Winter Run (7 page)

“Come on, Charlie, there’s a harness punch up to the shop at the big house. I’ll punch the holes.”

A little later the two of them were at the top of the hill in front of the garage, Matthew with the punch and the leathers pulled out, intent on the task, and Charlie looking down at Matthew’s hands, his eyes locked onto the leather and the old rusty punch, with the slanting October light coming over his shoulder, illuminating the pony’s head as she dozed on her feet, ears relaxed, uninterested.

When the stirrups were the right length, Charlie pushed his feet into them and stood up, holding on to the pony’s mane and looking around as if he were seeing the familiar scene for the first time, smiling as the yellow light fell across his pale features. When he sat back into the saddle, he looked from Matthew’s smile to the ends of the stirrup leathers, which were so long they fell beneath the pony’s belly.

“Cut them off, Matthew. They look dumb hanging
down like that. Cut them off.”

“Now Charlie,” he said, “one of these days you going to grow up and need those leathers long.” Here he paused and said, no longer smiling, “Surely you’ll need these here leathers. Don’t you dare cut them off. Here’s how to fold them up into the keeper straps …”

That evening after he had taken his first ride and put the pony away in the barn to eat an ear of corn, Charlie hurried up the hill to the big house, looking for Matthew.

“Why, Charlie, what you limping about? What happened?”

The boy was livid. “That damn pony kicked me! That’s what.”

Matthew said it was the first time he’d ever seen Charlie angry like that. And certainly it was the first time he’d heard him use bad language. Matthew smiled as he told the story to Fred Henry that evening in the store.

“Fred, that boy was mad. He was so fussed it took a while to get the story out of him. What happened was he led the pony into the barn and tied her next to the manger and went to get her an ear of corn. I reckon he felt like he needed to feed her something after the ride. He thought it would be a nice thing to do. So over to the barrel he goes and pulls out an ear and starts back to her. Now of course that pony ain’t used to eating grain, so she gets all excited and puts her ears back and starts switching her tail. Charlie
don’t know no better, so he walks behind her to get to the manger. And, whap, she kicks him right in the knee and knocks him down. Hit his funny bone. That boy flew hot! He jumps up and turns around to her and raises his hand. He’s still standing right behind her, mind you. Well, she slaps her ears down again and cocks a leg. By this time Charlie has figured out that this pony ain’t no workhorse. And not only that, she got a mind all her own and won’t put up with any foolishness from nobody. He still has a mind to take a poke at her with a broom handle. But after what he seen Clarence do to that mare last summer, he ain’t going to be mean to no horse no matter what. So he’s stuck. He thinks it ain’t fair. That pony didn’t have no cause to kick him, seeing as how he was being kind, not mean. ‘So why did she do it?’ he asks. Well, what’s to say? That she’s just a pony mare and that’s the way she is? Anyway, that’s what I told him. One thing for sure, though, that boy ain’t going around that mare’s back end again without he looks at her ears first.”

They smiled at Charlie’s dilemma as they always did. Even at eight, Charlie had grown deep into the community.

From the beginning, relations with the pony were strained. For starters and much to the amusement of everyone in the store, Charlie had been told by his father that he was not to canter the pony until he had had her for at least six months. It was Charlie’s daddy’s way of having Charlie start his riding career
slowly. Of course, Charlie being Charlie, that didn’t work. He cantered everywhere from the beginning and as a result didn’t learn to post to the trot until he was eleven. But when the pony didn’t want to canter, which was nearly always, she had a way of jerking along at a gait that was technically a canter but was in fact a very rough way to ride indeed. Finally exasperation overtook Charlie’s pacifism toward horses and he cut a switch from a maple behind the barn. The next time the pony did her herky-jerky gait, he was ready and slapped her good behind the saddle with the switch. The results were deeply satisfying. Suddenly the pony was floating over the ground in a lovely canter that was completely comfortable to ride. It had taken Charlie until November to figure this out, so there had been a lot of rough riding in between.

Another problem was catching her up from the field. The field in this case was over a hundred acres, because when Silver Hill had ceased to be a real working farm, the cross fences were let go and the gates left open. As a result, the four original fields became one. There were groves of trees interspersed throughout the field along with two creeks. The whole thing had gone wild. The result was occasionally rented out for pasture, but even the outside fences were going bad, so most people didn’t think it was worth it to have to chase cows that even inside the fences had only broom sage to eat.

