Follyfoot Read online

He was in a small hospital in the town where the Jordans had lived among the harassing new neighbours. His leg was in plaster to the thigh. It was very uncomfortable, and ‘Yes, it does hurt,’ he answered to the question that everybody asked.

  The Colonel was furious. He was usually easygoing, a peace-maker; but after what Steve told him, he wanted to steam right down to the Pinecrest Hotel and tell soapy Sidney Hammond what he thought of his rotten, vicious, ugly son Todd.

  ‘No, don’t.’ Steve closed his eyes. It still made his head ache if anyone raised their voice. ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘That’s not what you told me when you came out of the anaesthetic. You said it was deliberate. He came at you without lights and practically knocked the pony over. He probably did knock him over.’

  ‘He slipped.’

  ‘What difference?’ The Colonel picked up his cap and stick. ‘I’m going to tell that two-faced swine—’

  ‘Then he’ll tell you what I – what I – oh hell. What I did.’

  ‘What did you do?’ The Colonel’s voice dropped with a sigh from indignation to resigned patience.

  ‘It was a revenge thing. I’d beaten up his younger brother. You know,’ he added hopefully, as if he could persuade the Colonel that he had already heard about the fight, and had not minded.

  ‘I thought you weren’t going to get into any more fights, Steve.’

  ‘I can’t now.’ Steve closed his eyes again and lay like a corpse in a coffin. The Colonel put a hand on his forehead and went away.

  Chapter 15

  STEVE CAME BACK from the hospital with his leg still cocooned in the long heavy plaster, scrawled over with messages from the nurses.

  ‘Behave yourself – Cathy.’

  ‘Good luck from Rosalita.’

  ‘Mary Ellen – don’t come back.’

  ‘Love always Susie’ and a heart with an arrow.

  He could move about slowly with crutches. He spent one day sitting in the garden with his radio and various dogs and cats who were glad to find someone sitting still, and Anna bringing him things to eat and drink.

  ‘This is the life,’ he told her, but the next day he was out at the stables, trying to do his work again.

  ‘Here, let me.’ Dora ran up when she saw him at the outside tap.

  ‘Go away. I am going to be the only man on crutches ever to carry a full bucket of water.’

  He settled the crutches under his arms, bent down with difficulty, tried to pick up the bucket and grab the bar of the crutch with the same hand, and lurched forward in a flood of spilled water as Dora caught him just in time.

  ‘Careful.’ She propped him up against Ginger’s stable. Her face was grave with anxiety, so she quickly smiled. ‘That’s expensive plaster, you know.’

  Gradually Steve found out what he could do. He could carry a feed bucket, hung round his neck on a piece of bailing wire. Then he had to get into a loose box, move the horse out of his way with his shoulder or his voice, prop a crutch against the wall by the manger, unhook the bucket from his neck without the horse getting its nose in and strangling him, and tip the feed into the manger before the greedy horse knocked the bottom of the bucket and scattered the whole lot into its bedding.

  He could sweep a bit, and do some grooming, leaning against a quiet horse. He cleaned all the tack, which there hardly ever was time for, and blacked the harness that Cobby wore to pull the blue cart out to the fields. But there was not much more he could do except sit on the old mounting block made out of a milestone (CLXVI miles to Tyburn) and play the guitar to Dora and Callie.

  The Shetlands and the donkey had gone back to the children’s camp for the summer, and one of the very old horses had died, but five skeletons had come in from the stable of a man who had skipped the country to avoid arrest, and abandoned them. Dora and the Colonel and Slugger had more than they could do.

  Steve’s plaster would not come off for at least a month, the doctor had said after the last X-ray. So the Colonel rang the Employment Office and asked for a temporary stable hand.

  ‘I mean a real one. I’d rather have nobody than a damfool girl who gets her big toenail trodden on or a long-haired layabout who shouts at the horses and goes to sleep in the hay with a lighted cigarette.’

  After a few days, Mac turned up. He came in a fairly decent car, but terrible old clothes, a burly man with shaggy hair and a grizzle of growing beard, some age past forty.

