Sometimes in the dead of night I would awake to the sound of horse’s hooves pounding the roadway past our home. I would sit up in bed and look hurriedly out of the window and wait for the yells that always heralded this rider’s passing. The yells were an accompaniment to the hoof beats, the trumpet calls above the roll of drums. They laced the sound into one wild melody, the untamed cry of a moonlit night.
It was a sound that quickened the heart beats of people in sleeping houses and goaded the village dogs into a frenzied barking.
‘Yah-hoo-oo-oo-oo-oo. Ho, ho, ho, ho. Whoo-oo-oo-oo-oo!’
Some awakened husband would mutter to his wife, ‘East Driscoll’s on the booze again’, then turn over and return to sleep. The wives remained awake staring into the dark while they remembered his provocative eyes, his grin, his lithe flexible body and his swagger. He had flashed messages past their husbands’ heads to all of them at one time or another.
Dad once said to me, though I didn’t understand what he meant until years later, ‘A good rider on a good horse takes from the horse the virility and vigour of the animal and makes it his own. A man riding easily on a free-striding horse is a bigger man than when he is on the ground. Women think that he is all they have missed.’
East Driscoll was the local horse-breaker. He dressed in white corduroy riding trousers, held in place with a broad leather belt fastened by a buckle of silver in the form of a horse-shoe framing a horse’s head. He wore Gillespie’s Elastic Sided Boots and a white shirt and had a red cotton handkerchief knotted around his neck. His hat had a broad brim and he wore it pulled to one side. His eyes were bright and eager and laughter lurked in them. The women thought he was handsome and when he rode past them, sitting loosely and easily to the movements of a horse walking proudly, the women dropped their eyes before his glance.
But he was a larrikin. He obeyed no rules. He had a contempt for authority and went on wild benders when he felt like it.
He had a stockyard with an eight-foot high post and rail fence beside his house on the outskirts of Turalla. I would climb up on this fence and sit on the top rail and watch him breaking in horses brought to him by farmers who had neither the time nor the skill to break them in themselves.
To me he represented freedom and I always looked at him with a feeling of admiration. Elsie thought he looked like a God with the spirit of a horse.
‘He’s not only a good rider’, Dad said. ‘He’s a good horseman, and that is rare.’
I often sat on the fence and watched him handling a horse on a lunging rein. He always talked to the horse he was handling. ‘Steady, old boy, steady. Easy does it. Lift those legs. Hup! Hup! Steady, steady.’
Father once told me a well-handled horse never bucks, but there were times when East felt a need to display his skill as a rider. Then he would mount a horse not quite prepared for it. He was a balance rider, pivoting in the stirrups while the horse bucked beneath him. He never lost control of his head. It moved easily above him, never jerking free from his hold. He anticipated every buck before it happened and met it with responses from his body that went with the horse in every violent, grunting effort to unseat him.
Dust would rise from the hooves of the plunging horse. Men, driving milk carts laden with cans, would pull up on the roadway and yell encouragement from their milk-stained seat on the dashboard of the wagon. ‘Into him, East. Stick to him. You got him.’
Dad told me that this was East Driscoll’s one weakness. ‘He sometimes rides for the gallery and never thinks of the horse. He’s building up his reputation at the expense of the horse, but he’s pretty to watch isn’t he?’
When East Driscoll went on a bender he always dressed up for the occasion. His white trousers were freshly washed; his boots shone with polish. His shirt was ironed and clean and his red handkerchief was perfectly knotted. He rode the best horse amongst those he was breaking and he rode through the village on his way to the pub at Turalla, acknowledging with a wave of his hand the greetings of all those he met. I would climb on to our gate while Elsie stood behind me to watch him pass.
Ah! Those eyes, that cheeky grin that promised quick kisses in the grip of powerful arms!
One afternoon he was riding a half-broken colt with a wicked eye and a nervous temperament. It veered sideways; it propped and snorted at a limb on the road or sprang sideways like a cat. It walked uncertainly, reefing at the bit, and lowering its head to snort at shadows on the road.
‘A dangerous horse to go drinking on’, father said.
That night I lay in bed awake and looked out into the moonlight and watched the trees thrash in the rising wind. It was a restless, unsettled night, with gusts of wind that lifted the dust beyond my window and sent dead gum leaves hurrying like demented little people along the road. I was lying awake waiting for the sound of hooves and the wild yells of East returning to his home; but I fell asleep before he passed.
He didn’t pass at all that night. Early next morning a farmer, driving cattle along the road in the half-dark, saw a riderless horse grazing by the side of the road. He could just see something hanging in the stirrup leather. He hurried over to the horse, then approached it quietly and held its head. East Driscoll’s foot was caught in the stirrup and he hung downwards like a bloody rag with his head and shoulders on the ground. His face and head were badly battered. The white shirt was half torn from his body. He was limp, loose, his legs bent unnaturally, one arm flayed from the grind of metal. The farmer carried him to his wagon and took him to the hospital. He was unconscious for three weeks. One of his legs was pulled out of joint; one of his arms was broken; he had a fractured skull; his face was torn; his teeth broken; his mouth out of shape.
He had left the pub about midnight, they said. He took a long while to mount his horse, but men helped him on to the saddle and he lurched away into the night singing ‘There is a tavern in the town.’ They heard him urge the horse into a gallop, then the night closed round him. Somewhere along the road he was thrown and his foot caught in the stirrup. What happened in the mad gallop that followed no one knew, but he had been dragged for hours until the exhausted horse stopped and began grazing on the long grass near the Pejark Creek.
For the next month everyone fought beside him for his life. They suffered with him. He survived, and I saw him walking round his stockyard again; but he did not laugh or joke anymore. He sometimes looked round vaguely as if striving to remember. There was no spring in his walk; though he continued riding horses he sat heavily upon them.
‘East Driscoll is not the man he was’, said a farmer. ‘Half the time he’s not there. A bloody shame isn’t it?’