Dusk and Other Stories - James Salter [8]
Tack on the kitchen table, mud on the wide-board floor. In she strode like a young groom in a worn jacket and boots. She had what they called a good seat and ribbons layered like feathers on the wall. Her father had lived in Ireland where they rode into the dining room on Sunday morning and the host died fallen on the bed in full attire. Her own life had become like that. Money and dents in the side of her nearly new Swedish car. Her husband had been gone for a year.
Around Carbondale the river drops down and widens. There’s a spidery trestle bridge, many times repainted, and they used to mine coal.
It was late in the afternoon and a shower had passed. The light was silvery and strange. Cars emerging from the rain drove with their headlights on and the windshield wipers going. The yellow road machinery parked along the shoulder seemed unnaturally bright.
It was the hour after work when irrigation water glistens high in the air, the hills have begun to darken and the meadows are like ponds.
She was riding alone up along the ridge. She was on a horse named Fiume, big, well formed, but not very smart. He didn’t hear things and sometimes stumbled when he walked. They had gone as far as the reservoir and then come back, riding to the west where the sun was going down. He could run, this horse. His hooves were pounding. The back of her shirt was filled with wind, the saddle was creaking, his huge neck was dark with sweat. They came along the ditch and toward a gate—they jumped it all the time.
At the last moment something happened. It took just an instant. He may have crossed his legs or hit a hole but he suddenly gave way. She went over his head and as if in slow motion he came after. He was upside down—she lay there watching him float toward her. He landed on her open lap.
It was as if she’d been hit by a car. She was stunned but felt unhurt. For a minute she imagined she might stand up and brush herself off.
The horse had gotten up. His legs were dirty and there was dirt on his back. In the silence she could hear the clink of the bridle and even the water flowing in the ditch. All around her were meadows and stillness. She felt sick to her stomach. It was all broken down there—she knew it although she could feel nothing. She knew she had some time. Twenty minutes, they always said.
The horse was pulling at some grass. She rose to her elbows and was immediately dizzy. “God damn you!” she called. She was nearly crying. “Git! Go home!” Someone might see the empty saddle. She closed her eyes and tried to think. Somehow she could not believe it—nothing that had happened was true.
It was that way the morning they came and told her Privet had been hurt. The foreman was waiting in the pasture. “Her leg’s broken,” he said.
“How did it happen?”
He didn’t know. “It looks like she got kicked,” he guessed.
The horse was lying under a tree. She knelt and stroked its boardlike nose. The large eyes seemed to be looking elsewhere. The vet would be driving up from Catherine Store trailing a plume of dust, but it turned out to be a long time before he came. He parked a little way off and walked over. Afterward he said what she had known he would say, they were going to have to put her down.
She lay remembering that. The day had ended. Lights were appearing in parts of distant houses. The six o’clock news was on. Far below she could see the hayfield of Piñones and much closer, a hundred yards off, a truck. It belonged to someone trying to build a house down there. It was up on blocks, it didn’t run. There were other houses within a mile or so. On the other side of the ridge the metal roof, hidden in trees, of old man Vaughn who had once owned all of this and now could hardly walk. Further west the beautiful tan adobe Bill Millinger built before he went broke or whatever it was. He had wonderful taste. The house