8.

On the wall in the barn was a blurred photograph of a boat with a black funnel and a mast in front and one behind. A little smoke came from the funnel. Danny had worked on the coastal freighter as a deck hand, a sailor.

In a stall was a horse dying.

The other horses as quiet as the faraway sea.

The orchard woman had taken the photograph; she’d aimed her camera from the gravel beach where she’d been walking her dog. With a queasy stomach he rose from the bench where he polished things to have a closer look at his life as it had been, as seen by the first woman he’d loved. She had become a set of stories, lost and then remembered. He felt seasick, looking at the boat. He had cancer. He would have the thing cut out. He knew where to find the dog on the stone beach — a brown blur bottom left of the photograph. When had he stopped seeing that dog? He studied the beach, mountains, boat. And it yielded. It was not only a sepia seascape in a dusty frame across from the stalls, hanging amid tackle, no longer the stain of something ancient and irrevocable.

He tapped the photograph with his fingernail. Coastal freighter steaming right to left. Perhaps he’d been at the helm; perhaps it had been his watch the day it was taken. That period had resurfaced in conversations with Abi. Nothing for years, and then the girl asking questions about his affair with the married woman. Where was that woman now? Why hadn’t they run away together? Had her marriage disintegrated? Had she left the pilot? Abi’s questions were a fresh link to the woman holding the camera. She had been thirty-three and he’d been nineteen. Now his eyes were seeing what hers had seen then. Was that possible, to look though the eyes of a girl at what he had once been to a woman? Was the purpose of love to cancel time? What was left of that young man?

Love. Of course. He crossed to the big woodstove and opened the door and threw in a log. His bones felt tired. He slumped into the oak chair by the stove. Tortoise must feel like this. He looked at her where she lay, unable to rise, her ribs sticking out, her breath rattling, and felt tears coming. It took great effort to cross to her side and kneel. His fingers were frozen on her thick hide. He had always loved Tortoise, such a slow mare, and her eyes had looked at him, loved him slowly, for how many years? The account book of captures and births and deaths open to a day in the summer. Thirty years. Dust on the pages. The horse’s life ending as the day outside was ending, freezing wind sweeping clouds away, whistling through gaps in the walls.

Day ended but he didn’t want to leave her side until it was over, until she was dead. There was the sense of propriety, duty, faith, everything still to do. Food heavy in his belly, nausea. A pain in the ass. Likely he’d need the backhoe tomorrow. The living horses were rattled. The girl just left was still bright on that old kitchen chair in front of the feed chute, her ankles bare, her shoes immaterial things, beige, like dirty feet, her head cocked to one side looking at him tending the dying horse. The girl was not finished, not forgotten. Nor night. Nor fragrance. The cattle are lowing, no crib for his bed. Pity for Tortoise made him sob. He’d have to leave the horses. Of this life he would quit, he regretted the horses. Loth to leave the horses. Songs heard long ago. Rustle of hay. That kitchen chair and the oak chair brought down from the house winter before last.

Found my heart in the Bay of Biscay.

Chairs and framed photograph of the coastal steamer. He needed these items of his life, passed to him from experience or from his parents, and to fit them into the next cold day. It was none too easy, dying: dizziness, vomiting, weakness. For a man with no children death was a kind of blind from which to praise life, despite blood in the stool, red threads in Tortoise’s snot. He felt so sorry for himself. Adjust your course every day, read tides, currents, season, angle of light, keep an eye on the old creaking chair by the stove, on the girl come loose from her family (she would never belong here), her squinting worried grey eyes leaping into his own because fifty-nine was too young to die. It couldn’t be finished, couldn’t be. What a giant bobbling squally thought! Such eyes! Such a winter!

“She won’t be long,” he’d said.

“What will you do?” she’d asked him.

“Borrow your dad’s backhoe. Open the big doors. Tow her out.”

“Can I come and help?”

“Sure, if you like.”

Light cut across her midriff. Short fleece jacket, thin shirt, thin jeans, that prominent belly he’d been trying not to stare at.

“Aren’t you cold?”

“Yes,” with a shiver. “Not really.” A smile. “Kind of. I’m okay. I like being cold.”

It made him feel alive, careful. That she was young. That she didn’t mind the cold. “Your parents know yet?”

She’d shaken her head. “No,” with a smile. “Not exactly.” A shiver. “Maybe. I don’t think I’ll come tomorrow. I don’t want to see her — you know.”

She’d shot out of her chair, out of the barn, and darkness had fallen, was still gathering. Through webby glass he could see his parents’ rundown house (which was never his) up there on the hill. The one kitchen light, yellow, dim, muted as it flared through the hallway, the living room window, through cold shifting air down to his orbs hunting something. What? His thigh was cramping. He laid a hand on Tortoise’s neck and a shudder rippled through his body. He stroked out her old legs. She was a foal again, just for a moment.