  ‘I’m looking for work.’ He came rather shyly into the yard. ‘They told me to come here.’

  ‘Know anything about horses?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Like ’em?’

  ‘I guess so.’ He was American.

  ‘Worked with them before?’

  A pause. ‘Uh-huh. But I can learn.’

  ‘References?’

  The man smiled and shrugged his shoulders. Under the hair, he had a weathered face, craggy, with the kind of thoughtful, clear-sighted eyes made for scanning far horizons, or searching a face. The Colonel liked the look of him and took him on.

  In his dirty old trousers and his yellow-grey sweater that had once been white, pulled out of shape, with loops of thick wool hanging, Mac went straight to work helping with the evening feeds.

  There was a storm coming up. You could see it far down the valley, rolling blackly towards the hills, so all the horses were brought in.

  Mac pitched hay and carried water buckets, doing what he was told, not asking any questions, not answering any about himself, quiet with the horses, though he seemed to know nothing about them. When Dora said, ‘Two on that side need water – the grey and the roan. Know what a roan is?’ he thought for a moment, then smiled. ‘Sorry.’

  When he smiled, his broad tanned cheekbones lifted and his eyes narrowed to a grey glint.

  ‘It’s a sort of reddish speckled—’ Dora looked at him sharply. ‘I’ve seen you somewhere before.’

  Mac shook his head. He had hay seeds in his hair and beard. ‘Only in your dreams.’

  ‘What do you think of him?’ Dora asked Slugger Jones, as he was leaving for his cottage across the road.

  ‘What do I think? she asks. I seen ’em come, I seen ’em go. Mostly I seen ’em go.’

  ‘I hope Mac stays.’

  ‘Call me Mac, he says, coming out of nowhere. I seen ’em come, I seen ’em go,’ Slugger grumbled to no one in particular, clicked his knotted fingers for his terrier and ambled through the archway.

  When the work was done, Dora took Mac round to all the loose boxes and told him the names and stories of the horses.

  ‘Cobbler’s Dream.’ Everyone started with Cobbler’s Dream in the corner box. He was so striking, with his bright white blaze, his head always over the door, watching, demanding attention, chewing his hay now, and dribbling it into the yard. Mac picked up the bunch of hay and gave it back to him. Cobby turned his head to observe him with his good eye.

  ‘He was hit in the head,’ Dora said. ‘Spoiled, stinking brat with a whip. He used to be a champion show jumper. Still could be, even though he can’t see much. But we don’t go to shows.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We’re not good enough. We couldn’t afford the clothes anyway. And – oh, I don’t know. A horse doesn’t mind showing off, but having to perform perfectly, dead to order, our idea not his …’

  ‘Maybe he likes it.’

  ‘How do we know?’ Dora looked up at him. ‘We say a horse loves to jump because he gets all excited, but perhaps he’s only nervous. Look at this one – Wonderboy. He belonged to Callie’s father, who died. He loved to race, they said, but how do we know?’

  Mac went ‘Hm’ into his beard. Dora wondered if she was being a bore.

  ‘I’d love to know what Spot thought about the circus.’ She showed Mac the broad-backed appaloosa. ‘Three fat ladies in silver wigs and spangled tights danced on him at once, the Colonel says, though I don’t know how he knows, because he won’t go to the circus. Anna, his wife, took Call
ie once and they saw Hero.’ She took him across the yard to the brown, ewe-necked horse that Callie had saved. ‘His rider was forcing him to lie down, and pulling his head so far round that he couldn’t, and then beating him when he didn’t. So Callie stole him.’

  ‘How did she get away with that?’

  Mac seemed interested. Perhaps he – perhaps he was a thief too? He would tell nothing about himself. On the run? Incognito? The beard looked fairly new and the car was too good for the clothes. If he had stolen that, he’d better get it away from the road.

  She showed him the four newcomers – the fifth had had to be destroyed yesterday – the pitiful thin horses which had been abandoned, tied by the head and helplessly starving.

