The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [64]
IT WAS ABOUT THIS TIME THAT WE FOUND A HORSE GRAZING on grass one morning by the side of the house. It had a bridle with a lead tied to it but was otherwise unmarked and bare. It didn’t appear hurt or lame, and the girl approached it and it shied, but she held out a slice of beet and it nickered and ate and she patted its foreleg and rubbed its neck, holding on to the bridle.
“It belongs to someone,” I said, “or it would have charged out of here before we got close.”
“She belongs to someone,” the girl said. “It’s a mare. And what’s the harm in keeping a horse if she wants to be kept?”
“No harm,” I said, “except that someone might come looking for it.”
The girl pared another slice of beet and the horse ate and licked her hand, so that it was covered in red, as though dyed or bleeding, and she said, sounding like someone weighing odds or options, “Let’s leave her and see what she’ll do.”
I filled a trough with some water and we went about our usual chores the whole day as she grazed on the new grass that was beginning to come through. The next morning, the mare was still sauntering about the grounds, and after breakfast the girl went out and led her into the barn and to a stall that must have held a jennet or a mule at one time, closed the gate behind her, and the mare lay right down on the ground to rest.
For the next few days, we fed and watered her and she came out of the barn for some exercise, which meant I walked her up and down the road, then took her back to the house and let her roam. She didn’t seem to want to go anywhere else. At meals now, the girl and I talked of the horses we had known, and I told her that my father’s fondness for the American general Ulysses S. Grant made me believe that in war horses were treated as well as soldiers, if not better, until I went to war and found that if a horse wasn’t good for pulling, it was good for eating, and shot. And if it wasn’t good for eating, it was good for nothing and was left on the roadside to rot, so that the stench of a dead horse could be smelled for miles as you approached. She shuddered when I said this and told me that the horses of the Roma were as good, and sometimes better, than the horses she had heard they rode in America.
“A horse is clean,” she said “and noble.” And then, as an afterthought of virtues, she added, “And it can work harder than a man.”
Still, I felt in my gut that this horse wasn’t meant to be a blessing to us, and two days later I came out of the woods in the late afternoon after a long day of hunting, during which I netted one hedgehog and a hare, and I saw from a distance that the front door was open but the girl wasn’t about. I picked up my step and looked into the barn, but I found neither the girl nor the horse, and I ran inside the house.
It was ransacked and overturned. In the kitchen, I found cupboards emptied, the table smashed, and, by the back room, the girl lying on the floor, blood on her lip and a welt below her eye where she’d been hit. I picked her up and pushed through the curtain that separated the room she slept in from the kitchen and laid her down on the bed. She was conscious and kept whispering over and over, “Where are you? Where are you?” but she kept her eyes closed, and every now and then she would wince and hold her belly.
“What happened here?” I said, out of breath and anger rising. “Who did this?”
“The boy,” she whispered, “the boy,” and I thought she meant the baby inside her (for she had divined some time ago that she was to deliver a son) and told her that the boy would be just fine if she lay still and slept for a while. I went out to the well and wet a rag, brought it in and laid it across her eye, and told her again to sleep. In the kitchen, I bolted the last round I had into