Authors: R. A. MacAvoy
Odd enough, the sound it made each time I broke its grip was dry and hard, like a stick snapping. That percussion followed me through the morning until noon, when the sun stiffened the road’s fabric.
I smelled horse, I smelled leather, and I smelled great shovelsful of disturbed soil, much like the smell of Powl’s earth closet. Around a forested comer the road slanted down, and as I followed it the air lost the sunlight and grew wet again.
There I saw the beast itself, blowing and moaning, trapped past its chestnut belly in mud. It was fat, squat, and short-legged for its mass, and laid out flat on the road, its long face glistened with terror sweat. Where it had struggled against the sucking, remnants of its harness were flung out in the morass like water snakes. The cart it had been pulling was half gone behind it, with only one yellow, mud-caked wheel rising free. There was no human form in sight.
I could see the great crack across the left of the road, where a plate of earth, hard above but mucky under, had broken and canted and sailed off entirely into the ditch, dropping the beast into sediment more than a yard deep and without solidity. For a man it would have been a sloppy, infuriating sort of joke. For a light horse it would have led to panic and perhaps injury getting out. For this cobby, stub-legged fellow, it was slow death.
It had been there a while already, by the pale, dried earth speckling its back and by the immovability of its defeated head. The breath whistling in and out of the horse’s nostrils made me think of thirst; though it was trapped in treacherous water, there was nothing for it to drink. Nor had I anything to give it; in this desolation of rain and puddles, I had not thought to fill a bottle.
There on the yet-solid bank were the marks of sticks or shovels, where someone had tried to dig the beast a path out. Behind it was a black-soaked heavy rope, with which perhaps they had tried to rope and pull it out. Now there was no one.
I wondered where they had gone and what new attack they would attempt next. I looked at the horse, the tilted cart, and the broken harness, and I mused.
He grunted at me like a pig, very sadly.
There was an ax in the cart as well as a load of root vegetables; the driver must have been very certain no one would rob him in his absence. Or very distraught.
I took the ax and went into the low woods, where the trees were so thick few got enough light, and they clawed at one another’s branches and rose too thin. I picked a spindling pine and I hacked it through at my waist level, and then had ten minutes of dangerous work shaking it to free it from its neighbors so it would fall where I wanted.
It fell in the opposite direction, actually, but I was out of its path smartly. I had underestimated the tree’s bulk and was forced to chop again to remove the heavy end of the bole, and then raise another sweat cleaning off the biggest branches. In the end I could drag it and lift one end (the light end) off the ground. I hauled it to the road and lifted the light end over the floor of the cart, extending it like a blackboard pointer over the mud-trapped animal, which lifted its head dully to look. I took the rope with me and found it to be very heavy, stiff, and hard to grab, with all the grime. I climbed the tree to its end, which bobbed but held up my weight, and I lowered myself the three feet to the horse’s back.
The creature sank no farther; evidently it was standing firm under all that mire. I attempted to run the rope under the big brown belly, but it was too wide, and the mud was not firm enough to dig. I had to settle for tying a bowline around its neck. I ran that rope over the trunk end and wrapped it once. Inch by inch I shortened the line between the horse and the sapling until the heavy end rose over the road and the horse was half choked with the tension.
Like my patron spirit the monkey (though I had never seen a monkey), I climbed four-legged to the other end of my lever and then began to leap up and down on it. The natural spring of the sapling made this an interesting occupation, and the beasts strangled screams added urgency.
I thought perhaps I was only hastening the horse’s demise, for that neck now looked as long as any blood horse’s and the tongue seemed to be swelling in its gaping mouth, but then it began to thrash as well as scream and one front hoof broke surface, looking improbably round and delicate for a beast that size. It struck and splashed and was joined by its fellow, and then the mud released with a sound of great bad humor, and the horse was up on its hind legs and crashing forward again onto the edge of the road.
