitting nails over my asking you to travel with me. The more she hates me, the more she'll want to stay with Sophie.”

“So when exactly do you figure on talking to your cousin?”

Jonathan forced himself to laugh. “I'll burn that bridge when I get to it.” But all he could think of right now was how setting off that fire would leave him on the wrong side of a wide, lonely chasm.

“Dead,” Liam said, his face gray with sickness and exhaustion. He pulled the blanket over the two lads' faces.

Hugh Fogarty clutched the wall to steady himself. “Both?” He stumbled forward and dropped to his knees by the mattress. The shock of his landing scattered the fuzzy cloud of drunken numbness that had fogged his brain. His hand hovered over the blanket, but he couldn't bring himself to touch it.

Liam rose and stepped aside. “Aye, and where have you been hiding yourself all this time, whilst they were dying, eh?” He swayed over his father, little better than a walking corpse, clothes hanging from his fever-wasted body, eyes bloodshot from wakefulness, sickness, and weeping. Eighteen years old and nearly a man grown, Liam had been broad-shouldered and strong when Hugh had last seen him a few weeks ago. Now it would take but a breath to tumble him.

“You know I've no stomach for illness, Liam,” Hugh said. Even now he had to lean away from the stench of sweat, soiled linens, brimming chamber pots. He wanted to take out his pipe to mask the reek of illness and death with the sweet tobacco smoke, but it seemed a sacrilege to do so. God, his lads, his bright-eyed, laughing lads, who'd tumbled about the shanty like a pair of puppies at play, so loud sometimes he couldn't bear their noise and had to strike out against it. Surely, he'd thought, the sickness would go easy with two lads so strong and full of life. How was he to know? How was he to blame? He'd other cares, so many he couldn't number them. “Who'd'a provided for you lads if I'd'a stayed home?”

Liam gestured about the dark, sooty room. “Providing? The
cupboard's bare and the woodbox is empty, and I've not been able to more than crawl. Tell me what the bloody hell you been providing.” He slumped against the wall, panting from the effort of his outburst.

Fists doubled, Hugh rose to face his remaining child. The rage ran through him, taking him outside himself, so he felt he was watching another man raise his hand to strike. For once, though, he didn't lash out. He forced his hands back down to his sides. “You don't mean that, son. It's only the sickness talking. If Nuala was here, it would'a been different. She'd'a tended to you lads.” He'd not thought he'd miss the lass so much, that day he'd sold her to the peddler. But in no time, the money was gone and the shanty felt as empty as his pockets. And her music, sweet Jesus, how bleak the shanty was without her music. Just like a mockingbird, she'd been, only needing to hear a tune once to learn it, then turn it around and make it hers. So young, and so like her mam with her blue eyes and yellow curls and lovely voice. He'd been an idiot to let her get away.

“If Nuala was here, she'd'a died in a fever, lying in her own filth, just like Jimmy and Mick done,” Liam said bitterly. “She was lucky to go like she did. Better for her that way than this one.”

Hugh stared blearily at his eldest son, the boy's yellow hair dark with filth, drooping across his sweaty forehead and into eyes blue and cold as steel, a boy's eyes no longer. Liam was like his mam, too, but only the hard bits: the sharp tongue and harsh laugh she'd acquired those last few years. The lad was so young to be so bitter. Margaret had been bitter, too, by the time she'd died. Well, a hard life could do that to folk, and none so hard as Hugh's own. “All gone,” he said softly. “All gone and naught I could do.” Liam would be next, he thought, already mourning the son who stood trembling against the wall.

Something hit him in the chest, taking the wind out of him. His arms flailed, blindly grabbing the bucket that Liam had thrown at him. Hugh hadn't thought the lad would have the strength to lift so much as a handkerchief, never mind the heavy wooden bucket.

“Here's something you can do,” the boy said, pointing to the bucket. “Fetch some water, why don't you? The least you can do is clean 'em up so they can be buried decent.” He dropped to his knees and waved the flies away from the blanket, carefully folded it down, every motion an effort for his shaking body. He exposed the lads' ashen faces, then their shoulders, the stench of their sickness, of their emptied bladders and bowels rising as he peeled the blanket back from their grotesquely distended bellies.

Hugh's stomach roiled and he clamped a hand over his nose and mouth to keep the reek out and his dinner in. He tried to turn away, but he couldn't stop himself from staring at the two obscenely inhuman things that used to be his lads. “I can't,” he protested, clutching the bucket to his chest as if it could ward off his dead sons' angry spirits, his living son's accusing eyes, his own shame and guilt.

Liam's hands reached out and circled his father's wrists like shackles. The anger and bitterness in his eyes dissolved into exhaustion and tears. “For Christ's sake, Da. Please. I can't be doing this alone. I need you, Da.” He gestured toward the lads. “They need you.”

Oh, yes, Liam looked like his mam all right. Like Margaret the day she died, her face pale and narrow and full of pain and terror, her grip on his arm suddenly so powerful he'd feel the bruises for days after. Then just as suddenly gone, her hands, face, eyes, empty as his heart without her. Hugh couldn't see his son anymore for his own weeping, weeping all the while he fled the shanty, the empty bucket falling from his arms with a hollow thud.

“ 'Tain't fair, Phizzy.” Billy pressed her legs tighter around Phizzy's broad belly, urging him into a canter with calves and thighs and seat the way Mr. S. had taught her.

At first she'd been thrilled when Mr. S. had rescued that gawky lad with the big ears. But now she wished the lad had proved to be a murderer and was locked safely away.

It had been bad enough that Mr. S. had invited that one to travel with them, but now the lad knew her secret. Any day he would tell on her and she'd have to go back to being Nuala, and it would be that new lad traveling with Mr. S. instead of her.

It wasn't right. Wasn't this her true self, this boy she'd invented? Wasn't Mr. S. more her true da than the one she'd been given by mistake?

She leaned forward and wrapped her arms around Phizzy's neck, burying her face in his coarse mane. The moment she'd laid eyes on Phizzy she'd known that she was meant to be with the old horse, though at first she'd not understood that Mr. S. was supposed to be part of her new life as well. Now every day when she was out of doors in the fresh air and sunshine, singing and laughing with Mr. S and tending to Phizzy, her heart told her that this was where she was meant to be, who she was meant to be.

Father Brady had once told her that God never did nothing by mistake, but hadn't God made a horrible mistake taking Mam away? The priest had said it was God's will, that Jesus had needed Mam up in heaven with Him. But Billy had been only six when Mam died, Liam not yet thirteen, and Jimmy and Mick just out of nappies. It was selfish, if not just plain mean for Jesus to be
taking folks' mams when He had a perfectly good one of His own up there with Him.

God had made another mistake in trapping Billy in that skin of a girl that weighed upon her like a chain around her soul: an endless chain of soiled and torn clothing and dirty dishes and meals to be cooked. But He'd given Billy the music to show her He was sorry. When the music stirred inside her, it felt like God Himself was calling to her, just like Father Brady said God had called him to become a priest. Surely if God could call a priest to go about in skirts, He could call a lass to go about in trousers.

And then God had sent Phizzy and Mr. S. to finally put things right. It was so right to be free. That girl she'd been four months ago was gone. Dead and gone, and Billy sprung up in her place. And she'd not missed her one single bit.

“Where's Billy?” Daniel asked. He lounged in the Taylors' kitchen doorway like a sprite who'd materialized to remind Jonathan of his sins.