The morning after he got her home, Charlie turned the pony loose in the field. She disappeared for two
days. He walked and walked and called and called. The third day, as he crossed the first ridge, he saw her standing next to the creek at the foot of the hill. There were some small walnut trees growing next to the stream alongside a clump of multiflora rose and honeysuckle, long past blooming. She was standing with her back end to him, inside the tangle of vines, slowly swishing the late fall flies with her tail. Had it not been for the tail, he would have never seen her. Following Jimmy Price’s instructions, he rushed back to the barn and got an ear of corn. He circled around to get in front of her and whistled the horse-calling whistle and held out his hand with the corn. She raised her head, looked at him, and trotted off next to the creek on a path cut nearly a foot deep by hundreds of cattle hooves. Then she disappeared into a pine thicket at the head of the stream.

Charlie followed, calling her name. He’d never been in the thicket before. He walked the path carefully, looking down. The thicket consisted of cedars interspersed with field pine. Twenty-five feet in, it suddenly opened into a clearing with three large oaks in the middle. The clearing was more than an acre. It startled Charlie to break suddenly into the open after the prickers of the cedars and the twisting of the path. He looked up.

The pony was standing beneath one of the oaks, facing him, ears up, looking right at him, still almost white from the dry summer. She was surrounded completely by a sea of white, bleached bones. Dozens
of bones. There must have been thirty cow skulls lying in the clearing. But not just cows’. Charlie recognized the elongated skulls of horses and mules, and wide horse hooves and the unmistakably round and narrow hooves of mules. They were scattered around haphazardly. Charlie recognized some of the other bones. The hipbones looked huge and circular and the long bones of the legs were easy to recognize. Some of the rib cages were still intact, but mostly the ribs had been strewn about by the creatures that had eaten the flesh from them, leaving sections of verte-brae in piles. The thick wall of cedars and pines kept out the breeze. It was still, the day cloudy and cool with the hint of winter. The pony looked at him. Charlie looked at the bones and then at the pony.

Of course he’d heard of it, the boneyard. But he’d never known where it was exactly. This was the most remote place on the farm. No one came here except to drag a dead cow or horse or mule, and because the land was no longer farmed it had been years since this place had last been used. He’d had no previous interest in it. But it was different now. The boneyard was her hiding place. She had found it by crossing and re-crossing the hundred acres, grazing at night, her head never far from the ground, searching for the best grasses and the places humans seldom went, until she found the one place where people didn’t venture at all. And knew immediately that she had escaped, until, as horses will, she led Charlie to the very place where in the end she could have lost him.

He didn’t know the names of all the bones, but he knew her name. He put out his hand with some of the corn kernels in it and spoke to her. She let him catch her. She ate the hard kernels of field corn from his hand while he snapped the lead onto her halter. He led her very carefully along the little path so they wouldn’t trip on the bones, across the clearing and out of the thicket.

Later, when Charlie told it in his dramatic way, he said he was surprised the pony hadn’t been afraid in there with all those dead bones. But Robert Paine rolled his bloodshot eyes in his intensely black face and said in derision, “Charlie, you do make things more than what they is. That pony got better sense than that. She knows ain’t nothing living-dead in there. She knows they’s nothing to them bones. They’s all dried up just like in the Bible. Anyway, she don’t care nothing about dead things. You the one—not her.”

It was a strange outburst. Robert had never paid much attention to Charlie. But by this time Charlie’s passions were becoming of interest to us. Not many eight-year-olds wonder what a pony knows about death. It was just strange. And Charlie’s ideas seemed to strike some deep resentment in Robert that never left him. Not until Charlie was gone from the place. Maybe not even then.

Winter came and it snowed—not a lot, just enough to turn the roads to mud and the pony to her deepest reddish brown. The days grew too short for riding. Sometimes the only way Charlie knew she was still in
the field was that in the evenings, when he took her feed to the foot of the pear tree on the other side of the creek behind the barn, the previous day’s ration would be gone.