Someone.

The useless. The eavesdropper. The tattletale. The betrayer. The failure. The condemned. The guilty. Him. You. It’s you.

Who woke and rubbed his eyes, asked as usual no question. Simply stood from his cot there in the barn. The stove still warm. On the straw Tortoise was awake. Alive, but barely. The other horses’ ears aswivel. All breathing silence. A visitor. A meeting.

“Your name is Harry.”

“Yes.”

“She’s not here.”

“I know.”

“You should be home.”

“I wanted to talk to you.”

“Go home, I’m busy with a horse.”

“I heard you were sick.”

“Who told you that?”

“Kata.” The boy wouldn’t meet his eye, was as restless as he was tired. “How are you doing?”

“Like shit.” He stifled the urge to talk about that moment in the doctor’s office when something inconceivable was known, or disclose the diagnosis, the order of coming events, the prognosis. It was not right. Not with this boy. Not Harry. He waved his arm. “What do you want, then?”

“Did you and Abi . . . ”

“No, we didn’t.”

Danny and Tom picked their way up the frozen path, ice crystals scattering, half moon above. They went single file, not talking. Only their laboured breath signalled their passage up to the house.

“Thanks for the help,” Danny said.

Once inside the house, Tom shouted how cold the place was. “Don’t you keep a fire burning?”

“I don’t live here.”

“You’re living in the barn.”

“That’s right.”

“Why leave the lights on?”

Danny shrugged. He felt the dismantling loneliness of the rooms. He felt thin in his gut and went about the ritual of sticks and paper spills and threw a match in. “Be warm enough soon. Have a seat.”

Words might later be erased. Welcomes erased. The conversation about to launch itself deleted. He hadn’t wanted Tom in the barn, but he’d needed his help to move the horse. He put the kettle on the stove and opened the grate.

“You know, then?” Danny said.

“About Abi?” said Tom.

“Yes.”

Tom rubbed his hands together. “She won’t talk. She’s with you a lot.”

“Oh yes.”

“She talk to you?”

“She chatters a bit when she’s happy.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah. She tells me a bit.”

“You know who it was?”

“No.”

“Looks like you’re packing.”

“Just turfing the old stuff out. Eliminating, getting shut of.”

“Abi’s still useful with the horses, then?”

“That okay with you?”

“It’s okay.”

“She loves the horses.”

Danny poured water over the tea bags in the cups and sat down across from Tom at the table his father had built. He felt his muscles aching. He was exhausted. Towing the horse, digging the shallow hole, burying the horse, the uphill walk from the barn to the house, grape hills rising and falling — these repeated, the buckets of earth repeated, the paths multiplying. His toward uncertain health. After the operation, they wanted to hook him up to a bag and push chemicals into him that would make his hair fall out and his teeth loose in his head. Fuck that. It had taken a year to straighten and shore up the old barn, replace the split boards, double up the old studs, re-shingle the roof, fashion a new door, new windows, install the stove. It still wanted painting but he’d run out of time. He’d worked every day for a season, and returned every night tired and happy to his old room and sleep. His parents’ house had been all right then, and it was close to the work. His cabin on the bench had been neglected, too far from his horses, the barn work. He hadn’t gone camping all summer, hadn’t visited the valley. He’d thought the ponies all caught or gone, but one day in the fall he’d seen a small herd with foals in the distance: life in the valley had gone on unobserved during his frenzy of renovation.

“Lucy wondered — I’m supposed to ask you to come for Christmas Eve,” said Tom.

“I’ll be there.”

“You look like hell. Are you all right?”

“That appaloosa cross was a wonderful horse.”

“Yeah. I’m sorry. What’s going on, Danny?”

“Nothing, Tom. Abi’s a gentle girl. The horses were apprehensive about her, but she’s got the touch. Looking after them does her good.”

“I’m not talking about the damned horses, Danny,” said Tom.

This old fixed-up barn. The dividers horse-bitten. Sheaffer’s stall cracked through to Tortoise’s. Tooth marks of dead horses. Some of the landrace were ghosts before they decided to be captives again. He made hot chocolate on the primus.

Harry came looking for you.

Your dad was here.

The unspoken words hung like straw dust in needles of sun.

“You are such a beautiful girl,” he said. “You look seasonless.”

“What does that mean?”

“Not young, not old. Out of this world.”

“Why did Tortoise die?”

“Want of breath.”

She glared at him. “I’m serious.”

He nodded slowly. “Something in her gut.”

“She was old.”

“No she wasn’t.”

They had nothing to talk about except horses and the sea. Tell me again the story of the ponies. Why did you catch them? Which horse what year? What is it like to be at sea? What is it like in a storm? Never: When will you die? Who is the father?