It gave way. Like the piece beside it, it proved treacherous, and the horse sank into mud again. This time the undercut was not so deep, however, and the fragments of wagon-compressed earth remained underfoot, where they could be of use. The horse swam its front legs and heaved its rear and was out on the roadway, steaming.
The tree was bobbing up and down like a fishing pole, and with each bob it pulled the horse’s head up. I went to release it and found the rope hopelessly jammed. I had to hack it apart at the knot with the ax.
Now what? The beast was free but in trouble still. It shivered, and each of its knees had a tendency to buckle. It was important to get it home, to the amenities a cart horse expected (so much more than the amenities I was used to expecting): blankets, mash, clean straw, and possibly a roof overhead. But which way was home?
If the cart had been going away, then home was the way I was going. If the cart had been returning, then home was behind me. But there was nothing behind me for many miles, and besides, the load of roots indicated it was on its way to market. No one buys mangel-wurzels in that quantity for personal consumption. I was at least three-quarters certain the direction was south, but if I were wrong, the poor exhausted beast might not have it in it to do the walk twice.
As I mulled the problem, the horse began to walk, dragging me behind it.
It had immense strength for a horse so weary and so badly treated by life. I could no more turn or stop it with my rope tied to its headstall (to the best of my memory the bit was broken through) than I could have pulled it out of the muck by hand. I could have left it to its journey, but having so far taken charge of the horse, I felt reluctant to let it go.
Not many miles along, where low woods of maple and sumac gave way to plowed fields, I met a party of men coming toward me. There were four of them, walking two by two, three dressed much as I was, in light woolen the color of sheep and one in a linen apron much stained. This one also led an ox and cart. The two in front stopped as they saw us: muddy horse and muddy man, and they gaped like baby birds. Their next reactions were very different, for the peasant on the left pointed, hopped, and ran at me, shouting, “That’s my horse! It’s mine! Mine!” while the other—the fellow in the apron—cursed, threw aside what looked like a saw, and turned his back on the whole scene.
“I don’t doubt this one’s your horse,” I answered the farmer, and instinct prompted me to speak the broad Zaquash idiom of the territories. “I found it in a sinkhole.”
“’Deed! Indeed! In a hole he was, and neither man’s brain nor ox shoulders could get him out.” The owner spoke better Velonyian than I had expected. He took the mud-slick rope from my hand, and so it was he who was dragged at a good foot’s pace along the road. I liked the change.
“I got him out,” I said, and then realized it sounded like boasting. The peasant and both his retainers stared at me, fish-blank. The aproned fellow spat in my direction.
“Don’t min’ him. He thought he was going to get to take Rufon out piece by piece and keep the pieces. He’s butcherman.” This peasant spoke the heavy Zaquash I had expected. Probably he was the owner’s hired man.
“How’d you get him, then?” asked the farmer. “We couldn’t pull him nor pry him.”
“I used a class two lever, with the cart as fulcrum and myself as weight.” When none of the four congratulated me or even nodded comprehension, I began to add, “A class two lever is one where—”
The farmer cut me off. “He must a worked his way mostly out by himself,” he said, and as far as their party was concerned, that finished the matter. I stood in the road and allowed the horse to drag them on, for truth to tell, I was slightly miffed. After a minute the hired man ran back, puffing, to inform me that his master didn’t really think I had been trying to steal the horse and that I was invited to dinner.
To have it granted that I was not trying to steal was not as satisfactory as being thanked for returning a valuable animal otherwise doomed to rendering, but it occurred to me that there probably would be things to eat on the farmer’s table that I would not find by the side of the road. I had had nothing but my own cooking or Powl’s (horrific thought) for three years.
The walk to the farmstead was one long argument between Farmer Grofe and the butcher over the latter’s disappointed hopes. He felt that since he had closed his shop for a half day for this effort, he should receive recompense in the shape of a sheep or goat at least. After all, he remarked, the doctor doesn’t give back his fee when the patient dies, so the butcher ought not to be penalized when the victim does not die. Grofe was no sophist. He told the butcher that it was the luck of the draw, and if he found any of his livestock, large or small, hanging in the village shop the butcher himself would join it.