One Saturday in December when it was clear, Charlie walked over the hill to the boneyard wondering if she would be there. She was. This time she looked completely out of place. There was a little snow on the ground, just enough to make the place look whiter than usual. The pony was standing beneath her tree, covered with clay from end to end—in complete contrast to her surroundings. Even so, she was like a harbinger, as if the red clay in her coat somehow brought an earnest of spring into that white, bone-laden place.

Old Bat the mule spent the winter in the little field behind the house at Silver Hill where the milk cow lived. Bat liked to be near Matthew in bad weather because she knew he would slip her a coffee can of cow feed each evening. She loved the fine-ground feed and would snort and cough as she ate it. Charlie and Matthew thought it amazing that a twenty-five-year-old one-eyed mule would love dairy feed.

Brown the mutt cruised through on a regular basis because he knew Gretchen would give him scraps. The Corn House was tight and the radiators were nice to touch on a cold morning. Charlie’s father came home from Philadelphia on the weekends and Gretchen
minded the Corn House and read. Sometimes in the afternoon she had tea with Professor James in the front parlor of the big house. Charlie had school, which he seemed to like all right. And old Bat, when she had jumped out of the pasture, waited for him at the bus stop. We got used to the picture of the two of them trudging up the lane to Silver Hill on a winter’s afternoon.

The next time Charlie searched for the pony she wasn’t in the boneyard. From then on he only saw her when she was eating her hay in the morning as he left for school. She had never had so much to eat in her life, and with the mud caked into her thick winter coat she would be warm no matter how bad the weather.

Sometimes Charlie saw the red-tailed hawk in the afternoon. He would hear the whistle and look up to see the young hawk riding the air. But he never saw him dive again that winter. He didn’t know whether this hawk was the one he’d seen that afternoon in the back pasture at Mill Creek. Charlie liked to hear the whistle, the harsh, descending “keeeeer.” The hawk was a sentinel, a watcher. Charlie wondered of what. No one he asked was sure.

Our lives were snug and in order, waiting for the winter to be over.

The hawk declared the spring. In late April, Charlie, who would be nine that summer, saw the red tail hunting high above the field next to the lane into
Silver Hill. He and Bat were walking in together after school. In the beginning, whenever he saw the hawk, he waited for him to dive. But, as time went on, the experience at Mill Creek faded and Charlie no longer waited in suspense for the sudden fall of the hawk. So when it happened that day, he was caught off guard. He told Matthew that the suddenness of it took his breath away. The hawk landed not twenty feet from him and Bat. This time when the red tail spread his wings over the clump of broom sage, he also spread his tail, his vivid reddish-brown tail, so that half of him seemed to disappear into the ground. As usual when something exciting happened, Charlie was in a knot. He reached up and grabbed Bat’s halter. But the mule was impassive. Except for greetings, things had to be out of whack to get her attention.

At the beginning of May the pony began to shed her winter coat. Charlie was riding again, and Matthew had shown him how to take the rough metal curry-comb to the thick hair and make it fall out in clumps. As a result by the middle of the month she was gleaming. Even if there was rain she only stayed mud-colored for a day or so. She would roll in the winter grass and finish what Charlie and the brushes and curry had begun. She changed from the color of the clay to almost white again.

The day it happened began as any other chilly but clear spring Saturday morning. After breakfast Charlie walked to the barn, got an ear of corn, and
went to find the pony. Brown was wandering around, hoping for a handout. Old Bat looked down on the Corn House from in front of the garage at the big house, and every imaginable plant and animal was engaged in leaping into life. The red tail cruised over head. Charlie heard his whistle and looked up.

The pony was in the boneyard, looking her whitest. For once she let him walk right up to her. Charlie led the pony down the hill to the barn. Old Bat hee-hawed her greeting from the other hill and Charlie smiled.

He led the pony around to the front of the barn. Just as he was about to step across the concrete threshold, Gretchen called from the house telling him to come right now and get a sweater. The tone of voice was clear. He had better come right now. So once in the barn he hurriedly turned the pony around and tied the end of the lead rope to the ring next to the door, leaving four feet of it dangling. Then he hooked the low half door from the outside. He was in a hurry. It was time to go riding, sweater or no sweater.