Things as They Are (8 page)

This was the August Joseph came home to find that his father had cancer. His mother was the one who broke the news
to him, not the old man. That night, after supper was finished, the two men sat alone at the kitchen table with a bottle of rye between them while Mary Kelsey watched television in the living room. His father was not a drinking man, it was unusual for him to get drunk, but that night he did. For a long time neither Rupert Kelsey nor his son said anything. Joseph held himself sober, expecting the old man to raise the topic present in both their minds, but when his father did finally speak, it was to claim his innocence of crimes with which he had never been charged.

“One goddamn thing nobody could ever say about me was that I mistreated a horse,” he suddenly said. “I never mistreated a horse. Am I right or am I wrong?”

Joseph looked at him with surprise. He said he was right. Nobody could ever accuse him of cruelty to a horse.

His father nodded to himself. “Every horse I ever owned was fat and happy. Nobody can say otherwise. I had horses that died of old age on this place because I wouldn’t sell them to the likes of those that wanted to buy them. Died, mind you,
of old age and natural causes.”

“Yes,” said Joseph quietly.

“So, nobody,
nobody,”
the old man repeated with stark emphasis, as if challenging his son to dare deny it, “can say that Rupert Kelsey didn’t do right by any goddamn horse he ever owned. And if they say he did – why they’re goddamn liars. When there was money for nothing else around here, I saw to it my horses had oats. And nobody can say different. I never neglected a horse in my life!”

He continued on in a similar vein, justifying himself, offering evidence of his goodness, his kindness, his concern. Joseph wanted him to stop. It made painful listening. It put an ache in Joseph’s chest, the kind that managed at one and the same time to feel heavy and sharp, the kind he hadn’t carried around in him since he was a boy. It made him want to cry, the most inappropriate thing he could do in front of his father.

“Who’s saying you did?” said Joseph. “Nobody’s saying you did.”

Rupert Kelsey picked up his glass with the calculated steadiness of the far gone in drink. “There’s some,” he said, “who I won’t name, who would like to paint me in a certain light. They’re wrong. I was never cruel. I never mistreated a horse in my life.”

Joseph could not fathom what any of this struggled to express.

The following morning Joseph’s father invited him to come for a ride. Because of the circumstances, Joseph couldn’t see how he could refuse. It had been more than a dozen years since he had sat a horse and he felt ridiculous dragging himself aboard, feeling his ligaments tighten and burn alarmingly, his joints creak dryly as the horse plodded along.

His father led him down a little-travelled country lane, which was no more than the scar of old tire tracks. On either side of them the black poplars swirled masses of glittering leaves in the early morning breeze as birds hopped and sang noisily in the branches. A number of wrecked cars had been towed here to rust into the margins of the bush, shards of broken windshield grinning in the jaws of the frames with savage glass teeth. A woodpecker slashed by their horses’ noses in the level, swift flight plan of its kind.

His father began to talk, not about his cancer, but in a different fashion from the night before.

He said, “You won’t believe it but I had the same idea as you once – about getting out of here. I thought about going to South America, one of those countries there. Argentina. I saw this book with pictures, all open country, no fences, lots of cattle. Lots of horses. They live on the backs of horses there. I was twenty-one. I thought about going. But then the war came along.” He paused. Joseph saw that in the morning light his father’s face looked drawn, that in the light of day he looked sicker than he had in the electric light of the night before. “Who knows?” his father said to himself. “It doesn’t matter. I likely wouldn’t have gone. What do they speak there anyway? Mexican?”

“Yes,” said Joseph, restraining pedantry.

“I wouldn’t have been one for learning Mexican,” said his father. “I didn’t learn nothing much in my time.”

They went along a little further in silence. The trail had dwindled away from lack of use. Chokecherry, pincherry, cranberry, and saskatoon bushes crowded in upon them. Tall grass, which had overgrown the tracks, feather-dusted their horses’ bellies. The men were constantly fending off branches that threatened their faces, only a narrow channel of washed blue sky snaked above them. It felt to Joseph as if he were being swallowed up in a green dream.

His father said, “I had another chance to get away when you were about ten – you wouldn’t know this. A fellow who was up here from Texas buying horses said I should come down to Houston and break horses for him. He had this operation outside the city where he sold saddle horses to doctors and lawyers and businessmen, rich people. Then he stabled the horses for them, got them coming and going, got them twice. He said to me, ‘You can’t live in Texas unless you own a horse. I got Jew dentists, come down from up north, never seen a horse in their lives, and even they end up owning horses. If they don’t have to have one, their kids do. It’s a fucking gold mine. You ought to throw in with me.’ I ought to have. He needed a horse-breaker. He was offering good wages.”