  ‘The owner was some sort of underworld gambling type, who had bought this big house and the horses to make himself look respectable in the neighbourhood. He left in a hurry, he—’

  She stopped dead, staring at Mac. What if he—? The thought was into her head and out again in a fraction of a second. She laughed.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Mac was frowning at the black horse with the wound on its bony head, shoulders hunched in the awful sweater.

  ‘Fantastic things one thinks.’

  ‘Such as?’

  Dora always said what she was thinking. ‘I thought for a second, what if you were that man?’

  ‘What would you do?’

  ‘Kill you, I suppose. The halter on this horse was so tight that it was embedded in the flesh. The vet had to cut it out under anaesthetic. Even if it heals, he’ll have a dent in his head for ever, like a fossil. All the horses had halter sores. They had nothing to eat. They had chewed all the wood within reach. The one we put down yesterday had started to bite at her own chest.’

  ‘It’s unbelievable,’ Mac said.

  ‘It’s true.’

  Dora showed him Fanny, with an empty socket where a drunken farmer had knocked out her eye, and Ranger and Prince, whose mouths had been cut to bits by the gangs of ‘Night Riders’, with wire for a bridle. She showed him Pussycat, who had broken down on her way from Scotland to London with a petition for the Queen, the brewery horse and the old police horse and ugly Ginger, who used to have a milk round before the dairy went motorized.

  ‘They were going to put him down, but all the ladies in one street clubbed together and bought him. They call him Peregrine. They think he’s beautiful. Do you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know one horse from another,’ Mac said.

  Heavy drops began to fall out of the sky like lead pellets. The sky blacked over at great speed, like the end of the world. Dora shook back her short hair and stuck out her underlip to catch the rain. Mac pulled up the collar of his bulky sweater and lowered his beard into it.

  Anna ran out, with a coat over her head. ‘Come on in!’ she called. ‘Come in and have some supper,’ she told Mac.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I’ll get something. I have to go find a room.’

  ‘You can stay here.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He backed away. ‘I’ll be O.K.’

  The rain suddenly came down like a waterfall. He ran, splashing to his car.

  Anna ran with Dora back to the house.

  ‘What’s he afraid of?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Dora said. ‘I don’t think we’ll see him again.’

  Chapter 16

  HE WAS BACK in the morning.

  He worked steadily and well. He came on time. He left late if there were extra things to do. He became part of the Farm.

  After a while, he gave up his lodgings and came to live in the little room behind the tack room.

  There was room for him at the farmhouse, or across the road with Slugger Jones and his wife, but he preferred the stuffy little room, which was built into one side of the stone arch, and smelled of leather and horse nuts and his pipe tobacco, and the soups and stews and beans he cooked up on a small stove.

  Anna would gladly have fed him, but he wanted to be alone. He was nervous among a lot of people. When visitors came, he got busy in the barn or out in the fields. Sometimes he talked to Steve or Dora or Callie, telling very little about himself, and that little different each time.

  He said he had been in gaol, been in the Army, been at sea, been to Australia, lost everything in a flood, lived under the ice in the Antarctic for two years. He threw out bizarre bits of information as if he did not expect to be believed, and nobody believed him.

  He still said he knew nothing about horses, but he was naturally good with them, and seemed to like being with them better than people. The Colonel thought he might have been a ranch hand once. There were days when he walked like a cowboy, and when it rained he wore an old hat he found in the barn, tipped over his eyes like a ten-gallon Stetson.

  Besides the car, he did not seem to own much. He had very few clothes, a few paperback books, but no photographs. No pictures at all of anybody who belonged to him.

  ‘Haven’t you ever been married?’ Callie asked him. She and Toby were the only ones who were allowed to come into his room. When the evenings were cool, he sometimes lit a fire in the smoky fireplace and cooked something marvellous in a black iron pot – beans and sausages and molasses and onions and hot pepper ketchup with beer poured in on top. It was much better than supper at the house. They sat on the floor and ate out of the pot.

  ‘Like in the Wild West,’ Toby said. ‘Was you ever out West, Mac?’

  ‘Listen kid, I been everywhere.’ He always said something like that, to stop a question.

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘Like everything else – loused up.’ He always said something like that too.