The two attendants rolled their eyes at this, indicating that Farmer Grofe’s threats were rare and to be taken at face value. Next, the butcher suggested that I be held for the cost of a new cart, since my trick with the class two lever (he remembered that part) probably had broken at least an axle. No one replied to this, but I began to wonder if my being invited to dinner was entirely a friendly gesture.
It was a very uncomfortable journey, and an uncomfortable meal afterward. I had been away from groups of men a long time.
There were marrows in butter, and there was Mistress Grofe: a thin woman much smaller than her husband and seemingly angry. She did not inquire about the conditions of my visit, and that seemed to me odd, but neither did she fear to take the butcher’s part in the argument. I felt she believed the man’s goodwill to be of more future benefit to her than the services of one chunky plowhorse.
There was fresh mutton passed about the table, and that liberally, for it was the beginning of slaughter season, but the dishes that caught my eye and set me drooling were the great tureen of bright soup, with red beets and white parsnips floating amid a speckle of green herbs, and the poppy-seed pastry, glazed in syrup. The smells of the table were overpowering to one who had been so long on plain stuffs, but overpowering in a different manner were the odors of the diners: Grofe, his wife, two sons, one daughter, the man I’d met earlier, and one maid-o’-work. Three years of militant washing, in the company of Powl only, had made me more delicate-stomached than a deacon. The warm smells of the food mixed with the still warmer smells of sweat stink and well-aged sweaty wool, and that kitchen smelled worse to me than the fresh guts of a rabbit.
Adding to this the natural shyness of a man who never knew, when he opened his mouth, which language or mixture of languages would be coming out, and the Grofes had a very quiet dinner guest who breathed through his mouth. Perhaps they thought I had a cold. They did not ask me anything of who I was. It was obvious to look at me that I was a nobody.
The Grofe farmstead had much heavy woodwork in the dining room, and a clock that announced the hour by the antics of a wooden man who left his cottage on the wall and hit a tiny triangle with a mallet as many times as the hour allowed. The ringing was not made by the triangle, of course, but the effect was still amusing, at least for the first few hours. The furniture was black with beeswax and the cushions plump and the room very tidy. Mistress Grofe sat at her end of the table and glared her anger at all of us.
After dinner, at Grofe’s request, I scratched out a picture of the affair I had created to liberate the horse from the sink-hole; it was done on the back of a bill of sale for wheat in the shock, I recall. Grofe was literate, at least to the point of signing his name. He seemed to understand the principles of my deed (I have learned since that most farmers far surpass me in that sort of cleverness), and I found myself miming how I had jumped up and down on the butt end of the sapling, and how the beast had looked being hauled up by the neck, almost like Zhurrie the Goblin of North Dormitory, Sordaling School. I was terribly bucked up to find I could make these people accept me, even if only to laugh at me, and that I slid into their accent and idiom as cleanly as Powl might have wished.
I said that Grofe and his wife had a daughter. Her name was Jannie and she was sixteen years old. She had covered the walls with samplers of trees, flowers, houses, alphabets, all sorts of usual things, and now she took up a position at the right of the fireplace, engaged on an embroidery of adult scope. It made her squint a little and couldn’t have been pleasant work, but perhaps she needed the excuse of work to remain in the parlor with a male guest.
When the hired man returned from his evening call at the barn to say the old horse had made light work of his oats and looked ready for five more years, Grofe broke out a bottle of very potent cider and poured for me the very first glass. Jannie glanced up, hidden from all eyes but mine by the frame other needlework, and when she met my glance she was not squinting at all.
Most sixteen-year-old girls are pretty, and I can remember nothing more about her than that she was at least as good as the average, that she was slight as her mother, and that she had brown hair in ringlets.