“And why didn’t you?”

“Your mother didn’t want to go some place strange.” His father laughed. “You could have grown up a Texan.”

“Just in time for Vietnam,” said Joseph.

The grove of poplar was thinning, they came out into an opening in the bush, into the garish glare of prairie light unsifted by leaves overhead, rousting two large, rusty-brown hawks off the ground where they were tearing at a rabbit. The birds flapped into the air with harsh, indignant screams, inched up the sky steadily, one wing beat at a time, and disappeared from sight.

“I think we better turn back,” said his father.

“You don’t have to go back for me,” said Joseph. “I’ll pay for it in stiffness later, but I’m okay for now. You want to go on, go on.”

“I ain’t comfortable on a horse much any more,” his father said. “I got this thing in my belly, after twenty or thirty minutes up on a horse, it hurts like a fucker. I been twenty minutes here. I got twenty minutes back. I don’t have another twenty minutes in me.”

To Joseph this was the only direct reference his father made to his cancer. Ever.

It takes him two more years to die. There are inexorable advances of the disease and inexplicable remissions. Joseph is there for the last and final stage, by his bedside. His father is unrecognizable, all the deft grace and assured power of the horseman has been wasted, worn away against the grindstone of illness.

His father has a recurring dream that he recounts to Joseph repeatedly. In the dream it is spring, early April by the look of it, patches of melting snow on bare ground, water running in the gutters, a persistent, pushing spring wind. He is enjoying the warmth, the returning sap of life, when a nagging disquiet surfaces to spoil his pleasure. There is something important he meant to do, has forgotten. Then he remembers. Last fall he’d failed to bring the horses in from the pasture, they have spent the entire winter out, endured blizzards and bitter cold without food and shelter.

The horses are waiting for him at the gate, where they have waited all winter. Skeletons with ribs like barrel hoops under the long matted hair of their winter coats, feeble legs with swollen knees bulging like coconuts, cracked hooves planted in the cold trampled mud, pleading necks stretched across the barbed wire, dull eyes staring.

Joseph tells his father that dreams like this are common, mean nothing. Yet in the last hours of semi-consciousness, in the delirious prelude to death, his father makes him promise,
again and again, that he will save the winter horses. “Save the winter horses,” is his last appeal, to anyone. “Save the winter horses,” he beseeches.

Nine months after his father’s death when it is late at night, very late at night, and Joseph is sitting in his study supposedly working on his fictitious article about Charles Maurras and the Action Française but really reading books on horses, he locates a memory, or a memory locates him. The yellow lamplight loses its harshness, softens and deepens, signalling this is a memory situated in late afternoon, sometime around the supper hour. He is a small boy riding with his father, tucked behind the saddle horn in the way not so long ago his father used to carry Andrew, half-hypnotized by the horse’s head nodding up and down against the sky in the regular rhythm of a metronome, tick tock, tick tock, lulled by the rolling gait. Full of a child’s floating torpor, he is adrift, the tired, fumble-footed shamble of the horse rocking him, rocking him, his heavy-lidded eyes blearing the long grass rippling around him in a vibrant smear of endless green. The heat of the sun burns on his face and chest, the horse burns beneath him, the curve of his father’s belly burns on his back. Golden, burning, he is carried off in what direction, where, he doesn’t know. In his child’s heart this journey is forever, this hour is a day, this day a week, this week a month, this is infinite, this is everything. He falls back against his father and he sleeps.

In Christian art the horse is held to represent courage and generosity. It is the companion of St. Martin, St. Maurice, St. George, and St. Victor, all of whom are pictured on horseback. In the catacombs it was, with the fish and the cross, a common symbol. No one is absolutely certain what its meaning was, although it is assumed it represents the swift, fleeting, and transitory character of life
.

THE SUMMER OF
1968. Norman Hiller and Kurt Meinecke, both dreamers, and me caught sticky between them, the jam in the sandwich. Norman was the flashy type, the guy who collected followers, collected them the way he did baseball cards and Superman comic books. I was seventeen the summer he collected Meinecke, old enough to have said something, to have warned my mild and innocent friend, but I didn’t.