  While they were eating the marvellous beans, he would drink whisky out of a tin mug, and afterwards he would lie down on the low sagging bed and go to sleep. He slept for hours. They had never known a man sleep so much.

  Lancelot, an ancient rickety skewbald who had been saved from the fate of being shipped abroad for slaughter, was the oldest horse in the stable. The Colonel judged him about thirty. When Dora or Steve showed him to visitors, they always added a few years to make the people gasp and give him extra sugar. ‘Ah, the poor old thing!’

  ‘What’s poor about him?’ This always disgusted Slugger, ‘Life of Riley, he’s got. Nothing to do but eat and sleep and make a big mess in his manger.’

  You always had to look in Lancelot’s corner manger before you tipped in his feed. His front end was fairly strong, but like most old horses, he was getting weak in the loins, so he sat on his wooden manger.

  One night the manger went.

  Steve, lying stiffly in bed in his uncomfortable plaster cast, heard a splintering crash from the stable. It sounded as if a tree had fallen through the roof.

  By the time he had lifted his heavy leg to the floor and groped for his crutches under the bed, the upstairs corridor of the farmhouse was full of running feet. When he got out to the stables they were all there – the Colonel, Anna, Dora and Callie, pulling and pushing at Lancelot who was sitting on the floor like a dog, with his brown and white tail fanned out among the wreckage of his manger.

  They finally got him to his feet, where he stood trembling like an old man with ague.

  ‘Once more down like that, and he won’t get up,’ the Colonel said. ‘I’ll get Mac to fix a bar across the corner. He can sit on that.’

  ‘Where is Mac?’ Steve was leaning on his crutches in the doorway, hating to be only a spectator.

  ‘Fast asleep.’ Callie had looked through his cobwebby window. ‘The whole place could burn down before he’d know it.’

  The surgeon at the local hospital was worried about Steve’s last X-rays. The leg did not seem to be mending properly, and he wanted Steve to go to London for a specialist’s advice about another operation.

  ‘Over my dead body,’ Steve said. ‘I’m not going through that again.’

  ‘You want to limp for the rest of your life, like me?’ the Colonel asked.

  ‘Doesn’t seem to bother you.
’

  ‘And stiffen up and have to stop riding?’ The Colonel had been marvellous in his military days, riding for the Army in international shows, working one year with an Olympic team.

  ‘That damn Toad.’ When Steve thought about Todd Hammond and what he had done, he burned with rage, and the palms of his hands sweated with the desire to take him by his stringy throat. ‘I should have crippled his lousy little brother. I will too when I get my leg back.’

  ‘I’ll drive you to London,’ the Colonel said.

  Anna went with them, and Callie begged to miss two days of school, so that she could go too.

  School was a farce anyway. She had studied so hard for the scholarship exam that the muscles of her mind could not cope with revising for end-of-term exams.

  Miss Crombie was very disappointed in her. ‘You’ve gone off,’ she said, as if Callie were sour milk.

  ‘What’ll I do for two days without you?’ Toby put on his pathetic face, eyes very large, mouth drooping, those big bat ears sticking out at right angles.

  ‘Dora is going to take you for a ride.’

  Dora was going to ride with him over to the park of the deserted Manor house to show him the famous spiked iron fence which Cobbler’s Dream had once so heroically jumped. They started off that evening as the others were leaving for London.

  Steve hugged Cobby round his strong arched neck and said good-bye to him, as he always did before he went anywhere. He got into the back of the car with Callie, stowing his clumsy leg away with difficulty, wincing.

  Dora and Toby rode out through the archway, Toby with his head up and his back straight, short legs very correct, his small triangular face split by the smile that would not leave it until he scrambled down at the end of the ride.

  ‘Take care of the Cobbler, Tobe!’ Steve leaned out of the car window.

  ‘He’s supposed to take care of Toby,’ Dora said. ‘You care more about that horse than anyone.’

  ‘Why not? He cares more about me than anyone else does.’

  ‘Fishing.’ Callie pulled Steve back inside, the Colonel crunched his gears in a way almost impossible to do with this car, and they drove away.